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Promoting genocide of Whites? Noel Ignatiev and the Culture of Western Suicide

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There has been a renewed interest recently in a 2002 article by Paul Craig Roberts, actually the first of two (here is the second), drawing attention to a rather frightening phenomenon at Harvard University: the effort by a professor, Noel Ignatiev, and his journal, Race Traitor, to promote the “cultural and psychological genocide of whites.”

Now that’s an odd choice of words—guaranteed to draw attention to himself and his ideas. Was he in any way also promoting the slaughter or liquidation of whites, as some of his adversaries have suggested? Ignatiev says no. In his words,

We frequently get letters accusing us of being “racists,” just like the KKK, and have even been called a “hate group.” …

Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc….

Ignatiev et al. have developed a story that goes as follows: A bunch of very bad people got together and created a category called “white” to which they belong but people with different colored skin can’t belong. Then they made laws that favored people in the white category, they colluded with other whites to dominate the economic and political process, and they invented baseless scientific theories in which whiteness had its roots in real biological differences.  

All Ignatiev’s written material that we’ve seen carries the same odd message with the same extreme wording. He talks about the supposed privileges white people have just because they are in the white category, even though we all know that the only racial privileges in the US are affirmative action laws and various subterfuges that favor non-whites at the expense of whites. These practices result in blacks being overrepresented in high status jobs if one controls for IQ and test scores. And it even results in people like Ward Churchill exaggerating their non-whiteness in order to become beneficiaries of this largesse.

Ignative writes darkly and dramatically of “abolishing the white race,” “genocide of whites,” etc. When pressed, he emphasizes that that he doesn’t really mean killing people who call themselves white. He only wants to destroy the concept of whiteness.

So he’s off the hook, right?

I don’t think so. Try this analogy. We all know that blacks and Jews have a far stronger sense of their racial/ethnic identity and interests than whites. Consider voting: Around 90% of blacks and 80% of Jews vote Democrat. So does that mean that we can say we are in favor of abolishing the black race? Does that mean that we can say we are in favor of the genocide of Jews? And when the forces of political correctness descend upon us for making such statements, can we make everyone happy just by saying that all we meant is that blacks and Jews shouldn’t identify so strongly with their group that they do things like vote the same way. I think not.

Perhaps even Harvard, that bastion of anti-white political correctness, was bothered by Ignatiev’s rhetoric. Ignatiev left Harvard and is now peddling his poison at Massachusetts College of Art. Ignatiev must have felt right at home at Harvard since Harvard is notorious for discriminating against non-Jewish whites: While giving special preferences to blacks and Latinos, only 35% of Harvard students are non-Jewish whites — around half their representation in the population.

Beyond his outrageous rhetoric designed to call attention to himself, it seems to us that Ignatiev is engaging in a clever subterfuge, worthy of the best Talmudic slight-of-hand. The trick involves first adhering to the PC notion that “races” are only “social constructs” as opposed to being creatures whose biology, psychology and culture are inextricably entangled. Coupled with this notion is the other thread running through the ideology of this son of Russian Jewish immigrants, a legacy of his communist days, is an extreme egalitarianism that brooks no social hierarchy, at least one in which “whites” are at the top.

All this has allowed him and his protégés to vent their hatred for whites without being accused of doing so. Their hatred assumes a surface legitimacy because the hated “whites” are just a “social construct.” It’s not really about killing people, so where’s the beef? The “genocide” of whites is not about homicide or suicide; it’s only about getting white people to stop thinking that they are white.

Our interpretation is that Ignatiev’s views are nothing more than ethnic competition. As a leftist Jew, he is part of a long tradition that has opposed white interests and identity — the culture of critique that has become the culture of Western suicide. And like so many  strongly identified Jews, his hatred for the people and culture of the West comes shining through.

Notice that if Ignatiev were sincerely opposed to ethnic competition, he would have criticized all sorts of peoples and individuals around the world for thinking of themselves as belonging to a racial/ethnic category. After all, what’s left when there is no more category of whiteness? There will still be people with white skin who can trace their genetic ancestry to Europe but who have lost all sense of belonging to a racial category. And there will still be people who categorize themselves as Jews and blacks and Asians and various subdivisions of Asians. These people will continue to have a sense of racial/ethnic identity and they will continue to act on the basis of this identity. Only whites will be left without an identity and hence without weapons in the racial/ethnic struggle. Why doesn’t he campaign to get rid of these other categories?

And when only whites are left without an identity and hence without weapons in the racial/ethnic struggle, it doesn’t take much imagination to suppose that actual genocide of whites is the next step.

And yes, there is a hard biological reality to racial and ethnic differences. The theory that these are nothing but a social construct is itself a social construct — a social construct in the service of ethnic competition of people like Ignatiev who advance them.

What is so striking in the recent intellectual history of the West is that people like Ignatiev, who doubtless have a strong sense of their own ethnic identity and interests, have managed to pathologize any sense of ethnic identity and interests among Europeans and European-derived peoples — and no one else.

Ignatiev is just another Jewish intellectual in a long line that stretches back to Franz Boas, the Frankfurt School, and myriad others who now dominate the culture of Western suicide. He may call himself a race traitor, but there is every reason to believe that he has a sense of allegiance to his own people and the long history of hostility to the people and culture of the West that is so typical of highly committed Jews. For him, being a race traitor comes easily and naturally; it’s the mother’s milk of socialization as a Jew.

So do read Paul Craig Roberts first essay beginning below, and his second, and ask yourself where cultural critique leaves off and de facto support for, say, blacks murdering whites begins?

Harvard Hates the White Race?

