Right Wing Zionism is retarded and cracked in the head

With some remarks on the Israel lobby and geopolitics

Baruch wrote an article criticizing me for being a snooty Anglo who writes grant applications.¹ What is the point of this? Presumably to get my attention. OK, attention got. What do I see?

Even in its own backyard of Latin America, countries like El Salvador blatantly defy American requests when they wish. Does America launch a coup, like it would have during the Cold War? No-it buckles. Imperial decay is a bitch, especially combined with an ideology which constantly demands allies behave in progressively more suicidal ways, right down to surrendering to MS-13. You’re constantly tempting them to tell you to pound sand, and when they do, you have no leverage to make them fall back in line.

Baruch made this argument before. Bukele was able to thumb his nose at America and destroy MS-13, turning El Salvador from one of the highest-murder countries in the world to one of the safest. Therefore, Israel can also solve its problems if it just wants to enough. Baruch’s preferred solution to solving Israel’s problems is killing or expelling the Arab population of Gaza (2.1 million people) and Judea and Samaria (2.2 million people), the Shi’ite population of southern Lebanon (maybe 1 million people), and probably Arabs in Israel too (2.1 million people). However, here Baruch is being vague about what he wants to do, so lets assume something less drastic, maybe just a multi-front war and bit of expulsion on the side. Here are some relevant facts about El Salvador.

1. El Salvador’s most recent international conflicts were the 100-hour war in 1969, and the war of 1863 with Guatemala. It presently enjoys good relations with all its neighbours and is not under military threat. Therefore, in the hypothetical event that America wished to pressure El Salvador by threatening to withhold military supplies, as it has recently done with Israel, this would have little to no effect.

2. El Salvador receives about $145 million per year in aid from the United States, which translates to about $23 dollars a person. Israel receives $3.8 billion annually, equating to $391 dollars a person. In addition, in 2023, the U.S. provided an additional $14 billion, which is $1,435 per person. This obviously gives America a degree of leverage over Israel literally orders of magnitude greater than El Salvador.

3. The vast majority of people around the world believe that cutting the murder rate by imprisoning MS-13 members is a good thing. Baruch compares this to Guatemala in 1954, where America backed a coup against a pro-Communist leftist at a period of exceptionally high tensions with the Soviet Union on behalf of powerful U.S. economic interests. This was considered pretty dodgy at the time, however, instigating a coup against a leader widely acknowledged to be successful because he put people with tattoos on their faces whose motto is ‘kill, steal, rape, control’ in jail would be an incredibly strange and unpopular thing to do, especially in light of Nayib Bukele’s very high domestic approval ratings. Conversely, if the United States were to pressure Israel into not waging aggressive war against multiple Middle Eastern countries and committing ethnic cleansing at scale, this would be extremely popular around the globe.

4. MS-13, to reiterate, have tattoos on their faces and have essentially no media organizations supporting them. Conversely, Israel’s enemies have very extensive media backing, including from Qatar, the world’s 5th richest country per capita and English-language Turkish state media among others. To quickly gauge this, type ‘Israel settler’ into YouTube.

5. Pro-crime leftists in the United States find the example of El Salvador very embarrassing. If pressed on the topic, they will typically argue that crime was already trending down before Bukele and change the subject. Launching a coup to depose Bukele would be directly contradictory to their interests, which lie in having as little media attention as possible on El Salvador. Conversely, if Israel was to attempt to solve its problems militarily, there would be nonending media coverage and, to reiterate, practically unanimous support around the world for the U.S. pressing Israel into submission.

6. MS-13 was originally exported from American prisons to El Salvador, and then back into America. Both the FBI and ICE benefit directly from the suppression of MS-13, providing a domestic base of opposition to any attempt to overthrow Bukele, which was outlandish in any case.

So, in short, the cases are different in just about every conceivable way, and have no relevant commonalities. Here are some hypothetical examples of equally sound analogies:

1. In a given town, it is possible to park in places where it is technically forbidden without punishment. People do this all the time and get away with it. Therefore, it is also possible to murder the town mayor in public, spread his entrails over the town square, and live stream this on X.

