Dennis Prager is all too happy to lecture whites on why combining race and nationalism is evil while supporting Israel, an ethnonationalist state.
2,714 words
Part 1 here
Among the secular diaspora Jews in the West, a useful distinction can be made. There are those who will give Right-wing whites some benefit of the doubt, and there are those who won’t. The former group we can call “pragers,” and the latter we can call “foxmans.”
Let’s assume that the vast majority of both pragers and foxmans are ethnocentric: that is, they identify ethnically as Jews and exist on the Right-wing side of their own politics. This ethnocentrism manifests itself in two ways: either honestly, by being pro-Jewish or pro-Israeli, or dishonestly, by being anti-white. When Jews try to outlaw the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement or push the US government into condemning anti-Semitism, they are being honestly ethnocentric. When they promote non-white immigration or punish white ethnocentrism in the West, they are being dishonestly ethnocentric by assuming that what’s bad for their presumptive enemy (i.e., white people) must be good for them.
Both pragers and foxmans are this way for the same reason all people are: Ethnocentrism is perfectly natural. Where Jews distinguish themselves, however, is through the dishonest way in which they advance their own ethnocentrism. They do this by pretending to be anti-ethnocentric (or anti-racist, globalist, what have you). What they’re really doing is promoting anti-ethnocentrism among their enemies, which, they presume, will make life better for them as a diaspora in the short term and permanently rid them of their enemies in the long term. Kevin MacDonald offers a wealth of evidence to support this theory in his classic Culture of Critique. No other race does this to the same extent, yet Jews on the presumptive Left (foxmans) and the presumptive Right (pragers) do so as a matter of course.
Secular diaspora Jews will allow for no ethnocentrism to compete with their own. In the West, they will tolerate black or Hispanic ethnocentrism since most blacks and Hispanics are poor and easily controlled. Therefore, such ethnocentrism does not compete with Jewish ethnocentrism – at least not yet. Secular diaspora Jews will tolerate Japanese ethnocentrism, since most Japanese live on the far side of the world where there are extremely few Jews. They will even tolerate Arab ethnocentrism in the Middle East as long as the Arabs give up their designs on Israel. They only view white ethnocentrism as a dire threat. All manifestations of it, no matter how benign or necessary, must be extinguished. Both pragers and foxmans are on board with this program, and therefore wish to preside over the long-term destruction of whites – because, as we all know, no nation or race can survive for long without ethnocentrism.
If you’re trying to get to the bottom of anti-Semitism as we know it, this could be it.
But how do pragers and foxmans fundamentally differ? By appearing on different points along the Jewish political spectrum, which is the inverse of the white one. To white eyes, foxmans may appear to be extremely Left-wing by either promoting or not opposing much of the Left-wing agenda (non-white immigration, abortion, transgenderism, multiculturalism, etc.). But – irony of ironies – from a Jewish perspective, foxmans are instead deeply conservative and Right-wing, since they shrewdly allow as little influence as possible for their purported enemies – even if it means that some diaspora Jews must suffer alongside them as a result.
Pragers, on the other hand, may seem Right-wing to white people since they tend to extol tradition and find common ground with conservatives against socialism and cultural change. But on the Jewish political spectrum, they are on the Left – or at least to the left of the foxmans. They trust white people more than the foxmans do, and therefore wish to allow them more freedom and influence in their own lands. This, from a foxman perspective, is dangerously liberal, since the whites could one day use this freedom and influence against Jews. On the other hand, a prager may find the foxman agenda to be dangerously conservative, since the antipathy foxmans have towards white people may make their anti-Semitism worse than it ordinarily would be.
Round and round it goes. The prager-foxman divide encapsulates the search for the diaspora Jewish soul as both sides wrangle over the best way to manipulate the politics of non-Jews to their greatest benefit.
From a white perspective, however, the prager-foxman divide is perfectly meaningless. Both sides are the enemy, and everyone on the Dissident Right should understand this. It may even be a good Dissident Right litmus test to ask if a person sees one side as inherently better than the other. If the answer is yes, then the person can’t possibly be on the Dissident Right. It reminds me of the question Brad Pitt’s character posed in Moneyball: “Would you rather get a bullet in the head or five to the chest and bleed to death?”
