Author: The FAR Platform

There is a lot of ignorance on the left about what drives the pro-immigration agenda. I have had many discussions lately with left-wing folks and supporters of the Democratic Party (whose lines they robotically take up) who are startled when I tell them that a major proponent of pro-immigration is a coalition of right-wing anti-labor individuals and groups. “But right-wingers are anti-immigration,” they object. “They’re fascists.” No, they’re not. Many conservative Republicans are reluctant to openly join pro-immigration Republicans in pushing for open borders because they depend on political support from the rank-and-file workers, workers who have been abandoned by the Democrats and labor unions.

Blue collar workers increasingly make up much of the popular base of the Republican Party because they don’t want to see their standards of living decline any more than they have and they recognize that immigration is one of the causes of why they struggle to make ends meet. This is why Trump waltzed through the primaries and won the election in blue collar states: his stance on immigration appeals to blue collar workers, the same blue collar workers Democrats used to court (and still claim to represent). But Democrats no longer worry about the working class because they have major backing from globalists and enjoy the support of a coalition of identity groups that neoliberal cultural managers have knitted together over the years. Democrats and their supporters now claim to represent the “middle class” while disparaging workers in heartland as “white,” “privileged,” “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “deplorable.” 

Two right-wing individuals pushing hard for immigration are the powerful billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Their LIBRE initiative, which enjoys the backing of conservative mega-donors who stand to profit from the massive transfer of value that comes with immigration, strives to help immigrants (legal and illegal) come and live in America, learn English, and pass their drivers’ license tests. Learning English and being able to drive is critical for getting immigrants into the workforce where they can be pitted against native-born labor. This is a strategy to suppress wages and disrupt political organizing. It’s class warfare Koch brothers style. As is expected, the Koch bothers are supportive of the Democrat’s pro-immigration agenda.

A related Koch strategy is pushing public school vouchers as a strategy to defund the public schools working class kids go to. They’re particularly keen on organizing Hispanics to push for school choice. The goal is clear: the undermining of US national culture, a culture that has been supportive of public education and labor unions. Like today’s Democrats, the Koch brothers are globalists, aggressively pushing for open borders and open trade, pitting native-born workers in the US against cheap labor around the world. They dream of a completely open world in which workers in developed countries have to compete with workers in developing counties. For example, LIBRE refused to back House Republican’s compromise immigration legislation because it lowered immigration.

The Koch brothers have dispatched Daniel Garza, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and son of a migrant farmworkers, to lobby Congress for open borders legislation. Garza complains that immigration restrictions are unacceptable because they “hinder the ability to address market forces and the private sector to hire who they need to hire.” Yes, they are that explicit about their goals. Garza, like the other Republicans pushing for immigration, are opposed to efforts by Donald Trump to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border. Why? Because it reduces surplus population which in turn pushes wages higher.

There is a Time magazine article on this—”Koch Network Mounts Grassroots Effort to Support Immigration”— that is sweet on Koch’s efforts. There is nothing in the Time article about how immigration hurts native-born workers in America. Time’s parent company, Time Inc., was acquired by Meredith Corp. in a deal partially financed by Koch Equity Development, a subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc. However, given the favorable coverage of this across the corporate media, it appears that one does not need to be indebted to the Koch brothers to push for open borders.

The world capitalist system, which can now boast of nearly eight billion humans within its boundaries, is pressing against global ecological limits. Present and expanding rates of economic growth and consumption are environmentally unsustainable, evidenced by the rapid pace of climate change. The world cannot wait to tackle this problem.

I mention the nearly eight billion people who live on this planet because the mass of humanity is a big part of the problem. World population exploded after 1960s, growing from 3 billion to 7.7 billion today (the growth rate began its staggering climb after the world crisis of capitalism in the 1920s), and it is expected to grow to nine or ten million by 2050 (these are median projections). The rate of growth is decreasing, but the problem remains: the impact of billions of people today and in the coming years, almost all of whom will be born in developing countries. The fact that the projected near-zero population growth projected for 2100 comes with more than eleven billion people gives us no space to breathe a sigh of relief. It’s time for alarmism. 

Rather than helping the world’s public grasp the significance of the human population overshooting its planet’s carrying capacity, political and economic elites tell the developed world a different and egoïstic story: rising life expectancy and declining fertility rates are producing rapidly aging societies that will not be able to sustain their progressive structure of human services without some sort of intervention to restore integrity to the system. Life expectancy was 52 years in 1960; many people did not live to see retirement. Today, the population in the developed world has doubled and life expectancy extended to 67 years. By 2050, life expectancy will be 75 years. Many more people are living to see their golden years.

Twisting the good news that developed societies are at or below replacement rates, elites advocate importing from the developing world bodies to sustain the social structures of the developed world. They never mention the capitalist need for more bodies to suppress wages and consume goods and services. They never suggest redistribution of property as a means of securing future living standards for the mass of their citizens. They never appear concerned about the problems of overextending resources, environmental degradation, diminished social services, declining standards of living, the well-being of the native born, or political, cultural, and social disorganization. There is no talk of national strategies for creating a well-functioning societies that serve the interests of their citizens; instead, the best we can do is react to the changing demographic profile by patching it with peoples from other countries.

When the problem of overpopulation is raised in leftwing circles, either the conversation goes nowhere or the person introducing the topic is suspected of eugenics or racism. To be fair, much of the fear on the left of critical discourses concerning the matter is due to its perceived Malthusian implications. Thomas Robert Malthus, the English cleric and political economist, whose book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798, and undergoing numerous revisions over the next couple of decades, posits a relationship between population and the social surplus in which greater food production only temporarily improves the welfare of a people because surplus in turn triggers population growth, is rightly viewed as reactionary. 

Malthus insists that the rate of population increase tends to exceed the rate of increase in food production, which ensures a class of impoverished individuals, and can result in what later observers dubbed “Malthusian catastrophe,” where people at the bottom suffer famine and disease. His formula, posited without proof: the arithmetic increase in food production is swallowed up by the geometric increase in population. Crucially, overpopulation is not a future problem for Malthusian theory; overpopulation is an ever-present dynamic that drives human societies.

One implication of the Malthusian argument is that helping poor people through public intervention perpetuates the problem of misery by producing more miserable people. And so his theory was used to justify rolling back government assistance to the poor. A more general implication is the ideologically view that poverty is the inevitable and indeed natural result of progress; thus, the argument provides ideological cover for inequality and neglect. On a positive note, Malthus’s insight—a general law of population across the spectrum of life—was exploited by both Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, co-founders of the principle of natural selection, for their paradigm-shifting theory of natural history. However, human beings build their environments; so the Wallace-Darwin principle does not apply to humans (which did not stop social Darwinists from claiming it did).

But the logic of Malthus does not encompass all possible thinking on the population question. Karl Marx, the great revolutionary communist and radical political economist, also developed a theory of population, one explicitly at odds with Malthus, who Marx regarded as representative of the crude style of the vulgar British economist.

Operating on the basis of a material conception of history, Marx recognizes the inapplicability of natural selection to the human situation and inverts Malthus’ causal order, theorizing political economy as the driver of demographic change, not the other way around. As such, Malthus’ theory applied to humans amounts to a “libel on the human race.” Malthus’s claim is, Marx contends, “an apology for the misery of the working class.” Marx writes in Capital: “Every method of production that arises in the course of history has its own peculiar, historically valid, law of population,” which he distinguishes from the general law of population for plants and animals for which there a law “in the abstract”—“only in so far as man does not interfere with them.” 

The problem of the surplus human population, which is the source of human misery among the ranks of the working class, is tied not to an abstract and general Malthusian principle but is the concrete consequence of the capitalist mode of social production and its conditions. It is the result of capitalist accumulation, specifically the organic composition of capital, a term denoting the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, or the price of labor power. The dynamic proceeds thusly: maximizing surplus value production in pursuit of profit using the method of relative production, i.e. the introduction of labor-saving machinery and organization, systematically generates a surplus population, a redundant mass of labor, workers with no productive function. 

Marx thus proposes a law of progressive decline in the relative size of variable capital. At the same time, the capitalist system promotes population growth to maintain at its disposal a ready supply of labor power and a lever on the price of labor. Surplus population functions to suppresses wages, which is why, Marx argues, the price of labor-power never consumes the surplus. At the system level, this situation creates a contradiction in which capitalists fail to realize the results of expanded surplus value production as commodities as profit in commercial markets, thus triggering periodic realization crises, which lead to other crises until the system either resets and innovates its way out or collapses. 

There are two types of surplus population. The first is the traditional population characterized by a culture of high fertility rates (a bad thing) but for which modernity has reduced the mortality rate (a good thing), with the result a high natural rate of growth (a bad thing). Thus, the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production, or the impact of capitalism on societies peripheral to it, create a situation where extraordinary population pressures mount. China and India represent two examples of this problematic, where the development of productive forces outstripped the development of a culture conducive to optimal fertility rates, leading to a population explosion in those countries; both are the most populous nations in the world (1.4 billion and 1.3 billion respectively). The second type is in part the process described by the problematic of the organic composition of capital: workers have a functional role in capitalist production only to the extent that they can provide capitalists with useful labor power. As labor becomes more productive (more production with fewer workers), it is inevitable that there will be individuals who are no longer useful to capitalism, and thus will fall into the surplus population or, if lucky, suffer marginal engagement with the labor market. 

One suggested method for dealing with the problem is to tolerate a high mortality rate among the surplus population. Even if this were an effective strategy, humanitarian sympathies rightly prevent people from tolerating such a thing. Species ties require those with means find some way of at least ameliorating the conditions caused by overpopulation, which I am defining here as a mismatch between the needs of social productivity and the mass of people in a society. Thus, the standard solution is to compel the population that derives an income from either work or the exploitation of work to pays taxes that can be used to support a system making it possible for those who do not have an income or whose income is meager to continue consuming goods and services, thus subsidizing capitalism by recycling income (earned and unearned) through the system. The welfare system associated with the modern capitalist state, while often successfully ameliorative (more so in some developed European states than in others and in the United States) is not a vehicle for self-actualization for those at the bottom of the class structure, but rather is a functionalized system for managing their predicament. And without progressive taxing systems, there is a real question as to how secure this system is, with neoliberal restructuring by the transnational capitalist establishment shrinking the quantity and equality of the social welfare provisions. 

