The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

 Bigger Issue

This, of course, brings us to the bigger issue, which is, how do we know what really happened? The answer to that question is historical research, but that is precisely what the delict "holocaust denial" has been created to prevent. Holocaust denial is another word for Jewish control of discourse, in particular historical discourse, in particular historical discourse about World War II. If a historian publishes something that a powerful Jew, which is to say a Jew with powerful backers, dislikes, that person will be punished. If the person in question lives by writing books, as David Irving once did, the Lipstadt brigade will get him blacklisted in the publishing industry. If the person in question is a professor, the big Jews will try to get him fired, as Deborah Lipstadt herself did in the case of Professor David O'Connell. In this instance, Lipstadt failed, but David O'Connell's case is not typical in this regard.

More typical is the case of Norman Finkelstein, who was fired from his job at DePaul University in Chicago. The fact that Finkelstein was a Jew himself doesn't matter. It's the big Jews, in this case Alan Dershowitz, who decide who is to live and who is to die in academe and publishing. Finkelstein wrote a devastating critique of Dershowitz's book The Case for Israel, and, as a result, Dershowitz set out to destroy Finkelstein's career. It was, in many ways, a typically Jewish response, the academic version of "You'll never work in this town again." What followed was equally Jewish. In fact Finkelstein characterized the dispute as a contest over "who was the toughest Jew from Borough Park." The definitive answer to that question is in: the big Jew from Borough Park is Alan Dershowitz, who got Finkelstein fired with the collaboration of the supine Catholic priest who is president of DePaul University. Among other things, this also shows that a selection process is at work among Jews in academe. Any Jew who goes against the interests of organized Jewry will get destroyed by the ruthless academic enforcer Jews who represent their interests. Most Jews are immune to struggles like this because they fall into the broad, gray middle category of fellow travelers, Jews who go along with the agenda in order to collect big salaries for a cushy job.

But there are larger lessons to be learned here. First of all, when if comes to a choice between money and principle, Catholic universities go for the money. Secondly, the fact that academe has become the site of unseemly brawls like this is largely the result of Jewish influence in academe. As Professor Lipstadt made abundantly clear in her talk, the university not the place where the big Jews seek the truth. The university is a place where Jews settle scores. It's where they punish people who threaten the Jewish hegemony over discourse.

This should not surprise us. The university is not a Jewish creation. It is a Catholic creation of the Catholic Middle Ages, and so it should not come as a surprise that Jews have all of the difficulties which come with functioning in an alien environment when they are admitted to universities. For over 600 years, from roughly the beginning of the13th to the middle of the 19th century, Catholics were involved in the creation and preservation of the university as a place where one engaged in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. This was also the place and period of time during which representational art reached its culmination as well. The link between these phenomena--art and the university as manifestations of the Logos which finds its embodiment in Christ and its cultural expression in Catholicism--is no coincidence. Conversely, the Jewish subversion of academe is similar to the Jewish subversion of the art world, something which occurred during the same period of time and, as Israel Shamir points out in a brilliant article "A Study of Art," in his book, Caballa of Power, for the same reasons.

Modern art is controlled by Jews. Shamir is sensitive to the sensibilities this claim offends -- "'Does it matter that they are Jewish?' asks the annoyed reader" -- but the facts speak for themselves:

The Jewish influence in modern art is well attested. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80 percent of the 2500 core "art market" personnel of the United States-art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors-were Jewish. In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" US art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravits, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

"Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact the contemporary art scene has a strong Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish Mafia since they command power, prestige, and most of all money."

In 1996 Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton explained that she went into a career as an art historian in order to be in a field dominated by Jews: "I wanted to be where the Jews were, that is, I wanted a profession that would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company that I kept." The field of art history was filled with Jews. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an institution in which Jews, said George Goodman, "have enriched every area of the Museum's collections . ..."

By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur Foundation "genius awards" were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. The Kaplan Fund also has had an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of J. M. Kaplan's daughters was the Chairman of the New York State Arts Council. Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the $34 million New York State Arts Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was "not professionally trained in the arts." The Getty Museum . . . has consistently had Jews at the economic helm. . . . [former chairman] Harold Williams . . . was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los Angeles." The new president of the J. Paul Getty trust is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz, . . . .