It’s not even right to say that pragers and foxmans are on opposite sides of the same coin – because that would imply that pragers and foxmans are in any way opposites of each other. They are not. They simply differ by degree of ethnocentrism. To further the analogy, they occupy different spots on the same side of that coin – the same coin they will gladly place on the eyes of the corpse of the white race once their collective agenda is seen through to its logical conclusion.
No ethnocentrism for white people will ultimately result in no white people. Anyone who stands against ethnocentrism for whites is therefore the enemy of whites.
This came to the fore recently when Jewish writer Dennis Prager penned a column entitled “Clarity About Nationalism.” In it, he distinguishes between what he sees as good nationalism and bad nationalism:
Nationalism is beautiful when it involves commitment to an essentially decent nation and when it welcomes other people’s commitment to their nations. Nationalism is evil when it is used to celebrate an evil regime, when it celebrates a nation as inherently superior to all others and when it denigrates all other national commitments.
Okay, fine. Nationalism is good as long as nationalists respect everybody else’s right to nationalism. Of course, this is a platitude, since this formula could be used to differentiate good from bad in anything: religion, ideology, speech, and so on. In fact, can a nationalist who “denigrates all other national commitments” even be a nationalist? Wouldn’t that be a contradiction in terms? Nationalism by its definition implies the necessary existence of multiple nations. The nationalist who allows for only one nation is not a nationalist, but a globalist. What Prager holds up as the most evil form of nationalism may not even be nationalism at all.
Prager’s sloppy reasoning then leads to the crux of his argument: the desire to steer conservative and Right-wing whites away from ethnocentrism while allowing Jews to keep their own. Of course, being fundamentally dishonest, Prager does not openly admit to this. He’d rather give us an edifice of lies like this one:
One should add that nationalism is evil when it celebrates race, but that is not nationalism; it is racism. Nationalism and racism may be conjoined, as German Nazism did. But they are not definitionally related. While some Americans have conjoined American nationalism with race (such as the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan and currently various fringe “white identity” movements), American nationalism, based as it is on the motto “e pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”), by definition includes Americans of all races and ethnicities. That is how conservatives define American nationalism. I have never met a conservative who defined American national identity as definitionally “white.”
Prager makes two main points here:
- Nationalism conjoined with “racism” is evil.
- Nationalism by definition has nothing to do with race.
His first point is a mere assertion, and he backs it up only with the existence of “German Nazism,” as if this were all he needed to do. His reasoning – or what little of it there is – resorts to the following illogic:
- Premise 1: German Nazism was a combination of nationalism and racism.
- Premise 2: German Nazism was evil.
- Conclusion: All combinations of nationalism and racism are evil.
To see how backwards his logic is, let’s apply it elsewhere:
- Premise 1: My grandmother’s pie crust is a combination of water, butter, egg, and flour.
- Premise 2: My grandmother’s pie crust is delicious.
- Conclusion: All combinations of water, butter, egg, and flour are delicious.
Either Prager is not astute enough to catch the weakness in his own argument, or he is and chooses not to for his own ulterior motives. Since this second option very closely resembles the behavior of influential Jewish movements in Culture of Critique, it seems that the second option is closer to the truth than the first.
Prager’s second point is a lie, and a multifaceted one at that. It contradicts the historical record, and it isn’t even properly backed up by his own argument.
The word “nation” springs from the Latin natio, meaning to be born. Implied here is that members of a nation are connected by blood as children are to their mothers and fathers. Since Prager cited a dictionary for his definitions of nationalism, I will do the same for “nation.” My Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary, published in 1984, states in its first definition of “nation” the following: “A people who share common customs, origins, history, and often language.” By including “origins” in this list, our definition of nation remains true to its Latin root. People from the same nation must have the same biological origins: They must spring from an original population. Conversely, people of disparate nations must have disparate origins, and therefore no common blood ties.
