Evolutionary Psychology

"It’s Not the Arguments"

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A recent TOO piece offered an argument for the importance of solid funding for the success of any media venture, TOO included. The basic idea is an important one to discuss — that high status confers influence. Indeed, the importance of high status is a critical ingredient of theories of influence in sociology, and psychologists have argued that attraction to high status is part of our evolutionary heritage.

We see this repeatedly in the key institutions throughout the West, including the media and the academic world. Jewish influence basically stems from their influence on all of the high ground of the culture. The revolution of the Left was a top-down revolution that began in the most prestigious academic and media institutions and then spread to the lower reaches of the media and the K-12 educational system.

For all its espousal of egalitarianism, the academic world is a hierarchical system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity because any leak in the system would mean that non-conformists would benefit from institutional prestige. This, of course, is exactly why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused such a panic attack in the ranks of the Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt weren’t just two easy-to-ignore guys from some college no one heard of; nor were they members of an easily marginalized group, such as Arabs. They were well-known and academically productive professors from prestigious institutions — the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively. This resulted in a full-fledged smear campaign emphasizing “shoddy scholarship” (typically made by Jewish activist organizations or others without the least experience as scholars) and charges of being anti-Semites on a par with the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When all else fails, …

Another example is E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans — a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s. Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist, and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode, led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould — both of whom were also at Harvard and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.

The Israel Lobby and the Left won these battles ultimately. Politicians are loathe to cite Mearsheimer and Walt, and it is unthinkable that they could attain positions in the government where they could directly influence US foreign policy. Tamer versions of evolutionary psychology are tolerated, but arguments related to ethnic interests (Salter), the reality of ethnic and racial differences (Jensen, Lynn, Rushton), and my writing on Jewish influence on culture have been expunged from the mainstream media. I have sometimes thought that my ideas would be more influential if I held a position at Harvard. But the reality is that occasional lapses from decorum have been managed quite effectively.

The result is that Whites are intellectually and culturally insecure. Any cultural confidence they have must buck the tide of elite opinion which is constantly telling them they are racists who owe whatever success they have in life to “White privelege” or other inventions of the Left. As I noted elsewhere, “one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.”

The revolution may well begin because of the rage of non-elite Whites. But it won’t be successful until the elite bastions of anti-White opinion are breached. And that will not be an easy fight to win.

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Race Bias and Conception Risk: Implicit and Explicit Whiteness in Action

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A recent article in a top psychology journal (“Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle” shows that women have more race bias when they are most at risk for conception. Further, it shows that race bias is even stronger if the woman feels more vulnerable to sexual coercion.

The study once again shows a difference between implicit and explicit race bias. Implicit bias is unconscious. Implicit bias was shown by subjects taking longer to associate negative words like ‘horrible’ or ‘evil’ with photos of Whites than with photos of Blacks. (You can take a similar test here to see if you have implicit biases toward Blacks; around 80% of Whites do)  The study is saying that White women are more likely to have unconscious negative thoughts about Blacks when they are ovulating and this is especially the case if they think they are vulnerable to being raped.

Explicit bias, on the other hand, is assessed by rating how strongly subjects endorse negative racial stereotypes of Blacks (e.g., ‘‘Generally, Blacks are not as smart as Whites’’; ‘‘It is likely that Blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in’’). People tend to give more socially acceptable answers on race bias items compared to their unconscious, implicit attitudes.

Usually the differences between conscious and unconscious race bias are very large — especially for liberals. Liberals are supreme hypocrites when it comes to race. My favorite is the White affirmative action officer at a university who was horrified to find that she had strong unconscious biases toward Blacks.  Unconscious biases have been shown to have subtle effects on behavior.

What was surprising here was that these White women were also more likely to explicitly endorse negative stereotypes of Blacks when they were ovulating. The effect was weaker than for unconscious attitudes, but it was in the same direction and nearly as strong as for unconscious attitudes — what statisticians call a trend.

In other words, the hormones that make them ovulate are also making them less politically correct. Their unconscious negative attitudes about Blacks are more likely to leak out in their conscious opinions. The primitive brain wins out over the politically correct censor in the higher part of the brain, so that they become more conscious of their negative attitudes toward Blacks. They would therefore be better able to consciously plan ways to avoid them.

The other two tests of race bias were also quite explicit. In fact, the strongest single predictor of conception risk was explicitly stated fear of Black males. The subjects rated how “scary” photos of Black men and White men were. In general, these White women found photos of Black men scarier around the time they are ovulating — especially if they feel vulnerable to rape.

