Tag: history

Oppenheimer and the Manhatten PsyOp

Who would ever have imagined that Barbie may have been the more historically accurate of the two big movies this summer? Miles Mathis watches the Oppenheimer movie and concludes that it’s an inept attempt to cover for the fact that the Manhattan Project was a fraud from the very start.

At minute 47, we finally get to the Manhattan Project, and the strangest missed clue in the whole mystery is put right on the chalkboard. Oppenheimer suggests to Groves they create a secret base for the project? Where? Well, on Oppenheimer’s private ranch in New Mexico. . . Pause on that. Swish it around in your mouth for a while and taste it as if you are just swallowing for the first time. This is as strange as having the codebreaking project at Bletchley Park, or actually much stranger. In the 1940s the US military already had bases all over the country, with many in the west being out in the middle of nowhere and almost unknown. They didn’t need a new secret base, and if they did you would expect the brass to pick the location, not the 38-year-old Oppenheimer. Opie was allegedly a physicist, not an expert on US geography. So having Opie draw this up on the chalkboard as an X, and the X turn out to be his private ranch, is a magnificent and visual clue to the fake. We are supposed to believe this all happened on the private ranch of some rich guy out in the middle of nowhere? But as you see, it was perfect: it was the perfect place to hide a huge bomb project, but was also the perfect place to hide the LACK of a huge bomb project. All the secrecy would hide a project, but it would also hide the LACK of a project. What if there was nothing out there at all but some cacti and tumbleweeds? Would we know the difference to this day? No.

Here’s something else most people don’t know. Most of the uranium for the Manhattan Project supposedly came from the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, Africa. But it was derelict, being flooded and then closed in 1936. The US allegedly reopened it in 1944, which seems a little late, doesn’t it, especially since they first had to pump out all the water. To answer this little problem, we are told this Belgian mining company had stockpiled 1,200 tonnes of uranium in a warehouse in Staten Island. That’s convenient isn’t it? Sometime after 1936, after being closed, this company decided to stockpile all that uranium in New York? And why would they do that? In 1936 there was no call for uranium since no one was building bombs back then. But they just put 1,200 tonnes of it in Staten Island for a rainy day, because, you know why not?

And how is this for suspicious? After the war, ore containing 1% of U3O8 was considered fantastic, but this uranium in the warehouse in Staten Island just happened to be 65%, over 65 times higher in the needed yellowcake. What luck, right? Never before or since had uranium of that mix been found, but we happened to have it sitting in a warehouse in Staten Island. Right next to the Ark of the Covenant.

Oppenheimer was a Fraud, 5 August 2023

The more one reviews the details of 20th Century history, the more obvious it becomes that literally everything has been fake and gay for a lot longer than the last twenty years of open Clown World rule. There isn’t a single item of the mainstream history narrative that can be assumed to be generally true. At this point, it is more likely that space, nukes, and dinosaurs are all more or less fraudulent than they are actually as was taught to us in our schools and universities.

Be skeptical, be very, very skeptical, that anything is as you were told it was, if you haven’t personally gone over at least a substantial percentage of the details of the sort that Miles Mathis points out in his recent paper on the Manhatten Project. Because the closer one looks at these things, the more obviously manufactured they appear to be, and the devil’s hand is revealed in the ridiculous details.

What is astonishing is the ease with which these false historical events can be debunked with a level of knowledge that goes no deeper than Wikipedia. And it would certainly be nice if somewhere, someone is keeping an account of human history that is actually more or less an accurate record of real things that actually happened.

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Caesar Didn’t Have That Problem

Back in the day, Gaius Julius Caesar was facing the prospect of being charged for fake crimes by his political enemies. He never had to face them because he crossed the Rubicon with a single legion.

Actions have consequences. But a failure to act has consequences too. And those who don’t act when they have the chance shouldn’t whine about facing the inevitable consequences of their inaction.

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You Are the Bad Guys

David Brooks attempts to warn his fellow “class” that a reckoning for their irresponsible and self-serving misrule is historically inevitable.

I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out….

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months…

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with.

