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Groupthink in Sweden

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Sweden has become something of a paradigm of what’s wrong with the West, but one doesn’t expect light to be shed on the subject in an article on the false confessions of a Swedish man. However, this article has an interesting observation. The basic facts:

Sture Bergwall … confessed to 30 killings in the 1970s and 80s and to dismembering and eating some of his victims. In trials beginning two decades ago he was convicted and locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.

But, in a story redolent of the darkest Nordic crime fiction, doubts continued to swirl around the case until an investigative journalist, the late Hannes Råstam, demonstrated that the confessions had no basis in fact. (“Lawyers blame groupthink in Sweden’s worst​​ miscarriage of justice“)

The false confessions have led to soul searching in the Swedish legal community and, as the title of the article indicates, the explanation is “groupthink.”

“In hindsight, it is easy to see mistakes in the Bergwall affair,” the commission in Stockholm said on Friday.

Read more

Friends of Israel: Old and New Patterns in British Politics

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Two interesting patterns became apparent after the recent general election in Britain. One of them has been extensively discussed in the mainstream media. The other hasn’t been discussed at all. Why not? Because it involves Britain’s most powerful ethnic group and that group intends to maintain its stranglehold on British politics. Power that can’t be discussed is also power that can’t be challenged.

Key qualities of the left

First, let’s look at the pattern that could be discussed in the mainstream: the resounding success of the Scottish National Party, which held six of fifty-nine seats in Scotland before the election. Now it holds fifty-six. A huge Labour majority has evaporated in a single day. The fiasco is further proof that the left doesn’t understand the societies it wants to control. As I pointed out in “The Toxicity of Truth,” parties like Labour are interested in power, not in facts, logic or objective reality. But their insatiable greed for power is sometimes thwarted by another of their key qualities: their boundless incompetence.

Mini-Obama: Nicola Sturgeon

Mini-Obama: Nicola Sturgeon

Labour gave Scotland more and more autonomy in the confident belief that this would “kill Scottish nationalism stone dead.” They thought they were injecting cyanide into the SNP. In fact, they were injecting steroids. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP’s authoritarian, high-testosterone female leader, became a kind of mini-Obama during the election campaign. Just as millions of deluded narcissists in Europe wished they could vote for Obama in 2008, so thousands of deluded narcissists in England wished they could vote for Sturgeon in 2015. After all, she wants to put “equality and fairness” at the heart of Scottish politics, and she favours immigration and refugee policy that would only speed the Third Worldization of the U.K. What could be nobler than that? Read more

Excerpt from “My journey to race realism”: Reformers’ search to close “the gap”

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The following is the second of two excerpts from an article, “My journey to race realism,” to appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Prof. Ray Wolters is Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware.

First Excerpt: The Burden of Brown

Before 2010, I was aware of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.  As mentioned, during the 1990s I began to read American Renaissance, and about the same time one of my chums from grade school and high school, a bank examiner named Gene Stelzer, bent my ear with comments about Darwinism.  Gene was also the first person to call my attention to The Occidental Quarterly, a journal I later came to regard as an indispensable guide to understanding White racial consciousness.  At the University of Delaware, education professor Bob Hampel kept me informed about some of the best recent books in his field, and social scientist Linda Gottfredson told me about gene-culture co-evolution.  But from mainstream historians I heard and read nothing about Darwinism or the interaction of culture and genes, and my own written work was still based primarily on archival research.  It was not until 2010, when I was laid low by lung failure and could no longer rummage through archives that I began to read deeply and to think seriously about evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.  As it happened, at this time I was also thinking about the modern school reform movement, which since about 1990 had become, above all else, an effort to close the achievement gaps that show American Blacks and Latinos lagging behind Whites and Asians on standardized achievement tests.

In some ways, the reformers’ concern with test scores is surprising.  In recent international comparisons, African Americans have done better on standardized tests than Blacks in Africa or the Caribbean.  Hispanic Americans have done better than Hispanics in Latin America.  White Americans are doing better than students in other predominantly-White nations (except Finland).  And Asian-American students have done as well as most students in Asia — and better than those in Korea or Japan.  These results were achieved, moreover, at a time when an increasing proportion of American students were being reared in single-parent families and a growing proportion of parents did not speak English. Read more

Excerpt from “My Journey to Race Realism”: The Burden of Brown

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The following is the first of two excerpts from an article, “My journey to race realism,” to appear in the Summer issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Prof. Ray Wolters is Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware.

In the 1960s and 1970s I forged through the academic ranks.  My dissertation received favorable notice when it was published in 1970, and another book of 1975 received even better reviews.  At the age of 36, I was promoted to the rank of full professor at the University of Delaware, and I began to think about research for yet another book.  At that time, civil rights lawyers had brought a lawsuit seeking metropolitan busing for racial balance throughout the northern portion of New Castle County, Delaware.  From reading the local newspaper, I learned that the largest city in this region, Wilmington, had been one of the first five jurisdictions that the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), had ordered to desegregate its public schools.  Wilmington complied immediately, but desegregation led to inter-racial scuffles and a decline in cultural and academic standards.  This touched off White flight, and enrollment in Wilmington’s public schools tipped from 73% White to 90% Black.  I then learned that much the same had happened in three of the four other “Brown districts” — in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in Summerton, South Carolina, and in Washington D.C.  Only in Topeka, Kansas, where Blacks made up only 8% of the students, had the majority of Whites continued to patronize the public schools.  And desegregation had been problematic even in Topeka.[1]