By Paul Craig Roberts

vdare.com, September 4, 2002

Is the multicultural campaign really about diversity? Or is it about stamping out Western civilization and the “white race” itself?

College students will tell you that a university education today is a guilt trip for whites. The purpose is to prevent whites from appreciating and absorbing their own culture and to make it difficult for whites to resist the unreasonable demands (quotas, reparations, etc.) from “people of color.”

To the questions, “who am I, what am I,” the white university graduate answers: “a racist, sexist, homophobic oppressor.”

Neither parents, trustees, alumni, nor the public are aware of the anti-white propaganda that masquerades as education. When someone who is aware tells them, they think the person is exaggerating in order to make a point.

Now comes Harvard educated Noel Ignatiev, an academic at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research. Dr. Ignatiev is the founder of a journal, Race Traitor, which has as its motto, “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

The journal’s purpose is ‘to abolish the white race.’

At the least, Dr. Ignatiev intends cultural and psychological genocide for whites. It is unclear whether physical extermination is part of the program. A statement by the editors on the web site says that the new abolitionists

“do not limit themselves to socially acceptable means of protest, but reject in advance no means of attaining their goal.” [more]

[Part II, titled “Mugabe Or Harvard: Who Hates Whites More?”, is here.]

Media Watch – For the media, the less whites think about their coming minority status, the better

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About a month ago, the New York Times reported that the new projected “year of minority” for whites will be 2042, instead of 2050, as previously predicted.

The next day, a vigilant Times reader telephoned the writer of the story, Sam Roberts, with a proposal.  The coming minority status of whites is a huge, absolutely huge, story.  The Times could fan reporters out across the country looking for reactions and thoughts to it.  Whether good, bad or indifferent, there would be no shortage of opinions.  “What’s your opinion of it?” Roberts asked the reader, who responded that he didn’t think it was a positive thing.  But, the reader offered, surely there are any number of opinions on the topic, all of which would make for a hell of a story.  In all seriousness, you could quote Morris Dees, David Duke, and everyone in between.  Roberts agreed that it was a good idea, and promised to pass the idea along.

Thus far, the New York Times has not written such a story.  And, I’m fairly confident that it will never run such a story, for reasons I’ll explain below (yet if I am proved wrong, I will be very pleased).  In the meantime, I found it telling that about a month later, Mr. Roberts appeared in print again, not with a story about the white view of impending minority status, but with a story suggesting that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish spies executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union, were treated unfairly.

By his own admission, the Rosenberg case is an obsession for Mr. Roberts, who has written a book about it, which was adapted to a play.

I don’t know whether Mr. Roberts is himself Jewish, but his deep interest in the Rosenberg case (he was “haunted” by the funeral procession outside his Brooklyn home as a small boy) and eagerness to defend the Rosenbergs certainly tracks Jewish interests.  The Rosenberg case was of intense interest to Jews for many different reasons, one of which was that it exposed Jews as tending to be disloyal to the United States and favoring the Soviet Union and communism generally.  So, it would serve Jewish interests for a journalist to “uncover” any information that would complicate this view, and Mr. Roberts has certainly obliged.  He has been quoted as saying that the Soviet Union would have created the weapons they intended to create with or without the spying by Julius Rosenberg (as if this excuses the treason).

I am not a student of the Rosenberg case, but I do know this.  What the New York Times, Los Angeles Times or Chicago Tribune runs every day is a function of two things:  the stories the public expects to be covered (the presidential race, hurricanes) and what interests the reporters and editors personally.  From my time as a reporter, I know that so long as you’re on top of your “beat,” or assigned coverage area, you’ve got wide latitude to poke around topics that simply interest you personally.  Often, this makes for more interesting journalism, but it also clearly magnifies the interests and politics of the journalist himself or herself.

This in turn has a way of influencing the public’s thinking, and eventually, public policy.  By pushing his interest and slant on the Rosenberg case, Mr. Roberts wants to show that Jews are not disloyal, that “the evil system” is made up of bloodthirsty anti-Semites, and so on.  And, such efforts, in the aggregate, pay off:  the State Department now has a special office for monitoring anti-Semitism.

There is obviously no State Department office dedicated to anti-white policies and practices, or anti-Christian policies and practices.  Yet taxpayers fitting either profile must fund the “Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.”  So, if asked why it’s an issue that Jews dominate the media, this is one thing I would point to.

The bottom line is that although Mr. Roberts is obligated to report the bare facts on white minority status because it’s his “beat,” he’s not interested in the slightest in talking to actual whites on the street about how they feel about it.  He’s interested in talking about a perceived slight to Jews that happened a half-century ago.

As I discussed above, one of the biggest stories of the turn of the century is the coming white minority in America.  Yet the major media will not do the blazingly obvious:  ask whites what they think about becoming minorities.  It will not do so because it is made up of white liberals who have been trained to dislike their own kind, minorities who openly dislike whites, and Jews who see whites as a dangerous threat to their very existence.  To the extent that there are “conservatives” in the major media, they are de-fanged and de-clawed on racial issues.

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Whether they would admit it or not, to run a story in which whites are asked what they think of becoming a minority would get whites thinking.  And not in ways helpful to the white liberal, minority or Jewish causes.  Because it’s so obvious that being in the minority is not likely to be a good thing, encouraging whites to think about it by asking the question can only lead to negative consequences.

In other words, the less whites think about this topic, the better.  “Don’t rile up the white idiots,” the Jewish journalist thinks.  The truth is that even if a Morris Dees were quoted alongside a David Duke (and the inevitable end quote would be about how there’s only one race, the human race), more whites than not would be unable to convince themselves that being in the minority would be a good thing.

