Why the more subtle iconoclasms of the left, affect us all.
‘Haha. So you are employee of the month? These Americans. When I was a cadet, I won Communist of the month’.
I didn’t mind Pavlo (not his real name, for multiple reasons). He was a grotesquely large Ukrainian man. Seriously overweight, but strong, with arms like Popeye. He’d clearly gotten very comfortable on ships over the years and ended up as our reassuringly slow safety officer. He had a thick head of slicked back hair, and tanned well, even during our tour of the overcast Baltic Sea. You could tell he had been a handsome man in his youth.
‘In my day, this HR b*tch was called Comrade Commissar. KGB. Same sh*t’.
The last time he spoke to me so frankly had been a few months earlier, before his leave. He was drunk at that time, complaining that at 58 he was only 5 years from his life expectancy, and still working on ships.
‘Communism was smarter. On Soviet Cruise Ships, exactly 50/50 men and women, so everyone has someone to be with at night. And all crew from the same town. This has two things good. 1 – If Comrade HR is too unfair, someone at home will burn his car or break his windows. His wife will make sure he gets the message. 2 – People fight less, and keep secrets because they know, they will have to face these people again at home. No rats.’
I knew Pavlo as my superior officer but had heard many things about him second-hand. At this point, I wasn’t fully aware of his ‘peculiarities’.
‘It is a shame we lost. Communism was much better. Now we have these stupid American corporations. No alcohol. No sex. No jokes. No fun allowed.’
He had a point. And this was circa 2009 before the demonic spirits of wokeness managed to escape their holding cells – HR PowerPoint presentations – and possess their human hosts.
‘Working, working, working. All the time, until you die. And why? For nothing. Prices always go up, and who is in charge stays the same.’
Amen, Comrade.
‘And you know about the Gold Standard? This fiat currency, dollar, sh*t!?’. (He holds up a US $20 bill, contemptuously).
It was shortly after the 2008 crash, so the topic of currency was still fresh enough to be considered an edgy conspiracy theory. I couldn’t get a decent job out of University, and even the Royal Navy was over-subscribed with economic casualties. The Navy wouldn’t have a slot for me for another 2 years, and that’s how I ended up back at vocational college and on Merchant ships, listening to dodgy old Ukrainians tell me about the world.
‘I read many things on the internet. All banks are owned by Jews. The Rothschilds. They control everything because they control the money. All these wars are for them. And think about it. Why? If they own everything, if they have all the money they can dream of, why bother?’
I’m silent, holding my breath for where this is going, at 09:15 am on a rainy Monday morning in the ship’s safety office.
His big, glossy, sincere, brown eyes look up to the bulkhead above as his finger points slowly Skyward.
‘Aliens. Aliens control the Jews, who control us with stories and lies and fraud. To keep us divided, so we never find out we are food for aliens.’
At that exact moment, when I was sitting in my naïve, British, first-trip-with-a-foreign-crew, shocked stupor, I kid you not, there was a total blackout.
I will never forget it.
His delivery was so detailed, with the sincere conviction unique to the early internet-enabled auto-didact, that at that moment I actually felt as though Mossad agents were about to descend on us with submachine guns and silence this conversation.
The panicked rush to reset the generators, and check the electronics were up and running again and the general hubbub of ensuring the ships’ return to safety after a blackout punctuated the rest of the morning. But after we settled back into the normal routine, an uneasy feeling came over me.
He really believes that stuff. He lives in a totally different world from me. For him, the enemy is a clearly defined, inhuman species, so different that it can only be following extra-terrestrial orders.
The others who’d sailed with him before clearly knew about his beliefs. One security officer joked as we passed through Somali waters that he’d be issuing tinfoil hats for extra protection.
‘Ah, yes. I know this method’, quips Pavlo.
About 6 months to a year later, Pavlo ‘left us’. Home-made pornography had been ‘found’ on his work PC after one of our officers had accompanied him ashore to a brothel in Vietnam. He turned against Pavlo when his choice of companion for the afternoon was disturbingly young looking, even for an East Asian lady.
Pavlo grew up in Ukraine but was ethnically Russian. His father had been stationed there as a KGB agent, so Pavlo had grown up living ‘above the law’.
During his periods of leave, he didn’t spend much time with his wife or children. Rather, he’d drive around town with his policeman friends and pick up girls in the back of a van, for heaven knows what. That’s when he wasn’t driving around Ukraine with a metal detector, World War 2 maps and a shovel looking for German tanks buried by deserting soldiers in the war. Treasure worth a fortune apparently.
He told me he’d return home once in a while to ‘give her one of these from time to time’ – patting his fist. Because ‘you must’.
