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NO COLUMN: Reading Assignments

10 Wednesday Jan 2024

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Reading Assignments

 

Things being what they are and with me feeling as I do, there is no column this week. No apologies. Instead, I offer two reading suggestions. 

The first is Scott Ritter’s 2022 book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union. I’m about one-third through it and I can say it’s fascinating. Scott is a fine writer and did several cool things. First, he took an otherwise “dry” subject and made it interesting. Second, the book is full of a not-too-distant history of a kind to make Generation X a little nostalgic. Third, I think if he had added a few more personal details and interactions about and between the various characters he walks through, he would have come close to Erik Larson’s style of history that reads like a novel. Give Disarmament a read and see what you think.

The second item is South Africa’s ICJ Proceedings Application for a genocide investigation against Israel. From page 30:

C. Genocidal Acts Committed against the Palestinian People

43. This section provides an overview of the acts in which Israel has engaged that are genocidal in character, having regard to their nature, scope and context. These acts are ongoing, and ongoing in a conflict context, where Israel is deliberately imposing telecommunications blackouts on Gaza and restricting access by fact-finding bodies173 and the international media.174 At the same time Palestinian journalists are being killed at a rate significantly higher than has occurred in any conflict in the past 100 years. In the two months since 7 October 2023, the number of journalists killed already exceeded that of the entirety of World War II.175 Further detail will be provided regarding these acts over the course of these proceedings. However, such information as is available establishes that Israel: (1) is engaged in killing Palestinians in Gaza — including Palestinian children — in large numbers; (2) is causing serious bodily and mental harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including Palestinian children; and is inflicting on them conditions of life intended to bring about their destruction as a group. Those conditions include: (3) expulsions from homes and mass displacement, alongside the large-scale destruction of homes and residential areas; (4) deprivation of access to adequate food and water; (4) deprivation of access to adequate medical care; (5) deprivation of access to adequate shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation; and (6) the destruction of the life of the Palestinian people in Gaza; and (7) imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births.

Read the whole thing. And many thanks to SA for doing something, anything, while most of the rest of the world sits by doing nothing. More from me, later.

Deo vindice.

Six 5-Stars: An Omnibus Book Review

25 Tuesday Apr 2023

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Six 5-Stars: An Omnibus Book Review

 

While I’d like to take the time to give each of the following works independent consideration, I do not have that time. Instead, I’ve assembled a short list of short reviews of five six (of so many) more recent books I highly recommend. Each part will be accordingly pushed at Amazon. There were five, but I added one more to the end. (Amazon is, for some odd reason, a little slow to add a few of these, but we shall see).

Getting right into it:

Andrei Martyanov, Disintegration (2021)

Almost daily, Mr. Martyanov provides learned, insightful commentary on various geostrategic matters that all thinking Westerners (and others) need to consider. Even if, especially if they do not want to. His book reads a bit like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, if Edward Gibbon had lived during the 5th century, and had Gibbon addressed the process as it unfolded. Post-modern America has essentially rejected everything that once made it excellent. It has shunned Western Civilization itself. In fact, it increasingly shuns any civilized standards. This book keenly examines multiple “whys”, some of which go far beyond Martyanov’s usual military expertise: mindset, morals, economics, and more. The military adventurism, if one is honest, provides perhaps the most highly visible evidence of the decline. Yet, as the author notes, the United States is undeniably gripped by the “historical, psychological, and anthropological centrifugal forces of disintegration”. Before one can hope to salvage something for the future, it is important to understand what has led to the present. This book is a fine summary starting point.

Michael Hudson, …and forgive them their debts (2018)

Were one honest, and one wanted to claim a single book to demonstrate the vampiric effects of mass financial capitalism on a modern or postmodern economy, then this work would be very high on the list of available options. Hudson traces the history of usurious destruction across the ages. Time and again, the same patterns play out, a tale of credit, overextension, misaligned allegiances, corruption, decline, poverty, and immiseration. One thing that will stand out to the Western and/or Christian reader is the repetitive Biblical calls for sound economics and necessary periodic debt forgiveness. No civilization that fails to curtail financial excesses and protect its people therefrom ever lasts. Ours is no exception. But, while the contrary might seem true, it is never too late to do the right thing. In 2023, half the world is already breaking from the broken werewestern system of lies, theft, and enslavement. May the other half follow. This book lights the way.

