Antisemitic Article in The Atlantic Says Jews Want to Control What We Can Read

Several previous posts in this blog have developed this idea:

[S]imply by seeking out the truth, Gentiles like me may be doing more to protect the future of the Jewish people than many self-appointed defenders of Judaism are doing.

That thought comes to mind as I read an article in The Atlantic with this title, subtitle, and byline:

White Supremacy’s Gateway to the American Mind

Amazon’s self-publishing arm gives extremists and neo-Nazis banned from other platforms unprecedented access to a mass audience.

Story by Ava Kofman, Moira Weigel, and Francis Tseng

Now, just to be clear on our terminology, “white supremacy” is normally defined (by e.g., Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster) as the belief that white people are superior to people of other races. But in this Atlantic article, other races are virtually unmentioned. Words like “Asian,” “Hispanic,” “Latino,” “black,” and “African” do not appear. The only exception is a single sentence mentioning Mexicans, and that sentence appears to be merely separatist, not supremacist. As the Columbia Journalism Review (Perlman, 2017) explains, “Almost every American is a ‘nationalist’ of one kind or another. So is almost every Russian, Chinese, or North Korean. … [In saying this, we] are merely trying to emphasize, again, how overly simplistic some labels can be.”

As the reader quickly sees, this article in The Atlantic is not really an article about white supremacy. It does not address concerns of blacks and other minorities. It is simply about antisemitic books. Had I been consulted, I might have advised against what seems to be an effort to manipulate readers, to get their sympathy by portraying the Jewish people as an oppressed nonwhite minority. Jews in America are not an oppressed nonwhite minority.

The Atlantic article focuses on Amazon’s tendency to carry and publish antisemitic books. As often happens in such materials, the writers of that article appear to be so thoroughly marinated in a certain type of Jewish perspective as to assume that all Atlantic readers will see things as they do. They don’t seem to know or care how their words might sound to someone who does not share their particular type of Jewish heritage. As I say — as discussed in the other posts linked above — they seem to be out of touch with reality.

To explain what I mean, the following discussion presents quotes from the Atlantic article, followed by reactions that those quotes might provoke in readers from other backgrounds. These reactions are informed by my own experience, when I first moved to New York City and began my many years of interacting with Jewish people, and also by things that other Americans of various races and ethnicities have said to me about Jews.

So, in an attempt to communicate a different perspective to people who share the attitudes of these writers in The Atlantic, let’s begin with the article’s very first words:

“Give me, a white man, a reason to live,” a user posted to the anonymous message board 4chan in the summer of 2017. “Should I get a hobby. What interests can I pursue to save myself from total despair. How do you go on living.”

A fellow user had a suggestion: “Please write a concise book of only factual indisputable information exposing the Jews,” focusing on “their selling of our high tech secrets to China/Russia” and “their long track record of pedophilia and perversion etc.”

The man seeking advice was intrigued. “And who would publish it and who would put it in their bookstores that would make it worth the trouble,” he asked.

The answer came a few minutes later. “Self-publish to Amazon,” his interlocutor replied.

“Kindle will publish anything,” a third user chimed in.

They were basically right.

So that’s how the article begins. The writers may have assumed that the leading mention of “a white man” would trigger an automatic hostility to the person being described. Articles in The Atlantic and other progressive periodicals do often set up white men for bashing. This racism and sexism, starting perhaps 30 years ago, has done a great deal of harm to a tremendous number of innocent men.

The Atlantic seems not to have noticed, however, that we are in the age of Trump, and that the Democratic finalists, in the recent primary election contest to oppose him, have likewise been white men. Being a white male is not the barrier that it was in 2016, when Democratic party insiders chose Hillary Clinton because they felt that, as a woman, she deserved the presidency. That old second-wave feminist hostility toward white men is no longer quite as potent.

