Outlaw History #5

I received a number of letters regarding my reaction to a friend telling me that he believes all Jews should be murdered. This one from Joe Bishop is the most focused and unrelenting of the lot.

Joe: Thanks for writing. The image of me wanting to “smash” in the face of Bill Wright at a particular moment (the desire faded as it came without thought) appears to be the image that most rivets your attention. It's an ugly image, one of anger and brutality. I thought I had said so with this:

At the same time, I am not unaware that for all my talk about intellectual freedom, and the right of the minority to express its opinion, I betrayed myself when I got angry with Bill for expressing the idea that all baby Jews should be murdered. He was being sincere with me. He was being honest. My anger, my desire to smash in his face, illustrates how difficult it is for ordinary people to accept the right of others to express an opinion that you do not share. I am the one who is not supposed to believe in 'thought crimes.'

I wrote what I did as a “confession.” To note that I had acted against my own principles, in the heat of the moment as it were. That with regard to rage, and the desire to censor the words of the other, there are moments when I am no different and no better than those I criticize. Because I am no better than those who view me as their enemy, I am obligated to recall that I am guilty of the same urges toward censorship, brutality, and dominion as they are.

I don't buy the concept that Jews have a “human nature” different from mine. It is not even a concept that can be defined. We all have our personal history, our cultural history, our genetic history, and none of us can sort it all out in more than a very generalized way. I'm willing to be convinced that I am wrong about this, but if it can be morally justified for us to kill Jews, then it must be morally justifiable for Jews to kills us. If not, why not? If so, what are we complaining about?

If we can say anything whatever about “human nature,” it would be to say that it is now what it has always been, focused on an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You express that perfectly in your letter, as Bill does in his. I think it intriguing that the three of us are on the same page with regard to the gas chamber fraud and most the rest of that business, while so far apart on these matters. Guilt by association?

Re the Talmud: I have to say that with some thirty years living among and with Jews, that I never heard one Jew mention it. Never had the idea that any found it interesting. It won't do to say that they were hiding from me their interest in the Talmud. They didn't hide anything from me. I have to add that I did not associate with Jews who were religious. I didn't plan it that way. That's just the way it came about. In thirty years I never knew a Jew, as opposed to meeting one I suppose, who kept a kosher kitchen.

With regard to reading books and scholarly papers in order to decide which children to murder and which not to murder: as I wrote before, you do not get there via scholarship. Or how do we explain why the Aztecs sacrificed adults and children together by ripping out their hearts? Or Africans eating each other, with babies a preferred dish? Where are the scholarly papers, written by illiterates, supporting philosophically the concept that in some cases it is morally justified to murder children? That's just something we have always done – we meaning all of us. I recall reading where Germans, when they were still pagans and living in the forest in hamlets protected by stockades, would sacrifice a child and bury it beneath the main gatepost at the stockade entrance.

We get to the place where we want to murder by very subterranean routes. And then we write books and scholarly papers to invent reasons why we should murder some but not others. We parse the concept of murder like two-bit lawyers, depending on the culture into which we are born, the neighborhood we grow up in, the friends we make as we go along. The same way we choose which god to worship.

That's what “human nature” is, if it's anything. There is no difference between victims and victimizers, other than the context in which we find ourselves. The history of Western Europe, and Western man, exemplifies this perfectly. We have to be very careful with the concept of “human nature.” It's a hot potato.

In any event, thanks for the kind words about Bones.