This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comFriend-of-the-show “Uberboyo” joins Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin to discuss Friedrich Nietzsche and his perspective on the Jews: full of surprising reversals, back-handed compliments, back-handed insults, and ambivalence. Richard discusses what Nietzsche’s perspective on Zionism might be.
And I was talking with Mark, and we were kind of suggesting talking about the Jewish question as it's relayed by Nietzsche.
Because he has a very...
Complicated and contradictory conception of the Jews, and particularly the Jews in his time, which is more or less our time, that is the Jews in modern Europe.
We're also obviously going through this traumatic period in Palestine and Israel with this terrible war that's ongoing.
And it's, you know, a lot of these energies, I think, were dormant for some time, but they're cropping up.
It's like they're flaring up almost like a rash.
And so you have a obviously a lot of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment.
And I don't think the elites in the United States in particular, but also Europe, recognize.
And then, on the other hand, you have something else cropping up, which is these biblical fundamentalists or dispensationalists who will simply quote a Bible verse to you about bequeathing the land of Canaan to Abraham and then...
That's all they need to say.
And effectively, we need to support Israel till the end of time.
And Israel can't do any wrong, in fact.
So I think just due to this conflict, which is extremely ugly on both sides, but we're watching the Israeli ugliness at the moment.
A lot of these things that were kind of lying dormant have cropped up.
So I think it is worthwhile reexamining the Jewish question.
And what that means.
But anyway, what do you think about that?
And then maybe we can kind of lead into, you know, Nietzsche's concept thereof.
Well, I think Nietzsche is an interesting...
A person to consider when it comes to this, because I think what the internet represents is a little bit of a Protestant revolution.
You know, it's the printing press returned again.
And so everybody can suddenly start reading reality for themselves, if you so will, or the Bible for themselves.
And all of us start to have our own opinion and our own perspective.
We all get woke.
We all read and we're like, wait a second, the Pope is out there banging prostitutes.
What's going on?
We all start to freak out.
This is sort of happening with the internet.
There was a regime in place since 1945, I guess you could say, that was very stable and the television and all those systems of media were very stable and they kept like a coherent meta-narrative shrouded across the West.
Like, this is my perception of it.
I didn't live through this period of time.
But I look back and I kind of feel like the boomers lived through a sort of united.
America was one.
Western hegenomy was sort of all in with it.
Like Western Europe kind of supported it as well.
And a part of that, of course, was a very prestigious status for the Jewish people, which in some sense they've won.
And that's sort of they're sort of reaping the rewards for the last two or three hundred years, which Nisha will talk about.
And then, of course, now the Internet shows up and 4chan shows up, Twitter shows up and people start to dispensate alternate perspectives.
And this begins.
I remember this is I was very young at this time, still a teenager, but there was a movie called The Zeitgeist.
And this is sort of a really good representation of what this stuff is.
The Zeitgeist movie is saying Jesus is not real.
Jesus was actually an amalgamated myth of Horus from Egypt.
9-11 was fake.
9-11 was done by the American government on the American people because they hate the American people.
They're evil capitalists and all this type of stuff.
It was like David Icke, this type of stuff.
The Federal Reserve money printing, that does kind of boggle the mind when you think about it.
There's not enough money in the universe to pay off paper.
interest on the debt.
So it's this inherently contradictory system.
I mean, it is rather mind-boggling.
Just briefly, the mythicism in the film is just kind of bad mythicism, right?
It's sort of these kind of shoddy parallels when there are very strong parallels that you can make between the cult of Bacchus and the cult of Adonis and so forth.
So that's a kind of irony of the film because, again, it was popular, as Uwe Boyo was saying.
Struck a chord or resonated with people, but isn't it just sort of kind of characteristic that the guy didn't really know what he was talking about in terms of the mythicism?
It's almost like the stupid or crazier things are more liable to go viral than the things that are kind of sound and coherent.
I think there's a sort of innocence to it.
Like I look back and they were saying, you know, the kind of story that they're presenting is so...
It's weirdly kind of quaint and innocent.
It's compared to the conspiracy theories we have now, which is like the Jews are trying to eradicate the white race off the face of the planet or COVID-19 was a scam to genocide every person in existence and make them sterile.
You hear about the Muslims saying that Israel is Satan themselves or the Jews are like, oh, the Nazis are trying to set up the Fort Reich from behind the Western governments.
They're all secretly not.
You talk to the left and they say, That same things like this.
And you listen to those conspiracy theories and you're like, Jesus, they're pretty hardcore compared to like the zeitgeist, which is like the capitalists are trying to exploit you in some type.
It was just a little bit more innocent and a little bit more early internet, if you so will.
But it was showing the kind of trend that was coming up.
And that really cascaded.
Like when I was starting to, around about Trump, and I was like...
Early mid-20s, around about Trump.
When that was cascading, I remember that's when a lot of it really began to kick off.
I didn't really come across any of that stuff, like the zeitgeist and all that.
I came across that, but I remember around about Trump is when that really kicked into a different gear.
And that's when you started to see politics get into it and stuff like this.
The regime would start to bite back at some of these conspiracies.
You could have the zeitgeist up on YouTube, but...
You didn't see YouTube censorship until we got it into like 2016, 2017, 2018.
And that was really a big deal because that was showing that like, oh shit, something big is going on.
And to kind of pull this all to some sense, what I started to learn, because I had been reading Nietzsche long before Trump came around, Nietzsche actually provided some incredibly, a lot of Nietzsche that I never understood.