There is another solution. Recognizing that the capitalist class is less concerned with the problem of the surplus population than it is with economic growth, it falls to the world proletariat to limit the numbers of people in their respective nations by maintaining low fertility rates and restricting immigration from developing countries. Sharply limiting national population growth, ideally reducing the size of the population the long term, produces several benefits. First, it reduces the problems of overextending resources, environmental degradation, diminished social services, declining standards of living, and political, cultural, and social disorganization. Second, it reduces the surplus population which in turn shrinks the class of the unemployment thus pushing wages higher. This means that there is a smaller mass of people to be managed by government, which allows for more generous social provisions for those still or permanently in need of public assistance. Third, as I have written about in other essays on this blog, economic empowerment and cultural homogeneity contribute to social solidarity and strengthen support for the achievements of enlightened society: civil, political, and social rights.

When Marx published Capital, the world’s population stood at around 1.2 billion. Marx did not reflect on the impact of this mass of people on the ecosystem because the problem of surplus population was a political economic question; whatever the size of population, capitalism would see to it that there would always be too many people. Therefore, the solution was the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a socialist society in which all the needs of the people—even the desire to engage in creative work—would be met.

To be sure, socialism is still the solution to the problems of humanity. However, we are facing a problem that a world of 1.2 billion did not face: there are now nearly eight billion humans, and to make a world that allows all of them the comfort they deserve, while observing the principles of sustainable economics, is a daunting task the accomplishing of which is rapidly receding from the realm of possibility. The problem is not solved by redistributing the trillions of dollars currently hoarded by the global bourgeoisie. While they consume more per capita than the average people on the planet, they are small in number; meeting the normal needs of this group does not require very much of the world’s productive output. The real problem is elevating the average Asian or African to the same standard as my family enjoys here in the United States. 

My parents’ generation warned the world about the problem of overpopulation. Perhaps Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame was the wrong messenger, but the generation’s instincts were right: there are limits. My home country, the United States, is the third largest county in the world population-wise. Americans consume a lot. We should be this comfortable. I deserve it. Indeed, every American deserves to be as comfortable as I am. But the world is not able to support a world population of ten billion people consuming the West’s average level of consumption. It’s not just meat (the most recent effort to distract the public about the actual problem). It’s population.

We in the West can at least do our part: no more people. Indeed, we need fewer people. In a November blog I shared the thoughts of ecohumanist Karen Shragg’s on this subject. In her essay, she explains how it is not just a matter of radically reducing the consumption levels of the West. Total population numbers matter. So even though the average American adult impacts the environment more than the average Chinese adult, the Chinese people’s impact on the environment is twice as great as the impact of the American people. Imagine matching consumption on a per capita basis. 

The West overall has done a good job reducing fertility. And its people are more free as a result—especially women. But to many other cultures have not done this work and many of them aren’t prepared to. Moreover, some are worse than others. In a November 2017 article, The Atlantic complained that the myth of Muslim overpopulation won’t die. But there’s a reason for that: the world’s Muslim population is growing twice as fast as the non-Muslim population. Muslims have the highest fertility rate in the world. There are 1.8 Muslims worldwide, a population that far exceeds China’s entire population. Because this growth is occurring in developing countries (and they are to a substantial extent still developing because of the overbearing nature of their religion), mass migrations are going to grow in size and frequency. Some folks think Europe and North America represent the cornucopia into which population pressure can be relieved. Our spaces cannot be allowed to serve these ends. We must not willingly suffer on account of other peoples’ recklessness and irresponsibility and backwards cultural sensibilities. And we must not help capitalists in their desire for cheap labor. I see good-hearted people eager to open our space to the world. They should know they are serving the interests of capitalism.

Knowing that nothing is so obvious as to obviate straw man objections to argument, I hasten to clarify that the arguments in this essay have no basis in the net-malthusian and eugenicist theories of Garrett Hardin or Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt before him (which is not to say they were wrong about everything). I do not celebrate death as a means of restraining overpopulation. I abhor population control strategies that select reductions of groups based on race (as I have written about). I am advocating reducing fertility worldwide (which, to be sure, means some population groups require greater levels of intervention) and equitably redistributing resources as means of preventing deprivation. Even those harshly criticizing the neo-Malthusians, for example Marxist environmentalist John Bellamy Foster, recognize that, to quote Foster, “population growth is one of the most serious problems of the contemporary age.” And Bellamy wrote the words in 1988, when the world’s population was 5 billion. Population is tied to historical conditions, conditions driven by what Amartya Sen demonstrated long ago to be the result of differential entitlement radiating from capitalist market dynamics. To grasp the reality of population pressing upon society, one must understand how population is a result of the capitalist dynamic. But this is no reason to forget that “population growth is one of the most serious problems of the contemporary age.”

In these essays, I am advocating for the working class. The national proletariats in the developed world must resist the call for their countries to serve as the pressure valves for global population problem. They should not fall for false rhetoric about the need to import bodies to sustain entitlements, an argument designed to undermine the demand for redistributive policies to shore up the living standards of those who produce the value in society. Nor should the working class fail to recognize that the surplus population problem is a strategy capitalists use to suppress wages and create a culture of uncertainty that pits workers against each other and makes them thankful for the jobs capitalists “create” for them. A million and more immigrants a year keeps wage-killing competition going (as we have achieved low fertility in the West, which promised higher wages and stronger bargaining power). Half a trillion dollars in wages lost annually to the capitalist class because of the wage differential between native and foreign born labor. Should American workers start begging capitalists to pay them less so they can have a job? The national proletariats should not be expected to suffer diminishment in their standard of living because capitalism and overpopulation create crises in the developing world. We have tens of millions at home who need work. Constrain the labor supply and you raise wages and create jobs. There is no proletarian interest in increasing the population of their respective nations, either in the developed or the developing world. 

Fences stop illegal border crossings. Not entirely; some people go over or cut through the fence. But, extraordinary efforts notwithstanding, fencing deters around 90% of illegal border crossings. These reductions are associated with reductions in crimes in those areas where fencing is emplaced. This benefit is typical of security measures, such as padlocking shed doors. To be sure, padlocks can be removed with bolt cutters. But most people who find locked doors go no further than that.

Some have suggested that, since fencing is not maintained where there are few or no people, this security measure drives migrants to where the terrain is most perilous. There, they say, people are at risk to die from the elements. As reported on this blog (“The Border in 2014 … and Now“), illegal border crossings are associated with a high human cost. Ergo, they contend, fencing is immoral. The same argument can be made about watchtowers and watchmen, of course. People who intend to break the law avoid authority and its structures. If people engage in dangerous behavior to avoid being detected while breaking the law, then who is responsible for that?

For most people making the trek to the US on their own, seeing miles of fencing in either direction is an effective deterrent. They only knew to avoid ports of entry (since they have no legitimate reason to cross, they knew to avoid authority); not really knowing what to expect, they could not have expected security fencing. The amalgam of fences, steel barriers, and concrete walls, sometimes with razor wire crowning their tops, is an impressive sight. Fencing and walls are unwelcoming and many migrants turn back. However, many other migrants never encounter these structures because human traffickers lead them to where there are few people in order to avoid detection. That means to the gaps in the fencing and the roughest terrain. Human traffickers are interested in moving bodies, not usually with what happens to people once they feel their job is done. Sometimes human traffickers on the US side of the border—sooner or later—welcome migrants into the network of criminal companies where their labor will be superexploited. Other times traffickers on the US side don’t show and traffickers from the Mexico side abandon the migrants to the elements.

Enter humanitarians who seek to help migrants in this situation. One such group, the faith-based No More Deaths, provides aid and shelter to illegal immigrants on the southwest border. Last years nine members were charged by federal authorities for various offenses. Four of the nine are currently on trial for dropping off food and water for migrants. At least this is the way their crimes have been characterized in media supportive of their actions. Tagged the Cabeza 9 (conjuring civil rights imagery), they have become a cause célèbre on the identitarian left.

It is important to consider what is involved in leaving food and water for migrants. Rationally, there must be knowledge that migrants will be at a certain place at a certain time to receive the assistance, otherwise leaving food and water in the wilderness is like expecting an exhausted, hungry, thirsty individual to find a needle in a haystack. Serious people don’t engage in haphazard action. These are big spaces full of brush. Supposing no coordination, leaving large amounts of plastic and aluminum in a protected wilderness area (those on trial were issued citations in August 2017 by a US Fish and Wildlife Service officer in a protected area west of Ajo) is ecologically irresponsible. Of course, one cannot rule out naiveté even among serious people.

It is also important to consider that the offenses are misdemeanor charges: operating a vehicle in a restricted area, not having a permit for being in the area, and abandoning personal property inside the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. In light of the fact that Cabeza Prieta is one of the deadliest corridors migrants transverse, and that expectations of American assistance risks encouraging migrants to take this route, and, moreover, that the activists are aiding and abetting criminality, the charges may seem rather minor. Moreover, if the past is any indication, they will likely be dismissed. (One of the nine, Scott Warren, is facing a separate felony charge for harboring illegal immigrants. This is a more serious charge.)

Activists protesting the charges characterize No More Deaths’ work as “humanitarian.” Their slogan: “Humanitarian aid is never a crime. Drop the charges.” Subjectively humanitarian, perhaps. I’m sure they feel like they are doing the right thing. I’m sure they feel like they’re part of the second coming of the Underground Railroad. Objectively, however, facilitating the dangerous practice of crossing the Cabeza Prieta is not humanitarian action, but action contrary to federal laws designed to protect persons, the environment, and the integrity of the Mexico-US border. Dropping the charges sends the signal that, if migrants chart a path through the wilderness to avoid detection, humanitarians will be there to assist them, thus giving migrants false hope. With the amount of media attention, a lot of potential migrants will likely hear about the work of No More Deaths. With more caravans on the way, these is a dangerous message to send.

