Some other points

Herefore are some more comments on Miron's article "The Search for Jewish Nationalism" from Head Wide Open and Alex 'Eisod', which we decided to publish as a separate post.

After examining in further detail some of the positions associated with this nascent movement, I'd like to inject some of my own thoughts and critiques.

a Israel

My own personal position is that of general support for Israel but rejection for the typical Zionist position. I have been to Israel and while I found it a beautiful and inspiring place, I do not consider it "my" country. Rather it belongs to the pioneers who built it and struggled for it. I have observed that cheerleading for Israel has often taken the place of any broader and more nuanced Jewish identity. "Zionism" is an anachronism. If the purpose of Zionism is the establishment of a Jewish state, that state has been established. By turning the recognition of the existence of a nation into an "ism," we only propagate Israel's status among many minds as a rogue or artificial state. Israelis need to further coalesce their own identity as a Levantine state, and the paranoid, ghetto mentality of the Israel-or-nothing diaspora, most pathetically symbolized by the alliance with Christian Zionists who would see the Jews convert with the coming of Christ, is in the long run harmful to Israel's nationhood. Let us tap our own rich diaspora histories and let the Israelis build on theirs, rather than attaching our whole identity to a nation which is of course dear to us, but is not synonymous with Judaism and the Jewish people.

a The Holocaust/Anti-Semitism

A touchy issue of course, though I speak as one with no near relatives who suffered. So it's perhaps easier for me to say this but: let us not be defined by our tragedies. The litigious pursuit of marginal white supremacists is counter-productive, bringing more attention to them than less. Would Ernst Zundel be in the papers if he wasn't constantly being prosecuted? Of course not. He'd be a deranged hack with a website like thousands of others. One of the most heartening things I came across in recent times was the Israeli Holocaust cartoon contest, in response to the Iranian debacle. Now there is a brilliant, subversive and classically Jewish way to fight our enemies: expose their ridiculousness through our own free speech and superior irony. Let us focus less on Jewish lawyers and more on Jewish wit in fighting the useful idiots. If we want to create more anti-Semites, let's continue to sue fools and throw our suffering in people's faces. If we want to win sympathy, let's focus on the ingenuity, industriousness and humour which have earned our people respect.

a Religion

Personally I am not observant, though I come from an observant family. I understand the secularist attitudes of this group, and mostly agree. However I think it's counterproductive and ahistorical to ignore the fact that our nation through much of its history has been a nation of priests. Religion is strongly entwined with Jewish identity. From my understanding Russian Jews tend far more towards secularism, which is fine. But even if we don't believe the Bible, it is still our national mythology. The Ethiopians have the Kebra Negest, the Icelanders have their Viking sagas, the Chinese the Confucian aphorisms etc. So I support the secular orientation of this group, but think that we should respect the religious aspect of our history even if we don't agree with all its precepts. Let us not forget that the Jewish religious scholar tradition is part of the reason so many Jews went on to become successful and world-changing intellectuals, and why we tend to be an extremely educated and literate people.

- by Head Wide Open

Israel is not "my" state either and I don't feel connected with its middle eastern nature. I just not into this lifestyle! But still I love and cherish all good Israeli people who managed to do a helluva good stuff while being surrounded by hostile environment. So they have my respect yet I do not wish to live among them because its just not my place. My spiritual motherland is a European Diaspora who may not exist on the maps but do exist in hearts and minds of Ashkenazi Jewry.

As to various Jew-haters, well the prosecution is the best advertise for them, because in every age and epoch you can find some people who hate Jews with passion and ready to become martyrs of anti-Jewish struggle. So best way to deal with such kind its ridicule them, not prosecute!

As about religion...well its one really sensitive question, so before I say something, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts both on Judaism and its heretical offsprings such as modern non-orthodox movements, Sabbatianism, different kabbalist sects...

