Ethnocentrism

“The Evolution of Prejudice”: Less than advertised

A recent article in Scientific American (“The Evolution of Prejudice: Scientists see the beginnings of racism in monkeys“) is less than advertised. The study shows that monkeys are sensitive to group boundaries–they are especially concerned with monkeys from outgroups even if they are former ingroup members with whom they are familiar. But even if true it would not provide a firm evolutionary basis for negative attitudes toward other races because the negative attitudes on occur if those other races are in different groups. The monkeys are keying on the group status of the other monkeys, not on genetic differences.

In fact, evolutionary psychologists have been busy showing that if one sets up two very very clearly marked racially integrated groups (i.e., with different colored uniforms–exactly the situation in most sports), people have negative views toward the outgroup that are independent of race (Cosmides, L., J., Tooby,  & R. Kurzban. (2003). Perceptions of race. Trends in Cognitive Science 7:173–179).  Read more

Rachel Maddow on Jim Russell

Jim Russell, who is the Republican candidate for New York’s 18th Congressional District, is busy combating accusations about his association with The Occidental Quarterly. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s take is a classic example of the power of the media to create an alternate reality where facts don’t matter and where simply stating Russell’s opinions is enough to create mild amusement in her audience benumbed by decades of leftist propaganda. No need to note that Russell is a scholar who has a Ph. D. and has written a book published by Oxford University Press on how Christianity was influenced by German culture during the early Middle Ages. No need for any informed scholarly opinions on his statements in the article in question. If that well-informed anthropologist and psychologist Rachel Maddow thinks something is outlandish, then it must be outlandish. End of story.

Maddow starts by labeling TOQ a “White supremicist journal” —shorthand for not having to deal with the ideas presented there and not being sensitive to the obvious difference between White supremacy and White advocacy. Does she think that it is always illegitimate for any ethnic group to seek to advance its interests? If so, then she should come out publicly against the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza.

She then puts up on the screen this quote from the article:

While liberals and universalists constantly yammer about “bringing us together” and “diversity is our strength,” it may be suggested that the biological function of human language and culture is just the opposite, that is, to keep discrete groups apart.

What an absolutely outrageous idea! Maddow, being Jewish by descent,* could not possibly be expected to grasp the concept of a culture that erects barriers between itself and the surrounding society—as Diaspora Judaism has done for its entire history and as Israel has now taken to the point of building walls between themselves and the Palestinians, providing separate roads and neighborhoods—in short, apartheid.

Contemporary mainstream evolutionary theories of culture highlight the  importance of badges of group membership, such as language and modes of dress that function to define ingroups and outgroups, and psychologists are well aware that there is a powerful evolutionary psychology of social identity that responds to these cues by making people in ingroups have exaggerated negative attitudes toward outgroups and exaggerated positive attitudes toward their ingroup.

She then highlights Russell’s quoting “old racist arguments” from T. S. Eliot:

The population should be homogeneous…. What is even more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and culture combine to make a large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

As noted here repeatedly, multiculturalism has huge costs, especially for the majority ethnic group in terms of social cohesion, social isolation, and lack of willingness to contribute to public goods like government-sponsored health care— with no discernible benefits apart from ethnic restaurants. Yet if there has been one overriding goal of Jewish intellectual and political activism in the US and other Western societies over the last century, it has been to legitimize multiculturalism and pathologize any sense that the  traditional people of these societies have any interests in maintaining their demographic predominance and their culture.

Maddow then goes after Russell’s expressed concern about the effects of the media on imprinting children with images of other races because they may affect later mating preferences. Notice that Russell expresses himself quite tentatively: “One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact.” But in fact, there is quite a bit of research that has come out since Russell wrote his article indicating just that. For example, this is a quote from an academic article of mine:

Research on human
infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months
of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However,
racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup
faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006;
Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005).