But that’s not why I begin, here, with that particular excerpt from the article. Let us consider how a non-Jewish reader — indeed, even a Jewish reader who is not obsessed with antisemitism — might interpret those opening words. Within the article’s context, as we shall see, readers may interpret those Atlantic writers as saying things like this:

• Screw the guy on 4chan who seemed to feel he had no reason to live. We knew of his words, of his cry for help, but we were not remotely interested in taking a proactive approach, in caring why he (or others who shared his outlook) might feel that way, or in asking why he might have been seeking refuge or advice on 4chan, or how we could reach out positively to give him a better alternative. We only wanted to use him to complain about our own concerns.
• A participant in 4chan suggested that this man publish “a concise book of only factual indisputable information exposing the Jews.” Such a suggestion is obviously evil. Nobody should be allowed to publish factually indisputable information that is critical of Jews.
• Antisemites think Jews have a “long track record” of “pedophilia and perversion.” But, in our minds, nobody else would take such an idea seriously. Nobody else would read these words in The Atlantic and do a Google search to find out what those people on 4chan are talking about. Never mind that Haaretz (Sommer, 2018) ran an article saying that it “is vital” to address “the problem” in which “a high number of powerful Jewish men [e.g., Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Steven Cohen, Leon Wieseltier, Jules Gutin, Ari Shavit] have been accused of sexual misconduct.” Like the Jews in Weimar Germany, we just assume that readers of our article will know that this accusation of “pedophilia and perversion” cannot be taken seriously. Or perhaps we are like the woman in that Haaretz article who said,

“Jews are a family …. We should not speak ill of each other.” These ideas kept a kind of muzzle on me and the mere idea of speaking out [against a Jewish sexual abuser] paralyzed me with fear and questions.

Thus, multiple authors, in this article billed as “a collaboration between The Atlantic and ProPublica,” somehow managed to open with a remarkably blind and self-incriminating message about Jews. As I say, it appears that the authors may have been so thoroughly blinkered by what is considered common wisdom, among those who spend their time hyperventilating about anti-Semitism, as to have no awareness that others might interpret their words in ways they did not intend.

Let it be clear that these Atlantic authors do wish to silence dissenting voices. Here are some excerpts from near the end of the article:

Amazon has begun to make some of the hard decisions it had previously avoided. In recent years, it has taken down hundreds of works of Holocaust denial …. And in March, following decades of campaigns by Jewish organizations, the retailer blocked editions of Mein Kampf sold by third-party merchants or reprinted through KDP; the book can still be purchased directly through Amazon. …

We also came across nearly a dozen Holocaust-skeptic books still available on Amazon, including some for sale in Germany, where such texts can be illegal. In response to our questions, Amazon took three of them down.

They just happened to “come across” a dozen such books? They merely posed “questions”? Hmm. Readers might fairly interpret those remarks like this:

• “Holocaust denial” means different things to different people. Some consider you a Holocaust denier if (like some Jewish scholars) you conclude that probably only four or five (i.e., not six) million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. If you publish a book that researches the historical facts and disputes the official Jewish view of the Holocaust, we want to suppress it.
• There are actually Jewish organizations that have been struggling for decades to suppress Mein Kampf. This is not because the book is obviously silly. People don’t struggle for decades to suppress books that nobody would take seriously. This is because, to the contrary, some people may think it portrays Jews accurately. We have had nearly 100 years, and tremendous access to American media, with which to prove that Hitler’s view of us was absurd, that we are not the kind of people he described. And we are afraid that we may have failed to do so. We are afraid that people might read Hitler’s book and think he was right.

To emphasize, the point is not that such perspectives may or may not be correct. The point is that the Atlantic article seems determined to bring them to readers’ attention. The authors essentially say to their readers, “We believe we have the right to tell Americans what they can and cannot read — because some books raise uncomfortable questions for us.”

Maybe that’s why, throughout the article, the authors display no interest in honest dialogue, no willingness to learn or admit mistakes, no signs of openness to dissenting views, much less anything in the nature of positive or constructive outreach. As in many other pieces of this nature, these authors are ideologues, defined as “uncompromising and dogmatic” holders of a belief. The belief, in a nutshell, seems to be that Jewish = Good. I guess it’s not surprising that there are no joint committees, funded by wealthy Jewish donors, striving to sort out disagreements with those who don’t share their views. Why bother trying to talk with others when you have the power to silence them and even get them thrown into prison for their beliefs?

