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In La Defaite de l’Occidante, Emmanuel Todd claims that the collapse of the American empire was caused by the evaporation of Protestantism, which he describes as its hidden grammar.
America is now facing defeat in the Ukraine because of the complete disappearance of the Christian foundation of its culture, “un phénomène historique crucial qui, justement, explique la pulvérisation des classes dirigeantes américaines.”[1]Protestantism, which “to a large extent, has been the economic strength of the West, is dead.”[2] Both the United States and England have been caught up in a “centripetal, narcissistic then nihilistic drift,” which has led both the present empire and its predecessor to something which Todd calls the “Zero State,” which he defines as a nation state which is “no longer structured by its original values,” which in this instance means that the Protestant work ethic and the feeling of responsibility which previously animated its population has evaporated.[3] Both Trump and Biden epitomize the apotheosis of the Zero State because Washington’s decisions under both administrations have ceased to be moral or rational.
The Zero State was preceded by the Zombie State, which retains the form but is emptied of its content. Todd sees Benjamin Franklin as a typical Zombie Protestant, who no longer practices his religion but retains its ethics, attached to the values of honesty, work, seriousness, and always aware that man only has a limited amount of time.[4] Zombie Protestant society emerged in Europe when Germany and Great Britain created a world:
in which religious practice withers but where the social values of religion persist, as well as the rites of passage prescribed by the various Churches. Neither baptism, nor marriage, nor burial are called into question. But, as a sign that the West no longer respects the biblical commandment to “grow and multiply,” –fertility is falling in the middle classes. Deprived of its supervision, the Protestant work ethic in Britain devolved into pure nationalism.[5] Literacy is a fundamental Protestant value because sola scriptura requires the masses to be literate in order to have access to the Scriptures, which makes every man his own priest, thus promoting democracy and egalitarianism.
Todd derives his understanding of Protestantism from Max Weber’s famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In his attempt to answer the question “Qu’est-ce quel’Occident?” Todd identifies himself specifically as a pupil of Weber. Todd is “en bon élève de Max Weber, qui plaça la religion de Luther et de Calvin à la source de ce qui apparaissait à son époque comme la supériorité de l’Occident.”[6]
The best exposition of the Weber thesis in the English-speaking world is R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney writes: “Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism in its English version was the parent of capitalism.” According to Weber, “religious radicalism . . . went hand in hand with an economic radicalism.”[7] One of the first critiques of Weber’s thesis, however, noticed the connection between the Puritans and the Jews. In his 1907 book Jews and Modern Capitalism, Werner Sombart points out that everything Weber said about Puritans was a fortiori true of Jews. If Sombart’s earlier book on capitalism caused Weber to write his articles on the Puritan spirit, those articles led Sombart to write his book on the Jews. “In fact,” Sombart writes, “Max Weber’s researches are responsible for this book. I have already mentioned that Max Weber’s study of the importance of Puritanism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the importance of the Jew, especially as I felt that the dominating ideas of Puritanism which were so powerful in capitalism were more perfectly developed in Judaism and were also of a much earlier date.”[8] Having read Weber’s thesis, Sombart wonders:
whether all that Weber ascribes to Puritanism might not with equal justice be referred to Judaism, and probably in a greater degree; nay, it might well be suggested that that which is called Puritanism is really Judaism.[9]
According to Sombart, Puritanism is nothing more than an aberrant form of Judaism because both are based on:
the preponderance of religion interests, the idea of divine rewards and punishments, asceticism within the world, the close relationship between religion and business, the arithmetical conception of sin, and, above all, the rationalization of life.[10]
Sombart was hardly the first one to notice the connection. He cites Heinrich Heine who asked: “Are not the Protestant Scots Hebrews, with their Biblical names, their Jerusalem, their pharisaical cant? And is not their religion a Judaism which allows you to eat pork?”[11] Or as one Calvinist put it: “If I am to say on my honour why I am become a Calvinist, I shall have to confess that the one and only reason which persuaded me was that among all the religions, I could find nothing which agreed so much with Judaism and its view of life and faith.”[12]
Writing 60 years before Sombart attempted to correct the Weber Thesis by claiming that Capitalism was Jewish, Karl Marx wrote in Zur Judenfrage that the worldly cult of the Jew was huckstering and his worldly god, money, and that the most Jewish country on the face of the earth was New England because of the Puritans who settled there:
the devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol, which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels, he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit.[13]
Marx too emphasizes the practical sphere of life, specifically commerce, as the area in which Jewish values have most influenced their nominally Christian imitators and admirers, the Puritans. Money, not theology, is the true ecumenical lingua franca:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it. . . . The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.[14]
As Tawney showed malgré lui, there is no difference on the theoretical level between the Puritan Divine and the Catholic Schoolman when it comes to the relationship between morality and economics. On the practical level, however, the opposite was true. If we ask what the Jew and the Puritan have in common on the practical level, the answer is Capitalism, not theology.
Marx, like William Cobbett, whom he admired, felt that Capitalism began with the looting of the Catholic monasteries. In breaking with Catholicism, English Christianity became Jewish because by benefiting financially from the looting of the monasteries, the Anglican Church accepted Mammon as its god. This is what Marx meant when he said that the Christianity which “issued from Judaism . . . has now been re-absorbed into Judaism.”[15] The same Christianity which Marx characterized as “the sublime thought of Judaism”[16] became Judaism, which is to say, the worship of Mammon, once its raison d’être became the rationalization of looting. The moment in which English Christianity got absorbed back into Judaism is known as the Reformation. Capitalism is the worship of Mammon.
