Sports betting was effectively confined to a single US state as recently as 2017. After the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban in Murphy v. NCAA in 2018, sportsbooks of any form now operate in 38 states. Total wagers followed the same curve, climbing from $4.9 billion in 2017 to $121.1 billion in 2023—a roughly 25-fold increase. The decisive feature of this growth is that 94% of all wagers ($113.8 billion) were placed online, meaning the expansion of legal betting has been an expansion of online and mobile betting.

When North Carolina became the 38th state to legalise sportsbooks in 2024, it pushed the share of the US population living in a state with legal sports betting to 63%. Within six years of the Murphy ruling, legal access to sports betting had gone from a rarity to the majority experience for Americans.

Legal online sports betting expanded from one state in 2018 to 31 by 2026, and the result shows in account ownership: 27% of US adults—and fully 52% of men under 50—now hold an online sportsbook account. Where earlier waves of gambling legalisation required a trip to a casino or a racetrack, mobile apps put the sportsbook a few taps away from half of America’s younger men.

National surveys show that overall gambling participation stayed high between 2018 and 2024 at roughly 72%, masking a sharp shift in how Americans gamble. Online gambling participation rose from 15% of adults in 2018 to 25% in 2021, easing only slightly to 22% in 2024; sports betting participation rose from 20% to 23% and parlay sports betting—a single bet that combines two or more individual wagers—nearly doubled from 17% to 30%. The migration toward online, multi-leg products—bets that are fast, continuous and heavily marketed—is the clearest single indicator of the gambling industry’s digital pivot.

In a 2026 national probability sample of 1,677 Americans aged 13 to 27, more than half (52%) had gambled in the past year—including 43% of 13 to 17-year-olds. Among past-year gamblers, 10% were classified as high-risk problem gamblers, some 5% of the full sample. The survey covered 21 activities including emerging gambling forms such as social casinos and prediction markets.

Almost 8% of American adults—roughly 20 million people—reported engaging in at least one problematic gambling behaviour “many times” in 2025. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that about 2.5 million adults currently meet criteria for gambling disorder, with a further 5 to 8 million showing milder but still harmful patterns of play.

The National Problem Gambling Helpline averaged 36,723 contacts per month in 2025, even excluding a three-month data gap. For the first time, online and app-based gambling was the most commonly reported primary problem form (31% of contacts, up from 23% in 2024), overtaking traditional slots and electronic gaming machines.

The Lancet Commission predicts that consumers’ net losses to gambling will reach nearly $700 billion a year by 2028. Online gambling is the engine of that growth with online revenues forecast to rise from $75 billion in 2021 to $205 billion in 2030—roughly a tripling in a decade.

Some countries are already attempting to mitigate the effects of online gambling. The UK proposed a lower online-slots stake limit of £2 per spin for 18–24-year-olds, compared with £5 for older adults, in recognition of the elevated gambling harms among younger players. Online slots are among the most intensive and fast-paced gambling products available, and the two-tier cap signals that the UK regulator regards young adults as particularly vulnerable to their design.

UK survey data from 2019–20 found that 30% of current gamblers reported making unplanned gambling expenditures after seeing a gambling advert, promotion or sponsorship. Gambling advertising is heavily skewed towards men who are reached roughly 2.3 times more than women, with the 25–34 age group accounting for one third of all online gambling accounts reached by adverts.

The negative effects on people’s finances are already being felt. A study that followed the credit records of roughly seven million Americans found that when a state legalised sports betting, its average credit score slipped by about 0.8 points. In states that allowed online betting, the fall was nearly three times bigger—around 2.75 points. In states with online betting, people’s chances of going bankrupt rose by about 10%, and the amount of debt sent to collection agencies went up by around 8%. The effects took roughly two years to appear, the time window for repeated losses to turn into serious financial trouble. Negative outcomes from online betting hit subprime borrowers and lower-income younger men hardest.

Other data on bank transactions show that a 10% rise in spending of household income on gambling is linked to a 51% jump in payday-loan use, and makes people almost twice as likely to miss a mortgage payment. Higher gambling spending was also tied to lower savings and a greater risk of losing work. Among gamblers living in households earning under $10,000 a year, nearly 30% were classed as high-risk problem gamblers—far above the rate for the adult population as a whole.

When people finally ask for help, it is usually about money. Among National Problem Gambling Helpline conversations in 2025, financial struggles were mentioned in 73% of interactions, up from 66% the previous year.

The costs of the gambling boom are not counted only in dollars and defaults but in health and, ultimately, in lives. One study of insurance claims covering roughly 62 million enrollee-years of US adults found that after states legalised online sports betting, the numbers of antidepressant prescriptions, outpatient diagnoses of depression and anxiety all rose—most significantly for women. The increases grew stronger in each year after legalisation.

Online search results show an increasing number of people seeking help for gambling problems. Researchers tracked Google searches containing terms like “gambling addiction hotline” and “am I a gambling addict” from 2016 to mid-2024. After sports betting was legalised, national searches of this kind ran 23% above what earlier trends predicted. In the 73 months after the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, there were roughly 6.5 to 7.3 million such searches across the country, peaking at about 180,000 in a single month, June 2023.

For young people already gambling at the most dangerous levels, the addiction is tightly bound up with serious mental distress. More than half (53%) of high-risk problem gamblers aged 13–27 report anxiety, over a third (38%) report depression and roughly one in eight report suicidal ideation.

A long-running British cohort study following 2,801 young adults from birth found that each one-point increase on the Problem Gambling Severity Index—the standard nine-item scale of gambling problems—raised the odds of a past-year suicide attempt at age 24 by 13%. The association also held looking forward: the same severity scores predicted future suicide attempts one year and four years later.

A Swedish nationwide register study found that people with gambling disorder died by suicide at 15 times the rate of people without it. Their premature deaths from all causes were 1.8 times higher overall—and among 20–49-year-olds, the very group online betting has been designed to reach, that figure jumped to 6.2 times.

Of people entering gambling treatment programs, 32% report suicidal ideation and 17% have already attempted suicide. Those with suicidal ideation also have higher gambling cravings and spend more money gambling in the weeks and months before entering treatment. Problem gamblers have significantly higher rates of suicidal ideation (37%) and suicide attempts (17%) than non-gamblers or low-risk gamblers. Among pathological gamblers, roughly 50% have suicidal ideation.

Gambling problems go hand in hand with drug abuse. Some 57% of people experiencing problematic gambling also have a substance use disorder—28% of cases involving alcohol. Other data show that those with gambling problems are more likely to suffer from substance dependence and personality disorders.

Some nations prevent the obvious harms that online gambling causes by making it illegal, Israel being one of them. Despite this, some of the biggest online betting companies in the US have close ties to the country. PokerStars—owned by the world’s largest online gambling group Flutter Entertainment—was co-founded by Isai Scheinberg, an Israeli-Canadian dual citizen who fought in the Yom Kippur War. After building PokerStars into the dominant online poker platform, Scheinberg sold the company for $4.9 billion.

DraftKings—the US’ second largest sportsbook with revenues of around $6.1bn—was co-founded by Jews Jason Robins, Matt Kalish and Paul Liberman. DraftKings’ core sports-betting engine—SBTech—was founded by Israeli Shalom Meckenzie and was folded into DraftKings in 2020.

Evoke (formerly 888 Holdings) was founded in 1997 by Israeli brothers Avi and Aaron Shaked and Shay and Ron Ben-Yitzhak. It owns brands such as 888casino, 888poker and William Hill.

Israeli software plays a central role powering some of the biggest online betting platforms. One the most influential firms is Playtech, founded in 1999 by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi. It provides content and services for operators including FanDuel, BetMGM, DraftKings, Caesars/Horseshoe, bet365, Rush Street and Hard Rock.

In the 19th century, men dug into mountains chasing gold. In the 21st century, the mountain is the gambler and the seam is the credit limit on his phone. In our era of borderless techno-capitalism, the gambling industry has uncovered a resource more reliable than any mountain: human vulnerability.

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Der Weltkampf (The World Struggle) in October, 1938. Professor Johann von Leers introduces a reproduction of a text from the Supreme Arab Committee in which it laments the terror of British rule in Palestine under which Zionism is allowed to flourish.

“An Arab Voice in the Palestinian Conflict”

By Prof. Dr. Johann von Leers

We have already once reproduced in these pages a summarising political account of the Arab struggle in Palestine, since unfortunately, mainly for linguistic reasons and as a result of the English domination of numerous news sources, the Arab standpoint in the struggle for Palestine is given too little voice.

This time we are again reproducing a major programmatic declaration by the Supreme Arab Committee—almost without abridgments—which came about as a reply by the Supreme Arab Committee to the speech that the new British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael, gave on March 4, 1938, to all the inhabitants of Palestine. The appeal was distributed in June and July when the last hopes of the Arabs for a settlement were shattered. The serious, composed, masculine language of this declaration differs strikingly from the loud shouting of the Jewish press; here truly speaks a people fighting for its life:

“The Supreme Arab Committee agrees with the word of His Excellency that Palestine cannot be saved by economic measures alone, and agrees with the word that ‘man does not live by bread alone.’ It only regrets that British policy has deviated very strongly from this truth, for this is precisely what the Arab people in Palestine emphasised for twenty long years, but British policy sought to dissuade them from it through promises and wealth and economic upswing, which it claimed the Jews would bring to the country. In vain the Arab people endeavoured to make clear to the British government that out of love for the fatherland and national consciousness, they valued the fatherland and life higher than those goods, that this was more valuable and necessary to them than artificially created wealth and apparent prosperity, if the loss of the fatherland were to be connected with it.

One should not be astonished at the more recent history of Palestine. What happened was only the natural result of what inevitably had to come. For if one fights a people in the interior of its country, does one send a foreign people to it so that this people may take its fatherland from it? Does one not then expect from it an outbreak for self-defence and an uprising to assert its right to life? The fatherland is not sold for money. Self-defence and the right to life are the first natural laws. No one is more grieved about the sad situation of the country than the Arab people. This shame and this misery that the British power has brought upon the Arab people, and the extent of which no one knows better than His Excellency (the High Commissioner); gallows, blowing up of houses, arson, destruction, annihilation of foodstuffs, robbery of jewellery and valuables, requisitions of cattle and grain, imposition of punishments, banishment, outlawing, prison, tortures... these cruelties are worse than in the darkest times of human history. They hit people of flesh and blood who feel pain exactly as other humans do. Why do they endure this patiently? What forces them to resist a great power and its deadly weapons and to persevere to the last?

Doubtless there is something that is even worse than all these horrors—and that is exactly what the Arab people fear. That is why they endure these things. For twenty years it demanded its right without anyone hearing it, without there being an answer. It sees with its own eyes the difficult future slowly approaching: the loss of the fatherland and the expulsion from it! The current turmoil is not caused by the Arabs; they only bear it unwillingly; the revolution is not desired for its own sake and the people do not drive it because they love it; it brings only torment and pain, but it is a harsh means to prevent a greater evil.

In the Palestine question there is no reason for a confusion of the mind if one regards it with the eyes of justice. The Arabs are the inhabitants of the country and its rightful masters, who have inherited it from their fathers for many centuries. British policy now wanted to let a foreign people penetrate their land. This is a clear injustice and an obvious hostility. The solution to the Palestine question requires only the lifting of the injustice and the abolition of the hostility. This is clear and simple justice. The spirit of true justice and incorruptibility does not equate right and wrong. One does not regard marauding intruders like the rightful masters of the land, but one gives the right to whom it is due.

His Excellency says: ‘If it were not for the British people, then neither of the two warring parties could achieve even a small part of what they want.’ This applies only to the Jews. For only under the protection of the British administration and British bayonets have the Jews become strong. For the Arab people in Palestine, the situation is completely reversed; if England were not there, then their land would at least be preserved for them, and the plan would not be made to establish a Jewish National Home in their land; the plan to create a Jewish state on the ruins of the Arab land would not have appeared at all. The Arab people know the power of the British Empire very well, but this great Empire cannot acquire any glory if it uses its force against a small, unarmed people that only demands its right and fights for its life. This people suffers with great pain that this force threatens it, that their help is given to the oppressor and insulter of the Arab people, that the robbery of our fatherland happens under England’s flags and under the protection of its bayonets.

Perhaps it is right to remember that the friendship and help of the Arab world is not worthless; that their value became clear in difficult times, in the World War. The interests of the Arab people are not directed against the interests of the British Empire, if it were not for Zionism. The Arab people recognise Zionism as a real danger that threatens their existence, and not only in Palestine. All Arab countries are equally threatened by it in their national, political, economic and social life.

Again and again, the Arab people are asked to trust the British government and not to doubt its good intentions. At the same time, however, the Judaisation was being worked on, which proceeded with incomprehensible speed. Today we stand before the plan of founding a Jewish state in our land or on its ruins. Today a measure of torment is poured out over us that exceeds all concepts.

The Permanent Mandates Commission claims that England proceeded slowly and hesitantly in the establishment of the Jewish National Home. It simultaneously accuses the Jews of often having lost patience without reason because of the delay. England, however, allowed the number of Jews in Palestine to rise to 400,000. It gave them the possibility to acquire the most fertile lands. It handed over to them all valuable parts of the land. It gave them an independent existence and the decisive word. It crowned all this with the plan of an independent Jewish state. That all happened in twenty years or less. What must then still have happened in this time, and what is the end goal for the ‘National Home’? The Arab people do not want to make sacrifices through which they lose their existence and honour. It rightly believes that the mere demand for these sacrifices from them is a disgrace to their national honour and their love of the fatherland.

The Supreme Arab Committee would like to direct His Excellency’s gaze to the atrocities and tragedies that the British occupation causes in the Holy Land, and which are a disgrace to this land, irreconcilable with the respect and esteem for this land and also not with the clear right of the Arabs. As visual evidence shows, this method has achieved nothing except increasing dissatisfaction, deepening vindictiveness, solidifying hatred, inciting feelings, inflaming souls, strengthening resistance and a readiness to die for the defence of nationality and fatherland.

We cannot believe that a gentleman admits that such atrocities are committed, and we must remind His Excellency that such deeds press a stamp of shame upon their perpetrators that cannot be wiped away. The present rebukes them—as has indeed happened a few days ago—and history preserves their memory for future generations. The judgment of history is just, harsh and eternal.”

The leaflet closes with a summary of the Arab demands:

1. Recognition of the right of the Arabs to complete independence in their land.

2. Abandoning the attempt to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

3. Abolition of the British Mandate and its replacement by a treaty like the one between Great Britain and Iraq, between Great Britain and Egypt, between France and Syria, on the basis of the creation of an independent state in Palestine.

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The catch was that only one in eight participants would let their clone cast a binding vote. Even when the machine won, people wouldn’t hand it the ballot. That gap—between what AI can do and what we are comfortable letting it do—may well define the future of Western democracies. Leading the push for AI stepping in to vote when you don’t want to is a small, interlocking group of Jewish Israeli computer scientists.

A core concern facing Judeo-America and its democratic allies is voter turnout and the nascent power that voters hold in abstaining from election participation en masse, severely undermining or even collapsing the legitimacy of liberal democratic regimes and, with them, the post-war order.

There is a simmering discontent and disconnection with Western democracy. Turnout in US presidential elections hovers between 52 and 62 percent. US voter turnout fell through the 1960s and 1990s, bottoming out around 50% of eligible voters in 1996. Participation has recovered somewhat since, although the 2020 and 2024 voter turnout figures of 66.6% and 63.9% respectively do not speak to a healthy democratic investment. A chronic problem is midterms and local races: 2014’s midterm turnout was 36.4%, the lowest since the Second World War. The 2022 turnout was 46.4%. Some 26% of eligible American voters—mostly those younger and less educated—have no record of voting in any of the last three national elections.

Although democratic participation in Western Europe is healthier than in the US, some worrying trends are emerging. Long-term data show voter turnout in European democracies falling from 85% in the 1960s to 80% in the mid-to-late 1980s. Turnout for the UK general elections in 2024 saw a 60% turnout, the lowest since 2001. In Ireland’s 2025 Presidential elections—which saw a turnout of 46%—some 213,000 people spoiled their ballots, 13% of the total votes. In France’s 2022 presidential runoff, 8.7% of voters did not specify a valid choice on their ballots. In Belgium there is a 12.5% abstention rate despite the country having compulsory voting.

The long-term threat is what Israel Institute of Technology computer scientist Reshef Meir calls the tyranny of the minority: a small, motivated slice of the population deciding for everyone else, because the silent majority fails to show up. Every guarantee voting theory makes—fairness, representation, the wisdom of crowds—assumes majority participation. The answer is AI voting: if people withdraw their vote, a referendum on the democratic system itself, an AI trained on their values can stand in for them.

The intellectual father of the movement is Ariel Procaccia, another Israel Institute of Technology affiliate and now Harvard professor. In 2019, he published a blueprint for what he called “virtual democracy”: learn a model of each person’s preferences from a few sample decisions, then let that model vote for them on every dilemma that follows. The learned model, he argues, serves “as a proxy for the flesh-and-blood voter.”

The paper claims to prove the idea could carry formal guarantees: even when the algorithm’s guesses about your preferences were imperfect, the right way of tallying votes still produced the outcome your true vote would have. A real-world example using a food-relief charity was used to test the model. Whenever a donation arrived, the algorithm—not a committee—decided which recipient organisation it should be allocated to. Procaccia argues that citizens do not need to show up to vote to be represented; an accurate model of their preferences is enough.

The most explicit case for AI voting comes from Edith Elkind, another Jewish Israeli and professor at Oxford. In a 2026 paper she asked “what if AI didn’t just advise voters, but voted for them?”

Elkind simulated more than 50,000 AI voters, each designed to mirror a different kind of person, and ran them through 363 real elections. She claims that with the right way of counting votes, AI voting produces fair outcomes even when the individual AI voters are biased or inconsistent.

Elkind’s equal shares method spreads the results broadly rather than letting one group dominate. Equal shares gives every voter an equal virtual slice of the budget—a project only gets funded when its supporters pool enough of their resources to cover it. Because each person’s slice is the same size, the method tends to pick several cheaper projects that together satisfy more people, rather than one expensive crowd-pleaser. Ultimately, Elkind argues that AI can represent the people who can’t or won’t vote—and do it fairly.

Other arguments are more radical: AI shouldn’t just vote for the absent, it should change what representation means. One of the strongest advocates for this position is Yuval Rymon, a researcher at Tel Aviv University.

Rymon builds the case from two systems already in use. The first is Taiwan’s vTaiwan platform which allows citizens to shape legislation through an online deliberation tool—AI-assisted participation inside the state. The second is Austria’s public employment service, whose algorithm profiles jobseekers and steers who gets what support—a system that decides, without ever being elected, how public power touches people’s lives.

Rymon argues the question isn’t whether machines are inside democracy because they already are. The issue is what role they should play, and who should be the architect of the rules they apply. He writes:

“[R]epresentatives may assume the role of being architects of automated decision frameworks, responsible for guiding the translation of politically contested concepts like fairness and discrimination into technical-operational parameters.”

How these representatives are chosen, and what values they would hold, are not specified. Rymon derives six institutional conditions under which AI enhances rather than corrodes democratic representation and argues for hybrid human–AI systems. The first is that whoever holds democratic authority must authorise an AI system’s objectives before technical implementation. In an era of declining trust and attention, Rymon argues, AI-assisted participation may be the only way to scale meaningful democracy.

The Israeli academics are recruiting and training Gentile acolytes to further their cause. Dominik Peters, a German computer scientist whose DPhil at Oxford was supervised by Elkind and who has done postdoctoral work with Procaccia, argues that AI voters shouldn’t be treated as stand-ins for people at all; they’re a constituency of their own. When several AI systems must reach a collective decision—merging the preferences of multiple large language models, or aligning AI with the views of diverse groups of users—the outcome should represent the AI agents proportionally, the way a parliament represents its voters in a system of proportional representation.

Unsurprisingly there are oppositional voices to AI voting, the most prominent of which is another Israeli Jew. Reshef Meir argues that delegating votes to machines may repair the distortion caused by low, biased participation, but it also degrades engagement and accountability. He advocates for caution over machine voting for anything where participation itself has value—budgets, education policy, presidential elections—and allows it only in low-stakes technical settings.

As democratic discontent with Judeo-America continues to grow, AI voting would be an ideal way to neutralise the threat posed by mass voter abstention. The voters’ ultimate veto on liberal democracy—the right to remain silent en masse—may well be removed in the coming decades as the post-war order continues to crumble. Those at the bleeding edge of this great democratic reset will be a small clique of Jewish academics. The true tyranny of the minority.

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It had taken the crown two centuries to build, and one royal edict to dismiss, the Jewish presence in England. They would eventually return to exercise a level of control over the nation that not a soul at the time could possibly imagine. However, from the end of the 13th century to the middle of the 17th, the door of England was slammed shut for Jewry, marking an English golden age.

England did not prosper all at once. In the wake of the Edict of Expulsion came war, fiscal crisis and the great famine of 1315–17. When the Black Death of 1348–49 carried off a third to a half of the English population, wages climbed, food went cheap and the real incomes of peasants and workers rose by roughly a third. By the 1470s, an English labourer’s purchasing power stood at a level not reached again until the 1880s.1

It was also the age in which a distinctly English culture blossomed: Chaucer and Langland writing in English, the Perpendicular architectural style rising at Gloucester and Ely, Dunstaple’s harmonies setting the fashion on the continent and the Luttrell Psalter recording in its margins the idyllic rural life the new wages made possible.

