The Freedom of Knowledge, The Power of Thought ©
Current News | Introduction | Colloidal Silver | Chemtrails | Sylphs | Emerging Diseases | Forbidden Cures | Ozone | Immunity Boosting | Nutrition | Tone Gen
By Maurice Samuels Loyalty (Chapter 5 of You Gentiles by Maurice Samuels (Pub 1924) Facebook Censorship Chapter 5: Loyalty Whenever friendly tribute has been paid to the higher ethical nature of the Jew, it has
always been made to appear that the Jew obeys the laws of a common morality more
strictly than does the gentile. Jews and friends of Jews have wanted to make it appear that, if we differ from you ethically, it is
in that we are more self-sacrificing, more generous, more loyal, more honest, etc. I do not
desire to make it appear so, and in the foregoing pages I have tried to avoid any such
implication. Within our system we need be
neither better nor worse behaved than you within yours. We may transgress as frequently
as you, perhaps more frequently— I cannot tell: it is on the nature of the systems that I base the distinction. We deny your
very system, you ours.
A
play which is "indecent" may be so for one
of two reasons. Either it deals with sex within
the frame of morality or it denies the validity of this morality. In the first case (which
covers most successful plays) we have no attack on current notions of what is right and
wrong in the sexual relationship. We have, indeed, complete acceptances of the current
principles of sex morality. But with this acceptance en principe goes a generous denial in practice ; plays of this kind cover countless
breaches of morality with a knowing wink, a tolerant appeal to human weakness. It is ludicrous
to deny that the desire to tickle and provoke the sexual appetite, and covertly to
encourage its promiscuous satisfaction, governs these plays ; but it is not made a principle at all. It is the breaking of the law, not the
denial of it. Hence such plays (except when they become too obvious in their purpose and
thus become an overt attack en masse) are tolerated by the censorship and encouraged
by the public. For your system of morality is no less a need to you than ours to us. And the incompatibility of the two systems is not passive. You might say: "Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours." But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different. They are opposed in mortal, though tacit ; enmity. No man can accept both, or , accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other. No single attribute or virtue shows our mutual enmity more clearly than that of loyalty, which, among all the attributes contributing to your morality, is perhaps the most dearly cherished, the most vehemently advocated* It is impossible for me, in writing of it, to take up a purely analytic attitude; but I believe that the preferences and aversions which I here express will at least serve to make clear the irreconcilable difference between Jewish and gentile morality. The abstraction, loyalty, is not related to good and bad. Loyalty is preached naked, as a virtue for itself. It is proper and right to be loyal. To do a thing out of loyalty— loyalty to a man, to a group, to an idea—is in itself a sort of justification. To develop a loyalty is in itself commendable. To the Jew, naked loyalty is an incomprehensible,
a bewildering thing. That men should be called upon to keep a quantity of
this virtue on constant tap, to be applied on instruction to this or that relationship, is not
merely irrational to us: it is beyond the apprehension of our intelligence. Very often, indeed, loyalty is demanded where a demand for love would be too obviously ludicrous. For the application of loyalty is to you as seemly in the case of an association of shoe salesmen as in the case of country itself. It is expected, in your world, that a man should be loyal to his country, to his province, to his city, to his section of the city, to his college, to his club, to his business associations, to his fraternity, to every chance group into which events may bring him. In the first instance, country, the distinction between love and loyalty is startlingly clear. Love of country is a profound spiritual quality: it may go hand in hand with a dangerous and exalted morality. But loyalty merely says: "My country must triumph in all her undertakings, whether they be right or wrong"—or, rather, "There is no such thing as 'my country wrong.' " And in loyalty to king, class, or church, the same distinction or substitution is observed. Loyalty is a rigid code of behavior— not an emotion. But the real nature of loyalty is only seen
in its application to those relationships which are much more fortuitous than those of country, church, class. In these loyalty is clearly
revealed as a fictitious and artificial regulation, with no roots in moral conviction. Let us take the case of a young man who is faced with a choice of college. He may have preferences,
but there is no compelling association
which identifies him with any one institution. The choice is decided finally by some
quite irrelevant influence: he goes to any one college as he might have gone to any other.
