A Report from Planet
Mammon
...Which brings us back to our day and age
and me sitting on a train bound for London with the gnawing
sense of trepidation I usually feel these days whenever a talk
is approaching. It’s not that I’m nervous about speaking. It’s
not that I fear Jews particularly. What I fear is fellow
Catholics. I’m wondering if I’m going to be stabbed in the back
by a fellow Catholic who has just received an intimidating phone
call. Will the Catholics who invited me to speak stand by their
word when the inevitable counterattack from the thought police
occurs?
The situation this time was compounded by the
fact that I was not the only speaker. In fact, it was debatable
whether I was even the most controversial speaker since I shared
the bill with the redoubtable Israel Shamir.
Shamir was born in Novosibirsk in the Soviet
Union in 1947. In 1968 he converted to Zionism and emigrated to
Israel, where he joined the IDF and fought in the 1973 war.
Stationed in Sinai during a fierce battle whose point he failed
to understand, Shamir used that war as a symbol of what it meant
to be a Jew. Being a Jew provided no help in understanding what
Jews want from themselves and from bewildered mankind, “just as
belonging to the elite troops does not help you with an
understanding of the general staff” (Cabbala of Power, p.
12). When it comes to understanding the principle of unity among
Jews, we are confronted with the opposite problem from the one
we encountered with Catholics. Catholics have the principle of
unity in Christ but no practical unity. Jews, on the other hand,
have no principle of unity but, as Shamir says, like the
locusts mentioned in the book of Proverbs, they “‘have no king,
but they attack in formation’ and devastate whole countries as
if by plan.”
In 1975, after studying law at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Shamir moved to London where he worked
for the BBC. From 1977 to 1979 he worked in radio in Japan. By
this point, some ten years after he had left Russia, Shamir had
become disillusioned with Zionism because of the way the Israeli
government discriminated against non-Jews. From 1989 to 1993
Shamir returned to Russia where he worked as the Moscow
correspondent for Ha’aretz. In 1993 he returned to Israel
and settled in Jaffa, where he lives today.
At some point during the middle of the first
decade of the 21st century, Shamir became a presence
on the Internet and at around the same time he became a
Christian. The connection between the two events was more than
coincidence because, as Shamir himself put it, getting baptized
by the Palestinian priest, Archbishop Theodosius Attalla Hanna
“helped me sort out the question of identity.”
If there were ever a sign of contradiction
for the age of irenic interreligious dialogue inaugurated by the
Second Vatican Council, it is Israel Shamir. Shamir’s conversion
to Christianity was a sign that the repressed had returned just
in time to save the Church from total apostasy on the Jewish
question. Shamir, the Jewish convert, saw Jews not as our “elder
brothers” but as St. Paul saw them, which is to say, as “the
enemy of mankind.” In accepting baptism, Shamir joined a long
line of “Jews by birth who denounced the Judaic cult of Death
and accepted the Living Christ.” For Shamir, the crucial “sieve”
which separated good from evil in the great struggle of his day
was the “relationship to the Palestinian suffering”; “whoever
disregarded it followed Antichrist; whoever denounced it began
his way to Christ.”
Like St. Paul, Shamir has become a latter day
apostle to the Gentiles and a reproach to all those who would
ignore the warning of the Gospels and urge upon Christians a
quasi-Masonic brotherhood with their enemies which leads to
their mental evisceration and moral ruin. “The point,” as Shamir
says, is not pointless dialogue of the sort that is in reality
nothing more that a covert form of cultural warfare, “The point
is to liberate Jews from Jewishness, which is the enemy of
mankind.”
Like Nicholas Donin and Joseph Pfefferkorn
before him, Shamir is Lazarus returned from the realm of the
dead. In addition to being reborn out of the Judaic culture of
death, Shamir rose from the realm of what everyone had presumed
was a dead idea, namely, that Jews need to accept Christ as
their savior. Shamir was “granted the grace of Christ” and
therefore “reborn in His glory.” He has come back to life to
tell us all that he is “daily grateful to Christ who saved me
from the Judaic paranoia of hating and being hated and brought
me into the world of loving and being loved” and that “every Jew
who has come to Christ by the way of rejecting the Judaic ideas,
by upholding love for the nations, is a portent of Salvation” (Cabbala,
p. 310). Like Nicholas Donin and Joseph Pfefferkorn before him,
Shamir did not come back from the dead to become Eugene Fisher’s
successor at the USCC. Shamir came back from the dead on fire
with zeal to liberate Jews from the bondage of Judaism.
