Noticing: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 177-181

We’re back. That stomach virus is not a joke; I lost 13 pounds in three days over it.

Also note new posts are doing to be on Tuesdays going forward. My teaching schedule switched from Tues/Thurs to Mon/Wed.

Two weeks ago, when we last left off, Webster had begun a new chapter. The previous chapter had been curiously devoid of her random anti-Semitism with only a few mentions of the ethnicity of a couple of the French revolutionaries. This chapter wants to make amends for that oversight.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing is, among all of the other things that it is, lazy. Laziness is the least salient criticism of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing, but it’s also an important one. The thing about blaming “the Jews” is that it has an already built in audience that is ready to fill in all of your holes. The writing is done for you. Current GOP darling and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes doesn’t say anything new, he doesn’t have to—it’s all been written for him. He just says it a bit more coherently than people like Stephen Miller and more obvious than Charlie Kirk. Webster, as an actual historian, is going to have a bit more of a hill to climb because she doesn’t have 100 years of European conspiracy writing to back her up. She does however have 1500 years of Christian anti-Semitism to work with so she’s not breaking entirely new ground here.

Webster claims that, “It is a favourite ruse of the Jews to represent the Christians as their only enemies; in reality the persecution of the Jews began long before the Christian era, nor has it since then been confined to countries where the Christian religion prevails.”

An odd sentence. She does the thing where both ends of the sentence are related but the middle isn’t. Jewish populations have been the target of xenophobia since the days of Alexander the Great. Webster is right about that, but the Jewish claim that Christians are their enemies takes place in Europe where Christian states have persecuted them. Early 20th century Europe already has this problem and it’s only going to get worse.

Understand that the pre-Christian persecution is simple Xenophobia. This is an insular religious group with its own god, customs, and sometimes laws. The Romans, for example, had no beef with any of the myriad ethnic and religious groups in their territory as long as that group recognized who was in charge. Similarly with the Persians, notably under Cyrus the Great who liberated the Jews in Babylon.

The group itself gets singled out because they are this insular immigrant group. If you want a parallel, just look at something as seemingly innocuous as the American reaction to Irish immigrants. New culture, new ethnicity, new religion (sort of) and still laws were passed against them.

The real problem though is something that Webster accidentally reveals. She writes about Jewish immigrants in China, “Thus, in China, where the Jews were welcomed and allowed all the privileges of good citizens, the race found life unendurable because the Chinaman blandly declined to be exploited. The Jews therefore, finding it impossible to gain control of the principle wealth of the country, sought more congenial climes, and still today, outside treaty ports, very few are to be found in China.”

What she is trying to say is that the Jewish immigrants didn’t find banking jobs. What she leaves out is that this is because the Chinese people didn’t need to use the Jews as proxy treasurers in order to get around the Christian prohibition on charging interest. Because Christians were forbidden from charging interest, they used Jewish bankers to do it for them, then if the Christian king went bankrupt, he just seized all the Jewish property and had the population killed or exiled. It’s what the Spanish Inquisition was really about. The Chinese managed their own funds.

However, this also implies that the Jewish people can’t survive unless they run the money, which is obviously not true. It appears as though there has always been some kind of Jewish presence, but it, like their presence in most countries, has always been minor. When Webster says that they couldn’t succeed there, it’s probably explained by the unwillingness of the Chinese Imperial court to accept any foreigners rather than something about the Semitic people.

What we get from Webster is a loose connection of her earlier conspiracy claims that she now adds, “the Jews did it.” Anyone who desires the unification of the German states: also, part of a Jewish plot despite her earlier chapter where she blamed it on the Masons and the Illuminati. Frederick the Great? Once employed a Jew to manage the money. Perhaps even the same person worked for Frederick’s son. See? It’s all part of the plot.

Conspiracy theories like this only work if you are already primed to “notice” the patten. It’s nefarious, it’s literally killed people, and it is just so inherently lazy. All you have to is find someone with the right name working for a government and that person is the real person in charge. It’s like looking for hidden messages in a Shakira video only without the benefit of being able to look at Shakira.