Bitching about antisemitism or him talking about the Jews.
I never quite got it.
But then around about the Trump election and all of these topics get shoved into the forefront and realities about all these things get brought up and people start talking about them and the internet starts promulgating these things.
All of a sudden, I look back at Nietzsche and I'm like, this dude.
Had coherency around all of these topics, really well-formed ideas that are very explanatory towards our situation.
Like I've got a couple of quotes pulled up here.
I won't read them now.
But like one of them is, for example, the philology of Christianity, where he's talking about that psychology of Christians claiming that Christians are the true people of Israel, trying to say that the Jews are fake and stuff like this.
And it's just amazing because right now that's actually an enormous kind of swing narrative that's just so funny to watch where...
You have a lot of, like, hardcore Christians saying that they hate the Jews, but then, of course, they are, in some sense, fully affirming the Jewish Old Testament as, like, the meaning of the earth, if you want to put it this way.
205, the people of Israel, where he talks about the next century is the process of European Jews, which in some sense, I think just so perfectly predicts the destiny of the Jewish people.
It's quite amazing.
Beyond Good and Evil is another one as well.
He has a lot of things in there.
So what I find so amazing about Nietzsche is that he was obviously grappling with these and he presents basically these perennial problems.
But with a lot of clarity that gives us a lot of ability to understand our situation from a very level perspective, because when we're in the flux of the Protestant Revolution, emotionalism is it's very easy to get caught up in that.
It's very easy to get caught up with some of the fear inside some of these these theories.
And he's coming from 150 years ago and sort of explaining what he saw.
And you're like, wow, if it's if these trends are this old, there might be a broader perspective I could be looking at this stuff out that allows me to be less panicky.
So I'll leave it there.
Yeah, he had some very interesting comments on the Germans as well in Beyond Good and Evil.
And it's very typical of Nietzsche that when you think he's polemically attacking someone, he's also kind of complimenting them.
And the reverse is also true.
When he compliments people, he's in a way engaged in a polemical attack.
I actually think he does foresee Nazi Germany.
In fact, in those comments about Germans and how they are going to be kind of leveled and flattened and impressed with the monstrosity, and they're going to remain true to that vision, in fact, till the end.
And he also kind of suggests that there can be a leveling of a people through democracy and capitalism and technology, etc., but then that people is becoming ripe for tyranny.
And so you need these Hitlers or Donald Trumps or Elon Musk.
They're bigger.
They're bolder.
They're worse in many ways.
They're richer than men of the past.
And they're almost kind of rising as an organic process of the leveling that's taking place.
And Nietzsche, again, there's always a kind of reversal in his thought where...
He'll say, you know, these things are kind of great in their way, but then as one people gets leveled, another people is deepened in this sense.
And I think that gets at his...
Ambivalence about the Jews.
Because, you know, you can read, particularly on the genealogy of morality, I mean, you can pick out quotes or pick out whole paragraphs and say, well, Nietzsche's just clearly an anti-Semite.
It's Rome versus Judea, Arian versus Semite, blonde beast versus...
Rabbi, I mean, these are the dialectics.
This is like the battle of world history taking place.
And the Semites found a way of attacking Aryans via morality.
And they proved...
In a way that morality was stronger than steel or iron, that demoralize someone or make him question himself or reverse his psychology and up is down and left is right and cats are dogs, you can in a way destroy him or attack him or at the very least neuter him.
And that this is what the Jews were up to in their creation of morality and ultimately their creation of Christianity.
I mean, you can...
Read all of that and say that Nietzsche is siding with the blonde beast and he's anti-Semitic and all that kind of stuff.
And there's some truth to that.
But he also suggests that they deepen us.
In the self-introspection that was implied by this revolution of morality and was just hammered home with something like...
The Protestant Reformation.
That we became deeper.
Now, we might have become hamlets in the process, but we were, in fact, deepened by it.
And so the Jews invented morality in the grand style.
They moved beyond simply good and bad or weak and strong.
And they created a kind of cosmology of morality and certain reversals that the meek shall inherit the earth, etc.
Certain reversals, to be sure, but also a kind of I mean, there's something radical about the Protestant message of you're deserving of hellfire.
There is, in fact, nothing you could do.
That would conceivably allow you to escape God's wrath.
But you can truly give yourself a kind of audit, a psychological audit, and you can just throw yourself out there to Jesus and he can offer you grace.
And he's...
A sacrifice to pay the debt.
There's just something unbelievably radical about that type of thinking.
That type of thinking, for better and for worse, is going to lead to a kind of introspection that you see in figures like Hamlet or Luther or Nietzsche himself, etc.
It's going to lead to a kind of new way of thinking.
In some ways, you should be grateful.
You shouldn't just think of them as like, oh, these pathetic people and they're priests and they're tricking us with morality.
And so that's the kind of...
I mean, again, it's not like he even fundamentally disagrees with that, to be honest.
It's about embracing fate, accepting that, and recognizing their contribution.
That you can't have, you're a German Christian, you hate Jews.
All of your concepts, your moral concepts, your myths, these are all a fulfillment of Judaism.
They're not alien to Judaism.
You're hating from, you know, the thing from whence you derive.
I mean, it's bizarre in a way and schizophrenic or ambivalent.
What Nietzsche is offering is this kind of like giving credit in a way to something.
And even if it was based on resentment, and even if it was poison on some level, drinking that poison is going to some way make you stronger or make you deeper.
Yeah, there's some, like, amazing ideas that you bring up that I'd love to go into.