2. Hungary has repeatedly ignored directives from the EU, and, despite threats, has not been thrown out, nor will likely be in the future. Therefore, Spain could invade Provence, exterminate the locals, settle its own population there and outlaw baguettes, and it would also not be expelled from the EU.

3. There is a school where constant low-level disruption is effectively tolerated because of systemic incompetence and apathy by the school leadership, and the offenders get away with meaningless punishments that do not deter them. Therefore, they could also simply punch the headteacher in the face and nothing would happen.

Etc. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a Latin term for the fallacy ‘because this thing X is possible, this completely different thing Y is also possible’. But I do have a funny video.

Hopefully, that’s clear enough, but, if it wasn’t already clear to you, I invite you to consider the possibility that you might be stupid, your brain doesn’t work, and your time reading articles on Substack is probably not very well spent. Make a start by desubscribing now. Baruch isn’t stupid though, and he’s well read too. He has written some good articles, like this one or this one, but it is always just a ticking clock until he returns to obvious absurdities justified through inane innuendo and non-sequiturs because he is a rightoid crank. I’ve quoted him before, and I’d really prefer to quote someone else, but it’s just true that Sartre nailed these people in a way that can’t really be improved upon:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

A political conversation with a normal intelligent person goes something like this: you present your case, he presents his, you bring relevant facts and arguments to support it, and, when these are pertinent, you acknowledge and adjust accordingly. The next time you discuss the topic, you pick up where you left off, incorporating the progress you made in your previous discussion. A conversation with a rightoid crank goes like this: he says something absurd, you point out he is wrong, he tries to catch you in a contradiction by obviously distorting what you have said and contrasting it with a distortion of some other thing you said. Then he does the same exact thing every time you talk until you get bored and walk away. The rightoid crank is convinced that the frustration and annoyance he inspires is, in fact, proof he has touched a nerve, that he is on to something. He parades it as if it were a trophy. But let’s park that thought since I was a naughty boy and made a Note that wasn’t terribly good, and I should fix that by making some general theses about sovereignty.

Dependence and independence

1. The simplest model of vassalage is as follows. Country A is militarily superior to country B. Instead of invading and conquering, country A threatens B with invasion unless it does what is says and country B complies. Country B is now a vassal state.

2. Direct military threats, however, are not the only way this can happen. Suppose country B lacks a certain resource which country A has, without which country B’s economy will crash. Country A threatens to withhold this resource unless country B does what is says. Country B complies and is now a vassal state.

3. In general, when either conditions (1) or (2) pertain, the most likely way for country B to maintain its independence is to seek help from another country C who has what country B needs, or can assist it militarily. However, this is liable to ending up with country B becoming a vassal of country C. Therefore, country B will probably try to maximize its freedom of maneuver by playing off the two, using A or C as an resource to draw on whenever the demands of the other become too onerous.

4. An alternative mechanism is that country B has competing political factions. Country A can support the faction that is out of power, allowing it to seize power, but on condition that country B is now its vassal. Alternatively, it can credibly threaten the ruling faction with doing this and achieve the same goal.

5. We must make a crucial distinction between theoretical sovereignty and actual sovereignty. Consider the following extreme example. The North Sentinelese are almost naked, and fight with spears. Literally any country, even Italy, could easily defeat them militarily in a matter of days. If they refused to submit, they could just kill them all. Nevertheless, in practice, no-one does this and the Sentinelese are completely independent, with no-one telling what to do. They are even allowed to just kill people who show up on their island with no provocation because it’s their culture. The Sentinelese play absolutely no role themselves in contributing to the forces that give them their independence, indeed they are oblivious to their existence, but, until that changes, so what?

If you disagree with any of that, please let me know, but using it as a basic model, let us now explain why, by the nature of things, Israel can not be a very sovereign country.

