Beyond the Victim Narrative
The Best Book on the Jewish Question
‘The Jewish problem is a prohibited subject, of which it is forbidden to speak, but the situation is too grave for us to remain silent,’ writes Vicomte Leon De Poncins in The Secret Powers Behind the Revolution (1929).
It’s best book I have read on this subject because it’s a synthesis of all the most important books that came before it — books that would never be published now. Like all my book summaries, this is also my interpretation of it: I am not only selecting what points I think are important but sequencing, prioritising and commenting on them for you.
Poncins’ warning is even more important now than it was nearly a hundred years ago: the only ‘really important question in the world’, he said, ‘is the fight against the revolution and above all against the revolutionary idea.’ This idea has its roots in freemasonry and, Poncins explains, can be summarised in six points:
Religious. By philosophy or mysticism or empiric science to undermine and discredit all Christian creed.
Ethical. To corrupt morality of northern races with oriental codes — weaken marriage bonds — destroy family life: abolish inheritance, even heritable names.
Aesthetic. Cult of the ugly and aberrant in art, literature, music and drama — modernism — crude orientalism — degeneracy.
Sociological. Abolition of aristocracy — creation of plutocracy, money standard — by vulgar display, extravagance, corruption, to create revolt in proletarian minds, hence class-war.
Industrial and financial. Having destroyed ideals of craftmanship and pride in handicraft, set up golden serpent of profit. Standardisation of cheap and shoddy — centralization — cartel and trust loading to abolition of private ownership and to stale monopoly.
Political. To kill patriotism and pride of race: in name of progress and evolution set up internationalism as ideal of human brotherhood. Thus undermine national unity, weaken all governments and so prepare way for their super-government which shall rule the world.
It is important to note that the Masons openly acknowledged the French Revolution as their work.
These six points, Poncins says, correspond to the six points of the cabalistic star, and ‘the Jewish spirit dominates masonry and imprints upon it that anti-christian hatred the fierceness of which would otherwise be difficult to explain.’ Ultimately, ‘the inner meaning of this warfare is not only political, but essentially religious, for western civilization was founded upon Christian ideas and discipline.’
Thus there is ‘a profound antagonism between Jews and non-Jews’ that is ‘both spiritual and racial’ and arises from ‘a radically different conception of life’: on the one hand, 'the Jewish conception, which believes in the immense value of earthly life (the Kingdom of God upon earth), and which thrusts from it the hope of a future life’; on the other hand, ‘the Christian conception which is based on the inverse.’
I do not agree with Poncins that the antagonism is racial. Because a Jew ceases to be a Jew when he converts to Christianity, this shows it’s spiritual, not racial. Could a black person stop being black? Clearly not. And it’s important to note that a Jew doesn’t cease being a Jew if he converts to, say, Buddhism: opposition to Christianity is the critical point.
Indeed, ‘scattered and rendered powerless for two thousand years, the Jews have always been bitter revolutionaries, and thus we find them taking part in all modern revolutions of which they are the most active directing element.’ The bulk of the book is dedicated to outlining the evidence for this. Since I am more interested in the underlying principles, however, I will stress here only the quotation Poncins provides from the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Jew Disraeli:
‘The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes... That mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is yet known in England, is developing entirely under the auspices of the Jews.’
Poncins notes, for example, that ‘the government of the Soviets was composed of Jews.’
Unlike most writers on this subject, however, Poncins does not promote a victim narrative. And that’s what makes his book so valuable:
‘Can we blame the Jews because they are working for the greatness of their race? To that I should reply without hesitating: No; not more than we reproach an Englishman or a German with working for the greatness of his country. There is indeed much that is beautiful in the fervour and conviction of this Jewish patriotism.’
Rather than being merely something imposed on the West, Poncin argues, the revolutionary idea is ‘the logical consequence of modern principles’:
Atheistic materialism in the spiritual domain.
Democracy, republicanism and liberalism in the political domain.
Collectivism in the social domain.
Thus ‘so long as States followed the two guiding lines of absolute monarchy by divine right and of religion, the powers of evil were unable to prevail against them; on the day when they abandoned those principles these powers triumphed.’
According to Poncins, it 'cannot be stressed enough’ that ‘Judaism only became a destructive element when we allowed ourselves to be impregnated with it.’ The problem is ‘the democratic, materialist and revolutionary state of mind which reigns today and influences every one, consciously or unconsciously.’
The modern world is suffering ‘universal anarchy due to the disappearance of spiritual power’.
In this respect, ‘socialism and democracy are the greatest snares of modern times,’ and Poncins gives a bracing reality check for what needs to be done if the West is to recover:
‘We must give up the deadly principles of 1789… We must give up parliamentarism, demagogy and atheism regarded as a state religion; we must return to traditions, to absolute monarchy, to religious principles compulsorily taught in the schools, to the social hierarchy, to all that puts a check on the one hand on the blind forces of popular destruction, and on the other hand, on the unlimited power of gold; in so doing we may perhaps free ourselves from this brutalising present day economic mentality of Jewish origin: business and gold the supreme aim of existence to the detriment of all culture, all beauty, all moral elevation. Then the social organism will become normal again and the Judaeo-Masonic microbe will be powerless against it.’
And if we don’t? Then, as Dostoevsky warned in 1873, ‘the triumph of those ideas is approaching in the presence of which the sentiments of humanity are mute, the thirst for truth, the Christian and national feelings and even the common pride of the peoples of Europe.’ Instead, all that will remain is ‘the blind and grasping appetite for personal material well-being, the first for the accumulation of money by any means’.
On the significance of absolute monarchy especially, Poncins writes that it is ‘not only a political form; it almost inevitably implies a whole political, social and religious system which opposed both in spirit and by interest to revolutionary principles. The hatred of revolutionaries for monarchy shows that they fully realize this.’
Furthermore, since ‘the mentality of a people is not a spontaneous product’ but rather ‘moulded and created by various means, of which the School and the Press are the two principal ones’, it is ‘first of all necessary to become master of these two factors of public opinion.’ And therefore ‘one must defy the censorship over newspaper and book publishing, over news agencies, over important sections of film and play production, and over many politicians.’
Only then can we ‘overcome the systematic obstruction made to any divulgation of the real nature of things’.
The real nature of things is this: the victim narrative that blames the Jews is one of the surest signs of the emasculation of the West. In fact, as Yuri Slezkine argues in The Jewish Century, the modern spirit is the Jewish spirit. The West was given what it asked for — good and hard.
Ultimately, as The Bastard puts it in King John,
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.