Francisco Gil-White, The Management of Reality Substack Feb 16, 2024
Once thought to be the mask of Sargon of Akkad, this is now believed to be, on stylistic grounds, the mask of Naram-Sin, his grandson. Credit: Wikimedia.
Imagine that history class were like plunging into the millennia-spanning, action-packed, multi-novel adventure worlds of Frank Herbert (Dune), Isaac Asimov (Foundation), or J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings). No child would ever get bored!
So why are teachers boring them?
I ask because the political history of Western Asia—which includes Europe—does have that fantasy/science-fiction structure: it’s been a 4,300-year clash between two great ideological forces.
That’s tailor-made, I should think, for Asimov or Herbert. No? It’s even corny enough for Tolkien! Because these two giant forces, clashing time and again with nuances and complexities over the entire length of our political history, may with justice be called the forces—cringe if you must—of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’ (You’ll soon see why…).
I call this confrontation: semitism vs. antisemitism.
But this simple model, at once a giant, thrilling story and a powerful heuristic that clarifies the structure of our entire political history and—to boot—makes sense of our 21st-century predicament is not what they teach you in school. So allow me.
In this series I will:
define antisemitism;
define semitism; and
outline the structure of our political history.
What is antisemitism?
An antisemite is a racist enemy of the Jewish people.
Why this label? Because the racist enemies of the Jews have proudly wanted to be known as ‘antisemites’ (they invented the term in the 19th century) and everybody has deferred to them. They call themselves antisemites because Hebrew, the ancestral and ritual language of the Jews, is a Semitic language. By modern custom, then, we call the Nazis ‘antisemites.’
Antisemites pose a special danger to the Jewish people. In the WWII Shoah, the antisemites killed between 5 and 6 million Jews. But don’t get distracted by that; I want your eye on this ball: the antisemites, who started that war of planetary destruction, also got upwards of 64 million non-Jews killed. And those selfsame antisemites directly enslaved hundreds of millions of—again—non-Jews.
The point is this: the antisemites are coming for everyone. They’re coming for you. And there you have it: that’s the structure—or one half of it.
But can we find this structure in other centuries? We certainly can.
Earlier centuries saw great expulsions, forced conversions, burnings, and enormous massacres of Jews. The powerful antisemites responsible for all that anti-Jewish violence were then, as they are now, very bad news for all Westerners.
Indeed, enormous massacres of Christians were organized in Medieval and Renaissance Europe courtesy of the same antisemites then busy killing and expelling Jews. Many were burned at the stake—I mean the Christians, now. And those Christians who weren’t killed were definitely oppressed—yes, by the selfsame antisemites. The pagans, meanwhile, were either forcibly converted or exterminated by the stout and devout antisemitic Germanic knights.
And what about further back? Once again we find the same structure. Scroll through the centuries of pain and terror of the Inquisition and rewind all the way back to pagan Rome, searching now for the climactic crime: the first- and second-century genocide against the ancient Jews.
You heard perhaps of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (Tisha B’Av) in the year 70 of the first century of our era, an episode of the First Jewish War. The Diaspora Revolt and the Second Jewish War followed. All were genocidal wars. After this, few Jews remained in the Mediterranean. Historians estimate that, in proportional terms, the Romans killed more Jews than Hitler!
And guess what? Those same Romans, those antisemites who murdered the Jewish people of antiquity, well they were bad news for everyone else too. The Romans were enslaving all and sundry.
Interesting facts:
Hitler and his Nazis called themselves the Third Reich, a reincarnation (the second) of the First Reich: the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, governed by a kaiser (‘Caesar’), and itself a reincarnation of ancient Rome. The Nazis also proudly saluted their Führer with their right arm raised, as they believed the ancient Romans had done with their Caesar, shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ (Hail Caesar!).
The Catholic Church, author of much antisemitic cruelty over the centuries, is also proudly Roman. It was the Church that herself recreated the Roman Empire as the Germanic Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages.
I insist: there is a transhistorical structure here.
But let’s go further back—before the Romans. What did we have? Greeks and Macedonians. And they were enslaving everyone too.
