Cholesterol misunderstanding

 Statins

The establishment definition of a statin refers to,

“any one of a class of drugs that inhibit the action of an enzyme involved in the liver’s production of cholesterol.”

The reason that drugs are required to inhibit the production of cholesterol is claimed by the NIH, on the Resources web page entitled High Blood Cholesterol: What You Need to Know, to be because,

“High blood cholesterol is one of the major risk factors for heart disease.”

The medical establishment theory, which claims that a high level of cholesterol is dangerous and needs to be reduced, is, however, flawed. Interestingly, the establishment definition of cholesterol highlights one of the flaws in this theory because it includes the statement that,

“Cholesterol and its esters are important constituents of cell membranes…”

Despite the plethora of recommendations by the medical establishment that people should lower their intake of cholesterol, the total level of cholesterol within the body is not regulated by dietary intake. The overwhelming proportion, approximately 85%, of the body’s requirement for cholesterol is produced by the liver; it is only the remaining 15% approximately that is obtained through the diet. If, for some reason, the diet provides the body with insufficient cholesterol, the liver will increase its production to compensate for that dietary deficiency. It is clear therefore, that it is the body that regulates the level of this vital substance.

Cholesterol is not solely an important constituent of cell membranes; it is also an important constituent of the brain and essential for its proper functioning; as indicated by a 2010 article entitled The Effects of Cholesterol on Learning and Memory, which states that,

“Cholesterol is ubiquitous in the central nervous system (CNS) and vital to normal brain function including signaling, synaptic plasticity, and learning and memory.”

The recognition that cholesterol is vital for the proper functioning of many of the body’s vital organs directly contradicts the information promulgated by the medical establishment that cholesterol is ‘dangerous’, and that high levels in the body pose a serious ‘risk’ to health.

An April 2016 article entitled Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis, published in the BMJ, explains that the original hypothesis about levels of cholesterol stemmed from a study called the Minnesota Coronary Experiment that was conducted between 1968 and 1973; but the results of this study were not published. This experiment was a controlled study that, for the participants of one of the groups, involved the replacement of saturated fats with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat. This dietary intervention was shown to reduce serum levels of cholesterol and assumed to be beneficial.

The documents and data from this original study have recently been re-analysed and the results published in the BMJ. The reason that the original study was not published is claimed to be because the researcher did not believe the results he had obtained. The BMJ article states that,“In meta-analyses, these cholesterol lowering interventions showed no evidence of benefit on mortality from coronary heart disease.”

In addition to the lack of evidence that any benefits accrued from the lowering of cholesterol levels, the BMJ article reports that the evidence,

“…suggests the possibility of an increased risk of death for the intervention group…”

This is not the only study that has discovered that low cholesterol correlates with an increased risk of mortality, not a reduced risk, as the medical establishment claims.

It is stated that there are two types of cholesterol; LDL (low-density lipoproteins), which is regarded as ‘bad’ and HDL (high-density lipoproteins), which is regarded as ‘good’; but these labels are completely misleading. The idea that cholesterol can be either good or bad is based on a misunderstanding that arose from another study that investigated the effects of cholesterol on laboratory animals. The misunderstanding occurred because it was not recognised at the time that the cholesterol used in the study had been oxidised; it is the oxidation of cholesterol that causes health problems. In his book entitled Health and Nutrition Secrets, Dr Russell Blaylock explains the mistaken perception about the different types of cholesterol,

“The reason LDL cholesterol is bad is that it is much easier to oxidize than HDL cholesterol. But oxidized HDL cholesterol is just as dangerous as oxidized LDL cholesterol.”

Oxidation of the cholesterol that constitutes cell membranes will inevitably, adversely affect the cell’s function and, likewise, oxidation of the cholesterol in the brain will affect brain function. These detrimental effects are the direct result of the process of oxidation; a process that produces ‘free radicals’, which are highly reactive particles that can cause damage to any part of the body with which they make contact. Oxidised cholesterol has been shown to cause damage to blood vessels; although free radicals cause damage wherever they are produced in the body.

On the basis of the flawed idea that it is a high level of cholesterol in the body that is the problem, the pharmaceutical industry developed drugs called statins to inhibit the production of this vitally important substance. Inevitably, there are many dangers associated with the use of statins, which, by intention, are designed to interfere with the body’s normal production of cholesterol. The consequences of inhibiting the enzyme in the liver to reduce the production of cholesterol are discussed by Dr Carolyn Dean in Death by Modern Medicine,

“That enzyme, however, does much more in the body than just make cholesterol, so when it is suppressed by statins there are far-ranging consequences.”

Statins are proclaimed by the medical establishment to be both safe and effective, yet, like all other drugs, they produce a number of severely detrimental effects, some of which are explained by Dr Dean,

“Since the brain has the highest concentration of cholesterol in the body, it’s no wonder that the constant demand for lower and lower cholesterol counts is going to impinge on brain function. Previous studies have shown that statins can result in polyneuropathy, which causes numbness, tingling, and burning pain. Researchers showed that people taking statins were 4 to 14 times more likely to develop polyneuropathy than those who did not take statins.”

Statins are intended to inhibit the production of cholesterol; they are not intended to address the problem of oxidised cholesterol, which means that they fail to address the underlying cause of the problem. There are a number of factors that can cause the oxidation of cholesterol and they include many toxic chemicals that are ubiquitous to the environment, as Dr Dean explains,

“In addition, chlorine, fluoride in water, pesticides and other environmental pollutants can also oxidize cholesterol in the body.”

The problems with these chemicals and other environmental pollutants are discussed in more detail in chapter six. Oxidised cholesterol can also be found in processed and ‘fast’ foods, which are also discussed in more detail in chapter six.

In addition to their increased use as treatments for patients with high levels of cholesterol, statins are increasingly prescribed as preventives on the basis of the idea that this will reduce the risk of developing a CVD. As demonstrated by the study published in the BMJ, there is no evidence that high levels of cholesterol constitute a health problem or even increase the risk of developing health problems. The study in fact revealed the opposite; that low levels of cholesterol produce adverse health consequences and that statins increase the level of harm to health.

The harm that they have been shown to cause is demonstrated by the withdrawal of certain statin drugs from the market following reports about a number of severe ‘side effects’, and even death in some cases. Nevertheless, many statin drugs remain on the market, including some that are known to produce many serious adverse effects, as has been reported by many patients who have taken these drugs. This would seem to be another instance of the benefit being claimed to outweigh the risk; but this is clearly not the case.

One of the serious adverse effects that can result from the use of statins is reported in a December 2015 article entitled Statin Use and the Risk of Kidney Disease With Long-Term Follow-Up (8.4-Year Study) published in the American Journal of Cardiology. This study acknowledges that there had been few studies on the long-term use of statins, especially with respect to the effects on kidney disease. The conclusion to the study states that,

“…statin use is associated with increased incidence of acute and chronic kidney disease.”

The reason that these serious health problems were not discovered from the original clinical trials is also explained by the article that states,

“These findings are cautionary and suggest that long-term effects of statins in real-life patients may differ from shorter term effects in selected clinical trial populations.”

Yet again, the medical establishment’s lack of knowledge about the human body has created more problems than it has solved in the attempt to reduce the incidence of heart disease. Cholesterol is not responsible for heart disease, therefore attempts to reduce the body’s production of cholesterol will not reduce the risk of heart disease.

What Really Makes You Ill?

Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease is Wrong

Dawn Lester & David Parker

If I have met an arahant Ajahn Chah definitely was one

 Q: You said you trained under Ajahn Chah and his teaching. Was Ajahn Chah an arahant or not? What are your views on it?

Ajahn Amaro: If I have met an arahant he definitely was one. But you can’t really judge from the outside. If people asked Ajahn Chah if he was an arahant, he would say, ‘It takes one to know one,’ or ‘Why are you asking me that? Instead, you should ask yourself why you are not.’ He certainly seemed like the happiest man in the world. That was one of the most striking things about him.

The scriptures state that one of the qualities of stream-entry is to be ‘independent of others in the training, the practice’. That quality of independence doesn’t mean being isolated or abstracted, or having an egotistical attitude of ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks.’ Rather it is a profound self-reliance, self-confidence. Ajahn Chah didn’t need anyone to like him or to approve of him. If you tried to flatter him, he’d make you look at why on earth you were doing that. You could never second-guess him. He had an extraordinary quality of ease coupled with a tremendous liveliness. He paid close attention to those he was with and what was going on yet he simultaneously displayed an extraordinary relaxation at the same time. He was fully attuned to what was happening but he didn’t need it to be a particular way in order for him to be happy.

Ajahn Chah was an extremely strict and orthodox monk – we practise in a rigorous and traditional religious order that is 2,500 years old – but despite that set of conventional limitations he had an astonishing quality of freedom. He was completely at ease with whatever happened, which doesn’t mean to say that he had ‘checked out’, off in some distracted dream world; he was simply very flexible, responsive and adaptable with respect to how situations unfolded.

Having had a stroke, and pretty much physically paralysed, he was still cracking jokes about his brain function collapsing. Not trying to put a brave face on it out of insecurity, but being genuinely okay with watching what was unfolding in his life. He had enjoyed having his faculties and had made good use of them. He had used them well to help himself and others. Now that those faculties were fading, he was quite okay with them as they disappeared. He did the best he could with them as they were going, but there was no sense of loss as they were fading. The last ever formal Dhamma talk that he gave, in 1981, published in English as Why Are We Here?, spells out this skilful attitude out with great clarity. His stroke and the subsequent brain damage happened shortly thereafter.

Being ready to point out things that students are deeply attached to.

(...)

