Jewish Survival Strategies
Speech by Dr. William L. Pierce, September, 1984
Some 4,000 years ago, in certain parts of the world, there were nomadic tribes who made their living from their flocks of sheep and goats. They lived on goat’s milk and goat’s cheese; they killed and ate a sheep occasionally; they sheared their sheep for wool; they made sandals and wineskins and other utensils from their animals; and they followed their flocks from one place to another in search of grass as the seasons changed. The nomadic life was a hard life. And it was a life with no past and no future. There was nothing permanent in the lives of the people, except their way of life. They had no fixed habitations, no land to which they belonged — just land through which they passed with their flocks. They had no buildings, just their tents, so they had no architecture, no art, no literature. When someone died, he was buried on the spot and the tribe moved on. So they had no graves of their ancestors around them to remind them of a past, of a heritage, of an identity. They were tribes without roots. Only the present — the here and now — had any real meaning for these people.
There were towns and cities in this part of the world, but the nomads didn’t live in them. They had to keep moving to find grass for their herds. When they passed a town, they might trade some of their wool or a few goat skins for pottery or for metal tools or weapons. Then they would move on. And the various nomadic tribes also traded with one another.
Each of them was like a large extended family, headed by a patriarch, with his wives and his sons and his grandchildren, and their wives and so on — perhaps 200 to 300 individuals in a family. But all of these families or tribes remained quite similar in character, because not only was their environment the same, but there was a continuing genetic interchange among them. They customarily raided each other for women, or in more amicable times they purchased brides from one another.
But even in the best of times, some tribes didn’t get on well with the others. One tribe in particular was headed by a patriarch who was especially rapacious and unscrupulous. He began to acquire a reputation among the other tribes for dealing in diseased camels. The members of his tribe would customarily make their sheep drink as much water as they could hold, so they would appear fatter than they really were before trading them to some unsuspecting father in another tribe for his daughter. Eventually, this particular patriarch and his fellow tribesmen had such a bad reputation for crooked dealings that they could no longer even stop at towns to trade. The townspeople would see them coming, and would throw stones at them.
And, of course, since one bunch of nomads looked pretty much like any other bunch to the townspeople, this one tribe’s bad reputation began affecting all of the tribes. They were all likely to get stoned if they came near a town. And so the patriarchs of the other tribes got together and made a plan to gang up on the crooked one and fix his wagon good. They planned to get even with him for all of his cheating.
But old Abraham got word that they were coming. And so, in the middle of the night, he and his kinsmen folded their tents and stole away to the west. After a long trek, they ended in Egypt.
But in Egypt they persisted in the bad habits that old Abe had taught them. And so it wasn’t too long before their popularity among the Egyptians was pretty low. And the more the Egyptians disliked them, the more they hated the Egyptians in turn, and the more they felt justified in cheating the Egyptians. It was a self-reinforcing process: Jew cheats Egyptian — Egyptian finds chance to get back at Jew — Jew feels wronged and is more likely to cheat next Egyptian he meets, and so on. Eventually, the Egyptians were fed up with the process, and they ran the Jews out of the country.
So the Jews were still nomads, still on the move. They still had no past, other than a few oral legends, and no future. And in fact they were now worse off than before, because they had become so accustomed to cheating as a way of life and so disinclined to do the hard work involved in being a nomad, that the life rankled them as never before.
When they left Egypt, they headed northeast into the land of the Philistines and the Canaanites. They sent out spies ahead of the tribe to feel out the country and survey the possibilities for this tribe whose bad relations with the rest of the world had made it cautious and cagey. When the spies reported back that the hill country where the Canaanites lived was full of rich cities, and that the inhabitants seemed to be off their guard, the sons of Abraham decided to go for it. Now, I don’t need to go into all the details. You’ve all heard about how “Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho, Jericho, Jericho, Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho.” The outcome of it all was that the nomads acquired a ready-made homeland for themselves, and the whole course of their history changed in the most radical way as a result.