After a summary that covers the whole spectrum of modern art, Shamir concludes nonetheless that, "The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden-for anyone, anywhere -- to discuss the subject for fear of being branded 'anti-Semitic.'"

The art world is dominated by Jews, not because they are good at producing art, but rather because during the course of the 20th century, Jewish ascendancy rose in America and American ascendancy rose in the world and the art world as well. As a result: "The artist as creator of art disappeared and gave place to the museum curator, the collection owner. It is he who decides what sort of junk will be displayed, whose name will be written under the photo of tinned soup or a dead rat."

Shamir is basing his verdict in this instance on a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a Jewish creation (both the architect Frank Gehry and the funders, the Guggenheim family, were Jews) which is filled with junk and, inexplicably, an exhibition of Armani suits. In this world of Jewish art, "Only the Armani brand reigns supreme, impervious to the curator's will." The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao provides "a good place to contemplate the present decay, nay, demise of European visual art," which is now made up of "Rotten decomposed pig trunks in formalthehyde," pornography, and anything else that "became a piece of art by the decision of two Mammonites, the curator and the collector."

How did this happen? The crucial middle term in both equations (art and the university) is capitalism. The "economic freedom" of capitalism is traceable to the distinction between the Jewish prohibition on taking usury from a fellow Jew, and the permission which allowed it to be taken from "strangers." This differential first brought about a "complete transformation of commerce and industry," and then once capitalist principles became the cultural norm, other institutions (including art and academe) as well:

The theory of price in the Talmud and the Codes in so far as it affected trade between Jew and Jew, is exactly parallel to the scholastic doctrine of justum pretium which was prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But as between Jew and non-Jew, there was no just price. Price was formed, as it is today, by the "higgling of the market." . . . The differential treatment of non-Jews in Jewish commercial law resulted in the complete transformation of the idea of commerce and industry in the direction of more freedom. If we have called the Jews the Fathers of Free Trade, and therefore the pioneers of capitalism, let us note here that they were prepared for this role by the free-trading spirit of the commercial and industrial law, which received an enormous impetus towards a policy of laissez-faire by its attitude toward strangers. Clearly, intercourse with strangers could not but loosen the bonds of personal duties and replace them by economic freedom. (Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, pp. 246-7).

The spirit of capitalism brought about a similar transformation of both the art world and academe. Shamir calls this spirit "Mammon," something which he considers

the personification of capitalist Class Interest. A capitalist may wish to sell drinking water, but Mammon wants to poison all water in order to force everybody to buy drinking water. A capitalist may build the mall; but Mammon wants to destroy the world outside the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only meaningful occupation, shopping.

Since "Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to shopping," the Jewish spirit which created the system of Mammon known as capitalism will "turn every kind of art into Conceptual art" because "For Mammonites, Art is a distraction from the most important occupation, adoration of Mammon. Mammonite reviews of Art concentrate on the price of Art."

Jews are never content to integrate themselves into existing structures, whether those structures are states, universities, art museums or the military. They feel compelled to infiltrate and subvert the institutions which admit them as members. In the art world, the name this Jewish infiltration and subversion goes by is "conceptual art." In an article which appeared in The New Statesman, Ivan Massow, then chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, "noticed the damage this causes for the artists who are forced to fit into the Procrustean bed of this anti-art":

It seems sad that so many talented young artists, clawing to be noticed for their craft, are forced to ditch their talent and reinvent themselves as creators of video installations, or a machine that produces foam in the middle of a room, in order to be recognized as contemporary artists. ... We need art lovers to tell artists that they're not obliged to reinvent themselves into creators of piles of crap, or pass their work around like samizdat.

As some indication that Deborah Lipstadt's affliction is shared by other descendants of the Cheka, shortly after those words appeared in print, Massow got sacked. Massow's expulsion from the synagogue that the British art establishment had become was, as Shamir points out,

led by the Jewish cultural tsar Nicholas Serota, and by the Jewish art collector and advertising magnate, a friend of Pinochet, Thatcher, and Conrad Black, Charles Saatchi. His power is unique, and an art critic, Norman Rosenthal of the British Royal Academy, suggested that "the Saatchis are probably the most important collectors of modern art anywhere in the world."

