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Ezra Pound on Money

We’re never far from money. We spend most of our time and energy in quest of money.

But how did this thing become an intermediary between us and the world around us? Before money, we bartered. Why did money supplant barter and who is custodian of the money system?

These questions are dangerous: they cost Ezra Pound twelve years. Pound was a victim of political persecution at the behest of financiers and their minions like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These people feared Ezra because he asked “what is money for,” and came up with an inconvenient answer.

Pound understood that money is ticket for exchange. People who make thingscan trade more easily with other people who make things using money. There should only be as much money as there are things to trade. Another way of saying this is: money supply should increase and decrease along with the change in economic output.

Here’s the rub. If money supply grows faster than the amount of things made, then theft is taking place. The thief creates extraneous dollars and spends them first: at the time when the rest of us expect a dollar to be worth a certain amount. By the time the thief’s dollars have been absorbed into the economy, we notice our dollars are buying less. This is inflation. The thief has dipped into our savings and traded with shoddy bills.

What happens when money supply shrinks compared to things made? Then a new characteristic of money emerges. Things made don’t always last — take bread for instance. A baker must sell his bread in a matter of days, otherwise it’s lost. Money isn’t bound by such considerations. A thief can horde money until the baker’s goods rot, then buy his bakery at a huge discount.  

The “thief” in both these examples holds a special place in society: he controls the supply of money and “future money” called credit. Controlling money supply is economic power; it is a sovereign privilege. The people who really control a nation control its money supply.

Pound’s criticism of the financial class was that they were bad sovereigns. They managed money supply for their own benefit: they were thieves. In contrast, the Founding Fathers were good rulers because they designed a system where Congress managed the money supply; and Congress was answerable to a large swathe of the population.

Pound identified the grasping, vampire-like nature of international finance, and the venal nature of its supporters in national governments.He was interested in finding ways to systematically limit their power: perfecting what the Founding Fathers started in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. This is why Pound studied in the work of Silvio Gesell.

One of Gesell’s ideas was to eliminate the disparity between money and perishable goods. A way to do this is to discount large bills over time: holders of large bills would need to get them stamped every month, each stamp representing a decrease in their value. This way, hoarders bear the cost of their behavior and investment is encouraged. Small denominations would not be discounted.

Gesell recognized that the economy is like a body and money is like its blood. If blood builds up systematically in any one place, a disease results. His discounted script discouraged people from taking advantage of others’ simple lack of cash. (Note: this is very different than being forced to lend to people who aren’t creditworthy.) Saving in the form of investment was systematically encouraged.

Pound notes that Gesell’s system worked imperfectly in Alberta, Canada mostly due to planning errors that could easily be fixed. The system worked very well in the Austrian village of Wörgl, and it was promptly closed down by mainstream financial interests.

These financial interests were trying to preserve their privilege: they benefited from the increasing productivity of the societies they milked. Pound didn’t see how being born into a banking family; or buying the latest politician; should give them the right to those benefits. Ezra liked the ideas of Major Clifford Douglas: the people who worked should accrue those benefits. This is the essence of Social Credit.

The text of the 1933 version of Major Douglas’ book Social Credit, can be found here. Pound appreciated Maj. Douglas’ ideas, but thought they needed further exploration. What Pound really felt passionate about was fixing the money problem. Ezra wrote during the Great Depression when, much like now, people were captivated by the supposed security of gold.

Pound was never an advocate of gold-backed money. He understood how easily such systems can be subverted by controlling the supply or the clearing market for the backing commodity. Much of Britain’s power during the 19th century came from the fact that London was the clearing market for gold; and other nations used a gold-standard currency. They had to go to England to manage their money!

In Ezra’s words:

The trick is simple. Whenever the Rothschild and other gents in the gold business have gold to sell, they raise the price. The public is fooled by propagandizing the devaluation of the dollar, or other monetary unit according to the country chosen to be victimized. The argument is that the high price of the monetary unit is injurious to the nation’s commerce.

But when the nation, that is, the people of that nation own the gold and the financiers own the dollars or other monetary units, the gold standard is restored. This raises the value of the dollar and the citizens of “rich” nations, as well as citizens of other nations, are diddled.

Preventing nations from being “diddled” is why Pound supported Fascism in Italy. He saw Fascism as the only system available to the Italians that was likely to deal with the threat from international finance. Mussolini’s Fascism let Italy be ruled in an Italian fashion — and until Anglo-American banking interests were threatened, things worked better in Italy than they had in a long time.

Pound never supported Fascism in America. We have our Constitution, which describes a government for Americans run in the American fashion. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Pound realized that  America’s challenge was implementing the laws we already have. Read Jefferson and/or Mussolini for his whole argument.

Ezra was a true economic historian. He explained his analysis in the following way:

“The definition of an idea, as observed by someone who understands the events of the day, may shed more light on the historical process than many volumes.”

“History, as seen by a Monetary Economist, is a continuous struggle between producers and non-producers, and those who try to make a living by inserting a false system of book-keeping between the producers and their just recompense.”

“The usurers act through fraud, falsification, superstitions, habits and, when these methods do not function, they let loose a war. Everything hinges on monopoly, and the particular monopolies hinge around the great illusionistic monetary monopoly.”

Pound’s analysis identified the canker in American life: the cooperation between government and finance to defraud the public — the “monetary monopoly.” Monopolies don’t exist without tacit government approval. Beneficiaries of the financial monopoly have collaborated with venal officials against producers for a long time. The history of the largest American fortunes, since the Civil War at least, have followed this trend.

Historically, banking was begun by families as private businesses. As these businesses grew and issued receipts for gold and silver deposits, they gradually developed “fractional reserve” banking by issuing more notes than they had gold on deposit. Although kings would mint coins of gold and silver they owned at their royal mints, fractional reserve banking was a dangerous business, and Kings did not want to gamble with their sovereign power by going into that business. Rather, kings and especially parliaments, became dependent upon these fractional reserve bankers for loans, and would grant monopoly charters to a group of private bankers to create a national or central bank which would then have the power to regulate the size of the money stock through its fractional reserve activities, as it collected taxes, issued the national paper currency and sold sovereign debt on behalf of the government.

These national or central banks conferred significant advantages on the private banks that organized and owned them. Private banks were allowed to borrow at the discount window at special rates provided that they posted reserves with the central bank. Of course, the real advantage of the central bank for its owners and organizers was inside information. During the years of the gold standard, having a seat on the board of a central bank meant that the insider would know when emergency borrowings ticked up, telegraphing the probable start of a bank crisis and stock market crash. In the case of war, it was an easy task for a private bank with seats in several different national banks to calculate the deposits and income of the contesting states and the loans they secured to raise their armies, thus allowing the privileged few to bet on the probable winner.

The gold standard was popular among bankers for the simple reason that the supply of gold increased irregularly but on average more slowly than the increase in population, meaning that the value of loans would gradually increase over time as would the burden of repayment. Debtors resented the power of gold, hence William Jennings Bryan’s political appeal and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. Coincidentally the gold standard was finally abandoned in 1971, six years after the birth control pill descended upon the civilized world.

Pound recognized two very important threats to the international banking community that arose out of the Third Reich. First, Hitler abandoned the gold standard, meaning that Nazi Germany suddenly had the power to prevent defaulting on its future debt simply by printing money — a power that the U.S. copied from Germany just as it copied the autobahns. Second, and much more important, the Reich took back the power of central banks by financing infrastructure projects directly, issuing notes in payment to the laborers, contractors, and suppliers rather than first borrowing the money from a central bank at interest. (See here and here.) If this practice had spread, bankers would be no more powerful than plumbers.

Furthermore, as long as the supply of this newly printed money in the form of notes matched the increase in GNP and future productivity from these new highways, rails, and factories, the printing of money would not necessarily produce inflation. The Reich also issued debt directly to German citizens and businesses to finance Hitler’s economic miracle, but the central banks lost control over the money supply and lost the ability to trigger banking panics and depressions inside the Reich. It was a mortal threat, and it had to be stopped. Pound was right.

Hitler’s experiment in freedom from banking was broken, and the finance/government partnership was preserved at the cost of millions of lives in World War II.

This finance/government collaboration explains the American elites’ love affair with international socialism. They don’t know how to make money any other way.Competition is a sin. Government organized monopolies are profitable when you control the government. If there are no national restrictions on moving profits around, they can hide their loot offshore. The perfect crime.

Pound recommended the writings of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Burenfor a practical explanation of how the young Republic wrested itself from London finance. He recommended Classical study (Aristotle’s Politics and the works of Demosthenes) for understanding the tricks financiers use. Nationally-controlled money was popular politics until the Civil War; when Pound notes a collective amnesia took the mind of the American public. Tragedy and forgetfulness. This is also the time when Lincoln let the bankers back in with theNational Banking Act.

Ezra didn’t revel in victimhood. The “monetary monopoly” was made possible by voters’ laziness. In his ABC of Economics, Pound castigates the American public for letting its money fall into the hands of enemies and irresponsible men. Americans circa 1930 were ignorant about money and banking; the situation now is even worse. It is a national tragedy that we have been lazy enough to let Congress sell its responsibilities; and let hostile elites control our credit.

The way to fix the situation is to dissolve the Federal Reserve; force Congress to manage money supply as described in the Constitution; and vote the venal or incompetent out of office. The revolutionary patriots gave us the tools; we need to step up to the plate and use them.

Our amnesia and laziness have had a lot of help. Pound pointed out that hostile elites were overrepresented in academia and the media — a situation which has worsened with time. Now we are reaping the harvest: schools devoid of the Classics; universities teaching castrated Economics; and Gloria Vanderbilt’s boy on TV. Ezra saw it coming, and he told us how to fix it.

Carolina Hartley (email her) has a degree in Finance and Economics from the University of Chicago. She is also student of aesthetics and social history, though not from the orthodox perspective.

[1] Pound’s repeated recommendation of Christopher Hollis’ work The Two Nations is based on the book’s excellent explanation of British economic power over the centuries.  Return to text.

[2] “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Edited by Leonard W. Doob. Greenwood Press, 1978. Return to text.

[3] Pound recommended the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the writings of Van Buren for the economic history of the United States.

Pound’s Pamphlets on Money are excellent; the first “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States” and “A Visiting Card” are particularly useful. (Published by Peter Russell, London. 1950.) Return to text.

[4] The Works of John Adams: Second President of the United States: with A Life of the Author, notes and illustrations, by his Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. Little, Brown and Co. Boston 1850–56.

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition, XX Volumes, Washington, 1903-04.

The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren, written in 1854 and remaining in manuscript until its publication as Vol. II of the “Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1918,” Government Printing Office, Washington 1920.

