Classic EssaysWilliam Pierce

Books and Freedom

by Dr. William L. Pierce

A LISTENER SENT ME a clipping from the New York Times last month, the November 14 edition, and I just got around to reading it. It’s the obituary of a writer and Harvard professor, Dr Richard Marius. Marius had a pretty unremarkable career: a Southern Baptist divinity school graduate and student of the Reformation who wrote several very forgettable books and taught aspiring authors at Harvard how to write. We wouldn’t be interested in him, except for one detail: in 1995 he was fired as a speechwriter by Al Gore. The reason he was fired is that in a book review he had written three years earlier, which was published in The Harvard Magazine, he had criticized the way the Jews in Israel treat the Palestinians there: you know, torturing prisoners, collective punishment for the families of suspected activists, and so on.

Again, this criticism of the Israelis was not in a book written by Marius, but in his review of another author’s book, and book reviews are generally a bit more ephemeral and less weighty than the books themselves. But Marius’ review was published in The Harvard Magazine, and Jews, of course, scan very closely everything published anywhere by Harvard professors, so that they can keep their Gentile brethren at Harvard on the straight and narrow path of Political Correctness. Martin Peretz, the Jew who edits the leftist magazine New Republic, was apprised of Marius’ transgression, and Peretz complained to Al Gore, who promptly fired Marius. The Jews trumpeted the firing of Marius around the circle of liberal literati of which Marius was a member, denouncing him as an anti-Semite, and his friends began avoiding him. He protested loudly that he was not an anti-Semite, but it availed him nothing. He was washed up for good with the Clintonistas.

But really, what a jerk, not to have understood that it’s proper to condemn Serbs, say, for torturing prisoners and dynamiting the homes of families suspected of having a family member who isn’t sympathetic to the government, but it’s certainly not proper to condemn Jews for doing the same thing. How could anyone be a speechwriter for Al Gore and not understand that Jews are very special people, who must never be criticized, under any circumstances? I mean, we all know that the ordinary rules of behavior don’t apply to them. If the Germans or the Poles or the French or the Americans do something very illiberal, then we expect a Harvard liberal to criticize them. But not if they are Jews. Then the expected behavior of a Harvard liberal is to pretend that he doesn’t notice. So Marius broke the rule and was punished. Too bad. I really can’t feel sorry for a Harvard liberal — certainly not for a Harvard liberal who also was a speechwriter for anyone in the Clinton administration.

Reading Marius’ obituary called to mind the very special status Jews have in our society. We may criticize anyone — except Jews. Of course, a liberal isn’t likely under any circumstances to be critical of a homosexual or a feminist or a non-White or a member of any other group currently patronized by liberals. But as long as he assures everyone that many of his best friends are perverts or Blacks or what have you and that his criticism is intended to be constructive, he will be forgiven for an occasional sharp remark aimed toward them. But if he ever makes the mistake of referring to Jews in anything but the most flattering terms, his name goes on a hate list and is never removed.

I can think of a number of examples of literary figures far more illustrious than Marius: there’s T.S. Eliot, and there’s H.L. Mencken, and, of course, there’s Ezra Pound. They’ve all been dead for more than a quarter of a century, but whenever something is written about one of them today there’s a great deal of anguished soul-searching over the question, “How could So-and-so have been such a great poet or such a clever writer and nevertheless have made nasty remarks about Jews?” The Jews pretend not to be able to understand it. They pretend that it is an inexplicable mystery to them how anyone can be intelligent and creative who doesn’t love and admire Jews. They conclude that it had to have been some character flaw in the writer. And these were writers who only made passing remarks about Jews — except, perhaps, for Pound, who really despised them.

And the Jews prefer not even to mention exceptionally popular writers like Louis Ferdinand Céline or Jack London or Feodor Dostoevsky, who were quite outspoken in portraying Jews in an unfavorable light. They are a real mystery to the Jews. Perhaps the explanation is that they were dropped on their heads as children. If that is so, then most of our greatest writers of the past must have been dropped on their heads. Not every writer made much of it, but the general opinion was that Jews were not just different from their Aryan hosts, but unpleasantly different and dangerously different. These opinions about the Jews generally were not based on ignorance, social snobbery, or Christian bigotry, as the Jews would have us believe.

Consider the three outstanding writers I just mentioned. Neither Céline nor London was a Christian, although Dostoevsky was, and none of the three was wealthy or considered a snob. London, in fact, was an illegitimate child raised in poverty. At the age of 13 he was working 12-hour days in a cannery for ten cents an hour. London and Dostoevsky became intimately acquainted with Jews before expressing opinions about them. London for a while thought of himself as a Marxist and moved in Marxist circles, where he got a good, strong whiff of Jews at work and play. Dostoevsky was sent to prison on the suspicion that he had revolutionary sentiments, and he spent four years in a Siberian prison with Jews who really did have revolutionary sentiments. All three writers denounced the Jews for their hatred against Gentile society, for their deceitfulness, and for their destructive and parasitic activities.

