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Richard Lynn Recounts His Life

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Memoirs of a Dissident Psychologist
Richard Lynn
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2020
476 pages, £25

Richard Lynn, who turned 90 earlier this year, has published an account of his life and intellectual development, including portraits of some of the outstanding men he has known and worked with.

Lynn’s father was Sydney Harland, the world’s leading expert on the genetics of cotton. His mother Marjorie was the daughter of William Freeman, Director of Agriculture at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (now University of the West Indies) in Trinidad, another early researcher on plant genetics. Harland was, alas, married when they met in Trinidad, but Marjorie followed him to New York, where she conceived. The sight of homeless men in New York convinced her that capitalism was not working, and she became a lifelong communist. Harland concocted for her an imaginative story according to which she had married a mining engineer named Richard Lynn who had been tragically killed in a mining accident shortly after the wedding. With little except this story and her new political convictions, Marjorie returned to the UK in 1930 and settled in Hampstead, a suburb of London. On February 20, 1930, she gave birth to a son whom she named “Richard Lynn” as an expression of piety toward her lamented fictitious husband.

Richard Lynn had a mostly unremarkable childhood. When the war came, his mother sent him for his own safety to acquaintances at Ambleside in the Lake District of Northern England. He enjoyed the outdoor activities the area offered, following the course of the war on the wireless. “By the end of 1943,” he writes, “I was becoming increasingly conscious that my life at the Ambleside village school was on a slow track to no-where, and that if I was to make anything of my life I needed to get a decent education at a good school.”

By this time, his mother had moved to Bristol and there was little danger from the Luftwaffe. At his own request, Lynn rejoined his mother and applied to the Bristol Grammar School, the best in the city. He found that the entrance exam included many questions his schooling in Ambleside left him unable to answer. He performed well enough to gain admission, but was mortified to be assigned to the school’s “C stream,” for the dull boys. “I never worked harder than I did in that year,” he recalls, and the following year he was promoted to the A stream: “Once I had achieved this, I was content to rest on my laurels and coast along somewhere in the middle of the A stream.”

The young Lynn was no science nerd, being initially drawn more to history, literature, and classical music; the scientists in his family tree also seem on his account to have been men of broad interests. He writes that he was always attracted to “big ideas,” which the science classes at the Bristol Grammar School neglected in favor of minutiae. In biology class, e.g., the students were taught about stamens and pistils rather than the theory of evolution.

Partly from his mother’s influence, and partly from his own attraction to big ideas, Lynn joined the Young Communist League when he was fourteen. The YCL sponsored evening social hours, weekend bicycle trips, and summer camps where Lynn could join in the singing of communist songs: “It’s the same the whole world over, It’s the poor as gets the blame, It’s the rich as gets the pleasure, Ain’t  it all a bleeding shame.” He learned how to answer objections to the faith:

For instance, when people objected that communist Russia only permitted one party, I was able to explain that capitalist countries needed two parties, one to represent the capitalists and one to represent the workers, but as communist societies have only one class, they only need one party.

Within about a year, Lynn developed doubts about what he was being taught at the YCL, though he continued with the organization for a time in order to enjoy the social benefits.

In England at this period, grammar school students were tested in nine academic subjects at the age of sixteen, an ordeal known as the School Certificate examination. Six months beforehand, they were given a practice version known as the “mocks.”

I had not done much work since I had got into the A stream and had a full social life with the Young Communists and I was not well prepared for these mocks. After they had been marked and the results put up on the board, I found that I had not done well. Our form master asked me to stay behind after school. “Now Lynn”, he said, “I don’t know what to make of you. You seem to be intelligent but your performance in the mocks has been most disappointing”. He asked me how much homework I did each night and I said about half an hour. He urged me to pull myself together and do at least three hours homework a night. He said he thought that if I applied myself I might get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, but if I continued on this rake’s progress I would end up serving behind a counter.

Once again, the prospect of failure motivated Lynn to succeed: “I left the YCL, worked hard for the School Certificate examination, and managed to do quite creditably.”

In the summer of 1946, Lynn’s grandmother revealed to him the fictional nature of his supposed mining engineer father: “She said my father was a very clever but very immoral man, which sums him up pretty accurately.” The information came just in time: shortly thereafter, Lynn received a call from his half-sister Margaret to say their father Sydney Harlan was staying with her and would like to meet him:

I went round and met my father for the first time. He asked me about my political views and I said I was a socialist. He told me that he too had been a socialist at my age but that he was now a liberal. He gave me a copy of Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War and told me it was an important psychological study, and suggested I might consider studying psychology. I read this book that proposed that people have an instinct to identify with the groups and follow them, that religion plays an important part in binding groups together, and this is one of the causes of wars. I found this very interesting and began to think about studying psychology.

Lynn still had two years of school to complete. During this time, he had to prepare to take the Higher School Certificate examination (now known as the A levels) in three or four different subjects in order to go on to university. He chose to concentrate primarily on History and English:

One of the main reasons I liked History and English Literature was that we were encouraged to make up our own minds about controversial issues. For instance, our history teacher asked us to consider which side was in the right in the English and American civil wars, or in the disputes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. We were encouraged to think through these questions for ourselves. Similarly, in English literature the master would ask “Is Shakespeare any better than Pearl Buck, and if so, why?” I found all this much more interesting than science and mathematics which just entailed learning what was already well known.

In December 1947, Lynn was summoned to the headmaster’s study, where he anticipated a flogging for having violated some rule. Instead, the headmaster told him that King’s College at the University of Cambridge was offering examinations for three scholarships in English and History the following month, and encouraged Lynn to try for them.

So in January of 1948, Lynn took the train to Cambridge. He includes a little vignette of British postwar austerity:

The candidates were put up in the college and it was freezing cold. The bedrooms provided jugs of water and bowls for washing. One of the other candidates told me that in his room the water had frozen solid, but I told him that in mine the ice was only about a quarter of an inch thick and if he gave it a hard knock, he would probably strike water.

Lynn had to compete against about a hundred other boys, but was among the five invited to an oral interview. His headmaster at Bristol Grammar School had advised him, at this stage of the process, to “take an unconventional line in order to stand out from the crowd of conventional answers.” Lynn may have taken this too much to heart. Examined in recent history, he explained that Neville Chamberlain had been perfectly correct to appease Hitler at Munich, but wrong to declare war following the invasion of Poland, in view of Britain’s loss in the subsequent war. When the examiners asked him how he figured Britain had lost World War II, Lynn responded that they had fought to preserve the independence of Poland, but had ended up handing it over to Stalin along with the rest of Eastern Europe. At this point, recalls Lynn, his examiners lapsed into silence.

Although he might have been better advised to stick with what he had learned at the Young Communist League, the Dons were broadminded enough to pass the young know-it-all. Three days later he learned via telegram that he had been awarded a scholarship: “This news threw me into a state of hyper-manic euphoria whose intensity I had never experienced before or was never to experience again.”

Lynn began to consider what he would focus on at Cambridge:

I thought that history left a lot of questions unanswered such as why humans incessantly fight wars. I began to think that psychology might provide answers to some of these questions. I read a few psychology books to get a feel of the subject. One of these was William McDougall’s Introduction to Social Psychology which set out his theory of the instincts of aggression, home-making, social bonding and so on. I was quite favourably impressed, not realizing that all of this was passé. I began to think seriously about reading psychology when I went up to Cambridge, as my father had suggested when I met him two years earlier.

Lynn was so lacking in esprit de corps that he had found it impossible to care whether Bristol Grammar School won or lost its athletic contests against other schools. He was, therefore, an extremely poor fit for the armed services. Nevertheless, like all British 18-year-old boys at this time, he was conscripted in July 1948 and served until September of the following year. Despite his lack of enthusiasm, he was selected for officer training, where he made his first acquaintance with the Progressive Matrices intelligence test he would later use in research. Weapons training involved Boer-War-era bolt-action rifles with six bullets that had to be transferred from the magazine manually, making for a very slow rate of fire. By this time, the Red Army had Kalashnikov AK-47s which functioned like light, handheld machine guns.

We received instruction in leading an attack on an enemy position. The gist of this was that you led your men towards the enemy position while the enemy fired at you. If you were lucky, they missed and when you got near to their position you could shoot them at close range, or run at them and stick your bayonet into one of them. When I heard about this, I was not surprised about the enormous casualties in World War One.

Upon receiving his commission, Lynn was assigned to training raw recruits such as he himself had been seven months earlier. They were not an impressive lot:

The new conscripts had one session of learning to fire an air rifle. I was astonished to find that most of them found this very difficult and failed to hit the target at all. I found no difficulty in doing this because I had occasionally been to fair grounds and shot at targets. It was simply a matter of aligning the sights on the rifle against the target and pulling the trigger, and the bullet went into the bull’s eye or very close to it. I used to give them a demonstration of how it was done, and the sergeant would bring the target and show it to them with six neat little holes in the bull’s eye. The conscripts would gather round with exclamations of “Cor, blimey, look at the officer’s.”

As an officer, Lynn had a private room and leisure for reading and study. Besides tackling Dante’s Commedia in the original Italian, he made some time for psychology:

. . . including Galton’s Hereditary Genius, in which he argued that intelligence is a single entity, is largely hereditary, that high intelligence is required for civilisation and that in advanced civilisations the more intelligent individuals tend to have fewer children, with the result that the intelligence of the population declines and with it the quality of the civilisation. I found all this very interesting and it confirmed my intention to take psychology when I went up to Cambridge. 

Lynn matriculated at King’s College, Cambridge, in October 1949, where he found it was not possible to read (or, in American English: “study”) psychology until the third year. In the meantime, he continued the study of history, which involved producing a weekly essay.  Lynn found it a valuable exercise: “you had to grapple with a problem, structure an argument and write it up.”

Social life at Cambridge was centred largely on the college. After dinner several of us would usually gather in someone’s rooms (generally we had both a sitting room and a bedroom) where the host would make coffee and we would discuss the problems that young men always have and probably always will discuss – the meaning of life, politics, literature, history, war, pacifism, religion, and of course, sex and gossip.

Most of the students came from elite backgrounds and public schools like Eton, but nearly all were socialists of some sort.

A Christian fellow student attempted to convert Lynn, but he was too rationalistic to get the hang of religion:

I had read Francis Galton’s paper on the efficacy of prayer, which he tested by examining the longevity of kings and queens. He argued that many thousands of people pray for the life of kings and queens, so these should live longer than ordinary folk if prayer is effective. He found that this was not the case and concluded that prayer is ineffective.

Lynn found this demonstration dispositive.

King’s College was all male in those days, which fostered a highly competitive atmosphere:

Those who made their mark were designated “smart” and were elected to the elite societies and invited to the “smart” parties. Invitations to parties were issued by cards that students placed on their mantelshelf, where they were displayed like trophies. The number of cards you had on your mantelshelf was an index of how “smart” you were, so we were conscious of who was and who was not “smart”. The competition between the young men resembled that of young males in many animal species and primitive societies, where young males compete to be admitted to become full members of the adult group and are allowed access to women while those who fail are excluded. From the 1980s the Cambridge colleges admitted women and most of the inter-male competition has gone.

Lynn reports only meeting two girls during his entire seven years at Cambridge; one of these was Susan Maher, who would become his first wife.

I completed my history course at the end of academic year of 1951. I had enjoyed it, particularly the course on political theory where we had to master, among other writers, Plato and Adam Smith. Plato’s Republic was an introduction to the concept of a eugenic state in which people were bred for desirable qualities. I had already encountered this idea in Galton’s Hereditary Genius, which curiously makes no mention of Plato. I was intrigued with this idea and continued to think about it for many years.

Lynn found his socialist convictions no match for Adam Smith, the reading of whom “was a road to Damascus experience.”

Although I had enjoyed the history course, I was fundamentally dissatisfied with it because it was impossible to find the patterns that can be found in the sciences. History has been described as just one damn thing after another, and this did not suit my temperament. So I stuck to my resolve to take psychology for the rest of my degree.

Lynn enthusiastically began the formal study of psychology during the Autumn term of 1951: “Here, I thought, I would be on the frontier of a new and challenging science.” His early studies did not live up to these hopes. The head of the department was Sir Frederick Bartlett, a renowned and much-honored psychologist whose books Lynn found vapid and many of whose results were later found not to be replicable: “He had an impressive presence derived from a high opinion of his own self-importance. I thought his real gift was in producing an unending flow of words that sounded impressive but had virtually no content.”

Just as I realized at school that people are divided into conformists and dissidents, and that I was by nature a dissident, I soon found it was the same in the Cambridge psychology department. As usual, the conformists were the majority. These all thought Bartlett was a genius, and in their books and papers acknowledged their indebtedness to his inspiring work. [They] struck me as like one of those religious sects headed by a charismatic leader which believe that they alone have the truth and are saved, while everyone else is in ignorance and are damned. The people they hated most were those of the London school, represented at this time by Sir Cyril Burt and Hans Eysenck. They never tired of deriding this group. My father told me that Sir Cyril Burt was nominated for fellowship of the Royal Society from time to time, but Bartlett invariably blackballed him.

After many false starts, Lynn would eventually realize it was precisely with this group that he belonged. Arthur Jensen has described it in part as follows:

The London School is not really a school or even a doctrine or a theory. Rather, it is a general view of psychology as a natural science and a branch of biology. Its central concern is variability in human behavior. It is Darwinian in that it views both individual and group differences in certain classes of behavior as products of the evolutionary process. The neural basis of behavioral capacities is subject to these evolutionary mechanisms the same as other physical characteristics. It is quantitative in that it emphasizes the objective measurement and taxonomy of behavior.

In October 1951 there was a general election in Britain which the Conservatives won. Although still a Labour supporter at this point, Lynn did not think they had achieved much in six years of governing:

I did not think there was any improvement in the mines, railways and other industries that had been nationalized. There was no sign that the workers had become more satisfied now that they were no longer working for the profits of bosses and shareholders, as we had hoped, and they continued to strike for higher wages.

I was also concerned about the Commonwealth Citizens Act of 1948 which gave all Commonwealth citizens the right to come and live in Britain. As there were about a billion of these, I doubted whether this was sensible. When [it] was questioned in the House of Commons by a conservative, a Labour minister assured him that very few would actually come. A week or two after the act was passed the first immigrants from Jamaica arrived on the Empire Windrush.