The gap between the chroniclers’ arithmetic and the accountants’ truth is itself the story. England’s Jews were always more important than their numbers—because they were the king’s. How they came to be so is a question that begins not with the writ of 1290, but with a few families crossing from Rouen after 1066.

England’s Jews arrived in the wake of conquest. In October, 1066 William of Normandy defeated King Harold at Hastings and began remaking England—its church, its land and its law. Somewhere in that remaking, Jews from his own capital, Rouen, crossed the Channel at his encouragement or through bribery. Some Jews may even have come with the first voyages of 1066 itself, landing at Pevensey.2

William of Malmesbury, writing within sixty years of the conquest, recorded that the Jews then living in London had been brought over from Rouen by William the Conqueror.3 Alternative versions of the first Jewish settlement have Jews petitioning William for the right to immigrate with him, or paying a sum of money for the privilege.4 It has also been suggested that Arlette—William’s mother who was raped by his father Robert—was herself Jewish.5 Jewish nomenclature associated with the Conqueror also fuels the fires of speculation. The popular Jewish name Dieulecress, and its variants, may have been based on William’s battle cry dex aiae (God aid me).6 The name Manser—denoting men of the Bastard—which may have been used by those affiliated to William, could have derived from the Hebrew word for bastard mamzêr.7 Regardless, the Jews did not wander to England’s shores of their own accord; they were the king’s own before they ever set foot in his new kingdom.

The edict of 1290 closed a chapter that opened with a promise made some four years following the conquest. At a council in 1070, William I addressed the status of the new “English Jews”, promising them protection to the extent that he would treat both them and their property as his own.8 A decade after William had taken power, Jews had become a part of the Normanisation of England—their transfer a deliberate policy “to ensure their assimilation into the framework of the Normannic administrative process.”9

At the time of the conquest, the Jews of northern France were “supporting themselves primarily by commerce and increasingly by moneylending.”10 Some 135 years later, the ducal charter of 1201 under King John described the Jews as engaging in retailing and peddling and recognised their activities as village moneylenders and pawnbrokers. The ducal charter confirms the privileges Jews had enjoyed since their settlement, confirming their rights to reside in the king’s land and ordering that they “be free through all England and Normandy of all the customs and tolls…just as our own chattels.” Such rights reportedly cost the Jews 4,000 marks—roughly £2,666.

It is likely that both William and the Jews themselves calculated the benefits of Jewish immigration to England. Jews likely saw the potential for expansion in financial terms, with immigration offering them fresh financial pastures to be exploited.11 By the end of the 12th century, Norman Jews had settled in 38 different centres.12

Another catalyst for Jewish immigration from Normandy was the supposed massacres of Jews in Rouen in 1096 during the First Crusade. Evidence for this event rests only on two sources—the autobiography of Guibert of Nogent and the Annals of Rouen.13 The Jews of Rouen were apparently attacked by crusaders led by Robert Curthose, William the Conqueror’s own son and then Duke of Normandy. The crusaders’ motivation was likely both ideological—targeting the killers of their saviour—and financial. As members of “largely mercantile communities,” the Jews were “a visibly prosperous group in the towns of late eleventh-century northern Europe, and were therefore an obvious group from whom to extort or steal cash.”14

In the decades after 1096, the protection that the Jews of England and Normandy had been granted seemed to hold. Despite The Second Crusade of the 1140s and the Third Crusade in the 1180s targeting Jews in the Rhineland and northern France, neither touched England nor Normandy: “the Jews of both Normandy and England seem to have been immune from crusader assault until 1190.”15 This immunity cannot be explained by distance or indifference—Englishmen and Normans joined the crusades in significant numbers16—and it was not a matter of luck.

Money was also a factor. During the twelfth century, changes in the ways that crusades were financed created bonds of debt between those heading to the Holy Land and those funding them. Stricter church rules on money lending were not entirely successful but by the 1140s had made it more difficult for monasteries to finance crusaders as they had done in 1096.17 Credit mechanisms were also becoming more sophisticated and by the middle of the twelfth century fully developed legal frameworks were already in place.18 Crusaders, therefore, increasingly turned to men for whom finance was their business rather than a charitable obligation—mostly Christians, but increasingly Jews.

The protection that Jews at that time enjoyed was of a peculiar sort, closer to ownership than to charity: “the royal Jews were protected because they were the property of the Crown.”19 The king defended his Jews the way a shepherd defends his flock—not out of affection, but because what belonged to him was not to be plundered by anyone else. That bargain held for nearly a century. It broke in 1189, the moment Richard I left England on crusade and the king’s Jews discovered what it meant to be property without a protector.

For the Jews, royal ownership was a form of security: they required protection from the people among whom they settled. An unwelcome addition to the nation, “[t]he Jew needed protection from society from the day he arrived in England until the day he was expelled.”20 Jews in England stuck close to their protectors:

“It was for reasons of security, self-preservation and social welfare, as well as the preservation of their own religion, that they tended to live in centres that had a royal representative or a powerful protector close at hand.”21

From their arrival, the Jews “remained true to their entire way of life, which was completely different from the English one. Without any coercion and of their own free will, they settled in a specific part of the city, and if possible, always near the market square. They never cared about the most honourable and important concern of a nation: the defence of the land…Their food and drink were also completely different from those of their Christian neighbours. They refused invitations to eat a meal prepared by a Christian in a Christian household.”22

Jewish communities tended to settle close to the castles of their sponsors.23 The relationships between Jews and their protectors were so strong that when the latter moved, the Jews moved with them.24 When the Earl of Norfolk Hugh Bigod’s castle at Bungay was demolished in 1174, the Jews under his patronage moved with him to Norwich, Lincoln, Northamptonshire and Hereford.25 Later in the thirteenth century, Marcher Lords like Walter de Lacy took Jews—including the magnate Hamo of Hereford—under their protection.26

England proved a much more secure environment for the Jews than did the European continent. Across the Channel, a Jew might owe his security to any of several lords but England was different: there was only ever one lord of the Jews. In France and the Empire, bishops, abbots, counts and towns each claimed their Jews—taxing them, protecting them and treating jurisdiction over them as a transferable piece of property. A single Jewish community might answer to several lords at once. Even in Normandy, the duchy that gave England its Jews, the dukes did not exercise exclusive lordship over all Jews.27 England was the exception: “from their beginnings, the Jewish communities at Rouen and London were under the direct and exclusive jurisdiction of the crown”28, an inheritance dating back to William I’s 1070 declaration.

But the English monopoly was claimed before it could be made real. The precise claim belongs to Henry I (r. 1100–1135), who asserted exclusive lordship over all Jewish communities in England29, and even this frayed. Under Stephen (r. 1135–1154), seigneurial communities appeared at Thetford, Bungay, Bury St Edmunds and possibly Lincoln, implying centralised protection was not holding.30 After the murder of Eleazar, one of Norwich’s richest Jews—lured from the city on the pretence of settling a debt and ambushed in a wood—the Jews of Norwich reminded King Stephen that they were his own: “We are thy Jews.”

“We are thy tributaries year by year, we are continually necessary to thee and thy necessities, since we are always faithful to thee and by no means useless to thy realm…[W]e… beseech thee of thy clemency, O righteous King! that thou provide for our living in peace and security, and that thou do not suffer the undeserved death of thy Jew to go unpunished.”31

The appeal failed: Stephen postponed the case, the knight’s party reportedly bought the king’s favour and no judgement was ever given. The legal compilations of the age asserted the crown’s exclusive jurisdiction “in language that implies that the facts, by this date, were otherwise.”32

Only Henry II (r. 1154–1189) made the claim stick. In the mid-1170s, a revised Leges Edwardi Confessoris declared flatly that all Jews, wherever they were, lay “under the liege guardianship and protection of the king,” and that they and all their property belonged to him.33 The result was a monopoly of protection as much as of power—one master, one price. It helped make England “the most tightly governed kingdom in twelfth-century Europe”34 and its Jews the best-protected in the west.

Protection for Jews in medieval England had a price. The king taxed his Jews not as subjects but as property: a “voluntary gift” in 1159 that no Jews dared refuse, massive fines on individual Jewish lenders when the crown was short and a standing claim to a third of every Jewish estate at death. One death in 1186 showed what that meant in practice. When Aaron of Lincoln died, the crown confiscated his entire estate and opened a new department of the Exchequer to collect it. The Exchequer of Aaron, as it came to be called, was a department of state built around one dead man’s loans—and it would not be the last.

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Der Weltkampf (The World Struggle) in January, 1925. The article argues that the Zionist project is economically unsustainable and politically tyrannical, claiming that Palestine's barren soil cannot support mass immigration and that the British-backed "Zionist dictatorship" under High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel oppresses the native Arab population while monopolising resources. It further alleges widespread moral and religious degradation in Palestine, pointing to the importation of communist propaganda, the spread of vice and deceptive advertising used to mask the project's failures.

“The Truth about Zion”

By “Verajun”

The author of the following remarks does not intend to repeat what has already been set down in other German writings on the nature of Zionism (cf. A. Rosenberg’s Zionism as an Enemy of the State).

The following remarks serve no other purpose than to fill the gap that emerged in German völkisch literature following the publication of Rosenberg’s book (in June, 1922), and to provide the German public with a—albeit sketchy—picture of the further development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. Because German source material is almost completely lacking, the author was compelled to use non-German sources. In particular, English, American, French and Italian reports were utilised, as well as Jewish ones in some cases. The authors of these reports therefore all belong to those states whose governments endorsed the famous Balfour Declaration, thereby assuming joint responsibility under state and international law for the establishment of a Zionist homeland in Palestine.

As for the English voices, it is highly telling that Lord Northcliffe—who was certainly not hostile to Jews—having already visited Palestine in February 1922, delivered a thoroughly unfavourable verdict on the work of the Zionists in his reports for The Times, thereby arousing the strong displeasure of British Jewry.

The famous English writer Chesterton also offered sharp criticism of the “giant political ghetto” in his book The New Jerusalem, arguing that one could only agree with it if it were placed under the suzerainty of a “Christian” state. Chesterton, then, apparently no longer counts his beloved “Old England” among the Christian states!

Similar sentiments were expressed by Lord Raglan, who had undertaken an extensive study tour through Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, as well as by the military writer Hilaire Belloc—known for his valuable war reports—in his book The Jews.

The author of the 1923 book The Palestine Deception was also a former war correspondent: J. M. N. Jeffries of the Daily Mail staff, who—as a specialist on the Near East—was particularly qualified and prepared for his task. Jeffries traversed the country in every direction, sparing no effort through direct contact with representatives of all ethnic groups, social classes and religious communities, to fathom and establish the true situation and mood in the country. The final result of his studies can be briefly expressed in the following sentences:

“The Zionist dictatorship (in Palestine) has become unbearable. The military dictatorship that followed the occupation of Jerusalem could be described as moderate. The commanding generals were guided by a sense of fairness, whereas the Jewish High Commissioner (Sir Herbert Samuel), who is also the commander-in-chief, governs without any control whatsoever, especially since he is assisted only by an advisory council (Advisory Council), whose members he himself appoints and convenes whenever and however he pleases. […] The majority of the Jews who immigrated from the Slavic regions of Europe are engaged not so much in agriculture and handicrafts as in socialist and communist propaganda. Their leaders Ben Zewi (Socialist) and Chaim Ras (Communist), who saw themselves as fundamental opponents of the nationalist stance of the true Zionists, found their expectations severely disappointed. Ras declared quite openly that ‘it is simply impossible to establish a communist oasis in this capitalist desert’ (The Palestine Deception, p. 66).”

Jeffries’ verdict therefore represents an irrefutable confirmation of the research findings that a representative of the Morning Post had already arrived at in 1920, and which—for the sake of completeness—shall likewise be cited here:

• Under Turkish rule, the Jews were never hindered in the exercise of their worship or persecuted because of their religion. Every rabbi could even call upon the help of Turkish police if this seemed necessary to him in the exercise of his spiritual duties.

• The first acts of religious intolerance can be traced back to the English regime: Now the judges of the Mohammedan tribunals are appointed by a Jew.

• Trade with Syria is paralysed by predatory administrative and customs measures, which apply to everyone except the Zionists.

• An Englishman who had been settled in Jaffa for many years declared that the Arabs were a hundred times in the right to despise the Zionists. These were filled with a “wild intolerance and arrogance toward the native population” and pursued them, whether Christians or Mohammedans, with their hatred, which, however, was more of a political than a religious nature.

• The long-established Jews by no means sympathise with the Zionists. Many of the younger men therefore do as the Arabs do and turn their backs on their fatherland.

• Sir Herbert Samuel governs as an absolute monarch. The advisory council at his side (eleven officials and ten non-officials) is convened by him at his pleasure. He appoints the department heads responsible for finance, politics, justice, public works and public education.

• England committed itself only to covering the costs of the occupation troops. Consequently, the gigantic projects of Zionist entrepreneurs had to be postponed, which even then severely damaged the popularity of the “Prince of Israel.”

• Palestine is by no means the Eden that had been so highly praised to the poor Jews in Ukraine and Poland. “Palestine is only a land of promise when compared to the deserts of Sinai and Arabia.” Enormous sums will be required to make the ports navigable and to cultivate the few thousand hectares of arable land; and even if the ports were expanded, there would still be a lack of industrial hinterland.

• The country’s main sources of income will continue to flow from the pilgrim and tourist industry. After all, a certain Grünberg, who had grown rich in Russia through railway construction, had already arrived in Jerusalem at that time to bless the land with a network of six hundred new hotels and inns!

• There would have been nothing to object to regarding support for Jewish emigration to Palestine, as was already provided during the Turkish era. However, to leave the government of the country to Zionism so that it might establish “its state” there is a wicked offence against the national rights of other peoples and a step pregnant with disaster.

Regarding the Rutenberg Affair, which was also discussed in Germany at the time, Jeffries reports the following details (p. 69):

“In September 1921, a Jew named Pinchas Rutenberg, who had immigrated from Russia, was granted the right to exploit all water power of the Jordan and the Udja (in the Jaffa district) and a monopoly on the generation and utilisation of electrical current. The concession had not been put out for public tender, but had come about between the Zionists and the applicant Rutenberg—who were backed by American Jewish bankers—on the one hand, and Mr. Winston Churchill and Sir John Shuckburgh of the Colonial Office on the other. Consequently, the Arabs will be delivered over to this Mr. Rutenberg for a full seventy years, and he will torment them as he pleases. At the time Jeffries inspected the facilities of the engineer-Zionist Rutenberg, however, these consisted merely of two diesel engines “de fabrication allemande” [of German manufacture], which sufficed to generate light and power for a small village.”

Lord Sydenham of Combe, who alongside Lord Lamington fought the English government’s Palestine policy most courageously, summarised his judgment in a study published in the Nineteenth Century with these words: “The Zionist policy (of Lloyd George) endangers not only the vital interests of the British Empire but also the peace of the world.”

In the face of such pronouncements, the passivity with which the otherwise zealous representatives of the various Christian denominations in England observed the development of events in Palestine from afar was striking. It was only when one of the newly arrived Zionists dared to put the question to the Anglican Bishop MacInnes as to what was to become of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—whether it should be torn down or burned down—that the phlegmatic blood of many Englishmen began to boil faster. However, only the Catholic women have so far managed to bring about a thorough protest movement. At a federal conference convened for this purpose under the leadership of Countess Denbigh, Lady Sykes expressed her deep indignation “that England—though Protestant, yet still Christian—had conquered Palestine in order to hand it over to the Jews.”

The priest Beda Camm, who had returned from the Holy Land, declared succinctly that “the Zionist experiment would not last ten more years for the simple reason that the Zionists, as inveterate traders, would not find enough Christians to exploit.”

This sentence is in any case among the most apt ever said on the subject, and therefore deserves very special attention. This devastating judgment was ultimately confirmed and repeated from a prominent Jewish side itself. At the great congress of American Jews in Carnegie Hall in New York (on October 14, 1923), the most famous of all living Jewish poets, Israel Zangwill, delivered a major speech in which he spoke out with the utmost sharpness against the previous policy of the Zionists. The Mount Zion fertilised by the Balfour Declaration had brought forth only a mouse (The Jewish Chronicle, Oct. 18, 1923). There would never be a Jewish state in Palestine, but at most a certain expansion of the Jewish population already resident in the country. There was only one Jew for every nine other inhabitants, and only 4 percent of the land was in Jewish ownership. With fine mockery, Zangwill made fun of his ethnic and religious comrade Sir Alfred Mond, who a few days earlier had claimed in a speech that “the Jews must make an effort to justify England’s trust in order to thereby maintain the Balfour Mandate.”

For the unwavering advocates of the fulfilment policy in Germany, the judgment that Zangwill expressed on this occasion about the League of Nations should certainly also be of interest: “It is much more a league of damnations than a league of nations.” This word, too, should be sharply impressed upon one’s mind in Germany. Also piquant was the great Yiddish novelist’s statement that he had shortly before supplied his friend Lloyd George with the material for the latter’s famous article against antisemitism. Naturally, the entire Jewish world press pulled out all the stops to keep Zangwill’s embarrassing findings and statements from becoming known outside the Jewish community of interest.

In a similar vein, former U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople and close friend of President Wilson, Mr. Henry Morgenthau, disassociated himself from the Zionist movement, of which he himself had long been one of the most prominent leaders. In his essay “Zionism a Surrender, not a solution,” published in July 1921 in The World’s Work, he commented verbatim on the economic conditions in Palestine as follows:

“The truth is that even in a state of prosperity, Palestine cannot support a substantial population. Its soil is meagre and stingy. It is a land full of rocky hills, where for centuries a courageous people sought to eke out a living by cultivating a few strips of land amid manifold difficulties... The few existing watercourses with weak currents are completely insufficient for constructing the irrigation systems absolutely necessary for rational land management. The underground waters could only be made usable at enormous expense. Based on my thorough investigations on the spot, I can only declare that Palestine can never support more than an additional million inhabitants.”

Finally, among the non-Jewish critics of Zionism in America, Professor Clay of Yale University should be mentioned. He accused the British government of blatantly violating Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant by trampling on the right of self-determination of the native population of the Holy Land in the exercise of its Palestine Mandate.

Among the French experts on the Palestine question, Roger Lambelin holds one of the foremost positions. In his book Le Règne d’Israel, which went through eight editions in a short time, the author describes, among other things, his personal impressions of a train journey he made from Cairo to Jerusalem in February, 1920:

“In the same compartment, two gentlemen and two ladies had taken their seats. They inquired about mutual cousins who had remained behind in Frankfurt and Darmstadt. A close relative of one of the ladies had obtained a position as an engineer in Palestine. A ‘Herr Professor’ was soon to arrive to hold a course at the university then being founded. This family of German Jews was neither filled with religious passion, nor did they dream of any mystical ideal. Father and son had found well-paid positions, and they congratulated each other on their good fortune after chance had brought them together so favourably. In the side corridor, a Jewish woman of about fifty was engaged in a loud conversation with an English officer. She inquired about the material living conditions in the holy city: “I am a correspondent for an Amsterdam newspaper,” she said; “I have no religion, but I am a nationalist, and for this reason I am interested in the reconstruction of Jerusalem…”.”

Chapter VIII, under the heading La Palestine Juive, deals with the San Remo Conference, which confirmed the English Mandate over Palestine, with the new “Prince d’Israel,” Sir Herbert Samuel, and with the partly very bloody resistance offered by the native Arabs against the new Jewish rule. Using several examples, it shows how even then the world was deceived about the true state of affairs by false reports. Thus, a “Zionist” correspondent had sent the following telegram to a major English newspaper regarding Samuel’s entry into Jerusalem:

“When Sir Herbert Samuel arrived in Jerusalem, twenty thousand Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans filled the streets of the city to cheer him, while the English flag waved on the Mount of Olives.”

Compare this with the truthful report that a participant in the “ceremonial” entry gave to Roger Lambelin:

“On June 30, from 1 p.m. onwards, English soldiers with fixed bayonets had blocked all streets. At 2:30 p.m., a locomotive pulled into the station, followed at a distance of 200 meters by the special train carrying the British High Commissioner. Almost no one had been informed of the hour of arrival... Between two rows of bayonets, the procession—consisting, besides the High Commissioner’s car, of six military vehicles—moved toward the Mount of Olives. Everywhere there was dead silence, and the escort crews on the military vehicles had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. The English flag waved over St. Paul’s Hospital and over the German Sanatorium, which has become the ‘palais d’un nouveau souverain’ [palace of a new sovereign].”

Lambelin also provides further drastic examples of the shameless advertising swindle of the Zionists in his recently published book L’Impérialisme d’Israël. In the chapter (VIII, p. 249) “La Palestine Anglo-Juive,” the following case is recounted:

“While in July 1922 the League of Nations Council was drafting the text of the Palestine Mandate, the Parisian Temps surprised its readers with a magnificent illustrated supplement under the heading ‘Palestine in the Hands of the Zionists.’ Besides the well-known old architectural monuments in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, it also reproduced the plans for the future Jewish University. Of two juxtaposed illustrations, one showed a desolate sand dune, while the other showed a magnificent orange grove. Both images evidently depicted one and the same area and were intended to present the astonished reader with irrefutable proof of the Zionists’ virtually miraculous colonising capacity. In reality, this too was the usual bluff. The Jewish colony of Richon-le-Zion depicted is namely of much older date than modern Zionism. It was founded as early as 1884 by Baron Edmond de Rothschild and—which is the most essential point—established and maintained almost exclusively by Arab field and garden workers. Of the so-called ‘Jewish farmers’ who the great financier had recruited for this purpose for Palestine, within a very short time only the director, the accountants, and a few commercial agents remained.”