If they hadn’t stolen the Canaanites’ cities, and eventually the coastal plain belonging to the Palestinians as well — if they had instead remained nomads — then their destiny very likely would have been the same as that of the other nomadic tribes. As Abraham and his cheating faded from memory, they gradually would have re-established their trading and wife-swapping contacts with other tribes. But in the cities of the Canaanites and the Palestinians, they acquired the art of writing, which others had developed. And with writing, they could for the first time hold on to their past. They could preserve their memories from generation to generation. They could more easily institutionalize the tricks of trade Abe had taught them. They could nurse the wrongs they imagined the world had done them, and they could fan the flames of their hatred by bringing out the holy books on special occasions and reciting everything that had happened to them. So not only their special trade tricks, and their hatreds, but also their sense of “us versus the world” became the basis for a religion which preserved all of these things.
And now they were living in one place all the time, instead of wandering with the seasons. So the land around them, and the events and people associated with it, began to acquire significance for them and to enter their racial memory through their religion, through their sacred writings, which more than anything else were a tribal history. Certain buildings and hills and streams gained emotional meaning for them over the course of generations, and added texture and detail to their concept of who they were. It was here in this stolen land that they really developed their sense of identity.
Unfortunately, acquiring a past and a stronger sense of identity didn’t make this tribe any more lovable. And a few centuries later, the Romans began to feel about them the same way the Egyptians had felt. So the Romans finally lost their patience, and laid waste to the tribe, ran them off the land they had swiped from the Canaanites and the Palestinians, and dispersed them throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.
Now, for most people, such a calamity would have marked the end of their history. Their remnants, very soon, would have been absorbed by other peoples. But the Jews were different. They resisted being absorbed. They continued to nurse their hatreds. They clung to their past. They exalted in their notion that they were a special people, different from and superior to all others, even though they were spread among other peoples all over the world. And, for the most part, they maintained their identity — certainly better than anyone else ever has done under similar circumstances.
Part of the secret of their success is that they were different. The thousand years they spent in Palestine breeding among themselves had frozen a special kind of nastiness into their genes. And partly it was their religion, which ritualized their hatred of the world. But more than anything else, it was their strong sense of peoplehood, which was intimately tied up with the land that they had formerly occupied.
What held them together was the idea of Zion. Whether they lived in Poland or Italy or France or Morocco or America, they developed no spiritual roots in those places, no sense of loyalty or belonging or past. Their only roots were in Zion; their only loyalty and sense of belonging were to those with the same roots. Even though they had not been there physically for hundreds of years, the idea of a place to which they belonged provided a sense of unity and gave them the strength to resist forming any loyalties to the various places in which they were living.
Very recently, of course, they were able to re-establish their physical presence in Palestine, and doing so gave them renewed strength. Even though most of them stayed where they were among various Gentile populations, the fact that they actually had their own turf in Palestine — a place to which they could run if they got in trouble, to be sure, but even more: a place on which they could focus their imaginations, their loyalty, their sense of belonging, even more strongly now that some of their kinsmen were actually there running the place — this fact gave them even greater self-confidence, greater arrogance and aggressiveness than they had when Zion was only an idea.
In addition to this psychological advantage, they now have also a real tactical advantage enjoyed by no other people: the advantage of being able to maintain a dual mode of existence, of being able to wage war against the world on two different fronts simultaneously. One front is the Diaspora. The other is Zion. If they were all in the Diaspora, they would eventually perish through absorption into the peoples around them: Even though they held out for many centuries in the past, the modern era has brought on a greatly increased rate of intermarriage nearly everywhere. In Zion, of course — in Israel — marriage with a non-Jew is illegal. So there they can preserve their genes and all of their cultural peculiarities. There they can resurrect their ancient language, which they couldn’t have done anywhere else. Israel gives them the ability to maintain the physical and cultural identity they had been losing rapidly since the Napoleonic Wars in the last century, when the walls of the ghettos came down everywhere in Western Europe. So in the modern world Zion has become even more essential to Jewish survival, by serving as a genetic and cultural repository, than it was in the Middle Ages where its value to the Jews was only psychological.