Research on human infants indicates that preference for own race occurs by 3 months of age but is not present at 1 month (Kelly et al., 2005). However, racial ingroup preferences are weakened by exposure to outgroup faces during infancy (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Sangrigoli, Pallier, Argenti, Ventureyra, & de Schonen, 2005). (p. 1022)

The reality is that social psychology provides strong support for the idea that exposure of babies to other races would make them favor their own race less. And Russell is certainly correct that the media is doing its best to aid this process. However, the good news is that the media does not really have access to infants, or at least much less access than it does to older children and adults. The research seems to indicate that babies learn who their people are by seeing family members–resulting in hysteria over “racist babies.” One can anticipate government programs that force White babies to be exposed to non-Whites (but exempt non-Whites from this process).

Maddow then goes off on Russell’s accusation that the media promotes miscegenation in films directed at adolescents and pre-adolescents and his claim that parents have “a natural obligation as essential as providing food and shelter to instill in their  children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.” Again, research supports the idea that media images could indeed overcome our natural liking for people like ourselves (programmed in infancy; see above) and lead people to be more open to miscegenation—especially in impressionable and conformist-minded children who are led to think that such behavior is “cool” and the sort of thing popular, attractive teenagers do. Several prominent social psychologists have argued that constant repetition by media images–especially if they are seen as coming from elite, mainstream sources–can overcome predispositions to be attracted to our own people.

One would think that Maddow would be well aware that her people have had very strong socialization pressures for marrying within the group which has led to very strong genetic commonality among long-separated Jewish groups. Urgings by Jewish religious and secular authorities (e.g., Alan Dershowitz, Elliott Abrams) to marry other Jews are commonplace. But when Russell makes similar suggestions, he is labeled a racist and a kook.

Her piece is a good example of how the media is focused on changing the behavior  of one group and one group only: White Christians.

*According to WikiAnswers, Maddow was raised Catholic, with an Irish mother and Russian father. She asserted she is “distantly Jewish.” See also here.

Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together: “From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”

The English translation of Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together (“From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”) is now available. (See here; donations are needed to complete the project.)

The main theme is the post-WWII purging of Jews from many of the powerful positions they held as an elite in Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn’s account is similar to other mainstream accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. When Jewish intellectual activists write about the role of the Jews in the USSR, they generally focus on this period—Jews as the victims of anti-Jewish actions—rather than the status and role of Jews in previous decades. The following quote from a historian sums up the situation:

“‘Pushing’ Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and ideological activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in 1948-1953. … Positions of any importance in KGB, party apparatus, and military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific establishments.”

Solzhenitsyn pointedly notes that Jews who had benefited from their nationality because they were officially classified as an oppressed minority under the Czar were now targeted on the basis of nationality:

Through its “fifth item” [i.e., the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very same method used in the Proletarian Questionnaire, other items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy, intellectuals and all the rest of the “former people” since the 1920’s.

Nevertheless, Jews were by no means eliminated from prestigious occupations. A historian comments that “Although the highest echelon of Jewish political elite suffered from administrative perturbations; but surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. … The main blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite — officials… and also journalists, professors and other members of creative intelligentsia.”

Anti-Jewish attitudes remained strong, fueled in large part because of the role of Jews as agents of oppression during the pre-war decades. For example, Solzhenitsyn notes that there were negative attitudes toward Jews returning to areas that the Germans had evacuated, particularly Ukraine.  Anti-Jewish attitudes combined both traditional ideas (Jews as wealthy: demanding restoration of prime residential property they owned before the war) as well as the role of Jews as government officials during the pre-war Soviet oppression.  A Jewish observer who claimed that Nikita Khrushchev had said, “In the past, the Jews committed many sins against the Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don’t need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn’t return here.”

Jews complained about these attitudes as well as the fact that other groups were indifferent to Jewish suffering, but Solzhenitsyn notes the irony, quoting another Jewish observer who stated “that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea and the Caucasus.” The example is a testimony to Jewish ethnocentrism–focused on their own suffering but never seeing, much less acknowledging, their indifference to the suffering of others or their role in causing it during the height  of their power.

There was a similar scene throughout Eastern Europe as Jews returned from exile after the war.

A great overrepresentation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts: “the Jews had played a huge role in economic life of all these countries,” and though they lost their possessions under Hitler, after the war, when “the restitution laws were introduced…  (they) affected very large numbers of new owners.” Upon their return Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by Communists and this created a new wave of hostility towards them (22).)

