October 14, 2010 

How does an educated person end up broadcasting socially unacceptable views? In matters of multiculturalism, immigration, and race relations, standard answers to this question aver psychiatric disorder or social maladjustment. Yet, I have never been diagnosed with the former, nor ever fulfilled the criteria for the latter: my parents are both intelligent White-collar professionals, retired after successful and remunerative careers; they are both in a happy marriage of 42 years’ standing; all three of us completed higher education, lived in various countries, experienced different cultures, learnt several languages, and have kept ourselves well read and well informed. Fellow TOO contributors of my acquaintance are not vastly different from me: Kevin MacDonald is a university professor; Tomislav Sunic is a former diplomat; Elizabeth Whitcombe is a financial analyst with an MIT degree in economics; Greg Johnson is a publisher, with a doctorate in philosophy.

What happened to them?

What happened to me?

Certainly, there must be genetic factors that have predisposed me to favor one suite of loosely inter-related values as opposed to another — to favor quality over quantity, individuality over generality, and so forth. But while that is material for a fascinating essay by an evolutionary psychologist, it does not make for a very interesting story: after all, if I cannot help myself, there is not much to discuss. What is more, genes tell an incomplete story: my inborn predispositions — being inborn — have not changed in forty years; yet there was a time when I had more conventional views on matters of multiculturalism, immigration, and race relations than I do now. That my prose is now regularly published here, under the aegis of America’s most controversial university professor, as well as in similar websites and publications, is the result of long processes, involving a succession of pivotal events.

As I mentioned in an earlier article, I write because I know the future is not what it used to be. I experienced it in Caracas over thirty years ago, at a time when the twenty-first century was imagined as a space-age utopia, and not as a Caribbean republic stuck in the 1970s. However, this was only a factor years later: although I lived in a racially conscious society, with a White minority at the top and a colored majority at the bottom, traditional White homelands were still almost wholly White and no one ever imagined that this would one day cease to be the case.

I first became aware of systematic non-European immigration into Western countries while living in The Netherlands during the 1980s. I remember noticing early on an inexplicably high number of Indonesians perambulating The Hague’s city center, and wondering how and why they came to be there. I did not resent them: they simply seemed incongruous in a country whose natives were tall, generally handsome, and predominantly blond. Presently, Indonesians are only 2.4% of the population in that country, but even in 1985 they were reinforced by a fair number of Moroccans, Turks, and Surinamese. Upon inquiring, I was told that the Indonesian presence was the result of the Dutch government having allowed immigration from a former colony during the 1960s and 1970s. This was inaccurate, of course, as the Indonesians arrived in the 1940s, with the 1960s bringing the Turks and the Moroccans, and the 1980s the immigrants from Surinam.

Spain, where I next lived, was very homogeneous as recently as 1990: a Black man walking down the Gran Via in Madrid’s city center was a noticeable and surprising apparition. Again, I did not resent the Black men: Blacks were very few in number and I assumed them to be rare asylum seekers. Being young and preoccupied with clothes and music, I was in fact rather annoyed by the effect on commerce of this demographic homogeneity, particularly because local tastes were ill-matched to my own: shops tended to stock many varieties of a limited and very conservative selection of styles. I much preferred it in London, The Hague, or Amsterdam, which catered to a much wider range of tastes and youth subcultures.

I did not become conscious of there being a racial problem until the late 1990s. And even then, my main concern was that the White man seemed lost — not that there were many Asian immigrants in London. In a vague and diffuse way, I sensed a lack of direction, a lack of fight, and a strangely introspective mood, riddled with skepticism, self-doubt, and feelings of historical guilt. By this time, of course, Tony Blair’s Labour regime had seized power, and its systematic demolition of Britain, physical and psychological, was well under way. Although agreed many years earlier, the withdrawal of Britain from Hong Kong in 1997 was oddly symbolic of a well-established, generalized, ongoing process of the White man’s retreat. Such preoccupations aside, however, I was mostly worried about Labour’s manifest predilection for attacking the private sector with predatory taxes and suffocating regulation. I was also repelled not so much by their immigration policy (their mass Third World immigration conspiracy was not uncovered until a decade later) but by their obsession with vacuous sound bites and their tedious New Labour mandarins parroting slogans nightly on television.

By the late 1990s I was already operating a record label specializing in Black Metal. Much of the latter had a radically pagan, ethnonationalist character. But it was the elitist, Nietzschean ideology that appealed to me. It was the ‘New Labour’ program that made me hostile to the New Labour program, not Burzum, Veles, or Graveland.

My ‘conservative’ perspective changed in the 2000s, following a series of events in the  early years of that decade — some of which had nothing to do with me.

The first was David Irving’s libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt. I only became aware of it when Irving appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight television program following his defeat. I remembered reading about Irving in 1992: one newspaper, reporting his expulsion from Australia that year, described him as so pro-Germany that his German was better than his native English. I cannot remember if I visited Irving’s website following the Newsnight interview (which left me with a negative impression of Irving), but I can remember doing so following his appeal in July 2001. The website offered an alternative, if disturbing, perspective on the world —  one that made me think seriously about the politics of historiography and (forgive me the mouthful) the political economy governing the construction of historical narratives. It was quite an experience to note the degree to which the same historical facts can be interpreted to serve widely varying —  and invariably self-serving — conclusions, and the degree to which social attitudes and policy derive from whatever happens to be the dominant historical narrative in a given point in space and time.

Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West, which I read around this time, proved equally seismic: one thing was to realize that the White man had lost his soul; quite another was to realize that this foretold his physical extinction, and therefore a future for the West that now resembled the past in the Caribbean. Imagine my horror thenceforward whenever I read celebrations in the British and American press of increasing multiculturalism, twinned with joyous imaginings among fashion-conscious literati of a convergence with Brazil. They seemed idiotic, reckless, and ridiculous emanating from comfortable middle-class brains who had never once experienced daily life in a Third World banana republic, with all the frustrations, irritations, and dangers that experience entails. They had evidently never rented a car at the Aeropuerto de Maiquetía in Caracas and seen it conk out after only ten miles, in the middle of the freeway, at night, amid mountains lined with zillions of grim shack-like dwellings. They had evidently never seen their savings halved from one minute to the next by a sudden currency devaluation. They had evidently never had to suffer the inconvenience of frequent power outages, water shortages, freeway muggings, and naked bureaucratic and professional corruption. They had evidently never lived in a city surrounded on all sides by hills lined with miles and miles of unsightly shantytowns, teeming with angry, poor, criminal, illiterate hominids looking for blood and handouts — the same hominids that only a few years earlier had overwhelmingly supported the Communist dictator Hugo Chavez, who last January deployed army troops bearing machineguns into his nation’s supermarkets in order to ensure prices were not adjusted following yet another currency devaluation. Already as a child I had concluded that a nation was as good as its people: the United States was prosperous because Americans had brains, worked hard, and followed the rules; the Caribbean republics were poor because its citizens were stupid, lazy, and corrupt. Hence, replacing Europeans by Third World immigrants meant substituting Third World dysfunction for European civilization.

Also, why did not those literati move to the Third World, if they liked it so much, instead of trying to bring it here and impose it willy-nilly on everyone?

Another significant event was, of course, the terrorist attack of 9/11. After a busy morning in the office, I suddenly noticed that the telephone had fallen silent. My next and final telephone call for the day came from Santiago, Chile: one the artists on my label broke the news to me. As I initially did not believe him, he urged me to switch on the television. The moment I saw the smoke billowing up from the ruins I knew that this had been a consequence of the U. S. government’s Middle East policy. What else could it be?

Until that point, I did not particularly care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, frankly, having seen it constantly in the news for as long as I could remember, and it having long become apparent that it would never be resolved, I had rather hoped that the Israelis and the Palestinians would finish killing each other off for once and for all.

September 11, 2001 demonstrated the counter-productiveness of this approach: however distant and irrelevant it might seem in one’s daily affairs, ignoring a problem only makes it grow larger and get nearer. Because the U.S. government had maintained an unfair policy in that ugly corner of the world, I was suddenly having to endure lengthy delays at the airport, partially strip at the X-ray machine, eat with tiny plastic spoons aboard my flight, buy whole new sets of toiletries at my destination, pay higher fares, and worry about being blown up at 30,000 feet by a group of lunatics in the name of Allah.

And since the British government supported the abovementioned policy, this was all being done in my name, and funded with my tax money, even though I did not vote for that government or was ever asked whether I agreed with such a policy.

Some months later I came across a review of Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy on Judaism. Most of the critiques of Judaism I had encountered up until then had been somewhat nasty in tone. As to the conspiracy theories, they seemed completely insane, driven by visceral animus and an inborn need for order rather than induced through methodologically correct observation and dispassionate analysis. MacDonald seemed the only one offering a calm, reasoned, scientific study of the movement that promised adequately to explain widely held attitudes towards Jews. And his trilogy did deliver what it promised. Yet, while elaborating a parsimonious theory with predictive power, it was still sufficiently caveated, nuanced, and propositional to permit exceptions, deviation, variation, and even the possibility of error, to any ascribed cultural and behavioral group tendencies among Jews, Gypsies, and the overseas Chinese. MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy lacked the pretension of predicting a specific behavior on all individuals on the basis that five different intellectual movements shared characteristics that might perhaps have resulted from evolutionary pressures on a given population over a long period of historical time. Indeed, MacDonald’s identification of conflicts of interests arising from resource competition between populations might have equipped him with an opinion on his subject by the end of his study, but this is called learning, not mindless evil.

Having corresponded with him for a number of years, and having since met him in person, what strikes the most about Kevin MacDonald is how normal he is in real life. Anybody reading about him in the mainstream press would be forgiven for imagining that there is a monster in Long Beach: a uniquely perverse and vicious demon, bent on warping innocent young minds with his nutty anti-Semitic theories, which he elaborated simply because he wanted to justify to himself his irrational hatred for Jews. But the real Kevin MacDonald is relaxed, amiable, and unpretentious. And while there is a steely resolve beneath his polite professorial exterior, he is not in any way a hateful, impatient, or arrogant man. Where I encountered plenty of the latter was, in fact, in the post-graduate program of one of this country’s top universities. Hatefulness, arrogance, and pretension are qualities I have come to associate with the academic purveyors of Freudo-Marxist scholasticism. Dishonesty, prejudice, and bad scholarship are others.

Despite the insights gained from MacDonald’s study, I have not become obsessive about Jews.  They comprise an interesting subject, and the dynamics of resource competition between populations is well worth understanding, but I find the obsessive preoccupation some have with Jews unhealthy and rather tedious. Besides, they are not the only ones competing. Ethnic competition is a universal fact of life, so it is no use railing against competing groups; it is far more constructive to focus on solutions. Being a White person, I am preoccupied with European civilization — with continuing to have a space where I feel secure and at home, with all what that implies. Having realized my continued enjoyment of home and security has come under threat, I felt compelled to take an active role in of the neutralizing of this threat. What, otherwise, will I tell my children when they ask me where I was when it mattered?

This would not have been an issue for me had not our academic, political, and media establishment not proven so relentlessly obnoxious, and spent decades actively engaged in the effort to deprive me of a basic necessity.