Culture of Death Watch
An Interview with Dr. E. Michael Jones on The
Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
by Martin Vianney
It was once said of Michael Jones that he was too radical to be a conservative and too conservative to be a radical. There is one word that always describes the man and his writing. Controversial. Jones, however, would say that a different word describes his writing. Catholic. And he would doubtless add that if one writes in the modern age as a Catholic one is necessarily controversial.
However, even by these standards Michael Jones’
latest book, The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History, is his most
controversial and ambitious book to date. At 1,200 pages this tour of history
which shines a theological light on conflicts between Catholics, Protestants,
Jews and revolutionaries though the ages is intended to provide a key to
understanding the present age.
I discussed the book with Dr Jones and tried to find
out the thesis of the book and explore some of the difficult theological and
political issues it brings up.
1. What made you decide to write this book?
Reading Daniel Goldhagen’s attack on Pius XII.
Suddenly, I realized that all of the talk about a new era of Catholic/Jewish
relations following Vatican II was a decidedly one-way street. Virtually every
celebration of Nostra Aetate’s various anniversaries was characterized by
Catholics apologizing for everything from St. John’s Gospel to the Holocaust
and Jews renewing their attacks on the Church as the font of all anti-Semitism
with renewed chutzpah.
2. Were you surprised by the size of the
undertaking?
The surprise came when I realized that the book was
1,200 pages long, in spite of a rather rigorous paring down during the editing
process.
3. What do you mean by Jewish?
A Jew is now a rejecter of Christ and thereby to
some extent a rejecter of Logos, which is the Greek word for the rational order
of the universe. Insofar as they rejected Christ, the Jews rejected Logos, and
in rejecting Logos, they rejected the order of the universe, including its
moral or political order. As a result, they became revolutionaries, a decision
they solemnly ratified when they chose Barabbas over Christ.
4. But even
your book allows that there is some racial element. After all, many rejecters
of Christ/Logos are not Jews. And the Jews are seen in the New Testament
as a distinct people who will perdure until the End Times when there is a
prophecy of conversion. So surely a Jew is not a rejecter of Christ/Logos simpliciter?
A Jew is an ethnic Jew who
has rejected Christ. An ethnic Jew who has accepted Christ is not a Jew.
Ethnicity is the necessary but not sufficient condition for being a Jew. The
sufficient condition is rejection of Christ. This was ratified by the Israeli
Supreme Court when they denied Oswald Rufeisen citizenship because he had been
baptized a Catholic. From a more religious perspective I note in the book the
words of Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner: “While not all Jews practice Judaism [it
is] the iron-clad consensus among contemporary Jews, Jews who practice Christianity cease to
be part of the ethnic Jewish community, while those who practice Buddhism
remain within.”
5. What relation, then, does Judaism have with
the religion of the Old Testament? What place do the Temple, the Torah and the
Talmud have in Judaism?
Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament. Catholicism
is the religion of the Old Testament. Anything that claims to be the religion
of the Old Testament must have a Temple, a priesthood, and sacrifice. After the
destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, Judaism had none of these things, but the
Church had all of them. The Temple was Christ, who explicitly stated that he
was its replacement. The Church also had the priesthood, which celebrated the
new sacrifice, which was the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass.
Judaism as we know it is a religion that was created
by Jochanan ben Zacchai after the destruction of the Temple. It was, as Jews
have to admit, not the Old Testament religion, because the Jews at that point
had no Temple to perform the sacrifices which were needed to fulfil their
covenant. As a result, the Jewish religion became a debating society or school,
which met at synagogues. The codification of those debates became known as the
Talmud, which got written down between the third and seventh centuries AD. The
Talmud is a systematic distortion of the Torah—“Whatever the Torah forbids, the
Talmud permits”—whose purpose is to keep the Jewish people away from Logos and
in bondage to Jewish leaders.
6. What do you mean by Revolutionary?
Any attempt to overthrow the state or the cultural
order of a particular people and replace it with one or other version of
Messianic politics which promises us all heaven on earth but ends up delivering
something quite different.
7. But surely
there are cultural orders that are largely at odds with Logos. Should not these
be overthrown? Moreover, are people like Caiaphas and Annas revolutionaries?