Toward the end of Stalin’s life, he intensified the campaign against Jews, possibly resulting in his death in 1953. The main source of his hostility toward Jews was the age-old concern about loyalty: Jewish ties with Jews in other countries — in this case, Israel and the United States. During the Cold War there was a fear that Jewish sympathies would lie with Israel and the US as Israel’s main source of support. One result was that Stalin crushed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK), a Jewish organization that had been created to court support for the USSR among American Jews during WWII. During the Cold War, the ties between Soviet Jews and American Jews became a liability in the eyes of Soviet regime.

An indication of Jewish power is that the campaign against the EAK in 1952 was carried out slowly and with great caution” because Stalin was “very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by using force.” It’s striking that the mass murders and deportations of the 1920s and 1930s were carried out without any international outcry, but the campaign against a rather small Jewish group was done very cautiously.  Thirteen Jews were executed.

This is similar to what happened when Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter in 1942. These murders of two Jewish leftist activists created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world — the same people who had previously ignored or rationalized mass murder during the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt made appeals to Stalin, and American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews.

Another manifestation of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign was the trial of Rudolf Slansky, the Jewish First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The trial was “openly anti-Jewish with naming ‘world leading’ Jews such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and putting them into the same harness with American leaders Truman and Acheson.”

Stalin also arrested a large number of Jewish doctors —the  “Doctors’ plot” — and “prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter to Pravda with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and their approval of Stalin’s government.” (The letter was preceded by an article in Pravda published on January 13, 1953 claiming “”The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ” Joint” [i.e., the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”)

In February, the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv was bombed. Solzhenitsyn accepts the idea that the “international anger” resulting from the Doctors’ plot  “could possibly” have motivated “internal forces” to murder Stalin:

And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the first time, right? He did not understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria (for example, according to [Abdurakhman] Avtorhanov’s version (66).)

The trimming of Jewish power in the USSR is important not just as a facet of Jewish history in the USSR but also because it had a major role in influencing some components of the American Jewish community to become less enamored with the left—notably Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives. Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic Western societies were best for Judaism. National Socialism was obviously bad for Jews, and Communism had become so. Despite their elite status, the events of 1948-1953 showed that Jews were vulnerable when the attitudes of an autocrat like Stalin turned against them.  Liberal societies were best, but they had to be controlled against populist tendencies. After all, the working class had eventually opted to join the  National Socialists.

Stephen Holmes describes Strauss’s solution to the Jewish dilemma as follows:  “The good society … consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young”a comment that sounds to me like an alarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern that an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival in the Diaspora and with the tendency for Jews to become an elite, it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that Jews would be a prominent part of the aristocracy and that the arrangement would serve Jewish interests–as indeed the current regime does.

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“Machete”: A new front in the war on Whites

Here at TOO, we have often noted that the heavily Jewish elite in America today does not particularly like the non-Jewish masses it controls, especially us Whites. Several writers (see, e.g., here) has also pointed to the way Jews have used blacks to advance the Jewish assault on the hated non-Jewish power structure in America.

One of the best accounts of this comes in a book by E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History. There, Jones devotes eight chapters to telling the story of the way Jews executed their plan to “carry the war into Africa” by turning American Negroes into revolutionaries. Some “alliance.”

In a way, however, that story is old hat. A newer story involves how the burgeoning numbers of Hispanics are being manipulated into assaulting Whites. My favorite blogger, Steve Sailer, shows how. In MSM Buries Lead—American Majority Supports Arizona Law. But Our Elites Don’t Like The American Majority, he begins by noting that

In modern America, Latinos often function as a sort of “stage army” for our elites. They want Hispanics to intimidate—by sheer bulk of numbers—the citizenry and make resistance to elite projects appear historically hopeless. The vast and seemingly always increasing quantities of Hispanics can be cited as justification for whatever a person in a position of influence wants to do. . . .

