Category Archives: Capitalism

Australian Jews: Productive Merchant Class, Mostly. Maimonides Would Have Approved.

America, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Business, Canada, Capitalism, Communism, Judaism & Jews, Neoconservatism, The West

Via Rob Stove, PhD., Australian author, editor extraordinaire and accomplished organist, come a few reflections, “stray remarks,” about Jews and Judaism in Australia. This little contextual analysis undermines the pat, crude, crass theorizing, regarding the immutable characteristics of the Global Jew, spewed by provincial ignoramuses like the American Andrew Uglin.

The vast majority of Australian Jews have been traditionally involved in small business. They’ve been quite often chefs, quite often café owners, very often chocolatiers, very often jewelers, watchmakers and pawnbrokers; sometimes accountants, sometimes owners of travel agencies, occasionally owners of bookstores and music stores ~Rob Stove

What they’ve almost never been, are devoted readers of magazines like Commentary. (The almost total lack of Jewish immigration from Tsarist Russia could account for this.) There’s no equivalent in Australia to the New York Jewish Intellectuals. Any Australian who maintained that John Howard supported the Iraq invasion because the Chief Rabbi of Australia told him to, would be regarded as a candidate for the nearest mental home ~Rob Stove

From what I can determine, Australian Judaism is as different from American Judaism as it’s possible for two Jewish groups to be who share the English language.

Whenever I happen to read (or read about) Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Norman Podhoretz, I realize that I really am confronted with a foreign country. I get the same feeling when I read Mordechai Richler describing Canada.

One factor separating Australian Jews from American Jews is that there are very few of the former. Of course Australia’s total population – 23 million or so – is itself tiny by American standards. Yet the Jewish proportion of Australia’s total population is a mere 0.4 percent (approximately 100,000 persons).

There were Jews in Australia from the start of white settlement in 1788 (several of the original convicts are known to have been Jewish). At least one synagogue existed in each of the biggest Australian cities from the 1840s onwards (some of these are still used), which suggests that even before the smallish influx of German-Jewish immigrants after the 1848 revolutions’ defeat, the Jewish community had grown to a size making such things viable.

But (and here’s the second big difference between the Australian and the American situation) Australia never had country clubs. Nor did it have the Ivy League. A numerus clausus (Jewish Quota) against Jews – whether it’s established by law, as with Admiral Horthy’s Hungary, or established by “gentlemen’s agreements”, as with Harvard – is scarcely going to be enforceable in a country like Australia, where (a) Jews hardly exist, (b) most of the few Jews who do exist have no discernible desire to enter universities or the professions in the first place.

I don’t wish to suggest that there was no Australian prejudice whatsoever against Jews. Individual Jews were probably given a hard time by individual Gentile malcontents.

But the number of Jews at the highest levels of Australia’s politics, judiciary, and military from the 1880s until now (Sir John Monash is the most famous instance of Jewish military success) implies overall Gentile apathy rather than overall Gentile hostility. A similar conclusion can be inferred from the fact that even though Australia was hit almost as hard by the Great Depression as any other country in the world, and it had the occasional demagogue (in particular Jack Lang, twice Premier of New South Wales), it never had a Father Coughlin.

The vast majority of Australian Jews have been traditionally involved in small business. They’ve been quite often chefs, quite often café owners, very often chocolatiers, very often jewelers, watchmakers and pawnbrokers; sometimes accountants, sometimes owners of travel agencies, occasionally owners of bookstores and music stores.

What they’ve almost never been, are devoted readers of magazines like Commentary. (The almost total lack of Jewish immigration from Tsarist Russia could account for this.) There’s no equivalent here to the New York Jewish Intellectuals. Any Australian who maintained that John Howard supported the Iraq invasion because the Chief Rabbi of Australia told him to, would be regarded as a candidate for the nearest mental home.

Nor are Australian Jews particularly prominent in the wider culture industry. As far as I can tell, our movie and theatrical milieux are very largely Gentile. Our communist parties did have occasional Jewish leaders – notably the Aarons dynasty – but the bulk of Australian commie activists were former Catholic altar-boys with Irish names!

These stray remarks demonstrate, I hope, that generalizing about the Australian Jewish experience from the example of the American Jewish experience would be a fool’s errand.

***********

Melbourne-based historian and organist R.J. Stove is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times and of a forthcoming book (When We Were Kings, scheduled for 2024) about Europe’s monarchist movements between the two world wars. Dr. Stove’s  innumerable disastrous career decisions include a total refusal to regard Rod Dreher* as the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived.