It is revealing that the defendants in the case called upon John Fife to testify on their behalf. Fife is a Presbyterian minister of Tucson, Arizona, who, in defiance of federal law, organized over 500 churches over several decades to help migrants illegally cross the border and find sanctuary in the United States. Fife was convicted in 1986 of violating federal immigration laws and sentenced to five years’ probation. He is retired, but works closely with No More Deaths. It is not uncommon for religious leaders to believe the work their god has called upon them to perform takes priority over the rule of law of a secular nation. It is also not uncommon for them to engage in what they believe is moral action only to endanger people’s lives. Religious ambition isn’t usually governed by reason and facts. I’m sure they believe the Lord guides their actions. What would Jesus do? Probably not this.

This is not to say that I disbelieve in civil disobedience in principle. There are reasons to break the law (albeit no valid reason hails from religious doctrine except accidentally). At the same time, disobedience comes with a cost. If your actions are illegal, then criminal sanctions are the price you pay. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded his followers of this fact: while the law was an obstacle to racial justice, and individuals were therefore right to disobey segregation ordinances, for example, they were nonetheless breaking the law. Responding to civil rights activists failing to wait for the proper permitting, the Supreme Court in Walker v. Birmingham (1967) commented: “This Court cannot hold that the petitioners were constitutionally free to ignore all the procedures of the law and carry their battle to the streets. One may sympathize with the petitioners’ impatient commitment to their cause. But respect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law, which alone can give abiding meaning to constitutional freedom.” You cannot expect those who enforce the law to excuse you from any consequences because you feel strongly about what you are doing.

I also believe in the legitimacy of the US federal government—the Supreme Court spoke powerfully to this in its 1967 ruling—and therefore expect that acts of civil disobedience will be clearly justified on legitimate moral grounds. Helping people illegally enter a country that has the most generous immigration laws in the world is not a legitimate reason for violating the law. It is hard for me to feel sympathy for the situation these nine created for themselves by violating the law to these ends. Indeed, it is hard for me to shake the feeling that people who do this harbor contempt for the nation and the will of its people. At the same time, I am feel some pity for them that their religious belief have so confused them about what is in the best interests of both the country and migrants. I would like to believe that people who probably mean well are also harmless. However, either intentionally or functionally, No More Deaths play a role in perpetuating human trafficking.

When I have these conversations with pro-migration folks, I often hear the sympathy claim that all migrants want is a better life. The following things are all true: there are people who seek to come to the United States to work and send money home and then return; there are people who seek to permanently move to the United States to live and work; there are people who are fleeing violence who seek asylum in the United States. However, in all those cases there is a process. The person arrives at a port of entry and requests the US government consider their case. There is a backlog of people who have sought entry into the US in a legal fashion. More than a million people are allowed into the United States every year to live and work or go to school. So while these may be reasons to seek entry to the United States, they are not reasons to illegally enter the country. Nor are they reasons for Americans to help people illegally enter the country. The so-called Cabeza 9 are not being unjustly treated.

One line in this Atlantic story, “The Unique Racial Dynamics of the L.A. Teachers’ Strike” story leapt out to me. Sorry, it’s the sociologist in me. But this: “In Los Angeles, 73 percent of students are Latino and another 15 percent or so are other racial minorities.” Other racial minorities? Has it become a habit in the elite media to treat Latinos as a race? Latino is not a racial designation, but an broad ethnic category.

There are five government-defined racial categories – white, black, Asian, American Indian, Pacific Islander. To be sure, census categories change over time, but we’re seeing unfolding a project to racialize Latinos. We are seeing a similar thing with Muslims (even ethnicizing Muslims is problematic, to wit: most Muslims aren’t Arab). This is troubling because it conflates culture with race (and religion with ethnicity and race in the Muslim case), which risks granting the profession of culture and even religion immunity from criticism because to criticize would be “racist.” Yes, I know, we are already some ways down that road – that’s my complaint!

To put this another way, the problem of racialization has shifted from being so labeled to justify oppression to, with the hegemony of antiracist ideology, claiming racial status as a new politics and a means of privilege-seeking. And it won’t do to revel in turnabout is fair play because intergenerational flesh-taking is abhorrent. But even if we were to accept the abhorrent in that regard, racializing ethnic categories is a form of deep othering. To separate people in this essentialist way is going backwards. How do we dismantle a system – racism – people want to expand? 

If we want precision in language, words need to have specific meanings – especially when objectivity is the end sought. Race refers to the organization of the human population into subcategories based on alleged biological and constitutional differences that are claimed to predict attitudinal and behavioral dispositions. Race is not an actual thing, but the product of a system of oppression based on identification of biological ancestry. In other words, race is a product of racism. Ethnicity is about culture and language and may include multiple racial identities. Latinos can be of European, Native American, African, or Asian descent. Moreover, Latino culture is derivative of European culture.

We really shouldn’t tolerate casual conflation of these categories.

If Obama sought money to build more fencing along the border, then a majority of Democrats would be for it. In fact, when George W. Bush (the presidential reputation Democrats are so keen on rehabilitating these days) signed the bill establishing hundreds of miles of fencing, at a cost of billions of dollars, the Fence Act passed the House 283–138 and the Senate 80–19. That’s a lot of Democrats. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was for it and now he is lying to America’s face about that. (He is also lying about the border situation being a “manufactured crisis.”) See the video below. It’s refutes the Democratic response to the president’s speech. (By the way, didn’t Schumer and Pelosi look and sound like aliens appearing on the viewscreen of a Star Fleet vehicle?)

The federal government has been continually building a security fence along the border since 1990 across Republican and Democratic administrations. It’s a bipartisan effort. The federal government started the project because a majority of Americans had turned against immigration generally in the late-1980s. The trend in opposition to immigration grew continually after immigration reform in the 1960s, a key piece of the elite war on labor and the old left. By the early 1990s, two-thirds of Americans wanted to see immigration curtailed (opposition spiked again after 9-11). The establishment did not want to see the level of popular opposition to immigration that occurred in the early 20th century that led to sharp immigration restrictions. Such immigration restrictions would interfere with the establishment’s globalist agenda. To knock down opposition to immigration, the government and media shifted the focus to the problem of *illegal* immigration successfully shaping public opinion by allowing the majority to express anti-immigration sentiment in way that strengthened popular support for immigration. The line in the Democratic Party was taken up by neoliberal operative Bill Clinton. This was an element in the broader New Democrat strategy. The strategy has worked quite well, reducing popular opposition to immigration by some 25 percentage points. Democratic opposition to new border fencing is about marginalizing Trump. Under a different president, we will see Democrats return to supporting stricter border control measures. Mark my words on that. 

I just read the recent polls on the current controversy and it is remarkable (yet expected) how public opinion is determined by party loyalty, opinion that would flip if their party took up the position. I am sorry to sound elitist, but Americans who follow the party line of either side of corporate-controlled political apparatus are zombies. Using what Chuck Schumer tells you today to determine how to think about an issue is embarrassingly naive. The reasons why people fall for this are explicable, but I have written enough for now. Just let me add that, while still a minority position, the polls show that support for the Trump’s proposal is gathering. With new reports coming out from partisan outlets like The Washington Post admitting there is a crisis as the border, popular support for more fencing may very well continue to grow.

President Trump has made his Oval Office speech to the nation (his first one) about his strategy to address the problem of illegal immigration. Part of his strategy involves more security fencing. A considerable length of the Mexican-US border already has security fencing, which has proven to be effective. Opponents of Trump’s plans are engaging in a wide range of subterfuge in an attempt to undermine them. One of the tactics has been to claim that illegal immigrants don’t pose a security threat to US citizens. This blog entry examines that claim and finds it to be problematic.

Since the current controversy concerns illegal immigration, either those who illegally cross borders or those who overstay their visas (it is estimated that 30-50% of illegal immigrants in the United States are those who have overstayed their visas), and their association with crime and violence, we might put to one side the association of crime and violence and legal immigration; however, as we will see, we need to include immigrants broadly in at least one respect, namely the problem of criminal aliens. 

I have reviewed numerous studies conducted on the general subject of immigration and crime and find them to be constructed in ways that downplay the problem; sampling is used to exclude crucial evidence and the focus is on crime overall. If we stand back, we find that illegal aliens make up approximately 3.5% of the US population yet account for 13.6% of all offenders sentenced for crime committed in the United States, including 12% of murder sentences and 20% of kidnappings. I chose the crimes of homicide and kidnapping because they are less likely to suffer from biased enforcement and sentencing—very few people get off for these crimes. What this means is that illegal immigrants are more than 3 times more likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population. Murder is the most serious crime of all.

But it’s not exclusively illegal immigrants who are overrepresented in homicide. According to the GAO in 2011, a study population of criminal aliens contained 25 thousand arrests for homicide over a seven-year period. According to the FBI, there were 115 thousand homicides from 2003 through 2009, the period covered by the GAO report. That means that more than 20% of homicides were committed by criminal aliens. Yet the overall foreign-born population, which includes naturalized citizens, is around 13 percent. One gets an entirely different impression from reporting by major news outlets.