Pound also recommends Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude G. Bower.

Peter Beinart on the future of American Zionism

Peter Beinart’s  NYRB article (“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment“) has gotten quite a bit of attention. Beinart thinks liberal American Jews are pulling away from Israel. The main reason is that

the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.

Beinart does a good job describing the dominance of racial nationalism in Israel and the rationalizations, blind spots and hypocrisies of the organized Jewish community committed to minority empowerment in the US. Like John Mearsheimer, he thinks that American Jews are liberals at heart and are pulling away from Israel, especially because the rhetoric of victimization on which Israel is founded is more and more remote from their daily lives.

There are some reasons to doubt this analysis. Commitment to Israel among young secular Jews is likely to increase if there was indeed a real threat to Israel, as happened in the 1967 war. (See my comments on Mearsheimer.) Moreover, there are always gaps between the more committed Jews who man the activist organizations and the great majority of Jews for whom Israel is not the center of their lives. (Mearsheimer calls them the new Afrikaners and the great ambivalent middle.) It’s not obvious that the new Afrikaners won’t continue to run the show and police the attitudes of the great ambivalent middle as they have been doing for years. This may be so even though, as Beinart points out, AJC polling data indicates that young secular Jews are less attached to Israel than are Orthodox Jews.

But in any case, notice Beinart is not saying that this will mean that the support of American Jews for Israel will end. Far from it. Rather, the most interesting part of his analysis is his claim that the organized Jewish community will have to look to the Orthodox and other seriously religious Jews to maintain support for Israel:

To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.

And that bodes well for Zionist organizations because demography, as always, is destiny:

Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For America’s Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach. The Orthodox “are still interested in parochial Jewish concerns,” explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “They are among the last ones who stayed in the Jewish house, so they now control the lights.”

The result will be that there will less of a gap between the fervid nationalism in Israel and the attitudes of a large percentage of American Jews: “If current trends continue, the growing influence of Orthodox Jews in America’s  Jewish communal institutions will erode even the liberal-democratic veneer that today covers American Zionism.”

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In the end, there will be “an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel.” Again, this last outcome is iffy because I can’t see any reason why the activists policing the great majority of ambivalent American Jews can’t continue indefinitely. And as the demographic trends continue, the job of policing secular Jews will be easier as they become an increasingly small minority of American Jews.

The interesting part of this analysis is what implications it has for how the rest of America sees Jews and the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby necessarily projects Israel as embodying American ideals: “AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to ‘free speech and minority rights.’ The Conference of Presidents declares that ‘Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.’”

It’s hard to see how the lobby can have any credibility with Americans at all if these deceptions are abandoned. Certainly the lobby will continue the deception as long as it can. It will continue to pour money into the campaign coffers of politicians who paint Israel as the democratic ally of the US and it will rigorously police the media—not a difficult job because so much of the elite media is dominated by hard core Zionists.

The worst case scenario for the lobby is that the propaganda that Israel embodies American ideals is so far out of touch with reality that even the American media cannot continue the charad, and American politicians would be laughed at as they spout the pro-Israel line.

But there are all sorts of issues besides Israeli racial nationalism where American media and politicians are completely out of touch with reality, particularly on issues related to race, multiculturalism, and immigration in the US. For example, elite consensus on immigration continues to shape media coverage and political rhetoric even though most Americans, particularly White Americans, oppose it.

The media has already shown that it can maintain egregious fictions for a very long time as long as there is elite consensus. But how is the  elite consensus going to change in the face of aggressive policing by the lobby? In the same way, elite consensus on issues like race, crime, and IQ continue to be maintained in the face of overwhelming data to the contrary. Some of the same organizations that police unreality in the case of Zionism, such as the ADL, also enforce intellectual orthodoxy related to the other fictions on race, multiculturalism, and immigration that are so central to American political life. Right now things are proceeding just fine for the spinners of deception.

The basic problem that I have with these “end times” for Zionism (and the American consensus on race and immigration) is that they assume a worst case scenario far off in the future somewhere. I certainly would like to believe that the mainstream media and politicians must eventually confront reality in all these areas — including issues related to White advocacy.  Certainly we in the White advocacy movement believe that the fictions can’t be maintained forever and that White anger will eventually result in a credible movement to take back America, or at least part of it. So it’s encouraging to see that a great many smart people think that the fictions about Israel can’t be maintained indefinitely. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.

CNN uses the Census to Spin Anti-White Propaganda

A national census should be nothing more than a statistical exercise, arousing no more emotion than renewing one’s driver’s license. However, given the fact that the US has become a cauldron of competing ethnic interests where anti-White hostility is the norm for the mainstream media, it has aroused all sorts of controversies, especially among liberals with the usual axes to grind.

The mainstream media is using the census as a teachable moment to spinpropaganda on multiculturalism and the ‘destiny’ of the United States as a non-White and miscegenated country. An example that I cannot not resist discussing is CNN.com’s series “Census: Who Am I?” It asks some prominent — and not so prominent — figures their opinion on the 2010 US census. Each article is filled with the usual multicultural mantras such as “what we do matters more than labels,” “I can’t fit in a single box on a census form” or ” “‘where are you from’ is not the right question.”

It is so obviously biased that out of the twenty essays currently on display, only five are written by Whites — not a random selection of Whites, of course, but Whites who have been carefully selected to exhibit appropriate White guilt or who, as victims themselves, can be safely counted on to be sympathetic to all things multicultural. At times the articles are nothing but rabid anti-White rant.

Exhibit A is novelist Walter Mosley whose anti-White tone perfectly reflects the sentiments of the rest of the articles — Whites as oppressors, haters, murderers, and rapists:

[I am] an American whose black-skinned ancestors were stolen from their lives and cultures and piled in the holds of ships like so many sacks of skin. An American whose Jewish ancestors stowed their lives into the holds of later vessels running from a thousand years of anti-Semitism that was soon to blossom into a Holocaust. An American whose ancestors walked across the frozen waters from Asia to North America discovering a new world that would one day be stolen from their descendants. … An English-speaking American whose language is also …  sublime Spanish from the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans I rubbed shoulders with growing up in Southern California. … I might be related to Thomas Jefferson or any of 10,000 masters who raped and sometimes even loved their slaves.

Exhibit B is Iranian-American Maz Jobrani, a comedian who helped lead the “Axis of Evil” comedy tour poking fun at Middle Eastern stereotypes and recently made a television pilot called “Funny in Farsi.” He has suffered greatly since coming to America, showing that anti-White hostility is not reserved only for Blacks with a long historical memory. People just off the boat understand that the best way for them to get ahead in America is to adopt the anti-White perspectives being spewed by the mainstream media.

Jobrani says he once met a woman at a club who asked him about his heritage and she walked away when he told her he was Iranian. (GASP!) He also claims he was called “sheikh”, “towel-head” and was told to “go home, Iranian” while living in the San Francisco Bay area during the Iranian hostage crisis in the early 1980s.

He now bemoans the fact that the census considers him White. Jobrani has a message for other Arab- and Persian-Americans: “Check it right; you ain’t white!”Jobrani says that people should check the “other” box and spell out their ethnicity on the form.

I obviously agree that people like Jobrani should not be considered White Americans. But from their point of view, it’s all about ethnic pride and money. In fact, Arab American Institute leaders aren’t shy to say that “information from each census is used for everything from determining federal and state funding for communities to awarding grants”, so naturally they wish to have their own category.

Cheryl Contee, the co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics, an African-American political blog, also gets the opportunity to tell us about ourselves. She says she is at least 25% Native American and is also part White, but she is not at all comfortable with expressing her White origins publicly.

When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot. … I do know from family stories and whispers on both sides that being Indian somehow felt even more scary than being Negro. Given the intensity of the oppression of African-Americans in this country says something about how Native Americans have been historically treated. … I’m proud to be African-American — I’ve co-founded in my spare time one of the most popular and influential Black blogs on the Internet:JackandJillPolitics.com. It doesn’t get much Blacker than that!. …

Another essay was written by the other co-founder of the Jack & Jill Politics blog, a comedian who goes by the name of Baratunde Thurston. His essay is supposed to be funny, but he has a hip-hop sense of humor I could not grasp. He makes a bunch of disconnected statements about his mother’s “rabble-rousing days in Washington during the ’60s and ’70s”, and says that he still has “a lot of her original vinyl records from that era, and to commemorate Malcolm X this February, [he] live-streamed several of his speeches via Ustream.” He describes his lecture “How to Be Black (Online)“: “I talked about the different ways African-Americans access and use the Internet and raised the question: Are we merely consumers of the new technologies that abound, or are we also creating them?” (I’ll answer his question: Users.) His Harvard education also prepared him to write his forthcoming book How To Be Black and to be called “someone I need to know” by Barack Obama.

Moustafa Bayoumian associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York, was chosen because he represents the cosmopolitan non-White expatriate from whom we have much to learn. He is an Arab, who was born in Switzerland, grew up in Canada and now lives in Brooklyn. Although is piece is far less intense than the others, he still describes his struggle with his identity as an Arab-American, the discomfort  he feels when being asked about his origins and concludes by saying that “it’s up to us to douse the flames of hatred and intolerance before they start”.

Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American entrepreneur was the first female commercial space flight participant and the first Muslim woman to travel to space. She is also the author of My Dream of Stars: From Daughter of Iran to Space Pioneer. She comes up with platitudes like “by labeling ourselves or others, we create boxes, boundaries and decide who belongs on what side of the line. We divide ourselves and […] determine which side of the line is better.” Even less original was the following remark: “When I was floating freely in space and looking back on Earth from my safe haven amongst the stars, I saw a world without division […] I knew that back on Earth, these imaginary lines were very much present and causing all of our problems. But up there, the lines did not matter. They did not exist.”

Ines Hernandez-Avila is professor and incoming chair of Native American Studies and co-director of the Chicana/Latina Research Center at the University of California, Davis. She is also a founder of NAISA, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and a member of the Latina Feminist Group. She is a Ford Foundation/National Research Council Fellow, at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. In other words, she is a complete product of affirmative action and the grievance industry. She goes on describing her complex ancestry composed of many breeds of native Americans, how she was an activist in the Chicano Movement in Texas in the 1970s and early ’80s, and concludes that“naming matters” and that her identity is “Nimipu/Tejana” — that is, a Nimipu (a member of the Nez Perce tribe) and a Tejana (a Chicana from Texas) .