Many would regard them rather as reactionaries, fearful of the people’s
reception of what they took to be a worldly Messiah.
In Spe Salvi,
Pope Benedict XVI reminds Catholics that the way of revolution, the way of
Spartacus and Simon bar Kokhba, is not the Catholic way. He says this knowing,
I'm sure, that Aquinas justifies the overthrow of unjust regimes in some
instances. We don't know if Annas and Caiaphas would have joined in the
revolution against Rome over 30 years after Christ's death. I think it is
reasonable to think that they would.
8. What do you mean by Spirit?
What the Germans call Geist, which is to say what
Aristotle and Plato would call “form,” as in “the soul is the form of the
body.”
9. Christians today appear to be most at risk
of persecution in Islamic countries and places like China. Aren't these places
where the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit never took hold?
I disagree. No one has been persecuted more
ruthlessly than the Catholics of the United States. We simply lack the
vocabulary to describe that persecution. That’s why I have written, in addition
to The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit: and
its Impact on World History, Libido
Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, and The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as
Ethnic Cleansing.
10. But in
terms of killing and degradation you still need to account for the enormities
which continue to be committed in these countries. One is not banned on pain of
death from hearing Mass in the US so we cannot dismiss the persecution in
other parts of the world, parts not obviously infected with the Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit. Bloody persecution has often been more effective in wiping
out Christians than ethnic cleansing of a non-lethal kind. Where do states
like China and Saudi Arabia fit with regard to the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit?
The Gospel tells us not to fear those who can kill
the body. I think the point is that there are worse things in this life than
physical persecution. Moral corruption is one of them because it kills the
soul. And if one thing characterizes the Catholics of the babyboomer generation
it is moral corruption, for which they bear responsibility, but we're talking,
nonetheless, about a moral corruption which was foisted on them by their
parents' generation, through the media, through the corruption of Catholic
education, and all of the insidious means I described in Libido Dominandi.
The last time I looked China was a communist country. Communism is one of the
prime examples of the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Saudi Arabia is run by the
Wahhabi sect of Islam. I do not deal with the relationship of Islam to Judaism
in the book, but in it you'll find a milder form of the rejection of the cross
and suffering in favor of a more carnal vision of worldly power and wealth.
11. What do you say to people who view the
Islamic world as a greater threat to the world than this Jewish Spirit?
It depends which “people” you mean. I can understand
why Serbs, given their history, would view Islam as a greater threat than the
Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, although they certainly suffered under the
imposition of Communism. However, when I hear an American talk about the dangers
of “Islamofascism,” I think it’s an infallible sign that I am in the presence
of either a propagandist, an intellectual coward or a useful idiot.
12. What do
you take the term anti-Semitism to mean?
Anti-Semitism is a form of biological determinism or
racism which claims that Jews are prisoners of their DNA. This would manifest
itself in the Church, for instance, if someone were to say that a Jewish
convert could not be trusted. This ugly attitude has always been repudiated by
the Church, which has always maintained that Jewish converts are to be accepted
“without calumny.” It came out very clearly in Erasmus’s attack on Pfefferkorn,
which I cover in my book.
Anti-Semitism is the flip side of Jewish racism, which claims that Jews
are superior because of their DNA. This idea is put forth by the Jews who
question Jesus in the Gospel of St. John. They claim that they are somehow
racially superior to everyone else because they are the “seed of Abraham.” A
recent manifestation of this racial outlook was the Charles Murray symposium on
Jewish intelligence held at the American Enterprise Institute.
13. But aren’t
there forms of anti-Semitism that are not explicitly racial? For example, if
someone shows a great propensity to believe the worst of Jews in spite of a
mountain of evidence to the contrary, is he not an bigoted anti-Semite (just as
someone might be an anti-Catholic who believes all priests are child abusers in
spite of the evidence), even if he has no beliefs about inferior DNA?
No, anti-Semitism is a racial concept. Being
anti-Jewish is something else. It can be rational, as, for example, in the
Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, where it is a manifestation of the rejection
of the rejection of Christ that is obligatory for all Christians, or it can be
irrational, but it's fundamentally different from anti-Semitism, which is
racial.
14. In your book you refer to your
friend the late Rabbi Dresner, a highly moral Jew (and author of Can Families
Survive Pagan America and Rachel).