And these are the things he would openly admit to because he didn’t see anything wrong with them.
Once evidence had been gathered, and Comrade Commissar’s boss in Miami had been informed, Interpol too was informed and he was marked as ‘do not rehire’.
He contacted me via Facebook a while ago (before the 2014 conflict), asking if I could ‘help him get a Schengen Visa’?
Nope.
What disturbed me so much about knowing this man was how he walked around in plain sight. His uniform was always clean and neatly pressed. The women all thought he was so charming. He would make people laugh everywhere he went, and they would say ‘Oh Pavlo, what are you like?’
He was like a paedophilic psychopath. And a genuinely, seriously sincere racist. One of the very few I’ve ever met in my life.
He once stood in front of a group of about 100 Filipino crew, pointed closely at some of their faces as they waited in line for work, and explained to me that ‘they all have this shape of skull and a pronounced overbite because they are savages who never evolved the ability to cook with fire’.
He said that, so loudly, in front of so many of my Filipino colleagues, I genuinely could not understand how nobody had yet knifed him where he stood. I was mortified.
And yet, he went on like this, for years.
Why didn’t people speak up? How can it be, in our HR-obsessed companies, in the 2010s, that there had been no consequences for him for so long? How long had been getting away with all of this?
The truth is, few people cared. And if they started to care, they’d find much worse.
From a management perspective, he had the correct pieces of paper to do the job, and his public behaviour was within acceptable parameters.
But this was my first brush with real antisemitism.
Another memorable occasion was shortly before I was about to propose to my Jewish-American wife. A leftist twenty-something male (blessed with chesticles like Labradors’ ears) know-it-all of a cadet, with a law degree and a thirst for a captain’s ticket, said to me: ‘oh, not a Jew. They’re the worst ones. All your children will be Jews too.’
That kid was two ranks below me, and he was lucky I was still new to that company. If he’d been on my ship now, I probably would have battered him.
On another occasion, while sailing as second officer on an oil platform supply ship North of Shetland, I came up to the bridge to take the midnight to six watch. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness in the wheelhouse, I approached the glow that surrounded the Bulgarian second mate, who was sitting by the ship’s computer.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to focus on the screen, but a good long moment before my mind could register what I was seeing.
‘Is that…. Are you buying an SS uniform online right now? On the ship’s computer?’ says I, in disbelief.
‘Yeah, it’s a good one. Really cheap right now, they have a sale’, came the reply. As if the price would be the only factor preventing everyone from owning their very own, authentic, SS uniform.
My point is, of course, that there is such a thing as real racism. And it is everywhere.
The Indians hated the Filipinos. The Filipinos hated the Indians. The Southern Filipinos hated the Muslims. Lunch tables in the mess room naturally segregated by race, like in a US prison. But so what? With up to 150 nationalities on board some ships, we were all there to serve one colour. Green. And it worked, for the most part.
Only non-seafarers are shocked when someone starts talking about the characteristics of x, y, and z national groups, like David Attenborough before he became a climate nihilist.
So why do I mention all this now?
With the news this week that Terrorist Tedros has announced the Monkey Pox Pandemic, as soon as people started losing interest in Ukraine. And as Russia kicks the WHO out of their country. And the UK government has vowed to redouble efforts to vaccinate the pregnant, the under-fives and the remaining ethnic minorities of the UK, despite world Ivermectin day. And the Speccie running a front page with the spectre of Donald Trump’s threat to return to politics this week?
Isn’t there bigger news to cover, than some old anecdotes about antisemitism?
That stuff is all important, but not as important as the way we talk about it all. We need to understand that everything s related by our attitude to epistemology – our relationship to truth. Once you have a concept of truth, you cannot help but notice that every element of our freedom is under assault, all the time, from every possible angle.
I re-grouted my dad’s bathroom this week while he was away on holiday, and I drove home past the BAE shipyard on the Clyde on Thursday. I noticed that the build of HMS Glasgow was progressing nicely, with sections coming together. It’s amazing how fast you can build a ship on the Clyde, when the SNP aren’t giving you more money for every day it remains incomplete.
When got home I learned that BAE had applied for planning permission to build a shed over an existing harbour basin, to allow them to build in all weathers. A sensible addition, about 50 years behind the rest of the world of shipbuilding. But a good idea nonetheless.
Although I’m sure Vladimir Putin will be shaking in his boots to learn that the mighty town and country planning department of Glasgow City Council will be delaying the expansion of the yard’s capacity, to conduct Environmental Impact Assessments and Visual Impact Assessments, and holding a Stakeholder Inquiry to discuss what colour the shed should be painted before permission can be granted.
