By: Markus Ely Ravage
Century Magazine (January 1928)
PREFACE by Ursus Major
It was "The Jazz Age": Bootleggers and Revivalists, Gershwin and the Blues, movie stars and one,
long, roaring Bull Market on Wall Street. The world had been "made safe for democracy" - but not
too safe: all of Europe's emperors were gone, but the dictators were just arriving. The first was
Vladimir Ulyanov (better known as "Lenin"), who together with Lev "Trotsky" Bronstein, had first
dismembered the Russian Empire, and then reassembled most of the pieces - after a brutal civil
war - into The Soviet Union, the first Marxist-Communist state. Although Lenin wasn't Jewish,
Trotsky was, as were a great number of other leading Bolsheviks (as they had been called before
the Revolution, and still were by their detractors). In Italy, a young former socialist named Benito
Mussolini had established an alternative to Marxism called Fascism. Mussolini styled himself Il
Duce: "The Leader." Mussolini had achieved power (not nearly as absolute as Lenin's) not so
much by revolution - although he liked to boast that was the case - but mainly due to The King of
Italy's dread of civil war. In war-ravaged Germany, a short-lived revolution (lead by a Jewish
politician) had proclaimed Bavaria an independent state. The former Empire, once so orderly and
prosperous, had become a federal republic solely because its leaders thought Wilson would
intercede for a republic, when in fact the U.S. President, who had mouthed "neutrality" (and
schemed with all the power of his office for intervention) did nothing, while the victorious Allies
presented Germany with a "Peace Treaty," the likes of which had not been seen since Rome had
made "peace" with Carthage. The Versailles Diktat was such an outrage, the U.S. Senate rejected
it out of hand. Lord Keynes went back to England and wrote "The Economics of the Peace," an
analysis which showed that Germany could never pay the astronomical reparations demanded by
the victors: the interest alone would be impossible to meet. Germany would be reduced to debt-slavery without end. In Munich, a former army major named Ernst Röhm (who detested civilian
government) was the impetus for yet another political party, and ordered his employee-informer to
join it. The new party had the impressive name of the National Socialist German Workers Party,
and Röhm's flunky, who became member number seven, was ex-corporal and recipient of The Iron
Cross, First Class, Adolf Hitler.
But that was Europe. In the U.S., the reaction to hordes of immigrants from the Balkans and other
"unsavory" areas was the enactment of the first Immigration Laws in U.S. History: keep your tired
and your poor - except for a very limited number, almost exclusively from north-western Europe.
(The wait-period for a Turk seeking entry to the U.S. was fifty years!) The 1920s also saw, for the
first time an old European tradition, but a relatively new phenomenon in United States: the rise of
rank anti-Semitism. The original Jewish immigrants to the U.S. had been from Western and Central
Europe and were virtually indistinguishable from other European arrivals. (The poem adorning the
State of Liberty, for example, was written by Emma Lazarus, a Jewess whose family were New
Yorkers for a number of years.) Following the assassination of liberal Czar Alexander II, there
began the immigration of a totally different type of Jew: "Polish Jews" is what they were called,
but as there was no legal Poland, they were mainly from Russia - fleeing the sporadic pogroms -
with some from Austria-Hungary (which disappeared after WWI). They were quite different than
the original totally-Euro immigrants: caftans and fur-trimmed hats, alien in all aspects, they were a
standing embarrassment to their assimilated co-religionists and generally loathed by the population
at large. Discrimination notwithstanding, through hard work, sagacity, and an age-old respect for
education (with assistance - but no invitations to dine! - from the established Jewish community),
they prospered - which added the onus of envy.
During WWI, the Jews had been ardent supporters of the Central Powers. Czarist Russia, with its
infamous pogroms, was universally detested. So ardent were the Jews in the U.S., that Anglophile
Wilson organized the first Palmer raids (a regular feature of the Prohibition Era) on them, and the
pro-British press fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. So solid was this Jewish bias that in 1917,
the British had been moved to issue the Balfour Declaration, promising a "Jewish homeland" in
Palestine - the only region the Zionists would consider - as an Allied war aim. The Brits were
walking on eggs, as they had induced the Arabs to revolt against the Turks by promising them an
independent Palestinian state. (Britain was extremely generous in promising territory - which was
ruled by their enemies.) A "homeland" is not a state; it is akin to an Indian Reservation: a region
internally autonomous, but lacking sovereign status. To the Zionists, it was a start. Following the
defeat of the Central Powers however, France and Britain carved up the Middle East between
them. Neither the Arabs nor the Zionists got Palestine; Britain kept it for itself under the fiction of a
Mandate. (It wasn't given the epithet "Perfidious Albion" without reason!) The Zionists cried
"Foul!" and Britain retaliated by propagandizing what the Bolshevik Jews
were doing in Russia.