Forget what they told you in school about Athens, supposedly ‘democratic.’ In a different piece I present a detailed and documented refutation of that school narrative (which is still going strong). But consider here only this: Demetrius of Phalerum—ruler of the small Athenian empire in the years 317-307 BCE—documented in his census the following totals: 21,000 citizens, 10,000 metics (semi-free or semi-slaves, take your pick), and 400,000 slaves.
I won’t say the Athenians were unimaginably cruel because we have the recent experience of the Nazi and Ustashe death camps. The Athenians had them too: giant multitudes of slaves—tens of thousands—were worked to death in the mines of Laurion, to the south of Athens. Motivated with whips and worked in irons, the slaves were made to enter the Earth again and again until they dropped dead.
A democracy has death camps?
This culture of horror was inherited to the Macedonians. And guess what? The Greco-Macedonians also committed genocide against the ancient Jews, as was famously narrated in the Books of the Maccabees (contained in the Christian Bible). They wanted to abolish the Jewish religion. So: antisemites.
I ask: Why this pairing? Why is it that, century after century, those who mean to enslave us all want also to kill every last Jew? Could it be, perchance, because the Book of Exodus traces Jewish origins—as a legal and political community—to a slave revolt?
It’s kind of obvious (once you say it…). And there you have it: the other half of the structure.
Now let’s put both halves together. Jewish Law, the Law of Moses, is the law of the liberated slaves who defied the Egyptian Pharoah and escaped to the desert to live in freedom. The entire point of this law is to fight oppression. So the danger—for the slavers—is that the Jews might inspire and lead other slaves in revolution! Therefore, the slavers—the antisemites—have always persecuted the Jews with great violence.
Antisemitism explained!
But the ancient antisemites—mind you—were not simply judeophobes. They were antisemites. The term really applies (this is the most interesting part). Because the ancient antisemites wanted to destroy not only the Jews but semitism writ large. And they were at it even before any Jews made their mark on world history.
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But what is semitism?
A full 4,300 years ago (2,300 years before Jesus), in southern Mesopotamia, cradle of the first civilization, a broad cultural and political phenomenon was established by the Semitic peoples of Babylonia, as they would later call that place. Judaism is the most developed, mature, and exquisite expression of this larger ideological movement, which I am calling semitism.
Semitism, defined thus, speaks of the relationship—anchored in the evolution of law—that must exist between a king and his people: the king guarantees the rights of all and protects, most especially, the poor and vulnerable. This ideology was founded by Sargon of Akkad, Sargon the Great, when he established the Akkadian Empire in revolution.
That’s the original revolution at the beginning of our story.
Now, before this, discontent had already manifested in Sumer, when Urukagina deposed the oppressive Lugalanda and followed that with loudly proclaimed legal reforms to protect the poor and the vulnerable in the cities of Lagash and Girsu that he ruled.
But oppression was a wider problem, because just a few years later, Sargon, with the widespread support of the lower classes, staged a general revolution of all Sumerian cities in one swift, sudden movement. And he unified those cities, establishing the Akkadian Empire (the world’s first). From the fact that Sargon replaced Sumerian with Akkadian (Eastern Semitic) as the new official language of government we may infer that the oppressed masses had been mostly Semites.
This Sargon was something special.
Judging by the famous claims made about him in a text copied in antiquity as his presumed autobiography, Sargon liked to boast that an agricultural laborer had raised him, thus highlighting an (adoptive) family connection to the Semitic lower classes he’d led in revolution and who were the very source of his power:
Sargon, the mighty king, king of Agade [Akkad], am I.
My mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not.
The brother(s) of my father loved the hills.
My city is Azupiranu, which is situated on the banks of the Euphrates.
My high-priestess mother conceived me, in secret she bore me.
She set me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen she sealed my lid.
She cast me into the river which rose not (over) me.
The river bore me up and carried me to Akki, the drawer of water.
Akki, the drawer of water lifted me out as he dipped his e[w]er.
Akki, the drawer of water, [took me] as his son (and) reared me.
Akki, the drawer of water, appointed me as his gardener.