- by Alex 'Eisod'

Some other points

Horizontal Jewry VS. Vertical Jewry

When the material about Jewish Nationalism from Miron Fyodorov had first been published a year ago, it met vast criticism. From all opinions the following statements, which can be considered a typical reaction of someone who beholds a traditional left-liberal (sometimes libertarian) point of view attracted most of our attention. Below is Miron's answer to those arguments.

a Kinship "I am opposed to the given interpretation of this slogan, i.e. the necessity to build a nation by singling out a group of people according to their blood kinship. Generally, I don’t think it’s practical to establish a single and everlasting definition of Jewishness separating Jews from non-Jews. In each given historical period, a different definition may reflect the current position of the Jews most fully. The most sensible common denominator for such variation is ‘liberal/cultural’, i.e. a Jew is anyone who is prepared to join the Jewish civilization in any of its traditional/existing or non-traditional/prospective forms. I believe that one can belong to the Jewry at the same time as belonging to other similar national or quasi-national groups. For every person or group sharing the Jewish identity their Jewishness must not necessarily be the only thing they identify with, but one among a whole complex net of national and cultural identities which can, for example, simultaneously include a French or ‘Queer nation’ identity, etc."

A nation, unless it is an ongoing breeding experiment, cannot ever be ethnically “pure”. On the periphery, there will always be ethnically distinct groups associated with the nation through socio-cultural, economic or geographic factors. In the case of the Jewry, these are converts to Judaism (both as individuals and as groups) as well as those whose Jewish blood is either minimal or non-existent, but who see certain benefits in joining the Jewish nation by means of false claims to a Jewish ancestry (e.g. Slavic ‘repatriants’ to Israel).

Both processes are natural and no one should be excluded on the grounds of ‘race-laws’; on the contrary, new blood, if taken up in small amounts, enriches the gene-pool. But these processes take place automatically: if there’s a stable core, there will always be a less stable periphery. There is no need to cater for the needs of the periphery by including it in the definition of the Jewry: our priority is the definition of the core, the periphery will follow.

To be able to join something from the outside that something has to exist first. That is, the core of the Jewish nation must be clearly defined so that the periphery can identify with it – and today, that definition is only effective if based on genetic affilation. What you call the ‘Jewish civilization’ is the periphery; to be called Jewish at all this civilization has to have an ethnic core around which it can evolve. ‘Culture’, ‘civilization’, even ‘nation’ in its current popular usage are all too vague: the ‘French nation’ includes both Arabs and Chinese. This is why JN is ethno-nationalistic, but not racist. Intermarriage: yes, for our blood will prevail; multinationalism: no. This system has worked for other cultures for millennia.

a Democracy and anarchism "I fully support the idea of a horizontal system. Moreover, I reject the idea of a national state, whether Jewish or not, in almost any of its forms. Ex-territorialism must be a most important aspect of how the Jewry organizes itself."

It is important to understand that JN is not opposed to the idea of national states per se: we would gladly have our own state, or states (as Obadiah Shoher suggests in ‘Samson Blinded’, proposing the break-up of the current ‘Jewish’ state into Judea and Israel). What makes us resort to national-anarchism is that in today’s world, no Jewish state will really be Jewish. Wherever Jewish statehood will appear, it will be established by exterior forces using the Jewish desire for self-determination for their own ends: geopolitical, economical, military and occult. We have seen this in the case of Israel’s puppeteers; we are bound to see it elsewhere. Our national-anarchism is not founded on aesthetics, or the love for Bob Black and Hakim Bey: it is a pragmatic, temporary strategy for the coming century. Thus we are not opposed to the states we live in and do not desire their downfall; but we realize the need to prepare for their disintegration by building our own power structures.

a Defense "Defense must work effectively on all levels, both on the suggested direct level and various others: the ideological, the economical, etc. Limiting oneself to the least effective forms of defense does not seem right. I must also note that the creation and exploitation of various guilt complexes for atrocities against both Jews and non-Jews is currently one of the most effective forms of defense. This is what should determine the attitude towards the Holocaust and the ideology of defending human rights. Sustaining the general level of tolerance in a society by all means necessary, staying in close contact and cooperation with other horizontally organized minorities – all of this is a much more effective than using direct violence. At the same time though, the hyper-concentration of the Jewish consciousness on a single event in Jewish history certainly isn’t a positive thing. At the heart of the Jewish consciousness must lie the Jewish history in all its variety. Finally, the most important (though not exclusive) form of battling anti-Jewish ideologies must not be violent conflict but their integration into the existing social structure as a sort of minor and unimportant element, eclipsed by a broad range of others. Generally speaking, the main form of defense must be an 'International of closely linked minorities working together'."