The idea of ‘Stakeholder’ Capitalism, for those who don’t know, is code for activists who contribute nothing but noise to society, being allowed to interfere with every human activity even if it has nothing to do with them. It needs to stop.
It especially needs to stop when our national defence projects can be delayed by the same Glasgow City Council who have flown Palestinian flags from City Chambers, and cost the city potential billions in foreign investment due to their leftist, anti-American, anti-capitalist activism.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a sailor, I actually take the law of communication by flags seriously, but I really think that people who take taxpayers’ money should be flying the flags of their own country. Not those of Ukraine, or Palestine, or any other political cause that divides opinion. It should be (and may well actually be) a crime.
Last summer I saw young Muslims driving around the city waving huge Palestinian banners, shouting what I presume were Hamas slogans, from the side of a dune buggy around the trendy west end. Which was pretty rich, considering that old men in their 80’s routinely get jailed in Glasgow for singing Irish songs on the day of a football match.
Antisemitism is alive and well in Glasgow today. A shameful state, for a city with one of the oldest Orthodox Jewish populations in the UK.
I don’t remember such ‘tolerance’ or ‘solidarity’ for Ulster or IRA banners by Glasgow City Council, back when those terrorist organisations held more sway. Do they know what Hamas is doing to its own people these days?
Glasgow’s activist governance reminds me of something that has been bothering me a lot since I watched the movie Tick, Tick, Boom. That is the subtle iconoclasm that has been occurring in Hollywood and in musical theatre in recent years.
The movie has several characters played by black or minority actors, representing people who were Ashkenazi Jews in real life. And the main character is played in a strangely effeminate, stereotypically homosexual manner. Now, it would be a fair assumption to assume that a Jewish musical theatre composer in New York was a homosexual. But the thing is, they show you real-life footage of the guy at the end. He didn’t have those effeminate mannerisms, and by all accounts was not gay.
Again, not an issue in itself. There are countless brilliant films, where ‘Jewish’ protagonists (Jesus, Moses, Ben Hur, etc) were played by non-Jews to great acclaim. In the olden days, that was called ‘acting’.
But, we don’t live in the olden days. We live at an end-of-empire descent into arbitrary authoritarianism.
We live in a time where the left are calling for every other race to be played by a person born of that race. Where disabled characters should only be played by disabled actors. And where homosexual characters should only be played by those with the same sexual orientation as the character.
Apart from the Whites and the Jews.
The ‘good’ whites of the American Revolution, or the presidents in disaster movies, now must be played by people of colour. Hamilton, Bridgerton and now Roald Dahl’s Matilda must be remade, to reflect the demographic make-up of modern London or New York. This is completely unrelated to the statue-toppling, history deleting antics of the amazingly covid-proof BLM, of course.
But not Tik, Tik Boom. And not the movie ‘Maestro’ about the hugely important and deeply religious Jewish composer, Leonard Bernstein. Or the West End musical Falsetto that sparked the Jewface row two years ago, and was shamed into hiring an ethnic Jewish person as a ‘cultural advisor’ to the entirely non-Jewish cast and crew of a play about a Jewish family during the ‘Aids crisis.’ Und so weite.
When you’re talking about cultural appropriation, it’s hard not to notice the major attempt to erase Jewish people from Jewish stories in our history. But why?
Antisemitism s not just restricted to the Corbyn/Kahn wing of the Labour party. And it’s not just in the intersectional complaints of David Baddiel.
Jewish erasure is real, and people of prominence have been noticing.
And when black actress Alexandra Shipp openly states that she ‘didn’t think she’d get the role’ meant for a Jewish actress, but she was going to use the opportunity for ‘anti-colonialist activism’, it’s hard not to see the combative element of this dreadful awokening in the culture.
Sarah Silverman famously spoke out about the issue on Howard Stern’s podcast, although, she seems to have swallowed her concerns. Recently she joined the Netflix team for ‘Maestro’, where Bradley Cooper will apparently be fitted with an enlarged prosthetic nose, to increase his Jewy-ness. The relationship between the neologism ‘Jewface’ and the more familiar ‘Blackface’ is exemplified here by Netflix.
But while I think Silverman has sold out on some very legitimate concerns regarding the ethnic group of Ashkenazi Jews, who moved to New York / LA and thrived in the post-war years, I think she is completely missing the point of all of this.
And here is where you, dear reader, come in.
You see, the problem is far deeper than ‘proportional representation, ‘political correctness, or ‘affirmative action.
The movie Tick, Tick, Boom gives the game away. It’s not just about big noses or skin tone. There are plenty of Black Jews. And plenty of gay people of Jewish ethnicity.