By the time Lynn began his second year of study in psychology, Sir Frederick Bartlett had retired and been replaced by Oliver Zangwill. This man was the son of Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill, famous in the United States for popularizing the idea that America is, or should be, a “melting pot” in which various immigrant strains are fused into a new race. The younger Zangwill was an uncritical Freudian, dismissive of factor analysis, the concept of general intelligence, and any psychologist whose work featured them. Lynn recalls: “He once told me that whenever he was asked to referee any of Eysenck’s papers that had been submitted to a journal for publication he always recommended rejection on the grounds that Eysenck’s work was not valid psychology.”

The King’s College psychology department favored environmental explanations of both mental disorders and intelligence. The department’s intelligence expert was Alice Heim, who taught students that the low IQ of blacks in the US was attributable to discrimination. At other times she maintained that the relative contributions of genetics and environment to intelligence could not be assessed since they could not be separated. Lynn recalls: “I explained to her that Ronald Fisher, who had been the professor of genetics at Cambridge, had shown in 1918 that the genetic and environmental contributions to a trait could be quantified by analysis of variance, but I failed to get her to understand this.”

The lecturing staff in the Cambridge department struck me a pretty mediocre lot. [The lecturer on perception] was seriously addicted to both alcohol and cigarettes. He turned up at his morning lectures unshaven and reeking of alcohol, often hung over, and chain smoked throughout his delivery. He once turned up wearing two neckties. On another occasion he put a chalk between his lips, mistaking it for a cigarette, and tried to light it, slowly raising a match with his shaking hand.

Lynn’s negative view of the King’s College lecturers was not unusual:

It was generally considered at Cambridge that most lecturers were at best mediocre and that it was more effective to read books and articles than to attend lectures. I followed this consensus and read widely, and I discovered other kinds of psychology that were much more to my taste. I was attracted by the ethological work of Konrad Lorenz and Nicholas Tinbergen, which was just beginning to become known in Britain in the early 1950s. But my chief interest became the work on intelligence done at University College, London, inspired and endowed by Francis Galton and developed by Karl Pearson, Charles Spearman, Cyril Burt and Raymond Cattell, and extended to personality by Cattell and Hans Eysenck. . . . Both Burt and Raymond Cattell were concerned that the intelligence of the population was declining and proposed ways of quantifying this. I thought this was much more interesting and important than the experimental psychology that was being studied at Cambridge.

Lynn occasionally patronized a pub opposite King’s College known as The Eagle. Here he ran into Francis Crick and James Watson just as they were working on their celebrated discovery of the double helix structure of DNA:

This made immediate news as one of the greatest discoveries of the century for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize some years later. Shortly afterwards when I met Jim Watson again I asked him whether he thought one needed a very high IQ to make a discovery of such importance. He replied that he thought not, and that he believed his own IQ was not especially high, because when he was a student at the University of Chicago he was by no means the outstanding student of his year and that he found that mathematics did not come easily to him. He said he thought an obsessive interest with a problem combined with a fairly high IQ were the essential ingredients for a significant scientific discovery. I think he was right about this except perhaps for discoveries in physics for which a very high IQ is probably needed. Francis Crick was quite a party animal and on a few occasions he invited me to the parties he and his wife Odile gave at their pretty little house in Portugal Place. On one of these occasions I talked with him and James Watson about the probable decline of intelligence resulting from dysgenic fertility. They both agreed it was a serious problem. I found Francis Crick charming and amusing, and I found Jim Watson a touch hypomanic and I was not too surprised when on later occasions he made indiscreet remarks.

Go to Part 2

Kevin MacDonald’s Preface to Giles Corey’s The Sword of Christ

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Note: Giles Corey’s new book, The Sword of Christ, may be purchased here. Get it before it’s banned!

Giles Corey has written a book that should be read by all Christians as well as White advocates of all theoretical perspectives, including especially those who are seeking a spiritual foundation that is deeply embedded in the history and culture of Europeans. This is excellent scholarship combined with a very fluid writing style. He has thought deeply about all the issues confronting the peoples and cultures of the West.

Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. On the other hand, Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel.

Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.

Much of my scholarly interest has been to attempt to understand the people and culture of the West, resulting in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future. As I argue there, individualism lends itself to moral and ethical universalism which led to the religiously based eradication of slavery long before the rise of an elite hostile to Christianity itself. And White intellectuals in the nineteenth century attempting to understand their own moral universalism often attributed it to their racial origins.

Such individualism was not disastrously self-destructive. As Corey notes, “Christian universalism historically posed little to no danger to White survival because it was preached by Whites living in a world ruled by Whites; it was only in the multicultural Egalitarian Regime inseminated in the mid-twentieth century that Christian sacrifice was transformed into a call for racial suicide.” The individualist, Christian West was thus highly adaptive—until the rise of a hostile, Jewish-dominated elite bent on corrupting adaptive forms of Christian individualism in favor of a completely deracinated individualism, now accompanied by powerful religious, media, and academic voices preaching White guilt, often from a Christian perspective.

Instead, Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.” This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.

The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. My view, developed in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism is that traditional Christian theology was fundamentally anti-Jewish and was developed as a weapon which was used to lessen Jewish economic and political power in the Roman Empire. Here Corey describes the writings of the fourth-century figure, St. John Chrysostom, who has a chapel dedicated to him inside St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome as well as a statue outside the building. His writings on Jews are nothing less than scathing and reflect long-term tensions between Jews and Greeks in Antioch. And Chrysostom was far from alone in his hatred. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa, also writing in the fourth century: “ [Jews are] murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels against God, God haters, . . . advocates of the devil, race of vipers, slanderers, calumniators, dark-minded people, leaven of the Pharisees, sanhedrin of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteousness.” The traditional Church was certainly far from friendly toward Jews.

And although Protestantism was generally far more amenable to Jewish interests even before its current malaise, there certainly are exceptions. Here Corey emphasizes Martin Luther’s writings on Jews. Luther emphasizes Jewish hatred toward Christianity and their sense of superiority vis-à-vis Christians, seeing the latter as “not human; in fact, we hardly deserve to be considered poor worms by them.” But he is also concerned about Jewish economic exploitation and domination of Germans via usury—certainly the biggest complaint about Jews in traditional Europe. And he is repulsed by Talmudic ethics which promote very different moral codes for Jews and non-Jews.

However, much has changed since the origins of Christianity. In the contemporary United States, Christian Zionism has had a very large influence on Evangelical Protestantism whose theology departs radically from traditional Christianity, particularly with respect to the Jews. Corey has an excellent section on how Jews helped shape this new theology; it should be required reading for Christian Zionists because it would open their eyes to the sordid history of the movement. The result of such thinking is that Zionism has often become a vehicle of moral idealism in the minds of a great many gentiles, from Lloyd George to the present, who believe that the restoration of Israel is far more important than the fate of their own people.

Jews have not stood by idly on this but have actively supported the Christian Zionism movement. I noted in a 2010 article on the delusional Pastor John Hagee:

Beginning in 1978, the Likud Party in Israel has taken the lead in organizing this force for Israel, and they have been joined by the neocons. For example, in 2002 the Israeli embassy organized a prayer breakfast with the major Christian Zionists. The main organizations are the Unity Coalition for Israel which is run by Esther Levens and Christians United for Israel, run by David Brog. The Unity Coalition for Israel consists of ~200 Christian and Jewish organizations and has strong connections to neocon think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy, headed by Frank Gaffney, pro-Israel activist organizations the Zionist Organization of America, the Likud Party and the Israeli government. This organization claims to provide material for 1,700 religious radio stations, 245 Christian TV stations, and 120 Christian newspapers.[1]

Corey notes that Hagee’s organization, A Night to Honor Israel, has donated over $100 million to right-wing causes in Israel over the years. He has been well rewarded financially for his efforts and is the recipient of numerous awards from Zionist organizations.

Christian Zionism is a fitting reminder of how humans, unlike animals, can be motivated by ideas, including ideas that are completely unrelated to believers’ real interests. These ideas may be disseminated by people who are only doing so for selfish reasons, such as the dishonorable Cyrus Scofield, whose annotated Bible has become central to Christian Zionism. Maladaptive ideas may also be disseminated by people who are utterly opposed to the legitimate interests of believers or even hate Christianity and the West in general. Here Corey discusses the role of Felix Untermeyer, a wealthy Jew, in promoting Scofield and his Bible. It was a religious ideology “with a new worship icon—the modern state of Israel,” and Corey does an excellent job showing how Christian Zionism is a radical departure from traditional Christian theology. I found the following passage quite stunning:

The heresy of Christian Zionism, using an arbitrary and self-contradictory literalist and futurist hermeneutic, contends that the Jews remain God’s chosen people, separate from and superior to the Church; indeed, they believe that earthly Jewish Israel will replace the Church, and that as such, “Christians, and indeed whole nations, will be blessed through their association with, and support of, Israel.”

Although Christian Zionism is far less influential than the Israel Lobby in furthering Jewish interests in the United States, it has certainly had some influence and creates a ready-made cheering section for wars in the Middle East on behalf of Israel. After all, other attitudes typical of Christian Zionists, such as opposition to abortion or pornography, have had much less traction with the current left-oriented establishment despite their powerful commitment to the state of Israel.

Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world.

Corey has great material on Jewish perceptions of Christianity in the Talmud and on negative Jewish influences on culture in the present West, including pornography and the sexual revolution generally. As is so often the case with Jewish activism, the pornography movement has been motivated not solely by money but by hatred toward Christian morality and Christian family functioning. The results have been devastating: huge increases since the 1960s—the breakthrough decade of Jewish power—in all the markers of family dysfunction and poor child outcomes: lower marriage rates, higher births out of wedlock, higher rates of teenage pregnancy, precocious sexuality, high divorce rates, and unstable pair bonds. In other words, the Western family pattern of monogamous nuclear families based on strong husband-wife pair bonds has been under attack from Jewish dominated movements, the most noteworthy of which was psychoanalysis promising an idyllic future if only people would jettison traditional Christian constraints on sexuality. These negative trends in family functioning have been most pronounced among the lower social classes and thus have much less effect on high-IQ middle- and upper-income groups, including Jews as a relatively high-IQ group. The disaster in family patterns has fallen far more severely on the White working class.

Corey’s has an extended treatment of the corrosive effects of pornography, now extended to child pornography and legalized pedophilia as the “final frontier” in the sexual revolution. As in other areas, this starts out by advocating language that makes the activity more or less acceptable depending on the interests of advocates. In the case of pedophilia, the first step is to label them “minor attracted persons,” whereas in the area of free speech, we find labels like “hate speech”—even for speech that is reasonable and fact-based. If issues related to free speech are any guide, there will soon be articles in law journals arguing that pedophilia is normal and should not be punished, and eventually courts will begin to adopt this logic in particular cases. Already Supreme Court justices like Elena Kagan have signaled a willingness to curtail speech on diversity issues,[2] and this would be joined by the other liberals, which would mean that curtailing free speech on race is at most one Supreme Court appointment away. And when that happens, it won’t be long before it is embraced by conservatives. As Corey notes in the case of pedophilia, “We are presumably one Supreme Court ruling away from the National Review cocktail ‘conservative’ crowd celebrating pederasty as the next great achievement of individual liberty.”

Given the exhaustive summary of the negative effects of pornography—including neurological impairments related to impulsivity and lessened interest in familial relationships of love and nurturance—it is horrifying indeed that “sixty percent of boys and thirty percent of girls were exposed to pornography in early adolescence, including ‘bondage, rape, and child pornography’, and another which concludes that children under ten years old now account for over twenty percent of online pornographic consumption.” This definitely was not happening when I was growing up in the 1950s, prior to the deluge. I agree with Corey’s conclusion, “We have conclusively established that Jewish leadership and participation was instrumental in and a necessary condition of the pornographic war that has struck at the most sacred foundation of the West, the family.” As Freud famously said, “we are bringing them the plague.”

Corey has an excellent and exhaustive section on Jewish ritual murder—an absolutely convincing presentation on a topic that, like so much of Jewish history, is a minefield for serious scholars. As he notes, “There are … hundreds of accusations and cases of Jewish ritual murder, each just as sadistically depraved as the last, involving barrels of nails, crucifixion, decapitation, spit-roasting, stoning, and a litany of other barbaric evils; we could fill entire volumes with the accounts of each of these innocent lives so cruelly taken from this world.”

 

This is a topic that I have never written about, although I was somewhat familiar with Blood Passover, Ariel Toaff’s book on the topic. As to be expected, Toaff’s book was condemned by the activist Jewish community and he was pressured into publishing an apology, promising to prevent distribution of his book, etc. However, we should not be surprised to find that such practices occurred. Ritual murder is an extreme manifestation of normative Jewish hostility toward the surrounding society which is an important facet of the entire subject. The eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon was struck by the fanatical hatred of Jews in the ancient world:

From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of human kind.[3]

The nineteenth-century Spanish historian José Amador de los Rios wrote of the Spanish Jews who assisted the Muslim conquest of Spain that “without any love for the soil where they lived, without any of those affections that ennoble a people, and finally without sentiments of generosity, they aspired only to feed their avarice and to accomplish the ruin of the Goths; taking the opportunity to manifest their rancor, and boasting of the hatreds that they had hoarded up so many centuries.”[4]

As I noted in an article titled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the Soviet Union,” “Hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus (“they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies”[5]) to the present.”[6] Toaff brings out the revenge motive: “In their collective mentality, the Passover Seder had long since transformed itself into a celebration in which the wish for the forthcoming redemption of the people of Israel moved from aspiration to revenge, and then to cursing their Christian persecutors, the current heirs to the wicked Pharaoh of Egypt.”