On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy, David Brooks, 3 August 2023

The “educated class” advantaged by “meritocracy”, as Brooks mendaciously describes his fellow corrupt, ethnocentric nepotists who are neither as educated nor as smart nor as accomplished as they believe themselves to be, is rightly getting worried. Not being aristocrats or empire-builders, they never understood the absolute necessity of noblesse oblige or serving as positive role models for their social inferiors. They were never capable of nor interested in leadership; they lacked any vision beyond pure hedonism supported by slaves. And they failed to comprehend the obvious fact that the flea which outgrows the dog upon which it lives cannot survive.

Their rapacious greed has damned and doomed them. So they had better enjoy their caste privileges while those privileges last, because the reckoning is absolutely inevitable.

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Comms by Meme

This will suffice to cover approximately 83.4 percent of all of my interactions on Gab. And an alarmingly high percentage of my real life interactions.

If anyone ever asks what the tears of blood are for, you can tell them, “it’s probably something you said.” This was the interaction that inspired the meme.

VD: You’re incorrect about the history of the word “racist”. The word and the concept were both invented by a US Civil War general, who coined the term “racism” in 1902 to justify the destruction of the American Indian race, language, faith, and culture. It was subsequently adopted by Trotsky, not Lenin, for the purpose of attacking European Christians.

GAB: Any historical records to back that up? Especially the strangely “anonymous” Civil War general?
I do agree that European Christians believed in segregation and that Trotsky also used the term racist.
Never heard of this “anonymous” Civil War general? If there was such a person, he would have certainly been in the minority. While many people in the US were against slavery… very, very few believed in racial intermarrying.

Notice the quotes around the word “anonymous”, which were inserted twice without actually quoting anything or anyone. No wonder the rest of the world is so unimpressed by Clown World’s toothless democracy rhetoric; five minutes exposure to any social media platform is enough to convince every rational being of the comparative merits of literally any other political system.

Let reason be silent when historical documentation gainsays its tortured syllogisms.

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Racial Destruction Goes Awry

At first glance, the Kalergi plan from the early 20th century to politically unify Europe and destroy the European race through admixture with “the lesser races” might appear to be working as designed, as one Hapa’s lament for the product of White Male Asian Female couplings tends to indicate:

One passage that really stuck out for me in Amy Chua’s book, was her digression on yellow fever. She acknowledges there are a lot of skeevy WMAF couples out there, and makes a point to say that her white husband has never dated an Asian woman before. It was revealing for me to see a supposedly academic intellectual professor from Yale, writing like some Asian teen girl blogger. With the old my white guy doesn’t have yellow fever line. WMAF has become self-aware about just how low status their coupling is, and so they often make the point of saying “my asian girl has dated Asian guys before”, “my white guy has dated white girls before”. Asian women don’t want to be part of any white country club that would let Asians in. Just by dating an Asian girl, white guys make themselves less attractive to future Asian girls. Asian girls are social poison.

They recognize that WMAF is overflowing with bad apples. Amy Chua would not have wanted to date a white man who dates Asian women. And yet she still wants to date a white man. To this extent she has “ruined” her future husband for future Amy Chuas. Now he wont be able to say, he has never dated an Asian woman before. WMAF is based on the opposite of the categorical imperative. Every WMAF wants to be the one exception. Yes, all other WMAFs are scum, but our WMAF is barely a WMAF. John Derbyshire is a white nationalist with a Chinese wife. And he says he would hate to live in a multicult society, in which many white men married Asians. But since he is part of a small minority, it is ok for him. WMAF is quite loudly and proudly based on hypocrisy.