This resulted in an open expression of anti-Semitism in the U.S., which has followed British cant
almost as slavishly as Canada. While the Jews were confined to manning the sweat-shops of New
York's garment-district, anti-Semitism was rather small. By the 1920s, however, they'd managed
to corner the motion picture industry, and a Jew named Sarnoff had put together a Wall Street
darling: "The Radio Corporation of America," RCA. Joseph Pulitzer, an Austro-Hungarian Jew
and leading yellow journalist had died in 1911, but his empire lingered on. Wilson had appointed
Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916, the first Jew (and a rabid Zionist) to hold that distinction.
By the 1920s, then, the old European tradition became a new American one. Such disparate
entities as the KKK and Henry Ford shared at least one thing in common: both detested the Jews.
Ford went so far as to make his newspaper a virtual soap-box for anti-Semites.
Marcus Ely Ravage was, by profession, a freelance writer and journalist. His family had brought
him as an infant from what was then Austria-Hungary, but after WWI became part of Rumania. His
natal site is rather immaterial. Yiddish, a German dialect, was the family language. He grew up in
Chicago, a city very pro-German before The Archangel Woodrow (as H.L. Mencken dubbed him)
succeeded in his schemes. It is against this background that Ravage's exegesis, written in the
breezy style a popular magazine like Century would insist upon, was crafted. One should not let
the ease with which it flows detract from its underlying profundity. It has commanded the respect
of many a major intellect. George Steiner, Professor of Comparative Literature at both Geneva and
Edinburgh, assigns its premise to Adolf Hitler in Steiner's remarkable 1978 novel, The Portage to
San Cristóbal of A.H., a novel which has the 90-year-old Hitler brought to trial - and acquitted by
the forces of Nature. One is urged to read for content, as in my opinion Ravage has, Orpheus-like,
descended to the Abyss of the psyche and returned with the Answer. [U.M.]
"Jewish Influences"
by Marcus Ely Ravage
Of course, you do resent us. It is no good telling me you don't. So let us not waste any time on
denials and alibis. You know you do, and I know it, and we understand each other. To be sure,
some of your best friends are Jews, and all that. I have heard that before once or twice, I think.
And I know, too, that you do not include me personally - "me" being any particular Jew - when you
fling out at us in your wholesale fashion, because I am, well, so different, don't you know, almost
as good as one of yourselves. That little exemption does not, somehow, move me to gratitude; but
never mind that now. It is the aggressive, climbing, pushing, materialistic sort you dislike - those,
in a word, who remind you so much of our own up-and-coming brethren. We understand each other
perfectly. I don't hold it against you.
Bless my soul, I do not blame anybody for disliking anybody. The thing that intrigues me about this
anti-Jewish business, as you play at it, you make such fantastic and transparent excuses, you seem
to be suffering from self-consciousness so horribly, that if the performance were not so grotesque,
it would be irritating.
It is not as if you were amateurs; you have been at it for over fifteen centuries. Yet watching you
and hearing your childish pretexts, one might get the impression that you did not know yourselves
what it is all about. You resent us, but you can not clearly say why. You think up a new excuse - a
"reason" is what you call it - every other day. You have been piling up justification for yourselves
these many hundreds of years and each new invention is more laughable than the last and each new
excuse contradicts and annihilates the last.
Not so many years ago, I used to hear that we were money-grubbers and commercial materialists;
now the complaint is being whispered around that no art and no profession is safe against the
Jewish invasion.
We are, if you are to be believed, at once clannish and exclusive, and unassimilable because we
won't intermarry with you, and we are also climbers and pushers and a menace to your racial
integrity.
Our standard of living is so low that we create your slums and sweat industries, and so high that
we crowd you out of your best residential sections. We shirk our patriotic duty in wartime because
we are pacifists by nature and tradition, and we are the arch-plotters of universal wars and the
chief beneficiaries of those wars (see The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion).