“The rest,” writes Lambelin (p. 250), “had disappeared again in order to devote themselves, in accordance with the traditions of their race, to usury and ‘business.’” The juxtaposition of the desolate sand dune and the blooming orange grove vividly reminded Lambelin of the pseudo-photographs “before and after use” that one could admire at the time on advertising brochures for certain hair and beard growth remedies. The text for this magnificent supplement was supplied by the journalist Jacques Calmy, the son of a rabbi in Jerusalem, who at the same time knew how to promote his Jewish interests as a Frenchman in Syria and as a Zionist in Palestine.

Economic development also proved thoroughly unfavourable. For the year 1922, a decline in imports of 290,746 pounds sterling and in exports of 63,000 pounds sterling was recorded. Total exports reached a value of only 1,353,368 pounds sterling. In oranges alone, which formerly constituted the main export article, about 400,000 fewer crates were exported in the last year.

Particular attention is also deserved by what Lambelin reports about Jewish immigration to Samuel’s realm, insofar as precisely this side of the Zionist problem continually occupies the public and also plays a major role in the negotiations of the League of Nations. Lambelin writes:

“The class of ‘poor’ Jews in Eastern Europe had imagined the true little Garden of Eden under the new Palestine, where beneath a mild sky they could eke out a quiet and happy existence without having to work much. But the great ones in Israel, the high priests of Jewry, and especially the Jewish owners and controllers of the goods and treasures of this world, wanted to make Jerusalem a nerve center from which the impulses, the drives, and the slogans of Jewish rule were to emanate. To the non-Jewish world, however, ‘the colonisation of Palestine’ was presented as the sole goal of the movement. It is therefore well worth the effort to ascertain, on the basis of the available reports, what has meanwhile become of the much-vaunted colonisation work.”

According to the latest publications of the English “Colonial Office,” the total population of Palestine is 757,000 souls. Of these, 590,000 are Mohammedans, 83,000 Jews, and 73,000 Christians and those of other faiths. At the entry of the Allies into Jerusalem in 1918, about 60,000 Jews lived in the country. The Jewish population figure has therefore risen by only around 24,000 souls since 1918. This number remains far behind the total figure resulting from the statements published by the Zionist government for the same years regarding immigration to Palestine. Since a healthy climate and a correspondingly low mortality rate prevail in Palestine, the indicated deficit can only be explained by the fact that a considerable portion of the immigrant Jews has already left the Promised Land again. That this is in fact not a coincidental and insignificant phenomenon, but rather a vital phenomenon for the further development of the enterprise, the well-known Jewish Chronicle revealed when it (in its issue of Oct. 12, 1923) reported that the National Council of Jews in Palestine, “Vaad Leumi”, had dealt in a special session with the question of Jewish emigration from Palestine, “which has assumed considerable proportions for several months.”

Also little known in Germany is the fact that Theodor Herzl’s successor in the leadership of the Zionist movement, the great world journalist Max Nordau, had spoken out with all decisiveness against the Balfour-Samuel Palestine policy several years before his death. Lambelin writes about this (p. 266):

“This outstanding Jew, who was very well known in literary and free-thinking circles, died on January 22, 1923, in Paris. His coffin was decorated with flags in the Zionist colours, and numerous Jewish delegations took part in his funeral. And yet Nordau had long since withdrawn from the Zionist movement. He had come to the conviction that the organisation emerging from the Balfour Declaration in no way corresponded to Herzl’s conception, and as early as December, 1919, he had declared in a letter to the Zionist Association in London: ‘We must have the courage to state clearly and freely what we think. Whoever is prepared to belong to a Jewish state standing under the protectorate of Great Britain cannot be described as a ‘Zionist’.”

Among the many incomprehensibilities that lend the previous development of English-Jewish Palestine policy its particular character, as already indicated, the indifference with which the appointed representatives, the various Christian churches, have accepted the severe damage to their Palestine interests caused by Jewish rule, is in the first rank. This applies especially to the Roman Catholic Church, and it is highly characteristic of the purely secular attitude of its high politics that for a long time the Vatican did not get beyond some lay protest declarations in the Osservatore Romano. It was only when, in May, 1922, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Msgr. Barlassina, appeared in Rome and gave a public lecture on the Jewish distress of Catholics in the Holy Land, that Vatican diplomats also felt compelled to adopt a somewhat more decisive stance. The descriptions of the courageous priest caused an enormous sensation at the time. Among the Italian contributions to the criticism of Zionism, they represent a piece of inestimable value and lasting world-historical significance, of which we only regret that, out of consideration for space, we can only reproduce a few sentences:

“Before the English conquest of Palestine, Jerusalem breathed the scent of patriarchal simplicity. Women appeared modest; most went veiled. Under the Zionist regime, all shame has disappeared. In Turkish times—namely in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth—public houses were forbidden by law, while already on August 1, 1918, just a few months after the occupation, this prohibition was expressly lifted and the establishment of several such establishments in Jerusalem was permitted! In February 1921, Sir Herbert Samuel even went so far as to completely remove all previous restrictions in this area through an ordinance published in the Gazette Officielle (No. 37). Since then, any Jewish white-slave trader and brothel keeper is free to pursue his shameful, specifically Jewish trade in the cities of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Beersheba, Ramleh, Bethlehem and Haifa. That is the work of the Zionists in the Holy Land. The conditions cry out for retribution. The entire Christian world ought to rise up against the fact that the land soaked in the blood of the Redeemer remains exposed to a damnable desecration. Even among the long-established Jews, anger and indignation prevailed over the doings of the Zionists, and many of them follow the example of the Arabs and turn their backs on their old homeland…”

While in Italy, Spain, France, indeed even, as already noted, in England, the Patriarch’s cry of distress awakened a loud echo, which finally condensed into a sharp note from Pope Pius XI, the call of the prince of the church faded almost unheard in Catholic Germany. However, the well-known Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit had published a short note about Barlassina’s lecture, but the news of it has not yet penetrated to wider circles of the Catholic population in Germany to this day.

Zionist experiences in Palestine became the catalyst for profound antisemitic popular movements. This occurred not only in predominantly Catholic countries, but even in Protestant England. The last Reichstag elections clearly demonstrated this. Despite this, major German Catholic political organisations continue to unwaveringly view Jewish-led parties as their ideological and political comrades-in-arms. These parties are fundamentally hostile to religion and the Church. The Catholic organisations see them as allies in a struggle against their own people and blood kin. Specifically, they are fighting against those who seek to prevent Germany from likewise being transformed into a kind of Zionist National Home.

In this fact, the spiritual distress of the German people has undoubtedly reached its peak. Therefore, state-hostile Zionism still constitutes a fateful problem for the German people, today more than ever!

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The breaking point for Jung was Freud’s centralisation of sexual libido and the theory of infantile sexuality. Freud located libido, the energy of the sexual drives, at the centre of mental life. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he argued that sexuality begins in infancy, tracing the child through oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital stages. His Oedipus complex describes how a child unconsciously desires the opposite-sex parent and regards the same-sex parent as a rival.

In Jung’s diagnosis of Freud, the Jewish provenance of such ideas was inescapable. He would write:

“What Freud has to say about sexuality, infantile pleasure, and their conflict with the “principle of reality”, as well as what he says about incest and the like, can be taken as the truest expression of his own psychic make-up. He has given adequate form to what he has noted in himself… He has devoted his life and his strength to the construction of a psychology which is a formulation of his own being.”1

Jung had discovered that the difference between the Jew and the European was not superficial but fundamental, and seated in the racial psyche. He would ask:

“May it not therefore be said that there is a Jewish psychology too, which admits the prejudice of its blood and its history? And may it not be asked wherein lie the peculiar differences between an essentially Jewish and an essentially Christian outlook?”2

The religious outlook of Judaism and European Christianity is a window into the racial soul—borne out in the contrast between their core values. While birth and rebirth lie at the heart of Christianity’s festivals, death and racial genocide lie at the heart of Judaism’s. Jewish psychology is not only at the root of the Jewish religion but also behind the prevailing attitude of Judaism towards other belief systems. Unsurprisingly, one religious figure is a central target: Jesus Christ.

The Jewish attitude towards Christ is exemplified in the Talmudic discourses. Like Freud’s theories of infant sexuality, the themes of the Talmud exemplify the particular essence of Jewish psychology: sex, murder and the profane.

The Talmud is the foundational compendium of Rabbinic Judaism, consisting of the Mishnah (the written codification of the Oral Torah, c. 200 CE) and the Gemara (centuries of rabbinic debate and commentary on it), preserved in two recensions—the shorter Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi) and the larger, more authoritative Babylonian Talmud (Bavli). Jewish scholars of the Talmud are forced to concede the centrality of certain Jewish themes which still echo through history today:

“The most prominent characteristic that dominates quite a number of the rabbinic stories is sex, more precisely sexual promiscuity.”3

The motif begins not with Jesus’ conduct but with his birth. In a passage from the tractate Shabbat, the rabbis refer to Jesus under two disguised names, Ben Stada and Ben Pandera, meaning roughly “son of Stada” and “son of Pandera”. A rabbi explains the puzzle: the name Stada refers to the woman’s husband, while Pandera refers to the man who was actually her lover.4

Another voice then adds the fuller story. The husband, it says, was a man named Pappos ben Yehuda, and the mother was Miriam. She is described as a woman who wore her hair long—a detail the rabbis associated with sexual looseness—and she was unfaithful to her husband in the town of Pumbedita, a major center of Jewish learning in Babylonia. The name “Stada” comes from a word meaning to wander off the right path, to go astray or to be unfaithful.5 The conclusion is therefore stated plainly: once the Talmud assumes Jesus’ mother committed adultery, it follows that Jesus himself was a mamzer—a child born outside marriage, a bastard.6 Thus, where Christians taught that Jesus was born of a virgin, the Talmud answers that he was born of an affair.

The artistry of the Talmudic insult lies in its precision. The lover’s name Pandera corrupts the Greek parthenos—or virgin—into pantheros, so that the claim of a virgin conception is answered by a pun. Because the father is a Roman soldier, Jesus “becomes not only a bastard but even the son of a non-Jew”, a child of the occupying power.7 This Talmudic discourse is essentially a counter-narrative against Christianity’s core claim of Jesus’ divine origin.8

After calling his mother an adulteress, the Talmud turns its attention to Jesus himself. In a passage in Sanhedrin, a rabbi comments on a verse from Psalms (91:10) and prays that he may never have a son or a student who “spoils his dish in public” the way Jesus did:

“‘Nor shall any plague come near your tent’ means that you will not have a child or student who overcooks his food in public, i.e., sins in public and causes others to sin, such as in the well-known case of Jesus the Nazarene.”

The cooking metaphor is a coded way of referring to sexual misbehaviour found in another Talmudic story in which a young rabbi called Rav Kahana hides under the bed of his teacher to observe how a learned man conducts himself with his wife. After hearing his teacher chatting and joking with his partner, Rav Kahana exclaims that the mouth of his teacher is “like one who has never eaten a cooked dish before”, meaning lustful. The point is blunt: Jesus is no better than his mother; the text implies the flaw runs in the family.9

The Talmud then associates Jesus with notorious wrongdoers. In Berakhot, he is placed alongside biblical figures remembered as traitors, enemies of God and corrupt officials such as Ahitophel, Doeg and Gehazi.10 In effect, he takes the place of the pagan prophet Balaam on the list of people who have no share in the life to come.11 Balaam is the archetypal gentile prophet who, though God forced him to bless Israel instead of cursing her, is remembered as an implacable enemy who counselled the Midianite women to seduce Israelite men into idolatry.

A longer story in Sanhedrin describes a wayward student—understood to be Jesus—who is scolded for staring lustfully at an innkeeper. He is formally cast out of the community in a dramatic ceremony using four hundred ram’s-horn trumpets (shofars), and later found bowing down to a brick. The story ends with the accusation that he used magic to deceive the Jewish people and lead them astray.12 Even the Christians’ shared meal—the agape, or love feast, connected to the Lord’s Supper—is described in Avodah Zarah as a forbidden banquet, somewhere between a secret Christian gathering and a wild, drunken orgy.13 Read in its historical setting, this whole cluster of images is best understood as a written reply to Christian claims: the virgin birth is answered with adultery, the holy community with lewdness and the Lord’s table with an orgy.

If sexual themes orbit around the birth of Jesus, those of murder are associated with his death. In countering the execution narrative of the Passion—the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial and death—the Talmud employs an audacious substitution.

According to the Gospels, Jesus was condemned by the Romans and put to death by Roman soldiers on a Roman cross. The Babylonian Talmud tells an entirely different story: it insists that Jesus was tried and executed by Jews, under Jewish law. In Sanhedrin, it states that Jesus was stoned and his body hanged on the eve of Passover (which also fell on the Sabbath). For forty days beforehand, a public announcer walked before him, declaring that Jesus was going to be killed because he “practiced sorcery, incited people to idol worship and led the Jewish people astray.” When no one was found to offer a single argument in his defence—the text claims—he was killed.

The Talmud converts the crucifixion into a halakhic execution invoking the Mishnah’s four death penalties: stoning, burning, slaying and hanging. The crimes are specified with technical care: Jesus was both a mesit and a maddiah—one who secretly seduces an individual and publicly entices many into idolatry.14 The forty-day herald pre-empts the charge that the Jews had killed an innocent man without a hearing.15 Even the dating is borrowed from the Gospels. The eve of Passover, 14 Nisan, follows John rather than the Synoptics, which demonstrates that the rabbis deliberately rewrote the Gospel story rather than presenting an independent memory of the event.16 The Jews, they claim, “have put [Jesus] on trial and executed him for what he was: a blasphemer, who claimed to be God and deserved capital punishment according to our Jewish law.”17 Not only has the person of Jesus been obliterated, but so too has the Christian symbology central to his martyrdom—the cross.

Having rewritten Christ’s birth and death, the Talmud goes on to rewrite his afterlife, and here its imagery becomes deliberately scatological. In a passage in Gittin, a man named Onqelos—who is considering converting to Judaism—summons the dead from their graves to question them and decide which power is truly in control. One by one he raises three notorious figures. Titus, the Roman general who destroyed the Temple, is shown burning, his ashes scattered, with an insect gnawing inside his brain. Balaam, the pagan prophet, sits in boiling semen. And Jesus is raised together with a group described only as “the sinners of Israel”. Onqelos first enquires of Jesus who is the most important in the afterlife. Jesus replies “the Jewish people”. He then asks:

“Should I then attach myself to them in this world? Jesus said to him: Their welfare you shall seek, their misfortune you shall not seek, for anyone who touches them is regarded as if he were touching the apple of his eye…”.

Onqelos then asks:

“What is the punishment of that man, a euphemism for Jesus himself, in the next world? Jesus said to him: He is punished with boiling excrement. As the Master said: Anyone who mocks the words of the Sages will be sentenced to boiling excrement. And this was his sin, as he mocked the words of the Sages. The Gemara comments: Come and see the difference between the sinners of Israel and the prophets of the nations of the world. As Balaam, who was a prophet, wished Israel harm, whereas Jesus the Nazarene, who was a Jewish sinner, sought their well-being.”

The Talmud essentially grants that Jesus’ intentions towards his Jewish brethren were not malicious; he was a Jewish sinner, not an enemy. He is thus assigned a more shameful punishment—boiling in excrement rather than semen—because an insider who sins against Judaism bears greater accountability than an outsider. The punishments reflect the sins: Balaam’s sexual seduction is answered with semen while Jesus’ invitation to “eat my flesh” (the Eucharist) is answered with excrement.18 Accordingly, Jesus was not resurrected as the Christian faith claims, but remains in Gehinnom—the Jewish version of hell. The story of Jesus’ five disciples in Sanhedrin, each one refuted with a Bible verse and put to death, drives the same point home: there is no resurrection, and therefore no surviving community of believers.

The Talmud’s excrement imagery is aimed directly at Christian symbology surrounding the consummation of Christ’s body in the form of the Communion wafer and wine. Jewish scatology likely references Jesus’ statement in Mark 7:15–20 regarding how a person is defiled not by what enters him but what comes out, as well as his words at the Last Supper over the bread and wine: “take, eat; this is my body…this is my blood of the new covenant.”19 Jews turn the very body and blood that Christians believe will give them eternal life into human waste. According to the Talmud, Jesus is fittingly punished by sitting in the excrement of his followers, who believe that eating his flesh and drinking his blood will let them live forever.20 Even as a traitor to the Jewish race, Jesus is still presented as “one of us” invited to repent and return to the old covenant—Judaism—because the new covenant is a fraud.

The rhetorical tactic employed in the Talmud is not denial, but inversion. Jews take the Church’s central accusation against them—that they murdered the Son of God and should feel eternal shame—and invert its meaning without ever denying Jesus’ killing. The Jewish response to the New Testament is not denial, but an affirmation that they did not murder the Messiah. Rather, Jews are the rightful executioners of a blasphemer and idolater, who was sentenced under Judaic law. Instead of responding defensively, Jews “raise their voice and speak out against what would become the perennial story of the triumphant Church.”21 The New Testament Passion story of Jewish guilt and shame as Christ killers is inverted.

This, it is argued, was a deliberate strategy. Jews “fought back with the means of parody, inversion, deliberate distortion, and not least with the proud proclamation that what their fellow Jews did to this Jesus was right.”22 The Talmud argues that Jesus:

“…deserved to be executed because of his blasphemy, that he will sit in hell forever, and that those who follow his example up until today will not, as he has promised, gain eternal life but will share his horrible fate. Taken together, the texts in the Babylonian Talmud…become a daring and powerful counter-Gospel to the New Testament in general and to John in particular.”23

What the Talmud established rhetorically, Jews would later enact physically. From around the 17th century, Ashkenazi Jews turned Christmas Eve into Nittel Nacht. Nominally from the Latin Natale Domini (Nativity of the Lord), its rendition in Hebrew takes on the meaning of “Night of the Hanged One”. At the hour Christians glorified the Nativity, Jews abstained from Torah study, believing its merit would grant Jesus vitality. Instead they would eat garlic, play cards and read the counter-Gospel Toledot Yeshu. The night’s folklore completes the inversion of the Ascension: Jesus returns from heaven only to creep through the latrines, and children were warned lest “the hanged one pull you in.” The shame of the Christ-killer charge becomes, for one ritual hour, defiant pride.

The feelings generated in Gentiles encountering the Talmudic discourses on Jesus Christ today will likely replicate those of Carl Jung over a century ago. In his final analysis, Jung would caution against the “grave error” of applying in medical psychology “Jewish categories” indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom.24 Because of this “the most precious secret of the Germanic peoples—their creative and intuitive depth of soul—has been explained as a morass of banal infantilism.”25

Freud, Jung argues, “did not understand the Germanic psyche any more than did his Germanic followers. Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on which the whole world gazes with astonished eyes, taught them better? Where was that unparalleled tension and energy while as yet no National Socialism existed? Deep in the Germanic psyche, in a pit that is anything but a garbage-bin of unrealizable infantile wishes and unresolved family resentments.”26

The animus toward European peoples, their collective psychology and their religious icons demonstrated in both psychoanalysis and the Talmud warns against accommodating Jewish narratives over both the European and wider Gentile world. Downstream of the Judaic psyche is not a healthy place to be.

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in March, 1940. In it the author outlines the central role that the Jew David Ricardo played in establishing the ideology of modern capitalism in 19th century England in which profit takes precedence over labour, and the economy is divorced from its wider social context.

“Theory and Practice of Plutocracy”

By Heinz Ballenstiefen

The English-Jewish community of interests, which broke the current war with Germany off the leash, has a centuries-old tradition.

As is well known, the Jews were expelled from the English island empire in 1290 and for almost 400 years every Jew was forbidden to reside and work in England. This state of affairs changed with the rule of Cromwell. The Lord Protector, rooted in the spirit of Puritanism, had recognised the possibility of a religious reinterpretation of the political striving for power of a people in the Old Testament. What was more obvious than an alliance with that people, which concluded a covenant with its God in the Old Testament and received in return the promise of chosenness and domination of the world? Cromwell therefore allowed the return of the Jews to England, and from that time dates the identical goal-setting of England and Jewry in the domination of the world. During this period, the view also arose that the English royal house descended from the House of David, so that the alliance with Jewry additionally received an inner justification beyond that. The external occasion of the English-Jewish alliance was the Spanish war under Cromwell, in which Jewry allowed England to prosper its first support.

The spiritual amalgamation between London and Zion was naturally followed by the Jewish incursion into English economic life. In the case of the English-Jewish alliance, it was obvious that a Jew undertook for the first time the attempt to press English economic life into fixed laws, which had the consequence that the entrepreneur took in gigantic profits at the expense of the working population. It was the Jew David Ricardo who, at the turn of the 19th century, laid the theoretical foundation for that state which today is referred to as plutocracy.