To do that, Shamir must first explain what it
means to be a Jew:
a Jew must first
understand himself and war against himself. Only steady
resolution, united to the highest self-respect, can free the Jew
from Jewishness. Therefore the Jewish question can only be
solved individually; every Jew must try to solve it in his
proper person”—by discovering God’s presence in the world, that
is Christ (p. 19).
Like Joseph Pfefferkorn, Shamir has had to
deal with the polite racism of the Left which associates Jews
with some ineradicable racial destiny. Like Joseph Pfefferkorn,
whom the humanist elite, including Erasmus, referred to as a “tauf
Jud,” a baptized Jew, Shamir has been described as “an
ethnic Jew who defines himself as a Christian.” Liberal Swedish
journalists are a lot like Adolf Hitler in Shamir’s mind because
they think “‘once a Jew, always a Jew’; baptism notwithstanding,
Shamir can only ‘define himself as’ a Christian.”
Jews collaborate in the promotion of this
sort of racism because it keeps Jews in line. Instead of
distinguishing between racism, which is bad, and anti-Judaic
principles, which are required of every Christian, Jews try to
portray the anti-Judaism that is part and parcel of Christianity
as a form of racism. Jews, in other words, manipulate the term
“anti-Semitism” for their own political advantage:
Anti-Judaic thought
is part of the foundation of Christianity and Communism, to
mention just two of the most important ideologies. Jews try to
present the anti-Judaic line as racism. Though anti-Judaic
thought has existed for hundreds of years, Jews insist on using
the name of “anti-Semitism,” a rather short lived racial theory
of the 19th century. For the anti-Semite, a Jew has
inherent and unchangeable inborn qualities, while anti-Jewish
thought analyses and fights Judaic tendency.
Instead of admitting that there is something
wrong with being Jewish because the Jewish rejection of Logos
disposes Jews to act in a way that antagonizes everyone
they come in contact with, the Jews fall back on outdated
theories of racism as a way of exculpating bad behavior. “It is
because of what we are, not of what we do,” a slogan recently
appropriated by President Bush, has become the mantra that
excuses bad behavior and hides from Jews the core of their
essentially negative identity and why they have faced
antagonism among every group they have lived with throughout
history.
There has never been a “paradisus Iudeorum”
that has not ended in catastrophe for the Jews, and there has
never been a catastrophe that has not been rationalized into one
more link in a long chain of anti-Semitism by Jewish apologists
determined to ignore the toxic effect of Jewish behavior on
native populations and the inevitable reaction which it brings
forth from them. Shamir cites the Jewish delight in using terms
like “hook-nosed” as “a clear sign of the Jewish effort to turn
anti-Zionist or anti-Judaic polemics into racist ones.” Racism
is the simplest way to deflect attention from the source of the
problem. Hence, the Jewish delight in discovering racism even
where none exists. “Anti-Semitism,” Shamir points out, “was
a short-lived racial theory of late 19th century
claiming that . . . Jews are what they are; that they possess
some racial qualities making them an inherent enemy of the
Nordic race, like a wolf is an enemy of a rabbit.” This was
never the position of the Church, which always maintained that
the problem between Jews and Gentiles was religious in nature
and solved by conversion. If there were ever a time when “hatred
of Jews for what they are” was an issue, Shamir claims
“such a phenomenon vanished completely. There are people who
object to policies of Jews, but none to Jews per se.” The fact
that Jews insist on obscuring the issue means that only
Christians can frame the issue properly, and yet this is
precisely what the Church has refused to do for the past 40 some
years. Making the proper distinctions would pave the way for the
solution to the problem, but this is precisely what Jews want to
avoid, because it would mean the end of their hegemony over
discourse. If Mel Gibson had had the benefit of understanding
the distinctions which Shamir made, he could have shrugged off
the charges of anti-Semitism by claiming what every Christian
should be able to claim, namely, “I am anti-Judaic, just like
Christ.”
