Monika Schaefer: Letter from a German Prison

…by Jonas E. Alexis and Monika Schaefer

Jonas E. Alexis: Studying Jewish political and ideological movements never ceases to fascinate me for various reasons. On the surface, they always pretend to be siding with logic and reason, science and history, as in the case of Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.[1]

But the same movements always end up contradicting themselves, confusing their devoted followers and proponents, and implicitly and indirectly finding themselves in a swamp of Talmudic mores and discourse. (E. Michael Jones found that out the hard way, when he was taking a class with Stanley Fish.[2])

In The Better Angels of our Nature, Pinker posits that violence has declined, despite the incontrovertible fact that terrorist cells have increased since the invasion of Iraq,[3] despite the fact that Israel has been sterilizing Ethiopian women against their will, which resulted in a fifty percent decline in their birthrate,[4] despite the fact that Israeli authorities were engaged in systematically torturing four to six thousand Palestinian prisoners every year,[5] despite the fact that at least thirty thousand of them had gone through that new gulag process since 1987,[6] despite the fact that car bombings and explosions are killing people virtually every day in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and despite the fact both the United States and Israel have embraced crude and unnecessary methods to torture people.[7]

Pinker does not want to talk about those issues because that would ruin his thesis in The Better Angels of our Nature. Philosopher John Gray has argued that Pinker’s thesis has been weighed and found wanting. In fact, says Gray, “Certainly the figures used by Pinker and others are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties of violence unaccounted for.”[8]

Pinker never addresses the Neoconservative ideology; he never talks about how the Israeli regime is mercilessly liquidating Palestinian men, women and children; he never even remotely mentions that the occupied territories are, in the words of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, “the biggest prison on earth.”[9]

If Yuri Slezkine is right, that the twentieth century is actually “the Jewish Century,”[10] then Pinker is indirectly defending that century and blaming the Middle Ages as backward and brutish and praising the “Jewish Century” for getting rid of those brutish people.

So when Pinker starts talking about Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, he is articulating an essentially Talmudic thesis, which basically says that the deaths of the Goyim are less important than preserving the “Jewish Century,” which gave us Stalin, Mao, the Iraq War, the Afghan War, the Libyan War, conflict in Ukraine, and even the Syrian War.

More importantly, Pinker will never take into account that the Goyim are going to prison even for expressing their views. Monika Schaefer has been placed behind bars for simply expressing her opinion on YouTube! And what was her crime? Well, she said “Sorry mom, I was wrong about the Holocaust.” And now Pinker wants to talk about Enlightenment Now? These people are simply a joke.

Monika has recently written a moving letter to Arthur Topham about what is happening, and we were fortunate enough to get a copy of that letter. Many thanks to Arthur Topham.

Monika Schaefer:

Dear Arthur and Shasta,

Words can hardly describe the joy I felt upon receiving your letter of January 8th, and the wonderful picture/graphic that you created. My heart pretty near burst right out of my rib cage. Thank you Arthur for all you are doing – I have seen from other correspondences that you put together a good list of contacts for people to write letters to, and that kind of thing.

For 21/2 weeks I heard nothing from the outside world, and then suddenly the flood of letters started arriving. Oh my goodness, I was in pretty good spirits before (all things considered), but receiving these letters REALLY lifted my spirits.

Life for me has simplified, in terms of day-to-day. My biggest concerns in the first while were about all the logistical stuff on the home front. I haven’t been permitted a phone call yet, nor a visit, and I have no idea if any of my letters to my brother have gone through, so of course those logistical concerns just stressed me out for awhile. But basically I just resigned myself to having faith that my friends and family would take care of things.

. . . As I mentioned, life has suddenly become quite simple. Time expands and shrinks simultaneously. I could write books already about the interesting experiences in prison, and it seems like a long long time ago when they locked me up. On the other hand, the days flow one into the next very quickly, as the simple punctuations of daily life go round and round. I am keeping healthy and well, in mind, body, spirit and heart & soul. It is wonderful to know that Truth and Light, and indeed God, is with me. I know that.

During my last free night at Alfred’s, I had a remarkable dream, in which I was walking in a circle, with a bunch of other people, all walking rather slowly, heads slightly bowed forward, kind of shuffling along. Going counterclockwise. After my first full day here, I bolted upright in bed and gasped, as I realized that what I had seen in my dream (3 days earlier) was the daily hour outside in the courtyard, the “Hofgang”.

The circular walk in the dream was the same general size as the courtyard here, and people walk round and round counterclockwise. That was not the first time in my life that I was shown something in a dream. But it has been rare.

I can assure you, about that “Hofgang”, that my head is not bowed, and I am NOT shuffling along. I either go vigorously, or sometimes a few of us play ping pong or volleyball. We have a lot of laughs and good moments.

I’m in a cell with 4 others. We have our moments, sometimes difficult, but mostly okay, and sometimes good conversations. Sleep is sometimes hard to come by as we have one vigorous snorer. Earplugs don’t work so well – Oh well – This time shall pass.

I pray that you are both well.

Mehr Licht!

… and much Love to you!

• [1] We will provide an extensive review of the book next month.
• [2] E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012), chapter 4.
• [3] See for example Fareed Zakaria, “End the War on Terror and Save Billions,” Washington Post, December 7, 2012.
• [4] Renee Ghert-Zand, “Shocking Decline in Ethiopian Israeli Birthrate,” Jewish Daily Forward, December 10, 2012.
• [5] See for example Dan Fesperman, “Israel Tortures Palestinian Prisoners Despite Peace Accords, Rights Group Says,” Baltimore Sun, June 15, 1994; see also Joel Greenberg, “Israel Reports Admit Abuses by Security Forces/Unsealed Probe of Shin Bet Details Harsh Treatment of Palestinians,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 10, 2000.
• [6] Joel Greenberg, “Israel Rethinks Interrogation of Arabs,” NY Times, August 14, 1994.
• [7]See Shane O’Mara, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
• [8] John Gray, “Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war,” Guardian, March 13, 2015.
• [9] Ilan Pappe, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories (Oxford: One World, 2016).
• [10] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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