Our Sefton

...... Nevertheless, my objection is to your blanket “the Jews” when referring to some segment of Jews who are virulently Marxist and/or Zionist. As you note, Ron Unz and Paul Gottfried are righteous. I could add many other names to the list. And as you also note, Christianity is the real root of our disease. It is the Catholic and Lutheran Churches bringing hundreds of thousands of African “refugees” into America. It is the Catholic Church harboring illegal mestizos. It is the tens of millions of evangelical Christians eager for our next war on Israel’s behalf. It is american christians who are Netanyahu’s biggest cheerleaders while our largest Jewish group, Reform Jews, are opposed to him. On all this it appears that we agree.

So when numerically the Christians actively pursuing our destruction outnumber the Jews pursuing our destruction (and their own subsequently) by a hundredfold, what benefit is obtained with saying, “The Jews .. The Jews”? We all know the Jews are more intelligent (on average) than the Christians and that this advantage is weighted toward verbal IQ so they carry an influence greater than mere numbers suggest. But I still fail to see any reason to blame “the Jews” for what the majority of Christians and indeed 100% of Christian leadership fervently advocates. America’s Christians are listening as much (or more) to their Pastors and Priests than to Moishe Goldfarbsilversteinowitz. And I’m sure you’d agree that a Jew weighing his beliefs will be alienated by any movement where every other advocate is railing endlessly against “the Jews .. The Jews!” Don’t we really want and need more smart white people to awaken to our cause? Based on the numbers of secular Jews and Jewish outmarriage rates, the number of Jews who self-identify as “white” rather than “Jew” is on the rapid rise. But secular or not, they’ve been fed “The Holocaust” with their mother’s milk from birth. My suggestion to you then isn’t that you change your mind, but that you become more specific in your condemnations. Instead of “the Jews .. The Jews” perhaps “the Zionist Jews and their Christian pals”? Or “the Christian and Jewish Zionists”? Or “white genocide favoring Christians and Jews”?

Stan D Mute, The Unz Review.

Before reading on, it might be worthwhile to refamiliarise yourself with System 1 and System 2 thinking.

One of my favorite movies is Stalag 17. It's a story about American airmen in a German POW camp during WW2 who have their plans for escape continually foiled. The pattern of consistent failure leads to a realisation that there is an informant amongst them and suspicion falls on an American named Sefton, who has been  fraternizing and trading with the German guards.

Sefton is the obvious choice for the informant. He is friendly with the Germans, is cynical with regard to the war and doesn't real show significant "patriotism". In addition, He possess several unlikable characteristics and places bets against the prisoners who are trying to escape, which makes him all the more repugnant to his fellow inmates. So convinced of his guilt, are the other prisoners, that they beat him up and want to lynch him, with Sefton being only spared by the intervention of the prisoners leader. The prisoners continue to believe that Sefton is the informant until the the very end, where in a plot twist, it is revealed that the congenial, blond, blue eyed, all-American camp security officer, whom nobody suspected, is the German Spy.  For his performance of Sefton in the movie, William Holden won the Academy award for Best Actor in 1954.

Apart from being a good movie, it is a powerful study into the "cognitive" behavior of mobs and how prejudicial (System 1) thinking can lead to false conclusions. More importantly, as the movie shows, sometimes prejudice acts as a smokescreen by making men focus on a probable evil and through cognitive neglect, letting true evil flourish. For the sake of this article, I'm going to call this the Sefton Effect.

The Sefton Effect requires four components for its operation:

1) An aggrieved party of cognitive misers. i.e most humans in groups.
2) A patsy, who by virtue of some attribute, elicits both a strong negative emotional response and is a plausible prima facie (low cognitive demand) explanation for some evil.
3) A villain, who is highly agreeable and continually deflects blame on the patsy.
4) The failure to dispassionately exercise logic and the rules of evidence.

The roots of prejudice can be found in the System 1 mechanism of the human mind. Prejudice is quite simply the result of the mind's capacity to associate facts, experiences and emotions in a low- cognitive-demand, higher-order-reflex arrangement. It is a biocognitve phenomenon which is a feature of the human mind. The reason why Stereotypical thinking is prevalent in human beings is because it's a type of thinking that works in most circumstances and confers a survival advantage. And stereotypes, like prejudices, no matter how politically incorrect, have some basis in the truth. Black men are statistically more prone to criminal activity than white men. White upper middle class men are low probability violent perpetrators. In situations of informational ambiguity, threat or in environments where low cognitive accuracy is habituated, the mind will come to conclusions based on pure probabilistic and associative assessment. It might be unfair, it might be unjust, but its a biological effect of the human brain. Its only by engaging in System Two thinking and by following the rules of evidence and logic, that System One thinking can by over-ridden and and an accurate logical analysis of facts and events can be made.

