The Censor’s Handbook

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More people and organizations are legally fighting back against smear campaigns and libel.

Editor’s note: We on the dissident right are under siege. A number of major figures are battling bogus but expensive lawsuits stemming from Charlottesville. Others have been banned from social media or have seen their accounts restricted in various ways. Many sites, including TOQ and TOO, have been denied financial services that facilitate donations. Most devastatingly, people have been fired from their jobs as a result of a simple phone call from the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Tom Kawcyznski, the author of this article, is one of those who have lost their livelihood and their reputation within their local community as a result of this evil. TOO has posted a review of Tom’s book, Someone Has to Say It: The Hidden History of How America Was Lost. This book recounts his experiences in losing his position as town manager for Jackman, Maine, but also shows someone who has thought deeply about all the issues facing White America. Since his firing, he has been a fearless and honest warrior in our struggle. 

The good news is that there is increasing pushback against these efforts to stifle our ideas. Attorney Glen Allen has sued the SPLC as a result of being fired by the city of Baltimore. Jared Taylor is suing Twitter for banning him from the social media site. And the Center for Immigration Studies, a non-profit critical of immigration is suing the SPLC because the SPLC labeled it a “hate group” simply for criticizing immigration. If the legal system retains any integrity, all of these lawsuits have a good chance of prevailing. Of course, our legal system, like our other institutions, has been corrupted, so the outcomes of these cases are far from certain.

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Amendment I – United States Constitution

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Americans assume based on long practice and as a cherished principle that the freedom of speech, encapsulated within the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights, offers universal protection to free exercise of political opinions — provided the basic constraint that one cannot advocate for bodily harm to another.  Our country has risen to international preeminence and global hegemony on this basis.  The Internet, our latest and greatest contribution, has served as a powerful force for human liberation in thought and practice by spreading this understanding to new regions.  Yet, for all the good it has done, never has this most basic freedom been under greater assault or in more perilous jeopardy.

Knowledge is power. Those with knowledge have always recognized this truth and tried to keep awareness of what is happening in the world away from others who don’t share their interests. From the shamans of tribes, to the clergy of the Church, or the mandarins of an imperial court, restricting knowledge has ever been the way by which the powerful maintained their supremacy over the people.  We imagine ourselves living in a world apart from those concerns, and our ignorance and apathy are enabling the creation of a censorship system so subtle and complete that we will not even realize it exists.

The single recurring conspiracy in human affairs has been the willingness of those with power, especially when representing institutions with authority and substantial assets, to do anything to maintain their status.  In our world, this represents a consortium of multinational corporations and the largest governments with which they constantly do business.  For these actors, life is good, and the globalism promises a united tomorrow, more profits, and more power. It is only threatened by those nagging voices who cry out for the old ways: nationalists, racial identitarians, Christian traditionalists, and anyone else who holds principles that depart from the new consensus of materialism/consumerism/relativism. All are all targeted without respect to their ideologies. They are targeted if and only if they are seen as threatening the state/corporate duopoly. Read more

Populism in the Liberal Mind: A Review of Brexit: The Uncivil War

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I recently had the opportunity to watch Channel 4’s made-for-TV movie The Uncivil War, which recreates the story of the June 2016 British referendum on withdrawal from the European Union, commonly known as “Brexit.” Personally, I am not a fan of biopics and docudramas covering very recent history. More time needs to pass before we can get the perspective necessary to judge events. In the case of this film, the storytelling is very much distorted by the contemporary manias of the liberal mind. That is instructive in itself.

The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Dr. Strange . . .) as Dominic Cummins, the chairman of the official Leave Campaign. Cummins is portrayed as brilliant, irascible, and indeed intellectual (he’s spent all spring reading Thucydides and Tolstoy, we are told with no subtlety). He’s a maverick, who would flourish if only the suits would let him play by his own rules, a typical TV trope. Cummins is too smart, too ahead of the curve for the old-fashioned British politicians to understand. He’ll have to impose his online campaign strategy by hook or by crook. And he did so, with great success. We are never shown Cummins’ motivations in leading the charge for Brexit. He comes across as largely amoral.

