Human Pre-History and the Making of the Races, Part 2: Genetic Distances

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Confirmation by modern genetic studies of the traditional racial classification categories

What are the percentages of genetic differences between the human races, indicating their relationships? Perhaps the best global scale study to date on this subject is still that of Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury from Evolutionary Relationships of Human Populations on a Global Scale (1993). Subsequent studies, which have included increasing numbers of alleles but have usually been regional rather than global in scale, have been consistent with Nei and Roychoudhury’s results. The following table (Fig. 1 below) of estimates of genetic differences between human populations is from their study.

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Human Pre-History and the Making of the Races, Part 1

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Since the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race there has been an increasing tendency to claim, based on Boasian anthropology and in promotion of a multiracialist agenda, that the human races are “socially constructed” and their existence is not supported by science, meaning not biologically and genetically real. This essay is an account, consistent with current scientific knowledge, of how the human races we know historically and today were really constructed.

The human species is blessed with great variety and diversity. Its rich diversity resulted from its global distribution, which caused the different populations of humanity to be geographically separated and thus reproductively isolated. Reproductive isolation enabled divergence — the process of divergent evolution — to occur, causing the isolated populations to evolve in different directions, developing their own distinct ensembles of genetic traits and characteristics.

Divergent evolution is the process by which new life forms are created by the division and separation of life into different branches. Human evolution has seen its share of divergent branching. The generic name commonly used to refer to the genetically different populations—that share a common biological ancestry that distinguishes them from other populations — is race. But in the human species, as in any species enjoying a great degree of variety, the constant branching and dividing that characterize the process of divergent evolution have created many different divisions, each of which possesses a genetic signature which distinguishes it from other divisions at the same level. For purposes of taxonomic accuracy each of these levels should have its own specific name and definition. The first or highest level is the species, and it is simply and objectively defined as including all those populations which are capable of interbreeding with each other and producing fully fertile offspring. The term race is commonly used to refer to a branch or division of the species possessing genetically transmitted physical traits (e.g., skin color) which distinguish it from other branches or divisions of the same level. Adding to this definition, it will here also be defined as including only those persons who are capable of reproduction with each other without alteration of the racially-distinctive genetic traits of either parent stock; that is, the genetically transmitted traits which distinguish a race from other divisions at the same level (i.e., other races) should not be diminished or lost by reproduction within the race. If racially-distinctive traits are lost or diminished by within-group reproduction then the population group is at a level of division too broad and inclusive to be accurately defined as a race. If it is too narrow to be defined as a species, as it does not include all those populations capable of interbreeding, then it is at a level between race and species, which will here be referred to as a subspecies. Read more

“Become other than White”: Ireland and Radical Jewish Activism

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“Five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [King of Munster], and they were sent back again over sea.”
           Annals of Inisfallen, 1079 A.D.

“I propose an interrogation of how the Irish nation can become other than white (Christian and settled), by privileging the voices of the racialised, and subverting state immigration, but also integration, policies.”
Ronit Lentin (Israeli academic), From racial state to racist state: Ireland on the eve of the citizenship referendum, 2007.

Prelude

Tairdelbach of Munster (Turlough O’Brien 1009–86), who was, by 1079, effectively the High King of Ireland, probably holds the world record for the fastest expulsion of Jews. He dominated the Irish political scene, had crushed the Viking leadership of Dublin, and possessed “the standard of the King of the Saxons.” His son had even commenced raids into Wales and the British coast. Unfortunately, we can only surmise the nuances of the 70-year-old warlord’s reaction to the sudden arrival of a handful of gift-bearing Jews, because the Annals of Inisfallen are thin on detail. The delegation almost certainly originated in Normandy, where Jews thrived under a symbiotic financial relationship with William the Conqueror. William, of course, had introduced Jews to Anglo-Saxon England thirteen years before the approach to Tairdelbach, leaving open the possibility they could have travelled directly to Ireland from one of these new Jewish enclaves in England. In any event, it is almost certain that they arrived seeking permission to settle in Ireland’s urban centers, forge a relationship with the Irish elite (Tairdelbach himself), and engage in exploitative moneylending among the lower social orders. This was a pattern that had hitherto been witnessed throughout Europe. And yet Tairdelbach’s reaction was to reject the gifts and immediately expel the Jews. They would not be able to form a community in Ireland for several centuries.