David Ricardo descends from a Sephardic Jewish family that made its way to England via Holland. A parallel to this migration of Jewry is found in the 19th century, when Jews, coming from the East, received culture and civilisation in Germany, in order then to attain wealth and power in the Western nations. David Ricardo was born on 19 April, 1772, in London. His father, who was born in Holland, had acquired a considerable fortune with which he exerted a corresponding influence on the London Stock Exchange. The young Ricardo was educated in his youth both for the faith and for business, reports one of his first biographers, the Jew-friendly Eduard Baumstark. The unscrupulous business methods which are taught to a Jew already in the Talmud are known, so that Baumstark rightly points out that the reason for Ricardo’s extraordinary business fortune is to be sought in his education. For Baumstark, the Talmud school possesses precedence over classical education—the latter filling people only with reservations that are merely hindering to business interests:

“Many a person who enjoys a classical education will be surprised that one can also become a deeper thinker and thereby one of the greatest spirits of his time. For this is what the young Ricardo later became with his commercial education. His innate decided talent for tenacious and deep thinking, his penetrating gift of observation in history and life, and probably also the coincidence of many state events during his life have made him what he became. The Amsterdam and Polish Jews are generally famous and revered among their co-religionists because of their extraordinary acumen. It is also acknowledged that the study of the Talmud sharpens acumen and generally the understanding to such a degree that one would not believe it if the meanest Jews did not often convince one of it. Here even Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn fall away, these great men without previous classical education!”1

From the Talmudic education derives a further character trait of the Jewish being: the addiction to wealth. The method of money acquisition is thereby free of scruples and morals, and Ricardo gives a typical example of this. His brother says about him in the “Annual Obituary”, 1823:

“The art of enriching oneself is not held in great esteem; however, Ricardo has probably trained his extraordinary mental abilities in nothing to such a degree as in his money transactions. The most complete knowledge of all difficulties, the admirable rapidity in the use of numbers, the gift of making the countless transactions in which he was involved, without even the slightest appearance of effort, the cold-bloodedness, his thoroughly penetrating acumen, and, to say this too, a favourable coincidence of public events—all this has made it possible for him to surpass all his competitors and to raise his fortune, as well as his reputation, to a height which one had not yet reached in such a short time in this career.”

The “cold-bloodedness” of Ricardo and the fine instinct for profit-bringing opportunities, which his brother highlights as characteristic, distinguish the Jewish capitalist in general.

The application of such business methods did not remain without success for Ricardo. Already in his young years he had accumulated a fortune that made him independent not only of his father, but also lent him influence and prestige. With the character of his mind aimed only at advantage, it is a necessary consequence that Ricardo early renounced the faith of his fathers and had himself baptised. At the age of twenty-three he was thus in a position to pursue his private interests unencumbered, that is, he could now let his money work and found besides this the time to hatch out a fixed system that allowed him to flow ever greater wealth without much effort. He occupied himself first with the study of mineralogy and mathematics, in order then to proceed to his actual field of work, economics. In 1799 he came into contact with the teachings of Adam Smith. In 1817 Ricardo’s main work On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, appeared, which achieved three editions up to 1821, which speaks best for his extraordinary attention.

The effect of this work, united with the prestige acquired through his wealth, allowed him to move into the House of Commons in 1819. Baumstark says about this:

“His fortune and fame put him in a position to withdraw from business in order to be able to work all the more. For had he hitherto contributed his share to the leadership of public affairs from the study of science, he now wanted to do likewise from the bench of the people’s representative.”

Thereby Ricardo undertakes the last necessary step: participation in the politics of the country. In order to appear outwardly as an Englishman of the elevated class, Ricardo acquired an extensive landed estate.

The House of Commons was a completely foreign environment for the Jew Ricardo, and he was not at all conscious of his calling as a people’s representative in the beginning. But he accustomed himself very quickly to his public and could soon let his rabbinical experiences play out:

“He was modest enough, when and as long as it was necessary, to yield the floor to another. But once he began to speak on a question, the victory was not long in doubt. He possessed an extraordinary skill to dissolve every matter into its simple elements. He endeavoured of a terse and concise expression—first the general proposition, then the fitting example for explanation and finally the conclusions. He achieved through calm and the gift of refuting the most subtle objections from the ground up...believing in love of the fatherland, a constant defender of the rights and freedoms of all classes.”

That Ricardo found himself in the ranks of the opposition would not have needed the mention by Baumstark at all. His last great effect, which was nothing other than the outflow of Jewish spirit and profit-seeking, under the surrender of all natural and common economic interests, Baumstark sees in the following:

“Had Ricardo in Parliament accomplished nothing other than the salutary spirit of thrift that now prevails in English state economy, and to drive out the predominant striving for monopoly from the British trade legislation, which now permeates the legislative power, he would already therefore deserve to be immortal.”

Also in his parliamentary activity Ricardo still finds time enough to compose a series of writings on agriculture and the plan for the establishment of a state bank. He died in 1823.

In his treatment of the obituary, Baumstark once again attempts to present Ricardo as an ethical human being serving not only the fatherland but also the whole world. In doing so, he wisely omits to speak of addiction to wealth, cold-bloodedness and similar Jewish character traits:

“His industriousness was boundless and finds only a partial compensation in his activity as a writer, to which he could only dedicate the few hours of time that his own and later his parliamentary business left him. At the age of twenty-seven he entered the antechamber of public economics as a novice and died at the age of fifty-one as a king of the same, mourned by friends, by the fatherland and by the entire world of science.”

The consequences, however, which Ricardo’s teachings had to record for the entire English economy, Baumstark could not yet overlook in their effect. They only showed themselves in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of the “basic laws” that Ricardo set up for the economy in his work published in 1817, only two shall be explained more closely: the theory of value and the theory of wages.

Like Adam Smith, Ricardo makes the distinction between use value and exchange value in the economy. Things like water and air, which possess a high use value, have only a low exchange value. For the standard of exchange value, however, Ricardo introduces two new concepts in contrast to Smith, who primarily considered the possibility of labour:

“Those things which grant utility receive their exchange value from two sources: their scarcity and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them.”

The scarcity of a thing cannot be increased by any labour performance, and Ricardo concludes from this that its exchange value is completely independent of labour and depends only on taste and caprice. Furthermore, these things make up only a small part of daily trade goods, so that they need not be considered in the determination of exchange value. Ricardo therefore sets up the proposition:

“The quantity of simple labour necessary for the production of a good determines the exchange value.”

From the constancy of value—insofar as it depends on the quantity of labour—Ricardo derives the doctrine that the sum of wages and profit is constant. This view is the fundamental idea of Ricardo’s economic conception. For if wages rise, this rise has no influence on the value of the product, since the quantity of labour is what is decisive here; it does, however, affect profit, which must then necessarily become smaller. The Jew striving for profit will therefore endeavour to keep the labour wage as low as possible. Ricardo writes:

“How much proportionally is paid in labour wages is, as soon as the question of profit is concerned, of the greatest importance, for it is clear that this must be greater or smaller according to whether the labour wage is high or low.”

Like all things that are bought and sold, says Ricardo, and whose quantity can be diminished or increased, labour too has a natural price and a market price. By the natural price of labour, Ricardo means a wage whose level depends on the price of the means of subsistence that the worker needs to support himself and his family. The market price, however, “has the property of persisting at a natural height under all changed circumstances.”

If the market price of labour stands above the natural price, then the worker has the possibilities to enter into a marriage, and under his favourable living conditions he will possess a greater number of children. This means, however, that the longer it goes on, the more the supply of labour increases, so that the market price must naturally sink back down to its “natural” level. If, on the other hand, the price of labour stands below the natural price, the consequence is a bad economic situation for the worker. Through these worsened living conditions, the working class will die out to such an extent that a noticeable shortage of labour occurs in the market, which brings about a return of the wage to its “natural” level. Thereby the worker is placed in a condition in which he can neither live nor die, yet always procures a profit for the entrepreneur.

The labour wage is, however, not only determined by abundance and lack of workers. It was already said that the wage, according to Ricardo’s view, stands in a relationship to the price that the worker has to pay for his necessities of life. But these fluctuations are independent of the worker. They can, however, bring about the same effects as the law of supply and demand. Ricardo says in summary:

“The labour wage can therefore fall or rise from the following two causes: 1) through abundance or lack of workers and 2) through the price of the means of subsistence, for whose purchase the worker uses his labour wage.”

In his theory of value, Ricardo presents labour as the sole factor of value determination. His proposition that the quantity of simple labour necessary for the production of a commodity determines the exchange value excludes all other phenomena of daily life that are also standards for values. Thereby, Ricardo simultaneously accomplishes the separation of the economy from all other forms of communal life. This separation is consciously carried out sharply and consequentially in all his other teachings.

But even within the framework of the economy itself, the proposition is not justified; for how, after all, is research work to be determined according to this principle? Ethical values of labor are not even a topic of discussion.

The main difficulty consists in the justification of profit of labour. The profit, as a magnitude remaining after deduction of the wage and the capital usage, can no longer be calculated by being inserted into the labour process. This residual magnitude later becomes a point of connection for Marx’s “theory of surplus value”.

The catastrophic aspect, however, emerges in Ricardo’s doctrine of the wage. The wage is the payment for the quantity of labor rendered; the payment itself, though, is governed by the state of prices for the means of subsistence. Labor, which in relation to the wage is nothing but a commodity, has its price calculated according to supply and demand.

With a ruthless cold-bloodedness, Ricardo concludes that just a number of workers with their families must perish so that the price could be brought back to its normal state through the large supply. It is a system thought out in a rabbinical manner, which exploits the worker to the last in order to achieve a high profit, without, however, completely destroying him, because otherwise the profit would also fall away.

The circle closes even more consequentially when it is considered that the natural price of labour corresponds to the quantities of means of subsistence that put the worker in a position to nourish himself and his family and to propagate. The price of the means of subsistence, which is determined in the first line by agricultural products, lies, however, in the hand of the large landowner, since according to Ricardo’s “theory of ground rent” he determines the price of the products.

Thus it becomes particularly clear here how skilfully a clique guided by Ricardo’s teachings has grasped the broad mass of the people in a finely spun system and exploits it for profit. Thereby the worker class is consciously presented as a class within the framework of the economy. The most concise formulation of Ricardo in this connection, that the sum of wage and profit is always constant, cannot mark the basic attitude more clearly.

Ricardo’s work rests on an abstract, deductive view of the economy. “Abstract” here means the detachment of the economy from the fabric of communal life, so that it stands as a sole factor existing for itself. For the view that the economy bears no relation to morality, culture, religion—in short, to any of the other contents of human communal life—dates from Ricardo. This detachment came about through the unrestricted will to power of self-interest, in whose name all bonds had to be loosened. It is the separation that Professor Rath calls the “bondlessness of free-floating speculation, which brands every national bond as a disturbance of its interests.”

The far-reaching effect of Ricardo’s teachings lies firstly in the skilful exploitation of the demands of the time and secondly in the favourable form in which these teachings were presented. Ricardo possesses the peculiarity of first setting up the determining doctrinal proposition, in order then, confirmed by a fitting example, to expand it to the general. The validity of an assertion set up in such a way can always be proven through well-chosen examples, so that this formula can establish a development as it seems fair to the interest of self-interest. The deductive method is handled with great ease by a Jew, since it is the actual form of the Talmud.

Rath seeks its main effect in the form of such propositions, which is easily graspable through its primitiveness. He writes:

“What appears like a Jewish theory arises as a rule only thereby, that Jewry seizes the possibilities of systematic thinking offered to it, processes them into a system closed in itself and abstract, and thereby helps the primitivisation and easy learnability lying therein to a vulgar dissemination.”

But it is not only this form that conditions the great possibility of effect. Far more, it is strengthened by the respect for the written word peculiar to the Jew. The veneration of the written word of the law—for such are Ricardo’s economic teachings—deepens the effect especially in the racially related masses.

The consequences of Ricardo’s economic teachings are to be established today in England. In the course of the 19th century, a Jewish-English capitalist class has crystallised, which, closely connected with one another through marriages, possesses the fortune of the English people. This emerges from the following figures: one percent of all Englishmen possess 55 percent of the entire British national fortune; five percent of all Englishmen possess 75-80 percent of the English national fortune, so that 95 percent of all Englishmen must content themselves with the remainder of 20-25 percent. Thus looks the English plutocracy.

It is the profits that have fallen to the followers of Ricardo’s doctrine and been withheld from the worker. So as to pay only a lower wage, English entrepreneurs initially did without the labor of children. When these measures no longer brought in enough profit, workers were given credit in order to increase the supply of labor; for according to Ricardo’s doctrine, a large supply of workers results in falling wages and thereby rising profits. Thus in 1931, 12.4 million working people stood against 2.4 million unemployed. The armament fever of recent years has changed this state of affairs relatively little.

Ricardo had further established that high necessities of life increase the wages of workers and thereby reduce the profit of the entrepreneur. Thus the English worker had to be kept at a very low standard of living. This already begins with housing, to cite only one example. The conditions of English workers’ housing are catastrophic and the slums are known throughout the world. Thus it came about that in Scotland, which has few slums, 46 percent of 10,000 one-room dwellings and 47 percent of 410,000 two-room dwellings were overcrowded in the previous year.

Cultural demands on the part of the worker would depress the profits of the plutocrats. The English worker is therefore kept at as low a level as possible. The rise in the prices of the means of subsistence—which was bound to entail an increase in wages and which assumed frightening proportions in England—brought profits into danger. A way out was therefore found in lowering wages. The numerous strikes and lockouts best testify to this. In 1937, 1,129 strikes were recorded in England, affecting 610,000 workers. In the process, they lost a total of 3,413,000 working days in wages. The misery thereby became even greater. There are simply too many workers there, and according to Ricardo’s doctrine a portion must die out so that a shortage of workers arises. The first signs of this dying out are already present. Out of 10,000 Englishmen, 16.2 percent died of tuberculosis in 1936 alone. Per 1,000 inhabitants, there were in 1937 only 6.8 marriages and 15.3 births—figures that cannot be compared with the German ones.

And this exploited people has been driven into a war against Germany. But it is not the plutocrats who pay for the war, it is the working people. The President of the National Savings Committee declared in November of last year that approximately 23.7 million people in England now have an income but only about 750,000 earn £500 or more. Therefore, it is primarily the approximately 23 million people with modest incomes who must come up with the money for war financing and war burdens.

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In September, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a group of American social media influencers and told them exactly how the Jewish state was fighting the war on public opinion over Gaza. “We cannot fight with swords anymore,” he said. “The most important ones are on social media.”

Days later, US foreign-agent registration filings revealed what that meant in practice: the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was paying a network of influencers between $6,000 and $7,400 per post to shape how the world understood the war in Gaza. The campaign—named the Esther Project—would constitute only a small part of Israel’s $1 billion diplomacy campaign since October 7th.

Most people assume that shifting public opinion is a war of arguments—one convincing thread or viral video at a time, gradually winning over the undecided. But operations like the Esther Project were not built to win arguments. They were built to engineer the environment in which arguments are received: to make a position feel ubiquitous, inevitable and socially safe. That distinction raises a question that goes far beyond this one battle in the information war. Is it possible for a small, coordinated group to shift the opinions of millions?

An instinctive answer is that such shifts in public opinion happen gradually with consistent exposure to arguments and evidence. This model treats ideas as viral: each exposure has an independent chance of infection, and enough exposure eventually tips the balance. But decades of research on social dynamics paints a different picture. Opinions do not shift through the steady accumulation of argument; they shift through sudden, system-wide cascades triggered by surprisingly small, committed minorities with the difference between success and failure coming down to a few percentage points.

Narrative shifts on social media are not mysterious viral accidents. They follow identifiable dynamics (critical mass thresholds, complex contagion, mathematically modelled tipping points) that have been measured in controlled experiments and validated on real platforms at scale. Like the trajectory of a missile, the dynamics of information warfare—the mechanism of narrative shift—are well understood.

A tipping point is the moment when a previously contained minority view triggers a cascade that sweeps through and transforms the majority. Below a threshold, the minority view makes little headway with converts drifting back towards the dominant convention. Above that threshold, the dominant convention collapses with violent speed. The term tipping point is employed in marketing and politics but has a precise meaning in social sciences: a nonlinear transition in a system of social coordination, where a small change in one variable produces a disproportionately large change in the collective outcome.1

For decades, the notion of tipping points sat uneasily alongside classical economic theory. Equilibrium analysis held that stable social conventions, the unwritten rules that the majority coordinates around, should be resistant to small perturbations.2 If the majority benefits from agreement on an existing norm, why would a small minority of dissenters matter? Critical mass theory, rooted in evolutionary game theory, argued the opposite:

“This theory argues that when a committed minority reaches a critical group size—commonly referred to as a “critical mass”—the social system crosses a tipping point. Once the tipping point is reached, the actions of a minority group trigger a cascade of behavior change that rapidly increases the acceptance of a minority view.”3

However, the evidence base for the tipping point theory was weak. Theoretical models posited a wide range of possible thresholds from as low as 10% to as high as 40%. Research into gender norms among corporate leadership4 and shifting attitudes to tobacco use5 offered suggestive but inconclusive evidence. No researchers had directly observed a tipping point in a controlled experiment.

That changed in 2018 with the first experimental demonstration of a tipping point in social convention.6 Researchers recruited 194 subjects and placed them in ten online chat groups of 20 to 30 people. Participants were paired randomly and asked to name a pictured face. If both parties typed the same name, they received money; if they disagreed, that money was lost. There was no right answer, no argument and no evaluation—the only goal was to coordinate on the naming convention.

Within a few iterations, each group converged on a single name. Then the researchers introduced confederates, a small number of actors instructed to deliberately advance an alternative name for the pictured face. These confederates were the committed minority. Across the ten independent groups, the size of the confederate minority varied between 15% and 35%.7

When the committed minority was below 25% of the group, it failed. A few people would occasionally change their naming choice but over time they reverted and the established convention held. On average, only 6% of the non-committed population adopted the alternative by the final round.8

When the size of the committed minority reached 25% or more, a tipping point was triggered and the new convention spread to a majority in every trial. At 31%, it reached full consensus. The theoretical model predicts that the larger the committed minority, the faster and more complete the cascade. But the experiment’s cleanest finding is the threshold itself: below 25%, the minority failed; at or above it, it succeeded.9 Most strikingly, in one trial the difference between failure and success came down to a single person; adding one extra confederate pushed the group across the threshold and flipped the outcome.10

The most profound implication is not the specific size of the minority. The 25% is not a universal constant and will vary based on the strength of social norms and the extent to which the majority is attached to an existing convention.11 What matters is where the minority’s power comes from. The confederates had no authority, no wealth, no information advantage and no ability to punish those who did adopt their alternative. They had only one thing: commitment. Their entire telos was to overturn the majority consensus and replace it with a new one.

Most people have a mental model of how ideas spread that is rooted in epidemiology. We tend to imagine information moving from person to person like a virus: one contact with an infected person, one chance of infection. This assumption was the foundation of some of the most influential work in network science. Mark Granovetter’s 1973 essay The Strength of Weak Ties argued that “whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger number of people, and traverse a greater social distance, when passed through weak ties rather than strong.”12 Two decades later, other researchers showed that it takes only a tiny fraction of long-range connections to give even tightly clustered communities the short path lengths of a random network—the small world effect.13 In this model, the ideal topology for spreading anything is a network with abundant bridges between distant groups. For disease and information, which require only a single exposure, this is correct. The problem is that opinions, social norms and political commitments are not information.

In a 2007 paper which became a cornerstone of network sociology, Damon Centola and Michael Macy made a vital distinction between two kinds of contagion. Simple contagions—like disease, news and rumours—require contact with a single source. Complex contagions require “social affirmation or reinforcement from multiple sources.”14 A contagion is complex “if its transmission requires an individual to have contact with two or more sources of activation.”15 The key distinction between simple and complex contagions is the number of sources, not the number of exposures. Hearing the same claim ten times from the same person is not the same as hearing it once from ten people. Shifts in opinions about politics, war or race do not happen on first contact.

Of the various mechanisms that make contagion complex, two are key.16 The first is credibility. One account on social media making an extraordinary claim is easy to write off. The same claim being made independently from several accounts is much harder to dismiss. The second mechanism is legitimacy. Adopting an unpopular opinion carries social risk because non-adopters are likely to question the legitimacy of the innovation—particularly when that innovation challenges deeply entrenched political and social shibboleths like the ‘Holocaust’. Innovators thus risk being shunned as deviants until there is a critical mass of early adopters. Most people will wait and watch until they sense that enough of those around them have adopted a view until they themselves subscribe to it, a rational response given the real social costs of having the “wrong opinion”.

This distinction upends one of the best-known results in sociology. The strength of weak ties holds for simple contagion where long-distance connections are valuable because they bridge otherwise disconnected groups. But those same long ties are structurally weak because a long tie delivers a single exposure from a distant source, inadequate for mass social change. What complex contagion requires is a wide bridge: multiple independent connections between two social neighbourhoods so that a person in one neighbourhood receives reinforcement from several sources in another.17

On social media platforms like X, retweets, quote-tweets, algorithmic amplification and the tendency for a small number of accounts to dominate a trending topic can manufacture the experience of multiple independent sources even when narratives originate from a tiny coordinated group. Controlled experiments on X using algorithm-driven bots have found that the complex contagion model—in which adoption depends primarily on the number of unique sources—fits the data dramatically better than the simple contagion model.18 Other studies which examined millions of tweets found that political cascades are driven by a small core of hyper-active accounts repeating the same slogans, precisely the architecture that can simulate broad social reinforcement from a core minority.19 Social media platforms like X do not just spread narratives; they structurally enable the illusion that a narrative has already hit the tipping point. The core mechanism of narrative shift is not persuasion but system dynamics. The goal is not to win people over through facts and logic but to shift the social equilibrium so that the target opinion becomes one people naturally converge on. To shift the narrative, shift the consensus—or the illusion of consensus.