But if it were not for the Diaspora, the Jews couldn’t survive either. In particular, Israel couldn’t last six months if there were no Jews in America to control the minds of the goyim and to keep the politicians bought. Then there would be no American jets and tanks and napalm going to Israel to keep the Arabs in line. And so both the Diaspora and Zion are essential to the survival of the Jews.
Today the Jews have the best of both worlds. They live among us, milking and controlling us — but exposed to certain dangers in doing so. And they have their own exclusive turf, accessible only to them, where they can keep their secrets, preserve their genes, and plot their offensive against the world without interference or prying eyes.
In thinking about how we ourselves can survive, my mind has often turned to this unique survival advantage the Jews have: a place to themselves, plus a continued presence in the rest of the world. No one else has that. And in thinking about this, I eventually became convinced that we had to gain a similar advantage for ourselves if we were to survive.
Now, I must confess that I feel a little sheepish about using the Jews as an example for us. We certainly don’t want to give the impression that we are modeling ourselves after the Jews or that we must turn to them in order to learn how to survive. But they do provide us with an instructive example that I find useful in illustrating certain ideas. And that’s why I’ve used the past five or ten minutes to develop this concept of a dual mode of existence: Zion and the Diaspora working together for the purpose of survival and mastery.
I’ve written about survival considerations in the [National Alliance member’s] Bulletin in the past, and I’ve written about them again in the August [1984] issue of National Vanguard, at least in a very general way. At the same time as I’ve been developing the general considerations, however, I’ve been thinking about the specifics — trying to solve certain problems in my mind relevant to the implementation of a long-range survival plan.
Before I begin talking about specifics, I’ll briefly review our general considerations. We’ve needed a way to make what we’re building independent of any one person. We have needed to tie it to a living, growing community which embodies our values and our goals. If the whole community truly does that, if it is composed of the best of our people, if it is large enough and has enough resources to sustain itself, then it should be able to survive the loss of any one person and continue working toward our goals. If our goal were to get a candidate elected president in 1988, then survivability would not be an urgent consideration and we would be foolish to waste much time on it. But, as a matter of fact, our goal lies far beyond 1988.
I’ve been working to build the Alliance since 1970, and I’m now 50 years old. It becomes increasingly important to take steps to insure that the work of the Alliance goes on without interruption in case something happens to me. Even if I were immortal, however, and could remain at the helm indefinitely, we would still have a survivability problem.
We need, very soon, to have something concrete — something visible and positive that everyone can see — as evidence of our progress, as evidence that we are permanent and have substance, as evidence that it’s all not just words, or some kind of trick done with mirrors. And for the most valuable people that we recruit, for the ones who have the most to offer in terms of putting their skills and talents to work for us, we need to be able to provide a totally supportive environment, an environment which not only keeps their morale up permanently, but which makes it physically possible — economically possible — for them to give up everything they have to give, and put it into our cause.
If we had unlimited funds, I suppose that we could solve that latter problem, and the morale problem as well: We could simply hire people at a higher salary than they could hope to earn anywhere else, and put them to work full time. And if they needed a little extra motivation to work harder occasionally, we could simply threaten to fire them. But that’s not realistic. We still depend largely upon people’s idealism, upon their willingness to make sacrifices, and we always will, even if we become a lot richer than we are.
And there is another aspect to morale in addition to just keeping up the enthusiasm necessary to get out of bed in the morning and tackle the day’s work. We need to have a spiritually healthy environment, or we ourselves run the risk of becoming spiritually ill.
Source: Kevin_A._Strom_20021130_White_Zion,_Part_1;_Jewish _Survival_Strategies;_by_Dr._William_L._Pierce
Thank you Will for posting this speech from 1984
Dr. WLP RIP
Its a nice story also.
I couldn’t help but to hear Dr. Pierce’s voice while reading this.
Damn sad to see the troubles the N/A is having and only getting worse.
If they read this every once in a while, the N/A would still be growing.
Thanks for posting this.
(and for making me aware of the fat rat, Covington)
Steve