In my best-known book, The Burden of Brown (1984), I told the story of how public education had fared in these five districts where desegregation began.  In the introduction and conclusion, and in a few statements that were interspersed in the text, I maintained that the misbehavior of Black students had created serious problems and that federal judges had made matters worse by redefining desegregation to mean something quite different from the original understanding.  When the implementation order for Brown was handed down in 1955, the Supreme Court defined “desegregation” as assigning students to public schools on “a racially non-discriminatory basis.”  Similarly,  in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress defined what “desegregation” meant and what it did not mean: “‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.”[2] Read more

Big Mother and the Therapeutic State

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Gustave_Doré-L'Enfance_de_Gargantua

‘Pantagruel  with his father Gargantua and mother Gargamelle” (watercolor); by Gustave Doré (1832–1883)

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic.

Below is the interview Alain de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire.

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Q: “Eat your five servings of fruit and vegetables every day!”; “Do some sport!”; “Quit Smoking!”; “Drink one glass, but not two!”; “Buckle up when driving!”;  “Do not eat too much fat!”; “Do the proper garbage recycling!” After Big Brother, have we now arrived at Big Mother?

A: Starting with the nineteenth century the welfare state has been progressively put in place in order to compensate for the disappearance of organic and community solidarities which, with the rise of individualist ideology, have become dissolved.  Today the welfare state it is morphing into a sort of “therapeutic state”— if we were to borrow an expression by Christopher Lasch. This therapeutic state can be defined as an unholy alliance of the medication process and the state, setting up all sorts of unjustified obstructions to our freedom. The authority is becoming more and more maternal, albeit maternal in a way of a possessive mother eager to maintain its subjects in total dependency. The unilateral relationship with the state replaces the ancient social bonds. This hygienic control augurs social control. Medicine itself, when taking part in the control of populations, becomes totalitarian.

Alain de Benoist

Alain de Benoist

The dominant human type of today is the immature narcissist, ignoring all realties other than his own, and who, above all, wishes to satisfy all his cravings. This infantile type of a human being, predictably of liberal-libertarian orientation, is perfectly in line with a system which, as Marx wrote, drowns everything “in the icy waters of egoistic calculation.” What follows is a therapeutic civilization centered on the “Me” only. Pierre Manent  rightly stresses that liberalism means primarily renouncing to apprehend human life in terms of its own good and its own finality. In a society ruled by the entertainment industry in which nobody asks himself about the meaning and significance of his presence in the world, body-care of the Self becomes the alpha and omega of human life.  Not only does it signify being of good health, but also “feeling good about oneself,” and thus forgetting one’s own finitude. While expecting immortality in this world, the dream of eternal youth grips all those who have never become adults, and who conceive now of their life as a maternal fusion defying any symbolic order, while thriving  in a culture of the present tense that has expelled any meaning of historical continuity. Henceforth society functions according to the principles of mimetic rivalry, as a form of “ego rivalry” (in Freudian terms), i.e., with  the Self  being stripped off of its “id” and its  “superego,”  convinced now it is the center of the universe. This only facilitates the war of all against all. Read more

Greville Janner update

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Janner bklt front+back outside cover

The Lord Greville Janner affair shows no signs of winding down despite the best efforts by the authorities to kick it into the long grass. Each week brings new revelations about the former President of the British Board of Jewish Deputies, who is suspected of at least 22 cases of child sexual abuse.

Up until now the scrutiny has mainly focused on how, although said to be too ill with dementia to be tried, the 86-year-old founder of the Holocaust Education Trust was able to take part in parliamentary debates, collect a hundred thousand pounds in expenses, and was compos mentis enough to sign over his property deeds to his children thereby putting them out of range of any damages litigation.

The Director of Public Prosecutions decision not to prosecute was equally baffling given that there are well-established and regularly used court procedures for dealing with suspects who have lost their faculties. The DPP’s decision is now to be reviewed. Read more

The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour

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candourThe History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour
by Hugh McNeile and Rob Black
Published by the A.K. Chesterton Trust; 150 pages

One of the most remarkable aspects of the collapse of the British Empire was the relative lack of people who seemed to care about it. Resistance to the process was extremely muted, both from the Empire’s elites and the mass of its people. This was baffling considering its two-hundred-year stretch of global dominance, its enormous impact, and the millions of people around the world whose interests were directly tied to its existence.

The sheer inexplicableness of the event tends to throw up either glib and dismissive explanations, or dark and dastardly ones that seem more like paranoid conspiracy theories. In short, either the Empire was done to death by secret cabals and nefarious networks or it was simply on the wrong side of history — and accepted that fact with an all-too-easy grace and sense of resignation.

Today it is difficult to get a sense of what really happened. Mainstream history, of course, has its narratives worked out — Britain was exhausted after its war with Germany and Japan, attitudes to race had been transformed, and the “Winds of Change” blew in shortly afterwards followed by the “Winds of Multiculturalism.” Thanks to the alternative history now possible due to the internet, this narrative now faces some opposition, but because the period is rather remote, such opposition usually comes from those with a particular axe of their own to grind.

A better way to get at the truth is to focus on those few who were most concerned about the demise of the British Empire, and to consider their experiences. In this respect one of the best books is Hugh McNeile and Rob Black’s The History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour, published last year. Read more