pretend to support equality and social justice. Marxism, for Hitler, is ersatz socialism contrived by Jews to mobilize the workers against the enemies of the Jews, such as his own impending National Socialist regime. But the deeper Jewish offenses that he primarily details and denounces in
When the Arab leader Musa Alami in 1934 told Ben-Gurion that he would prefer Palestine remain a wasteland for a hundred years than permit the Israelis to develop it, he was echoing Hitler’s position.
The fundamental conflict in the world pits the advocates of capitalist freedom, economic growth, and property against the exponents of blood and soil and violence. Capitalism requires peace. A real capitalist can want war only against threats to international peace and trade.
Although everyone benefits from capitalist prosperity, it inexorably produces “gaps” between rich and poor. It necessarily requires toleration of superior entrepreneurs who can make the system work. A free regime will always tend to favor peoples who excel in commerce and industry. For centuries, Jews have been disproportionately represented among these entrepreneurs and inventors, scientists and creators. Even though Jews are a tiny minority of less than a tenth of 1 percent of the world’s people, they comprise perhaps a quarter of the world’s paramount capitalists and entrepreneurs. This was true at Hitler’s time and it is true today.
As in Hitler’s time, demagogues tend to target successful capitalists for envy, resentment, and violence. They rant against the “rich” and wish to confiscate their wealth. They celebrate a cult of nature and land. In Thomas Friedman’s felicitous metaphor, they cling to the olive tree and resent the Lexus. They hate capitalism and resent capitalists.
The ultimate source of their resentment is that, under capitalism, success does not normally go to the “best” or the naturally fittest as identified by physical strength or beauty or by the established criteria of virtue. Even the best in academic credentials do not prevail. To Hitler, “The Aryan… is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire, which in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth.” And so on. But if the Aryan’s design of a Mercedes-Benz does not satisfy customers, he will not prevail over a member of the inferior Japanese race — making a Honda or a Toyota. If the Aryan’s business choices do not prosper in the market, they will not succeed against the enterprises of Jewish entrepreneurs.
Under capitalism, Jews often prevail. Until the dominance of capitalism, Goths and Vandals and Teutons prevailed. Hitler preferred the previous regime. Hitler’s followers in the Middle East now wish to restore it.
CHAPTER SIX
The twentieth-century descent of middle Europe into anti-Semitic mania, rage and plutophobia brought down the Austrian and Hungarian economies and centers of culture. It built up the awesome animus and momentum of the Axis armies. It unleashed the frenzies of the Holocaust and the Stalinist pogroms and finally brought forth a new global empire and apparatus of Communist movements and powers. Then the forces mobilized by the Western democracies managed to turn back the totalitarian tide.
How did the Allied victory come about?
To observers who focus on politics and statecraft, the central history of the era follows the feats and follies of generals and dictators, politicians and demagogues. In many accounts, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, Eisenhower and Montgomery may seem to have defeated Hitler. But there is another way to tell the history of the time. All of these political and military leaders were utterly dependent upon the achievements of science and technology for their military success. At the same time that Hitler and Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were on center stage in the realms of statecraft and war, behind the scenes, other more singular and cerebral forces were quietly released into the world. They launched a contrary tide that ultimately prevailed against Nazism and the Axis powers and ultimately overcame the communists as well.
Pushing this contrary tide was the Jewish diaspora. Flowing around the globe, devoid of the repulsive force of nationality, the largely homeless Jewish intellectuals honed in like neutrons into the nuclei of the most receptive centers of Western science and technology. There they galvanized the energies that won the war, shaped the peace, and transformed the global economy and the scientific culture of the age.
This process had begun early in the twentieth century. Before quantum theory, science was chiefly an enterprise of gentile Europeans — men like Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford, and Max Planck. With the rise of quantum theory came the ascendancy of Jews in science, led by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Max Born. In the post-World War II era, Richard Feynman became the paramount teacher and interpreter of quantum theory.
The twenty-first-century world emerged chiefly from this microcosm: the new revelation of the early twentieth century that matter consisted not of unbreakable solids but of enigmatic waves of energy, largely governed by information. From quantum theory ultimately emerged IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Sony, and Qualcomm. From quantum theory, too, would spring forth — from the wretched wastes of communism and feudal paralysis — the vast new energies of China, India, and the rest of increasingly capitalist Asia.
These developments originated in Europe early in the twentieth century, with events in Budapest and Vienna first rocking and then overturning the cradle of the new science and industry. The history of Budapest echoed the history of Vienna. In both great cities of the Hapsburg Empire, Jewish entrepreneurs led an economic miracle. But in science, Budapest was preeminent. From quantum mechanics to nuclear weapons to computer technology, information theory, and holography, Hungarian Jews bestrode the history of the twentieth century, from the pinnacles of research to the practical triumphs of Silicon Valley.
Paramount among these Hungarian Jews were Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard, who all played vital roles in the creation of nuclear weapons; Dennis Gabor, the Nobel laureate who invented holography; Michael Polanyi, the eminent chemist-philosopher who inspired a school of followers around the globe; and Arthur Koestler, the scientist-historian who wrote
Of all the Jews who emerged from the anti-Semitic turmoil of Europe during World War II, however, none had more impact on the history of the epoch than the son of a marriage between Budapest banker Max Neumann and scion of finance, Margit Kann. Adding an aristocratic “von” from the title Max Neumann purchased in 1913 but never used himself, his son John’s name became von Neumann and it looms over our history. Born on December 28, 1903, John von Neumann epitomizes the role of the Jews in the twentieth century and foreshadows their role in the twenty-first. Although he was not a religious Jew and I have been challenged for stressing his role, he was genetically and paradigmatically Jewish and his vision was virtually rabbinical in its rigorous drive toward ever more exalted abstraction and unity.
Von Neumann’s record of accomplishment is as stunning as his ubiquity across the sciences of his era. But this record, like the ubiquity, can be deceptive. Von Neumann’s work intrudes widely not so much because he was a man of many ideas but because he was a man of one idea, or perhaps one idea about ideas.
Assuming an intellectual position more exalted in the hierarchy of knowledge than perhaps any of his peers, he successively imposed his synoptic mastery of abstraction in mathematics, quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons, computer science, game theory, and information theory. Bringing all these sciences and capabilities to bear, he could be said to have tipped the balance in the cause of freedom. But as Eugene Wigner wrote in his autobiography, “Despite the variety, all of his very great achievements rose from a single coherent view of life.” Since his childhood, von Neumann had been a master of the ladders of abstraction, from physical data through number and symbol to set and group, all unified by the concept of the algorithm.
An algorithm can be thought of as any step-by-step set of instructions that is sufficiently precise to produce a determined outcome in every iteration without additional human intervention. Any machine from which its human tenders can walk away while it does its job is driven by an algorithm, which can be abstracted from the machine itself. Men make algorithms, but they also discover them in the process of exploring the physical world. Not every human endeavor is algorithmic. The design of a pitching machine made by men is algorithmic; the prowess of a