I wonder if “intimidate” is not too weak a word for what we are seeing. Evidence suggests that some parties seek to turn Hispanics in America into actual political murderers of “gringos.”

For example, a few years back, a spoof movie trailer called Machete was made. Here is that original trailer.

In these anti-White times, such a murderous depiction of a war on Whites has lasting power, so the idea has now been turned into a movie.  Wikipedia already has an entry for it (see here).

To emphasize the racial aspect of this film, a new message has been added to the beginning of the trailer. The message threatens the people of Arizona for having passed a stringent law against illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico. Click on the video in the middle of this blog to hear Danny Trejo growl, “This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message — to Arizona!”

A consistent theme of TOO has been that the rise of hostile anti-White minorities with historical grudges presents enormous dangers for Whites, especially as we become a minority. As in the cartoon below, high-minded Whites (the Amy Biehl syndrome) will not be spared.

Machete is yet another wake-up call on what the future holds for Whites–quite possibly, the very near future. Alex Jones bluntly called this film a rallying cry for race war in America. Later, he claimed that two anonymous Hispanic crew members alerted him to the extent of the anti-White scenes in the film. “Further, two individuals who were privy to early screenings of Machete have warned that the film is far more racially inflammatory than either the trailer or leaked have indicated.”

Machete is slated to be released on September 3rd of this year.

Edmund Connelly (email him) is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

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The Arizona Ethnic Studies Law: The Last Gasp of American Individualism

Things keep getting more and more interesting in Arizona. Now they have penalized school districts that have ethnic studies courses: As reported by the NYTimes, “any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.”

The people involved in teaching these courses deny that there is any advocacy of ethnic solidarity or racial resentment against Whites. And if you believe that, I’ve got some land I’d like to sell you.

Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, is the main man behind the law. He points to an incident in which all the Mexican students walked outon a speech by his deputy, a Republican Latina who was trying to counter another speaker who said that Republicans hate Latinos: “In the middle of her speech, a group of students that are in the Raza [!] studies program got up, put their fists in the air, turned their back to her. The principal asked them to sit down and listen, and they walked out on their own principal.” Sounds like a hostile act of ethnic solidarity.

The NYTimes article mentions that Horne objects to Pedagogy of the Oppressedby Paulo Freire, and the LATimes mentions Horne’s objection to Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña, a professor and founder of the Chicano studies program at Cal State Northridge. Who would ever think that titles like that could lead to resentment against a certain (very evil) race?

Actually reading these books is well beyond my tolerance level. Friere’s book sounds like straight cultural Marxism right out of the Bill Ayers playbook. A reviewerquotes Friere: “Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indocrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.”

Occupied America emphasizes the evil that Whites have inflicted on Mexicans and Native Americans in the past. An Amazon review titled “Abajo con los Gringos!” (“Down with the Gringos”) states that Acuña’s book “contributes additional heft to the indictment of White settlement and expansion in this hemisphere as the cause of immense suffering by an essentially stone-age culture at the hands of a militarily superior civilization.” Another states that Acuña

pulls up countless accounts of slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, and abuse of Mexican men, women, children, mostly incited as a sort of blood sport by American cavalry, enlisted men, volunteers, and associates, as well as the leveling of Mexican cities and towns just for target practice. To add to the war crimes, most of the Americans involved, even the command of Zachary Taylor, were never brought up on any charges, nor even in the most slightest way, reprimanded for their actions.

One has to agree with Horne and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer that this sort of thing is likely to produce hatred toward Whites. A spokesman for Brewer stated, “Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” Horne says much the same.

So the ideology underlying the bill is to let bygones be bygones and get on with the project of getting along with each other. The intellectual basis is classic libertarian individualism. Horne puts it this way:

I believe that what’s important about us is what we know, what we can do, what’s our character as individuals, not what race we happen to have been born into. And the function of the public schools is to bring in kids from different backgrounds and teach them to treat each other as individuals. And the Tucson district is doing the opposite. They’re teaching them to emphasize ethnic solidarity, what I call ethnic chauvinism. And I think that’s exactly is the wrong thing to do in the public schools, and that’s why I introduced this legislation to give myself the authority to put a stop to it.