And Céline, London, and Dostoevsky were not really exceptional in their attitude toward the Jews. Their attitude was that of the majority of the most perceptive, sensitive, and thoughtful men in our society. I chose these three not because their attitudes toward the Jews were exceptional, but because they were the most outstanding writers of their time: Céline in France, London in America, and Dostoevsky in Russia. So why are things different today? Why don’t we have America’s leading literary lights warning us about the Jews’ destructive intentions toward us, the way we did in the 19th century — and in this century up until the Second World War? Did all of our honest writers get killed during the war?

Actually, I can think of one honest writer of the first rank who survived the war and warned us about the Jews — although in a somewhat more muted voice than the prewar writers. It’s a curious fact that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, just like his countryman Feodor Dostoevsky a century earlier, was arrested by the secret police and sent to a prison camp on suspicion of being a dissident. While in prison Dostoevsky had observed closely the Jews around him and developed the conviction that if they ever got the upper hand over the Russians, the Russians would be devoured by them. That, of course, is exactly what happened.

Solzhenitsyn, a mathematician and an officer in the Red Army, was arrested in 1945 when a Jewish political commissar opened and read a letter written by Solzhenitsyn criticizing the communist regime. Solzhenitsyn spent the next 11 years in communist prison camps and had a good chance to observe at first hand the gulag system which already had devoured some 30 million of his countrymen. When he was released from prison in 1956 Solzhenitsyn, a man of exceptional courage and integrity, began writing books critical of the communist regime.

The Jews in his books were treated with some degree of subtlety, but not with enough subtlety to keep the Jews from whining immediately that he is an anti-Semite. I am sure that the Jews have more sensitive antennae for detecting anti-Semitism than I do, but in fact after reading two or three of Solzhenitsyn’s novels even I had a strong suspicion that he was trying to tell us something about the Jews. And after reading his Gulag Archipelago I was sure of it. Solzhenitsyn didn’t come right out and say, “The Jews are our deadliest enemies, and we ought to kill them all as soon as we can,” but for the perceptive reader the message was there. For example, in Gulag Archipelago he names some of the communist secret police commissars who set up and ran the murderous system of forced-labor camps which consumed the lives of so many Russians. There are photographs of six of these communist butchers in the book. All six of them are Jews. And this in a country where less than one per cent of the population is Jewish.

But you know, Solzhenitsyn is really the exception in the postwar period, whereas before the war he would have been the rule. So again: what has happened to our writers? Why are there almost no writers of the first rank today who will speak openly of the Jews? Actually, I might rephrase that question and ask why there are virtually no writers of the first rank today, at least in the English-speaking world? We have a huge flood of trash literature being published, but very little of lasting value.

The same answer fits both questions, at least in part. We have fewer writers today publishing honest and significant commentaries on the Jews, because of the sort of thing which happened to Professor Marius — and also because of the greatly increased degree of direct control Jews have over what can be published and sold. A really competent, established novelist can write a first-rate novel in which the villain is a greasy kike, a la Ehud Barak or Ariel Sharon, who heads some Israeli murder organization — but he would be quite unlikely to find a major publisher interested in handling his book, and even if he did the major bookstore chains would boycott it, and the reviewers would give it the silent treatment. He would have infinitely better luck by making the villain a Nazi. And what is true of fiction also is true of non-fiction.

I’ll back up just a bit here, because there are few absolutes in the world of literature. Tom Wolfe is one writer who just might get away with a novel in which the villain is a sly, despicable, lecherous rabbi who kidnaps 12-year-old Gentile girls from the streets of New York, rapes them, and then sells them to an Israeli White slave gang, which is finally broken up by a blond hero with distinctly Nazi overtones to his character, who says, “Die, you Jewish pig,” as he dispatches each of the White slavers.

Well, I’m exaggerating a bit. I might write such a novel, and I’d really enjoy doing so if I had the time, but no major publisher would come near it. If Tom Wolfe wanted to write such a novel he would make it quite a bit more subtle than I have described it, undoubtedly leaving out the “die, you Jewish pig” comments as the hero slits the throats of the Israelis. But, judging from some of his other work, he just might get away with a subliminal version of the story. He certainly pushes the envelope about as far as it can be pushed today.

And in non-fiction there is the truly remarkable and valuable work of Professor Kevin MacDonald, whose trilogy on Jewish psychology, Jewish behavioral characteristics, and the interaction of the Jews with their Gentile hosts has been published in the past five years. It is really surprising that these books are available even to scholars. I am quite sure, however, that the same information could not be published and sold in a popular context today, where any Joe or Jill Sixpack could pick it up at the corner newsstand.