Alexander Macris, Running On Empty (2022)

At the moment, as I write this review, de-Dollarization is all the rage around the globe. This will have ramifications for all populations and for generations to come. Some will benefit more and sooner than others. Macris’s excellent short book examines a nearly-hidden, or, rather, oft-ignored reason behind the rise, fall, and changes to and behind the Dollar Almighty. The Petrodollar was a first in world history, and perhaps a “worst” so far as economic ideas go. Instituted as a kind of emergency stopgap, it indeed served a temporary purpose for a select few beneficiaries. Their day has now ended, and many will pay the (over)due bill. It’s remarkable that many of the predictions in this book, written but a few months before my review, have already come to pass. And then some. If one wants to rapidly catch up, this is a fine place to start.

Padraig Martin, et al, The Honorable Cause (2023)

By the current, hysterical counter-reactions, one would never know or even suspect that the cause of Southern Nationalism and identity was lost. Mr. Martin and his associates have assembled a wonderful collection of short essays on the very-much-alive-and-needed cause. Herein, one will find others frequently talk about yet seldom deliver with sincerity, clarity, or intelligence – diversity. Read a grand assortment of diversity of thought concerning a People and their rightful place in the modern/post-modern pantheon of nations. While each of these presentations will or might strike the reader differently, they all point in the same, forward direction. As Martin correctly summarizes near the end, “we need to create functional parallel societies”. Given the general decay and collapse around us, that is an imperative notion. The great news for Dixie is that they, we, rather, already have such a society. In time, perhaps sooner than most imagine, we will only need to hone it a bit further and then turn it loose. Even better news: the ideas expressed in The Honorable Cause are not necessarily exclusive to Southerners. It is understood, if unpopular to admit, that many other demographic and geographic groups yearn for independence and sovereign peace and prosperity. I encourage members of all identifiable parties to consider the hopeful and honest expositions herein.

Mary Morrissy, Prosperity Drive (2016)

Humanity. Morrissy has delivered eighteen gripping short stories about, ultimately, the human condition. This book is a little outside of my ordinary reading. As such, beyond the author’s high and deserved reputation (including the esteemed recommendation of a close mutual friend), I had few expectations. Refreshingly, both expectation and reward were forged hard and fast as I plowed through the pages. There is an element, or so I gather, of feminism in the collected works – of what wave I cannot say. Yet, without saying, I was happily pulled along by the current. We people are not always pretty, pleasant, kind, or worthy, and neither are all of the characters contained between these covers. But they are all real; they feel real, recognizable, and memorable. One will find a little of many mortal commonalities herein: the beautiful, the sorrowful, the pitiful, the startling, the regrettable, the disdainful, and the mundane. There is also a recurrent notion of familiarity as the various well-painted actors revolve around the title location. One may not exactly “find” oneself in the text, though one can expect to trace a few memories, perhaps in homage to the old Welsh concept of hiraeth, the longing for a home or place that one may have never even visited before, or which is not so clearly recalled. For instance, for those who venture but a few pages in, my grandfather (not father) kept his mint-conditioned old American car in a garage packed full of lawnmowers of all things (scores of them – a hobby I suppose it was). For a moment, before being shocked, again, by the depths of human nature, I was taken back in time. It’s a fascinating ride, made all the more enjoyable by Morrissy’s flowing, alluring poetic prose. Go for it. Cruise Prosperity Drive.

Jeffrey Addicott, Union Terror (2023)

It’s remarkable to consider, in the early 21st century, that in the middle of the 19th, the only world power that gave substantial material support to Lincoln’s Union was Russia. I sometimes wonder if modern Russians consider the irony that Czar Alexander’s support for nascent US terror helped give rise to the empire that would deliver similar tactics and operations to the American Indian Tribes, Nagasaki’s Immaculate Conception Cathedral, the good people of the Donbass, and many others. Professor Addicott delivers a tour de force about a tragedy that has afflicted populations far and wide beyond the borders of Dixie. I encourage all to carefully consider, among many other points, what Addicott says and implies about the wisdom of Karl von Clausewitz, against whom there really is no intelligent arguing. A must-read for all peoples of goodwill and open minds.