Shamir’s conversion is clearly a scandal and
a reproach to the entire era of post-Vatican II inter-religious
dialogue. Shamir became a Christian during the period when the
Catholic Church had all but officially called for a moratorium
on Jewish conversion. One of the most painful events in the time
of his life surrounding his conversion came in 2002, when the
bishops of the United States issued their document “Reflections
on Covenant,” which in effect said that Jews did not have to
accept Christ in order to be saved. Shamir described
“Reflections” as “an act of cruelty to the Jews” which came
perilously close to the denial of Christ and apostasy of the
Church that the faithful would experience in the last days.
According to Shamir,
The Catholic Church
after Vatican II accepted the unacceptable demands of the Jews
and agreed to the conditions once rejected by St. Paul. They
agreed to the idea of two covenants, as if the Old Covenant is
not the same as the New Covenant. Thus they came to the weird
idea of two Chosen Peoples—Israel of the flesh and the Church.
The Orthodox Church is still safe from this dangerous heresy.
Only the Orthodox Church can offer true salvation to the Jews
escaping their supremacist creed. And now, when thousands of
Jews try to come to Christ, the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem
does not make a sufficient effort to bring them in.
Shamir has similarly frank things to say
about the doctrine of two covenants, which he mistakenly
ascribes to the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which affirms
the fact that the Church is the New Israel. The notion that the
Jewish covenant is still valid “undermines the very meaning of
Christ’s sacrifice. ... Since Christ had opened the Covenant for
all, the Christian Church became the True Israel, and the Jews
that rejected Christ do not belong to the True Israel anymore,
nor do divine prophecies pertain to them anymore…. The Church
should attract and baptize Jews, but without giving them special
status. Otherwise, the church, the most powerful defense against
the ongoing Jewish offensive, will be subjugated.”
Unlike most Catholics, who were mesmerized by
the pronouncements of Jewish-appointed leaders like Richard John
Neuhaus at the time, Shamir was perceptive enough to see that
the Iraq invasion of 2003 was preceded by a media barrage aimed
at the Catholic Church, designed to take the Bush
Administration’s most formidable foreign policy enemy out of
action. Shamir sees parallels between what Rod Dreher was
writing for National Review and what Alfred Rosenberg was
writing in the Voelkische Beobachter and Der Stuermer:
Whenever the forces
of darkness prepare a new attack on mankind, they use their
considerable artillery to shut up the potential resistance
forces, starting with their new enemy, the Church. . . . This
was the practice of the Third Reich as well: before starting the
war, they began their campaign of “priests as sex fiends” to
force the church’s silence. Now this is the turn of the Fourth
Reich: the Church was against the war in Iraq; the Church was
steadfast in her defense of Palestine, the Church is certainly
against the impending attack on Iran, so she has to be put on
defense. The same people who control the US media call for war
with Iran, and they are behind this campaign against the Church.
The Jewish-American empire sees the Church as
its main adversary, according to Shamir, because it is in
reality a competing church, “the church of darkness.”
We can’t remain
indifferent to the travail of the church for she has a potential
to change the US from the predatory neo-Judaic state it is today
into a peace-loving Christian one. Her bishops went too far
trying to accommodate their enemy, but they have discovered now
that his way leads to perdition. Next time they may be braver,
if there ever is a next time.
Another word for the same enemy is “Masters
of Discourse,” the title of Shamir’s most recent book. The
Masters of Discourse “are trying to create a pseudo-Judaic
universe on a planetary scale.” They want “to destroy Iran and
cripple Russian for these lands did not forget God.”
Because of the essentially theological basis
of his political critique, Shamir finds himself cut off from his
natural allies. He can’t talk politics to Catholics because
so many Catholics identify with the regime that oppresses
them, and he can’t talk theology to the Left, the de facto
basis of the antiwar movement, because the Left has no use for
God. “In Counterpunch,” he writes at one point, “one
can’t say a good word about the Church.”