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in December, 1932. The author takes aim at the feminism that preceded German National Socialism which not only failed young women by exposing them to the vicissitudes of economic downturn but also denuded the feminine soul. Contrary to popular tropes associated with Germany under Hitler, the author stresses the importance of work for women in shaping them into the mothers of a new nation.

“Women Remains Woman!”

By Marie Diers

Throughout all ages, people who lack an eye for the wonderful structure of nature have made the attempt, in favour of a theory, to transgress the great laws of life. There have also been times that fell out of balance—times of decline, of over-refinement, of soulless materialism—that created a contempt for these laws. But this could only be temporary, as long as it was not a sign of degeneration sinking into complete decay. Where the core remained sound, the most general law of nature reasserted itself, often slowly but inexorably.

One of the later aberrations of this kind is the blurring of the natural differences that have existed between man and woman since time immemorial. But whole classes carry within themselves, for their own protection, the consequences of this sin against nature. The Amazonian ideal may live only in legend, but its counterpart stands in broad daylight: realised masculinity in that caste whose successes, through the stock exchange and the press, rest upon distinctly feminine qualities. An oriental caste, adapted to foreign zones, instinctively provoking resistance in vigorous peoples—and when this resistance is forcibly subdued, it has a disintegrating effect.

The distortions of eternal laws of life may persist for centuries; they may gradually even seem to become laws of life themselves. They may penetrate all economic and intellectual relations, assume legal forms, the gaps they tear in the sense of justice, the living conditions they create may be praised as cultural phenomena—but in the hour when, in a people that is not willing to die, the old strong instincts awaken again, often roused by a single man whom God called; when the unadulterate divinity within it pushes aside all question-games with a smile and reveals itself in its clear imperishability—then all artificial new orders will scatter like mist.

In this respect, too, we stand at a turning point. When the spring storms come, not only a part of the fields awakens—all seeds shoot up, the trees come to life, flowers and birds thrive, human faces change their expression, becoming brighter, more reliable. And when a sick people is healed, it is not healed only in one part; the young, strong life rises in all veins; everywhere the rotten leaves fall, the yellow, unhealthy shoots. Then too, the defiant, auspicious word rings out again: “Straight is the path.”

Farewell, you advocates of women’s rights, of every age, of every degree. Whether you, like the first female fighters from the eighties and nineties, display an external masculinisation, or whether today you present yourselves as feminine in external form, in elegant clothing, even in marital aspirations. You have forced your theories upon our people, theories borne of three sins against nature:

First: You have attempted to turn a purely economic question—a matter of vocational opportunity that initially concerned only the “higher” daughter—into a women’s movement; that is, to pit the planned “women” against men, to drive a wedge into the middle of the people, to sow antagonism between family members, indeed to uproot the family. Not with ill intent, but out of an inability to see an economic question in its proper limits, out of layman’s overzealousness.

Second: You have utterly failed when faced with the great life-questions of the nation. You wanted to be political, and your only political insight was the dwarf-like thought-form of pacifism, of vague illusions. Because the democratic parties also supported your efforts, because the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] threw you women’s suffrage unexpectedly quickly, you childishly and dependently adopted the political direction of that sort of men as well. A shallow “conviction,” without understanding and without strength of heart, became your guiding star. Hence also your pitiful fear that the girls from your educational institutions might become National Socialists.

And third: You have inevitably failed, always and everywhere, on every point concerning the natural qualities of women—from the beginnings of women’s studies, where in barbaric levelling you equated female education with male education, right up to today’s public activity, in which we can see not a trace of a feminine, motherly influence—neither in your parliamentary work nor in your vocational work. Where is it? Where have we felt the living heartbeat of a mother amid the raging heartlessness of recent years? Let us look at just two points that cried out for maternal intervention and remain untouched to this day: the wholly inadequate protection in cases of child abuse, and the endangerment of unprotected young office girls, mostly under Jewish bosses. Both are serious chapters in themselves, despite the host of female parliamentary representatives!

And the so‑called “opened” professions. Yes—they have been opened, but behind that stands the great hardship. What good does it do the poor girls to have their heads filled with training, when today all opportunities to actually practice it and earn a living from it are disappearing?

Then the reply comes: “That’s just the economic crisis, we can’t help that.” Really not? And you couldn’t foresee it two or three years ago, when even the youngest SA man among us already knew what was coming? Weren’t you so proud of your “trained intellect,” of your broad horizon? And yet you left the poor girls unwarned into these conditions?

In October of this year, the Federation of German Women’s Associations held its 17th General Assembly in Leipzig. This federation is part of the international women’s associations and represents everything that today still believes in the power of such women’s organisations under Fräulein Dr. Bäumer, the last female pillar of the State Party—now also broken. Such associations are included: the female employees’ association, the home and rural women’s associations, colonial and diaconate associations, etc. At this general assembly there were 700 women present. The report finds it “more than well attended.” A large number of young girls, cheated of their training, had come, in the last hope that they might perhaps still receive advice and help from their leaders. Fräulein Dr. Bäumer then said in her speech:

“The atmospheric pressure of economic and psychological insecurity must be overcome by educating a positive strength in today’s youth, by educating them to adaptability, which…can still stand on the narrowest ridge.”

Bravo, Fräulein Bäumer. What particularly appeals is the complicated and self-satisfied expression for simple matters. With our Leader we are accustomed to the opposite: the simplest form for complicated matters. But did the poor things, in their desperate need, leave much comforted and strengthened from this conference by the lofty flights of a well-paid ministerial councillor, so that they can now enthusiastically stand on the narrowest ridge? Or are they too beginning to sense dimly that from these cool hands they are offered stones instead of bread?

Woman remains woman: even the academic women could not escape their feminine nature. Of course, there are also stupid men here and there who are not a whit smarter than these overeducated ladies. But surely the purpose of the whole so‑called women’s movement was not to pick out precisely the least of them in order to compete with them in incompetence.

Woman remains woman: in the coming Germany we shall find our rightful place again. We will not be “thrown out” of the national economy, as hysterical headlessness cries out, as long as housekeeping does not yet have enough room for everyone. It is not even advisable to let young daughters sit at home with their mothers until marriage—which for hundreds of thousands never blooms—living off their fathers. That would again produce those narrow-minded spirits who afterward cling tearfully and anxiously to their husbands’ and sons’ sleeves when the call to duty rings out. That would produce the new bearers of an old, pernicious class arrogance. Young girls in a profession learn the seriousness of life, the necessity of standing on their own feet; they stand among all levels of the people. Only from this will true mothers emerge, who will raise the right sons and daughters for the new Germany in its surging vitality.

But our life’s purpose lies in the family, in warming, elevating, and inwardly enlivening the small circle—the root-soil from which our strong trees grow.

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New demographic projections by the Israeli Democracy Institute show the dramatic and potentially devastating impact that rapid Haredi population growth will have on Israel’s military, society and economy. The Ultra-Orthodox Haredim—Israel’s fastest-growing demographic group—are characterised by their religious education that prioritises yeshiva study over secular subjects, low male workforce participation and broad exemption from mandatory military service.

Projections show the Haredi share of Israel’s population will increase from around 14% today to between 22% and 24.4% by 2050, meaning that the Haredim will go from being a significant minority to almost a quarter of the country’s population in a single generation. The Haredi birth rate of 6.5 is roughly triple that of the general Jewish population, meaning the Haredi growth rate of 4.2% per year is exponential. Between 2009 and 2025, their population nearly doubled from 750,000 to 1.45 million. If trends continue, their numbers will hit 2 million by 2033 and 3.7 million by 2050.

The Haredi demographic surge is set to be catastrophic for the Israeli military. Despite a Supreme Court ruling in 2024 which found no legal basis for the blanket Haredi military exemption, the Netanyahu administration has pushed through new laws which effectively halt the enlistment of Ultra-Orthodox men and enshrine the Haredim’s religious studies as a foundational value of the state.

The Haredim’s population share among those eligible for military service is projected to rise from 23.5% today to 40% by 2050, essentially ending Israel’s people’s army. Only 45% of Jewish men and 30% of Jewish women aged 18 are expected to serve in the Israeli military by 2050. With non-Haredi Israelis already subsidising the Haredi military exemption by more than 13 billion shekels (≈$3.4 billion) a year, costs will only grow as reserve duty expands. Israel may be forced to rely on mercenaries or US troops if it is to remain a viable military force.

Education is another area of concern. Currently only 16% of Haredi students gain matriculation eligibility, the equivalent of a high-school diploma and the primary credential for university entrance. If current Haredi practices remain unchanged by 2050, the total percentage of Israeli students who gain matriculation eligibility will drop from 71% to 61%. In this scenario, the number of Israeli Jews aged 35 to 44 holding bachelor’s degrees would fall from 47% today to 44%.

Israeli employment rates are predicted to remain around 80% through 2050, with increases in the Haredi population offset by increased Arab Israeli workforce participation. Improved education and employment opportunities for Arab Israelis is seen as vital to maintain economic growth and tax revenues. Although Israeli Arabs only make up 20% of undergraduate students, the employment rate for Arab women increased from 33% to 46% over the last decade.

However, while Arab Israeli workforce participation helps to maintain overall employment rates, the report notes that it comes at a cost of increasing subsidisation of Haredi society. Mobilising the Arab population to plug Israel’s economic holes solves short-term problems but does not solve Haredi-specific issues. With Arab population growth slowing and projected to stabilise, Arab integration is not a viable solution to Israel’s demographic problems, especially given that Israel is an explicitly Jewish ethnostate.

Growth in the non-economically productive Haredi population is also set to increase the tax burden on other Israelis. Currently the monthly net tax payment per Israeli household stands at 4,419 shekels (≈$1,475). If the Haredi demographic projections are realised, the monthly net tax payment will drop by 24% to 3,354 shekels (≈$1,110). To maintain tax revenues at 2023 levels, the Israeli government faces a choice of significantly increasing the tax burden on non-Haredi Israeli households or cutting the quality of services. Most Israelis are already disillusioned with the state’s functioning, with only a small percentage rating the state of democracy as “good” or “excellent”. Public trust in core government institutions remains near record lows, with less than half of Jewish Israelis trusting the government.

The Haredi demographic boom is also set to inflict huge damage on Israel’s economic output. If the 2050 projections are correct and the Haredim are not fully integrated into the Israeli economy, the loss of potential in GDP per capita resulting from non-integration could exceed 10%, translating to a GDP loss of approximately 160 billion shekels (≈$53.7 billion). This economic impact intensifies over time because of the exponential nature of Haredi demographic growth.

Israel’s perpetual war against opponents of Greater Israel—including Iran—has already caused a severe budget crisis. The total cost of the conflicts launched by Israel post-October 7th has been estimated at 405 billion shekels (≈$138 billion), representing more than 17% of the country’s GDP. The attack on Iran alone is estimated to have cost 35 billion shekels (≈$12 billion). The growth in the Haredi population will further exacerbate Israel’s financial woes due to the bloc’s leverage over government “coalition funds” which are essentially rewards for political agreements reached during government formation. In the 2026 budget—a record of 699 billion shekels (≈$221 billion)—the Ultra-Orthodox community was able to procure over half of the coalition funding, amounting to roughly 2.2 billion shekels (≈$714 million). This money goes to fund Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivas and Kollels, Haredi Schools, Haredi cultural activities and drop-out prevention programs aimed at discouraging Haredi youth from leaving the community.

Another concern is that the downstream cultural and economic impact of Haredi growth will lead to elite flight from Israel as more liberal Jews seek escape. A report by Tel Aviv University estimated that 270,000 Jews had left the country over the last three years. Some 53% of Israeli multinational/high-tech companies have reported an increase in the number of employees requesting job relocation outside of the country.

While stopping short of predicting Israel’s collapse if current demographic trends continue, the report warns of a “substantial deterioration in Israel’s economy and national resilience.” Without a new “social contract” between the Israeli state and the Ultra-Orthodox—including fundamental changes in education, military enlistment and subsidies—the Zionist project faces a systemic unravelling.

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in December, 1932. Here former Italian Education Minister Balbino Giuliano argues that Fascism represents not merely a political reaction, but a profound spiritual and cultural renewal of the Italian nation, reconciling tradition with modernity, the people with the state and national identity with universal human values.

“The Idealistic Idea in Fascism”

By Balbino Giuliano

We are all agreed that every intellectual development, no matter how profound, always has a preparatory period. The originality of an idea or of any intellectual movement can never be detached from the constitution of history; it rejects what was false and untenable in the past and instead gives broad and rapid development to all that appeared true and fruitful. The Fascist movement therefore does not claim—although it is absolutely original—to break history into a dark period and a luminous one, and each of us is ready to acknowledge that in the Italy we grew up in there undoubtedly lay a far greater value than the people of that time themselves believed.

Having made this declaration, however, in order not to run the risk of being too greatly misunderstood, we may well say that a fifty-year-old Italian who, up to the present moment, has grown up with the life of his time, looking back on the days of his youth, has precisely the impression of having crossed a mountain range along his life’s path and of having arrived on the other slope, now to stride toward new goals in a new land. Certainly, in the Italian consciousness, as in that of every people, there always remains a fundamental core of a certain dissonance between two epochs, but no attitude, no way of thinking and feeling, no capacity for reacting to one’s surroundings has suddenly undergone such a profound transformation—one that has also radically changed the outward orientation toward life.

I do not mean to say that in the Italy of our early youth there was a lack of cultural activity; indeed, in those years we even had the impression that books and periodicals occupied a greater space than today. Today, however, we recognise that the culture of that time had a fundamental flaw: it felt somewhat detached from reality, as an object of a certain ornamentation for elegant curiosity, as a sometimes very noble occupation, but without true unity, without immediacy, and without real effect on practical life and its destiny. On the other hand, the reality of actual life appeared to us impenetrable, without the light of ideals and without the enchantment of passions. There was only one ideal that promised a future that should be better than the present, but this was an ideal that shone in the false light of utopia: Marxist socialism. It had by then lost all serious theoretical value and was fading even in the hearts of its most faithful adherents. What won over the masses was no longer the social ideal, which no one had seriously thought of transferring into real life; it was the intoxication of a sad egoism that created factions among the various categories of workers, setting them against the ethical unity of the state.

Practical life appeared as a sordid game of merely materialist interests, which for the masses and their preachers was supposed to be resolved in a future but utopian “socialist order,” while for cultivated minds it was nothing more than a grim reality that had to be accepted, by trying to adapt to it or to avoid it as much as possible, taking refuge in the realm of a perhaps useless but distinguished inwardness. In any case, one could feel nothing but contempt for the present. The essential character of intelligent and modern-minded persons consisted in an attitude of resistance, which could remain a mere state of mind and need not translate into deeds; yet it left its indelible stamp on every way of thinking.

The intelligent man always had to be negative and rebellious toward everything and everyone. If he was a rebel, it was his duty to rise up against the state, but even if he was a quiet man of order, he had at least to speak ill of it, to smile with great condescension at any patriotic enthusiasm, to speak with a certain mockery of every national institution and tradition; every day he had to deny one truth, break down a door, desecrate an idol. If one considers the matter carefully, one sees that the European spirit for more than half a century had been busy gradually dissolving all syntheses and convictions, and in doing so sought a new originality every day.

This critical-dissolving process brought dangerous consequences for everyone. It is certain, however, that the consequences for the Italian nation could have been even more dangerous than for others, since it had only conquered its unity half a century earlier and, from the great cultural periods of its past, inherited not a living continuity of the values of those times, but rather the dead remnants of a universalism and an essentially anti-national municipalism. And perhaps out of the awareness of these very grave dangers, the reaction which called itself Fascism began first in Italy.

At first glance, it seemed as though Fascism were simply a national uprising against the Bolshevik excesses of socialism, against the far-reaching denial of the fatherland, and against the criminal destruction of all sacred values of life. It seemed so in that first moment, as though Fascism represented merely the negation of a negation. But even for one who has never philosophised professionally and has never heard speak of dialectical processes, it is clear that a negation can never victoriously oppose another negation unless it carries within itself the affirmation of a positive idea. And today we recognise the power of this idea not only in the immense value of the works carried out in this decade, but much more in the complete transformation of our consciousness. And this transformation of our consciousness began right at the start of the Fascist movement, even when it still essentially possessed the aggressive spirit of its volunteer bands, so that one might have believed one was witnessing merely an insurrectionary movement.

When Fascism had taken up arms to oppose its enemies, it immediately felt that its true enemy was not the mass of workers, but the wretched clique that exploited the people for their own soulless ends; and it then further understood that it was necessary not to deny the spirit of sacred solidarity among all productively active people, but rather the materialist conception in which this idea of solidarity was enclosed and falsified by Marxist socialism. It understood that the highest values of life, such as peace, justice and the happiness of individuals, classes, and peoples, cannot simply be derived from the dialectical process of history, but can only be acquired little by little through the progress of that process, through its counter-questioning, and through our efforts.

It thus understood that if one wants to bring perfection into reality, one must earn it by advancing slowly toward it, suffering along the way the necessary human imperfections. It thus understood that the socialism of the nineteenth century, with its claim to artificially create a paradise on earth, went so far as to offer us an idea for the organised entrenchment of all servitudes and all selfish interests; and it also understood that, unfortunately, the various democratic parties, with their harmless sermons in honour of those empty idols consisting only of words, served as instruments of that wretched organisation which, under the socialist banner, worked in every country toward the ruin of the fatherland and of humanity. Fascism thus perceived life as a drama, even as a social drama, which in the succession of its various acts through history produces the harmonies of its ever higher, broader, and ever closer to truth and beauty.

Beyond the great pathos of history, the Italian soul saw the idea of the nation shine forth, enhanced in a new light. The nation was no longer merely a piece of earth or a sum of individuals, but rather a spiritual unity which found its concrete expression in that native soil and in the totality of individuals, and which constituted their deepest truth. We have seen that in the nation the same sacred ideal of unity is realised historically, and we have also seen that when each individual serves the nation to which he belongs, he also serves human progress. It is reality and idea; it is the symbol of the highest living human perfection within the limits necessary for our humanly limited consciousness—limited both in its capacity to think and in its capacity for devotion. And on this new idea of the nation as a living historical expression of universal human value, Fascism has worked and continues to work under the guidance of its Duce.

Let us imagine for a moment that the evil devilish miracle were to succeed and all men agreed to tear down all borders and barriers and to erase all differences among men in order to create world peace. What would happen then? They would necessarily arrive at a wild chaos and a war of all against all. And very often, when those in power have believed they could realize on earth this anarchic dream of a universal melting-pot of harmony, they have in fact sown only the seeds of bitter and deep discord. Mussolini expressed this idea clearly in one of his last speeches: the most dangerous people for peace are usually those who make a profession of preaching it (Turin, 23 October 1923).

He grasped this in order to deduce that precisely he who experiences life as a drama and knows that he does not fear it, also knows how to work—with greater severity but with more sincere effectiveness—to unite things among themselves and to form harmonious compositions from them. In Italy, Fascism has succeeded in reconciling all the opposites in life and in the national consciousness: it has given us the inheritance of tradition and the sense of a new duty—that is, at the same time, a sense of responsibility toward the past and toward the future. But what is perhaps even more important, it has definitively resolved the opposition that to a certain extent still existed between nation and state, between the people and its legal organisation, between the freedom of life and sovereign authority, between the old revolutionary tradition and the sacredness of the monarchy of the House of Savoy. And finally, it has taught us that it is not always necessary to be a renegade in order to be an intelligent person, and that it is likewise not necessary to live as a rebel in order to be a strong man of action; on the contrary, one can be very proud precisely in obedience and feel very gladly the energy of one’s own individuality while marching in the ranks of the fighters for an idea as a simple soldier.

Finally, from the reality of practical life the ideal of the nation has emerged, to illuminate also the sphere of culture. We know very well that culture cannot remain enclosed within the borders of the nation, even if we conceive it only materialistically as a piece of land or as a sum of individuals—as parts wholly detached from a whole that transcends them and encompasses them; not only culture, but all of life surpasses the borders of nations understood in this way. But for us, nations are not, as we have already said, merely pieces of land and sums of individuals, and they are neither separated from one another nor from all of humanity. They are different expressions of universal human activity; they are different currents of history and are destined to reflect in different forms the one and perhaps manifold truth that is enclosed in the depths of their consciousness. Therefore culture, like life, is simultaneously national and universally human, and only when it is vigorous and most deeply national is it also strong and deeply human.

In the face of the new light and the new value of the nation, those who work in these activities begin to feel the full responsibility of their endeavours. It is no longer the activity that we in our youth felt as detached from reality, as an object of decorative and elegant curiosity, as a very noble occupation but without unity of purpose, without real effect on practical life and its destinies—as was already stated above. We feel today that this work of culture is a creation of the Italian spirit and of a faith that could have value for all humanity. Thus it is for culture as for life: every nation offers its work to the progress of history, and history undertakes the work of testing and selection. So in the realm of culture, as in that of life, there exists among nations at once opposition and cooperation; it is the drama of life that unfolds, as was said earlier. And I believe that the peoples who experience the drama of life and do not fear it can more easily emphasize the character of cooperation than that of opposition.