First of all, the idea of, like, politics and the grand style, and I have a kind of spin on this that I think is actually very useful when you come to think about the Jews and their contribution towards European thought, and in some sense, like two fighters, you know?
An UFC fighter goes up and he fights against another guy, like Conor McGregor fighting against Nate Diaz.
And the first time Nate beats him, and Conor realizes, oh shit, I'm not good enough and I have to go and train and become better in order for me to be able to actually beat this guy.
And it's very similar, like the Jews and I guess you could say the Aryans or Europeans.
They're vastly different.
And Nietzsche points out, probably one of the best people at pointing out the differences between these two people.
But the sort of priestly mode operandi.
People don't want to cast respect upon it, per se, but it doesn't mean that it's in any way lacking value.
It may be crafty, it may be sly, it may even be toxic and bitter with resentment, but it's not without its own virtues.
And oftentimes, I think this is one of his biggest complaints about anti-Semitism, is that they just refuse to see the virtues.
I guess you could say their enemy.
They refuse to acknowledge that this Tekken fighter has things going for them.
From dawn of day.
This is the people of Israel.
I'm going to read a little bit of this because he just explains it better in his own words than anything I could say.
Dawn of day, daybreak, aphorism 205, the people of Israel.
In Europe, however, the Jews have gone through a schooling of 18 centuries such as no other nation has ever undergone, and the experiences of this dreadful time of probation have benefited not only the Jewish community, but even to a greater extent the individual.
As a consequence of this, the resourcefulness of the modern Jews, both in mind and soul, is extraordinary.
Amongst all the inhabitants of Europe, it is the Jews least of all who try to escape from any deep distress by recourse to drink or to suicide, as other less gifted people are so prone to do.
Every Jew can find in the history of his own family and of his ancestors a long record of instances of the greatest coolness and perseverance amid difficulties and dreadful situations, an artful cunning in fighting with misfortune and hazard.
And above all, it is their bravery under the cloak of wretched submission, their heroic spare name.
Now, this is actually quite high praise, and he's very good at layering this onto the Jews.
And I remember when I read this, we'll say post-2016, and I kind of thought about it, and this is actually really true.
If you look through Judaism, for example, Malachi is one of the characters from the Bible, and he's...
The court Jew, and he's all the way back in like prehistory, but he's the model for the Jew of like staying quiet in the courtroom and being very useful.
And people will all often say like, you know, the conspiring court Jew who's like Grima Wormtongue or something like this.
That's the frame that maybe the sort of the European or the Westerner would have upon this.
But from their perspective, the way they're seeing out of their eyes, Malachi is about being super useful to the king and making himself very benevolent.
And they have a very Good attitude towards themselves.
Joseph, for example, in Egypt is the exact same character, a very benevolent, good organizer, clever man that comes in and helps the pharaoh and is able to actually redeem his entire community through basically just being a hard fucking worker, a good politician, a good sort of urban organizer, this type of thing.
The prophet Daniel is another brilliant example.
So they have like prophets inside of the, they have like these shamans, these dream readers inside the court of, I think it's...
Darius or something like this.
And Darius or the one Persian king is having nightmares.
And he's like, tell me what my nightmare means.
And he's like, I don't know, you should eat less eggs or something like this.
And Darius just kills them all because it's a stupid answer.
And then Daniel comes up very innocent and kind and very benevolent, you know, very timid and none of this like rubbing the hands together and like this.
And he solves the guy's dream and he presents himself as a very benevolent type of character.
And you can see from their perspective, this idea of how you should act around power.
And this is something that actually enormously helped them during their emancipation as Europe liberalized them.
Now, you compare this to our Aryan myths, if you so will.
I look at, like, Irish myths, and it's all about Cuchulain, you know?
You look even on the internet now, and all of us are trying to romanticize the past because we feel our identity is getting crushed.
And we're running around saying, like, Hernán Cortés went in 400 men and killed all the fucking Aztecs, and we fucking took over everything.
Badass super warrior, or Caesar, or Napoleon, you know?
Napoleon the big fucking Chad who went in and fucking murdered everyone.
William the Conqueror and Colin, as I said, it's super warriors who we idolize.
We idolize the man of bravery, the man of strength.
And that certainly is a set of virtues that you don't really see.
I guess you could say modern Jews, especially.
But it's interesting to be able to pull yourself out of that perspective and go and look at what these guys are focusing on as values, as things that are important.
And they build into themselves over the course of centuries, of millennia, they build into themselves all these attributes, almost like an evolutionary process that allowed them to be very effective community organizers.
Like, it's not romantic.
It's not like they're charging into battle, cast in glorious armor, charging down French knights.
They don't do stuff like that.
They're not a warrior people.
But it's not like they're without their virtues.
They don't drink themselves to death.
They are very realistic.
Like the one thing that Jung would speak about this as well, the Europeans are very idealistic, romantic, in some sense delusional, out of touch.
Nietzsche hated this in Wagner famously.
The romanticism of his time he thought was an escapism, a weakness.
It was like drink.
It was like alcoholism, Christianity and escapism.
The Jews don't have a trace of that in themselves.
They're actually brutally realistic to the point of almost like they need more romanticism, if you want to put it this way.
But failing to see those things as virtues is really selling yourself short.
How could I put it?
Us Europeans, I have a lot of friends now who are very distressed about what's going on with the migration projects.
And a lot of people complain about Muslims, for example.
Meet some of the boys and it's like, oh, they're hungover on a Sunday.
And I'm like, bro, you know, the Muslims are doing so well, perhaps because they don't drink.