We are at once the founders and leading adherents of capitalism and the chief perpetrators of the
rebellion against capitalism.
Surely, history has nothing like us for versatility!
And, oh! I almost forgot the reasons of reasons. We are the stiff-necked people who never
accepted Christianity, and we are the criminal people who crucified its founder.
But I will tell you, you are self-deceivers. You lack either the self-knowledge or the mettle to face
the facts squarely and own up to the truth. You resent the Jew not because, as some of you think,
we crucified Jesus but because we gave him birth. Your real quarrel with us is not
that we have rejected Christianity but that we have imposed it upon you! Your loose,
contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the blackness of our historic offense.
You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit that charge. What of it?
Compared with the Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheaval is a mere
street brawl.
You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theaters and movie places.
Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering
influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts
you think every day?
A clumsy Russian forges a set of papers and publishes them in a book called The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion which shows that we plotted to bring on the late World War. You believe that
book. All right. For the sake of argument, we will underwrite every word of it. It is genuine and
authentic. But what is that besides the unquestionable historical conspiracy which we have carried
out, which we never have denied because you never had the courage to charge us with it, and of
which the full record is extant for anybody to read?
If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct your attention to one worth
talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by
Jewish financiers, newspaper owners and movie magnates, when you might as well justly accuse
us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish Gospels?
You have not begun to appreciate the real depth of our guilt. We are intruders. We are disturbers.
We are subverters. We have taken your natural world, your ideals, your destiny, and played havoc
with them. We have been at the bottom of not merely the last Great War but of all nearly all your
wars, not only of the Russian but of nearly every other major revolution in your history. We have brought discord and confusion and frustration into your personal and public life.
We are still doing it. No one can tell how long we shall go on doing it.
Look back a little and see what has happened. Nineteen hundred years ago you were an innocent,
care-free pagan race. You worshiped countless gods and goddesses, the spirits of the air, of the
running streams and of the woodland. You took unblushing pride in the glory of your naked bodies.
You carved images of your gods and of the tantalizing human figure. You delighted in the combats
of the field, the arena and battleground. War and slavery were fixed institutions in your systems.
Disporting yourselves on the hillsides and in the valleys of the great outdoors, you took to
speculating on the wonder and mystery of life and laid foundations of natural science and
philosophy. Yours was a noble, sensual culture, unirked by the prickings of social conscience or
by any sentimental questioning about human equality. Who knows what great and glorious destiny
might have been yours if we had left you alone.
But we did not leave you alone! We took you in hand and pulled down the beautiful and generous
structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no
empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without bullets, without blood
or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by the might of our spirit, with ideas,
with propaganda.
We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the
barbarous races of the world, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding
what we were doing to you, you became the agents at large of our racial tradition, carrying our
gospel to the unexplored ends of the earth. Our tribal customs have become the core of your moral
code. Our tribal laws have furnished the basic groundwork of all your august constitutions and
legal systems. Our legends and our folk-tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants.
Our poets have filled your hymnals and your prayer books. Our national history has become an
indispensible part of learning of your pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen,
our prophets, our warriors are your heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our
national literature is your Holy Bible.What our people thought and taught has become inextricably
woven into your very speech and tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is
not familiar with our racial heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints, with countless statues
carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals raised in their memories. A Jewish maiden is
your ideal of motherhood and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your
religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your racial inheritance, and
substituted for them our god and our traditions. No conquest in history can even compare with this
clean sweep of our conquest over you!
How did we do it? Almost by accident. Nearly two thousand years ago in a far-off Palestine, our
religion had fallen into decay and materialism. Money-changers were in possession of the temple.
Degenerate, selfish priests mulcted our people and grew fat. Then a young patriot-idealist arose
and went about the land calling for a revival of faith. He had no thought of setting up a new church.
Like all the other prophets before him, his only aim was to purify and revitalize the old creed.
(1)
He attacked the priests and drove the money-changers from the temple. This brought him into conflict
with the established order and its supporting pillars. The Roman authorities, who were in
occupation of the country, fearing his revolutionary agitation as a political effort to oust them,
arrested him, tried him and condemned him to death by crucifixion, a common form of execution at
the time. The followers of Jesus of Nazareth, mainly slaves and poor workmen, in their
bereavement and disappointment, turned away from the world and formed themselves into a
brotherhood of pacifist non-resisters, sharing their memory of their crucified leader and living
together communistically. They were merely a new sect in Judea, without power or consequence,
neither the first nor the last.
Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new creed come into prominence.
Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived the idea of humbling the Roman power by
destroying the morale of its soldiery with the doctrines of love and non-resistance preached by the
little sect of Jewish Christians. He became an Apostle to the Gentiles, he who hitherto had been
one of the most active persecutors of the band. And so well did Paul do his work that within four
centuries the great empire that had subjected Palestine along with half the world was a heap of
ruins. And the law which went forth from Zion became the official religion of Rome.
This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was only a beginning. From this
time forth, your history is little more than a struggle for mastery between your old pagan spirit and
our Jewish spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious wars, fought over the interpretation
of one thing or another in our teachings.You no sooner broke free from your primitive religious
simplicity and attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther armed with our
Gospel arose to down you and re-enthrone our heritage. Take the three principal revolutions in
modern times: the French, the American and the Russian. What are they but the triumphs of the
Jewish idea of social, political and economic justice?
And the end is still a long way off. We still dominate you. At this very moment, your churches are
torn asunder by a civil war between Fundamentalists and Moderates, that is to say between those
who cling to our teachings and traditions literally and those who are striving by slow steps to
dispossess us. Again and again, the Puritan heritage of Judea breaks out in waves of censorship,
Sunday blue laws and national prohibition acts. And while these things are happening, you twaddle
about Jewish influence in the movies.
Is it any wonder you resent us? We have put a clog upon your progress. We have imposed upon
you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot swallow or digest, which is at
cross-purposes with your native spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease, and which you
lack the spirit to either reject or accept in full.
In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings. In your hearts, you still are
pagans.(2) You still love war and graven images of strife. You still take pride in the glory of the nude
human figure. Your social conscience, in spite of all democracy and all your social revolution, is
still a pitifully imperfect thing. We have merely divided your soul, confused your
impulses and paralyzed your desires. In the midst of battle, you are obliged to kneel down to him
who command you to turn the other cheek, who said "Resist not evil" and "Blessed be the
peace-makers." In your lust for gain, you are suddenly disturbed by a memory from your Sunday
school days about taking no thought for the morrow. In your industrial struggles, when you would
smash a strike without compunction, you are suddenly reminded that the poor are blessed and that men are brothers in the Fatherhood of the Lord. And as you are about to yield to
temptation, your Jewish training puts a deterrent hand on your shoulder and dashes the brimming
cup from your lips.
You Christians have never become Christianized. To that extent we have failed you. But we have
forever spoiled the fun of paganism for you!
So why should you not resent us? If we were in your place, we should probably dislike you more
cordially than you do us. But we should make no bones about telling you why. We should not
resort to subterfuges and transparent pretexts. With the millions of painfully respectable Jewish
shopkeepers all about us, we should not insult your intelligence and our own honesty by tattling
about communism as a Jewish philosophy. And with millions of hard-working impecunious Jewish
peddlers and laborers, we should not make ourselves ridiculous by talking about international
capitalism as a Jewish monopoly. No, we should go straight to the point. We should contemplate
this half-Christian half-pagan medley, and we should say to you point blank: "For this mess
thanks to you, to your prophets, and to your Bible!"
- Finis -
Go back!
NOTES:
1) Ravage's contention that Christ had no intention of spreading his doctrines outside the Jewish community seems to be borne out by orthodox Xian sources. Consider this excerpt from the New Testament: These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, "Go
not unto the way of the Gentiles [= Greeks & Romans]...but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
[Matt. X:5-6]
This contradicts other statements in the New Testament; however, the Xian Scriptures are a awash in contradiction, as Tom Paine pointed out in The Age of Reason. BACK!
2) Ravage's contention is well born out by events in the first half of the 20th century. Many intellectuals, on both sides, in the trenches of the first phase of The Great Suicide Pact of 1914-1945 compared "the Great War" to Homer's Illiad. Can we rightfully assume that 100 million Europeans would have enthusiastically re-adopted the Roman salute (in the case of Germany, within a matter of months), if the longing for a return to the vitality of Antiquity had not been festering in their subconscious?
In 1720, John Toland (a pioneer of deism, to which many of the leaders of American Independence subscribed) circulated his Pantheisticon: a project for adapting the Anglican liturgy, but based on the writings of pagan authors. BACK!
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