Chapter Seven Jewish Historiography

 

A book published in 1980 provides as good a starting point as any for a general exploration of the almost infinitely complex subject of Jewish historiography; its title: Jews and Zionism; the South African Experience 1910-1967; its author: Dr. Gideon Shimoni, Lecturer in Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the publisher: Oxford University Press, Cape Town,1

 

This book is an excellent example of Jewish historiography, painstakingly researched and well written, from which it is possible to draw valid conclusions that are equally applicable to the works of most other Jewish writers in this field.

 

Here we have a history of the Jewish people in South Africa covering a period of close on 60 years which is also a history of South Africa. But it is addressed to the Jews and, with a few exceptions, will be read only by Jews. What distinguishes it from all other histories of South Africa is the fact that it is concerned exclusively with the interests of a tiny minority of the population of the country-indeed, in all its 364 pages there is not to be found any expression of genuine sympathetic concern with the interests of any other section of the population, except only where the grievances of one section can be used for the furtherance of the Jewish interest.

 

Professor Henry L. Feingold, Professor of History at the University of New York, has put it in a nutshell:

 

Is it possible that there is something so idiosyncratic about the Jewish presence in history, considering the fact that it is a community baaed on an idea and on history itself, that it resists the tools and thwarts the assumptions of modem scholarship?2

 

Part of an answer to Professor Feingold's question is supplied by the French Jewish writer, James Darmesteter in his book Camp d’Oeil sur Histoire du Peuple Juif (Paris, 1892):

 

Not all those engaged In these studies (i.e., history of religion etc.) reached that degree of serene impartiality where facts are studied for the sole purpose of being understood and where thought is carried to a height that will not permit of conclusions dictated in advance by the ephemeral prejudices of politics, of faith, or of metaphysics.

 

For which sentiments Darmesteter is categorized by Richard J.H. Gottheil in his book Zionism as being not a genuine Jew but only "a Frenchman of Jewish race.”

 

Professor Feingold can, therefore, expect to find no answer to his question unless, like Darmesteter, he can see history from outside the confines of his identity as a Jew-after which, if it is scholarship that commands his allegiance, again like Darmesteter, he will have ceased to be a Jew. In a word, he can be a Jewish historiographer, but he cannot at the same time be a scholar and a Jew, for in historical scholarship, as in all the sciences, it is the shared interest of all mankind that is called on to preside over the study and contemplation of the legitimate separate interests of the innumerable groups of which mankind is composed.

 

That does not mean that all history not written by Jews qualifies as genuine scholarship; in fact, very little of it does so qualify. History is the story of what happened and is, therefore, always heavily influenced by those who make things happen and who are naturally Inclined to represent their actions and intentions in laudable terms. In particular, the history of any great conflict is inevitably the victor's story; and in more general terms it can be stated as an axiom that it is the prevailing power, those who control the present, who dictate the story of the past and of the present—in their history books and in the media of public communication which they own or control.

 

Nevertheless, there is still a significant difference between Jewish and non-Jewish historiography, the one always more rigorously partisan than the other, the one intended exclusively for a Jewish readership and the other, with all its faults and shortcomings, addressed to the world at large. The main difference is one of subject matter which, in the case of Jewish historiography almost invariably repels the attention of the gentile. Thus, opening Shimoni’s book at random, at page 173 we read:

 

Far more vibrant than Mizarcki was the sodalist-Zionist Paolei Zion (Workers of Zion) Party, founded in Johannesburg in November 1918 by a group of young immigrant Jews of Litmk background, notably the brokers Richard and Leibl Feldman, Jacob Judelowitze, E.M. Pincus and S. Kartun. Emphatically preferring Yiddish to Hebrew, Paolei Zion produced a Yiddish monthly called Unser Weg (Our Way)...

 

Closing the book and re-opening it at random we 6nd ourselves at page 263 and we read:

 

... and by the time Habonim augmented by the merger with Dror and Bnei Zion has at last crystallized its educational policy, there were far fewer candidates for Chalutz Aliyah than there had been at the time of Israel's establishment.

 

The general reader cannot be interested in all this bacause the concepts and the institutions lie entirely outside his own field of experience and have no meaning except to Jews, and words are used which are not to be found in any English dictionary.

