The Intellectual Death of Anti-Semitism
Gerard Menuhin is a British-Swiss journalist, writer, novelist, and film producer. He is the son of Jewish parents, the American violinist, and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, who is considered “one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.”[1] Menuhin’s mother was a ballet dancer and died in 2003 at the age of 90.[2] Menuhin graduated from Stanford University and is the author of Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil .
JEA: In your book, you quote Albert Einstein as saying, “I believe German Jewry owes its continued existence to anti-Semitism.”[3] It appears that he recognized that the term anti-Semitism was increasingly deployed as an ideological instrument—one capable of silencing or discrediting critics, given that no reasonable or serious person wishes to bear the stigma associated with being labeled an anti-Semite. Could you elaborate on this point for us?
GM: That depends on one’s definition of a serious person. Is a serious person one who has some position in society or in academia or government — therefore regarded as an ‘expert’, worthy of respect — which they might lose if they don’t adhere to political correctness? Or is a serious person one who has the ability and takes the time to formulate his own opinion about a particular subject, unaffected by the opinions of others?
‘Anti-Semitism’ as an expression is not only a misnomer, it’s gibberish. Douglas Reed suggested a substitute: ‘anti-Semolina’ (The Controversy of Zion).
As I state in the book, ‘Semitism’, at best, describes a language. So ‘anti-Semitism’ would denote opposition to Semitic languages – an absurd stance. To deduce from the expressed opposition to Semitic peoples would be stretching the point. And are Jews Semitic?
Anti-Semitism is therefore a suppressive weapon that only survives because it is linked to the guilt all decent people feel—or is intended to feel — when confronted with ‘The Holocaust.’ There you have two allegations in one sentence. The first is a misnomer and the second is a mere psychological projection. Anti-Semitism would be an impotent pseudo-expression, were it not coupled with ‘The Holocaust.’
A further useful weapon of suppression is the accusation of ‘discrimination’. In a world bent out of shape by political correctness, ‘discrimination’ is an accusation to be avoided at all costs. In a free world, discrimination merely means choice or preference. If someone chooses not to associate with certain people, for instance with Jews, that is of course his perfect right as a free citizen.
Alone the sensational nature of the ‘Holocaust’ claim and the immense figure immutably tethered to it of course invite awe. But it is awe unmixed with rational skepticism. To ask a very simple, innocent question, why was there no independent investigation of this alleged crime in 1945, or in the Seventies, when the expression really caught on and precluded any other meaning of a formerly unbiased English word?
‘When after twenty years of silence, Holocaust theology began in the late sixties and seventies,…’ (Pour out Your Heart like Water, Towards a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust, Rachel Adler, p. 1).
When someone is murdered, the police are called in to find clues and track down the perpetrator, if he is still at large. In the case of ‘The Holocaust’, 6 million murders are said to have occurred. Yet no such police investigation has ever sullied the pure, unblemished assertion of this crime. We have been told that it occurred and the subject is closed without debate. (The total itself is in doubt and has indeed been reduced, yet, magically, the 6 million are still universally quoted.) (No, Emily, the innumerable ‘eye-witnesses’ are as unconvincing as the confessions of tortured German soldiers. No, Abigail, the ’Nazis’ didn’t burn or otherwise cause to vanish 6 million bodies to. Where are the bones, the ashes?)
Where, for a start, is the corpus delicti? Piles of emaciated corpses are regularly shown on television, but whence came these corpses? Were they evidence of typhus/typhoid deaths in the camps, which indubitably occurred during the last months of the war, when transport had been bombed to a standstill and manpower had been transferred to the east?
Or were they corpses trucked in for effect from elsewhere: the remains of captives in the infamous U.S. Rheinwiesen concentration camps, where German prisoners of war were starved into a state of cachexia, under the pretext that they were ‘Disarmed Enemy Forces’ instead of POWs?
So, for 70 years, much of the world and of course particularly Germany have been paying respect to a putative atrocity that has never been properly examined by the appropriate authorities. Billions in restitution money have been paid and continue to be paid to the supposed victims or their successors (although it’s debatable whether the victims, such as they may be, ever receive much of it).
The further the world distances itself in time from the alleged event, the easier it is to assert that ‘The Holocaust’ occurred. As education is steadily degraded and citizens become more concerned on the one hand with superficial entertainment and on the other, with keeping their jobs, it becomes less likely that anyone will pose the fundamental question: If we are eternal to honor 6 million allegedly murdered Jews, to create organizations and build memorials to aggrandize their passing, shouldn’t we at least have irrefutable proof that they were actually killed; that the crime really occurred?
By irrefutable proof is meant, of course, not the ludicrous and invariably refuted notions of ‘survivors’ and other self-important liars, fictitious fact and factitious fiction, but the results of a completely independent investigation, without the participation of a single Jew, or the obstruction of the Jew-owned media.
Once one has looked into the subject one discovers, not only that many educated people, historians, and scientists, have explored it without finding any truth in it, but that it only takes a few seconds of reflection based on common sense to come to the conclusion, as I have written, that a people with the traditions and culture of the Germans could not almost overnight have become barbarians and committed mass murder.
Unfortunately for the Jews who can least afford it, once one has begun to research the topic, one is inevitably drawn towards further investigation, and one is forced to conclude that such an enormous lie fits perfectly with previous lies and that lying is perhaps the primary attribute of this very fickle folk.
So why do we continue to tolerate it?
