1,966 words
The struggle against every form of anti-Semitism — from the Left and Islamically motivated — it is our governmental and civic obligation . . . Der Kampf gegen jede Form von Judenfeindlichkeit — von rechts, von links und islamistisch motiviert — ist unsere staatliche und bürgerschaftliche Pflicht . . .
Thus Angela Merkel’s Categorial Imperative: “Jews must be able to feel safe in Germany.” “Juden müssen sich in Deutschland sicher fühlen können.”[1]
Compare this with Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[2]
Immanuel Kant, arguably Germany’s greatest moral philosopher, formulated the signature of his moral philosophy in the famous Categorical Imperative (CI). With it, each and every human being emerges not as an abstraction but as a unique person inviolate and irreplaceable, a creature whose very nature morally forbids that he become merely a means for the designs and ambitions of another. To use another human being as a pure means is to dehumanize him, to turn him into matter. As Kant saw it, human beings as rational creatures were bound by a moral law whose validity was logically tested by its universality. Every individual from the King to the servant was bound by the moral law, even God himself.
Kant stands at the apex of Enlightenment philosophy with David Hume and, like Hume, has been subjected to the rogue reductionism of today’s mini-philosophers, which amounts to scouring the writings of the giants for evidence of “racism,” thumping their chests, and pronouncing the stock anathemas.
For the Germans, Kant no longer resonates. Nowadays it is the ethnomasochistic derangement of their former Chancellor, the perfidious Angela Merkel, as expressed in a recent speech that was made after Hamas’ attack on October 7. Responding to the outpouring of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, she said that “Jews must be able to feel safe in Germany.” Moral rules, obligations, and behavior for the German people, you see, are now circumscribed with the necessity to combat “racism and anti-Semitism” with the weapon of “hate speech.” Kant’s magisterial philosophy of transcendental idealism has given way to Merkel’s degenerate feminist ideology of coerced compassion.
The same style of schoolmarmish scolding aimed at those who might hurt Jewish feelings flourishes here at home. Harvard’s new black lady-president, Claudine Gay, recently made clear what students and faculty were forbidden to say about the current situation in Gaza:
[O]ur community must understand that phrases such as “from the river to the sea” bear specific historical meanings that to a great many people imply the eradication of Jews from Israel and engender both pain and existential fears within our Jewish community. I condemn this phrase and any similarly hurtful phrases. (italics added)
“Similarly hurtful phrases”? Imagine what possibilities that opens up for alliances of the thought-supervisors with the guardians of fragile feelings. From the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of killing me with kindness.
The illocutionary force of Merkel’s utterance and what it portends for both German Jews and German gentiles, you might think, would lead the latter to question the sanity of this former East German Communist — or, perhaps to wonder how such a profoundly treacherous personality reached such heights of power. She did, did she not, when in office throw open Germany’s borders and import millions of folks from parts of the world where making Jews feel unsafe is the most popular form of recreation? Also, have not these Third World refugees been unable or unwilling to assimilate to German culture and society with criminal tendencies — as in raping German women on the streets of Cologne — that make all native Germans feel unsafe?
So, for starters, as we all know: Feelings are a very subjective thing, with huge variations in intensity that corelate with different stages and conditions in life such as age, sex, and economic security, to name just some of them. We also know that feelings are not necessarily rational with respect to their causes. It is rational to feel fear when a mugger presses a knife to your throat. It is not rational to feel high hopes for the prospect of wealth with the purchase of a lottery ticket.
With Merkel’s CI, only German Jews get to say what makes them “feel safe,” since no non-Jews would be qualified to judge what makes Jews feel how they feel. The “what” is limited only by the imagination, and self-interest and/or pathologies will dictate what spin to put on the “how.” This means that the moral obligation for non-Jewish Germans to make Jews feel safe is unlimited with no measure to determine what performance satisfies the obligation, and which also means that Jacob’s power to hold Fritz accountable for making him feel safe is arbitrary and unlimited.
