Two quotable quotes:
— Joe Klein, Time, June 24, 2008
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. … Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite [foreign nation] are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
—George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
(Links helpfully added by VDARE.COM).
As survivors of one of the great historical crimes of the mid-20th Century, this American ethnic group has gained a veto power over American foreign policy toward their historical homeland—with seriously detrimental impact on America's reputation in that important part of the world.
Moreover, out of concern for their co-ethnics abroad, they have obtained strong influence over America's immigration and refugee policy.
I'm talking, of course, about … Cuban-Americans!
Who'd you think I was talking about?
The best thing about Cuban political power in America is that you're free to talk about it. (Well, at least outside of Miami.) Heck, Cubans want you to talk about how much clout they have. It makes them seem stronger than they may actually be.
Moreover, they are upfront about their motivations. If you say, "You want to extend the trade embargo on Cuba because Fidel stole your grandfather's sugar plantation," they'll reply, "Well, duh."
Do Cuban-Americans display "dual loyalty?"
Well, first, let's toss in all the caveats about the diversity within any ethnic group.
That said, the answer is, more or less: Sure.
(Cuban-Americans are seldom loyal to the present government of Cuba, of course. Instead, they tend to be loyal to their vision of the future government of Cuba.)
Is this pattern of Cubans promoting Cuban ethnic interests through our political system good for America as a whole? Probably not. But it has been so narrowly focused that it hasn't been a disaster for the country.
American policy toward Cuba has been knuckleheaded, but less so than Castro's policy toward Cuba. Only this year, for example, Fidel's brother Raul finally allowed microwave ovens to be sold in Cuba—three decades after they went on sale in the free world!
The relevant point: any single foreign country, even one as nearby as Cuba, isn't all that important to America's national interest.
What is important is that our political and intellectual life not be sapped by a single ethnic group's determination to promote its interests at any cost. The Cuban-Americans have played by the rules, at least on the national stage (as opposed to in Miami, where they've intimidated local critics). They've won on the trade embargo through reasonably open and transparent activism because they just care more about it than anybody else does.
Most importantly, Cubans don't inflict on the national debate their intellectual paranoia about slippery slopes. Lenin said: "He who says A, must say B." By this logic, nobody can be allowed to say A. Fortunately, Cubans aren't obsessive or powerful enough to impose this kind of reasoning on the rest of the country.
For example, you can write "The subprime mortgage meltdown shows the need for more government regulation of the financial industry", without fear of being shouted out of the Main Stream Media by all the Cubans in important positions in the business who worry that if anybody is allowed to say that in public, it will inevitably lead to the government expropriating the sugar plantations and banning the sale of microwave ovens.
Perhaps some anti-Castro Cubans would like to ban all criticism. But they don't have the mojo to impose their taboos on the rest of American society.
Similarly, on immigration, Cuban-American political muscle has mostly been exerted to get special treatment for Cubans, rather than to open our borders in general. Of course, some Cuban-Americans, such as Florida Senator Mel Martinez, have allowed the Bush Administration to use them as Designated Hispanics in its amnesty campaigns. Still, those are mostly just unscrupulously ambitious individuals. As a group, as long as Cubans are legally treated as refugees rather than immigrants, Cuban-Americans don't much care about other Hispanics and their immigration problems, let alone anyone else.
So far, at least, granting special immigration privileges to Cubans has been less catastrophic for America than if the Cubans had used their political leverage to agitate for more open borders in general.
But in striking contrast to Cuban-Americans, you're not supposed to write about Jewish influence on American government and culture at all. While the Cubans ethnocentrically exert strong, but open and sharply delimited influence over the U.S., Jewish-Americans have tended to mandate that nobody mention their power.
Of course, this is primarily testimony to the relative strengths of the two groups. The Cubans have been pounding their chests over the crucial role they played in the 2000 Presidential election for eight years now. Jewish organizations, such as AIPAC [the America Israel Political Affairs Committee], try to (and generally succeed in) intimidating gentiles into not mentioning how much control they have.
Pay no attention to that Lobby behind the curtain!
It's comically self-contradictory. But it works.
It's impossible to understand how
America functions today without understanding
the sizable role played by Jews in elite positions.
In their 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene
"During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series." [pp 26-27]
This is an extraordinary record of achievement because Jews make up only about three percent of the adult American population. It's attributable largely to higher average Jewish IQs, strong work ethics, sobriety, heavy investment in their children, self-confidence, networking, and nepotism.
As one influential Jewish
writer aptly put it: "With great
power comes great responsibility". Yet
the standard response by Jewish spokesmen has been to
deny the existence of their power and to use the
"anti-Semite" smear on anyone who publicly spills
the beans, as the distinguished foreign affairs scholars
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby
People can lose their jobs for even mentioning something as bleedingly obvious as Jewish leadership in Hollywood. In 2003, veteran liberal journalist Gregg Easterbrook in 2003 was fired from his ESPN.com job by then-Disney boss Michael Eisner after Easterbrook mentioned "Jewish executives" in a posting about a violent movie on the blog of the Jewish-owned New Republic. Most commentators, being well-trained, said Easterbrook had it coming.
In contrast to Cuban activists, whose goals are straightforward—control American foreign and immigration policy regarding Cuba—Jewish activists have convinced themselves that, rather than openly pursue their ethnic goals in the marketplace of ideas, they must control the marketplace itself. They must rule out of the bounds of discussion any ideas linked to Jewish influence by even the most Rube Goldbergian logic.
