Book Review: Separation and Its Discontents

Islam Versus Europe
January 13, 2014

I’ve just finished reading Separation and its discontents : Towards an evolutionary theory of anti-semitism, the last of Kevin MacDonald’s major trio of works on this subject that I hadn’t read.

The book explores the nature of Judaism, arguing, convincingly to me anyway, that is not, in essence, a religion. It is, rather, a genetic lineage, and is perceived as such by Jews, in effect a eugenic experiment. The religious cloak it has donned in the modern age is simply a disguise designed to make it seem more palatable to post-Enlightenment goy. Proof of this is that there has almost never been any proselytism within Judaism, for example, that is there has never been any attempt to convert non-Jews to the “religion”. And those who have converted of their own accord have often met with hostility and ostracism. This is exactly what you would expect if Judaism was primarily about genetic purity rather than mystical truth.

Indeed, a case could be made that Judaism is the prototypical ideological racism in the world. One of the book’s most astonishing insights, to me, was the suggestion that the various kinds of ideological racism that have arisen in Europe were merely defensive responses and, crucially, mirror images, of Jewish ethnic chauvinism towards the gentiles in whose country they were living. For example, MacDonald illustrates that the conversos in Spain, Jews who appeared to convert to Christianity following the royal edict for Jews to convert or leave, continued to retain Jewish customs and to practise in-group marriage, retaining their blood purity. They also came to dominate large sectors of Spanish society, systematically discriminating against the indigenous people and favouring their kin group. The Inquisition, and the obsession with limpieza de sangre (blood purity) it helped engender, were merely defensive indigenous responses to this Jewish ethnic chauvinism and taqiyya. Something similar happened in Germany following the 19th century emancipation of the Jews. Using their higher average intelligence, they came to dominate whole sectors of society, discriminating against the out-group (Germans) and in favour of their fellow Jews. Antisemitism and, ultimately, National Socialism, were the responses this behaviour produced.

Jews have constructed a fantastical account of history in which they appear merely as innocents gliding through time, doing no wrong, simply being the helpless victims of other peoples’ motiveless hatred, a motiveless hatred that, for some curious reason, has been felt by essentially every other people they have ever encountered. This, of course, is exactly the same story that Muslims try and sell us with their “Islamophobia”. It is clear to me, reading MacDonald’s work, that this account of history is grotesquely false. “Antisemitism” has been, and is, a response to Jewish behaviour. “Islamophobia” is a response to Muslim behaviour. We are not helping either of their peoples by continuing to indulge their paranoid persecution fantasies.

Another of the book’s fascinating suggestions is that the spirit of individualism we now think of as a fundamental characteristic of European civilisation emerged first in France and Britain precisely because they did not have substantial Jewish populations. The idea is that the discriminatory, collectivist behaviour of the Jews inevitably provokes a similar response from the indigenes. Much of the country’s psychological energy is thereafter taken up by this conflict.

This has clear parallels with our own experience in modern times. Our multicultural elites claim to yearn for a society “where race doesn’t matter”. But it becomes increasingly apparent that the only society in which race doesn’t matter is one in which everyone, or almost everyone, is of the same race. Multi-racial societies inevitably dissolve into a series of contending ethnic factions.

In conclusion, it’s rare to find a book so packed with novel insights. Of course in large part this is because Jews have come to dominate European societies intellectually, politically, through media ownership, and morally through the falsified history of the 20th century from which the Jewish role in the atrocities of Communism has been carefully erased. This dominance means that almost no public criticism of Jewish conduct can be aired. Perhaps, in a normal world, the insights in MacDonald’s book would seem commonplace. As things are, they seem precious and rare.

Those of you concerned about the islamisation of Europe need to lift your eyes from the Muslims and stop reacting to the symptoms. Your daily spoonfeeding from JihadWatch and GoV isn’t going to help you understand how this catastrophe came about. Kevin MacDonald’s books will. Even though they say almost nothing about Islam, there is no richer source of insight into why Europe is being progressively islamised today. These are among the most important books of our age, and you should regard it as an imperative duty to seek them out and read them. Trying to understand contemporary events without having done so is like to trying to decipher a newspaper article in a language you don’t understand.

Two extracts from the book in which MacDonald discusses Jewish self-deception:

Whether it is deception or self-deception, the implication is that some truths are better left unstated or even unacknowledged, and regarded as pathological expressions of anti-Semitism. As Weiss says, there is moral capital to be gained by adopting an identification as an outsider. I believe that the moral capital obtained by being a psychological outsider has been a critical component of the movements of social criticism discussed in The Culture of Critique. To a very considerable extent Jewish status as outsiders has allowed them to engage in radical criticism of the moral and intellectual foundations of Western society whileretaining a perspective of their own ingroup as ethically and morally beyond reproach. But as Weiss points out and as I have tried to document extensively, ethnocentrism and hostility toward outsiders is rife among Jews, and this is exactly what would be predicted from an evolutionary perspective based on social identity theory. Moreover, Judaism, because it is characterized by high intelligence and resource acquisition ability, has produced ethnic warfare virtually wherever Jews have lived. But by retaining the view of themselves as the morally pure outsider arrayed against a pathologically antisemitic gentile society, Jews are able to simultaneously pursue their own ethnic interests and conceptualize their opponents as morally depraved (and also, as Weiss notes, as “dim-witted”). Self-deception is very useful in this warfare, because it essentially allows Jewish leaders to deny the reality of Jewish wealth and political and cultural influence.

Self-deception may also result in a sort of moral blindness which results in applying different moral standards to the outgroup compared to the Jewish ingroup. Yeshiva University students were asked about the double standard in which they support immigration of all peoples into the United States while Israel only admits Jews ( Rabbi Mayer Schiller, personal communication, December 27, 1995). The double standard had not occurred to any of these strongly identified Jews. When pressed to develop a reason, they tended to say that since Western culture had been anti-Semitic, they were justified in favoring the decline of ethnic solidarity among the European-derived people of the United States.