 Sometimes you’ll see meditation courses or mindfulness programs that do make outrageous promises. ‘Just pay $5,000 for this weekend and your life will be changed forever. You will be happy, liberated, enlightened’ and so on. These are very sweeping statements. I’m not quoting adverts verbatim, but I think we’ve all come across those pieces of literature and their promises.

I do feel that the commercialising of Dharma is an uncomfortable drift. When things have a big price tag on them, they have to be dressed up in a way that makes them interesting, sexy, and attractive. That means that sometimes the challenging aspects of the teaching may be trimmed out. For example, those teachings that point to your opinions, your middle-class value systems, your attachment to your appearance or to your wealth. And teachings like ‘renunciation’ or ‘unattractiveness of the body’ are deleted because they don’t help to fill the seats at your events.

It is an ongoing dialogue, but I feel the degree to which the challenging or less attractive teachings get edited out, or left in the fringes, is a weakness. That can weaken the teaching. In 1979, when our teacher from Thailand, Ajahn Chah, visited the USA, he was invited to teach at a ten-day retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. He was asked to give advice to the teachers: Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Jackie Schwartz (now Jacqueline Mandel) and Joseph Goldstein. They asked Ajahn Chah to give them advice as teachers. He said: ‘You will succeed only if you are prepared to challenge the attachments and obsessions of your students.’ The Thai phrase was literally, ‘If you’re ready to stab their hearts.’ Ajahn Chah had a good way of getting people’s attention. Because that is the kindness of the teacher, in being ready to point out things that students are deeply attached to. Particularly to point out the things that students really don’t want to let go of. That is the job of the teacher. That is the kindness of the teacher.

Probably there are a few doctors and surgeons here. How could a surgeon operate if you didn’t use a knife occasionally? These days there’s a lot of microsurgeries but you need the knife sometimes, to get to where the trouble is. That was pointed advice from Ajahn Chah. The kindness of the teacher sometimes needs to manifest as giving advice that’s painful or challenging. It manifests as giving advice that goes against the preferred version of the student’s reality.

Another story that comes to mind is from a friend of ours, a Tibetan lama, Tsoknyi Rinpoche. He would refer to editing the approach to Dharma practice according to your own preferences, as ‘California Dharma’. ‘Yes, I see, all things are empty, nothing is worth attaching to, but I simply like my comforts. I like to have a few beautiful things around but I’m not attached. I just like to have a beautiful home in Marin County, with a nice view, with a picture window looking out over the Bay. But I’m not attached!’

He was staying in a particularly beautiful house in Marin, and his host was from a very wealthy family, and he was talking in these terms. Rinpoche picked up a coffee pot that was sitting on the table, and he started tilting it towards the hand-made Turkish carpet. He asked, ‘How much did this carpet cost you?’ The host replied, ‘About $35,000.’ Rinpoche said, ‘So, tell me about your non-attachment...’ as he tilted the coffee pot a little bit more and a little bit more. ‘You say you really like this place and you enjoy having beautiful things around, but you’re not attached? So how not attached are you?’ And then he tilted the coffee pot a few more degrees. ‘Alright, alright, alright! I’m attached! I’m attached! Just don’t spoil the carpet.’ That was a very practical teaching. It is also the kind of teaching you get from the Thai Forest Ajahns. Teachings that are very to the point.

One other weakness that is happening in the West – in this trimming and editing of the Dhamma teachings to fit people’s preferences and opinions so that it is not challenging – is particularly with respect to mindfulness teachings and the absence of reference to ethics, the deliberate omission of teachings on ethics. For example, the Five Precepts that the Buddha established as guidance for the lay community. Those Precepts are very deliberately left out of the mindfulness trainings: such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). I’ve had long discussions and correspondence with Jon Kabat-Zinn, (founder of MBSR) on this and he speaks very strongly for the need to leave ethics as implicit rather than explicit, within those trainings. The same approach has been taken with respect to MBCT.

I’d like to read a piece in relationship to that. There’s a rich ongoing discussion within the field of whether ethics should be articulated or not. My own (probably biased) opinion is that it’s a weakness. It would be much more helpful to be more explicit, to spell things out in terms of what really benefits us as human beings. I would say that ethical guidelines, the Precepts, can be articulated and held, without them being seen as religious dictates or uptight Victorian formalisms. But rather the Precepts can be held as skilful guidelines for living wisely, carefully and compassionately.
As it seems very relevant to the theme, I’d read this extract from a commentary I wrote on an article in the academic journal Mindfulness. It addresses some of the aspects in the relationship between MBSR and the ethical field. The original article was written by Elaine Montero, who is from the University of Toronto, and her partners.

Jon Kabat-Zinn in 2004 defined mindfulness as: ‘Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.’

My comment is: ‘His definition is somewhat broad and though useful, is open to misinterpretation or misuse.’ On this issue, Montero et al. commented:

‘On the implicit rather than the explicit role of ethics in the teaching and practice of mindfulness. This omission of silā may result in concepts such as ‘non-judgmental awareness’ fostering a range of negative stances from self-indulgence to passivity. And this is where, in the absence of proper teacher-training, a poor grasp of concepts such as bare awareness, non-judgmental awareness, nonduality and so on, are likely to misguide participants into bypassing their experience rather than connecting with it.’

Then in a different section it says:

‘The response to this central issue concerning mindfulness-based interventions from the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction is significant. Elaine Montero stated: ‘Reflecting on the choice to keep the teachings of ethics implicit, Jon Kabat-Zinn states that, “Each person carries the responsibility both personally and professionally to attend to the quality of their inner and outer relationships.” At the same time, he indicates that this must be supported “by explicit intentions regarding how we conduct ourselves both inwardly and outwardly.”’

Further, Kabat-Zinn, in 2007, responds to earlier concerns about the exclusion of ethics by indicating that personal and professional ethical guidelines are intrinsic to the delivery of MBI (Mindfulness-Based Intervention Programs.) He also argues that because there is a societal tendency to be incongruent with respect to inner and outer moral stances, an implicit teaching of silā is preferable.

My comments:

‘Jon Kabat-Zinn’s words here seem particularly carefully chosen, as though balanced on a tightrope between his acknowledged respect for the source of MBSR: “I’ve always used mindfulness as a placeholder for the Dharma” [Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2013] and his intention to make MBSR as accessible to as broad a field of people as possible. ‘However, the guidelines he gives are, from the Buddhist perspective, significantly vague, in my opinion. The statements that “each person carries the responsibility both personally and professionally to attend to the quality of their inner and outer relationships” and that one should have “explicit intentions regarding how we conduct ourselves both inwardly and outwardly” could comfortably be assigned to the fictional characters of Tony Soprano (the Mafia boss) or Walter White (methamphetamine cook).’ (That’s my comment.)

‘Of even more concern is the statement that: “because there is a societal tendency to be incongruent with respect to inner and outer moral stances, an implicit teaching of silā (ethics) is preferable.” This seems to state that, because there’s a disparity between the ideals people hold and what they actually do, it’s best not to talk about the subject at all. ‘If this is a correct interpretation of the comment – and again from a traditional Buddhist standpoint – this is a very dubious principle on which to structure a pedagogical approach and a system of would-be beneficial psychological practices.’

I was having a bit of a rant there, and I was wondering what Jon Kabat-Zinn would say about that. But he read it and to his credit, he was quite okay with it. But I felt that sense of things being implicit was so vague. And yes, Walter White (from ‘Breaking Bad’) he was cooking methamphetamine and making millions of dollars for his family. Yes, he was doing it on purpose, it was deliberate. He had an intention in mind. He was surveying his internal concerns. Yes, thousands of people are going to have their lives messed up by this, but it’s worth it because this is what my family needs to survive, because I’m dying of cancer. That is his ethic. That is the story of the whole series. And so, yes: it was deliberate. It was thoughtful. He is paying attention to the standard. And he is a meth cook.

So also in the scenario with Tony Soprano, the mafia boss in 'The Sopranos': what he does is deliberate, it is intentional, and it is for the family. And a few people get rubbed out along the way... Those things are not insignificant. Again, this is my biased viewpoint.

There is a way that our actions and our speech can be guided by concerns that there are results. There are beneficial results and harmful results. The Five Precepts create a very helpful standard of conduct to stop creating trouble for ourselves and for others. The Five Precepts are: to refrain from killing, to refrain from stealing, to refrain from sexual misconduct, to refrain from lying and to refrain from using intoxicants. They are a helpful standard for people so that they can live skilfully and kindly.

It doesn’t have to be a decree from above: ‘Thou shalt not…’, a diktat from outside, held as a Victorian moralism. But rather it is like the way the law requires you to have effective brakes on your car. If you’re going to be on the road, if you get pulled over, and the police want to check your brakes and they don’t work, then you’re off the road. So, similarly, I feel it’s helpful to think of these ethical guidelines in terms of driving safely amongst the other members of the traffic on the road.

Another challenge is the ongoing meshing of ancient traditions and patriarchal Asian societal forms, with an egalitarian Western society. That is an interesting mix. We must bear in mind that the Buddha was teaching 2,500 years ago. It was a very long time ago. The forms that you have in traditional Buddhist societies – such as Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, China, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Tibet and into Mongolia, Siberia and so forth – are forms which have been the body of Buddhist practice developed over many centuries. There are a lot of challenges in taking those forms and planting them into Western society. Challenges in terms of what to keep, what to delete, how to adapt things, how to change things. It is an ongoing dialogue. In some respects, it is a weakness and a challenge; because some things don’t fit very well in terms of the customs, the traditions, the superstitions, and the forms. They are an uncomfortable fit in Western society.