“Nationalism” is a relatively recent term which first appears in English in 1836. Its original meaning was theological: that different nations are divinely ordained. Since then, scholars have debated objective criteria for nationhood (language, territory, ethnicity) versus subjective criteria (cooperation, sentiment, perception) and have come to few unanimous conclusions. “Primordialism” is a kind of nationalism described by the Abbé Siéyés in 1789 which posits that nations “share with God the attributes of existing before all things and of originating everything,” according to scholar Anthony Smith. It’s hard to imagine Primordialism sharing breathing space with Prager’s idea that nationalism by definition can be poly-ethnic or poly-racial. Primordialism received a big push in 1973 in a work entitled The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz, who, according to Smith, identified two powerful drives behind it, one of which was “personal identity, based on the continuing strength and hold of attachments to kin, race, language, religion, customs and territory.” Geertz himself states that “[t]hese congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times, overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves.”[1]
Although Geertz’s view is not definitive among scholars, and Smith himself hesitates to accept it, it certainly jibes with Walter Consuelo Langsam’s observation that in the early nineteenth century, German Austrians began to feel greater kinship and loyalty to the Germans to their north than to the Central and Southern Europeans with whom they shared political and civil ties.
But once a number of German Austrians realized, or believed, that they were one with the Germans of the Reich in the matters of language, culture, and historical traditions – that is, when they became conscious of their own German “nationality” – there soon developed a definite form of cultural nationalism among them. In other words, they began to feel a supreme love and reverence for the language, literature, customs, traditions, laws, and heroes of their nationality.[2]
Prager’s main fault lies not only in denying the role of blood and ethnicity in the formation of nationalism as we know it today, but also in pretending that this denial is universal.
Prager then uses American nationalism – and only American nationalism – to defend his highly inclusive definition of nationalism. He doesn’t seem to want to admit that there are other forms of nationalism. For him, it’s enough to say that American nationalism abjures ethnocentrism. This, of course, is extremely flimsy and akin to defining the term “football” by looking only at the American variant of the game. Even if his interpretation of American nationalism were correct, that would be a far cry from proving that nationalism and racism are not “definitionally” related.
But of course, Prager’s interpretation of American nationalism is shamelessly, staggeringly, sand-poundingly incorrect. He neglects to mention the 1790 Naturalization Act, which explicitly limited immigration to “free white persons of good character.” He neglects to mention how the Founding Fathers had no intention of including Indians and blacks as citizens of their new nation. He also neglects to mention that the motto e pluribus unum originally referred not to different races and ethnicities coming together, but to the thirteen original states joining to form a nation. Prager is so off-base in his flip characterization of American nationalism that I cannot imagine it’s not by design. Could he really be this ignorant? Or is he up to something else?[3]
Then, of course, there is the five-hundred-pound circumcised gorilla in the room that Prager simply ignores. If nationalism must look past race and ethnicity, then how can he look past his precious Israel when it indeed combines nationalism with racism? To immigrate to Israel as a citizen with a right to return, you must be born of a Jewish mother. They check that out these days with DNA testing. If an Israeli Jew wishes to marry a gentile, by law they cannot do so in Israel. Recently, Israel declared itself a Jewish state – and this can’t be entirely a religious distinction, since Jewish atheists and Jewish Buddhists have just as many rights in Israel as do Jewish Jews. Then there’s the sixty thousand African blacks that the Israelis have been wanting to deport recently.
By any definition of the terms, this is racism conjoined with nationalism. Dennis Prager has voiced his strong support for Israel in the past. Why is he suddenly reticent about Israel when warning us about the evils of nationalism? Because if he were to include Israel in the discussion, he would be forced to conclude that Israel is, by his own logic, evil. And since his Jewish ethnocentrism prevents him from wanting to do this, he simply pretends that the problem doesn’t exist. But the problem of white ethnocentrism, of course, does exist and must be dealt with.
