Frodi Midjord: Good evening, or good afternoon, culture vultures! We’re back! We’re back with Andrew Joyce. We’re going to talk about “The ‘Moichant’ of Venice” [in a jooish accent]. Hopefully my microphone works properly, because, well I ran some update a couple of weeks ago. And my mic stopped working. So I used a backup mic, and hopefully we’re back to business now.

So the website is guidetoculture.org. You can find us on Twitter real underscore gtk and on Telegram. Subscribe to the Telegram channel. That’s. The best way to follow us. And we have the archive of previous videos on BitChute. So make sure to follow that and subscribe and like, etc.

And having said that, I think it’s time to welcome Andrew Joyce back to the channel. How are you doing?

Andrew Joyce: I’m doing very well thanks Frodi. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. And it will be especially pleasurable to have a conversation today about Shakespeare.

Frodi Midjord: Yes! We’re [chuckling] going to talk about the “Moichant”. Well, I guess he isn’t “The ‘Moichant’ of Venice”, because the “merchant” refers to Antonio, right?

Andrew Joyce: That’s right. That’s the common mistake made by people who haven’t read the play, that Shylock is the merchant. He’s not the merchant, even though he is probably the most prominent character, or certainly the most memorable in the play.

Frodi Midjord: Oh yeah! He is the reason for the play being so famous today. I mean, otherwise it would just be one of Shakespeare’s plays. But now it’s something that even people who don’t read Shakespeare, and who aren’t very interested in culture and literature, everyone is aware of this particular play and they know that it’s about “jews”, or one jew at least. And that’s why it’s very controversial.

So the first thing I wanted to ask you is I watched the 2004 film by Michael, yeah created by Michael Redford — was also known for 1984 — with Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio. And the film opens with these sort of “warning labels”! It’s almost like a pack of cigarettes, [loud laughter]! You know, you’re gonna see something you’re not supposed to see!

And one thing that is claimed there. And this is a trope that I want to ask you about. This is something this is sort of a cliche almost, that jews were hated, because they were money lenders. But, in fact, jews were forced to be money lenders. They weren’t allowed to work with anything else. And Europeans, non-jewish Europeans, were not allowed to be moneylenders. So therefore the jews were left without any other option. And then unfairly, they were disliked, because of that. What’s the truth behind that?

[02:58]

Andrew Joyce: Well it’s a lot more complicated than that, for sure Frodi. I mean, I hadn’t seen the 2004 film before yesterday, when you told me that you were going to watch it so I thought:

“Oh shit! I probably should watch it too.”

I only managed an hour before I fell asleep. Make of that what you will. But that introductory scene had me laughing! It had me concerned. And it’s full of lies! Now the movie opens with this bald-headed monk sailing down one of the small streams in Venice, in a boat, with a massive cross behind him. And the entire setting of the scene is very sinister. And it’s intercut with short captions. Which more, or less say, you know:

“In the 16th century Venice jews were sort of harshly persecuted. They were forced into money lending. And then, because they were money lenders, they were despised by the local population and subjected to frequent persecutions and outbreaks of violence.”

More, or less that is what the opening scene says. And the reason that it says that is, because it’s an attempt to kind of mollify, or explain all of the subsequent bad actions, shall we say, on the part of Shylock for the rest of the play. It’s meant to provide him with an excuse. And it’s not in the play. But it’s been inserted into the movie.

Now in terms of the real historical context then, were jews forced into money lending? No they weren’t! Were they prohibited from possessing, … And I think in the movie it actually says they weren’t prohibited from possessing land, but prohibited from possessing possessions! Or something like this. Here they couldn’t hold possessions again, like any kind of material things, [Frodi chuckles] apart from money. Which, of course, is nonsense!

For large parts of European history jews could hold land, for example, the south of France they had whole vineyards. And they had employees and slaves work those vineyards for them. And we find the same in Spain. And we find it in other parts of Europe, also.

There were certain periods of time at which certain monarchs found it useful to ban jews from owning land. And this normally happened when there was a competition for resources between the elites at the very top. In other words, the kings and queens, and the noble class.

Say, for example, a knight who owned say a few hundred acres. It was a small scale knight. Say he borrowed some money, before he went off to war, from a jew. Because he fell on hard times he wasn’t able to repay the jew and his land would then be forfeit to the jew. Now the Crown would work a sleight of hand here, by saying:

“No! jews are prohibited from holding land. But what I will do is, I will take the land and I will pay a fee to the jew. That’s how we will work this.”

And it basically facilitated a kind of land transfer so that the monarchs became ever more powerful and owned ever larger tracks of land across Europe. And, as I say, it happens sporadically.

Now the real context in Venice at this time at the time that the play it set, the 16th century, Venice is booming as a city. It’s increasing its trade with the Ottoman Empire a and obviously being Venice, living space and land is at a premium. So you build sort of higher rise buildings, because your streets are basically water and all the rest of it. And you have an influx of merchants, and traders, and money lenders. And all the rest are trying to make a quick buck off of the economic boom.

So what actually happens is they create these ghettos. Now the word “ghetto” comes from the Venetian “getti” which means “metal”, because the original ghettos, these living quarters, were run by the blacksmiths, or the people who smelted gold and silver.

So what happens is for a lot of the jewish money lenders that come in, an arrangement is made that they will live in the place of the getti, the ghettos. So they would live in these ghettos, and the ghettos would have certain terms attached to them. Because to give everyone a fair bite of the economic cherry you had a kind of circulation, or you would cycle people in and cycle them out.

Now when we say that jews lived in the ghetto, it’s a common misconception — and it’s not really cleared up at all by the very deceptive introduction to the movie — that these are whole jewish families that are living in these ghettos, and they’re locked up for morning tonight and all the rest of it. But this is not true! The people who lived in the ghetto were jewish traders. They were adult men. Sometimes they have an adult child with them.

And they would be granted a license to perhaps come in, live in the ghetto for say three, four, months. And then they would be asked to leave again. The permit would expire. And they would go out. Their proper home would always be outside the city. Always be outside the city. It was basically like a kind of live-in business arrangement. They would come in, conduct their business for three, or four months. And then they would be cycled out and then new traders would come in.

As the economy boomed there would be an increase in the number of ghettos, and the ghettos that did exist would be enlarged in size. So this is the direct Venetian history behind the play.

And actually when you look at the play, when you look Shylock he has an adult daughter. He doesn’t have young children. He doesn’t have a wife. So clearly Shakespeare knew more about the Venetian context than the directors of this particular movie. Shakespeare doesn’t present anything really in The Merchant of Venice that is not in any way explainable by the reality of the history that’s there.

Frodi Midjord: Right. But just to be clear, usury was prohibited for non-jews as for Christians in Europe, back in those days, right?

Andrew Joyce: It was. But there were always exceptions. And, of course, it’s in northern Italy it’s among the Lombards that we see the primary competitors to the jews eventually, emerging. And it’s within the 16th century to be honest.

And at the start of the 17th century they really take hold, as well. There are always Christians who are lending money. Yet they’re extremely socially ostracized. At times they’re punished quite severely by the church. And actually a lot of the medieval expulsions of jews were incidental in the sense that there were expulsions of moneylenders, not jews. And jews just got expelled along with gentile, Christian moneylenders, also.

But but, of course, in the histories we just hear:

“Oh! The jews were expelled!”

Well some, but not all of these expulsions can be explained with these incidental expulsions of moneylenders. But Europeans were lending money at interest as well, at this time. That’s an established historical fact.

Frodi Midjord: Right.

Andrew Joyce: But it was the done thing that it was good form that if a church, for example, required instant cash credit — to be able to expand the church, or to begin a new construction project — that they wouldn’t ask another Christian to do. So that they would turn to the jews.

And for this reason we actually see that some of the major Bishops and church leaders in the medieval period are the primary defenders of the jews, mostly, because they have this kind of financial symbiotic relationship with them.

Frodi Midjord: Hmm mm. So I think the narrative, or the storyline, is pretty familiar to everyone listening. It’s quite simple. It is Antonio borrows money from Shylock and demands a Bond, that is a pound of flesh, if he doesn’t pay the money back. And in the end there is this legal proceeding about him being allowed to take a pound of flesh out of Antonio, because, well, there are lots of twists and turns. And we can get into all of those.

But what was the reception? Let’s talk a bit about how the play, or how the story has been received, or how it’s been treated throughout history since it since it was published up until now.

Andrew Joyce: Well, even when it was published it was one of Shakespeare’s more successful play. It was certainly more successful and enduring than Christopher Marlowe’s “The jew of Malta” — which appeared right about eight years earlier. — certainly was far more strikingly anti-semitic than Shakespeare’s play was.

In Marlowe’s play the main character is a jewish merchant called Barabbas, who ends up poisoning a whole nunnery and kills about half of the people of the play. I mean, this is the ultimate arch-jewish villain! A lot of people have interpreted The Merchant of Venice as Shakespeare’s response to The jew of Malta, which may, or may not be the case.

But let’s look at what The Merchant of Venice is, in itself, as a play. And how that might have shaped how it was received. I mean, the play itself, it falls within the category of a comedy. It does have tragic elements. But it’s predominantly a comedy. It’s an example of what’s called “New Comedy”.

Now when you go back to the Greek times they had a thing called “Old Comedy” an example of which, the plays by Aristophanes which were sort of satirical and heavily political. And once Aristophanes kind of leaves the scene he’s followed up by a man called, a playwright called Menander.

And Menander initiates something called “New Comedy”. A new comedy always orientates around a fixed set of tropes. And one of those is this idea of young lovers outwitting their parents, and basically seeking “a happily ever after”. A new comedy is something that Shakespeare was particularly attracted to.

We see it, of course, in Romeo and juliet. But we definitely see it here in The Merchant of Venice, also. Because although there is the antagonism between Antonio and Shylock the primary narrative really other than that, is a love story. It’s a love story between Bassanio who is Antonio’s friend, and Porsha, this wealthy heiress, or princess that he is desperate to be able to become a suitor for.

And in order to be a suitor, he requires the funds from Antonio, his best friend. Antonio is a wealthy and successful merchant, but all of his ships are out at sea. And when they’re out at sea they’re vulnerable. They’re vulnerable to storms, and as Shylock later says:

“This guy’s wealth is quite significant. He’s probably good for the loan. But it’s vulnerable to whether he can staff the ships. It’s vulnerable to whether rats will eat the stock that he has on board the ships.”

And so on, and so forth. So it’s a vulnerable wealth. And the play, of course, opens quite ambiguously and filled with tension in the form of Antonio standing, kind of brooding. I mean, his friends ask him:

“Why are you brooding? Are you thinking too much about your merchandise?”

He’s basically saying:

“I just can’t put my finger on it.”

So the tension is there from the beginning as to how vulnerable his wealth is. And in some ways the play is a meditation on fixation on wealth not just for Shylock , but for everyone. But anyway, these new comedy plays always have a bad guy. They always have an antagonist who’s going to spoil the party, and spoil the fun. And in this case it is Shylock . And the play was initially received as a new comedy. I suppose also as a commentary on the knowledge, the cultural knowledge of jews at the time.

So throughout the 17th century, as Shakespeare becomes increasingly popular and his plays be become read and re-read, the jewish aspect of the portrayal of Shylock does come to the fore over time. And by the time you get into the late 19th century Shylock has more, or less entered common parlance as a byword for jewish greed, or for greed in general.

And actually, there was a fairly recent case, probably about eight years ago where Joe Biden himself got into trouble, because in a conversation about loans, I think something to do with the military, he used the phrase:

“I can’t believe the Shylocks.”

Which brought him much opprobrium from apparently Foxman, who Biden later described as “a friend and advisor”. And thanked Foxman for correcting his views on this. Foxman very quick to silence him on that.

But the play has always been controversial, and always has been interpreted far out of proportion to what it actually is. As I said, it’s an example of “New Comedy”. It’s quite dark. It is a dark comedy. But it’s been interpreted as something much more sinister by jews. And we can get into the reasons for why that is, but we would need to dissect the character of Shylock , and what Shakespeare has to say about him. And I suppose also for Antonio.

[15:18]

Frodi Midjord: Yeah, it’s funny that you brought up the thing with Joe Biden, because that wasn’t his first sort of faux pas, because I think in, well I don’t know when that statement was, but in 2013 he gave a speech to AIPAC I believe it was. Where he applauded all the efforts of the jewish community to bring PC trends into Western society, homosexuality, mass immigration, [chuckling] etc., and he appreciated that. And they didn’t appreciate his honesty, I guess.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, he said something like:

“Without you it wouldn’t have happened!”

Or something like that. [loud laughter] And this is the thing with jews. And then it leads in also into The Merchant of Venice! Is that, there are certain things that jews are quite happy to claim. But there are certain realities about them and their history that they’re very much keen to brush under the carpet.

One of which is money lending. I mean primarily that the problem with Shylock is that it’s a jew portrayed in a massively popular example of literary genius, as a money lender! And that’s a part of their history that they want to get rid of permanently! They don’t want it mentioned.

I mean, I have my own small library of books on jews, and believe it, or not, the majority of books that are in that library are not written by our guys. They’re actually opposition literature. Because I find it fascinating! I always learn something from the strategies that they employ in trying to defend themselves.

And one of my favorite, and I would say funniest books is Abraham Foxman’s “Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype”. Because in that book he discusses Shylock . And he was through all these kind of leaps, and bounds, and twists, and turns, in order to try and say that the jews don’t have a special relationship with money. And this is the phrasing that I personally have always used. I don’t say that they’re greedy, or this, or that and the other. They certainly have a “special relationship” with money, with finance capital, along with lending money at interest. That’s undeniable!

And if you look at texts like Salo Baron’s “Economic History of the jews” you see a more academic example of that twisting and turning, where they try and produce evidence. That, because there was one jewish blacksmith in medieval England, that that meant that there was a diverse, you know, occupational structure to the population of the time. Total nonsense! Everyone was involved more, or less in money lending to a certain extent.

So saying, or expressing realities about the jewish occupational past, or present, because don’t forget that jews are still at the forefront of money lending. And certainly most of the cases one of the most notorious and exploitative money lenders in terms of the Payday Loan companies of recent years.