However favorable the rates reported by the media are to immigrants, they do not negate the reality of propensity. Supposing that rates really are lower, if there were fewer illegal immigrants, it follows that there would be fewer crimes committed by them, thus there would be fewer crime victims. In other words, the rates of crime and violence in the United States are bad enough without adding another layer of crime and violence on top of them. Put in human terms, it is not of much importance to the victims of crime committed by an illegal immigrants that rates for this population are lower than the general population. It is an odd argument indeed to claim that illegal immigration is somehow okay or not a concern because illegal immigrants commit crime less frequently and therefore more crime is okay (that is the implication). For example, a study in 2013 admits that, although research shows that immigrants do not commit as many crimes as native-born persons (this is one of the favorable studies to immigrants), if the number of illegal immigrants increases, then there will be numerically more crime committed by this population. Moreover, this study found that when police stepped up enforcement of the law, illegal immigrations became less likely to report victimization for fear of deportation; the decline in crime rate with increased threat of deportation was both because the element was being deterred or removed or because victims were more reticent to report criminal behavior because of their own criminal status. 

There are a myriad of reasons why immigrants are associated with crime and why that association can be elusive. One of the reasons individuals from Central America and Mexico come to the US to escape prosecution by authorities or violence at the hands of those whom they have betrayed, either fellow gang members or other gang members. There is an incentive to lay low or be more careful in crime commission to avoid arrest and deportation. The crimes of illegal aliens are harder to detect because many of them, especially those illegally crossing the border, are unknown to authorities. Foreign-born victims of crime are less likely to report their victimization to authorities because of fears that they will experience negative consequences, such as deportation (there is a massive activist network protecting illegal immigrants from authorities that knows about these crimes). Most criminal violence occurs within population groups, i.e. it is intra-ethnic, intra-racial, etc. As expected, immigrants from Central America and Mexico gravitate toward their ethnic communities, and it is, for the most part, individuals living in those communities whom they victimize. It is not unreasonable to expect that they are more likely to prey on other immigrants knowing their vulnerable circumstances.

What about terrorism? We are told that this, too, is a false concern. The large group of Muslims that killed nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001 entered the United States because of poor border control. (Perhaps it is not the number of terrorists who attempt to enter the United States, but the amount of damage they do if they make it?) In 2011, Mark Metcalf found that, between 1993 and 2004, every one of the 94 foreign-born persons involved in actual attacks on US soil had committed an immigration law violation.

We know about the numbers of possible terrorists trying to enter the country (and they run into the thousands) because border control, which covers a lot more than just activities at the southern border, catches the vast majority of people trying to get in to our country illegally. To be sure, most of those stopped are trying to get in by plane, but that hardly makes it not about border control. I suspect the corporate media don’t want to tell the truth because the legal immigration system and airport security are tight and the success of immigration authorities in deterring and preventing terrorism proves the point that strict restrictions on entry work to protect the public. You have to come through a port of entry when you fly to the US. It bears repeating: given that the number is so high, and that only one-in-ten persons claiming asylum has a legitimate claim, the evidence is solid that tightening immigration is of great benefit to public safety. What we lack is the level of control at the southern border that we do through other ports of entry. This is because people who illegally enter by definition avoid ports of entry.

Whatever facts Sarah Huckabee-Sanders may botch, the fact is that border control has a place in protecting the public, and the tighter that control is, the safer the public will be. It’s not as if the American people are obligated to throw open the borders of their country and let anybody in. The evidence indicates that a tougher border control stance—which started before Trump—has resulted in a significant drop in individuals trying to illegally enter the country. That’s good news. But the government can do better. 

All this should be understood in the context of a one-sided class war being waged against workers. Because of bourgeoisie desire to maintain a continuous flow of immigrants into the United States for optimal economic conditions (high employment and low wage levels) and political advantage (cultural disorganization and social disruption), the corporate media, knowing the public is concerned about crime and violence in their communities, saturates the popular information consumer market with the claim, supported by a handful of studies, that both legal and illegal immigrants have lower rates of crime than native-both populations. It is disappointing to see the left move from defending the standard of living of working class of this country—it is the capitalist class that benefits from immigration, including illegal immigration—to a reckless disregard for public safety with an open-borders stance.

The government shutdown drags on, apparently over Trump’s desire to secure $5 billion for more border security fencing. Democrats are denying Trump his “wall” and it appears to be entirely over their desire to not allow the President to be able to keep his signature promise made during the 2016 presidential campaign. It certainly isn’t understandable as a principled position given past statements on the subject of illegal immigration.

Here’s Bill Clinton in 1995:

“All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”

He continued: “We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.”

Here’s Barack Obama in 2013:

“Real reform means strong border security, and we can build on the progress my administration has already made—putting more boots on the Southern border than at any time in our history and reducing illegal crossings to their lowest levels in 40 years. Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship—a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English, and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.”

In 2006, Obama said that “better fences and better security along our borders” would “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.” The year before he said: “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States, undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.” “We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants,” he said. “We are a generous and welcoming people, here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law,” he said.

In 2013, All 54 Democrats voted to pass the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, And Immigration Modernization Act. The bill required the completion of “700 miles of pedestrian fencing along the border” and allocated $45 billion on border security improvements. Not $5 billion. $45 billion. And in November 2015, Hilary Clinton told a crowd: “I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders.”

We can go down the line and identify numerous Democratic leaders saying very similar things. So what has changed? Why are Democrats hanging up Trump over 5 billion dollars in security fencing? Why all the sudden do we see a flurry of analyses claiming security fencing doesn’t work? Why are we now seeing border control depicted as the second-coming of the Holocaust? Why is every migrant portrayed as a refugee? Where was the outcry when Democrats sounded like Trump?

On this business about the efficacy of walls, Jennifer Miller, writing for Scientific America, claims that “Trump’s wall” “would destroy an extraordinary web of biodiversity that evolved over millions of years.” She makes a very powerful case for the efficacy of walls to prevent the migration of all manner of flora and fauna. For those who say walls don’t stop things, the truth is they can stop almost everything, according to Miller. The fact that walls and fences are good at stopping people is why we build them around prisons and forts. It’s why we have locks on doors. The two-story corrugated metal fence erected by George W. Bush’s administration dramatically curtailed both illegal border crossings and crime in El Paso, which borders Juarez, a city shot through with crime and violence. I know there is a great desire to deny that criminals cross the border (they’re all refugees, right?), but the fact is that they do. Mexicans and Central Americans enter the United States to extend the range of their criminal territory or disappear from law enforcement or other criminals looking for them. Not all of them. A lot of them. The Yuma Border Sector on the US/Mexico border in San Luis, Arizona, has also drastically reduced immigration and, as a result, crime. The reductions in immigration in both cases near or exceed 90%. The reduction of crime is a consequence of reducing the flow of those who are most likely to seek to illegally enter a country; as a rule, reputable and stable citizens follow the rules and aren’t running from anything, therefore they are not crossing borders without authorization.

Walls and fences are not as effective when there are gaps in them, but they are nonetheless effective where they stand. Fences designed to allow flora and smaller fauna would address many of the concerns the Scientific America article presents. Whatever gets built there will be called a wall whether it is a wall or a fence. Trump gets what he wants. But it’s what Democrats want, too.

Democrats know that the southern border is a source of crime and violence in the United States, that criminal networks involved in human trafficking are driving people, including children, across dangerous terrain and around ports of entry and security fencing to drop them in the United States where their labor will be super-exploited by capitalists who will not pay US citizens wages commensurate with the job. Crime makes Democrats look bad. For both parties, crime is used as a justification for more police, tougher laws, and more prisons. The public has a compelling interest in crime reduction at the border. I am not happy that fencing is part of the solution to the problem. I wish I could live in a world where I didn’t have to lock my doors.

To be sure, Democrats do not mind the exploitation of immigrant labor or the displacement of native-born labor; what they want is a legal system of imported labor for these purposes. Every year in the US, hundreds of thousands of foreign workers enter the country legally. When in the context of rhetoric concerning illegal immigration Bill Clinton says, “The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants,” he conveniently leaves out the fact that legal immigrants hold jobs that might otherwise be held by citizens. Whatever the motive, the effective control of people across the US-Mexico border is a necessity.

Footnote: Consider the millions of citizens in the criminal justice system, disproportionately black, who are there because there was no real effort to train them and put them in a job that could have kept them out of trouble, or who, despite committing a nonviolence offense, or a not-very-serious violent offense, are left to waste away behind walls financed by the US tax dollars at a cost of tens of billions of dollars annually.  This is a great betrayal on a moral plane. As a nation we need to find or make a job for every man and woman who is able to work. Only after that should we assess labor shortages and consider foreign workers. That will require sharply reducing the flow of legal immigrants into the country, which will have the benefit of providing time for assimilation to proceed and our culture to adapt. I am fully aware, as I have written about on this blog, that the rationale behind the constant flow of immigrants into the United States is to increase supply relative to demand and suppress wages for American workers. It will take a very large popular movement to change the force of capital importing labor to undermine the domestic working class (the left seems completely incapable of putting two and two together on this one). However, restricting illegal immigration can help our most vulnerable citizens.

The problem I have written about on this blog continues. A network of social media platforms censors and deplatforms not just on the basis content, but on the basis of real or perceived political identity. This it the latest example: http://insider.foxnews.com/2019/01/03/jordan-peterson-daughter-mikhaila-censored-youtube-professor-calls-out-big-tech

There are exceptions, but as a general orientation, and it will pain my leftwing friends to hear me say this, the censorship and deplatforming is aimed at extending and deepening the left-identitarian political sensibility (identity politics, multiculturalism) by pandering to marginalized groups (while reducing individuals to them), simultaneously narrowing the diversity of ideas, in order to expand the market and thus increase profits.

This neoliberal corporate strategy focuses mass attention on questions of gender, race, gender identity, etc., at the expense of and dissimulating the overarching structure of social class and heightening the antagonisms between proletarians segmented by identity. The vast range of ideas become coded as left and right by cultural managers and conditioned and reinforced ideological reaction shuts down consideration not only of the full range but recodes things to stand on the other side of the line – in other words, the culture industry redefines what left and right – and right and wrong – are.

To enforce this religious understanding of political thought, the culture industry creates a set of blasphemy rules that can get you expelled from the church of social media based on your utterances and associations. And to take full advantage of its religious-like character, it claims a wall of separation from the state and therefore manufactures its own justifications for excommunication, actions that operate beyond the scope of the Bill of Rights which are conveniently defined (and this is true with religion, as well) to work in one direction and not the other.