Asian women are low status. The same Columbia speed dating study that rated Asian men the least attractive, also rated Asian women the least attractive by all races of men. What? I thought Asian women were exotic and desirable, how can they also be sexual failures? If you believe EvoPsych, men and women have different sexual goals, and thus different ways to fail. A female sexual failure will not be a virgin, but she will only attract low status males. And Asian women have become legendary as the woman of choice for loser white males. This is the ultimate definition of female sexual failure, becoming the easy partner of choice for the males of lowest value. Scandinavian women are the highest status women in the world, and so they can price themselves high with radical feminism. East Asian women are the lowest status women in the world, and so to market themselves to loser white men, they have to advertise themselves as the least feminist. Sexual Coolies serving as strikebreakers against White Feminism. By being so openly desperate for the lowest white men, Asian women have destroyed their own bargaining position in the sexual market. It is impossible to drive a hard bargain when you are so obviously desperate for whiteness. Athletes are the Alpha Males of American society. And it is impossible to name a single athlete married to an Asian women. They have become the Geisha goddesses of white male losers.

Asian women have crashed their own sexual market value, 6 March 2015

It’s true, there is a saying among Hapas that if you want to know if a hapa boy’s father is Asian or White, all you have to do is throw a football at him. Loser white fathers don’t tend to produce boys who can catch. A suboptimal result of the sort the author is describing is not a surprise when low-quality WMAF pairs get together. But what about when WMAF pairs of high-quality get together?

Remember, Kalergi concocted his long-term plan of genetic undermining at a time when it was assumed that Asians were weak, and the Chinese were an old and degenerate nation. Now that the Chinese have shown themselves to be both a) more strategic-minded than the Jews, and, b) martially competitive with the most powerful European militaries, what is the likely result when the most common interracial mixes are White male with Asian female instead of the intended Black male with White female?

Meanwhile, continuously siphoning off the low-quality Europeans by encouraging them to trade in their children’s genetic heritage for additional sexual market value is only going to increase the average quality of the pure Europeans who remain. I also think that the author has forgotten that one reason Scandinavian women are valued so high is that there are very few of them. There are orders of magnitude more Asian women; just as there are 10x more 150+ IQs among Christians than atheists, there are almost certainly more Asian 10s than Scandinavian 10s, even though the average Scandinavian woman is more attractive than the average Asian woman.

So, we can reasonably anticipate that one of the inevitable results of the Kalergi Plan, mass immigration, and the endless marketing of mudsharking provided by the media will be the production of two new genetic elites, one of higher-quality Europeans, and a second that is a super-subset of very high quality Eurasians that could turn out to have some of the highest-performance genetics ever produced by Man.

Which would be fittingly ironic, as Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi was himself a high-quality Hapa.

Oft evil intent will evil mar.

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Japan’s Surrender – The Trohan Article

Since some Americans still in denial over the USA’s historical war crimes are “skeptical” about the verifiable and undeniable facts of history, the article written by Walter Trohan in February 1945, and published on the front page of the Chicago Tribune on August 19, 1945, is provided here in its entirety.

Chicago Tribune, August 19,1945

JAPS ASKED PEACE IN JAN. ENVOYS ON WAY — TOKYO
Roosevelt Ignored M’Arthur Report On Nip Proposals

Release of all censorship restrictions in the United States makes it possible to report that the first Japanese peace bid was relayed to the White House seven months ago. Two days before the late President Roosevelt left the last week in January for the Yalta conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin he received a Japanese offer identical with the terms subsequently concluded by his successor, Harry S. Truman.

MacArthur Relayed Message to F.D.

The Jap offer, based on five separate overtures, was relayed to the White House by Gen. MacArthur in a 40-page communication. The American commander, who had just returned triumphantly to Bataan, urged negotiations on the basis of the Jap overtures.

The offer, as relayed by MacArthur, contemplated abject surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. The suggestion was advanced from the Japanese quarters making the offer that the Emperor become a puppet in the hands of American forces.

Two of the five Jap overtures were made through American channels and three through British channels. All came from responsible Japanese, acting for Emperor Hirohito.

General’s Communication Dismissed

President Roosevelt dismissed the general’s communication, which was studded with solemn references to the deity, after a casual reading with the remark, “MacArthur is our greatest general and our poorest politician.”

The MacArthur report was not even taken to Yalta. However, it was carefully preserved in the files of the high command and subsequently became the basis of the Truman-Attlee Potsdam declaration calling for surrender of Japan.