At the beginning of the Christian era, the Christian was a “theorizing Jew.” He achieved this state by choosing the quest for heaven over the quest for money. Any Christian, on the other hand, who asserts the hegemony of mammon over morals, becomes a “practical Christian,” which another word for a Jew. Or as Marx puts it: “The Jew is the practical Christian. And the practical Christian has become a Jew again.”[17] As soon as he subordinated morals to economic considerations, which is to say as soon as he began to worship Mammon, the true god of the Jews, the Christian became a Capitalist, which is to say, a Jew, and Christianity became a form of Judaism, henceforth known as Calvinism or the Geist of Protestantism. Framed in these terms, Marx’s formulation explains the hidden grammar of both sides of the English Civil War: the Anglicans (who benefited from the looting when they became the state Church and the owners of stolen property) as well as the Puritans, who became envious of their ill-gotten wealth and hijacked it 100 years later. The common ground which both came to share in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, when Roundhead and Cavalier joined together for the first time as “Protestants,” was Capitalism, which is the worship of the Jewish god, money.
Sombart’s reading of Weber sounds like a continuation of Marx’s treatise on the Jews. According to both men, the Geist of Capitalism is Jewish. “The Jewish outlook,” according to Sombart, is “modern.” All these activities are summed up in the word “capitalism.”[18] Sombart substantiates Heinrich Pesch’s claim that modern capitalism is state sponsored usury when he claims that money-lending, the quintessential Jewish occupation, “contains the root idea of capitalism.”[19] Like Marx, Sombart felt that “the Jewish religion has the same leading ideas as Capitalism.”[20] “Rationalism is the characteristic trait of Judaism as of Capitalism”.[21] Capitalism, like the usury upon which it is based, is, as Sombart puts it, “contrary to . . . Nature.” Before capitalism could develop, “the natural man had to be changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically minded mechanism introduced in his stead.”[22]
The rise of Capitalism in Christian Europe meant that the businessman would become more and more “Jewish” in his dealings with fellow Christians. The pious Jew was forbidden to take interest on money lent to fellow Jews, but he was “not oppressed by the burden of the anti-usury prohibition which weighed upon the Christian” when it came to lending to non-Jews. Before long the permission turned to a form of encouragement, that quickly degenerated into a Talmudic culture of cheating in which the Jew was praised for his usurious dealings with Christians. The Jew “took delight in cheating and overreaching.”[23]
As this attitude spread among Christian businessmen and combined with the undeniable fact that the looters in England belonged to the aristocracy, class conflict began to emerge among the English, where Jewish concepts like the “goyim,” were applied to the those who were not part of the Calvinist Elect. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, when, as Marx put it, “Locke supplanted Habakkuk,”[24] economics supplanted theology, and the reprobate “goyim” were redefined as the proletariat or the lower orders. According to John Locke and Adam Smith, labor was the source of all value. Capitalism was created by the Whig oligarchs who created the Bank of England as their way of appropriating surplus value via usury, and the laboring classes who were the source of all value became via this same alchemy, the goyim, which means, in short the people whom it was permitted to cheat. By the time Marx arrived in England, class conflict was an inextricable part of the capitalist system.
Similarly, the concept of the just price was not unknown among Jews, but it only applied to fellow Jews. In the Jews’ relations with the goyim the price became whatever the Jew could extort. This distinction would have far-reaching consequences. As Sombart points out, over the course of the centuries Jewish standards of commerce became more and more the norm throughout Europe. Christian merchants began acting more and more like Jews, and gradually those methods began to supplant the commercial dealings that were based on Catholic moral theology. With the rise of Capitalism, the Christian who aspired to treat every man as his brother in Christ was more and more supplanted by the Capitalist who treated the customer in the same way that the Jew treated the goyim in his business dealings with him. The Christians who were most likely to succeed in commerce became those most willing to act like Jews, as the success of the Lombards as pawnbrokers in Brugge proved.
Like Yuri Slezkine, Sombart felt that “the Jewish outlook was the ‘modern’ outlook.” As a result “the Jews have been champions of the cause of individual liberty. They resisted regulation, supported free trade, free competition, and advanced economic rationalism…. The Jewish religion and capitalism contain the same spirit. Both are alien artificial elements in the midst of a natural, created world. Both are creations of the intellect.”[25]
Unlike Weber’s theory of the origin of Capitalism, Sombart’s thesis actually corresponds to the historical progress of Capitalism because that “economic activity follows the wanderings of Jews as they passed from the nations of southern to those of northwest Europe. Holland, England, and France became significant economic actors from the first appearance of the Spanish Jewish emigres in those countries.”[26]According to Sombart the Capitalist ball began rolling with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain:
One of the most important facts in the growth of modern economic life is the removal of the center of economic activity from the nations of Southern Europe—the Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese, with whom must also be reckoned some South German lands—to those of the Northwest—the Dutch, the French, the English and the North Germans. The epoch-making event in the process was Holland’s sudden rise to prosperity, and this was the impetus for the development of the economic possibilities of France and England.[27]
Many Jews from the Iberian peninsula ended up in the Spanish Netherlands, and as a result Antwerp became the most significant entrepot linking the Atlantic trade in gold and silver, the Spice trade from the East Indies, the Mediterranean trade from the South and the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic. Given Antwerp’s link to all of these markets as well as to the river trade in Germany, commerce took a quantum leap forward, and, given the role that Jews recently expelled from Spain (in collaboration with English Protestants and Dutch Calvinists) played in defining how that commerce would be conducted, it is not surprising that Capitalism would become ipso facto inimical to Catholic interests and the moral law as well.