As depicted in the film, Cummins’ main strategic decisions are twofold. First, the rejection of any collaboration with Nigel Farage and UKIP. For you and me, Farage may be a funny bloke to watch on TV, but he and UKIP are a pretty thin gruel indeed. Hovever, for the writers of Uncivil War, these folks are already beyond the pale. They are no more than unscrupulous troglodytes. In particular UKIP financier Arron Banks, played by Lee Boardman, is portrayed as gratuitously vicious and petty. Second, a ban on explicit discussion of immigration by the Leave Campaign. Instead, Leave would emphasize the EU’s cost to the UK (allegedly £350 million per week) and potential Turkish membership of the EU. (That’s a good dog whistle, since Turkey is, ridiculously, an official candidate country to join the EU, although is unlikely to join for the foreseeable future.) These two strategic decisions tell you how policed things are in mainstream UK politics. Read more

On Yellow Vests and Monsters

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“Any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-right populism, betrays class struggle.”
Slavoj Žižek, The Philosophical Salon, 2019.

Commenting on the political aspects of Shelley’s life and poetry, Virginia Woolf asserted in 1927 that the poet’s England “has already receded, and his fight, valiant though it is, seems to be with monsters who are a little out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous.” Woolf was referring to Shelley’s nineteenth-century opposition to a system in which journalists were imprisoned for being disrespectful to the Prince Regent, men were stood in stocks for publishing attacks upon the Scriptures, weavers were executed upon the suspicion of treason, and boys (Shelley included) were expelled from Oxford for avowing their atheism. Dramatic in its own time and context, by the decadent mid-1920s such activism had indeed become a little anachronistic on paper, even if I disagree with Woolf that it had become slightly ridiculous. The exertion of political power, after all, is a monster that may change costume and migrate in certain seasons, but is also a fixed reality of human relations and therefore no more ridiculous, in any guise or era, than the people it rests upon.

The profundity of Woolf’s comment, for me, therefore lies less in its discussion of Shelley’s poetry than in its exposure of Woolf’s own interwar sense of political security. It is this sense of political security that today seems the more out of date, and therefore slightly ridiculous, especially as we live in an age where the monsters of the past, present, and putative future, are perpetually invoked in all areas of life. Today, people are imprisoned for being disrespectful to certain races, men are stood in the postmodern equivalent of stocks for attacking certain ideologies, workers are today arrested more often for patriotism than treason, and children are threatened with expulsion for the new sin of ‘racism.’ Woolf’s smug security, and not Shelley’s poetic demonology of the political, thus seems quaint at a time when everything in the tumultuous present is discussed via reference to monsters that may at any moment return from their slumber or drop their mask, and are certainly not to be laughed at.

How does one fight today’s monsters, and who is fighting them? One of the most interesting aspects of the persistent Yellow Vest protests, about to enter their tenth weekend and once more growing in size, is that they have been claimed by almost everyone on the political spectrum. As such, no-one is yet clear as to what monsters the Yellow Vests fight, or which monsters the movement itself may give birth to. Although coming from an avowedly Marxist/Maoist perspective, Slavoj Žižek is almost certainly correct is his recent assertion that:

The yellow vests movement fits the specific French Left tradition of large public protests targeting the political, more than the business or financial, elites. However, in contrast to the 68’ protests, the yellow vests are much more a movement of France profonde (“deep France”), its revolt against big metropolitan areas, which means that its Leftist orientation is much more blurred. (Both le Pen and Melenchon support the protests.) As expected, commentators are asking which political force will appropriate the energy of the revolt, le Pen or a new Left, with purists demanding that it remain a “pure” protest movement at a distance from established politics. One should be clear here: in all the explosion of demands and expression of dissatisfaction, it is clear the protesters don’t really know what they want. They don’t have a vision of a society they want, just a mix of demands that are impossible to meet within the system, even though they address them at the system.

Attempts to define the protesters in simple terms appear doomed to failure. Not only have factions of French Yellow Vest protesters been filmed fighting each other in Paris, but in almost every attempt to export this protest model there have been similar splits and fights, as competing groups attempt to see themselves, and only themselves, in the Rorschach of riotous assembly. Most recently, in London, pro-Brexit Yellow Vest protesters and anti-Brexit Yellow Vest protesters clashed at Trafalgar Square, with reports of both sides calling each other ‘Nazis.’ Both the collapse into Yellow Vest vs Yellow Vest, and the mutual use of the ‘Nazi’ pejorative, are illustrative of the wider confusion of ideology and childish terror in the face of name-calling in postmodern politics. These phenomena also illustrate the fact that, as Žižek points out, none of these groups have a vision of a society they want (or will admit to wanting). One guide to characters in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is titled “Who’s Who When Everybody is Somebody Else?” — a question that could as easily be put to the labyrinthine and evasive nature of a postmodern political activism in which identities are claimed and simultaneously disavowed by all concerned. Read more