COLUMN: Teaching The Trivium: A Review

25 Wednesday Jan 2023

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Teaching The Trivium: A Review

 

Dear readers, our topic for today is one of the most important books of this century: Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style, Harvey and Laurie (RIP) Bluedorn, Trivium Pursuit, Muscatine, Iowa (2001). If my review drives home nothing else, then I must at least emphasize that this book is critical to those who either have young children or who intend to have young children. It’s also important for those with older children, or grandchildren, along with those who have no children, or those who only want to further their own intellectual development. It is a cogent defense of and general plan for preserving high Christian Civilization. 

Do not send children to schools. Let that stand as my second critical point. Please take all contrary excuses and burn them. I am angered by the fact that generation after generation of our children (this includes you, your children, your grandchildren, your parents, and even your grandparents) have been, are being, or will be misled or forced into the same trap. Most people do not realize what they’ve missed and what we’ve collectively lost. Teaching the Trivium sheds a bright light on this tragedy while offering a wonderful escape from it. 

When I finally sat down with the book and started thumbing through it, I was struck by how comprehensive the Table of Contents alone is, and how much the relayed organizational wisdom differs from what passes for institutional educational doctrine. For purposes of commentary, I reproduce a small segment, for Chapter One:

(Bluedorns, Trivium, page 11).

Contrast any part of the foregoing with what passes for valuable systemic pedagogy in, say, fag queen pedo hour, a horror with a purpose even conservatives finally begin to notice.

Perhaps the greatest veritas of this partial page is the line: “All true education must begin with the revelation of God.” The entirety of the text is a roadmap for implementing proper Holy education. One of the tell-tale Hasbara one-star reviews I read at Amazon, while subtly chastising Christianity, stupidly lamented the lack of a comprehensive, easy, ready-to-go curriculum. “Breaking out of the mold” means just that; this is a task that no formal syllabus is capable of adequately presenting or fostering. As a guide, it is an extensive map of a long, meandering road – one well worth the effort. The Table of Contents is fourteen pages, and it sets a better cursory direction than any other work I have ever seen. It covers everything from the Christian formation of the nuclear family to fueling the family by having children, to raising children, to shielding children from the evil of the world, to properly coaching children through grammar, logic, and rhetoric, to successfully sending children forth on their most important earthly endeavor – having and raising more children. The whole matter is a testament to God’s plan; the “conventional-minded” detractions I’ve read are also, negatively and indirectly, testaments to His intention. 

The Bluedorns note, on page 34, “Education is for a purpose. If the purpose does not have God in view, then it is  godless education, and it will eventually produce godless results.” They also maintain, correctly, that the only real education begins with, and consistently maintains, the revelations of Almighty God. One may be aware that in the USSA, God has been banned from schools and from the larger society, and the result has been a kind of hell on earth. The book also does a masterful job of clarifying and interweaving the Greco-Roman classical model of learning with that of fundamental Christianity. In that context, their wise view of the purpose of education does not so widely differ from Old Tully’s: “The purpose of schooling is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.” For a century and a half, our wicked, stupid culture has dispensed with all such wisdom, with our schools becoming the tyranny of the present.

With very few exceptions, homeschooling children, under the authority of the family, is not only the best way to educate the young, but it is the only way that fulfills various Biblical commandments. That may be the key takeaway from the book, along with the general “how-to” structure of the curriculum. It offers a one-size-fits-one approach; the exact Bluedorn route might be slightly different from mine, as mine might be from yours. This is fine and, in fact, great for us, but it is anathema to the luciferian status quo. And make no mistake, the schools, by design, are satanically evil. They were always that way, literally instituted to turn people into wage slaves, dumb down the population, terminate the family unit, and destroy Christian Western civilization. They have been extremely successful, an Enlightenment gift that keeps on killing. They cannot be fixed unless the fixing involves a Caterpillar D9 and an ample quantity of fire. But my own experience, and likely the reader’s, is almost exclusively set within the confines of the unnatural, anti-traditional, and unproductive K-12 classrooms. We are to be forgiven then, or at least a little lenient with ourselves, as we think about the schools and about saving future generations from them. 