This shows that despite all the propaganda to the contrary, White women retain defensive attitudes — both consciously and unconsciously — about Blacks as potential rapists. The authors suggest that this psychological mechanism may work by being sensitive to the stereotype that Blacks are dangerous. In other words, White women’s evolutionary psychology is making them behave adaptively based on the stereotype that Blacks are more likely to rape. It works by making them avoid Black men, especially if they are ovulating and especially if they are in a situation where there is a danger of rape. And it is making them more conscious of the real threats posed by Black men and less likely to suppress these attitudes in order to be socially acceptable.

Of course, the stereotype has more than a grain of truth: The 2005 FBI Uniform Crime Report show that though Blacks are only 12.4% of the US population, they commit 33.6% of the rapes of White females.

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Edmund Connelly’s "Farewell, My Dear WASP"

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Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article “Farewell, My Dear WASP” again raises the conundrum of why the WASPs collectively abdicated their position of power in the US. He mentions the Stockholm Syndrome and other possibilities — all of which should provide for an interesting discussion here. What strikes me most is the quote from Scott McConnell’s review:

While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement.

This severe proneness to guilt has always struck me as the defining feature of the Puritan strand of American culture. And with excessive guilt comes moralistic aggression aimed at ingroups and outgroups alike. As I noted elsewhere, the Puritans have a unique ethnic background among Anglo-Saxons generally. They have a strong tendency toward moral idealism, whether expressed as opposition to slavery in the 19th century, or as anti-anti-Semitism in the 21st. Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins — perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as the term is used in the scientific literature.

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms . . . are punished by altruistic aggression.

And since Gilder has never quite forgiven himself for a minor ethnic slur, he has become a soldier on behalf of righteousness. Like a Puritan magistrate of old, he is ready to do battle against the sinners among his own people. Of course, in the current environment, people like Gilder also benefit in terms of fame and fortune. But their feelings of moral righteousness make them feel good about what they are doing. Happiness for a Puritan is when self-interest coincides with a feeling of moral righteousness.

Once Jewish intellectuals achieved the moral high ground in the US and elsewhere, people like Gilder lost their resolve to defend their own ethnic interests; the game was over. Fundamentally, we have to stamp out Puritanism among Whites, or at least find a form of therapy for people like Gilder:

Given this state of affairs, what sorts of therapy might one suggest? To an evolutionary psychologist, this moralistic aggression seems obviously adaptive for maintaining the boundaries and policing the behavior of a close-knit group.  … Groups of Angles, Jutes, and their Puritan descendants doubtlessly benefited greatly from moralistic aggression  because of its effectiveness in enforcing group norms and punishing cheaters and defectors. There is nothing inherently wrong with moralistic aggression. The key is to convince whites to alter their moralistic aggression in a more adaptive direction in light of Darwinism. 

The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans [like George Gilder] won’t be around to witness it.

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The Failure of Head Start — Another Blow for IQ Realism

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I teach courses on child psychology, and every textbook has a chapter on IQ. It’s always a bit touchy talking about it — I’ve got to be on my best behavior. I discuss the data showing genetic influences and then I point out that most of the “environmental influences” on IQ could equally well be explained by parent-child genetic correlations: Smart parents are genetically inclined to high IQ and they talk to their kids more. This results in correlations between IQ and parents talking to their kids.

But the chapter always ends on an optimistic note for the environmentalists because of the Head Start data. The standard line is that Head Start has a positive effect on IQ for a while and then tapers off to nothing after a few years. But the good news for environmentalists is that there are lots of other great things Head Start does, like improve academic achievement, prevent school dropout, etc.

However, the recent report on Head Start shows that there are no positive effects at all on academic achievement, social and emotional functioning, or health, even in the first grade. These are overwhelmingly poor non-White children — the future of America

As the Brookings Institute’s Russ Whitehurst notes,

The children in Head Start are overwhelmingly poor and minority. They are at high risk of starting school far behind their more advantaged peers, and falling further behind over time. They tune-out and drop-out at alarming rates. In a world in which nearly everything we value, from a long lifespan to financial wealth to family stability, is associated with educational attainment, these children’s lives are in danger.

So the ever hopeful left is back to square one. No positive effects at all. Indeed, things seem to have gotten worse: “In the critical area of vocabulary (a good measure of IQ), 3-year-olds entered the study at the 29th percentile in terms of national norms and finished first grade at the 24th percentile whether or not they attended Head Start.” They might as well have stayed home with grandma.

But because the ever hopeful educational establishment didn’t want the word to get out, they delayed the report for three years. During this time they sweated the data (as we psychologists say) to try to come up with some positive results. Not possible. And believe me, they were motivated. There are lots of private contractors and an entire bureaucracy to feed. They pulled out all the stops.

