Holes: Arktos Media and Jason Reza Jorjani

[Strelnikov]

Recently these has been a giant academic scandal about Jason Reza Jorjani, a Ph.D. philosophy graduate and lecturer, who has turned out to be a paranormal-loving member of this new political grab-bag we call the "Alt-Right." Jorjani took his dissertation and turned it into a book, Prometheus and Atlas, which is published by Arktos Media, a publishing house/occasional record company Jorjani is involved with. Want to find out anything about this on Wikipedia? Good luck, there isn't even a stub on Jorjani and if you stick in "Arktos Media" you get this article on Integral Tradition Publishing, a house that was incorporated into Arktos as an imprint. If you want to find about Arktos at all on a wiki, you have to go to the Nazi Metapedia, where they have a slightly-out-of-date article.

Here is Jorjani talking to Jeffery Mishlove on the YouTube version of Thinking Allowed:

Jason Reza Jorjani is on the left.

To me this whole situation is darkly hilarious; Jorjani is a product of the Stoney Brook University Philosophy department. They had a jillion chances* to shut him down when he was a grad student, to quietly force him to write something less "unacademic", but because he used obscure sources and could couch what he did as "Heideggerian" they let it pass. And all the academic CSICOP wannabees are going ape because the book is shot through with talk of psychic phenomena, ghosts, and all the other topics they loathe and that Jorjani is a lecturer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.....(Helen Lovejoy voice): won't somebody think of the children?

Here are two Stoney Brook Philosophy graduates in Jacobin going after the "postmodernism" they think let Jorjani get that Ph.D which has so blackened the college's reputation. It wasn't PoMo; Jorjani is half-Iranian and he used the more exotic parts of his background** to create his thesis and they let him get away with it because the modern university is terrified of insulting people or being accused of being racist.

Let me be clear: I am not supporting Jason Reza Jorjani - from the people that read his book (in the comments of this link) it turns out he is a crap historian and supposedly sloppy elsewhere, on top of his anti-Semitism. What has always driven me crazy about American academia is that there are undrawn lines on the floor that you can never cross and they assume you know where they are, especially when you hit grad school. I wish they would be honest in what work they want students to turn out; the unaccredited near-diploma-mill Fundamentalist "Colleges" make damn certain to tell their charges what sort of drek they want to see before the worthless diploma is handed to them. If the object is to scare off the actual radicals of the Left and the Right and create this grey soup of a professorate, then American higher ed has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

___________________________

* That's what advisors (aka "major professors") are "for"; this site goes into that in painful detail.

** He hates Islam and wants to bring Zoroastrianism back to Iran; he believes Iranians are white, etc.

Jorjani never broke any academic rules in his work, but Stoney Brook reviewed his Ph.D anyway in December of 2016, then screwed up and e-mailed JRJ a notice they were reviewing his dissertation. He was willing to have his doctorate rescinded but Stoney Brook said no.

It should be said that in writing Prometheus and Atlas, Jorjani has joined that long line of writers like René Guénon, Julius Evola, Alain de Benoist, Miguel Serrano, Wilhelm Landig, Helena Blavatsky, etc., where Right-wing politics meets paranormal ideas, or where racism meets paranormal ideas, or where the Right meets spirituality. Until Trump was elected, the only people who took this stuff seriously were the professional Antifa groups.

[Flip Flopped]

I just read William Deresiewicz's piece, "On Political Correctness: Power, class, and the new campus religion" in The American Scholar. He highlights the code of self-censorship that has infested academia. Twenty years ago it was worth discussing the ideas that are now ascendant. Back then there were open questions. Now those ideas have become dogma and cannot be interrogated. American thought has closed itself off from the marketplace of ideas.

Jorjani was able to capitalize on his marginalized identity to argue for ideas that don't hold water. Due to his minority status he wasn't forced to defend those ideas.