They spend all their time working together with their family.
They collect collectivize their money and buy up these churches.
They make huge families.
Maybe they're getting health welfare and all this, but it's like you're busy getting drunk, being a hedonist, not having any children.
Like, you know, your virtues, as much as you don't like them, it's not very impressive to see that these guys have all these discipline.
And the same with Judaism, you know, like I'm sure...
We all know there's many, many dodgy things going on, like Sam Bankman Freed is a very famous recent example of basically running a giant scam, a Ponzi scheme.
But a lot of them are doing well because of these same virtues that we're just discussing here.
So again, Nietzsche is just so brilliant at cutting through and seeing that and giving credit where his credit's due, and also being able to criticize as harshly as is needed, as you said, in Genealogy of Morals.
Yes.
So real quick, it's Nebuchadnezzar that is one of the kings that Daniel is living among in the captivity.
But your point remains, of course.
Mark, I'll just throw it to you.
I mean, you can pick up on anything, of course, but isn't there a kind of fascinating trend among Jews of being...
Dream interpreters or mind readers.
You can see this with a whole host of figures.
Daniel, Joseph.
You can see this with modern Jews.
Freud is an interpreter of dreams.
That's a pretty good point.
Never even taught it.
Wow, that's very interesting.
Yeah.
And Freud's a really interesting Jew.
He's obviously very bourgeois, highly assimilated in the Vienna of his time.
But then someone who's...
You know, Jewish identity was still very much there as well.
Something he was aware of, but he was also a kind of atheist Jew as well.
I mean, he's a fascinating study.
But Mark, do you want to pick up on any of these things?
Yeah, I mean, so in these myths as well, I think there were both instances where king or host of the Jew is asking that his dream be interpreted.
But there's also cases as well where...
The Jew is also telling him what his dream was, so he needs to know what his dream is.
So the Jew is also giving him the dream.
But in the former case, where he's interpreting the dream, he's also, in a way, giving him a dream, right?
Because it's also about the interpretation of the dream.
It's the understanding of the dream.
Which itself represents a kind of prophecy.
And in these myths, it explicitly represents a prophecy.
It's what's going to occur.
It's what's going to happen.
The Jew is essentially taking a kind of matter or substance or creativity the Gentiles producing and interpreting it, telling him what it means.
What it ordains, what it prophesies for his future.
But this idea of prophecy, and this is something that we discuss in the book as well, is that art, myth, certainly religion represents prophecy.
The prophecy is not just, you know, miraculously telling us what's going to happen in the future.
It's creating the future because people believe the prophecy.
So on a subconscious level, you could say that people coordinate in a way kind of subconsciously to fulfill the prophecy.
Or esotericists collaborate.
To fulfill the prophecy or work toward the end of that prophecy.
So it becomes a way of creating the future, not just predicting the future.
To prophesize is also to create the future.
And so I think that that's why this motif is a kind of reoccurring motif.
To use the example of Freud, it also becomes a way of saying, for example, to the Gentile, really what is latent here are these kind of sexual desires, for example.
Or these unresolved relationships with parents and this sort of thing.
That's what you're feeling.
That's the problem.
And therefore, the problem could become, for example, sexual repression in this society is a problem.
The authoritarian personality type, right?
These are all ideas coming out of the Frankfurt School.
Is the problem that leads to, you know, is a consequence of sexual repression, leads to anti-Semitism and this sort of thing.
So in that case, it's the diagnosis of something that's not even necessarily a problem.
It's just a characteristic that could be a healthy characteristic that is being diagnosed as a problem.
For example.
So it becomes a way to interpret the dream or to diagnose.
It becomes a way to psychologically influence the subject, of course.
That's obviously what's occurring with Daniel and Joseph.
Daniel is in a way demoralizing this Babylonian king through these kind of dark prophecies.
He's predicting a dark future and therefore he's demoralizing this king.
Who fears for a dark future now and anticipates a dark future and through his demoralization fulfills this dark future.
It becomes a way of kind of psychologically poisoning the well, you could say.
So on Nietzsche, I guess I'll just comment briefly.
Yeah, sure.
There is a kind of general kind of coherency to his thinking.
Even where he seems to kind of contradict earlier writings, for example, we see a direction, a coherent direction where we see where he's headed.
And we see him kind of working through problems, as it were.
But I think ambivalence does kind of characterize in a lot of ways, and that doesn't make him less coherent on the question of Jews, certainly.
But I think it is a good characterization of his view of Jews, as he expressed in his writings.
For example, he has some, he says some, and again, part of this is the time that he's living in.
So there's a different criteria for what is considered anti-Semitic.
When Nietzsche is writing than what is considered anti-Semitic now, of course.
And we weigh that, of course, when we're considering his view on Jews.
I would say that one kind of striking thing that he says is that, and they seem like they're kind of contradictory to things, but they're not really.
On one hand, he says that Jews are the opposite of degenerates.
He has a quote where he says they're the opposite of degenerates.
In another passage, he'll say we find Jews at the head of every degenerate movement.
What emerges is Jews as a kind of drug dealer that doesn't sample their own supply, as it were.
Bacchus, right?
So this is a kind of picture of Bacchus as well, is this deity who is himself a dying and rising god who is in some sense immortal and indestructible, but is causing these kings to be torn apart by Maynads, causing Orpheus to be torn apart by Maynads.
There is contained within that, you could argue there's a kind of anti-Semitism, but if it is true...
So he's just kind of describing phenomena, as it were.