This Jap peace bid was known to the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald shortly after the MacArthur communication reached here. It was not published under the paper’s established policy of complete co-operation with the voluntary censorship code.

Must Explain Delay

Now that peace has been concluded on the basis of the terms MacArthur reported, high administration officials prepared to meet expected congressional demands for explanation of the delay. It was considered certain that from various quarters of Congress charges would be hurled that the delay cost thousands of American lives and casualties, particularly in such costly offensives as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

It was explained in high official circles that the bid relayed by MacArthur did not constitute an official offer in the same sense as the final offer which was presented through Japanese diplomatic channels at Bern and Stockholm last week for relay to the four major Allied powers.

No negotiations were begun on the basis of the bid, it was said, because it was feared that if any were undertaken the Jap war lords, who were presumed to be ignorant of the feelers, would visit swift punishment on those making the offer. It was held possible that the war lords might even assassinate the Emperor and announce the son of heaven had fled the earth in a fury of indignation over the peace bid.

Defeat Seen Inevitable

Officials said it was felt by Mr. Roosevelt that the Japs were not ripe for peace, except for a small group, who were powerless to cope with the war lords, and that peace could not come until the Japs had suffered more.

The Jap overtures were made on acknowledgment that defeat was inevitable and Japan had to choose the best way out of an unhappy dilemma — domination of Asia by Russia or by the United States. The unofficial Jap peace brokers said the latter would be preferable by far.

Jap proposals to Gen. MacArthur contemplated:

  • Full surrender of all Jap forces on sea, in the air, at home, on island possessions and in occupied countries.
  • Surrender of all arms and munitions.
  • Occupation of the Jap homeland and island possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
  • Jap relinquishment from Manchuria, Korea and Formosa as well as all territory seized during the war.
  • Regulation of Jap industry to halt present and future production of implements of war.
  • Turning over of any Japanese the United States might designate as war criminals.
  • Immediate release of all prisoners of war and internees in Japan proper and areas under Japanese control.

After the fall of Germany, the policy of unconditional surrender drew critical fire. In the Senate Senator White (R.) of Maine Capehart (R.) of Indiana took the lead in demanding that precise terms be given Japan and in asking whether peace feelers had not been received from the Nipponese.

Terms Drafted in July

In July the Tribune reported that a set of terms were being drafted for President Truman to take to Potsdam. Capehart hailed the reported terms on the floor of the Senate as a great contribution to universal peace.

These terms, which were embodied in the Potsdam declaration, did not mention the disposition of the Emperor. Otherwise they were almost identical with the proposals contained in the MacArthur memorandum.

Just before the Japanese surrender the Russian foreign commissar disclosed that the Japs had made peace overtures through Moscow asking that the Soviets mediate the war. These overtures were made in the middle of June through the Russian foreign office and also through a personal letter from Hirohito to Stalin. Both overtures were reported to the United States and Britain.

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The Atomic Bomb was Never Necessary

Although apologists for the atomic bombing of Japan have long claimed that it “saved American lives”, their arguments have always been false and historically ignorant. But while the relevant information belying the justification for the bombings has long been available to historians and military history enthusiasts, it’s now becoming too widely known around the world to ignore.

I suspect the Oppenheimer movie marks the last hurrah of the historical A-bomb mythology.

The whole moral driving force of the project was a fantasy.

In the summer of 1945, British intelligence assembled a group of captured German scientists at a picturesque old house in Godmanchester, near Huntingdon. The house was bugged from basement to attic. The Germans were astonished at news of the bomb and plainly had never got within miles of making one. This has been public knowledge since 1992.

Even more devastating is modern historical research about Japan.

It is clear that Japan’s surrender was not forced by the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Japan’s fanatical leadership cared little about civilian deaths (they had not blinked when a firebomb raid in March 1945 killed 100,000 in Tokyo itself). By the time the bomb was ready, there were few Japanese cities of any size left standing.

The scholar Tsuyoshi Hasegawa concluded from Japanese and Soviet records that Japan’s surrender was mainly caused by Stalin’s decision to enter the war. The military leadership feared he would invade Japan from the north and seize large parts of the country.