 

There may be little genuine historical scholarship in very many books written by gentiles-but scholarship is always amply represented within the corpus of Western historiography. Thus, while British establishment writers, many of them highly gifted, were churning out shamelessly partisan histories of the Angio- Boer War period in South Africa, it was still possible for British readers to find books on the same subject which were destined to stand the test of time, like J,A. Hobson’s The War in South Africa. Genuine history in the West has tended to lag behind propaganda; yet truth has prevailed, if only, as Lord Acton put it, “when it is no longer in anyone's interest to suppress it.” The propaganda story of the Anglo-Boer War period has tended to fade into popular forgetfulness, to be replaced in our time for the benefit of those who still want to know what happened, by Thomas Pakenham's The Boer War, which hides nothing, falisfies nothing and makes no excuses for British policy in Africa, even if it falls short of explaining in historical terms what happened.3

 

On the other hand, in the entire corpus of Jewish historiography we find nothing but the most slavish subordination of scholarship to a stringently narrow conception of the Jewish national interest, accompanied very often by the execration of any Jewish writer who has fallen into the heresy of trying to achieve a reconciliation of the moral interests of Jew and gentile, the most bitterly execrated of these being the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

 

Moses Maimonides (born at the Talmudic Center, Cordova, in 1135) drew up a famous code of the principles of Judaism and wrote:

 

It is forbidden to defraud or deceive any person in business. Judaist and non-Judaist are to be treated alike.,. What some people imagine, that it is permissible to cheat a gentile, is an error and based on ignorance,.. Deception, duplicity, cheating and circumvention towards a gentile are despicable to the Almighty, as "a]] that do unrighteous are an abomination unto the Lord thy God," (Quoted by Douglas Reed in The Controversy of Zion).

 

The Talmudists denounced Maimonides to the Inquisition, saying: “You who clear your own community of heretics, clear ours too."4

 

It is thus by insisting on separateness and secrecy, that a Jewish presence in the West “resists the tools and thwarts the assumptions of modern scholarship." Nothing could be more idiosyncratic or peculiar than the presence in history of a nation, strongly united and organized, an endogamous or inbreeding biological unit, not confined like all other nations within territorial boundaries but dispersed worldwide among other populations. For Jewry, under the banner of Zionism, as Shimoni and virtually all other Jewish historiographers frankly admit, is a real nation in which religion is a factor of rapidly diminishing importance.

 

Many pages of Shimoni's book are taken up with an account of the struggle within Jewry which gathered pace early in this century as Zionism, an essentially secular nationalist ideology, prevailing irresistibly over Judaism as a religious adaptation to existence.

 

Prominent in the religious rear guard was the Reverend A.P. Bender of Cape Town, of whom Shimoni writes:

 

He regarded Zionism as a misleading illusion, since the revival of a Jewish homeland was, in his view, a matter for God and not men.

 

If anything, he preferred territorialism contending that, whereas the Zionist goal was only “a far-off divine event," territorialism might at least provide immediate relief.

 

Shimoni writes elsewhere that Zionism made rapid progress in South Africa-more so than in the United States and Britain -adding: “Consequently it must be noted that in South Africa successive generations of Jewish youth were exposed, almost exclusively, to a mode of identification determined by Zionism."

 

Shimoni’s book is virtually devoid of any religious tones and is the clearest imaginable statement of the feet that Jews within the nations of the West are alien political intrusions highly organized and integrated on an international basis as a separate nation with a different and separate set of interests and values.

 

Needless to say, it is nowhere suggested in Shimoni’s book that the world's Jews regard Israel as a homeland to which they or their children hope one day to be able to return, this perception of the imagined destiny of the Jews being today almost exclusively confined to Christians.5

 

It is this idiosyncratic Jewish presence, exerting enormous and even decisive influence within all the nations of the Western world, including the Soviet Union, and in all spheres, economic, political and cultural, which today presents to what is left of Western scholarship a challenge which it declines or evades at its peril.

 

In other words, it has become the most pressing duty and responsibility of Western scholarship to penetrate, explore and fully incorporate in the shared knowledge and wisdom of mankind a partisan history from which it has allowed itself for so long to be rigorously excluded; the urgency of this duty has been enormously enhanced in recent years by developments in the Middle East where Jewish interests and those of all other nations are inseparably involved, and where it is Jewish interests which most frequently take the initiative and exert the decisive influence.