The ideological measures you are suggesting (indoctrination of non-Jews, creation of guilt complexes, a focus on human rights, positioning ourselves as a vulnerable minority, relying on the goyim state for protection) have been employed for the last 50 years all over the Western world and are the current strategy of the Diaspora. They have failed. 41% of the British population, traditionally one of the most philosemitic in Europe (at least superficially so), have responded to a survey saying that a new holocaust can easily happen in the UK. And they’re right, it can happen among any local host population; my favourite near-anagram is ‘local host – holocaust’.

If anything, creating a guilt-ridden host population through indoctrination naturally fuels anti-Jewish sentiments instead of extinguishing them. Relying on the state for protection gradually erodes the instinct for self-preservation. It is not the goyim who are the real victims of the holocaust industry and Jewish ultra-liberal propaganda in the media, but the Jews themselves. Our non-verbal defense mechanisms have died off. We have no backbone, no self-protection of even the most basic kind; in this respect, we are not even a nation. This is why JN believes in a world-wide anti-Jewish conspiracy: we have been tricked into thinking we are safe, again and again, we have been brainwashed and taught to brainwash ourselves.

Every ‘vertical’ defense mechanism presented to us as the new means of securing our safety, such as large-scale Jewish presence in the media, politics and economics, is fake. However often we repeat the prescribed mantras of tolerance and multiculturalism, they will not protect us. Jews are the world’s village idiots cruelly mocked by being told they run the village. We are the naïve scapegoats employed to cover up the machinations of goyim governments and mafias.

There is only one solution to this sorry state we are in: horizontal structures of grassroots self-protection. At first, these will, no doubt, be pathetic: a tiny class of krav-maga pupils here, a sports summer camp turned nationalists there, an old village barn turned into a shooting range, an underground seminar on anti-Jewish occupation, etc. One will rightly ask how this ridiculous activity can possibly compare with the existing levers of supposedly Jewish power: the world banking system, the US think-tanks, the high-tech State of Israel with its air force and nuclear weapons?

The answer is simple: these measures will actually be Jewish, with no one else pulling the strings. Because none of the above are. It’s great to have a tank division or a nuclear missile for protection, but it’s not really ours. It’s great to control banks and governments as we do in ZOG conspiracy theories and hyper-zionist fantasies, but we never did that nor shall do. In reality, they control us, not vice versa, and there’s no way we can turn the game around. But we can opt out. That they won’t expect or take seriously, and when they will, it will be too late to stop us.

You may be surprised, but we do not want to ‘battle anti-Jewish ideologies’ at all: that is both difficult and futile. What we need are deterrents against potential aggression. I am sorry to say this, but liberal bubbles are there to be pierced: I think your view of the world is somewhat naïve. How are you planning to cooperate with the Arab or Chechen or Muslim minority, being both Jewish and gay (as far as I gathered from your journal)? I don’t think you will be welcomed OR safe if you try that. The state and its safety net will disintegrate, there is no question about that. Which network will be able to protect you then? The ‘Queer nation’? Non-White minorities? White nationalists? Come on, man. If there will be one group to protect you, it will be Jewish nationalists, your own people. And it is in your interest, as it is in the interest of all of us, to ensure that we are as strong as possible when the collapse happens.

- by Miron Fyodorov

Horizontal Jewry VS. Vertical Jewry

The Search for Jewish Nationalism

The following article of mine, "The Search for Jewish Nationalism", was kindly published by Troy Southgate in the latest issue of his Synthesis webzine. This choice of publisher was dictated by the plain fact that no Jewish website, whatever its political affiliation, would have accepted it. The article is a brief outline of the principles of Jewish Nationalism (JN); its aim is at least to provoke debate and hopefully bring together fellow-minded Jews. Please leave your comments, questions and suggestions below.

* * *

One must admit that Jewish politics on the web are nothing short of a freak circus. Anarchist splinter-groups accusing each other of high treason, weedy Trotskyist shepherds quarrelling over a non-existent flock, orthodox Jews hurling Anti-Semitic slurs at the Reformists. Hyper-Zionists, rabid Anti-Zionists, Jews for Jesus, Jews in Neo-Nazi organisations: every aberration, every oddity has a niche of its own in this cacophonous bazaar of political superstition. And with all the wild juggling of political terminology going on, it is only natural to ask, “What about Jewish nationalism?”