It has long suited Japan and the US to pretend that the two A-bombs ended the war. Japan can pose as a victim nation. The US, which is embarrassed about being the only country to use the bomb in war, can soothe consciences by saying the action saved tens of thousands of Allied troops from death. But the worrying truth is known to academics and diplomats. So the second great justification for the use of the bomb in 1945 melts away.

What Peter Hitchens happens to omit here is that Japan had been trying to surrender for eight months prior to the bombings, and had offered terms to Gen. Douglas MacArthur that were virtually identical to the terms ultimately accepted after the bombings. Also, it’s clear that Stalin and the Soviet military leadership knew all about the atomic bomb long before the first one was dropped, as evidenced by General Giorgy Zhukov’s memoirs.

After the end of one of the Conference meetings, Truman informed Stalin that the United States now possessed a bomb of exceptional power, without, however, naming it the atomic bomb.

As was later reported abroad, at that moment Churchill pinned his eyes on Stalin’s face, eager to observe his reaction. However, Stalin did not betray his feelings and pretended he saw nothing special in what Truman had said. Both Churchill and many other British and American commentators subsequently surmized that Stalin had probably failed to fathom the significance of the information received.

In actual fact, on returning to his quarters after this meeting Stalin in my presence told Molotov about his conversation with Truman. Molotov reacted immediately: “They are trying to bid up.”

Stalin laughed: “Let them. I’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov today and get him to speed things up.”

I understood they were talking about the development of the atomic bomb.

It was clear already then that the US Government was going to use the atomic bomb for reaching its imperialist goals from a position of strength. This was corroborated on August 6 and 9. Without any military need whatsoever, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the peaceful and densely-populated Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

– Marshal of Victory: The Autobiography of General Giorgy Zhukov, 1966

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The Shadow Can Only Mock

“Racist” is what they call you when you aren’t willing to stand by and permit them to destroy your nation, your language, your faith, and your culture without resistance. All the blathering about “hate”, “equality”, “diversity”, and “civil rights” is nothing more than rhetoric intended to emotionally manipulate you into refraining from perpetuating your own kind.

As for the idea that “racism is a sin”, that is pure satanic inversion. Any “sin” invented in 1902 is obviously a fake and man-made one.

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Mailvox: Borrowed Time

A reader with knowledge of the US shipbuilding industry concurs with my assessment of the USN having lost its naval superiority:

Your analysis about US shipbuilding capacity was spot on. I have an uncle who is an engineer at Newport News shipbuilding (Ingalls). I remember, many years ago, we were having a discussion similar to this topic and it centered on submarines construction.

I didn’t know this but New London, Conn (Electric Boat) can only build sections of the subs. The bow section is built at Newport News. The reason being, Electic Boat lacks the machine necessary to bend the steel in the bulbus shape of the bow section. They sold it off years ago. Newport News is the only shipyard that has that machine. I was surprised because this is an obvious single point of failure.

But then he went to tell me that Newport News is the only shipyard that can install a nuclear reactor. I shook my head in disgust. Right then and there, I knew that we, as a country, were pretenders living on borrowed time.

No amount of glorious history and past success can prevent an outdated power from being surpassed by its successor. Sooner or later, the illusion of invincibility inevitably fades.

UPDATE: Apparently the reader’s take is the optimistic scenario, as someone with direct experience of naval repairs weighs in.

As someone who worked in ship repair on aircraft carriers and submarines at a naval shipyard for [more than 20] years, and on non-nuclear vessels for [additional] years as well, the description given to you of the industry is a vast understatement. The ability for the handful of nuclear capable yards to fix ships has been crippled by a combo of inability to train new workers well, and inability to maintain the skilled workers they do have. “Diversity” pushes women and racial minorities to the top in engineering positions. Some of those may have actually been able to do the jobs they were pushed into if they’d been given the time to build their skills in the way any man would have 10-20 years ago.