To properly assess the wickedness of the schools is to ultimately dismiss them. Perhaps the best words to that end belong to Anthony Esolen. “There are only two things wrong with our schools: everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do.” Esolen, Out of the Ashes, page 68 (another must-read). The Bluedorns partly refer to this as teaching trivia instead of the trivium, coddling along with pre-packaged nothing facts rather than teaching the elemental processes of thinking. This maleducation is a grievous sin. It also fails even by its own pitiful metrics.

The cat is out of the bag that the USSA’s school systems produce results, in all areas, far below other developed, or even developing countries – even as compared to foreign systematized schools. George Carlin summed it up well when he said “they” only want people who are “just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept [all the Carlin-Esque explicatives]”. Again, the schools have not failed in their intended purposes. They have worked almost perfectly. And that near-perfect working literally kills real learning and any notion of legitimate education. The Bluedorns have a subsection about this phenomenon called “Regressive Learning,” pages 97 – 98. They’re not alone.

The late, great John Taylor Gatto went into some depth with this lurid concept in his 2009 book, Weapons of Mass Instruction (read it too). Gatto noted, as early as 1990, that homeschooled children were five to ten years ahead of their state-abused peers. Things have become much worse since then. In addition to noting the disparity and that compulsory schooling indisputably lowers things like literacy rates, he focused on a little-known university study about university studies (the UCONN study_. Read all about “Another Inconvenient Truth,” pages 37 -38, and how roughly half of the colleges in the USSA teach nothing and the other half force negative learning on their victims. 

I’ve added to this sad observation, elsewhere, by tracking mathematical failure, in a Georgia school system, from elementary (14% math proficiency), to middle (11.9%), to high school (7%). From end to end, our worse-than-useless schools reverse learning. Frequently, the longer a child is in school, and the more he is instructed, the less he will know. 

Something like eighty to ninety percent of US schoolchildren are doomed to languish in evil government-run schools. Roughly ten percent (my hasty estimate) attend private schools, of one degree of value or another (most increasingly dreadful as they conform to public expectations). Around five to ten percent of our kids, the homeschooled champions, receive one degree of real education or another. I once said that the C19 Hoax was the best thing that ever happened to the schools because it temporarily closed them. No education is better than maleducation! And, happily, a few more parents woke up and started allowing their children to learn. Still, the hyper-majority of them continue to send their precious young off to indoctrination and grooming centers. For that, they should perhaps be horse-whipped. Or, perhaps, forgiven. They either don’t understand the importance of education, or else they just don’t care.

But the other side does care about homeschooling if malice counts as caring. The nefarious educrats, most of whom deserve to be burned at the stake, know that the valid alternative of home education not only makes them and their evil work look like what it is, but they also know that homeschoolers, like latter-day monks in little, quiet monasteries, hold the potential to carry the seeds of civilization through the spreading fires. Therefore, the acolytes of the devil’s enlightenment hate with a passion the ordinary Christian families who properly raise and teach their children. These low, crawling Deevs make war on noble homeschoolers. Know their intentions and actively resist them.

Chapter two is an exposition of why the family, and certainly not the state, has genuine authority to educate children. Subsequent chapters explain what, exactly, that entails, along with how to go about doing it. For most of us, this is foreign territory. For instance, while we may associate classical grammar with Latin instruction, too many of us would neglect Greek. I, for one, was somewhat surprised by the logical and forceful arguments for including Hebrew studies as well. 

The recommended course of instruction is broken down by age and ability levels, and also by sex differences. The book assumes that some or most parents will not have anything but a rudimentary understanding of what they are teaching their children. Rather than viewing this deficiency as an obstacle, it is presented as a great opportunity, with the adults gaining a real education alongside their children. As many autodidacts have discovered, it is never too late to learn. The Bluedorns note that as many as three generations of homeschoolers may be required before parent instructors are masters of the material they present. Happily, those who started early are now one generation into the new era. May many more follow the trailblazers. 