Sombart, like Marx before him, felt that the United States was destined to become the pre-eminent Capitalist country because of the circumstances surrounding its colonization and birth as a nation. Foremost among them was “Jewish access to newly discovered gold and silver in the countries of Central and South America,” which “facilitated their role in international trade in luxury goods.” As a result, “the United States are filled to the brim with the Jewish spirit.”[28]
After deconstructing Weber’s claim, Sombart proposes his own myth concerning the origin of capitalism. Modern Europe was created by a confluence of two groups: Germans rooted in the soil, and Jews who were wandering herdsmen. According to Sombart:
The capitalistic civilization of our age is the fruit of the union between the Jews, a Southern people pushing into the North, and the Northern tribes, indigenous there. The Jews contributed an extraordinary capacity for commerce, and the Northern peoples, above all the Germans, an equally remarkable ability for technical inventions.[29]
The main premise upon which the German half of Sombart’s origins thesis rests is the claim that “From the very first [our ancestors, i.e., the Germans] . . . seemed to be rooted in the soil.”[30] This means that Germans, who live in cool forests, are closer to nature (“Man is brought into closer touch with Nature in the North than in the hot countries.”) than the Jews, who “have received their peculiar impress from the thousands of years of wandering in the wilderness.”[31] The German genius, in other words, brought forth the “feudal manorial system,” a system tied to the soil:
from the soil which the ploughshare turns up arose that economic organization of society which was dominant in Europe before Capitalism came—the feudal, manorial system, resting on the ideas that production should be only for consumption, that every man should have a niche to work in and that every society should have differences in status. The peasant’s holding, strictly marked off as it was from his neighbor’s, gave prominence to the idea of each man’s limited sphere of activities, of “the estate to which it had pleased God to call him” there he was to remain and work in the traditional way.[32]
This system finds its antithesis in Jewish Capitalism: “From the endless wastes of sand, from the pastoral pursuits, springs the opposite way of life—Capitalism.”[33]According to Sombart:
Their constant concern with money distracted the attention of the Jews from a qualitative, natural view of life to a quantitative abstract conception. The Jews fathomed all the secrets that lay hid in money and found out its magic powers. They became the lords of money, and, through it, lords of the world.[34]
As with Max Weber, whose book he criticizes, Werner Sombart runs into trouble when he tries to formulate a theory which can explain the origins of Capitalism. To begin with, the German half of Sombart’s foundational myth flies in the face of historical reality. The Germans were not bound to the soil, certainly not “from the very first” as Sombart claims. In fact, the rise of German hegemony over European culture, as symbolized by the Holy Roman Empire, began with the exact opposite of attachment to the soil. It began with something the Germans term the “Voelkerwanderung,” i.e., with the wandering of the German tribes beginning in earnest around the Fourth Century AD. When the Goths settled on the southern bank of the Danube and defeated the Roman legions in the battle of Adrianople in 378, the stage was set for centuries of looting and pillaging as these barbaric and largely Germanic hordes swept over what was left of the Roman empire and remade Europe in their image.
The Lombards (or Langobards) are a typical example of one of the wandering Germanic tribes who changed the face of Europe after the fall of Rome by looting and plundering. After subduing the local population, the Lombards exacted tribute so that they could engage in things they considered important, namely, hunting, warring, and raising pigs. The Germanic invasion would have significant consequences for the economic development of Italy, and once northern Italy became Europe’s premier power in banking and finance, their development would have significant consequences for all of Europe, and once Europe founded its colonies in the New World, consequences for the entire world as well.
The Lombard conquest of Italy began when the entire Lombard nation (200,000 strong) was driven out of their most recent home in Pannonia on the Danube by the Mongols. Following the route already established by the Roman legions, the Lombards crossed the Julian Alps into Italy in 568 “and soon overran Venetia and the valley of the Po as far west as Milan.”[35]
In the aftermath of the invasion, the conquered “Romans” had two choices. They could remain on the land, in which case they became slaves of the Lombards. This peasant class supplied the material needs of the Lombard elites because “The main activity of most free Lombards was warfare and hunting; their land they left to be worked by the dependent population.”[36] A new Germanic aristocratic culture replaced its Roman predecessor, and “Their principal activity was hunting and the breeding of swine and other animals most easily adapted to forest life.”[37]
By the middle of the seventh century, the Lombards controlled a land area four-times larger than Byzantine Italy, but “the Lombards . . . were practically cut off from all maritime activity and even neglected to use their two ports of Genoa and Pisa.”[38]The “Greeks,” on the other hand, controlled all of the coastal districts, all of the ports, and therefore all of the commerce of what was the former Roman Empire in the West. Commerce continued in Italy during the “dark ages,” largely because of the ports of Byzantine Italy, all of which “maintained perpetual contacts with Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, which at that time were economically the most vigorous and enterprising part of the world.”[39]
Those who chose not to serve the new Germanic masters left the land and took up residence in the complex of islands that made up the delta of the Po and Adige Rivers, which came to be known as Venice. Venice retained its identity as an outpost of the Roman empire largely through its navy, which facilitated trade with Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire which remained untouched by Germanic invasions. Culture in Italy, as a result, took on a dual Germanic-Greco-Roman character. Tilling the soil according to the system of the feudal, manorial economy characterized the Germanic, Langobardian interior of Italy, while commerce with the Greeks, which engendered a money economy, characterized the cities along the coast. Eventually, during the course of the Middle Ages, these two Italies, along with their different economic systems, would come in conflict with each other, and it would be up to the Catholic Church to adjudicate their differences and decide which economic advances were compatible with a Christian social order and which were not.
