The Blog

2021-

2021-04-11 f
INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE GREAT REPLACEMENT

[...] The Long History of Jewish Efforts to Replace the White population of America

The lack of concern on the part of [Max} Boot and [Jonathan] Greenblatt for White Americans is entirely typical of the organized Jewish community. The following is based on Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique along with some more recent research—the point being that the organized Jewish community has long had the aim of diluting the White population of the U.S., motivated by fear and loathing of the White population. The culture of critique is the erection of an adversarial culture that is hostile to the traditional White population of the U.S.

Jewish activists on immigration rejected the ethnic status quo put in place by the 1924 and 1952 immigration laws. Otis Graham (2004: 80) notes that the Jewish lobby on immigration was not only the most effective force in enacting the 1965 law, their activism “was aimed not just at open doors for Jews, but also for a diversification of the immigration stream sufficient to eliminate the majority status of western European so that a fascist regime in America would be more unlikely.” The motivating role of fear and insecurity on the part of the activist Jewish community Jews thus differed from other groups and individuals promoting an end to the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws.

Stuar Svonkin ( 1997, 8ff) shows that a sense of “uneasiness” and insecurity pervaded American Jewry in the wake of World War II even in the face of evidence that anti-Semitism had declined to the point that it had become a marginal phenomenon. As a direct result, “The primary objective of the Jewish intergroup relations agencies [i.e., the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the ADL] after 1945 was . . . to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary mass movement in the United States” (Svonkin 1997, 8).

Writing in the 1970s, Isaacs (1974: 14ff) describes the pervasive insecurity of American Jews and their hypersensitivity to anything that might be deemed anti-Semitic. Interviewing “noted public men” on the subject of anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, Isaacs asked, “Do you think it could happen here?” “Never was it necessary to define ‘it.’ In almost every case, the reply was approximately the same: ‘If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,’ or ‘It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.’ ” (p. 15).

Writing long after the passage of the 1965 law, prominent Jewish social scientist and ethnic activist Earl Raab remarked very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States. Writing for a Jewish publication, Raab noted that the Jewish community had taken a leadership role in changing the northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (Raab, 1993a, 17), and he also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that “an increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop” (Raab, 1995b, 91). Similarly, Elliott Abrams (1999, 190) noted, “the American Jewish community clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

In 1952 President Truman’s President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) pointedly noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo, and that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was not the national origins system, because there were already high levels of nonquota immigrants and because the countries of Northern and Western Europe did not fill their quotas. Rather, the report noted that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was the total number of immigrants.

The [PCIN] thus viewed changing the racial status quo of the United States as a desirable goal, and to that end made a major point of the desirability of increasing the total number of immigrants (PCIN 1953, 42). As Bennett (1963, 164) notes, in the eyes of the PCIN, the 1924 legislation reducing the total number of immigrants “was a very bad thing because of its finding that one race is just as good as another for American citizenship or any other purpose.” Correspondingly, the defenders of the 1952 legislation conceptualized the issue as fundamentally one of ethnic warfare. Senator Pat McCarran stated that subverting the national origins system “would, in the course of a generation or so, tend to change the ethnic and cultural composition of this nation” (in Bennett 1963, 185)—a result that has indeed come to pass. (The Culture of Critique, 1998/2002: 281)

The chairman of the PCIN was Philip B. Perlman, and the staff of the commission contained a high percentage of Jews, headed by Harry N. Rosenfield (Executive Director) and Elliot Shirk (Assistant to the Executive Director); its report was wholeheartedly endorsed by the AJCongress (see Congress Weekly, Jan. 12, 1952: 3). The proceedings were printed as the report Whom We Shall Welcome (PCIN, 1953) with the cooperation of Rep. Emanuel Celler and with an essay by Oscar Handlin, the Jewish academic activist (see below).

The American Jewish Congress, the largest American Jewish organization at the time, testified during the Senate hearings on the 1952 law that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in preserving the ethnic balance of the United States, but it commented that “the objective is valueless. There is nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the population in 1920. It would be foolish to believe that we reached the peak of ethnic perfection in that year.”[1]

During this period the Congress Weekly, the newsletter of the AJCongress, regularly denounced the national origins provisions as based on the “myth of the existence of superior and inferior racial stocks” (Oct. 17, 1955: 3) and advocated immigration on the basis of “need and other criteria unrelated to race or national origin” (May 4, 1953: 3). Dr. Israel Goldstein (1952a, 6), president of the AJCongress, wrote that “The national origins formula “is outrageous now . . . when our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples” (Goldstein 1952b, 5), thus presaging the current mantra promulgated by American media and politicians that “Diversity is our greatest strength.”

Prominent Jewish intellectuals, such as Harvard historian and public intellectual Oscar Handlin, published pro-immigration books (e.g., The Uprooted [1951/1973]) and articles. Handlin’s (1952) article, “The immigration fight has only begun,” was published in Commentary (published by the American Jewish Committee) shortly after the Democrat-controlled Congress overrode President Truman’s veto of the restrictionist 1952 law. In a telling comment indicating Jewish leadership of the pro-immigration forces, Handlin complained about the apathy of other “hyphenated Americans” in joining the immigration battle. He repeatedly uses the term “we”—as in “if we cannot beat [Sen. Pat] McCarran and his cohorts with their own weapons, we can do much to destroy the efficacy of those weapons” (p. 4)—suggesting Handlin’s belief in a unified Jewish interest in liberal immigration policy and presaging a prolonged “chipping away” of the 1952 legislation in the ensuing years mentioned by Graham (2003) as part of the context of the 1965 law and noted by Cofnas.

Handlin clearly rejected an ethnic status quo, arguing that it was “illusory [to expect] that the composition of American population will remain as it is” (Handlin, 1947, 6). And he never addressed the stated justification used by restrictionists in the 1924 debates, describing their attitudes as follows: “The hordes of inferior breeds, even then freely pouring into the country in complete disregard for the precepts of the new racial learning, would mix promiscuously with the Anglo-Saxon and inevitably produce a deterioration of the species” (1951/1973: 257). Handlin thus ignored the actual argument used by restrictionists during the Congressional debates of 1924—that the national origins formula was fair to all ethnic groups in the country because it created an ethnic status quo (MacDonald, 1998/202: 263) with its implicit and entirely defensible assumption from an evolutionary perspective that different ethnic groups have conflicts of interest on immigration (e.g., conflicts between Palestinians and Jews in Israel over a Palestinian right of return).

Handlin was a critical figure in the decades leading up to the passage of the 1965 law:

Handlin’s thinking on immigration policy both reflected and shaped the course of reform in the postwar period. He may be credited with popularizing a new interpretation of American history—one that conceptualized immigration at the heart of American economic and democratic development. In creating this framework for immediate political reform, he founded a normative theory of immigration history—one we popularly known as “a nation of immigrants” (Ngai, 2013, 62).

(read more and see references)

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