Frank Salter on Race and Nation in Australia

Frank Salter has published a collection of essays titled The War on Human Nature in Australia’s Political Culture, reviewed favorably by John Derbyshire at Vdare.com. It consists of six essays, five of which previously appeared in Quadrant, an Australian political magazine. Below is an essay I wrote on two of the three essays that deal with the national question when they originally appeared. (Derbyshire labels these three essays “the real meat of the book.”)  Derbyshire notes the following about the Salter’s essay on libertarian immigration enthusiasts which hadn’t appeared when I wrote my commentary:

Salter tosses and gores Australia’s little—but influential and dismayingly respectable—clique of open-borders libertarians, using arguments that will be familiar to VDARE.com readers. He rounds off the essay with some blunt facts.

The only population difference between the immigration levels adopted by succeeding governments over recent decades and open borders is the date at which the country becomes overcrowded. In addition ethnic stratification is growing. Most Aboriginal Australians remain an economic underclass and some immigrant communities show high levels of long-term unemployment. Anglo Australians, still about 70 percent of the population, are presently being displaced disproportionately in the professions and in senior managerial positions by Asian immigrants and their children.

The solution, he believes, is to break the stranglehold of ideology on university departments of humanities and social sciences.

Lots of luck with that.

My essay, originally posted on January 24, 2013:

Readers of TOO are familiar with Dr. Frank Salter’s work on ethnic genetic interests and his critique of multiculturalism. Now he has a series of articles in Quadrant exploring the decline of biological perspectives in the social sciences and concluding with two articles dealing with race and nation.  These articles are brilliant analyses of the plight of White majorities in all Western countries as they attempt to cope with displacement-level immigration and with sweeping changes in national identity and culture. Salter’s analysis focuses mainly on Australia, but it’s clear that his analysis applies to all Western countries. His attempt is not to chart the causes of this sea change, but to describe the changes by presenting a realistic analysis in terms of ethnic interests of all groups, including Whites, and emphasizing the costs to the White majority. Although Salter does not mention Jewish issues, his analysis is entirely compatible with the decisive role of the Jewish left in Australia specifically and in the wider culture of the West. For an in-depth analysis of the Jewish role in promoting non-White immigration and multiculturalism in Australia, see Brenton Sanderson‘s important essay, “The War on White Australia: A Case Study in the Culture of Critique.”

In “The War on Human Nature, III: Race and Nation in the Media” Salter notes that in the course of the twentieth century, the left shifted from attempting to improve the lives of people within particular societies to an internationalist focus. “From before the Bolshevik coup of 1917, cosmopolitans have fought against beliefs that would bolster Western identity and confidence.” He emphasizes the role of Franz Boas in altering the landscape of the social sciences in opposition to Darwinism and biology. (Boas is discussed in The Culture of Critique as motivated by his Jewish identity and antipathy to the people and culture of the  West.) The long-term result has been the dominance of “intolerant utopianism of multiculturalism, revolutionary levels of immigration, and censorship of free speech on the subject.”

As an evolutionist, Salter is aware that the policy of non-White immigration has huge genetic costs to the host population. What is remarkable is that this assault  “is occurring at the invitation of Western elites, often contrary to public opinion. The process is epochal whether viewed through zoological, national or democratic eyes.” He is well aware that ethnic consciousness should be seen as normal for all peoples, not just the peoples who are now inundating Western societies. “Not only racism but pro-social values of ethnic and national community have an innate basis. And if minority ethnic consciousness is normal, so is the majority equivalent.”

Salter analyzes the present ethnic hierarchy in Australia as consisting of a White majority dominated by hostile elites and non-White minority ethnic coalitions. “Anglo-Celtic Australians are being rapidly displaced by mass Third World immigration that they were never asked to approve, are excluded from multicultural forums, and are the prime targets of political correctness, including a growingly coercive legal apparatus.” The mass media focuses completely on alleged White racism, but it is “somnolent in the case of minorities. This is odd from the biosocial perspective because ethnocentrism is a species characteristic, a universal potentiality. Ethnic networking and other forms of solidarity are usually most intense in minorities.”

The elite media is a participant rather than an observer in these cultural transformations,

sometimes [adopting]  a hostile attitude towards Anglo and white Australia but not towards minorities … Abuse of Anglo Australia is common. The asymmetry in pecks and the identity and institutional affiliations of the peckers indicates that Australia has an ethnic hierarchy in which Anglos are firmly underneath and an alliance of leftist intellectuals and minorities are firmly on top. The examples also indicate that the hierarchy is not the natural order of things but is maintained through soft totalitarianism, known euphemistically as “political correctness”, consisting of intolerance on the part of the elite media, lack of political alternatives, and intimidation both informal and formal delivered by a growingly authoritarian and openly anti-Anglo immigration industry.