This libertarian ideology is indeed the last hope of those intent on avoiding a race war as the inevitable consequence of present trends. The idea is that the faces will look different as the US absorbs all these immigrants, but we’ll still have a consensus commitment to individualism — nothing but vestigial group loyalties. No group conflict. No retribution for what happened in the past.

But now that America has gone so far down the road of minority ethnic consciousness and has signed on to massive non-White immigration motivated by fear and loathing of the traditional White population, is it really possible to turn back and pretend we are all nothing more than individuals? One reason to think that this is very unlikely to happen is that individualism is a unique creation of Western culture. No other culture has developed individualist institutions, and there is no reason to suppose that the millions of non-Whites who are crowding our shores will do so. Certainly these programs of ethnic consciousness raising will do nothing but strengthen group loyalties and hatred and resentment and hatred of the White majority.

At TOO we have repeatedly emphasized that White Americans are crazy to voluntarily become a minority in a society where the non-White majority has historical grudges against them and continues to have a strong group consciousness. Hostility to the traditional people and culture of America is a powerful current among Jews, spanning the entire Jewish political spectrum, from leftist intellectuals like Susan Sontag (“The white race is the cancer of human history”) and Howard Zinn (whose A People’s History of the United States has been a staple of college history courses for three decades) to neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz (see also here). It goes without saying that these attitudes are common among Blacks, and the fact that Acuña’s work is mainstream among Latino intellectuals is yet another indication, if any were needed, that it is common among Latinos too.

All the indications are that non-Whites are coalescing into a powerful political coalition centered in the Democratic Party. This coalition is formidable in large part because of the prominenc of Jews who are such an important component of American elites in the areas of personal wealth, media and political influence, and in the legal and academic worlds.

This plea for individualism is really the last gasp of hope for avoiding a racial bloodbath in the future. It is simply inconceivable that a non-White majority led by racial and ethnic activists filled with anti-White hatred of the sort that we see every day now will somehow be magically transformed into an idyllic Neverland of individualists of all races, ethnicities and religions. Unless Whites manage to develop a separatist state or manage to massively reverse the changes of the last 45 years, they will be in a physical fight for survival.

This is not to deny that Whites have been brutal towards other peoples in the past. But it is naïve to suppose that non-Whites would behave any differently if they could have. Speaking as an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous.

But the idea that Western culture and White people are uniquely evil have been common among the intellectual activists of the left that now dominate in the academic world, beginning with the Boasian anthropologists who dominated anthropology for most of the 20th century. The Boasians created an imaginary past expunged of ethnic violence and warfare (see here, p. 29 ff.) Non-Whites were portrayed as gift-givers and myth-makers, not at all prone to ethnic warfare.

Non-White intellectual activists are now celebrating their ethnocentrism and hostility toward Whites. Legions of them are tenured professors in departments of ethnic studies. Acuña’s department of Chicano studies at CSU-Northridge has 28 professors, and it’s the same pretty much everywhere. The Arizona legislation shows that this sort of intellectual ethnic activism also pervades the K-12 curriculum.

So Whites really have three choices:

  • Reverse the trends of minority empowerment by getting rid of ethnic studies programs and deporting illegal immigrants, as Arizona is doing. However, that won’t be enough, unless they succeed in getting the very large numbers of legal non-White immigrants to leave.
  • Stake out a White separatist area in North America.
  • Get ready for the coming race war.


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Alison Weir at UC-Irvine

It’s Israel Apartheid Week at the University of California-Irvine. I went to see Alison Weir who runs  IfAmericansKnew.org. She gave a great talk, a beautiful combination of data and emotionally compelling comments on her personal experience as a witness to the plight of the Palestinians–very moving.