Conceptual art isn't art, but it is Jewish. It signals the culmination of the Jewish take-over of modern art. Conceptual art requires no artistic ability, talent or skill. That's why Jews gravitate toward it and promote it. It's an example of Jews defining art as what they do rather than defining art in its relationship to Logos. It's as if, Shamir says at another point, we all woke up one day and found that only cripples could compete at the Olympics. Or, to give another example, to find out that the high jump had been replaced by a chess match. Jewish domination of the art world was not "due to the great achievements of Jewish artists." Quite to the contrary, Shamir points out that 

The Jews were extremely ill-equipped for their conquest of Olympus. For many generations, Jews never entered churches and hardly ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of their rejection of idols. In the course of a two thousand-year-long selection process, the visual gifts of Jews were not developed, as opposed to the abilities to learn, argue, and convince, honed to perfection in the Talmudic environment.

Shamir goes on to add that "Rejection of Christ," the Logos incarnate who is the "main fountain of creativity," was the ultimate reason why Jews could not be artists, because

There is no visual art or poetry outside of God; at best the godless person can imitate art. For this reason, Jews are, as a rule, poor painters and sculptors. . . .While their mastery of word and ideology is very high (well above the average of 100 at 130), their average visual ability is only 75, extremely low. One can consider it a scientific proof of "no art without Christ." Indeed, until recently there were no important Jewish painters or sculptors. The Jewish temple was supposedly built by Phoenecians and Greeks, and it had very few images. Even the Illumination of Jewish manuscripts was usually done by non-Jewish artists, who made very obvious errors trying to copy Jewish letters.

The same thing applies, mutatis mutandis to the university. The people whose defining characteristic is rejection of Logos cannot excel in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. If they are allowed into the university they will subvert the principles of the university and redefine academic achievement things that Jews do well. If the university were the Olympics, chess would replace basketball. If Jews controlled the Olympics as effectively as they controlled the art world, only cripples could compete.

In order to disguise their total lack of artistic talent, "Visually handicapped Jews created a similar anomaly -- that of non-visual 'conceptual' art" because "Preparation of these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by anybody. Such art is perfectly within Jewish abilities. Moreover, Jews with their good ability to produce ideas and read iconography will surely succeed in it. Jews bend art to fit their abilities, in order for them to succeed in this difficult (for them) occupation."

The culmination of this trend to conceptualize and thereby redefine art can be found in works of "art," like "Piss Christ," an artifact which kills two birds with one stone, combining Jewish subversion of the art world with Jewish hatred of Christ. "Piss Christ" is a work of art because, as Marcel Duchamp once said, it is "in a museum." "Piss Christ" is a work of art because a museum curator said it was. In this instance, the man responsible was Leonard Lauder, the Jew who runs the Whitney Museum, a man who was, according to Shamir, "a great friend of Ariel Sharon." Are we talking about a conspiracy? Shamir lays the blame at the feet of Group Interest:

For Jews, their Group interest lays in undermining visual art, for they can't compete in it. The even deeper Group Interest of Jews is to undermine Christianity, their main enemy. We see this interest satisfied . . . by their relentless attack on Mel Gibson, who dared to produce a film about Christ. ... As sacrality in Europe is unavoidably Christian, profanation of art is certainly within Jewish Group Interests. It does not mean the Jews, or even some Jews, understand that they act in their own group interest.

This is not a new phenomenon. Shamir sees the Saatchis of the world, the Jews responsible for the creation of conceptual art, as the descendants of "The Jews [who] were prominent in the great tragedy of Byzantine art, the iconoclasm. The contemporary writers leave us no doubt: Jews (a powerful community in those days as nowadays) were extremely active in promoting this concept."

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the university; however, I see the cause of this convergence in the form, which is to say, formal causality. The student of formal causality who attempts to deal with Jewish influence at the university is confronted with a curious philosophical phenomenon. People regularly refer to Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists (As for example, when they say 'Baylor is a Baptist university'), but the minute one refers to Jews, the term is stricken as impermissible.