 

The late Professor Sir Arthur Keith, one-time President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, penetrated to the heart of the anthropological problem in his book A New Theory of Human Evolution.

 

The chapters in which Professor Keith examines the problem of Jewish minorities and of the phenomenon called "anti-Semitism" form only a small portion of a book of more than 400 pages in which he explains the role of group consciousness in the evolution of races, nations, and moral sentiment.

 

Dr. Shimoni’s history of the Jewish community in South Africa, like “Dr. B.A, Kosmin’s history of the Jews in Zimbabwe”6 (formerly Rhodesia), like nearly all histories of the Jews and biographies and autobiographies written by Jews, endorsed Professor Keith’s thesis by illuminating it with innumerable examples.

 

What Professor Keith says is that The Jews are permanently at war with the peoples among whom they dwelF - no less a state of war because the weapons used are almost exclusively those of the mind. This situation illustrates the Ingsoc dictum in George

 

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, "War is peace and peace is war,” where war itself wears the disguise of peace; indeed, Orwell’s book can be read as a brilliant expose of some of the methods now actually being used by a small alien power elite to expand its dominion over the rest of mankind.

 

However important the mind-bending technology analyzed by Orwell, this is only a small portion of a technology of political warfare which covers the entire range of human activity, including high finance, the media of communication, party politics, the administration of justice, education and the arts-and does not even stop short, as Shimoni shows, at active involvement in revolutionary subversion and terrorist violence.8

 

Dr, Shimoni supplies the facts about Jewish involvement in revolutionary activity in South Africa but makes no attempt to interpret or explain, confident, no doubt, that his mainly Jewish readers will need no help in relating these facts to Jewish political aims and aspirations. The main struggle began, he writes, in 1950 when the South African Government introduced the Suppression of Communism Act, a measure amended from time to time to give the state powers to ban any organization deemed to be furthering the aims of Communism,

 

Shimoni writes at page 227:

Apart from the effect of these dramatic events upon the lives of Jews as White citizens of South Africa, they had significant consequences for South African Jewry as a community. The reason was the extraordinary salience of Jewish individuals in the White opposition to the regime of apartheid. Throughout this period Jewish names kept appearing in every facet of the struggle: among reformist liberals; in the radical Communist opposition; in the courts, whether as defendants or as counsel for the defense; in the lists of bannings and amongst those who fled the country to evade arrest. Their prominence was particularly marked in the course of the Treason Trial which occupied an important place in the news media throughout the second half of the 1950s. This trial began in December 1956, when 156 people were arrested on charges of treason in the form of a conspiracy to overthrow the state by violence and to replace it with a state based on Communism. Twenty-three of those arrested were Whites, more than half of them Jews.

 

Shimoni lists the names of some of those accused: they included Yetta Barenblatt, Hymie Barset, Lionel (Rusty) Bernstein, Leon Levy, Norman Levy, Sydney Shall, Joe Slovo, Ruth (First) Slovo,

 

Sonia Bunting, Lionel Forman, Isaac Horvitch, Ben Turok, Jacqueline Arenstein, Errol Stanley, Dorothy Shanley. Then he adds, casually:

 

To top it all, at one stage in the trial the defense counsel was led by Israel Maisels, while the prosecutor was none other than Oswald Pirow. The justaposition was striking: Maisels, the prominent Jewish communal leader, defending those accused of seeking to overthrow White supremacy; Pirow, the extreme Afrikaner Nationalist and former Nazi sympathizer, defending White supremacy.

 

It is significant, surely, that nowhere in Shimoni’s books do we find any trace of an antagonism of interest and attitude between the Jewish community as a whole and those accused of seeking by revolutionary means to overthrow the state. The same bland non­committal attitude of the Jewish community towards revolutionary activity was revealed in 1963 when the police raided the luxurious home of one Arthur Goldreich at Rivonia near Johannesburg, where they captured almost intact the leadership cadre of a supposed Black Communist revolutionary movement called Umkonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation").

