These comments are interesting because in many ways they are straight of out of Theodor Herzl himself. Herzl has been accused by anti-Zionists of being a Jewish anti-Semite, and he was a serious critic of the Jews. He felt that Jews and Gentiles could not live together and he felt that the fault was equally divided between the two groups.
He originally favored Jewish assimilation, but after the Dreyfus Affair in France in the late 1800's (this shocked many people because they thought that anti-Semitism in France was history by this time) he changed his mind and figured that the only way forward was for Jews and Gentiles to live in permanent separation.
He noted that when Jews did well, they become very successful businessmen and aroused the envy and wrath of the Gentiles, and when they sank into poverty, they bred radicals like rabbits.
When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 1896, p.91.The commenter points out that many early Zionists were socialists who felt that one of the problems of the Jew was that he had gotten out of touch with the land itself (however, Jews were forbidden to own land for most of their stay in Europe). To cure this defect, these socialist Zionists supported a sort of back to the land thing that would get Jews' hands dirty and make them into salt of the Earth again.
The question of whether or not nations have carrying capacities for Jews is most interesting, but I don't even want to go there. The author suggests that the US is presently reaching such a capacity.
Another very successful minority similar to Jews is the Overseas Chinese. There have been some pogroms against the Overseas Chinese, but it's nothing compared to what Jews have been through. Only about 3% of the population, they control about ~70% of the economies of, say, the Philippines and Indonesia.
Now, no group of people, no matter how kind-hearted or progressive, is going to put up with that kind of bullshit for long, and there is no way that the Overseas Chinese work 23 times harder or are 23 times smarter than Indonesians or Filipinos. At the outside, perhaps they are 3.5 times more intelligent than Indonesians or Filipinos. This would entitle them, with 3% of the population, to ~10% of the wealth, not an insane 70%.
The problem with capitalism is that in amasses such insane fortunes in the hands of small groups who frankly have not earned it due to either their genes or their harder work. In so doing, capitalism virtually guarantees endless racial conflict.
There are differences between Jews and Overseas Chinese. The Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, keep out of politics, and are not endlessly meddling in the cultural and political affairs of the nation - they just focus on making money. Jews focus on making money too, but they can't seem to help trying to change society, a habit that arouses mountains of anti-Semitism.
This is an interesting comment:
In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.That paragraph is most interesting, and led another commenter to rebut that Jews were never a part of industrialization in Germany and Britain; instead they were associated in Britain anyway with finance capital. The commenter then said he was reading a book by a guy named William Engdahl, A Century of War.
The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale...coincidence?
Engdahl is no anti-Semite, but he felt that the predominance of finance capital in Britain led to colonial adventures instead of building up domestic industry, to the eventual detriment of Britain. He then noted that in the 1920's and 1930's, German products were said to be better than British products.
I don't know about Jewish emancipation leading to the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Germany, but I believe that Jews played an essential role in the development of capitalism itself.
I also don't agree with the "German socialist" viewpoint that Hitler later picked up - along with Israel Shamir - that the Jews are a virus-like people, a race of rootless cosmopolitans without ties to the blood and soil and without loyalty to the nation, as the German capitalists supposedly had.
It's my understanding that in the 1920's, many top German capitalists, including factory owners, were Jews. Jews are now heavily involved in industry here in the US. Jews do not limit themselves anymore to finance capital, and they are not very big players in it anymore anyway, as it all seems to be taken over by multinational banks in the US, Europe and Asia with few to no Jewish connections.
The role of the Jews in finance capital in the past was quite large (they almost controlled European banking from ~1850-1930 or so).
The big players in the UK 110 years ago were not Jews but a couple of cabals, one centered around a man named Cecil Rhodes. This cabal also had ties to top UK universities like Oxford and Cambridge.
They went to the top boys schools like Eaton. They were active in colonialism and in groups such as the Oriental Society. They actually formed secret societies. It's true that Lord Rothschild was a member (at the periphery) of one of these secret societies, but he seems to have been the only Jew.
I really doubt that the dominance of finance capital (=Jewish money) in the UK 110 years ago is what led to colonial adventures. This group centered around Rhodes was very much into colonialism, and Britain was a huge industrial power in those days, mostly due to her Navy and her colonies.
Britain ruled the world from 1588 (the defeat of the Spanish Armada - and also the first stirrings of English nationalism - one of the first manifestations of classic European nationalism) all the way up until about 1935, when air power, notably German, successfully challenged British sea and colonial power.