[Strelnikov]

I just read William Deresiewicz's piece, "On Political Correctness: Power, class, and the new campus religion" in The American Scholar. He highlights the code of self-censorship that has infested academia. Twenty years ago it was worth discussing the ideas that are now ascendant. Back then there were open questions. Now those ideas have become dogma and cannot be interrogated. American thought has closed itself off from the marketplace of ideas.

Jorjani was able to capitalize on his marginalized identity to argue for ideas that don't hold water.

Due to his minority status he wasn't forced to defend those ideas.

I disagree; his dissertation committee was out to lunch. Had they asked the right questions, we would not be calling Jorjani "doctor."

....William Deresiewicz....

I know the guy but I have problems with his criticism as do others. The issue I brought up was more about blank spots in vision: Wikipedia not following these farthest-Right people (the Jorjani scandal started this December, writing a stub article on him would have taken less than ten minutes; Arktos has been around for seven years at this point), Stoney Brook not seeing what they had in Jason Reza Jorjani.

There are traditions of anti-democratic Right-wing thought and JRJ falls within them. Read Julius Evola's Men Among the Ruins (1953) to understand where Jorjani gets his inspiration from.

[ericbarbour]

Here are two Stoney Brook Philosophy graduates in Jacobin going after the "postmodernism" they think let Jorjani get that Ph.D which has so blackened the college's reputation. It wasn't PoMo; Jorjani is half-Iranian and he used the more exotic parts of his background** to create his thesis and they let him get away with it because the modern university is terrified of insulting people or being accused of being racist.

Let me be clear: I am not supporting Jason Reza Jorjani - from the people that read his book (in the comments of this link) it turns out he is a crap historian and supposedly sloppy elsewhere, on top of his anti-Semitism. What has always driven me crazy about American academia is that there are undrawn lines on the floor that you can never cross and they assume you know where they are, especially when you hit grad school. I wish they would be honest in what work they want students to turn out; the unaccredited near-diploma-mill Fundamentalist "Colleges" make damn certain to tell their charges what sort of drek they want to see before the worthless diploma is handed to them. If the object is to scare off the actual radicals of the Left and the Right and create this grey soup of a professorate, then American higher ed has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams.

Lol. I've seen similar shit accumulate around Israel critics in academia, most of whom are left-wing in general ways. The shit ends up rubbing off on Wikipedia content. It is NOTPERMITTED to criticize Israel or its leaders even if the critiques are accurate. Things end up operating like Homeland Security; "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists".

Western academia no longer deals in open discussion of ideas. Don't piss off the corporate sponsors or the government grant-makers AT ALL COSTS. Imagine the panicky faculty meetings: "OMG they will take their money away and our nice new lab (named after a corporate CEO usually) will close and I'll have to flip burgers." Cowardice wins first.

And of course, people like Jorjani can use that to their benefit, as can unaccredited religious colleges and assorted crackpots. PhDs can be so stupid about certain things.....If this continues, the very idea of "tenure" or "academic freedom" will be a fading memory. No one had to censor them; they cheerfully gagged themselves.

It came as a great shock, then, that one of Stony Brook’s newest alums had become the self-appointed spokesperson for “Aryan Imperium.”

Ha ha ha ha this is rich. If the actual Nazis saw Jorjani they would probably toss him in a death camp "because he's too brown".

[Wikipediacritics]

It is threads like these which restore ones faith that Wikipedia criticism is alive and well.

[Strelnikov]

It came as a great shock, then, that one of Stony Brook’s newest alums had become the self-appointed spokesperson for “Aryan Imperium.”

Ha ha ha ha this is rich. If the actual Nazis saw Jorjani they would probably toss him in a death camp "because he's too brown".

No, the actual 1921-45 Nazis considered Iranians "Aryan"; the ancient name for the country is Airyanəm Vaējah ("Expanse of the Aryans") in Avestan, a dead eastern Iranian language the holy texts of Zoroastrianism were written in. "Persia" came from "Farsi", the language Iranians speak now; it came to European languages through ancient Greek (I think). Nazi Germany wanted Iran on it's side during the war to undermine the British in the Middle East; the British and the Soviets together invaded Iran in 1941 to throw Reza Shah Pahlavi off the throne. His son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took over and became the last Shah of Iran.

