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Reestablishing the Significance of Race: Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” rebuts the pseudoscience of race denial

Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance is the latest setback for the pseudo-scientific claim that race is meaningless. In lucid prose, Wade establishes the validity of race from converging lines of scientific inquiry. The gist of A Troublesome Inheritance is that races are biological formations, race differences are genetically based, and human evolution didn’t end with the ice age. Wade’s conclusions rest on a mounting volume of evidence, much of it only recently available since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003.

Wade’s perspective flies in the face of current orthodoxy in the social sciences. For several decades, radical ideologues in the scientific community have insisted that race is strictly a “social construct” — a vague, worthless concept that is biologically insignificant. Spearheading the race denial movement have been professors at elite universities, such as Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin among others.

In their 1984 book, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin argue that race is a “fuzzy concept.” The authors note that “differences between major ‘racial’ categories, no matter how defined, turn out to be small. Human ‘racial’ differentiation is, indeed, only skin deep. Any use of racial categories must take its justifications from some other source than biology.”

In a 2012 article Lewontin claims, “‘Race’ is a term of uncertain etymology and many meanings.” He notes that it is often used interchangeably with “people,” “tribe,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” the “human race,” etc.—presumably an attempt to undermine its utility. But words often have multiple meanings or can be used rather loosely as a slang expression. This isn’t unique to the concept of race nor does it invalidate its use as a taxonomic category. This obfuscation reveals deliberate deception on Lewontin’s part. (Ullica Segersträle examines Lewontin’s political agenda and sketchy scientific arguments in her book Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond; Lewontin also has a starring role in Chapter 2 of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, p. 40ff)

The concept of race never disappeared from the biological sciences.  The Dictionary of Genetics (fifth edition, Robert C. King and William D. Stansfield, Oxford University Press, 1997) defines race as “a phenotypically and/or geographically distinctive subspecific group, composed of individuals inhabiting a defined geographical and/or ecological region, and possessing characteristic phenotypic and gene frequencies that distinguish it from other such groups.”

Essential works on the subject, such as John R. Baker’s landmark Race (Oxford University Press, 1974), clarify the meaning of race and address much of the repetitive slipshod arguments that race deniers often make. Race as invoked in common parlance has been broad and vague at times, but to conclude that it has no specific meaning is simply a fallacy.

For example, University of Texas genetics professor Jennifer Raff faults Wade because computer programs designed to find genetic clusters in human populations can be programmed to come up with different numbers of clusters. But the number of races is a trivial issue. Obviously there are many meaningful human genetic clusters—a fine enough clustering would separate out Japanese and Chinese while a broader clustering would place them with other East Asians.

But this hardly makes the clusters arbitrary. A convincing argument for the arbitrariness of race would be if the computer program which was designed to find genetic clusters and used in the research cited by Wade found that the Japanese cluster just as easily with Africans or Europeans as they do with other Asians. But of course, that can’t happen.

Wade notes that if race is biologically insignificant how can physical anthropologists and criminal forensic investigators identify the race of victims and perpetrators with 80 percent accuracy? Also, if race is a “fuzzy” biological classification, why is there a strong interest in racial and ethnic ancestry, particularly among minorities? Several genealogical services, such as Oxford Ancestors, use DNA to track human origins, trace ancestral migrations, and pinpoint racial pedigrees.

Races are biological descent groups. They are real. Read more

A blind eye to murder of Whites in South Africa

It’s business as usual in South Africa where the ANC has won a predictable victory in the first elections since the death of Mandela. It is unlikely there will be any big changes in a country mired by one corruption scandal after another, which is now the murder capital of the world and which is slowly sliding into economic chaos.

And one thing that will not be changing soon will be a relentless upward tick in the grim daily toll of murders of Whites by Blacks.  Around 50 murders take place in South Africa every day and according to Genocidewatch around 20 of these are of Whites by Blacks — a  grossly disproportionate figure for a minority who make up only nine per cent of the total population. This and the shrill, blood curdling threats from some Black politicians mean many Boers fear a White bloodbath in the future.

Since the beginning of Black rule in 1994 around 70,000 Whites have been murdered though exact figures are difficult to come by because the police have stopped breaking down victim statistics by race.

Ethnic hatred is a clear factor in these killings, with murder scenes often featuring such graffiti as “Kill the Boer” in blood. An unspeakable level of savagery is also a feature. Gruesome torture with pangas, electric irons or kitchen implements are frequent features and the average victim is elderly. On the day Mandela died, an 84-year-old Afrikaaner woman was robbed in her own home, held down and drowned in her bath. Read more

Greg Johnson’s ”New Right vs. Old Right”

Review of New Right versus Old Right by Greg Johnson

At the micro level it is still possible to call America a democratic country — with various local officials being elected by a citizenry fortified by the right to bear arms and express their opinions.  But at the macro level — that of cities, states, and the nation itself — the level at which people need to be represented in order to implement real change (or stop it happening), it is quite a different story. Here, America is a masterpiece of anti-democracy — a society controlled by oligarchic elites that agree on most things and which use their power (the media, the judiciary, and the political parties they pay for) to check any independent impulse that arises from the People.

The cunning beauty of this system is that the sheep who are controlled still think that the shepherd and the sheepdogs controlling them are just other sheep. The false political consciousness that this reveals is also bolstered by relative prosperity and material comfort, especially for the more potent and intelligent members of society.

The consequence of this is that America is a de facto political desert in a way that other countries of the West are not. Unlike France, Finland, or Hungary, or a number of other European countries, where there is a considerable variety of political options available for voters, in America there are no meaningful choices outside the false duopoly which is merely a disguised monopoly.

