Why Antisemitism Is Retarded

Don't Get Sucked Into the Jet Engine

Dagestanis looking for Jews in all the wrong places. Source: Quora

Antisemitism is on the rise globally. Deadly anti-Jewish violence is at its highest level in over three decades. Progressive anti-Zionism is intersectional with Der Stürmer, as British Green Party candidates variously claim that “Zionists” in the Soviet Union “killed 20 million Christians,” Israel is harvesting Palestinian organs “to help alter [the] DNA of Zionists to claim land,” and Jews are “cockroaches.” A quarter of Republican voters under 50 actually self-identify as antisemitic, while grifters like Candace Owens (and, more surreptitiously, Tucker Carlson) traffic in debased Jewish conspiracy theories. So, what is to be done? Many attempts to combat antisemitism try to elicit sympathy for Jews. For example, Piers Morgan told white supremacist Nick Fuentes that “It’s your lack of humanity and compassion for people about things like the Holocaust, about slavery, it’s that that people find so contemptible.” Fuentes countered that Adolf Hitler “was really fucking cool” and Morgan is a “boomer.” At least on the boomer angle, Fuentes has a point. Rather than educating young antisemites about what they see as ancient (if not fabricated) history, or appealing to a compassion they clearly don’t possess, let me suggest a more based line of argument: Antisemitism is retarded, and you’re being taken for a ride.

Lest I offend the intellectually disabled, let me be clear: I’m referencing the famous statement by Friedrich Engels that “anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture.”¹ Here’s a truth that even Fuentes, who regularly mocks his own fans, would grudgingly admit. Of course, there are learned antisemites who write lengthy treatises with weighty titles like The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. But they, too, for all their motivated reasoning, are fundamentally retarded. In historian Bernard Lewis’ framing, the defining feature of antisemitism, which distinguishes it from “normal” prejudice, is “the accusation against Jews of cosmic evil.” In medieval Europe, Jews were accused of ritually murdering children to make matzah, causing the bubonic plague by poisoning wells, and literally having horns. When German agitator Wilhelm Marr coined the term “antisemitism” in 1879, he was modernizing peasant mythology using the veneer of racial pseudoscience. Right-wing, left-wing, and Islamist antisemites have adapted an old demonology to their preferred ideological frameworks, but kept the retarded core.²

Again, I’m using the word “retarded” in its precise, analytical sense. If a grown man claimed that the boogeyman was trying to replace him, we’d diagnose him with arrested development or worse. If a group of grown men marches with tiki torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” is this qualitatively different? The tiki-torch crowd is proud of “noticing” their preferred boogeyman, but individual Jews who support immigration aren’t evidence of a vast conspiracy. That’s why antisemitic “arguments” quickly give way to rants, forgeries, caricatures, and memes. The attribution of cosmic evil to human beings belongs to the realm of primitive folklore, not rational inquiry. Nor do such retarded beliefs stay narrowly focused on the Jews. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, antisemitism is “a comprehensive attitude that one adopts not only toward Jews but toward men in general, toward history and society.” This attitude is a form of destructive Manichaeism that “localizes all of the evil of the universe in the Jew,” and which, in turn, both “conceals a deep-seated attraction toward Evil” and “favors laziness of mind.”³ The immoral, irrational nature of antisemitism is inseparable from a broader, self-destructive retardation. Or as Peter Vierek warned, “Political anti-Semitism is no isolated program. It is the first step in an ever-widening revolt of mob instinct against all restraints and liberties.”

Consider, for example, Holocaust denial. The antisemite can’t discount mounds of evidence for one well-documented event, but be an honest broker when it comes to the rest of history, or indeed empirical reality. If you think the Holocaust is a hoax, you must also believe in an elaborate, pervasive conspiracy to cover up the lie. In that case, most institutions and fellow citizens can’t be trusted either. What does Holocaust denial and conspiracy theorizing look like at scale? Consider the Middle East and North Africa, where, according to an ADL survey, 69% of adults think that “significant world events have been the result of activity from a small group who control world events” and 43% say that either the Holocaust didn’t happen or has been greatly exaggerated. As commentator Hafed Al-Ghwell writes, conspiratorial explanations are “dominant and widespread, even among the educated” in the Arab world, which leads to a sense of resignation that “paralyzes the Arab mind and limits its capacity to think critically and pragmatically about important issues.” The most antisemitic countries tend to be ruled by authoritarian regimes that benefit from a population tranquilized by learned helplessness. An Egyptian governor even blamed shark attacks at a tourist resort on the Mossad. Antisemitism is harmful to the nation, but it’s useful to rulers in need of scapegoats to feed the mob.

History, too, is replete with anti-Jewish regimes that retarded national development. In 1492, Spain expelled its Jews just as it discovered the New World. Portugal followed in 1497. Among the expelled Jews were scientists like Abraham Zacuto, who contributed to the seafaring knowledge that enabled Iberian expansionism. As historian David Landes writes, Portugal “tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.”⁴ Naming the Jew is an old, retarded tradition. More broadly, Spain and Portugal tried to shut out foreign and heretical influences, including the dangerous new ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Compare Al-Ghwell’s comments about the Arab mind to 18th-century Englishwoman Mary Brearley’s observation that “the bulk of the [Portuguese] people were disinclined to independence of thought and, in all but a few instances, too much averse from intellectual activity to question what they learned.”⁵ Inquisitiveness is incompatible with Inquisitions. Many exiled Sephardic Jews immigrated to Holland, where they contributed to its eventual economic ascendance. Though Spain and Portugal amassed vast material wealth from their empires, they squandered it on war and luxury. Europe’s center of economic and political gravity shifted north, to the more capitalist, scientific, and—not coincidentally—religiously tolerant Protestant countries. Other examples of antisemitism’s national self-destructiveness were to follow.

