[Bret L]

(( I disagree, somewhat. The WASPs DID commit suicide. Bret.))

Farewell, My Dear WASP

Edmund Connelly

February 12, 2010

“Here’s a WASP joke. Question: Why do WASPs not engage in more orgies?
Answer: Too many thank-you notes to write.”

Thus began a NYTime’s book review last fall about the new book
Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor by
Tad Friend.

I read the review and highlighted a phenomenon I thought was worth
commenting on later. The passage was:

In his teenage years, Tad Friend chose to attend the Shipley School in
Bryn Mawr, Pa., where he first grew aware of the designation
“N.O.C.D.” — “not our class, dear,” an exclusion usually directed at
Jews and Catholics. Friend offers a fitting tirade against WASP anti-
Semitism, reminding us that well into the 20th century, signs on the
lawn of the Lake Placid Club read “No Dogs. No Tuberculars. No
Hebrews,” and noting that his paternal grandfather “was hardly alone,
among the WASPs on Squirrel Hill, in fretting” that it was harboring
an increasing number of Jews. In atonement, the author observes that
“almost everyone” he’d hung out with at Harvard was Jewish, as was his
first significant other, Melanie Grayboden. When relating his painful
eventual shedding of Melanie, he digresses divertingly on different
forms of ethnic guilt. “If Catholic guilt is ‘I’ve been bad’ and
Jewish guilt is ‘You’ve been bad,’ then WASP guilt is ‘You probably
think I’ve been bad.’ ”

This review that I clipped out of the Sunday Book Review then gathered
dust on the big pile of magazines and papers that invariably grows on
my side table. Atop it later came a curiously related story, this one
about a WASP named George Gilder who seems to love Jews more than many
of them love themselves, if that’s possible. By pure chance, I’ve just
happened across the third review of Gilder’s latest book, which I take
as a sign to now write about it.

My first notice of The Israel Test, Gilder‘s new book, came while
reading Scott McConnell’s review of it in the Dec. 2009 American
Conservative. Titled Chosen People, the review sadly noted the usual
mainstream fa “For Gilder, the superior men are not Teutonic
explorers or generals but Jewish scientists and financiers.” (Save the
guffaws—we’re not supposed to notice that Madoff, Summers, Rubin,
Blankfein et al. are all Tribe.)

We also see that Gilder’s prose includes, “Is one able to admire and
embrace Jewish superiority and creativity, or does one, out of envy,
oppose it?” Getting to the central argument of the book, we find that
Gilder’s thesis is that “all opposition to Israel is rooted in anti-
Semitism.” Or this: “We need Israel today as much as Israel needs us,
as much as we needed Jewish physicists and chemists [for the Manhattan
Project].”” Ho boy, the same old tired arguments trotted out by so
many Jews. Fine, Gilder must be a Jew doing the usual group-shielding,
meme-selling job. Or so I thought.

Much to my surprise, McConnell revealed that Gilder is a WASP raised
in an upper-class world. And McConnell thinks he has found a reason
for Gilder’s strange Judeophilia, an explanation that oddly parallels
that of Tad Friend above. It seems that

an incident that occurred when [Gilder] was about 17. While trying to
impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out
something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she
was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he
has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a
sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are
not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or
embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social
anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style
Zionism. Atonement.

This is simply bizarre. I cannot relate to a group that would be so
easily traumatized by, as McConnell states, something so trivial. What
is going on?

It gets worse.

The next time I ran into a review of The Israel Test was in the Nov.
2009 issue of Commentary, penned by Michael Medved. Gilder is quoted
as declaring: “Israel is hated above all for its virtues.”

This of course is lunacy. Could Gilder be that clueless about Israel’s
actual behavior? He shouldn’t be. After all, McConnell described him
as a “veteran luminary of the American Right, author of a successful
polemic against feminism and a Reagan-admired ode to the free market,
and publisher of a newsletter touting technology stocks.”

I believe I understand why many Jews offer explanations for anti-
Semitism in which Jews are blameless. Readers will likely recall what
Kevin MacDonald wrote in chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents
about Jewish failure to be realistic about their own often bad or
brutal behavior: “Historians of Judaism have often falsely portrayed
the beliefs of gentiles as irrational fantasies while portraying the
behavior of Jews as irrelevant to anti-Semitism” (p. 220).

But of course Jewish behavior is overwhelming responsible for
occurrences of anti-Semitism: people react angrily when their culture
is relentless attacked, when they are swindled, and particularly when
they are subjected to genocide. This is rational human behavior. Why
does Gilder miss this?