Incredibly, no such thing exists. The most straightforward, healthy and innate political idea, that of nationalism, is simply missing from the spectrum of Jewish thought. The term itself does pop up every now and then, but is erroneously used interchangeably with “Zionism” and “Israeli patriotism”, though the former is not necessarily nationalist, and the latter not necessarily Jewish.

Nationalism holds that a nation, i.e. a distinct group of people of common descent, is the basic unit for human social life, and thus takes precedence over any other social and political principles.

Traditional Zionism, therefore, is not the same as Jewish nationalism, as it equates a nation looking back on two millennia of dispersion with a territory it came to inhabit only half a century ago, and asserts that territory’s sacral precedence over the nation. Whether secular or religious, Zionism, by claiming that all Jews should “repatriate”, subdues the Jewish nation to external forces – to history, geopolitics, and religion. But to do this means to place ideology before biology, for it is the concrete genetic code that determines one’s Jewishness, not, as many would have us believe, the vague abstractions of “culture” and “religion”. Contrary to wild speculations such as Koestler’s ‘Khazar theory’, genetic evidence (e.g. Hammer’s recent haplotype study) indicates that despite considerable exogamy, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews are still fairly homogenous genetically and of a clear Middle-Eastern origin. A Jew is simply a person descended (fully or partly) from a particular Semitic ethnic group. Zionists may agree, but their approach puts that which is primary (blood kinship) after that which is secondary (geopolitics). Such a confusion of priorities is the exact opposite to what Jewish nationalism asserts: blood first, soil second; blood first, politics second. Zionism is not Jewish nationalism.

Nor is Israeli patriotism the same as Jewish nationalism; in fact, it is not even the same as Jewish etatism, for a Jewish state could have technically be founded anywhere, not necessarily Palestine (Argentine, Uganda and the Russian Far East have all been considered at some point, and the early 20th century Jewish Territorialist Organisation actively advocated establishing Jewish homelands wherever possible). Let us imagine for a second that Palestinians would, by means of a slow demographic takeover, become the majority population in Israel – a scenario not that improbable, considering that almost 1.5 million Arabs are now citizens of what was designed as a racialist Jewish state. In that case, Israelis of Arabic descent taking pride in their mostly Arabic state could be rightly called Israeli patriots. So to be an Israeli patriot, one does not even have to be a Jew – and yet under no circumstances could an Arab be a Jewish nationalist. Clearly, Jewish nationalism is not Israeli patriotism. So what is it then?

The answer is simple. Jewish nationalism (JN) holds that the optimal structure of the Jewish nation around the world is a decentralised network of democratically run, armed, secular communities of kinsmen. Thus it is based on four principles:

1. Kinship: To be a Jew is to have Jewish blood. Kinship ties come first, everything else second. 2. Democracy: To be among one’s kin is to be among equals. One Jew, one vote. 3. Defence: Kinship holds if kinsmen are strong. Democracy works if voters are armed. 4. Secularism: A Jew must be his own Lord, or else a slave.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

KINSHIP. We are not concerned with hierarchies based on the purity of Jewish blood, or with supposedly traditional matrilineality: whatever the intermarriage rate, Jewish blood prevails, for it is always the more distinct one. What we are concerned with is the nation as the totality of all those fully or partly of Jewish descent. Religion, ideology, acceptance or rejection of one’s ethnicity, the presence or absence of foreskin, one’s views on Israel – none of these external factors can make a person more or less Jewish. The degree of one’s Jewishness is invariable, fixed at the moment of conception. Genes do not simply vanish because a belief system requires them to; ideas, on the contrary, are man-made and variable. History teaches us that you either shed ideology in favour of your blood or shed your blood for an ideology. We therefore consider Jewish blood to be of primary worth: this is the sole source of our politics.

DEMOCRACY. So far, Jews attacked Zionism from the Left for its supposed imperialism, disregard for human rights and close ties with America (e.g. Chomsky), or else from the Ultra-Orthodox viewpoint for establishing a Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah (e.g. Neturei Karta). We could not care less about “rights” or “religion”, but we care about our people. Jewish nationalism therefore criticizes Zionism from a Right-wing, secular point of view: for us, Zionism is simply not Right-wing enough. The violent evacuation of near-autonomous outposts like Amona has shown that the puppet-state of Israel can neither protect its own people nor enforce far-right values (individual liberty, armed democracy, private property) as successfully as a community of free and equal individuals bound by kinship ties. The furthest a state can go to the Right is Fascism, the unsavoury union of industrialists, clericalists and conservative bureaucrats, and the best democracy a state can offer is (mis)representative and plutocratic. It is the State and not the Left which is the true enemy of the Right. Rather than needing a state of its own, Jewish nationalism requires horizontal power structures existing parallel to the states where Jews now live – a world-wide network of private contacts, extended families, local communities, and trained militias. Jewish nationalism is by definition national-anarchist: no other approach will give us direct grassroots democracy which is essential for a nation’s self-sufficiency and self-esteem.