And I think it is a kind of apt description of phenomena.
But that's just to use one example.
I'll let you guys talk.
Awesome.
Yeah, I'd actually love to go back to the prophecy question, because there's some very interesting things Mark brought up.
The whole idea of, like, prophecy shaping the future.
Because this comes down to, again, Nietzsche digging into Judaism, and he's just so brilliant at this.
He, like, comprehends the extreme European biases that we have.
For example, his famous passage where he complements the Muslims.
And like I was saying earlier, he says, like, alcohol and Christianity, these things that put the Europeans to sleep.
And, like, obviously...
No proud, patriotic German or any Westerner, really.
You talk to any right-wing conservative American and they'd be disgusted at hearing this.
Muslims are based.
What are you talking about?
And Nietzsche's there like, yeah, they're fucking based.
And you're a drunk, delusional, religious person or whatever.
And then...
He's really good at this.
And so, of course, he looks into the Jews and I see him seeing many of these virtues.
And again, he's accurate.
He categorizes them as priestly.
And he points out that they're hardly respectable.
They're not brave warriors.
They've got many, many things that we would consider ugly and decrepit.
But he's able to be morally relative here.
He's able to flip into their perspectives and try to comprehend how is this evolutionary organism capable of succeeding using its strategy?
It's looking at this weird ant farm.
This weird fish or something like this.
Why is this working for this thing?
And I think one of the keys is actually this priestly capacity for enormous thinking, the capacity for visionary thinking, big thinking, dream thinking, the mastery of the mind, if you so will.
He says in Beyond Good and Evil, what does the European owe to the Jews?
Richard mentioned this earlier.
Nietzsche says many things, good and bad, and above all, one thing in the nature both of the best and of the worst, the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands and infinite significations, basically infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and subliminary of moral questionableness.
I'm so illiterate, man.
I'm such a drunk Irishman.
I can't even read this properly.
As you can see, when he says something like infinite demands, infinite meanings, why does he assign this to something like the Jews?
Because if you read through the Bible...
There's this epicness to us.
He often talks about this with the Bible as a whole, is that it's got more profound characters, more big moments, big dramas, great speeches than Greek mythology and Hindu mythology.
It puts them to shame.
It's got this world-defining demands to it.
They're making these prophecies about the meaning of the earth, about the idea that this entire world is going to be destroyed in hellfire and God is going to create a kingdom in heaven.
It's enormous in their scope.
Their prophecies are massively motivated.
You know, they're really captivating stories.
And comparatively, and he talks about this again in Beyond Good and Evil, us Europeans, us good Europeans, us Northern Europeans, whatever you want to say, we're actually quite shit at this.
You know, we might be awesome at organizing Roman states or organizing massive militaries or colonizing the world, but we're actually a little bit weak on this front.
You know, we're a little bit kind of, weirdly...
In the earth, in nature.
And we don't think about infinite significations and we don't create religions of prophecy per se, although maybe there's a little bit of that.
It's just not something that we're...
We're biased towards.
We don't max out on that stat, if you want to put it this way.
And so our pagan religions are, like, about cyclical universes, and they're a little bit more, like, sprite-like and fun, and they don't call into question these enormous, dramatic destinies and things like this.
This stuff is not as much of a feature, I guess you could say.
And how do you translate this into modernity, I think, is a fascinating question.
Because, again, if you look at, like, many of the right-wing Christians now and their relationship to this whole Israel thing, A big motif is that Israel is trying to push forward the prophecies and create the Antichrist.
They're talking about stuff like that.
And you can see, again, the Jewish prophecy, the Jewish big thinking is just so captivating that it's bewitched half of America.
Still, apparently the base right wing America that's woken the Jews, if you so will, they're still bewitched by the incredible style of thinking that the Jews have about defining the nature of the world.
And I always try to relate this to another Nietzschean idea, which I again, this is a little bit my own concept, but I'd love to actually to throw it to you guys because you're so well read in them.
And his whole notion of like grand projects or he says grand style and morality or grand politics, if you so will.
And I. Try to simplify this into thinking big.
The idea that we need enormous goals, projects, and destinies to justify our efforts and our will and our work in the world.
Like Elon Musk and his promise of taking people to Mars.
Actually, the promise is what took him to becoming one of the most wealthy people in the world.
The promise of electric cars.
The purpose, the great destiny, the great project, the grand thing that's going to save the world, the tikam olam of the world, of making electric cars, all these types of things.
This grandness, this big thinking is actually what captivates people.
And if you're able to possess the vision, the purpose-creating visions of a culture, you, in some sense, own the warriors.
The Crusades is a grand project that was able to dictate what all the kings of Europe were going to do for about 400 years.
And I think what Nietzsche is pointing out is that these Jews are brilliant at being able to grab that part of the imagination.
What do the Europeans owe to the Jews?
Many things good and bad.
They've taught us how to do this.
And weirdly, in the era of nihilism, I think Nietzsche is pointing out that all we have to do is realize that this faculty to...
To aim big, to think big, to prophesize grand visions is actually in our possession.
There is no morality around this.
There's no biblical prophecy tethering us to some type of...
I don't have logic to this at all.
It's actually just the capacity within the human imagination to make this.
And oftentimes we restrict ourselves and limit our ability to think big.
And we could actually learn a lot from them and say to ourselves, how could we create something like this for ourselves?
I really think the Ubermensch was Nietzsche's attempt at doing something like this.
and his sort of personification of, and he says this himself, Isaiah, the prophet of the Europeans, as opposed to the Jews, and maybe setting us in for the first time ever, formalizing that instinct inside of ourselves, which we've in some sense disrespected.