Actually, it’s quite surprising that they couldn’t come up with something positive, since, as Whitehurst points out, the same federal agencies that administer the programs are in charge of evaluating them. Short of  making up the data, they couldn’t come up with what they wanted. It’s something of a miracle that they didn’t falsify the data. All for a good cause, you know.

But, as Whitehurst notes, when the report was finally released there was absolute silence in the MSM. The New York Times did not think it was news fit to print, nor did the Washington Post. I am still waiting for an article to appear in the LA Times.

Reports like this are just not the sort of thing that the left wants to hear, because it does not augur well for the future of the impending multicultural paradise we are heading into. I wonder if the next edition of my textbook will even bother to note it.

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The academic left’s involvement in politics

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In today’s LA Times, the op-ed page was dominated by comments on Howard Zinn (“An experts’ history of Zinn”), who by all accounts was a leftist political activist as well as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn, who probably deserved a chapter in The Culture of Critique as an exemplar of a leftist Jewish intellectual activist, was involved in all the leftist causes of the last 60 years. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and was proud of his lack of neutrality in his writing, titling his memoir You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.  As one of the commentators, Sean Wilentz, notes,

He saw history primarily as a means to motivate people to political action that he found admirable. That’s what he said he did. It’s fine as a form of agitation — agitprop — but it’s not particularly good history.

To a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.

But other historians are much more sympathetic to Zinn. Eric Foner, who is described by one reviewer as the “sainted PC commissar for US history and Reconstruction fabulist” is, like Zinn, an academic radical activist. Foner says about Zinn:

The idea that historians have to be neutral about everything they study is the death of history. Every historian has beliefs and feelings about what they’re studying. Howard made them very explicit. The teachers you remember are the ones with a passion for history who made it clear what they thought. They were not polemicists. They respected the canons of historical scholarship, as Zinn did, but they cared deeply.

Well, I’m not sure how much Zinn respected the canons of scholarship in creating what one commentor called an “eternal struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” The print version of the Times op-ed provides some quotations from Zinn’s work A People’s History of the United States. The Western culture = evil, native peoples = good theme is obvious. Europe of the Renaissance was “dominated … by the religion of the popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western Civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.” The natives, on the other hand, are all about hospitality and sharing, and they have no concept of war. (Imagine the horror if someone made blanket assertions about Jews as having a frenzy for money.)

As an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous, but the idea that it is uniquely evil has been common among Jewish intellectual activists, most notably the Boasian anthropologists. As I noted in The Culture of Critique,

one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers [or, as hospitable, loving, and sharing people, as Zinn would have it]. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfarein 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. 

The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174).

Howard Zinn was obviously in this tradition. But because he plugged into the anti-Western zeitgeist of the academic left, he had a long and happy career at Boston University — untroubled by student activists trying to get him fired.

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Should Haiti be Rebuilt?

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It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue.

It is yet another example of the power of the media. Imagine if the media simply framed this as what you would expect from a people with an average IQ of 72 and a 200-year record of economic failure and inability to govern themselves. Imagine if the media messages were informed by ethnic genetic interests and if adopting parents were made aware that they would feel less psychological involvement with their African children than to genetically similar others. Imagine if there were no high-status figures on TV advocating Haitian relief  and thereby appealing to our evolved psychology of emulating high-status people. (By adopting a Haitian refugee or making a donation, I can get the approval of people like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.)

Altruistic Whites who contributed to the relief effort would be scorned as naïve and misguided  — and they would be made aware that they will likely be unhappy in the long run. The aid would dry up. Our explicit processing mechanisms (human rationality) could easily overcome the natural empathy that we feel when we see human suffering. On the other hand, Whites would not at all be surprised that Blacks and other non-Whites (including presumably President Obama given his strongnon-White identity) strongly support the immigration of Haitians because in doing so they are supporting their own ethnic genetic interests in a non-White America. Indeed, 70% of Black Americans favor Haitian immigration compared to 45% of Whites.

A recent TOO article is an anecdote to all that. As it notes, the left has a “profoundly Eurocentric” belief that other peoples are the same. It adds that the result is a campaign for ever more aid and development, fuelled by the belief that, given enough money, education, and opportunity, the Third World (including even Haiti) will eventually converge with Europe.

From the standpoint of the multicultural left, societies like Haiti can’t be allowed to fail because the failure challenges their whole belief system.