Midway through his review, even the normally level-headed Medved gets
taken in and becomes party to Gilder’s fantasy about Israel. The
Palestinians, Medved and Gilder agree, are fortunate to have had the
Israelis take over Gaza and the West Bank because this has “decisively
raised the living standards of local Arab populations” [emphasis in
original]. Between 1967 and the first intifada in 1987 “per capita
income tripled in the West Bank while it rose in Gaza more than
twentyfold—from $80 to $1,706.”

I suppose to worshippers of mammon, this represents progress, but what
about all those thousands and thousands of Palestinians— including
countless women and children—blown to bits by Israeli offensive
weapons? Does a dying youth utter with his last breath, “All to the
best. At least I would have earned more money . . . had I not died so
young”? (See my essay “For Whom the Gaza Bell Tolls” here and here .)

The best review so far of The Israel Test is a negative one by Robert
Sungenis that appeared in the January issue of E. Michael Jones’s
Culture Wars. (Subscribe here.) Readers should know that Culture Wars
and its editor are pariahs among respectable company, mostly because
The Jewish Problem is addressed forthrightly. I think that’s the whole
draw of the magazine. Indeed, Jones and his writers are “Jew-wise,” as
TOQ editor Greg Johnson likes to say.

The Israel Test is reviewed in Culture Wars by frequent contributor
Robert Sungenis, Ph.D. He begins by noting the same Gilder quotes
about Jewish and Israeli superiority covered above. He then addresses
some of the negatives. To be sure, Sungenis’s critique is that of an
arch-conservative Catholic, but his claims are nonetheless intriguing.
For example, he writes that despite Jewish prominence in capitalism,
technology, etc., “there has resulted more atheism, more murder, and
more sexual deviance than at any time in history. If anything, these
technological advances have stunted man’s development, since the
tendency is now to rely on one’s own Tower of Babel to measure human
worth to the virtual exclusion of the development of the inner man.”

He goes on to charge these smart Jews with “the promoting of
homosexuality, divorce, adultery, gambling, insider trading, cultural
revolution, and many other societal ills.” Mischievously he adds that
"Among Israel’s Muslim neighbors these ills are practically non-
existent.”

With respect to Jews and capitalism, he asks, “How much more economic
upheaval, corruption, greed and scandal do the capitalists need to
realize that their system is on a self-destruct course? How many
Savings & Loan debacles, Enrons, WorldCom’s, Ivan Boeskys, Bernie
Madoffs, deceptive collateralized debt obligations and credit default
swaps are needed to see that the capitalist system is a racket of
smoke and mirrors?”

Sungenis goes on to skewer other categories of Jewish “geniuses.”
Psychologists? Well, take Sigmund Freud. Sungenis’s estimation of the
good Doctor Freud is in line with what Kevin MacDonald wrote in The
Culture of Critique, MacDonald’s culminating volume in his trilogy on
Jews: Freud was a charlatan cult leader who was not good for gentile
society.

Jewish feminists? Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and their
ilk “have destroyed the traditional role of wife and mother.” Jewish
artists and architects? Fuggedaboutit. (See here, here and here.)
Ditto for the eighty percent of American comics who are Jewish—“the
raunchy Sarah Silverman or the sex-crazed Woody Allen and Howard
Stern.” Such humor presents “the abnormal as normal, the neurotic as
necessary, the outsider as the true insider.” Even a prominent rabbi
admitted that “Some of the most notoriously foul-mouthed and obscene-
minded entertainers are Jewish and earn no reproof for their public
aggrandizement of filth.”

In summary, according to Sungenis, “The humanist Jew has poisoned
every area of our culture. Gilder can’t see any of it because he lacks
a properly tuned moral compass. The moral ineptitude of the humanist
Jew at large is ignored and only his ‘technological achievements,’
‘his raw genius,’ his ‘capitalistic entrepreneurial spirit’ is
enshrined as the model which the world is not only to follow but to
bow down to.”

This leaves me trying to get my head around why such an obviously
brilliant WASP like Gilder would write what he does about Jews and
Israel. From what I can tell, he sincerely believes what he writes,
too.

Consider that this man is the product of the best America has to offer—
wealth, Exeter, Harvard, exposure to top leaders (he was a
speechwriter for Richard Nixon), etc. His long list of books attests
to his intelligence and work ethic. Among them a

Wealth and Poverty

Sexual Suicide (updated as Men and Marriage)

TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World

Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology

The Spirit of Enterprise (updated as Recapturing the Spirit of
Enterprise)

The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech
Innovation

Life After Television

Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America

In addition he writes the Gilder Technology Report.