I’ll continue to hope that the major media provides fairer coverage of whites in America.  But I won’t hold my breath.  In the meantime, the internet offers opportunities for whites to do an end-run around the major media — and reassuringly, it’s more and more of a source for information.  Stay tuned.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Secession and implicit whiteness

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The Sarah Palin phenomenon continues unabated. Journalists are poring over Alaska to find out everything about her beliefs and anything else they can use as ammunition. So far the results are not particularly encouraging. Despite her possible support for Pat Buchanan, her comments on immigration do not suggest strong convictions one way or the other — this at a time when nothing will be accomplished without strong convictions. And her dispensationalist theology is worrisome because the neocons have been adept in exploiting such sympathies to harness US military power on behalf of Israel. Indeed, her recent statements on Iran and Israel sound like they were written by Richard Perle.

Another issue that has been aired a bit in the media is whether she supports Alaskan separatism. As governor, Palin gave a videotaped message welcoming the convention of the Alaska Independence Party—not the sort of thing a governor would do if the AIP was out of the mainstream of Alaskan politics, but not exactly an endorsement either. Her husband Todd was an AIP member for 7 years but doesn’t seem to have been active in the party.  

Secession is certainly an option that has occurred to whites intent on preserving the traditional people and culture of the US. At least on the surface, this is not the focus of the AIP. The AIP seems far more libertarian. On this audiotape, AIP founder Joe Vogler vents his grievances on overregulation, states’ rights, and federal ownership of Alaska’s land and mineral rights. At one point, he says “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

Christopher Ketcham’s recent LA Times op-ed on the issue (“America’s secessionist streak” points out that a recent Zogby poll showed that over 20% of American adults agreed with the proposition that  “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede from the United States and become an independent republic.” Slightly less stated that they “would support a secessionist effort in my state.” In the same poll 44% agreed that “the United States’ system is broken and cannot be fixed by traditional two-party politics and elections.” In a 2006 poll released by CNN, 71% of Americans agreed that “our system of government is broken and cannot be fixed.”

We at The Occidental Observer are in complete agreement that the system is broken. If things continue as they are, white people will soon be a minority in the US. Ceding political and cultural power to others is extremely dangerous, especially when many US minorities have deep historical grudges against white people.

Indeed, we can already see the writing on the wall. In a vdare blog posting, Patrick Cleburne explains the sentence given to Jeremiah Munsen in the Jena race case as a result of a black affirmative action US Attorney and an AsianActing Assistant Attorney General:  “Welcome to Multicultural America: A black and an Asian use a perverted legal process to rob a white American of his political birthright and promote the interests of minorities. The effect will be to intimidate the entire white community from resisting another Black Scam: in other words, to prevent them acting politically to defend themselves.”

This sort of thing will only get worse as whites lose political power. The theme of a broken system can already be seen in some manifestations of white culture. Country music has been described as “implicit white culture” — implicit in the sense that it represents white people and white culture without explicitly making claims for white identity and interests. Implicit white culture “cannot tell its name” because of the prevailing hegemony of political correctness. But virtually all the artists and the people represented in country music videos are white, and a major theme is the culture of small town America. These are the type of people that Sarah Palin appeals to, and the unifying thing about these people is that they are white.

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An excellent recent example is the video “A Country Boy Can Survive”  by Hank Williams Jr. All the people in the video are working class whites from “little towns all around this land” far from the city: “You only get mugged if you go downtown.” And there is the confederate flag—a remnant of traditional Southern culture.  The theme is that country people can survive because of their ability to live off the land. The US political system is broken and can’t be fixed within the present political structure. But they will survive.

Secession then becomes one possibility for whites to act in an effort to carve out at least some political and cultural space for themselves. A 2007 secessionist convention described by Ketcham is notable for the presence not only of libertarians, but also “Southern nationalists” and paleoconservatives more likely to be in tune, at least implicitly, with the views of The Occidental Observer.

But a secessionist movement that is explicitly aimed at preserving white people and their culture is probably much more difficult to get off the ground than a movement aimed at small government and getting back to America’s republican past. Any secessionist movement is sure to be resisted by the Leviathan state, but the intellectual legitimacy of such ideas is certainly likely to attract more people and have a greater chance of success.

Consider the case of Vermont. Vermont is 96.9% white as of 2005, and is one of the three whitest states in the union. The Vermont separatist movement is a mainstream endeavor aimed at reclaiming republican roots. The Second Republic of Vermont is “a nonviolent citizens’ network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly the dissolution of the Union.” It claims that “America desperately needs a new metaphor, an alternative to empire. Vermont stands ready to provide such a metaphor, the Vermont village green. Village greens are small communities devoted to life, liberty, land, and locality rather than death, doom, and destruction of the planet earth.”

Without saying so explicitly, their vision of Vermont is a vision of the white past created by their English ancestors. Their website includes a nice article advocating a declaration of independence from the Israel Lobby and a review of a book critical of Einstein. (Einstein, who was an ardent Zionist and a Jewish racial chauvinist, has become a central cultural icon of the American empire.) Is it too much to suppose that the author, Thomas H. Naylor, has a negative attitude toward the group responsible for so many of the trends the Vermont secessionists abhor?

Their website contains links to a wide range of secessionist movement in the US (e.g., the Southern National Conference) and Canada (e.g., the Parti Québécois).  Non-white and anti-white separatist movements in Hawaii and theAztlan movement to reclaim the American southwest for Mexico are also part of the separatist scene. The Middlebury Institute for the Study of Separatism, Secession, and Self-Determination also has a wide range of separatist literature, including this movie trailer on separatism in the western US.