I was just alerted to Brad DeLong’s superficial account of the libertarian role in opposing public accommodations (no time for his hackery here), but with social media we can see clearly the neoliberal tack of maintaining a smooth “non-offensive” culture that makes it easy to discriminate against people based on political identity (speech and association) in violation of the spirit of the First Amendment and basic human rights.

Markets under neoliberalism are not neutral facilitators of exchange, but are ideologically-controlled systems of thought control. Corporations cannot (yet) throw you in jail, but they effectively disappear you in a world where everybody is kettled and channeled. Being excommunicated is a terrible thing. Ask Rosanne Barr. She broke the blasphemy rules of the culture industry and paid the price. She’s just one of a long list of causalities of the prevailing PC culture. 

This speaks volumes about Elizabeth Anderson’s point about the oppressions of private government (The Philosopher Redefining Equality). She highlights the unfreedom of being an employee. Here we’re talking about the unfreedom of being a creator of content and a consumer of content. For being allowed to say and here things doesn’t make you free.

Feel good about capitalists telling you what you can hear? Of course, eventually, how would you even know about what you’re not allowed to know about. Yes, that is the idea. When somebody else is deciding for you what you can see, hear, say, and think, you become a child. Tragically, too many people are infantilizing themselves. Part of the jive talk you get about this is that free speech is a ruse the rightwing uses to oppress people. Speech is violence. Etcetera.

It’s like the Devil. He’s trying to beguile and seduce you with his tempting ideas. And because you are weak and fallen, you are susceptible to his charms. So all the better to not listen at all. After all, doubt is the unpardonable sin. You can’t be trusted with your own brain. Leave that to the cultural and political managers.

Dylan Riley, sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has published an essay, “What is Trump?” in the New Left Review (No. 114, November-December 2018) that echoes arguments I have been making since Trump appeared on the scene as a presidential candidate for the Republican Party. It’s nice to see somebody with expertise in the sociology of fascism making the same points—especially when those around me look at me like I’m a space alien when I make them. As many of you already know, my argument is that Trump, a New York real estate tycoon with an independent streak, is alien to transnational power and at odds with establishment norms and goals. He thus represents a disruptive force in the prevailing capitalist hegemony that desires to project globalism and multiculturalism as appealing and animating values, values harmful to working class interests. Make no mistake, there is a downside to Trump (as I have written about on this blog). At the same time, there is an upside to disturbing the smooth surface of prevailing bourgeois hegemony.

I have argued that Trump is not, as the center and the left like to portray him, a fascist (see Navigating the Spectacle and Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum), and Riley agrees. Riley is author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2010). Much of Riley’s essay is an analysis of interwar fascism, its economic, political, and cultural character. I will let you study his argument for yourself. It should suffice to say here (I will have more to say about interwar fascism later) that, as a capitalist strategy to disorganize the labor movement and disrupt the socialist consciousness that threatened the ceaseless accumulation of wealth, fascism represents something quite different from what we see on the political right today, what amounts to a popular revolt against regionalism and globalism, a moment in which counter-establishment and charismatic politicians appeal to workers suffering under neoliberal economic policies. Indeed, while the politicians answering the call are rightwing, much of the reaction is not intrinsically so, but rather is pro-native-born labor sentiment—and, to varying extents, these politicians are in tune with that. 

Riley writes that, “in class terms,” “Trump’s hostile relationship with key sections of the American elite” stands “in sharp contrast to the good relations the interwar fascist leaders enjoyed with their big bourgeoisies and landowners.” I argued from the outset that Trump was not a candidate the establishment would have put forward. Unlike the rigged primary process of the Democratic Party (the superdelegate system), the openness of the Republican party machinery betrayed the power elite and spit out a populist candidate, one who, in Gramscian terms, lacks “any organic connection to the class of which he is part” (quoting Riley). Trump’s election came as a shock to the establishment, whose propagandists immediately turned on the distortion machine in an effort to delegitimize the president or at least bring him to heel. The pattern thus far has been establishment elites tolerating Trump where their interests align, such as tax cuts and deregulation, while criticizing him when he attempts to make peace with “America’s enemies” or roll back US military commitments around the world. The left should applaud Trump’s moves in these areas, but hysteria makes it hard to see the windfall that comes with an anti-establishment moment. The tragedy here is that the left can’t see clearly enough to seize the moment. That blindness has been a long time in development. 

Riley detects “a high level of unease within the US capitalist class about Trump” and identifies several key antagonistic relations: “intellectuals and the media” and “national-security intelligentsia and imperial bureaucracy.” Riley notes in particular Trump’s contempt for the State Department and the school of international relations. “He is the only president in living memory with the temerity to make a public issue of how much US deployments in Europe and Asia cost,” writes Riley. “This has led to indignant commentary across the political spectrum, condemning the President for failing to understand the vital role that forward bases play. Indeed the State Department, with the support of the Democrats, has often been more belligerent than Trump himself, forcing him to take a harder line on Russia and the DPRK.” Riley captures concisely the point I have been making for months about the establishment tactic of goading the president into assuming a more muscular military posture in order to continue the neoconservative Project for a New American Century. Decidedly not a Cold War liberal, Trump frustrates the modus operandi of US military-industrial ambitions. Tragically, hysteria on the left is causing many progressives to defend imperialist goals.

Riley adds to these observations an analysis of Trump’s supporters. As he notes, analyses “before the November 2016 election suggested they were likely to lack a college degree and have slightly higher-than-median incomes.” Indeed, Trump “did well among skilled blue-collar workers.” As Riley rightly observes, given the material interests of this demographic, afflicted by globalization, one can plausibly cast their concerns in “nationalist terms.” Thus “Trump’s key move in 2016 was to combine the core Republican electorate—evangelicals; relatively affluent white, rural and suburban southern voters; a section of the Appalachian working class—with a sliver of working-class swing voters in the Upper Midwest.” These are the segments of the electorate who have felt most disaffected culturally, politically, and economically by the bicoastal elite with their focus on left-wing identity politics, diversity, multiculturalism, and globalism. And despite feelings of optimism in the 2018 midterms, “Democrats lost non-college-educated white men by 34 percentage points.” That this group seeks meaning on the right is a chief indicator of the failure of the contemporary left to represent the organic interests of the working class. Instead, it indicates the alienation of a large segment of the working class by the deformation of leftwing thought into an identity politics, blaming white men for the world’s problems, accusing disadvantaged and exploited white workers of bearing “white privilege.” 

A person on my Facebook page accused the New Left Review of maintaining a stable of “leftwing analysts sympathetic to western nationalism.” One would hope so (although this doesn’t seem to be the case). After all, Marx and Engels were, given their understanding that it’s civic nationalism that emancipates oppressive structures (religion and property) from the traditional state thus providing an opportunity for emancipating individuals from ideology and class (see Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”), and that, therefore, the proletariat must first settle accounts with its national bourgeoisie (see The Communist Manifesto), which is difficult to do amid the politically and culturally disorganizing effects of globalization. In their most immediate political arguments, Marx and Engels suggest reforms that are only possible in the context of the nation-state; the internationalist movement piece is about orienting national-level proletariat in those parts of the world with liberal values waiting to be fully actualized in the same basic direction. The erasing of nationalist boundaries is something that comes later in history, once the socialist revolution has taken root in the most developed societies. Yet many on the left act as if capitalist globalization was a manifestation of the Internationale.

We should modify Marx and Engels in one crucial way, however: they could not have foreseen the disruptive effects of resurgent religious fundamentalism, especially Islam, which, unlike the Protestant strain of Christianity that made possible the political systems of the most developed capitalist countries, rejects completely the secularism necessary for the potential emancipation of individuals from irrational ideologies that politically paralyze them. Hence another reason for fortifying national boundaries and the values of civic nationalism. The modern western nation-state benefits not only the national proletariat in the developed world by protecting them from the disruptive effects of Islamism, but will, in the long run, help individuals mired in the muck of the Islamic world, since they will have powerful secular states—if we can keep them—as lights on the path to emancipation from religious backwardness. Along with this, we also need to consider that Catholicism remains a regressive force and also must be marginalized. Indeed, Islam and Catholicism represent the most obvious fascisms in waiting. Yet people do not see the real fascist threat (reactionary Catholicism was the heart of classical fascism) and instead smear those who are defending the West from the parties of god with such labels as “nativist” and “xenophobe.” 

Nationalist solidarity (of the liberal and civic sort) is a protective force against fascism. As the world saw in the interwar period, communist internationalism, disconnected from national-level sentiment, could not muster popular resistance to fascism, that latter designed by capitalist elites to heighten sympathies for ethnic (over against civic) nationalisms, intensify the split in the working class, and establish an illiberal state in order to gain control over labor and restore profits by force. The United States experience, where fascism did not become a dominant politics (rather social democracy did), provides a useful contrast. Rank-and-file workers in the US marginalized the internationalist wing of the labor movement, pushing, for example, for immigration control in a decidedly populist anti-globalization move. It took nationalist sentiment decades to pull leadership on board, but when it did, and immigration was sharply restricted, the result was greater union density, the development of broad-based democratic socialist consciousness, mass support for the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism, and a vast expansion of individual freedom—all of which was undermined by the opening of America to immigration in the mid-1960s, coupled with other strategies of labor discipline (off-shoring, for example.) 

