I’m still reelin and rockin from Joe Klein’s statement/confession that Jewish neoconservatives made the Iraq war happen. Of course the key word in it is Jewish. That’s what’s got the Foxmans and Commentary bloggers so upset. Because the essential understanding Klein offers is that the neoconservative ideas for Iraq have a Jewish origin, and are caught up with the Zionist religion that has overtaken the American Jewish mind in the last 60 years (including the neocons’ fellow traveler mainstream Jewish journalists with a little Zionist fire in their bosom). That’s starting to unravel now, imshallah. inshallah.
Walt and Mearsheimer avoided the word Jewish. They are political scientists not sociologists, yet one of the most important moments in their book is when they talk about the changeover of Washington political culture from the days when William Quandt was at Brookings and writing important studies on the need for a two-state solution, way back in 1975, to 2002
when Kenneth Pollack is at Brookings, under the wing of Haim Saban, toymaker and Zionist, and issuing his Iraq war tract, The Threatening Storm, in which he stated that the Arab world doesn’t really care that much about the “troubles” in Israel/Palestine, and said nary a word about the occupation. You simply can’t look at Saban and Pollack’s accession without talking about the Jewish rise, Jewish success, Jewish money.
A few weeks back a reporter at a local Gannett paper interviewed me about the new Jewish establishment. He said he was interviewing Jamie Johnson, who has chronicled this trend somewhat at Vanity Fair, and Nick Lemann, whose book The Big Test described the ruling class before the meritocracy as the “Episcopacy.” ‘Cause they were all Episcopal. I don’t know if the guy’s piece has run, I suspect not or I would have heard about it; but in the interview as soon as I started talking about Zionism, he cut me off. This is about the sociology, he said, not international relations.
So right now we have a little reporting about the sociology, and on the other hand political reporting on the neocons and Iraq. Joe Klein’s comment and the furor over it may help at last to bring these two ideas together.
Look what’s happened to the Episcopacy, it’s vanishing from American life. I married into an Episcopal family. My wife doesn’t go to church, her sisters don’t go to church, and I hear fairly violent statements about religion at the Thanksgiving table. My mother-in-law is still a churchgoer, and for real. She went to Palestine with a church group, and smuggled sheets into a hospital in Bethlehem. But another Episcopalian and Israel/Palestine activist, Nancy Horn, tells me that in her small town in PA, she can go to one of three churches. “One’s got 15 members, one’s got 30, one’s got 40.” Then she adds with delicious irony: “The buildings are beautiful.” Liberal Protestants are leaving American public life.
One reason for the departure is religious fervor. “Liberal
Protestants were crucial to abolitionism and the civil rights movement–they were in the driver’s seat. But now, the
word Christianity has almost become a synonym for evangelical or
fundamentalist or pro-life,” says Brian Dana Akers, the son of a Methodist minister who was a big do-gooder. Akers himself is now a leading publisher of yoga books. “I myself have never been a churchgoer,
taking after my father’s father instead of my father, so perhaps I’m
part of the reason for the mainstream decline.And it occurs to me–not only was liberal religion driving events in
the 60s, many of the main actors were literally clergy members: Martin Luther King Jr. and many of his associates, William Sloan Coffin, Father Drinan, the Berrigan brothers, et al.”
This all speaks to a fact that an Arab friend pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago: “in the diverse American establishment, Zionists are the only ones with an esprit de corps.” By esprit, he meant a religious understanding, a way of giving life meaning. That religious understanding of course includes Israel–in the same way that fundamentalist Christian understanding includes pro-life and stem-cell research ideas. Joe Klein has kick-started a really important conversation. Can we have it?
The WASPs are spent as a force; the Jews have succeeded. That WASPs are merely one contingent of Christians shows how little
pure religion counts, as distingished from ethnic ID politics, the blessing of the 1965 Immigration Act. Let's get to this point: reparations: The Germans gave it to the Jews, but the Americans never gave it to the blacks. And the Israelis copycat, with righteousness. Obama is more like an American than a German:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/02/obama-opposes-slavery-rep_n_116506.html
Whence whitey? They took all in their name, now they pay. Reward:
Anniliation.
Witty can empathize.
LOL
M.J. Roseberg writing in TPM Cafe had a good suggestion for allowing the neocons to do penance for their part in causing the Iraq War. He said they should spend the rest of their lives volunteering at Walter Reed.
The WASP Episcopalians of the northeast aren't the only Christians, and contrary to the mythology in which they wrap themselves, they aren't exactly looked upon with love by many of their white Christian counterparts. They were just as self-serving as Jews seem to be, and their support of England in two wars was just as destructive.
The problem is that with the decline of northeastern Wasps and the rise of Jews, the rest of the nation is once again left out in the cold. Unfortunately, I think we will fare worse under Jews.
Yes, if that's possible–and it is. Look at Russia, 1917.
Here we come.
I'm going to ignore some of the other comments about Jews (yukky generalizations)
and talk a bit about do-gooding Protestants, from whom I am descended. My mother's father was a do-gooding Virginia Methodist minister – a deeply flawed man who nevertheless joined the NAACP in the 40s, held joint services with a Black reverend in the 50s at a time when this was unheard of, and completely supported my mother when she sat in at a lunch counter in Lynchburg, VA and went to jail. My grandmother was also a do-gooder of the high-minded, starchy Protestant sort.
My mother left the church in the mid-60s because it seemed irrelevant. Now she is back but she attends a traditionally Japanese-American Methodist church in California that is (of course) ethnically diverse and extremely liberal. The place is usually packed. Not everybody is Japanese there but there is a core ethnic glue that holds the church together.
I don't know if do-gooding liberal Protestants like my mother are going to save this country but I do believe I'm seeing a resurgence in these churches. Young people want their kids to have some kind of values. I send mine to church with mom (I go to another church occasionally that lines up with my own spiritual beliefs a little better – it is also packed every Sunday, 2 services, hundreds of people, diverse, prosperous, and very liberal).
See the Street Prophets offshoot of Daily Kos, and Sojourners. Are these folk taking over? No. But they arise from a longstanding tradition in this country and they are starting to fight back.
I think that if the economic woes continue we will see churches like these grow and become more influential.
Oh yes and you had better believe these liberal churches get it about Palestine. Yes they do.
Hey Phil, where does your WASP wife stand on what to do about Israel and its money & blood drain on Americans? Is she slated for an HBO special?
How does she feel about SOG/Bill Pearlman–who wants to milk all Americans to keep Israel safe?
Here's Ezra Klein on AIPAC and the media:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=07&year=2008&base_name=cry_antisemite_and_let_slip_th#comments
Revenge against WASPS set the current elite up; Phil joined the one-sided partnership when tribal revenge had reached a certain point of equality. He stakes his future on it. But, as insurance, he has no kids. Is this unfair?
The acronym WASP wasn't coined until 1964, at which time the decline of what it represented was already beginning.
The Jewish "ascendency," if that's what it is, won't last either. On college campuses, Asians are the "new Jews," and it's unlikely that Jews will be as prominent in politics a generation from now as they were in the Clinton-Bush years.