Obviously, separatism and secession are not ideal solutions to the problems of whites in the US. Ideally, we would reclaim the federal government with an explicit ideology of white interests and identity and attempt to return to the situation as it was before the immigration law of 1965 when the US was 90% white.

But with 100 million non-whites in the country, the chances for such a movement seem remote. Secession, perhaps under an implicitly white ideology of libertarian republicanism, then looms as another alternative that should be supported by racially conscious whites, especially if reconquest after secession remains as a possibility. It would be a fitting end to the utopian dream of multiculturalism.

The Washington Post’s Willing Executioner?

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Last week, an editorial on this site made reference to a Washington Post column in which a Jewish writer contended that “the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party . . . the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.”

There was a picture of the writer, Harold Meyerson, at the top of his column:

An acquaintance of mine put the anti-white sentiment together with the photo and concluded:

It is the policy of Jews [that is, White-Jews] that White people [that is, White Christians] have no place in America or the American future. Anyone who says it is labeled an anti-Semite. Yet Meyerson’s is an unambiguous exterminationist position. Whites have as much place in America as Palestinians in Israel.

(His face is, BTW, like that of the NKVD killers who murdered 40 million Christians in the Soviet Union.)

It is as blatant as that.

At first blush such words come across as overly harsh, but upon reflection they make sense. This struck home for me because earlier this year I had a long essay published in which I used Yuri Slezkine’s descriptions of seemingly normal Jews turning into blood-thirsty killers during the Bolshevik Revolution.

Titled “Israel’s Willing Executioners,” the essay included long considerations of two recent books, The Power of Israel in the United States and Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants, by retired professor James Petras. (The essay can be found in the Winter issue [7,4] of The Occidental Quarterly. Unfortunately, it is not available online.)

Petras was unique among academic writers in that he expanded upon the identities of Zionist American Jews to include the “sayanim” — “Those who cooperate directly with Israeli intelligence agencies”; the sayanim comprise “a huge worldwide network of Jews in strategic or useful places.” What’s interesting for my purposes is they include “doctors, dentists, philanthropists, real estate magnates, financiers, journalists, media moguls, and academics.”

In my essay, I wanted to use the common image of the “Jewish dentist” to show the transformation from a familiar and harmless member of the American community to a potential killer. Perhaps it was because I found a passage where Slezkine described the highly visible cadre of Jews charged with executing the Russian Tsar and his family. One of the murderers, Shaia Goloshchekin, was a dentist.

In any case, my editor did not think the dentist trope would fly, so my line “Is it so unthinkable that today’s typical Jewish American, say a dentist, might become an executioner?” was axed.

Still, the general message of peril came through. I noted that during the Red Terror in Russia, some expressed shock that seemingly pacifistic Jews changed almost overnight: “We were amazed by what we had least expected to encounter among the Jews: cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical, warlike activity; those who yesterday did not know how to use a gun are now found among the executioners and cutthroats.”

Slezkine also describes a “formerly oppressed lover of liberty [who] had turned into a tyrant of ‘unheard-of despotic arbitrariness.’” He had been “transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness.” He could now be pictured as “standing in a Cheka basement doing ‘bloody but honorable revolutionary work.’”

Petras makes a similar claim with respect to Jews today, at least “those who claim to be a divinely chosen people, a people with ‘righteous’ claims of supreme victimhood.” We must, he admonishes us, expose the fact that “many descendants of victims have now become brutal executioners.”

Left to his own devices, I initially wrote, our American Jewish dentist may well remain nonviolent and lead a life of industry and contentment. But too often Judaism and Jewish groups have worked on such ethnic Jews to radicalize them, with or without their consent. As Kevin MacDonald has emphasized, “At all the turning points, it is the more ethnocentric elements—one might term them the radicals—who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day.”

Petras makes the same point, noting that “Judeocentrism is the perspective which guides the organized, active minority driving the major Zionist organizations and their billionaire camp followers. And it is always the organized, zealous and well-financed minority, which assumes ‘legitimate’ claim to speak ‘for the community.’”

Getting back to Harold Meyerson’s mug at the top of this page, the point is that when someone like him writes that “whiteness is a huge problem,” we whites have reason to worry. We have seen the radical turn in Russia, which resulted in rivers of gentile blood. Now Jews have risen in America. Ominously, as MacDonald has noted, “If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite—hostile to the traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to dominate.”

MacDonald expanded on this theme in the foreword to Tomislav Sunic’s Homo Americanus, arguing that the current American regime is “maintained less by brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated, and massively effective campaign to constrain political and cultural activity within very narrow boundaries.” A violent communist death is not yet necessary because dissenters “are not yet trundled off to jail or beaten with truncheons, but are quietly ignored and marginalized. Or they are held up to public disgrace, and, wherever possible, removed from their livelihood.”

I suppose that is a relatively happy state of affairs, at least when compared to the potential bloody future such as the one Petras envisions. Already the “Zionist Power Configuration” has “effectively colonized the  White House and Legislative Branches,” and “ultra-Zionist” Attorney General Michael Mukasey and “Israel-First” Head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff man critical posts. To be sure, they may in fact be honorable men, but the point is to recognize the parallel to the rise of Jews to power in Soviet Russia and their role in the deaths of millions of perceived ethnic enemies (disguised as “class” enemies).