Two forms of solidarity are possible among civilised nations: the solidarity of those who love peace out of cowardice and who abandon their post and their duty, and the solidarity of chivalrous souls who may have fought even on the opposing side, each at his post and for his duty, but who, as soon as it is possible, in the name of the common final goal, first exchange the soldier’s salute among themselves, in order then jointly to determine the character they wish to give to this common final goal as the highest contribution to cooperation in place of the previous opposition. And in this way may what is right be fulfilled for the nations of the great old Europe, the hope of the world.

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“There aren’t even chairs here,” said Alexandra Feodrovna, the last Empress of Russia, to the gunmen. No such niceties were considered when she and her family were ordered to stand against a wall in a cramped basement room of the Ipatiev House, a private mansion requisitioned by the Bolsheviks following the 1917 revolution.

A chair was ordered and she sat down with her daughters. Her husband, now former Tsar Nicholas II, stood holding his 13-year-old son Alexei in his arms. The leader of the assassination squad spoke up. “Your friends are advancing on Yekaterinburg and so you’re sentenced to death.”

“What?”

This was the last word that Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov would utter before him and his entire family—his wife, four daughters and son Alexei, along with four household attendants—were murdered.

There was to be no dignified ending for the Romanovs in Russia’s new beginning. The shooting was frantic. Promised their chance, eager assassins shot through the doorway. The firing intensified in concert with the screams of the victims.

“I managed to stop the firing but with great difficulty,” said the leader Yakov Yurovsky. When the firing finally abated, Alexandra and some of her children were still breathing. “I think they had fallen from fear or maybe intentionally,” said Yurovsky “and so they were alive. Then we proceeded to finish the shooting.” He goes on:

“Previously I had suggested shooting at the heart to avoid a lot of blood. Alexei remained sitting petrified. I killed him. They shot the daughters but did not kill them. Then Yermakov resorted to a bayonet, but that did not work either. Finally they killed them by shooting them in the head. Only in the forest did I finally discover the reason why it had been so hard to kill the daughters and Alexandra Feodrovna.”

The diamonds that the women had stuffed in their corsets had temporarily stayed their execution.

The shockwaves of Tsar Nicholas II’s murder during the Bolshevik Revolution would continue to reverberate throughout the Soviet era, resurfacing with renewed force in the post-Soviet period as Russian Orthodox Christianity began its resurgence.1 With this new wave of orthodoxy came new interpretations of eschatology flavoured by the Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik takeover.

Prior to the revolution, eschatological thought within Russian Orthodoxy had been driven by both the official state-aligned ideology and that of the more radical, popular tradition. The official position of the Russian Orthodox Church promoted Moscow as the Third Rome, formulated by the monk Filofei of Pskov in the early 16th century. It argued that Moscow was now the bastion of Christianity following the fall of the first Rome due to heresy, and the second—Constantinople—due to the “godless” Turks. The more radical eschatology of the Old Believers was triggered by the reforms of Patriarch Nikons, and the subsequent schism, in the late 1660s. They believed that the official Church had accepted heresy and was now in the grip of the antichrist, with the year 1666 considered the beginning of his rule.

Russian Orthodox eschatology is chiefly inspired by The Revelation of St. John the Divine in which it is said that the end times would herald the arrival of the antichrist who would be proclaimed the ruler of the world and whose religion would become the new global creed.2 From the second century AD, the antichrist was associated with the Jewish messiah figure—a descendant of Dan— primarily as part of the early Church’s struggle to define itself against Judaism. Early Christian theologians drew on the Old Testament prophecy in Genesis 49:17, which describes Dan as “a snake by the roadside, a viper along the path”, interpreting this as a veiled reference to the antichrist. A crucial feature of Orthodox eschatology was that bishops would also be tempted by the antichrist and the church almost totally destroyed—a narrative that would permit the criticism of clerics for apostasy.3

Given the persistent failure of the end times to materialise, the concept of the restrainer (katechon; κατέχον) became popularised within Orthodoxy.4 The term—borrowed from 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7—means “one who restrains” the coming of the antichrist. The term has been applied to various entities throughout Russian history that are interpreted as holding back the tide of disaster such as the Roman Empire, the Holy Spirit, the Orthodox Church itself and the Russian government.

Following the Bolshevik revolution, Russian Orthodox thinkers began to identify the Russian Emperor with the restrainer.5 According to the Russian clergy, that Christianity in the country had survived the Soviet system meant it should be seen as the true faith which God would protect from the antichrist, allowing Russia itself to save the rest of humanity.6 This worldview would be central to the strain of Monarchist Orthodoxy, for which the most important omens were tied to Jewish activity.7 The Jews (and Freemasons) were viewed as agents not only anxiously awaiting the arrival of the antichrist but actively facilitating it.

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in February, 1940. It is an address by then Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg at the morning ceremony in the Schiller Theatre, Berlin, on December 17, 1939. Rosenberg invokes the Germany poet Friedrich Hölderlin to argue that great political deeds require a spiritually awakened people, with visionary poetic art giving direction to the collective will. He contrasts the fragmented, materialistic Germany of the post-1871 Empire with the heroic ideals embodied in classical antiquity and medieval Germanic epics, calling on Germans to draw strength from their cultural heritage as the nation fights for its survival.

“The Poet and the Fighter”

By Alfred Rosenberg

It is said that the great deeds of world history speak for themselves, as it were. The founding of a mighty empire, the victories of one power over another, the glory of a statesman or autocrat—all these stand clearly and for all sides as things of great value, and from deed to deed they create new historical contexts.

That is correct, and National Socialism in particular understands, through its struggle and through the lessons of the World War, how decisive victory or defeat can determine the course of peoples for decades, sometimes forever. But we also know something more: namely, that a deed, if it is truly great, is never an isolated exertion of force, but rather the expression of a profound life-force or of an ideal bound to that life. And we know further that such an idea, such a worldview, must be shaped, lived, formed and explained if the deed is to have lasting historical significance.

We thus know that a creation placed into life may become a deep consciousness in the people it affects; that word and writing which report of it may not merely be chronicles that merely recount great deeds after the events, but that singers and poets, through the power of artistic formation, shape the impulses behind them—the will to live, the ideal—in ever newly inspiring forms. Thus the Iliad became the parable of ancient heroic life and ensured that the deeds of the ancestors advancing toward Ilion would not perish, but would be understood as a binding heritage. And for us, too, the Nibelungenlied stands as a similar symbol for the eternal Germanic attitude toward fate, and therefore gains enduring significance beyond its temporal conditions. And in this sense, it is quite understandable if we conceive of poetic art not merely as a grand depiction of what exists, but as a directing of the will toward future problems and struggles. Indeed, in the genius, the poet becomes a figure who pre-senses still-unborn feelings and ideas, anticipates the solution in advance, and proclaims ideals that only later, in struggle, ignite political movements or find their powerful political fulfilment in the mind of a great man of action.

From this way of thinking within our movement, we therefore today see this asserted unity of idea and power quite differently than in past times. Power in itself appears to us of little value, however great such power may be, and an idea in itself, if it is accompanied by no deed, appears to us not as a life-strengthening and inspiring force, and thus also not as a genuine ideal.

But for us, in this regard, one thing is always binding: never to measure the developments of life with petty temporal standards, and not to want to examine the great achievements of history with the yardstick of everyday life. We have just heard the words of a poet [Hölderlin] who belongs to the greatest singers and shapers of the German spirit. He wrote them at a time when Germany lay politically prostrate, torn into many pieces, and when a young German genius, with a high ideal of Germanness in his heart, sought the fulfilment of this ideal in his own country. He found a beautiful, strong nature to which his love was devoted; he found diligence and industry; he found symbols of a great past—but he did not find the will to secure for the great idea of German essence a unified, strong embodiment. In despair, he cried out in the midst of this life: “Great deeds, if no noble people perceives them, are nothing more than a mighty blow against a dull brow.” And when he finds no helper, he laments: “Oh, you companions of my time! Ask not your doctors, nor your priests, when you perish inwardly.” And then he looked across the centuries and found in ancient Greece figures that appeared to him as the embodiment of those values he wished to serve. In the poets and deeds of the Greeks, a finely sensitive imagination ignited here. Across all medieval and other transmissions, a genius instinct struck upon that kindred humanity, which we see developing more freely in many respects than was granted to the German people in certain epochs of its history.

Often the words that Hölderlin1 speaks about his time remind us of that feeling which we too once had, when we saw Germany collapsed in 1918, delivered over to those speculators who thought only of their own interest and no longer of German values. Hölderlin found, as he said, the Germans at that time “deeply incapable of any divine impulse, in every degree of exaggeration and pettiness offensive to every well-disposed soul, dull and inharmonious, like the shards of a discarded vessel…”.

“It is a harsh word,” he continues, “and yet I say it because it is truth: I cannot imagine any people more torn apart than the Germans. Craftsmen you see, but no human beings; thinkers, but no human beings; priests, but no human beings; masters and servants, young and old, but no human beings—is that not like a battlefield, where hands and arms and all limbs lie severed among one another, while the spilled lifeblood seeps away into the sand?”

And out of this mood of the loving seeker arose those songs of longing that belong to the finest and greatest that Germany has ever composed in poetry. But Hölderlin, too, in this mood of despair and abandonment, cannot and will not stand still, despite everything, and adds to his complaint: “Better it would certainly be if I could live, live in the temples, on the newly assembled agora of our people, with great joy to quiet the great sorrow.” And in this desire, his song of the German rings out: “Where is your Delos, where your Olympia, so that we may all find ourselves at the highest feast?”

Hölderlin was enveloped by deep night, but the songs he set down in the few years of his waking life have increasingly become spiritual forces for ever wider circles of the German people. And they, like many other works of German art, are for us today both an impulse for new creations and a strengthening for the struggle to defend these creations, to secure by the power of the sword the wellspring from which, throughout all centuries, the great values of German culture have arisen.

Once, after 1870/71, Germany celebrated the re-founding of the Empire. A dream of all Germans seemed at last to find its political fulfilment. And yet it became clear that this Empire increasingly allowed the soul of its people to wither; a world of technology and commerce had come over the nations like a flood, the discoveries of many hundreds of years now found their material fulfilment in dizzying haste. Perhaps it is no wonder that the people of that time could no longer master their own inventions.

The age of the machine enabled a small class to rise to enormous economic wealth and great power, but at the same time disinherited entire generations and cheated them of their rightful life’s destiny. It took further decades—and they still continue today—until man learned to make himself the master of the machine again rather than its slave, and until technology, which for decades had disfigured the sites of German culture, was elevated to a means of beautifying his life. In view of this passing, economically determined age, we understand that, in the midst of the Empire of 1870/71, thinkers, poets, and prophets once again arose who, undeterred by all external splendor, stood up for the inalienable demands of the German soul and therefore came into fierce and bitter enmity with the ruling figures of commerce and the stock exchange. For what are Nietzsche and Lagarde and Wagner but living protests, akin to Hölderlin and Goethe, against the petrifying forces of the stock-exchange age! And what were the social movements but manifestations of despair against the capitalisation of all values of existence.

In view of this historical fact, the mission of the National Socialist movement, in the midst of today’s war that decides the being or non-being of the German nation, also arises: to remember all those voices that once rose up in German history to speak for this soul of the Germans, to honour its values, and to deploy them as a force in the entire struggle for existence of our nation. They proclaimed the deep meaning of German life and, through all that is transitory and conditioned by time, secured that nobility of the soul which bears the struggles of existence, indeed first makes men truly capable of these struggles. And we then understand that the state is more than the sum of its laws, that the people are more than the sum of their members; that it is the unity of all great creations from grey prehistory to the present that we are called to carry forward.

The soul of the people is an inexplicable, exemplary presence that emerges only in the power of great deeds and in the art of genius, which moves the mind of even the everyday man and, in hard times, gives him the strength to face a great destiny with courage. The struggling German man shall draw this strength from the manifold works of German folkhood. He may draw it from the immediate homeland of his tribe, from the traditions of his kin, from the experiences of a warrior’s life, from the political tradition of the whole people; he may be uplifted by the gift of spirituality and the lightness of a joyful life-feeling; he may draw strength from German poetry, he may draw it from music or from the songs of his great poets. He may picture before himself the venerable cities and great cathedrals and castles as signs of this life-force, and he may, when he is truly great, think of all that has come down to us over thousands of years of struggle as an inheritance of power and greatness—an inheritance that defending and enlarging constitutes that duty which we have received on our path through life.

It is the stirrings of the spirit that help carry much that would otherwise cause a man to break down. But whoever grows weary should ask himself whether he has truly felt any desire for these deeper stirrings of the spirit, and he may then perhaps not infrequently have to blame himself and his own weakness if he was incapable of seeking there that strength which enables other men to master more easily the adversities, yes, even sometimes the injustices, of human life. He may also ask himself whether he has sought comrades in life to stand by him in his difficult hours, or whether, as a grumbling, embittered loner, left to himself alone, he has tried to master existence—perhaps cursed it.

Everyone will be able to answer this question for himself: whether he truly endeavoured to grasp that unity of inner strength which today joins the German soldier and the German singer as different manifestations of the same German folk-soul. He will then understand that instinct and deed, and instinct and vision, are fundamentally the same, and that form in worth and form in spirit together determine the form of life. We all serve this life, which ever anew proves itself in struggle, and to carry out this service victoriously in the defence of higher values is the highest duty of our existence.

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Hutchinson admitted that he did not expect the volume of replies and general traction the question would garner. This is because the democide of poor White Americans is a silent one; no hospitals are bombed or food stations fired upon like in Gaza as a horrified world watches on. The demolishing of the once-proud edifice of working-class White America is being achieved not in a spectacular explosion but a brick-by-brick deconstruction. The flotsam and jetsam of White mentally ill homeless men and women washing up on America’s streets is the result of decades of deliberate economic policies of de-industrialisation.1

The economic war against White America began over half a century ago. Around 1970, the economy that had sustained the White working class for a generation, and was the source of pride for many working men, was weaponised against them. The deliberate uprooting of American heavy industry through globalisation and automation—and the financialisation of the US economy—set real wages and job opportunities for workers without a university degree on their long, grinding decline.

The good jobs—those offering a sense of belonging, meaning, purpose and prospects for advancement—evaporated. What remained were precarious positions in the service economy, stripped of the dignity and security that had once defined working-class identity. The share and influence of labour, especially less-skilled labour, fell relative to the share and influence of capital. Workers who had once been able to support families on a single income now found themselves trapped in a cycle of declining attachment to employment, falling wages and diminishing prospects.

The social fabric of White America was unravelled alongside the economic one. Marriage rates declined sharply alongside rising rates of non-marital childbearing. Religious participation, which had long provided community and meaning, fell away. The tangle of pathology that the 1965 Moynihan Report had described among Black families half a century earlier began to echo among White families in the post-industrial heartlands.2

Unionisation—which had reached its peak in the 1950s—collapsed alongside the factories. Today, only 6.3 percent of private sector workers in the US are members of a union.3 Unions had done more than raise wages; they gave workers control over working conditions, a sense of collective (racial) purpose and political power both locally and nationally. They were the bridge between working-class communities and the Democratic Party. As the factories closed and the unions withered, that bridge crumbled.

The US healthcare system accelerated the devastation. America’s medical provision—more than twice as expensive as any other rich country—is financed in part through what is described as a head tax on wages.4 In 2020, employer-sponsored health plans cost an average of $21,342 per family, money that comes directly out of take-home pay.5 For low-skilled workers, these costs often make them unemployable, pricing them out of the very jobs that might offer a path back to stability.

The sense of collective identity that unions and factories had provided was replaced by isolation and fragmentation. Men who had once taken pride in their work found themselves unable to provide for their families and, consequently, unable to command respect in the communities that had once looked up to them.

Into this void stepped the pharmaceutical industry. The pain that accompanied this social and economic collapse created a baseline demand for opioids. Drug companies, seeing an opportunity, targeted communities that were already hurting: places where jobs had been lost, where pain was prevalent and where despair had become entrenched. The escalation of addiction that followed was not simply a demand-driven phenomenon; it was a supply-driven catastrophe in which the pharmaceutical industry and its political enablers flooded the country with largely unnecessary painkillers. As legal prescriptions were pulled back in the early 2010s, the epidemic mutated into an illegal street drug crisis—first heroin, then fentanyl, then deadly combinations. The term deaths of despair was coined to describe a White working-class extinction event via suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease.6

Concurrent with the targeting of White working-class America by the US state has been its abandonment by the Democratic Party. As the mainstream Democrats reoriented away from their traditional working-class and union base towards a coalition of minorities and educated professionals, less-educated workers moved to the right. This realignment continued through the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, millions of working-class voters had already abandoned the party of their parents.

The China shock, the loss of jobs following China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation, provided a clearly-demarcated exogenous change marked by rising political polarisation from 2000 to 2016. Moderate Democrats in Congress were replaced by right-wing Republicans, while the move to the left by progressives was not large enough to offset the shift.

Conservative media like Fox News amplified a narrative of government betrayal at the expense of ordinary White Americans. The distrust that working-class voters felt toward Washington was weaponised and deepened. The China shock led to political polarisation among both voters and donors, creating a feedback loop that favoured the right. Less-educated whites increasingly saw safety-net policies, the very policies that might have helped them, as favouring minorities at their expense. They voted for conservative candidates who opposed such programs, candidates whose wealthy backers also opposed the taxes necessary to pay for them. The desire for social solidarity gave way to resentment, and the political system that might have provided relief became a source of further injury.

The relationship between health and politics in the United States underwent a dramatic inversion. In the 1960s, healthier states—those with higher adult life expectancy—voted Republican. By the 2016 election, the correlation had reversed: the least-healthy states, those with the highest rates of deaths of despair and the lowest life expectancy, were the ones voting for Trump.7 As less-educated workers left the Democratic Party, the political economy of health became a politics of despair. The neoliberal policies that had inflicted economic hardship and worsened health did not generate a political demand for better safety nets and health provision, as one might expect in a well-functioning democratic state. Instead, the anger and disillusionment were channelled toward a political project that offered vibes-based cultural resentment and scapegoating rather than tangible material redress.

The evidence that the US state’s economic policies have disproportionately impacted middle-aged White Americans (non-Hispanic) is clear. Prior to 2000, mortality rates among White Americans aged 45-55 had been falling. Between 1978 and 1998, the mortality rate for US Whites declined by 2% a year on average, matching the rates of decline in other rich industrialised nations such as Canada, the UK, France and Germany.8 From about the year 2000, mortality rates for middle-aged Americans began to increase by half a percentage point per year while other rich nations maintained the 2% year-on-year declines.9

Between 1999 and 2013, all-cause mortality for Black Americans fell by more than 200 per 100,000 and for Hispanics by more than 60 per 100,000.10 In contrast, mortality for White Americans in midlife rose by 34 per 100,000. The much-touted narrowing of the Black-White mortality gap in the US has been largely driven by an increase in White mid-life deaths.

If the mortality declines had held constant at about 2% from the turn of the century, roughly 488,500 deaths of middle-aged White Americans could have been avoided, 54,000 in 2013 alone.11 This mortality phenomenon is restricted to White Americans in midlife. All-cause mortality for White Americans aged 55-59 and 65-74 declined by 0.5% and 2% respectively in the period 2000 to 2014.12

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in January, 1936. An excerpt from a speech given at the German Academy in Berlin, it describes National Socialism’s policy of seeking an inclusive and mutually beneficial trading relationship with other nations—including Eastern Europe—founded on an organic and pro-social economic philosophy at home. The reader is invited to note the striking similarity between National Socialism’s anti-imperialist and reciprocal economic ideology and that of modern China.

“Soldierly Socialism: Worldview and Economy”

By W. Dass

Just as the German Wehrmacht threatens no one, but rather has its effect through its mere existence—namely, protecting the people and living space from external threats—so too does the Party, through its mere existence, have its effect on the inner creative orientation of the entire national life.

In both cases, it is an effect without action. For the Wehrmacht need not wage war in order to make its protective effect felt outwardly. The Party need not unleash a civil or interest-group war, nor should it interfere in the processes of state administration, in order to make its spiritual leadership effective. In both cases, the goal—securing the vital and growth-forces of the people both internally and externally—is achieved through education toward complete discipline. For 'national comradeship' means: military community externally and social harmony internally. One without the other is impossible. Both can be achieved solely through the complete discipline of the German people in every area of their activity—through soldierly socialism.

That is why we also demand of the economy a complete discipline internally and externally. For if the manager of an economic enterprise steers it without regard for the economic independence of the nation, solely according to the highest possible return—then he will inevitably also destroy the social peace within his enterprise. His followers will inevitably adopt the same attitude—as the master, so the servant—and will then strive, without regard for social peace or the survival of the enterprise, by all means for the highest possible wages. For capitalism is always followed by its shadow, Marxism. Both grow from the same root—the Jewish money-spirit, which only ever finds its way into Nordic economic thinking once the middle class has been destroyed. Both together thus destroy, for the sake of an alleged higher monetary profit, blood and soil—the biological foundations of their peoplehood—and thereby their own existence.