But the reason that socialists, communists, statists, technocrats and fascists alike all hate the Jews is not mere bigotry. It is not about funny hats and big noses. And it’s not even about the resentment of the wealth and success that conservative Jewish families have enjoyed in the USA.
It is far deeper, philosophical hatred that drives it.
You see, to quote OS Guinness (who I think was quoting the late Rabbi Sacks), ‘The voice of freedom, speaks with a Hebrew accent’. And therein lies the reason that even apparently ‘Jewish’ people in Hollywood are going along with this subtle silencing of their own culture.
The substitution of religious Jews from contemporary fiction, with ‘minority’ actors, is not about redressing some intersectional balance. It is about equating Judaism with a race, ethnicity, or generic minority.
It is meant to erase their philosophy, as their defining characteristic.
It is a tactical weapon of subtle iconoclasm. A rewriting of history that allows the viewer to view all minorities as just that, minorities. By erasing actual Jews from the big screen or the theatre, we will not see the different skin tones of Mila Kunis, Tiffany Haddish or Natalie Portman and recognise them as Jewish. Not every Jew looks like Fran Drescher, Larry David or Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Sarah Silverman is wrong to ask for people with her nose and hair and accent to be cast in Jewish roles because that reinforces the incorrect idea that being Jewish is simply a racial or ethnic issue. She does not believe in Jewish values at all but still wants ‘Jew’ to be a special intersectional category, worthy of special treatment. That way she can enjoy her place in the woke Olympics while retaining her position of privilege.
No, Judaism is the tradition of debate – of wrestling with God – that gave birth to the West. The God of Abraham is the personification of truth. He was the first and only God in all of human history to say ‘Let my people go’ to a ruling politician.
The culture that begins with the axiom ‘we are all the children of Adam and Eve’, cannot engage in intersectional politics, or left-right animosity, in any serious philosophical way. This is one of the things that unites us all.
Exodus demolishes the idea that slavery was a unique evil, perpetrated by white Europeans, toward Africans. Or that it was based on some sort of bias regarding skin colour. (I can’t wait for the movies depicting the African slave trade to Arabia or the Ottomans).
The cruel Hindu and Buddhist doctrines of transcendental acceptance of fate, or karmic retribution do nothing to oppose slavery. Paganism and polytheism worship only ‘what is’ and give no commandment for what ‘should be’. Polytheism and Scientism are also retrospective by their nature. Not so, the Jewish God who says ‘I will be, who I will be’.
And the declaration from Genesis, that everyone is made in the image of God, is the only declaration human rights that is philosophically eternal. The point is not the form, as we all are different. The point is, that none of us created ourselves. We each have an equal right to exist. Therefore, one may not claim a greater right to existence, over another. There is no special category among human beings.
Declarations of human rights made by governments are always ethically and morally compromised from the start because they are made by defence corporations who only exist because they routinely violate property rights. They are always performing a contradiction when they make such promises, and so always reserve the right to violate a promise that is broken from the start.
Their lack of logic is what allows them to claim to be the ‘free and liberal west’, while simultaneously adopting CCP policies and turning our countries into open-air prisons for two years.
Like woke Hollywood actresses moaning about being too low down on the slippery pole of intersectional grievances – they want to leave the door open for themselves at a later date, rather than admit that the entire concept is wrong.
Now, of course, I am a Christian because I accept the criticisms everyone’s favourite rabbi made of his people. By being ‘tribal’ and not universalist, they make a self-defeating argument for morality. That and the foreskin thing (I’ll detail my battles on that issue another time – stay tuned!). But you have to honour the source of the Judeo-Christian philosophers, to understand how we got to anything approaching epistemology, or science, or the concept that the rule of law means equality before the law for both citizens and rulers.
The hijacking of the Jewish story, by other groups, tries to make the story an ethnic story.
Jewishness is not a race. It is a philosophy, a tradition and a religion. One that gave birth to the West and the concept of liberty. One that we are now allowing to collapse. And mostly we allow this because we are too cowardly or over-leveraged to even hit a like button on a social media post we agree with.
Weakness is the hallmark of our current society.
By making Judaism nothing more than a group identity, like a race or sub-culture, that can be substituted by any other, the intersectional leftists seek to alienate us from the most basic roots of western philosophy.
This rewriting of history is an attack on the concept that there is such a thing as truth, at all. And erasing the fathers of monotheism from our stories is a serious attack on our philosophical foundations of the meaning of truth and equality.
That bothers me, not just because I’m married to a Jew. It bothers me because I believe in such a thing as truth. And so it bothers me when these people rewrite history because it is an attack on the very fabric of our reality.