As a result of this schism, the Church finds
herself defenseless against her enemies, largely because Church
leaders have convinced themselves that they don’t have any
enemies anymore in the age of interreligious dialogue. The
enemies of all mankind whom St. Paul talks about in his
epistle to the Thessalonians have been miraculously turned into
“elder brothers” in a act of wishful thinking that becomes more
determined in the face of every Jewish-led assault on the
Church. The most recent example of this came in October when the
synod of bishops invited a rabbi to address that august body for
the first time in history. The rabbi promptly took this
historical moment as an opportunity to harangue the bishops for
being insufficiently zealous in their support of Israel. At a
press conference after his speech, the same rabbi used the forum
which the bishops had provided him to attack the memory of Pope
Pius XII. By now this sort of “dialogue” has become depressingly
familiar. So familiar that one has to wonder just what the
bishops were thinking when they extended the invitation. Weren’t
they paying attention during the “celebrations” of the 40th
anniversary of Nostra Aetate a few years back when the
chief rabbi of Israel, Yona Metzger, laid the responsibility for
the Holocaust at the feet of the Catholic Church and its
“2000-year history of anti-Semitism?”
Shamir is the man of his age precisely
because, as a Jew who has liberated himself from the bondage of
Judaism, he can name the evil of this age without hesitation or
circumlocution, at a time when the Church, which should be the
enemy of Jewish pretension and subversion, is silent, impotent,
and bound hand and foot with chains forged under the false
presuppositions of another age. This paralysis of mind and will
on the part of the Church has led to dire consequences for all
of mankind, because as Shamir puts it, “When the Church is
subjugated, Jews triumph and when Jews triumph mankind suffers.”
What was true of Europe under Communism is true of America under
the hegemony of the neoconservatives. “The Jewish
universe,” Shamir continues,
is good for the
Jews. It is a curse for the others. . . . In Eastern Europe,
times of Jewish dominance were the worst experienced by the
ordinary people. . . . The Jews lost their high position in the
Communist Church by 1934, and the life of ordinary Russians
improved greatly. After 1991, the Judeo-Mammonites enforced
their paradigm upon Russia, and the life of ordinary Russians
was degraded while the new elites prospered. . . . In Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the years of Jewish dominance
(1945-1956) were the most harsh and unpleasant. In Germany,
Jewish pre-eminence in 1920s coincided with terrible inflation
and unemployment for Germans, and the growth of Jewish wealth
and influence. . . . In the US, as Jewish influence has grown
steadily since 1968, the lives of ordinary people has [sic]
worsened. . . . A good time for the Jews is not a good time for
mankind. . . . The blessing of the Jews is a curse for others. .
. . The regimes that are “good for Jews” are rarely good for
anybody else.
If Shamir is a prophet, his main prophecy in
the political sphere is that the war of left and right belongs
to the past. “The struggle of Left and Right has become obsolete
in the face of the new dichotomy,” which is the Jewish American
Empire vs. the rest of the world. Because this is an essentially
theological struggle between the Church and the Synagogue of
Satan, the secular categories which have dominated political
life in Europe since the French Revolution are no longer
relevant. Fighting the current war with the weapons forged by
the Enlightenment is like trying to bring down an F-16 with a
musket. As a result of their residual Enlightenment-based
suspicion (if not hatred) of religion, countries like England
and Germany (and now France) have become curious political
backwaters, locked in irrelevant battles over race and sexuality
but all the while incapable of effectively saying no to
supporting American imperialism because of the implicit
blackmail threat which Jews exert over them. “Germans,” Shamir
notes, “go into collective toxic shock whenever the word ‘Jew’
is pronounced.” The Germans have not only handed billions of
dollars over to the world’s major Jewish organizations (money
which will be used to mold public opinion against them and
extort still more money), they have also provided Israel with
two nuclear-capable Dolphin class submarines which can now
target German cities and, therefore, enhance the threat and,
thereby, extort still more money.