Real life has similar examples of this type of thing,  The Sefton Effect can be seen in the phenomenon of the Racial Hoax. White perpetrators, wanting to deflect the blame from themselves of a crime will frequently blame a black man for the crime they have committed and, unfortunately, many times they have been successful. The reason why this sort of thing works is because most people are cognitive misers and  are quite content with the solutions provided by intuitive stereotypical (System 1) thinking.

False rape accusations are in a major way facilitated by the effect. Pretty White Southern Girl, Petty Criminal Black man, Beta male mob. Need I say more? The conclusion is foregone even though no facts have been presented.

Now the reason I bring this up is because in my opinion, the Sefton Effect has seriously hampered the Right's understanding of why it has failed in the 20th C, choosing to blame easy to grasp low hanging fruit instead of tackling underlying fundamental issues which plague Conservatism. And perhaps one of the biggest example of the Sefton Effect in Conservatism is anti-Semitism.

It appears that there is resurgence of Conservative thought in the West and one of things that I would hate to see it do is shoot itself in the head by repeating the same mistakes of the past. One of those mistakes is anti-Semitism.

The Jews, many ways, are tailor made to be the Right's bogey man. After all, there is the longstanding cultural embrace of the Left by Judaism, the disproportionate representation of ethnic Jews in the Communist tragedy of Eastern Europe, with its virulent anti-Christian nature. Their self-proclaimed chosen status, the differential treatment handed to Goy and non-Goy, (paging Salomen Morel) whilst lecturing all on the evils of discrimination. Their vastly disproportionate representation in the leadership of the Cathedral and in the institutions of Banking and Finance. The Tribes fierce assault on one noticing (Mearsheimer and Walt) and cynical weaponisation of the Holocaust. Their exclusive claim to Auschwitz (Never mind the Christian Poles killed there) The silencing of any criticism by framing it as a wannabe Nazi restoration. The condemnation of the Nazi's whilst pursuing a policy of Lebensraum settlement in Palestine, the promotion of multi-Culturalism in the West whilst simultaneously promoting mono-culturalism in Israel, the war on Christmas under the banner of discrimination and so on. For the Goy, there's a lot not to like.

Many Goy, seeing this, justly or unjustly, don't like the Jews and will through a mechanism of cognitive biases selectively "interpret" the evidence to prove that they are enemies of the Right.

The Jews fill a vital role for the cogntive-lite-Right, being the low hanging fruit by which they can easily explain the Western cultural decline. Much like Black demagogues seeing an explanation of all evil in the White Man, the lite-Right tend to blame all of Western Society's ailments on the Jews. They are the Lite-Right's Sefton.

However, many of these same Goy fail to notice that many Jews just want to fit in to society. In the U.S., many are secularising and Israel is a secondary priority. Many Jews, as professionals have positively contributed to the sciences, arts and to all other forms of community service and even amongst the Jews themselves, the Rabid Zionists and Leftists are on the nose. It's high time that the Right recognises the Righteous amongst the Jews. I nominate John Monash and Issac Issacs.

It is so easy (cognitively) to stitch them up for the failure of Conservatism in the 20th Century but it is also wrong. Instead of arguing why were there so many Jews in the Communist Revolution, the question should really be, why was Western society so weak that Communist revolution became possible. What changed? Instead of asking why is the media controlled by the Jews? We should be asking why should anyone group be able to control the media and why has society permitted this. Instead we focus on the symptoms instead of the disease. It's the aching sore toe that pre-occupies us, not the cancer in the belly.

Now, the reason I bring this up is because there has been a "tradition" in Right Wing circles of anti-Semitism which has seriously crippled the Right's ability to think about the problems of the 20th Century critically, tending to blame the failure on obvious patsy's like the Jews instead of focusing on the problems that are "in house". They have been the Right's Sefton. Much like our characters in Stalag 17, the Right has concentrated on obvious explanation instead of difficult to comprehend and subtle internalities which rot at conservatism unremittingly from the inside, untreated. Secondly, anti-Semitism is a slow poison which fundamentally weakens the Right, especially Neoreaction by making it susceptible to entryism by Nazi and crypto-Nazi elements. It needs to be remembered that National Socialism is the "right wing" flavor of socialism and any influx of Nazi's, apart from being personally repellant, is also likely to destroy Neoreaction from the inside both intellectually and ideologically, pushing it to the Left. The way that Neo-reaction should deal with the issues of Semitism is to ignore it.  Semitism is irrelevant to Neo-Reaction or Conservatism and is a ultimately distraction from real issues.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom no one can accuse of being a philo-Semite came to the same conclusion. After years of looking into the matter he was of the opinion that the Jews were not responsible for the Russian revolution, he saw that the rot lay deeper:

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened. 

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

In this secular age, it may not be socially polite nor cognitively pleasing to admit that what ails Western Civilization is a collapse of the faith. It's easier to pin the blame on the bogeyman we don't like rather than see that the rot lies within ourselves.