MacDonald, Petras and Slezkine have all shown in their own ways how talent, high intelligence and above all ethnic networking have allowed Jews to exercise great power despite low numbers. Jews operating in other Jewish movements in America have already succeeded in disestablishing the tradition European-derived majority, whether through Boasian anthropology with its scientifically unsupported claims that race is an illusion; whether through the arguments of Horace Kallen and others that America is merely a “propositional nation” without a founding people; or whether through activists like those in the Frankfurt School who combined psychoanalysis and Marxism into a “devastating weapon against the ethnic consciousness of white Americans.”

Sunic also sees dark clouds on the horizon for any group in America that might be targeted: “Thus, in order for the proper functioning of future Americanized society, the removal of millions of surplus citizens must become a social and possibly also an ecological necessity.” MacDonald identifies what sectors might be targeted “and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of Moscow.” They are the European-derived whites populating vast areas of the American nation, particularly in the so-called “red states.”

In fact, Jewish sources have long been openly admitting that a less white America is in their interests. Activist Ben Wattenberg, for example, has said that “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”

Another Jewish activist, Earl Raab, explained why Jews have led “immigration reform” movements that favor non-whites, one factor being the belief that a less homogeneously white America will be less anti-Semitic. In an oft-cited passage, he wrote:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever.

This is the sentiment that the unhandsome Meyerson expressed in the above Washington Post column, the view that “this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white.”

Ultimately, is it so unthinkable that today’s typical Jewish American, say a Washington Post columnist, might become an enthusiastic executioner?

Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

Fighting the Bell Curve: Why Affirmative Action is an inevitable disaster

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Affirmative Action (AA) started out as a well-intentioned effort to increase the representation of black, then other minorities and women, at the higher levels of the American educational system. Well-intentioned, but ill-founded because it was based on the article of faith that the only reason there were fewer blacks in colleges, universities, and professional schools is the legacy of racism and discrimination.

Initially AA was first defined as making every effort to find qualified minority members. The search was expanded to include even the “potentially qualified,” but when that failed, the program transmogrified into one of “goals and timetables” — a euphemism for quotas based on race, etc. This is the antithesis of the supposed objective of the Civil Rights movement, namely judging on “the content of character.”

Well, AA could have benefited from some advice from the other AA — Alcoholics Anonymous, one of whose admonitions to family members of recidivist abusers is “you didn’t make ’em that way, you can’t fix ’em.”

While fair-minded commentators and the public at large  have had their fill of reverse discrimination, ethnic activists continue to make every effort to enforce more and more AA until some critical mass of minorities inhabits every desirable sector of American society.  

In California, citizens led by former University of California Regent Ward Connerly (who happens to be African American) passed Proposition 209, which banned “preferential treatment” of race, sex or ethnicity in admissions to California’s public universities. The box score: by fall 2006, only 250 of the 12,189 students admitted to UCLA’s freshman class were African American, roughly 2%. This is the lowest number since at least 1973 — results that could have been predicted right out of the tables and graphs in The Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve, the outstanding tome by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, shows that African Americans have a mean IQ of 85, one whole standard deviation below the white mean of 100. Even more disconcerting to AA advocates is that Richard Lynn has summarized findings that sub-Saharan Africans have a mean closer to 70.

And the devil in the bell curve is not only in the details but in the tails of the curve. The normal or bell curve describes continuous biological variation that is the result of many genes. The classic case is height, but IQ is almost the same: Most individuals fall at the middle or closely around it. The further one goes either up or down from the average, the fewer the number of individuals. The further out one goes, the greater the effect.

And this applies with a vengeance when two groups differ in their average score. The further out you go in either direction — up or down, good or bad — the greater the differences between the groups. What this means in terms of education is that as one goes from high school to junior college to college to graduate/professional school, the percentage of qualified blacks goes steadily and increasingly down. And the ratio of qualified whites to qualified blacks goes up dramatically.

The figure shows what happens if you have two IQ distributions that differ by a standard deviation — whites on top, blacks on the bottom. If the test is made so that 50% of whites pass, then 16% of blacks will pass. This would mean that if we consider a population of 1000 people taking the test in a population that is 10% black and 90% white, then 16 blacks would qualify, compared to 450 whites—a ratio of around 28 to 1 — much higher than the population ratio of 9 to 1.

The 28 to 1 ratio is pretty steep — exactly the sort of thing that gives the affirmative action industry fits. And it explains why even tests for fire fighters and policemen — which are geared for the middle of the IQ distribution — have to have lower standards for blacks. Here’s a case where white firefighters who scored high on an employment test successfully sued the city of Boston for favoring lower-scoring blacks.

But if the test is made more difficult, it gets way worse. The figure shows what happens when only 16% of whites pass. (This would make the test more like a law school admissions test.) In that case, only 2% of the blacks pass. This means that if we consider a population of 1000 people, 10% black and 90% white, only 2 blacks of the 1000 would qualify, compared to 144 whites—a ratio of over 70 to 1. Hence the desperate need for affirmative action.

And imagine what happens when one adopts the standards of an elite law school like Harvard where the average of successful white applicants approaches the 99th percentile. Finding a black that can compete on the basis of mental ability in a situation like that is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Which reminds us, we’d love to see Barack Obama’s grades and test scores at Harvard Law. In fact, Stanford Law Professor Richard Sanford has already shown that black lawyers have no difficulty being hired by elite firms but are much more likely to leave these firms without making partner. Just recently he filed suit to obtain the records of the Bar Exam of California to replicate previous findings that black law school grads are over 6 times more likely to fail the bar exam even after multiple attempts than whites. His thesis is that blacks are being set up for failure: They are admitted into schools where they cannot hope to compete with those admitted on the basis of intellectual ability.

Maybe that’s why Obama became a “community organizer” instead of trying to compete in the world of big time law.