The asymmetry is also indicated by the low status of White advocates, whereas minority advocates have access to lucrative and influential careers in government and academia. Anglo ethnic advocates tend to be lower in social class, whereas minority ethnic activists are part of the elite power structure. Any hint of Anglo ethnic consciousness is met with ridicule and loss of professional opportunities. “The resulting stigma helps silence the professional class that could marshal a powerful electoral and cultural defence of the historical nation.”

In Salter’s analysis, this disconnect has happened because beginning in the 1950s Anglo elites “were stepping away from their traditional role of national leadership.”  In other words, the critical step was the emergence of a hostile elite that viewed the traditional people and culture of Australia as backward and worthy of displacement. The thesis of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish intellectuals with access to prestigious universities combined with Jewish media influence were a critical component (necessary condition) of the emergence and dominance of this new elite.

Salter is scathing in his description of pro-immigration activists, “advocating ethnic moralism that soared unburdened by a concept of ethnic interests. … From the 1960s the universities became a stronghold for anti-Anglo activists, eventually leading to school curricula having their civics courses stripped of patriotic history.”

The present Labor government is intent on introducing a national civics curriculum for schools that teaches children nothing of the country’s Anglo-Celtic and European history. Instead it intends to emphasise Aboriginal culture, Asian geography, environmental sustainability and leftist values. …  Australia’s own English and European political traditions are not mentioned in the draft curriculum; neither is individual liberty. And as the Australian Christian Lobby argues, there is no justification for ignoring Western biblical traditions.

As in America and throughout the West, non-Whites have become critical components of electoral coalitions of the left and strong advocates of continued non-White immigration. In the U.S., Barack Obama owes his election to the fact that 80% of non-Whites voted Democrat, and he is actively pursuing “comprehensive immigration reform” that will further fuel the non-White coalition that has coalesced in the Democratic Party. In France, Muslims decided the last presidential election in favor of François Hollande, voting 93-7 for the Socialist candidate. Similarly, a conservative Australian politician, John Howard, was defeated by Asian votes because 20 years earlier he had expressed reservations about Asian immigration during a time of economic recession.

Race trumped class. More significantly, the commentariat did not hurl accusations of racism at the Labor Party or ethnically-motivated voters. Instead they commended the tactics used. It seems that anti-racism sometimes means anti-white. … A similar double standard prevents the Greens from opposing mass immigration, which overnight transforms low-polluting Third Worlders into the highest polluters on the planet. In a way, race trumps the environment.

Salter is unsparing in his condemnation of the entire enterprise:

The subordination and steady replacement of Anglo Australia is not due to high principle but an unholy Left-minority alliance. The cosmopolitan Left has abandoned the shrinking white blue-collar working class for new constituencies, including minority ethnics who can be relied upon to vote for parties that keep the immigration door open to ethnic kin. Australia’s cosmopolitan elites are, in effect, electing a new people to replace reactionary Anglo Australia. The fact that the new people are more ethnically motivated than Anglo Australians has not bothered ideologues who are on hair-trigger alert for any hint of Anglo ethnic sentiment. 

Salter concludes his series with “Race and Nation in the Universities,” a look at the university as an elite institution that is hostile to the traditional people and culture of Australia. (For a discussion of these issues in American universities emphasizing Jewish influence, see Why are Professors Liberals?—A Corroboration of The Culture of Critique). Again the legacy of Franz Boas is center stage:

Indirect evidence that the ghost of Franz Boas still haunts the antipodean ivory tower comes from leading scholars of ethnicity and nationalism who I contacted. They could not name one Australian scholar who professes biosocial theory. … No political science or sociology department reported a scholar basing his or her research or teaching on behavioural biology. The skew towards Marxist and other environmental theories means that scholars of nationality do not know what to do with the wealth of findings drawn from evolutionary psychology, ethology, and sociobiology—except ignore them.

As in America, the dominant scholarly paradigm is that nations are social constructs in which the ancient ethnic core counts for nothing. Although Salter highlights some recent scholarly work that challenges this perspective, it is clear that the traditional concept of nations as having an ethnic core is still marginalized. In the dominant paradigm, Anglo ethnicity is seen “mainly as a risk factor for racism, but immigrant ethnicity as a legitimate and rich human value.” In the work of one professor,

Anglo racism and privilege, and immigrant victimhood, are treated as axiomatic. For example, the “new racism” is held to be a distinctively Anglo view of the nation as assimilationist, ethnocultural, or egalitarian, a narrow conception at odds with the civic nationalism on which multiculturalism is based. Egalitarian images of Australia are a form of Anglo racism, it is argued, because they deny the supposed reality of Anglo privilege.