Clearly, we have to take such a man seriously. But, again, what could
make him believe such things about superior Jews and an enlightened
and moral Israel when the facts are so starkly otherwise?

Kevin MacDonald attempted to unravel the effects Jews and WASPs have
had on each other. This came in his discussion of Eric P. Kaufmann’s
The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. In essence, Kaufmann argued that
WASPs voluntarily relinquished hegemony in America—cultural “suicide,”
in other words.

Writing on VDARE.com, MacDonald explained why he viewed it as murder
rather than suicide. In short, as he argued at length in his book The
Culture of Critique, “the rise of Jews to elite status in the United
States and the influence of particular Jewish intellectual and
political movements, especially the push for mass and indiscriminate
immigration, were key contributions—necessary conditions—to the demise
of WASP America.”

Crucially, MacDonald complained that Kaufmann

never mentions coercion and the penalties that are imposed on people
who dissent from the elite cosmopolitan consensus. The fact is, Whites
who violate these strictures are severely censured — a phenomenon with
which I have considerable personal experience.

Kaufmann presents the views of elite Whites who are cooperating in the
demise of their own people as nothing more than the enlightened
opinions of an intellectual and moral elite. But it is far more than
that. Since the 1960s, Whites who depart from the consensus of
cosmopolitanism have been penalized in a wide variety of ways — from
lack of access to the mainstream media, to firing from their jobs, to
social opprobrium. Conversely, those who collaborate are rewarded.
This revolution is neither peaceful nor bloodless.

I’m not sure if this helps understand Gilder. In fact, doesn’t it
deepen the mystery, because, as MacDonald concluded about the Jewish-
WASP ethnic war in America, “For the Anglo-Saxons, it is a defeat of
cataclysmic proportions.”

How could Gilder not recognize this? He’s old enough (b. 1939) to have
grown up with older relatives who represented the apogee of WASP power
in America, but his whole life has witnessed the unbroken decline of
his caste — and a concomitant rise of the Jews. Are we witnessing a
form of the Stockholm Syndrome, in this case, one where a formerly
free man worships the power of his (cultural) captors? I confess I
don’t know.

I almost wish I could find evidence that Gilder was blackmailed into
writing The Israel Test, or that he did it as a quid pro quo for
something else, or that he’s in love with a Jewish woman. Lacking any
evidence of that, however, I’m forced to grapple with the question of
how an otherwise highly intelligent man could be so misguided about
Jews.

Whites in America have suffered in recent decades because of the
migration of power from WASPs to Jews. To be sure, middle and working
class Whites who are not elite WASPs have done their best to protect
their interests. Ford was from a rural background, Lindbergh was never
part of the Eastern elite, and McCarthy, Coughlin, and Buchanan were
or are Catholic.

Where are the WASPs today? Some have led lives unworthy of their
ancestors (think Paris Hilton), while others have died young after
fleeting and dissolute lives. The Short Unhappy Life of Casey Johnson
may be fitting:

Lesbian heiress, socialite, and Hollywood celeb Casey Johnson, 30, was
found dead in the bedroom of her West Hollywood home on January 4,
2010. Jewish gossip website TMZ reported that Johnson, last heard from
on December 29, 2009, had been dead for several days before her body
was discovered by a maid. A coroner’s toxicology report has yet to be
issued, but foul play is not suspected. Johnson suffered from diabetes
and had a history of drug abuse.

Casey Johnson’s death provides a convenient window into the seamy
underbelly of the contemporary WASP “elite.”

Mostly, it seems, American WASPs have simply disappeared. Updike died,
while President Bush (41), undeniably a WASP, gave way to his son
Dubya (43), who certainly did not look, speak or behave like a WASP.
Where can we now find in positions of power those tall, lean men who,
whatever their vulnerabilities, once so confidently bestrode the world
stage?



Averell Harriman



George H. W. Bush

Where once we had men like Averell Harriman and George Herbert Walker
Bush, we now have Alan Dershowitz, Larry David, Woody Allen, and
Michael Chertoff.



America, including its White gentile majority, is about to find out
what it’s like to be ruled by a hostile elite. The upper crust WASPs
seem to have gone quietly for the most part, but what of the remaining
White masses? As MacDonald said with respect to the WASPs, “For the
Anglo-Saxons, it is a defeat of cataclysmic proportions.”

The same now goes for all Whites."

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and
expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The
Occidental Quarterly.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...ly-Gilder.html

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Feb 13, 1:59*pm, Bret L wrote:

Farewell, My Dear WASP

Damn. I thought Bratzi was finally leaving.