But Affirmative Action advocates and ethnic minority activists rarely allow fact to disturb their attempts at social engineering. In a recent article, we compared advocates of the No Child Left Behind law to King Canute commanding the tides to behave. It’s the same here. The realities of the two different racial bell curves are such that any would-be affirmative action King Canute who commands that blacks be admitted to law school at the same level as their percentage of the population would have to override not just the tide, but a tsunami tidal wave.

Not that that will stop them. They remain undeterred, seated in their thrones, or at least in their endowed academic chairs.

Case in point: one Darnell M. Hunt, professor of sociology at UCLA and director of the university’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.Pontificating in a recent LA Times OpEd, he decries the effects of Prop 209, while heaping praise and hosannas upon a new “holistic” admission policy implemented at UCLA which considers applicants’ grades and test scores more fully in the context of their life experiences.

Technically, admissions officers would not consider race, gender or ethnicity as a plus, which remains illegal under Prop 209. But they do consider “all available information about a student.” Whereas previously the files of applicants were divided into academic and personal areas and read by separate reviewers, reviewers now consider “the total package.” Although racial preferences per se remain forbidden, “socioeconomic and other factors” can be taken into account. Race by any other name…. (Remember those bad old days when prospective students were required to submit a photograph?)

Prof. Hunt is wholly happy with the results of the “holistic method.” The number of African American freshmen admitted to UCLA in 2007 climbed to 407, and this year it climbed again to 453 — nearly double the 2006 number. He expresses no concern that many of these holistic admissions will either drop out or graduate with meaningless degrees in subjects devoid of market value. To Hunt, that smells like, “important progress”!

While African American activists like Prof. Hunt are gloating about these results, others are not even mildly impressed. Just the opposite. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear have noted that this increase in the relatively small number of African American freshmen admitted constitutes clear evidence of “illegal admissions practices.”

Anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly, for example, called a spade a spade, accusing the university of trying to “rig the system,” while political science professor Tim Groseclose resigned from the UCLA’s admissions oversight committee. Groseclose declared that UCLA is “cheating” on admissions and is engaging in a “cover-up” to keep it from being discovered.

Either outraged by the candor of Connerly and Groseclose or willfully ignorant of the totality of scientific evidence, Prof. Hunt offered up the usual litany of anti-testing mantras (e.g., “test scores are not objective,”), all of which have been tested and disproven, tried and failed. We’d love to see Prof. Hunt make a serious attempt to dispute Arthur Jensen’s massive data on the validity of IQ tests.

Over 100 years of research in mental testing and genetics has established that IQ is measurable and predicts not only academic, but other life outcomes that are critically important to maintaining a complex, technological society. IQ is heritable, culturally fair, and not tractable to any significant degree.

Fortunately, Heather MacDonald has provided readers of the LA Times with the lowdown on the low down machinations of the AA activists.

Ms. MacDonald tells it as it truly is: “The University of California has tried to engineer admissions systems that would replicate the effect of explicit racial quotas while appearing color-blind.”

She then makes public the dirty laundry dumped out of the AA hamper by Prof. Groseclose. In somewhat Stalinist tactics, the university has refused to give him access to the data that would prove the point, thus causing his resignation.

Despite the stonewalling, enough info has leaked out to establish not only the facts, but the motive. When Prop 209 reduced the number of unqualified African Americans admitted to campuses across the state, UC officials resorted to a bit of academic chicanery to sneak underqualified blacks and Latinos back into the system’s most demanding campuses, and they did it without officially “making race a factor.” Rather than race, they introduced a preference for low-income students. But alas, they were hoist on their own petard: Rather than blacks and Hispanics, poor whites (especially Eastern Europeans) and Vietnamese filled up the slots — not the sort of diversity the university had in mind.

This is because whites outperform blacks at every social class level (once again showing that the black/white IQ gap is not caused by social class.)

Administrators cut the low-income preferences in half and went back to the drawing board.

One scheme was to reduce the weight given to academic qualifications in ranking students. For example, in 2002, the law school at UC-Berkeley admitted only 5% of white students in a low academic rank, but it admitted 75% of black applicants in the same range. At UCLA, from 1998 to 2001, black applicants were 3.6 times as likely to be admitted to its undergraduate college as whites, and Latinos 1.8 times as likely, even after controlling for economic status and school ranking, according to an unpublished study by statistician Richard Berk.

The next finagle factor introduced to subvert the will of the people and simple fairness was what is euphemistically termed a “comprehensive review” which, it is claimed, “broadens the conception of merit.” Translation: Students’ academic qualifications are cranked up or knocked down based on their “life situation.” (Guess what that means.)

Even that didn’t do the trick. UCLA still had a dearth of qualified black students. You just can’t beat the bell curve if you take any objective and valid measure into account. Enter acting Chancellor Norman Abrams and the more radical — “holistic” review, so beloved by Darnell Hunt.

But even that’s not enough. UCLA’s Associate Vice Provost for Student Diversity (doubtless a well-paid sinecure for a person with appropriate non-white skin tone) also decreed the admissions committee must increase the number of blacks who read and rate student applications. This resulted in a 25% black representation among readers, which is three times the percentage of blacks in California’s population! Presumably this is a hope that ethnic favoritism will succeed where all else has failed. They’re probably right.

Those interested in the entire sad saga of the UC “Educational” system and the courageous efforts of Prof. Groseclose to restore it should consult Heather MacDonald’s wonderful summary. Suffice it to say the future of the Golden State, once praised as the high tech center of the globe and with the best kindergarten to college educational system in the  nation, is being sacrificed to the gods of political correctness.