So I'll leave it there.
And I'd Yeah, I mean, this is a very almost banal example of what you're saying, but I remember seeing this study of Republican Democratic voters and Republicans were Largely working class.
That is, they're taking a salary from another guy employing them.
Or they're in the world of small business.
So they're an employee or they might own their own small business effectively.
And it is this, it's a good life choice.
You learn a...
Some skills and you make money.
But you saw the other side of this where it's like the Democrats control government workers, obviously, but they control professors.
They control teachers.
They control, I'm sure, many in theology, including Christian theology.
They get 99% of every professional artist in the world is voting left-wing.
And I think that's almost telling it all.
And I'm not saying that the Democrats are the Jews or something.
But what I am saying is that they're an expression of that type of capacity, that capacity to interpret something and this change your perspective, that capacity to read the law or maybe manipulate the law to kind of create a different outcome, that capacity to create authority, that capacity to create beauty is just...
Not present in a guy who owns his own mechanic shop.
It just is what it is.
There's nothing wrong with that person.
It's just the level of influence.
I mean, someone with $200,000 of student loan debt who makes $20,000 a year interning at an art gallery is probably more influential.
It's probably going to have more of a say of the direction of a country than a guy who makes $300,000 a year owning a successful car dealership.
That just is what it is.
So it's like Daniel, even in captivity, Daniel's inflecting.
He's maintaining Judaism and being loyal, but he's also kind of changing the world.
In a really profound way.
I mean, I think it is inspiring in a way of the power of being an artist or being a philosopher.
And this is something that Nietzsche obviously endorsed.
I mean, it's like the world, what makes the world go round?
Is it money?
Okay.
Is it sex?
Sure.
I mean, those suggestions aren't wrong, of course.
But it's ultimately values.
And those make the world go round.
And if you can control the values, you are a master of the universe.
Yeah, this is such an enormous...
This is actually something that I think people absolutely bungle with Nietzsche.
They don't seem to really get what he was saying here.
And I think it's so funny because...
Maybe you have to get into the very hardcore right-wing extreme narratives about the Jews to really be able to see what he meant when he was talking about the Jews.
And I think the Jews are actually one of the keys.
For helping you understand exactly what he was coming at with is exactly as you've said that the capacity for you to be like the Jews in ancient Judea and just create a whole world vision and a whole value system.
The idea that that's not incredibly impressive is delusional.
You know, like that is one of the most incredible things that has happened in human history.
He said himself, it made human history interesting.
And this is what he's, this is like the ultimate white pill.
You know, he's basically turning around to the Europeans and saying, you get haggard by your, the way we do philosophy in Europe is like this rigid, maybe like you could say slightly like the logic, you know, Kant talking about the logical imperatives of morality.
And we get stuck in these frames of thinking that are just not generative or not fertile or not creative.
We get caught up with this sort of neurotic way of thinking or Christianity, which is essentially just.
Turning off our philosophical, creative, visionary mind and allowing the Jews and the Old Testament and the frozen part of ancient history to dictate that part of our mind and what it does.
And he's saying that if you break free from those two cornerstones, which is essentially Plato and Christianity, you realize that the world is in some sense like a Buddhist, samsaric flux.
And you can literally inject into it whatever will you so wish.
And of course, your vision is the version of that will, if you want.
And he's sort of like, I don't think any European has ever fucking done that.
Like on that level of like the theological scope of the destiny of the world, he's never seen that.
And in some sense, he was trying to do that first.
Plato, I think.
Yeah, and someone like Nietzsche in his limited way, because Nietzsche was limited due to his impoverished state and fairly short life, etc.
And maybe a little bit to the kind of casual slapdash quality of life.
I mean that as a compliment, actually, of his writing.
It's very accessible, but it's kind of deeply insightful, but not as thoroughgoing.
But yeah, I mean, I definitely think Plato...
Is a figure like this.
I mean, he offers a just world shattering or world directing type of philosophy where it is fair to say that all philosophy is just.
Footnotes on this man.
And I think that Jesus Christ is also a similar figure.
Martin Luther, I think, is also a similar figure.
And Napoleon.
But yeah, it's really about changing values, which is the thing.
And I have one other point, but if you want to respond to that, you can.
I have kind of another little direction.
Awesome.
There's so much to say to this, because as I said, I was originally bringing this up in reference to Mark talking about prophecy and making a very great point about this, is that this capacity to prophesize, to set your own agenda, I guess you could put it this way, and use the visionary part of your mind to direct people's consciousness.
It is an incredibly powerful tool.
Like, even this is very kind of like casual neo-pagan versus Christianity.
But again, you look at how Christianity has just such an emotional grip on people.
Like it's prophecies.
I've spoken to lots of Christians and actually get on really well with a lot of them.
But it's so fascinating to me to see how they decide Christianity is true.
The vast majority will say something like, oh, well, I read the Bible and the Bible predicts all these prophecies and Jesus fulfills them.
And therefore, that is the truth.
That is reality.
That is exactly what happened.
And it's like these people will make decisions about the entire shape, nature of the world, and all sorts of consequential decisions that come after that, all based on essentially the stories in the Bible, the stories in the Jewish Torah, if you so will, the promise of prophecies, the inherent internal logic of something like this.
