ZGram - 7/22/2002 - "Book Review: "The 'Jewish Threat'" - Part IV

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 22, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is the conclusion of a lengthy book review of The "Jewish 
Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army by Joseph W. 
Bendersky. New York: Basic Books, 2000, xvii + 539 pp.  The reviewer 
is Kevin MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California State 
University at Long Beach, California. 

[START}

Attitude of MID Officers toward Jews. Bendersky tries to portray the
officers as thinking of Jews as a lower race, but his own data belie him.
The officers thought Jews were very good in business and disinclined to
manual labor (p. 37). Jews were typically seen as very intelligent. In the
words of one officer, persecutions over millennia in conjunction with the
"desperate, pitiless struggle for existence in occupations requiring
sharpened mental qualities . . . [have] made the Jews the keenest race of
mankind and the best equipped for a successful struggle for a 'spot in the
sun' in our days of liberal laws and equal opportunity for all" (p. 44).
Intellectuals who lectured at the Army War College had similar views. For
example, Lothrop Stoddard viewed "The Jewish mind [as] instinctively
analytical, and sharpened by the dialectic subtleties of the Talmud".
Despite such statements, Bendersky, echoing the rhetoric of Jewish activist
organizations throughout the period, characterizes the 1924 immigration law
as directed at "inferior racial types from Southern and Eastern Europe" (p.
154).

Bendersky dismisses the officers' beliefs as resulting from "xenophobic
geopolitics, anticommunism, and racial theories" (p. xiii), oftentimes using
language that makes the officers seem bizarre and paranoid: "insidious
[Jewish] political machinations" (p. 117), "diabolical IWW-Bolshevik scheme"
(p. 126); U.S. Army officers are described as "racial sentinels" (p. 205);
"officers relentlessly pursued these surreptitious forces" (p. 129);
"paranoid intelligence" (p. 130); "obsession with radicalism and alien
forces" (p. 133); "dire predictions" of the consequences of unrestricted
immigration (p. 162); the army's understanding of "the calamitous price of
the nation's neglecting the 'racial factor' in history" (p. 167); by
enacting the 1924 immigration law, "America had narrowly escaped this
disastrous fate [of race mixing]" (p. 181).

Officer Kenyon A. Joyce "described his work as a necessary vigilant struggle
against 'subversive' Russian Communism" (p. 201). One wonders why the only
word directly quoted from Joyce is "subversive", as if his attitude is
weird. The activities of Communists in the U.S. were indeed subversive, and
they were indeed orchestrated from Moscow. It is unconscionable that the
attitudes of the officers are ascribed simply to racist paranoia given the
findings of Klehr et al. (1995) showing that indeed the CPUSA was directed
by the Soviet Union and had a high percentage of Jewish members, often above
40%. And citing percentages of  Jews fails to take account of the personal
characteristics of Jewish radicals as a talented, educated, and ambitious
group. ...

(Please note:  It is possible that the review does not end here, but 
because of time pressure, it is not possible for me to search for the 
rest.)