*Image is of General Sir John Monash

Editor: *Barely A Blog has an archive dishing on Rod Dreary. Read the milder stuff before you broach Juvenal Early‘s “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem.” You’ve been warned!

NEW COLUMN: Exporting Toxic Wokeism

America, Capitalism, Economy, Free Markets, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Pop-Culture, Propaganda

Exporting Toxic Wokeism” is the new column now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, CNSNews.com, The New American and American Renaissance.

And excerpt:

America has made a habit of exporting democracy at the point of the bayonet, be it by fomenting war or agitating for color-coded, plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by the duopoly.

While not as lethal, cultural trends and products exported can be toxic, too. They, moreover, displace and contaminate indigenous culture. To wit, Wokeism is made in America, is entirely toxic, and, sadly, suffers no supply-chain disruptions in its spread abroad.

In case you’re not awake to it, woke is the current state-of-being in America. In particular, to be woke in America is to be anti-white and to be anti-white is to be woke. More so than “in” and “hip”—to be woke is existentially important; it will often determine whether one gets and keeps a job, a social media account, even a bank account.

Although Wokeism is a product of a distorted and deformed American marketplace of ideas—there is always a libertarian who sees a free and energetic agora worthy of defending and exporting, where there is only coercion and cruelty.

“Wokeism has passed a market test,” effuses Tyler Cowen, an economist writing for Bloomberg.com. “The woke movement could be the next great U.S. cultural export—and it is going to do many other countries some real good.”

Yes, Cowen, a libertarian, both explains and exculpates  an increasingly entrenched, coercive system of pigment-based prejudice and persecution. “Wokeism,” he further enthuses, “is an idea that can be adapted to virtually every country: Identify a major form of oppression in a given region or nation, argue that people should be more sensitive to it, add some rhetorical flourishes, purge some wrongdoers (and a few innocents) and voila — you have created another woke movement.”

Welcome to the quintessential, collectivist, libertarian Jacobinism—Cowen’s. Omelets can’t be made without breaking the few proverbial eggs. Cowen, like most of his ilk—and against all evidence—also thinks that, “American culture is a healthy, democratizing, liberating influence,” so he wants “to extend it.” …

… READ THE REST. “Exporting Toxic Wokeism” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and Townhall.com, CNSNews.com, The New American and American Renaissance

 

China Is ‘Decoupling’ From Decadent Western Culture For Fear Of Being Infected

America, Capitalism, China, Communism, Foreign Policy, Nationalism, The West

Fareed Zakaria is a CNN serial plagiarizer. (Read “Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer.”) Like another CNN offender, online onanist Jeffrey Toobin, Zakaria is always forgiven and brought back from literary purgatory, to inflict mediocrity and derivative insights on viewers who’re none the wiser.

The neoliberal Zakaria recently broadcasted a “television special, China’s Iron Fist.” He joined neoconservatives in calling China “The most serious competition the United States has ever faced. The Chinese are doing AI, biotech, hi-speed rail – the industries of the future.”

I watched the broadcast. It was the simplistic, angels-and-demons story-line, that proceeds from the premise that America is an oasis of freedom and happiness, whereas in China, which has become quite the middle-class, materialistic, consumerist society, all yearn to breathe free … in America, naturally.

Well, the Han Chinese, who constitute 94% of China, rather like their nationalistic, monolithic  (at least compared to the US) country.

What I most hate about the Chinese culture is its contempt and abuse of the natural world, critters included. But I couldn’t be bothered with the American foreign-policy elite’s sinophobia, which seems to be a distraction from the fact that the Chinese ruling class generally acts in the national interest; whereas American ruling elites act in ways so antagonistic to the people’s welfare as to constitute treason.

In any event, China, warned Zakaria, is becoming less western. The West being the best, such a trend is condemned. Well, the always low-key observations of The Economist make more sense:

“China’s leaders still want investment and technology from the West, but they think it is in decadent decline and are decoupling from Western norms and ideas.”

They have a point, no?

* Image courtesy The Economist

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Deep Tech As Pirates In Competition With The State

Business, Capitalism, Economy, Free Speech, Race, Technology

NEW ON YOUTUBE: Deep Tech As Pirates In Competition With The State:

… In which I share a few leftover thoughts about Deep Tech or Big Tech, as pirates in competition with the state, wishing their woke leaders could commandeer the ship of state. Certainly, when Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon were growing up, they wanted to be government. Now they are!