In the trades, even a modicum of skill is enough to find yourself fast tracked to a supervisor position before you even finish the apprenticeship program. Admirals appear to think that the lack of capacity to perform can be solved by creating more shipyards. This requires ignoring that the private shipyards can’t hire and maintain skilled labor either, both in nuclear and non-nuclear work. It’s not uncommon to leave a shipyard with many systems in worse shape after “maintenance” than they were in before arriving there. The ridiculous lead times for materials suggests other related industries are in just as bad of shape. As I write this, i’m staring at photos that just came out to my group of [important ship’s equipment destroyed by carelessness].

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The Etymology of “Yahweh”

This is an educational dive into the way modern Christianity has been infiltrated and influenced by non-Christian parties, in this particular case, by a pair of Enlightenment-era etymologists.

Have you ever heard someone refer to God as “Yahweh”? That’s just the English for His revealed name in the OT, right? That must mean it’s the ancient Christian practice!

Let’s look at the genealogy of this one, because it is wild. N.b. this thread is not about “the secret name of God,” or YHWH, or Jehovah, or vowel pointing, or any other such debate. It is solely focused how & when the six letters “Yahweh” came into common use in English.

A friend asked this week whether a CPH commentary that insists on translating Lord as “Yahweh” is subversive. My first instinct was “yes, absolutely.” But what do I know? So I turned next to Google Ngrams, which searches over 8M books going back centuries. Ngrams shows just what I imagined: the term was invented in the last two centuries, and took off in popularity very recently. Neither of these are what you want to see when you’re considering sound doctrine. An unchanging God does not engender fickle beliefs.

Ngrams also lets you drill down to any date range to see precisely which hits are represented on the graph. After some spelunking, metadata errors, lots more googling, and hours of reading original source material, here is how we were tricked into saying “Yahweh”.

For thousands of years, there has been debate over the pronunciation of “YHWH”–the name “I am” which God gave Himself from the burning bush in Exodus 3. Written Hebrew of course has no vowels, so with only the text, there are numerous possibilities for any consonant set. “Jehovah” itself is one such made-up word, which deliberately transposes the vowel sounds from “Adonai” onto the consonants in “YHWH”. While the intention at the time was pious, it is highly relevant that no such thing was done in Jesus’ day.

The Greek Septuagint (LXX) is the Old Testament that was commonly used in Jesus’ day. Hebrew was already a dead language in the 1st century, meaning it was no longer spoken conversationally and most couldn’t read it. Jesus quotes the LXX, as does the NT hundreds of times.

So it is relevant how the LXX treats the YHWH “I am”. What we find is that the word is simply and naturally translated “ego eimi”–”I am”. The 4th century Latin Vulgate also faithfully translates it simply as “ego sum”. Zero interest in it as a proper name, vs. a declaration.

This fact is crucial to the question because it ties directly to Christ’s Divinity. When Jesus said, “Before Abraham was I am” He said ego eimi, and the jews tried to murder Him on the spot for blasphemy. He didn’t use some special Hebrew utterance, but “I am”–God’s Name.

For over 14 centuries, every Christian believed that God’s revealed name to Moses was “I am”.

I’m neither a theologian nor an etymologist. But I am an exemplaragnitorian with a respectable track record for correctly sniffing out both bullshit and sulfur. And all the fake Hebrewisms that some Christians like to sling around with pious abandon have always struck me as redolent of both, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn that “Yahweh” is an Enlightenment-era construction.

UPDATE: a thematically-related article that takes the position that the use of “Yahweh” is dishonest.

Over the last generation, most American clerics have switched to pronouncing the divine name as Yahweh. I want to make the case that this is dishonest at several levels. First, few can even give a cogent summary of the reasons why Yahweh is to be preferred to Jehovah even though willing to disrupt the tradition over it. I am confident of this because even at the august Westminster Seminary, I caught three professors in the Hebrew OT department out of class and asked why we should say Yahweh. Two of them waved me off to “look it up.” The third, the only one to have an earned PhD from Harvard, said that Jehovah was an entirely possible way the tetragrammaton was pronounced; he used Yahweh as a disruptive mechanism, to shake people out of their comfort zone.

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