Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age [Paperback]

Looking around at the Western world today, the effect of Political Correctness on true freedom of speech is obvious. This is just one aspect of a larger problem that Dr. Tomislav Sunic approaches head on in a clear concise manner, drawing from many sources of philosophical and historical literature.

Dr. Sunic approaches this Homo Americanus and draws attention to the root of the problem and what it has blossomed into today. Such as comparisons in the current state in America and the previous state of communist Russia with attention drawn to the different methods each ideology enforces thought policing.

The book is fantastically structured throughout with each chapter taking on an individual issue of each aspect of the Homo Americanus. A personal favourite chapter of mine was The Bibilical Origins of American Fundamentalism covering early American Puritism and the continuing effect these founding myths have had on today's society.

I can not recommend this book enough to people who are not afraid to question the world around them and hope to find clarity on conclusions they have reached as well as people who are truly open minded and wish to explore this topic more.

Heritage and Destiny readers are already indebted to Dr Tomislav Sunic, a former Croatian diplomat, for his wide ranging analysis of the European New Right, Against Democracy and Equality, reviewed in issue 20. Dr Sunic has now produced what many will regard as a doubly dangerous book. Not only does he dare to write openly about the Jewish Question - a temerity which invites prosecution in many European countries - but he goes much further than most critics of Jewish influence in America in tracing the roots of a cultural malaise which lies behind the slavish U.S. commitment to the Zionist project, all the way back beyond the familiar neocon targets, via `Christian Zionism', and ultimately to the Christian origins - the founding myths - of America.

As a friend of mine aptly commented recently: "You don't have to be Jewish to be Jewish". Sunic notes that:

The Jewish-American lobby has its supporters among Christian Gentiles who often wish to show in public that they are more Jewish than the Jews themselves. This trait of political mimicry is widespread among American intellectuals and politicians who also wish to prove that they are more Zionist than Zionist Jews.

This book was published before the recent death of the most politically influential Christian Zionist, Jerry Falwell, but revelations in some of Falwell's obituaries bolster Dr Sunic's case. It turns out that when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin briefed Falwell by telephone even before he called the Reagan White House, demonstrating a shrewd appreciation of the realities of power in the Republican Party, and of the origins of the alliance between American conservatism and Zionism.

Dr Sunic does not present Christian Zionism as some crude conspiracy of venal pastors and crypto-Jews. Nor does he view the U.S.-Zionist embrace (as more shallow analyses by more orthodox political commentators have tended to) as merely contingent on the `neoconservative' reaction (developing out of early American Trotskyism) against Stalinist anti-Semitism.

His approach is to set Christian Zionism in the context of America's broader political culture. Dr Sunic maintains that a fundamental deceit is at the core of the American system, just as it was behind the Iron Curtain. But most victims of Soviet tyranny had seen through the official lies decades before the system's final collapse and had been only maintaining a polite fiction of believing in communist ideology.

In America, by contrast, politicians and scholars, let alone the masses, passionately believe in every written word of democratic discourse... [As] an unwritten rule, seldom can one see rallies in America that challenge the democratic substance of Americanism or the ceremonial language of the American ruling class.

...To put it crudely, postmodern Americans and the Americanized masses in Europe are better fooled and deceived by official propaganda than were the Sovietized and communized masses in Eastern Europe. Due to the torrent of meaningless vocables and idioms, such as "human rights" and "democracy," the thought control and intellectual repression in postmodern America functions far better.

The postmodern world appears to allow this American ideology to be adopted with infinite flexibility by former leftists and "postcommunists," eager to extend (and profit from) market liberalism amid the ruins of the Eastern Bloc. As Dr Sunic observes, one reason for this is that Americanism has always parroted slogans about equality and global humanity. Even as Marxism has been officially consigned to the museums, Soviet-style slogans about "ethnic sensitivity training" and the like proliferate in American public life, especially in academia.

No longer are professors required to demonstrate skills in their subject matters; instead they must parade with sentimental and self-deprecatory statements which, as a rule, denigrate European cultural heritage.

The very ubiquity of these messages, Dr Sunic suggests, is an indication of the underlying weakness of the American system rather than a sign of strength, let alone permanence.