Does he not represent a type of Judaism that takes the Torah seriously and is
thoroughly Jewish yet not infected with a Revolutionary Spirit?
Yes, I wish Rabbi Dresner were alive today. He was a
man who was open to the truth and, incidentally, an admirer of my writing, who
would urge the Catholics he knew to support me by subscribing to Culture Wars. On the other hand, he
would also write to me and chastise me for talking about Jewish villains. He
came to the defense of Leo Pfeffer, who in my opinion was a Jewish villain if
ever there was one. So he was torn, as I said in the article I did on him after
his death, between Torah and Ethnos. I have no doubt that he was a sincere
follower of Torah. But he was also troubled by the fact that virtually every
prominent Jew in America—he was particularly annoyed by the cult of Woody
Allen—was a proponent of some sort of revolutionary subversion of the moral
law. As I said, I wish he were alive today. I would like to know what he would
have thought of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.
15. You refer to neoconservatism as a Jewish
movement, yet the majority of Jews in the US are opposed to it, just as they
were to the Iraq war.
We’re talking about successive revolutionary
movements here. Most Jews still retain an ancestral allegiance to the Messianic
ideologies known as Marxism, socialism, communism—in general—the ideologies of
the left that were regnant among American Jews during the middle of the 20th
century. Zionism didn’t really catch on among American Jews until the collapse
of the Black-Jewish alliance and the 1967 Six-Day Arab Israeli war.
16. Yet you
certainly see Neoconservatism as a Jewish Revolutionary movement. Why do you
think this and could you tell us what you think Neoconservatism is?
First of all, Irving Kristol, the founding father of
neoconservatism, was a Trotskyite during his college years. If you look at the
tenets of neoconservatism--perpetual war, the uprooting of social structures,
hierarchies, classes - you see that all the major elements of Trotsky's version
of messianic politics have been maintained, mutatis mutandis, with the United
States instead of the Soviet Union now being the land that is going to liberate
the world.
17. You seem to see Protestantism as an
inherently Judaizing religion. Can you explain why?
Because when the Catholics who wanted to break with
the Church needed an alternative authority that was as authoritative as the
Church they invariably turned to the Old Testament. John Milton’s treatise on
divorce, in which he appeals to Moses as a greater authority on the issue than
Christ, who clearly forbade what Milton wanted to have approved, is a classic
instance of what I’m talking about. Judaizing also flowed naturally from the
Protestant notion of sola scriptura.
If the Bible is our only guide, it’s quite natural that the Old Testament will
predominate in any question, because there are more books in the Old Testament,
and, from a carnal point of view, they are also a lot more interesting. The Old
Testament detached from the New Covenant and the Church becomes a gross
distortion of what it is meant to be.
18. Aren't some of the great critics of Judaism
Protestants - e.g. Martin Luther and Johannes Andreas Eisenmenger. Why should
this be?
I can’t speak for Eisenmenger, but I do know that
Luther was extremely pro-Jewish at the beginning of his career, operating under
the principle that the enemy of his enemy (in this case, Rome) must be his
friend. Luther also felt that once the Jews were exposed to the gospel in its
purity (i.e., as preached by Martin Luther), the Jews would convert in droves.
When this didn’t happen, Luther (who was nothing if not choleric) turned on the
Jews and wrote the violent diatribe against them in the 1540s for which the Lutherans
have been apologizing ever since.
19. What is the relation between Freemasonry and
the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit?
Freemasonry is another word for what Frances Yates
would call “Christian Cabala.” It was the “scientific” reaction to the excesses
of the Judaizing Englishmen known as Puritans. But the “science” in question
derived, via people like Fludd, Bacon, and John Dee, from the Cabala, which was
Jewish magic.
20. Arguably the most important European
revolution was the French Revolution (not to mention the English Reformation).
Yet in the French Revolution there is no evidence of extensive Jewish
involvement. Doesn't this present a problem for your thesis?
The French Revolution was a black operation which,
as they invariably do, got out of control. The Whigs who came to power in
England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 used the Masonic lodges on the
continent to spread Enlightenment propaganda among the Catholic French in order
to bring down the House of Bourbon. Voltaire was, as Alexander Pope suspected,
a Whig operative and spy. The goal was to bring about the French version of the
Glorious Revolution, but when that black operation took on a life of its own
and careened out of control, the English were appalled by what they had wrought
and declared war on France.