Other things do fit well, but they are unfamiliar and strange to our perceptions. For myself, in my own community, that’s been a very rich ongoing dialogue. When Ajahn Chah first came to teach in Great Britain, he received an invitation from a group in London to visit their little monastery in Hampstead, in Haverstock Hill in London. He accepted the invitation and told Ajahn Sumedho and a few other monks that they should stay there. He said, ‘You can change the robes if you want to, and you can change the chanting. This is a cold country. You can adapt those if you want to, but you must go out on alms-round every single day.’ They thought that was a bit strange, they thought he would insist on the robes and the ritual forms. But why go on alms-round? 'Who is going to put food in our bowls in London?' But Ajahn Chah was insistent about the alms round. He said, ‘You must go out. Your job is to be the fourth heavenly messenger [the sign of renunciation]. You must go out every day.’ That became a very strong ethic for us that we have adapted a little over time.

(...)
Ajhan Amaro

Mental Enema

 

In this winter’s retreat, the month of January has passed and a new month begins in the silence, the cold weather, the stillness of winter. Whether the retreat is organized for us to be meditating as a group or alone, being the listener, the witness to the way it is, is the important issue. We’re not trying to get or get rid of anything but to just be the neutral observer, the Buddho, the witness to the way things are. This is bhāvanā – the Pali word for meditation and for developing the Eightfold Path.

During these days, many of you will experience a lot of suppressed memories or emotions that might arise, such as fear, guilt or remorse. Repressed anger or resentment can come up during these silent retreats. You can be rather frightened by it because sometimes we see a retreat like this as getting tranquil, getting samādhi and living in a blissful state where all the fears and anger, resentments, the world and all its complexities are suppressed and we're just in a one-pointed state of happiness that we'd like to hold on to.

Many times we may have been on retreats where we got various strong senses of samādhi, of luminosity, of peace, and then we want that again. We'd like to always feel like that, to feel enlightened, to feel blissful, to be free from fear and desire. When we practise meditation to get something, remember that the previous blissful experience is now a memory. So when you remember past experiences of being peaceful – feeling bliss through the silence of a retreat – you're remembering something that happened in the past, and that creates a desire to get to that state again. This is where being the witness is the important position to take – not the one who's trying to get something that you don't have in the present, that you remembered having on previous retreats. Be a witness to that very desire, the desire to get something you're not feeling, or that you don't have at this present moment. Much of our life is like this.

The cultural conditioning, the social conditioning that we've all experienced, very much sets up a habit pattern of repression. Cultural conditioning is about what's right and wrong, what's polite, what's impolite, what is true, what is false. You acquire these values from your parents, from your social group, and then carry them through life making value judgments about yourself and the world around you because of the cultural conditioning that you acquired when you were quite innocent, before you had any time to reflect on it. You just absorbed like a sponge, absorbed everything that was thrown at you, given to you, or what you were told was right and wrong.

During these retreats, maybe we have a lot of fear that arises over nothing in particular, either in the monastery or the immediate environment. Or maybe a lot of anger or resentment may manifest when you're in silent meditation. And then you try to get rid of it, that's one reaction, to suppress it, or feel that you can't meditate. Then you feel you're not a good monk or a good nun because you're feeling like this, or because the mind can proliferate, fight, resent. And all of this can be witnessed. All of us have a lot in life to resent because the life we experience from an ideal position isn't like that. It's not about justice and fairness where everything's right and your parents, social group, religious education – whatever it might have been – was right or wrong.

This word ‘conditioning’ is neutral. It's not about right conditioning or wrong conditioning, but conditioning itself through reward and punishment. When you're good, you get rewarded for that, and when you're bad, you're punished. That's the conditioning process. That's social and cultural conditioning that we experience. But witnessing that conditioning is not judging it in any way, but recognizing that there are a lot of repressed feelings, emotions, and desires. Resistance and repression are other forms of clinging. Vibhava taṇhā, the desire to get rid of or resist something, is like this.

Luang Por Chah had many stories to tell about how he dealt with fear. In Thai society, they are very much conditioned to believe in ghosts and spirits that you can't see but that exist in various places. That's very strong cultural conditioning. Being a dhutaṅga bhikkhu, a wandering monk, he would go and live in charnel grounds or graveyards where the suggestions and conditions for fear of ghosts or spirits would be most prominent. A graveyard always gives the impression of someplace you don't generally want to go into, even to someone who was not conditioned like that. It reminds you of death, and death is another fear we all have; fear of dying. In the worldly life, the sensory realm that we experience, there's a lot to fear. It's not an unreasonable emotion; it's primal to the animal world. The animal world is a world of survival and fear. Fear is a kind of protective mechanism, to be aware of where danger lies and try to avoid it. But because of memory, we can remember things even in the safest places and be frightened in our condo in London with locks on the door, guards at the gate.

Resentment is another example of conditioning. We have all maybe experienced unfairness in our lives, from teachers or parents who didn't understand what we were doing. Friends, or society in general, can make value judgments about us. Fear of what other people think is another strong social conditioning experience. ‘What will the neighbours think?’ But the ‘witness’ isn't thinking. It's not about thinking or deliberately trying to do something, but working with the way things are. You don't have to go to a graveyard to deal with fear of ghosts or spirits, or fear of something out there in the atmosphere that is some kind of menacing presence. We can consider just the way we can make ourselves frightened with what we're thinking or by remembering things of the past.

Fear is also an emotion that we sometimes like to experience. You wonder why people go to horror movies to be scared out of their wits by what they see on a screen. Why would you pay money to be scared? It’s because it is an exciting feeling, to be frightened and scared, to feel like you're a victim of life, a victim of society or a social group. There's something very egotistical about playing the role of a victim because it makes us feel that we're somebody who's been unfairly treated or victimized by something else outside ourselves. But the witness is aware. When one feels victimized by life, it’s like this. You're taking the position of ‘Buddhaṁ saraṇaṁ gacchāmi’ – refuge in Buddha, to witness the way it is. It's not about getting rid of fear, or justifying everything and just trying to explain or analyze everything away. Or you try to think about it and analyze yourself, and blame your frightened tendencies on others. Or maybe you blame yourself, thinking you're just a weak person because you have a lot of fear to deal with. Whatever you think, whatever direction the critical mind takes, it's still words and thoughts and habits that you're using. You're not being a witness, you're being a critic – thinking about yourself, thinking about the world.

Sometimes one can relate to meditation, taking the witness position, as a kind of mental enema, a cleansing process. The word enema means a kind of cleansing process for the body, but this is a mental enema where we don't have to do anything but witness the mental conditions that arise. What comes out of your mind might be repulsive like any physical enema, but it's being released from yourself. You're letting go of it and allowing it to manifest, becoming fully conscious and not clinging to it. The Buddho is a refuge that we all refer to – Buddha as a refuge. It’s not refuge in some idealized Buddha of the past, not in some kind of traditional ceremonial chant, but it's about witnessing the way things are. When we talk about Gotama the Buddha’s enlightenment, he was witnessing the way things are, not trying to get rid of things, to fight or resist, or just get into a state where he didn't feel anything. There is that image of him under the Bodhi tree where he gives up trying to control his mind, trying to arrange everything, trying to get into a nice peaceful state. He just lets go of everything and then, as the legend goes, all the forces of the universe come and tempt him both on the fear and desire levels. His response is witnessing, not trying to control it, get rid of it, or condemn it, but just noticing, witnessing the presence and the absence of phenomena that arise. So it's a fearless position.

In my own experience, that's how I've learned to really develop or cultivate bhāvanā or sammā diṭṭhi, right understanding. It's not to fight or resist but to observe. Luang Por Chah’s definition of Buddho, the Buddha's name, is ‘the one who is a witness’. Knowing is like this. During this retreat, when negativity arises – fear, jealousy, anxiety, worry, doubt – see it as a blessing. It's asking to be let go of. It arises in consciousness when the conditions in a retreat here are not frightening. Amaravati Monastery is a very safe place in terms of external conditions. The community is trained with the vinaya – the precepts – so we’re committed to non-violence, to celibacy, to right speech; that's our intention as a group. In terms of safety it's as safe as you can get, where you have the community you're actually living and associated with, that makes such a strong commitment to moral precepts. So even if fear, jealousy, anxiety, worry, or doubt arise, don't take it personally. Don't see it as some kind of thing you've got to get rid of, or that if you want to get enlightened you've got to get rid of doubt. Because that very position of ‘I've got to get rid of doubt, get rid of fear’ is the ego again. ‘I'm somebody who has something I shouldn't have. If I were wise and enlightened, I wouldn't have any doubts or fears.’ That's an ideal we might create around Buddhist monks or nuns, or the Buddha himself. There is social conditioning, for example, the sīlabbata parāmāsa or attachment to conventions, social conventions, religious conventions. The vinaya is a moral convention that we attach to, not to create a sense of personality with it. We can become very arrogant when we look down on others who don't seem to have the high standards of moral conduct that we see in ourselves, that we are clinging to. It's not about creating a sense of moral superiority or condemning others, but they’re guidelines for action and speech in community life, in daily life.

Social conventions are something that we might not even notice. So much of Western psychology is based on the ego. We emphasize the word ego a lot, a sense of self-conceit or self-importance. It includes even an ego where we despise ourselves or look down on or criticize ourselves. Whatever habitual identity you form – an attachment to your physical body, or your physical identity – the ego comes from that strong conditioning, through social conditioning, through thinking.