I don’t know what acquaintance Mamma, “Mutti” Merkel has with Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy, but it appears that with her imperative (“must”) of Jewish-safe-feelings for the German people, she has put Schmitt’s central concept of the political — “the friend-enemy distinction” — into play. For the Jews “to feel safe” in Germany, they must be confident that their potential “enemies” pose no threat to them. And, consistent with Schmitt’s concept of the political as a potential friend-enemy confrontation, it is, per Merkel, the German Jews who get “to decide” who are their enemies and what mobilization efforts are necessary to achieve and maintain an adequate feeling of safety:
Schmitt claims that one cannot judge, from an external perspective, that a group is morally unjustified in defining its own identity in a certain way and to introduce political enmity, with the attendant possibility of killing, to preserve that identity. Only members of a group are in a position to decide, from the perspective of an existentially affected participant, whether the otherness of another group amounts to a threat to their own form of life and thus potentially requires to be fought.[3]
Given German-Jewish history and that the Jews have established the German-initiated Holocaust at the center of their religion of perpetual victimhood, with the German people as the paradigm of modern, genocidal anti-Semites — Hitler’s willing executioners — the Germans can never be forgiven and must remain in some form as existential enemies of the Jews. The Jews have no incentive or inclination to relinquish their victimhood, and the Germans are fools to believe that the show of any reluctance to embrace their assigned guilt will do anything other than be used to prove that they are still in thrall to Hitler, and will again be “willing executioners” at some future time.
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It is not an unreasonable question then to pose: What would make Jews feel safe in Germany?
It would seem that Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction provides the answer. For Jews to feel safe, Germany would have to become a whole lot “less German” up to some vanishing point where the German people of the present bear no resemblance – ethnically-culturally — to the German people of the past. That German “enemy” would have to be effaced. This was the thinking behind the 1944 proposal put forward by Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s — to use starvation, forced labor, and dismantlement of the entire German industrial complex to destroy what was left of a soon-to-be-defeated Third Reich.
The full force of Morgenthau’s Carthaginian peace was never applied as the Western Allies prudently concluded that a strong, rebuilt West Germany was needed as a bulwark against its former ally-turned-enemy, the Soviet Union. The occupying Western Allies’ de-Nazification program, however, turned out in the long term to be a de-Germanizing affair, fulfilling Morgenthau’s goal, albeit with a softer, more gradual, insidious means of implementation. The German people, fully internalizing their guilt, have, nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War, embraced the multicultural ideology of their Leftist conquerors, with “racism” having become a tool of moral blackmail. This burden of “racism” has been made to weigh particularly heavy on the German people for obvious reasons, and to prove themselves free of it they have had to aggressively de-Germanize themselves.
The German Right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has recently gained in popularity with the voters by pushing back against the government’s Great Replacement policy that has already made Germany at lot “less German” — and a lot less safe. However, when the voters democratically support a party that the Left and center parties morally disapprove of, they respond by attempting to criminalize it.
From Politico:
The Saxony-Anhalt state chapter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been classified as a right-wing extremist group by state-level intelligence authorities tasked with surveilling anti-constitutional groups.
AfD is now classified as having “definitely extremist aspirations” — the highest threat category used by the domestic intelligence service, which allows intelligence services to increase monitoring of the party branch.
According to the authorities, the party violates human dignity, the principle of democracy and the rule of law — three pillars of the German constitution. Particularly problematic is AfD’s disregard for human dignity, which it demonstrates by calling migrants “invaders,” “intruders” and “culturally alien supply migrants” . . .
Again, we see how Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” distinction works in contemporary German politics. While the German Jews get “to decide” who the enemy is and designate them as their historic, existential enemies — “Nazis” — the AfD isn’t permitted “to decide,” i.e. to observe the non-German speaking, culturally hostile hordes invading their borders and then use descriptors that accurately capture the reality of the current migration crisis. The AfD has in effect been declared the enemy, an existential threat to the established order. Calling them names apparently does not “violate” their “human dignity.”
Again, from Politico:
Strong evidence of democratic violations by the [AfD] party — including Islamophobic, antisemitic and racist statements by elected officials — were collected by the German authorities and ‘prove the efforts of this party against the free democratic basic order,’ said Jochen Hollmann, the head of Saxony-Anhalt’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, to German news outlet mdr on Tuesday.