The Atlantic article doesn’t seem to realize that it is actually about Jewish extremists vs. white extremists. For perspective, imagine an article expressing the other side, telling us that white supremacist = good. This is simply not something that most of us believe. And a periodical like The Atlantic would never publish it. So this article raises the question, what’s going on here? Why does one side in this fight between extremists have such unequal power to communicate its views to the American public?

Somehow, we have a nation with 33 million Irish-Americans who do not seem to be trying to silence anyone else — and yet we have maybe a quarter as many Jews, and only a subset of them who share the attitudes of these writers, and this little group feels entitled to control what all Americans are allowed to read and publish. It is as if the concept of a “free press” does not apply to them – except when it favors them. I wonder whether the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum covers this topic.

If some Gentile were to stand up and state that this is what Jews are secretly trying to do — to gain control over what Gentiles can read — that person would be accused of gross antisemitism. And yet, when Jewish writers in the Atlantic forthrightly declare that this is exactly the kind of power that they expect to wield, the goalposts move: now what’s antisemitic is to suggest that they should be denied such power.

In this post, I am trying to explain that people who consider themselves defenders of Jewish people and culture can overdo it. They can be too close to the fight, too passionate about it, to retain a sense of perspective on the big picture. In the worst case, their efforts may be disastrous, and they may not even see it.

In this particular instance, we have a contemporary recurrence of the situation in Weimar Germany of the 1920s: in America today, as in Germany back then, Jews have been widely believed to control the media. Jewish people with powerful influence in media go to great lengths to suppress that belief. And then Jewish writers (with, it appears, a token named Tseng) come out with an article like this, in a mainstream periodical like The Atlantic, demonstrating that they do, in fact, consider themselves not only willing and entitled but apparently able to control at least some important parts of the media. From a public relations perspective, this is a disaster.

That disaster hasn’t yet had many practical consequences, for the Jewish people, because Jewish extremists have long been able to count on one core fact about Americans. For the most part, our attitude toward the Holocaust has been, like, Fine, whatever. The Jews say the Germans killed six million of their ancestors; sounds like a reasonable estimate. That, and the Jewish = Good mantra, have given us many gripping World War II movies that include or focus on the Holocaust. Beyond that, Americans generally haven’t seen much reason to get involved.

In that, we have made a costly mistake. Granted, we have had other things to worry about. But it’s not just that we have thus left Hollywood with only one acceptable way to interpret and portray Jews and the war. That part was easy: we didn’t like the Nazis anyway; we even had to fight a war against them. The more unfortunate and expensive part is that, somehow, the U.S. got roped into providing a virtually endless flood of billions of dollars to surviving Jews and the State of Israel, continuing even in years when the U.S. has found it politically impossible to make sure its own people aren’t going hungry. How did that happen, exactly? We weren’t the ones who threw Jews into concentration camps. We weren’t the ones who lost the war. How come we’re the ones footing the bill?

As of seven years ago, Haaretz (Cohen & Feldman, 2013) calculated that the U.S. had given Israel a total of $234 billion, not counting loan guarantees and gifts of military hardware. The gifts have continued, intensified, since then (see Haaretz, 2019). Jerusalem is 6,500 miles from Omaha. Never mind the fact that, by enabling Israel to do pretty much whatever it wanted, our support has attracted the anger of Muslim terrorists worldwide. Just consider what a wise investment of $234 billion in Mexico might have done for our actual neighbor and, not incidentally, for ourselves. South of the border, we have a country where 14 million people live on less than $3.20 a day (Statista, 2020); $234 billion would be almost $1,900 for every man, woman, and child in Mexico.