Vicikicchā, generally translated into English as doubt, is the third fetter which prevents us from seeing the right path to sammā diṭṭhi. So we investigate doubt – to not be sure, to be uncertain, to be unstable, to not know something is like this. And that's about thinking, isn't it? You realize the danger of attachment to thought, how you create a whole world of expectations and fears just through thinking. We live in a realm of doubt and uncertainty and instability because the world is an illusion. It's not what you think. It's not a condition that you can control. The world arises and ceases according to other conditions. The sensory bodies we identify with are conditions: what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch – everything we think – is conditioned. Conditions can be skilful, kusala, or unskilful, akusala. But the Buddho, the knower, the witness, is aware. Skilful, unskilful, good, bad are all conditions created through thinking, through believing, through grasping. When you really penetrate that with wisdom, then the insight you get is letting go. It doesn't mean getting rid of the conditions, it means just releasing your grasp. In terms of samādhi or concentration, it's more like a relaxed state of awareness, not an intense grasping state of intense concentration on an object. It’s a sense of relaxation, of letting go, of releasing the body from all its tensions, releasing your mind from all its fears and desires. So when this happens, when we really trust in letting go, then sammā diṭṭhi – right understanding, or perfect understanding – arises. It’s there naturally. As individual people, we're not trying to be wise and get right understanding. When we think we're very wise and have sammā diṭṭhi, that's another conceit. After 55 years of monastic life, if I still think I have sammā diṭṭhi as a person, that's a delusion. Sumedho is an illusion, it's a costume, it's a convention. It's not a real person. But Buddho you can trust – conscious awareness in the present is like this.

Striving to get right understanding is good. There's nothing bad about it, wanting to become enlightened, wanting to become free from suffering, wanting to attain Buddhahood, wanting to become a bodhisattva. Wanting to become anything, like just a good person or a good monk or nun, that's good karma. It's good but it's still a convention. It's still a condition, a sense of me and mine – me, trying to become a very good monk or a good person, or get a good rebirth in the next life or even to get out of rebirth. Wanting to not be reborn again is still a thought, words that we read in the scriptures. These are good but the grasping of that, the sense of me and mine, ‘I'm somebody who doesn't want to be reborn again’, is like this. It's still a condition that arises and ceases. So, good is impermanent; bad is impermanent. The Buddho makes no judgments about good and bad anymore, it’s just knowing whatever condition you’re experiencing or attached to at present. The insight is to let go, to relax with it. Let it be what it is and it ceases all by itself. Allowing the natural cessation of phenomena is a relaxed open awareness, not an intense effort to destroy evil or get rid of the satanic forces in your mind or the universe.

To want to get rid of ignorance is a noble desire but it's still a creation of words. ‘I want to be free from all ignorance’ is a wholesome thought, but a thought is still a condition. Out of the habit of not understanding the way things are, or avijjā, we cling to these high-minded ideals, these goals, these conventions. The Four Noble Truths, the first sermon of the Buddha, is a really skilful tool to use to investigate that. We're not here to just become good people, good monks, good nuns, good samaṇas, good lay people. Even though that might be wholesome, or that what you think yourself to be as a person is making good karma, that very sense of being a person, a separate form in the universe, is a basic delusion of the ego, sakkāya diṭṭhi. You can't get rid of sakkāya diṭṭhi but you can know it by being the witness to it, whether it be a positive ego or a negative one is not the issue anymore. Perfectly healthy, well-adjusted, a normal personality or a neurotic one, these are judgments made in society. I've heard many people say, ‘I can't meditate, I don't have good karma. I've got to deal with all my repressed anger and fears and I need psychotherapy. I need to get rid of all of these obsessive ideas that come to my mind. I want to become a healthy personality.’ These are all good desires but it's still coming from the sense of total belief that you are what you think, what you're feeling, or what your emotions are. And as long as that belief goes unquestioned, then you're always going to experience suffering, no matter what you do, no matter how good you are.

We all have to witness the changing conditions of life, the COVID pandemic, climate change, the rumours, the political problems of various countries, seeing our parents grow old, get sick and die. We get attached to dogs and cats and then they die, and no matter how good you've been you still feel grief and sorrow at the passing of beloved pets. Is that good or bad or right or wrong? It's not about good or bad, right or wrong anymore, but it's when you attach, when this attachment is caused through ignorance, then we create suffering throughout our lives. Death is always the obvious end of a life. If your sense of self-worth is attached to what you look like, your body, or your social conditioning, beliefs, thoughts and memories, then you die in fear or with the hope to get a rebirth, there's still the desire to become. Some people fear death because they haven't been perfect in life. When people die, many times the relatives fear that they've made bad karma because they didn't tell this person that they love them enough, they didn't give them perfect care and love and total appreciation in their lives. You didn't visit them as often as you should have, so there's a lot of guilt when relatives or good friends pass away because we create this sense of what we should have done in the past. But no matter how good and caring we might be, death is the inevitable end of a birth. We've experienced birth already. We don't remember being physically born because we didn't have a language, we hadn’t developed memory with language to remember what it was like to be born. But we were conscious.

We acquire the cultural, even the religious attitudes about death, that’s social conditioning. Death itself is a rather frightening word for many people. It’s not considered polite to talk about death at social events. Even I find, when somebody dies, to say they're dead seems rather blunt. So we use the words ‘passing away’ or something less startling than ‘they're dead’. That seems so heartless, so final. But it is true, what is born dies.

So a mental enema is a cleansing. It's cleansing consciousness, allowing what you’ve repressed and feared to come into consciousness rather than just try to slam the door every time fear, doubt, anxiety, and worry arise. We get caught in that and spend our lives worrying about anything that we can worry about because it's become one of our thinking habits. The future always has the possibility to worry about something. The future is one big worry right now, isn't it? Who knows what's going to happen with pandemics, climate change, or universal problems like the universe we see and experience through the senses? We know we're all going to get old. And getting old means the physical form weakens; the senses fade and it's like this. But in awareness, the Buddho, the witness doesn't get old, isn't afraid, doesn't worry about anything, is not guilt-ridden, forgetful or blaming or feeling victimized. These are all mental constructions that we tend to hold in us. When they enter the door of consciousness we develop habits of resistance, of repression.

In bhāvanā, or meditation, the fearlessness of the attitude of Buddho, of witnessing the way it is, is not a witness that is afraid. It's aware of fear. So, what is Buddho; what is the witness position? We can call it conscious awareness, mindfulness, pure consciousness or whatever. The word doesn't matter as long as you understand what it really means, that just to be aware of this present moment is like this. Now that sounds very simple in words, but the conditioning process is complicated. Sometimes we have to deal with just witnessing loneliness, boredom, and conditions that we don't want. We don't want to feel alone or lonely or left out. We don't want to feel bored with life. These are created through the idea that life should be just one interesting experience after another. But no matter how many interesting experiences you've had in your life, life is quite boring really. That's why people go to horror shows, because they're bored. Then they feel excited, frightened, horrified, and that's a state they can feel alive with. But boredom, what do you do with it? How do you cope with boredom? How can you get rid of it? Of course, the usual way is to distract yourself with something interesting. Saṁsāra vaṭṭa, the worldly life that we identify with, is an endless seeking of distractions, because otherwise just being consciously aware like this seems like boredom to the thinking mind.

With the thinking mind, you can excite yourself with thoughts. It’s interesting to analyze yourself, or considering your astrological sign you become more interesting as a person because you're born under a certain sign, and the stars and the sun and the moon were all in alignment, and this creates a sense of self-interest. So astrology can be very interesting. Or self-analysis: Why do I fear? Why do I suffer? Who's to blame for it? That can be very interesting because we didn't all come from happy home lives where our parents were absolutely perfect, or from a life that has been perfectly fair. So who's to blame for my suffering? Who can I blame?

Praise and blame are worldly dhammas, or worldly conditions. Praise is what we're after, what we want. That's exciting and interesting. To be praised, to be acknowledged, to be respected, to be admired is very pleasant. To be disregarded, ignored or condemned is very unpleasant. Modern life is very much aimed at trying to become something – become a famous person, become a rock star, become president of the United States, become somebody that's in the news, win a beauty contest, join the French Foreign Legion or some exciting militia group. They're very exciting, to be fighting for righteousness – to be a fighter for human rights, a fighter for democracy, a fighter for freedom. That gives you a sense of being somebody who’s on the right side of goodness and skilfulness. We can devote ourselves to good causes, to peace movements, to social justice, to democratic principles, to the rule of law, to all the best that we can think of. One considers that's good karma. It might be, but it might also not be very good karma because so many righteous groups are very deluded. If feeling righteousness is what you're aiming for, to make everything right according to what you think or according to what you've been told, this can be a form of tyranny. If I am attached to righteousness and you don't agree with me, then you're wrong. And what does that mean in terms of relationship? Then that's a kind of absolutizing of right and wrong. You become absolutely wrong and I become absolutely right. How can there be any communication between right and wrong except through destroying what's wrong; go on righteous wars to kill off the evil forces or the wrong views of others? So we get caught in endless wars. We get news of terrorism, killing, murdering, collateral damage; bombing people, villages and so forth where a lot of innocent people get killed out of a sense of righteousness, of clinging blindly to being right, or for principles such as standing up for democracy. That's exciting, that's not boring. But when you talk to men and women who have been in military lives and dealt with conflicts and wars, wars are quite boring actually. So much of it is waiting around. But when we go to the cinema and watch war movies it's all very exciting. Excitement is available to us, it's a distraction. But boredom is what we don't want, so we ignore it and seek various ways to find pleasure, happiness, comfort, romance, adventure, and excitement. And that's the world. The world is like that and that's why it's an illusory world. It's not the real world that everyone claims it is. It's the world of different illusions that individuals hold and grasp out of ignorance.