Hatred and revenge were clearly on display in the early decades of the Soviet Union, a period in which around 20 million people were murdered. From “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” a review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century:

There can be little doubt that Lenin’s contempt for “the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant” was shared by the vast majority of shtetl Jews prior to the Revolution and after it. Those Jews who defiled the holy places of traditional Russian culture and published anti-Christian periodicals doubtless reveled in their tasks for entirely Jewish reasons, and, as Gorky worried, their activities not unreasonably stoked the anti-Semitism of the period. Given the anti-Christian attitudes of traditional shtetl Jews, it is very difficult to believe that the Jews engaged in campaigns against Christianity did not have a sense of revenge against the old culture that they held in such contempt. …

Slezkine seems comfortable with revenge as a Jewish motive, but he does not consider traditional Jewish culture itself to be a contributor to Jewish attitudes toward traditional Russia, even though he notes that a very traditional part of Jewish culture was to despise the Russians and their culture. (Even the Jewish literati despised all of traditional Russian culture, apart from Pushkin and a few literary icons.) Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. …

Slezkine’s argument that Jews were critically involved in destroying traditional Russian institutions, liquidating Russian nationalists, murdering the tsar and his family, dispossessing and murdering the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church has been made by many other writers over the years. …

The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.”[7] … It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.” And as Elliott Abrams notes, the American Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.”

As the quote from neocon Elliott Abrams—and much else—indicate, this fear and loathing continues into the present. Consistent with what we know of the psychology of ethnocentrism, a fundamental motivation of Jewish intellectuals and activists involved in social criticism has simply been hatred of the non-Jewish power structure perceived as anti-Jewish and deeply immoral—Susan Sontag’s “the white race is the cancer of human history,” which was published in Partisan Review, a prominent literary journal associated with the New York Intellectuals (a Jewish intellectual movement), is emblematic.

As I write this in the summer of 2020, we are experiencing what feels like the end game in the Jewish conquest of White America. Because Jews have become a hostile elite with a powerful position in the media and educational system, Jewish attitudes in the 1950s that the U.S. is an “awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society” are now entirely mainstream and the cancel culture that we see now is indeed directed most of all toward White red state voters, particularly in the South. Cancel culture started with toppling Confederate monuments, but of course it didn’t stop there, so now statues of the Founding Fathers are being destroyed and there are demands that statues dedicated to Christian religious figures be removed. Jews in particular have demanded the removal of a statue of King Louis IX of France because of his attempt to curb Jewish moneylending in the interests of his people and for burning 12000 copies of the Talmud.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame burning, April 15, 2019. Much of the cathedral was built during the reign of St. Louis.  

This hatred won’t end if and when Whites become a minority. Jews were responsible for the 1965 immigration law that opened up the United States to immigration from all over the world, and they have energetically worked to make alliances with these immigrant groups who are encouraged to hate White America and often adopt anti-White rhetoric almost as soon as they arrive because they can see the political advantages of doing so.

This won’t end well. As I concluded in my recent book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition:

I agree with Enoch Powell: “as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”[8] All the utopias dreamed up by the Left inevitably lead to bloodshed—because they conflict with human nature. The classical Marxist Utopian vision of a classless society in the USSR self-destructed, but only after murdering millions of its own people. Now the multicultural utopian version that has become dominant throughout the West is showing signs of producing intense opposition and irreconcilable polarization. 

Given the very large Jewish involvement in these projects consequent to the Jewish rise to elite status throughout the West, the big picture is that the thrust of Jewish power has been to create societies envisioned as being good for Jews, inevitably advertised in idealistic, morally uplifting, humanitarian terms [to appeal to the evolutionary psychology of individualism where social ties are based on belong to moral communities rather than communities based on kinship ties]. Historically, such projects have typically not ended well and have resulted in massive social upheavals. It would thus not be surprising if current social divisions result in a movement characterized by anti-Jewish overtones. …

All of the measures of White representation in the forces of social control will continue to decline in the coming years given the continued deterioration of the demographic situation. At this point, even stopping immigration completely and deporting illegals would not be enough to preserve a White America long term.

The left and its big business allies have created a monster. Whites have to realize that if they do nothing, they will be increasingly victimized and vilified in the coming decades as the monster continues to gain power. Better that any blood be shed sooner rather than later. 

What happened in the early decades of the Soviet Union is a chilling reminder of what can happen when an alien hostile elite seizes control of a country.

I agree entirely with Corey’s conclusions and recommendations for a revival centered around the adaptive aspects of Christianity—the aspects that produced Western expansion, innovation, discovery, individual freedom, economic prosperity, and strong family bonds. A Christianity that is adaptive in the evolutionary sense of survival and reproduction and fundamentally cognizant of the mistakes of the past.

We must not tolerate subversion. Liberalism must go; we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the Enlightenment. We cannot afford to countenance any further anti-American, anti-family, anti-White speech, and this should be reflected in a new Constitution. Just as conservatism was not enough, the United States Constitution was not enough, with gaps that left it gaping wide for judicial “interpretation.” For another thing, we must circle the wagons and inculcate the männerbund, restraining our individualism at least for the time being. For another, we must return to our Lord and Savior. A nation without faith can have no guiding light, no purpose, no drive, no Mission. Izaak Walton, writing of his friend John Donne’s last days, described the body “which was once a temple of the Holy Ghost and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust.” His last line: “But I shall see it reanimated.”

Kevin MacDonald, August 9, 2020

[1] Kevin MacDonald, “Christian Zionism,” The Occidental Observer (March 12, 2010).

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/03/12/kevin-macdonald-christian-zionism/

[2] Kevin MacDonald, “Elena Kagan: Jewish Ethnic Networking Eases the Path of a Liberal/Leftist to the Supreme Court, The Occidental Observer (May 20, 2009).

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/05/20/elena-kagan/

[3] Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol.1, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1909), 78.

[4] Quoted in W. T. Walsh, Isabella of Spain: The Last Crusader (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1930), 196.

[5] Tacitus, The History 5, 4, 659.

[6] Kevin MacDonald, “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR.” Review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The Occidental Quarterly, 5(3), 65–100, 93–94.

[7] This quote comes from Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Chapter 3.

[8] “Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech,” The Telegraph (November 6, 2007).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

The Maladaptive Altruism of White Communities: Chapter 7 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

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“The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840” by Benjamin Haydon (1841).

The white race is uniquely altruistic. Why? This is a very difficult question to answer. It is easy to understand altruistic behavior for the benefit of one’s family members. This is common among animals. Mother bears will put their lives in danger to protect their cubs from attack. Sacrifices for one’s relatives and in-group ethnic members are also common. The difficult question is: why whites are singularly motivated to perform actions that benefit members of out-groups when such actions harm their ingroup members and families? This is known in dissident circles as “pathological altruism”.

The Antislavery Movement

One would think that the existence of a huge literature on the subject of altruism would have provided us with definite answers about the unique nature of white altruism. Not really. Since any discussion about racial differences is prohibited in academia, this behavior is invariably framed as if it were a disposition among humans in general. White academics habitually project their altruistic behaviors to humans as humans. Kevin MacDonald is one of a few evolutionary psychologists who understands that whites are singularly altruistic outside their kin-group, and that explaining this behavior requires a Darwinian approach that is wedded to the history of whites. This is the subject of chapter 7 of his book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. He argues that the “moral idealism in the British antislavery movement”, which led to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833, offers an excellent case study of the nature and historical origins of white pathological altruism.
Without overlooking other psychological motivations which generally come into play among leaders in all movements, such as ambition, personal gain, including the satisfaction of being praised as a selfless individual, MacDonald carefully goes over the antislavery sentiments expressed over many decades, starting in the eighteenth century, by Quakers, Evangelical Anglicans, and Methodists. The leaders of the antislavery movement were sincerely empathetic individuals moved by the suffering of others. The influential Marxist explanation that the campaign against slavery occurred only when it was no longer advantageous for capitalism to exploit slave labor is seriously flawed.
One would expect an evolutionary psychologist to be drawn to an explanation that emphasizes the economic self-interests of whites. But as we have seen in our multipart review of MacDonald’s book, this type of explanation misses out the singularity whites have exhibited throughout history in creating communities with ideological norms that encouraged trust beyond one’s family network. As we saw in Part 3 of my extended review, whites exhibited WEIRD behaviors early on in their history. Back in the age of hunting and gathering they were more inclined to extend their trust to members of outside tribes (because this was a naturally advantageous strategy in the climes of northwest Europe). In contrast, trust in the non-Western world was restricted to ingroup members. In the course of time, whites came to exhibit more WEIRD traits, such as monogamous behaviors among powerful men despite their natural instinct for polygamy. The Catholic Church nurtured norms inside the “higher” frontal parts of the brain capable of inducing guilt and fear of godly punishment among powerful men who failed to control their sexual drives.
By the 1800s, as we saw in Part 6, we witness Puritan-descended transcendentalists believing that humans could transcend their biological drives and become purely selfless moral beings caring for strangers as much as for family members. The abolitionist movement was also a descendant of this egalitarian and universalist tendency within Protestantism. In this case the major activists were Quakers. The Quakers were “highly principled and deeply Christian, with a powerful sense of fairness and egalitarianism”. They had, in MacDonald’s words, a “genuine empathy for the slaves,” morally outraged by “acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings”. The Quakers were also “highly egalitarian” in their institutional organization; “there were no bishops or ordained ministers, and any person (including women) could speak”. They emphasized the “intellectual and moral equality of African slaves”. Although the Methodists were more into self-help, diligence and hard work, they too believed that all humans were equally valuable, and that’s why they opposed slavery.
MacDonald’s point is not that whites were wrong to seek the abolition of slavery. His aim is to understand the excessive moral preoccupation whites exhibited about the plight of Africans coupled with their current pathological empathy for aggressive immigrants occupying their lands. In light of this reality, and the complete indifference Muslims have to this day about their thousand-year old enslavement of Africans, these Puritan-descended movements do seem incredibly naive, child-like, and devoid of realism. What is there to admire about this?
I will make the argument below that the eighteenth century was period of “radical change” in the conception of the Western self, the first time Europeans began to write about an “authentic self” residing in each person, in contrast to the more stereotypical character types of the past when individuals tended to perform the “roles” ascribed to them. This “new self” was a continuation of the liberation of the Western mind from the “otherness” of norms, impulses, and structures which have not been ascertained, approved, or authenticated by the self, encouraging a new cultural reality in which the “I” came to obey its “inner voice” and aesthetic judgments.
This period also saw the spread of the nationalist idea that all peoples have an authentic identity and that each ethnic group should enjoy national self-determination. Only when a people have their own homeland, in awareness of their own traditions, history, and ethnic heritage, will they fulfill themselves as individuals in control of their destinies. This nationalistic movement was associated with the idea that a liberal state should promote the positive liberty of its citizens so they can bring out what is best in them rather allowing the state to be dominated by the negative liberties of the private sphere. But this conception of positive liberty would be hijacked by the left after WWII to mean not the nationalistic cultivation of the higher nature of citizens but the promotion of multiculturalism.

The Making of the Modern “Authentic” Self

MacDonald is aware that the period of the abolitionist movement included a “wider context”, a period some have identified as “The Age of Benevolence”, a time when Europeans showed themselves to be “kinder and gentler”, building hospitals, insane asylums, nursing care for the infants of paupers and educational facilities for the poor. MacDonald alludes to this authentic self when he writes about a “new sensibility” among Europeans, an “affective revolution”. He mentions Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as an example of many “sentimental” novels of this period. This “new sensibility” has been associated with the “Rise of the Novel“. Numerous “sentimental” novels were written in the eighteenth century emphasizing personal experience and feeling, a spirit of non-conformity towards rigid and ‘insincere’ conventions, a fascination with the inner depths of the affective self.

Since the West has always been in a state of discontinuity, we can’t envision this new sentimentality as a sudden product of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth one already sees a “new valuation of commerce”, the idea of “le doux commerce”, the observation that a bourgeois lifestyle makes life more “polished”, peaceful, and “gentle”, replacing the warrior virtues of the old aristocracy, honor and heroic fame. Protestantism has also been associated with a new emphasis on the role of mothers and the eventual idealization in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century of marriage based on sentiments, true companionship between husband and wife, and a new concern for children and for childhood as an distinctive phase in the life cycle. In the pre-seventeenth century world, parents and kinship groups continued to exert a powerful influence on the choice of marriage partner. The rise of the “companionate marriage” brought a higher degree of personal choice in marriage partner, and a new concern for privacy within the family,  and new houses built with private rooms.

The rise of sentimental novels was part of a broader cultural movement known as Romanticism, which included such writings as Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761),  Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hölderlin. It also included English philosophers who developed the theory of moral sentiments: Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Lord Shaftesbury, and others. These philosophers identified morality with actions done by the right affections based on one’s inner sense of right and wrong. Morality is not about following socially prescribed norms; it is about being true to oneself, to one’s nature, or the voice of nature within. This idea was articulated by Rousseau in a very idealistic way in his claim that human beings were naturally authentic and inherently good and that socialization was responsible for instilling artificial conventions.

Some say it is really late in the eighteenth century when we see a movement characterized by “expressive individuation”. It is then that we see a generalized public culture emphasizing what is original and different in each person, the importance of allowing one’s “inner voice” to speak out  —  in art, painting, music, and poetry. Each artist sought to express his own individuated nature; novelists sought genuine characters who would reveal their true feelings, not the type of characters one tended to see in earlier novels, with “painted like” personalities, “one of a genus”, what a person had in common with others.

But I believe there is something incomplete and even misleading about the existing scholarship on these movements. Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), Michael Mascuch’s Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591-1791 (1997), and Dror Wahrman’s The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England (2006)  — all identify the emergence of this “new self” using the same language of “man” and “nature” that the European originators of this self used. The thinkers of the eighteenth century wrote as if they were discovering a natural disposition in man as such, a trait that was “innate” or intrinsic to the “essentiality of man”. This same mistake has been continued by current academics. Even though they know, in Taylor’s words, that the authentic or expressive self is a “recent idea in human history”, they explain this movement as if entailed a discovery of the existence of an inner self naturally present in all humans.

There is no space here to elaborate, but another weakness in the current scholarship is the absent of any attempt to contrast this new Western self with the rather undeveloped sense of identity in the modern non-Western world. As far as I know, no one has written about this: to this day ones sees in the non-Western world humans with more stereotypical personalities; as I read recently from a traveler, “if you meet a few South Koreans, you will have met most South Koreans.” It is true, and that’s a complex discussion, that in the current Western world we are seeing a process of standardization, but it is still a subject worthy of investigation whether there has been a profusion of differentiated personalities, complex motivations, richer psychologies, in the modern West in ways that are unparalleled before and outside the West. It has been noted, I might add, that an “undifferentiated state of being” is an ideal in Eastern philosophies “for the development of a complete and harmonious personality“.