But never mind our own interests; let us consider all that money to Israel a gift based on mutual friendship and appreciation between descendants of two somewhat coincidental ancient religious cultures. For which, supporters of Israel repay us in ways that this Atlantic article illustrates. The adage about how power corrupts might be rephrased to say that, if you want to see whether someone is dangerous, just give them a little power.

The Atlantic authors seem to take for granted that they have — and that they should have — a power that Gentile Americans lack, namely, the power to override our constitutional right to a free press, in order to silence those who disagree with them. I can imagine a legitimate American institution that would essentially suppress falsehood, after giving all sides a full and fair opportunity to present their side. It’s called a court. I can’t imagine a legitimate American institution that gives just one side that power, without any such hearing.

This power to silence others has corrupted influential elements among the Jewish people themselves. I came to realize that when, one time, a few years ago, I sat down and worked through some questions about the Holocaust. I was just interested in trying to understand why people would be Holocaust deniers, if the evidence for the Holocaust was so obvious and indisputable. I wound up writing a long post titled “Holocaust Belief and Denial.” The Conclusion of that post said this:

I did not think that the skeptics would ultimately persevere in the debates reviewed here. In some regards, I was surprised: there did seem to be legitimate disagreements that legal authorities in various countries should not have suppressed with laws against honest inquiry. It seemed that I would have encountered more such surprises if I had investigated other topics, such as the alleged discrepancy between the flood of corpses coming out of the Auschwitz gas chambers and the limited capacity of the crematory ovens.

Overall, [however,] I felt that those who denied the Holocaust had terribly much to explain, and had not done a very good job of it. Some of that was due, no doubt, to political repression: it would be difficult to find capable people willing to jeopardize their academic positions, never mind risking conviction and imprisonment, in order to engage in academic debates aimed toward resolving unsettled issues about the Holocaust. …

Contrary to the preferences of [Deborah] Lipstadt among others, it did appear that world Jewry was becoming increasingly associated with the silencing of dissent.

This is not to say that the deniers were heroes. I did not mind the view that Germans had been mischaracterized, and some falsely accused, in the postwar era. But expressions of support for Hitler were beyond the pale for me. …

What disappointed me most, however, was the evidence of manipulation, concealment, and distortion on the part of mainstream Jewish organizations. It seemed, in other words, that the postwar overreaction against the Holocaust had brought us to a place where many Jews and Jewish organizations rejected core Jewish values. My companion post on the accusation of anti-Semitism had noted the plaintive question, raised by Jews, of whether Jews can still pride themselves on their love of genuine debate. Forcible silencing of dissidents was obviously incompatible with that. …

At this writing, unfortunately, it appeared that such organizations were still preferring a strategy of refusing to talk with their critics, so as to deny their legitimacy. That strategy seemed to be working among the aging white audiences that had been granting them inordinate latitude since 1945. It was not clear whether it would continue to work with younger generations.

There’s no good excuse for what the Nazis did, to the Jews and to many others, during the war. But the war ended 75 years ago. The postwar era is by far the more familiar historical era for virtually every person now living in this world. You’ve heard about the equal and opposite reaction. Every abuse invites its own retaliation. At some point, the rubber band will snap, and Americans will no longer buy the Holocaust as an excuse for what might suddenly look like many decades of Jewish looting and manipulation.

After the war, the Jews took the money and the political power that America was offering. Who could blame them? They had been through hell, and the Americans were falling all over themselves to make everybody happy. We got a lot in exchange: Jews have contributed incalculably to this country’s wealth, successes, and culture. Still, there comes that day of starvation and darkness, as in Weimar Germany, when all people can think about is that someone must be responsible. Will Americans then be so blasé about those billions gifted to Israel? Or will they have pretty much the reaction of Germans who felt that the Jews had used their country without ever really becoming part of it?

I doubt any ethnic group would turn down the money and the power. But at some point, wisdom begins to recommend moderation. Nature has supplied this on its own, insofar as many American Jews were born here, will die here, and will spend their lives as patriots whose first loyalty is to America, not Israel. They will be Exhibit A for the argument that Jews are not an undigested alien presence. But I have known Jews who have gone exactly the opposite way on that question of loyalty, and who have seen America as merely a spigot for the benefit of Israel.