The final element which contributed to the development of economic life in post-Imperial Christian Italy was the Catholic Church, in particular the large ecclesiastical estates which were first managed in a systematic way by the monastic orders: “The man most responsible for this was St. Benedict (480-543) who in his famous Rule, compiled about 534 for the abbey on Monte Cassino, provided a model for the economic practice of all the Benedictine houses subsequently founded throughout Italy and western Europe.”[40] Gradually under the influence of Benedictine monks, who in addition to the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, took a vow of stability binding them to one place, animal husbandry and agriculture took the place of the hunting and looting, which had been the basis of aristocratic Langobardic culture.
Sombart got it wrong when he ascribed to the Germans some mystical connection to the soil. The Germanic connection to the soil came not from the culture of wandering German tribes but from the Catholic Church in general and the vow of stability taken by Benedictine monks in particular, as they tried for 1,000 years to civilize and Christianize the Germanic barbarian looters who constituted the ruling class in Europe.
Economic development in Italy took place in a cultural matrix composed of these three competing forces. Gradually, the forests and swamps of the Po Valley, where the Lombards did their hunting, were cleared and drained under the tutelage of the Benedictines, and the surplus food which this land produced helped feed the commerce-oriented population of cities like Venice, Florence and Milan, which could then engage in increasingly far-flung and sophisticated trading with Byzantium and the Levant on the one hand and Flanders and England on the other. This increasingly lucrative trade, especially after the added impetus of the Crusades, led, in turn, to increased economic development, which led to the need for increasingly sophisticated financial instruments to keep track of and facilitate even more complex forms of commerce. As increased economic activity led to increased wealth and increased wealth to increased power, conflicts arose between the stable feudal culture of the land and the money culture of commerce that was slowly replacing it as centers of northern Italian commerce like Florence, Lucca, Siena and Milan rose to prominence alongside Venice. “In the Middle Ages it was the international trade ventures that did most to favor the rise of the capitalist spirit.”[41]
Trade flourished in spite of ecclesial skepticism and downright disapproval. St. Thomas Aquinas felt that trade destroyed culture: “For,” the angelic doctor wrote,
the city that for its subsistence has need of much merchandise must necessarily submit to the presence of foreigners. Now relations with foreigners, as Aristotle says in his Politics, very often corrupt national customs: the foreigners who have been brought up under other laws and customs, in many cases act otherwise than is the use of the citizens, who, led by their example, imitate them and so bring disturbance into social life. Moreover, if the citizens themselves engage in commerce, they open the way to many vices. For since the aim of merchants is wholly one of gain, greed takes root in the heart of the citizens, by which everything in the city, becomes venal, and with the disappearance of good faith, the way is open to fraud; the general good is despised, and each man will seek his own particular advantage; the taste for virtue will be lost when the honor which is normally the reward of virtue is accorded to all. Hence in such a city civil life cannot fail to grow corrupt.[42]
By the end of the 15th century, it looked as if Aquinas’s prediction had come true for the city-states of northern Italy, where “competition had become intense, and beyond what was allowed by law” and no longer “mitigated by aspirations towards a society based on brotherly unity.”[43] This is certainly the case if we take the sermons of the Mendicant preachers as an accurate picture of what is going on. Instead of embodying the Catholic ideal, Florence under Medici rule was becoming a place where: “no one feels shame if he acts in a capitalistic manner. The younger men, swept along by the current, drag the old ones with them. Capitalists seek to break down the barriers that civil and ecclesiastical legislation set on their action.”
Schooled by Weber’s understanding of Protestantism, Todd ignores the Catholic monastic contribution to the development of the work ethic in the Germanic speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire from “Ora et Labora,” the motto of the Benedictines, to “Arbeit macht frei,” the Nazi distortion of that concept, to the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s. He also ignores the role of the Jewish revolutionary spirit in subverting that work ethic by promoting both usury—symbolized best by the rise of the Rothschild family—and revolution—symbolized best by agents of the Rothschilds like Heinrich Heine or agents of the Schiff family like Lev Trotsky. The common denominator for both usury and revolution is Jewish, just as the common denominator which unites all those who feel that labor is the source of all value, including Karl Marx, is Catholic. Protestantism provided the transitional vehicle from the latter to the former throughout northern Europe, which is how Todd defines the “West.” Defined more narrowly, the West is based on three revolutions which create a “select club which only includes England, the United States and France. The English Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 are the founding events of this narrow liberal West.”[44] The “entire Protestant sphere,” to use Todd’s terminology, is based on revolution.
At this point Todd’s adherence to Weber’s thesis sidetracks his own argument, causing him to focus on extraneous issues like literacy and predestination while ignoring the main point, which is revolution. The Protestant Reformation began as a looting operation which despoiled the monasteries of 900 years of accumulated labor, but it soon became the Protestant Revolution, which sought to consolidate those ill-gotten gains through theological contortions of the sort Tawney characterized accurately when he wrote that “the upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon.”[45] In this sense, Tawney, Weber, and Todd misunderstood the trajectory of Protestantism, which was basically an after the fact theological justification of looting.
Conspicuous by its absence from Todd’s list of foundational revolutions was the revolutionary decade of the 1640s in England, which preceded the Glorious Revolution by 40 years. Todd, for some reason, omitted the prime example of the Revolutionary spirit in both England and New England, namely, the Puritans, who are doubly significant because of their overt and obvious link to the Jewish revolutionary spirit, but also because one of the most famous Puritans was John Milton, the man who wrote the Protestant epic Paradise Lost, which portrayed Satan as the patron saint of Protestantism. Both William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley believed that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost:
They both critiqued Milton’s Satan by finding several imperfections in Paradise Lost. Both tried to surpass Milton by creating their own perfect version of Milton’s Satan. Shelley goes a step beyond Blake when designing his Satan by producing a new tragic hero that does not have a hamartia.[46]
Protestantism may be the hidden grammar of the American Empire, but Satanism is the hidden grammar of Protestantism. Herman Melville understood this. In Moby Dick, First Mate Starbuck rebuked Captain Ahab for the “madness” involved in taking “vengeance on a dumb brute . . . that simply smote thee from blindest instinct” by describing it as “blasphemy.” Ahab, who seems predestined for destruction at his own hand, doubles down, like a good Emersonian, and says, “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”[47]
As they are getting ready to sail on the Pequod, Ishmael and Queequeg are confronted by a strange figure who “levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question” and asked them: “Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?” The name of the “ragged old sailor” is Elijah. When Ismael admits that he and Queequeg have signed a contract binding them to sail on a whaling expedition with Captain Ahab, Elijah follows up Ishmael’s admission by asking “Anything there about your souls?”