Structuralist Denial of the Self and Marcel Mauss

It is very difficult for Europeans to accept their unique individuality. Most theories in the social sciences tend to downplay the role of individuals. There is a school of “methodological individualism” which says that social phenomena must be explained in terms of the intentional states that motivate individual actors, rather than in terms of class or group dynamics. But this methodology is applied to all humans across the planet in terms of their self-interests or “rational choices”. It has nothing to do with “inner depths” and the differentiation of personalities. This denial is pervasive, and it prevails in the same leftists who talk about the right of individuals to choose their own sex. The impact of structuralists in this respect can’t be underestimated — from Marx to Freud, from Ferdinand Saussure to Roman Jacobson, from Levi-Strauss to Michel Foucault. All these thinkers, and there are quite a few more, deny the existence of a “real subject” with a conscious ego. The human subject is de-centered, constituted by structures and forces beyond his control, unconscious motivations, linguistic structures, capitalist “laws of motion”, under which the subject is subsumed rather than in charge. They argue that what requires understanding are the structures that have shaped history and that continue to be in charge of human motivations and behaviors. As Foucault put it: “It’s not the assertion of identity that’s important; it’s the assertion of non-identity”.

But this line of thinking is rather odd. If we have become aware of these structures, should we not conclude that our cognition has imbued them with consciousness and that these structures have lost their otherness? Was not the cognitive goal of structuralist knowledge to unveil/reveal the logics of these structures in order thereby to free us from their blind control? It is true that some structuralists insisted that one can’t step out of these structures since each discursive interpretation carries its own structures. I take this to be true in the degree to which humans can never be in control of the nature of things and in complete charge of their identities and the many forces of nature that control our destinies. But one should not deny out of hand that there are substantial differences in the degree to which cultures have understood the forces of nature and, in this respect, minimized the “otherness” of these forces and structures, and thus their blind determination over humans.

The insights of structuralists would have been impossible without the level of self-consciousness reached in the Western world. In cultures where the psyche is subsumed, barely explored, enveloped by nature, trapped within mystical beliefs from which it cannot step outside in a state of critical reflection, you can’t have such self-conscious studies as semiotics, for example, which entail a clear headed attempt to explain the relationship between a sign, an object, and a meaning. This is why all structuralists were educated in the West. The self, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss noticed back in the 1930s, is “a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures”. It emerged only in the West.

I should say a few things about Mauss’s seminal lecture, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Self”, published under a slightly different title. Mauss distinctly conveys how unusual the Western concept of the self is, and how it evolved historically. He observes that the category of self” was a “recent” category, an “aberration” in history. It was only India, due to the influence of Indo-Europeans, that one sees outside the West some “notion of the individual, of his consciousness”, “the “creation of the ‘I'”. In India the word “aham” equals ‘I’. This word is “the same Indo-European word as ‘ego'”. However, “in contrast to Hindus and the Chinese, the Romans, or perhaps rather the Latins, seem to be the people who in part established the notion of ‘person’ personne.” Only with the coming of Roman law do we have “the right to the persona…established.” The slave is excluded from it, he has no ‘personality’, but all Roman citizens are legally identified as persons with a capacity to be individually responsible for their actions and to engage in legal contracts as individuals.  The Stoics added a “voluntarist and personal ethics”, which enriched “the Roman notion of the person”. Christianity added a “metaphysical foundation” to the notion of the person. Man as man was now seen as substantially a “persona – substantia rationalis individua“.

This was not the end of the history of the self in the West. As Mauss continued:

The notion of the ‘person’ (personne) was still to undergo a further transformation to become what it has become over less than one and a half centuries, the “category of ‘self’ ” (moi). Far from existing as the primordial innate idea, clearly engraved since Adam in the innermost depths of our being, it continues here slowly, and almost right up to our own time, to be built upon, to be made clearer and more specific, becoming identified with self-knowledge and the psychological consciousness.

Mauss said next to nothing about the history of the self after Christianity, during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, but it is worth quoting another paragraph about how German idealist philosophers were the ones

who finally gave the answer that every act of consciousness was an act of the ‘self’ (moi), the one who founded all science and all action on the ‘self’ (moi), was Fichte. Kant had already made of the individual consciousness the sacred character of the human person, the condition for Practical Reason. It was Fichte who made of it as well the category of the ‘self’ (moi), the condition of consciousness and of science, of Pure Reason.

Mauss is hardly the only scholar who noticed this fundamental contrast between the West and the Rest. I have cited other authorities in prior publications who have written about how the self began to appear during ancient Greek times, or how the concept of the self came to be historically, rather presuming that awareness of the self is a naturally given disposition among humans as such. Some of these authorities include Eric A. Havelock, Bruno Snell, Julian Jaynes, and Hegel. What is identified in the eighteenth century, the authentic self, which has been attributed to Rousseau as well, builds on earlier forms of individualism, the aristocratic individualism of Indo-Europeans, the Greek civic concept of freedom, the concept of libertas of the Romans, the monogamous individualism reinforced by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, the individualism that Jacob Burckhardt observed in the Renaissance, the “I think, therefore I am” of Descartes, the political individualism of Locke, and, during the early 1800s, the “I that posits itself as self-positing” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy.

Authentic Freedom and Ethnic Nationalism in Herder and Fichte

Another interesting, and seemingly paradoxical novelty, which stands out during this period is the spread of the idea that all peoples have an authentic identity and that each nationality should enjoy self-determination. The age of nationalism takes off during the late 18C and intensifies in the nineteenth century. We have seen in prior parts of this extended review that the same individualism MacDonald sees as the core value of Western cultures became the basis for the formation of collective ingroups based on moral norms rather than kinship ties. The issue is not between Eastern collectivism and Western individualism. It is between groups based on blood lines and groups based on norms. This is not to detract from MacDonald’s additional observation that the moral communities created by Europeans have been inclined to be open to members of outside groups willing to exploit white altruism to pursue their own ethnocentric interests, as Jewish intellectuals did in twentieth America.

Since MacDonald’s focus is on American moral communities, including Sweden’s extreme individualism, I would like to bring up the possibility that individualism could have co-existed with nationalistic communities based on a strong ethnic identity. The WASP version of America as a moral community is one version among others witnessed during this period. There was also a Germanic version with a stronger collectivist outlook based on the principle of “positive liberty” — as contrasted to the Anglo version which was heavily based on the principle of “natural liberty”. This Germanic version was heavily influenced by the Romantic concept of authenticity.

The idea of authenticity found a nationalistic expression in Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). Herder belonged to a generation of Germans struggling to reconcile the freedoms enunciated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution with a growing sense of German national identity. He argued that each nationality was unique in its own authentic way, its own particular language, religion, songs, gestures, legends and customs. The individuals of different nations should not imitate the individuals of other nations since different Volker have a particular way of being human. Individual self-fulfillment was inseparable from the fulfillment of the national culture to which the individual belonged. Humans need to belong, and the group/nation within which this need can find satisfaction can be none other than the group/nation within which individuals grew up and acquired their languages and beliefs.

Herder cherished the variety of races and cultures he saw in different regions of the earth. He rejected a universal history of humanity in which the unique national and ethnic character of peoples would disappear as every nation came to adopt the same “correct” values. Each nation was a unique “family writ large,” an organic community rooted in a particular soil. Out of this soil each people nurtured its unique identity and “its own ideals” of perfection. Since each nation developed its culture out of its own needs and unique soil, its cultural standards could not serve as a model for other nations. Each culture had to be judged by its own standards.

Herder was also a liberal who believed in freedom of expression. This freedom was essential to the realization of the individuality of each citizen. In this respect, he was a typical Western liberal in post-Enlightenment Europe. He believed that an open contest between contrasting ideas was a prerequisite to the advancement of knowledge. He was also an advocate of the extension of the vote. While Herder was certainly not a modern progressive who rejected inequalities of properties, he was egalitarian in his opposition to fixed hierarchies and his call for the education of the poor to realize their authentic selves.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), the same thinker who said that philosophy must commence from the “I” that “posits itself absolutely”, called for a German nation state based on ethnicity and liberal principles. He is known both as a father of German nationalism and an ardent supporter of Kant’s liberal idea that moral concepts must be derived from the free deliberation of rational human beings, rather than from values mandated by priests or kings. His Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) is ranked as a foundational text of nationalist political thought. In the Anglophone world, Fichte tends to be condemned for his “proto-racist”, “anti-semitic” nationalism, but in France he is championed as a liberal or cultural nationalist who believed that Germany should based on cultural values in alliance with the liberal principles of the French Revolution of 1789.

The French school says that Fichte expressed his “conception of a people qua nation in explicitly linguistic–cultural terms.” “Purity of descent” was “insignificant” for determining membership into Fichte’s German nation. This school also says that he welcomed an “open nation” capable of educating outsiders into becoming good Germans. But I get the impression that this school is trying to assimilate Fichte to a post-WWII civic conception of nationalism. I agree with Arash Abizadeh that Fichte was an ethnic nationalist who wanted Germans to realize their potential and “higher freedom” as an ethnic group in contradistinction to the universalist ambitions of the French imperial armies. Fichte spoke of German nationals as those who have a “common descent”.  He believed, in the words of Abizadeh, that the nation requires a “natural anchor”, a living and original language, in order to have a “single continuous national identity over time”, “the original language of one’s ancestral people”.

This ethnic nationalism troubles Abizadeh, who thinks that only a civic conception is consistent with liberal values. In truth Abizadeh wants a Germany that is open to millions of Africans and Moslems, a Germany that is illiberal in its suppression of open debate about the merits of diversity. Fichte was more open minded than the current cultural Marxists controlling Germany. What he advocated, although he did not use this term, was a nation based on “positive rights”. He believed that the state should play a strong collectivist role in the cultivation of the “higher freedom” of Germans, a concept that is akin to Herder’s idea that the nation should educate its citizens to realize a potentiality that is their own. We can call this higher freedom, in the language of today, “positive liberty”.

Positive liberty encourages individuals to act in such a way that they are not controlled by their lower appetites, but are instead rational masters of their actions. This positive liberty in combination with ethnic nationalism speaks of individual freedom within the context of a nation state that encourages its members to express what is highest in their nature. As Abizadeh puts it:

Expressive, or authentic freedom requires the historic language of one’s ancestral people, organically linked with (indeed, arising out of) the people’s ‘own’ historical experiences, uncorrupted by foreign influences…Infiltrated by foreign elements, the national language would lose its anchor in the nation’s history…thereby becoming a corrupt and dead language incapable of harbouring expressive freedom.

It is only within the context of a nation dedicated to “higher freedom” that individuals can express their full potential as self-determining beings. Each individual embodies “the spiritual law of nature of his nation” while in turn the nation’s law is influenced by the individual’s contribution. It should be added that Fichte believed that the state should guarantee the right to work of its members; and that Kant’s vision of a peaceful federation of constitutional republics would only become feasible if the nation-states of Europe were largely self-sufficient national economies disentangled from the competitive and warlike relations common to open capitalistic states. (I will add parenthetically that the ideas of Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and other German thinkers identified as conservatives, would find a thorough reflection in the German political economy of nationalism exemplified in Friedrich List’s writings and other economists; and in actual policies associated with the rise of Germany to economic supremacy in Europe from the 1850s on).

III. Multiculturalism = Hijacking of Western Positive Liberty

This ethnic nationalism found expression in many Western nations, including in the Anglo-Saxon world, as embodied in the strict immigration rules of the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand against non-European until the 1960s/70s, notwithstanding the emphasis of these states on the “negative” rather than the “positive” liberty of citizens to choose their own way of life and happiness. But after WWII this ethnic nationalism was decisively discredited in its identification with Nazism. A thoroughly civic conception of Western nations, which had been developing over the interwar years, took over. The main exponents of civic nationalism were Jewish immigrant refugees from central Europe: Hans Kohn, Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm. They argued that the modern nation states of Europe were not rooted in primordial ethnic ties but were instead “artificial historical constructs”, “invented traditions”, designed by political elites to create states with a cohesive population, a national infrastructure, one official language and uniform laws. The ethnic nationalism of Europeans, in the words Hobsbawm, was based on “demotic xenophobia and chauvinism” rather than any factual ancestral ties.

While Hobsbawm was a communist who called for international revolution and the abolition of nations, Kohn, Deutsch, and Gellner called for Western nation-states based on negative liberties or individual rights alone, private property and equality under the law, without any reference to ethnicity. The implicit political message of the otherwise academic writings of these Jewish intellectuals was that a Western nation-state could only be true to liberalism insomuch as the identity of its citizens was conceived without any collective reference to their ethnic identity. Ethnicity should be a matter of individual choice and the state should not be identified with any ethnicity.

In fact, if I may conclude briefly with this observation, this civic conception would eventually come to advocate a lot more than the negative liberty of citizens, with the rise of what is known as “liberal communitarianism”. A major exponent of this new communitarian liberalism was Charles Taylor, a student of Isaiah Berlin, but later a critic of Berlin’s argument that the West should be based on the principle of “negative liberty”. Berlin argued that negative liberty, the right of individuals to decide for themselves the good life, was incompatible with the idea of positive liberty, which in his view gave state officials the power to dictate to citizens what they should do with their freedom. Taylor countered that humans are generally not in charge of their decisions but are influenced and controlled by a whole host of external influences and powers — unless they are socialized and educated to take charge of their lives, to think critically, and cultivate their “authentic selves”.