 

Writes Shimoni:

 

Seventeen people were arrested, including Sisulu and Kathrada, leaders respectively of the banned African and Indian Congresses who were both hiding from the police. Five of those arrested were Whites, all of them Jews. They were: Arthur Goldreich, Lionel Berstein, Hilliard Festenstein, Dennis Goldberg and Bob Hepple,

 

The Jewish community’s weirdly antithetical role in South Africa (as in so many other Western countries) was summed up by Nathaniel Weyl in his book Traitor's End, when he wrote of anti- Semitism in South Africa:

 

A perhaps more important ingredient was the prominence of South African Jews in finance, mining and other economic command posts of the nation on the one hand, and in revolutionary and racial reform movements on the other, From the outset Jews had been prominent in the Communist Party and its various fronts. They were equally conspicuous in the various movements which sought to break down the barriers separating the White from the non- White population.

 

Since the weird contradiction of a highly privileged ethnic minority represented out of all proportion among those who seek to overthrow the prevailing order is left unexplained in books written by Jews (like Shimoni’g history of Zionism in South Africa) it must be assumed that among the Jews themselves no explanation is needed or required. Such an assumption which offers to resolve the contradiction would be fully in line with Professor Keith's thesis that the Jews, for reasons of group solidarity, are everywhere committed to clandestine warfare against the majorities among whom they dwell as self-perpetuating minorities. Hence their continuous struggle to break down all barriers separating one ethnic group from another, except only that occult barrier that has always ensured Jewish separation,

 

Shimoni's handling of the subject of anti-Semitism is founded on the simple presupposition that there never was and never can be any justification for gentile dissent or disapprobation of anything the Jews do or say in maintaining or promoting their group interests.

 

Anti-Semitism is thus regarded either as an infectious form of moral perversion to be equated with “racism" and "intolerance" or as an evil ideology associated with “Nazism,* “Fascism" and any other form of political totalitarianism-except Communism which, although frequently mentioned in the book, is nowhere disparaged.

 

Shimoni writes of that period in South African history when simultaneously nearly all White listed Communists were Jews and when Israel voted consistently against South Africa at the United Nations:

 

Also reflective of the groundswell of suspicion again9t Israel and Jewry was the hostility revealed by an organization called the Inter- Church Anti-Communist Actions Commission (AntiCom), It published a bilingual newsletter which fostered the impression that there was a close tie between Jewry and Communism. With the support of “evidence’* taken from standard neo-Nazi propaganda, it purported to show how Communism and Bolshevism were fomented by Jews. In the circumstances prevailing in South Africa, these allegations were particularly insidious, for AntiCom ostensibly enjoyed the responsible auspices of the Afrikaner churches. Yet protestations by the Board of Deputies to the AntiCom committee were of little avail. It responded that in the light of “the high percentage of Jewish names among the listed Communists,” the Jewish community should declare where it stood in “the fight against Godless Communism.''

 

The Jewish community was evidently in no position to declare itself unequivocally against “Godless Communism," nor would it have been possible in an atmosphere of full and frank discussion to prove to AntiCom that its allegations were groundless and that there had been no linkage between Jews and Communism before, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution, The Board of Deputies then, as always in such circumstances, could respond only in one way: by indignantly condemning all such accusations. Again, when at an International Symposium on Communism in Pretoria in 1966 Major-General Hendrik van den Bergh, chief of South Africa’s security police, coupled Jews and Communism, there was nothing the Board of Deputies could do except angrily condemn the General's remarks and bring massive pressure to bear on him to retract them-without any attempt to prove that what he had said was untrue or incorrect, or even permit the matter to be debated.

 

There is not, nor has there ever been, in the West anything of the kind represented by the word "anti-Semitism”; the West has never offered any resistance whatever to the acceptance and assimilation of persons of Jewish ethnic origin; in fact, Innumerable Jews down the ages have disappeared through assimilation into the different nations of the West; and all the world’s Jews would quickly vanish as ethnic minorities if they abandoned their policy of exclusiveness and the dual code of conduct which such exclusiveness necessitates. That which is called "anti-Semitism* is, therefore, only a gentile reaction to the Jew’s unwillingness to be accepted and assimilated and the steps which the Jews take to give effect to that unwillingness.

 

Anyone who studies Jewish newspapers and other publications-very few Westerners do-is left in no doubt that it is the ongoing process of assimilation that worries Zionist leaders most and that sign of gentile resentment are always given the maximum of publicity and are eagerly exploited to scare rank-and- file Jews back into tine and increase resistance to the natural temptations of assimilation.