And I’ve written about this. I think in 2012 I wrote an essay on contemporary jewish money lending, about ten thousand words. And took a lot of research. But basically behind most of the controversial Payday money lending operations in the United States, in the UK, throughout Europe, and Australia, they’re all ultimately owned by jews. So this issue of Shylock has not gone away.

But let’s come back to the play. All attacks seem to be on the fact that Shylock represents the worst of anti-semitic stereotypes. Being that jews are quote-unquote “greedy” and also that Shylock himself is an example of the literary representation of the so-called blood libel.

So the blood libel being the idea that jews killed Christians for ritual purposes. Reflected in the play by the fact that when Antonio comes to Shylock and he says:

“Look I want this loan on these terms. Can I get it?”

And at first there’s an ambiguity to Shylock’s first response to that first request for the money. And I’ll read it out, because I actually, I reread it last night. And I thought to myself:

“There’s an ambiguity there, because you almost feel like Shylock is going to provide the loan out of friendship. That he is making a peace offering.”

But that’s completely destroyed by what happens later in the play. But he almost sucks you in and makes you believe that he is going to meet Antonio halfway there. And even though he claims that Antonio has spat on him in the past and abused him as a jewish dog and so on, and so forth. That Shylock is willing to let bygones be bygones and make the loan, and perhaps repair their relationship.

Now in the film, as I say that I watched last night, it’s portrayed quite differently. Because you’re immediately, in the first scenes, sort of made to feel sorry for Shylock, because it opens with Antonio spitting in Shylock’s face. And I think a jew is thrown from a bridge into the river, or something, as well. I mean, it basically starts with abuse of jews.

But let me read this out. So Antonio comes to Shylock and he says:

“Look I want the loan.”

And Shylock says:

“O father Abram, what these Christians are.
Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect the thoughts of others!
Pray you tell me this; If he should break his day what should I gain by the exaction of the forfeiture.
A pound of man’s flesh taken from a man is not so estimable, profitable neither.
As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats. I say to buy his favour I extend this friendship.
If he will not take it so; if not, adieu;
And for my love, I pray you wrong me not.”

In other words, he’s saying there, basically:

“What do I take is my bond? A pound of your flesh.”

You know, in the grand scheme of things it’s not that realistic a request. In fact, Shylock only becomes obsessive about getting the pound of flesh once he realizes that Antonio has definitely defaulted.

And at that point he’s become so embittered at the fact that his daughter, Jessica, also seems to be running off with a Christian boy, that he basically gets into a blood frenzy.

But at first it’s almost like Shylock sets the bar so high, because, … And again he sucks me in here, because I’ve read this play, I don’t know how many times. And I read it last night and I’m still trying to wrap my head around, what’s Shakespeare saying here? Is he saying that this hostile money lending jew is willing, does he have some humanity in him whatsoever? In that he’s willing to just “pound of flesh”. But it’s not totally sincere:

“I’m just saying that’s going to be my bond. So you better give me my money back. And I pray you wrong me not.”

And even Antonio seems to perceive it that way, because he says:

“Hie thee gentle jew.”

And then once Shylocks leaves, he says:

“The Hebrew will turn Christian: He grows kind.”

So Antonio also interprets that as perhaps an olive branch in the conflict between the two. Which is certainly later, that’s thrown completely out the window, because Shylock does reveal himself to be bloodthirsty. He does reveal himself to be not so much greedy for money, but greedy for revenge. And this issue of revenge comes to the fore in the famous speech.

I mean, there are two ways of dealing with Shylock for jews.

One is to say that he’s a gross representation of anti-semitism, to try and censor the play. And this has, by far, been the predominant strategy the jews have adopted in trying to deal with The Merchant of Venice, and the genius that’s inside it.

Another strategy has been, … Just before I watched the movie actually, I read a movie review by a jewish critic called, I think, Ron Rosenbaum. And he was criticizing the movie, because it did strip out a lot of the really antagonistic elements within Shylock’s character that are in the play. They stripped it out of the movie. And he basically said:

“Look, us jews we have these kind of diversionary strategies at times in dealing with this. In that, we don’t want to admit that it’s anti-semitic. So we’ll just try and kind of soften it up a little bit. We’ll try and say that Shakespeare’s not really anti-jewish. He’s making a broader commentary on society at the time.”

Or something like this. And all of this gets, you know, it’s just dancing around the fact that, look is just a nasty jewish character! And we have to live with it. We can’t have every character who’s jewish in literature represented in a positive way! It’s not realistic.

[23:37]

Frodi Midjord: Yeah I mean, a go-to way of dealing with things like that is saying that he’s sarcastic. He means the opposite. This is just a caricature for Shakespeare being sarcastic, or Voltaire saying something sarcastically when it says something about jews. I mean, that is a very typical response [chuckling].

Andrew Joyce: Exactly. And the number one thing that they go to when they’re wanting to engage in this strategy, is they appeal to the:

“Have not a jew, …”

That very famous speech from Shylock . Which is supposed to be the speech where Shakespeare is speaking. And when they want to divert they say:

“Shakespeare’s saying, ‘look jews are humans too. And they bleed when we cut them ‘.”

And all the rest of it. But when you read the full speech, when you read the whole thing it’s clear that, yes, while Shakespeare is saying jews are human, he’s also saying this is a really vicious, vengeance-filled individual! And to try and soften that up by saying the jews are just human beings, … Let me read out the speech itself. It won’t take that long. But it’s worth hearing it from beginning to end. Because once Antonio basically looks like he’s going to forfeit, and Shylock is asked:

“Why do you want a pound of flesh, anyway?”

And Shylock replies:

“To bait fish withal.”

In other words, he’s saying:

“Look. I’ll do with it, whatever I want. If I want to use it to bait fish, I’ll bait fish.”

So he says:

“If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason?
I am a Jew.
Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

That’s a phenomenal piece of writing for a start. Now, if I could point to any other speech in literature that reminds me of that, it’s Ahab in the boat when Starbucks says to him:

“The White whale is just a whale! Why are you so furious about that?”

And Ahab turns to him and he said. He says something like:

“Fool! If the sun insulted me I would strike it!”

So it’s a kind of its the ultimate fury! It’s the point of anger when it just becomes unhinged from itself. And Shylock is basically saying here is:

“If there’s an antagonism that’s mutual between jews and Christians, for every time Christians come against me, I the jew will pay him back even harder!”

Which to me encapsulates so much of the dynamic of the jewish-European interaction for the last, over 1,000 years, let’s say, because it’s a pendulum. Because there’s jewish action, European reaction, and the jewish action is even harder than that. And then it swings back. And then you have this constant to and fro between the two populations.

And, rather than then focus on what Shakespeare is saying about the fact that jews are human here, and saying that they are human does not detract from the fact that they can be at fault for things. In fact, I think that it’s perfectly good that Shakespeare is saying:

“Look, they’re humans!”

Because say The Merchant of Venice is a reaction to The jew of Malta, where Barabbas is a kind of two-dimensional, cartoonish, evil jew a a meme, so to speak.

Well what Shakespeare is doing, is saying someone like that does not really have much moral agency, or responsibility. It’s just a caricature. You can impart a lot more moral responsibility and agency to someone when you say:

“Look, this person is human. They have the same faculties as me, but they’ve still chosen to undertake this action.”

And I’ve been asked in the past when I’ve doing a podcast with Luke Ford many years ago. Where he was trying to bait me into all kinds of things. But he said to me:

“Do you believe that jews are parasites?”

And I said:

“That’s a very easy way out of trying to explain, or attribute responsibility, to jewish people who are doing these very harmful things. A parasite is this mindless creature that doesn’t really know what it’s doing. It’s just feeding off of a host and all the rest of it. No. Jews know exactly what they’re doing!”

And that’s where the real problem, the real moral responsibility lies, that it’s much more terrifying in a way.

So this speech, you know, if I could point to anything in literature that kind of sums up the nature of the jewish-European antagonism, read this speech! The speech that so many jews are holding up as an example of:

“Oh Shakespeare was trying to make a defense of the jews.”

No! It’s all here. Read the whole thing! Because it begins with revenge and it ends with revenge.

Frodi Midjord: I think one of the sort of famous quote-unquote “anti-semites”, if we’re going to use that term, Ivor Benson, he wrote an essay about The Merchant of Venice. And he basically said:

“That it was the most important, or most insightful texts on the jewish issue.”

And there is a lot of depth. It isn’t just that Shylock is greedy, ore whatever. Because he isn’t greedy! And this is the thing that I want to get into next. The issue of revenge. Because the fact of the matter is that Shylock isn’t in it for the money.

Andrew Joyce: No.

Frodi Midjord: He doesn’t want the debt to be paid. He wants the bond. He wants the pound of flesh. Because he wants revenge.

And I think this is very important because, … Well I mean, we in modern times we have a sort of, it’s almost like a remnant of liberalism in our way of thinking. Where we think that people do things for rational reasons, for maximizing profits, or whatever. So that we think that it’s just resource competition between us and jews, for example.

But the thing is that they see themselves as “victims”! And I think Shylock represents that. He sees himself as a victim who needs revenge! Who hates the people that, [chuckling] he doesn’t like the people he lives among! And it isn’t just for profit.

And jews have also throughout history been willing to give up profit in order to achieve a much more sort of conscious political agenda, for example.

So there’s more depth to the issue than just greed. I mean, he wants to harm. He hates Antonio! He acts out of spite and he wants revenge, because of his perceived “victimhood”.

And I think that is a more important motivation in many, or more important motive, in many ways of interpreting a lot of jewish behavior that we see as hostile, or problematic, or whatever. That they act out of perceived victimhood and they want revenge. And they want to hurt the people who they believe hurt them.

Andrew Joyce: Absolutely! That’s the fundamental take away from the play. If you want to focus on the character of Shylock ..

People who haven’t read the play, or read on a very superficial level do think it’s about greed. But when you actually delve into the play, and when you really sort of examine the characters on the Christian side. For example, Antonio, or Solanio, these Christians have a very superficial Christianity. They’re sitting in church. But when they’re sitting in church they’re thinking about their merchandise.

And the play opens with Antonio more, or less, brooding over his merchandise although it isn’t explicit, the subtext is there. So the greed that’s in the play seems to originate with the most Christian characters, or the ones that are postulated as the sort of the origins of the kind of the Christians who are spitting on Shylock , the jew.

It’s not about greed, or it’s not primarily about greed with Shylock . You’re right. It’s primarily about revenge. And even when people turn up towards the end of the play. Bassanio returns. And he basically says:

“Look. We borrowed three thousand ducats off you. I’ll give you six thousand ducats.”

And Shylock basically says:

“If you were to take those three thousand ducats, divide each of them into ten, and then make each one of those a ducat, [making 30,000 ducats] I still wouldn’t take it! I will have my pound of flesh! I will have my bond!”

And throughout the play leading up to that act where the court scene takes place, he’s approached by Solano, Bassanio, so many of the other ancillary characters to Antonio. And all of them are saying:

“Can we divert you from this?”

But he’s single focused.

I mean, there’s that speech where he repeats “I’ll have my Bond” so many times that Shakespeare is trying to reinforce the obsession that he has. That no, the time for all negotiations and talk about money and this, that, and the other, is gone.

And Shylock does use the term “my tribe” on several occasions to discuss the offense that he feels that Antonio has caused. Shylock’s tribe has been offended. And he will have his revenge on one of the city’s most prominent Christians, on behalf of his tribe. And he will take it in the form of flesh! He wants it to be painful. And he wants to literally take a piece of the man who slighted him.

I mean, that speech, not so much a speech, but a response to the pleas for him to relinquish the bond and just simply accept the money, or accept something else. He says:

“I’ll have my Bond! I will not hear thee speak. I’ll have my Bond! And therefore speak no more. I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool, to shake the head relent, sigh and yield to Christian intercessors. Follow not; I’ll have no speaking. I will have my bond.”

And the time for negotiation has passed.

It’s prophetic in a sense because, when you see so many of the people today on the White side. Whites who are engaging in all this “woke” nonsense, or they’re apologizing for all of these putative historical crimes against non-Whites, most specifically against the jews, they think that that earns some kind of brownie points. That, that placates the matter. That’s a way of diverting it away from continuing the antagonism between the peoples, should I say.

And for most of them, they don’t even perceive that such an antagonism exists. They just view that on some level they have to recompense the jews for the crimes that have been committed against them.

But what they don’t understand is that the dynamic here is “revenge focused”. And there is a financial aspect to it, but money gets power. And it’s what the power is then put to use to, that really counts.

And I’ll never forget the words of Barbara Roche, the jewish minister under Tony Blair in the UK, who said that she feels safest walking down the streets of London when it’s, in her words “a vibrant multicultural city”. She wants to see the White population diluted right down! Because she feels comfortable in that. And she feels safe in that. And she feels that that is a more natural environment for a jew to be. And that all wraps into her own perception and worldview absorbed through her religious ideology, on how to view Europeans.

Because I remember speaking to a jewish academic years ago. And he said:

“That in the particular town that he grew up in, there weren’t that many other jews. So there’s no jewish school for him to go to. So he went to a normal school.”

And it was in Britain. And in Britain when you go to school, every school opens with morning hymns, or they did back when he was a child, anyway. He said:

“So every morning we sang hymns. And they always sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.”

And even as a child all that came into his head was this vision of the Crusaders going through medieval villages killing jews! So right from a very young age, jews are led to believe that they are victims of Europeans, and European society and culture. So this naturally leads to a kind of subtext of revenge.

[37:00]

Frodi Midjord: Right! Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot there. And I said probably 15 years ago that, … I mean, the reason jews want multiculturalism is, because it is the ecological niche where they are successful, because they can blend in. And they are not seen.

I mean, Kevin MacDonald has described this as they stick out as a sore thumb in a homogeneous society they are the only significant minority. But yeah, they are successful, because they are adapted to this sort of tribal group competition in the sort of, well in the Middle East. And their culture has evolved in that environment.

And when it comes to the topic of greed. I mean, there are many examples I can’t think of any sort of very clear examples. But I know I’ve thought about this many times throughout the years that, yeah, they are willing to give up profit, or if they own the media, for example, if they own a newspaper, or a TV channel, their motivation isn’t:

“What will sell more copies? What will get us more profits?”

Because they are willing to not talk about certain things that would sell copies, because it doesn’t fit their political agenda, right?