For instance, Gentile Americans so far don’t seem to have paid much attention to those who deliberately exploit the welfare system by having as many babies as possible at public expense, most notoriously in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn that was, according to a New York Times article in 2011, the poorest place in America. In terms of public relations, will that never become America’s future version of the notorious welfare queen? One can’t be sure.

People of various races and ethnicities have taken advantage of America in many, sometimes very expensive, ways. As a recent example, the U.S. has very belatedly become somewhat responsive to espionage and theft of American knowledge on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. It is not difficult to imagine a day when an America more distant from World War II, less rooted in Christian fundamentalism, and more attuned to the perspectives of a rapidly growing and increasingly familiar Muslim minority, becomes similarly sensitive about Israeli espionage and exploitation of a supposedly mutual relationship.

In anticipation of such a day, it would seem prudent to pay more attention to the optics — and perhaps, thereby, to actual honesty and respect for American culture and ideals. Returning to the Atlantic article, consider these excerpts pertaining to a man named Billy Roper, who is apparently a white nationalist:

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Billy Roper “the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism”; Roper calls himself “the most widely read living fiction author in the white-nationalist movement.” …

[Roper says,] People can go to Amazon—which is mainstream and acceptable; there’s nothing radical about that—order a book, and in the privacy of their own home they can read the book without ever having to visit a white-nationalist website. …

Among the topics discussed in Roper’s “European American Reading Group” is whether it’s useful to read books by “jews and the opposition.” …

Many works by historical Nazis and anti-Semites, no longer held by copyright and long out of print, have been reprinted through KDP [i.e., Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing].

I, myself, am not particularly interested in Billy Roper. A glance at some reviews of his writings suggests that I probably wouldn’t get much out of them. But that’s not the point. The point is, once again, that the foregoing excerpts from the Atlantic article may not be interpreted by American Gentiles in quite the way intended by the article’s authors. Among other things, in their response to Billy Roper, the authors seem to be saying this:

• We recommend that you believe the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), even though an editorial in the Washington Post (Thiessen, 2018) says the SPLC has “lost all credibility … after years of smearing good people with false charges of bigotry.” The New Yorker (Moser, 2019) discusses “uncomfortable questions that have surrounded the organization for years” coming to the surface after Morris Dees, SPLC’s longtime leader, was fired for creating what one former employee called “a virtual buffet of injustices.”
• We are not like Billy Roper, who offers a reading group that discusses whether books by Jews are worth reading. First, we are not encouraging anyone to participate in such groups, where they could play a constructive role by expressing a healthy attitude toward Jews. Also, unlike Roper, The Atlantic does not offer a space for comments on this article and, anyway, we don’t think there’s anything to discuss. We simply hope that, someday, we will be able to prevent you from reading books by people like Roper.
• In the meantime, we are making determined efforts to keep Americans from being able to find and read books by historical Nazis, or any books that we consider “antisemitic,” within an extraordinarily broad definition of that term.
• We think it’s bad that you can buy a white nationalist novel, through Amazon, instead of having to visit a white nationalist website. We want to force you to visit the white nationalist website. Then, someday — long after you and your friends have seen what that site offers — maybe we will find a way to get that shut down too.
• We and other Jews definitely are in “the opposition” to writers like Roper. But it is antisemitic for him to say so.

I started this article with the suggestion that, in effect, war is too important to be left to the generals. The fact that these Atlantic writers are so passionate about their viewpoint is precisely why Jewish and Gentile readers alike should criticize their overreach. Just as the generals would destroy the village in order to save it, Jews of this mentality would destroy the free press in order to “save” it in the form they prefer — and, in doing so, they may contribute to deep hostility toward them and their attitudes.

I’m not denying that they have reason to be concerned. It has to be worrisome that the “Never again” chant has failed — that, contrary to the desires of the wartime generation, neo-Nazi views continue to circulate. It is true that, someday, something like the Holocaust could happen again. It makes sense to work against that outcome.