This kind of double standard-bearing is profoundly dishonest, and is a main reason why we have anti-Semitism to begin with. Later in the article, Prager says some nice things about civic nationalism and seems to support the European nations’ push for nationalism against the globalism of the European Union. But whites should never see such overtures as being truly friendly. They’re not. The foxmans among the Jewish diaspora may be more openly hostile to whites due to their own off-the-charts Jewish ethnocentrism. But the pragers are ethnocentric as well. They may seem friendlier and more cooperative than the foxmans – and they may share many political goals with whites – but this all comes in exchange for whites first submitting to their multi-racial, philo-Semitic agenda.
For all their differences, the pragers and the foxmans act as one with regards to the most important issue of our day: keeping white people from having a racial and nationalistic agenda of their own.
Notes
[1] Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
[2] Walter Consuelo Langsam, The Napoleonic Wars and German Nationalism in Austria (New York: AMS Press, 1970).
[3] Keep in mind that Dennis Prager writes these sorts of essays for a living and, as head of Prager University, has tremendous resources at his disposal. Meanwhile, I do this in my spare time and having nothing at my disposal other than my limited library and Duck Duck Go – and I’m correcting him! This is how I know (but of course cannot prove) that Prager is deliberately lying: A man of his stature should not be refuted so easily by amateurs unless he’s utterly incompetent or, as I suggested above, is acting according to an ulterior motive.
Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You.
6 comments
Short, clear, to the point and utterly impossible to refute – which is why we are silenced and marginalized and almost never debated.
Good stuff, but if you study the “works” of Prager, you’ll find out he has been studying the arts of propaganda since he was a kid. You, the author, on the author hand, will never ever get to do
what Prager has done, since he’s in that Glenn Beck-Bill O’Reilley-Christer-Zionist wing of the old school jewish Hollywood elite.
“Where Jews distinguish themselves, however, is through the dishonest way in which they advance their own ethnocentrism.”
This reminds me of a favorite quote from The Godfather II, which I’ve suggested can be read (against the filmmakers’ intentions) as anti-immigrant (i.e, little boys fleeing oppression in their native lands just recreate their criminal syndicate here, under the cover of being a plucky olive oil entrepreneur). We’re supposed to hate hate hate Sen. Geary, but like his model, Nixon, he did nothing wrong:
“I don’t like your kind of people. I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, passing yourselves off as decent Americans. I’ll do business with you, but the fact is that I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself. Yourself and your whole f***ing family.”
Jews are born Jews. They might not all be white of skin, but they are born as Jews. No conversion needed, no mikvah no bar or bat mitzvah. Now, how does that compare with other groups of people? One is not born Protestant, or catholic. One is born jewish and one is born into all that birthright entails. The most important aspect of the birthright is the national inheritance, and the inheritance of a physical nation.
Judaism is the OG urtext of racial nationalism, with a little G dash d sprinkled in, holier than thou, crypto, prager/foxman kosher sandwich, usury, all of that is idol-worship In service of racial (born-identity, or Bourne-identity?) nationalism.
Jews not only try to manipulate the degree of tribalism among whites but also manipulate the degree of tribalism among non- whites to further hurt whites. This is truly unique.
I benefited significantly from reading Prager several years ago back when I was a conservative. As Greg Johnson says, the last and most daunting barrier to moving into White nationalism is often the JQ. Prager helped me through that barrier.
He’s clear that after their Napoleonic/Enlightenment emancipation, most Jews abandoned their religion in favor of secular forms of messianism. This he mourns. But in passing, he noted that despite the tensions between the secular majority and the religious majority, Jews could be relied upon to viscerally hate two things: the religion of Christianity and any nation-state based on genetic identity. Their own excepted, of course.
Having been given permission by a son of Israel to see this pattern, it now leapt out at me. Very painfully. Much of my previous combination of sympathy, admiration and moral anxiety about them dissolved. Reading, via The Occidental Observer, Anglo-French Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc’s 1921 “The Jews” sealed the deal. They were not of us. Never had been and never could be. And they are not our friends. Macdonald came later.
Then the dominoes continued to fall. I began to see crypsis everywhere. It still shocks me.
So although Prager and other Judeocons continue to pull the wool over the eyes of millions of White Gentiles, he was very helpful in allowing me to break through the deluge of post WWII narratives that kept me from seeing what was right in front of me. Thanks, Reb Dennis.
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