 

One of the consequences of all this, almost laughable for its absurdity, is that many gentiles find themselves burdened with guilt feelings over what they are supposed to have done to the Jews-when, in fact, atl the trouble can be traced to what the Jews persist in doing in their efforts to preserve their exclusiveness and, when possible, extend their predominance over the gentiles.

 

A great deal of space in Dr. Shimoni's book is taken up with information and discussion about the strenuous and persistent efforts of Jewish leaders in South Africa to harden Jewish youth against the temptations of assimilation. Having already discussed the variousjewiah youth movements and Habonim youth-training and indoctrination camps, he writes on page 253:

 

Another index of Zionism’s strength in South Africa was its influence upon the phenomenal development of the Jewish day schools after 1943. Bjr 1967 there were 14 such schools spread throughout the major cities of Southern Africa, encompassing 5500 primary and secondary school children or about 30 per cent of the Jewish population of school age. Although these day schools were neither created nor directly sponsored by the Zionist Organization, their protagonists and promoters were almost at Zionists, Moreover, as we have noted in a earlier chapter, the formula “Jewish education based on broadly national-traditional lines* had been incorporated into the Board of Education's constitution in 1945.

 

The Jews’ insistence on Jewish nationalism as a basis for their children’s education did not predispose them to regard with sympathetic understanding the efforts of the Afrikaners to influence their children in favor of Christian-national principles. On the contrary, the Afrikaners’ policy of Christian National Education (CNE) was regarded as "yet another reactionary and, therefore, potentially anth-Jewish expression of Afrikaner nationalism,’'

 

It is not simply the practice of a dual code, clearly distinguishing between “u8w and "them,“ that is idiosyncratic about the Jewish presence in history, for the dual code, as Professor Keith explains, is part of an evolutionary process which has; always ensured the promotion and preservation of group solidarity, as among all other social creatures; what is idiosyncratic is a dual code, as practiced by the Jews within the territorial boundaries of other nations, establishing within the nations so penetrated an antagonism of group interest hurtful to the host people and sometimes dangerous for the Jews.

 

Shimoni’s history provides innumerable examples of the weirdly different kind of thinking and of expression made necessary by this idiosyncratic presence in history, producing in the reader who does not "belong” sensations of bewilderment much like those experienced by Alice in her Wonderland; for it is a world in which the unreal acquires to a quite marvelous degree the verisimilitude of the real and in which the most radical contradictions are rendered convincingly acceptable,

 

It is a kind of thinking with which the West has gained a slight acquaintance in its attempts to penetrate the mysteries of Marxist- Leninist dialectic, the main features of it being the subordination of all testa of truth and of logical consistency to the requirements of "the cause"-if it suits “us" it is true; if it suits “them" it is untrue; thus, it is possible to reconcile in a single belief what is both true and untrue; this is what George Orwell calls Doublethink.

 

It must be a source of infinite wonder and amused self- congratulation among the Jews to find that the whole world seems not to have noticed that what they so passionately condemn as “apartheid" is only an Afrikaans version of what they themselves preach and practice under the name of Zionism-namely, racial and national self-preservation and self-determination, At the same time, while Jews all over the world are in the forefront of every campaign against South Africa, Jews in South Africa, many of them Israeli citizens, work in the closest cooperation with the government on every plane, including high finance, industry, military defense and even in national security agencies.®

 

It would be tediously repetitive to list the innumerable examples of double standards, or Doublethink in Shimoni's book, for in virtually every page we see how it serves the purposes of a nationalism of the mind that lacks the security of geographical boundaries. One example, therefore, will have to suffice.

 

Question: What in the Zionist view is the most detestable of all political ideologies? Answer: National Socialism.

 

Next Question; What was happening in South Africa while German National Socialism was raging in Europe?