It's totally forgotten how complicated the racist views of Nazi Germany were; they were willing to let Bosnian Muslims and Croats serve in the Waffen-SS (in their own separate ethnic units), but Serbs were somehow forbidden. Indian soldiers captured in North Africa were allowed to join a "Free India" unit that was at first under the Wehrmacht, then part of the Waffen-SS. Tibetans were somehow Aryan. Germans were somehow Greek. There was this odd underground of Germans with Jewish relatives serving in the German military; Erhard Milch (Generalfeldmarschall, Luftwaffe) was one. A teenaged Solomon Perel (whose story was turned into the film Europa, Europa) posed as an ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) after getting cut off in the Polish-Soviet Ukrainian border region; he served the German Army as an interpreter/"civilian assistant" for a motorcycle reconnaissance unit for a few months, then was sent to Germany, where he was a student in a NaPolA (Nazi Political Leadership School).....so he was a Jewish Hitler Youth until the Red Army came calling, and then he was forced into the Volkssturm "last ditch" army.

[ericbarbour]

Ha ha ha ha this is rich. If the actual Nazis saw Jorjani they would probably toss him in a death camp "because he's too brown".

No, the actual 1921-45 Nazis considered Iranians "Aryan"; the ancient name for the country is Airyanəm Vaējah ("Expanse of the Aryans") in Avestan, a dead eastern Iranian language the holy texts of Zoroastrianism were written in. "Persia" came from "Farsi", the language Iranians speak now; it came to European languages through ancient Greek (I think). Nazi Germany wanted Iran on it's side during the war to undermine the British in the Middle East; the British and the Soviets together invaded Iran in 1941 to throw Reza Shah Pahlavi off the throne. His son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took over and became the last Shah of Iran.

Perhaps it was "said" the Nazi regime wanted the support of Iran. Hitler had "coherent policies" on the subject and put them in Mein Kampf. This is assuming you can call "Chinese and Japanese, although non-Aryan in origin, were bestowed the status of Ehrenarien (Honorary Aryans) so that they could conduct lives and businesses in the German Reich without notable difficulties. Hitler respected these ancient civilizations and their strength of keeping intact their traditional cultures in the face of foreign colonization.[1]" a "coherent policy". He cheerfully split hairs in a pathetic attempt to "make allies". Have a look at Nazism and race for examples of this. PS, it fails to mention Iranians entirely, nor does it mention the actual original Aryans, who originated in the area of Northern Iran, Afghanistan, and Northern India. That area has some of the messiest political history the world has ever seen.

They also said little about the Arabs or other Middle Eastern groups, who were just as "Semitic" as any Jew. Ashkenazi Jews were far more European than Middle Eastern thanks to centuries of intermarriage; that part was also never addressed. Hitler and Himmler were mostly concerned with getting rid of the Jews, as their propaganda was based on exploiting the common antisemitism of German-speakers. Everyone else was ultimately "optional roadkill". That was the only real leverage they had, given that the "German people" themselves were a mishmash of assorted tribes and the "German state" didn't even exist until 1870.

Fun fact: most of Hitler's lunatic ideas of racial purity came from the eugenics movement in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics

The lesser minions of Hitler often could not agree on who was "Aryan enough" to be "spared", and they planned to revisit these "terms" after they "conquered the world" anyway. Remember the "German Blood Certificate"?

The certificate was conditional, and had a clause stating that it would be reconsidered after the cessation of hostilities.

And don't start me on the Pahlavis.....

[Strelnikov]

Ha ha ha ha this is rich. If the actual Nazis saw Jorjani they would probably toss him in a death camp "because he's too brown".

