Jeffrey Tucker blogs about the Cato Republicans and their strange devotion to Ronald Reagan and his supposed “commitment to limited government.” (Ha!)

Time to rerun this Russmo cartoon:

The British Israelite thesis — that the “lost tribes” of Israel migrated up across the Caucasus Mountains and then west to become the Germanic tribes that eventually became White Anglo-Saxon Protestants — sounds more like science fiction than history.

But if we’re doing science fiction, then why have the Israelites walk all that way? Why not just teleport straight from west Asia to East Anglia?

Well, teleportation brings up some philosophical issues that the Christian Identity movement probably isn’t ready to confront.

To the rescue: iceberg offers a lesson in practical etymology. How practical? How does warp-drive technology strike you?

By the time Sargon II was deporting the ten tribes, they may have figured out the bending of space-time implicit in the Hebrew words k’fitzat haderech.

This could also explain much of the Book of Mormon.

This is from page 375 of Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World:

… Sargon II wiped the political state of Israel from the map. He took [Israeli King] Hoshea captive, put him in jail, and then set to work deporting the Israelites, which was the typical Assyrian response to a vassal state that clung stubbornly to independence. Deportation was a kind of genocide, murder not of persons, but of a nation’s sense of itself. Sargon’s own inscriptions note that he removed 27,290 Israelites from their homeland, and settled them from Asia Minor all the way over to the territory of the Medes. These Israelites became known as the "lost ten tribes," not because the people themselves were lost, but because their identity as descendants of Abraham and worshippers of Yahweh was dissipated into the new wild areas where they were now forced to make their homes.^*

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^* Students of modern history will recollect that a not-so-charming and peculiarly British movement whose adherents called themselves "British Israelites" grew up during the nineteenth-century renewal of interest in national identity. With practically no historical or geographical support, British Israelites proposed that the ten tribes had travelled across the Caucasus Mountains and ended up in Britain, which made white Western Christians of British descent the "true Israel." This served to act as a justification for anti-Semitism, weirdly enough, since the Jews of the present-day were labelled as pretenders. This is completely ridiculous simply from a political standpoint, given that Sargon II would never have allowed any sort of mass exodus of the Israelites; his whole goal was to destroy their identity as a nation. The ten tribes of Israel were not "lost," as though they had been misplaced in toto and could be rediscovered. They were very efficiently destroyed.

British Israelitism faded in the twentieth century, but has made a very ugly comeback in the so-called Christian Identity movement of the United States. I was startled to receive, only a few years ago, from a then-neighbor out in rural Virginia, a set of "teaching videos" from a Christian Identity "church" in the Midwest laying out, in great detail, how the Jews are actually "Edomites" cursed by God, and Caucasians are the true Jews, the chosen people of God. My attempt to explain that the supposed difference between cursed and non-cursed humans rested on a mistranslation of the Hebrew words for "man" was totally fruitless; it must have sounded like sophistry. This idiotic theology is alive and well.

I had my own indirect exposure to the Christian Identity movement through, of all people, a black friend of mine in Virginia. I had been telling him about how fractional-reserve banking works (as prologue to a conversation on Austrian Business Cycle Theory, which we never got around to). A month or so later, he phoned me and said he needed to apologize, that he may have sent a lunatic in my direction. It seems my friend had run into an old acquaintance of his from the local music scene, and they had had the what-have-you-been-up-to exchange. Apparently this other guy, a white Virginian, had been reading all about fractional-reserve banking.

"Oh, you should talk to my friend, BK Marcus!" said my friend. "He’s been reading about it, too."

At which point, I am told, the white Virginian went on to explain that banking is run by Jews, but they’re not the real Jews, you see. They’re fake Hebrews…

Etc.

Fortunately, I never did hear from him, but I appreciated the warning from my friend.

It still puzzles me that someone exposed to Christian Identity theology, according to which all non-WASPs are either cursed by God or descended from Satan himself, would happily convey his theories in a friendly conversation with a black man. Maybe he hadn’t gotten that far in his reading.