Taylor, in order words, took over Herder’s concept of authenticity to argue that Westerners were “narcissistic” and “disenchanted” due to the fact that their lives were consumed with the satisfaction of private wants without a higher purpose. Humans need standards, and these standards can’t be formulated by isolated individuals but come from their cultural horizon, in dialogue with others and within a state-community. From here Taylor went on to argue that multiculturalism is the best way to enhance and nurture the social horizons of individuals, because Western nations are diverse and no one culture should be imposed on a multicultural community. Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants would be deprived of pursuing “authentic” lifestyles in a nation in which they were compelled to assimilate to the “dominant” cultures of whites. The state must play a role in promoting multiculturalism, celebrating the “authentic” cultures of “oppressed minorities” rather than reducing culture to a private decision.
Taylor was articulating intellectually a general trend in the Western world led by progressives to create moral communities dedicated to multiculturalism within which no dissent would be allowed, no true negative liberty on the question of the merits of diversity. Multiculturalism was inherently good, it provided whites with a more “enriched” cultural horizon beyond their world of negative liberties. The task of the communitarian liberal state was ensure the acceptance of this good. Today, diversity is not an individual choice but a mandated policy across the West, a totalitarian world view permeating every market, school, government institution, policy, and business. The conception of the authentic self and of “positive liberty” originated by German nationalists would thus be hijacked by an establishment dead set to diversify the West against the “inauthentic” world of whites.

From Puritan Individualism To Jewish Infiltration – Chapter 6 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

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Editor’s note: Chapter 6 is an important part of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition because the Puritans became an elite group in the United States, dominating the academic, media, financial, and industrial establishment. They instigated for the Civil War, and their moral idealism remains with us today as we confront our current moral panic surrounding Black Lives Matter and our wars for democracy in the Middle East. Since around 1950 they were increasingly replaced by a new Jewish elite with very different values and outlook, and this cultural revolution was substantially accomplished by the 1970s, resulting in the America we see today. I thank Dr. Duchesne for his excellent introduction and commentary on this material.
Franklin Roosevelt (front, second from left) with football team, 1899

Chapter 6, “Puritanism: The Rise of Egalitarian Individualism and Moralistic Utopianism,” of Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, claims that Puritanism and the intellectual movements descending from this religion were the “most important” forces shaping the culture of the United States “from the eighteenth century down to the mid-twentieth century.” Puritanism, and the WASP culture it engendered, would cease to be hegemonic over American culture as Jews came to infiltrate “critical sectors of American life” from the early 1900s onward.

For some time, Anglo-Saxon Darwinism managed to hold Jewish influence at bay, winning the battle for immigration restriction with the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924. But the Jews were growing behind the scenes.  Two million arrived from Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1924. While they lost the fight against immigration restrictions, their influence would grow unimpeded in the media, the social sciences, the legal profession and in finance. Darwinism, and the theories of race associated with this movement, would soon face defeat in academic circles, in no small measure because of the influence of Franz Boas. By 1965 Americans would come to agree with Jewish elites that their WASP nation was meant to be a “melting pot” of multiple races based on universal principles.

Jewish Infiltration of WASP Community Norms

Was there something in Puritanism and the Anglo-Saxon mind set that made them susceptible to this kind of infiltration? Contrary to common interpretations, MacDonald does not frame this debate solely in terms of  WASP individualism versus Jewish in-group strategic control. He distinctly says that individualism is not incompatible with in-group strategies and collectivist norms. The Puritans had strong in-group markers. Their Anglo-Saxon descendants had a strong sense of ethnic identity, what it meant to be “distinctively American”. In fact, as we will see in our examination of later chapters, MacDonald believes that the “liberal cosmopolitanism” ruling the Western world today resembles “the Puritan tradition of combining individualistic tendencies with strong social controls”.

Western individualism has engendered its own forms of collectivism. The difference is that the collective identities the West promoted have tended to be based on moralistic/ideological principles rather than on kinship relations. Their ethnic attachments were exhibited within in-groups far larger (city-states and nation-states) than the typical clannish tribal groups we find outside the West. The argument is not that Western individualists were bereft of any communitarian ties. The argument revolves around different types and degrees of individualism in relationship with different types and degrees of “ideological” collectivism.

The type of moral communities whites created (relatively freed from kinship ties) left them susceptible to out-group infiltration. While Americans managed to create very powerful nation-state with a strong in-group WASP ethnic identity, their liberal and egalitarian values left them susceptible to out-group infiltration. The Jews successfully radicalized  the Anglo-Saxon “sense of fairness and egalitarianism” against  an America based on a WASP identity.

“Puritanism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy”

MacDonald believes that the English Civil War, which established the influence of Puritan culture in both Britain and the United States, should be “seen as a turning point in the history of the West”:

It marked the beginning of the end of aristocratic individualism with its strong emphasis on hierarchy between social categories and the beginning of the rise of egalitarian individualism with its ideology of social leveling and parliamentary democracy — blended with capitalism and wealth accumulation.

In other words, the egalitarian individualism that originated among northwest European hunters and farmers took the upper hand away from the aristocratic individualism which prevailed in ancient and medieval times. MacDonald notes that Puritanism originated in East Anglia, a region with a strong tradition of freedom, fond of town meetings and arguments, with the “highest average intelligence in Britain,” a larger proportion of literate inhabitants, scholars and scientists.

I would add that East Anglia was a region with a high proportion of yeomen farmers, that is, a “middle class” of farmers, just below the gentry, in possession of their own land, without subordination to feudal lords, as well as free to serve on juries and in municipal police forces, from the 15th through 18th centuries. They were also individualistic in their heavy participation in the woollen cloth industry since the fourteenth century, which nurtured a tradition of self-determination and consensual social contract.

However, the one cultural trait Puritans have stood out for historically, and Protestants generally, is liberty of conscience; every individual should be allowed to live by the faith that seems to true to him; every individual should have “direct, unmediated access to God”. MacDonald observes that the “Puritan revolution was carried to its extreme in the United States,” where they were “freed of the hereditary aristocracy and religion of England, during the Jacksonian era”. Another feature of Puritanism was its tendency to “pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues,” in terms of “appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that the principal purpose of government is moral.”

There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate — inspired by the devil.

This brings me to a trait MacDonald brings up right from the beginning, and it is that Puritans were also “strongly collectivist”, with clear ingroup-out group distinctions. This is why he writes of Puritanism as a “group evolutionary strategy”. It was not a “genetically closed strategy” (even though Puritans were ethnically homogeneous for a long time) since they were open to outsiders who converted to Puritanism. Puritans came to constitute, nevertheless, a very cohesive group with a

powerful emphasis on cultural conformity…and public regulation of personal behavior via social controls related to sex, lack of religious piety, public drunkenness, etc.

MacDonald calls these controls “anti-individualist” in the same vein as he designates Puritanism as an “individualistic group strategy”. This may seem confusing to those who think that individualism is inherently anti-collectivist, but it is not. The Puritan “individualist group strategy” was “remarkably adaptive in an evolutionary sense,” both in England and the United States. In the United States, Puritans “multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries”. They nurtured very strong families, with strict yet warm family practices and bonds. They emphasized literacy in both sons and daughters, supporting public libraries and schools. Within their communities, Puritans were indeed committed to egalitarian fairness “and the good of the group as a whole”, rather than allowing each individual to maximize his interests as a private agent. They had a strong moral commitment to the moral well being of others. Farmers without any educational background, for example, “voluntarily contributed some of their harvest to support university faculty and students”.

Early Puritan in America

At the same time, in the United States, as Puritans prospered and “became more inclined to commercialism and materialism,” the religious controls waned, particularly as the population grew, and the areas originally inhabited by Puritans grew into cities, as they were opened to waves of immigrants who were not committed to a Puritan way of life. But these developments did not bring an end to the moral commitments of Puritans, but resulted in the rise of a “secular version of moral utopianism”.

 Puritan-Descended Transcendentalist Intellectuals

Transcendentalists were a very influential intellectual elite (roughly from 1830 to 1860) in America with Puritan origins. They are called “transcendentalists” because they believed that humans could transcend their animal instincts by using their minds in the creative way it was meant to be used. They believed that humans could overcome their greedy impulses, lust for sex and power, and ethnocentric biases, through socialization in the ideals of “brotherly love” and control over their bodily senses and appetites. MacDonald notes that this utopian optimism coincided with the incredible material progress American was witnessing in the nineteenth century, in science and technology. This progress inculcated the belief — and not just among transcendentalists — that a “golden age of peace, harmony, righteous behavior and material comfort” was attainable.One could get into a long discussion here about how the ability of whites to form groups freed from biologically-based kin-groups is what allowed them, not just transcendentalists, but Western thinkers from ancient times onward, to employ their minds in far more creative ways than all the other cultures combined. This creativity, witnessed in multiple fields — the arts, architecture, music — can hardly be identified as inherently naive just because it presupposes the freeing of the mind from purely Darwinian pressures. It can, and has been, the basis for Western “realism” and the formation of powerful ethnic states, and indeed the creativity behind Darwinism. This transcendence, however, can be very dangerous as we have seen aplenty in the many utopian worlds whites have concocted out of their imagination. The American transcendentalists, as was observed of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the main intellectuals of this group, tended to be men with a “cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil” — easy prey to manipulators of the mind.

Although the ideas of transcendentalists would lose their preeminence after the bloody Civil War, and American intellectuals would be influenced by ideas of progress based on realistic assessments of human nature, their illusions about a peaceful “brotherhood” across the world would continue to influence American liberalism thereafter.

Anglo-Saxon Individualism and Ethnic Identification

One could argue, roughly speaking, that the Anglo-Saxon liberalism that came to dominate America from the late 1800s through to the 1960s was a compromise between the universalism of transcendentalism and the materialism of Darwinism. On the moderate side (so to speak) were the Anglo-Saxons who were proud of their ethnic identity and view their individualism as a unique attribute of their ethnic heritage, while believing, at the same time, that immigrants from other European ethnic groups could be assimilated into the dominant WASP culture. They were influenced by the Social Darwinists, but they also believed that non-Anglos could be socialized to act like “good Anglo-Saxons”. They believed that their individualism “sprang from their ethnic heritage” and that if this heritage was to be preserved immigrants had to be raised as good Anglos.
Some Anglos were more radical in their individualism, advocating individual freedom from all remaining Puritan social controls; identified by MacDonald as “early precursors of 1960s’ hippiedom, celebrating self-discovery, emotion over logic, intuition, rebellion free love, Black jazz”, but others were on the right of the Anglo-Saxon spectrum, influenced by Darwinian theories of race. While we can say that the Anglo-Saxons intellectuals who advocated assimilation were voicing the majority view among Americans, MacDonald identifies the long period from 1880 to 1965 as a period of “ethnic defense” in acknowledgement of the considerable influence that Social Darwinian ideas (developed by Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gustave Le Bon, Herbert Spencer, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard) played in ensuring the Immigration Act of 1924 and keeping the borders close until 1965. For these Darwinians, racial differences were real, and the races were “in competition with each other for supremacy”.
For MacDonald, then, the WASP culture of Americans, had nurtured within itself a strong Darwinian movement capable of instilling a solid sense of ethnic identity among white Americans. But this current would not last. Right from the beginning, as this school held sway, a cadre of Jewish immigrants, freshly off the boats, set out to argue that the American ideals of individualism and universalism were inconsistent with any notion of America as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic state.

Between Jewish Universalism and Jewish Nationalism

Some Jews argued that all races, including Jews, should dissolve themselves within an American melting pot of races. But the more influential Jews, themselves influenced by Darwinian race theories, believed that Jews, in the words of Felix Adler (1851-1933), should only “universalize themselves out of existence when the task [of ethnic dissolution of non-Jews] was complete”. The Jews had their own unique universalist ethics, with a commitment to bring an end to the ethnic and racial identities of Americans (and the rest of the world). Jews should preserve themselves as the harbingers of a new world order. At the same time, Jews should build their own nationalism in order to protect themselves in a world full of antisemitism. Some Jewish intellectuals (Israel Zangwill, for example) would argue that “Jews were a morally superior race” with a morally superior religion—Judaism—with a “moral vision” to become the shinning light for a future America bereft of its historic Anglo-Saxon identity.
I was very surprised to learn from MacDonald (when first I read some four years ago his article, “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965“) that Jews were the first to articulate the idea of multiculturalism. I thought that the theory of multiculturalism was quintessentially Canadian. While I still think that Canadians, such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, would go on to develop a full explanation of how multiculturalism, not assimilation, was consistent with Western liberalism, it continues to surprise me (reading this chapter) that back in the early 1900s Jews were already making the case that America was meant to be a “polycentric” nation characterized by cultural pluralism. To compel immigrants to assimilate to a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, Jewish intellectual were arguing long ago, would constitute a violation of their “human dignity”. Assimilation entailed the denigration of the culture of immigrants. The nation of America must be de-linked from its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core. Anglo-Saxon culture should be seen as just one culture among many others.
Jews arriving in America

Worse than this, actually, for Jews the Anglo-Saxon majority culture in America was never meant to be a particular culture in its own right, but a culture inherently open to multiple cultures with their own particular identities. This view was only a few steps away from the Canadian idea that immigrant minorities deserve special group rights to protect themselves from the majority European culture with its inherent tendency to be racist and discriminatory.

MacDonald emphasizes how Franz Boas and his followers would assume control over the American Anthropology Association, as well as every major department of anthropology, by 1926, displacing the Darwinians. Jewish intellectuals effectively exploited the moral universalism of American liberals, a task becoming all the more easy after the Second World War, which discredited ethnic nationalism as inherently belligerent and genocidal. This intellectual displacement of the Darwinians (and the American intellectuals who emphasized their Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage) came together with the “unseen power” of Jewish international finance, increasing control of the media and outright ownership of major newspapers. Henry Ford famously wrote about this influence, observing in the 1920s that Americans had been made to feel that public discussion of the Jewish Question was improper.
It does not seem quite accurate to say that collectivist Jews exploited the inherent inability of American individualism to generate any form of ethnic identity. It seems more accurate to say that they hijacked Anglo-Saxon moral communities. The same Jewish intellectuals who would “expose the power structures of white America” would come to create a rigid ideological community with norms prohibiting debate on race differences, biological differences between the sexes, criticism of mass immigration, and white identity.  A strange social order would appear, characterized by the decline of the family, paternal authority, and genuine individualism. The Anglo-Saxons were genuine individuals in their appreciation of the capacity of the rational ego to decide what is the good life in communication with others. But this rational self, capable of choosing its own religious beliefs, was substituted by what Christopher Lasch would call in the 1970s a narcissistic individualism entrapped to a world of consumerism, helpless, dependent and passive, but assured by the politically correct community that he is living a meaningful life as long as he accepts diversity without rational criticism, views whites as inherently racist, praises non-whites for their authentic culture and longs for a multicultural world across the West.