Andrew Joyce: Yeah. It actually goes both ways. I mean, I always laugh at these studies that are done now and again whenever they talk about billionaires and about the psychological characteristics of billionaires and how they score highly in sociopathic and psychopathic traits.

And the inevitable question asks itself once you realize that jews comprise a huge element of these billionaires as they say. I wonder what it is about jews that lends them so extraordinarily to becoming billionaires? You know, I wonder if there’s a higher disposition to these characteristics of sociopathy and psychopathy, and this kind of single minded focus on the acquisition of money?

I mean, I’ve said before somewhere that you don’t become a billionaire by accident. I mean, you can become successful and wealthy with hard work and everything. But you can do all that your whole life and never become a billionaire. To become a billionaire you need to have such a single minded focus on the acquisition of money that it kind of blots out even huge elements of your own humanity. And I apply this also to someone like Jeff Bezos, not exclusively the jews.

But yeah, I’m talking about these kind of completely out of touch, completely sociopathic billionaires, who will sit on vast quantities of money and just hold it. And just live off it and feed off it. And that is the primary goal in their life is just to acquire more, and more, money to complete the next merger, and to take over that company. And just to keep going, and going, and going.

And I know that some people view these characters as kind of “latter-day Vikings”, that they are just going for the endless conquest. No! No! This group requires a completely different set of aptitudes and a completely different type of personality. If you think that when you look at a photograph of Jeff Bezos, that he’s a latter-day Viking you have some serious conceptual problems in your mind. That’s not what we’re looking at here.

And jews will sell what they think will sell as well. I mean, things like pornography. Unfortunately vice does sell, because it appeals to our lowest and most based nature. So you will always find a healthy customer base of gamblers, of pornography addicts, of alcoholics, and so on, and so forth.

And jews over the years, certainly in the late 19th century when they first started flooding into the West in very large numbers, made a name for themselves and created a lot of antagonism by focusing on those trades and vices. Those lucrative areas.

But you’re right also the jews will know what’s healthy and what’s not for them, and what they should avoid selling. And they will make sacrifices. And when we’re talking about it not always being about the money, don’t forget that all these jewish billionaires will be very, very philanthropic towards their own community and interests. They will pump huge amounts of money into communal interests.

I mean, Sheldon Adelson did not invest millions in Trump, and these other billionaires aren’t investing millions in the Democratic Party, and so on, simply, because they happen to like Donald Trump, or Joe Biden.

They’re acting on what they perceive to be the broader jewish interests of upholding the commitment to zionism and pursuing jewish interests generally. Whether that’s donating massive amounts to organizations like the ADL, promoting gay marriage, which is, of course, really was a jewish hedge fund project led by people like Cliff Asness and Paul Singer.

You know, you have jewish billionaires so thanks for that kind of stuff. It’s a willingness to part with their money if it’s viewed as in group communal interests. Or, as you say, if it’s going to help them get some kind of revenge on the people and the culture they feel has very mortally wounded them over the centuries, based on no matter how bankrupt an interpretation of history.

Frodi Midjord: Yeah. I mean, I did a show with Tai, my co-host, on film episodes. We did a show on films dealing with the Leopold and Loeb case. We did that I think was three days ago Sunday, yeah. And one thing I said there was that, just the fact that they are outsiders, that they are wealthy, that they are intelligent, and that they cannot relate to the society they live in. They do not feel like they are a part of that society. That alone is enough to make them hostile, or to not have any sympathies for that society. And that sort of brings out their psychopathic traits in that case.

And I mean, there’s also just on the personality spectrum the overwhelming over-representation of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome which is emotionally. I mean, it’s a part of Asperger’s, for example, that you are more emotionally callous, right? I mean, there are many of these elements that go into explaining these traits and why they are over represented.

But I definitely think that the fact that they are outsiders and that they have been outsiders for centuries, and that they choose to be outsiders. It’s sort of like gypsies, right? Gypsies have been invited to sort of become a part of society repeatedly throughout European history. But they choose not to, right? They choose the outsider’s status and mentality. And that brings out a sort of a lack of sympathy for the people around you, right?

Andrew Joyce: Yeah. I mean, some months ago I wrote an essay, a long essay, nearly nine thousand words, on the merits and inadequacies of middleman minority theory and explaining the jews.

And you get this explanation over time that jews were money lenders and this, that, and the other, because it was just kind of accidental, or they just kind of fulfilled this role. And there are kind of comparisons that can be made with the overseas Chinese, and the Parsis, and certain other diaspora populations that have been involved in trading among hosts and so on, and so forth.

And I looked at this. And I dug into the depths of the theory. And even those who right at the heart of the origins of the theory weren’t that convinced that it really applied all that well to jews. Who really for the most part represent a unique case.

And one of the things that they said was that in a lot of these other populations it’s a modern example of becoming a middleman minority, and so on, and so forth. And the trading patterns that they had.

But with the jews, it wasn’t a kind of environmentally conditioned middleman minority status. It’s that it’s so cultural with them. And it goes right back probably to the Book of Exodus, if you want to look at the jews as having this ingrained diaspora people’s mentality. Where they are kind of persecuted, outside, exiled group. That this is self-chosen.

And in the essay I basically said:

“That they had adopted the middleman role as a raison d’etre of life.”

This was the part of life that they chose for themselves. I mean, we can go back into The Merchant of Venice. And we can talk about these people voluntarily wanted to go and spend time in the ghetto, because it was financially lucrative. And, you know, Martin Luther, and On the Jews and Their Lies, he raged. He’s like:

“Why are all these jews here anyway? We didn’t go to Jerusalem and round them all up and bring them to Germany! They came here!”

And the introduction to one of the volume of essays that I’m going to publish, I’ve basically said:

“That jews when they came to Europe they knew the risks. But they decided that the risks would be worth the profit. So you come in, you adopt a really hostile role within society. It’s going to create antagonism. But you basically decide that it’s worth it to me, because the payoff’s going to be really good! I’m going to get really rich. I’m going to get really powerful! I’m going to be able to forge alliances with the elites!”

And when we look at some of the original early settlement charters, the jews would basically come to an agreement with the king that they would come in and lend capital if in return the king would section off a certain part of the town or the city with heavily fortified walls.

And to this day in England some of the oldest houses still standing once belonged to jewish moneylenders in towns like Lincoln and York. Because they were the only homes that were built of stone at the time. All the old wooden houses, and things have long since rotted away and disappeared.

But the jews houses still stand. And some of them have been turned into publishes called “The jews House”! They’re still there, because they were made of stone. They were the strongest houses built.

This was the arrangement and the agreement that the jews came to when they decided they were going to come to Europe. It was a gamble. It’s a gamble they thought was worth the effort. And you’re right that over historical time you kind of develop a selection for these gambling types. These people who are willing to risk it all. And who have this kind of single-minded focus.

And again if we want to come back to The Merchant of Venice. Just as Shylock was intent on getting his pound of flesh, regardless of all reason, jewish groups have been very intent on getting rid of The Merchant of Venice, regardless of the realities of that the play is actually rather subtle. That it can be read in any number of ways. And the fact that even today, you know how many people even in our schools now are reading Shakespeare? It’s on the decline. It’s declining fast. It’s one of the great tragedies of modern cultures that we don’t pay attention to the classics.

But the jews only really discovered — in a big way — Shakespeare in the 1890s. Because, you know, they weren’t in the Russian shtetls, reading Shakespeare. They were reading the Talmud and all of the rest of it. But they come to the West in the 1890s, early 1900s.

And I think the first Yiddish translation of the play appears on something like 1893 in New York. And at first it’s kind of Shylock is kind of a hero to them, because the first Yiddish translation isn’t called The Merchant of Venice. It’s called, in Yiddish, something like “shilak dirk coiffman”, whatever it was anyway.

In Yiddish it was something like “Shylock the Moneylender, …”, or “…, the Merchant of Venice”. They made Shylock the main character, because to them he was the main character. And he was heroic, apart from the fact that at the end he’s converted, more, or less against his will to Christianity. I’m not sure if that part was even included in the Yiddish translation.

But I do know the jews hate that part! In the “Trials of the Diaspora — History of English Anti-semitism” by the virulent, I should say, jewish activist Anthony Julius — who also was once the lawyer in the David Irving trials — Julius basically just pours total scorn on Shakespeare for having Shylock converted to Christianity at the end!

And I know that the literary figure Harold Bloom, who passed away I think last year, he also said that that was a low point in the career of Shakespeare, was to finish the play with the religious conversion of Shylock.

But it’s been very difficult for jews to let go of this play. The first major censorship efforts began in the 1920s in the United States, they spread to the UK. And I think through the 1980s, once the ADL really had started to peak in its in it’s power, they began a rash of activity to try and get a banned in schools across the United States.

I know, for example, that they managed successfully to get a banned in schools in Michigan for a while. In Canada it was banned in several schools in Ontario in 1986. And 1988 it was banned in several school districts in New York.

And even most recently when you ask me what we should talk about in this particular podcast, the reason why I said The Merchant of Venice is, because one of the top children’s authors of Britain, the guy called Michael Marpurgo has recently released a collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Kind of rewritten for a nine, or ten year old audience.

But one of the plays that was left out was, or the only play that was left out, was The Merchant of Venice. And he explained his reasons as being that it was anti-semitic. And Morphergo, I would say, has at least some relations of the jewish faith, or, if not that, then certainly has been brainwashed by the propaganda that’s been going on against the play.

But this is something that’s still a live issue. The play is over 400 years old. It’s still at the nexus of the confrontation between jews and Europeans. It has a lot to say. It’s worth paying attention to.

In the 1930s the Germans put on something like 50 major productions of the play. They saw in it — perhaps more than has deserved actually — a strikingly anti-semitic depiction. I think it’s more three-dimensional than that I think, as I say, it has a lot more depth to it than Marlowe’s play. But both are deserving of attention and serious consideration.

[51:45]

Frodi Midjord: Right. I just wanted to add to the fact that the jews have chosen their status as outsiders. Hitler, memorably and famously wrote, you know, 20 years before Israel was founded that, yeah, they say they want to create a country of their own. But they don’t want to live there! [chuckling] You know, they’re still going to want to live as minorities among us.

And it’s the same thing with this documentary that came out probably around 10 years ago, called “Defamation”, by this Israeli guy Yoav Shamir, or something like that. Where jewish school children go to Poland to sort of be marinated in the sort of victim status, that everyone around them is hostile to them so they have they reinforce this mentality all the time.

Going back to the play though, I think one other aspect that I found interesting is that Antonio says that it’s pointless, during the trial, he says that it’s pointless to plead with Shylock. Because he doesn’t enter the negotiation in good faith. So, and I mean, to put it kindly this is the group dynamics that appear in multi-ethnic societies.

Because, this is something that liberals and individualists don’t understand. And that is that people are tribal. And therefore a society, … I mean, because what Shylock tries to do, is he tries to take advantage of the letter of the law to manipulate and twist the law into doing what he wants. Because he doesn’t enter into the legal negotiation in good faith. And he ends up, of course, being the victim of the same tactic where the law is twisted sort of ridiculously against him [chuckling] and he ends up losing.!

But I just think this is a central point as well, that in order to have a law you have to have some sort of loyalty. It’s sort of presupposed. Because society isn’t governed by laws alone. And it’s sort of like at least the sort of mythology of America and American conservatives that America was founded by documents and like a contract.

But that is never the case, because in order to have a law functioning you need a sense of loyalty and the sense of community. And if you don’t have that, no laws and no documents will be able to keep society together. Because, if you don’t have a sense of community. And if you don’t have people who are loyal to the same community, then people will start trying to exploit the law like Shylock does. And that will lead to just a breakdown of the law and of social trust and of society in general.

And that’s what we’ve seen throughout the modern European history over the last few decades that everything just breaks down, because you don’t have this fundamental aspect of society, that is a sense of community.

Andrew Joyce: You’re right that, you know, Act Four Scene One is what you’re talking about there. The court scene go. And you’re right that Antonio does highlight the fact that Shylock does not appear to be engaging in the proceedings in good faith. And in Antonio’s words he says:

“I am arm’d to suffer, with the quietness of spirit, the very tyranny and rage of his.”

So he’s basically saying that:

“There’s no way out of this for me.”

He says:

“That no lawful means can carry me out of his envy’s reach.”

So there’s a point at which Antonio was saying:

“Look Shylock is here in court. But it’s merely to fulfill the letter of the law. The spirit of the law is completely absent from his thinking and from his heart.”

Which is true. And, of course, all of that comes crumbling around Shylock, because Portia, in disguise as a young lawyer, stranger to the city, basically outwits him. And this itself is a genre of literature of the time and which persisted actually until the 19th century, where you get these short stories of these highly aggressive and smart jews who ultimately get outwitted. Sometimes by a peasant boy, or something like this. This is a genre of literature that exists at the time.

But the question of the law. I mean, jews have a very special relationship to “legalism”, I should say, in general. I mean, it’s a fact of history that in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the United States and Europe also, jews who were going into money lending would also be given rigorous training in the law prior to going to doing it.

The reason being was that eventually they would get some people who would default. And the jews wanted to have a good grounding in all aspects of the kind of the nooks and crannies, and twists and turns, and small print, of all the laws to make sure they could get their money back, plus their interest, and so on, and so forth.

So Shylock, within the tradition, is actually quite weak! Because he doesn’t appear to have, … He knows the basics of the law. He basically says:

“Look I have a note saying that this is going to be my Bond. I want to clear my Bond.”

But other than that, he’s not very legally sophisticated. Which allows the very smart and quick-witted Portia, in disguise. Basically a young girl, you know, a little bit of an airhead. She’s one of the lighter characters within the play. She outwits them by simply saying:

“Right, your note here allows you to take a point of flesh. It doesn’t say you can take any blood! So you can take the flesh, but you’re not allowed to cut him, because he’ll bleed. So go ahead and take the flesh!”

And he’s like:

“Well I can’t!”

And then Portia’s like:

“Well, wait a minute. If you were planning to take his flesh, that might have killed him. So it looks like you, a jew, are trying to kill this Christian. And in the law it says if a jew tries to kill a Christian he’s fit to forfeit his own life! So you’re not facing sentence of death!”