The late 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, in which a French-Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of spying for Germany, led to a cultural civil war that internally weakened France. Ironically, anti-Dreyfusards and their Vichy heirs would themselves commit treason by collaborating with the Germans during World War II. In Tsarist Russia, institutionalized persecution and state-sanctioned pogroms led to the emigration of over two million Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely to Western countries. As historian Paul Johnson notes, Russia was weakened not just by the loss of human capital, but “by the immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Additionally, the Tsarist antisemitic bureaucracy “became a model for the subsequent Soviet system of internal control, which can be understood as an extension to the population as a whole of laws that once oppressed Jews only.” The persecution of Jews is a dress rehearsal for totalitarianism writ large. In 1933, Hitler expelled Jews from German state institutions, declaring that “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.” Persecuted scientists, including Albert Einstein, immigrated to the West, where a disproportionate number of Jews helped develop the atomic bomb for the Allies. (How’s that for “noticing”?) Meanwhile, the Nazis embraced “Aryan Physics” and turned pseudoscientific quackery into state policy. Hitler accelerated the transfer of global scientific leadership from Germany to the United States, a shift reflected in the changing distribution of Nobel Prizes.

But let’s give the devil his due and not fall into antisemitic-style Manichaeism. There have clearly been antisemites who weren’t totally retarded. American industrialist Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile industry and mass production more broadly. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century. Even Hitler was a skilled political organizer and orator, which he put to catastrophic use. But Ford, who republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his weekly newspaper, eventually reckoned with the consequences of his antisemitic mind virus. During a 1946 screening of a film documenting the Nazi death camps, the businessman had a major stroke. He died the following year, with a Ford executive writing that her boss finally “saw the ravages of a plague he had helped to spread.” Céline, whose antisemitism was considered too extreme even by some Nazis, squandered his literary gift on polemical screeds that verge on unintended satire. His 1937 anti-masterpiece, Trifles for a Massacre, was largely plagiarized from fascist propaganda and includes 114 instances of the French word for “kike.” On an immeasurably greater and more destructive scale, Hitler, too, was undone by his antisemitism. His disastrous decision to attack the USSR while still battling Britain, and then to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, reflected a delusional contempt for nations he perceived as Jewish-controlled.⁶ Hitler diverted resources that could’ve aided the German war effort towards the Holocaust, alienated potential allies through his racial fanaticism, and then ordered the destruction of Germany before killing himself in a bunker.

Needless to say, most antisemites aren’t business magnates, prose stylists, or totalitarian dictators with legacies to diminish, talents to waste, or countries to annihilate. They’re more like the suicidally low-IQ Dagestani mob that stormed an airport in 2023, peering into jet engines to see if any Jews were hiding. There’s certainly money to be made and power to be had by exploiting the retarded sentiments of a backward population. In that sense, antisemitic influencers like Fuentes—and progressive politicians who tolerate or encourage antisemitism, like the British Green Party’s Zack Polanski—aren’t themselves stupid. But ironically, for all that antisemites accuse Jews of being parasites, it’s the antisemites themselves who feed upon and undermine their host countries. They sow division, reduce public trust, push “goyslop” on the gullible, and, in extreme cases like that of the Nazis, start cataclysmic wars. David Azerrad has observed that the “Jewish Question” (JQ) functions as “a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge that allows the enlightened few to pierce through the illusions of ordinary politics and grasp the ultimate reality.” JQers believe they’re being lied to and manipulated. And indeed they are, but by demagogues who think they’re retarded, not by “organized Jewry.” Hitler himself wrote that the “broad masses of the people” are “a vacillating crowd of human children” who are “ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning.” If you are, in fact, not retarded, then don’t get sucked into antisemitism’s jet engine.

1. I don’t actually know if this quotation is famous, but it should be. I learned it from Substack scholar wittmayer.

2. For the modern story of Muslim antisemitism, see Bernard Lewis’ Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry Into Conflict and Prejudice (1987). Among the retarded claims he cites are that John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was “armed by the Zionist organization,” that Al Capone was really an Israeli named Isaac Schacher, and that Zionists actually coined the term antisemitism. As Lewis writes, “It is not clear what propaganda point is served by such stories, except perhaps the general one, common in anti-Semitic writings; not only are all Jews evil but all evil is Jewish” (pp. 214–15).

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1946, trans. 1948), pp. 17, 40, 45, 43.

4. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1999), p. 134.

5. Quoted in Landes, p. 135.

6. Hitler said of the United States: “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together?” Of Russia, he wrote that the German rulers of the “inferior” Slavs had been replaced by Jews, and it was “impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever.” Needless to say, both American and Russian statehood have long outlasted Nazi Germany.