The problem, according to Shamir, is
theological not political. The Germans accepted their “second
class status” as “children of a lesser god” when they “elevated
Auschwitz” over Golgotha as the center of human history. As the
Jesuits wrote in Civilta Cattolica on the centenary
celebration of the French Revolution in 1890, any country which
turns away from God will find itself ruled by Jews. In siding
with Caiaphas against Christ, the Germans allowed themselves to
become entangled in the tentacles of the “voracious Octopus of
Judaism,” and as long as they continue to structure their lives
according to the outdated categories of Left and Right, they
will continue to languish in that embrace, debilitated by sexual
licence, anomie and guilt, lashing out at Americans without
understanding who is grinding ordinary Americans under its heel
as well. Countries with no strong theological foundation will
end up, like the Soviet Union, in the dustbin of history because
“The ‘struggle against anti-Semitism’ is a theological concept
which entails the adoption of a new religion.” For Shamir,
becoming a Christian meant rejecting the current conventional
narrative which sees the Holocaust as anti-Christianity.
Conversely, countries like Germany become absorbed into the
Jewish-American empire the more they demote Christianity and
raise up the Holocaust as an idol in its place. According to
Shamir, the very concept of Holocaust is a concept of Jewish
superiority (as opposed to the historical event in which Jews
and Gentiles were killed).
Christianity is the
denial of Jewish superiority. Whoever believes or accepts Jewish
superiority denies Christ for He made us equal. The French
Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, the creator of “Shoah,” said:
if you believe in holocaust you can’t believe in Christ. We can
rephrase the words of Lanzmann: belief in a special historical
meaning of death of Jews is a sign of apostasy. . . . We believe
that Christ suffered for us and came back to life. The Holocaust
believers believe that the Jewish people suffered and came back
by creating the Jewish state. In this competition, the Jews
win: as opposed to Holocaust, you can deny Crucifixion and
Resurrection, and your career won’t suffer a bit.
Belief in Jewish superiority, according to
Shamir, is the official faith of the Pax Americana.
Similarly, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed because it
lacked an adequate theological foundation. This fatal flaw is
echoed in the “neo-Jewish” American empire. “The Judaic paradigm
has replaced apostolic Christianity, and now America is
suffering “in the grip of a New World Order—featuring a
dwindling middle class, a vast security apparatus, a growing
social gap, and a general impoverishment of spirit. It is not
the first time the Judaic paradigm has risen in this world; but,
like its predecessors, it will inevitably collapse—this type of
society lacks broad social support. This time the adepts have
decided to ensure its survival by making their project global .
. .this is the logic and pressure behind their reckless and
desperate expansion.”
Now that the war of Left and Right belongs to
the past, the only real issue is how to deal with Jewish
supremacy and the Pax Americana which is its practical
implementation. Another way of framing the same question is to
ask, “Will our society stand on the rock planted by Christ, or
will it worship the Jewish state?” Those who affirm the former
proposition will also have to affirm its theological
ramifications, the most important of which is that the only
solution to the current world crisis is the conversion of the
Jews, a step which Shamir has taken and one which he urges on
the rest of the world, either directly, by asking the world’s
Jews to convert as well or indirectly, by asking the rest of us
to pray for their conversion: “Let us pray for perfidious Jews
that our God and Lord will remove the veil from their hearts so
that they too may acknowledge the light of the truth which is
our Lord Jesus Christ and be delivered from their darkness.” As
for the rest of us—Catholics, Americans, non-Jews: “The
Palestinians have no chance, unless we free our souls form
Jewish control. And here we may turn to the second J-word, more
mighty than the first: Jesus. The present subservience of the
West began with one small step: in the 1960s, Western Churches
removed from their liturgy the prayer “Oremus et pro perfidis
Judaeis.”
Shamir writes that “I believe Lenny Brenner
when he argues that young Jews are deserting Judaism and Zionism
in droves,” Shamir writes, articulating what may be the
fundamental sign of our age. “More and more Israelis,” he
continues, “are coming to their senses.” The main danger to
this movement toward conversion “comes from the extreme American
Zionists who are ready to fight from their recliners until the
last Israeli falls.”