There is the typical double standard where a professor “calls for minorities to organise ethnically to advance their corporate interests and condemns white Australians for any hint of doing the same.” The ethnocentrism and ethnic networking of non-White groups, such as Chinese middleman trading networks, are ignored. The bottom line is that “Whites have no legitimate ethnic interests.”

The result of the left’s addiction to the proposition nation rather than nations built on an ethnic core  is “the fantasy that manipulation of Australia’s national historical narrative can produce something that has never existed, a diverse ethno-nation possessing the same benefits of social cohesion, social capital and allegiance that accrue to real nations.” Not only has such a nation never existed, all the research indicates that proposition nations with a high degree of multiculturalism have less social capital, more conflict, and a greater sense of alienation than nations built on ethnic core. Yet, as Salter notes, the academics who come up with these ideas are richly rewarded with prestigious university positions and best-selling, lavishly praised books.

Salter highlights an early forerunner to the idea that Whites have no legitimate ethnic interests, E. Digby Baltzell’s classic denunciation of WASP ethnicity, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964).

Baltzell treated Anglos as possessing no legitimate interests that might be threatened by other ethnic groups and thus by mass immigration. He clinically examined Anglo-Americans, and only Anglo-Americans, for any sign of ethnic solidarity, inevitably finding symptoms which he promptly diagnosed as immoral. He treated immigrant communities very differently, as possessing legitimate interests that are often threatened by Anglo racism but which would be wholly benign if realised. In this perspective minorities harbour no competitive ethnic sentiments, a most improbable exception from human nature.

Finally, Salter notes a seldom discussed cost of multiculturalism: lack of consensus on foreign policy. Muslims tend to retain a strong identification with Muslims in other countries, and Asians often retain close ties to their homelands. “The United States is declining economically and its ethnic bond to Australia will weaken as the two countries’ populations become more diverse. At the same time Australia’s Asian population is entering the professions in large numbers, making their loyalty a relevant issue. … Australia’s diversity is often praised for its vibrancy. It is also a potential asset to regional powers in attempts to separate Australia from its traditional ally.”

Salter concludes:

Anglo Australians are a subaltern ethnicity. They are second-class citizens, the only ethnic group subjected to gratuitous defamation and hostile interrogation in the quality media, academia and race-relations bureaucracy. The national question is obscured in political culture by fallout from a continuing culture war against the historical Australian nation. Many of the premises on which ethnic policy have been based since the 1970s are simply false, from the beneficence of diversity to the white monopoly of racism and the irrelevance of race. The elite media and strong elements of the professoriate assert that racial hatred in Australia is the product of Anglo-Celtic society. But in the same media and even in the Commission for Race Discrimination most ethnic disparagement is aimed at “homogenised white” people.

Salter’s solution is a resurgence of a legitimate sense of Anglo consciousness and ethnic activism:

One or more Anglo councils are needed, non-governmental organisations along the lines of other ethnic councils but oriented more towards promoting the scientific study of ethnicity and nationalism. The council should also advocate for Anglo Australians, broadly defined. An Anglo council, and ultimately a federation of Anglo councils, would defend its constituents’ ethnic interests—against defamation, exploitation and demographic swamping. It would demand full representation in multicultural bodies and seek consultative access to government. It would lobby for schoolchildren to be taught the true history of the nation. It would affirm its attachment to the land of Australia. And it would insist that if any people is to be recognised in the Constitution, pride of place should be given to that which founded the nation and provided its infrastructure, political and legal systems, culture and language. Representing the core national identity and the majority of Australians, such a council should adopt a conciliatory role to smooth ethnic relations but in a manner compatible with defending its constituents’ rights and legitimate interests. The effect would be to democratise multiculturalism and the immigration industry by giving the majority of Australians representation in those spheres for the first time.

This is a very sensible suggestion, sure to be met with all the fury and economic power of the multicultural industry, particularly non-White ethnic activist organizations. Charges of “racism” would be only the beginning.

But the good news is that Salter’s essay was published in a mainstream conservative journal in Australia. This is a very important development because it gives nationalists the intellectual firepower they need to confidently meet the arguments proposed by self-serving  multicultists. Salter’s analysis clearly implies that the unfolding disaster of White dispossession could not have occurred without the dominance of the left in the universities and the media. The fact that Quadrant was willing to publish this work by a highly qualified academic in a mainstream conservative publication is a huge blow in the opposite direction.

If even one Western nation, such as Australia, turned away from its current path of self-destruction and suicide by asserting the legitimate ethnic interests of Whites, there would be a powerful ripple effect throughout the West. And that would be revolutionary.