German products have always been better than British products, especially fine machinery. I doubt the superiority of German fine machined products over such British products has much to do with Jewish money. There was plenty of Jewish money floating around Germany around that time too.
This cabal around Rhodes, I believe, continues to run The London Times to this very day, or at least they did in the mid 1960's.
At this point, the Jews are in Israel and they are not leaving. Radical Palestinians want to throw out every Jew who came after 1916 (The Balfour Declaration was in 1917). As a settler-colonist myself whose ancestors were still stealing Indian land for our settler-colonial project as late as 1873 in California (see Modoc Wars), this sort of thing makes me really uneasy.
Any settlement to the conflict in the Holy Land must take into account the safety of the Jews already there. I would hate to see a situation similar to Iraq where maniacal insurgents are running around slaughtering Jews at will and setting off car bombs and killing 100-200 Jews at a time. Arabs are Arabs, and I don't think Palestinians and Iraqis are all that different, except one comes from the Levant and the other from Mesopotamia.
I'm also not sure that Jewish-led industrialization in Germany (assuming it is a fact) led to the alienation and impoverishment of the rural people and the rise of Nazi blood and soil German ethnic nationalism, but it's a complicated question to be sure. The followers of the Nazis were mostly petit bourgeois, lower middle class office workers and the like. Rural dwellers were not so supportive.
Zionist Apologist writes:
Every ethnic group has a right to a state. It's a shame that the Jews had to steal Israel, but at least they have a place to call home now. Imperialism is unfortunately a part of humanity's dark history -- and we now have to deal with the dark consequences.
A homeland for Jews (whether in Israel or wherever else) is the ONLY WAY to 'heal' the Jews, and it'll take many generations. I'm sure you've heard the oft-repeated phrase [paraphrasing]: "Diaspora is the disease, and Israel is the cure."
The Zionists were considering places like Uganda or Argentina early on, and places like those would have been a better choice than Israel in the long run since the Jews would have then been able to develop an agricultural base economy, which is the root of a settled and stable nation-state.
However, those places were very rural and undeveloped and hence probably wouldn't have been successful (as the Jews saw many of their 'agricultural colony' experiments in Argentina and Africa and the USA and Canada collapse in dismal failure).
I have noticed that Ashkenazi Jews have a definite inability to settle anywhere in any substantial numbers that hasn't already been fairly heavily settled or where they don't have access to a nearby network of fellow Jews.
It is telling as well that the early Zionist ideals of hard work, agricultural and manual labor, and other mainstays of key Zionist doctrines are now being filled by imported (!) labor (often Asian or Arab) since so many Israelis 'dislike' that kind of work and all want to be lawyers and doctors and professors and journalists and bankers (surprise, surprise) rather than just another cog in Israeli society.
Israel is even having problems with their military draft now. But, you see, THE WHOLE POINT of the Zionist experiment was for Jews to become cogs in a stable Jewish society instead of always being the perpetual Jewish 'Other' in the societies of foreign peoples.
The Zionists also noticed that sometimes Jews tended to take advantage of often-times gullible non-Jewish peoples because of their general intelligence and capacity to facilitate commerce, and they wanted to fix that too.
In fact, some theorists and historians even believe that it was the general emancipation of the Jews in the early-to-mid 19th Century that led to the Industrial Revolution in The West and the consequent rise of modern industrial-capitalism, which Jews also played and still played a large part in.
The countries in Europe where Jews had the most political and economic freedom, especially England and Germany, were also the first to industrialize on a large scale...coincidence?
The problem with this, though, is that this Jewish-inspired industrialization tended to slowly choke the lifestyle and economic systems of the rural/agrarian people of those countries who obviously weren't Jews, thus leading to resentment (antisemitism) - hence the Nazi doctrine of "blood and soil" and their desire to eventually resurrect the German peasantry in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe.
I have also noticed that every nation has a sort of Jewish 'carrying capacity,' i.e. it is unable to manage, hold, or absorb Jews in very large numbers until antisemitism starts to break out (for instance, history shows that antisemitism in Germany grew very quickly as more and more Jews from Eastern Europe fled to Germany and Western Europe trying to escape poverty or antisemitism or whatever).
And in some ways I think that the saturation point may be close to being reached in North America.I must say that an island nation might actually be best for Jews, as long as it could be mostly self sufficient. As Ezra Pound once said in one of his infamous WWII radio broadcasts: "Sell 'em Australia."
References
- Herzl, Theodore. 1896. The Jewish State. New York: Dover Publications reprint in 1988. Originally published, 1946, New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, edited, original translation by Slyvie d'Avigdor revised by Jacob M. Alkow.
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