It’s a question Americans have been asking about the ship of state for a long time. The question became especially relevant when Stockton Rush’s aptly named submarine the Titan imploded with all hands-on board near the wreck of the Titanic, which each passenger paid $250,000 to view. Rush has been described as “a cowboy who cut too many corners,” but he is really an avatar of Captain Ahab. Docile to the conventional narrative, Ishmael thinks that Ahab is “a good whale hunter and a good captain to his crew,” but the stranger knows that he is more than that. Ishmael and Queequeg have made a pact with the devil, but like most Americans they don’t understand how. After signing the contract, everything is “all fixed and arranged” in a way that mirrored covenant theology and Calvinist predestination. Like his namesake, Elijah is a prophet without honor in his native place. The Pequod is the ship of state; Ahab is the psychopath who sits at the helm as it sails to its doom. Stockton Rush is Captain Ahab. All CEOs are psychopaths and narcissists, and before you raise any objections, it is always the exception which proves the rule. A psychopath is now captain of the ship of state, which is America, which is the world’s fourth great religion, as Yale Professor David Gelernter has pointed out. David Gelernter failed to point out that Satanism is the hidden grammar of the religion known as America. America was a Protestant colony, and so it should come as no surprise that Satanism became the hidden grammar of England, America’s mother country, at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare pointed this out in Ulysses’ speech in Troilus and Cressida, when he describe the aftermath of the Reformation as well as its inexorable trajectory:
Take but degree away untune that string
and hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnacy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be the lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right, or, rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resided,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself.[48]
Shakespeare’s play is set in ancient Greece, which means that he is really talking about the situation in Elizabethan England in the aftermath of the looting operation known as the Reformation, when the crown had lost all legitimacy but retained its hold on power by transforming Catholic England into the world’s first police state. Shakespeare’s genius lay in his ability to describe accurately if poetically the novel form of government which the Reformation ushered in in England.
Todd calls it Nihilism, which is closely related to Satanism. Because nature abhors a vacuum, the void created by the disappearance of Protestantism was filled by “nihilism,” which Todd defines as “an amoralism stemming from an absence of values.”[49] Nihilism, he tells us at another point, “denies reality and truth; it is a cult of lies.”[50] Nihilism leads to Narcissism, both of which are based on a denial of reality that has become pandemic in societies which claim that “a man can become a woman, and a woman can become a man,” an affirmation which Todd describes as both false and “close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.”[51] Because “right and wrong . . . have lost their names,” a man can become a woman if the powerful decree it possible. That has political ramifications because it also means that a nuclear treaty with Iran under Obama can transform, overnight, into an aggravated sanctions regime under Trump.[52]
Todd indicates that Satanism is the hidden grammar of the Zero State obliquely when he claims that a “satanic ritual” (“une sorte de rituel économico-philosophico-satanique”) served as the demarcation point between the era of the WASP elite and the moment when it was succeeded by the Synagogue of Satan as America’s ruling class. Blinded by the superficial categories he has appropriated from Max Weber, Todd fails to see not only that the hidden grammar of Protestantism is Satanic, but also, and more importantly, that America became the Great Satan when the Jews took over its culture. Todd insists that the disappearance of Protestantism is “the decisive explanatory key” to understanding “the current global turbulence”[53] without telling us who succeeded the WASPs as America’s new ruling class. Todd claims that “religious extinction,” (l’extinction religieuse) led to “the disappearance of social morality and collective feeling; to a process of centrifugal geographic expansion combining with a disintegration of the original heart of the system”[54] as if it were an impersonal act of nature without human actors at the helm.
Satanism has been the trajectory of the Anglo-American empire ever since Satan gave his famous speech at the beginning of the Protestant epic poem Paradise Lost. England’s Romantic poets, as we have already indicated, knew that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost. When Percy Bysshe Shelley wanted to light the fire of rebellion in Ireland, he could find no better phrase than the one Satan used to rouse the demons in hell when he said at the conclusion of that speech: “Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.” Milton’s heroic Satanism becomes apparent at the beginning of the same speech when Satan, who has been expelled from heaven, wakes up in the sea of flame which is now not only his eternal home but his kingdom as well. In that speech, Satan begins by saying farewell to heaven, but soon gets to the point:
Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy forever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.
“Here at last,” the Puritans said when they arrived in America, “we may reign secure.” After the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell died in 1660 a wave of revulsion at the excesses of Puritanism swept through England, which was best symbolized by the mob which exhumed Cromwell’s body and hanged it. Crowell’s head popped off during this act of desecration, and its whereabouts remain unknown to this day, but his revolutionary spirit had departed from England while his head was still on his shoulders and migrated across the Atlantic to Massachusetts, where it became the spiritus movens behind the American Revolution a century later.