If something is "self-evident" it does not need to be repeated ad infinitum, it need only be stated once. Communist systems were replete with "self-evident truths" and questioning that truth could land a dissident in jail. One may surmise that if a political belief or an idea, such as is the case with Americanism today, is founded on strong empirical evidence, it does not need to be repeated ad nauseam. Conversely, if an ideology or a political belief is founded on frail evidence, its enforcers and disciples are obliged to resort to its constant repetition.

Dr Sunic quotes Jean Baudrillard, the postmodernist critic of America, who has died since this book went to press, to support his argument that the "constant verbal and visual featuring of Jewish Holocaust symbolism" creates a "saturation process among the audience as was once the case with former Holocaust symbolism". Relentless exterminationist propaganda, not to mention the vicious persecution of those who dissent from the dominant ideology, becomes self defeating.

In Baudrillard's words even the image of Auschwitz itself - the holy of holies - becomes hyperreality: "not a site of annihilation but a medium of dissuasion". In other words the exterminationists themselves eventually transform Auschwitz in the public mind from a "historical fact" to a propaganda or marketing tool.

Let us hope that this prospect of exterminationist hegemony defeating itself - or to quote Marx providing its own gravediggers - brings some comfort to its interim victims, such as Ernst Zundel and Germar Rudolf. As Dr Sunic notes elsewhere:

Despite its vaunted First Amendment, America has also shown on countless occasions how it rids itself of its own heretics - often under cover of free speech and in the name of proverbial human rights. American politicians and academics are aware of the fact that even a minor critical comment about Jews and Judaism can ruin their career - and life.

H&D readers will be familiar with the standard treatment of "anti-Semitism" which treats it as a form of mental illness. Serious criticism of Judaism cannot even be discussed in a rational manner, even to be refuted. Both Americans and Jews therefore appear immune from introspection, which Sunic concludes may eventually prove a weakness.

This is more than a political, propagandistic sleight of hand. It stems from the very founding of America and the notion of "self-chosenness" which conditions Americans' view of themselves. The German social scientist Werner Sombart - a leftwinger who was by no means an anti-Semite - wrote in 1913 that "what we call Americanism is nothing else than the Jewish spirit distilled," and few would dispute that this remains a reasonable summary of Homo Americanus almost a century later.

After the events of September 11th 2001 President Bush and his allies - notably the overtly Christian Tony Blair - implied that our common Christian heritage helped to bind Americans and Europeans, and contributed to a supposedly widespread European reaction that "we are all New Yorkers" after 9/11.

Yet as the eminent political philosopher of the French New Right Alain de Benoist has written, the Christian "self-chosenness" built into America's founding myths involves a rejection of their European heritage.

"Not only did the Americans desire to break away from Europe," writes de Benoist. "They also wanted to found a society which would be capable of regenerating the whole of mankind. They wanted to create a Promised Land which would become a universal republic. This Biblical theme which is at the heart of the Puritan mind comes back over and over again as the real leitmotiv in the entire American history."

We can see the consequence of this Judeo-Christian messianism in the bloody chaos of Iraq.

Dr Sunic suggests that the constant self-censorship which Americans impose on themselves, by treating any serious criticism of Judaism as psychopathic "anti-Semitism", is dangerously artificial and sows the seeds of future conflict:

Mendacity carries the germ of a civil war. The entire Western history, particularly since the First World War, has abundantly proven that distorted self-perceptions, as well as the romanticized perception of the "Other," if based on negative wishful thinking, lead to war and chaos. Eventually, both American Jews and American Gentiles will be pitted into an ugly clash from which there will be no escape for any of them.

...If the subject of Jews is mentioned in America, then it is usually in a laudatory fashion, which clearly points to a morbid desire of postmodern American white elites to curry favor with the Jews. These same individuals will be the first to declare themselves certified anti-Semites when an opportunistic moment becomes official enough for pogroms and Jew baiting.

Yet Dr Sunic goes on, in a section which should be compulsory reading for many in the movement, especially the many varieties of Christian "anti-Semite", to reject the most obvious forms of Jewish conspiracy theory.

Contrary to classical anti-Semitic arguments, strong Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles' acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and America in their diverse Christian modalities. Postmodern Americanism is just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset.

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