So in this retreat, I encourage you to not to take sides with any issues but to investigate. This investigation, how is it done? It's not an investigation of who is right and who is wrong but it's a witnessing, observing, like a really mindful soldier who's out in the field observing, just open to life, and the sounds and sights that are in the present moment are like this. But the soldier is interested in trying to identify any dangerous enemies lurking in the forest or on the horizon. We're not looking for enemies but just observing, witnessing Dhamma, ultimate reality, supreme reality – whatever words you want to use for it, it's apparent here and now, so it's available every moment. That's where we experience life. It's always here and now – it's like this. Just sitting here in the Temple is like this. Breathing is like this. Sitting is like this. What is it that’s aware of sitting? Are you aware of sitting or is sitting just the natural movement of the body: sitting, standing, walking, lying down? Do you force yourself to breathe? You can take pranayama lessons and develop all kinds of exercises with the breath. We're not asking you to do that. We're encouraging you just to be the awareness of the inhalation; it's like this, and the exhalation is like that. It sounds very boring, but getting through boredom is where wisdom lies. When life becomes boring – when you get old, life is increasingly boring. During a winter retreat, where there's nothing to do but sit, stand, walk, lay down, watch your breath, it’s very boring. Then we think of all kinds of things we should do to get rid of the boredom. But boredom is a mental state. It's not ultimate reality. What is ultimate reality? What is supreme reality, here and now, is conscious awareness. And that's where boredom ceases, where loneliness ceases, where the ego collapses, disappears; where the social conditioning, conventional attachments, disappear. You're not resisting or denying them, but they naturally cease. They’re mental states that arise and cease. They're very ephemeral and have no substance.

So it's up to you as individuals. What I've said this afternoon is an encouragement because one thing I can do is encourage you. The Buddha’s teachings are very skilful directions on how to end suffering. The First Noble Truth is about suffering, to be understood. The Third Noble Truth is the end of suffering. The ‘end of suffering’, what does that mean, that you don't get old, you don't get sick anymore, you don't feel grief when your beloved mother passes away or when your favourite cat dies? It means you're aware of grief, of old age, and you're not attaching to it. It doesn't make you cold-hearted and indifferent to life, but it allows empathy to arise in social situations. You don't become a totally unemotional zombie. Then you feel the wisdom of the brahma vihāras. That’s what's left when you’ve let go of everything – mettā, karuṇā, muditā and upekkhā. That’s how we relate to the deluded world, the illusory world that we're experiencing through the forms that we no longer identify with. So I offer this as a reflection.

Ajahn Sumedho

Prophetic Satire in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985)

“They were all Hitler majors, members of the only class I still taught, Advanced Nazism.”
Don DeLillo, White Noise

Along with Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo is commonly regarded as one of the finest living writers in American fiction. As well as winning the National Book Award for White Noise in 1985, DeLillo has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1992 and 1998), and he was also awarded the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction in 2013. DeLillo’s work is, in the author’s own description, concerned with “power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments.” As such, his work is relevant to most sections of the political spectrum, including our own, and no work is more bitterly appropriate, prophetic, and caustic than White Noise, his 1985 postmodernist satirical masterpiece. Pathological consumerism, insanity in academia, pandemic panics, social decay and fragmented families, the nihilism and anonymity of urban living, obesity, alienated youth, Western modernity’s terror of death, and the manifold abuses of Big Pharma are all foretold and satirized. Added ingredients include a sneaky and oversexed Jewish character, and a protagonist who is founder and director of the discipline of Hitler Studies. What results from this combination is a novel at once terrifying and hilarious, prescient and unforgettable.

The book begins with the start of a new semester at College-on-the-Hill, the work place of the novel’s protagonist, Jack Gladney. Gladney and his wife Babette both suffer from a pathological phobia of death, something that’s exacerbated when a chemical spill from a rail car releases a black toxic cloud over the town. Following a mass evacuation, Gladney discovers that Babette has been secretly taking a new experimental drug named Dylar, which is supposedly capable of treating intense fear of death. He also finds out that Babette has been obtaining her supply of Dylar from a man she’s been having an affair with. Consumed with his own fears, Gladney sets out to obtain his own illicit supply but the drug not only fails to achieve its stated purpose, at least in Babette’s case, but leads to addiction and a number of psychosis-like side-effects. Gladney spirals deeper into his fear of, and obsession with, death. He eventually decides to murder Willie Mink, the man with whom Babette has been having an affair. Gladney then shoots Mink, but the immediacy of another man’s death brings his own obsession with mortality into realignment. He decides to save Mink’s life, and takes him to a nearby hospital where Mink survives.

The baseline plot of White Noise is quite offbeat and simple, but the novel is intensively interwoven with a thorough social critique almost unheard of in contemporary fiction. I have to admit to some negative first reactions to the text, simply because I’m not particularly fond of novels that are “weird” or rely on certain cartoonish exaggerations to make their point. My first reaction to White Noise, based on the plot alone, was therefore much like my first reaction to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), another work of postmodernist satire with which it has much in common in a stylistic and thematic sense. White Noise is, however, worth pursuing through its various literary devices, because at its heart is one of the most profound and cutting indictments of modern culture. It’s a text with much to say to the Dissident Right, despite the moderate leftism of its author, and the social critique within the book is best discussed thematically rather than from the perspective of the chronological plot.

Academia

In White Noise, DeLillo satirizes the decline of academic standards, and the degradation of universities into a plurality of microscopic pseudo-disciplines taught by hubristic charlatans. DeLillo’s literary device in this regard involves a protagonist, Jack Gladney, who acts as founder and director of “Hitler studies.” This is an interesting choice to say the least. Of all areas of ideology, only two are totally unable to be commodified, absorbed, and assimilated by the current system — National Socialism and radical Islam. As such, the idea of universities operating courses of study involving the objective analysis of the life and career of Adolf Hitler is obviously inconceivable. One gets the impression, however, that DeLillo knows this, and that he chose “Hitler studies” precisely because of its extreme nature, as well as its darkly comic potential. DeLillo is also concerned with the impact of “celebrity culture” on modern society and intellectual standards, and while Hitler is anathema in the contemporary West, he at least remains ever-present — a kind of notorious anti-celebrity. In DeLillo’s words, “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.” As such, for DeLillo, Hitler is the perfect candidate for a micro-discipline within his satire of academia, and Hitler studies takes its place among such real-life disciplines as women’s studies, chicano studies, comic book studies, and celebrity studies.

Most of the novel’s early laughs come from the jarring effect on the reader of the celebration of Hitler studies. Jack Gladney, for example, introduces himself with gusto:

I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.

Gladney is never far from his dog-eared and heavily annotated copy of Mein Kampf, and he informs us that it’s his custom on Fridays, “after an evening in front of the TV set, to read deeply in Hitler well into the night.” Gladney is told by a colleague that he’s done “a wonderful thing here with Hitler,” and when asked later “How’s Hitler?,” he responds enthusiastically: “Fine, solid, dependable.” When Babette informs Jack that “[Hitler] was on [TV] again last night,” Jack replies, “He’s always on. We couldn’t have television without him.” DeLillo presents Gladney as an intellectual opportunist who merely capitalized on, and in a sense commodified, Hitler. This image is complicated only twice in the novel. In the first instance, we learn that Gladney named his son Heinrich, an act that he later explains is because “I thought it had an authority that might cling to him. I thought it was forceful and impressive and I still do.” The second point where Gladney’s ideological foundations might be regarded as deeper than surface level come when Babette asks him why Hitler is on TV so much. Gladney responds ambiguously that “It’s not a question of good and evil. I don’t know what it is.”

Overall, however, Gladney is depicted as a quintessential example of academic hubris and fraud. He is obsessed with the pretentious aspects of academic posturing, wearing black academic robes and rejoicing in “clearing my arm from the folds of the garment to look at my watch. The simple act of checking the time is transformed by this flourish.” He invents a middle initial so that he can style himself “J.A.K. Gladney.” Although secure in his position as the celebrated founder of Hitler studies, Gladney’s department is “composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad” and the overall academic atmosphere is “one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.” Ultimately, Gladney is self-conscious as an academic fraud, remarking that he had

long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence on paper. The least of my Hitler colleagues knew some German; others were either fluent in the language or reasonably conversant. No one could major in Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill without a minimum of one year of German. I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

DeLillo thus satirizes the creation of academic disciplines by figures who are themselves intellectually average or lacking in suitable insights or skills, something reinforced when Gladney admits early in the book that in regards to the illustrious posturing of J.A.K. Gladney, he is merely “the false character that follows the name around.” Gladney’s success with Hitler studies, despite the fact he’s something of an imposter, is obvious to other academics. One tells Gladney he wants “to do the same thing with Elvis,” and later explains he’s been asked to “teach a course in the cinema of car crashes.” DeLillo probably never appreciated just how much his speculative jesting would become reality.

