Quote of the day—Eric King

Before the existence of the state of Israel ever since the diaspora Jews have lived in small areas of other people’s countries. Among American Jews this now typically means great grandparents who lived in shtetls or ghettos, segregated, isolated rural or urban areas in Europe. One of the major hazards of this situation was that occasionally a few Cossacks would get drunk, ride over to the nearest shtetl, rape a few women, maybe murder a man who protested rather than begging for his life and then ride off into the sunset, big fun… for the Cossacks.

It had to be inescapably clear to these Jews that there were dozens if not hundreds of them, able-bodied and sober, surely a match for 8 or 10 drunk Cossacks. It would have been easy, even for people not trained in arms, to kill them and bury them someplace, but it is obvious why they did not. If they had done so, all the Cossacks would have come to the shtetl fully armed for battle. They would have massacred every Jew in this shtetl and every other one within 100 versts. Defense was just not an option, not a survival trait. The women raped and the men murdered had to be seen as the price Jews paid for living, for surviving as a people. Since no Jew ever even remotely considered the possibility that without some major provocation someday the Cossacks would try to kill them all, it seemed like a reasonable if awful compromise.

Such a compromise must have taken a devastating and horrific psychological toll on the people forced to make it. Sooner or later someone among our traumatized ancestors had to make the following rationalization to justify this situation: “We are better than those people because they are violent and we are not. They handle weapons, and we do not.” In order to maintain self-respect people in such a condition had to explain it as the result of something that made them better than their oppressors. This was the notion that they voluntarily (rather than of necessity as was the actual case) eschewed the use of weapons of any sort because they understood that violence was evil while their tormentors did not. It was the key to survival, self-respect and eventually the shtetl mentality which American Jews, far removed from the shtetl, still carry with them despite the fact that it has long since lost its utility.

Eric King
2015
The Shtetl Mentality
[Interesting hypothesis. It is better than any I have been able to come up with.—Joe]

Share

12 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Eric King

  1. It makes sense, but there’s a critical piece missing. As I understand it, it was common practice in Europe in the past to have laws that forbid Jews from possessing arms, on penalty of death. Sort of like the “black laws” here, except for the more draconian penalty.
    If that’s accurate, the “shtetl mentality” is a survival trait rather than a misguided attitude.

  2. Parasites are well advised to not make their host itch.
    History is fascinating. A few broad strokes of it if I may.
    In many places, jews either served as expendables in totally replaceable roles (i.e., the shtetel surfs farming above), or in abusive/extractive roles by the rulers to exploit the serfs or doing “unsavory” work. For example, in the Polish-Lithuanian empire they were brought in and used as the tax-collectors (among other things) because they had no moral qualms about squeezing the local goyim mercilessly to extract taxes for the rulers (who were busy with their own squabbles and duties and wars), keeping the “extra” for themselves. Their merchant contacts were also used by people who brought them in to manage the slave trade. They managed to weasel a monopoly on vodka making and selling in Russia for a while, and were very good at keeping the peasants drunk and broke. When the P-L empire collapsed, most of them moved west, many landing in the Netherlands, where with Dutch paperwork they resumed the slave-trade, taking blacks across the Atlantic to the new world, again because they had no qualms about abusing the goyim and the richest class found them useful. And who do you think was busy selling a great deal of fire-water to the Indians? It wasn’t all white Christians, and it was very profitable.
    People who are very verbally fluent and can ingratiate themselves with the powerful while usefully exploiting the lower classes for them are a problem. Certain outside groups are useful for that. Not having any emotional attachment to the groups you are abusing because you religion says they are just animals, cattle, not worthy of worry, helps in that exploitation.
    The Venn diagram of Bolshevik leadership in early Soviet Union, gulag camp commandants, and ethnic Jews is nearly a circle. They don’t forget the Cossacks, and revenge is a word they are familiar with.

    • Classic tale of minor differences going back and forth. I had a bad day, so I’ll take it out on someone different from me. Hey that guy was a little nasty to me last week, so I’ll be nastier to him today. Keeps going back and forth over and over until really nasty things start to happen. Next thing you know you’re exploiting and killing each other, and can hardly remember what the real reason ever was.

      • The break-point between jews and Christians is pretty clear-cut, though. Jews see Christians as heretics, literally worse than an atheist because they convert jews and disrupt Jewish power. (the “judeo-Christian” thing is a canard and a crock).

        The Jews used Roman power to oppress the heretic sect for centuries. When Constantine converted, the Christians used roman power to oppress Jews. (well, they got oppressed a few times on their own in the meantime, re: Masada).

        When the Moors invaded Spain in 711, the Jews sided with them to depose the Christian Visigoths ruling Spain, and oppress and enslave the Spanish. Centuries later, following the Reconquista, the Catholic Spanish Inquisition was a reaction to being ruled by the Muslims and their Jew henchmen.

        Further east, the Jews were the slavery middle-men between the Christians capturing heathen Slaves and the Muslim eunuch market in the Middle East, doing most of the brutal surgery in Italy or Greece and shipping the survivors south. It was the Jew’s connections and money-handling that let them exploit lots of unseemly markets that otherwise would not have existed, and it made lots of people fear/hate them.