Review of Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion. Vicomte Léon de Poncins.

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Review of Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion
Vicomte Léon de Poncins, trans. Timothy Tindal-Robertson
Palmdale, CA.: Christian Book Club of America, reprinted 1999. Originally printed 1967.

Editor’s note: TOO has posted several articles over the years on Jewish influence on the Catholic Church: George F. Held’s translations of Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council in four parts, Jimmy Moglia’s “Quo Vadis Vatican? Jewish involvement in the radical changes of the Second Vatican Council,” my “The role of Jewish converts to Catholicism in changing traditional Catholic teachings on Jews.” Andrew Joyce’s “Jews, White Guilt, and the Death of the Church of England” shows how some of these same figures (e.g., Jules Isaac) have influenced the Church of England.

After a little over a half century, it has become quite clear that the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the changes which took place in its wake—especially the promulgation of the New Mass by Pope Paul VI/Montini (1963–78)—has created a new religion that while it may still be called “Catholic” is in reality something quite different than what had existed for some two thousand years beforehand. The Council had been called by Pope John XXIII/Roncalli (1958–1963) to be “pastoral” and not to define doctrine or settle theological disputes; however, it was quickly taken over by Modernist forces who, despite being a minority (albeit a very determined minority), were able to force through a progressive agenda.

The Modernist takeover at Vatican II was not by happenstance, but, as with a great many important historical events, was well planned in advance. John XXIII’s predecessor, Pope Pius XII/Pacelli (1939–1958), had contemplated calling a council, but had been warned against it. Although Pius XII prevailed in not convoking a general assembly and is thought by many as the last “traditional” pope, an objective look at his appointments and actions during his pontificate paint a different picture. Many of the Vatican II revolutionaries operated freely during Pius XII’s reign and some had gained influential positions inside the Roman Curia. One of the most prominent Modernist was the future Pope, Paul VI.

It has been argued that had the Council never been convoked and had the Church retained its traditional stance on morals and doctrine, the cultural revolution which took place in the 1960s and beyond may have never taken place or would have been mitigated. The Vatican II documents, in many instances, were not explicitly heretical, but they were worded in such a way that they could (and were) interpreted in a liberal fashion. Modernists boasted that the Council inaugurated a “New Springtime” in the Church which would add converts and invigorate the faithful to greater devotion. Just the opposite occurred, as millions left and joined other denominations or simply lost interest .

Vatican II would have profound societal effects, especially in regard to marriage, child rearing, and the role of women. Very soon after the Council had ended, “Catholic divorce” in the form of Church annulments became popular. Where marriage in the time before Vatican II was held as indissoluble, married couples by the thousands were afterwards granted annulments by Church authorities and could and did remarry. Traditionally, Catholic women were seen and acted as homemakers and child-bearers or, if called, sought a religious vocation; after Vatican II women were encouraged to pursue careers and were granted positions in the Church and even allowed liturgical roles. Under the papacy of John Paul II/Wojtyla (1978–2005) for the first time, younger women and girls were permitted to become altar servers.

The New Springtime proved to be an unmitigated disaster on all fronts, as not only vocations, Church attendance, and membership plummeted to historic lows, but also widespread divorce and the new role of women led to a catastrophic drop in birthrates especially among the Catholic populations of Western Europe.

One of the most significant changes which took place at the Council was on the relationship between the Church and the Jews. The Modernists had hoped, with considerable Jewish backing, to push through language which would absolve the Jews from their crime of Deicide, condemn “anti-Semitism,” and play down Christian efforts to convert the Jews. Evangelization was to be replaced with the idea that Jews were “elder brothers” of Christians, as opposed to the traditional doctrine of “supercession”—that the covenant between God and the Church superceded the covenant between God and the Jews. This new construct appeared with the notion of Western civilization’s “Judeo-Christian” heritage which became a popular phrase in conservative and neoconservative literature.

There were few Churchmen or those among the laity who opposed Vatican II and almost none who objected to the new policy toward the Jews or did any investigation on how such a radical change came about. Among the few who did was Vicomte Léon de Poncins, a distinguished French author who had written numerous books and articles dealing with Freemasonry, the Jews, and subversive political movements. Poncins was the founder of the famous review, Contre-Révolution, which was published in Switzerland. He came from a distinguished French family. His great-grand-fathers were defenders of the Ancien Régime, one losing his life fighting the revolutionaries in 1789, while the other was imprisoned by Napoleon for his support of the monarchy.

Poncins wrote two books shortly after the close of the Council: Judaism and the Vatican (1967) and Freemasonry and the Vatican (1968). The former chronicled the events, personalities, and literature which led to the changes which took place in the decades prior to Vatican II in regards to the Jews. It also gave a first-hand commentary on the machinations which went on behind the scenes at the Council, including the actions of Paul VI and progressive bishops which many Catholic conservatives at the time, and even now, did not hold accountable or looked the other way, especially about the Pope’s involvement.

While there have been studies of Vatican II in the turbulent years which followed and while most have included analysis of the changes in Church policy toward the Jews, the later literature (mostly from traditional Catholic sources) has steered clear of the notion that the Jews had malicious intentions in their efforts. More traditional authors argued that they were doing so for self-preservation and in reaction to Christian persecution. Poncins was not of this mode of thought, believing in more sinister aspects of Jewish behavior which was why he was smeared and called an “anti-Semite.”

The Jewish onslaught on the Church began in earnest after the conclusion of World War II. The justification that Jewish intellectuals used was that the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism was the culmination of Gentile oppression and hatred which stemmed back to the time of Constantine’s emancipation of the Church and his patronage of it. Once given power, both Church and state persecuted the Jews over the next two millennia.

The reason for the Church’s animus toward the Jews was Christianity itself which at its root was “anti-Semitic.” In the minds of Christians, the Jews were directly responsible for Christ’s death. Therefore, the Gospel accounts which placed the blame on the Jews during Christ’s “trial” and Crucifixion, along with the early Church Fathers’ commentary on these events, had to be discredited. Later, the great Church doctors also had to be undermined for their upholding of Jewish responsibility in the death of Christ.

The pronouncements on non-Christian religions and the declaration Nostra aetate passed in the Fourth Session of the Council (1965) accomplished almost all that the Modernists had hoped for. In effect, these pronouncements repudiated nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on the Jews. Ever since, the Church has continually bowed to Jewish pressure in regard to its liturgy, the naming of saints, and in the political realm—its most infamous decision in the latter being the recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.

Poncins, who closely covered the Vatican II proceedings, wrote of the declaration:

. . . a number of Jewish organizations and personalities are behind the reforms which were proposed at the Council with a view to modifying the Church’s attitude and time-honored teaching about Judaism: Jules Isaac, Label Katz, President of the B’nai B’rith, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, etc. . . . These reforms are very important because they suggest that for two thousand years the Church had been mistaken and that she must make amends and completely reconsider her attitude to the Jews. [10]

The leading figure in the years prior to the Council was the virulent anti-Catholic writer Jules Isaac, and he played an active role during the Counsel. “Isaac,” Poncins describes, “turned the Council to advantage, having found there considerable support among progressive bishops. In fact he became the principal theorist and promoter of the campaign being waged against the traditional teaching of the Church.” [11]

Isaac had long before begun his hostile campaign to overturn Catholic teaching on the Jews with his two most important books on the subject: Jésus et Israel (1946) and Genése de l’Antisémitisme (1948). Poncins accurately summarizes the main thrust of these works:

 In these books Jules Isaac fiercely censures Christian teaching, which he says has been the source of modern anti-Semitism, and preaches, though it would be more correct to say he demands, the ‘purification’ and ‘amendment’ of doctrines two thousand years old. [11]

The two fonts of Revelation are: Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. To be successful, Isaac had to challenge the veracity of the Gospels, a seemingly monumental undertaking, but Jewish hubris apparently knows no bounds. The passages which Poncins quotes from show a number of inconsistencies, errors, and omissions which makes one wonder how books so flawed and biased could attain such notoriety. Poncins points out the shabby scholarship and vitriol that Isaac has for his subject:

In short, in their account of the Passion, now revised and corrected  by Jules Isaac, the writers of the Gospels appear as arrant liars of whom Matthew is unquestionably the most venomous. [19]

 

While the Romans cannot be completely exonerated for Christ’s death, Isaac focuses solely on the actions of Pilate during the Passion. He ignores the number of occasions during His three-year ministry where the Jews sought to kill Him. The most important omission was when Caiphas, shortly after the raising of Lazarus, condemned Christ to die: “Neither do you consider that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” [S. John ch. xi, vs. 50] There is no evidence, even at that late date, that any of the high Roman officials, including Pilate, knew of Christ until his Crucifixion.

In addition to his written works, Isaac organized “both national and international gatherings attended by sympathetic Catholics who were favorably disposed towards his arguments.” [12] Instead of falling on deaf ears inside the Vatican, in the post-war Catholic world, Isaac attracted a significant following. In fact, he was able to obtain a private audience with Pius XII where “he pleaded on behalf of Judaism.” [12] In 1960, after discussions with high ranking officials of the Roman Curia, Isaac met with John XXIII and asked the pope to “condemn the ‘teaching of contempt’ [in the Gospel narratives], suggesting that a sub-commission should be set up specifically to study the problem.” [12–13] Isaac’s activities proved to be quite fruitful, as Poncins reports:

Some time afterwards Jules Isaac ‘learned with joy that his suggestions had been considered by the Pope and handed on to Cardinal Bea for examination.’ The latter set up a special working [party to study relations between the Church and Israel, which finally resulted in the Council vote on the 20th of November 1964. [13] 

That a vicious critic of Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers, and saints was received by the Catholic hierarchy says a lot about the power and influence that the Jews had attained. And that their ideas were eventually accepted by Rome, shows how it had become increasingly Judaized. Judaization would only accelerate especially after the promulgation of the New Mass as popes would visit and pray with Jews at synagogues.

While Judaism and the Vatican appeared over a half century ago, it is still relevant for it was one of the first works which showed that the modern Catholic Church is a different institution than had previously existed for some two thousand years. Furthermore, Poncins addresses the touchy subject of the Jewish infiltration of the Church which even many traditional Catholic authors have typically avoided.

Poncins’ tome is important, for the changes in the Church’s attitude toward the Jews played a large part in its downfall as the Western world’s preeminent moral authority which used to defend the family, taught what the proper role of women in society should be, while it condemned societal-wrecking evils as sodomy, divorce, abortion, contraception, and concubinage. Without the Church’s guidance, Western societies were easy prey for the cultural Marxists’ (often Jewish) assault on traditional values and morals.

A revitalization of Western civilization can only come about if the nightmarish demographic trends of the Occidental peoples are reversed. It is doubtful that such a turnaround can come about unless the Catholic Church repudiates the Second Vatican Council, especially in its policy toward the Jews, and becomes once again a defender of traditional Christian morality. To begin such an arduous task, there is no better place to start than a thorough reading of Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ Judaism and the Vatican.

Review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility

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Robin DiAngelo
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Beacon Press, 2018.

I first encountered Robin DiAngelo three years ago, during my investigation of the Jewish origins and intellectual currents of Whiteness Studies. DiAngelo was then just another relatively minor speaker and academic on the university/consulting network in Whiteness Studies, and I was undecided then, and remain undecided, as to whether DiAngelo is wholly, in part, or not at all Jewish. She didn’t feature in my essay at all, and, when I looked over my old notes a few days ago, she appeared only as a name scribbled in the margins. As it happens, her ancestry is relatively inconsequential in light of the fact that White Fragility, published in 2018 but reaching bestseller status in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, is heavily and transparently influenced by Jewish thought and by Jewish pioneers in the field she now finds so conducive to fame and fortune. I don’t make a habit of buying the texts of the opposition, but when certain of them reach a significant level of academic or popular attention (look for it in your child’s school curriculum), it’s probably necessary for someone among us to carry out some form of intellectual reconnaissance, and to bring back for wider consideration the most essential of the gathered information. This was my approach to Jean-Paul Sartre’s widely-read and overly-praised Anti-Semite and Jew, and so, when I heard DiAngelo had managed to make herself a bestselling author, I headed to my local bookstore, where dozens of copies had been helpfully stacked on a table devoted to “in-demand” literature on race and racism.

My first action on picking up a copy of White Fragility was to turn to the bibliography. I knew what I’d see, and it was a gratifying and familiar feeling to see so many names from my research on Whiteness Studies. They were almost all there, protruding from the page like shunned relatives at a family reunion — Noel Ignatiev, George Lipsitz, Ruth Frankenberg (described in White Fragility as “a premier white scholar in the field of whiteness studies”), Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, along with helpful co-ethnics like Thomas Shapiro, David Wellman, Sander Gilman, Larry Adelman, and Jay Kaufman. These are DiAngelo’s mentors and intellectual forbears, and I could tell, scanning through this list of names and works, that White Fragility was sure to boast very many references to “fellow Whites,” and streams of inducements to abandon White ethnic interests. These expectations weren’t disappointed. White Fragility is the kind of book that can be written in two months, read in two days, and forgotten in two hours, but Robin DiAngelo’s text is also a deeply pernicious piece of work, utterly contemptuous of the “normie” Whites it aims to convert to a more radical form of racial self-abnegation than they currently demonstrate. In fact, the work is so hostile and ideologically loaded that it can’t help but present a kind of dialectic, wherein certain truths are revealed in spite of itself. As such, I have to confess that I learned something from White Fragility, even if it isn’t what DiAngelo had in mind.

What is White Fragility?

