Greek Biopolitics and Its Unfortunate Demise in Western Thinking

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Mika Ojakangas, On the Origins of Greek Biopolitics: A Reinterpretation of the History of Biopower
London and New York: Routledge, 2016

Mika Ojakangas is a professor of political theory, teaching at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He has written a succinct and fairly comprehensive overview of ancient Greek thought on population policies and eugenics, or what he terms “biopolitics.” Ojakangas says:

In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics (sexual intercourse, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, public health, education, birthrate, migration, immigration, economy, and so forth) from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. At issue is not only a politics for which “the idea of governing people” is the leading idea but also a politics for which the question how “to organize life” (tou zên paraskeuên) (Plato, Statesman, 307e) is the most important question. (6)

The idea of regulating and cultivating human life, just as one would animal and plant life, is then not a Darwinian, eugenic, or Nazi modern innovation, but, as I have argued concerning Plato’s Republic, can be found in a highly developed form at the dawn of Western civilization. As Ojakangas says:

The idea of politics as control and regulation of the living in the name of the security, well-being and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as Western political thought itself, originating in classical Greece. Greek political thought, as I will demonstrate in this book, is biopolitical to the bone. (1)

Greek thought had nothing to do with the modern obsessions with supposed “human rights” or “social contracts,” but took the good to mean the flourishing of the community, and of individuals as part of that community, as an actualization of the species’ potential: “In this biopolitical power-knowledge focusing on the living, to repeat, the point of departure is neither law, nor free will, nor a contract, or even a natural law, meaning an immutable moral rule. The point of departure is the natural life (phusis) of individuals and populations” (6). Okajangas notes: “for Plato and Aristotle politics was essentially biopolitics” (141). Read more

Marketing Miscegenation

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Since “cutting the cable” several years ago, I have felt secure behind my own personal immigration wall, free of the barrage of marketing demands and political poltroons upon my time and money. During the Christmas holidays, however, I ventured onto the major networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS) with an external antenna affixed to the TV to satisfy my curiosity of what had been happening in the “real” world since my self-imposed exile.

My attention was immediately attracted to a commercial featuring the Paddington Bear. In the commercial a non-traditional looking Santa is aided by Paddington Brown in sorting Christmas presents for one particular family. At the end, all is well as Santa and Paddington peer through the window at the family enjoying opening presents under the tree in their living room.

The family was composed of the mother, who was an auburn-haired White woman, the father, who was Black, and their mixed-race children, a boy and a girl.

I was not shocked or even surprised at this portrayal of miscegenated merriment, as I naively assumed it was an isolated attempt by the commercial’s creator to appeal to two different segments of the consuming public with one commercial.

I was wrong.

As I continued to watch TV that day, it didn’t take long for the intrusive appeal of the commercials to outweigh that of the programs. There were simply so many of these commercials featuring mixed-race families and couples that I suspected something else was being presented. Read more

Jews and Jewish organizations lead the gun control campaign

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Given the Parkland shootings, I thought it appropriate to rerun this article, originally posted on January 1, 2013. See also Andrew Joyce’s article, “Jews and gun control: A reprise.” 

In Cooper Sterling’s TOO article (“Guns, profiling and White males“), he notes

The Left’s irrational obsession with gun control goes beyond the latest mass shooting. It is endemic among the cosmopolitan literati, who loathe Middle America, to dwell on the risks associated with firearms while disregarding or minimizing the benefits of firearm ownership. …

Anyone monitoring the national scene since Newtown is witnessing an emotional antipathy toward the last trace of political leverage among an identifiable demographic: an overwhelmingly White male gun culture. What the MSM and gun control advocates ultimately detest is the gun culture in America, which is too White, too male, and too conservative. …

The tradition of gun ownership is as old as the Republic. It reflects the pre-1965 demographic of America as an overwhelmingly White—and more civilized—nation. As a native Midwesterner, guns were rampant in our neighborhoods where few homes didn’t have some sort of firearm. We came of age hunting with our fathers, uncles and cousins, acquiring rifles and shotguns in our mid-teens.