And Shylock is just like, it’s just a succession of hammer blows to his entire legal strategy, which was far too simplistic. And he basically gets outsmarted completely! And wanders off under pain of losing his entire fortune, to get baptized into Christianity. And he just basically loses everything.

And some people view this as a strategy to gain sympathy for Shylock. But actually, I think it’s a way of Shakespeare crushing him and his desire for ethnic revenge. And I think that’s why it’s particularly a source of grievance to jews to this day, for example, with Anthony Julius. They hate this scene within the book, because it’s the total crushing of Shylock’s desire for revenge to the point where he can never again even think about trying to obtain a revenge on Antonio, or any other Christian.

Frodi Midjord: Right! We have one question and it’s from Sam. I’m not going to say the last name:

“Given that the play was, …”

And this is through Entropy I should add:

“Given that the play was written when the jews were expelled from England, how much of an effect did that have on its tone and theme? Would it have been written upon their re-admission into England later on, or were these kinds of attitudes toward jews still very ingrained in England around the mid 1600s?”

So yeah did you get the question?

Andrew Joyce: Yeah. First of all the jews were formally exiled from England in 1290 by King Edward. And on paper certainly were supposed to be that there were no Jews between 1290 and the re-admission of the Jews under Cromwell.

However we do know that there were Jewish traders and jewish merchants, predominantly Sephardic, in London. One of whom was a physician to Queen Elizabeth during that period.

So the ban was not total. It was quasi-hidden. It was kind of an open secret. It wasn’t something that was discussed. It wasn’t something that was put up for discussion. And they were just they were relatively quiet, and relatively inoffensive, to be honest.

But in terms of how the play fits into broader European discourse on jews, there was a discourse which was cultural, which derived in part from the Bible, but from other sources as well. The trading of folk stories, folios of plays. And someone as worldly as Shakespeare, who read widely in literature, would have been familiar with the themes and contexts, and content that was being produced on the continent.

But the English despite exiling the jews always had a “cultural knowledge” of jews. This is the phrase that I always use “a cultural knowledge”. Because we have a lot of people today who don’t know jews personally, but they have a cultural knowledge of jews.

Some of their cultural knowledge is junk! For example, if they base their knowledge of jews on watching some stupid comedy with a lighthearted jewish character in it. For example, … What do you call the guy? Seth Rogen. You know, you’ll get a lot of people who will know that Seth Rogen, or Adam Sandler, are Jewish. And they’ll think that’s your typical jew.

But there are other forms of cultural knowledge about jews which come down from different areas within culture. It could be religion. It could be political. It could be cultural and song, for example. And a lot of these things are lost to us now over time.

But the English never forgot about the jews. As Anthony Julius says with much bitterness in The Trials of the Diaspora”, the jews were written into song. And the English, more, or less, celebrated the fact that they had conquered the jews and dominated them. And gotten rid of them! But the memory lingered on, just as most conquerors will remember the conquered in their songs of celebration. And for Julius, The Merchant of Venice is a song of celebration. A song of conquering the jew!

[62:22]

Frodi Midjord: Right. This is one of the things. It’s interesting that you mentioned that the English had not forgotten about the jews during the years, or the centuries, that they were sort of expelled, or not allowed to live within the country.

I’ve always thought about how likely is it that if we miraculously save this situation and we get sort of ethno-states back. And if we separate ourselves, and start living in separate countries. If that should happen how could we make sure that people understand this throughout history? So that they don’t become naive and sort of make the same mistakes again. Because that seems to just be a persistent lesson from history is that people don’t learn from history!

Andrew Joyce: The vulnerability within culture is always political instability. Don’t forget that when, … We haven’t mentioned Chaucer. We probably should have mentioned Chaucer earlier in this. But it’s another example of cultural memory. Chaucer has The Prioress’s [included in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales] as his tale, of course, which is basically a blood libel story about the murder of a young child by a jew.

But the readmission of the jews, the formal readmission of the jews, occurs in the aftermath of catastrophe. Which is the revolution in England, if you want to call it that. The beheading of Charles the First. The coming to power of Cromwell. And a shift in the spirit of the English, I should say, towards mercantilism and a focus on money. And also a shift towards radical Millennial Protestantism with this kind of eschatology about the end of the world, and on all of those notions.

So within that environment it was quite easy for Manasseh Ben Israel [1604 − 1657] the Dutch jew leader of the Dutch jewish community, and a merchant, to write to all over Cromwell basically saying:

“Look, if you grant us jews formal re-entry to England we will, on the one hand, make your country prosperous, and, on the other hand, we will help your desire for the Christian eschatological ambition.”

In other words, the second coming of Christ to come into place, or come to pass. So those were the vulnerabilities. You have the collapse of Catholic England, you have the rise of a mercantilism Protestant England — this is not a slight against Protestants. I myself grew up in a Protestant household. It’s just this is the nature of what actually happened.

So political catastrophe, or a radical reshaping. And anytime there’s a dramatic shift in the culture, and the political culture, and the social culture, of a country, there’s always a vulnerability that certain things will be dispensed with, and that certain good ideas will be thrown out with the baby’s bathwater, so to speak. And that important lessons are forgotten. And that’s the story in the English context.

But don’t forget that there are many, many countries across Europe that exiled their jews, only for jews to be readmitted sometimes within a very short period of times and the reasons in those cases were very often that a new monarch would come to power. That this monarch would be greedy and not have had the bad experiences that the previous monarch would have had.

And I’m trying to answer a question like, “How do we stop the loss of cultural memory?” It could have thousands of answers Frodi. We could go on and on. But the biggest prophylactic against such a thing happening is probably to maintain that cultural memory as strongly as possible so that it exists strongest in the population at large, rather than among the elites who are always liable to change. And always liable the stab the masses in the back.

Frodi Midjord: Yeah. I mean, that’s obviously the case that the elites, or at least the sort of upper middle class is the more likely to be open to these big changes, whereas the middle, … I mean, this is what the Left realized in the mid — 1900s [chuckling]. The working class they are more conservative, they are more stable, they’re not going to be open to the sort of transgender weird changes [chuckling] that the elites want to implement. So they have to direct their message to a different class.

Is there anything else we should say about the history of the reception of The Merchant of Venice? You wrote this article about Biden and the word Shylock. And you mentioned there that they stopped using the word “Shylocking” as a word for usury in legal texts [chuckling] that’s quite funny!

Andrew Joyce: Yeah. I mean it’s all the rage at the minute to talk about censorship. I’ve been writing for The Occidental Observer for nearly 10 years. And if there’s one thing I’ve kept returning to, it’s censorship. Because it’s at the heart of the problems that we face. It is this gradual restriction of language.

And when you restrict language, you shape, in the negative sense, ways of seeing. “Ways of seeing” being Kevin MacDonald’s phraseology for the way in which jews tend to manipulate culture. They shape “ways of seeing”. So we are having our ways of seeing gradually restricted. And part of that is the elimination of terms like “Shylock” and “Shylocking”, which have vanished from certain American legislatures to describe certain harmful usurious activities.

But it’s interesting that Shylock certainly is, … I mean, I titled that piece “Joe Biden and the Ghost of Shylock”, because the ghost of Shylock still lives with us. You can erase the words, and all the rest of it, but the ghost of Shylock lives on.

And Shakespeare was true genius! I mean, you cannot demolish, or get rid of this play. I mean, even those sections of speech that I read earlier. I mean, they’re pure poetry! And they say so much in the course of like 10 lines that it might take me 10,000 words to try and say, because the depth is there, if you treat it right. If you treat the text right, you’ll get that depth out of it.

But everywhere where the play has been translated, … I mean, it was translated into Japanese for the first time in 1885. And for a long time it shaped — and probably to be honest still does shape — the way that the Japanese see the jews, because Japan has a quite vibrant anti-semitic scene, which we may find quite difficult to believe.

But I think when we spoke about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, there are many, many, many Japanese translations of it. And there are also many riffs on it. So there are a lot of Japanese authors who will sell their books in mainstream bookshops, that are basically about sort of jewish conspiracies! And the Japanese to this day — if you trace the lineage back of their perception of the jews — it goes back to The Merchant of Venice, which was the first Shakespearean play to be used to teach Shakespeare in Japanese schools, in 1885.

[69:42]

Frodi Midjord: Right! Yeah I like that that term “ways of seeing”. The feminists they tend to use the term, you know, that you have the “male gaze”. That you see through things through a male perspective. When you see a film looking at women in a particular way, that’s like the “male gaze”.

And we see everything through the “jewish gaze”. We see it from their perspective, especially parts of our history. I mean, the reason that the National Socialist era in Germany was “evil” wasn’t that they were evil to the German people it’s, because they were evil to jews. And that’s why we should think that it’s the most evil era in human history.

And I think very few people stop to think about that. [chuckling] That the suffering of this particular group is the worst of all, because we see all of our culture, and all of our values are sort of filtered through that it’s in sort of Swedish classical old-school Right-wing circles they call it “Moses glasögon” which means “Moses glasses” [chuckling]. You see everything through the glasses of Moses.

Andrew Joyce: Well recently I saw on Twitter this vetting that’s been going on of the National Guard around Biden’s inauguration. About how they’re being examined for tattoos and they’re having their history delved into. I tweeted and I’m basically saying that our entire culture now seems to be oriented around the anxieties and ambitions of jews!

This is insanity! This is insanity, to have that level of paranoia! But paranoia is about to go viral! I mean, we’re in an increasingly paranoid society. Paranoid in the wrong way. We’re paranoid about what White people might do. And that’s a jewish paranoia! We’ve adopted at wholesale.

Frodi Midjord: Yeah. I mean this is something that I’ve said and it’s probably controversial to say. I said it in a conversation I had with Kevin MacDonald’s many years ago. I said that:

“When jews become overwhelmingly powerful they will default, jewish power will default to a sort of Soviet-style totalitarianism.”

Because they perceive themselves as hated and everyone around them being hostile. And I mean, they’re just a couple of percent of the whole population, so they think everyone is hostile. So the only chance they have of being safe is an extremely totalitarian society! Where they can control everything in detail!

Because otherwise they’re afraid, because everyone is, for no reason at all, of course, hostile! And this is sort of a self-perpetuating cycle right? Because they have this paranoia. And it’s just a fact. And it’s been a fact. And I think that’s true.

I think when they will have overwhelming power in a society they will default, they will try to default to that type of totalitarianism. And I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it yet.

Andrew Joyce: When you combine paranoia with a gambler’s instinct, you get an inevitable and constant escalation towards conflict! The risk-taking mixed with the paranoia, the desire for security, is that you will go to any lengths in order to secure your security, in order to make yourself feel safe.

And, of course, I’ve written about this in the actions of Moshe Kantor, European jewish Congress leader. He’s also involved with the World Jewish Congress. He also has connections with the ADL.

And this document, this manifest, that he’s produced, called “Manifesto for Secure Tolerance”. “Secure tolerance” being real Orwellian language. Because what the Manifesto for Secure Tolerance will do — and it is in the early stages of becoming legislation throughout the European Union — is it will make it mandatory for governments to ensure that their schools teach “tolerance” and “diversity”, that all public broadcasters will produce tolerance and diversity propaganda on their television stations.

That racism and anti-semitism will be made fully illegal. And that the prison sentence for these crimes will be around, in the region, of around 10 years. So in other words if you are found guilty of an instance of anti-semitism then you will get 10 years in prison.

Frodi Midjord: Is that in America?

Andrew Joyce: Well, he has links to the ADL, but this is primarily for Europe, for now. If you look at my essay “Moshe Kantor Secure Tolerance”, you put that into The Occidental Observer it will bring it up. I can’t remember the exact title of the piece. But “Secure Tolerance”, and if you don’t believe me you can Google the document yourself, “Manifesto for Secure Tolerance”. And you can follow the paper trail to the European Union on it.

But he’s been working in conjunction with Jewish legalistic experts like Raphael Cohen Almagor. And one, or two other zionists from Israel who’ve come up with this legislation. I mean, it makes hate speech legislation look like a slap on the wrist! I mean, this stuff is bad! And it’s right around the corner.

This guy is a billionaire jewish oligarch. And what reason he has for being involved at the highest levels of European politics, I don’t know. I do know that his “pet”, who works for him right now in his organization, is the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair. This guy has links to the global elite, basically. He is the global elite! And they will be enthusiastic in implementing these laws as soon as it’s possible.

So Biden coming in he staffed his cabinet with I think 18 so-called, The Forward’s [jewish newspaper] calling them “engaged jews” at the minute. That means that they’re both zionist and fully on board with the censorship agenda. That plus the fact that in Europe we’re seeing that the screws are tightening would suggest to me that we are about to enter, as Churchill said:

“Not the end, and not the beginning, but perhaps the beginning of the end.”

We are going to see a shift I think over the next four years. So it’s time to be alert, to read up as much as you can on the things that are genuinely coming up, rather than kind of Qanon delusions about what Trump’s going to pull off at the last minute of this inauguration. Believe you me the inauguration will go on without a hitch!

No. Don’t be distracted. Keep your eyes on the real developments, the stuff that you can research right now, today, in the next 20 minutes. The stuff that you can find that’s in the public view, and yet obscure. It’s hiding in plain sight. But it’s there if you’re smart enough and alert enough to be able to look up the information that you require. But this stuff is around the corner!

We’re dealing with Shylock! We’re dealing with the ghost of Shylock! We’re dealing with the paranoia, we’re dealing with the rage, and above all we’re dealing with the revenge!

[76:52]

[IN PROGRESS]

[87:17]

(Readers: please enter any corrections in the comments section.)