“White Fragility,” as a theory, is confirmation of my belief that inducing guilt in Whites was never the end goal in itself. It’s never simply been about making us feel bad about ourselves or our ancestors. White Fragility, White guilt, and indeed Whiteness Studies as a whole, is fundamentally about power. Those of you familiar with the New Testament will recall the verse from John’s third chapter, wherein John the Baptist declares that Christ “must increase, but I must diminish.” Power and influence never simply disappear, but rather transfer. John (and it is entirely inconsequential whether you regard him as historical or fictional) was aware that as a popular local mystic or holy man, his mere continued presence was an obstacle to the local growth in power of Christ, and so he made a conscious decision to diminish himself. Likewise, we are living in an age where Whites continue to have some social, political, and economic power, but where large and growing numbers of non-Whites are seeking to obtain what remains of this power. For them to “increase,” it has been declared that we must diminish. Whiteness Studies is fundamentally about making us willing and enthusiastic participants in our own decline. When Blacks or Jews demand a reduction of, or end to, White power or wealth, it means that they want that power or wealth. Despite all sloganeering, there can be no equality in power among races. Not now, not ever; only ruthless and unceasing competition.

White guilt, in itself, is certainly an act of psychological diminishment, but the message of DiAngelo’s text is fundamentally that this psychological diminishment has not led to a desired correlation in material or structural diminishment. Whites merely feeling sorry for themselves isn’t enough for their competitors, if it isn’t accompanied by a wholesale transfer of power, land, and other resources. In this context, “White Fragility” is an indictment and insult levelled at White progressives merely frozen by fear of racism accusations and White guilt. In short, White Fragility is a horrifying call for Whites not simply to be paralyzed by White guilt, but to become active participants in their decline, and willing accomplices in their political and demographic destruction.

DiAngelo’s introduction begins with accusation. America “began with the attempted genocide of Indigenous people and the theft of their land. American wealth was built on the labor of kidnapped and enslaved Africans and their descendants.” So far, so familiar. But the book very quickly moves to an outline of the theory of White Fragility. I actually found this, and some other chapters on the same theme, extremely interesting, because DiAngelo, and presumably other Whiteness Studies activists, are keenly aware that Whites are peculiarly concerned with morality and with appearing to be good people (all of which is very much in keeping with the arguments and research of Kevin MacDonald). For example, DiAngelo writes on the fear White progressives have of being perceived as racist: “We consider a challenge to our racial worldview as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offence. … One of the greatest social fears for a white person is being told that we have said or done something racially problematic.” Of course, the groundwork for the connections among White ethnocentrism = Racism = Morally Bad were laid by Jewish academics over many decades. The problem for Jewish activists and incentivized Whiteness Studies traitors is that this moral terror has resulted in what they perceive to be paralysis and inaction.

Actual “racists” aren’t really discussed in White Fragility, and where they are, it’s clear that they aren’t the target of the title of the book. In fact, DiAngelo points out: “Of course, some whites explicitly avow racism. We might consider these whites actually more aware of, and honest about, their biases.” In other words, even if we’re moral monsters in DiAngelo’s eyes, we aren’t “fragile.” Again, because of the extremes of the some of the dialectics here, certain truths emerge. DiAngelo remarks early in the book that “race matters,” something that many of our readers would agree with, even if it’s from a slightly different angle than the author intends. She also argues that:

All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid it. … People who claim not to be prejudiced are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization — we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. … Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.

I couldn’t agree more: Whites have been uniquely affected by mass propaganda designed to brainwash them into viewing as morally evil something that is natural and instinctive to all humans.

The real targets of this book are White progressives who profess anti-racism, and because I also possess many frustrations in relation to this demographic, I couldn’t help but agree with some of DiAngelo’s characterizations. Take, for example, this gem:

I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “gets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us having arrived. [emphasis added]

I think this is a beautiful indictment of the demonstrative and showy nature of White anti-racists who simply love to engage in social theatrics in search of kudos, approval, and incentives without really understanding the deeper destructive meaning of anything they’re doing. DiAngelo has contempt for people like this because they place all their energies into grandstanding instead of helping in the transfer of real power and wealth. I have contempt for them because they place all their energies into grandstanding for short-term personal benefits while stabbing their ancestors, contemporaries, and progeny in the back.

The book’s first chapter, “The Challenges of Talking to White People About Race,” is devoted to convincing White progressives that they are in fact racist, and that they need to become better allies in their own racial destruction. The message here is quasi-spiritual; Whites are told that their quest for racial redemption will be lifelong, lasting until the day they die. Their existence is an ontological problem, the only solution to which is an endless quest to compensate for simply existing:

Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished.

I really wish more White moral grandstanders would understand that, ultimately, they will never be given a “pass” by our enemies once they’ve accrued enough kudos, or groveled enough, or displayed enough platform sympathy with Blacks, or any other ethnicity that happens to be Victim of the Month. They will only ever be temporary tools, held in contempt as much for their weakness as their whiteness.

Another interesting feature of the chapter is its attack on White individualism, presented here as a myth that prevents Whites from taking collective responsibility for alleged historical wrongs. For DiAngelo,

Individualism is a story line that creates, communicates, reproduces, and reinforces the concept that each of us is a unique individual and that our group memberships, such as race, class, or gender, are irrelevant.

DiAngelo’s problem with White individualism is that it’s a barrier to White guilt, and also a barrier to Whites perceiving alleged advantages in employment and social advancement in a society in which they enjoy a demographic majority. Again, due to the dialectic at play, I happen to agree that individualism among Whites is a problem in certain contexts. It’s just that in my perspective it’s a barrier to the explicit assertion of White ethnic interests and collective action in pursuit of those interests. In fact, without widespread awareness of an ethnic threat, it seems almost impossible to convince Whites to see themselves as a group and to act as one. A further obstacle to White ethnocentrism is decades of social conditioning in which Jewish propaganda is dominant. Even DiAngelo concedes that “reflecting on our racial frames is particularly challenging for white people, because we are taught that to have a racial viewpoint is to be biased.” Unfortunately, DiAngelo doesn’t ask who did the “teaching” in this regard, and she certainly doesn’t consider the broader implications of what she’s saying.

In the second chapter, “Racism and White Supremacy,” DiAngelo trots out the “race is a social construct” trope, with footnotes for her claims leading invariably to a section of bibliography that reads like a Bar Mitzvah invitation list. Black academic Ibram Kendi is quoted as arguing that “if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination.” I agree, but I think the problem isn’t systemic discrimination but the belief that all humans are equal. Eliminate that belief and disparity in condition is neither surprising nor subject matter for conspiratorial conjecture. But alternative theories and beliefs like mine don’t feature in DiAngelo’s book, which has the air of a religious text, and issues utterances with an authority that demands faith rather than reason. There is an interesting section in the chapter denying that there can be an anti-White racism, with DiAngelo remarking:

People of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism; the impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual.

Let’s set aside that horrific last statement, and focus for a moment on the unstated premise underlying the first. Isn’t it more or less the stated goal of “Whiteness studies,” White guilt, the theory of “White Fragility,” Black Lives Matter, and the massive power of multicultural propaganda to lead to the further diminishment of White social and institutional power? As stated at the outset of this review, this power is destined for the hands of ethnic interlopers. We know full well which of these ethnic groups will take the lion’s share of that power, because they have their hands on most of it already. The question is therefore: why should Whites hand what remains of their social and institutional power to hostile groups that will unquestionably ensure that their prejudice is enacted on Whites in a way that is far from “temporary and contextual”? What possible incentive could adequately convince Whites to sign up to such a Devil’s pact? Isn’t the entirety of White guilt built on a psychotic and media-induced fantasy — the idea that if Whites would just give up all remaining power in their hands the world would enter an age of racial peace and harmony? DiAngelo doesn’t even touch on areas like this, preferring instead to subject the reader to a steady stream of meaningless gibberish, such as a lengthy rumination on the theories of Ruth Frankenberg who, we are told, gave birth to such dazzling notions as “whiteness is multidimensional.” DiAngelo then caps the chapter by treating us to the heights of Jamaican philosophy, where one Charles W. Mills advances a conspiracy theory titled “the racial contract” which involves:

A tacit and sometimes explicit agreement among members of the peoples of Europe to assert, promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy in relation to all other people of the world. … It is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.

And there you have it — this Jamaican genius has discovered the Protocols of the Elders of Europa.

Charles W. Mills: A Caribbean Socrates

The same themes are repeated in the third chapter, “Racism After the Civil Rights Movement.” DiAngelo again attacks “fragile” Whites who claim to be color-blind, pointing out that they merely believe that it’s racist to acknowledge race and therefore flee into a denial of reality. The only real novelty in the chapter, and one I found highly entertaining, was DiAngelo’s list of racist behaviors exhibited by fragile Whites. These include “acting nice” and “being careful not to use racial terms or labels.” But such phrasing is all the rage now, as in the New York Times podcast series “Nice White Parents” which explores hypocrisy among progressive Whites expressing all manner of liberal pieties—but moving heaven and earth to avoid sending their children to schools with large numbers of POC.

The next chapter, “How Does Race Shape the Lives of White People?,” is probably the strangest of the book because, if DiAngelo is indeed White (and not someone with some Jewish ancestry), then it represents a very disturbing and irrational detachment from reality and common sense. For s start, DiAngelo seems to view even the mundane aspects of White ethnic homogeneity as pathological.  She writes:

As I move through my daily life, my race is unremarkable. I belong when I turn on the TV, read best-selling novels, and watch blockbuster movies. I belong when I walk past the magazine racks at the grocery store or drive past billboards. I belong when I see the overwhelming number of white people on lists of the “Most Beautiful.” … I belong when I look at my teachers, counsellors, and classmates. I belong when I learn about the history of my country throughout the year and when I am shown its heroes and heroines — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, John Glenn, Sally Ride, and Louisa May Alcott …

All of this is presented as negative and sinister, to which one can only ask: what is the alternative? To hand over one’s nation and territory to others, so that you can cease to belong? What then? DiAngelo comments:

It is rare for me to experience a sense of not belonging racially, and these are usually very temporary, easily avoidable situations. Indeed, throughout my life, I have been warned that I should avoid situations in which I might be a racial minority. These situations are often presented as scary, dangerous, or “sketchy.”

I can’t image why. What I do suggest is that in order to help clarify her theoretical framework, Robin DiAngelo should, with all reasonable haste, relocate to an area in which she is most certainly not going to belong racially. Since she views “un-belonging” with great enthusiasm, while confessing she has no real experience on which to base this view, she should find the Blackest of Black areas and spend some quality time there — time that isn’t “temporary, easily avoidable.” I think, in the course of such an experiment, she will truly, honestly, encounter some helpful folks that will be only too glad to show her how fragile she can be.

By far the most entertaining chapter of the book comes within the last 50 pages. Titled “White Women’s Tears,” it’s an indictment of that infamous sight — bawling, wailing, and normally overweight White women clutching themselves in feverish grief over the death of some poor Black gangbanger who just happened to get shot while rushing a police officer. DiAngelo is probably correct in asserting that this is a self-indulgent demonstrative act designed to heighten status (“I’m moral, good, and empathetic”) and get attention from men of all races (“I’m vulnerable right now, and need attention and resources”). Some of the anecdotes in this regard, from DiAngelo’s “Whiteness” seminars are priceless, normally involving some weak-minded woman breaking down at the revelation she’s “racist,” and they went some way to compensating me for the purchase price and hideous ideology of the book. Above all, they confirmed to me that what we see unfold before us is both tragedy and farce, and that our situation is no less dangerous for that:

A black man struggling to express a point referred to himself as stupid. My co-facilitator, a black woman, gently countered that he was not stupid but that society would have him believe that he was. As she was explaining the power of internalized racism, a white woman interrupted with, “I think what he was trying to say was … “ When my co-facilitator pointed out that the white woman had reinforced the racist idea that she could best speak for a black man, the woman erupted in tears. The training came to a complete halt as most of the room rushed to comfort her and angrily accused the black facilitator of unfairness. … Meanwhile, the black man she had spoken for was left alone to watch her receive comfort.

Conclusion

DiAngelo scathingly remarks on incidents like this that “when we are mired in guilt, we are narcissistic and ineffective.” Essentially, the new direction of Whiteness Studies and its intellectual corollaries will be to wean Whites away from demonstrative habits of virtue signaling and into active participation in racial decline. We can expect to see in the near future (and we already to some extent have with the Black Lives Matter riots) a greater emphasis on Whites becoming active “anti-racists.” It will become increasingly difficult for Whites to appear simply as “not racist.” Active, enthusiastic activity on behalf of the ethnic power-grab will be demanded, and anything less will be portrayed with disdain as “fragility.” DiAngelo concludes her book with the blunt assertion that “a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.” White identity is therefore to be destroyed wholesale, and White ethnic interests crushed alongside it. DiAngelo proclaims with all the vigor of the subversive or the brainwashed that she will “strive for a less white identity, for my own liberation and sense of justice.”

Liberation and justice. These words were uttered a long time ago in France. The beheadings started soon after.

Fade to Black

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The darkening of our screens and stages and its part in the theft of our past and future

YOU FLY into London on a British Airways plane on which you are shown an animated film about safety. It stars a cartoon Black man with his cartoon White wife and their cartoon mixed-race child. You pass through immigration control and are poked and probed by Brown people wearing hijabs and turbans who jabber at you in an unintelligible version of the English language. Heading for the tube you pass a poster that shows a Black woman dressed in Elizabethan garb beckoning you to the Globe Theatre.

On the ride into town you see posters for the latest West End plays. There are productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry V starring Black women in the title roles. (The critics rave that these classic plays finally make sense.) There is also an Asian actor playing David Copperfield and Christmas pantos starring Blacks and Asians as Cinderella, Dick Whittington, and Snow White. Next to the entertainment ads are those for mortgages and mattresses all featuring Black men with White women. And, they are almost always blonde women.

You get home, put your feet up in front of the TV and notice that there are an unusually large number of Brown people on the streets of Victorian London as depicted in the BBC’s latest version of A Christmas Carol. And the villages of Midsomer are teeming with more people-of-color than your local benefits office. Even Doctor Who is suddenly a Black woman! You channel surf and are confronted by Black vikings, Black centurions, Black Tudors and an Asian King Arthur!

The news is read by a Brown person. The weather is given to you by a Brown person. Your favorite gardening program is presented by a Brown person. The Brown person presenting your favorite wildlife program explains without a trace of irony the danger of extinction faced by native fauna and flora due to the invasion of alien species.