It’s probably no coincidence that Tairdelbach was regarded in his lifetime as a good and Christian king. He enjoyed close relationships with the Irish church, and the church in England, and was patron to a number of religious figures and scholars. He was almost certainly a literate and educated man, and his decision to expel the Jewish delegation may have been based on a body of knowledge rather than mere instinct. Historians Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien comment on the expulsion:

No one in Ireland had ever seen a Jewish person prior to this incident, yet the visitors are unambiguously described as “five Jews” (coicer Iudaide) and the Irish people already have a word for Jews, Iudaide, a medieval Gaelic word that clearly has its roots in the languages of classical antiquity. But more than that paradox, there is also a certain kind of cultural knowledge at work here. The medieval Irish who gave such short shrift to these Jewish guests “know” something about Jews, or more accurately they think some things about Jews: they “know” that Jews are not trustworthy, that Jews bearing gifts are not to be taken into one’s care. And Jews are not suitable for residence in Ireland – they should be expelled from the country.[1]

The impression is therefore that Tairdelbach was a savvy and selfless leader, who sought the good of his people more than the good of his own short-term financial situation. Read more

The Ministry of Minority-Worship: Gay Rights and the Goals of Globohomo

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The mark of a true prophet isn’t perfect accuracy, but powerful ideas. It’s impossible to foresee the future in every detail, but a true prophet should give us the ideas that explain what he doesn’t foresee. For example, in one way George Orwell got the future completely wrong in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In his totalitarian surveillance state, the Party harshly punishes “sexcrime,” which includes “all sexual misdeeds whatever [including] homosexuality and other perversions.”

Raising the rainbow

So homosexuality is a perversion and a serious crime on Airstrip One, the name Orwell gave to the British Isles. But what do the real British find in their own surveillance state in the 21st century? They find that homosexuality is actively celebrated by the thought-police. The cyber-snoopers at GCHQ (Government Communication Head-Quarters) are “the most extremist and invasive in the West,” according to Glenn Greenwald. In 2014, the cyber-snoopers “raised the rainbow flag on the GCHQ flagpole in Cheltenham for the first time to show all our staff that we value our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) colleagues and are a modern organisation that does not tolerate discrimination in any form.” That last claim is true in one way: GCHQ doesn’t discriminate in its invasion of privacy. It siphons up everything it can on everyone it can, collaborating with the American National Security Agency (NSA) and Israeli cyber-snoopers like Unit 8200. The NSA too actively celebrates homosexuality: in June 2019, which is Gay Pride Month “in much of the US,” it “posted a photo on Twitter of its secretive Maryland headquarters in rainbow colors,” boasting that: “At NSA, talented individuals of all backgrounds, contribute to something bigger than themselves: national security. #PrideMonth.”

Raising the rainbow at the NSA (above) and GCHQ (below)

Orwell didn’t foresee the celebration of homosexuality by totalitarians, but he did explain it. Totalitarian ideologies live by lies and contradiction. For example, the slave-state of North Korea, ruled by a hereditary dictatorship, proclaims itself a Democratic People’s Republic when it is neither democratic, popular, nor a republic. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote of how “the names of the four Ministries by which [the oppressed population is] governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” Read more

Review: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, Part 2

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Go to Part 1.

Zionist Eugenics

Notions of race and racial competition pervaded Zionist thinking in the early to mid-twentieth century, a time when “volkisch conceptions were firmly established among Zionist intellectuals.”[i] Raphael Falk notes how “Zionist writers appealed to biological conceptions of race and nation and displayed an awareness of their responsibility not only to serve this biologically circumscribed ethnic group but also to propagate and improve it.”[ii] Many Zionists viewed evolutionary theory “as a conceptual framework for understanding the detrimental effects of Diaspora life and argued for the positive benefits that would accrue to Jews in Palestine.” Weikart observes that many “Jewish physicians, feminists and sexual reformers embraced eugenics,” and that leading Jewish anthropologists “embraced scientific racism” in the early twentieth century.”[iii] 

Several leading Jewish physicians and educators became flag bearers of a campaign to promote the eugenic aspects of Zionism. In 1922, the Zionist physician Mordechai Bruchov emphasized that: “In the struggle of nations, in the clandestine ‘cultural’ struggle of one nation with another, the one wins who provides for the improvement of the race, to the benefit of the biological value of the progeny.”[iv] Parental guidance articles and books published in Palestine from the 1920s emphasized “the purity of the race and the quality of children required to improve the nation,” which “subsequently shifted to the need to increase the birthrate in order to catch up with the high birthrate of the neighboring nations.”[v] Jewish biologist Fritz S. Bodenheimer (1897–1959), the son of one of Theodor Herzl’s closest allies, likewise stressed “the external threat posed by the faster reproductive rate of the Arab population.”[vi] Child care in Israel has long been conceived “as part of a national project” where “every mother who raised her child in Israel, in the past and at present, is conscious that this is not only her personal task, but rather a national task the climax of which – at the age of eighteen – is the recruitment of the Zionist baby to the nation’s army.”[vii] Read more