An article from The Forward notes that the Jewish community has taken the lead in gun control and that part of it is hostility toward the  gun culture of White America that is especially apparent in rural White America. Jews “instinctively recoil” from this culture (“After Newtown Jews lead renewed push on guns“).

Jewish organizations pride themselves on gun control stances that date back to the early days of the debate, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and of President Kennedy. Most played a supportive role in passing legislation then limiting access to weapons, and have since reaffirmed their commitment to reducing the availability of guns.
One reason for broad Jewish support of gun control, Mariaschin said, has to do with the community’s sense of security, “which perhaps leads us to feel that the possession of assault weapons is completely unneeded.”
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, former head of the Reform movement, listed in a recent Haaretz article several reasons for Jews siding with supporters of gun control: the community’s affiliation with the Democratic Party; the fact that Jews are urban people and detached from the culture of hunting or gun ownership, and suspicion toward the NRA, which is “associated in the minds of many Jews with extremist positions that frighten Jews and from which they instinctively recoil.” Read more

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     The Occidental Quarterly provides scholarly articles on Western history and culture. Articles are written from a variety of perspectives, including intellectual history, evolutionary biology, behavior genetics, and ethnic studies. The Winter 2017 issue (Vol. 17, no. 4) contains 136 pages of content.

     In the Fall issue, Brenton Sanderson reviewed Roger Scruton’s book which attempts to defend Richard Wagner against academic Jewish activists who have attempted, with some success, to denigrate Wagner’s musical genius because of his attitudes on Jews. This is a continuing theme. In this Winter issue, Dr. Andrew Joyce, who has written previous articles on similar attempts to destroy the reputations of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, discusses the attempt to erase the legacy of a lesser-known figure, poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers was originally attacked because he, like other patriots such as Charles Lindbergh, was opposed to U.S. entry into World War II.

     Dr. Ricardo Duchesne’s article on Johann Christian Herder has a similar purpose—pushing back against academic activists who have attempted to portray Herder as a proponent of multiculturalism. These activists seek to find support for the current dispossession of Europeans among the intellectual giants of the European past.

     Perhaps the greatest disaster of the post-World War II era is that the left has abandoned the White working class in favor of massive non-White immigration and multiculturalism. Here Dr. Brian Thorn reviews the opposition to Asian immigration from working-class Canadians in the nineteenth century. As in the U.S., the Canadian labor movement strongly opposed immigration, with much of their rhetoric opposed to the capitalists who profited from cheap labor, but often shading into what today would be labeled “racism.” The parallels to the contemporary world are obvious.

     Guillaume Durocher continues his series of articles on the ancient Greeks. In this issue, he reviews how Herodotus viewed culture and nationhood, concluding that he viewed an adaptive society in a manner quite the opposite of the modern liberal worldview. Herodotus emphasized the importance of familial and ethnic kinship, creating a strong sense of being an ingroup, promoting reproduction, and emphasizing manly virtues of military prowess.

     Dr. Joyce also has an extended review of Benjamin Ginsberg’s How the Jews Defeated Hitler. Ginsberg’s book illustrates the intensity of Jewish activism in a broad range of areas, from guerilla operations against the German army, to a major role in the officer corps of the Soviet army, code breaking, Hollywood propaganda, and influence on financial policy in the Roosevelt administration. He concludes that it is a serious mistake to underestimate the ability of Jews to influence events important to them.

     There are three shorter reviews:

  • Nelson Rosit provides an essentially positive review of Jim Penman’s An Epigenetic Explanation for the Decline of the West.
  • Tobias Langdon provides a scathing review of Richard Dawkins’ Science in the Soul, noting Dawkins’ studied blindness to natural selection against his own people occurring in the contemporary West.
  • And finally, Dr. Robert S. Griffin reviews George Hawley’s Making Sense of the Alt Right, concluding that Hawley’s politically correct attitudes are on display despite his insistence that his is a clinical, unbiased study. Dr. Griffin concludes that with a book like this, Hawley is will on his way to getting tenure at his university.

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TOQ Winter 2017-2018

Let’s agree Trump is a racist (properly defined). Good for him!

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The New York Times recently published an “op-ed” piece titled, “Trump is a Racist. Period.” by Charles Blow.