1. Israel is very small country with few national resources and cannot be self-sufficient in food, fuel, industrial products, or military hardware. It could - and probably should - try to increase its strategic autarky, though this would necessitate a drop in standards of living that would be highly unpopular domestically. But there are hard limits to what can be achieved.

2. Israel was created in the the middle of the Muslim world, against the objections of 100s of millions of people. It cannot survive a prolonged war of attrition against multiple neighbors with combined populations more than 20 times larger, which would be supported by over a dozen more Arab and Islamic countries. To avoid such a scenario, Israel has relied on a mixture of deterrence, technological and logistical superiority (which is substantially incompatible with economic autarky), and effective blitzkrieg tactics, the results of which are then locked in through internationally imposed ceasefires. Another tactic is the barely veiled threat of nuclear annihilation, though there are limits to how credible this is. In more recent decades, it has also relied on peace deals with Jordan and Egypt, which the two countries entered into in exchange for certain gifts from the United States.

3. Israel, being the only Jewish state, has no natural allies, whereas its enemies have many. No matter how productive Israel’s economy is, it simply makes no sense for countries looking out for their self interest to take its side against a billion Muslims, which is why both Russia and China responded to October 7th with morally disgraceful victim blaming.

Note that this explains why Israel is by nature not a sovereign country, why it must submit to someone. It does not explain why Israel is specifically a vassal to America, because this is a choice that has been made by generations of Israeli policy elites specifically to maximize their freedom of action relative to other options. If reality precludes independence, you look around for the best deal you can get, and Israel’s deal isn’t bad.

The special needs relationship

What is at the core of Israel-American relations? Baruch explains:

Alright, but aside from giving us control over the junction of Europe, Asia and Africa, the Northern Red Sea and the Eastern Med, and combat testing all our kit under live fire conditions, what have the Israelis ever done for us?

Military realities have changed a bit since the days when Ptolemies and Seleucids fought over control of Ashkelon, rendering control over the Levant a bit less strategically important than it once was, but, yeah, sure, I guess that’s part of it. But there’s some other stuff too. Thomas Massie explains:

Everybody but me has an AIPAC person. It’s like your babysitter … who is always talking to you for AIPAC. They’re probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in AIPAC… I don’t now how it works on the Democrat side, but that’s how it works on the Republican side. And when they come to DC you go have lunch with them, and they’ve got your cell number, and you have conversations with them. I’ve had 4 members of congress say ‘I’ll talk to my AIPAC person … I’ll see if I can get them to dial their ads back’ … It’s the only country that does this.

And that’s not even the most distasteful thing about the Israel lobby. Leaving aside the almost incomprehensible levels of cringe from Christians United for Israel, there was a certain island. The truth is no-one really knows exactly what that was all about, but there is little reasonable doubt that it involved a blackmail operation against wealthy and influential people. Since Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was a Mossad agent himself, it’s not credible to suggest that Israel wasn’t getting something out of it.

The funny thing about based Right Wing Zionists is that they lack the redeeming features you might expect them to have. Instead of ditching the whiney, histrionic paranoia characteristic of Jewish liberals, they turn it up to 11. Everyone (everyone!) is antisemitic, everything is a blood libel, it’s always a pogrom or Kristallnacht, or Oy Vey! It’s annuda Shoah. They make Bari Weiss look calm, Abe Foxman look forbearing, and, like them, when it comes to the Israel lobby, they insist you deny what is staring you right in the face. Baruch explains:

Bibi is our longest-serving prime minister; from his first election in 1996 to his current term, he’s been opposed by the US State Department and everyone in DC who matters, using the full arsenal of soft power from money to the Orange Revolution toolbox. Yet Bibi is in office, and America’s preferred replacements are stuck fantasizing about taking power through civil war.

So here’s Bibi Netanyahu getting multiple standing ovations from Congress for saying outright inanities, delivered poorly, as if he was Uday Hussein at a Ba’ath Party conference.

