by Brandon Wainscott
I now call the fallacy reductio ad Judeum, similar to the opposite fallacy reductio at Hitlerum. The former of course means "reduction to the Jews", and the latter "reduction to Hitler". For example of the latter: That Donald Trump is a Nazi for his views on immigration is stupid. His views about a wall are nowhere near what Hitler wanted. He makes this clear. He wants a wall to control simply the illegal immigration of Mexican immigrants. One may disagree, but calling it akin to Nazism is absurd. It has little intellectual substance to argue that. In fact none,
On the other end, there is reducing all the problems of the world, namely tyranny, to the Jews, who seek to control it supposedly. Now not everyone who confesses this belief wants the Jews to be killed. Most of them I would say do not. They just believe in a Jewish conspiracy. It does create a dangerous mindset, however. I of course never wanted the Jews to be destroyed. But as I said, I did have the reductio ad Judeum view.
On the other hand, I was not a racialist [1] as some like to call themselves--namely that we should take pride in our own race and keep it pure, not mixing. They say it is not racism. I think it is a scientific form of racism, as opposed to the form where rednecks lynch and say nigger every time they see a black man. That perhaps makes is worse, as it tries to justify it with intelligence, rather than mere stupidity and ignorance, Blacks have smaller brains,, so they must be stupider, they argue, some of them at least. Yes, blacks do actually have smaller brains, [2] but that does not prove anything in itself. I am not going to go about trying to understand the arguments, as it can be quite scientific. Just like in the historical science, when talking about the Civil War or the Germans in World War II, the historian must remove emotion and bias against the one side, namely the Confederates and Germans, so intellectually the issue has to be looked at form a formal scientific view in studying races because that is just intellectually honest and fair; and besides arguments should not be fallacious, even if they are true. True arguments can be fallacious.
In short, I am no longer an anti-Semite. Of course I hate using that word too much, as it gets thrown around like Marxist does on the Right. I enjoy Marx, but am far from a Marxist. But many on the Right, especially Reactionaries, love to throw around the term Marxist like Leftists do racism. One should actually read Marx. The idea that all this egalitarian class antagonism is from Marx is absurd. Marx starts from the beginning saying all problems of the suffering of the working class come from the bash of the classes against one another, to put it colloquially, but that hardly proves anything about the egalitarianism of the Left. There is a whole French Revolution and this guy named Locke! Marxism--bah. But I will touch on that in another post.
And one more thing. Everyone likes to be the devil's advocate. For the Reactionary it is Hitler, who is exaggerated by the liberals in his evil. Certainly we can lose a perspective and understanding of World War II by focusing on Hitler overmuch, but we should agree he was bad. But, having become disillusioned with the Reactionary movement, and looking into Eastern Orthodoxy, I am an advocate of Stalin. Though he killed three times as many, I think he can be defended as a devil's advocate defendant more justly. I am particularly interested in Russian Orthodoxy, and Russia. It seems that even on the Russian right, there is not the hostility to the Soviet Union as there is on the American right, and even some affection for it. I suppose Reactionaries cannot understand. Since this is about books, I may touch on that: In the Russian novel The Brothers Karamazov in "The Grand Inquisitor", Dostoevsky in his anti-Catholic, anti-Western poem of Ivan is also speaking against the Reactionaries, a Western, Catholic movement. In the novel he uses Alyosha to represent how sin should be dealt with--with calm love and little reaction. But that is another post.
Oh, and my political view. I support Bernie Sanders, am a conservative. I am not a Reactionary, except in my socialist views perhaps. There is that type of socialist whom Marx calls a Reactionary Socialist, generally a form of socialism founded by the European nobility or Reactionary middle class against the liberal bourgeoisie. There has always been a natural antagonism between the merchant class and the nobility. The nobles were wealthy by nature (though there were nobles who were poor), while the merchants had to work for it. It was the bourgeoisie (merchant class) that was behind the revolutions of France of Russia, using the lower class as their means--but it was the Jews some tell us! The nobility, trying t win the favor of the lower class, created a conservative form of socialism, one which Marx called Reactionary Socialism. However in general, I am not Reactionary. I may write on why I am not longer so. As one very conservative Orthodox friend put it: Reactionaries are usually half-autistic people who thrive on argument--hence the name Reactionary. Granted I am autistic, but it is a good point.
_______________
[1] Wiki cites a more formal definition, not giving it a negative connotation, but indifferent, but the colloquial use denotes, from what racialists have told me, a scientific form of racism--that is, that while one race is not superior, they should take pride in themselves, and not mix. Although, to a degree, some believe, it seems there is an intellectual superiority of the white race. There is a thin line between this and white supremacy, a sort of: all white supremacists are racialists, but not all racialists are white supremacists.
[2] I am not completely comfortable citing the New York Times in this matter, even if they cite scientific evidence. Better to cite directly to a formal scientific source, but that creates the problem of having to find fair, unbiased studies, and I don't want to spend time on that as I feel the issue is not that important.