This is the major flaw in Riley’s essay in understanding the present moment: the immigration question. When the author writes that “economic malaise today focuses on the ‘downsides’ of globalization—the relocation of manufacturing jobs abroad, to be replaced by growing precariousness, longer hours worked for falling real pay and rising household debt—thrown into relief by the trillion-dollar banker bailout,” he leaves out the other side of globalization: the importation of foreign workers to domestic production spheres, a relocation that displaces native-born workers, lowers wage, undermines living standards, increases personal debt^[1], marginalizes union power, disorganizes communities, and stresses social welfare systems. Of course, the immigration side of globalization is the problem that cannot be identified honestly under the current regime of political correctness, so it goes not exactly unacknowledged, but rather the truth of it is rationalized. Riley provides a good example of rhetorical contortion: “To the extent that Trump’s economic-nationalist agenda had a popular basis, it rested on workers and middle-class layers who had suffered from the offshoring of jobs and who feared competition from immigrants in employment, rather than welcoming them as a cheap source of labor.” By describing the reaction to immigration in terms of attitude rather than fact, Riley leaves the impression (reinforced elsewhere) that concern over the importation of foreign workers is irrational, while concern over the exportation of American jobs is empirically grounded: workers and middle-class layer suffered from the former while fearing the latter. He even detracts from the reality that immigrants are a cheap source of labor (for surely he does not wish to sell immigrants as cheap labor to American workers).

More than this, Riley goes after former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for what Sessions got right. Riley notes “Sessions’s anti-immigrant fanaticism” and claims that it is “rooted in a theory” that “the massive inequalities of the Gilded Age were an expression of uncontrolled immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. With the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, the European population was assimilated, becoming a homogeneous white working and middle class—the foundation for US world power and domestic tranquility in the twentieth century.” Here’s what Sessions actually said in 2015: “Some people think we’ve always had these numbers [of immigrants], and it’s not so, it’s very unusual, it’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the President and Congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through to 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America.”

I know it pains folks on the left to admit that a right-winger like Sessions could be right about this (or anything, really), but this argument is not only logically obvious, but is empirically confirmed. It was the sharp restriction of immigration in the 1960s that allowed for the emergence of a shared culture that supported unions and civil rights and fostered a social democracy with great promise for the transformation of the US economy (I have written extensively about this on this blog). But social democratic progress was blunted by a well-organized and determined business class that sought a new imperialism—and worked through the Democratic Party and the academy—to open the world to capital investment. This project was accompanied by the development of postmodern ideas (beginning as arguments hailing from the Frankfurt School and French reaction to communism), which led to the development of a leftwing identity politics among relatively affluent and educated youth that was hostile to labor.

At the same time, as Riley notes, the development of the postmodern attitude interferes with fascist politics. “Postmodern charisma throws up yet another contradiction for a would-be patrimonial ruler. Ideally, the charismatic aura is transmitted to the staff through some sort of ideology, creating a layer of disciples who can spread the central message outward and downward. But Trump has no mechanism for this and so lacks disciples.” To put this another way, Trump disrupts the inverted totalitarianism of the current capitalist hegemony (to borrow Sheldon Wolin’s characterization) not by throwing up an alternative ideology, but by channeling popular anger and resentment. This is one of those upsides to the Trump presidency:

“One merit of the present Administration is that, despite his own lack of ideological coherence, Trump politicizes everything, thereby undermining the fiction of technocratic consensus and rule-bound behaviour. There is no real parallel to his open attacks on the Department of Justice, the courts and the security apparatuses, to say nothing of his rejection of the idea that structures such as NATO, NAFTA and the WTO, for example, are non-political. This pervasive politicization of the institutions and treaties of the neo-liberal state may have unintended consequences.”

Perhaps we should be more Marxist about it and admit that it exposes contradictions and sharpens antagonisms. (The question is whether the left is conscious enough and in a way capable of taking advantage. The evidence suggests it is not.)

The author usefully notes that the present circumstances, which find their roots in the 1960s, represent “an inversion of the class-nation relations” we witnesses in the 1930s. “In the US today, a pro-globalist professional layer is pitted against a ‘nationalist’ white working class — a configuration that is almost the opposite to that of interwar fascism.” Identifying the nationalist working class as white prejudices the reader against the nationalist sentiment by assuming an ethnic caste, thus excluding its civic character. In a foot note, the author comments that globalism “is more cultural than political: a key difference between the ‘internationalism’ of the working class and that of the professionals.” One suspects this appears as a footnote because working out this line of thinking might compel a different interpretation of the immigration problematic. So, the author writes: “Fascism, in contrast, emerged in contexts in which the political leadership of the working class, the communist parties, remained internationalist, whereas the petty bourgeoisie swung to extreme nationalism. Far from being a form of populism, fascism was premised on its failure.” But then writes: “Socialism, at least in the advanced world, has emerged where both the new professional strata and the leadership of the working class are oriented internationally: an unfortunate rarity.” This depends on how one is defining the internationalist orientation. Is it one that is supportive of the neo/imperialism of capitalist globalization, which dismantles the nation-state and cultures supportive of civil liberties, human rights, and social democracy for the benefit of a small network of families who believe they are immune to cultural irrationalities (and environmental catastrophe)? Or is it one where, as Marx and Engels argued, the proletariat of the various advanced capitalist states settle accounts with their national bourgeoisie while being mindful of the interstate situation? 

Riley writes, “The contemporary new rights differ from these in attempting to mobilize a nationally oriented working class against a globally oriented ‘new petty bourgeoisie’.” This should be reworded to explicitly identity the new petty bourgeoisie as the administrative and cultural managers running public institutions and corporations; these are the servants of the global power elite, carrying out an ideological program of diversity over equality and identity over liberty (these as ideational control structures). One can see what is hanging Riley up. First, he makes the argument: “With the partial exception of the evangelical churches, the hollowing-out of the civil-society organizations that once mobilized electoral support for these oligarchic formations has been a condition for the steady decline in voter turnout—American political culture thus reinforces the political-economic tendency to atomize the population.” It is unclear whether Riley thinks this is a good thing (it is and it isn’t). “On the other hand,” Riley writes, “the movements for black civil rights and women’s self-determination, while lacking formal organizational structures, have continued to renew themselves and now constitute a significant feature of the political landscape.” But these movements, liberated from their traditions by postmodernism, have been substantially corrupted by a mix of the epistemology of anti-truth and stealth ethnonationalist-like notions of group identity over human being (and thus over universal human rights).

However, as Riley points out, and this is the main takeaway from his essay: “pinning the ‘fascist’ label on Trump…means uniting behind the program of the present Democratic leadership…[the] superintendents of the oligarchic order; the very project that gave Trump the White House in 2016.” In other words, the neoliberal policies of the Democratic Party, while providing no protective value against the popular nationalism Trump represents, are not the politics the left should desire in-itself. The need to persuade working class people to vote for Democrats also lies behind the hysteria over Russia and fake news; the establishment has been reduced to the most obvious of fear tactics, even dusting off and rejiggering anti-Soviet hysteria, which was longer ago than those who remember it think. 

There is a mundane explanation to all this. What the world is witnessing is the way a businessman operates in his environment. As CEO of a corporation, it is applauded (not by me, of course). But when CEO of a nation-state, it leaves a lot to be desired. But it is not fascist. Riley puts it nicely: “The hour is late and the stakes are high; but bad historical analogies will not aid in dealing with the present crisis.” The question is whether folks as enlightened as Riley will finally jettison identity politics and operate on the reality principle, especially when it comes to political economic truths.

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^[1] The author makes an interesting point about “personal debt-to-income ratio in the United States,” namely that it “exploded in the run-up to 2008.” As well as this sociological observation: “indebtedness is not a collective experience, in the way that mass unemployment is, but an intrinsically individual one: every debtor has a quantitatively specific credit score, for example, and the crisis for her or him takes the form of difficulty in paying the bills. Debt therefore tends towards an individualization, or serialization, of political activity. Rather than collectivizing wage-earners, it atomizes the population into what Marx famously described as ‘a sack of potatoes’.” As the author notes, “‘potatoes’ don’t make for fascism; they make for Bonapartism—rallying as individuals to a charismatic leader, rather than forming a coherent paramilitary bloc. If they are to be galvanized today, it is likely to be on the defensive basis of protectionist nationalism, rather than yet further imperial aggression.” This must be grasped within a full understanding of the dynamic.

Born in 1962, in the Bible Belt, I was raised in a Christian home by liberal-minded parents. My father was a Church of Christ preacher. My maternal grandfather was also a Church of Christ preacher. Both my father and my mother were trained in biblical studies at Freed-Hardeman University, a private liberal arts university associated with the churches of Christ located in Henderson, Tennessee. My father had two ministries, the first in Roger Springs (Hardeman County), Tennessee, and then in Sharpsville, Tennessee, in Rutherford County (where I spent most of my formative years). My father was also a sociologist (not an uncommon trajectory for evangelical Christians). Theological arguments, and their social implications, were commonplace growing up. I knew about Thomas Altizer long before most kids do (if ever).

My parents kept a good library; the most important books for me growing up were the collection Great Books of the Western World (where I found Hegel and Marx), the World Book Encyclopedia, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and, of course, The Holy Bible, the King James version. When I finally got serious about college, in 1988, I spent hours in the Andrew L. Todd library underground at Middle Tennessee State University studying E. A. Wallis Budge’s translations of Egyptian mortuary texts (where I learned about the great architect of the universe, the artisan, the demiurge, Ptah, and immediately knew him as Yahweh). I also got lost in the Oxford Annotated Bible (where I first learned about the Nephilim, rendered “giants in the earth” in my King James version of Genesis). And through all of this, as a devout atheist, I have been arguing about religion and its negation.

So when I signed up to teach sociology of religion at the university where I am a tenured faculty member (I hold a master’s and a PhD in sociology), I could boast of no small measure of competence in religious studies. However, as they say, you never really know a subject until you teach it, and preparing lectures for this past semester taught me a lot about the subject. I could have used a textbook and canned lectures to save time (it is sometimes tempting given our heavy load at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay), but I took this as an opportunity to integrate what I knew about religion and sociology in the scope of a fourteen week semester and calibrated to the level of a smart undergraduate sociology class.