        That’s all well established, but not frequently taught, history.

      • That’s the thing — even here, we only hear about the forth. Nobody ever mentions the back, just a series of escalating forths.

  3. I can’t help but think their true problem was not doing what God told them in the first place.
    If I may do some paraphrasing.
    “Do these things and I will bless you in the land of milk and honey. Do them not and I will scatter you to the wind.”
    Jews ended up in the land of the Cossacks because they don’t listen very well. (Which is strange considering they still consider themselves jews.)
    And then racially adopt a mentality of passivists to overcome their problem. Only to refuse to adopt the mentality of America, (defend oneself), when they’re in America able to defend themselves for 300-400 years?
    Sounds like BS to me.
    And since when is it a Jewish tradition to be non-violent? Is that what God was to Jericho? The Canaanite, Ammonite, and the Hittite?
    I have a bunch of nationalities in me. But I am 300% American. What happened to all the other nationalities that came here?
    The problem with most Jews is ego. But they ain’t alone.
    Just like anyone else that defines themselves with dual nationalities.
    You Jewish- America? You African-American, You Irish-American.
    Or American?
    My advice to Jews and everyone else is to drop the emotional baggage, and read the Constitution of the United States.
    And if you don’t like it, get the f–k out while you still can. There’s a storm coming.

  4. The Ashkenazi genetically selected for linguistics talent (as opposed to physical prowess) in its male population, therefore resulted in super predators specialized in the feminine use of force spectrum (using language as a weapon). It makes sense from an evolutionary strategy perspective: if you specialize in one form of violence, it is to your advantage the suppress the other competitive forms of violence so your enemies have no way of retaliating. This leads to an irreciprocity and violates natural law, leading to the industrialized lying we see in public sphere today, and civilizational decay. The solution is to outlaw and suppress irreciprocal use of feminine use of violence like we suppressed masculine violence.

  5. As MTHead pointed out, the Torah (or Old Testament, for Christians) is full of examples of the Hebrews/Jews disobeying God and paying the consequence, usually by being slaves of another nation for a couple centuries. Somehow, eschewing violence and weapons became part of that in the “shtetl mentality”.

    However, let me present a few counter-examples:
    1. Joshua. After the Golden Calf incident that caused the Hebrews to wander the desert for 40 years (long enough that all those responsible died off), and after the death of Moses, Joshua took over and under the direction of the “commander of the Lord’s armies” [Joshua 5:13-15], the Hebrews took up weapons and — with divine support — conquered many of their neighbors.
    2. King David. While the man himself continually lost and regained the Lord’s favor, the circumstances of his getting the attention of the king — putting himself on the path to eventually becoming king himself — are rather violent [1 Samuel 17,18,19].
    3. Judas Maccabee. The story of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, is the story of retaking and resanctification of the Temple by force from a nation determined to eliminate the Hebrews/Jews, first by denying them their religious rites and traditions, and then (when that didn’t work) by killing them all.

    Slightly tongue-in-cheek, the one-line summary of most Jewish holiday celebrations is, “They came to kill us. We won, with the help of the Lord. Let’s eat!”

    The “shtetl mentality” might be how the Jewish people survived during those “in-between times” when they were being attitude-checked by the Almighty, but when they were in good standing the war campaigns were epic. During those times the “shtetl mentality” would have prevented them from establishing their claim on the Holy Lands as God intended.

    • Ya, they like to play with the “shtetl mentality”, until they’re able to act like Cossacks.
      Which is a good example of human nature in general. The difference is that certain people pride themselves as being a separate group from everyone else.
      Then they complain about being treated special.

  6. Israeli Jews have the same sort of ancestral background, at least the Ashkenazi Jews. And for the Sephardic Jews, it was even worse as they were prohibited from bearing arms. Yet there doesn’t seem to be be widespread disdain of weapons among Israelis.

    My theory is that American Jews lived in leftist cities, mostly NYC, and acquired those tastes here.

    • Nope. Collectivism, communism, is in Jewish blood and culture from way back. They always stick together. The one witness to a Jack the Ripper murder was a Jew. But, because the accused was a (Polish) Jew, the witness refused to testify; protecting their own was more important than imprisoning a murder. After all, it was only non-jewish women being murdered, and they account for nothing (in Jewish eyes). Sticking together allows collective survival, at the cost of the occasional pogrom… which inevitably happen, because they are frequently not the best of citizens in their host country, using “sharp” lawyer and abusive contracts, usury, and a very strong-ingroup support network.

      They are fairly consistent in their culture, accounting for changing technology. In Weimar Germany, the jews were the ones pushing homosexuality and prostitution on destitute Germans in the clubs, they opened the first transgender clinic in Berlin, and were behind much of the drunkenness and pornography that was heavily popularized by the (jewish) government over the humiliated German people. That was why HItler came to power, is he called it all out, named the oppressors of the German people; real cultural and economic problems were not being addressed by the government, which was largely being run by a minority group nobody really liked.

      Huh. Lot of Jews today in banking, lawyering, media, movies, pornography, pushing transgenderism and homosexuality, drag shows for kids, and pharma (drugs)….. Nah, I’m sure it’ll all work out fine for them, right?

Comments are closed.