Jews

White Noise is an unusual example of modern fiction in that it presents, as one of its main characters, a rather negative portrayal of a Jew. One of Gladney’s colleagues at College-on-the-Hill is Murray Jay Siskind, an ex-sportswriter. Siskind, who is described as “a stoop-shouldered man with little round glasses and an Amish beard,” is a sex-obsessed urbanite who is totally out of place in small town America. He is also acutely aware of his Jewishness. Siskind informs Gladney that he’s staying in a rooming house, and proceeds to describe the other inhabitants in abstract ways like “A woman who harbors a terrible secret. A man with a haunted look. A man who never comes out of his room.” When Gladney asks him, “Which one are you?”, Siskind responds, “I’m the Jew. What else would I be?” Siskind obsesses with awe over the mundane behaviors of regular townspeople, taking notes about them almost as if he is observing a different species. He is also irrationally suspicious of rural people and manual laborers—reflecting the normative fear and loathing of Jewish intellectuals toward populism and the White working class. When discussing a dripping faucet in his bathroom, Siskind tells Gladney his landlord will fix it before adding “Too bad he’s such a bigot.” The exchange continues:

“How do you know he’s such a bigot?”
“People who can fix things are usually bigots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of all the people who’ve ever come to your house to fix things. They were all bigots weren’t they?
“I don’t know.”
“They drove panel trucks, didn’t they, with an extension ladder on the roof and some kind of plastic charm dangling from the rearview mirror?”
“I don’t know, Murray.”
“It’s obvious,” he said.

The humor of the exchange resides in the fact it isn’t at all obvious that manual workers are inevitably bigots. The link between the two exists only in Murray Siskind’s mind, which in fact evidences its own form of bigotry. Even aside from this incident, DeLillo leaves us in no doubt that his Jewish character is altogether unpleasant. Siskind is a lecherous pervert, described several times as having a “sneaky” smile, who reads a magazine called American Transvestite, solicits unusual acts from prostitutes, and leers constantly at Babette, his colleague’s wife, smelling her hair as well as things she’s touched. In fact, elsewhere in the novel he is described in quite animalistic terms, sniffing utensils in the canteen before eating with them. Most ominously, he is also the Mephistophelian influence who persuades Jack Gladney that committing a murder will relieve Gladney’s fear of death.

DeLillo grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s, a time when Jews were accelerating their move into the professions and other areas of economic, social, and political influence. It’s worth pondering whether Siskind was based on real characters encountered by the author, or whether Siskind emerges instead from the unstated, and in many cases unconscious, cultural knowledge that most White people still possess about Jews, despite all politically correct conditioning. Siskind, the quick-talking, psychologically-intense, leering, and predatory bigot, who in turn accuses others of bigotry, is all-too-reminiscent of so many Jewish cultural figures who go on to enter the popular consciousness. Harvey Weinstein, donor to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL’s campaigns against “bigotry,” is a prime example. And there is little the ADL can do to stop such figures causing speculation, to use their terminology, on “Jewish sexual degeneracy and perversion.” For this reason alone, I found DeLillo’s portrayal of Siskind, the urban Jew in small-town America, to be less grounded in satire than in a rather uncomfortable social reality.

Fear of Death

At time of this writing, much media attention remains focused on the outbreak of novel coronavirus in Wuhan, as well as new outbreaks in Iran and Italy. This panic follows on from previous feverish (pardon the pun) media coverage of Ebola, swine flu (H1N1), and SARS, as well as increasingly vocal and violent protests about putative ecological and environmental disasters such as climate change and the mass extinction of species. In short, we live in a civilization that is in terror of death, and pathologically so. I say pathologically, because our civilization is in fact dying, but not from the causes currently distracting and fixating the masses. Our civilization is not dying from a disease epidemic, global tsunamis, or an asteroid strike, but from its willful and ignorant abdication (via self-hate and industrialized abortion) of a future in favor of mass immigration, consumerism, and instant gratification. We panic about old people dying from flu, but barely blink when millions of Muslims migrate to our countries, utterly transforming the nation and its future. Indeed, we might say that just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into inauthentic decay.

This is the paradox of our age. Fear of death everywhere coexists with a cult of death. Social media and celebrity culture, especially among women, is fixated on fighting ageing and extending youth perpetually. Trying to look younger for longer has long been a human preoccupation in eras of decadence, but our current age would appear to have taken matters to new lows. We live in the period of FOMO, Fear of Missing Out, where individuals collapse into pathological social anxiety if they can’t keep up with events in other people’s lives. Death, once seen as an inevitable part of life itself, and perhaps, for the religious, even of something greater than life, is now reduced for many to a terrifying obstacle to what “might have been.” Death becomes an awful, and extremely personal thing. In their classic essay, “Modernity, Self-Identity, and the Sequestration of Death,” Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling contrast the role of death in modern and pre-modern societies:

[In the past] when death occurred, its significance denoted a disruption to the social body more than it did the passing of an individual body. When identity is rooted more in the group than it is in the individual, death does not threaten the individual as it does in the modern world. Death meant that society had lost part of itself, not that an individual had lost society.

The collapse of group identity in the West has led to a radical change in approaches to death. Death in modernity is lonely, is utterly individualized and lacks deep meaning beyond personal loss. As such, many lives lack meaning also. The elusive search for meaning has translated into an $800 million dollar industry in “self-help” literature, and a series of diet and fitness crazes apparently designed in desperation to ensure one’s body conforms to youthful and sexual standards. The elderly, uncomfortable reminders of an unavoidable future fate, are increasingly segregated from the young. The result is a society, to use the words of Mellor and Shilling, consumed by “intense confusion, anxiety, and even terror,” in the face of mortality. Paradoxically, it does this while condoning abortion on an industrial scale, and the celebration of non-reproductive sexual behaviors that are known to produce their own forms of contagious and fatal illness. In short, the West’s fear of death is as selfish as it is pathological.

To my mind, there are no rivals to DeLillo’s White Noise in terms of the way it tackles fear of death in modernity. Death is a constant topic of discussion for Jack and Babette Gladney. They obsess over who will die first. Jack wakes “in the grip of a death sweat,” while Babette “thinks nothing can happen to us while there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We’re safe as long as they’re around.” As well as fixations on personal mortality, and much like the postmodern West as a whole, the Gladneys and their children have a nihilistic fascination with natural catastrophes, which provide a kind of entertainment—a mediated version of death too large-scale and “cinematic” to be a genuine disturbance to the real death phobia. Jack describes a night with his family:

That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never before been more attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie … appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in the mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

Consumerism

In White Noise, death and consumerism are intimately bound up together. Faced with death and disaster, everyone in the book responds by shopping. In fact, every negative feeling is assuaged by consumption. In Gladney’s narration, this is reinforced by periodic unexplained insertions into the text (and therefore of Gladney’s consciousness) of marketing data, or phrases from TV ads. While discussing his fear of death, for example, Gladney suddenly spouts “Visa, Mastercard, American Express,” before returning to the topic at hand. His wife mutters the various models of Toyota cars in her sleep. After an altercation with a colleague, Jack Gladney explains that it “put me in the mood to shop.” Ventriloquizing via Gladney, DeLillo’s meandering reflection on irrational postmodern therapeutic consumption is masterful:

I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in security rooms. I traded money for goods. The more I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit.

A similar process is enacted in Gladney’s experience of withdrawing cash from an ATM:

I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval … What a pleasing interaction. I sense that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed.

When news reports suggest a coming snowstorm, Gladney observes swarms of old people engaged in media induced panic-buying:

The old people shopped in a panic. When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death. They whispered to each other in the checkout lines. Traveler’s advisory, zero visibility. When does it hit? How many inches? How many days? They became secretive, appeared to withhold the latest and worst news from others, appeared to blend a cunning with their haste, tried to hurry out before someone questioned the extent of their purchases. Hoarders in a war. Greedy, guilty.

DeLillo also links the broader social malaise to that other form of postmodern mass consumption — eating:

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. Blacksmith is full of obese adults and children, baggy-pantsed, short-legged, waddling. They struggle to emerge from compact cars; they don sweatsuits and run in families across the landscape; they walk down the street with food in their faces; they eat in stores, cars, parkinglots, on bus lines and movie lines, under the stately trees.

For DeLillo, postmodernity is typified by an economy built on induced, quasi-therapeutic panic-buying and eating where the majority consumers are reduced to the status of greedy and guilty hoarders. Fear is thus a commodity of sorts, since it is a stimulant to sales, and, to use DeLillo’s words, “Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us.” This reality can be observed not only in the media, which exaggerates and commodifies bad news in order to sell otherwise superfluous products to concerned buyers, but also in all aspects of marketing. Here a guiding principle is that people should be convinced of an ever-increasing number of artificial “needs” so they can be sold a proffered, and profit-making, “solution.”

Society

DeLillo’s scathing treatment of consumerism is part of a broader critique of society. Most obviously, DeLillo satirizes the decline of stable, married families. While our contemporary education and cultural systems increasingly laud the various types of “new families” (single-parent, homosexual, etc.), DeLillo bases his novel around the fact the Gladneys are a “blended family” that results from two divorces, two sets of children from prior marriages, and all of the emotional baggage and childhood dysfunction resulting from that. Heinrich, in particular, is a 14-year-old metaphor for the confused, alienated, and emotionally-abandoned children that result from such environments, and it really is remarkable that DeLillo appeared to predict both the pattern and notoriety of mass school shooters like those involved in the Columbine massacre. The boy has morbid obsessions, plays chess via mail with an incarcerated mass killer, often wears camouflage, and Babette worries “he will end up in a barricaded room, spraying hundreds of rounds of automatic fire across an empty mall before the SWAT teams come for him with their heavy-barreled weapons, their bull-horns, and body armor.”

Another of DeLillo’s substantial social predictions is his anticipation of vacuous Instagram culture. In the novel, this takes the form of heavy satire on things that are “famous for being famous” and focuses on a trip undertaken by Siskind and Gladney to “the most photographed barn in America.” The barn is entirely nondescript, and its fame is artificial—the result of signs that merely proclaim it to be famous. Siskind and Gladney arrive to find more than forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot beside the barn, and become aware that people are more interested in taking photos of the accumulation of people, cameras, and tripods than they are in the barn itself. They come to the realization that, in postmodernity, fame itself has become famous; that celebrity itself has become the focus of celebrity. Or, in DeLillo’s words:

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said.