The stick of ‘anti-Semitism’, coupled with the carrot of financial benefits, is firmly in the hand of those who are steering our world towards an abyss. Although without substance, the accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ flaunts its power ubiquitously. That’s why it is vital urgently to analyze and dismiss it as so much hot air. All it would take would be for enough ordinary citizens to stand up and say ‘Stop it, it’s nonsense, you know it’s nonsense, and what’s more, it’s boring nonsense!’
JEA: You are precisely correct in your assessment. I have engaged in discussions on these matters with numerous individuals who possess the intellectual sophistication necessary to reach reasoned conclusions. Nevertheless, the reflexively convenient—and intellectually evasive—response often reduces to a single accusation: “anti-Semitism.”
I once encouraged a staunchly Zionist friend of mine to listen to a lecture delivered by the Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein, in which he systematically deconstructs the contemporary deployment of the “anti-Semitism” accusation. After the lecture was over, I turned to my friend and remarked, “Finkelstein’s own siblings perished under the Nazi regime. Do you consider him an anti-Semite?”
He responded with complete silence. Yet only a few days later, he resorted once again to the familiar “anti-Semitism” accusation. At that moment, I realized that I was no longer engaged in a rational conversation. Any possibility of genuine dialogue had become impossible, for he remained captive to an ideology that prevented him from exercising practical reason and, consequently, from perceiving reality as it is. He repeatedly attempted to reopen the conversation on the same issue, but I finally replied:
“I no longer wish to discuss this issue. Let us talk about biking instead [I’m also a cyclist]. If we cannot mutually agree to subject our views to rational analysis and serious historical scholarship, there is no reason to engage in an interminable debate. You persist in disregarding the points I have raised, and you do not appear willing even to examine the evidence presented. Time is valuable, and we should not squander it.”
Over the years, I have come to recognize that some individuals will readily dismiss practical reason whenever it challenges their ideological views. I have engaged in dialogue with many such individuals throughout the years. One individual, an amateur historian, confidently asserted that the Allies were unquestionably the “good guys.” To engage him, I specifically bought him R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2012) and suggested, politely, that we discuss the matter once he had read it. A few months later, when I inquired about his progress, he responded that he was no longer interested.
In other words, when confronted with historical evidence that conflicts with his ideological preconceptions, he chose to cling to his prior assumptions. This pattern is common in many forums: when individuals are unable to engage with a rational or historical argument, they often resort to name-calling, character assassination, straw man tactics, ad hominem attacks, and other fallacious strategies, as though they have never consulted a logic textbook or learned how to structure a formal argument and respond to an interlocutor in a reasoned manner. So, what typically motivates you? What drives your interest in exposing liars?
GM: Like millions of people, I am accustomed to respect the truth and to despise lies and liars. Now, it turns out that liars are the most successful people on earth. If anyone is curious about how this extraordinary situation came to be, they should read ‘Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil’.
This book is my gift to humanity. The fact that a minute section of humanity rejects it is not surprising, one cannot please everyone. The book exposes an ancient conspiracy against humanity, whose power is so great that it has succeeded, through lies, in imposing on about 30 countries fraudulent laws, which feign to counter alleged ‘bias-motivation’ (‘hate-crime’), but in reality, are designed to suppress freedom of expression, if this is directed against liars.
In addition to innumerable lesser lies, there have been three global lies, on which their inventors own the copyright and thus can be used for their benefit alone.
The First Great Lie declares the Rights of Man and a related Dignity of Man. This lie served as subterfuge for the murderous so-called ‘French’ Revolution of 1789, during which around 600,000 French people were robbed of their dignity.[4]
The Rights of Man and His concomitant Dignity have at no time prevented people from being mistreated and killed in the foulest fashion, often as a result of the machinations of the very beings who invented these rights.
The Second Great Lie is that money is finite and must be borrowed at interest (while simultaneously being produced out of thin air). This has resulted in the entire world being forced into debt.[5]
The Third Great Lie claims that there has been an exclusive massacre, which non-exclusive people must never forget. If this lie, while just as preposterous as the first two, is not yet quite as universally believed, it’s not for want of trying.
Lying for these beings is not so much an occasionally effective instrument as an ideology, a way of life. The drawback is that, eventually, their very existence has come to depend on lies. Truth, therefore, is an embarrassment which they must attack. They and their myriad minions fight around the clock to perpetuate their lies by twisting the facts and the law until they can be used to forbid and to punish freedom of expression, as though it were a crime equivalent to murder.
Ever since the birth of the Great Lies, there has existed a struggle between truth and lies. Will society lose its already precarious hold on reality by adopting a modish sophistry, or will it stick with plain unfashionable truth? Only you can decide which code you’re comfortable with.
JEA: Excellent point once again. One of the thinkers I admire most is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was among the most remarkable and penetrating minds of the twentieth century. He wrote,
“Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.
“And thus, overcoming our timidity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?”
Solzhenitsyn could not have expressed it any more clearly.
Notes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehudi_Menuhin .
[2] Humphrey Burton, “Lady Menuhin: Gifted dancer who complimented the life of her brilliant husband,” Guardian, February 7, 2003.
[3] Gerard Menuhin, Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil (Washington: The Barnes Review, 2015), 386
[4] E. Michael Jones has an entire chapter on The Rights of Man in his recent magnum opus Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 1169-1200.
[5] Ibid.
https://www.unz.com/article/the-intellectual-death-of-anti-semitism