Shamir is the revenant in our day of famous
Jewish converts like Joseph Pfefferkorn, Jews who woke up one
day and realized that by being Jews they were working for the
evil empire. Then as now there were Christians who hated the
idea of Jewish conversion and were more comfortable with racial
explanations that cut off the Jews from Christian society. The
Dominicans of Cologne were not part of that group. The great
question for Christians in our day is whether we are as acute as
Shamir in discerning the signs of the times. In this respect,
his conversion story is especially relevant for American
Catholics, who are still asleep at the switch, drugged by bad
politics, bad theology, and what seems like a congenital desire
to appease their oppressors.
The Talk in London
As some indication that Shamir was right when
he saw the current political scene dominated by unacknowledged
religious categories, it was the English Catholics who ended up
sponsoring our talks in London, not the pro-Palestinian left. In
fact, I ended up back addressing the same organization I had
spoken to 12 years ago when I had spoken on Medjugorje and the
sexual revolution.
The Jews, of course, tried to stop the
talks, but in a half-hearted way, at least in comparison to how
their counterparts work in America. The job of stopping the
talks was assigned to a freelance journalist with connections to
a national Jewish newspaper. Under the
guise of reporting on the talk, he called up everyone he could
think of--the archdiocese, the Catholic information centre, the
nuns who owned the building, as well as Pro Fide, the sponsoring
organization, to panic them into shutting down the talk. Did you
know, he asked David Foster, who served as moderator of the
talks, that Shamir thinks the “final solution” to the Jewish
problem was conversion? That a Jew feels that a Catholic should
be shocked by this kind of statement gives some indication of
the theological chasm separating the two groups. In spite of the
deliberately inflammatory rhetoric, Foster agreed with Shamir’s
point; Catholic solidarity prevailed, and the talks went
on.
There was an attempt to disrupt the talk
after it began. A crazy Russian Jew who calls himself a
performance artist showed up with his black leather-clad
Austrian girlfriend and, after shouting a few comments, stood up
and turned the lights out in the room. When the lights came back
on, he stood up on a chair and encouraged everyone to take their
clothes off and engage in an orgy, at which point he was ejected
from the room. Whether this attempt to derail the talk was
demonic or moronic, it failed, when stood up to. On his way out,
he shouted that he wanted to hear his friend Shamir. It turns
out that Shamir did, in fact, know the guy, who used to show up
at salons in Israel, where he would defecate on the floor of art
exhibits. He found more fertile ground for his art in Europe,
until he was caught defacing a work of art in a Dutch museum and
was sentenced to six months in prison. At one point he told
Shamir that he had come to England because he felt that the
English were more indulgent in dealing with things like this.
The topic of the conference, “Israel, the
Church, and Antisemitism,” guaranteed a more diverse audience
than at my last venue in England. Paul Eisen, an English
Jew who was one of the organizers of Deir Yassin Remembered, was
there, as was Martin Webster who had been involved with the
British National Party, and Lady Michele Renouf, who had
been prevented from speaking to the party for her radicalism.
Eisen felt that my talk was “painful, but it was all true.”
Eisen seemed half convinced by the talk. It was not difficult to
persuade him that the great struggle of his day was “Palestinian
suffering.” According to Shamir’s theological calculus--”whoever
disregarded Palestinian suffering followed Antichrist; whoever
denounced it began his way to Christ”--Eisen had already taken
the first step toward Christ by founding Deir Yassin Remembered.
In terms of the trajectory that Shamir’s life had described,
Eisen had no trouble condemning the Judaic cult of death, but he
was having difficulty accepting the “Living Christ” as its
alternative.
Eisen was reluctant to give up his identity
as a Jew because a Jew, in his view, was by nature an
iconoclast, someone who smashed idols. Since the biggest idol of
our day, according to both Eisen and Shamir, was the false
religion known as the Holocaust (as distinguished from the
massacres committed by the Nazis), Eisen felt called as a Jew to
smash that idol, something which he attempted when he wrote an
article in support of Ernst Zundel, then languishing in a German
jail, where he faced criminal charges of Holocaust denial. The
article was pure dynamite; unfortunately, one of the first
things that went up in smoke when he detonated this bomb was
Deir Yassin Remembered. Angry letters of resignation followed
the publication of his article, and he was left to ponder the
paradoxes which his Jewish iconoclasm had wrought, but unable to
take the final step toward embracing Logos as Shamir and Gilad
Atzmon, the Israeli saxophonist, Christian, and “proud
self-hating Jew” had done.