So the French revolution derived from Freemasonry,
which was, as I stated above, a form of Cabala. This, of course, rightly leaves
the whole question of direct Jewish involvement in the French Revolution out of
the picture. But as Daniel Pipes has pointed out,
the evidence is there, even if not as he would portray it. When Barruel got the
evidence, in the letter from Simonini, he simply suppressed the evidence, even
though he received a letter from both the pope and Napoleon’s uncle supporting
Simonini’s allegations.
21. You have much to say about Russia but say
very little about Stalin's anti-Semitism. Why, according to you, were the Jews
persecuted by Stalin's revolutionary movement?
Because every successful revolution leads to a civil
war. The Stalin-Trotsky split was inevitable because the victors always quarrel
after they win, and the Jew/Goy split in Communism was the ethnic fault-line
that no one could ignore.
22. Explain what you mean when you say the Jews
rejected Christ/killed Christ. Are you saying that all the Jews in Jerusalem
rejected Christ or only some? Are Jews today guilty of deicide? If so, how
does this fit in with the idea that all sinners share responsibility for
Christ's suffering?
No, obviously not. Many Jews accepted Christ as the
Messiah. The situation becomes confusing because of how St. John, for one
example, handles the term “Jew.” By the end of his Gospel, it’s clear that Jew
no longer has a purely ethnic meaning. A Jew is primarily someone who rejects
Christ. The ethnic Jews who did not reject Christ became known as the Church or
the New Israel, at which point blood, DNA were not the point. Nostra Aetate says that “not all Jews at
the time of Christ” were guilty of calling for his death. Logically, this, of
course, means that some Jews at the time of his death were guilty of deicide.
Using the definition of the Jew which St. John formulated, we could say that
only Jews were responsible for his death. Those Jews also ratified that death
when they said “Let his blood be on us and our children.” We are not talking
about some occult “blood curse,” as some modern day Jews like to portray it. We
are talking about a profound and premeditated form of rejection—murder being
the ultimate form of rejection—that has perdured to this day. As long as Jews
perdure in rejection they will be in the avant garde (as Marx would call it) of
revolutionary ferment. Every Christian who sins participates in the rejection
of Christ, but they will never constitute an avant garde like Jews because they
cannot pervert their status as God’s chosen people because they never enjoyed
that status.
23. But
wouldn't what you have said make Pilate a Jew? And might there not have been a
mass of Jews in Jerusalem who were merely indifferent to Christ?
Pilate, as a matter of fact, did feel that he was
being drawn into a Jewish struggle. That's why he said at one point, "Am I
a Jew?" If Pilate felt that way, then the Jews felt the same thing to a
much greater degree, to the point where I would say that, at a certain level,
no one in Jerusalem at that time was indifferent to Christ. The entire adult
Jewish population was either for him or against him. In a sense, all of us have
to become one kind of Jew or another, either the kind of Jew who accepted
Christ or the kind who rejected him. The United States today is a Jewish
country, which is to say a country where the culture is controlled by those
Jews who rejected Christ. Any follower of those Jews who accepted Christ is
going to be persecuted. As Yuri Slezkine said in his book The Jewish Century, modernity has turned
us all into Jews.
24. Is Nostra
Aetate a document that preaches error with regard to the Jews?
No.
25. What are your thoughts on the papacy of Pope
Benedict XVI, and especially on his handling of Catholic-Jewish relations?
The pope has shown a lack of even-handedness in
dealing with Muslims and Jews, symbolized best by his trip to Cologne. The pope
went to the synagogue in Cologne, where he was insulted by the rabbi there, but
the Muslims had to come to meet with him at the chancery office. The pope wags
his finger at the Muslims, but he never chastises the Jews in his meetings with
them. I think the Muslims are offended by this double standard. Islamic
terrorism did not spring full-blown from the mind of Zeus. Much of it is a
function of Israeli behavior in Palestine and American support of those
policies. To mention the former without mentioning the latter is a
manifestation of the double standard they’re talking about. The classical
Catholic position was articulated in the title of Raimondo Martini’s book: Pugio Fidei adversos Mauros et Iudeos,
or The Dagger of Faith aimed at Moors and
Jews.