If you are a stupid person, or someone who holds the entire concept of reasoned argument in contempt and delights in shamelessly abusing words, then you might say ‘you dummy, משכיל, congressmen don’t matter, they’re just geriatric ciphers, it’s the Cathedral that’s in control’.² Well, yes, Senators and House Representatives are, to simplify matters somewhat, essentially proxies for a wide range of interests and factions you cannot directly see, so it looks like those interests and factions have instructed (again, to simplify) their proxies to clap for Bibi like less-than-averagely-self-aware seals.

Moldbug teaches that ‘Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.’³ Equivalencies work both ways round, though. Cthulhu swims left, but he swims slowly. It is certainly true that elite opinion - and thus, at a delay of a decade or so, popular opinion - is trending inexorably, irreversibly towards Palestine. The writing has been on the wall for some time and, eventually, Israel’s current security fudge will no longer be compatible with American support, necessitating desperate measures of some sort. But Israel started off with a head start. In 1960, Hollywood was putting out straight up pro-Israel propaganda that was even fairly sympathetic to the Irgun. The pro-Israel stance of U.S. elite liberal opinion started eroding, and only slowly, after 1967, locking in massive popularity for Israel among the boomer electorate. The monetary and, to a certain extent, even numerical importance of Jews to the Democratic party has acted as a constant brake on America’s slide leftwards on Israel, which has happened more slowly than on almost any other issue. All this buys time, and, for many matters in politics, time is all you need.

What gives the Israel lobby its unusually grotesque quality is the way that, in the window it has, it ruthlessly targets the weak points and kinks in the American system of government, getting maximum ROI wherever it can be found. When future historians attempt to map out what’s really going on in the labyrinthine system under the polygon’s hood, they’ll have few better sources than whatever records they can get from Mossad. It’s not pretty, which is why so much furious effort is spent denying its existence. Chutzpah goes a long way. Sometimes, it’s really not pretty. Bibi has visited Congress more than once. Here he is in 2002:

If, like me, you’re a Bibi supporter, this will make you wince, it should make you wince, but you should watch it anyway. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

The background behind this is instructive. In 1999, Likud lost the election and Bibi lost his control of the Likud to Ariel Sharon. In 2002, Bibi challenged Sharon for the leadership of the Likud once again and lost. But Bibi knows what’s up, and instead of wasting time in the periphery appealing to voters, he went to the imperial center and levied his connections with neoconservatives who were at that time riding high. Part of the deal was pimping the Iraq war, which Sharon and the Israeli defence establishment quietly opposed. My view is that Bibi knew every word was nonsense, that the likely result of the war was chaos ultimately ending up with Iraq as an Iran puppet. I like to think he didn’t expect it to turn out quite so badly as it did, but maybe he predicted ISIS too and thought it was worth it because only he could save Israel from a spiral of doom. Maybe he was right. Sure enough, in what Wikipedia describes as a ‘surprise move’, Bibi was back in the Sharon cabinet in 2003, and, by December 2005, the Likud was his again. As for Iraq, well, sorry about that. Eggs, omelettes etc.

It is exceptionally strange, evidence of a guilty conscience perhaps, if not some sort of early-onset dementia, to cite Bibi as an example of Israel not being a U.S. satrapy.⁴ Bibi spent a total of 12 years living in America, getting his education and business experience there. His supporters openly and correctly proclaim that his superior ability to navigate and manipulate the corridors of American power make him a cut above his rivals with their shitty English and provincial mannerisms. His most trusted confidante, Ron Dermer, practically the only man he has not fallen out with, is a Yank, and a very un-Israeli one at that (look at his hair). Disgraced former close aide, Ari Harow is also an American. He’s been super-tight with the Adelsons. It’s probable that discussions of Bibi’s inner circle are conducted in English, where they can be more free in airing their based HBD opinions about their voter base. All this really looks like the politics of a U.S. vassal state, because that’s what it is. Of course, because the U.S. has warring factions, Bibi has many U.S. enemies, some even being a bit obsessive about it. The intermingling of factions in the metropole and periphery is precisely the indicator of an imperial relationship.⁵

The Lebanon Deal

Baruch explains:

The ceasefire is not an Israeli defeat, nor a Hezbollah victory.