A typical example of the “colour-blind” casting was the 1997 Disney adaptation of Cinderella — in which a negress Queen (played by Whoopi Goldberg) — and a White king somehow managed to have a Filipino son, who ends up married to a negress Cinderella.

In disgust, you turn off your TV and browse through the latest brochure from the National Trust. But something is odd — most of the people shown wandering around the stately homes of England are Brown. The mothers of the large, happy families in the photos wear Muslim or Hindu garb. The only White faces are those of blonde women holding hands with Black men and their mixed-race children.

Meanwhile, your teenage son is in his room playing a new computer game set in World War I. But, in this version of the Great War, the trenches look like a Saturday night in Brixton and the game’s logo is the face of a Black Tommy. You wonder if you have slipped into an alternate universe or are dreaming. But you aren’t dreaming. You are living through a waking nightmare. And I can tell you why.

I’ve been a professional actor for fifty years. I’m also a proud member of that most despised of all groups — old White men. I’m not a star or even a semi-name but you have probably seen and heard me many times. I know the world of advertising and show business. And I know how, why, and by whom our screens are being darkened, I am being denied work, and our past and future are being stolen from us.

The answer is BAME. It stands for “Black, Asian, or Mixed Ethnicity.” And that acronym is now an essential part of every media company’s ethos. When a “brand” is hiring actors for a commercial or a production company is hiring actors for a play, movie, or TV program, they proudly trumpet the fact that they prefer to see or will only see performers who are BAME. (Imagine what would happen if someone advertised with a preference for White actors and actresses.)

The Cultural Marxist octopus has many tentacles and has been at work in all the arts for many decades. As a child in 1950s America, I saw early attempts at “color-blind” casting. But, in the 1960s, the prominent New York theatrical producer Joseph Papp started pushing non-Whites big time in his Shakespearean productions in Central Park. (You will not be surprised to learn that Papp was a Jew.) I suffered through many productions of Romeo and Juliet with a Black Romeo and a White Juliet. Or a Black Macbeth and White Lady Macbeth. The audience “wasn’t supposed to notice” these racial absurdities and anyone who did was a “racist.” So, most people pretended not to notice — and they still do.

Oriental audiences are more forthright in their opinions. They want White heroes. Star Wars films that feature Black actors flop in China — a very important film market. So, the Star Wars producers avoid putting Black faces on the film posters. And, the latest Star Wars had to remove a “gay” kiss to make it acceptable to Orientals who want their heroes straight, too.

What’s wrong with this picture?

We Occidentals feel the same, even if most won’t admit it. We vote in private with our money. The producer of the mega-successful comic-book “cape hero” film franchise let slip at a convention that movies and action figures based on non-White characters don’t sell — worldwide. The sale of dolls, clothing and mugs, etc. is a major part of the profit stream for any film or animation. It is a racially revealing economic fact that Black Barbie and Ken dolls don’t sell — even to Black kids. “Gay” and trannie Barbies and Kens also gather dust on store shelves. White heterosexuality is the go-to choice for everyone.

But, shouting “commercial considerations be damned”, the Cultural Marxists have doubled down in Britain and are putting propaganda ahead of profit. The British Film Institute (BFI), which bestows crucial funding to film projects, fell into the tentacles of one Josh Berger, an American Jew with a long Hollywood history.

Under Berger’s malevolent influence the BFI has mandated higher levels of BAME. Any production that does not meet the set levels will be denied funding and thus any chance of distribution or awards. It will be dead. So, producers genuflect to globohomo and grind out the anti-White, anti-heterosexual, anti-Christian propaganda that pollutes our screens. Adding insult to injury, we are paying for this filth because the majority of the BFI’s money comes from the UK taxpayer!

The levels of “race and gender-blind” casting mandated include:

• At least one lead character must be non-White
• 50-50 male-female ratio in entire cast
• At least 20% of cast must be non-White
• At least 10% must be LGBTQ
• At least 7% disabled
• A large proportion of plot lines and filming locations must be set among underrepresented groups.

With those parameters in mind, try writing a film that should by natural law, reason, and historical fact be set in a White, male world. How can you fit that many women, homos, lesbians, trannies, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Blacks, and crippled, cis-phobic, bi-curious Eskimos into a Lancaster bomber, a monastery, or the Alamo? And, I wonder if these same race and gender targets will apply if an all-Black film company sought funding for a movie set in a lesbian bathhouse in Somalia? Would the screenwriter have to find a way to squeeze White, Christian, hetero males into the steam room?

Uh… better make that – 12 Angry Black, Chinese, crippled, cis-phobic, trans-sexual, lesbian Eskimos.

We aren’t being betrayed by the BFI alone. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts which bestows the prestigious BAFTA awards is equally on-board the globohomo express though it is (small comfort) privately funded. Still, if you want to win a BAFTA you must bow down to the Cultural Marxists who run that outfit.

And British Equity (the actors’ union) promotes and protects every race but White. It cares nothing for the race that only created theatre, film, television, radio, the Internet, and trade unions! It promotes and protects every sexual persuasion but heterosexuality. My union dues are currently paying for a campaign to ensure that “trans” actors get to audition for roles of any gender including those of the gender they claim to have left. Meanwhile, I can’t get an audition to play an old White guy because it’s being played by a Black female-to-male trannie!

The BBC admitted that its “race-blind” casting of period dramas is not historically accurate but feels it is important to do it in the interests of cultural cohesion. Well… if this BAME business is not part of an anti-White agenda but just a well-intentioned attempt to make us all race- and “gender”-blind then when do I get to play Martin Luther King or Winnie Mandela?

Meanwhile, for all their disingenuous calls for race-blindness, Black performers insist on race-based preferential treatment and love “acting Black” — especially in period dramas. Notice how Black actors in plays by Shaw, Ibsen, or Wilde will use a ghetto pose and vocal inflection to get a cheap laugh. They are Black to their bones and they know it and are happy to play the minstrel if it’s to their advantage.

At this point a few questions come to mind. If non-Whites were important personages in what we thought had been a White world then what the hell are they complaining about? If Blacks really “wuz kangz” as the Black Israelites proclaim (including kangz of England) then where was the discrimination? And, if Blacks were capable of achieving so much back-in-the-day, then what the heck happened? Did they simply forget how to be physicians, scientists, architects, engineers and, yes, kangz?

Not Wakanda but Merrie Olde England.

Remember those National Trust (NT) brochures full of photos of happy smiling Brown people? They are a staged hoax. The National Trust advertised on casting sites all over Britain for BAME models and actors to pose as visitors and staff at stately homes. But, in reality, if you visit NT properties you will see that with rare exception they are delightfully White in both staff and visitors.

Still this hasn’t stopped the NT management from pushing globohomo. They “out” and promote queer members of the families that owned the properties. And they suggest that bent Uncle Bertie was the best of the bunch. The NT even tried to force its volunteers to wear rainbow flags but most refused. Meanwhile, when I speak privately with older NT volunteers, I find they have fond memories of Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley.

I have starred in many TV commercials for top brands that were broadcast worldwide. I assure you that it isn’t merely fashion or whim that matches so many Black men with White women. In a thirty second commercial every second counts and nothing appears on screen by chance. I have seen directors, clients and cameramen almost come to blows in arguments over the color of my shirt. How much more debate has gone into the color of the actor’s skin?

No, these racial pairings are not accidental but are blatant attempts to break down the resistance to race-mixing from all races. Listen to Black talk radio programs and you will hear Black women weep that Black men are encouraged to get blondes. In fact, Black nationalists (our mirror image and possible allies) believe that race-mixing is the ultimate sin. And we know what happens to Asian girls who race-mix. But, as with films, the Cultural Marxists don’t give a damn and plow on, sacrificing profits for propaganda.

Case in point: Gillette recently ran an anti-male ad campaign that suggested all men (especially White men) are sex-pests. White men were outraged. This campaign culminated in an ad in which a Black father showed his daughter who had “transitioned to male” how to shave. This time Black men were outraged. This PC campaign cost Gillette a record amount of profit. But its CEO said it was worth it to promote “diversity.”

Careful now, daughter, er… I mean, son… uh… whatever da hell you is. Wouldn’t want ya to slit your throat now, would we?

Alongside the tribe that foments and feasts off our replacement lives an opportunistic parasite — the Black “race hustler.” The uber-obnoxious Whoopi Goldberg is a master of this scam. And, despite being as funny as a fire in an orphanage, Whoopi has made a fortune playing the fat, sassy soul-sista who is the repository of all wisdom. (Sort of an X-rated version of Mammy in Gone with the Wind or a potty-mouthed Aunt Jemima.)

You’ll notice that this smart, sassy maid stereotype is a staple of sitcoms. She is always the smartest person in the house she cleans. She’s certainly smarter than the doofus White dad who is the butt of all her jokes. (There is literally a genre of US sitcom called “Doofus Dad.”)

Believing her own bullshit, Goldberg has morphed into a political pundit. She holds forth daily on US TV on all manner of subjects while injecting the race card into all of them — no matter how misplaced. She gets away with this because Whites are afraid of challenging her lest they be called “racist.” Believe me, if you think Jews are good at squeezing the “Holocaust” into any discussion, you ain’t seen nuthin’ till you see Whoopi at work. (We have the Jewish director Mike Nichols to thank for Goldberg’s rise to fame.)

Another race-hustler is Bonnie Greer, a smug, American Negress based in the UK and a poor man’s Goldberg. Greer is a regular on BBC political chat programs where she is introduced as a “noted American playwright.” But I challenge anyone on either side of the pond to name a single Bonnie Greer play. In fact, in America she is entirely unknown. The woman is a fraud. And, like Whoopi, she benefits from Whites’ reticence to call her out.

The BBC loves wheeling her out because it allows them to tick certain boxes on their diversity chart. Foreigner. Female. Black. Greer’s many appearances allow her to shoe-horn the race card into every subject imaginable while demonstrating the stultifying banality of her opinions. But, I gotta give this sassy, soul-sista credit because with no talent (especially no playwriting talent) she has become the House Negro of the British middle class and (wait for it) — a board member of the British Museum!

“You racist, sexist bastards, I wanted to play LADY MacBeth!

Homosexuals are also useful idiots for their Cultural Marxist masters. They’ll do anything if it gives them the chance to snort poppers and wear frocks. Meanwhile, the lesbians happily play along because they get to wear the pants on stage in taxpayer-funded all-female Shakespearean productions. It is true that in Shakespeare’s day young men played the female roles. But, this was not transvestism by choice. It was necessary because women weren’t allowed on the Elizabethan stage. And there was no kissing or touching in the original productions.

Homosexual playwrights, directors, and designers rarely miss a chance to demean Whiteness and masculinity and to degrade females. In a recent London production of a play based on Patrick Hamilton’s brilliant WW2 novel The Slaves of Solitude, the queer director and adapter changed the American GI who was the play’s love interest into a Black soldier. This was impossible casting for all sorts of reasons. But it allowed the queers to indulge in their own fantasy of having a Black buck ravage the spinsterish English heroine.

There have been many other instances of plays and musicals being mangled by ludicrous race and “gender-bending” casting. Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, and Rodgers and Hammerstein all forbade such changes. Some of those men were homosexual but they still recognized cultural vandalism when they saw it. Sadly, their estates are managed by their PC grandchildren determined to make their Grandpa’s back catalogue hipster-friendly. That sound you hear is of those disrespected gents turning in their graves.

Politically Correct theatre was typified by the multiracial, “anti-fascist” production of Hamlet at the Irish Theatre, Covent Garden in 2019.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of the Cultural Marxists and their apparatchiks in the arts is stunning. They live in the Whitest communities they can find and send their children to the Whitest schools. (The Clintons live in the Whitest zip code in America, and Jewish Bernie Sanders moved from multi-ethnic Brooklyn to Vermont — the Whitest state!) The only contact these hypocrites have with any non-White is with their Black maids. And, if she gets too sassy, they’ll fire her Black ass.

As employers these showbiz Marxists are anything but progressive. All the major film, TV, and commercial producers including the big streaming services film their projects in poor countries. South Africa and Eastern Europe are especially popular. They do this to bust the performer’s unions in the US and UK.

This anti-worker behavior is nothing new. In the 1930s, the Jewish movie moguls who ran Hollywood hired goon squads to bust up organizing meetings for the Screen Actors Guild. Meanwhile, British Equity is too busy creating new genders to act as a genuine trade union and fight the media giants.

These media “liberals” also go abroad to abuse and exploit the local actors and crews. The same producers and stars who cry on the awards shows about Trump and climate change and animal rights allow film extras to be treated like cattle — forced to stand in the cold and wet for many hours (sometimes all night) and given little or no food and very meagre wages.

I’ve had extras beg me for food while the loud-mouth lefty stars dined like Meghan Markle. And the film crews are forced to work round the clock which leads to unsafe conditions. I have seen actors and extras almost decapitated by machinery. I have walked off unsafe sets but most actors are afraid to stand up for themselves.

If I sound angry it’s because I am. And I’m proud of it. I’m also proud of my history, heritage, and culture and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone degrade, destroy, or steal them. My anger is fueled by the blood of my ancestors that flows through my veins. And as long as that most precious blood flows through me, I shall do all I can to expose and resist the deliberate genocide of our people. A genocide that is being dramatized and broadcast. On prime time. And we are paying to watch the spectacle.

If you don’t believe me, just go to a movie or play. Turn on your radio or TV. Or, just open your eyes. It’s happening. It isn’t a sitcom or movie. It’s real. It’s deliberate. And we can stop it. But the entirely legal means of doing so are best discussed elsewhere. In the meantime — Hail Victory!

Editor’s Note: Jack Antonio is the author of Boy Outa Brooklyn — a murder memoir. It is available on Amazon as a paperback and eBook and from all major eBook distributors. Or, visit Jack’s blog at http://boyoutabrooklyn.com/2020/06/20/fade-to-black/

This article originally appeared in Heritage and Destiny a bi-monthly 24-page magazine, published in the UK, to reflect a cross section of 21st century racial-nationalist opinion. For a sample copy please send $10.00 to; H&D, 40 Birkett Drive, Preston, PR2 6HE, England, UK. For full subscription details check out heritageanddestiny.com

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio
Available as an eBook here and as a paperback and eBook from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk