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Identity and Difference, Part 1: Difference

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Alain_de_Benoist

Alain de Benoist

Translated from the Spanish by Lucian Tudor 

* This was translated into English from the Spanish version titled “Identidad y Diferencia,” published in the digital journal Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 47 (May 2013): 3-10. The Spanish text was the translation and combination of the original French articles titled “Le droit à la différence” and “Qu’est-ce que l’identité? Réflexions sur un concept-clef,” published in Eléments, No. 77 (April 1993): 24-25 & 44-47. The translator wishes to thank Daniel Macek for reviewing the translation and Alain de Benoist for approving of the translation.

Difference

The debate about immigration has raised in a sharp manner the questions of the right to difference, the future of the mode of community life, of the diversity of human cultures and of social and political pluralism. Questions of such importance cannot be treated with brief slogans or prefabricated responses. “Let us, therefore, oppose exclusion and integration,” writes Alain Touraine. “The first is as absurd as it is scandalous, but the second has taken two forms that need to be distinguished and between them there must be searched for, at least, a complementarity. Speaking of integration only to tell the new arrivals that they have to take their position in society as such and what it was before their arrival, that is much closer to exclusion than of a true integration.”[1]

The communitarian tendency began to affirm itself in the early eighties, in liaison with certainly confusing ideological propositions about the notion of “multicultural society.” Later it seemed to be remitted due to critiques directed against it on behalf of liberal individualism and “republican” universalism: the relative abandonment of the theme of difference, considered as “dangerous,” the denunciation of communities, invariably presented as “ghettos” or “prisons,” the over-valuation of individual problems to the detriment of the groups, the return of a form of purely egalitarian anti-racism, etc. The logic of capitalism, which, to extend itself, needs to make organic social structures and traditional mentalities disappear, has also had weight in that sense. The leader of immigrant minorities, Harlem Désir, sometimes accused of having inclined towards “differentialism,”[2] has been able to boast of having “promoted the sharing of common values and not the identitarian tribalism, the republican integration around universal principles and not the construction of community lobbies.”[3] Read more

Exponential growth of Ashkenazi Jews following a Medieval population bottleneck

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A recent paper by Marta Costa et al. found that around 80% of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA had a prehistoric European origin (and ruled out the Khazar hypothesis). Combined with previous Y chromosome studies indicating that  the male line is Middle Eastern, the results suggested a scenario in which Jewish males married European females after traveling to Europe.

Now another paper, by Shai Carmi et al., reinforces this scenario, finding an “even mix of European and Middle Eastern ancestral populations” (“Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins“).

The basic picture is illustrated in the following figure.

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The left side of the figure at the top shows Ashkenazi origins in the Middle East (AJ=Ashkenazi Jewish), with a bottleneck around 90,000 years ago. Then around 21,000 years ago a portion of the Middle Eastern group migrated to Europe (FL = the Flemish control group) and, according to the authors, became the predominant European group. After undergoing genetic differentiation in Europe (presumably shaping the modern behavioral and intelligence profile of Europeans), there there was an influx of the FL group to the AJ group within Europe, with 49% of Ashkenazi genes coming from the FL. This was followed by an extreme bottleneck around 700 years ago when the Ashkenazi population dwindled to an effective population size of around 330 people. Read more

Friends of Rape: How Feminist Liberals Help Sex-Crime to Flourish

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Deafeningly. That’s how liberals would have reacted if the victims in Rotherham had been Pakistani, the rapists White and the cover-up organized by the Conservative party and its allies in the right-wing media. If the scandal had been like that, the Guardian would have boiled with righteous wrath and indignation: “The horror of it. At least 1,400 victims subject to sixteen years of rape, torture and degradation. These right-wing officials and journalists should be put on trial for their active, wilful complicity in these racist atrocities. Then we should lock them up and throw away the key.”