An excellent refutation of something I never said. Clearly, the late war represents a decisive military victory of Israel over Hizb’Allah, something that very few outside observers predicted, testimony to the surprising competence of the Leftist military elite which he hopes to drive out and replace with militias. The point is that, given the extremely successful military operation, why was it halted before completion for a ceasefire deal substantially identical to the one already made after the disastrous 2006 war? Sure, Israel’s situation at the northern border is now better than it was 4 months ago, better indeed than two years ago, but it is not any better than it was ten years ago when Hizb’Allah was at an early stage of building up its stockpiles.

Not a military expert, needs to get educated by PostKahanism.

This was all taken as a given by just about everyone, but especially on the Israeli Right, which promised to block any proposed ceasefire, and then just suddenly voted for one.

Sure, Jan.

So, what gives? What happened to Smotrich? Most likely explanation is the same reason why the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood promised for decades to end the peace treaty with Israel on becoming the government, and just didn’t. Someone sat him down in a room and explained what the story is. But what was the story? The simplest version is that lame duck administrations are traditionally a weak point for the Israel lobby where its normal methods of persuasion are rendered impotent. That’s certainly what happened at the end of the Obama years, and perhaps the Biden administration made a list of credible threats and one of Smotrich’s quants showed him what that meant for his budget and that was that. Another alternative is that someone from the incoming Trump administration phoned and said good things are on the way if Israel can just ride out the next two months, and the IDF should take a breather till then. A third option I have seen suggested is that the G7 nations offered Netanyahu effective immunity from the ICC arrest warrants in exchange for a ceasefire. Honestly, if that’s true, it’s pretty bad and me and Bibi might be done. Feel free to spitball some other ideas. What they all have in common is that they have nothing to do with either (a) domestic Israeli politics or (b) the military realities in Lebanon. What they do have to do with is stuff happening abroad that Israeli politicians try to navigate as best they can, because that’s what you do when you’re not - because you can’t be - sovereign.

Rounding it up

Did you enjoy that? I didn’t. It’s boring and a waste of time trying to deal with cranks because it takes a hundred times as much time explaining why their claims are absurd as it does for them to shift seamlessly to their next absurd claim. Dear readers, don’t befriend cranks, you have no idea how many years later you might still be regretting it. As Mencken once wrote, ‘they show a vast development of what Nietzsche used to call 'the delight to stink,' and are thus less interested in propagating their idiotic ideas than in annoying those who object to them’. Some things don’t change, whaddayagonnado? To reiterate, if you need me to explain to you why obvious bad-faith sophistry is wrong, then you shouldn’t be reading. Not me, not anything. It will do no-one any good. Desubscribe. To make this worthwhile for the rest, I’ll make a few points that are perhaps less obvious.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was generally understood that Right Wing military Zionism was the variety most opposed to and by Rabbinic/Orthodox Judaism. Since Zionism itself was a rejection of the tactics and way of life of European Jewry, the most souped up, radical version of Zionism was the most violently opposed. High Herzlian ‘political Zionism’ was formally neutral on religion, though religious Jews were all too aware of its western assimilated character. Labour Zionism was more hostile, but military Zionism was a level beyond. The New Jew envisioned as farmer or proletarian was different to the typical Jew of Europe, for sure, but not inherently antithetical. If you told an old-timer Polish Rav that you want to raise chickens, he’d tell you to knock yourself out, but to make sure you had something on the side for parnassah when it’s time to make chasunah. If you told him you wanted to be a race warrior, who, with Yakov Cahan, embraces the ‘sacred cruelty’ that ‘redeems ordinary evil and transforms it into good’ he’d have a real problem.