Give that hermeneutical ring on your finger a twist and it should tell you that “Islamophobic, antisemitic and racist statements by elected officials” proves “the efforts of this party against the free democratic basic order” is a barely coded message that says that white Germans are no longer the future of Germany. Germany’s “principle of democracy” does not include freedom of speech for native Germans.
The political dynamics of “racism and anti-Semitism” going on in Germany are being replicated in the United States, with the Republicans aping Angela Merkel’s making the Jews “feel safe” and the Democrats split between railing against the genocidal Zionists and affirming Israel’s right to exist. You do have to relish the dilemma that the Left’s support for Muslim mass migration to the West has put them in. What to do about those brown victims of white racism who are now doing their “anti-Semitic” war dance in the big city streets?
It is best, I believe, not to view the mounting political challenges as resolvable within the conventions of our traditional two-party system. It is better to employ the friend-enemy distinction in framing the problems and determining how to act. The Republicans serve Israeli-Jewish interests, and the Democrats have been busy importing the replacement population for white people. The political establishment is our enemy, which means, practically speaking, we must be realistic and expect them to continue to treat us as enemies. It is to our advantage to convince beleaguered white Americans outside of our ranks of this reality in order to grow our base of resistance. We also should support and applaud the efforts to weaken Israel and strenuously resist all attempts to bring Palestinian refugees to our shores.
Notes
[1] Junge Freiheit, “Merkel besorgt über zunehmenden Antisemitismus,” November 9, 2023.
[2] Immanuel Kant (1993) [1785], Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by James W. Ellington (third ed.), Hackett, p. 30.
[3] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Carl Schmitt.”
19 comments
I came across a really interesting bit in the current edition of the Jüdische Rundschau, a Jewish “right-wing” monthly newspaper. The article itself is about the history of the IDF, but there is this one passage (emphasis mine):
“The demonstrations against the judicial reform have made it clear how much Israel is controlled by the so-called secular Ashkenazi elite, which built the country and has held the reins firmly in its hands ever since. The protests were so fierce because the government wanted to put the strongest bastion of this social class, the Supreme Court, back in its place.
However, it has become clear that the army is also dominated by the descendants of the pioneers. Religious and non-Ashkenazi soldiers have long known that the high ranks of the army are only accessible to secular Ashkenazim.
However, it is not only the fact that the descendants of the founders of the state divide up the country’s positions of power among themselves that is criticized. Incidentally, this can be seen very clearly in pictures from Israel, in which representatives of Israel, whether government, army or business, look like Europeans, while the Ashkenazim make up at most 45 percent of the country.
The army is also criticized for continuing its pro-Palestinian policy, although it has not achieved security for Israel for decades. If the high ranks of the army were also open to the many highly motivated religious soldiers from Judea and Samaria, it might have a different approach to the conflict with the ‘Palestinians’.”
I thought that was a… different… take than the usual narrative.
The Globalists want to destroy any national society, and the Israeli society, which were actually NS in its origin, is no exception for them. It is beneficial for the Globalists to maximal replace the white population with non-whites, since non-whites represent better subjects for them. They are content with fewer social and civil rights. They work poorly, but are willing to sell their labor cheaply. They will not speak out against the government and any of its decision because they have no concept of civil rights and liberties. They are better consumers and better citizens than pampered whites accustomed to a good life, good working conditions and certain political rights, like freedom of speech. Therefore, it is simply beneficial for the Globalists around the world for economic and political reasons to replace white people in all countries with non-white people. This is not a conspiracy of some evil guys (or even ET alliens) to destroy whites. No, globalists economics dictates this move. And the same thing happens in Israel. The white European Jews, Ashkenazim, there must be replaced by Moroccan savages and the equally uncivilized Ethiopian black Jews. Although Globalists are disproportionately Jewish, it is a mistake to think that they have the interests of white Jews at heart. For them, white Jews are just as unnecessary, excessive eaters, as white gentiles. And, in their opinion, they should also be slowly gotten rid of.