The Appendixes are almost 200 pages of relevant articles and resources, beginning with The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers (1947). In short, there is something for everyone within these immaculate 600+ pages of encouragement and wisdom. Some of it may appear unusual, but all of it is unusually beneficial. Several myths, even as held by general homeschool advocates, are dispelled. For instance, my understanding of the theory of “un-schooling” was misplaced, barring, I still suppose, exceptional circumstances. Read chapter ten to understand why. And there are so many more topics even the intelligent and curious might not have independently fathomed. 

Personally, I have already taken one such lesson to heart: “Protecting a Child in the Library”, page 325: “Libraries have become dangerous places for children. The covers alone on some books on display are very wicked.” This was observed over a decade before the pedo queers in dresses and clown makeup first polluted the library assembly rooms. But it was observably true, just as to the book covers, and it was so at the beginning of this century as well as at the end of the last one. Therefore, I have resolved that no book cover of mine, regardless of subject, shall ever appear risque or salacious, to say nothing of appearing “wicked.” I am proud to say that no existing cover of mine risks contributing to this problem, though I had never reflected on the possibility; however, having now reflected, I intend to keep it that way. The odds are that no matter who one is, one will find something of interest and value, even if it is something as mundane as my example. If one happens to have young children, then the odds are one will be walking into a goldmine with Teaching the Trivium. I still have never developed a rating system, therefore I will merely mark this book as an absolute must-read. Read it!

And, if one has a little extra time, then I have another book to recommend – and it’s a short one: Christian Nationalism, Andrew Torba and Andre Isker, GAB AI, Inc. (2022). It’s not perfect, but it is one heck of a statement in defense of Christendom in the post-modern age. Among other things, it provides a list of the official state religions, through time, of the several sovereign American States (one will note that they all fell away by the latter half of the 19th century when the unofficial religion of the US Empire was instituted), and a rebuke of the heretical nonsense of the “Judeo-Christian” idea. 

Read, read often, and teach your children a love of reading. Deus vult.

Deo vindice!

A New Writer

15 Sunday Jan 2023

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One who will discover that she writes in an age when most people are either illiterate or possessed of a determination not to read. Still, Jessamine Lee has talent. She’s a Boomer-bashing Millennial prepper chick who gets it. Have a gander at her debut at Reckonin’. 

PS: I see WP has some new “gifts” for us this year… Try this: https://www.reckonin.com/jessamine-lee/preparedness

PPS: I almost wrote a short about my plans for future telephonic communication. I’ll just leave that to the callers.

USSA v The Free World: Some Reading

08 Saturday Oct 2022

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Read all of the Saker’s breakdown of Putin’s landmark speech last week.

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.

Comment: and now he said it, openly and directly – what Russia is threatened by and struggling against is pure Satanism.  If I am not mistaken, that is the first time that Putin ever used such words.  And, just to clarify, he does not mean “bad” or “evil” he means it literally: the forces arrayed against Russia today are Satanic in their origin and core.  Oh, I know, in the West this reference to “Satanism” will only trigger condescending smiles and, as always, a deep sense of superiority over these primitive, Asiatic, barbarians.  But here Putin is not addressing the western audience, but the Russian one and in the Russian civilizational realm to speak of “pure Satanism” is a very shocking and compelling argument.  It brings this entire war into the realm of a “just war” fought for profound spiritual reasons, not just money or power.  I personally consider these words as the single most important part of Putin’s speech!

Read the whole thing.

Part of the arrogance and genocide from the Werewest is the Covid war and the war against, well, most of the post-modern wars. Yes, Nordstream and C19. Read that.

And, yes, Russia and most of the world are tired of this evil, and they are not going to have it anymore. Read that. Americans can (and should) wake up, though that alone will not stop the wicked foreigners who rule over them. Consult the Saker, above, about the domestic oppression in places like the US and the need to shake it off.