While I was a gardener, Ishtar granted me (her) love […]
As historian Robert Wolfe comments: “There is more than a hint in the ancient inscriptions that the rise of Akkad under Sargon was also something of a social revolution.”1 Yes, and Sargon’s presumed biography (above) has uncanny resemblances to that of Moses, leader of the revolution narrated in The Book of Exodus. No scholar that I know considers that a coincidence.
There is indeed no reason to doubt that Sargon led a revolution, because the evidence from his dynastic successors makes clear that, from Sargon’s reign onwards, a new political culture became strongly institutionalized in southern Mesopotamia.
And that astonishing—and astonishingly stable—political culture and ideology that Sargon founded would be preserved in turn by Akkadians, Amorites, Chaldeans, and Arameans—all Semites who, for almost two thousand years, would never forget Sargon.
And what is this Sargonian political culture that the Mesopotamian Semitic peoples transmitted and preserved? It speaks of the king’s obligation to his people; of the importance of establishing peace, tolerance, legal equality, and justice; of the sacred mission to eliminate oppression.
Get MOR from life.
I am calling this ideology semitism, then, for three obvious reasons:
because it was originally produced and transmitted by Semites;
because it flourished in a majority-Semitic civilization; and lastly (but hardly least)
because it is precisely the opposite, in its ethical and political content, to what the antisemites want.
This contrast and opposition—semitism vs. antisemitism—has been the engine of our entire political history. From the deepest antiquity in Western Asia (which includes Europe), all the way through to the modern ‘West’ (understood as Europe and its descendant societies), and finally to the Nazi genocide and the horrific events of October 7th, 2023, antisemitic criminal groups eager to profit from our slavery have seen in semitism their mortal enemy. So they’ve done their dishonest best to poison and mobilize ordinary folk against the human vehicles of this liberating ideology.
Against all that, and paying an incomprehensible human price, semitism has nonetheless made tremendous strides for political progress and transformed our world.
That story follows, in Part 2.
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@Felix He writes:
Is there certainty that this historical figure Moses existed? Gil White is suggesting there is not you are saying.
Where does he say or even infer that?
So then there is something wrong with the way we are analysing things. How can we understand something is true or false?
I think we have to seek out what information we have, ascertain if it is trustworthy or not and go from there.
Or in the words of Forrest Gump:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJh59vZ8ccc
or, of greater immediacy, in our case,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoes_on_the_Danube_Bank
From an explanatory link in the Shoes on the Danube article. There’s your condemnation of Stalinism at the end of it, Felix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A1l_Szalai
Or in the words of Forrest Gump:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJh59vZ8ccc
or, of greater immediacy, in our case,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoes_on_the_Danube_Bank
And in turn, from one of the links in the Danube article, there’s your condemnation of Stalinism from a Zionist perspective, Felix, and why I am no longer a Stalinist:
“Show trial preparations 1953 in Hungary
Preparations for a show trial started 1953 in Budapest to “prove” that Wallenberg had never been in the Soviet Union, nobody had dragged off Wallenberg in 1945, least of all the Soviet Army. Everything was ready for a trial designed to prove that Wallenberg had been the victim of cosmopolitan Zionists. Three leaders of the Jewish community of Budapest Dr. László Benedek, Lajos Stöckler, and Miksa Domonkos, as well as two additional “eyewitnesses” Pál Szalai and Károly Szabó were arrested and tortured. The preparations for the show trial were initiated in Moscow, as part of Joseph Stalin’s increasing antisemitic and anti-Zionist campaign – e.g. Solomon Mikhoels murder, Night of the Murdered Poets (of the World War II time Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee), Slansky Trial, Doctors’ Plot. After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, and as Lavrentiy Beria was executed, the trial was aborted and the arrestees released in fall 1953. Due to severe torture Miksa Domonkos died shortly after being released and Lajos Stöckler became psychologically impaired.[11]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A1l_Szalai
Anybody remember the late great humorist, Russell Baker? I’m reminded of this hilarious piece:
😀
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/09/opinion/observer-the-historian-glut.html
@Felix OK. Stalinism sucks. In one form or another, it’s the inevitable outcome of Marxism as we have seen and are now seeing in slow motion in the West.