When  it comes to the data, she is at her best in showing how the US media is corrupted by its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–an issue that extends far beyond the Middle East to include everything related to multiculturalism in America, including coverage of the Kagan nomination. She presented data on the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and National Public Radio. NPR is particularly interesting because it is often the target of pro-Israel activist organizations like CAMERAPro-Israel groups have sought to boycott NPR and have pressured it financially. (Corroborating Alison’s work, just today Mondoweiss posted another devastating critique of NPR–this time “on the month-old Israeli ‘military order’ that allows the IDF to deport any Palestinian inhabitant of the West Bank it defines as an ‘infiltrator,’ simply for lacking the paperwork that the Israeli government itself refuses to issue”–Arizona on steroids. But don’t expect American Jewish organizations to get worked up about it even though they are unanimously against the Arizona law.)

And here she lists all the journalists writing for American publications (one hesitates to call them American journalists) who cover the conflict but also have family ties to Israel or have served in the Israeli army (some may still be in the IDF). Two particularly struck me:

• A previous [New York]  Times bureau chief, Joel Greenberg, before he was bureau chief but after he was already publishing in the Times from Israel, actually served in the Israeli army.

• Media pundit and Atlantic staffer Jeffrey Goldberg also served in the Israeli military; it’s unclear when, how, or even if his military service ended.

Weir is optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. She thinks that more and more Americans seem aware of the situation in Israel. The Israel Apartheid week and the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are high-profile efforts on college campuses. Outside the lecture hall was an elaborate display of anti-Israel cartoons and an apartheid wall that had been around to a number of campuses.

Apartheid Wall
Apartheid Wall; Universities are listed on bottom
Mock Israeli tank
Mock Israeli tank
Latuff Cartoon on display
Latuff Cartoon on display

It made me think that my current TOO article on John Mearsheimer may have been too pessimistic. Let’s frame it at its most hopeful: If the Israel Lobby loses its control of the political process in the US, it would mean that Jewish power in general loses. And that would have major implications for a wide range of issues, from immigration to the legitimacy of assertions of White identity.

One thing that struck me was that almost all the ~150  students who came to her talk were Arabs. The women wore scarves, and almost everyone wore a black anti-Israel tee shirt, so the meeting had the air of a uniformed, homogeneous, almost military group, with a couple of White outliers like me. Her talk was sponsored by the Muslim Students Association. It was preceded and followed by the reading of a passage from the Koran in Arabic, followed by an English translation. The event was held in the campus Cross-Cultural Center which has offices for all the ethnic activist student organizations. Immediately following her talk, the MECHA activists set up their meeting, presumably to denounce what’s going on in Arizona. (MECHA and all the other student ethnic lobbies and leftist groups are co-sponsors of Israel Apartheid Week. Hostile Jews have turned up at some of the IAW events, especially Norman Finkelstein’s talk, but I felt cheated by not witnessing any shows of Jewish hostility. They evidently pick their targets, and Finkelstein as a “self-hating Jew” is certainly high on their list.)

So even though I was cheered by the thought that more people are becoming aware of what’s going on in  Israel, it was depressing to think that the anti-Apartheid doings are basically just another ethnic lobby. These students identify with the left, and I rather doubt they would be sympathetic to my view that they really shouldn’t have been allowed into the US in the first place. And they would be rather hostile to the idea that Whites have interests too.

I felt like a foreigner viewing someone else’s show. Outside the lecture hall, I felt like a foreigner even more. Despite the fact that UC-I is in the heart of Orange County (formerly considered a bastion of White Republicanism), spotting a White student was almost a rarity.  Whites officially make up around 23% of the students at UC-I, well below their proportion in the state. UC-I is often called the University of Chinese Immigrants, but Chinese were not particularly noticeable. It was all manner of non-Whites, from every part of the world.

Just walking around campus the percentage of Whites seemed to be far less than what the university says. The official statistics are based on freshman enrollment, and I suspect that a lot of White freshmen decide UC-I is not the place for them and transfer to some other university.

It was actually rare to see a White student. When I got into the student union, there were 2 or three Whites in a total of about a hundred. Four White guys later came in and sat together–probably at least implicitly realizing that their association was based on their race. But it was eerie how Whites stood out because of their minority status–almost like being in Hong Kong or Karachi and noticing a few stray Americans.

Like the Palestinians, I had the feeling of being displaced. Only I very much doubt that the Arab students who were involved in the Israel Apartheid Week would sympathize with my feelings.