The Crimea bridge bombing. This is proof of several things. Truck bombs are powerful and tactically effective. Terrorism works. However, terrorism from a state actor (Ukraine) is evidence that formal military capability is gone. Thus, this is evidence that Russia is achieving her stated objectives in the SMO. Also, these attacks will not go unpunished.

Speaking of bridges, perhaps Americans should be less concerned with Crimea and more concerned with where they live. By any structural or systemic measure, the US is rapidly turning into a third world country. These measures include murder rates, with 60% of murders now committed by only 13% of the population.

Read all that and then get back to your enjoyable Saturday decline.

UPDATE: Half the Crimean Bridge has reopened already.

Public Anti-intellectuals

18 Monday Apr 2022

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Another liberal laments the passing of liberalism. Read the whole thing.

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

Take the “progressive” out and this is a universal truth in modern Amerika. There’s a very good reason why the neocons look just like the neolibs and the fake right looks just like the fake left. Hint: they are all satanists and whatever else one calls them doesn’t matter.

COLUMN: Tolkien’s Dwarves Are Not “Jews”

23 Wednesday Mar 2022

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Tolkien’s Dwarves Are Not “Jews”

 

*This week, a break from WW3 and the usual madness. Herein, I smash up a little religious and literary misconception.

My titular opinion comes in response both to old rumors I’ve heard as well as more recent suggestions in line with the old rumors that, contrary to my position, the Dwarves are Jewish. The counterpoints are based on artificially-narrow stereotyping and, in my estimation, a lack of understanding of concepts both Biblical and those related to Professor Tolkien’s whole legend and mythology.

The following presupposes that the reader has read The Holy Bible, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, and more. Much more. R-E-A-D. I do not care what one saw in a Peter Jackson atrocity.

I also assume that the rumor spreaders conflate anything “Jewish” with “bad,” and that they make absolutely no differentiation between the classification and labeling of Karaim, Reform, Orthodox, Rabbinical, Talmudic, secular, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, atheist, Elect, Chosen, Jewish, Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, any other division, or any subdivision within any division. They probably know little to nothing about any of these divisions and do not care. They come off just a little monomaniacal: “the Jooooos is bad!”

Tolkien, by the way, did not suffer such misunderstandings, nor did he dislike “Jewish” people. To the latter point, see his 1938 response to Joseph Goebbels via Rutten & Loening, Berlin. Furthermore, Tolkien repeatedly asserted that his works were not a Christian allegory. They were deeply steeped in his own Christianity and Christian worldview and many a reader is tempted to gainsay the great author (but really, how smart is that?). It stands to reason that the works are similarly not allegorical in a Jewish sense either. Rather, many of his themes, many of his developed situations, and many of his created peoples were influenced by his ardent Catholicism. They were also influenced by this being English, a father, a genius, a poet, a soldier, etc. His Dwarves have the characteristics are various types of peoples, real, fictional, and mythological. With a few specific exceptions, most of which do lean allegorical, I do not think he intended any of his contrived races or beings to represent certain exactly-identifiable groups. The possible non-allegorical exception would be the subset of Men who, by default, were destined to become the fictional, mythical predecessors of the English People.

The truth is, like Anglo-Saxons and all people, some Jews – however one defines the term – are bad and some are good. But, as the rumors address a monolithic Jewish People in the worst light possible, for the sake of argument, I will examine the allegedly Jewish People of Durin in accordance with the harshest interpretation of John 8:44 (NJB, 1985):

You [Jewish Dwarves] are from your father, the devil, and you prefer to do what your father wants. He was a murderer from the start; he was never grounded in the truth; there is no truth in him at all. When he lies he is speaking true to his nature, because he is a liar, and the father of lies.

I’ll leave aside that, in keeping with the monomania, the gossipers would not read that passage in pari materia. Not a lot of reading, period.

The slanders, against good Jews and good Dwarves, derive from the assertions that the Dwarves are: 1) a wandering people, and 2) in love with gold and jewels.