But once he is there loyalty demands that he regard this college as the best in the country —perhaps in no particular, for particulars are occasionally too tangible—but at large; the
best, the finest, the noblest. Of this college he must think, and above all speak, with enthusiasm, passion and devotion; he must defend
its name against all aspersions, without investigating their foundations: if he even
stops to consider the plausibility of these aspersions before denouncing them, the quality
of his loyalty is already second-rate. The
scholastic reputation of his college may be less than mediocre; its staff may not number
a single scholar of note; its alumni may be an indistinguishable mob of obscure failures:
worst of all, its football and baseball teams may be the laughing-stock of the locality.
But his college is the best and noblest in the country and the world: the astonishing feature
of all this being that not only his schoolmates expect him to say and seem to believe so, but that everybody outside the college,
convinced of its worthlessness, also expects this of him and considers him rather a cad if he acquiesces in what to them may be obviously This obligation of loyalty must pursue the man to the end of his life. Forty years after he has left his college he will be regarded with suspicion as something less than a gentleman if he should have discovered that his Alma Mater was and is an extremely inferior and uninteresting institution: "It may be all that, you know, but a man's got to be loyal to his college." What is true of college loyalty is true of other loyalties. A man who joins the army and is assigned to any regiment must have loyalty for his regiment—which means that he must seem to lose the faculty of discrimination and criticism as soon as the regiment he was accidentally assigned to is under consideration. Should he in later life become a member of a fraternity, of a business association, of a poker-club, he must be loyal. He must be loyal even at large, without an organization to be loyal to. He must be loyal to the paper-manufacturing trade, to the cleaners and dyers, to the transport business. And if he goes down into a factory to earn, by the sweat of his brow and under bitter duress, a bare livelihood, he must at once be loyal to his employers. But the application of loyalty is sometimes pushed to extremes which are nothing short of grotesque. One finds in surface cars notices like these: "Be loyal to the Bronx, to Bensonhurst, to Wapping, to Pendleton, to Charlottenburg, to the Ring, to the Marshalkowska, to Montmartre. , . ." Sometimes I have wondered: "If you live in the Bronx and are loyal to your neighborhood grocer, how
long are you supposed to yearn for him after you have moved to Brooklyn: and how soon may you with seemliness develop a loyalty for your neighborhood grocer in Brooklyn? Or are you supposed to leap into your loyalties at once as into a bath-tub and be immersed in them without a moment's loss? And similarly, how if you attend two or three colleges in succession, or are attached to a number of regiments in succession? Or change your business, or your fraternity or your poker-club
?" In our life, the Jewish life, loyalty is unknown. There is no equivalent for it among our attributes. We understand love, which is serious, profound: which must be treated, therefore, with due dignity. But we do not understand loyalty, which is trivial, gallant, gamesome, conventionalized. But I have touched on the college only as
a single illustration of the predomi nance of the virtue of loyalty in your concept of the
proper human relationship. All your society is divided into "teams"—with a fictitious morality to correspond. It has little to do with direct utilitarianism. One might object, saying: "This morality, like any other, is merely the adjunct of the economic or biologic struggle.
What we call 'morality' is merely the assistant illusion in the struggle for existence. And in this regard gentile and Jew are alike." But this is an irrelevant truth. There was a time when, among you gentiles, one man would courteously challenge another to mortal combat: without real motive, without enmity, without passion. So it was: when no excuse for combat was available you dropped even the pretense of an excuse. Do not answer that this was a passing phase: for I say that when men actually kill each other for mere sport it betokens a profound, an almost eternal instinct. That instinct to-day finds expression in equally moralless relations, equally passionless associations and enmities. You arrange your life in such wise as to get the maximum of sport out of it. And, for the purpose of sport, it does not matter to which team you belong: England or America, Harvard or Yale, the Black Watch or the Old Guard, the eighborhood Association of Wigan or the Rotarians of Los Angeles, the Goodrich Rubber Factory or the Sunlight Soap Garden City, the Alpha Sigma Mu or the '95 Club, the Progressive Republicans or the Decorators' Association, the United Cigarmakers or the Fascist!. There's good fun in all this; it is exciting, jolly, sporty. It puts rush and gaiety into life. But we Jews are no good at it. Just as we are inaccessible to the meaningless exhilaration of college loyalty, so we are bewildered by the fast and furious games of your general life. We Jews cannot play the game. You Gentiles: Contents (Only chapters 1-5 and 9 are currently uploaded)
|
|||||||
|
|