 

Answer: We read in Dr, Shimoni's chapter on the war years in South Africa of the emergence of the Zionist Socialist Party-the word Zionist having by now been firmly established as synonymous with national; this Zionist Socialist Party, we are told, was "making great strides." Dr. Shimoni writes: "In the late 1930s and during the war years a new ideological constellation at last conducive to socialist Zionism had been taking shape in the country," International Socialism and its supposed deadly opposite National Socialism are brought together by Dr. Shimoni without the slightest hint of contradiction in fact or logic:

 

The Ideological program of the party affirmed that it stood together with the socialist labor movements of all countries and people in the struggle to "liquidate the capitalist system of private property and to create in its stead a socialist society built on the basis of cooperative ownership of the means of production.“ However, it contended that for Jews the prerequisite of socialism was a Jewish homeland in Palestine so that their occupational distribution and their national existence could be normalized. Zionism embodies a progressive nationalism compatible with socialism, according to the formula: "Socialist in content and national in form.'' {Emphasis added),10

 

In a word, national socialism for “us'’ and international socialism for “them"; the preservation of group identity for "us" and the obliteration of group identity for “them"; one standard for "us," another for “them"; power for “us," impotence for "them."

 

Could it be purely fortuitous that the concept of Doublethink, so clearly enunciated and explained by George Orewll, corresponds so closely with the kind of thinking we encounter in Jewish historiography, whether addressed to Jew or gentile? And could it be fortuitous that Doublethink and the behavior that goes with it are precisely what is required to give effect to a dual moral code which Professor Keith has identified as a significant feature of race consciousness?

 

We are driven to the conclusion that Jewish historiography precludes any possibility of scholarly debate-for what kind of debate can there be with enmity, no matter how carefully disguised? Or, to put it another way, what kind of debate can a gentile scholar have with those who insist in advance that Judaism’s separate interest is sacrosanct, therefore non-debatable?

 

For the gentile student, Jewish historiography is like that legendary Cretan labyrinthine cave from which the hero Theseus would never have been able to extricate himself without the clew of thread given to him by Ariadne, daughter of King Minos. The detailed analysis and explanation of Doublethink which Orwell has supplied is for the gentile student the equivalent of Adriadne’s clew of thread, the fibers of it moral as well as intellectual.

 

We learn from Orwell that:

 

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.,. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies-all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. (Nineteen Eighty-four).

 

The Jewish historiographer is proof against any feeling of falsity, or any twinges of conscience, because the justification of a potentially hostile and assimilatory majority is felt to be necessary for the preservation of a separate Jewish identity and interest, therefore, biologically necessary, to be practiced just as innocently as all those other forms of camouflage and concealment which characterize antagonism of interest throughout nature.

 

Doublethink can be regarded as a kind of original sin that has been with the human species ever since it was discovered that an untrue statement, if believed, can produce the same effect as a true one, and that the misrepresentation of reality can be used by one to impose his will on another. Falsely inform someone that his house is on fire, and he will react and behave exactly as if it is on fire. A state of persuasion has thus been substituted for a state of genuine knowledge and understanding. Plato in his criticism of the sophist (Pkaedrus 261) draws attention to what he calls “the universal art of enchanting the mind with arguments producing opinions that come from persuasion and not from truth. However, this is a process that places some strain on the persuader, because every factual misrepresentation and every misleading argument he uses requires the incorporation of more unreality in his own thinking processes, increasingly at the risk of undermining his own grip on reality. The end result is a state of alienation or schizophrenia where all ability to distinguish reality from unreality has been lost.

 

 

However, in much the same way that training and practice make possible certain physical feats otherwise impossible and even dangerous to attempt, so, too, can the practice of Doublethink be developed in some individuals far beyond the breaking point of the untrained and uninitiated. It is this highly sophisticated Doublethink which has been developed into a major weapon of psychological warfare in our century, practiced with incomparable skill by nationalist Jews, either as Zionists or Communists, and with less skill by their gentile surrogates. Indeed, there is a big difference between Doublethink as practiced by Jewish political activists, including journalists and historians, and as practiced by their intellectually enchanted surrogates-the first energized by strong race instinct and reinforced with centuries of accumulated experience, and the other having no other source of motivation and assurance than a bloodless leftist ideology.