And I'm not saying that Europeans should set up a Bible part two or something like this, the space Bible or something, but I'm more pointing out that that capacity, that part of the human, like Tolkien sits down and makes Lord of the Rings using that fantasizing mind, whereas the Jews all those years ago used that same fantasizing mind, but they just asserted that this is reality.
And it's like, it's that capacity that we have where we write our novels and we make Lord of the Rings and we write fiction and all that.
Is it actually something that we could possess?
And we could utilize and we could push in a, as Nietzsche said, this worldly reality, not a romantic fantasy, not caught up with some other promise of some different direction, but actually like somehow inject that capacity that the Jews possess so well into this world.
And would it lead to some type of answer, I guess, a solution, some type of vision?
Would it would it be effective?
You know, and I think that's a very interesting question.
We can and we have.
I mean, if you look at.
Rome, for example, that would be a kind of imperfect example of what you're describing.
Every example, I guess, would be imperfect, certainly.
But yeah, I mean, that's the sort of myth makers in Rome essentially accomplished what you're describing.
I mean, they created a world, a reality, dreams, paradigms for people to follow, types to emulate, gods to emulate, and so forth.
So, I mean, we certainly have that capacity.
Without question.
But I think that that is something that is coming in the future.
I mean, REM theory is especially concerned with what you're describing.
Just really quick on that.
There's a very fascinating, I think I brought up Maurice Samuel last time we were speaking about sports.
And later in that same book, so he's like, you Gentiles, he's a Jew talking to the Gentiles.
And he says, like, he puts out all these fascinating things about, you love sports, we think it's all bullshit.
Like, he talks about frat houses and stuff.
And it's all very funny.
You Gentiles.
It's kind of funny.
When did he write that?
He wrote it in like the 1920s.
He was an American Jew.
It's great.
It's actually such a great read because he's just very frank about all this.
He points out frat houses and going in and doing the initiations and frat houses and how the Jews go into that and just like, what the fuck are these idiots doing?
It is very funny from an outside perspective because I remember going through that and getting grills and you allow yourself to get beat up and all this and you're like, what is this stuff?
Another one he talks about is the contrast between world visions, like the Welton Sound between the two and how the Jews...
The world needs to be fixed.
Nature needs to be overcome and reshaped into the kingdom of God.
And he points out how the Arian one is Plato's Republic, the Roman Republic.
Our god is a god who fixes reality and he's a super father.
Your gods are a republic of boisterous frat boys that play around and create this kingdom on earth.
They're very earthly.
And exactly as Mark's saying, he actually sort of sees that archetype too, which I find quite cool.
I'll read this quote if you like.
The Jews were something contrary to nature itself.
Something like its monstrous polar opposite.
In Rome, the Jew was considered guilty of hatred against the entire human race.
And that view was correct.
To the extent we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, the Roman values.
So, I mean, for all those people that think that Nietzsche went soft on the Jews, I don't know.
I mean, he says some stuff that's...
Oh, yeah.
From even a sort of basic bitch anti-semi perspective, I suppose.
Yeah.
I know Richard did want to say something, but just a final point on that, which I think is very fascinating, again about Nietzsche, is that I'm talking about this idea of him pointing out this capacity for the Jews to prophesize and set the agenda of world visions and paint the biggest pictures, which actually are the most crucial parts of a culture, because they...
The visions, the dreams, the imagination, the big thinking leads to the decision-making, and the decision-making leads to action.
So all the warriors, all the kings are subservient to the vision creators of the priests, and maybe certain kings might have that capacity, like Napoleon, whatever.
And I think he's really good.
He's almost like a priest who confronts the priestly type, the problem of the priestly type.
Nietzsche is able to not just complain about the Jews and say, oh, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
He's able to say, This is why their vision, their prophecies are wrong with the savage logic that he has.
And he doesn't just do it in a reactionary sense.
He crafts a whole new alternate perspective, the worldly naturalistic and alternate alternate perspective that we probably haven't heard for about.
2,000 years by the time that he was writing.
You know, it's quite amazing when you think about it.
And so he, like, broke the Matrix spell.
Andrew Tahir being like, he broke out of the Matrix type thing.
And he saw that this type of thinking had become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of destiny.
And there was no reason for us to be trapped to that.
We could actually, like, really break out of that and think in different directions.
And I think that is another core to getting what he was poking at.
One more remark, though, on that quote, because this is something that This is a kind of discovery we make in the book.
The idea that Jews are misanthropic or guilty of hatred against the entire race.
I mean, this is an idea that develops in Greece, if not earlier, of course.
But there's this idea, you know, you have these sort of Greek writers accusing Jews of basically hating mankind, right?
The Hebrew Bible, and this is the argument we make in the book, reveals that there's a kind of conscious understanding that they do, in fact, Hate mankind.
And I think that that especially emerges with the figure of Adam, who we can equate with Edom.
Etymologically, the words can be pronounced the same.
Adam can be pronounced as Edom and so forth.
They both have the same meaning, right, to be read in this sort of thing.
So they have the same etymology.
And both are related to Esau.
Edom especially is related directly to Esau.
So the Arian, effectively.
But, of course, Edom becomes the enemy in the Hebrew Bible.
The Edomites are kind of primary enemy in the Hebrew Bible.
The Amalekites, for example, are a descendant of the Edomites, if I'm remembering correctly, they're an Edomite tribe.
And that's the kind of more famous, you know, at least in the DR, people would recognize that name more quickly.
There emerges this idea that they're kind of at war with the human race, or that's what they're kind of indicating symbolically in their myth.
When the Greeks are accusing them of this misanthropy, it does seem that their myth makers are esoterically aware of this misanthropy.