“What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here. We’re now.”

Like the throngs taking photographs of DeLillo’s barn, the cultural life of the West has descended into a celebrity cult where the objects of adoration are largely non-entities whose individual qualities are of lesser importance to the simple fact that they are famous. In this sense, the Kardashians and other focuses of mass media attention are little more than our “barns,” inanimate and unimportant objects that attract attention because we’ve been convinced that they attract attention. We photograph them being photographed, and in doing so “become part of the aura.”

Conclusion

Don DeLillo’s White Noise is one of the best and most intelligent socio-political satires of the last 50 years, and deserves a careful “reading from the Right.” There are certainly themes in the book that will resonate with dissidents, and this review is intended only to cover some of them within a thematic structure. The plot and style of the novel won’t be to everyone’s taste. White Noise is itself, after all, an example of postmodernist literature. It is quirky, sometimes unbearably so, and is occasionally needlessly abstruse. DeLillo is also much better at descriptive writing than he is at writing dialogue. However, I believe the novel is worth the effort of a slow reading and re-reading, and White Noise is perhaps both the kind of art that the present age needs and deserves.  It’s an awful mirror in which our contemporary society is morbidly, strangely, and yet accurately reflected. If you’ve felt like we’ve been living out some kind of dystopian novel, maybe it’s because we have.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

Larkin - Books

I am quite the wrong person to write this foreword.1 I should never call myself a book lover, any more than a people lover: it all depends what’s inside them. Nor am I a book collector: when a don asked me how many books I had, I really couldn’t reply, but this didn’t matter as all he wanted to tell me was that he had 25,000, or 50,000, or some improbable number. I was too polite to deliver a variant of Samuel Butler’s ‘I keep my books round the corner, in the British Museum’, yet at the same time I felt a wave of pity, as if he had confessed to kleptomania or some other minor psychological compulsion. 

Yet my life has lain among books: what minor psychological compulsion makes me strike this disclaiming attitude? Perhaps a question of age: I grew up when the written word was ceasing to be a major entertainment industry. Society was turning away from the state of affairs that made it possible to live comfortably in, say, St. John’s Wood with a couple of servants, and bring up a family, by reviewing and reporting and writing trivial ‘middles’. Then again, the writers one admired—Lawrence, for instance, or Auden—tended to dramatize a Literature v. Life conflict, and leave no doubt which side you should be on. If you weren’t careful, you would end up ‘with an animal for a friend or a volume of memoirs’. Thirdly, well, books—and particularly the kind designated ‘antiquarian’—were politically suspect. The workers didn’t bother with them: they were the badge of the rentier. The pink-boarded Left Book Club volumes were all right, and the first Penguins, but any hint of ‘musing among silent friends’ marked you out as an enemy of the people. 

Nevertheless, I have always been a compulsive reader, to match one compulsion with another, and this has meant that books have crept in somehow. Only the other day I found myself eyeing a patch of wall in my flat and thinking I could get some more shelves in there. I keep novels and detective stories in my bedroom, so that visitors shan’t be tempted to borrow them; the sitting-room houses the higher forms of literature (and my jazz books, a far from exhaustive collection), while the hall I reserve for thoroughly worthy items, calculated to speed the parting guest. None of them can be called remarkable. At best they are items bought on publication which now qualify as ‘modern first editions’. At worst they are picked from a bad bunch on a station bookstall. I remember that John Malcolm Brinnin says somewhere that he never saw Dylan Thomas read any thing but a paperback shocker. Still, they are read, not like Michael Fane’s nine-volume Pater ‘in thick sea-green cloth’ that I doubt ever got opened: read in bed, in the bath, at meals. Within reach of my working chair I have reference books on the right, and twelve poets on the left: Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen. True, I reach to the right more often than to the left, but the twelve are there as exemplars. All in all, therefore, I should miss my books. I like to think I could do without them—I like to think I could do without anything—but indubitably I should miss them. 

It may be that a writer’s attitude to books is always ambivalent, for one of the reasons one writes is that all existing books are somehow unsatisfactory, but it’s certainly difficult to think of a better symbol of civilization. Of course the symbol changes: the fine book, its materials, its craftsmanship, its design, was eloquent of a civilization founded on means, leisure and taste; today the symbol is the paperback, hurled in hundreds of thousands against the undeveloped areas (Asia, Africa, the young), spreading what we think is best in our thought and imagination. If our values are to maintain a place in the world, these are the troops that will win it for them, but victory is not a foregone conclusion. And what is won abroad may all too easily be lost at home. Perhaps George Orwell best used the book-as-symbol in a way satisfactory to both sides: you remember how in 1984 he made his hero, Winston Smith, treasure a book that he had acquired from ‘a frowsy little junk shop’; it was, Orwell tells us, ‘a peculiarly beautiful book’ in paper and binding alike. Only, the pages were blank. For a writer, the image is a powerful one: the books the past has given us, the books in which the bookseller deals, are printed; they are magnificent, but they are finite. Only the blank book, the manuscript book, may be the book we shall give the future. Its potentialities are endless.

1972

1 To the programme of the Antiquarian Book Fair, 1972.

Required Writing

Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 

PHILIP LARKIN

On Jewish Vulgarity

 

I read with interest a recent column in The Tablet by David Mikics (Professor of English, University of Houston) on Jewish vulgarity or, as the piece otherwise explains it, “the once-vibrant Jewish trait of not caring what the goyim think.” Although touted as a three-part series, only the first part has been published thus far, and this first essay is a kind of focused review of elements within John Murray Cuddihy’s The Ordeal of Civility and Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. In the following essay I want to expand upon, and challenge, some of the ideas raised in the piece by Mikics.

I have to agree with the basic premise of the opening remarks of Mikics’s column. He writes that “the charge that Jews are vulgar now seems almost quaint. … Jewish lack of manners was once taken seriously both by Jews and by their gentile neighbors and competitors. The vulgar, unmannerly Jew was a countercultural force, and not just a reason for shame and repression.” The overall state of contemporary culture has indeed degraded to such an extent that Jews no longer stand out as singular producers of cultural obscenities. And yet there is a deep history of Jews as the agents of vulgarity in the West, stretching back to Roman accounts. Mikics doesn’t seem concerned with this deep history, focusing only on the twentieth century as covered by the works of Cuddihy and Slezkine.

Historical Jewish Obscenity

Jews have often been regarded by host cultures as both inherently obscene and as promoters of the obscene — a corrosive force acting against group morality, and therefore group cohesion. In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), Josh Lambert points out that in the ancient Mediterranean Jews were referred to as “an obscene people.”[1] Such comments may have been as much observations as aspersions, since we know that in later centuries obscenity became an integral part of Jewish linguistic culture. For example, Bernard Dov Weinryb writes that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland, “many erotic or obscene expressions and metaphors appear in Hassidic writings. …They reflect the way the average Jew in those times used obscene language, mainly of an erotic character, in his conversation.”[2] On more recent contexts, Jonas E. Alexis has written that,

Jewish actors tend to gravitate towards shows with sexual themes. …  Israeli-American Natalie Portman tells us in the movie No Strings Attached that “monogamy goes against our basic biology.” And [Jewish singer] Adam Lambert says, “When I’m on stage there’s definitely a sexual energy that goes into it.” In 2009 Lambert performed ‘For Your Entertainment’ at the American Music Awards. During the performance Lambert dragged a female dancer by her ankles and pushed “a male dancer’s head into his crotch and simulated oral sex.”[3]

As well as being represented and self-representing as having an intrinsic relationship to the obscene, the historical record is also replete with examples of Jews involving themselves heavily in the trade in obscenity. In his pseudonymously-published Letters from England (1808), the English Poet Laureate Robert Southey remarked on Jewish peddlers who wandered nineteenth-century England hawking “miserable and obscene prints.”[4]

In 1886 Édouard Drumont warned of a “pornographic war” being waged on France by Jews.[5] In 1913, a “filthy press” in Warsaw “belonging to a certain Zimmerman,” was confiscated by Polish police after it was discovered disseminating pornography throughout the Russian Empire — activities described by the newspaper Przegląd Katolicki as a “Jewish atrocity.”[6] Estonian police raided a building in 1909 belonging to the Jewish Benjamin Mikhailovsky, one of the richest merchants in Narva. One of Mikhailovsky’s side projects, apart from the trade in precious metals, was printing, and during their search police seized “11,119 cards they considered pornographic.”[7] And in Poland in 1910, the Polish Archbishop Pelczar would write, “I consider it my duty to warn Christian society against those Jews who intoxicate our people in the tavern and destroy them with usury; against those who maintain houses of debauchery in the towns; who trade in live goods [i.e. selling women into prostitution], who poison our young people with pornographic prints and periodicals.”[8] In the U.S, it is well-established that Jews have had a prominent role in the porn industry since the late nineteenth century.

Weaponized Rudeness

As well as prominent involvement in pushing pornographic vulgarity into Western culture, Jews have been noted for their general disdain for the social norms and manners of the host population. Naomi Cohen writes that the nineteenth-century Jew was faulted for “his vulgarity, boorishness, and ostentatious behavior.”[9] In his article in The Tablet, David Mikics is primarily concerned with this strain of Jewish vulgarity. Although it was a kind of open in-joke among Jews, discussions of Jewish social vulgarity among non-Jews were a source of alarm. Cuddihy’s book in particular, notes Mikics, “was notorious: Here was a non-Jew talking about vulgar Jews, as if this were a real thing. Clapping the lid over such a shonda was the primary task of some reviewers, who hinted that Cuddihy must be an antisemite.” He continues,

It is bad manners to talk about Jewish bad manners the way Cuddihy did— and even more so today than 50 years ago. But his book made a powerful case that Cuddihy did not see vulgarity as a flaw but instead as a weapon Jews used to disrupt gentile society—for which he admired them. Jews deployed their rudeness to make a principled argument against the goyim (a word Cuddihy didn’t shy away from), who were cultural prisoners of a hypocritical code that swept unruly emotions under the rug and leaned on polite euphemism to conceal the vampiric nature of capitalist exploitation. The grand Marxist and Freudian theories about the human condition have a crude Jewish impulse at their core, Cuddihy argued, which makes them more, not less, compelling.