But the desert has always attracted its ascetics, its mad-eyed lunatics or true holy men, who revere the truth or their delusions more than their personal comforts. From the desert, as history has proved, a force can sometimes emerge to shake the world. Read more

Alexander Dugin’s 4 Political Theory is for the Russian Empire, not for European Ethno-Nationalists

Only a rare few in the alternative right knew Alexander Dugin before the publication and translation of his book, The Fourth Political Theory, in 2012. Suddenly, the contents of this book became the subject of lively discussion and he was hailed as “arguably the most prominent New Right thinker in the world.”  With the exception of Michael O’Meara at Counter Currents, most of the reviews were very positive or at least sympathetic.  After reading reviews, interviews, blogs, articles, and listening to some video lectures by Dugin, I decided to read The Fourth Political Theory (FPT).

Through the first pages, I was fairly impressed by Dugin’s laconic treatment of the way liberalism had created the normative conditions for a humanity predisposed toward a world government in its “glorification of total freedom and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, identity (social, ethnic, or even gender), discipline, and so on” (18). With the “liberation” of man from any necessary, pre-ordained membership in any community or identity, and the universal morality of human rights widely accepted, few obstacles now stood in the way of a totalitarian global market.

Dugin is a patriot and I agree that Russia must act as a counter-hegemonic power against the spread of American Hollywood values and the continuing expansion of the EU inside former Soviet territories. Read more

Reflections on Some Aspects of Jewish Self-Deception: Part 5. Self-Deception in Jewish Participation in Politics

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Part 5: Self-Deception in Jewish Participation in Politics

Like Jewish participation in secular culture, since the Enlightenment Jewish participation in politics has been a prime context for self-deception. Scholar Eleanor Sterling argues that since the Enlightenment the spotlight of the modern state fell on the Jews, demanding their honest assimilation. In response, Jews failed to ‘honestly’ assimilate; instead driving many of Judaism’s outward features, like ethnic solidarity, into an internal, psychological realm. Sterling writes that the key elements of Judaism were never purged from the secular, assimilated Jew, but “became part of the inner life of the individual, a kind of psychological ghetto.”[1]

I would argue that it was this ‘psychological ghetto’ which formed the breeding ground for Jewish self-deception in its modern form, along with developments concurrent with this self-deception such as radical Jewish sub-cultures and intellectual movements. Read more

Reflections on Some Aspects of Jewish Self-Deception: Part 4. Self-Deception in Jewish Participation in Secular Culture

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4. Self-Deception in Jewish Participation in Secular Culture

Germany Jewry was a community invisible to itself.”
David Sorkin[1]

That the mass media and entertainment industry has long been dominated by Jews is a matter of fact and not one of belief. Nor is it empirically debatable that while a host of Jewish productions have critiqued all aspects of gentile society, the same productions have been notable for the marked absence of Jews or Judaism. No less an authority than noted Columbia sociologist Herbert J. Gans has affirmed that “the mass media, like other entertainment industries, continues to be dominated by Jews but … they have generally leaned over backwards to keep Jewish characters and Jewish fare out of their offerings.”[2] The aim here is not to go about arguing the case for these already well-established facts, but to probe deeper into the role of self-deception in Jewish involvement in secular culture, and in Jewish beliefs and assertions about the extent and implications of that involvement.

The first major point argued here is that Jews involved in the media and the entertainment industries have to a marked degree engaged in self-deception about the influence of their Jewish identity on their activities in these fields. For example, David Dresser and Lester Friedman have pointed out that literary critics are often perplexed by the denials of Jewish authors that their works have been influenced by their ethnicity, even when such influences are obvious. Dresser and Friedman note that such flagrant, yet apparently earnest, denials have been attributed by experts to “conscious evasion, a personal blind spot, or a psychological problem.”[3] Read more

Reflections on Some Aspects of Jewish Self-Deception: Part 3. Self-Deception in Jewish Historiography (continued)

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Self-Deception in Jewish Historiography (continued).

As Wistrich turns his attention to the early medieval period, further examples of self-deception become evident. Language euphemisms and lies of omission remain prevalent. For example, Wistrich describes as “humiliating” the canonical restriction on Jews entering Churches without asking himself whether any Jew would in fact have wanted to do such a thing.[1] Similarly, Wistrich agonizes over regulations which prevented Christians from living, eating or engaging in sexual relations with Jews even though the very tenets of Judaism were designed to maintain just such a segregation.[2]

Language euphemism is rife in his description of power relations. These restrictions on Christian-Jewish relations, which simply mirrored those in Judaism, amounted to “ideological warfare waged by the Church against the Synagogue.”[3] Independent, wealthy Jewish capitalists and usurers become mere “economic instruments of the royal power.”[4] According to Wistrich, the Talmud, which in addition to its general anti-Gentile tenor informs Jews that Jesus will be punished in hell by being immersed in boiling excrement and instructs Jews to publicly burn any copy of the New Testament that comes into their hands, merely contains a few “anti-Christian statements.”[5]

Another manifestation of Wistrich’s self-deception is his persistent recourse to ‘images’ and ‘stereotypes’ as a way of explaining anti-Jewish attitudes. This is by no means rare among Jewish historians. In my analysis of historiography concerning the riots in nineteenth-century Russia, I noted that “those historians who have accepted that economic issues have played a role in provoking anti-Semitism fail to engage in actual case studies of economically provoked anti-Jewish actions, preferring instead to probe ‘images’ or stereotypes which allegedly infuse the consciousness of non-Jews.” I argue that this focus on ‘images’ allows Jewish scholars to only superficially acknowledge the economic role, while really lending more weight to their argument that European society has suffered some kind of neurosis. Such arguments deftly offer us a scenario in which Jews and economics play a role in the development of an anti-Semitic “image,” without placing the Jew in anything but a passive role. Read more