The rant goes on in the next essay, written by Raquel Cepedaan “award-winning” journalist and documentary filmmaker. She was also editor-in-chief ofOneworld Magazine, a defunct hip-hop rag run by rap tycoon and black activist Russell Simmons. Cepeda is a mixed-race women: “a Latina, Dominican-American and Latino-American, interchangeably.” Through commercial genetic genealogy testing, she says she discovered that she is “the face of miscegenation in the New World. And the journey is just beginning.” Praising the miscegenated make-up of Latinos, she says: “As our numbers grow to more than 130 million in the next several decades, so will the racial landscape of the nation shift radically.” She warns about the coming pushback by Whites: “Couple anti-immigration hysteria and a 41 percent spike in hate crimes against Latinos over the past six years with a troubled economy, and one may find a pressure cooker waiting to explode.”

She also complains about the reintroduction of the offensive term “Negro” and blames the U.S. Census Bureau for a “failed attempt at engaging the hip-hop generation” saying it is “alienating the very people it’s spending millions of dollars trying to target.” Keeping an eye on government subsidies given to protected groups, she adds: “On the one hand, it’s important for every citizen to be counted because the information collected determines how $400 billion dollars of federal funding is allocated”. Taking a staunch anti-White position, she concludes: “While we collectively continue to ignore the festering wound, I intend on honoring my ancestors on the census form by rejecting the term ‘Negro’ and opting to identify my African, Amerindian and Arabic roots by filling in the blanks under ‘some other race’.”

Then we have U.S. representative Anh Cao, a Vietnamese-American who arrived in the United States as a refugee when the Vietnam War ended. Throughout his life, he has been an activist for the rights of refugees and an immigration lawyer. He says that Japanese-American and minority rights advocate Mike Honda encouraged him to run for office when he saw that there were not enough Vietnamese-Americans in public service.  Another piece is written by Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American novelist whose “books explore identity and assimilation among immigrants and first-generation American citizens”, while another one is written by Jean Kwok, a Chinese-American writer whose first novel, Girl in Translation, explores these issues of identity through the story of an immigrant Chinese girl and her mother, who not only survive difficult circumstances, but triumph over them.” Kwok also tells the story of her father who, when she was a child, gave her the family’s genealogy book: “These are your bloodlines,” he said. “Four-thousand years that went into making you. We copy this book, generation after generation, so that we won’t forget.”

Nafees A. Syed who was born in the state of Georgia to Indian parents also gets her say.  She is a senior at Harvard University, an editorial writer at The Harvard Crimson and a senior editor for the Harvard-MIT journal on Islam and society,Ascent. She claims that one time on Independence Day, she and her family were taunted by a man who said “what planet are y’all from?” She also claims that she is occasionally told to “go back where [she] came from.” Then she also utters the cliché “if all of us ‘went back to where we came from,’ meaning the places of our family origin, there would be nobody in America except for Native Americans.”She then adds more clichés like “I am a Muslim and I am an American … a fair study of Islamic and American values would find corroboration, not contradiction”. She concludes with: “There are three important dimensions in my life — my religion, my ethnicity and my country — and they are all at peace.”

Next in line is Lila Downs, a Mexican/American singer, Latin Grammy Award winner as well as Academy Award nominee who lives in New York, Mexico City and Oaxaca. Her father was a White university professor and her mother was Mixtec (an indigenous groups from the state of Oaxaca, in Mexico). She goes on describing that she first “chose to deny [her] Mexican heritage at one point in [her] life, since [she] felt it made people uncomfortable.” She adds: “I didn’t realize I was denying myself, but that I would at one point have to confront and accept who I really was.” She claims her identity journey began when her father died: “I was left with my mother, a very independent Indian woman who was also mestizo. […] We spoke about her Indian-ness, about Mexican social ideals, about being a strong woman … I was curious about this new self that had been buried in shame. I was hungry to learn more about why I was the way I was.”

Finally, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, lectures us in her essay called “I’m a criminal and so are you. She is a mulatto who was the director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California and of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School. She now holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. All of which illustrates that being an anti-White advocate has a very nice payoff in today’s academic world.

She seems to think there is no difference between misdemeanors and felonies:

Haven’t you ever smoked pot, didn’t you ever drink underage, don’t you sometimes speed on the freeway, haven’t you gotten behind the wheel after having a couple of drinks? Haven’t you broken the law? … As I see it, you’re just somebody who hasn’t been caught. You’re still a criminal, no better than many of those who’ve been branded felons for life.

She then goes on with her antics:

If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons … In this country, we force millions of people who are largely black and brown into a permanent second-class status, simply because they once committed a crime.

The cultural Marxist line becomes even clearer when we look at the few Whites they chose. The first two are young Whites, 23 and 31 years old respectively. They are devoured by White guilt and can only be described as brainwashed far-left lunatics.

One is David Paul Strohecker, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is covered with tattoos and piercings. He says his sociopolitical views are a large part of his identity, and he incorporates these into what he wears — for example, T-shirts with the faces of activists whom he admires. He is aware that others see how he presents himself as a “measure of [his] character” and “it is to this end that [he] deliberately tries to throw people off.” He says his body is a “billboard” for his “life.” and his “tattoos tell the story of [his] identity”. His earliest tattoos were direct quotes and Bible verses that “captured [his] identity as an outspoken social-justice advocate.” He then says hebegan to display his political views more directly in later tattoos: “I have the ‘female’ sign behind my left ear to reflect my commitment to feminism and women everywhere; I have the Human Rights Campaign logo behind my right ear to reflect my commitment to LGBT struggles.”

The very politically correct and handsomely tattooed David Paul Strohecker

The other bubblehead is Christian Lander, the Canadian-born writer living in Los Angeles who published a satirical book called Stuff White People Like and has a blog with the same name. “I’m not attempting to assert some sort of superiority through my Whiteness; quite the opposite actually. Thanks to my liberal upbringing, I am imbued with the appropriate amount of guilt and shame about my ancestors and their actions in the New World”. Thinking he’s funny, he then says: “Even in my home, I can’t offer a blanket to a nonWhite friend without the fear that they [sic] will look at me and say ‘no smallpox on this right?'”

I’m a White male. I belong to a group that pretty much always been [sic] able to own land and to vote. I’m more or less from the kind that grabbed power somewhere after the fall of Rome and never let go. In other words, I’m the kind of White guy that has never experienced any real oppression.

I am sure that he will welcome the coming oppression of Whites when they become a minority among people with all that anti-White hostility. And he’s completely forgotten about the long wars with Muslims — the fact that the Balkans, Spain and Constantinople were taken and ruled by Muslims invaders. Like everywhere else in the world, Europe has a history of both invading and being invaded. But he is completely programmed by the education system and the mass media, both of which relentlessly bombard the populace with the culturally Marxist line of thinking.

Lander goes on citing Marxist activist Noel Ignatiev, who is on a crusade to deny the existence of race as a biological reality and to “abolish the White race,” describing Ignatiev’s book as “actual, intelligent research.” Lander is the sort of liberal who thinks he understands everything when he is in fact completely brainwashed by conventional anti-White propaganda — the morality tale that White people are the only evil people in the world:

America has a long history of welcoming immigrants who will never be able to check that white box on the census, and unfortunately that means America also has a long history of discrimination against those people. … Just one example would be the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II contrasted against the treatment of German-Americans. … But all of that was in the past right? Well, ask yourself this: Who is more likely to get pulled over and forced to show his papers in Arizona today? A first generation Canadian immigrant, or a 10th generation Mexican-American?

But of course, the reason Mexican-Americans are more likely to get pulled over is because they are literally invading this country with perhaps has many as 20 million illegal aliens. If Canada sent as many illegals to the United States, it would lose two thirds of its population!

He then concludes with: “What I hope this census will force the country to deal with is the fact that White immigrants like me will never again make up the majority of people that come to this country. America is not getting Whiter, it will never get Whiter. Well, unless we start handing those blankets out again.” The sad reality is that it America will not remain White as long as Whites think like Lander.

While Bill Ayers could not have done a better job writing the articles by Strohecker and Lander, the three other essays written by Whites do not reach the same level of delirium. They are written by middle age Whites. The reason they were chosen by CNN.com is because they all belong to a minority victim group: they are disabled. In other words, CNN’s survey of Americans does not include even one White person who has any doubts about the non-White future, even though a major political theme recently has been White rage, especially among working class Whites who are being dispossessed by the onslaught that is celebrated by CNN.

One White victim is Anne Feeley, a brain cancer survivor and an activist for brain cancer research who labels herself a “feminist.” Another is Robert David Hall, an actor best known for his role as coroner Dr. Albert Robbins on the TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Robbins, the victim of an accident in which he lost his legs and was burned over 60 percent of his bodyis an advocate for the disabled. The last White victim is Shane Stanford, the pastor of Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church, a hemophiliac and has been HIV positive for more than 20 years, due to a contaminated blood supply.

None of these three essays had anything to do with race or ethnicity. They were chosen because their authors belong to the “disabled” minority. As victims, they are in the same boat as the ethnic grievance industry — a group with special claims on society. Leaving that aside, I must say that the hardships they have gone through are truly moving and make the other minority writers look like a bunch of arrogant, spoiled and selfish whiners, whose little worlds revolve around their phony ‘identity’ struggles.

The funniest thing about this series of articles is that at the end of each essay, CNN inserts that “the opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of [the author].” But it’s obvious that they were deliberately chosen by CNN.comprecisely because they beat the drums of multiculturalism, miscegenation, anti-White hostility, and ethnic minority grievances. The only Whites allowed into this forum are those who have internalized a powerful sense of guilt or who are victims themselves — the coalition of the aggrieved that is now such a powerful political force in the US.

Needless to say, there is no space for White victims who have lost their jobs to immigrants  or to affirmative action. Nor are their stories by Whites who have been victimized by non-White criminals. This, after all, is the mainstream media, and those aren’t the stories they want to tell.

William Davis (email him) is a freelance writer.

Racial Genetic Similarity and Difference: The Witherspoon et al. Study

One scientific topic that has been often previously discussed here and at other similar sites is the biological validity of the race concept.  This, unfortunately, has become necessary, because some people, perhaps with political motivations, assert, contrary to the evidence, that “race does not exist” and that race is a “social construct” with “no biological foundation.”

One popular and misinterpreted finding that has been eagerly grasped at by those who preach that “race is not real” is derived from the work of Richard Lewontin, which demonstrated that more genetic variation exits within than between groups.  In a previous article in this journal, I have explained how Lewontin’s finding in no way discredits the race concept.  However, there are “anti-racist” activists who still claim, based on their misinterpretations of population genetics, that it is possible for individual Europeans (“Whites”) to be more genetically similar to sub-Saharan Africans (“Blacks”) than to other Europeans.  Until now, there has been no formal proof that this assertion is incorrect.  I am now pleased to say that a recent scientific paper has delved into this very topic and that the findings of this paper clearly demonstrate that the race deniers are wrong.  First, let me give a brief introduction for the sake of clarity.