Review: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, Part 1

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Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory is an important dimension of modern Jewish history and thought. While Jewish leaders and intellectuals have used the science of evolution to bolster notions of Jewish identity, they have also confronted and (often fiercely resisted) the use of evolutionary theory to conceptualize conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Published in 2006, Geoffrey Cantor’s Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism,  by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, explores the ways Jews – singly and communally – have engaged evolutionary thought in a variety of historical contexts, and the role it has played in modern Jewish history. A central focus of the book is exploring how evolutionary ideas have been deployed, by Jews and others, in the domains of race, anti-Semitism, and Zionism, and the recurrent use over the last century and a half of evolutionary ideas to characterize Jews.

Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) postulated natural selection as the driving force for biological evolution: that individuals in any species show a diversity of inherited characteristics and compete for the scarce resources needed to survive and reproduce. If certain characteristics benefit them in that competition, these are more likely to be passed on to the next generation and, consequently, the species will evolve over time. By the time Darwin’s book was published the transformation of species was a familiar theme, but Darwin was the first to publicly explicate the precise mechanism. While socialists and communists soon deployed Darwinian evolution in their antireligious polemics, it also attracted conservative and nationalistic thinkers. Darwin’s theory could, for example, be seen to justify unfettered capitalism. Indeed, the centrality of competition in the process of natural selection raised a host of moral issues for a Christian West. The advent of Darwinism also spawned a new way of conceptualizing race and racial competition. Read more

A nação global

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20 de julho de 2019

A Idade Moderna, que começou com a chegada de Cristóvão Colombo à América, caracteriza-se pela ligação cada vez maior entre as sociedades do mundo e pela cada vez menor distinção de seus limites. Esse fenômeno vem ganhando intensidade ao longo do tempo com a disparada tecnológica dos meios de transporte e telecomunicação, o que se fez acompanhar de tendências intelectuais em ascensão, como ideologias internacionalistas e antinacionais. Nós podemos definir o globalismo como a inclinação, ao mesmo tempo consciente e inconsciente, para a destruição da diferença e da autonomia das nações e estados, alegadamente em favor de uma sociedade mundial politicamente mais harmoniosa. O globalismo ignora a realidade das diferenças raciais e a poderosa natureza da identidade étnica, fatores que estão na raiz dos conflitos e tensões inevitáveis em toda sociedade multirracial e multiétnica.

Existem elementos materiais vigorosos conducentes à dissolução dos limes nacionais. Ocorrem ganhos de eficiência quando o trabalho e o comércio podem cruzar fronteiras. Há, além disso, bilhões de seres humanos com vontade de deixar as condições miseráveis de onde vivem no Terceiro Mundo e ingressar nos nossos países para gozar vida mais confortável e segura, o que se compreende. Não será pela inércia da situação ou pela nostalgia conservadora que essas pressões poderão ser anuladas. Até o Japão, ainda homogêneo em grande medida, começa a perceber número significativo de imigrantes fenotipicamente diferentes (principalmente indianos e filipinos). Recentemente, aliás, um indiano saiu vitorioso de eleição local em Tóquio. Na verdade, a oposição à imigração exige consciência e doutrina de resistência em nome do bem-estar econômico e social dos nativos, da preservação de sua identidade cultural e genética e da sua soberania.

Depois da II Guerra Mundial, os internacionalistas pretenderam, compreensivelmente, impedir novos conflitos entre os Estados, engajando-os em  instituições internacionais (Nações Unidas, União Europeia…) e redes comerciais, sob hegemonia ideológica liberal-democrática. Esperava-se que isso fosse criar uma comunidade de interesses que fizesse da guerra entre as grandes nações uma coisa impensável.

No pós-guerra, os dirigentes que criaram essas instituições internacionais, gente como Dwight Eisenhower ou Konrad Adenauer, não tinham a intenção de destruir suas respectivas nações. Ao contrário, estando cientes dos terríveis massacres das guerras étnicas na Europa Oriental, esses homens geralmente viam a existência de estados-nações distintos e homogêneos como fator de paz. Os inúmeros conflitos étnicos no Terceiro Mundo, na Iugoslávia ou nas antigas repúblicas soviéticas e as intratáveis tensões e confrontações em toda sociedade multirracial levam a crer que eles tinham razão. Read more