END

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See Also

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Luke Ford – Andrew Joyce On The Jewish Question — Apr 17, 2017 — Transcript

David Duke Interviews Dr Andrew Joyce — TRANSCRIPT

Red Ice Radio: Dr Andrew Joyce – The History of Jewish Influence — TRANSCRIPT (Part 1)

Red Ice Radio: Dr Andrew Joyce – The History of Jewish Influence — TRANSCRIPT (Part 2)

TOO – Andrew Joyce’s Podcast – Talmud and Taboo — Part 01 – Jun 30, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce’s Podcast – T & T No. 1 – The Skype Directory — Jul 15, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T No 2 – And then one day… – Jul 20, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T No 3 – Kicking Over the Bucket – Jul 27, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 4 – The Man Who Put the Jews on Trial – Aug 3, 2020

Andrew Joyce – T&T 5 – The Return of the Bucket – Aug 5, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 6 – The Antisemite’s Handbook – Aug 11, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 7 – The TOO Takedown – Aug 14, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 8 – SEMITISM – Aug 28, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – Trumpism, Bidenism, and the System – Nov 9, 2020 — Transcript

Guide to Kulchur – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Andrew Joyce – Nov 22, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – BLM – Irish Edition – Dec 31, 2020 – Transcript

Horus – Discussing the ‘Russian Pogroms’ with Andrew Joyce – Jan 20, 2021 — Transcript

Guide to Kulchur – The Merchant of Venice – Abusive Victim-Identity Syndrome – Andrew Joyce – Jan 20, 2021 — Transcript

Barbara Lerner Spectre

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Version 5: Mar 21, 2021 — Added See Also Part 3 image and links.

Version 4: Feb 3, 2021 — Added last 8 minutes of transcript. Total transcript completed = 77/87 mins.

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Version 2: Feb 1, 2021 — Added 10 more minutes of transcript. Total transcript completed = 62/87 mins.

Version 1: Jan 31, 2021 — Published post. Total transcript completed = 52/87 mins.

[00:00]

Ford: I’m here with Andrew Joyce, who’s got a book coming out called “Talmud and Taboo”. So Andrew, can you to tell me about your forthcoming book?

Joyce: Yes. Well anyone who has taken a look at my articles at the Occidental Observer, or in the Occidental Quarterly and some of the other sort of Alt-Right journals will be familiar with the subject matter that I deal with. And the book is no exception to that.

The book really concerns, in the broadest capacity possible jewish influence, jewish history, and aspects of jewish culture, from the perspective of a White European who possesses, I would argue, a level of ethnocentrism that would be equivalent to many within the, I suppose, inner core of the jewish community, to the extent that it would represent people who are highly ethnocentric, or certainly care for their ethnic interests and see themselves as a group to a very strong degree.

So the book, I guess, is the response of a highly identified, strongly identified European against similar ethnic feelings within the jewish community.

Breaking it down it looks at jewish influence in academia, in particular the writing of history. And also in contemporary politics. There’s some nineteenth century politics and I also look at some offshoots of literature and how jewish influence has manifested itself in relation to efforts to promote the concept of jewish genius, with particular focus on, Spinoza and some other figures.

The book really is a collection of what I have regarded as my best materials at the Occidental Observer and the Occidental Quarterly, with some new material, but most importantly the [word unclear] edition.

What really makes it a book is I’ve written a quite lengthy introduction of some fifteen thousand words, or so, in which I try and condense, not jewish history in its entirety, but certainly the history of jews in Europe into a kind of easily digestible narrative, pulling out some of the main themes in that history. Some of the major problematic areas of interaction between Jews and Europeans.

Ford: What precisely is your ethnic background? Are you English? Are you Irish? What are you?

Joyce: My own ethnic background, I actually have no Irish in me. I was born in Ireland. But I was raised in several different countries actually. I come from a military background. And in terms of my immediate ethnic background my parents, there’s English, Welsh, and Scottish there. And nothing else, as far as I can tell. I’ve done quite extensive work on my own family tree. And certainly on my father’s side I’ve researched back to the fourteenth century. I haven’t been able to go back anywhere as far on all my mother’s side, but it’s predominately English people from Yorkshire. And also the south of Wales to the extent that there were sort of English and Norman settlers in that part of Wales.

Ford: It’s interesting how dramatic the differences are between say, the English and their genetics, and the type of variety they create in the Irish. So when you had the Irish coming to the United States, it took many generations to assimilate them, because they’re much more ethnocentric than the English. And much more likely to commit crimes, and to be drunk. And it’s interesting the dramatic genetic differences, you know, within that still pretty similar geographic locale and how they play out in the way group statistics play out.

Joyce: The Irish are fascinating! I have many, many Irish friends. And, I have a great deal of respect for them I would agree with you that the Irish possessed a heightened sense of ethnocentrism, to a degree. It’s kind of become perversely plastic and the late 20th century. In the way that we have this kind of “plastic paddy” phenomena, where you have the sort of the orange beards and the Leprechaun hats that accompany St Patrick’s Day tomfoolery.

But yes, going back into the middle the nineteenth century, certainly through, say the 1940s there was a very, very strong drive for Irish nationalism. A very strong emphasis on the importance of ethnocentrism within Ireland during that period. There are substantial differences between the English and the Irish.

I think overall those differences have been exaggerated at times. And some of the recent genetic studies, for example a book called “Blood of the Isles” it was discovered that the English and the Irish, and also the Scots and Welsh share a lot more in common genetically that was ever thought previously. And this was down to the fact that the study of English DNA revealed that there was a lot more remnants of the pre Celtic even, and certainly pre-Germanic sort of settlers within, … The remnants were still there of their DNA.

So this kind of image that people have in their minds of the Anglo Saxons, of all of all these German tribes migrating from Saxony, and Freesia, and some of those German lands, and basically pushing the Celtic or pre-Celtic peoples into the Celtic countries of Wales or Scotland, are largely a myth. There was a great deal of intermixing there. Certainly between a relatively small group of Saxons, and many of the indigenous tribes that the Romans would have been familiar with, for example.

So yes, there are differences there. I think they’ve been overplayed. But certainly if you look at the studies produced by someone like Richard Lyn on IQ. The IQ gap between English and Irish has been very substantial at times. And the Irish IQ actually has been remarkably low for Western Europe. It was on par I think with, or was it, with Romania and some other incredibly impoverished European countries.

Ford: You’ve mentioned that the beginning that you are someone with a strong European identity. What about English identity vs European identity?

Joyce: Yeah, this is a question I get asked quite frequently. I was actually contacted not so long ago on social media by a guy who, he had a question, I think he was French. But he asked me:

“Did I think it was right, …”

It was a hypothetical question:

“Did I think it was right, for example, if a sizable German population came into France and assumed positions all power and influence in the top levels of French government, …”

And he basically said:

“You’re describing yourself as a White nationalist. So, if these are fellow Whites, at kind of problem would you have with such a scenario?”

The first thing I said, well, I conceded that the problem that he posed was a good one. But at the same time it was quite unlikely scenario. And thirdly, in order to give him a straight answer to it. I said:

“No. I don’t think that that would be a good idea.”

I think that, because of the threat, some people would argue obviously against me. Certainly a Social Justice Warrior say there is no threat to the White race currently. But I do perceive it there to be a broad demographic threat to the White race as a whole. And I do believe that the White race is being targeted for what it is.

For those reasons alone, I think we need strategies which are in some respects international. I think that some of the threats that are being posed to us are international in nature, and certainly their international in their scope and in their strategy. And we need a response that is going to work on that level.

For example, if I was to support any sort of White nationalist government, or English nationalist government that is race aware and is keen to redress the demographic decline, et cetera, et cetera, such a government may well, hypothetically, take hold over England and then succeed to some extent. But the international community would still bring enough pressure to bear on that country, on England, in that hypothetical scenario, to the extent that any gains that it may make would be minuscule.

And certainly if you look at the modern apparatus of international government sanctions, and the worst case scenario of military responses, I don’t think that any White country can go it alone, so to speak. I believe in a kind of pan European strategy, if you will. And by that I don’t mean anything remotely similar to the European Union.

But, I do believe that Whites must learn to come together and operate in different nations, towards the same goals, in the same way, for example, the jews have all operated across borders in order to look after their interests and achieve their ethnic goals.

Ford: At the beginning of his book, The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald makes the point that people of northwestern European heritage tend to be about the least ethnocentrist people around while, jews and other Middle Eastern people tend to be very highly ethnocentric. But, you know, under a certain level of stress people from northern Europe can start to become increasingly ethnocentric. I’m wondering how much of your strong European identity is a response to say, strong jewish identity, and the challenge that presents to your people?

Joyce: I would say that plays a large part in the development of my own ethnocentrism. I think that ethnocentrism can arise from a number of positions within the mentality of the person. One way in which ethnocentrism can develop is on an emotional level.

So for example in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, in daily interactions with with jews many of the peasant populations lost money, they lost possessions, whether it was through the money lending system, the tavern system, petty pawn brokering, or different things. In general and cumulatively, and together, the Russian peasantry was losing out to the Jews. And this gave way to a groundswell of resentment, and to anger. And I think that was a huge point in fueling the development of ethnocentrism in that part of the world, at that time.

Have I ever been ripped off by a Jew? Or have I ever been financially exploited or otherwise? No! My own journey towards a more ethnocentric outlook bears a a lot of similarity to Kevin MacDonald actually, about how he describes his development. I think in his introduction to Culture of Critique he does say something like:

“This has been an intellectual journey. When I wrote ‘A People that Dwell Alone’ I was sort of pushing this from a purely intellectual standpoint but as time has gone on I discovered more things. I’ve become more aware of my own ethnic interests.”

And I think that my own journey has been roughly similar, although I think I started significantly younger age than Kevin MacDonald. I’m not sure what age he was when he started writing Culture of Critique. Certainly by the time I was about twenty years old, I had a fairly well developed sense of ethnocentrism.

One of the things that I would add actually my sense of ethnocentrism was, even to this day when I write something like “my people”, or “our people”. These phrases actually don’t sit well, they don’t come out of my mouth or my pen easily. It’s still something that I’m not exactly sure why. But I find it difficult. It doesn’t slip off the tongue. And certainly there’s a lot within my own culture that currently I’m not very happy with. There’s a lot in the past that I’m proud of, but sometimes it can difficult .

One of the great things that Western Europeans, or Europeans in general are good at, perhaps human beings are good at is, a kind of self-criticism, or a critical approach of one’s self. And sometimes that takes a conscious overpowering in order to really assert, that:

“Yes, okay, my tribe has its flaws, but it’s my tribe! And it has to be defended if it is to have a future.”

So in terms of ethnocentrism, yes, it’s fairly strong in me. It’s not, I wouldn’t say it’s sort of ADL strong, or SPLC strong! [chuckling] But it’s definitely stronger than the average. And the reason it’s got there is, I think is largely due to an intellectual process. At times there are things that have infuriated me during that intellectual process. But overall, it’s been through study and observation of facts, as I have interpreted them.

[16:18]

Ford: I think I heard in a previous podcast that you did. That in high school you wrote a critique of Schindler’s List, so you must have been pretty red pilled on the Jewish Question in high school!

Joyce: Well the thing is at that point I knew very little about Jews in high school. When I was very young my mother sent me to a Presbyterian Sunday school. And it was one of those branches of the Presbyterian, … A small breakaway factions of the Presbyterian Church where jews were revered! And my first encounter with jews was that they were the apple of God’s eye. That they originated in some far off sunny land. It certainly wasn’t cloudy, windy, rainy. Northwest Europe.

And they had all these exotic fruits, you know, there was talk of pomegranates in the Old Testament. And all this was made much of and discussed with great fanfare within that Sunday school. But between that very young age that I attended that school, and that essay that I wrote on Schindler’s List, there was nothing. There was a blank space!

I didn’t encounter any jews, read anything about jews. It was only really when I encountered the high school curriculum, in which the rise of the Nazis, the “Holocaust”. And within the curriculum was Schindler’s List that they really came out. And even at that stage, when I critiqued the film, from what I thought was just a purely analytical perspective. But I should also say that even at that young age my personality was quite contrarian.

And so I was led to believe that this was a film I should feel sad, or that I should have great sympathy with the victims as portrayed in this film. It would have been much my personality at the time to adopt the opposite approach. So I would have adopted a kind of a hostile approach to the mainstream narrative presented within that film. I think anyway.

This is me, you know, some, almost two decades later reading something back to my younger self. A flawed exercise perhaps, and certainly I need to be very careful in how much I read back into my younger self.

But was I well versed in the JQ [Jewish Question] at the age of fifteen, or sixteen? No, I wasn’t. I wouldn’t claim to be that precocious or a child that was well read at that age. I just had a film in front of me in which I saw flaws. And certainly had some level of bias in its presentation. And I just wanted to argue against it.

Ford: So what about at university? What did you study? And how did that bear on your developing response to the jewish question?

Joyce: I studied history and literature. And that is something that I stuck with throughout my academic career. Again I didn’t study anything explicitly jewish at any point during that. I did focus on twentieth century United States history.

And that really didn’t even offer much scope in terms of looking at Jews. I did encounter some reference with the jews, or I think, I guess from the age of eighteen, or nineteen. From Nixon, the mentions that he made in the Watergate tapes, for example. And I also encountered Jews again through, I guess a more in-depth study of the “Holocaust” during that time. But only ever as part of a broad sweep, you know, this general classes on the 20th century international history, 20th century European history.

But at the age of, I think it was coming to the end of twenty, I might have turned twenty one. And I was wanting a good meaty book that was also controversial. I just wanted something that would capture my interest. And I heard about this book by Daniel Goldhagen, called the [word unclear] Willing Executioners [? Hitler’s Willing Executioners]. And it was a book that was largely hammered actually by the critics. And certainly I read many criticisms from some jewish critics, who said that it was awful. Purely from a professional standpoint.

But I wanted to know [chuckling] what “bad history” looked like! So I read it, and I thought it was actually fascinating! I actually liked the way Goldhagen wrote. It was a very well written book, even if in terms of its argument, it was very deeply flawed. But I enjoyed reading it, none the less.

It stimulated me to start reading independently, and use some of the skills I learned picking up my degree and later my PhD., into a broader study of what went wrong in Europe, in the early 1940s. Because there were certainly mass killings. And they certainly did occur right across Europe at the time. And I wanted to know why. I wanted to dig deeper.

So I got Paul Johnson’s “History of the Jews” and started from there. And then I just branched out. And I read as much as I could, whenever I could. And over the years that knowledge accumulated and expanded, and I started developing my own ideas.

But within a couple of years really started with my current work with Kevin MacDonald, which was both affirming in a sense. In the sense that I found echoes of my own thoughts in his work. And also it was directional in the sense that it pointed me in the areas that I wanted to go, or felt that I should go.