A number of scientific studies have shown that it is possible to genetically cluster individuals to their self-identified race with near 100% accuracy.  Further, racial categories can be determined by the genetic data even without any a priori information about the groups involved.  In other words, racial groups can be empirically observed through genetic analysis without any prior assumptions about these groups by the researchers.

However, does that imply that individual members of these races will always be more genetically similar to members of their own racial group compared to members of other groups?  Or, are genetic clustering and individual genetic similarity so different that this may not be always so?  Can individuals share more genetic similarity to members of other groups rather than to members of their own group, even if everyone is properly clustered with their self-identified race? In other words, can there be significant genetic overlap between individuals on the fringes of, say, the European and African clusters?

These are the questions asked, and answered, in the paper “Genetic Similarities Within and Between Populations” by Witherspoon et al. (online free).  I will simplify the authors’ statements and analogies so as to make the work more understandable to the broad readership; although this may mean that certain detailed specifics are glossed over, the main “take home” points and essential interpretations remain intact.  And, since the paper is available online at no cost, any reader interested in delving into the scientific details can do so at their leisure.

The authors introduced the metric “w”, which they defined as “…the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population.”  In other words, what is being determined with “w” is the frequency with which, for example, individual Whites and individual Blacks may be more similar to each other than to members of their own race. This measurement, which is based upon gene by gene comparisons between individuals, is different from the two measurements of clustering that the authors compare to “w.”  Unlike “w”, the clustering measurements incorporate population-level genetic information, and thus consider the “aggregate” qualities of the population’s genetic information.  To put it simply, and bypassing many details, “w” compares individuals to each other, while clustering is, essentially, comparisons of individuals to the “genetic average” (or “centroid”) of different populations.  By crude analogy, we could consider physical traits. “W” would analogous to how similar two individuals are to each other in height, weight, eye color, skin color, hair color, facial features, etc.  Clustering, in contrast, is more analogous to how similar each individual is to the average measurements of height, weight, eye color, etc. for any group.  Thus “w” can tell us how similar individuals are to each other, while clustering tells us whether an individual is more similar to one group or another.  Clustering allows us to “bin” (or “cluster”) individuals as belonging to one group or another.

Is it possible for individuals from different groups to be more genetically similar to each other than to members of their own group?  More importantly, can this occur even if all of these individuals are correctly “binned” by genetic cluster analysis to their correct racial group?  In other words, is it possible to correctly cluster everyone to their self-identified race, even though members of different groups are more similar to each other than to some members of their own group?  In theory, yes, and the authors provide an example of how this may occur.  For the sake of understanding, I will simplify their explanation and calculations.

Assume that the measurement “q” represents the averaged gene frequencies for groups or for individuals.  The African genetic average (or “centroid”) of “q” may be 0.46; the European “q”, 0.61.  This “q” measures the average frequency of different gene types at various parts of the genome. Assume three individuals, two Africans and one European, with their own individual “q” measurements of 0.4, 0.52, and 0.55 respectively.  Consider the African with q = 0.52.  He is closer to the African average of 0.46 than to the European average of 0.61.  Thus, he clusters with Africans; in fact all three individuals would cluster with their identified group. Yet, at the individual level, the African at 0.52 is closer to the European’s 0.55 value than to the other African’s 0.4 value.  Thus, it would seem that individual racial overlap can be possible even though clustering is absolutely correct.  Does this actually occur in reality?

Bamshad et al. (“Deconstructing The Relationship Between Genetics and Race”, Bamshad et al., Nat. Rev. Genet. 5, 598-609, 2004.) , using 377 DNA markers in 1,056 individuals, found that in 38% of the cases, individual Europeans were more similar to individual Asians than to other Europeans.  So it would seem that significant genetic overlap across broad racial lines exists, even if everyone is correctly binned to their own racial group.  But, is this really true?  Will that hold true when more markers are used?

These are the questions that the Witherspoon et al. paper attempted to address. What were their basic findings?  The authors first examined the amount of genetic overlap between individual Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans using 175 markers, comparing the “w” metric with two measurements of clustering. Since clustering is a less stringent measurement than is genetic similarity (“w”), it is not surprising that, with a given number of genetic markers, there is less overlap with clustering than with “w.”  For example, in the case of Africans vs. Europeans and using 175 markers, the two measures of clustering gave overlaps of 4.9% and 1.9%; in contrast, the “w” measure of similarity has an overlap of 23%.  This “w” means that, given these 175 markers, nearly one quarter of the time an individual European will be genetically more similar to an African than to another European.  This tracks fairly well with the findings of Bamshad, discussed above.  At the same time, 175 markers were sufficient to yield clustering at an accuracy of ~95–98%.   

Thus, given a moderate number of markers, accurate racial clustering of individuals may not coincide with individual members of a group always being more similar to members of their own compared to individuals of another group. Are the racial liberals then correct?  It is possible for a Dane to be more similar, genetically, to a Nigerian than to a fellow Dane, even if the error rate is less than 25% of the time?  The answer is, simply put, no.  This genetic overlap between individuals from the major racial groups is an artifact of not using sufficient numbers of markers.

As the authors used more and more markers to compare the three major racial groups (Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans), the less stringent clustering measurements rapidly fell to a 0% overlap, as expected from previous studies.  What about the more stringent measurement “w”, which looks at comparisons between individuals, and does not consider group data?  Once the authors reached 1,000 (or more) markers, the genetic overlap between these groups essentially reached zero. It is useful at this point to quote the authors about this fundamentally important finding:

This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically more similar to members of their own group.

With respect to the question of whether individual members of one group may be genetically more similar to members of another group, they write:

However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes ‘never’ when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations.

Thus, the naïve “anti-racist” view, actually stated at times (e.g., the NOVA program on race), that it is possible for individual Europeans and Africans to be more genetically similar to each other than to members of their own race, is simply false.  Any such “finding” is simply due to insufficient numbers of DNA markers being used.

With an adequate methodology, individual members of the major racial groups will always be more similar to members of their own group than to members of other groups.  Some may not like this and deem it “racist”, but these are the scientific facts, nonetheless.

For whatever reason, the authors were not satisfied with ending their study with these findings and decided to repeat their data analysis incorporating populations they term “intermediate” or “admixed.”  These included New Guineans, South Asians, Native Americans, African Americans and “Hispano-Latino” groups.  Not unexpectedly, it became somewhat more difficult to distinguish between groups, with a given number of markers, when these additional “intermediate/admixed” populations were added.  Even with more than 10,000 markers, the “w” measurement and the clustering measurements never quite reached zero with respect to overlap, although the numbers were low.  For example the authors state that with 1,000 or more markers the “w” measurement reached a value of 3.1%, meaning that even with the intermediate/admixed populations, genetic overlap was at a frequency of less than 5%.

Do these latter findings mean that there will always be genetic overlap between members of more closely related groups, especially when so-called “intermediate” and “admixed” populations are considered?  Although some people may fervently wish that 100% accurate classification will remain impossible, except for the most widely divergent groups, this may well not be the case.  We are entering an era in which reasonably affordable whole genome sequencing will be possible, and with the proper methodologies, it will be possible to compare a number of markers considerably larger than what is used in the current paper.  While 10,000 markers may not be sufficient to eliminate overlap between all groups completely – although it does reduce the overlap to very low levels – it is possible that larger numbers of markers, or even whole genome comparisons, could do so.  With more data, it may well be possible to distinguish, with near 100% accuracy, between groups that still demonstrate a low level of “w” with current data.

We must also consider the issue of genetic structure, not directly addressed in this study.  Although structure can include such genetic phenomena as inversions, deletions, and copy-number variation, the major component of genetic structure is the co-inheritance of specific genes.  In other words, we must consider not only the frequencies of each gene taken in turn, but the frequencies of specific genes together.  For example, there are genes that code for eye color, skin color, hair color, etc.  One can examine the frequency of each gene on a one-by-one basis in an individual (or group) and do all the pairwise comparisons to another individual (or group) and determine “w.”  But what are the frequencies of particular combinations of gene types inherited together?  For example, what is the frequency of having genes for blue eyes and blonde hair and fair skin, etc. co-inherited, rather than measuring the frequencies of each of these genes in turn and averaging the results?  Genetic structure superimposes further genetic differences on top of one-by-one consideration of genes; therefore, differences between groups are going to be larger when structure is considered compared to when only frequency differences of individual genes are measured and averaged.

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To further explain the difference between genetic similarity and genetic structure, I present an analogy using colored marbles.  Assume that individuals of different races each have a set of marbles, numbered from one to 100, with the marbles being of various colors.  Genetic similarity (the basis of the “w” metric) would be analogous to comparing the marbles of two individuals one-by-one; first comparing the color of marble #1, then #2, then #3, and so forth, on an individual basis and then counting the total number of matches.  Genetic structure, on the other hand, would be analogous to asking if the two individuals have similar, or even identical, combinations of colors for specific marbles.  For example, person A may have red marbles for #1, #6, and #15; blue marbles for # 3, #10, #33, and #95; green marbles for #7, #8, #22, and #84, and a yellow marble for #38.  If this particular, specific combination of colored marbles is of importance, we can then ask if person B has a similar combination.  What is important here is not the one-by-one counting of matches, but whether the whole pattern is replicated, or almost replicated, between two individuals (or groups).

What about the relation between genetic ancestry and individual phenotype? The authors state that: “Thus it may be possible to infer something about an individual’s phenotype from knowledge of his or her ancestry.” However, since phenotypic traits are coded for by a number of genes smaller than that required to yield low genetic overlap, the authors assert that there may be significant phenotypic overlap between people of different groups.  They give an example of a trait “determined by 12…loci”, which would yield a 36% overlap of phenotypes between individuals of different groups.  Yet, racial groups show markedly different phenotypes.  How is this so, if what the authors state is true?

There are two points that the authors neglect to emphasize.  First, many phenotypic traits, including racially relevant ones, have been selected for because of their adaptive value, or the populations commonly exhibiting these traits have been subject to genetic drift isolated from other populations.  Thus, it is not reasonable to assume that genes that code for a particular phenotype are going to have the same “worldwide distributions” as markers used in this study. For example, gene alleles coding for skin color show markedly higher frequency differences between populations than do the neutral markers used in population genetics.

A second point is that racial phenotypes are the result of genetic structure, of many types of traits co-inherited together. It is the sum total of all these differences that allow for racial distinction at the phenotypic level.  Looking at individual phenotypic traits, just like looking at individual gene frequencies, is going to provide a markedly incomplete picture of human racial variation.