The man who understood this best was the Methodist divine William Fletcher. In a letter denouncing the “seditious sophism” which Rev. Richard Price, the nonconformist supporter of both the American and French revolutions, espoused in his sermons, Fletcher compared Price to Satan with specific reference to Milton’s epic. Price’s wicked patriotic speech could have been made by:
Satan to the Son of God, when, according to Milton’s fancy, they encountered each other in the heavenly plains. I meet thee in the field to defend my freedom and assert the liberty of these heavenly legions. Before I pierce thy side with my spear, let me pierce thy conscience with my arguments. “In a free slate in heaven, where liberty is perfect, everyone is his own legislator. To be free, is to be guided by one’s own will; and to be guided by the will of another, is the character of servitude.” They call the Messiah The Prince ; but for as much as thou sayest, I do nothing of myself, and art not ashamed to add, Father, Not My will, but thine be done; and to teach the mean Spirits who follow thee to pray, Thy Will be done in heaven and on earth; it is plain, that thou the power of self-government, and introduces Slavery.”[55]
Satanic liberty is another word for slavery. Fletcher echoes Satan’s speech directly when he ascribes to Price and other supporters of the American Revolution, the notion that “self-government and supremacy in hell, are preferable to servile obedience and subordinate grandeur in heaven.” Fletcher concludes his argument by claiming that the “speech of the patriotic Seraph,” otherwise know as Satan, “is formed upon the [same] principles laid down in Dr. Price’s pamphlet.” It is that Satanic spirit “which deluges America and threatens to overflow Great Britain itself.”[56]
A century after Milton wrote his epic, Satan’s speech became the basis for America’s Declaration of Independence. Even though all of the signers of that declaration were in full rebellion against the Calvinism which inspired Milton, the signers of the Declaration of Independence expressed the gist of Satan’s speech when they wrote:
when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.[57]
America was destined to become what the Ayatollah Khomeini referred to as “the Great Satan,” the moment Milton’s co-religionists stepped onto the shores of Massachusetts Bay. The sons of those Puritans were the best interpreters of that spirit as it morphed into Unitarianism and then apostasy over the course of the 19th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson most certainly read Paradise Lost. We know this because his most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” resonates with the same Satanic spirit and cadence. Having learned from Milton that
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
Emerson concluded that “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” When a generation raised on the Bible demurred, saying “But these impulses may be from below, not from above,” Emerson countered by invoking Satan: “They do not seem to be to be such, but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” Emerson got the idea that he was “the Devil’s child” from the Calvinist principle of total depravity, which he rejected while at the same time retaining the Satanic gist of the Protestant revolutionary spirit.
Emerson’s neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne inherited the same Calvinist legacy, and like Emerson, he rejected it, but he could never accept Emerson’s naïve optimism and remained a prisoner of the dark forest which he described in “Young Goodman Brown” after Brown left his wife Faith to meet up with the Devil. Confronted with the devil’s impatience, all Young Goodman Brown could say is that “Faith kept me back a while” before being welcomed into “the communion of your race,” which is that “Evil is the nature of mankind.”
Faith kept the American Republic back a while, but the emergence of the American Empire after World War II has been one long plunge into Satanism. Like Satan, the dark figure who welcomed Young Goodman Brown into the forest, the Puritan minister explains that “evil must be your only happiness.” America, if by that we mean the world’s fourth great religion, has been one long pact with the devil ever since.
Ben Franklin was known as the American Prometheus because he stole fire from the heavens when he flew a kite with a key dangling from it during a thunderstorm and stored the electricity which flowed from it in a Leyden Jar, as a preliminary step toward taming that force of nature and paving the way for its use in running the engines of the emerging American Empire. Thanks to Satanists like Ben Franklin, who was a member of the Hellfire club in London, the spirit of the Great Satan took up its abode in Catholic France a mere 13 years after it emerged in the Declaration of Independence, culminating in the French Revolution of 1789. Russia punished France for its rebellion against God in 1814, but in spite of God’s repeated chastisements, the Spirit of Rebellion has never left France, as evidenced by the riots that are now plaguing that country as it lurches toward anarchy. Sick of Macron’s support of NATO’s war in the Ukraine, the French are now praying for a Russian invasion because Russia was the first scourge of God which punished the French for the sin of rebellion against God’s anointed leader of their country during the French Revolution.
France, however, refused to learn the lesson which God used the Russians to teach them. The Prussians became the scourge of God in 1870, but again France refused to learn the lesson God was teaching them. In 1890, Civilta Cattolica explained the lesson God was trying to teach France when it announced on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution that any country which turned away from the laws created by God would end up being ruled by Jews, who still embody the revolutionary spirit which France refuses to abjure. Todd’s fixation on Weber’s Protestant Geist blinds him to the fact that the same Jewish spirit has taken over France.