Of course, some military Zionists justified their violent rejection of Jewish menschlichkeit in favour of manly nationalism in terms of a return to the old model of Joshua or King David. Some of them even spoke of building the temple. To the pious Jew, though, nationalist neo-Karaism is more offensive than vanilla atheism, and military Zionists went out of their way to be offensive. I’ve posted these line before, by Shaul Tchernichovsky:

I will bow down to life, to courage and beauty
I will bow down to all desirable things
which those human carcasses, those corrupted rebels
against life plundered from Tzuri-Shaddai -
the wonderful god of the desert,
the god of the gods of those who conquered Canaan
in a whirlwind - and bound him with straps of tefilin.

I’m a little on the spectrum, so I can take a step back and, leaving piety behind, appreciate the spiritual power of this, objectively speaking. I’m not really frum in that way, perhaps any way, but blimey that’s very offensive.

What was the character of military Zionism? This vignette might sum it up. On December 30th 1947, one month after Arab nationalists had initiated hostilities by murdering five passengers on a bus in Jaffa, Irgun terrorists threw grenades into a crowd of Arab workers waiting at a bus-stop in Haifa, killing six. The Haifa oil refinery where they worked employed both Jewish and Arab workers, and relations are generally held to have been good, albeit under increasing strain. Arabs are excitable people, though, and typically possess a weak internal locus of control, and a massacre ensued in which around 40 Jews were killed. The Irgun fighters were nowhere to be seen: they just lobbed the grenades and f**ked off. The evil British army showed up to stop the killing. Nor did the Irgun do anything in the aftermath, leaving the mess to be cleaned up by the Palmach who, being rather stretched at the time, did their own retaliatory massacre. Throwing a grenade at civilians is murder and - apart from ‘heightening the contradictions’ by getting a bunch of Jews killed - murder for what, exactly, except to show tatty that you’re not some cowardly little talmud-reading yid like him, you’re a warrior who says a ת like a t and can kill, just a like a real Israelite?⁶

I’ll make a little confession here. For many years as a rightoid myself, I knew almost nothing about the Deir Yassin massacre. I read a few articles that said Uri Milstein had deboonked it and it was a big blood libel by nasty Labour Zionists, or that it was a legitimate military target, or maybe a bit of both, whatever. It was only after Shemini Atzeret last year when I was reflecting on what it means to massacre that I even read the Wikipedia page, and found this:

A crowd of people from Givat Shaul, with peyot (earlocks), most of them religious, came into the village and started yelling "gazlanim" "rotzchim"—(thieves, murderers) "we had an agreement with this village. It was quiet. Why are you murdering them?" They were Chareidi (ultra-orthodox) Jews. This is one of the nicest things I can say about Hareidi [sic] Jews. These people from Givat Shaul gradually approached and entered the village, and the Lehi and Irgun people had no choice, they had to stop. It was about 2:00 or 3:00 PM. Then the Lehi and Irgun gathered about 250 people, most of them women, children and elderly people in a school house. Later the building became a "Beit Habad"—"Habad House". They were debating what to do with them. There was a great deal of yelling. The dissidents were yelling "Let's blow up the schoolhouse with everyone in it" and the Givat Shaul people were yelling "thieves and murderers—don't do it" and so on. Finally they put the prisoners from the schoolhouse on four trucks and drove them to the Arab quarter of Jerusalem near the Damascus gate. I left after the fourth truck went out.

The devil on your shoulder will tell you this is a ‘galut mentality’, that their minds were befuddled by exile, that they didn’t understand the authentic Torah of Eretz Yisrael. Maybe, but, then, maybe your conscience is right.

The essential opposition of military Zionism to Judaism continued after the birth of the state, exemplified by the Canaanite movement, but at the critical juncture when the prophets of scared cruelty could have done the decent and set up their own thing, they bottled it and thought it better to rape Judaism instead. The story of how military Zionism was reborn as an ostensibly Jewish ideology clothed in the quasi-Sabbatean verbiage of Kookism⁷ is an interesting one. I will attempt, one day, to tell it in another article. For now, we can just skip to the end.