These findings powerfully support Frank Salter’s concept of ethnic genetic interests.  After all, there is essentially zero genetic overlap between individual members of different major racial groups; a member of one of these groups is always going to be more similar to a member of their own group than to that of another.  Multiplying over the large numbers of people that constitute racial groups yields a very substantial genetic interest.

Even if we take at face value this paper’s findings concerning the intermediate/admixed populations, the ethnic genetic interest concept holds as well. In the vast majority of cases, individuals will be more similar to members of their own group; overlap, while not zero, is low.  When one multiples these differences over the large numbers of people involved, then there are very large and crucial differences of genetic interests regardless of which populations are considered.

But that is not all.  First, consider that with sufficient numbers of genes assayed, the small degree of overlap observed with the intermediate/admixed groups may disappear; it would almost certainly disappear if genetic structure is considered.

Second, and perhaps most important, the ethnic genetic interest concept is not based on overall genetic similarity/difference, but rather on differences in frequencies of distinctive genes, above and beyond random gene sharing.  After all, those genes that do not differ in frequency between groups do not contribute to differences in genetic interests, because their frequency stays unchanged regardless of the outcome of competition.  Even if an entire racial group were to die out, the frequency of these “shared genes” would remain unchanged.  Note that measurements of overall genetic similarity, such as “w”, will as a matter of course also include genes that do not differ in frequency between groups. Therefore, even when “w” shows a low degree of overlap, there may well be no overlap at all with respect to those genes that are distinctive, that vary in frequency between populations.

To further explain the importance of distinctive genes vs. “w”, I will go back to my colored marbles analogy.  Imagine that the distribution of colors for marbles 1–80 was completely random, but the colors for marbles 81–100 were specific to a person’s race.  Overall similarity in marble color (analogous to “w”) would consider all 100 marbles.  However, if we were to ask how the color frequencies of the marbles were to change if people of one race were completely removed from the example, we would observe that only marbles 81-100 would be affected.  For marbles 1–80, since the color distribution is completely random with respect to race, it doesn’t matter if one race or another is eliminated from this marble counting exercise.  Only the “population-distinctive marbles” are at issue here.

Likewise, when considering competition and conflicting genetic interests between human groups, the gene frequencies that really matter are those that exhibit differences in frequency between the groups, not those that are randomly distributed between the groups.

Thus, while the Witherspoon et al. paper strongly supports the concept of ethnic genetic interests, we need to remember that ethnic genetic interests is a more stringent and specific concept than simply measuring the degree of genetic similarity.  If we are not careful, we may otherwise conclude that a group of mice constitute a greater genetic interest for a person than does another person, since the group of mice would contain more copies of the person’s gene sequences than would another single person! (By some measurements, mice and humans are ~90% genetically similar.)

But this is not the case: Genetic interests are determined by the gene frequencies that are distinctive between humans and mice (as well as differences in genetic structure between the two species). They are not determined by overall genetic similarity, and they are not determined by counting the numbers of gene sequences held in common.

In summary, this is a crucially important paper that demonstrates that individual members of the major racial groups will always be more genetically similar to members of their own group than to individuals of the other major races.  The paper demonstrates the importance of using sufficient numbers of markers in these studies, and the findings also underscore the differences between the concepts of clustering (“binning”) of individuals into groups vs. measurements of the genetic similarity between individual members of these groups (“w”).

Although the inclusion of “intermediate” and “admixed” populations prevented the genetic overlap of cross-racial individuals from reaching zero, with a sufficient number of markers the overlap was at a very low level.  Further, it is quite possible that when utilizing a greater number of markers, or even a whole genome analysis, this genetic overlap may vanish completely.

Another important point to consider when evaluating this (and any other) genetic study is that genetic structure is an important part of human genetic variation that has not yet been carefully examined, but which will likely amplify the differences in genetic variation between human population groups.  When considering the totality of genetic structure, individual overlap between racial population groups, including “intermediate” and “admixed” group, will almost certainly be nil.

Finally, the data from this paper support Frank Salter’s conception of ethnic genetic interests, although we must remember that genetic interests are properly thought of as derived from differences in the frequencies of distinctive genes, rather than counting total copies of genes shared in common.

In the final analysis, the primary findings of this paper are a devastating blow to politically motivated assertions of “no genetic differences between human races.”

Footnote:

With respect to the issue of clustering itself, there has been some controversy, which has been laid to rest with a recent article “Geography and genography: prediction of continental origin using randomly selected single nucleotide polymorphisms”, Allocco et al.BMC Genomics 8:68, 2007; online free.

Race deniers, as we know, claim that there are no genetic differences at all, of any significance, between even the major continental racial groups.  When confronted with the ease by which people can be “binned” (or “clustered”) into specific racial groups, the deniers bluster that such clustering requires an enormous number of markers and/or requires the choice of “biased” markers specifically picked because these markers are known, in advance, to sharply vary in frequency between groups.

These assertions and accusations are incorrect.  Allocco et al. have demonstrated that only 50 randomly chosen markers (with the emphasis on random) can cluster individuals into the major continental racial groups (Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians) with 95% accuracy.  The “misclassifications” resulting in the 5% “error” rate were of two African Americans, likely of admixed racial heritage, who were observed to be in between the European and African clusters.  The authors also demonstrated that as few as 5 completely random markers are sufficient to yield a 63% accuracy rate in clustering individuals into racial groups.  The authors state that “differences between continentally defined groups are sufficiently large that even a randomly selected, minute fraction of the genetic variation in the human genome can be used to characterize ancestral geographic origin in an accurate and reproducible manner”, and they conclude that their findings “argue strongly against the contention that genetic differences between groups are too small to have biomedical significance.”  The authors also assert that the clustering methodology can be “easily extended” for distinguishing more closely related groups and those with mixed origins, as long as more genetic data is obtained, sufficient to make these distinctions.

Much of this type of work is freely available to the public. It would seem that the race deniers are running out of excuses as to why they continue to promote what amounts to fraudulent pseudo-science to an unsuspecting public.

Ted Sallis (email him) writes on scientific issues.

Race and Immigration in the Writings of Michele Wucker

Michele Wucker

Michele Wucker is Executive Director of the World Policy Institute, a nonpartisan center for “progressive global policy research.” Her writing is an interesting insight into what passes for thinking about race and ethnicity among contemporary mainstream American intellectuals.

Wucker’s social and racial history of the peoples of Hispaniola, Why the CocksFight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola is an important indicator of how she sees immigration for the United States, a topic explored in her 2006 plea for open borders, Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right.

In Why the Cock Fights, Wucker artfully combines both the physical and the cultural anthropology of the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola, an island divided between  Black French-speaking Haiti and mulatto Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. She describes the ethnic conflicts that have troubled that unfortunate island for centuries. The Dominicans finally won their independence from Haiti in 1844 after a 22-year brutal and corrupt occupation.

The dividing line separating the two peoples runs along Rio Massacre, so named because of the thousands of Haitians and Dominicans slaughtered at the border. In 1933 alone, the Dominicans massacred 25,000 Haitians on the river border.

Wucker sees the political and sociological situation on that perpetually troubled island as a continual cockfight enjoyed by both parties. Although cockfights are strictly in the male domain, Wucker manages to gain a true appreciation of the cockfighters (galleros), the arenas (galleras, gagaires), and even the triumphant strutting cock (gallo), and to convey that understanding and appreciation to her readers. Equally popular in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the cockfights are highly symbolic of the cross-cultural violence between the two major population groups — the  Blacks of Haiti and the mulattos of the Dominican Republic.

Wucker has great respect for the peoples she discusses. For example, when referring to Haiti’s folk religion, a mixture of African animism and Roman Catholicism, she uses the spelling ‘Vodou’ to distinguish it from what she calls Hollywood’s grotesque portrayal of ‘Voodoo’. In depicting Vodou practices, Hollywood typically cannot refrain from including a scene in which the priest or priestess drives a needle into a doll image of an individual the priest intends to harm. In reality, the doll piercing is very much like Chinese acupuncture in which the practice is aimed at healing not harming the targeted area.

Likewise she uses the term ‘Kreyol’ when referring to Haiti’s language, better suggesting its origin as one of the group of languages called creoles and reflecting that they are a mixture of African and European languages. Language, Wucker observes, can be a divisive political force as on Hispaniola, or a unifying force as English is in the project of globalization.

However, the rough classification of Black and mulatto is an oversimplification. Both countries, initially at least, shared the same racial composition, consisting of French, Spanish, English, African, Arawak Indian and Taino Indian blood. Only after the African element revolted against their French rulers, first slaughtering all Whites and then most mulattos, did the complexion of Haiti darken.

Their racial histories are fascinating, reflecting their colonial beginnings, genocidal outbursts, and subsequent racial amalgamation. The peoples of Haiti classify each other by color, fluency in Kreyol and hair texture. Drawing upon the research of Dominican, French and French-Canadian scholars, Wucker provides a detailed racial history of Hispaniola. Particularly interesting is the obsessive detail with which race was categorized and how it influenced every aspect of life:

In the early 16th century, even before the Africans arrived, Nicolas de Ovando, the Spanish colonial governor, had forced many of the colonists to marry Indians. . . . Many of the men, according to Dominican historian Roberto Cassá, were already living with Taino women. In the late 16th century, desperate to keep up the dwindling Spanish population as a last defense against French and English aspirations to shrink Spain’s territory on Hispaniola, the colonial government went so far as to encourage White colonists to marry the former slaves. These mixed-race children were treated as Spanish and White, and brought up with a strong sense of Roman Catholic identity to strengthen their resolve in fighting off Protestant (English) invaders. . . .

Over the centuries, the racial lines within Dominican society blurred, and it became, as it still largely is, mulatto. . . .

As early as 1549, according to the Dominican historian Franklin J. Franco, Santo Domingo’s colonial government defined seven racial types:  Black, or “negro,” slaves brought from Africa; White, Spaniards; mulatto, offspring of  Black and White; mestizo, descended from Indian and White; tercerón, child of a mulatto and a White; cuarterón, child of a tercerón and White; and grifo, mixed Indian and  Black. There does not seem to be a term for tri-racial ( Black-White-Indian) hybrids.

In the early 1970s the Dominican sociologist Daysi Josefina Guzmán identified nine hair colors and 15 main kinds of hair texture on a spectrum between bueno (good) for soft, Caucasian hair and malo (bad) for kinky, Negroid hair. [Among these were] lacio for straight and smooth; achinado for straight, stiff hair; espeso, thick, abundant and very slightly wavy; macho, thick and strong, abundant but without luster; rizado, thick and fine with small waves but dull; muerto, thin and greasy; ondulado, wavy; vivo, thick, dry, and out of control; variable, indescribable; crespo, thick and frizzy; de pimienta, peppery, growing slow and tight to the skull in small balls; motica, like peppery hair but thin, wavy; and pegaíto, so close to the skull that it is impossible to comb. . . .

She identified 12 skin colors: lochoso, “too White,” like milk; blanco, White; cenizo, ashen; descolorido, “without color”; pálido, so pale as to appear sick, desteñido, jaundiced; pecoso, freckled; pinto, mostly light but with large freckles or moles; trigueño, light, with a very slight dark touch; manchado, dark, with light streaks; “negro,” very dark; morado, so  Black as to be “almost purple.” In addition, there were 10 facial structures, six physical types and five general racial types.

Each category could be used as a guide to where any Dominican stood on the social scale. . . . In the Dominican Republic, calling someone “Haitian” is on the surface synonymous with describing them as negro or morado, but with an added psychological weight of fear and hatred.

The early French colonists in Saint-Domingue identified 128 different racial types, defined quite precisely along a mathematical scale determined by simple calculations of ancestral contributions. They ranged from the “true” mulatto (half White, half  Black), through the spectrum of marabou, sacatra, quarterón, all the way to the sang-mêlé (mixed blood: 127 parts White and one part  Black. . . .

The sociologist Micheline Labelle has counted 22 main racial categories and 98 subcategories (for varying hair types, facial structure, color and other distinguishing factors) used among Haiti’s middle class in Port-au-Prince in the 1970s. Within each category, the words are often as imaginative as they are descriptive: café au lait (“coffee with milk”), bonbon siro (“candy syrup”), ti canel (“little cinnamon”), ravet blanch (“White cockroach”), soley levan (“rising Sun”), banane mûre (“ripe banana”), brun pistache (“peanut brown”), mulâtre dix-huit carats (“18-carat mulatto”). . . .

The decidedly darker complexion of the Haitians dates back to 1804, when dictator Jean Jacques Dessalines decided to slaughter all the “Whites” still residing in Haiti. Because some of the “French colonists” already had African blood, Dessalines devised a language test to weed out “Whites” that could pass for  Black on the basis of skin color. The test was simple and effective. Since the colonists spoke continental French, rather than Haiti’s Kreyol, suspected colonists were asked to sing a country tune containing the line, “Nanett alé nan fontain, cheche dlo, crich-a li cassé” (“Nanette went to the fountain, looking for water, but her jug broke”). The “French,” meaning anyone who gave himself or herself away when they could not reproduce the Kreyol sounds or African cadences of the melody, were summarily bayoneted.

After Toussaint had been removed, his successor Henri Christophe mimicked the vanquished French by crowning himself King Henri I, building a magnificent palace and the massive Citadele La Ferrière, and appointing Afro-Haitian dukes and lords to rule over his domain.

Haiti soon began its rapid descent from the richest colony in the Caribbean to the absolute poorest. Lothrop Stoddard, the once famed (now politically incorrect) American scholar whose views very much influenced the U.S. immigration law of 1924, described these early events in his famed The French Revolution in San Domingo, published in 1914 and now available online.

The same process of a nation’s unnecessary descent into chaos and poverty has been repeated in our own day in the case of Rhodesia, one of the most prosperous states in Africa. When most of the members of the government, who were of European origin, were expelled from the country because of the color of their skin, prosperous Rhodesia became basket case Zimbabwe. The UK, the USA, and the USSR then pressured South Africa to permit the  Blacks to govern that state. As of today over a million Whites have migrated out of the country, which is fast becoming a criminal state.

Early in World War II, President Roosevelt, to aid Jewish refugees from Europe without the need of Congressional consent, made a deal with Rafael Trujillo in which the Dominican leader agreed to take in Jewish refugees from Europe. Trujillo, who had just recently slaughtered about 20,000 Haitians along the Rio Massacre, was under the impression that by admitting the Jews he would be infusing new “White” blood into the Dominican racial stock. As it turned out, however, most of the Jews subsequently entered the United States, and the Dominican Republic remained mostly mulatto.

In recent years, U.S. President Bill Clinton was so captivated by the charms of a renegade priest, the defrocked Jean-Bertrand Aristide, that he used 20,000 U.S. troops to reinstate the expelled demagogue to power. It is not surprising, however, that today, despite an infusion of billions of American dollars, Haiti has returned to its natural state: chaos, lawlessness, postponed or phony elections, corruption, drugs, poverty and the rest. Consequently, as Wucker notes, in the last two decades one out of every eight Haitians and Dominicans has moved to and now resides in the United States. To this day, Clinton remains a friend to Haiti, helping it as best he can. Sadly, Haiti has not yet found a native leader, wise and strong enough to institute a just and effective government.

The French critic and playwright Aimé Césaire once described Haiti as follows:

Poor Africa! I say poor Haiti! It is the same thing. Over there, tribe, languages, rivers, the castes, forest, village against village, hamlet against hamlet. Here,  Blacks, mulattos, griffes, marabouts, what-have-you, clan, caste, color, defiance and conspiracy, fights between cocks, between dogs over a bone, the combat of fleas!

Wucker’s fine study of Hispaniola demonstrates the importance of ethnicity and ethnic conflict as very important determining factors in human affairs. The politics of the island have been one continual cockfight. But perhaps of even greater importance, she also shows the limits of racial analysis and the utter futility of attempting racial classifications based on simple surface appearances after miscegenation has progressed through several generations. Early racial studies were based solely on the color of the skin and hair texture. Modern DNA studies have provided a wealth of new information. 

By 2006, however, following two years at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Ms. Wucker has emerged a more “enlightened” person. Incredibly, in her second book, Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right, written in her new capacity as Executive Director of the World Policy Institute and advisor to the U.S. Government on immigration policy, Wucker disregards ethnicity entirely as a criterion for immigration. Despite the long history of ethnic violence on Hispaniola, Wucker proposes that the things Haitians and Dominicans share in common can lead to reconciliation. For example, she notes that there have been no reports of violent attacks since the recent earthquake. (Of course an earthquake would tend to take your mind off routine everyday squabbles.) Perhaps not coincidentally, after the publication of Lockout Ms. Wucker received a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Institute describes itself as a progressive non-partisan source of informed leadership that develops and champions policies requiring a global point of view. The Institute appears to share the economic and social goals of globalization and operates under the Boasian dogma of racial equality. Ms. Wucker pleads that America not put any restrictions on further immigration. Despite the long history of racial conflict she so ably documents in Why the Cock Fights, she advocates — against all logic and common sense — that diversity need not be divisive in the long run.

Among other solutions for the resolution of possible conflicts resulting from diversity, Ms. Wucker suggests mongrelization. She first disingenuously identifies herself as a mongrel, pointing to her parents and grandparents as having spoken different languages and having lived in different parts of Europe. Then extrapolating wildly makes the completely unfounded statement:

Americans today are as proud of being mongrels as the higher classes of earlier Americans of British and German roots were of their “purebred” family trees. (Lockout, p. 219)

By turning up the heat under the melting pot and encouraging miscegenation, a mongrelized uniformity could indeed be achieved, but older Americans are not yet ready for it. More importantly, such a solution ignores the reality of racial differences in IQ and other valuable traits. A mongrelized population will inevitably be stratified by degree of admixture of genes from groups higher or lower on these traits. Only Draconian laws administered by a police state could possibly result in completely diluting all racial differences to the point where race becomes irrelevant as a way of classifying people. Wucker goes on and on about getting “the best and brightest” as immigrants as necessary for economic progress, but completely ignores the fact that in reality the vast majority of immigrants are uneducated and have low IQ — the sort of people who suck up public services rather than contribute to a modern economy.

But her greatest failing is her lack of appreciation of how massive non-White immigration is likely to lead to ethnic conflict and the Balkanization of America. The fact that immigrants from different parts of Europe did indeed manage to assimilate to America is no sign that this will continue into the future. The recent law in Arizona banning ethnic studies programs in public schools was motivated by the well-founded fear that such programs fuel hatred toward the White majority of America. Such programs are common throughout the American education system.

Far better is the advice of the quintessential American poet Robert Frost who once wrote that “good fences make good neighbors,” a sentiment that most older Americans understand and believe.

When Jean Raspail published his prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints in the 1960s, American liberal intellectuals called it hate literature. By the 1990s Raspail in his essay The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic had to concede that his France was irretrievably lost and could never return. Without any popular mandate at all, the US government in the past half-century has been derelict in its responsibility to control immigration. As a result, the ethnic composition of the country has rapidly changed from predominantly European to a mixture of races. In effect, the country is being repopulated.

The consequences of this massive transformation are unknown. But if human history is any guide, the result will be a very large increase in ethnic conflict and a very perilous future for the traditional people and culture of America.

Daniel W. Michaels, a native New Yorker, received his BS in geography from Columbia University in 1954. Following five years in the Army (three of which stationed in Germany) and a Fulbright grant for studies in Tuebingen University, Mr. Michaels worked in the Defense Department until his retirement in 1993. He continues to contribute articles to various journals on World War II and Cold War matters. (Email him.)

The Christian Question in White Nationalism

There is a strong anti-Christian tendency in contemporary White Nationalism.

The argument goes something like this: Christianity is one of the primary causes of the decline of the White race for two reasons. First, it gives the Jews a privileged place in the sacred history of mankind, a role that they have used to gain their enormous power over us today. Second, Christian moral teachings—inborn collective guilt, magical redemption, universalism, altruism, humility, meekness, turning the other check, etc.—are the primary cause of the White race’s ongoing suicide and the main impediment to turning the tide. These values are no less Christian in origin just because secular liberals and socialists discard their supernatural trappings. The usual conclusion is that the White race will not be able to save itself unless it rejects Christianity.

I think that this argument is half right. I do believe that Christianity is one of the main causes of White decline, for the reasons given above. But I do not believe that discarding Christianity is a necessary condition of White revival. I am not a Christian. But the fact that I am not a Christian might lend credibility to my argument that the White Nationalist movement need not and indeed should not be anti-Christian.

First, although intellectual debate is definitely part of White Nationalism (perhaps too large a part), we must never lose sight of the fact that White Nationalism is a political movement, not an intellectual one. Intellectual movements require agreement on first principles as well as ultimate goals. Political movements require agreement only on practical goals.

Our goal is a White homeland in North America. This political goal is, as a matter of fact, shared by Christians and non-Christians alike. To achieve a White homeland, we have to work with our allies, not against them. We might wish that they agree with us on other matters besides the goal of a White homeland. But this is not necessary, and emphasizing differences of opinion is not productive. When one is on the barricades, one does not turn to one’s comrades and start finding fault.