Nihilism is Todd’s word for the Satanic spirit which traces its roots back to the time when Jesus Christ confronted the Jews who claimed that they were the “seed of Abraham” by telling them that “Your father is Satan” (John 8:44). By killing Christ, the Jews who rejected the Logos Incarnate became the “Synagogue of Satan” whose rejection of Logos found expression in a trajectory of revolutionary activity which stretched from Barabbas and Simon bar Kochba, to Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, to Irving Kristol and other Trotskyite revenants from Alcove B at the City College of New York in the 1930s who have come to be known as Neoconservatives, who destroyed what was left of Russia after the demise of Communism through the activity of Jewish looters like Jeffrey Sachs and the Jewish oligarchs who profited from his activity. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia recovered, “after the nightmare of the 1990s,”[58] but America did not recover from the victory in the Cold War which created that nightmare because “Western leaders have remained blind to reality.”[59]
Displaying a blind spot of his own, Todd identifies the group of blind men responsible for the eclipse of the WASP elite as “les néoconservateurs,”[60] or simply “les neocons.” Todd’s inability to identify the enemy becomes apparent in the original French edition, where the term “neocons” appears jarringly out of place in the midst of his otherwise precise French prose:
L’implosion, par étapes, de la culture WASP –blanche, anglo-saxonne et protestante –depuis les années 1960 a créé un empire privé de centre et de projet, un organisme essentiellement militaire dirigé par un groupe sans culture (au sens anthropologique) qui n’a plus comme valeurs fondamentales que la puissance et la violence. Ce groupe est généralement désigné par l’expression « néocons ». Il est assez étroit mais se meut dans une classe supérieure atomisée, anomique, et il a une grande capacité de nuisance géopolitique et historique.[61]
If we ask the question: qu’ils sont les “neocons”? we learn that they are:
an essentially military organization led by a group without culture (in the anthropological sense) which only has power and violence as its fundamental values. This group is generally referred to as “neocons”. It is quite narrow but operates in an atomized, anomic upper class, and it has a great capacity for geopolitical and historical nuisance.[62]
Instead of naming the Jews as the group which created the Satanic Zero State in America, Todd creates a category of the mind known as “The Blob,” which he describes as:
the group of individuals who, concretely, conduct the foreign policy of the sick power that America has become. Who is this tribe with singular morals which, through its tastes and its decisions, has led the West to the gates of Russia? We most often study a primitive community in its natural environment: this will be the city of Washington. We will be particularly interested in the American geopolitical establishment, which is colloquially called the “Blob”, after the name of a worrying micro-organism.[63]
Todd seems unaware that the name comes from a 1950s horror movie, attributing it instead to Stephen Walt, who got the nickname from Ben Rhodes, a former Obama adviser, to designate the microcosm responsible for foreign policy.[64] “The Washingtonian Blob as presented by Walt corresponds entirely to my vision of a leading group devoid of intellectual or ideological ties external to itself.”[65] After listing the Kagan family—including Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, who is married to Robert Kagan—as “one particularly central example of “the small band of semi-intellectuals who inhabit the Blob, a sub-village of Washington,”[66] it turns out that the Blob is, mirabile dictu, Jewish:
I was surprised to note the frequency of Jewish ancestors coming from the Empire of the Tsars and its margins. We noted that the two most influential figures “managing” Ukraine, Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, and Victoria Nuland, the Deputy Secretary of State, are of Jewish descent. More precisely, we discover that Blinken is on his mother’s side of Hungarian Jewish origin and that his paternal grandfather was born in Kyiv. Victoria Nuland’s father’s side is a combination of Moldovan and Ukrainian Jews. Let’s move on to the ideological background, Victoria’s in-laws, the Kagans. Robert and Frederick’s father Donald was born in Lithuania. The fact that so many people in the high geopolitical establishment have a family link with the western part of the former Tsarist Empire is disturbing.[67]
Once Todd establishes the Jewish identity of the Blob all sorts of interesting connections emerge. Because Jews “remember Ukraine as the official birthplace of ‘Russian’ anti-Semitism, beginning with the pogroms of 1881-1882,”[68] NATO’s war against Russia emerges as a Jewish desire, especially on Nuland’s part, to punish the Ukraine for the Chmielnicki pogroms. Or as Todd puts it, “Why would the Americans of Ukrainian Jewish origin who, with the government in Kyiv, co-pilot this butchery not feel this as a just punishment inflicted on the country that made their ancestors suffer so much?”[69]
Unlike “les néoconservateurs,”[70] whom Todd describes as the heirs of McCarthyism, George Kennan, the WASP who was the architect of America’s policy of containment during the Cold War, was “anything but a blind anti-communist.” Because Kennan spoke Russian, because he knew and loved Russian culture, he designed a strategy of containment which aimed to prevent an armed confrontation.[71] The Kennan era ended, according to Todd, when the neocons took over American foreign policy. Todd identifies the man responsible for that takeover as Walt Rostow, Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser during the Vietnam War. At this point, Todd’s thesis becomes problematic because Rostow was in no sense of the word a “neocon,” (a word which did not exist in the 1960s) but unlike his predecessors at the State Department, who were committed to Kennan’s containment policy, Rostow was a Jew.
Todd tells us that “Today, the village of Washington is nothing more than a collection of individuals completely devoid of common morals. I don’t say ‘village’ by chance,”[72] but he can’t bring himself to tell us that the “village” is ruled by Jews, in spite of all of the evidence he amasses to the contrary:
The same overrepresentation is observed in the Board of Directors of the most prestigious foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations: almost a third of its thirty-four members are Jewish. In 2010, the Forbes ranking showed that, among the top hundred fortunes in the United States, there were 30% Jews. We have the impression of being in Budapest at the beginning of the 1930s. The interpretation of this fact is also the same: in order to explain a strong over-representation of Jews in the upper categories of a given society, we must first be looking for, and more often than not finding, an educational weakness in the general population, which allowed the educational intensity of the Jewish religion to be fully manifested.[73]
And here we reach the fundamental problem of La Defaite de l’Occident. Todd is himself a Jew for whom the term Jew is an empty category of the mind which has no reference to the realities I have described in detail. Like Colonel Macgregor and Tucker Carlson, he prefers the euphemism “neoconservative.” Todd admits that “the Blob” is under Jewish control, but Jew is not a meaningful category for Jews, as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein have shown. Todd’s use of the term “Neocon” prevents him from identifying who took over America after the Protestant spirit evaporated in 1978, the year in which John D. Rockefeller, 3rd and his brother Nelson died. Instead of telling us who was responsible for the eclipse of Protestantism which led to the collapse of the American Empire, Todd refers to an impersonal “implosion, in stages, of WASP culture—White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant” which began in the 1960s when the Neocons deprived the American Empire of “a center and a project,”[74] which Todd describes as “a national culture shared by the masses and the ruling classes.”[75]
Breaking the cultural form of the American empire known as Protestantism was similar to splitting the atom because of the violence and destruction it unleashed on America and the rest of the world, but it was not an impersonal eruption of force majeure. It was a revolution. It was a coup d’etat which supplanted the Protestant work ethic with the Jewish idol of nihilism. Todd is nothing short of brilliant when it comes to explaining how nihilism leads to violence. At this stage in the disintegration of the American Empire, war has become “the dynamic” of the Zero State, for which “because war is, always and everywhere, one of the virtualities of nihilism.”[76]America’s insistence on war as the solution to every problem, especially in the Middle East, has led to total isolation. The American vote against a UN-sponsored ceasefire in Gaza is “nihilistic,” because “it rejects the common morality of humanity.”[77] In the most recent vote, the US was supported by three other countries, Israel, Micronesia, and Nauru, which, because guano, its main natural resource, has been strip-mined out of existence, qualifies it as the world’s paradigmatic shit-hole country. Nihilism has led to self-destruction, which allows us to see that America’s “thoughtless and unqualified commitment to Israel is a suicidal symptom,”[78] that has turned the United States into the land of mass shootings, fentanyl zombies, zero religion, and denial of reality, where “the primary impulse is a need for violence.”[79] Todd adds the opioid crisis to the list without telling us, of course, that that was another Jewish project run by the Sackler family.