Without going any further, both of these libels describe the Dwarves … and, to one degree or another, just about all the other races of Arda. The Valar themselves wandered down to earth at the beginning of time. Dwarves, Elves, Men, Hobbits, Orcs, the Istari, and the Ents roamed far and wide at various intervals for various reasons. We’re reliably informed that one Elf is still wandering around the world’s coastlines, mumbling to himself, to this very day! Dwarves did value gold and other precious things. So did many Elves and Men. This trait was shared by even some of the Valar and Ainur. Elves, Men, a few of the Angelic beings, and even a few Hobbits went murderously insane at times over trivial things like, say, rings, necklaces, and artificial stones. Much like our real people, these literary creations all had their bad (or misguided) apples.

There are other negative attributes that could also be falsely, solely applied to the would-be-Jewish Dwarves. Assuming they are Thirteenth Tribe, Kazarian, satanic, fake Jews – that’s how the gossipers think of them, even as most gossipers are probably unable to define those necessary terms – then shouldn’t there be other evidence of more “nation-wrecking” behavior among Dwarves? There is, here and there, but none of it is exclusive to the Dwarves. In fact, it’s arguable that the Dwarves were far less given to subversion, inversion, theft, murder, lying, and malicious conquest than Men or Elves.

Back to the Dwarves, exclusively, as the children of the devil: Christopher Tolkien tells us in no uncertain terms that originally the Dwarves were “always portrayed as an evil people.” Lost Tales, Ch. 10, “Gilfanon’s Tale…” That was the original sketch. Originally. Things changed; the same page (236 of 1st American HMC Ed. (1984)) that relates the original evil of the Dwarves also speaks of “evil fays” and “ogres.” How many fays and ogres made it into the final narrative publications?

And, most importantly for the Gospel of John analysis, who is the Dwarves father? Is he Melkor/Morgoth, the cautiously-analogized Lucifer character of the Legendarium? No. Movie-goers will be mystified by this revelation, but the Dwarves were literally carved and hammered into existence by Aule, the Vulcan/Hephaestus figure of the Valar (Tolkien’s gods or angelic beings). Their spontaneous creation was a technical violation of the established natural law but, because Aule’s reasons were innocent, Eru Iluvtar (“God”) not only allowed their continued existence but blessed their being (subject to a certain timing). See: Silmarillion, Ch. 2, “Of Aule and Yavanna”, 43-45, 1st American HMC Ed. (1977).

The Dwarves were created by a good guy and sanctified by THE good guy. And while they were at times the subject of suspicion and curses, nobody ever de-sanctified or super-bedeviled the Dwarves. While those Dwarves given the Seven Rings did succumb to partly ruinous gold lust, the hard, fair, and decent nature of the Dwarves thwarted Sauron’s ultimate gifting goals: he found Dwarves ultimately indomitable and spiritually incorruptible. Durin’s folk were also fanatically loyal to their friends even if the friends were not Dwarves.

In summary, shining the harshest light possible on the Dwarves, as suggested by those who understand neither the light, the Dwarves, nor the Jews, it is patently and literarily obvious that Dwarves are not stereotypical, bad “Jews”. Certainly, some Dwarves held both good and bad characteristics. It is possible that some Dwarves could inadvertently represent good “Jews”. How to put this in plain terms? Not all who occasionally wander with gold are Shylocks?

Now, to stoke further learned discussion, I posit that it is possible (if unlikely) that there is a better divergent two-race fit in Tolkien’s world for the ancient “real” Jew v. more modern “fake” Jew conundrum. Lakeside under the stars or something. Go ask Orome, advised that he’ll probably say something against blanket universal judgments.

BONUS: Speaking of really, really modern and really, really, REALLY good Jews! To dispel an even dumber rumor! I understand that circular whispers about nothing are presently bandied about by nameless “sources,” so say the nameless “admins” of an essentially nameless entertainment news site, the popularity of which is known only to Google AI. Bullshit, I say! I know what and who is behind this wicked idiocy. It can’t even be a lie, because it simply does not exist. My sources, and my own eyes, know the truth. Gal and Jaron have never been stronger; they’ll still be together when Melko is finally undone and Maglor gives up the wandering.