It’s interesting that one of our favourite neocons, Elliott Abrams, wants to increase Haitian immigration to the US so that they can send money back to Haiti. This is a twist on the leftist theory that everyone is equal and that Haiti, given enough support, will be just like Sweden. Abrams’  implicit theory is that Haiti cannot possibly be expected to make itself into a viable society unless it can siphon off wealth from the US. As he points out, this is already happening for a great many countries, prototypically Mexico, Honduras, and, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

As a charter member of the Israel lobby, he knows all about siphoning off wealth (not to mention the lives of US military personnel) from the US on behalf of a foreign country. And as a Jew, he is certainly well within the Jewish mainstream when it comes to immigration policy generally. The implicit model of the US for Abrams is exactly the model advocated by Jewish activists for the last century: A proposition nation composed of different cultures and ethnicities, each with an allegiance to their own people wherever they may live.

Needless to say, this vision of American is profoundly antithetical to the interests of European-descended people in the United States.

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Controlling Historical Memory

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Dovid Katz’s article in The Guardian “Halting Holocaust Obfuscation” is yet another example of Jewish intellectual activists with access to the media attempting to control historical memory in a way that highlights Jewish suffering and presents Jewish behavior as nothing more than innocent victimhood. Katz is determined to disallow any equivalence between the horrors inflicted on the populations of Eastern Europe by the Germans and by the Soviets. He condemns Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, linking to this article, for bringing up Jewish behavior in the Jedwabne incident in which Jews were murdered during the German occupation of Poland during WWII:

One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: “I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn’t respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this.”

At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who’d killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: “Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles.”

Would a British politician who’d behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics?

Probably not. But that’s only because mentioning Jewish behavior as contributing in even the slightest way to anti-Jewish attitudes is off limits, even if they collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles or against the Baltic peoples. The following is from a review of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (italicized quotes are translations of Solzhenitsyn):

“Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way.”

In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne.Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.

Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan “Revenge for the Soviet Occupation”? Solzhenitsyn:

“In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule.” (p. 329)

In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:

“Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia.” (p. 310)

See here for a comment on the distortions of Jan Gross’s Neighbors which attempts to blame the massacre solely on the irrational anti-Semitism of Poles. This compilation notes, among other things, that “There was significant collaboration on the part of some Jedwabne Jews with the Soviet invaders from 1939 to June 1941; the victims were primarily the town’s Polish population, several hundred of whom were deported to the Gulag.”

When a significant percentage of people from an alien ethnic group support an invader and collaborate in the deportation of people from one’s own ethnic group, it is not at all surprising that there would be reprisals when there is a shift of power; nor would be be surprising if the reprisals were directed all Jews, not just the ones known to collaborate or sympathize. That’s how our evolved psychology of ethnic competition works.

I notice in my notes that Checinski (1982, 9) writes that “even then [in 1943] there was an attempt to rationalize this blind hatred [of Jews] by recalling the ‘improper’ attitude of the Jewish population in eastern Poland towards the Bolsheviks in September 1939 when the Soviet army, in connivance with the Nazis, occupied their territories.” Checinski also notes that immediately after WWII Jews welcomed the Soviet army and the new regime “with favor if not with outright enthusiasm” and that “the small Jewish community was seen by friends and foes alike as one of the mainstays of the Soviet sponsored regime. This only further alienated it from the great majority of the Polish population” (p. 8). This comment  is highly compatible with Jaff Schatz’s (1991) treatment which I discuss extensively in Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique. It is interesting that American Jewish representatives visiting Poland after the war presented the new Polish regime as “a paragon of liberalism and tolerance, unequaled in Eastern Europe” (Checinski, p. 11).

To conclude, anti-Jewish attitudes in Eastern Europe had a basis in the real behavior of Jews. No doubt the events of 1939 and thereafter were influenced by traditional grievances between Poles and Jews, but actual Jewish behavior during this period is also relevant. Jews were correctly perceived as more welcoming to the Soviets after the 1939 invasion and as more loyal to the Communist regime and as willing executioners of the remnants of Polish nationalism after 1945. (As I and others have noted, the common denominator of the behavior of Diaspora Jews in European countries has been to oppose nationalist movements; further, during this period, Jews throughout Europe and in America saw communism as good for the Jews at least partly because Jews had become an elite in the USSR and the USSR had outlawed anti-Semitism.)

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jews were also highly placed in the government and in the security forces. Under these circumstances, social identity theory predicts that Poles would develop the well-attested stereotype of “zydokomuna” (Judeo-Communism) and exaggerate the differences between themselves and all Jews in Poland. It simply reflects typical ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout the ages — nothing more than a reflection of our evolved psychology.

In the West, Jewish activists have had a relatively easy time erecting the image of innocent Jews and evil Nazis as a complete explanation of the events of World War II. This message is much more difficult in Eastern Europe where there is a collective memory of collaboration of Jews with the horrors of communism and in the extermination of nationalist elements of the non-Jewish population.

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