I think it would have gone something like that. But alas for liberals, it wasn’t evil right-ringers who were complicit in the horrors of Rotherham: it was golden-hearted liberals. Which political party gave rape-gangs the go-ahead year after year? Not the Conservatives or the British National Party, but feminist Labour, champions of the poor and vulnerable. Which newspaper dictated the multi-culti, rape-friendly politics of left-wing councillors and social workers in Rotherham? Not the Daily Mail or the Times, but the feminist Guardian, that staunch opponent of sex-crimes and patriarchal oppression. And you don’t have to take my word about the Guardian’s role in more than a decade of rapes, beatings and psychological torture:

Labour MPs: Left ignored sex abuse

A culture of Left-wing political correctness led politicians and officials to ignore the plight of young girls who were being sexually abused by Asian men, Labour figures have warned. Ann Cryer, an MP from 1997 until 2010, told The Sunday Telegraph how she had feared being called “racist” when, in 2002, she exposed a sex-abuse scandal involving Pakistani men in her constituency of Keighley, West Yorkshire. A “politically correct Left just saw it as racism”, she said.

At the same time, Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, revealed that even now some of his colleagues disapproved of his efforts to uncover child abuse, because some were “obsessing about multiculturalism”. It follows the exposure last week of the scale of child sexual abuse in Rotherham. An inquiry estimated that at least 1,400 girls as young as 11 were assaulted and raped by gangs of Asian men over a period of 16 years. Some had guns pointed at them or were doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. Mrs Cryer recalled how there was a politically correct Left that saw her fight as racism. “At the time I was dealing with this, 2002-04, political correctness was playing a big part. The Guardian at that time hardly mentioned these things… because it was so politically correct.” (Labour MPs: Left ignored sex abuse, The Daily Telegraph, 30th Aug 2014)

Read more

Steven Pinker on Harvard Admissions: Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

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Steven Pinker (“The Trouble with Harvard“) argues that students should be selected on the basis of standardized testing. He is tone deaf on Jewish overrepresentation and on the underrepresentation of non-Jewish Whites.

Like many observers of American universities, I used to believe the following story. Once upon a time Harvard was a finishing school for the plutocracy, where preppies and Kennedy scions earned gentleman’s Cs while playing football, singing in choral groups, and male-bonding at final clubs, while the blackballed Jews at CCNY founded left-wing magazines and slogged away in labs that prepared them for their Nobel prizes in science. Then came Sputnik, the ’60s, and the decline of genteel racism and anti-Semitism, and Harvard had to retool itself as a meritocracy, whose best-and-brightest gifts to America would include recombinant DNA, Wall Street quants, The Simpsons, Facebook, and the masthead of The New Republic.

This story has a grain of truth in it: Hoxby has documented that the academic standards for admission to elite universities have risen over the decades. But entrenched cultures die hard, and the ghost of Oliver Barrett IV still haunts every segment of the Harvard pipeline.

Sounds like Pinker is implying that WASPs like Oliver Barrett IV still run the show at Harvard, keeping out the Jews and anyone else who can’t trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.

The reality, of course, is there is more than a grain of truth to the idea that admission to Ivy League universities is anything but meritocratic. In fact, Jews are vastly overrepresented on the basis of any available metric, while Whites and Asians are underrepresented, as Ron Unz has shown. Pinker is aware of Unz, but interprets Unz’s results as showing only that the deck is stacked against Asians, with the implication that folks like Oliver Barrett IV are the beneficiaries of unearned privilege:

Jerome Karabel has unearthed a damning paper trail showing that in the first half of the twentieth century, holistic admissions were explicitly engineered to cap the number of Jewish students. Ron Unz, in an exposé even more scathing than Deresiewicz’s, has assembled impressive circumstantial evidence that the same thing is happening today with Asians.

Read more

The Moral Dimension of Rotherham: “We can’t carry on like this. We just can’t.”

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Margaret Wente, “The Unspeakable Truth about Rotherham” (The Globe and Mail, Sept.4, 2014):

Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist whose investigative reports prompted this inquiry and others now under way, has explained why this travesty is so toxic to Britain’s liberal elites. “The suggestion that men from a minority ethnic background were committing sex crimes against white children was always going to be the far right’s fantasy come true,” he wrote. “Innocent white victims, evil dark-skinned abusers. Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear.”