No, the actual 1921-45 Nazis considered Iranians "Aryan"; the ancient name for the country is Airyanəm Vaējah ("Expanse of the Aryans") in Avestan, a dead eastern Iranian language the holy texts of Zoroastrianism were written in. "Persia" came from "Farsi", the language Iranians speak now; it came to European languages through ancient Greek (I think). Nazi Germany wanted Iran on it's side during the war to undermine the British in the Middle East; the British and the Soviets together invaded Iran in 1941 to throw Reza Shah Pahlavi off the throne. His son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi took over and became the last Shah of Iran.

Perhaps it was "said" the Nazi regime wanted the support of Iran. Hitler had "coherent policies" on the subject and put them in Mein Kampf. This is assuming you can call "Chinese and Japanese, although non-Aryan in origin, were bestowed the status of Ehrenarien (Honorary Aryans) so that they could conduct lives and businesses in the German Reich without notable difficulties. Hitler respected these ancient civilizations and their strength of keeping intact their traditional cultures in the face of foreign colonization.[1]" a "coherent policy". He cheerfully split hairs in a pathetic attempt to "make allies". Have a look at Nazism and race for examples of this. PS, it fails to mention Iranians entirely, nor does it mention the actual original Aryans, who originated in the area of Northern Iran, Afghanistan, and Northern India. That area has some of the messiest political history the world has ever seen.

They also said little about the Arabs or other Middle Eastern groups, who were just as "Semitic" as any Jew. Ashkenazi Jews were far more European than Middle Eastern thanks to centuries of intermarriage; that part was also never addressed. Hitler and Himmler were mostly concerned with getting rid of the Jews, as their propaganda was based on exploiting the common antisemitism of German-speakers. Everyone else was ultimately "optional roadkill". That was the only real leverage they had, given that the "German people" themselves were a mishmash of assorted tribes and the "German state" didn't even exist until 1870.

Fun fact: most of Hitler's lunatic ideas of racial purity came from the eugenics movement in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics

The lesser minions of Hitler often could not agree on who was "Aryan enough" to be "spared", and they planned to revisit these "terms" after they "conquered the world" anyway. Remember the "German Blood Certificate"?

The certificate was conditional, and had a clause stating that it would be reconsidered after the cessation of hostilities.

And don't start me on the Pahlavis.....

I agree that the Nazi Germans got their eugenic ideas from us, and also that Nazi death camps killed more than just Jews: male and female gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), dwarves, political opponents from multiple countries, etc., were also housed in those places. Where I disagree is with the foreign policy - Hitler was an opportunist, and good at creating allies which he backstabbed if he needed to. Iran would have been in the same position as Axis Bulgaria or Axis Slovakia if it could have been turned; the two states I listed had their militaries acted as part of the German invasion force of the USSR. Another example would be Francoist Spain had the dictator been willing to join the Axis (instead he sent the Spanish Blue Division to fight the Red Army and they were used up in two years - it was a way of pacifying Hitler). Hitler wanted Spain to attack Gibraltar so that the Italian Navy could join the Kreigsmarine in an invasion of Britain. My point is that everything the Nazis did before 1940 was about trying to get Great Britain to either become an ally, become a neutral, or invade the country. When all of that became impossible, then it became "let's get Stalin before he gets us" and hope that the Soviet Union would collapse as fast as Poland. That didn't happen either. So they decided to destroy the Jews because that was a goal that could be accomplished "easily."

When you see how the Nazis came up with crazy rules they had to circumvent to keep the war going, the idea of "honorary Aryans" is not mindblowing. After all, they cancelled out all the business insurance claims after Kristallnacht to keep the German insurance industry from collapsing.

Ashkenazi Jews were far more European than Middle Eastern thanks to centuries of intermarriage; that part was also never addressed.

They never cared; a Jew was a Jew no matter if the person's parents had converted to Christianity before they were born (which is one of the reasons why the Gestapo had long-dead Karl Marx on a card in their card files).

I don't get why Jorjani backs "the Naziism that won't call itself Naziism", this fraud they call "Traditionalism." It would be interesting to find out what attracted him to it.