Norman Podhoretz on Jewish Liberals

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Editor’s note: This review is from 2010, originally posted at Altright.com, and it appeared in Radix. However, it seems to have disappeared from the internet. And in any case it raises important issues, particularly Jewish perceptions of their own history, that bear repetition. We Westerners have a sense of our history — a traditional pride in accomplishment that has now been propagandized into guilt for past sins. Jewish conceptions of Jewish history are much different. Jews are proud of the many Jews who have achieved wealth and other markers of success, but they tend to be virtually obsessed with what they see as their persecution of blameless Jews, especially in Western societies. This has major effects on Jewish activism in the contemporary world. And given the power and influence that Jews now have throughout the West, its importance cannot be overstated. Andrew Joyce’s work on historical anti-Semitism, much of it posted on TOO, as well as my book Separation and Its Discontents and the work of several other mainstream historians (e.g., John Klier and Albert Lindeman), are attempts to provide a more balanced perspective. But, not surprisingly, they have fallen on deaf ears within the mainstream Jewish community.

Some aspects of this review require an update. Podhoretz makes a major point that the right is more sympathetic to Israel than the left. Whereas some on the right, such as Pat Buchanan, are critical of Israel, they tend to emphasize the disastrous influence of the Israel Lobby on U.S. foreign policy, while the left emphasizes Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians. I argued against Podhoretz’s position, but since 2010, the left has become increasingly anti-Israel, particularly in the U.K. where the Labour Party is routinely labeled “anti-Semitic” and the great majority of Jews no longer support it. In the U.S., only around half of Democrats support Israel, and the 2018 election brought in radical leftists, such as Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib, who have been vociferous opponents of Israel.

Nevertheless, it is far from obvious that the anti-Israel component of the left will actually gain power, either in the U.K. or the U.S. Although Jews have indeed stopped being major funders of the Labour Party, they remain a backbone of the Democrats, and this is not likely to change any time soon. Among likely presidential candidates, only Tulsi Gabbard has deviated from standard Israel Lobby positions in the Middle East, opposing U.S. military interventions and “forever wars.” 

Norman Podhoretz
Why Are Jews Liberals?
Vintage, 2010

Norman Podhoretz is something of an anomaly in the American Jewish community. His entire life is centered around his Jewishness, but he sees himself as an outsider in the mainstream Jewish community. He shares a great many of the attitudes typical of that community, but draws different conclusions about how to navigate the contemporary American political landscape in a way that’s “good for the Jews.”

Podhoretz’s Lachrymose View of Jewish History

One area where Podhoretz is absolutely mainstream among American Jews is his sense of history. The first half of the book lays out his version of the “lachrymose” theory of Jewish history in Europe and America in which the Diaspora has been one long vale of tears since the beginnings of Christianity. Whether or not this view of history is correct (and quite a few of his claims are simply wrong), the important point is that this is how the great majority of Diaspora Jews see themselves and their history. (My view is that our evolved ingroup/outgroup psychology and real conflicts of interest are by far the most important contributors to the main historical outbreaks of anti-Jewish feeling.)

This lachrymose view has major implications for understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora. It proposes that, beginning with an unfortunate theological belief (that Jews killed God), Jews have been passive, innocent victims of marauding non-Jews.

The lesson that Jews learned from the Middle Ages carries down to today: The Jews “emerged from the Middle Ages knowing for a certainty that — individual exceptions duly noted — the worst enemy they had in the world was Christianity: the churches in which it was embodied — whether Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox or Protestant — and the people who prayed in and were shaped by them. It was a knowledge that Jewish experience in the ages to come would do very little, if indeed anything at all, to help future generations to forget” (p. 29). Read more

Darwin on the Rise and Fall of Human Races, Part 2 of 2

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Go to Part 1.

On the Human Races

According to Darwin, human races have emerged as a natural consequence of their spreading across the globe, leading to their separate evolution in relative reproductive isolation. As a result of their prolonged separation in different environmental and socio-cultural conditions, humans show differences on a variety of traits; these differences were also shaped through the constant culling of individuals and societies in perpetual tribal warfare. It follows that races are expected to differ. Darwin took the heredity of mental traits and mental differences between races as inseparably entailing one another: “Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind” (148).

In The Descent of Man, Darwin is primarily dedicated to proving that human beings are descended from lower, animal forms of life: “It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion” (43). Darwin is only quite secondarily interested in discussing the differences between human races. He nonetheless endorsed the racial science of his day, observing that “the differences between the several races” was “an enormous subject which has been fully discussed in many valuable works” (18).