Cuddihy, like Josh Lambert and Unclean Lips, imputes an idealistic motive to what is quite obviously a phenomenon fuelled more by the baser instinct towards aggression. Lambert, for example, argues that Jews “engaged with obscenity — produced it, defended it, wrote about it — for precisely the same reasons that many of their Protestant, Catholic, and nonreligious peers did so: to make money, to seek sexual gratification, to express antisocial rage.”[10] In terms of factuality, this probably ranks somewhere alongside defining a dog as a four-legged mammal — it is technically truthful but is so insufficient and incomplete as to be almost worthless. Most interesting of these proffered reasons is ‘antisocial rage,’ which is left hanging in tantalizing fashion without further elaboration. Indeed, lest readers begin to ponder the fact that, numerically speaking, Jews appear to have a disproportionate amount of ‘antisocial rage,’ Lambert hastens to clarify that he means his subjects are merely “expressing anger about their individual lives” [emphasis added].

Speaking through one of his characters in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), the Jewish filth-peddler Philip Roth seethes: “With me money is not the paramount issue. The defiance is. The hatred is. The outrage is.” Lambert takes this comment and avoids asking who Roth is defying, or who his hatred and outrage is directed towards. Roth’s hatred, like other subjects discussed in Unclean Lips, is simply abstracted into what Lambert describes in anodyne fashion as a purely “personal, apolitical rage.”

I’ve reached different conclusions from Lambert, who argues with some tremendous leaps of logic that Jewish vulgarity was a method employed by Jews to facilitate assimilation and force their way into genteel society (!). Evidence in the field of obscenity suggests that Jews have long possessed a disproportionate surplus of “antisocial rage,” and that the expression of this rage is rather more political than apolitical, and rather more communal than purely personal or individual. In the careful, consistent, and persistent action of Jews in challenging and overturning obscenity laws, for example, one detects a hatred that is more focused than abstract, more contrived than spontaneous.

My own perspective is echoed by Joshua Furst in a 2014 article published in The Forward, titled “A Short History of Jews and Obscenity.” The article reviews Unclean Lips and finds the book an anodyne and bland text that avoids the fundamental impulses behind Jewish transgression of the host culture’s norms. For Furst,

What’s lost in “Unclean Lips” is the thrill obscenity can create. It’s the sharp dangerous edge of anarchy and when used effectively, it can BLEEP up the most carefully planned cocktail party, smashing all propriety to BLEEP. Lambert’s systematic and earnest exegeses take all the fun out of obscenity. It’s like going to a strip club to find yourself being lectured about heteronormativity and the male gaze by a fully clothed BLEEPer. Presenting obscenity as a means of gaining access to the domain of polite, civil society seems, to me at least, to miss the BLEEPING point.

Furst continues:

Maybe more problematic, if one cares about the relationship between Judaism and American culture, are the limited and predetermined objectives Lambert presents his Jewish protagonists as having. In these pages, obscenity is first and foremost presented as a tool by which Jews were able to assimilate and gain acceptance by the American cultural elite as well as monetary and societal success, and to enter the “prestige culture” as Lambert calls it. But what of the other ways in which obscenity can and has been used? What of transgression and dissidence? Obscenity is such a powerful weapon against those who would wish to control our behavior (to say nothing of our imaginations) and villainize us for our culture. And the angry refusal of Jewish figures like Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman and even Al Goldstein to accept the terms the over-culture demanded was as Jewish in character as Henry Roth’s yiddishisms and Liveright’s entrepreneurship through scandal.

Genteel society, or Gentile society?: Moral Destruction as Ethnic Warfare

When Jews discuss Jewish vulgarity and its motives, there is an obvious conceit at play in the framing of the issue. Almost exclusively one encounters the notion that Jews wanted to upset a stuffy “genteel society.” Such phrasing places Jewish action in the sphere of a clash of behaviors rather than a clash of ethnicities. Take, for example, Mikics, who writes, “The one time I saw him, in the 1980s, Abbie Hoffman seemed to me a genuine charismatic, as well as a matchless stand-up comic. Like Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks or the gang at Mad, he sensed how Jewish vulgarity could explode the sacred cows of genteel society” [emphasis added]. This is little more than a clever shell game. If Jews are the aggressors seeking change, isn’t the genteel society really just gentile society?

The lowering of the moral values of a nation or ethnic group and the systematic encouragement of vice in it are inherently aggressive and political acts, designed to weaken the spiritual resistance of the national group. In Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, the Australian academic A. Dirk Moses discusses the use of “moral techniques” as an instrument of genocide. He writes that “The technique of moral debasement entails diverting the ‘mental energy of the group’ from ‘moral and national thinking’ to ‘base instincts.’ The aim is that the desire for cheap individual pleasure be substituted for the desire for collective feelings and ideals based upon a higher morality.” It is demoralizing to a people. It is debasing to a nation. It is a weapon wielded in ethnic warfare.

Moses, who I am assuming is Jewish based purely on his name, was writing specifically about policies enacted in post-invasion Poland by the National Socialist regime. On these policies, Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish self-styled expert on genocide, remarks: “Therefore the [National Socialist] occupant made an effort in Poland to impose upon the Poles pornographic publications and movies. The consumption of alcohol was encouraged, for while food prices have soared, the Germans have kept down the price of alcohol, and the peasants are compelled by the authorities to take spirits in payment for agricultural produce. The curfew law, enforced very strictly against Poles, is relaxed if they can show the authorities a ticket to one of the gambling houses which the Germans have allowed to come into existence.”[11]

As discussed in Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents, the National Socialist movement in Germany adopted what in many respects was a mirror image strategy of that employed by the Jews. This is clear not only in the adoption of race laws, but also in the fact the National Socialists were here merely copying and expanding upon what they understood to be the pre-existing tactics of Jewish cultural domination in Poland (and others in Europe). Indeed, Jews were widely understood by both Poles and Germans as having been intimately involved in the alcohol industry of Poland prior to the invasion of 1939, with the Tablet even affirming in a 2014 article that Jews “ruled Poland’s liquor trade for centuries” in a system in which Polish peasants were compelled to purchase Jewish alcohol. Jews have also long been associated with dominating the gambling industry (Israel is currently the global center for online gambling). In those areas of nineteenth century Poland where local nobles granted tax exemptions to Jewish communal institutions, Jews continued to sell liquor and run inns and taverns, in which they established gambling facilities to further squeeze the Poles. And the activities of Jews in promoting pornography in Poland have already been discussed above.

My question then, on considering the remarks of Moses and Lemkin, is both simple and stark: If, by promoting vice, the National Socialists were employing a genocidal technique against the Poles, what had the Jews been doing? And if the Jews are engaging in the same activities in the West today, what are they doing and why? Can we really describe a set of behaviors as on the one hand indicating a desire to “assimilate” and promote “freedom,” while maintaining on the other hand that these same techniques are designed to destroy?

Jewish Vulgarity

Mikics, while playfully teasing for much of his article as if these Jews were simply a bunch of loveable rogues, slips towards the end when he laments such ‘tame’ shows as Curb Your Enthusiasm:

Shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm hawk Jewish rudeness for easy laughs, proving that the vulgar Jew has declined from a real threat into an amusing, half-legendary caricature. … The exuberance of Jewish vulgarity, and the in-group solidarity of the shtetlakh it expressed, are both missing. [emphasis added]

What is Jewish vulgarity, then?  Mikics seems to suggest here that it’s a way in which Jews can both bond with one another and threaten the host society. Or, to use another of his phrases, it melded “Jewish aggression with communal solidarity.” Perhaps it’s best to end with the self-explanatory, and consider the following remarks from Joshua Furst:

Among the Jewish traits I am most proud to be historically and culturally associated with is the way my people obstreperously defend our principles even when doing so goes against our best interests. … I see it as my birthright to get under people’s skin and annoy them until they want to scream. And one of the greatest rhetorical tools people bent towards this sort of behavior can wield is the well-timed, carefully aimed obscenity.

[1] J. Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p.3.

[2] B. D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland, from 1100 to 1800 (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), p. 387.

[3] J. E. Alexis, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: Surprising Differences, Conflicting Visions, and Worldview Implications—From the Early Church to our Modern Time (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2012), p.217.

[4] R. Southey, Letters from England: Volume Two – Third American Edition (Philadelphia: Benjamin Warner, 1818), p.179.

[5] R. Blobaum, ‘Criminalizing the ‘Other’: Crime, Ethnicity and Antisemitism in Early Twentieth-Century Poland’ in R. Blobaum, (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p.89.

[6] Ibid.

[7] A. Weiss-Wendt, On the Margins: About the History of Jews in Estonia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017), p.43.

[8] B. A . Porter, Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.303.

[9] N. Cohen, What the Rabbis Said: The Public Discourse of Nineteenth-Century American Rabbis (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 159.

[10] Lambert, Unclean Lips, p.14.

[11] J. G. Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen (London: Praeger, 2001), p.45.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/