 

There is thus a world of difference between the Doublethink of a Whittaker Chambers (principal witness in the memorable Alger Hiss Soviet espionage case in the USA 1948-1950) and that of a leading modem Jewish historian like Professor Norman Cohn. Chambers, having broken under the strain of trying to live simultaneously in two mental worlds, explained as follows the purgation of his psyche which preceded his conversion to Christianity:

 

I have had to transform my whole way of life and thought. In the process I have thrown off many-year-old influences. It happened that they were almost completely Semitic. There is no question of blaming these influences, Rather would I blame my own susceptibility to them. (Whittaker Chambers, letter to a friend in 1943).11

 

So complete is the amalgam of reality and unreality in the mind of the trained and instinctually strengthened practioner of Doublethink that he can, as Orwell remarks, actually believe (if only for as long as necessary) what he knows to be untrue, without any risk of disturbing his total grip on reality; and it is the fact that he himself believes it that confers on his utterance a high degree of credibility.

 

An excellent example of this species of Doublethink is the concluding chapter of Professor Norman Cohn's book Warrant for Genocide, in which he attributes Gentile reactions of resentment to a psychological “mechanism by which human beings read into the behavior of others the anarchic tendencies which they fear to recognize in themselves,"

 

Cohn argues his thesis most ingeniously:

 

... the Jews, as a collectivity, are unconsciously seen both as the "bad'1 son, i.e. the rebellious son full of murderous wishes toward the father, and the "bad" father, i.e. the potential torturer, castrate and killer of the son.

 

He goes on to explain:

Following Sigmund Freud himself, various psychoanalysts have argued that the Jews, because they reject the Christian God, are unconsciously seen by some Christians as “bad," rebellious sons-indeed, as parricides; this means that traditionally, it has been easy and tempting for a Christian to make the Jew into a scapegoat for any unconscious resentment he may have against this father, or that matter against his God,

 

If that explanation leaves us understated, Professor Cohn has a couple of others to offer:

 

Unconsciously, the Jew is even more closely identified with the “bad" father than he is with the “bad" son. This is understandable enough, for the historical relationship of the Jewish people to Christianity and to Europe makes it almost inevitable that it should be seen as a kind of collective father-figure. As an identifiable people the Jews are, of course, very much older than moat of the European peoples, but that is not all: Jewish religion is the parent religion out of which, and in rivalry with which, Christianity developed.

 

Still not persuaded? Professor Cohn has yet another explanation to offer:

 

Most important of all, perhaps, is the fact that while the God of Christianity combines the attributes of father and son, the God of the Jews is father only-and, one might add, in the eyes of the Christians who learn of him only from the Old Testament and know nothing of the later development of Judaism, a singularly tyrannical and merciless father at that.12

 

We are reminded that exactly the same kind of persuasion is used in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where O'Brien (his name now interchangeable with that of Emmanuel Goldstein) says to Winston Smith:

 

You know perfectly well what Is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory.

 

It is explained to Winston that his memory can be described as defective because he has insisted on retaining knowledge that ought to have been forgotten and so rendered totally nonexistent.

 

Similarly, the gentiles are called on to expunge from their collective memory all knowledge about injuries and injustices suffered at the hands of the Jews, and to understand that anything short of total conformity with Jewish requirements is classifiable as no more than what Professor Cohn calls “collective psycho­pathology

 

In tones of cold superiority, Mephistophelian in confidence and arrogance, Professor Cohn presents a slightly complex explanation of “anti-Semitism’' which the unwary student, impressed by its ingenuity and logical consistency, will be tempted to accept-without pausing to scrutinize the dubious foundations on which it has been reared; namely, a murky and wholly unsubstantiated Freudian thesis of innate “father-son" enmity.

 

 

All such "explanations" of “anti-Semitism,'’ like much of Freud's writing, are identifiable as a form of psychological warfare passed off as scholarship, cunningly contrived to disable the Western mind and to transfer and transfix attention as far away as possible from an area of inquiry where, logically and realistically, any genuine investigation should begin: actual complaints of Jewish injustice which have been made almost continuously down the ages by people of different race and nationality among whom the Jews have dwelt as minorities. Instead of the complaint being made the subject of inquiry, it is the complainant who is put on trial or, better still as Professor Cohn suggests, handed over to the psychiatrists for clinical study!