Not emphasizing differences of opinion is not the same thing as hiding them, however. A mature and healthy White Nationalist movement should cultivate a culture of openness and frankness. We need to be as willing to express our differences in a civil manner as we are to put them aside to work for the common good.

Second, Christianity may be a necessary condition of White racial suicide, but it is not really the driving force. Christianity has long ceased to be the ruling power in Western societies or individual Christian lives. Instead, the churches preach White suicide and Christian Zionism because they wish to suck up to the real intellectual and political power structure, and today that power structure is overwhelmingly dominated and defined by Jews and Jewish interests.

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This is not a new phenomenon, either. The church has long trimmed its sails to the winds of expediency. When there were absolute monarchs, the church preached the divine right of kings. When there was slavery, it bade slaves to obey their masters. When there was patriarchy, it taught wives to obey their husbands.

It is tempting to condemn this tendency as mere political opportunism, but that would be a mistake. The church has always been supple at bending to the reigning political and intellectual orthodoxies because, ultimately, its kingdom is not of this world. In spite of aberrations like the Social Gospel movement, the church has always been more concerned with saving individual souls than with social justice. Thus churchmen regard sucking up to the secular powers as a small price to pay to stay in the soul-saving business.

What this implies for White Nationalism is that the church will resist us less fervently than those whose aims are primarily secular, such as Jewish organizations, non-White ethnic organizations, and the secular left. And when we gain power, ministers will begin hunting for Bible verses to justify the new regime. There is no reason why a White Nationalist regime cannot become a new Caesar, to whom Christians render their secular loyalty while reserving their religious loyalty for God. 

Third, it is a basic principle of political struggle that one should always work to preserve the unity of one’s ranks while sowing division among the enemy. Christian resistance to White Nationalism will be weaker if the churches are divided, and they can be divided if there are Christians in our ranks, especially Christians with personal ties to church leaders. Resistance will be stronger, however, if White Nationalism ceases being a merely political movement and takes on the aspect of an anti-Christian crusade.

Once a White Nationalist regime emerges, White Nationalist Christians can use their ties with the churches to better bring them into compliance with the new order.

Although the presence of Christians in the White Nationalist movement will help split the churches and weaken their resistance, their presence will not split or weaken White Nationalism as long as it remains a purely political movement unified solely by the pursuit of a White homeland.

Today White Nationalism is a movement of the political right. Someday, however, it may become the common sense of White people up and down the political spectrum. To my mind, this would be a positive development, because when it comes to religion and politics, I am very much a liberal: I believe in the separation of religion and politics and in basing political decisions on secular reason.

To me, it seems fortunate that the separation of church and state in the White homeland may well be necessitated by political reality. The White Nationalist movement must unite Whites of widely different religious convictions in the struggle for a homeland. That means we must build religious pluralism and tolerance into our movement today, which means they will be built into our homeland tomorrow.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

John Mearsheimer and the Future of Israeli Apartheid

John Mearsheimer has given a fascinating prognosis of the situation in Israel. The basic argument is as follows (skip to the end of the bulleted list if you’ve already read it):

  • There is not going to be a Palestinian state. There is no political will for it in Israel, and the US lacks the power to impose a two-state solution, largely because of the continuing power of the Israel Lobby. Netanyahu’s “victory was so complete that the Israeli media was full of stories describing how their prime minister had bested Obama and greatly improved his shaky political position at home.” Mearsheimer quotes Andrew Sullivan’s comment on “a cardinal rule of American politics: no pressure on Israel ever.  Just keep giving them money and they will give the US the finger in return. The only permitted position is to say you oppose settlements in the West Bank, while doing everything you can to keep them growing and advancing.”
  • A Palestinian state is anathema to the Israeli government — the most radically ethnonationalist in its history — and it contradicts basic Zionist ideology, going back to Mandate days: “From the start, Zionism envisioned an Israeli state that controlled all of Mandatory Palestine.  There was no place for a Palestinian state in the original Zionist vision of Israel.”
  • It is possible that there would be a mass ethnic cleansing — but such a “murderous strategy seems unlikely, because it would do enormous damage to Israel’s moral fabric, its relationship with Jews in the Diaspora, and to its international standing.”  Nevertheless, “we should not underestimate Israel’s willingness to employ such a horrific strategy if the opportunity presents itself.  It is apparent from public opinion surveys and everyday discourse that many Israelis hold racist views of Palestinians and the Gaza massacre makes clear that they have few qualms about killing Palestinian civilians. … Still, I do not believe Israel will resort to this horrible course of action.”
  • The result is that the trends toward an “incipient apartheid state” will become a full-blown apartheid state “over the next decade.”
  • “In the long run, however, Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state.  … It will eventually evolve into a democratic bi-national state whose politics will be dominated by the more numerous Palestinians.”
  • An apartheid Israel is non-viable for several reasons: The information freely available on the Internet; continued outrage among the Arabs and Muslims; because it is “antithetical to core Western values”; because it endangers American lives; and because most American Jews will not back it.
  • Elaborating on the last point, he divides American Jews into three groups, “righteous Jews” (liberals like Norman Finkelstein and Philip Weiss who are critical of Israel), “the great ambivalent middle,” and the “new Afrikaners” — people like Abe Foxman and Elie Wiesel whose views are identical to those of the politically dominant ethnonationalist government in Israel. At the very least, the new Afrikaners will support Israel no matter what it does.
  • Although the organized Jewish community is now dominated by the new Afrikaners, this will not last because Jews, like other Americans are ill-informed about the extent of Israeli apartheid. “This situation, however, is unsustainable over time.  Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Greater Israel is a reality, the righteous Jews will have two choices: support apartheid or work to help create a democratic bi-national state.  I believe that almost all of them will opt for the latter option, in large part because of their deep-seated commitment to liberal values, which renders any apartheid state abhorrent to them.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is where I part ways with Mearsheimer. It is certainly true that Jewish activist organizations like the ADL are constantly going into high dudgeon at the very mention that Israel is an apartheid state. Any such assertion is regarded as an “extreme anti-Israel rhetoric” by the ADL and has the effect of shaping the views of ordinary Jews and preventing them from acknowledging Israeli apartheid as it already exists.

But how is this going to change? The reality is that American Jews are quite comfortable with a morally schizophrenic view in which they have vastly different moral standards when it comes to Israel versus the US. This has been going on for a long time — to the point that I started a recent blog by writing, “Finding examples of Jewish double standards and hypocrisy vis-à-vis their attitudes about Israel and the US is like shooting fish in a  barrel. But their posturing on the Arizona immigration law is particularly egregious.” Recall that opposition to Arizona-type laws spans the entire organized Jewish community in the US, despite the fact that such practices are routine in Israel.

Jewish moral particularism is a powerful reality among Jews. Mearsheimer takes Jewish liberalism in America and throughout the West at face value, as representing “deepseated commitment to liberal values” that is central to Judaism itself.

In accepting this, Mearsheimer is taking people like Gideon Aronoff of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society at face value — always a bad idea. The HIAS declares,

Drawing strongly on Jewish tradition, we provide services to Jewish immigrants, refugees, and others in need – without regard for their religion, nationality, or ethnic background. We are guided by our Jewish values and texts. The Torah (Hebrew Bible) tells us 36 times in 36 different ways to help the stranger among us. This, and our core belief that we must “fix the world” (tikkun olam, in Hebrew), are the driving principles behind our work.”)

Aronoff makes it sound as though Jewish advocacy of immigration is part of a deep ethical commitment that goes to the heart of Judaism. But of course he never attempts massive resettlement of non-Jews into Israel, nor does he agonize about Israel’s biologically-based immigration laws. His moral posturing is entirely directed at the US. Even a casual look at traditional Jewish society shows it to be highly authoritarian, with no concept of individual rights or free speech and deeply concerned about the racial purity of all group members. However one interprets the Torah, Jewish society has never welcomed the stranger, and that is certainly true of Israel.

Jewish commitment to liberalism in the West has been all about ethnic hardball, not about high-flown moral values. Jewish liberalism is the cutting edge aimed at displacing previously dominant WASP elites and their culture. It is not motivated by a moral universalism of human rights — a philosophy that is utterly foreign to the Jewish tradition. Rather, it is motivated by fear and loathing of the traditional peoples and cultures of Europe — and the desire to become a dominant elite.

Obviously, the vast majority of Israelis fail to hold liberal values, and historically the common denominator of Jewish behavior in traditional societies has been alliances with elites, often rapacious alien elites. Jewish radicals in the Soviet Union became “Stalin’s Willing Executioners,” perpetrating the greatest mass murders of the 20th century,  and the Jewish left in the US rationalized or ignored it for decades. Indeed, the remnants of the Jewish left in the US are far more concerned about the imagined excesses of McCarthyism than they are about the horrific deeds of their co-ideologues in the Soviet Union.

The result is that Jewish liberalism is far better seen as ethnic strategizing rather than a core ethical commitment:

The Jewish identification with the left should … be seen as a strategy designed to increase Jewish power as an elite hostile to the White European majority of America. As I have argued, Jewish intellectual and political movements have been a critically necessary condition for the decline of White America during a period in which Jews have attained elite status. All of these movements have been aligned with the political left. As Democrats, Jews are an integral part of the emerging non-White coalition while being able to retain their core ethnic commitment to Israel. Indeed, the organized Jewish community has not only been the most important force in ending the European bias of American immigration laws, it has assiduously courted alliances with non-White ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and Asians; and these groups are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party. (Review of Norman Podhoretz’s Why are Jews Liberals?) (See also Ch. 3 ofThe  Culture of Critique, p. 79ff)

Mearsheimer suggests that American Jews, especially young Jews, will over time be less committed to Israel as they realize that they are safe in America, so that Israel is not needed as a safety valve. He also points to a very real phenomenon — that Jews in Israel are increasingly dominated by the religious fundamentalists and, I would add, the secular ethnonationalist descendants of Vladimir Jabotinsky. Both groups are highly fertile and they will increasingly dominate Israel in the future. Indeed, they are already the backbone of support for the current ethnonationalist government, which features the openly racialist, pro-apartheid Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister.

But it is highly questionable that commitment to Israel by American Jews has anything to do with Israel as a safety valve. Anti-Semitism in the US declined to vanishingly low levels in the aftermath of World War II, and there has been absolutely no possibility of a serious anti-Jewish movement since.