And certainly having read, even by the time, I think I just finished reading Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century”, when I find Kevin MacDonald’s work. And at that time I had read one, or two, maybe three or four actually of the nineteenth century seminal texts on the jewish question. And for all of their plus points there was a certain vulgarity or bluntness of approach in many of those texts that wasn’t there with Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald’s work is very clear! It’s very exact! And that has very unique in terms of writing about the jewish question.

Historically, writing for the jewish question has involved lots of emotion, a little bit of analysis, and quite a lot of, just bitterness! Which is understandable. It is an emotive and emotional subject matter when you look at it’s, all it’s implications, for jews underpinnings, and Europeans.

But it has taken us a long time to get to the point where Europeans can write at least somewhat objectively about this subject matter. It’s been getting better over time. I think that Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” actually was a leap forward in the sense that there’s a break from some of the writings, certainly from French writers like Drumont, [words unclear], and some of the, … Well Germany always had a traditional sort of intellectual anti-semitism, if you want to give it that title.

But MacDonald’s work really was, marked, a huge break from the past.

[24:57]

Ford: We keep talking about the Jewish questions, so my definition of the jewish question is that it’s Gentiles are asking:

“What do we do about the jews in our country?” [chuckling]

 

What’s your understanding of the definition of the Jewish Question?

Joyce: That’s fairly, that is nice and concise! I actually like it! But, it’s almost like we’re jumping the gun a little bit, in terms of what do we do. For me the jewish question is really two questions. What we’re asking when we talk about the jewish question is, do Jews really possess more influence in European societies than they should?

And then sort of the second part of the jewish question would be, what you just said there. Would be like, well what do we do about it? How do we manage this? And within each of those questions are a lot of smaller questions. The jewish question is a nice title for what are endless socio-economic, political, and cultural questions.

And I think that before we talk talk in any sense of about what are we going to do about jews. We really need to be very careful about what we mean about jewish influence, how we understand it, where next itself manifest, how it makes itself manifest.

And only when we fully understand those things can we even begin to discuss remedies. Now I know that in Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald says something along the likes of, we might need something like affirmative action in order to redress certain manifestations of jewish influence in European societies.

For example, jewish over-representation in the universities, and in some professions. This has been attempted before. It’s been attempted countless times before with the quota system, with the numerous clauses that were in place in the United States. When did that end? I think sometime in the 1920s.

Ford: No, like the 1960s.

Joyce: 1960s? Wow!

So efforts to kind of curb via legislation, or codes, or admissions requirements, and things like this, they have kind of come and gone. They were also in place in Russia. They were also present in different parts of Western Europe at various times.

Then they were an effort at a solution. And for me, it’s just so far down the line I never think about solutions, to use [chuckling] a dubious term, “solutions to the jewish question”. I’m more interested in simply investigating it’s manifestations.

Ford: How old were you when you read Culture of Critique?

Joyce: I think I was maybe twenty two at the time. I think twenty two.

Ford: And I don’t know anyone can be the same after reading that book.

Joyce: No. It was transformative! As I said I was already on some of the track. Culture of Critique wasn’t the first MacDonald’s books that I read. I was, as I said, I was predominately interested in anti-semitism. I came away from Goldhagen’s book wanting to know more about why people didn’t like jews.

As I said, I didn’t have any personal interaction with them growing up, so I reached the age of my early twenty’s, without ever having met a single jew.

And I was fascinated! I just thought:

“Why all this trouble? Why all these centuries of conflict and bloodshed? There must be a reason.”

So my own investigation did not begin with wanting to find out about jews, or the Jewish Question. My investigation started with wanting to find out about anti-semitism, and why it came about.

So the first book that I read of MacDonald’s was his book on anti-semitism, “Separation and Its Discontents”, which was an evolutionary analysis of anti-semitisms it was, and remains, my favorite of MacDonald’s books. I like “Culture of Critique”. But everyone adopts a position on the jewish question that reflects some sense, some aspect of their personality. For example, Martin Luther was a thunderous preacher. And his approach to the jewish question was that of thunderous preacher. “On the Jews and Their Lies” is just a long ranting sermon about jews, and about eternal damnation, all the things that really appeal to Luther.

And, on the other hand, you’ve got the kind of journalistic type people, like Wilhelm Marr who coined the term anti-semitism. He wrote the pamphlet tract, “The Victory of Judaism Over Germany”. And his book, … And also I would argue Drumont’s as well, “La France juive” [1886 by Édouard Drumont], “Jewish France”, those are written by journalists. And the tone of their text that they develop are journalistic texts. So they always sort of err on the side of the exposé! The whole tone of the book is “let’s expose the jews”. And they bounce from one revelation to the next. Some are more authentic than others.

So, and then you course you have the academics who think everything can be solved by breaking them down into minute parts and analyzing it and putting it together and developing theories about it. And the first two books, by MacDonald, were the most truly academic in my opinion. And certainly the second appealed most to me.

The Culture of Critique on the other hand, certainly while being a very academic book — and I don’t take anything away from that regard — but it’s content, and also some of its tone, because MacDonald does shift his tone in that third book, and some of his phraseology certainly adopts a more journalistic tone. There is more in there that has a kind of a journalistic feel, there’s something of the exposé about it. Particularly when he’s talking about Freud. He gets into some aspects of this, and the Frankfurt School, exposing the jewish nature of the Frankfurt School. It’s exposing the jewishness of Freudianism.

So “Separation and Its Discontents” has always been my favorite. And it was a good primer in a lot of ways, anyway, for Culture of Critique.

But yeah, I read it! It sits on my bookshelf. I think it’s an absolute tremendous, timeless classic that will be read and re-read in decades to come. And perhaps centuries.

But I would say that it didn’t dramatically, or radically change any aspect of my thinking. It helped in my development. I just wouldn’t say that there was a transformative effect.

[32:39]

Ford: What subject did you get your PhD in?

Joyce: My PhD was, … I don’t want to be too specific, but it was on a quite famous 19th century literary figure. But the thesis took in quite a good bit of nineteenth century British history, economics and literature.

And I think that the breadth of reading on that, certainly just in terms of how to craft a piece of history, helped me along in my development. Certainly, the analytical approach. I still have a great fondness for literature. I do write a lot about jews, obviously, for Kevin MacDonald.

But recently, I’ve kind of intertwined that with my passion for TS Eliot, Ezra Pound. I have in the past written some pieces in the Occidental Quarterly which has taken in some of the works of Charles Dickens, and some other nineteenth century authors.

Ford: When did you arrive on the scene, of the Alt-right writing under, you know, Andrew Joyce? Was it two or three years ago?

Joyce: No, no, no. It’s been longer than that actually. I’ve been in contact with Kevin MacDonald for at least eight years. Well, yeah, at least eight years. And we corresponded for a long time, about a number of different topics. And I think it’s about six years ago now. Five, or six, years ago, I suggested that I’ll send him a piece of writing and perhaps he’d want to publish it at the Occidental Observer.

And he did. But I read written little bits, little blog posts anonymously. And I’d read the lengthy pieces in chat forums and things previously.

So it wasn’t like a sort of a radical and sudden appearance on the scene. It developed incrementally over time. But I think it was in 2012 that I first wrote for the Occidental Observer under Andrew Joyce. And at first I didn’t have the time — I still don’t have the time — [chuckling] to write as much as I do. But first I wrote something every six months, four, or five months. It is quite a distance between the pieces that I was producing.

And then a couple of years ago, I just started pushing myself a little bit more in part. I think I do have a contribution that I could make. I have read a lot of stuff, at this point. So, I’m going to try and up the work rate and increase the input.

And I try to, as much as possible, to produce content for the Occidental Observer on a fairly regular basis. And sometimes, sometimes there’s nothing to write about! Sometimes you’ve got so much to write about, whether it’s current affairs, or something that you’re reading, or something that’s come into your head, that you don’t have the time to write or, … At the minute I’m writing like three pieces! I just need to get them out on paper.

[36:23]

Ford: How do you deal with the tension between being an activist and an academic?

Joyce: It’s difficult. It’s difficult. Academia is hostile territory for some of my beliefs, so they need to be concealed, almost entirely! Because it’s very sensitive environment. It’s a very, it’s like the spotlight is always shining on anyone who may have any ideas which are dissident to the status quo.

Academia is very difficult. I’ve had many conversations with Kevin MacDonald about this. Obviously he was practically tortured and hounded by the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] in the latter years of his position at, the University of Southern California, Santa Barbara?

Ford: He was at Cali State, Long Beach.

Joyce: Yeah, that is right, Long Beach. They made his time there quite terrible towards the end. And I think it was a great relief to him when he [chuckling] finally found his way into retirement!

But the tension. Just, … There is almost there is no tension simply because you cannot allow the two sides to come into contact. To be openly Alt-Right within the university system, within the college system, is impossible!

Ford: Yeah! Well, ..

How, … You’re on the more tough end of dealing with the Jewish Question. Like Kevin is not nearly as tough on jews as you are. [chuckling] How did you end up on your end of the spectrum? You know, you’re to the Right, so to speak, of Kevin MacDonald on dealing with the jews.

Joyce: Umm, … [chuckling] I didn’t realize that I came across so far to the Right of Kevin MacDonald! I think it’s more a matter of writing style, than position. Certainly in conversations that I’ve had with Kevin MacDonald, intellectually we’re sort of in the same position. We’re both kind of questing, and we’re both pushing, and we both are aware of our own interests, our ethnic interests in this entire [?] conflict.

But before I answer, I guess maybe I could ask you a question as to what is it in my work that makes you think I’m particularly hard on the jews?

Ford: I think it’s just a feeling that I get. I mean, also I could point to your essay for Radix Journal in January, “The Jewish Question and Some Answers”. I mean, you really want complete separation between jews and non jews. And Kevin MacDonald has not, you know, advocating anything like that. I mean, that’s a pretty big difference!

Like you and Richard Spencer now advocating for complete separation. While Kevin MacDonald is not calling for something like that. So that’s why I would say that you’re to the Right. Also, it’s just a feeling tone that I get, like when I read Kevin MacDonald I feel, you know, very much that I’m reading, generally speaking, the work of a surgeon.

And when I read you it just feels more hostile. You know, I could be wrong. That’s just the feeling. It’s like I have to put on a thicker layer of armor to engage with your writing on the jews than I do with Kevin MacDonald.

Joyce: Hmm.

Ford: Because, you know, as someone who converted to orthodox judaism who naturally, like everybody who strongly identifies with his group, tends to naturally think of his group being awesome, and members of other groups being less awesome!

And Kevin MacDonald is a challenge to deal with, but I have to put on even more armor to put myself in a place where I can engage with your writings.

[41:20]

Joyce: I think I can understand where you’re coming from. I think of the part of the reason why my work might be seen as a step up in terms of hostility, part of it might be due to the tone I write, and writing style. I do have an abruptness of style where I don’t like grey areas. And sometimes if it comes between taking the foot off the gas, or putting the pedal to the floor, I’ll put the pedal to the floor. So that’s part of a personality thing.

But in another sense some of the things that I have encountered in my research do make me angry! And sometimes that may come across in something that I’ve written. And certainly it’s not impossible that readers could pick up on that sense of grievance in my writing.

In terms of the Radix piece and advocating complete separation. I thought long and hard about the introduction to that interview. If you think back to when it was published it was kind of an iffy time in the Alt-Right in terms of how do you address the jewish Question. Red Ice Radio had a guy called “Reactionary Jew”, I think. Yeah, they had Reactionary Jew from Twitter, on. And they did an interview with him.

And a lot of the kind of 4chan crowd were unhappy that Red Ice had done this. So they started complaining, or some kind of online activism against Red Ice Radio. Which was picked up by The Right Stuff. And The Right Stuff took Red Ice’s side on this matter. And then the 4chan guys that started attacking the Right Stuff guys, which resulted in the doxing of a few of them.

I watched this. This was all very interesting to me, because it was a tussle about do Jews have any say even in how the Alt-Right approaches the jewish question. And I actually didn’t listen to the Reactionary Jew interview, but in the summaries that I heard about it, I think that, … Well this is all secondhand, this is all hearsay, as I said, I did listen to the interview.

But the word on the street, so to speak, was that Lana [Lokteff] had been quite soft on this guy, Reactionary Jew, in the first place. And that’s where the problems all began, that Lana had basically gone, made approving noises to this guy, saying, you know, there could be quite some kind of common ground there. So all of this was floating around and I thought to myself at the time:

“I would actually like to interview some jews!”

Some so-called, Right wing, reactionary jews.

Who I undoubtedly would have some kind of common ground with, in the sense that they were ethnocentric, and I was ethnocentric. And I wanted to ask them some pretty blunt and honest questions, which is the way that I would, with my personality, conduct an interview.

So, at the time I had been exchanging words with a couple of these people on Twitter. Really it was Reactionary Jew I conversed with most. And then he, got the other guy, their rabbi [?], I think he was either a convert, or this is mother, or someone, was not ethnically jewish, but he was very, very strongly identified as a Jew. It was almost like, because he was only half jewish, he had to like make up for it with a super amount of strong jewish identification. He was fascinating to talk to.

So we have some honest discussion. I said:

“Look. Here’s the deal guys. Here’s my email address, let’s us the take a step further.”

So I did this interview and I was happy with the responses. And I said to MacCaddis:

“Look. One thing I’m going to promise you with this interview is that I’m not going to alter your answers any way, shape, or form! What you send me is what will go in Radix. And I will send you a full copy of everything! Even my introduction before it is published and you guys can give me any feedback that you want.”

So I want a really transparent interaction with them where we walked through every step of the way.

Once I had the interview I thought to myself:

“Right how do I introduce this?”

And, it’s funny when you say that I’m really, really hard on the jews Well, there were people on that interview when was posted that were like:

“Oh, you know, Joyce has completely cucked out! [Ford laughs] I was soft on the jews!”

And there were people, a bit like yourself, who read that, … I know you reviewed the interview on your own blog. And I thought many of the criticisms, if not all of them, that you made about that interview in the blog were pretty valid. I don’t dispute, I don’t think that my writings is perfect, or even that was the perfect interview.

But it was difficult for me to frame. But I try to think about all angles of objection, first of all, to publication on Radix. And, you know, the first objection is:

“Look! Jews have no place in any of our publications, or, we don’t need to discuss anything with them. They are the enemy. And they just need to be opposed one hundred percent! We don’t need to listen to a single word they say.”