The 2008 election will increase the racial polarization in the US

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The 2008 election is shaping up to be a watershed event—or at least that is a strong possibility. First, the Democrats nominated Barack Obama as the first black nominee for a major political party. During the Democratic primaries, it was obvious that white working class people supported Hillary Clinton rather than Obama.

Obama’s nomination meant that blacks would be even more inclined to vote Democrat than usual, and Republicans had no motivation to reach out to black voters. The result was that the racial breakdown at the convention was 2% black, 5% Hispanic, and 93% white. This compares with 85% white in 2004 (due to outreach by George Bush) and 89% white in 2000. The breakdown for the Democrats was similar to previous conventions: 65 percent white, 23 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic.

Meanwhile, McCain was the model neocon candidate (i.e., favoring whatever the Israeli right wants and a poster boy for massive legal and illegal immigration to the US). He became the Republican nominee after über-Zionist Joe Lieberman jump started his moribund campaign with a ringing endorsement that was picked up by the mainstream media, propelling him to the nomination.

But McCain, who has been a strong advocate for the ill-fated bill that would have granted amnesty for illegal aliens and a variety of other liberal causes, had a problem: Lack of enthusiasm from the grass roots of his own party and from leading Republican opinion makers like Rush Limbaugh. The Democrats had all the momentum of an historic candidacy, a bad economy, an unpopular war, and lots of brain-dead whites hoping for racial absolution.

The (rather brilliant) solution was to select Sarah Palin for McCain’s running mate—a solution that has energized the Republicans but will also further the racial polarization of American politics—a prospect that is certainly welcome for us atThe Occidental Observer. The image of Palin endorsing small town values and surrounded by her white children on stage at the Republican convention is absolutely nauseating to the hegemonic left. Gloria Steinem expressed her outrage in the L.A. Times. Steinem’s ideal woman is doubtless someone like herself: a childless post-modern intellectual railing against male hegemony and other injustices.

Needless to say, this image of white fertility and small town values is not going to appeal to blacks or Latinos either. Indeed, Palin’s  speech reminded Whoopi Goldberg of a German-American Bund rally(!). Way too many happy white people in one place.

German-American Bund Rally, Madison Square Garden, 1939

German American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. New York, United States, February 20, 1939.

Palin is a personification of what I term implicit whiteness. She has a white political and cultural affiliation even if there are still taboos about saying so explicitly. As she stressed in her acceptance speech, she is unabashedly proud of being a small-town American—an advocate of hunting, fishing, hockey moms, and serious Christianity. (The downside is that Palin’s Christian beliefs seem to be the Dispensationalist variety. Dispensationalists believe that the preservation of Israel is a Biblical imperative and they have become closely allied with the neocons.)

And there’s a strong dose of populism—a word that strikes fear and loathing in the hearts of American elites. (Remember Pat Buchanan’s “peasants with pitchforks”?)

The prediction is that an even greater percentage of whites will vote Republican in the 2008 election than in 2004. In 2004, 58% of whites voted Republican, and their votes constituted 88% of all the Republican votes.

If and when this occurs, there will be much weeping and gnashing in the media. In fact, it’s already happening. Writing in the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson is particularly blunt, claiming that the Republicans are using identity politics in a last gasp effort to hold on to political power:

The GOP’s last best hope remains identity politics. In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem. This year, however, whiteness is the only way Republicans cling to power. If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked — and their silence this week on nearly all things economic means that they know it.

This of course is ridiculous. Identity politics is what multiculturalism is all about. Meyerson doesn’t seem to notice that blacks are much more likely to engage in identity politics than whites: Well over 90% of blacks will vote for Obama. And he would never complain about Jewish identity politics in which the great majority of Jews vote Democrat (74% in 2004, 79% in 2000) despite their elite economic status and despite the fact that the Bush II administration was dominated by foreign policy operatives whose main allegiance is to Israel. Just imagine the angst of people like Meyerson if 75% of whites voted Republican.

Meyerson’s scorn and contempt for “the American past” is a scorn and contempt for white people—not at all surprising in a member of the ethnic group responsible for opening the flood gates of immigration to the US. He would doubtless agree with fellow Jewish intellectual activist Ben Wattenberg that “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”

Unlike the explicit ethnic identifications of blacks and Jews, white ethnic identification remains implicit. But white ethnic identification is bound to become increasingly explicit as the election returns show whites stubbornly attempting to cling to political power —not to mention the other signs that most whites—like Sarah  Palin—still pledge allegiance to the traditional culture of America.

The danger, of course, is that this artful move by McCain in selecting Palin will not have any effect on policy should McCain be elected—that a McCain administration would be yet another neoconservative administration with all the dangers (war and massive legal and illegal immigration) that that implies. McCain has surrounded himself with neoconservative Jews, and there is a real possibility that Joe Lieberman could become Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense in a McCain administration.

(My favorite of these Jewish McCain supporters is Marshall Wittmann: “A former self-confessed Trotskyite, radical Zionist and labor organizer, Wittmann served in the elder George Bush’s administration, then went to work in the mid-1990s for the Christian Coalition of America despite being Jewish.” We’ll take a wild guess that he still has a Jewish identity and is pursuing Jewish interests—a crypto-Jew by any other name.)

This was certainly the strategy of the Bush administration: Rally the white base of the Republican Party by appealing to implicit whiteness and then do absolutely nothing to advance the interests of white people. But that sort of tactic can’t work forever. It’s like the immigration amnesty act of 1986: When people realized that the amnesty law did not stop illegal immigration, they couldn’t be fooled a second time and overwhelmingly rejected a (McCain-sponsored) amnesty law.