The issue is philosophical. It is based on a philosophical error known as nominalism, which maintained that there was no such thing as "trees," only individual birches, pines, oaks, etc. This extreme form of nominalism was noticed by Hilaire Belloc in the 1920s in his book on The Jews, when he wrote, "If anyone referred to a swindler as a Jew, he was an anti-Semite," but exposing the absurdity of the claim did little to stop the tendency.

In order to unravel this error at the bottom of what is in reality a ban on thought, we need to distinguish between essence and existence. If I say that a dog is a four-legged creature with fur, I am referring to essence not existence, and my claim is not refuted when someone says, "Yesterday, I saw a hairless, Mexican dog with three legs."

Similarly, the philosophical validity of the term "Catholic" or "Jew" is not refuted when someone claims "I know a Catholic who is proabortion." Or "Are you saying my Jewish mother-in-law is a revolutionary?" Both the Catholic and Jew get their identity qua Catholic or Jew from the form. In the case of Catholics, that form is acceptance of Christ the Logos as defined or determined by the Catholic faith, i.e., by scripture, tradition and the Magisterium. In the case of Jews, that form is defined by rejection of Christ and Logos, as determined by rabbinic interpretation of the Talmud. Catholics are formed by the gospels; Jews are formed by the Talmud. The result is two radically different cultures.

If the culmination of Catholic culture was the creation of the university, the culmination of Jewish culture was capitalism, which, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century in America, gradually devoured the university, by restructuring it according to capitalist, which is to say, Jewish principles, in particular those articulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, a gang of thugs which rivals Professor Lipstadt in its brutality. The institution of tenure, which was a relic of the Middle Ages, was subverted and then replaced by a system in which Jewish superstar professors like Stanley Fish could earn six figure salaries (While at UIC, Stanley Fish earned more per annum than the Governor of Illinois), while the majority of the teaching was done by wage slave adjuncts. 

During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography, who claimed in his magnum opus that the study of the Talmud led to the moral corruption of the Polish Jews:

To twist a phrase out of its meaning, to use all the tricks of the clever advocate, to play upon words, and to condemn what they did not know . . . such were the characteristics of the Polish Jew. . . . Honesty and right-thinking he lost as completely as simplicity and truthfulness. He made himself master of all the gymnastics of the Schools and applied them to obtain advantage over any one more cunning than himself. He took delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat that way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.

This assertion and what follows are recounted in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History. The only thing that saved Graetz himself from the fate of Polish Jews was German culture, the German Enlightenment in particular, and role models like Moses Mendelssohn and Salomon Maimun, who saw their own separation from Talmudic culture as a liberation from Jewish bondage.

And yet in spite of that liberation and the rise of the maskilim in the Pale of the Settlement, when the Jews were finally admitted to the university in significant numbers, as happened in Russia in the mid-19th century, they used the university as a staging ground for revolutionary activity. The same thing happened in America. In his memoir Commies, Ronald Radosh describes how he and other Jews in the Young Communist League were sent from New York to Wisconsin to take over the university there.

The same thing happened in slightly different fashion at Notre Dame. As one has come to expect, the main culprit in this matter was the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC. In addition to being the president who stole Notre Dame from the Catholic Church, Father Hesburgh has the distinction of hiring the first Jew at Notre Dame, Samuel Shapiro, who was brought into the history department. I knew Shapiro for the last 20 some years of his life; he would show up at my house and plunk himself down on the living room sofa periodically. I visited him in the hospital when he was dying, and I wrote his obituary after his death. In the Middle Ages Catholics were told to avoid contact with Jews because, they were told, the only time a Jew wants to talk with a Christian is to subvert his faith or corrupt his morals. For over 20 years Sam Shapiro tried to do just that. He attempted to undermine my faith -- largely by trying to convert me to Darwinism -- and I tried to get him to convert to Catholicism. In the end, neither project was successful. I have written about this elsewhere; the obituary can be read at culturewars.com. For now I'd like to propose the Jewish corollary to the above statement, namely, all too often the only time a goy wants to talk to a Jew is when the goy wants big money. This was true of the princes in Medieval Europe, and it led to misery among the population at large and pogroms against the Jews, who were granted privileges that were invariably economically ruinous for the population at large in exchange for the low interest loans they provided to princes. Needless to say, this deal often included princes of the church.

L'affaire Williamson:

The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

By E. Michael Jones