I lectured on the following subjects: “The Politics of Science and Religion” (value neutrality and objectivity, critical theory, sociological method, science and humanism), “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion” (Ricoeur, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche), Peter Berger and The Sacred Canopy (social constructionism, phenomenology), “Eminence, Transcendence, and the Death of God” (19th century liberal Christianity, the Niebuhrs and neo-orthodoxy, Tillich and Altizer and dialectical Christianity), “Materialism and Realism” (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, and Simmel), “Max Weber and the Badges of Protestantism” (Calvinism, capitalism, bureaucracy, irrationalism), “The Legacy of Judaism” (Weber’s Ancient Judaism and Marx on the Jewish question), “The Overthrow of Mother-Right” (Marx, Engels, and Morgan, class and patriarchy), “The First Murder” (Cain and Abel, legal theory and state development), “Demons and Sin (Catholicism, demonology, antisemitism, heterosexism, and misogyny), “The Travails of Gilgamesh” (the flood myth and state development in Mesopotamia), “The Churching of America” (Finke and Stark’s thesis), “Syncretism (the social evolution of Judaism, Sumerian, Egyptian, and Canaanite influences), “The Story of the Torah” (documentary hypothesis and criticism, political sociology of Israel), “More Syncretism” (The Social Evolution of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hellenistic mystery cults), and “The Secular Revolution” (Christian Smith’s edited volume).

I can see ways to be more efficient next time around in order to cover more material. I will do more on human prehistory and proto-religion. Although I dealt with the subject of Islam quite a bit, the subject deserves a dedicated lecture, so that is in the future plan, as well. But the area about which I most want to expand is the influence of Achaemenid hegemony and Zoroastrianism on Second Temple Judaism. The more the class worked through the historical comparison of Christian and Zoroastrian mythologies, the more Christianity looked like Zoroastrianism adapted for a Jewish audience. I realized there were questions about this that I needed to answer for myself before pushing the comparison too far. For example, when exactly did this happen? Did it happen in the first century CE or before that? And so I had to balance bringing the semester to a close (teaching four classes), while continuing to develop my understanding of the history of the Achaemenid period and its legacy.

What inspires this blog entry is a Facebook discussion about the influence of Zoroastrianism on Christianity on my time-line. It was trigged by a video I shared, which I share below, in which Michael Skobac, a rabbi with the Rabbinical Council of America, argues that Satan is a blessing in Judaism and that, crucially, the Satan of Christianity is not the Satan of Talmudic Judaism.

There is only one force in the universe, Skobac argues, and that is Yahweh. Yahweh is the sole source of good and bad. Judaism is thus monotheistic (I hasten to add, at least after the Torah). We’re put through trials on earth because of the capitalist principle of earning our place in the world to come. In other words, God created us, but he believes we will not appreciate heaven if we don’t work for it. God made us unappreciative of things we do not work for, thus he made us born to toil. Satan’s role is to be the obstacle we have to get over to secure a spot in heaven. In contrast, Christianity is a dualistic religion, like Zoroastrianism, and the Christian Satan represents enmity to God.

It was noted by a friend that the Jewish notion of Satan as a blessing is used by Christians to justify their antisemitism – to paint Jews as satanic. My response was that this is indeed what the Tanakh (the Old Testament for Christians) says. I then explained that Christianity developed from a Jewish sect under the influence of Zoroastrianism. Second Temple Judaism had to contend with the influence of Zoroastrianism the moment it fell upon Jewish ears, I noted. I argued that Jesus is a Jewish Saoshyant, a divine savior being in Zoroastrianism sent to do battle with Angra Mainyu’s dragon Zahhāk at the end-times, a battle the forces of good win just before resurrecting all of the souls of the faithful, to make the world perfect and ascend with him to be with the god Ahura Mazda in heaven. The implication I meant to leave is this: instead of supposing Jews are Satanic, perhaps Christians should consider how Satan’s character was transformed under the influence of another religious tradition.

This led to a claim by a teacher of religious studies that the Satan I was identifying was an invention of the Middle Ages, not a figure in early Christianity. That Satan was different, he asserted. The implication is that medieval Christian ideologues concocted the modern version of Satan. For example, some contemporary observers blame it on liberties Dante took in The Inferno. One can hear these arguments in the History Channel program True Monsters: The Origin and Evolution of Satan. Here’s the trailer:

But what about the fact that Satan I identify is also in Islam? To be sure, the archangel Iblis is not the Satan who challenges God’s throne, but he is the Satan whom God banishes from heaven for refusing to prostrate himself before Adam, thus disdaining humanity – which, as we will see, is a narrative originating in Second Temple Judaism and Christian apocrypha. Moreover, Al-Shaitan (Satan) and the shayatin (fallen angels or demons) are clearly evil entities in the Islamic tradition, the Arabic root of the terms meaning “astray” (in contrast to “accuser” or “adversary” from the Hebrew root of the term). The Islamic Satan was well before the medieval moment. More to the point, I argue, I can show that the modern Satan is found in Christianity from its beginnings and that the dualism of Zoroastrianism is implicated in this development.

Before getting that that, I need to point out that this claim made in the above trailer, namely that hell is never mentioned in the Bible, is deceptive. Consider the name “Gehenna,” often translated as hell in rabbinic literature, and Christian and Islamic scripture (it is rendered “Jahannam” in Islam), which refers to final destination for sinners. Gehenna is a reference to an actual place (the Valley of Hinnom), a place known in the Old Testament for its child sacrifices to the Canaanite god Molech. Over time, it became a metaphor for the place sinner would perpetually burn in the afterlife. Consider when in Matthew 5:21-22 it is written, “You have heard that it was said to an older generation, ‘Do not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders will be subjected to judgment.’ But I say to you that anyone who is angry with a brother will be subjected to judgment. And whoever insults a brother will be brought before the council, and whoever says ‘Fool’ will be sent to fiery hell.” The word for hell is here is “Gehenna.” Matthew uses Gehenna several other times, in the same way, as does Mark (who describes it as the “unquenchable fire”) and Luke. Is this not the hell Christian children are taught to fear? It’s an act of deception to deny this. In the Hebrew bible, when people die, their souls survive and enter a shadow world, Sheol, from which they can communicate with the living. They become ghosts. Thus Sheol (as well as Hades) is the Jewish place or state of the dead, another dimension or the grave. Later Jewish mythology evolved to include the notion that there will come a future time when the righteous will be resurrected, but this is not original to the ancient religion. But does perhaps explain the bone collections, the stone ossuary, that keeps surviving matter for its ghostly owners.

In the late Old Testament and intertestamental period (between late sixth century BC and the first century AD), Jews came under the influence of Persian culture (when Persia conquered the Babylonians in 536 BC) and were influenced by Zoroastrianism, which conceived of the universe – and the soul – as containing opposing forces of good and evil, or cosmic/moral dualism. The evil force opposed God’s creative force, polluting/corrupting God’s pure creative work, hence aging, sickness, etc. There are two paths you can go by in the long run, the righteous path, which is the road to heaven and happiness everlasting, and the wicked path, which leads to wretchedness and eternal torment in hell.  I will argue that under Zoroastrian influence, Jewish cults emerged that reconceptualized Satan as the personification of evil. Satan is no longer tempting man as God’s prosecutor to test for loyalty (as we see in Job, one of the Bible’s oldest myths), but enticing man to sin for his own sake. He becomes the corrupter of men’s souls. In the emerging version of Jewish cosmology, God (and his angels) and Satan (and his demons) become independent forces, locked in a struggle for cosmic power. Christian mythology takes this further: Satan, an archangel who sits at God’s right hand, is depicted as rebelling against God in the celestial realm. God casts Satan out of Heaven. Satan falls towards Earth (though its unclear whether all the way). Jesus, another of God’s archangels, is sent from Heaven, eventually depicted as God incarnate, representing along the way the fulfillment of a revised Jewish prophecy, repurposed to wash away the stain of sin with his purifying blood magic (more on this in a future essay).

The idea of choice, of free will, so central to Zoroastrianism (one must choose to be good, as the priest in A Clockwork Orange insists upon seeing the horrific fruits of the Ludovico technique showcased), is incorporated into Christian doctrine, producing a more agency-driven religious feel in the context of a personal salvation cult, a popular mode of religious desire associated with the rise of cosmopolitanism; a person accepts Jesus as his personal savior, honoring the sacrifice Jesus made, in order to be welcomed into paradise, now removed from earth to heaven. Jesus, one of many savior deities, thus represents a composite myth, and is subsequently historicized (or euhemerized) via the Gospels, written in the late first and second century AD (again, more on this in a future essay).

Returning to the Facebook thread, the religious studies teacher rejected the claim of dualism in Christianity, and did so on the grounds that, in the end, good prevails over evil (at least that’s the forecast). On that reasoning, I countered, Zoroastrianism is not dualistic, either, since Frashegird (the Final Renovation) brings the defeat of Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian evil spirit. If Zoroastrianism isn’t dualistic, then what is? (Manichaeism, perhaps? But that is also derived from Zoroastrian writings!) Moreover, if there was no dualism, then what is there to defeat? Is this self-defeat? Then what how will a crooked world be made straight again? Sauron represented a genuine threat to Middle Earth, no? His defeat returned the king (Aragorn) to the throne of his ancestors. In Judaism there is no Armageddon; the Jews need to come back to God to enjoy the rebirth of their kingdom. There is clearly a contrast.

At this point the “Day of the Lord” in the Book of Joel was injected into the discussion to suggest that Jesus was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, not a Zoroastrian twist. But Joel is almost certainly post-exilic, produced around the same time as Ezra and Isiah, and that this supports my point upon reflection. We see in it the “prophecy” of Cyrus the Great, the captor of Judah, the “God who is in Jerusalem,” he who walks the path of Ahura Mazda, who “shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke” (Joel 2:30). Again, this was the Achaemenid period, the time of Persian hegemony, that spread to the known world what we today call Zoroastrianism (as well as the Aramaic language) to Jerusalem. A human being – Cyrus – was a messiah! A god only in metaphor! Moreover, Yahweh is the Hebrew god of war, the “god who makes armies” (rendered “Lord” in translation). In Hebrew usage, the Day of the Lord refers to the day of great war, the appearance of great armies. Cyrus is thus the messiah who brings about Yahweh’s kingdom, which in the way the Jews work mythology is a terrestrial situation that embodies spiritual energies, not an other worldly kingdom – if we remain true to the ancient Hebrew tradition. This is not Armageddon.