McCain himself may well be absolutely cynical about all this, but sooner or later, the Republican appeal to white identity will have to actually do something to advance the interests of whites. And they will have to be explicit about it. Right now, it looks like the election of 2008 will bring that day closer.

Fantasizing about the Palin–Buchanan connection

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The prospective nomination of Sarah Palin has made everyone a bit curious about where she stands—none more than among the organized Jewish community. The Jerusalem Post—a neocon outpost in the neocons’ favorite country—agonized about the topic in an article titled “‘McCain VP choice unknown to US Jews’.” Palin is indeed little known to the Jews. She hasn’t been on the national scene long enough to have been on a trip to Israel (gasp!), and she has never spoken publically about Israel (horrors!).

There is also the fascinating possibility that she is an admirer of Pat Buchanan. She showed up at a Buchanan fund raiser in 1996, and Buchanan himself claimsthat she was a “Buchanan Brigade” member.

Such a possibility raises red flags with serious Jews. Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler of Florida was livid:

John McCain’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans…. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel, even going as far as to denounce bringing former Nazi soldiers to justice and praising Adolf Hitler for his ‘great courage’.

Palin is denying she supported Buchanan, and the Republicans are doing their best to distance themselves from all this. But let’s engage in a bit of fantasy for a moment.

What’s intriguing about Palin is that she hasn’t been vetted by the usual process that gets politicians to high status in the US. She hasn’t been to an elite law school, nor has she achieved office in a state where fealty to the Israel lobby is asine qua non. She is governor of the last frontier state in the union—far from the power centers of the East Coast and the large urban areas and therefore far from their pervasive influence. Her attitudes on religion, abortion, and guns are anathema to the mindset of these elites. And her husband is a white blue collar guy—exactly the type of guy that has been left behind in the vast changes that have transformed the country. White working class voters were notable for their lack of support for Obama in the Democratic primaries.

Is it too much to hope that she really is exactly the type of person that the organized Jewish community abhors—that is, someone like Pat Buchanan who is steadfastly against the mass immigration that will result in the death of the West? Could she really have Buchanan’s populist inclinations and use her influence to attempt to preserve the  traditional peoples and culture of the US? Is it too much to hope that she might really subscribe to a view of US foreign policy that is not yoked to whatever the Israel Lobby dictates to its underlings in the US Congress? And can we dream that having once attained high office and with a national audience she could galvanize a movement to take back America?

Probably not. But if she really does have these tendencies, she had best keep them under wraps. The powers that be have made an uneasy peace with Christian religiosity, but certainly not with any attempt to preserve the traditional peoples and culture of America. (This includes the neocons for whom support of some of the trappings of traditional America is seen as a convenient way to advance their Israel-centric foreign policy interests and their commitment to mass immigration.)

Admittedly, the possibility that Palin in her heart is a Buchanan clone is only a small possibility. Even if she were, it’s very difficult to imagine that anyone could actually be elected president without the blessings of the political establishment somewhere between the confines of the far left (think Barack Obama) and the neoconservative right (think John McCain). But given McCain’s age, it is certainly possible that she might accede to the presidency without being elected, and this adds to the angst among the powerful.

It’s more than likely that with her background she really does not have very sophisticated beliefs about much of anything. If so, she would be a babe in the woods—much like George W. Bush when he entered the White House only to become the prey of the neocons. (Jacob Heilbrunn has a nice section on how Perle, Wolfowitz et al. were thrilled at Bush’s lack of foreign policy knowledge and his willingness to admit he didn’t know anything.)

And for her to achieve the vice-presidency would mean that we would have to put up with the very real likelihood of further wars for control of the Middle East in a McCain presidency—a very big downside, but scarcely worse than an Obama presidency.

In any case, her candidacy likely means that a whole lot of people who were at best lukewarm about McCain will vote for him, just like his strategists intend. Palin is like a Rorschach test: Because we don’t really know what she really believes deep down, we see what we want to see. For those of us without power (like admirers of Buchanan), that raises tantalizing possibilities. For those with power (and that includes the Israel Lobby), it’s clearly a very large negative—an unnecessary risk to be taken only if they really think that Obama would be a disaster for their interests.

In fact, Obama’s flimsy track record and his leftist proclivities (given that honest leftists like Jame Petras and Alexander Cockburn typically oppose Israel) are exactly why serious Jews need constant reassurances about him. Because he hasn’t been around for long, he doesn’t have a tried and true track record on the issue that is so near and dear to their hearts. Sure, he made the pilgrimage to the AIPAC convention, but did he really mean it? Could he possibly be aMuslim masquerading as a Christian?

In the same way, many on the far left are doubtless fantasizing that an Obama presidency would bring on a socialist revolution, while some of his black supporters likely dream of sudden riches or violent revenge.

In fact, AIPAC is doing all they can to find out about what Palin thinks about Israel. Within days of the announcement that Palin would be nominated, AIPAC securedan interview with her where, in the words of AIPAC spokesman John Bock, she “expressed her deep, personal, and lifelong commitment to the safety and well-being of Israel.” The clincher was that she displays an Israeli flag in her office.

Looks like Palin may not be any different from the sociopaths who currently run the country. She seems to know what politicians have to say to be elected to high office in the US. Her speech to the Republican convention will doubtless be tailored to demonstrate her fealty to the Israel Lobby and to show that she is a good neocon at heart.

So let’s not get carried away about Palin. But we can dream that her apparent support for Buchanan really meant something and that her gut feelings really would mean a dramatic change from politics as usual in the US if she attained power.