By the end of his book Todd becomes the classic example of an acute critical intelligence sabotaging itself by its failure to identify the enemy. As Sun Tzu said, if you do not know who you are, and you cannot identify the enemy, you will lose every battle. More importantly, Todd doesn’t know that his own identity and the identity of his enemy are one and the same. The French say Cherchez la femme because they feel that any mystery can be solved by finding the woman behind it. We could modify that famous phrase and say, in the light of Todd’s revelations, Cherchez le juif. But America gained its own insight into the hidden grammar behind Todd’s expose of the Zero State when Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
So where does that leave us? A German reader gives some indication when he writes:
Eine Frage zum besseren Verständnis ist mir gekommen: Du sprichst ja vom Verdunsten des Protestantismus.
Gleichzeitig ist die „versteckte Grammatik“ des Puritanismus der Satanismus – von Anfang an. Wie muss man dann die anfängliche Kraft und Produktivität Amerikas deuten? Ist das Deiner Meinung nach „der Überhang“ des Katholischen, die Früchte dessen, was eigentlich aus dem katholischen Geist stammt, und nun einfach geraubt und abgeerntet wird, bis nichts mehr übrig ist?
Meinst Du also, dass in der WASP Elite eigentlich nie eine „richtige“ Produktivität da war, sondern immer nur eine geraubte? So dass die Idee einer „Rückkehr“ zur WASP Elite vollkommen undenkbar ist? Weil sie von Anfang an auf Satanismus gebaut ist?
Vielleicht in unserem nächsten Gespräch, wenn Du wieder zurück bist.
The best way to understand the term “evaporate” (Verdunsten) would be to intensify its meaning by replacing it with the related term “distillation.” Distillation is an accelerated form of evaporation of the sort we have seen as the Empire plunged toward its end toward the middle of the 21st century. Protestantism is nothing more than the etiolated Catholicism which resulted from the theft of the Bible which took place under the rubric of “sola scriptura” at the time of the Reformation combined with the Satanic spirit of rebellion which transformed Protestantism into an economic system known as capitalism. Over the course of five centuries, as that evaporation intensified into distillation, the Catholic legacy burned off leaving only the Satanic gist of rebellion behind. Perry Miller rightly points out that Ralph Waldo Emerson embodied both aspects equally. He lived the bourgeois life of a married man, patting little Rose Hawthorne on the head and giving her candy while on visits to her father Nathaniel, while at the same time espousing an essentially Satanic philosophy in his writings and especially in “Self-Reliance.”
Why then was America so spectacularly successful economically if Protestantism was its hidden grammar? The answer is simple enough. America became wealthy because of abundant natural resources (reiche Bodenschaetze) and an unprecedented ability to mobilize labor, symbolized best by Henry Ford’s assembly line. Calvinism, as the first manifestation of the protestantische Geist in America, hindered the growth of wealth because Calvin, unlike Luther, allowed usury and because of that the eventual judification of America which took place after World War II. Capitalism, as Heinrich Pesch, reminded us, is state-sponsored usury combined with the systematic appropriation of all surplus value. Toleration of usury created a debt load which forced manufacturing, especially after the creation of the Federal Reserve system, to drive down wages in a futile attempt to keep up with the predations of compound interest.
Once we have a clear idea of the problem, the way out of this mess becomes clear. We must eliminate usury from the economy. We must appropriate and redistribute wealth accumulated by usury. We must eliminate the funding of all political campaigns as well as political advertising, and, most importantly, we must deny Jews the rights of citizenship, something which no country in Europe granted them before Napoleon emancipated the Jews at the beginning of the 19th century. The Biden Administration has shown clearly what happens when Jews take over our government. As long as that happens, we will have foreign wars, largely in support of Israel, and crushing debt. A first step in this direction would be a ban on anyone holding dual citizenship from any political office. Jonathan Pollard stated plainly after Donald Trump pardoned him that the Jew has a duty to betray any country which grants him citizenship. Sun Tzu said that if you don’t know who you are and you can’t identify the enemy, you will lose every battle. Unlike Pogo, we can say that we have met the enemy and he is not us, because we are Americans and they are rootless supporters of the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.
FURTHER READING: https://www.unz.com/ejones/cherchez-le-juif-satanism-as-the-hidden-grammar-of-america/#footnote_25
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