But of course, the anxieties of the right were never fantasies. The fantasy was the left’s ideology that there are no important differences between people, that race doesn’t exist, and that the bloody history of ethnic conflict would magically disappear when millions of Muslims immigrated to the UK.

But no amount of liberal angst will make this story go away. Current Home Secretary Theresa May has acknowledged that “institutionalized political correctness” has inflicted appalling damage on the innocent. And the broader failures of Muslim integration are now too obvious to ignore. It’s not just all the young men who run off to join the caliphate and saw off people’s heads. It’s the Birmingham school scandal, where it was discovered that dozens of secular schools had been targeted for Islamization by Muslim radicals. It’s the imported culture of violence and misogyny.

Right. It’s not just the Pakistani rape gangs preying on White girls, but the reality that the West has imported cultures of violence, misogyny, extreme ethnocentrism, political corruption, and hostility toward the West. As Wente notes, the effects of the campaign to displace the native British populations has resulted in moral travesty against the innocent.There is thus a powerful moral dimension here that should be exploited by patriots. Read more

Natural Selection against Europeans: Why the Silence?

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At his blog West Hunter, Greg Cochran writes 

Natural selection is not an odd, unusual, poorly understood phenomenon like ball lighting. It is not something that last occurred 50 million years ago, like a kimberlite pipe eruption. And, of course, it applies to human behavioral traits, which are significantly heritable. Unless you think that the optimum mental phenotype (considering costs and payoffs) was the same in tropical hunter-gatherers, arctic hunter-gatherers, neolithic peasants, and medieval moneylenders (which would strongly suggest that you are an idiot), natural selection must have generated significant differences between populations. Differences whose consequences we see every day, and that have been copiously documented by psychometricians.

This notion that ongoing natural selection is not the default – that it only happens on national holidays or whatever – is fairly common among biologists. Obviously untrue, because you can’t even have things stay the same without ongoing selection – otherwise mutations and drift would gradually ruin everything. Only selection lets horseshoe crabs outlast mountain ranges.

Sure, some of this is because the topic of human psychological differences makes biologists upset, or threatens to impose unemployment and/or celibacy – but it also shows up in topics that don’t seem to have much emotional or political charge.

He’s right, of course. Natural selection is ongoing. But a foundational dogma of evolutionary psychology was that natural selection stopped in the Pleistocene somewhere, resulting in the set of adaptations possessed by all humans, the only differences being between genders. This view allowed them to safely ignore group differences in traits because for all practical (and scientific) purposes humans are identical — a view that is tailor made to fit into the left/multicultural academic milieu. Read more

Jews, Hollywood, and Gaza: Some Thoughts

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A few days ago I noticed the appearance of a truly remarkable full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter. The ad, which I initially saw as a piece of poorly conceived propaganda, was concocted by the Anti-Defamation League, and called upon world leaders and ‘decent people everywhere’ to make sure that ‘Hamas terrorists’ cannot be rearmed so the ‘people of Gaza and Israel can move toward a more peaceful future.’

My immediate impression was that the ad failed on two levels. The first is the quote from the truly hideous Golda Meir: “We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Presented in bold, the quote reeks of an ADL desperate to counter the images of slaughtered children that continue to fill our television screens. A couple of important textual and contextual changes have been made to the quote — note the substitution of “the Arabs” from the original quote with the less pejorative “them.” But even more significantly, the original quote was referring to the deaths of sons and daughters on either side — soldiers rather than infants. The ADL has simply adapted the quote contextually in order to fit the current Israeli policy of mass child murder.

Even examining it in its new context, the central message being conveyed is that Israel is being forced to kill Palestinian children, and further, that Israel is distraught at being made to do this. Such a claim is ridiculous given world has seen images of Israelis making the bombing of Gaza’s schools and hospitals into a social occasion complete with snacks, drinks and selfies. Read more