Charles Blow is an angry middle-aged Black man who writes a twice-weekly column for the Times. He’s divorced with three kids and openly bisexual. Mr Blow graduated Magna Cum Laude from Grambling.

Professionally, Mr Blow is definitely obsessed with “racism.” Which is pretty much the prerequisite for Black “op-ed” writers in major newspapers (scream “racism” and scream it loudly). Come to think of it, I can’t recall the last time I read an op-ed piece by a Black columnist that wasn’t in some way correlated with racism. The last one I remember was in the Dallas Morning News, in which the author theorized that high Black mortality rates were due to a combination of cruel treatment by White doctors and a lack of Black doctors. She even went so far as to blame the City of Dallas for not producing more Black doctors — all the direct result of systemic racism, of course, not the fact that a minimum of 120 IQ is needed to meet the intellectual requirements of an MD (85 is avg Black IQ).

If you review Mr Blow’s articles, the subject matter may change to some degree, but the premise is usually the same: “Racism” this. “White supremacy” that. Trump called Haiti a “shithole” and played golf on MLK day, so that proves once and for all that he’s a racist. Blah, blah, blah. Nothing of substance, only stale garrulity.

Even when Mr Blow’s commentary isn’t focused explicitly on “racism,” such as his recent piece regarding the Mueller investigation into Russia, there is still an implicit racial undertone. It’s seems as if he fantasizes about radical racism:

If this were Barack Obama, Tiki-torch-toting Nazis would have descended on the White House and burned it to the ground. Not only that, America’s racist folks masquerading as religious folks would have used Obama’s moral failing as proof of a black pathology.

However, my purpose isn’t to critique Mr Blow’s efforts at perfecting the art of literary victimhood, but rather his opinions. After all, freedom of speech is one of the pillars of “White supremacy.” Which, ironically enough, enables people like Mr Blow to publicly call the most powerful man in the world racial epithets on a daily basis. The fact is that if Mr Blow couldn’t write about “racism,” he wouldn’t have anything to write about. Read more

Who Was George Lincoln Rockwell?

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George Lincoln Rockwell

I suppose most readers of this publication have heard of George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967), but some may not know much about him.  For those unfamiliar with Rockwell, perhaps this writing, drawn from my book on the late William Pierce, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds, will provide a sense of him.

George Lincoln Rockwell was a tall, slim, dark-haired, good-looking fellow in his forties when, for a few years in the 1960s, he became a prominent figure in American life.  Rockwell billed himself as the Commander of the American Nazi Party, which he founded and headquartered at Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.   He had twenty or so active participants in his organization, and a few hundred subscribed to his publications, Stormtrooper and The Rockwell Report.

Rockwell projected a dashing, rakish image with his corncob pipe, and tended to approach things with a showbiz touch.  His public rallies, with him surrounded by “stormtroopers” and American and Nazi flags and decked out like Hitler in a brown uniform and boots and a swastika armband greeting his audience with the Roman salute, had a theatrical and, to many, frightening quality.  In his speeches Rockwell railed against Jews for being behind communism and scheming to mongrelize the American racial stock by promoting racial integration and interbreeding with blacks.  He called for resettling American blacks in Africa in a new African state at public expense.

Rockwell was both serious and tongue-in-cheek.  In response to the freedom rides, as they were called, where civil rights activists rode buses in the South to integrate interstate bus travel, Rockwell and some of his fellow Nazis drove a “hate bus” through the South.  With reference to the strong Jewish presence among psychoanalysts and therapists, Rockwell put out a pamphlet that gave instructions on “how to combat the Jew mental health attack.”  And there was his booklet, “The Diary of Ann Fink.”

I came upon an audiotape of a Rockwell speech to a college audience in November of 1966.  The speech was given at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where Rockwell had been a student before the outbreak of World War II.  I presume the audience was made up primarily of Brown students and faculty.

Rockwell’s speech took about an hour.  He had an upbeat manner and a rapid-fire speaking style reminiscent of a standup comic (“Let me tell you, ladies and gentleman . . .”).  There was a lightness and likeability about him: he wasn’t dark or harsh, although there were a few moments where he got a bit testy. Read more