No group, not even African-Americans, are as shielded from appraisal and criticism as are Jewish-Americans. For example, it's clear that some American Jews, such as former number three man in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, feel loyalties divided between the U.S. and Israel. After all, Feith and his father shared the Zionist Organization of America's 1997 Man of the Year award. Feith's longtime law partner, Marc Zell, is a spokesman for extremist Zionist settlers on the West Bank. America's third richest man, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, invests heavily in both George W. Bush's Republican Party in America and Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud Party in Israel
Yet, it's precisely because so many influential Jews clearly do have the dual loyalties that George Washington warned us against that the whole topic has long been off limits, especially to gentiles.
A week after veteran Time
reporter Joe Klein, the once "Anonymous" author
of the bestselling roman a clef novel about the
Clintons, Primary Colors
"Max Boot, Pete Wehner, Jennifer Rubin, Paul Mirengoff and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League all wrote confidently outraged responses to Klein's raising of the 'divided loyalties' possibility—and, indeed, it's not the sort of assertion that has typically gone unpunished in the past. When Klein stubbornly failed to back down in a second post, Wehner somewhat smugly anticipated his near-certain demise:
'It's like watching a movie that you now know is going to end very badly, and very sadly.'
"But here's the thing: It's now a week later, and as far as I can tell Klein still has his job. … He hasn't been forced to issue a groveling apology.
"Can it be that the rules have changed?"
Perhaps. But the key test would be when it's safe for non-Jews, as well as Jews like Joe Klein, to criticize Jewish activists, like the neoconservatives, in the same way that it's always been safe to criticize Cuban activists.
This censorship leads to profound ignorance, and disastrous results. For example, as Andrew Cockburn reported:
"One day during that holiday, according to friends of the [Bush] family, 43 asked his father, 'What's a neocon?'"
"'Do you want names, or a description?' answered 41."
"'Description.'"
"'Well,' said the former president of the United States, 'I'll give it to you in one word: Israel.'"
Yet it's important to remember that the two most fundamental Jewish ethnic policy interests—promoting Israel's territorial integrity and ensuring that Jewish refugees would be admitted to America—are not particularly worse for America than the policies successfully pushed by Cuban-Americans.
Unfortunately, the way Jewish-American power promotes its interests in this country—by imposing a code of silence about Jewish power, by blackballing anybody who speaks out on any issue even tangentially related to Jewish influence, and by demonizing immigration restrictionists—has far-reaching debilitating effects on America.
Our country would be better off with a "Cuban Compromise"—giving Jewish interests roughly the same privileges as Cubans currently enjoy, but no more:
Of course, Jewish representatives would have no reason to accept Point 3 of the Cuban Compromise, since they already have their cake and eat it too. My point, however, is to illustrate what a reasonable compromise would look like—protecting specific Jewish interests, while liberating American intellectual and political life from the stifling Political Correctness now imposed upon it.
For example, consider how the question of differences in average IQ among hereditary groups has been driven out of polite society. The fact in itself may not seem important, but it turns out to touch on so many issues—for example, education—that the ban on writing about it pervasively degrades the quality of American thought.
You might imagine that the kibosh was put on IQ by blacks to cover up lower mean black IQs. Yet the record shows relatively little contribution by black intellectuals to the debate. Thomas Sowell has had some important things to say, and Claude Steele and John Ogbu have offered theories of possible value. But that's about it.
Instead, when the mob of media yahoos is hounding somebody for crimethink on IQ and race, there's usually a leftist Jewish intellectual at the forefront.
For example, when America's most
eminent man of science,
James Watson, was forced out of his job last year
for violating the taboo, the
effective leader of the vigilantes in Britain was
Steven Rose, co-author with
Leon Kamin and
Richard Lewontin of Not In Our Genes
And the Holy Writ of IQ Know-Nothingism [VDARE.COM note: Peter Brimelow objects that this misuse of the term is UNFAIR TO THE KNOW-NOTHINGS!] remains Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 bestseller The Mismeasure of Man.
This is not to say that Jewish intellectuals line up on only one side of this issue. Richard Herrnstein, the co-author of The Bell Curve, is an outstanding counter-example. Nonetheless, the most strident and destructive of the IQ Know-Nothingists have tended to be far leftist Jews.
Why are so many Jews hypersensitive to empirical investigations of IQ differences?
As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker noted, when he asked his Yiddish-speaking grandfather why he reserved the tricky tasks at his small Montreal garment workshop for himself rather than leaving them to his Canadian employees:
"He shrugged, tapped his forehead, and said, "Goyishe kop," a term of condescension that literally means 'gentile head.'"[The Lessons Of The Ashkenazim| Groups and Genes, The New Republic, June 26, 2006]
Pinker explains:
"Jews have long had an ambivalent attitude toward their own intelligence, and toward their reputation for intelligence. There is an ethnic pride at the prevalence of Jews in occupations that reward brainpower. …But pride has always been haunted by fear that public acknowledgement of Jewish achievement could fuel the perception of 'Jewish domination' of institutions."
In other words, the chain of logic run like this:
If the Goyishe kops aren't allowed to hear that the Shvartze kops aren't as smart on average,
Then, they won't notice that on average the Yiddishe kops are smarter than the Goyishe kops;
And, then, they won't kill all of us Yiddishe kops for being smarter.
So, to prevent another Holocaust, it's our moral duty to crush anybody who tells the truth about anything at all related to human diversity.
When you lay it all out like this, it seems ridiculous: absurd paranoia.
But that is the problem—nobody lays out the logic.
Because they are scared.
This isn't sustainable in a free society. Why not an honest Cuban-style compromise?