 

Jewish injustice, the practice of which Professor Sir Arthur Keith has described as a "code of enmity," is proverbial in all the languages of the Western world. Thus we find in standard dictionary English the noun “Jew" defined as "an extortionate usurer, driver of hard bargains," and the transitive verb “jew"* as meaning,<to cheat, overreach" (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

 

All the facts appertaining to the perpetually troubled relations of Jew and gentile are readily accessible to investigation; all that is lacking most often is the will and the power to investigate, The Jews in their determination to survive, prosper and grow strong; as a self-conscious, geographically dispersed nation have always found it necessary to concentrate their energies on precisely those forms of economic activity which lend themselves most readily to the “driving of hard bargains, cheating and overreaching" where, by collective action, they can most easily control the flow of money and goods. So, also, they have always shown a marked preference for those professions and occupations which provide firm bases for a maximum exercise of influence over the host population; on the other hand, rigorously avoided are all those avenues of employment in which a firm and inseparable common interest prevails, such as agriculture, the armed services and all the skilled trades,

 

Thus, armed in our minds with complete insight into the motives and methods at work, we can venture into the dark labyrinthine caverns of Jewish history-writing, whether addressed to Jew or gentile, without much risk of being overcome with giddiness or of losing our way, firm in our faith-like Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress—that there does exist truth, the truth we need for our health and happiness, capable of standing firm against any

passionately partisan powers of persuasion and intellectual terrorism.

 

Notes

 

1. Jews and Zionism: the South African Experience 1910-1967, Gideon Shimoni (Oxford University Press. Cape Town 1980).

 

2. Professor Heiuy L. Feingold, in Special Interest Report, August 1982, published by The American Council for Judaism.

 

3. The Boer War, Thomas Pakenham, (Honathan Bali and Weidenfeld & Nicholson); The War in South Africa, J.A. Hobson James Nisbet, London, 1900); see also Sir William Butler, an Autobiography, Lieut-General the R. Hon. Sir W.F, Butler G.C.B,, chapters xxi, xxii and xxiii (Constable, London, 1912).

 

4. The anathema pronounced against Spinoza by the Amsterdam rabbinate is given in The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed. More recently the distinguished American Jewish scholar Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, author of Tke Zionist Connection, svas excommunicated by the Jewish hierarchy in the United Slates.

 

5. Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, in his newsletter Middle East Perspective of December 1984, reports on his visit to Israel and the various evangelical Christian movments operating inside Israel to form “an invaluable adjunct to the Zionist movement."

 

6. Majuda: a History of the Jewish Community in Zimbabwe, (B.A. Kosmin, Mambo Press, Zimbabwe, 1981); this is a significantly different history of Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe).

 

7. Referring to the destruction of Carthage, Professor C. Northcote Parkinson, tn his book East and West (Riverside Press, Cambridge 1963). makes the following observation which would appear to coincide with that of Professor Sir Arthur Keith: “Carthage had been destroyed, but among the Carthaginian satellites liad been the Jews, scattered westward from Palestine but of Asian origin and sympathies, potential spies and rebels, difficult to assimilate and impossible to trust. The Jew represented then, and has appeared ever since, as an enemy agent behind the European lines.,

 

8. Dr, Nahum Goklmann, former president of both the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, put It this way in his book The Jewish Paradox:“... the feet Is that the Jews are revolutionaries for other peoples but not for themselves."

 

9. A significant article on “the Relationship between Israel and South Africa appears in the February' 1985 issue of Israeli Foreign Affairs, ‘an independent Monthly Research Report on Israel’s Diplomatic and Military Activities World Wide’ (5825 Telegraph Ave. No., 34, Oakland, California, 94609 USA).

 

10. It is of Interest to note that E, Ben-Shaul, writing in the South African Jewish Herald of August 27, 1074, stated that the Israel Establishment “was by its very nature secularist and Marxist, a socialist-cum-nationalist movement.,. (whose) external policy towards the Mandatory was dovetailed into the socialist program of creating a new Marxist., secular society on a selective basis,"

 

11. Whittaker Chambers's letter to a friend Is quoted by Allan Weinstein in his book on the Chambers-Hiss case, Perjury, it was Alger Hiss who was convicted of perjury (or denying under oath his treasonable activities. A brilliant summary of the Chambers-Hiss case is given by Douglas Reed in Behind the Scene (a reprint of Part Two of Far and Wide); see also Whittaker Chambers's autobiography, Witness (Random Press, New York 1952),

 

12. A healthy corrective to the involute thinking of Professor Norman Cohn on so-called 'lather-son* psychology is given by Professor Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Pyschotherapy, and Douglas Reed in The Controversy a} Zion,