What is more, if the religious studies teacher was indeed suggesting that the early Christians manufactured the Jesus myth from Old Testament prophecy, isn’t that what Paul admits to doing? The righteous Jewish kingdom in the Tanakh, the earthly regime to come, becomes a supernatural event for Christians. The great terrestrial armies are for the Christians the supernatural armies of Armageddon, led by the great red dragon. Of course Joel, already corrupted by Zoroastrian ideas, could be made to serve Christian purposes. But only crudely, as New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman points out; Paul and his fellow cult members are plainly wrong abut the prophecy. Maybe Ehrman doesn’t dwell as much into Jewish angelology/demonology as he should, or he puts it aside as most modern Jews do as so much spookiness. At any rate, the Christians appropriated verse and concept. Much in the New Testament is greatly embellished and repurposed retellings of the myths of the Tanakh.

Crucially, then, and this is so often missed, “messiah” doesn’t mean the same thing in Judaism that is means in Christianity. Messiah in Christianity is used in the sense of the Zoroastrian Saoshyant – born of a virgin, no less! The messiah becomes a savior deity in Christianity. For Jews, the messiah is a future terrestrial king (of the Davidic line of course, which is why the New Testament invents a terrestrial genealogy for Jesus). This is why Ehrman says Jesus is not the fulfillment of prophecy (to his credit, despite being rough on mythicists, Ehrman doesn’t believe in prophecy). For Ehrman, the early Christians manufactures the son of God from scripture and did so in stages clearly evidenced in the order of Gospels. But I now contend they did so from a Zoroastrian-inspired Judaism that developed in the Second Temple period!

I wrote the foregoing to provide context for the reader. I felt it necessary to state the problem this blog is addressing. Rather than add to the thread on that Facebook post, or start a new one there, I am moving my argument here to a broader audience. The balance of the essay will build on a video of a superb symposium at the University of California, San Diego, held on March 3, 2014. I summarize the points of two of the speakers and weave in other material. What it shows is the claim that Satan is an invention of the Middle Ages cannot in any reasonable fashion be sustained. The modern Satan is an invention of the ancient world, not of the Middle Ages. It will also show the powerful influence Zoroastrianism had on Second Temple Judaism and Christianity.

Jenny Rose’s presentation is useful for understanding Zoroastrianism and its influence on late ancient Judaism by providing crucial context. I focus mostly on the next speaker, but the reader will profit from Rose’s work, and I will have something more to say about her work later on.

Before I get to the next speaker’s remarks, I want to note Bryan Rennie study of the Book of Daniel, scripture based on Jewish writings in the Aramaic language, finding it to be produced during the period of Iranian-born Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanies (or Epimanes for those who despised him), originally Mithridates, who lived between 215-164 BCE. You may ask why many Jews were speaking Aramaic at this time. This was a consequence of Achaemenid hegemony, the Persian empire guided by what we today called Zoroastrianism, which assumed control over Palestine in 539 BCE and ruled there for the next two hundred years. The Achaemenid moment pushed Aramaic into the near east. Aramaic represented a revolution in written language, replacing cuneiform, with its hundreds of letters, with an alphabet of 22 characters. Aramaic is ancestral to Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic alphabets and largely supplanted Hebrew during Achaemenid hegemony. Alexander the Great brought an end to Achaemenid rule in 332 BCE and Jews were Hellenized as a result. Daniel’s story was in Aramaic with Greek language interpolations.

There is a lot of reasons for Rennie’s dating of Daniel, not least of which is that the on-going historical events about which Daniel is most accurate. His understanding of the period in which he has been traditionally located is faulty. In this sense, Daniel is an attempt to fake prophecy, with Aramaic-language folk tales interpolated with supernatural claims. Moreover, Daniel’s near-term predictions are wrong. But more important to my interests is that Daniel is reflective of a genre of Apocalyptic, which was at the time a new literary genre that intensifies during the period of crisis and persecution under Antiochus. Rennie finds that the few examples of Apocalyptic in the Tanakh are all late. Daniel’s Apocalyptic is rather Zoroastrian (see Chapter 12, for example). Rennie further concludes that the popularity of Apocalyptic in early Christian writings indicates that the genre was a relatively new and popular literary form around the time when Jesus (who spoke Aramaic) is said to have existed and in which Saul of Tarsus (the Christian figure Paul, who almost certainly did actually exist), a Hellenized Jew, would have been intimately familiar, given that he was educated at the school of Gamaliel. Not incidentally, Hellenistic Judaism, following the manner of Zoroastrianism, spoke of Wisdom as if of an independent entity. Moreover, at the same time that Apocalyptic was shaping early Christian theology, Gnostics were preaching a dualism in which a messiah brought to humanity knowledge of its divine origins.

Rose is followed by Dayna Kalleres, who discusses Second Temple Judaic literature and its focus on a devil character, an evil spirit, and his minions, angels who fall away from God and become demons. This new theology is under construction during what we call the intertestamental period, the period between the Torah and the Gospels, emerging in a period in which Zoroastrian influence is at its peak in the world. The figure that emerges is Satan and it is here we find my argument verified. Through lies, deceptions, and sections, Satan leads humans into evil acts, not in the manner that the Jewish Satan, God’s prosecutor, tests Job for God’s sake, a myth in which God has to give Satan permission to act, but on the contrary in an independent effort to thwart God’s order, operating beyond God’s will. The influence of Zoroastrianism is evidenced by the fact that, in the temple literature, free will is emphasized. This is the spirit that is carried over into the Christian literature, specifically that individuals make a choice to be seduced, allowing themselves to be deceived, and a God who allows them to stray. The goal of the evil force is to get man to turn away from God. Again, this is Satan as enmity to God. This is not the ancient Jewish Satan, the blessing, but a different Satan, Satan the curse.

Kalleres charts the path of this figure we know as the devil, who goes under many names, identified in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs as Beliar or Belial, in Jubilees as Mastema, a personification of the Hebrew word mastemah (which means persecution and enmity), the Enochic collection (the Book of the Watchers), and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Mastema is identified as the angel of disaster and the father of evil. The Dead Sea Scrolls are especially remarkable in their dualism, for example with its sons and daughters of light and sons and daughters or darkness. As Kalleres points out, this being is also identified as Satan in this literature. The basic story is a familiar one to Christianity: a divine being (Satan) is ejected from heaven, either for challenging God or refusing to bow down before man, taking with him an army of fallen angels that become an army of demons, the Spirits of Beliar. The being is explicitly referred to in this literature as the devil and the dragon. This is the dragon of Revelations. 

The Second Temple literature reinterprets the Torah in terms of this emerging demonology, for example, riffing on the passage from Genesis, Chapter 6 concerning the Nephilim, interpreting this way: the Sons of God’s (identified as the Watchers), i.e. divine beings or angels, during the period of giants, come to earth (suggesting they are fallen), have sex with the daughters of men, give birth to wicked men or demons (which are given names by Jewish demonologists), and teach women the ways of the law, herbs, makeup, and magic. You know the rest: Yahweh becomes angry and floods the world, choosing Noah, a righteously man, to reestablish natural history (this part plagiarized from the Sumerian/Babylonian flood epic the Travails of Gilgamesh). Thus this ancient story is recast as the fall-in-action behind which lurks Satan, the master of disaster and lies. The Second Temple writers do the same to Genesis, Chapter 3, in which the serpent that deceives Eve is none other than Satan, giving the story a decidedly Zoroastrian cast (when Angra Mainyu enters the world at its creation and corrupts mankind), and thoroughly reconceptualizing Judaism. Eve then deceives Adam who willingly gives into seduction, putting free will central to the story. This is the origin of evil in the world, and Yahweh gives mankind over to it, ultimately leading to the great flood. (I always preferred Erich Fromm’s take on the story: this was when human freedom entered the world. Thank God for women!)

So, we see Second Temple Judaism taking great liberties with the ancient fables of the Jewish people. Is it any wonder that the writings of this period are downplayed or largely abandoned by modern Judaism? But that Jewish demonology, while marginal, or at least not explicit, in Judaism, becomes central to Christianity. The Satan we recognize today is completely recognizable in the Second Temple literature before Christianity. Satan takes on an evil role from the beginning of the Christian faith, since he has already been transformed by Second Temple Judaism. Underlying this is Zoroastrianism. The core idea in Zoroastrianism – that there are two spirits: The spirit of light and truth, and the spirit of darkness and deception – is the core of the Judaism we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The devil is the Great Deceiver, the Great Liar. How can a person push back against this evil? More Zoroastrianism here, as well: the path against evil is dedication to the path of wisdom, to the path of light. This is the path of Ahura Mazda, the wise, but not all powerful, god who leaves it to human beings to make their choice of paths, but punishes them on the afterlife for stepping off the right one. And this god requires human agency to defeat evil in the end. Thus the duty of every righteous person who loves Ahura Mazda – who loves light and wisdom – is to resist the lie. Rose speaks eloquently to this spirit.

In the final analysis, Christianity is a continuation of a particular Jewish tradition, which mainstream Judaism rejects or diminishes. Kalleres argues that this theology is entirely taken up by the Jewish sect that becomes Christianity. Humans turned away from God, and thus God did not just leave them in misery, but abandoned them to the spirit of darkness. And so Judaism, which focuses on the fortunes and fates of humans in the material world, is transformed into a mythology that focuses on man’s fortunes and fates in the world to come. And the whole thing is punctuated by Apocalyptic style. Armageddon, the battle with the great red dragon, the resurrection of the righteous, the great renovation, is Zoroastrian eschatology.