For the eternal protection of gold and money only ever becomes effective when money is elevated to a counter-natural magnitude dominating the entire economic process, instead of being merely a bridge for the exchange of goods. The entire organically grown and meaningfully interwoven economic process becomes mechanised and thereby uprooted. Everything is made “liquid” and becomes the object of the Jewish-dominated money-spirit.

Even residential buildings and farmsteads become objects of financial transactions, become objects of mortgages and legal dealings. The personal relationship to the school, to the house and to the commercial enterprise is increasingly supplanted and degenerates into impersonal, businesslike bookkeeping conducted through files, limited-liability shares and mortgages. The economic activity of the rooted, native-born person, and his labor bound to his peoplehood, are increasingly displaced by a nomadic pursuit of profit—no longer tied to the homeland but bound to foreign blood.

Soldierly discipline, in which duty takes precedence over profit, and which thereby secures the people’s own living space, stands in eternal opposition to the Jewish profit-motive, in which profit takes precedence over duty, because it has no living space of its own to secure. For Jewry can take possession of the living space of its host people only to the extent that this people, through the intellectual disintegration of its national community and the adoption of its profit-motive, loses its defensive discipline.

That is why Nordic man will always place defence policy before monetary policy, whereas the Jewish money-spirit must place monetary policy before defence policy. That is why it is disastrous for a people that, in its economic practice, abandons soldierly discipline and adopts state-less economic operations—which detach the economy from the closed defensive front of the nation.

For the political independence of the German people depends not only on its military strength, but just as much on its economic independence. Economic independence for the German people does not mean autarky, but rather the recovery of its freedom in nutrition and raw materials—lost through the intellectualist world-trade mentality—and through the lack of which we lost the World War. National Socialist economic policy therefore demands, above all, that the iron ration of foodstuffs for man and beast and the iron ration of industrial raw materials be produced within the country itself. Only then are we protected from capitulation in the event of trade boycotts or blockades. Everything beyond that—after exploiting all domestic economic possibilities for raising the standard of living of our people—is to be obtained through meaningful and extensive barter trade, in comradely cooperation and complementarity, through exchange with the other peoples.

Thus National Socialist economic policy is not directed against the volume of pre-war foreign trade, but against its then-wrong structure and orientation. The wrong structure consisted, as mentioned, in the fact that, without regard for the preservation of the German people’s political independence, industrial raw materials and foodstuffs were purchased wherever in the world they happened to be cheapest and could be obtained with the greatest monetary profit. The wrong orientation consisted in the fact that Germany placed its foreign trade space, without regard for consequences, within the sphere of interest and power of other peoples, so that it could be cut off from it at the decisive moment—which is indeed what happened.

These errors are avoided by the new soldierly discipline of the German economy. Through labor deployment and market regulation in agriculture, and increasingly also in industrial production, the production of the iron ration of foodstuffs and animal feed and of industrial raw materials (the latter, if necessary, through synthetic processes) is first of all secured. For even if this self-sufficiency should initially cause somewhat higher costs than obtaining them from the respectively cheapest foreign raw material sources, this additional cost must be borne. It is the insurance premium against capitulation, which can no more be grasped than the insurance premium against fire hazard. Because the pre-war economy, out of its false money-thinking, cursed trying to understand this premium, it lost its entire capital through Germany’s capitulation at the end of the war. Thus, even from a commercial point of view, these supposedly cheapest prices were in reality the most expensive prices that any people has ever paid for obtaining its indispensable foodstuffs and raw materials from abroad.

Moreover, within a short time German technology, organisation, and willingness to work will have compensated for the initially perhaps still higher production costs here and there, so that there can be no question of a diminished competitiveness of German production in the world for this reason. But be that as it may, for freedom no sacrifice is too great! For what is saved in money must otherwise one day be paid for with blood.

Through this soldierly discipline of the German economy outwardly, through this securing of the most necessary economic independence, the foundation is at the same time laid for a more extensive, more durable, and above all more peaceful foreign trade than existed in the pre-war period. Political entanglements no longer necessarily lead to the deployment of army and navy, as happened under the aegis of the planless “world economic interlocking.” Rather, the deployment of the military need only occur when it truly concerns the highest and ultimate goods of the nation—its honour and freedom.

This new economic structure also enables Germany, to a greater extent than before, to fulfil its obligation toward Continental Europe. For through the inevitable formation of large economic blocs as an intermediate stage of a new world-spanning trade and exchange—as we see them emerging today in the British Empire, in the Japanese-Chinese Bloc, in the Monroe Doctrine of North America, in the French Ottawa system, in the closed-off nature of the Russian space—Continental Europe finds itself in an extremely precarious position. Because for 400 years it squandered its most vital and economic forces across the world into the newly discovered lands, which today are turning against Continental Europe, the economic and vital strength of its peoples is extremely endangered. It is widely overlooked that not only Germany, but all of Continental Europe is passive in its trade and payment balance vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

If today 70 million German people in the heart of Europe turn from the West toward the East, and thereby bring to an end the 400-year liberalist-capitalist economic orientation, then all of Continental Europe must turn from the West toward the East along with them, whether it wants to or not! Thus Germany is charged with the duty and the opportunity to shift its foreign trade relations—which it must reduce in the overdeveloped West and the overseas East (Australia being an exception here)—preferentially toward Northern and Southeastern Europe. Several billion marks that Germany has previously spent annually on the procurement of goods from the overseas West and overseas East can and must in future be gradually made available for the expansion of German trade with the countries of Southeastern and Northeastern Europe. In this way, the peoples of Eastern Europe are opened up—through Germany and in mutual exchange—a new market, one that far exceeds the scale of the markets they have lost through the collapse of the former world economy outside Europe. Indeed, there is even the possibility that through this expansion of intra-European trade, which compensates again for the passivity of Europe’s trade and payment balance, an increased trade between Continental Europe and other large economic blocs may also set in, as well as an increased procurement of tropical products thanks to the increased purchasing power of Germany and the other Northern and Southeastern European countries—so that world trade and traffic from Europe as a whole may again receive a new powerful upswing.

Only Germany, situated in the heart of Europe, with its large and diverse demand, is capable of bringing about a new economic and cultural strengthening of the continent—one that secures Europe again for the Europeans, and makes usable all cultivation and mining possibilities for European needs. Only in this way can a new European community of labor and culture arise, founded on the complete sovereignty of all peoples involved in it, in political, economic, and cultural respects. For precisely the soldierly discipline of Germany—the discipline of the peoplehood-idea as the foundation of the National Socialist worldview through Adolf Hitler—is the sure guarantee that the sovereignty of foreign peoples is in every respect inviolable for Germany. Germany rejects, on ideological grounds just as much as on practical political considerations, every kind of imperialism, universalism and despotism—such as have arisen again and again over the past two centuries on the shores of the Mediterranean through the degeneration of the once also there predominant Nordic peoples’ substance under the southern sun and through the penetration of Jewish-intellectualist spirit. The pseudo-imperialism born of intellectualist boasting—practiced by certain Western countries, which leaves the peoples of Eastern Europe their mere existence without increasing the volume of trade with them in equal measure, and thereby threatens their sovereignty—is one of the varieties of this spiritual disposition.

Germany therefore keeps its trade policy free of all such dealings that impair the sovereignty of foreign peoples, and allows only mutual commodity obligations to arise. Germany regards the oppression of foreign peoples as the stupidest and most reactionary policy there is. And it wishes only that other peoples were of the same opinion.

The living space that Germany shifts, in the form of its foreign trade sphere, from the West to the East therefore does not constitute a trade-political or even political imperialism aimed at forcible border shifts vis-à-vis Southeastern and Northern Europe. Rather, its structure—described above as protecting German independence—is at the same time an equally strong protection for the independence of the peoples with whom it enters into trade relations. It is merely a peaceful contribution to the mutual raising of the standard of living and culture of the Continental European peoples far beyond the level that each could achieve for itself through its own efforts alone. Thus the peoplehood-idea of Adolf Hitler establishes a new Continental European community of labor and culture of sovereign peoples.

In conclusion, the defensive structure of the German economy is no artificial construction but arises from the natural growth of the farmstead into the national economy, when the destructive interference of intellectualist boasting is prevented.

For the farmstead already contains in embryo the entire national economy with all its thousandfold ramifications. The true national economy is, as it were, only an optical magnification of the farmstead. For in reality, every naturally grown national economy must remain structurally identical to the defensive structure of the farmstead if it is to preserve the economic independence of the people—the farmstead that never separates plough and sword, and never surrenders its sovereignty even when cooperating with other farmsteads.

Therefore the national economy is also organised into the three natural occupational groups that already exist on the farmstead, each of which has its particular task in service to the national whole. For even on the farmstead, only a part of the family members can till the fields—that is, engage in agriculture. The other part—the younger sons—must, when new settlement land is not available, turn to the maintenance and improvement of the agricultural implements, so as to increase the intensity of cultivation and the yield of the soil, enabling them to live from the same plot of land. Thus arises the domestic industrial economy, through crafts, industry, trade, transport and the development of the domestic market. If the family on the farmstead and in the national economy continues to grow, and if new settlement land is not available, then upon the ground floor of agriculture and the first floor of the domestic industrial economy, a second floor—the foreign economy—must be built. Just as several farmsteads, without surrendering their independence, enter into meaningful exchange with one another and thereby create new opportunities for work and life for their growing families—so too do the national economies, originally without surrendering their sovereignty, enter into meaningful, complementary exchange with one another. Thus arises the foreign economy, which is divided into foreign trade, maritime shipping and the monetary and credit system of foreign trade.

We therefore have before us, organically grown from the farmstead, three natural occupational groups, each of which has its particular task to fulfil in service to the national whole—in service to the defensive duty of the economy—and which thereby increase their structural identity with the defensive farmstead and close the complete defensive front.

The three groups are:

• Agriculture. It has the task of securing the renewal of the blood and food security through market regulation.

• The industrial economy (crafts, industry, trade, transport and domestic banking). It has the task of securing the civilisational and technical needs of the people and raw material security through market regulation.

• The foreign economy (foreign trade, maritime shipping and the monetary and credit system of foreign trade). It has the task of promoting and securing the external metabolism and living space of the national economy.

This clear grouping also enables a clear and uniform formation of the necessary self-administration bodies and self-responsibility bodies of the economy. The structure of each group corresponds to the National Socialist fundamental principle of popular organisation: security and self-responsibility within natural political ties.

They are thus vertical organisations that, like the plant, grow out of the soil and again place themselves at the service of the vital and growth forces of the German people thereby granting them passage. They thus stand in contrast to the intellectualist-horizontal organisations of the liberalist-capitalist era, which diverted the always vertically directed vital and growth-forces of the German people.

The conflict of interests is thus, through this soldierly reorientation, led back from the plane of the pursuit of profit into the plane of the organic. Nowhere shall the personal freedom and initiative of the individual be restricted—with one single exception, namely, where he endangers the higher freedom of the community and its national cohesion.

This utterly simple, natural conception of the economy shatters the purely intellectualist-constructed economic theories of the last 150 years, which broke the economy out of the defensive front of the nation and gave it an un-state-like, incomplete constitution, through which discord was sown in the world.

The freedom and independence of the economy, too, can only be promoted through self-defence. Selfish profit-seeking versus the spirit of the community. That is why we declare that peoplehood must take precedence over the economy, and that freedom must take precedence over the money-spirit.

The intuitive wisdom of the people, however, senses in the unification of this fundamental question the renewal of its innermost, eternal life and growth—the rebirth of all essential forces. Thus the Leader of eternal Germany, Adolf Hitler, shows those who once called him the greatest fantasist and most unrealistic man, anew with each passing day, that he is the greatest realist in every field—because he tackles and renews all things from the worldview side and thereby restores to them their eternal meaning.

Life from the whole—that is our motto. National Socialism is soldierly socialism.

One for all, and all for one!

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Suspicions over the Jewish nature of the revolution were strengthened in its aftermath not only by the physical emancipation of Russian Jews but the rhetorical support they received from the new communist system which supposedly collapsed all ethnic distinctions. Under Soviet rule, all Russians were free but some, it seemed, were more free than others.

Possibly as a counter-measure against an increasing leeriness towards Jews from working-class Russians in the wake of the revolution, Russia’s new leader Vladimir Lenin gave a speech in 1919 denouncing anti-semitism. Hatred toward Jews was, Lenin argued, a consequence of the conditions of capitalism, which foster abysmal ignorance: “Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews.” He said:

“Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital.”

In the wake of centuries of anti-Jewish sentiment in tsarist Russia, Lenin was keen to foster a sense of comradeship among ethnic Russians and Jews under the new regime of communist egalitarianism. He continued:

“It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism.”

In the new Russia, anti-semitism was to be conflated with regression and dishonour:

“Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.”

Lenin’s pronouncements were widely distributed in Soviet publications. However, none of them mentioned that the actual author of the text was not Lenin but Semion Dimanshtein who would become a prominent Jewish political and literary figure in Russia.1 Born in Lithuania, Dimanshtein received two rabbinical ordinations in Lithuanian Jewish Orthodoxy before embracing socialism and joining the Russian Social Democratic Party in Vilna in 1904.2 Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Dimanshtein would play a key role in the Soviet government as both Jewish commissar of the Commissariat of Nationality Affairs and deputy head of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee Secretariat of the Communist Party.3

A year prior to Lenin’s pronouncements, British journalist Robert Wilton—Russia correspondent for The Times—published his first-hand account of the Bolshevik takeover titled Russia’s Agony.4 The seeds were sown, he argued, by the Eastward advance of former Polish Jews from the Pale of Settlement into Russian institutions such as the law, medicine, art and literature, bringing Marxism with them. The Pale—a western region of the Russian Empire established in 1791 to which Jews were largely confined—acted as a petri dish for Jewish attitudes which would slowly rot and then eventually devour Russia. Wilton wrote:

“Amongst this suffering multitude the devil of class-hatred raised a fearsome harvest. The teachings of Karl Marx, a German Jew, were here depicted in their quintessence and spread by migrants from the Pale into more favoured lands—into the heart of Russia, into England and far America. Like many a noisome malady that has come to afflict mankind from the Near and Farther East, the worst political poisons exuded from the Pale.”5

The Jewish entry into Russia’s educational system was motivated not by a thirst for learning but by a desire for freedom and revenge. Their inevitable infusion into banking and industry was facilitated by the payment of a Guild Tax which granted them full residency rights. The Russian bureaucracy’s attempts at holding back the Jewish tide—such as a ban on the election of Jewish board members—were ultimately futile.6

Restrictions on Jewish residence were circumvented by Jews taking up positions as dentists’ assistants and artificers which allowed for partial exceptions. Russian cities such as Petrograd became swamped with Jews who paid the police a “private tax” for their protection.7

Ultimately, The Pale of Settlement—Wilton argues—had backfired as a means of insulating Russian society from Jewish influence:

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (National Socialist Monthly) in February, 1940. Here Julius Évola contrasts Judaic proclivities toward ontological abstractness with an Aryan worldview of natural harmony. The secularised Jewish outlook, he argues, has—through a mathematics of pure abstraction—led to physics being divorced from the world it purports to represent.

“The Jews and Mathematics”

By Julius Évola

The considerable proportion of Jews among modern representatives of the mathematical sciences is a rather remarkable and frequently highlighted phenomenon. Usually, one does not know what to make of it. Anti-Semitic polemics seem to find a difficulty here that is not easily overcome.

Mathematics has the reputation of being a wholly objective and abstract science. What sense, then, can a racial evaluation have in this field? How can one seriously speak here of the “disintegrative” nature of the Jewish spirit? If one wishes to remain fair and impartial, the investigation seems hopeless.

In the problem under discussion here, of course, the professions of Jews, or their incidental cultural or political activities as mathematicians, are not at issue. Albert Einstein’s anti-German and sharply Zionist stance, for example, is well known to everyone. However, it should be acknowledged that such an attitude on Einstein’s part is not a consequence of his mathematical doctrine—or of the assumptions for which his name became known.

On this occasion, it may perhaps be useful to dispel the misunderstanding often associated with the term “relativity”. Anyone who lacks competence in this regard may be misled into seeing in this term an incitement to anti-Jewish polemics. Through the designation “theory of relativity”, Einstein’s theory has certainly exerted an inadvertently pernicious influence. In this way, the layman assumed that even science confirms relativism, the untenability of any fixed point of reference, the chaos of values and views—that is, that modern mood to which the “creations” and “discoveries” of the Jews in other fields have contributed so much. Nevertheless, the matter stands differently: Einstein’s doctrine considered generalised relativity in the world of physical phenomena only to transcend it; the so-called “transformation formulas” enable this doctrine to arrive at “invariants”—that is, at a determination of physical phenomena that is entirely independent of the relativity of any point of reference.

In this, Einstein succeeded insofar as he dispensed with any physical reference and established a wholly abstract, mathematical-algebraic physics. In this physics there are only numbers, equations, integrals and differentials—that is, the formulas of rarefied intellectual abstraction—while every intuitive representation, every image or element from concrete experience and from the world in which we live, is strictly excluded: over-mathematicisation of physics. This is what is specific to Einstein; but this is also what is specific to the aforementioned modern trend in Jewish mathematics. With this, we have already approached the subject under consideration and can now fathom the significance of this Jewish tendency toward abstract mathematics.

As in so many other cases, we must here start from the origins. If we do not accept as a premise the recognition that today’s world is so burdened by a corruption of values, and especially by a rootlessness of the spirit, that in it every inquiry into values and meaningful content in their purer state is almost hopelessly difficult, then we cannot see clearly in the principal questions of our culture.

The Jewish tendency toward mathematics arises from the secularisation of some main features of the worldview that was already characteristic of the Jew in antiquity. This worldview, in turn, cannot be properly understood if we do not at the same time know its natural opposite—that is, the Aryan worldview. As far as it is relevant here, the Aryan worldview rested on two main pillars: the concept of the Cosmos and the ideal of the “solar”. In the ancient Aryan-Hellenic idea of the Cosmos (which corresponds to the Indo-Aryan concept of ṛta [Sanskrit: ऋत])1, there is expressed an organic conception of the world and of life, or life as order, as a natural and also supernatural law. It is not a matter of “pantheism,” but rather of the recognition of deeper interconnections, by virtue of which every phenomenon and form of life acquired a higher symbolic, sometimes even ritual, significance. The ancient Aryan world knew no fragmenting dualisms. Its highest ideal was the Olympian—that is, an almost natural supernaturalness as the supreme expression of synthesis and harmony between two worlds.

From this arises the second main trait, that of the “solar.” The Aryan man felt himself in connection with the primal force of Being; he lived two lives simultaneously—or better expressed: life and the over-life—a state that did not lead to paralysing antinomy or tragic division; the spirit was in him power, and the divine was not a beyond to be reached through world-alienation, but rather the centre of his deeper life. From this springs that “central” and “radiant” quality which—according to the analogy offered by the natural world—determines the meaningful content of the “solar”.

Let us now turn to the worldview peculiar to the ancient Near Eastern peoples and especially to the Jews; it emerges that its characteristic is the destruction of the ancient Aryan synthesis between world and overworld, between life and what stands higher than life. In the foreground here is a dualism that sometimes assumes almost crass features and destroys every inner calm, every equilibrium, every clarity of vision. The body is here regarded as the “flesh”, conceived as the root of “sin”, which is incompatible with the “holy”. The world is no longer a divine order, no longer a Cosmos; it is something desecrated. Reality is pure materiality, and the divine is accordingly reduced to something unreal and transcendent in a negative sense. Man becomes a “vessel”; he is determined by a fundamental passivity, which gives him a “lunar” nature—like the moon, he must draw and receive his light from a principle outside himself. Thus it comes about that the Jewish soul eternally wavers between a coarse materialism, a raw sensuality and the longing for “redemption” and unattainable “blessedness”. But even the cultural sphere that is not properly Jewish but generally Near Eastern shows us similar destructive divisions. We may mention Assyria and Chaldea—Chaldea even offers us an important clue for the inquiry with which we are actually concerned.

As is clear from its mythology, Assyria, on the one hand, created gods and divinities of a violent, crudely sensual, cruel and wildly bestial type; on the other hand, a divinity that culminates in female figures—figures which ultimately surpass their divine male companions and belong to the sphere of the astral Great Goddesses and the great nature goddesses. One would otherwise seek in vain the Olympian and heavenly Aryan ideal of a solar and supernatural masculinity. In this context, in the typically Near Eastern cultures, the highest type is no longer—as among the ancient Aryans—the royal man, but the priestly mediator.

This “fall”, which is the consequence of the anti-Aryan dualism, is also reflected in the thinking of the ancient Chaldean culture and gives rise within it to a particular form of science, which is precisely the forerunner of that with which we must concern ourselves. It is a priestly, a mathematical-lunar science. It is an astronomical science that turns rather to the planets than to the fixed celestial bodies, rather to the moon than to the sun. Thus for the Babylonians, the night was more sacred than the day (from the symbolism of the day and daylight, on the other hand, arose the entire higher divine figures of the Aryans, from Dyaus to Zeus and Apollo).