The question here is, do you work hard, or do you work smart? Working hard means the nonstop, full-bore, loud and arrogant push to control what Americans are allowed to read. As just indicated, that approach makes you an even more highly visible extremist than your white-supremacist adversaries.

Working smart means recognizing that such arrogance is counterproductive — that it makes Jews look like the kind of people that a Hitler would reasonably denounce. If you want to win hearts and minds, you won’t get there by telling people what they are allowed to read.

There is another approach. It is illustrated by, of all people, Jeff Bezos. I’m impressed by his Amazon business, but not by the way he treats employees. But for purposes of this article, I was very impressed to read what these Atlantic writers say about him:

[Bezos said,] We want to make every book available—the good, the bad, and the ugly …. [Y]ou actually have an obligation … to sort of let truth loose. …

In the late ’90s … a rabbi wrote in to complain about the company selling The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century anti-Semitic text alleging a Jewish plan for world domination. “Jeff said, ‘Who are we to decide? There’s a comments section and people will comment on the fact that this is beneath them,’” [an] employee recalled, noting that Bezos was disgusted by such content but concerned about acting as a censor. … [Reportedly] the same rationale guided the company’s decision to stock Mein Kampf ….

[When Amazon began publishing books, a former operations director said,] It wasn’t our job to judge whether something was right or wrong. Our whole goal was to let the market and the people decide what’s of value. …

That began to change in 2010 …. The company introduced additional guidelines for sexual content, yet the process was still largely ad hoc …. [T]he prepublication review process continues to focus more on illegal or indecent content than on hateful, derogatory, or defamatory speech.

Sadly, as if to underscore how wrongheaded they could be, the Atlantic writers made a point of finding fault with Bezos’s attitude toward a free press. On that topic, their views seem to be as follows:

• We reject Bezos’s philosophy. We do not supporting “letting truth loose,” or leaving it up to readers to review books as they see fit, or letting the market decide what has value. We do not share Bezos’s concern with censorship. His philosophy has resulted in Amazon making Hitler’s Mein Kampf available. That is unacceptable. We think people should listen to our version of who Hitler was, and should not be allowed to read Hitler’s own words.
• We are not trying to compete by offering better ideas. We could use this opportunity to show that Bezos, a Jew, exemplifies an intelligent and honest attitude toward books and knowledge. But we are not that kind of Jew. We have the power of laws, in many countries, to punish those who raise difficult questions for us. We use that power to control what people are allowed to read. And, slowly but surely, we think we are succeeding in forcing Bezos, and the world, to behave as we wish.
• Amazon should not be allowed to sell books that express derogatory views toward Jews. Even the Jewish ADL organization says, “We recognize that the First Amendment protects even hateful or offensive speech, and we believe that the best answer to hate speech is not censorship, but more speech.” But we disagree. We admit that hate speech is “notoriously difficult to define,” but that is irrelevant; we simply think that Amazon should let us tell them what is forbidden.

American readers are not likely to appreciate such efforts to control their thoughts. If you want to help the neo-Nazis recruit new followers, what better way than to virtually invite the question of “what gives these people the right to come here and tell us how to run our country?”

Suppose that some Christian immigrant to Israel went around insisting that the Crusaders had the right idea — that Christians should control the Holy City. Israelis would think the person must be mentally unstable. Now imagine hundreds of wealthy and politically powerful third-generation Christian immigrants in Israel, talking and thinking that way, throwing their weight around and actually expanding Christian control over parts of Jerusalem. Does anyone doubt that Jewish Israelis would find this intolerable? Such Christians would be virtually begging Israelis to say, “Go back to where your type belongs.”

As the saying goes, the sign of a bad businessman is that he takes a loss on each sale, but makes up for it in volume. That is, our Atlantic writers are not content to send a few bad signals. They want to really hammer the point home, to make sure that nobody will have any doubts as to their hostility to American law, rights, and culture. So here’s what they say about Amazon’s practice of suggesting books to readers who seem interested in a certain topic:

[Amazon’s] recommendation algorithm uses your purchasing, browsing, and reading histories to steer you to the books you are most likely to buy, as opposed to what critics have championed ….