Only the Judeo-Christian philosophy is anti-authoritarian in its nature. It is the only tradition where the highest deity is an individual, and so the only philosophy that threatens and rejects collectivism. And only this tradition can restore concepts of equality and objective truth. It must be rediscovered and explained to non-religious people in a pragmatic way if our civilisation has a hope of avoiding a repetition of the bloodbaths of the French or Communist Revolutions.
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I recall reading a couple of weeks ago that the word Jew and the word Pharisee have been banned from the official Scrabble rules and apps. And this week, the word ‘Woman’ has been altered by Marriam Webster to be more ‘politically correct’ (meaning pleasing to leftists).
I have chosen the word Leftist carefully. I am not referring to liberals of the left. Leftists are the authoritarian left. The phrase ‘political correctness’ is literally an invention of the murderous Vladimir Lenin.
I think Jordan Peterson might be on to something, when he says he thinks Putin is willing to bring us to the brink of nuclear war and beyond, simply to avoid the madness into which the West is currently descending.
Jews first articulated the idea of God as absolute truth. Unknowable to any one human, more than another. They, therefore, created the concept that man should be free from the arbitrary compulsion and coercion of other men, who have no greater right to life than another. This stems from a concept of truth that we absolutely need to rediscover, if we actually stand against tyranny, as we claim.
If we move on from Covid as if we haven’t just torched our own credibility, we will be in real trouble.
Freedom is not the freedom from reality or consequences, promoted by modern leftism. It is freedom from betrayal, euphemism and arbitrary injustice. Its moralities are ‘the shall nots’, murder, theft, and other classics. Not the aesthetic preferences of modern ‘thou shalls’, that make one immoral if you fail to carry a smartphone at all times.
The world is, and always has been, locked in an ideological and philosophical war.
This war manifests itself on so many fronts, that is exhausting. You cannot go for five minutes without encountering some small piece of territory that has been lost, or fought over.
Some people are relativists. They believe that there is no right or wrong, except that which is determined by those with power. And so they seek power. And make the categorical decision that ‘whatever I do is good, because I am good’. The circular reasoning of those who deny any fact that conflicts with ‘their truth’, always encourages evil. Just watch the Jack Black movie Bernie for an astonishing exploration of this human capacity for category errors in the moral domain.
These are the people who can justify any and all sacrifices in the name of some abstract ‘greater good’, for a collective, while ignoring every injury to individual members of that same collective.
Relativism is part of the child-like philosophy of progressivism, which assumes that everything new is ‘good’. Coupled with the cocaine rush of unlimited deficit and debts, there is no accounting for the costs of unquestionable, vanguard, nudge-unit theorising.
And now we live in this world of NHS shutdowns for hot weather or diseases that kill nobody. A world where you need to keep a soggy, useless cardboard straw in your mouth while sucking from a plastic cup, because Chinese fishing vessels are dumping plastic nets in an ocean on the other side of the world. Or where we keep piles of rotting garbage on our kitchen counters, only to have them not be recycled, because councils have no capacity to recycle useless garbage. Where we pay a sin tax for alcohol or tobacco, that kills us earlier and cheaper than the NHS even could if it tried.
Where the government can reject its own scientific advisors’ risk assessment and say ‘we think it’s worth it’ to vaccinate children at greater risk than ever before experienced, with a jab that doesn’t stop the spread, against a disease that poses zero risk of death to them.
Coercion. Force. Lies. Manufactured consent. Fraud. Debt slavery.
I dined with friends from Iran tonight (Sunday). They spoke of 300% inflation in Iran. Bureaucracy and immigration complications separating families over nothing. British government handouts of £50k+ to recent immigrants to the UK during Covid. And of the call centre supervisors paid £800 per hour as consultants during the Pandemic, people working while on furlough, and some businesses making more money from lockdown compensation than they ever had before covid.
We compared the current batch of Western tyrants – bullies and thugs who wear nice suits and make pleasing noises – to Blair and the Iraq war years. Sadly, these power-lovers will likely get knighted, instead of jailed, and the catastrophic human cost of their prolonged war on their own populations will be suppressed and ignored. None of these people is being held accountable for the consequences of their actions. We need to articulate these injustices and keep them alive, before all of these criminals get knighthoods, like Blair.
Some of us are universalists or objectivists. Whether coming from a purely rational point of view, or as one who accepts truth is unknowable by man, the sense of outrage at injustice is fully palpable now. The sense that those who are enthralled with politics are true idol worshippers, banging their pots and pans at a false idol, is not going away any time soon.
We need to stand up for the Jews, in times like these. If for no other reason, than gratitude.