26. But did
not this same pope bring back and amend the Good Friday prayer calling for the
conversion of the Jews, thereby showing he was not to be intimidated in these
matters?
As to the pope, I think he realized that the Church
stood at the brink of the abyss when he ascended to the throne of Peter. If he
had not written that prayer, he would have denied the Gospels, and no pope will
ever do that. But this doesn’t change the fact that he is not even-handed in
dealing with Jews and Muslims.
27. Some people find your language harsh and yet
uncritical of Catholic behaviour in the past. Does it worry you that some
Jewish readers may be put off by this and become less likely to embrace the
Church?
This reminds me of a discussion I had about another
book I wrote. The title I chose was “Nigger Hell.” When the publisher felt that
that title was offensive, I offered to change it to “Nigger Heck.” The real issue though is that the title
was a direct quote taken from Claude McKay’s book Home to Harlem. This is the language that was used at the time, and
I felt it was better to use that than capitulate to the sensibilities of the
school marms and the commissars.
The same is true of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. The shocking part is not so much
what I say but what I report other people saying. I have been called an
anti-Semite (in Prague, to be specific) for quoting Christ’s statement to the
Jews, “Your father is Satan.’” I have been called an anti-Semite for using the
phrase “the synagogue of Satan,” as if I had made up the term, when I was
citing the Book of Revelation.
Similarly, I get blamed when a term like “the vomit of Judaism” appears
in my book, when the phrase comes from St. Bernard of Clairvaux. I could go on
and on, but you get the point. Nothing I have said is as pointed or as
“anti-Semitic” as what the evangelists, church fathers, and even Jesus Christ
has said before me. The Jews of Jesus’ time found language like this
off-putting, so I’m not surprised that some Jews would feel the same way today.
On the other hand, there are always going to be the “true Hebrews” like
Nathaniel, a man without guile, who will respond to the truth when they hear
it.
28. And what do you say to the criticism that
you have a tendency to minimize or underestimate the bad behavior of those
claiming to be Catholic, seeing their behavior, at worst, as reactive to Jewish
faults? Surely there is much wrong on both sides, with Catholics having less
excuse?
Anyone who reads my book will know that this isn’t
true. There’s plenty of blame to go around here.
29. What have been the consequences to you in
undertaking this controversial work? Knowing what you now know, would you
do it all again?
Would Zebedee’s sons have drunk from the cup if they
had known what drinking from it entailed? Probably not. That’s why Jesus
doesn’t let us peek into a crystal ball before he asks us to do something.
30. What has been your experience of Jewish
people throughout your life? Did you ever discuss the ideas in your book with
them?
From 1966 until 1979 (with the exception of the
three years that I spent in Germany), I spent most of my time hanging around
with Jews, primarily in the art world (working for Sam Maitin, the Philadelphia
artist, and at the Prints for People art gallery, which involved me in hanging
shows at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed synagogue on Old York Road) but in the
literary world in Philadelphia as well (through Robert Summers, the playwright,
who was my creative writing teacher, poetry readings at the Painted Bride, and
graduate school in English and American Literature at Temple University, where
Stanley Fish, the “Reader-Response” literary theorist, was one of my teachers).
I was also a camp counselor at a summer camp for handicapped children sponsored
by the Variety Club, which was a Jewish organization. I have lost contact with
just about everyone from that era, but I did discuss the idea of the book with
my friend Paul Goldstein in its formative stages.
E.
Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars and author of 11 books
including The Angel and the
Machine; Degenerate Moderns; Horror: A Biography; The Slaughter of Cities and
Libido Dominandi.
This interview appears in the
September 2008 issue of Culture
Wars.
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World
History by E. Michael Jones. Jews for Jesus versus Jews against
Jesus; Christians versus Christians versus Jews. This book is the story of such
contests played out over 2000 turbulent years. In his most ambitious work yet,
Dr. E. Michael Jones provides a breathtaking and controversial tour of history
from the Gospels to the French Revolution to Neoconservatism and the "End
of History." A Must Read. $48 + S&H,
Hardback. Read Reviews Order
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