I don’t know how Amazon decided I might be interested in Hilaire Belloc’s pretentious anti-Semitic tome, unless they are counting all my keystrokes (they aren’t, are they?) and found out I looked him up on Wikipedia recently—because I was quoting him, favorably, for his critique of the ultimate justification for western imperialism—“For we have got/The Maxim gun/And they have not,” for my recent piece on William Gladstone (in footnote 3, if you’re really interested.) I noted at the time that Belloc, born of a French mother by an English father, was a Catholic apologist, a sort of fancy blood and soil type forever going on about Catholic Europe and, very frequently, bitching about the Jews, though I didn’t know until now that he had written an entire book of this tripe.
I don’t believe in censorship. Belloc’s book and other pieces of pernicious racist nonsense should be available, in libraries, certainly, for free, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be available on Kindle for 99 cents, even though there are a great number of better books that aren’t available on Kindle at all, although much of that is just a question of copyrights. There seems to be “new” interest in Belloc’s book, and what is appearing on Amazon reflects this. There is a new hardcopy edition dated 2019 and the blurb for it on Amazon leads off with this language:
This defining work on Jews, Jewish ethnicity, behavior, impact, and the causes of anti-Semitism, remains one of the most ground-breaking and incisive such studies ever produced in the English language. The book-dedicated to Hilaire Belloc's Jewish friends-laid the blame for anti-Semitism squarely on Jewish behavior, that is, Gentile reaction to what he called the "inevitability of friction" caused by the presence of Jews in non-Jewish society.
Didn’t think you’d be reading language like that in 2019? Neither did I. Contrary to Mr. Belloc’s nonsense, there never was a “Jewish Problem”. There was only a “Christian Problem”. And it seems there still is.
Indeed, depressing .