DEFENSE. In a globalised world, the traditional state is passing away as networks and communities flourish, and the very fact that today the state is struggling to tighten its grip on the individual is a sign of its decay. From blogging to hooligan firms, networks of all kinds are taking over the traditional functions of the state: information, defence, etc. The explosive issue of race relations, however, has not been extinguished by multiculturalism as predicted, and remains the crucial factor in uniting individuals into groups. New power structures are evolving, both internationally and locally, and, judging by demographics, it is only a question of time before large areas of Western cities will be patrolled by ethnic minority militias or subjected to Sharia law. All indicates that we have entered a century of unprecedented ethnic conflict in which communities bound by kinship will wage war against each other as well as the decaying State, and where tightly knit horizontal networks will successfully resist regular armies. With the temporal protection of the State gone, ordinary Jews will once again become victims of various ethnic, religious and political groups, and, judging by the vast problems Israel is experiencing today, it will not be able to provide the Diaspora with a safe haven. What we therefore need are our own horizontal security mechanisms, starting with individual physical fitness and including combat training, survivalism, firearms and militias. For inspiration, we must look to all historical precedents of Jewish grassroots defence structures, such as the early paramilitary defence groups in Europe and the British Mandate, or the Jewish mafia in American cities. From a fatally Holocaust-fixated, spineless tribe with a vague identity, depending on Gentile states for protection, Jews must evolve into a clearly defined nation of free, armed kinsmen, self-sufficient but ready to respond symmetrically to any aggression.

SECULARISM. The nationalism we envisage is enlightened and Western in character, putting the individual before the community, the community before the nation and the nation before everything else. Secularism is inseparable from this ideal: we are concerned with what is concrete and of immediate importance, such as biological identity and physical survival, not with metaphysical abstractions mutated into dogmas. However, our secularism is not merely anti-clerical, though we do, of course, firmly believe in the separation of religion and politics. Leaving the question of private faith for the individual to decide, and accepting a ‘private’ Judaism that is non-prescriptive, we nevertheless tend to go further. The religious view going hand in hand with Jewish nationalism is not lukewarm agnosticism but National-Atheism (the refusal to grant YHWH or any other being, even hypothetically, sovereignty over the Jewish nation) which in its extreme forms becomes National-Gnosticism, an open conflict with the “Jewish god”. It is irrelevant whether such a being exists or not, or whether it is a Demiurge or simply a national deity: what matters is the destructive influence its cult has on the Jewry, propagating the serf morality of Judaism and the fatal “chosen people” meme. If YHWH is dead, demented, displaced or if he simply never existed, then his cult must be opposed on the grounds of it being a waste of resources. If, however, he is the actual ruler of the Jews, then the Holocaust alone suffices to consider him an enemy and a usurper, and his cult an enemy force: “If God loves all that is anti-Jewish, the Jew must love all that is anti-God” (Ioan-Isidor Goldstein). Atheists tend to follow the former line, Gnostics the latter. Beside these two, no attractive alternatives exist as the search for non-Yahweist Jewish spirituality is still young, usually producing New Age mumbo-jumbo incompatible with nationalism, such as Jewicca. One appealing line of Jewish spirituality, however, which may be worth exploring because of its sound biological basis, is ancestor veneration. Yet whatever the options, our approach to spiritual matters is strictly non-dogmatic, the common denominator being secularism.

The search for Jewish nationalism is only about to begin. The basic principles have been formulated, the direction indicated; now is the time for all those who want to participate in shaping it. As a starting point, the LiveJournal community "Nationalist Jews"(rus) has been set up to stockpile ideas, discussions and contacts; please feel free to join, whatever your views.

Kinship, Democracy, Defence, Secularism. May we succeed.

- by Miron Fyodorov

The Search for Jewish Nationalism