“I enjoy exercising Jewish power,” Eisen said
to me at one point. “The only reason you’re talking to me is
because I’m a Jew,” he said at another.
There was an element of irony too powerful
for the goyishe kop (or at least this goyishe kop)
in Eisen’s discourse. Did he say this out of fear that I
wouldn’t talk to him if he embraced Logos as Shamir and Gilad
Atzmon had done? If so, wasn’t the fact that I shared the bill
with Shamir evidence to the contrary? Or was his statement
subtly derogatory of me and my intentions? Did he view me as
some sort of spiritual opportunist? Did this imply that I viewed
Jewish conversion as a sort of one-night stand, after which I
wouldn’t talk to him in the morning? Perhaps I wasn’t demanding
enough. Perhaps, in imitation of St. Paul, Eisen’s namesake, who
claimed he would become all things to all people to save souls,
I should have adopted the persona of the Jew hater to make
conversion seem more attractive to him. “Think of it, Paul,” I
might have said, “If you convert, there will be one less Jew in
the world. Conversion is the final solution.”
Dealing with Lady Michele Renouf, who was
gracious enough to invite me and Shamir to her posh Kensington
flat after the talk, was relatively straightforward by
comparison. Lady Michele, former ballet dancer, and photo model,
actress, academic, author, and purveyor, via
television commercials, of everything from Tokalon Beauty care
products in Portugal to Three Castles cigarettes in Pakistan, is
a public defender of David Irving and free speech, as well as a
devotee of Wagner and Nietzsche, as well as a Hellenist who
feels that Christianity is too Jewish.
“Hellenism,” Lady Renouf announced after she
had served Shamir and me a cup of tea, “is what makes our
discussion possible.” We didn’t need anything else, certainly
not Jewish fairy tales about a vindictive God who should be
dragged to the Hague and charged with crimes against humanity
and genocide.
I replied by reminding Lady Michele that that
the most famous convert to Hellenism was Julian the Apostate,
who thought he could wash the effect of baptism from his person
with the blood of bulls and ended up conniving with the Jews in
their attempt to rebuild the Temple. Hellenism was another word
for magic and mumbo jumbo. Greek philosophy, even in its pure
state, as when it came from the lips of Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle was incapable of saving itself from decadence. The
only thing that had saved Logos as discovered by Greeks like
Plato and Aristotle was Christianity and its fusion with the
Hebrew scriptures by thinkers like St. Augustine.
Thinking that this was a bit too impersonal,
I gestured toward Shamir, who was sitting next to me on the
sofa. “If it weren’t for Christianity and the waters of baptism,
Shamir would still be a Jew. Would you prefer that?”
By this point I was fairly wound up in spite
of the late hour. Perhaps it was the tea. Feeling that I was
already coming across as one more American enthusiast frothing
at the mouth about religion, I decided to embrace my role as the
American evangelist and jumped up in the middle of Lady Renouf’s
drawing room and said, “Come to Jesus, Michele!”
Shamir is no fan of American Protestant
preachers, a group he regards as lackeys to American Jews, but
no matter how coarsely they were expressed, he couldn’t disagree
with my sentiments. If Christ was good for the Jews, then he was
equally good for Wagnerian proponents of Hellenism.
The source of our differences lay elsewhere,
and they came out in the lobby of Shamir’s hotel where we met
the day after our evening at Lady Renouf’s flat.
“You’re a revolutionary,” Shamir said to me
as we shared a pot of tea in the lobby of his hotel in London. I
could tell by the way he said it that Shamir intended the term
as a compliment.
“No, I’m a counter-revolutionary,” I replied.
“The revolution has already taken place. I want to overthrow the
revolution.”