Also, re: AfD – Hans Schmidt wrote in Hitler Boys in America:
“The rulers of the alleged Western democracies (especially the United States and Great Britain) have instituted secret stop-gap measures that make it impossible for German nationalistic (i.e., patriotic) parties to ever make an impact on the political process in the former Reich. Once a genuinely patriotic party that has the true interests of the German people at heart gains enough electoral votes to reach the ‘secret’ 15 percent mark, it will and must be destroyed by the German stooges themselves – and by whatever illicit means – according to Allied fiat.”
Now, I haven’t done any research on whether that is actually true. Schmidt did get some things wrong in his books. But whether there is a secret plan or not, the powers that be certainly act this way. As soon as the AfD began to rise in the polls, you heard all the usual phrases and accusations and, yes, suggestions to ban the party. It is more opportunistic than anything else: You pursue a completely misguided policy, and when voters switch to the other side, you don’t change your policy (which obviously doesn’t appeal to the people), but instead ban the other side. The “Hitler on the horizon!” narrative is just convenient.
The story of how the British occupation administration practically liquidated the Socialist Imperial Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei) of the former General Otto-Ernst Remer in 1952 in the British Zone of Occupation (despite the fact that the British generally treated both captured German POWs and the civilian population of their occupation zone much more humanely than the Americans, and even more than the French) surprisingly echoes the way in the Soviet Union, where the pro-British forces in the communist elite in 1953 eliminated Lavrentiy Beria, who advocated the same thing that General Remer advocated, i.e. the united neutral non-aligned and demilitarized Germany with the withdrawal of all foreign troops (as this happened in 1955 in Austria). This decision was extremely unprofitable for Britain, so it killed two birds with one stone. Or rather, two stones. One was used against Remer, the other against Beria. Fortunately, Remer, unlike Beria, at least remained alive.
Gorbachev also survived, although he was removed from power as punishment for allowing Germany to unite, despite fierce British resistance.
Funny you should mention Kant and refugees. Curtis “Moldboig” Yarvin had a piece last week that stirred up a bit of controversy; he suggests that if one really wanted to help the Palestinians, one should put aside “feelings” such as outrage, etc., so as to “rationally” accept the best possible solution: relocate them to Thailand, let the Israelis build condos and casinos on the West Bank, and use the proceeds to compensate the refugees. From refugees to passive investors, a win/win for all!
Some had the temerity to point out that if the US evaluated the Middle East “rationally” the correct policy would be to help the Arabs take back Palestine and just buy oil from them.
Yarvin leads me to recall Richard Taylor’s comment: “If anyone told me that he guided his life by Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and I believed him to be sincere, I would regard him with as much loathing as if he had confessed to habitually drowning small children, just to watch them squirm.” [Paraphrased from memory]
Schiller said much the same thing back in the day, though more poetically.
But why to Thailand? Right now, Ukraine is being depopularized at an accelerated pace in order to provide a place of residence for the Palestinians and for all other cultural enrichers (Kulturbereicherer) from the Middle East and Northern Africa.
Germany’s Constitutional Court banned the government from giving a green light to the shooting down of a hijacked plane on a 9/11-style suicide mission. The reasoning went back to Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which forbade seeing the doomed passengers – even if they only had 20 minutes left to live – as merely a means.
No doubt there was an amendment exempting a plane heading for an Israeli target.
I get the impression that if someone lower down the food chain – an air-squadron commander, say – were to approve the downing of the civilian plane, he’d probably escape prosecution.
The ruling seems designed to give German politicians the right to wash their hands of the decision. They probably still have nightmares about Nuremberg.
Why did Richard Taylor say that? While there are problems with it (counter examples), I think most great philosophers regard Kant’s CI with high esteem. Whenever I taught Ethics I always taught the CI. It is certainly more interesting than Mill’s Utilitarianism.
Oddly enough, although Taylor’s remark is memorable in its hyperbole – I recall it some 40 years later – it wasn’t until Yarvin came along that I grasped his point.