And I can understand that sentiment. But at the same time, from an intellectual point of view, it’s almost like:

“Well if won’t even discuss anything with them, there’s no point in really studying them, or anything else, neither. There’s no point in studying our interactions, or the history of it, you know, Culture of Critique can go out the window, or in the trash can. And so many other publications that have been produced over the centuries as well.”

Actually, engaging in some kind of dialogue even if you go into it with a certain amount of bias. Like, for example, if you want to make the argument that I went into that interview with those two jews with a fully loaded set of preconceptions, biases, and hostility, that still does not preclude the fact that elements of that interview could be useful to me and also to them.

So for me there was always going to be some kind of usefulness in interacting with these people, as I said, to some critics, and some people, who applauded the interview. I would interview Heidi Beirich [SPLC] if she let me. I would interview her for Radix, for the Occidental Observer. If you wanted to. Or Abe Foxman [former head of the ADL], or anyone else, in what I would regard as a jewish establishment.

Because, if we are confident of our position, we can’t guarantee that we’ll ever get honest answers to our questions, but if we are truly confident of our position, then we will take all of our arguments and all the questions that we have to pose, and put it’s of these people who we have designated as our opponents. And in my opinion, rightfully so.

So that interview was free and explained in accordance with how I understood it would be perceived. And I also wanted to explain to people why the interview even took place. And perhaps the only thing I left out in that introduction was, it was to satisfy, in some respects, my own curiosity.

A lot of the things that I write about, the things that I engage in are part of my own intellectual journey, which is ongoing. This is still something that I try to understand as time goes on.

I think Kevin MacDonald is still learning and developing things within his own mind, and his own understanding too. Although I think in recent years, certainly in last five, or six years, his emphasis and his focus in terms of what he is seeking to understand, have shifted inward in the sense that he has stopped looking so much for anything new on the jewish side. And he’s now looking into White pathology, the origins of Europeans. He’s trying to understand European man more.

Whereas I think I’m so really deeply in the stage of trying to understand why jews operate within European societies, and how that provokes responses from those societies. And how that vicious cycle, it sort of perpetuates itself.

[51:07]

Ford: And part of what you’re talking about when you give the framework for the Radix essay and interview is a problem faced, but everybody who belongs to a group. And that is the problem of virtue signaling and purity spiralling.

So, for instance I’m in Orthodox Judaism, so there’s always a strong incentive to be more religious, and more observant of jewish law, and more of a warrior for jews and jewish causes, than the next jew! So there’s always this inherent tension in any group that your more pure, you are more devoted to the cause, stronger in your devotion to the cause than the next guy. And it’s a real obstacle for honesty! [laughter] You’re always under, … Like I know in Orthodox Judaism you’re always under the pressure to show how observant you are, and how devoted you are to jews.

And so there’s a strong incentive then to deceive, or to say things that you don’t believe, or do things that you don’t believe, in order to appear more pure and more virtuous in the eyes of your group. And it seems to me that the same sort of dynamic, you know, operates in White Nationalism, along with every other group.

Joyce: It certainly does to an extent. And within any group you also have a certain type of person, or persons, who may not have anything particular original to contribute to the discussion, but they will find some sense of self-worth within that movement by acting in a certain capacity. And that capacity is to be the the guardian of purity spiralling, or the perpetual critic. And that’s the person who will just sit there all day long and say:

“Oh he’s cucking hard, or he’s selling out, or he didn’t name the jew on this one thousand two hundred sixteenth occasion! He didn’t mention jews this time. What’s going on there?”

And you go find this level of autism, you know, periodically within any movement, or any organization. It’s someone who has nothing else to say, so they will just simply engage in that behavior. It’s not helpful! I agree that it’s a barrier to honesty.

The question of jewish interactions in Europe, in European societies, and visa versa Europeans have responding to jews being in their midst, is so complex! It’s incredibly demanding! I mean, I’ve really lost count of the number of books I’ve read on the subject. I have not a hope of ever counting up the number of academic journal articles I’ve read on the subject matter, or the references in the literature and art. It is mind blowing the amount of effort, time, and ink, that has been consumed in dealing with this question!

And some people will prefer not to engage in even the slightest bit of effort to understand any of it, and will simply just say:

“Oh, it’s all the jews!”

And if you don’t say that, you’re cucking then. So you have to contend with that. But also you have to understand the emotional reactions, you actually understand the problem where in. And unfortunately, there’s no beating around the bush here, Whites are in really rather demographic decline across the board. We are losing rapidly our dominant position, and even our ancestral homelands! It does not look good! This is a very high pressure environment!

Perhaps the time of calmly analyzing this problems academically is drawing to a close. Simply, because of circumstances and the environment that we are in. That is unfortunate. It’s always unfortunate in any situation in which time runs out for calm discussion and the war drums start beating in the distance.

It is certainly not a situation that I want to see in my lifetime. It’s not a situation that I want for my children, or my grandchildren. But there is a certain hopelessness, certainly that I feel about the situation that may well preclude Kevin MacDonald’s of the future from having their voices heard, because for all the SPLC, the hysteria about the work of Kevin MacDonald he is certainly not an extremist! And he is certainly not any of those slurs that they made against him.

He is actually, in my opinion, a voice of incredible reason! His appeal is actually is at the end of the Culture of Critique is astonishing in a lot of ways, and in some ways touching. And it reminded me in some respects of the work by Hilaire Belloc, “The Jews”, 1922 in which the whole book is basically an appeal! It’s an attempt at reason that said:

“Look! We have friction here in our society. And if we ignore this friction it will continue to increase. If we lie about the friction it’s really going to set this tinder box on fire.”

And, of course, Belloc’s warnings were ignored. And just over ten years later we had the advent of a explicitly anti-semitic government in Germany, in which things really were forced onto a new level.

And this is just something that has occupied my thoughts a lot recently, actually. For how much longer will the Occidental Observer type material, have any kind of sway. Or we go towards the simplest message. For example, the Daily Stormer type content. And that’s not to take anything away from the Daily Stormer either. It presents a message that is broken down so simply that it can be digested by just about anyone. Certainly the popular message is always going to be the most powerful.

[58:09]

Ford: Right. I mean the Daily Stormer and David Duke are aiming at, you know, 100 IQ. The Occidental Observer is aimed at an audience with an IQ 120.

Joyce: Mmm, …

Ford: Obviously any successful movement is going to have different messages for different levels of IQ. So that’s why I get up upset by Daily Stormer and David Duke, because I see them as appealing to the 100 IQ crowd, and so they’re obviously not going to have the nuance of someone who aims his work at the 130 IQ crowd. I mean your work is aimed at people north of 120. It’s not acceptable to people with a 100 IQ.

Joyce: Yeah, … [chuckling] I’m always surprised, you know, I meet some people, I met some people at an Alt-Right meeting in Washington DC, I guess a year and a half ago now. It was all young guys, some of them were subscribers to the Occidental Quarterly and certainly read some of my work, but they explained to me that they weren’t regular visitors to the Occidental Observer because the stuff is heavy, it is dense. It does require a significant level of background reading and education.

You know, the last time I looked at Alexa, I was just having a quick glance at the ranking of the Occidental Observer. But it breakdowns visitor educational background. How they gather this information, I don’t know. Whether it’s by survey, or whatever. But the majority of people that visit the Occidental Observer had not just a first degree, but a higher degree. So I guess that is when you when you are talking about Masters and PhD’s, you are talking about an IQ level in the range of what you just described. So yeah, and then in a way that limits your audience. But that kind of argument still needs to get out there.

And in terms of leaders, and culture shapers, you really have to reach people with that level of IQ if you have any kind of influence too.

Ford: Yeah. One thing that makes me pessimistic about the relationship between Whites and Jews, is that I can’t think of many historical examples of White cohesion and Jewish strength going together in a country. Can you think of any examples of that?

Joyce: Not genuine examples. No. Some of the more, … There have been examples given for what you’ve just described. One of them would be the growth of commerce in the Netherlands from the late sixteenth century, onwards. So you’ve got the growth of the Amsterdam jewish community, the development of merchant shipping, their involvement in the financing of that. And you have a genuine rise and growth in the geopolitical power of the Netherlands at the time.

The question is how interlinked or deliberate is any of that, or is it purely coincidental? Unfortunately, the dominant pattern in history, certainly when you look at England in the Middle Ages, in France, and some of the German principalities, but most definitely in Eastern Europe, where jews were strong and they did not derive their strength in those periods from within themselves.

It wasn’t that the jews arrived extremely powerful and just kind of stamped down the peasantry. It was that they came in and they were opportunistic, talented, in certain areas, certainly in the financial areas. And their entry into European society, and into some of these countries, was just so perfectly timed. And the system of government was so perfectly set up for the entrance of a middleman minority like the jews at that time, that that’s what the strengths really came from. And as long as jews were strong, the development of a middle class was pretty much precluded at that point in time.

But, I hesitate to say just because, … Again this issue of nuance. Just, because the jews were a strong position does not necessarily mean that the peasants were completely down trodden for that reason. There was a whole system of government going on at the time, where the king and the nobles were dominant. The jews came in just under them, sometimes alongside the nobles. The peasants were always going to be the peasants.

That doesn’t mean that they weren’t exploited by jewish money lending, but it does mean that were on a lower level.

Ford: And then you’re also about the American South prior to the Civil War. No rabbi in the American South spoke out against slavery. Like jews in the American south prior to the Civil War had no problem with slavery. And jews were quite popular in the South. They got along better in the South, than in the North. And jews it was that played a prominent role in the Confederacy. So to me that’s one example of jewish, … There are very few numbers in the South but, you know, they got on great! Jews and Whites seemed to have gotten on great in the American South prior to the Civil War.

And also jews in say, nineteenth century England, you know, there’s just a small number. But England continued to flourish. And the small number of Jews also did well. So these seem to me to be examples of Jewish strength and White cohesion growing together.

Joyce: Well, … I would certainly debate the example of nineteenth century England. I think it’s always important to say, if we’re talking even about jews and those in the American South getting along well, it’s important to talk about who’s getting along well? Let’s just break it down. We are talking in both cases, in England and the American South of relatively small numbers of jews. Which is always going to lead to slightly better relations, in some circumstances.

But the problem with England in the nineteenth century, is yes, there were a relatively small number of jews. They were all quite well assimilated. They weren’t from [word unclear] immigrant class. They where not engaged in kind of petty money lending that gave rise to a lot of resentment in Eastern Europe. But on the other hand there were other problems. Yes, there was intermarriage, the beginnings of intermarriage into the English aristocracy. So you could point at that and say:

“Look that is them getting on well. The British Empire is at its strength.”

But there were also problems and antagonisms. There were issues, for example, the Marconi scandal, the Indian silver scandal. And these big governmental, financial, scandals of the nineteenth century in Britain involved Jewish nepotism. For example, a lot of the high positions within the British Empire were occupied by, really only three, or four, jewish families! They were the Nathan’s, the Montefiore’s, the Goldsmith’s, and who were the others? I think, …

Ford: Rothschilds!

Joyce: Yeah, … The Rothschild’s weren’t explicitly involved in the sense of taking named explicit positions within the British Empire. But they were intermarried with those families. They were intermarried with the Nathan’s and the Goldsmith’s and the Montefiore’s and some of the others there, the Montague’s. So, they were all intermarried. They were called “The Cousinhead”. Because they were literally all cousins to each other. And they all married each other’s cousins. So there was higher level of consanguinity going on at the time.

A lot of it was about being jewish. A lot of of it was about seeing themselves as an aristocracy. And, of course, aristocrats tended to arrange marriages within themselves, even the non-jewish nobles of the time. So inbreeding was sort of the order of the day in terms of trying to keep wealth within a certain family circle, and also influence.

But certainly jews were very prominent in a lot of the scandals of the day. So there were difficulties there. There were objections to jewish influence in those positions, particularly when we see the coming of the Boer War, which was denounced by many socialist politicians actually at the time, as a war for the jews. For jewish diamond mines in South Africa. And certainly the British Army at one point was described by one socialist politician as the “Janissaries of the jews”.

See: Andrew Hitchcock with Dr Peter Hammond – “Remembering the Late Great Stephen Mitford Goodson!” — TRANSCRIPT

So, there were problems. But are there any terrific examples of a growth in jewish power and a non jewish population that also seems to be growing, and doing well, at the same time? Nothing really stands out.

Ford: How do you see Israel? As an inspiring example of an ethnostate, or what?

[68:55]

Joyce: As an ethnostate? Yes. It’s a pretty good example obviously. It’s a State founded on ethnic principles. It’s immigration policies, it’s walls. It’s explicit and unapologetic description of itself as a jewish state is admirable. And something that any White nationalist really if he’s honest would want to replicate for himself and his own.

However, I’ve always been hesitant to go beyond that in terms of anything valuable I see in the State of Israel, because it just doesn’t stand on its own two feet. None of what we see in terms of how it performs on the international stage is truly authentic. Because so much of what it is and how it performs is backed by copious amounts of non-jewish aid in the form of military support, financial support, diplomatic support. It’s like Israel has some kind of umbilical cord attachment to the West!

Ford: Yeah. Yeah. Going back to Kevin MacDonald. I’m thinking that one can regard all of Kevin MacDonald’s major points about Jews as true. But then you get the implications of what should we then do, just all over the map. And it doesn’t seem to me like there’s a straight line between, you know, accepting the basics of MacDonald’s evolutionary psychology analysis of jews, and then, what we then do. It seems to me like the implications are quite varied.

Joyce: They are. And we can come back to this thing of my advocating the complete separation of jews and non-jews. Which some could say that’s incredibly harsh. It’s inhumane, it’s unnecessary, it’s impractical. There are any number of criticisms which could be made against such a proposal. However, when we even begin to think about alternatives, the effort involved in trying to devise any number of social solutions would be so vast that we would have to eventually come to some kind of questions for ourselves in terms of:

“Is this worth it? Or has this been tried before and failed?”

And in many cases we would say:

“Yes. That has been tried before and failed!”

Because there is nothing new under the sun. And, you know, whether it’s quotas, whether it’s, you know, go right book whether it’s some form of ghettoization, whether it’s limiting jewish ability to enter into certain professions.