Nor is it likely that the dominance of the ethnonationalist right in Israel will alienate American Jews. American Jews with even a modicum of Jewish identity see themselves as part of the Jewish people, with interests that transcend the interests of the country they happen to live in. This has always been the case, and is the source of the recurrent charge of dual loyalty (see here, p. 60ff). There is no reason to suppose that this will change in the future.

And this means that if Israel is seen as threatened — and the ADL will see to it that Israel is always presented as threatened, American Jews will rally to its defense. All the more so if the threat is real and dire.  If there was a real threat to Israel, as happened during the Six-Day War, American Jews will suddenly develop an intense commitment that will surprise even them:

[As expected by social identity theory in psychology] in times of perceived threat to Judaism there is a great increase in group identification among even “very marginal” Jews. … Jewish identification is a complex area where surface declarations may be deceptive and self-deception is the norm. Jews may not consciously know how strongly they in fact identify with Judaism.… [For example,] around the time of the 1967 Arab/Israeli war, many Jews could identify with the statement of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that “I had not known how Jewish I was.” (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 9)

I think it is highly doubtful therefore that when push comes to shove the American Jewish community will fail to come to the defense of Israel — no matter how overtly racialist and explicitly apartheid it becomes. Recall Paul Gottfried’s reminiscence about what the 1967 war looked like on American college campuses :

All my Jewish colleagues in graduate school [at Yale], noisy anti-anti-Communists, opposed American capitalist imperialism, but then became enthusiastic warmongers during the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. One Jewish Marxist acquaintance went into a rage that the Israelis did not demand the entire Mideast at the end of that war. Another, though a feminist, lamented that the Israeli soldiers did not rape more Arab women. It would be no exaggeration to say that my graduate school days resounded with Jewish hysterics at an institution where Wasps seemed to count only for decoration. (Paul Gottfried, On “Being Jewish”, Rothbard-Rockwell Report [April]:9–10, 1996.

I saw the same thing among Jewish radicals at the University of Wisconsin at that time: Radical internationalists suddenly became obsessed about Jewish nationalism. Similarly, the Jews who are most critical of Israel would alter their views in a heartbeat if Israel was really threatened.

The internal dynamics of the Jewish community are always led by the most committed activist elements within it, with the rest of the community ultimately going along with them. The best example of this is Zionism itself — once the view of a small minority of deeply committed Jews, but eventually becoming the defining feature of the entire community. Jews who do not go along with the policies advocated by the radicals have been aggressively marginalized by the mainstream Jewish community. I see no reason to suppose that that trend will not continue into the future.

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Mearsheimer concludes that “Greater Israel will eventually become a democratic bi-national state, and the Palestinians will dominate its politics, because they will outnumber the Jews in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.” This could be avoided by an energetic commitment to a two-state solution, but that just isn’t going to happen for all the reasons noted above. Israel will therefore self-destruct, a victim of Palestinian fertility and the non-viability of an apartheid state in the modern world.

The problem here is that Mearsheimer assumes that the globalist values that he as an American liberal holds dear have triumphed and there is no going back. But the reality is that, as Pat Buchanan noted in a recent column, globalism is on the defensive. Everywhere except the West, that is.  Ethnonationism is utterly normal around the world, except for Whites.

The triumph of ethnonationalism is especially apparent in Israel. Historically, the Middle East has always erected societies based on apartheid. Different religious and ethnic groups lived together, often in superficial harmony overlaying relationships of dominance and subordination. But they remained separated socially into endogamous groups. It’s sobering to realize, for example, that the nethinim who were the remnants of the peoples conquered by the Israelites during the late Bronze Age, remained as an unassimilated, unmarriageable group for hundreds of years within Israelite society. Western ideas of individualism and exogamy are completely foreign to this part of the world. What we see now is Judaism returning to its ancient roots. The only difference now is that the groups are physically separated by walls and separate roads. Israel will jettison democracy long before the Palestinians have a majority.

Moreover, looking ahead, there are numerous signs that the power of the West to enforce its liberal worldview on others is in decline. America cannot afford another trillion dollar war with Iran, and it seems to be losing in Afghanistan. Its hold on Iraq depends on continuing massive injections of money and an occupying army, and in any case has not altered the sectarian, ethnically based structure of the society typical of the Middle East. The entire Muslim world is what it has always been — resolutely opposed to building Western-type societies based on representative government and individual rights against the state.

Moreover, the rise of China certainly does not mean that they will develop an interventionist foreign policy aimed at ensuring human rights and democracy. Far from it. Indeed, China is a model of an ethnonationalist state, with no commitment to democracy but a strong commitment to economic nationalism and remaining ethnically Chinese. For example, its response to the threat of minority breakaway states on its borders has been to flood those areas with Han Chinese.  It’s foreign policy is dominated by its economic goals, not by dedication to abstract principles of democracy and individual rights, and there is no reason to think that that will change in the future. Such principles have no historical basis within Chinese society.

In the case of Israel, the will of Western powers to force an end to apartheid is non-existent.  And while the US and the West are set to decline in influence, Israel remains armed to the teeth. Mearsheimer’s argument is an updated version of the argument in The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that the influence of the Israel Lobby should be curbed for the long term good of Israel. But from Israel’s point of view, continuing their aggressive ways has a good chance of winning:

After all, Israel is by far the preeminent military power in the region and can easily act to preempt the development of weapons of mass destruction by its enemies, including Iran. And as a nuclear power, it could inflict huge costs on any enemy who even contemplated destroying it. It also has the world’s one remaining military superpower completely at its bidding, so that it’s difficult to envision a worst case scenario in which Israel is decisively defeated. Why should the Israelis give up anything when victory is in sight?

Mearsheimer concludes with some generally sensible advice to the Palestinians. But again, he assumes the perspective of a liberal Westerner. Two of his suggestions show his belief that somehow everyone thinks and acts just like White folks.

It is essential that the Palestinians make clear that they do not intend to seek revenge against the Israeli Jews for their past crimes, but instead are deeply committed to creating a bi-national democracy in which Jews and Palestinians can live together peacefully.  The Palestinians do not want to treat the Jews the way the Jews have treated them.”

 

Finally, the Palestinians should definitely not employ violence to defeat apartheid.  They should resist mightily for sure, but their strategy should privilege non-violent resistance.  The appropriate model is Gandhi not Mao. Violence is counter-productive because if it gets intense enough, the Israelis might think that they can expel large numbers of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.  The Palestinians must never underestimate the danger of mass expulsion.

I completely agree that violence by the Palestinians might trigger expulsion, but expulsion or at least continued apartheid will happen in any case. Non-violent resistance will be met with effective counter methods. The latest non-lethal method used by the Israelis is spraying Palestinians with “skunk”:

Imagine the worst, most foul thing you have ever smelled. An overpowering mix of rotting meat, old socks that haven’t been washed for weeks — topped off with the pungent waft of an open sewer. Imagine being covered in the stuff as it is liberally sprayed from a water cannon. Then imagine not being able to get rid of the stench for at least three days, no matter how often you try to scrub yourself clean.

Whatever form of resistance the Palestinians adopt will be ineffective.

Non-violent forms of resistance seem to be effective in gaining the sympathies of White Europeans, but I can’t think of any other group of people that they have been effective with. I suspect that the effectiveness of non-violent protest among Westerners is due to their weak ingroup bonds — another aspect of Western individualism which cannot be assumed to operate among other peoples. While everyone else sees human suffering primarily in terms of how it affects people in their ingroup, Westerners seem susceptible to moral appeals — the moral universalism at the psychological level that was exploited so effectively in the civil rights era and now on behalf of impoverished immigrants (legal and illegal), persecuted refugees, Third World orphans, and Haitian earthquake victims.

On the other hand, Jewish fanatics like Abraham Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and the entire Jewish activist community led by the new Afrikaners feel nothing but contempt and hatred at the sight of suffering Palestinians. They are prone to elaborate rationalizations that rationalize any and every sort of brutality against them. Psychological research shows that powerful ingroup commitments make one morally blind to the suffering of outgroup members — especially if the outgroup members are seen as in conflict with the ingroup.

Mearsheimer believes that images of suffering Palestinians will eventually pull at America’s heartstrings, especially if among those who browse certain sites on the Internet. But there are a lot of reasons why this won’t have a decisive influence in the foreseeable future:

  • Most non-Jewish Americans don’t care about the Middle East and the largest group of those who do care, the Christian Zionists, see Israeli atrocities as easing the way for the End Times. When Americans browse the Internet, they are much more likely to go to entertainment sites — sex, sports, and movie stars — than to anti-Israel sites. They won’t see images of suffering Palestinians unless they appear in the aboveground media.
  • But the aboveground media is still in Zionist hands and that won’t change any time soon. Media moguls like Haim Saban — a new Afrikaner if ever there was one — would go all out to prevent any change away from the status quo. Historically, Jews have been very effective in pressuring media they don’t like with negative economic consequences, such as advertizing boycotts. This is true whether the media is Jewish-owned or not.
  • Even if the American public became motivated on this issue, politicians would think twice about opposing Israel because their opponents would suddenly have lots of campaign money. There are quite a few issues — most notably immigration — where popular attitudes are irrelevant to public policy. America is run by its elites, and Jews are a very prominent component of American elites at all the points of influence — media, financial, legal, and political. Far more than immigration (whose disastrous effects are getting obvious to pretty much everyone), popular anger about Israel is unthinkable without elite concurrence.

 

 

Moreover, it would be foolish for the Israelis to believe that the Palestinians would not hold a grudge against them for all that has happened if indeed the impossible dream of a bi-national democratic state comes to be. This is the same impossible dream that White Americans have when they think that the future multi-racial, multicultural, White-minority America will cease to hold historic grudges against the formerly dominant Whites and that it will retain all the institutional structures as when Whites were dominant. It won’t happen.

The Israelis surely know what their fate would be in a democratic society dominated by the Palestinians and they will go all out to prevent it. Surely no one would suppose that Israelis are so committed to democracy as a principle that they would commit themselves to certain persecution and destruction by continuing to adhere to it. What’s good for the Jews and all that.

Would that White Americans were less committed to principles and more committed to survival. Unfortunately, White Americans still don’t grasp what is in store for them in a society dominated by Jews and other groups with a historical grudge against them. The end of democratic and republican institutions will be the least of it.

Mearsheimer’s almost child-like faith in what the bi-national state would look like shows that he certainly does not really grasp the deadliness of ethnic politics. The Israelis and Jews in general are under no such illusion.

The main point here is that Mearsheimer’s point of view makes a great deal of sense if one can assume that post-1960s liberal Western values will persist into the future and that Western societies will have the power and will to enforce them on Israel. It makes sense if in fact there is some deep democratic impulse in the soul of all Jews. But for all the reasons mentioned above, this is wishful thinking.

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.