Sin, the moon god, stands higher than Shamash, the sun god. This ancient science is fundamentally inseparable from a fatalistic mood; it is determined by the idea of the omnipotence of an alien law, by the awareness of a true transcendence—in short, by a natural and non-heroic limitation in the divine. Even the reckoning of time among the Assyrians and Babylonians had the moon as its basis (among the Egyptians, the sun)—a circumstance that is not without significance. The Jews were so burdened with this limited conception of life that originally the idea of immortality was unknown to them; they knew only Sheol, where without exception all souls, even those of the “patriarchs” and the priestly kings of Israel, lead after death a shadowy, extinguished existence—that is, a kind of Hades or underworld, which, however—in contrast to that of the Aryan peoples—has no counterpart as a seat of the privileged immortality of the “heroes”.

We hardly need to emphasize the destructive nature of such views, as well as their capacity to act as a genuine agent of decomposition within races and cultures of Aryan origin. Here, however, we are not to consider such consequences as develop through various ethical and religious subjects; rather, we are concerned with the effects that relate to the field of knowledge. In place of a vision that has as its presupposition the Cosmos idea—that is, the living connection between the natural and the supernatural, between life and spirit—there now appears a science determined by the opposite premise. Opposed to the materiality of nature there now stand abstract, lifeless laws and relations, first of a lunar-astronomical nature, then of a lunar-mathematical nature, which are at first determined by lunar-pantheistic harmonies, but then—through secularisation—have a universalist-rational stamp. From this stem springs directly the “tradition” of Jewish mathematics, which thus represents a pernicious dissolution, a precise negation of the ancient Aryan order. Everything shows this.

Incidentally, it is significant that Pythagoreanism—in which, as is well known, mathematics played such an important role—was already regarded by the ancients, with a meaningful emphasis on the feminine gender, as a non-Hellenic or non-Aryan phenomenon and as a return to the spirit of that Pelasgian-Asiatic culture which is typical of the pre-Aryan Mediterranean. Pythagoreanism was banished by Rome, which was conscious of its deeper, nobler idea. It is significant that the ancients connected Pythagoras with the Etruscans, that this connection was emphasised in the banned commentaries on the books of Numa Pompilius, and that Pythagoreanism found its greatest distribution in Italy among those peoples where the Pelasgian element predominated—besides the Etruscans, among the Sabellians and in many tribes and cities of southern Italy.

Pythagoreanism, namely, strove to revive a pre-Roman ethnic substratum that Rome, as a representative of a “solar” culture, had subjugated and that was opposed to the Roman spirit. The same applies to the Etruscans. The words of Seneca are well known, reflecting an opinion very widespread in the Roman world: Tuscos Asia sibi vindicat (Asia claims the Etruscans for itself). The almost identical similarity of the Etruscan and Chaldean divination systems is one sign among many.

But we wish to return properly to Judaism. From the earliest times, Judaism has developed a pronounced mathematical and intellectualist interpretation of the world. In its tradition, unlike that of other peoples, number plays as prominent a role as in the Jewish Kabbalah and generally in the esoteric interpretations of Mosaism contained in the Zohar. Just as modern mathematics dissolves the sensory world into number, so Kabbalism dissolved the divine world and made number and letters (to which, in turn, a numerical significance attaches) the means of fathoming the most secret matters of transcendent metaphysics.

Fundamentally, these speculations correspond to the higher aspect of Judaism, which, characteristically, was rejected by rabbinic orthodoxy (Kabbalism is regarded by rabbinic-Talmudic orthodoxy as heresy). Even from the racial standpoint, it can be demonstrated that the current we have designated as intellectualism actually has predominantly Sephardic Jews as its representatives—that is, those Jews who, in comparison to the Ashkenazim, were also regarded by Chamberlain, Drumont, Lapouge, etc., as the nobler stock within the Jewish people. Sephardic Jews are, in fact, Avicebron, Moses of Lyon, Spinoza, Leo the Jew, Maimonides, Jacob, and other representatives of the current already indicated.

In Spinoza, one can see in a striking way how the old lunar and fatalistic spirit, which had already broken through in the Semitic Mediterranean, persists unchanged through the centuries. The Spinozistic contemplation from the standpoint of the eternal—sub specie aeternitatis—is equated with contemplation “in geometric fashion”—more geometrico. The same mode of thought that is inherent in geometric and mathematical thinking is here applied in theology and philosophy with the corresponding result: one arrives, namely, at a fatalistic conception of the world and of God; everything is represented like a flat succession of causes and effects that develop automatically, just as the properties of numbers and geometric figures develop from their definitions. The “lunar” and deterministic spirit receives in Spinoza so perfect an expression that one would search in vain in cultural history for a similar contrast to the “solar” attitude.

To proceed from these ancient manifestations of the Jewish spirit to the modern Jewish representatives of the “positive” mathematical sciences, one has only to take into account the process of secularisation that marks the further development of Western culture. Under new forms, the old spirit continues. As indicated, the Einsteinian theory represents the limiting case of the dissolution of physics into mathematics and pure abstraction—a science which, in order to gain certainty, withdraws into a world consisting of purely algebraic relations and entirely indifferent to the concrete givens of human experience. In this connection, it should be emphasised that the construction of the Einsteinian theory was made possible by the reform of infinitesimal calculus carried out by another Jew—Levi-Civita—just as another Jew—Weyl—is responsible for the further development of Einstein’s physical-algebraic world-picture.

The agreement between the ancient Near Eastern spirit and the modern manifestations of the same becomes even clearer when we approach the speculative field. In this field, Judaism divides into two columns, which stand in the closest connection with the two terms of the Jewish dualism that arose from the decomposition of the ancient Aryan solar synthesis. On the one hand, then, we find Jews among the originators of the modern glorification of life, of the irrational, of becoming, of the unconscious, and of the almighty drive—from Bergson to Simmel and Freud; on the other hand, the Jews are represented in another column, which pursues the path of an abstract rationalism and even of a new mathematical Pythagoreanism.

Alongside Benda and Meyerson, the so-called Marburg School—whose principal representatives are Jews: Hermann Cohen and Cassirer—is very significant in this connection. Whereas Kantian philosophy endeavoured to trace the conditions of every possible experience back to abstract a priori concepts, the Marburg School puts number and the algebraic function in place of the concept and of the Kantian a priori categories. The organ of this philosophy is “thought”, which in its origin is meant as unconditional, and which, from the infinitesimal principle, in complete detachment from sensations and sense-bound representations, derives the whole of mathematical and mathematical-physical science. In this way believes it can do justice to the main concepts and main problems of previous philosophy. One thus sees with what persistence, under new forms, the tradition in question has maintained itself through the centuries.

Should the question of evaluation now be raised, it is clear that its solution encounters particular difficulties if one proceeds from the standpoint of “modern” culture, since such a standpoint is simply that of chaos. It is necessary, on the contrary, to fall back on those primordial and ultimate oppositions already alluded to, which give expressions such as “solar”, “lunar” etc., their meaning.

This turn of mind will, of course, be difficult for every progressive and critical spirit. Such spirits today still hardly realize that “progress” has driven the West to a precipice where only the movement of a fall is possible; in the final phases of this fall—or rather, this involution—of Western culture, conceptions have come to light that are very similar to those that arose from the soul of the Jewish people. This is even the sole reason why Judaism has been able to exert such a decisive influence on “modern” culture. It found a soil already prepared by processes of civilisation; therefore it was quite easy for it to insinuate itself and to accelerate the dissolution of what was already decadent and no longer pure.

Since matters stand thus, every “modern” spirit often feels a certain embarrassment before some developments of anti-Jewish polemics; in some fields where the abstract and theoretical predominate, he fears that he cannot strike at the Jew without at the same time striking “himself” and calling into question the significance and value of sciences that are not exclusively Jewish creations. This fear is justified. But what can be struck along with it is only the result of alien and involutive turns of the European man—that is, a false “self.” The lost contact with the Aryan heritage, with the Aryan ideal of knowledge and action, with the Aryan conception of life and human meaning, makes every radicalism impossible and tends to lead modern man into a labyrinth in which he would seek in vain for points of reference for a decisive struggle.

What we have said about Jewish mathematics, its origins, and the spiritual decomposition connected with those origins, may perhaps already serve as an example and give occasion for useful reflections. The Jewish element is connected on every field with the limiting form of a decline. Thus, while the Jew points to the danger that must first be removed, he also shows us the direction in which the Aryan soul originally went astray. Only when this deviation is overcome through an inner deed will every new decline be prevented from the outset, and the Aryan man be preserved against every corrupting influence emanating from alien elements.

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Instead of signalling a self-confident advance, this caravan of American hardware—floodlit in the Iraqi night—would signal a retreat. The column of vehicles was likely heading from al-Asad Air Base in Anbar province in western Iraq to the semiautonomous Kurdistan region in the north. It would be a scene repeated at every US base in the country’s federal region as well as other Gulf states, all of them now ripe targets for Iranian ballistic missiles.

Coming just over twenty years after America’s invasion of Iraq—when the juggernaut of Pax Americana seemed unstoppable—the troop drawdown under the looming shadow of geo-political multipolarity is the latest crack in the edifice of empire. Like all empires before it, Judeo-American is slowly succumbing to the vicissitudes of political entropy, eroded both by challengers without and parasites within.

While the superstructure of American dominance still stands, its slow collapse is becoming an inevitability. Like the empires that preceded it—from the Persian, Greek, and Roman to the British—Judeo-America will one day become history.

While the collapse of each empire differs in its particulars, the trajectory of decline is found to depend on a series of variables that remain constant across time and geography.1 The systemic instability of hegemons tends to increase as challengers reach power parity,2 when subordinate states begin to reject the dominant norms and institutions,3 as material capabilities of oppositional nations shift and the costs of empire spiral,4 and when ideological legitimacy and institutional authority begin to critically erode.5

The decline of Judeo-America can be analysed both through the historical precedent of imperial collapse and the contemporaneous sui generis challenges facing the empire today. Historically, Judeo-American stands shoulder to shoulder with other great imperial powers such as the Persian, Mongol, Roman and British empires. But, like the great hegemonic forces which preceded it, America’s empire is destined to degrade, weaken and die.

When comparing Judeo-America with preceding empires, a major historical inflection point is the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Technological empires such as the British, Russian, Japanese and Portuguese tend to be characterised by bureaucratic centralisation and the utilisation of technology such as the telegraph, railroads and modern weapons for territorial expansion. These powers utilised empire-building strategies based primarily on economic and industrial dominance in contrast to the territorial and tributary control exercised by pre-modern empires such as the Mongols and Romans.6

Among modern industrial empires—of which Judeo-America is the apotheosis—common patterns of development and disintegration emerge. Compared to ancient hegemons, these powers tend to be larger in scale, face greater competition, demonstrate sharper decline and be shorter-lived relative to size and economic power.7 The largest non-industrial empires had an average life-span of roughly 236 years with their decline spanning about 70 years from peak power. Industrial empires average roughly 215 years with a 41-year decline period.8

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The following is a translation of an article which first appeared in Volk und Rasse (People and Race), issue 4, April 1935. Its central thesis is that exercise and art are not ends in themselves but complementary tools for racial selection and the creation of a lasting aesthetic ideal. The original title is “The Significance of Physical Exercise for the Racial Preservation of the German People”.

“Physical Exercise for Racial Survival”

By Enno Folkerts

Physical exercises are no longer to be understood within the racial-political aspirations of the Third Reich from an individualistic perspective, but only in connection with the preservation and improvement of the national whole. It is desirable that the liberalistic view of sport as an end in itself, typical of the past era, be overcome and that the purpose of all physical exercise be recognised in the context of national fitness.

Physical exercise: we wish to understand it in the sense that the body is trained for the sake of higher life-performance, not merely for higher athletic performance. This must never be the goal, but only the means of any physical education. Of course, one cannot demand that all athletes are clear about the essential significance of physical exercise: just as it is not necessary for a soldier who performs a great and brave deed to understand the strategic meaning of a military manoeuvre. The main thing is that the athlete is generally physically improved, that willpower is increased and that fighting spirit is cultivated.

Everything that is acquired here during practice and in competition in terms of physical prowess benefits not only the individual but the people as a whole, by consequently raising the nation’s physical fitness. For women as well, the gain lies not only in the general increase of physical vitality, but also in the associated capacity for performance. That this, as well as vitality, can be jeopardised by inappropriate physical activity has been sufficiently proven, and should prompt women to turn to physical activity befitting their nature, above all gymnastics, and if possible under conscientious, expert guidance.

Of particular importance is the enhancement of athletic performance in competition. Competition demands, if one wishes to contest it successfully, such great willpower that only the most earnest physical work, combined with a Spartan lifestyle, can lead to the goal. Through this preparatory work, which is carried out in obscurity, competition first acquires its educational meaning. For without the challenge of measuring one athlete’s strength against another and the associated increase, great achievements would generally not be accomplished. Thus, ambition and competitive spirit are placed in the service of physical training. These means are by no means new to us in the education of the armed forces (decorations, prize competitions, etc.).

If, in addition to the aforementioned stimulating effect of competitive games, one also counts the recruiting element in the national sense, which adheres to every great public event, a further essential significance of competitive games still remains unconsidered: the selective/breeding effect. Here we should be interested in the corresponding cultural phenomena of the racially related Greek people.

Arising from eugenic considerations, the competitive games were established in Sparta around 600 BC. All youths and maidens were to compete in these without clothing. First, they were hardened in this way, and then there arose the unique high level of physical training on the unclothed body. It is clear that in this way a valuation of physical beauty among the youth was cultivated, and attention was also drawn to racial differences, insofar as such existed at all. But the most important thing is the racial selection connected with this: undoubtedly, the most beautiful and able-bodied of the youths and maidens will have found their way to one another, and thus ensured racial selection and racial preservation.

For Greek culture at that time, the concept of the most beautiful human being was still synonymous with the Nordic type. If we compare sculptures from that era with our best Nordic youth of today, we have the impression of a genuine similarity in physique and bearing. In the decorative relief from the Temple at Aegina (Figure 1) and the Nordic athlete (Figure 2), we see the same strength and composure in expression, along with a correspondence in body structure. Compare this with the depiction of the decorative relief by the French sculptor Bourdelle (Figure 3). The entire conception stems from an entirely different racial sensibility. It is not the calm and closed composure that prevails, but rather a passionate movement extending into the smallest muscle, an exaggerated, ostentatious exertion of muscular strength, which bulges out abnormally. Note also the Middle Eastern facial features and the claw-like formation of the feet. What manifests here is a purely impulsive approach to the bow-like tension with wild force, whereas in the first two examples it is more controlled and deliberate.

It is to be assumed that in the Greek competitions it was precisely the best Nordic race that distinguished itself—an observation that can also be made today at major athletic competitions in Germany and indeed in other countries. The participants in the competitions each represent a significant positive selection compared to the total body of those engaging in sports, as could again be observed at this year’s German Winter Championships. Thus, the ideal physique of the athlete will have been Nordic race both among the Greeks of the Archaic period and among us—and this not merely on the basis of physical characteristics, but as a total appearance, in style, and indeed in the entire exemplary mental bearing. It corresponds to the Greek striving for balance (harmony) that the masterful contest became the focal point of the competitive games, and the victorious all-around athlete was the most accomplished competitor.

Through wise foresight, limits were thus placed on specialisation. With the racial degeneration of the Greek people, these racial-political lines of thought also faded, and a specialist mentality forced itself to the fore, which is best illustrated by the brutal depictions of fistfighters in later times. As in all of Greek life, foreign-racial elements also appeared in the arena in later periods. Specialisation in sport does not necessarily have to be harmful, but it usually develops the body one-sidedly, and therefore does not correspond to the benefit of a general physical education in the sense of making our youth fit for defence. Among the sportsmen of the present day, the all-around athlete and master Hans Heinz Sievert is therefore likely to represent an ideal figure. He is a farmer’s son of Nordic race and is probably the best athlete in the world.

Antiquity also shows how close the relationship between physical exercise and art can be. The victor in the contest was immortalised by sculptors and thus stands for all time in the arena of striving youth as a model of achievement and of racial ideal form. One must realise the great inspirational moment of how it spurs on the competing youth to win such an honour.

The arena gave the ancient artist the best opportunity to study the body, and there he found the most magnificent models. Today, a sports field offers the same possibility. An artist there, if his eye is trained for physique, would find equally good models of the best Nordic race, if he seriously endeavoured to do so. The past generation of artists, however, in its racial disintegration and decadence, had almost completely lost the eye for the racially good human being and preferred to depict the so-called “interesting” (i.e. ugly) human being.

In reality, however, no great art can grow without an ideal of beauty; above all, the idea of the beautiful must be rooted in the spirit, as was the case with the Greeks. For today’s art, the task is not to create an ideal of beauty through the idealisation of a halfway Nordic human being; rather, the first-class Nordic human being in physique and expression must be discovered (Figure 4) and depicted again and again by artists until the pure image of a coming generation stands before us as a model. The sculptors of antiquity worked no differently. Through the centuries, the striding Apollo was fashioned; generations trained themselves on this single task until it was shaped in perfected beauty. Only in this way can great art arise. Christian art, too, depicted Christ, Mary, and the saints again and again, and through all stylistic epochs varied and deepened that one theme—though, to be sure, in a sense that almost never emphasised the healthy, strong body and the deed-joyful soul.

However, the high-quality and capable body is not merely an innate gift, but must be worked toward through the hard discipline of physical exercise to achieve genuine strength and expressiveness. Herein lies one of the most significant tasks of physical exercise: the physical breeding-education of the racially best youth, which, on the basis of physical breeding-value, will have a healthily firm foundation and also a better opportunity to assert itself in life.

At the same time, the high-quality body of the Nordic athlete is the most convincing means of recruitment for the Nordic idea in general, especially when it appears as a group or team (Figure 5). Only when the goal of breeding-education is realised not merely in the mind but also physically, and when the perfect Nordic body and Nordic expression are placed before the eyes of the people as an ideal image, again and again on every occasion, can a thoroughgoing racial improvement be crowned with success.

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Having been largely confined to the dark corners of cultural discourse, conspiracy theories were propelled into the political mainstream by QAnon and the Covid 19 pandemic. No longer were conspiracy theorists a kooky and powerless minority—they were now invested with the power to shape America’s political future and did so in 2024 via the re-election of Donald Trump as US President.

The general perception that the public is being misled by our political industrial complex—that maleficent forces are at play under the glistening surface of our democracies—is a perfectly reasonable, and increasingly justified, concern. The Epstein scandal exposed a pulsating core of political corruption, financial fraud and sexual abuse which many suspected but could not comprehend. It has also exposed the very real extent of Jewish power over the American Empire.

However, the psychological architecture of conspiracy theorising is worlds apart from a general cognisance of corruption—and it is one which is increasingly understood and weaponised. Rather than intrepid detectives of shadowy political intrigue, the conspiracy theorist is himself the subject of a conspiracy to exploit his paranoid epistemology for political ends.

The study of conspiracy theorists has tended to explain their behaviour through irrational bias, cognitive error or—at worst—mental deficiency. Research on the personality correlates of conspiracy theorists has found that pseudoscientific beliefs, paranoia, mild schizophrenic traits and religiosity are particularly salient, along with generally lower cognitive ability.1

Conspiracy theorists have been shown to be more prone to cognitive biases such as the conjunction fallacy which describes the probabilistic error of judging a conjunction of two events as more likely than one of its constituent events alone. Conspiracy believers have been found to make significantly more conjunction errors than non‑believers across both conspiracy-themed and neutral domains, implying the salience of general intelligence in conspiracy beliefs.2

Other research has found that a tendency to conspiracy theorising is predicated by hypersensitive agency detection (HAD), the propensity to attribute intentionality, purpose and agency to inanimate objects or events where they are unlikely to exist.3 Conspiracy theorists, it is argued, inherently project purpose, agency and intentionality onto events often when plausible alternative explanations exist. People with HAD bias are more likely to see “someone pulling the strings” behind ambiguous events, making conspiratorial explanations intuitively appealing.

Conspiracy beliefs have been found to be strongly associated with education such that those with higher levels of education are less likely to endorse conspiracy theories.4 Mediating factors in conspiracy belief—such as the tendency toward anthropomorphism in which free will and intentionality are attributed to inanimate objects—tend to be more salient in people with less education.5

That such research is predicated on a liberal bias against the right-wing coded conspiracy theory community has already been remarked upon within academia, with warnings against the othering of those who should be the subjects of objective scientific enquiry.6 There is a growing awareness that conspiracy belief adoption does not simply involve passive knowledge absorption by naive recipients, but a complex cognitive architecture. It is this psychological circuitry which is being hacked in order to propagate a politics stripped of any potential for real-world change.

The ur-example of this cognitive warfare is QAnon. Adherents of the conspiracy theory believe that a cabal of satanic, cannibalistic elites—primarily in government, media and Hollywood—runs a global child sex trafficking ring against which President Donald Trump is waging a secret war, ultimately culminating in a prophesied event known as The Storm in which the cabal would be arrested and executed. The conspiracy—initiated on 4Chan from 2017—was propagated largely through “Qdrops”, cryptic posts from so-called government insiders which were then woven into an overarching narrative by content creators on YouTube and other social media sites. Adherents of the QAnon conspiracy number in the millions, with hundreds of thousands of believers even in non-English speaking countries like Germany.7

What makes QAnon distinct from other conspiracy theories—and what implies high-level US intelligence involvement—is the problem-solving nature underlying it. QAnon created a game-like knowledge environment in which believers are the central character in their own virtual role-play. Instead of passively absorbing information, QAnon believers are encouraged to “do your own research”, to actively decode and encode information within a gamified knowledge matrix.

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