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Whites’ lack of empathy for other Whites

There are doubtless a great many factors accounting for the general willingness of Whites to allow themselves to be pushed aside and to voluntarily become a minority amid a sea of non-Whites, most of whom hold historical grudges against them. My general view is that these cultural transformations are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting tendencies of Europeans toward individualism interacting with the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.

The problem with individualism is that we have weak ties to other Whites and we don’t have a sense (yet) of common fate. In other words, we are low on ethnocentrism. We hear about a White person who was victimized by a Black criminal or denied a promotion or admission to a university in favor of an “underrepresented minority”, and we don’t feel empathy for the victims simply because they are White. We don’t feel any psychological pain when we hear that White working class men have moved out of an area because their jobs have been taken by illegal Mexican immigrants.

At a rational level, Whites may well think that victimization of Whites is morally wrong. Hence the finding that Whites support ending affirmative action and ending immigration (especially illegal immigration) as has been shown in California and other states. But I suspect that there isn’t any real gut feeling of empathy with other Whites. And it’s the gut feeling of empathy that in the end motivates the sort of behavior that can really begin to alter things politically.

This was demonstrated recently in a study that scanned the brains of Black and White subjects viewing Black and White victims of Hurricane Katrina (Race and Empathy Matter on Neural Level, Science Daily). Everyone reported empathy for the victims. This is a verbal judgment that reflects nothing more than conventional morality. People certainly would not want to tell the experimenter that they have callous disregard for suffering.

But the brain’s emotion centers told a different story. Black subjects had empathic responses to Black victims, and the more ethnocentric Blacks had stronger emotional responses. Whites on the other hand, did not show any empathic responses to people of either race.

It’s not that Whites are incapable of empathy. Images of family members would doubtless result in strong empathic responses among Whites — responses that would motivate helping family members. Indeed, all the research shows much stronger family bonds among Whites than among Blacks — bonds that are motivated at least in part by empathic concern for family. But in general, we just  don’t get emotionally aroused when we see Whites  suffering or victimized.

And it also suggests that the many Whites who do behave altruistically toward Blacks or other non-Whites are not acting out of an emotional imperative of empathy, but for some other  reason — quite possibly social approval. What better way these days to show you are a good person?  I thought about this today when viewing a photo of Sandra Bullock with her newly adopted Black baby. Of course, it may be misplaced maternal affection.


But this lack of empathy for other Whites is a problem for political action on behalf of Whites. People are motivated far more by emotions than by rational appraisals. The  empathy among Jews for Jewish suffering is legendary. As Walter Benjamin once said, Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, 1968, 262)

There is undoubtedly variation among Whites for ethnocentrism, implying that at least some Whites would be upset by the suffering of other Whites more than by the suffering of, say, Blacks. In other words, they would have the same pattern that Blacks show, only reversed.

Personally, I have found that I do have an emotional reaction to Whites being victimized. This could be because I am more genetically inclined toward ethnocentrism than most Whites. But it could also be influenced by living in Southern California where Whites are now a minority. Social psychologists have shown that members of majority groups do not have the same sense of an ingroup feeling as do members of minority groups.

The good news is that as Whites become a minority, ingroup solidarity–and empathy for other Whites–would be expected to increase. And getting involved in White advocacy with like-minded others doubtless has the effect of reinforcing and increasing those tendencies, especially when it is not at all difficult to imagine nightmarish scenarios of the future for Whites. Such nightmarish scenarios have a great deal of emotional impact, especially when they are graphically depicted. That is the reason why we will not see such depictions in the media.

The bad news is that even with empathy for other Whites, there are still huge barriers for Whites to really get involved in White advocacy — barriers such as losing one’s job and social ostracism. The power of the left to inflict economic pain is huge, as recently shown by the burgeoning movement to inflict economic sanctions on Arizona for having the temerity to enact a law aimed at getting rid of illegal aliens.

But having empathy for other Whites would certainly be a great first step in the right direction–and probably a step that is necessary if we are going to see really intense commitment by Whites to change the current regime.

My view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
EuropeMy view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
Europe..

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