Last I heard, Baruch was moving to Rehelim so maybe this guy is his neighbour. If that sounds like guilt by association, it doesn’t count when you do the associating yourself.

I have written before that the chronic problem of Zionism has been solving problems on a five-year horizon. The tactics have been pretty good, mostly, but they only necessitate even better tactics in the next round. But if mainstream Zionism is all tactics, no strategy, Right Wing Zionism is all masturbation, no tactics.

The cry of the Rightoid everywhere: they dindu nuffin and it’s good that they did it. They will protest the allegedly wrongful arrest of a murderer while, at literally the same time, celebrating his depraved deeds. A baby burned alive here, a teen burned alive there, sooner or later you’re talking real numbers. There are nations who have let their right-wing cranks get sufficiently out of control that the shame of it renders them unable to function decades later. Or, a better example: Gaza. Will that be us? Probably not, after all, we’re a vassal state with limited room to maneuver, for better and for worse. But there are people for whom it is their deepest hope. You might know some, online or in real life. You tell yourself they are ‘directionally correct’ and it’s OK. We’re different, Jews wouldn’t do that, not for real. It’s all fun and games, just words, and hopefully it will stay that way.

1. For the record, the roughly a dozen grant applications I have written over the course of my life were all for a soup kitchen, except for two which I wrote for a primary school library.

2. CA Bond, who is smart, if a bit of nut, put it well, all the way back in the ReactionaryFuture days, that what the average Neoreactionary means by the ‘Cathedral’, is ‘nothing more than a puritan version of the Elders of Zion’.

3. I’ll permit myself a few words here about Moldbug’s writing on Israel. The classic statement of his position is here where he compares the Israel lobby to dental floss, while the broader promotion of third-world nationalism that finds specific expression in Palestinianism is the iron rope. The visual metaphor is not the best, but, like a lot of pieces in UR, it makes a very important point with a great deal of oversimplification. Moldbug moderated his position somewhat here:

Worse: the Wilsonians lied. Because a substantial, if gradually weakening, faction in Washington does support the Zionists. Thus the billions of dollars, thus the bodacious hardware, and thus the failure in 1948 or since to drive the Jews into the sea. And thus the appalling and continuing suffering of the Palestinian refugees, unlike their German, Egyptian and Algerian counterparts, who have all accepted reality and gone on to have a life.

With that said, even allowing for oversimplification, some of what Moldbug writes about Israel must be admitted to be wrong since he wrote:

In the second half of the 20th century, actual warfare was generally unnecessary—countries such as Rhodesia, South Africa and (early in the 21st) Israel were easily intimidated into suicide.

This is intended to be reference to the Gaza withdrawal, but, twenty years later, Israel has not in fact committed suicide. If we return to the original article, it just isn’t true at all that ‘if USG (and its European satellites, of course) agreed to close its eyes for a year, at the end of that year, Israel could easily be occupying the entire Muslim world from Karachi to Mauritania. Strictly as a matter of military power, of course’ and, when you stop to think about it for a few seconds, it’s pretty obviously not true.

4. Satrapy is Baruch’s word, not mine. It’s a little odd that he is so adamant that this is a false description since it’s pretty easy just to do this:

It’s OK to change your mind, just don’t act like you didn’t.

5. Moldbug puts it as follows: ‘A nation is genuinely independent of America if its domestic politics are not correlated at all with American domestic politics.’

6. On re-reading this, I want to add that, no doubt, military Zionism had its great men too. The obvious example of Jewish virtu is Yosef Trumpeldor, a true chad and hero, but, though a solider through and through, he was not a military Zionist, rather straddling the divide between Labour and Revisionist Zionism.

7. R. Avraham Kook זצ’’ל, it should be said, was not a militarist at all, indeed had borderline pacificist leanings in a sort of vaguely Tolstoyesque way. His most authentic representative in modern Israel was R. Menachem Froman זצ’’ל.