I then launched into a discussion of Logos as
the objective criterion of whether actions are revolutionary or
not. Revolutionaries want to overturn the rule of Logos;
counterrevolutionaries want to restore it.
Shamir shrugged by way of response. “That’s
not what the word means. If you want to use words, you have to
use them in the way that most people understand them.”
The unresolved theological question behind
Shamir’s conversion is “What remains?” Shamir is of the opinion
that nothing remains when the Jew converts. Since a Jew
is a rejecter of Christ, rejection of the rejection obliterates
the Jew. Shamir now considers himself a Palestinian orthodox
Christian. In his epistle to the Romans (11:28-29), however, St.
Paul claims that the same Jews who are “enemies of God, as
regards the Gospel” are “beloved for the sake of the
forefathers. For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.”
This seems to indicate that something Jewish has perdured and
will perdure, certainly until the Second Coming, but even in a
certain sense after their conversion. What remains can be bad as
well as good. The sad story of the converso crisis in Spain is
some indication that something remained culturally from the time
when the Spanish converts lived as Jews. In some instances it
was preserved by bad will and insincere conversion, in others by
the sheer weight of cultural inertia and insufficient catechesis
in the wake of conversion. Joseph Pfefferkorn was aware of the
pull his former life exerted on him and aware as well of the
strenuous moral and spiritual effort that was needed to prevent
a “return to the vomit of Judaism.” “If I continued to associate
with Jews,” Pfefferkorn wrote after his conversion, “and
continued to take usury, what would you say other than that I
was in serious sin and that I never really became a Christian,
and everyone would condemn me by saying that the blood and
suffering of Christ had been lost on me. What help would the
holy sacrament of baptism have been to me?” (cf., E. Michael
Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, p. 225 ff).
The waters of baptism redeem personal
history, but they don’t obliterate it, and part of what Shamir
brought into the Church from his previous existence as a Jew is
a nostalgia for Stalin and the Soviet Union, which many of his
new found brothers in Christ found repugnant. Shamir was six
years old when Stalin died and nine years old when Nikita
Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes before the Politburo.
Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was old enough to be his
father, Shamir never did time in the Gulag. When he thinks about
the Soviet Union what Shamir remembers is a life free from worry
where “Everybody lived under more or less the same conditions:
safe and assured employment, free accommodation, free
electricity, free telephone, free heating, free public
transport” (Cabbala, p. 195). The Soviet Union of
Shamir’s youth was “A society free from worry about life’s basic
necessities,” something which Shamir considers “is a society
well-prepared for spiritual pursuits.”
According to Shamir’s version of history, the
fall came, not in 1917 when the Bolsheviks murdered the Czar,
but during the 1980s when the “de-spiritualized Russian elites
of the last decades began to lean West” and became “infected by
the neo-liberal world-view” of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan, which he describes as the worship of Mammon. The Soviet
Union got hi-jacked by pro-Western elites who “embraced the
Chicago school of Milton Friedman with fervor and despised their
own people, their own history, and the traditions of their
parents” and then handed the country over to an orgy of looting
in which most of the oligarchs who ended up with Russia’s wealth
were Jews. Former Premier and now Russian President Vladimir
Putin, in Shamir’s view, has shown himself to be insufficiently
daring in dealing with the Jewish oligarchs. As a result, “the
Slav Orthodox world is without a rudder in boiling rapids.” If
the Soviet Union had been left alone, the Russian Orthodox
Church and the Russian Communist Party would have united in a
Hegelian synthesis based a mutual hatred of Mammon. As if
conceding for a moment that life under Stalin was not, as Monk
Seraphim might put it, “hunky-dory,” Shamir writes, “It’s not
that the Russians miss the Gulag or industrialization, but
Stalin and his rule are part and parcel of Russian history” (Cabbala,
p. 197). That caveat notwithstanding, Joseph Stalin is
nonetheless, in Shamir’s view, “the great man who restored
fortunes of Russia, beat off western attacks, and united the
Ukraine” (Cabbala, p. 208) (elsewhere Shamir does concede
the mass graves filled by Stalin).
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