And, you know, for it, essentially.
You know, they understand Adam or Edom as their enemy.
That's the argument that we put forth in the book.
So it's a kind of remarkable, I mean, this is kind of one of the things that's remarkable about Jem or a kind of esoteric reading of the Hebrew Bible, provided you do a kind of close end.
Accurate or correct reading, to the extent that you're able to, is that it reveals things.
Certainly, I wouldn't accuse the common Jew of being actively misanthropic.
I think that they don't consider themselves to be misanthropic, of course.
I think that this understanding is an esoteric understanding that comes from artists and scribes, whether...
Hollywood filmmakers are the writers of the Hebrew Bible.
Yeah, they're kind of at war with the human race.
But it's because Adam has a kind of particular significance.
He's related to Esau.
He is Aryan, effectively.
He's the ruddy-faced, you know, to be red, be ruddy-faced.
So, in other words, to be fair in complexion.
But in any case, that's just one thing, a kind of fascinating thing that I wanted to remark on, is that I think that, again, I don't think the common Sussman Jew thinks of themselves as against mankind or anything like that, but I think that there is that esoteric message in the Hebrew Bible itself, is that the Hebrew Bible is anti-mankind, effectively.
I've been thinking about this, of criticisms.
Of Zionism.
And I've been thinking about what a Nietzschean criticism of Zionism might be.
So the criticisms of Zionism that you hear now are very immediate of, you know, we're seeing death and destruction, the brutalization of children and women in Gaza.
I mean, it is completely awful.
Right-winger, you might get at some hypocrisy of Jews.
They're supporting left-wing causes, yet they want nationalism for themselves and Israel, etc.
You could even go back a little bit further and say that this state, however well-intentioned, was based on a debacle, the Nakba, an initial ethnic cleansing, a kind of original sin.
I think all of those criticisms carry water, of course, and should be considered.
But I'm not sure those are the criticisms that someone like Nietzsche would make.
First off, America and almost every country is based on some sort of brutality.
You might have to go back 75 years, 200 years, 1,000 years, but you'll find it.
And there always was some original sin to the foundation of any order.
But I think in this funny way, I think Nietzsche would criticize Zionists for not being Jewish enough, so to speak.
So it's not that they are hyper-Jewish, etc.
It's that they're not Jewish enough.
And this is how I think he would...
And the sense that Herzl was arising as an intellectual in this period of nationalism, one that had been going on really since the Napoleonic time, particularly in Germany as it was theorized, one that would reach its fruits in the 20th century with the...
The establishment of all these democratic nation states after the First World War, and even something like the United Nations, which presupposes a global array of nation states that can communicate in a parliamentary manner.
It's a kind of nation state of nation states, if you will.
But that's never been how the Jews have succeeded.
Obviously, they were promised something.
Abraham was promised Canaan by Yahweh, but the Bible is It's full of examples of them falling away from Yahweh, losing the land and squandering their inheritance, etc.
If you look at an ancient Jew like Daniel, obviously he's a literary figure, but we'll suggest there's some sort of historicity there, or a modern Jew like Sigmund Freud, etc.
They've succeeded, and they've been deeply influential in the world precisely because they haven't engaged in blood and soil nationalism.
That they haven't gone the way of Herzl.
They've gone the way of embracing and fulfilling a diasporic role in the world.
It's kind of like tomorrow in Jerusalem or something was a toast.
It's not fulfilling that Ultimate promise, leaving it out there as a sort of dream and living among others and being a kind of dream interpreter or middleman or intellectual or priest within another society, within a host population.
Now, you can maybe dislike that model inherently if you are yourself a blood and soil nationalist to come out or something.
Nietzsche obviously had a more complicated view of it, but at the very least, that seems to be how Jews succeed the most.
And this attempt to join the nation states as we're independent, we're blood and soil, this is just about us, get away, we're going to just drive the Arabs out, drive them across the Jordan, and we'll just take this land, we're going to be farmers, and so on.
Isn't there something just inherently un-Jewish about these types of motivations?
And isn't it a kind of betrayal of a Jewish spirit and a way of being, a way of existing and managing?
The storms of the world that actually has been extremely successful for Jews.
Despite the pogroms here and there, despite anti-Semitism here and there, it always crops up.
They've ultimately survived as a coherent people.
Maybe not In spite of their diasporic quality, but because of their diasporic quality.
The notion of Zionism as a, we're a blood and soil nation state.
We're an ethnic group or a race.
It's in a way warping as being a Gentile or a goyim.
And that is going to bring them to destruction.
The destruction of the temple in 70 AD, I think some people have some romantic fantasies about it.
The Romans came in and almost like killed them all because they were anti-Semitic.
No.
There were multiple rebels who wanted independence from Herod, from Rome, etc.
They were engaging in all of this internecine warfare and fighting.
And maybe the lesson of the destruction of the Second Temple is you're not going to be a nation-state.
You're not going to be independent.
Your role in life is to kind of live in the shadows.
As it were, to be diasporic, to be among others, and gain power that way.
Isn't that kind of the message?
Of these Bibles.
It's not about blood and soil.
It's about living in between.
Yeah, I think that's very accurate.
And like, it is weird because it's, you know, you're dealing with prophecy and you're dealing with this.
And I can obviously see how somebody could read the Bible and be like, oh, the promised land.
Well, we should get that back, shouldn't we?
And Herzl sort of has a little bit of this.
But actually, the facts of Herzl is that Herzl was basically a-religious.