[W]e found that many of Amazon’s suggestions reinforced and amplified the given book’s political ideology. … [R]ecommendations for far-right books often overlap with and refer back to one another, creating a sort of echo chamber. … Curious readers can easily click through several different clusters of books … without encountering a text from an opposing point of view. …

[Some] authors manipulate their ratings by making their self-published books temporarily free so that readers can “purchase” them and leave a positive review. “ALL of my books are available for FREE in e-book form this week in exchange for an honest review on Amazon later,” Roper posted in 2017 on the neo-Nazi message board Stormfront. … The first installment of Roper’s trilogy has 70 reviews and a rating of four out of five stars.

Once again, the authors just don’t seem to have paused to think about how their words might sound to others. They seem to be saying this:

• There is the view that we consider antisemitic, and then there is the truth. God has given us the truth. This is why we have not complained about an echo chamber effect among buyers of pro-Jewish books. We think Amazon needs to steer our political adversaries to books that are critical of them or their views. But Amazon should not do the same to us. To the contrary, as already indicated, Amazon should remove books that are critical of us.
• We think it was dishonest of Roper to request honest reviews.
• We haven’t actually read any of Roper’s work, but we want you to believe that it isn’t very good — that he got four-star ratings just because he manipulates his reviewers.

By this point, I think most readers are likely to agree with what I say: this is a public relations disaster. This is where you are a tinpot dictator; you’ve already run your country into the ground; and now your solution is to suppress any independent voices that criticize your style. If you want to convince everyone that the solution is to get rid of that dictator, you’re on the right track.

Fortunately, Jews in America have enjoyed generations of peaceful life and acceptance. Americans have generally not cared whether someone’s origins are Jewish, Korean, or Mexican. If they’re funny, they can have careers as comedians; if they’re smart, they can become scientists; if they work hard, they can succeed in business. Many American Jews have plainly seen that it is unnecessary, indeed counterproductive, to perpetuate a forever war against white America, as if we were all closet Nazis, just waiting for a chance to persecute Jews. In this country, if you don’t want to be attacked, don’t go around asking for it.

The Atlantic piece is an example of a generally older Jewish-immigrant cluelessness about what it means to live in a free society. Coexisting peacefully in the U.S. does not mean controlling what people think. Not that even most older Jews are like that, anymore; this is more the mentality of those who have found it beneficial to trade on their increasingly distant family relationship with Holocaust survivors. They, personally, have not suffered, but they feel their great-grandparents’ suffering entitles them to special treatment. The point of this post is simply that their mentality is not helpful for American Jews as a whole.

I opened this post with a quote from a previous one, in which I suggested that some Jews who consider themselves defenders of the Jewish people are actually Jews’ worst enemies. You might find it instructive to read at least the introductory section of that previous post. Perhaps that will help to explain why I have concluded that these self-styled defenders are shortsighted. Their unscrupulous victory-at-all-costs attitude keeps on guaranteeing that, even if they win the battle, they once again set themselves up to lose yet another war. As that previous post suggests, I can see how this sort of agitation could help to stimulate donations to supposedly pro-Jewish organizations. I just don’t see how it is beneficial to actual Jewish people.

It is a bad idea to try to take away people’s basic human rights. It is an especially bad idea to try to suppress the free press in America. In the process of trying to prevent people from learning about Hitler and such, you risk re-creating the problem, teaching the same lessons to the next Hitler. If you can’t win on the level of ideas — if you are avoiding discussion — then that’s a hint that maybe your ideas just aren’t very good. This is the core lesson of the Atlantic article.

* * * * *

Postscript

After writing this article, it occurred to me that Jeff Bezos, or his staff, might appreciate the vote of support favoring his non-censoring approach to making books available. Accordingly, I emailed Bezos a link to this post. Another post describes what happened next.