Taylor, in his book Good And Evil: A New Approach, argues that morality is conative, not cognitive; entities without emotions or feelings would have no use for morality, or understand it.
Kant’s CI is an attempt to locate the nature of morality in the mere logical form of a command; it seems like sort of system a sociopath or autist would construct so as to model the behavior of actual humans; hence, Taylor’s point, that someone who actually felt the need to use the CI to figure out what was right or wrong could only be a sociopath (or, more kindly, an autist).
Or… an OT Hebrew, who has no empathy and consequently no ethics, only commands to be blindly followed only because of their source, YHVH, the Divine Commander. As Schopenhauer pointed out, the CI is the mirage of a command without a commander, to be obeyed only because of its categorical form. Kant needs to do this because, as a Protestant, he is a crypto-Jew who views morality as a system of commands, but he can’t talk about God without admitting he’s really doing theology. So the source of moral authority can only be the logical form of the command itself.
Hence, Yarvin asks us to put aside our “irrelevant” feelings and deduce with pure reason the best possible solution (which just happens to be total Israeli victory, what a surprise). Ironically, in logical form, it’s the same as Eichmann’s “I was only following orders.” Leave aside any feelings or emotions, just “do your duty” and whatever happens, you acted “morally.”
Schiller expressed this at the time, along the lines of “I do good to my friends, because I want them to prosper; alas, if only I could be moral!” (I paraphrase, alas, it’s not as memorable as Taylor!)
As for Mill, yes, snore.
Thanks for your detailed answer. I have great respect for Richard Taylor as a philos0pher. His entire book “Metaphysics” is interesting, especially his defense of Fatalism. What you wrote about I have never heard of before so I will have to dig into it.
Here I would note that the most Jews in Germany today are not German Jews. The German Jews, assimiliated since at least Friedrich II der Grosse von Preussen, and had all civil rights since Napoleon, have greatly contributed to the development of Germany, its economy, science, arts, etc. The German Jews fought at the fronts of the Great War, and many of them were real heroes. Most of them were good German patriots and some even supported nationalist parties and organizations during the Weimarer Republik. There’s a good article to this topic, written by Kerry Bolton.
After the First World War, however, the EASTERN (not German) Jews flooded into Germany from Poland, Halychyna, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, etc., i.e. from the underdeveloped countries. Those Jews were not assimiliated, uncivilized, mostly religious, brought up in ghettos, and many of them have bad sentiments to everything European. They were ferments of short-lived Communist republics in Germany and in another European states. Many of them became members of Communist parties, members of Comintern, or spies for the Soviet intelligence services, i.e. subvertive elements. The Nazi repressions of Jews were initially caused by the actions of these subversive elements among Eastern European Jews, but soon spread to ordinary German Jews. For many of them this was a shock, since they saw no reason for reprisals against them, because they considered themselves (and mostly were) loyal Germans. This was probably A.H.’s main and first mistake – the Nazis threw out the baby with the bathwater.
(Another example. In the USA, a huge number of Soviet agents in the 1930-50s were Jews, but they were all from so-called Eastern Europe; there were no Western Jews among these traitors.)
As a result of the war, the Jewish population in Germany was extremely reduced. Later, already in the early 1990s, the German government for some reason wanted to “revive” the Jewish community in Germany and began to import into the country again not civilized European Jews, but Eastern European Jews from the former USSR. Of course, over the past time, these Eastern Jews have become civilized in many ways, but still among them there were a huge number of various kinds of crooks, swindlers, thieves and outright gangsters who significantly contributed to corruption and organized crime both in Germany and in the former SU-countries from which they came . In addition, they were very far from Jewish customs, culture, and language. Many of them have only far distant Jewish ancestors, and some just bought Jewish papers. (I do not know how many of them were agents of Russian intelligence services, infiltrated into Germany, but I suppose that some were.)
So, when talking about Jews in Germany, we must remember that these are not German Jews, but savage Jews from Eastern Europe. And the difference between Eastern European Jews and German Jews is about the same as between the Slavs and the s0-called Eastern Slavs. On the one hand there is civilization, on the other there is primitive barbarism, strenuously masquerading as civilization, and seeking to destroy from within the society into which they have penetrated, and although they enjoy the advantages and privileges of such society, they do not understand it and even hate it.