Anyway, Solzhenitsyn and Wolfe and MacDonald are the rare exceptions, simply because of the massive degree of Jewish control in the book publishing and marketing industries — and even more so in the book reviewing business — and because of fear on the part of timid writers who don’t want to write anything Politically Incorrect and suffer the fate of Professor Marius.

And that also explains in part why the American literary scene has become such a wasteland today. Jewish tastes and Jewish sensibilities are more important today in determining what is published than Gentile tastes and sensibilities. Which is to say, what has happened to art and music since the Jews decided to become our cultural arbiters also has happened to literature. This really goes beyond a Jewish publisher looking at a manuscript and deciding not to publish it because it is hostile to Jews or reveals something the Jews don’t want publicized, such as the names and ethnicities of the commissars who ran the extermination camps in the Soviet Union. It’s more a matter of using his own, Jewish taste to decide that the public would rather read a novel with a Jewish flavor — a Norman Mailer or Philip Roth or Saul Bellow flavor — than a Gentile flavor.

This process of replacing Gentile tastes with Jewish tastes is self-reinforcing, because it involves more than the big, New York publishers and the bookstore chains. It also involves the literary critics and the universities. Jews have arrogated to themselves the office of deciding what’s good literature and what isn’t and of interpreting literature — ours as well as theirs — for us. What passes for “literature” in American universities today is almost unimaginably different from what students were introduced to 60 years ago. And certainly, students want to be fashionable. They want to have the “right” tastes. They want to be part of the avant-garde.

Since most Americans don’t do much serious reading these days, perhaps the question of who our literary critics and literature professors are seems unimportant. Actually, it’s extremely important, if we’re interested in such things as freedom and survival. Certainly, we can’t become terribly excited over Professor Marius’ loss of his job as speechwriter for Al Gore. Al Gore can hire or fire anybody he wants. But having Jews interpret our literature for us is a more serious matter.

In a literate society a people’s sense of who they are is passed from generation to generation through their national literature. A people’s values and standards of behavior are expressed in their literature. Their history, the lives of their heroes, their attitude toward the world are all incorporated in their national literature. To permit an alien people, with different values and standards, a different history, a different sense of identity, a different attitude toward the world to become custodians of a nation’s literature and to begin changing it, reinterpreting it, denigrating it, and replacing it is tantamount to national suicide. It leads immediately to a loss of the sense of peoplehood, a loss of the sense of national identity. It leads immediately to alienation and the breakdown of public and private morality. It leaves a people easy prey to those whose aim is to control and exploit them.

And that is why the Jews have, in their inimitably pushy manner, made themselves the masters of our literature. Of course, if you discuss the matter with a Jew, you will hear other excuses for this development. Some will try to turn your questions aside with the old jealousy ploy: “Oh, you’re just jealous because we Jews are smarter and work harder than you do. That’s how we became so prominent in your cultural activities.” Others will try to convince you that their Allen Ginsberg was promoted as a talented poet and their Philip Roth and Norman Mailer were treated as serious writers by Jewish publishers and Jewish reviewers and Jewish literature professors because that’s what they really were; that they were sensitive and creative writers deserving to be studied and discussed by Gentile university students, that their books were bought by fashion-conscious Gentile yuppies because that’s really what the yuppies wanted to read.

And to be honest about it, we have not been without fault in this, because we let it happen. We foolishly opened our city gates to the enemy, because we already had undergone a long process of subversion and decay. We had in our own ranks, even before the Second World War, idiots with pretensions to learning and culture such as Professor Marius, ready to welcome the alien distorters and destroyers of our culture into our midst, ready to fawn on them and believe whatever the enemy said. Well, how that came about, how fools like Marius became predisposed to accept the Jews and believe them, is another story. We may be amused that Marius got bitten, but our task remains as formidable as before: and that is to break the grip of the Jews on the minds of our people by breaking the Jewish monopoly on our mass media.

Until we do that, modern American literature and the rest of modern culture will remain a wasteland, devoid of the real spirit, the real genius of our people. It will remain a culture which corrupts rather than uplifts our people. It will not be a culture which inspires them to fight for their freedom and their racial integrity and their survival as a people. Quite to the contrary, in fact. A people with no real culture of their own — or at least, a people who have lost contact with their own culture — will be victimized and exploited and eventually exterminated. That is the aim of our current cultural arbiters, at Harvard, in Hollywood, in New York, in Washington, and elsewhere.

Well, we do still have creative individuals among our people: writers of talent, musicians and graphic artists of talent, who are able to renew our culture, to put us back on the right cultural track, to inspire us to value the things that our people used to value before the Judaization of our culture. When we make it possible for these creative individuals to express themselves and to reach the masses of our people, so that our people have a choice between Jewish culture and our culture, then we will begin to see some changes. Anyway, our task, my task, the task of the National Alliance, remains to provide the media-free media, non-distorting media — through which our writers and artists can reach our people.

* * *

Source: American Dissident Voices broadcast, December 4th 1999

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23 March, 2022 6:30 pm

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