And, Now, after a short commercial break –
Back to Zionism.
Or, in the case of the subject of the article, the putative mythical past.
Incidentally, did you notice the author doesn’t believe Moses existed because of the similarity of the story of the baby in the basket?
Or that Sargon was the real Moses?
What do you think of that?
Or that he was Akhenaton, as another theory went?
Sounds like good material for a spoof, like, for instance, an episode of “To Tell The Truth” – Will the real Moses please stand up?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Tell_the_Truth
I notice modern revisionist biblical “scholars” are continually getting egg on their faces when archaeological discoveries actually validate one biblical event after or another.
A recent one, I recall reading, is the discovery of a piece of writing that was much earlier than had been thought to have been practiced which debunked the notion that the events of the entry into Canaan were only composed in the time of King Josiah in the 6th century, BCE.
Here’s another one that apparently even rabbinical sources apparently suggest is a mythical parable. But, who knows, similarities in history and between cultures happen all the time. Jung called this, “synchronicity.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife%E2%80%93sister_narratives_in_the_Book_of_Genesis
I don’t think one can do much more than fancifully speculate just from literary analysis.
I remember sitting in disbelief as a history class I was in analyzed Melville’s “Moby Dick” and found all this abolitionism symbolism based on acronyms..
Maybe, but in the words of Freud, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” ya know?
Seb
Instead you should be coming in to give me support in helping to educate people about role of Stalinism and raise issue of why it arose…a serious and difficult question. Why not help in this…
@Felix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw
I think Isaac Asimov’s 1951 novel, “Foundation” is based on the story of Johannen ben Zakkai and how the voluntary exile to Javne to compile the Mishna and Talmud, led to the rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth 2000 years later. He said it was based on Gibbon’s decline and fall of the Roman empire.
“In 12,067 G.E. (“Galactic Era”), mathematician and psychologist Hari Seldon has developed psychohistory, a new field of science and psychology that allows for the probabilistic prediction of future events. By means of psychohistory, Seldon has discovered the decline and eventual fall of the Empire, angering its rulers, the Commission of Public Safety. Seldon defends his beliefs and the Commission, not wanting to make Seldon a martyr, offers him exile to a remote world, Terminus.”
[And unbeknownst to the Foundationers as well as the empire, Seldon predicts that the objective forces that will be brought to bear on the community created to support the work of the encyclopedists will make it the capital of the reborn intergalactic empire, shortening the period of barbarism from 30,000 years to 1,000, And the novel and the subsequent sequels and prequels are the story of that thousand year history.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(Asimov_novel)
The above article likewise sounds fanciful speculation but I don’t mind.
I thought this was a great article and even though I am a traditional Marxist and opposed every betrayal of Stalin…this type of analysis keeps things fresh without for a moment abandoning Trotskyism (is correct spelling)
What about Star Trek, the Original Series? That’s the first thing that pops into my mind when I hear that name. 😀 (as an 8 year old, I was in the original tv audience that saw this.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Tomorrow
Air date, Feb. 9, 1968
How’s this for a TSS metaphor?
As an afterthought, I thought of looking up the names of the other characters:
“THALASSA was the primordial goddess (protogenos) of the sea. Mingled with Pontos (Pontus), her male counterpart, she produced the fish and other sea creatures. Thalassa was the literal body of the sea and in the fables of Aesop, manifests as a woman formed of sea-water rising from her native element.”
https://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Thalassa.html#:~:text=THALASSA%20was%20the%20primordial%20goddess,rising%20from%20her%20native%20element.
“Enoch (/?i?n?k/ ?)[note 1] is a biblical figure and patriarch prior to Noah’s flood, and the son of Jared and father of Methuselah. He was of the Antediluvian period in the Hebrew Bible.
The text of the Book of Genesis says Enoch lived 365 years before he was taken by God. The text reads that Enoch “walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him” (Gen 5:21–24), which is interpreted as Enoch entering heaven alive in some Jewish and Christian traditions, and interpreted differently in others.[citation needed]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch
Terrible written nonsense from a usually EXCELLENT
Francisco Gil-White.
what a disappointment.