I also want to add that I knew some of ex-Soviet Jews resettled into Germany in 1990’s. They were ordinary people, many were good guys, some not so good, some were real crooks. But they all have two things in common. They were totally assimiliated, and very far from Jewish language, religion, customs and culture. And they emigrated to Germany only because of economical reasons, just because the life standards in Germany were and are much higher, than in the post-Soviet world. They were happy to come as “Kontingentfluchtlinge” and live in Germany, to get subvention and accomodations for free, and to make some merchant deals with their former motherland and to get some money. They were not bad people at all, just like all of us. Anyway it was better to let them in, than Syryan and Moroccan “refugees”, but how could their immigration help to revive Jewish community and Jewish cultural life in Germany, this I do not understand.
About ten years ago, I wanted to apply for a job in Germany, and they were interested in talking to me, but they did not want to go through the process of hiring a foreigner. My parents were German immigrants to the US, and I called two German consulates to ask if I qualified for German citizenship based on the fact that both my parents were Germans, and they both said no. If I recall correctly, the reason was that I was born after my father became a citizen of the US. I am almost certain that was the reason given. Based on my knowledge of today’s Germany, I concluded that the qualifier that prevented me from getting citizenship was put in there for no other reason than to keep ethnic Germans from claiming citizenship in Germany.
About a week ago, I watched an interview with Maximilian Krah (link below), an AFD member of the European Parliament. He said something that clarified certain things for me. He said Germany’s mainstream parties that rule Germany don’t recognize a German ethnicity and think doing so would be unfair to German citizens that are not ethnically German. That means they want the eradication of ethnic Germans, and that is what has been happening since 1945. I recall that in the 1970s, foreign immigration was an issue. Helmut Schmidt was a popular leader, but he and his party (Social Democrats) were viewed as letting in too many foreigners, but I’m sure they still knew what a German is.
I recall before 1991, when you never heard of any Jews living in Germany, but the idea of it for New York Jews (where I lived) was, I think, extremely strange. They thought a Jew buying a German car was betraying the Jews.
After 1991, there was some immigration of ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union. Many of these people had left Germany about 200 years ago, and I’m not sure they even spoke German any longer. That was around the same time I heard that Germany made a special effort to have Jews come to Germany. I’m sure Jews that were of German heritage always had the right to return to Germany beginning sometime after 1945, but then I think I read that any Jew that suffered in WW II as a result of German actions could apply for German citizenship, and then a few years ago I thought I read that any Jew that lived in Europe (even non-warring countries like Spain) could apply for German citizenship. But not ethnic Germans whose father became a citizen before he was born.
However Qazaq (Steppendeutsche), and Russian (Volgadeutsche), and Ukrainian Germans were and are allowed to emigrate into Germany and they get the citizenship, even if many of them are very far from German culture and do not know the language too.
I think here the Germany’s mainstream parties use the same rule, as all globalist forces use everywhere in the world. The globalists want to replace whites with non-whites, because non-whites are for them better subjects, politically and economically, who are much easier to rule than the whites and who would be satisfied with worse life standards than the whites.
In Germany the mainstream parties are agree to bring in Volksdeutsche from Russia, Qazaqstan, Ukraine and other underdeveloped countries just because they would be better subjects, who would be happy to work for lesser salary, under worse work conditions, and who would without any question obey to everything what the government say and keep their mouth shut (like also the “tamed” native people of their Asian countries of origin always did and still do). Why should they instead let some American Germans in, which would ask for better life standards, better salaries, labor unions, or freedom of speech? Nobody needs such inconvenient subjects, pardon, “citizens”, you know.
There are lots of things this brings up, but one thing stands out for sure. Germany’s mainstream politicians are lucky, because in nearly every other country, they would’ve been tarred and feathered.
But not in the castrated Western Europe. In Central (and so-called Eastern) Europe, yes, they probably would.
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