All this has been done before. All of it has failed. It’s really difficult to be original in terms of coming up with solutions in this field of social interaction and ethnic relations. Because, as I said earlier, [chuckling] this is something that has been written about for centuries, portrayed in art. It has been the subject of sermons, fulminations, publications, screeds, legal proceedings, legislative acts, … Everything has been done under the sun! And we always seem to find ourselves back at square one with this stuff.

So, … It’s, you know, solutions are something that I try to stay away from! It’s really difficult!

The only thing I would come back to the issue of “effort”. Is it worth it? And I go through the same sort thought process when I think of multiculturalism.

Even on my best day, and with the best of will, and if I get out of bed on the Right side and the sun is shining, and, you know, my kids have done their homework, and all the chores are done, whatever it might be. Everything’s going well. And I listen to some person on TV talking about multiculturalism, how good it is, and how, you know, some black school in London has just won some kind of prize for doing some kind of academic contest, … Even on my best day, in those circumstances, I still have to think:

“What with all the other difficulties, is it still worth it? Is it still worth it.”

I mean, are all of these gang rapes by Muslim immigrants, and all of this crime that we are seeing in the multicultural society, and all the money, … I mean, the amount of money that is invested in trying to make the multicultural society even seems somewhat sane is got to be phenomenal!

A book should be written one day on the financial cost of multiculturalism! We all know the human cost. We all know the cultural cost. But I’m certain that the financial cost, in terms of the funding that some minorities require just to function in Britain. The The cost of the NHS [National Health Service], the cost of education, the cost in policing the crime, the cost in foreign aid, and all the other financial aspects of this. It’s huge! And that’s just one aspect of it! Is it worth it? It’s not worth it in my opinion!

And we have to kind of put on our super rational hats on when we deal with this topic, I was listening to radio show a couple weeks ago, where they were talking about developing machinery in which the human consciousness will be able to leave the human biological body and be uploaded on to some kind of hard drive. And they were discussing the scientists behind this as hyper rational people. There are people that literally are so black and white, so committed to just blunt reason that nothing is out of the question! And ethics doesn’t really play a part. And morals doesn’t com into it. Because they’re just looking at the end goals.

Perhaps in some ways, that’s what I am. It’s the hyper rational person. I look at all the difficulties, I look at two thousand years, or more, of bloodshed, of heartache, and wars, and constant antagonism, and cultural decay, and the resurgence and then decay again after generation! Is it worth it?

[76:22]

Ford: Richard Spencer made this great point he said:

“One of the challenges of dealing with the Jews is that they are in our head!”

Meaning that Jews have lived within Western civilization for over a millennia. And many of unspoken assumptions, ways of thinking, come from the Jews and are just automatically absorbed by non-jews, so it’s hard for non-jews trying to think about, you know what’s best for their people, to separate out what is jewish, and what is authentic to their own tradition.

Joyce: Yeah. I would agree with that to an an extent, although I think Richard gives, he always gives Jews too much credit with a statement like that. I don’t agree with it fully. I think that we imbibed a lot of ideas from jewish intellectuals, and some jewish interactions in our culture. But would I go so far as to say that they are really at our heads in a really strong sense, and a real literal sense of that statement? I don’t think. So I also think that it would be wrong to assume that we aren’t in jewish minds to the same extent.

I remember a quote from a guy called Anthony Julius who was jewish lawyer to Princess Diana some years ago, during her divorce from Prince Charles. And he wrote a book, “Trials of the Diaspora — a History of Anti-semitism in England”. It’s not a very good book at all. I wrote a review critiquing it for the Occidental Quarterly, and the Occidental Observer, also.

But in it he wrote that one of the attractions of anti-semitism was that it gives a troubled non-jew an opportunity to appear as an expert in something. It’s kind of a typically arrogant statement from Julius. It’s a perfect Julius statement to come out with. But one of the things Julius, even if I were to grant him that, which I don’t, but even if I was to grant him that, and say:

“Julius, there are some people who really don’t have much going on in their lives, you know, just like any kind of crank conspiracy theorist, this gives them an opportunity to appear as an expert on something, and they can a few quotes and sound smart, Jews suffer with exactly the same thing!”

Jews like to appear as experts on the anti-semitism.

It is in so many of the books that I’ve read on anti-semitism but Jews, there’s such a level of naivety and arrogance in the writings of those books. And I’m thinking in particular of historians like Robert Wistrick [?], Leon Placoth [?], and what’s his name? Not Jerrery Katz, he’s actually not that bad. But certainly Robert Wistrict. Striekter [?] was another one. But just the level of naivety there! They think that they can be completely objective when looking at anti-semitism when, of course, they can’t. Because they’re one of the warring parties.

I think the only truly objective history of anti-semitism is probably yet to come. And it will come from somewhere like China, or a different continent. Not Africa, because [chuckling] you probably won’t get that many good books written from Africa, anyway!

But it might it might be left to the Japanese, or the, or the Chinese to really write some kind of more impartial account, anyway. But there’s an arrogance there, there’s a naivety there. But I think that we are in the jewish mind as much as the jews are in ours.

Ford: It’s a shame that there’s no term like “anti-gentilism”, because as a convert to Orthodox Judaism I know that there’s just as much antipathy towards Gentiles among many jews, to varying degrees, as there is antipathy to jews amongst Gentiles to varying degrees.

Joyce: Yeah, … It’s there. I mean, I’m certainly aware from all my research, I believe that there is a deeply ingrained hostility among jews towards Europeans.

When you look at the, even the philosopher of someone like Leavenas [?], a Jewish philosopher. When he discusses European he talks about the Greeks, and how jews should not be like the Greeks. And he doesn’t mean the Greeks literally in terms of the ancient Greeks, but he means the Greeks in terms of, … That’s all Europeans.

And the reason why he’s using the terminology is this is going back to the [word unclear] [name of people]. This is going back to the original conflict between the jews and the Hellenes in ancient times. And it was a conflict that they largely believed to be ongoing. It just kind of fluctuates in different times and it adopts different phases. We are all familiar with this terminology that is used a lot by strongly identified Jews, :

“Anti-semitism is a virus that mutates.”

It’s not! It’s just that it follows Jews wherever they go. So the only concept they can come up with to rationalize it is:

“Oh! It’s just a virus just keeps adapting no matter what we do! It keeps adapting!”

But in truth anti-semitism has never had to adapt, because jewish behavior has never adapted, it has never changed! Jewish behavior has been largely continual, and remarkably stable, and consistent, over many centuries, if not millennia.

For that reason anti-semitism really has not changed, even if we were to regard it in some fairy-tale land as a virus, it’s a virus that has never had to mutate because all the arguments always been the same! Whether you pick up your Cicero or whether you pick up your Kevin MacDonald, the argument there is the same:

“Jews are highly cohesive, they stick together, they look out for their interests.”

Literally! The same argument made by Cicero is made by Kevin MacDonald, separated by some two thousand years the argument is the same! How is this a virus that’s mutating? Where is the mutation? Where is the change? There is no change.

[83:27]

Ford: Right, … But I mean, for much of European history in the last two thousand years it seems like much of the animus directed against jews came from theological differences, that the very existence of Jews argues against the theological truth of Christianity.

Each day that there are jews walking around their they are crucifying Christ anew. So that’s a different dimension of the incentive to have negative views of jews.

Joyce: That’s part of that. But I think the theological argument has been overplayed.

There is a book by a jewish historian called Dan Cohn-Sherbok called “The Crucified Jew” [The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism (1997) ] and he really overplays it. He basically says that anti-semitism began with Christianity. When in truth we know that in ancient pagan times there were criticisms made of jews as being highly ethnocentric, and that they separated themselves from other peoples. That they were in money lending and different forms of financial exploitation.

What we see of the Christian era, is yes, there was still was a theological overlay that was placed on top of those grievances. But those earlier grievances never went away. So we see, for example, as much as [Martin] Luther in all “The Jews and Their Lies” in the sixteenth century he may well rant against the jews as sort of the sons of Satan, or as deniers of Christ, et cetera, et cetera. A large part of the book is still taken up with some very old themes that we had already seen in pagan times and in the pre-Christian era.

So anti-semitism does not fundamentally change with the advent of Christianity. It takes on a new complexion for a while, but fundamentally it remains the same. So there is no dramatic alteration in that anti-semitism over a historical time. It is remarkably consistent.

As I say, if you really pick up the works, for example, church fathers, Ambrose, some others, you get many of the complaints within those texts
Don’t appeal as much as theological reasoning as you might suspect, if you were basing your understanding of the subject purely works [word unclear] like the “The Crucified Jew” by Cohn-Sherbok.

Ford: There maybe some great analogies to the topics that we were talking about that can kind of reduce the emotion, if we simply look at the world of animals and the world of plants.

And there’s a perspective called “invasive species”. Just a quote from Wikipedia:

“An invasive species of a plant, fungus, or animal species, that is not native to a specific location, which has a tendency to spread through a degree you believe to cause damage to the environment, human economy, or human health.”

So, when you introduce a people who are not native to the location it is very likely to have negative consequences for the native populations. Such as the United States and the land mass of North America when Europeans came here, you know, the Europeans were going to triumph or the Native Americans are going to succeed in repelling them. The two groups are not going to live in peace.

And so, when you bring eucalyptus trees to southern California — I’m from Australia, I love eucalyptus trees, I’ll walking around something California seeing eucalyptus trees — but they have this property whereby they kill out, you know, [chuckling] others plant, or tree, that falls under it’s branches. So they also suck up a lot of water resources.

So I’m thinking the naturalistic perspective of invasive species is a way for people to approach the difficult and emotional laden topic that we’ve been discussing, with a less emotion. And just, seeing the human interactions and human immigration as just another form of invasive species of nature.

Joyce: I agree with that to an extent. The only thing I would say is that I would be very cautious about appealing to the animal kingdom, or the plant kingdom in that respect, or even microbiology, before I would start talking about types of virus, or insect, or whatever it might be. Because there is an element of dehumanization there. And jews are humans! There are human beings! I think that needs to be kept in mind at all times.

They have different. Interests to Europeans. They pursue their interests very aggressively in my opinion. That needs to be met aggressively. But I think we can never lose sight of the fact they are human beings.

If I was to look for analogies, that would enable us to deal with the subject in a less emotional way, I might not look necessarily to things like plant species and things like that. I think it might be more helpful to look at similar middleman minorities.

For example, Indians in Uganda, or the Chinese in other parts of South East Asia. Where they have performed functions and reached levels of influence that are broadly similar to those of the jews in Europe and European societies. There are some differences, for example, jews tend to be very unique in the way that they become actors culturally, and the way they seem to have a detrimental cultural effect on their surrounding societies. The analogies are not perfect.

However, I think that I would stand by my argument that we need to see Jews as human beings, and always to conduct our struggle for our own self-determination against negative jewish influence with our heads held high. And in order to do that I think we should always look at our opponents of the eye, and that does not entail writing them off as, on a level, or in any way some way, as some kind of virus, some kind of bacteria, infection, cancer, or insect.

Ford: OK, great! Is there, I’m going to throw the interview to a close, but I want to leave you with any final words, or any final topic, that you feel are necessary.

Joyce: No. I think this has been a very, very, enjoyable interview, one of the most enjoyable I’ve given. Actually your questions have been terrific.

One thing I would sort of leave off with is that it looks like this is going to be a very interesting remainder to Donald Trump’s presidency.

I was always a Trump skeptic. I did publish a piece on the Occidental Observer some time ago about Jewish intermarriage. And I did always say that the Jewish intermarriage into the Trump’s family was always going to be problematic on some level. And would probably make itself manifest quite early into his presidency.

All that had to be set aside for a time I think across the Alt-Right. I think many of us had our suspicions about Trump, and perhaps for those reasons, but the prospect of a Clinton presidency was just so horrific, that the gamble had to be taken.

So we find ourselves not only post election, and post Trump victory, but by we find ourselves post Trump realisation in the sense that some of the predictions that we were hoping would not come true, have come true. And certainly looks like, in terms of foreign policy and in some other aspects of culture, it doesn’t look like much is going to change.

Ford: Well, thank you Andrew. This interview is recorded on April 30th of 2017. Thank you very much for your time.

[92:59]

END

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See Also

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Luke Ford – Andrew Joyce On The Jewish Question — Apr 17, 2017 — Transcript

David Duke Interviews Dr Andrew Joyce — TRANSCRIPT

Red Ice Radio: Dr Andrew Joyce – The History of Jewish Influence — TRANSCRIPT (Part 1)

Red Ice Radio: Dr Andrew Joyce – The History of Jewish Influence — TRANSCRIPT (Part 2)

TOO – Andrew Joyce’s Podcast – Talmud and Taboo — Part 01 – Jun 30, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce’s Podcast – T & T No. 1 – The Skype Directory — Jul 15, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T No 2 – And then one day… – Jul 20, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T No 3 – Kicking Over the Bucket – Jul 27, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 4 – The Man Who Put the Jews on Trial – Aug 3, 2020

Andrew Joyce – T&T 5 – The Return of the Bucket – Aug 5, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 6 – The Antisemite’s Handbook – Aug 11, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 7 – The TOO Takedown – Aug 14, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – T&T 8 – SEMITISM – Aug 28, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – Trumpism, Bidenism, and the System – Nov 9, 2020 — Transcript

Guide to Kulchur – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Andrew Joyce – Nov 22, 2020 — Transcript

Andrew Joyce – BLM – Irish Edition – Dec 31, 2020 – Transcript

Horus – Discussing the ‘Russian Pogroms’ with Andrew Joyce – Jan 20, 2021 — Transcript

Guide to Kulchur – The Merchant of Venice – Abusive Victim-Identity Syndrome – Andrew Joyce – Jan 20, 2021 — Transcript

Barbara Lerner Spectre

Luke Ford – JQ Debate with Age Of Treason – Mar 2018 — TRANSCRIPT

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Version 9: Feb 2, 2022 — Added Age of Treason transcript link. Improved formatting.

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Version 6: Oct 18, 2020 — Added last 15 more minutes of transcript.  Transcript text now complete = 93 minutes.

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Version 1: Oct 13, 2020 — Published post. Total transcript complete = 16/93 minutes.