Darwin takes for granted the existence of physical and psychological differences between both men and women and between human races: “Man differs from woman in size, bodily strength, hairiness, &c., as well as in mind, in the same manner as do the two sexes of many mammals” (25). Darwin lists numerous areas in which human races differ. The “civilised races” have an inferior sense of smell, inferior eyesight, and smaller wisdom teeth than do “dark races” and “savages” (35, 37, 52). Human races differ in the presence of earlobes (32), hairiness (36), skull length (44), and prognathism (58).

There is . . . no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other, — as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain.[1] But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitutions, in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans, who live under these same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea. (196)

Darwin praises “the old Greeks” in particular as an exceptionally gifted people “which stood some grades higher in intellect than any race that has ever existed” (166). Read more

Darwin on the Rise and Fall of Human Races, Part 1 of 2

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Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin, 2004 [reprint of second edition, London: John Murray, 1879]).

Western intellectual life today is characterized by a marked schizophrenia. On the one hand, virtually everyone accepts the scientific theory of Charles Darwin concerning the emergence and evolution of the various species in the world, including humanity, through the process natural selection. The only exceptions to this rule are a few Creationist hold-outs. On the other hand, our culture denies the biological reality of race and the relevance of hereditarian thinking to human societies. Our egalitarian culture rejects heredity’s implications in toto — both the descriptive (in-born human differences between individuals and races) and prescriptive (e.g. eugenics). Given how taboo racialist thinking still is, it is then useful — in order to think freely — to go back to the roots of evolutionary thinking by looking at what Darwin himself had to say about human evolution and racial differences.

The concept of race or lineage is central to Darwin’s evolutionary thinking. His classic The Origin of Species is indeed subtitled By Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In one place, Darwin defines a race as the “successive generations” of a particular population (102). Darwin’s model for evolutionary change is simple and powerful: every species will tend to bear too many offspring, leading to overpopulation, a huge percentage of these will die before reaching maturity or in competition with others (whether of the same species or not), those who survive this struggle will be those with the traits best suited for their particular environment. The constant generation and culling of “races,” that is to say new of populations with different traits, is then central to his system, which also applies to human evolution.

The foundation of Darwin’s entire system is the reality of heredity — that the offspring of plants, animals, and humans tend to inherit the physical and/or mental characteristics of their parents. Concerning humans, Darwin follows the observations of the ancient philosophers in asserting that man’s specificity is in being both a social and rational creature.[1] This, along with his free hands, have enabled humanity’s remarkable conquest of the Earth: our intelligence and dexterity allowed our prehistoric forbears to fashion tools, our social instincts enabled us to work together to bring down much larger animals, and the combination gave us a unique ability to adapt to the most varied environments. Darwin says concerning intelligence and sociability: “The supreme importance of these characters has been proved by the final arbitrament of the battle for life” (68). Our hands and brains were incidentally developed at considerable cost: we are awkward bipeds and the tension between enormous heads and narrow hips means that childbirth is quite dangerous to our women. Read more

M. R. James and Saki: Two Literary Greats and their Anti-Semitism

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Megalomaniacs dream of ruling the world. Philosophers dream of understanding it — ideally from an armchair. Armchair-understanding is what I’m going to attempt in this article. After all, armchairs are good places for reading. I want to take two short stories by famous English writers and use them to address an important question: Do Jews seek to control gentile societies for their own ends?

Serpents and Waspes

This is also a dangerous question. Any Westerner who answers it in the affirmative will certainly lose his reputation and might lose his income and liberty too. These negative consequences prove the wickedness of the proposition, of course, and not its truth. Or do they? The writers M.R. James (1862–1936) and Saki, born Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), might have said otherwise. Each of them was responsible for poisoning the well of English literature with doses of anti-Semitism, which is sometimes called the Longest Hatred.

Painting by Burne-Jones for “The Prioress’s Tale”

It’s called that with good reason: the well had already been poisoned for centuries when those two writers were born. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342–1400) is known as the “Father of English Literature” and was the author of The Canterbury Tales, which dates from about 1380. He wrote in “The Prioress’s Tale” of a pious Christian child ritually murdered by Jews at the instigation of “the serpent Sathanas,/That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest … .” (see modern version) In the tale, a miracle reveals the crime to the grieving mother and the Jews responsible are hanged. Chaucer concludes his hate-narrative with a prayer to “yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also/With cursed Jewes.” Read more