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Paul Gottfried and Claes Ryn on Leo Strauss

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The academic life is probably like many careers in that ultimately you have to find an audience. Professors spend months or years on a major project, then try to get it published in the best possible venue. Then they hope for positive reviews and, ultimately, acclaim and influence. I suspect that if one did a study based on exit interviews of academics as they retired from the profession, not a few of them would express the feeling that the game was somehow stacked against them—that their work did not get the attention it deserved, that it should have been discussed in all the elite intellectual venues—the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and ultimately, perhaps, become assigned reading in college courses everywhere. They should have been somebody.

Lots of academics probably feel this way, but no one has so explicitly expressed it quite like Paul Gottfried has. In his recent VDARE.com piece, “Claes Ryn, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, and Me,” Gottfried is clearly frustrated. He managed to get his book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, published by an elite academic publisher, Cambridge University Press—no mean feat. But intellectual fame and fortune haven’t happened, and Gottfried is not pleased:

I shall lay my cards on the table. I am outraged at how the usual suspects kept my book from being discussed. Despite my well-known views on certain delicate subjects, I tried to produce a fair study of a difficult topic and bent backward in showing sympathy for the movement’s founder and at least some of his disciples. The successful attempt to white out my work has annoyed me no end.

In order to explain this lack of attention, Gottfried refers to Claes Ryn’s  “Allan Bloom and Straussian Alienation“:

The arguments marshaled by [Claes] Ryn indicate, as does my book, why Straussians reign in the NYT’s Sunday Book Review Section as well as in Conservatism, Inc. Although Ryn does not make this last point explicitly, perhaps for fear of reprisal, a fuller explanation is at least implicit in what he does tell us. His comments may also explain why my book, initially marketed by Cambridge with high hopes and considerable promo, received absolutely no attention in the national Main Stream Media.

For fear of the Straussians.

So how have the Straussians been able to dominate all the high ground of American culture? And in particular, how they have managed to completely co-opt what passes for conservatism? These questions are not really answered by either Gottfried and Ryn, but there are hints. Both emphasize that Straussian ideology has functioned to pave the way for a new elite with no ethnic or cultural ties to the old elite by conceptualizing America as a proposition nation without specific ethnic or religious roots. Given the very large role of Jewish intellectuals among the new elite, the motivation is obvious: If one doesn’t share the ethnic, religious, and historical roots of a society but wants to be accepted as the new intellectual elite, then define the society as having no ethnic, religious, or historical roots. Ryn notes that

the desire to have America be something different from its historical past and to make it perhaps also more palatable to an aspiring new elite is probably most evident and explicit in Bloom’s fellow Straussian Harry Jaffa. Jaffa has made a career of asserting that America must not, repeat, not, be understood as owing anything of importance to an old historical heritage. It must be seen as born out of a radical break with the past and as based on abstract principles of an essentially Lockean cast—Lockeanism understood concomitantly as a departure from earlier thought.

The subterfuge of the Straussians was to attempt to locate this proposition culture in the deep wellsprings of Western culture in order to make it more palatable to conservatives, a position that required them to completely disregard normal standards of scholarship. Thus Plato is presented as an ardent democrat. Ryn:

Allan Bloom contends that Plato, whose iconic status and authority he would like to invoke on behalf of his own beliefs, is markedly different from how a long tradition of classicist scholarship has understood him. Contrary to all appearances, Plato is not scornful of democracy and democratic man. He is a democrat in disguise.

Indeed, in the hands of the Straussians, all of Western philosophy comes down to alienation from society and from tradition—an odd proposal to say the least, and here Ryn also mentions the Frankfurt School as completely on board with the Straussians. The tension arises from the fact that rejection of society and tradition are usually considered to be of the left. As Ryn notes,  “in their disparagement of tradition [they] resemble the open, unqualified left.” In place of tradition and ethnic or cultural particularity, these philosophers opt for universalist abstractions in which the White race or Christianity are excluded as significant categories. Read more

O Lobby Israelense e a comunidade judaica organizada querem mudança de regime na Síria

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Tradução e i
O presidente Obama agora está dizendo que sua administração decidiu atacar a Síria mas vai buscar a aprovação do Congresso para fazê-lo. Isto cria uma situação realmente interessante se o Congresso não concordar, como parece bem possível.
A ideia de Obama ordenar um ato de guerra contra a Síria sem apoio internacional significativo e sem um mandado do Congresso sempre foi uma coisa espantosa. Eis aqui nosso presidente de extrema-esquerda advogando mais outra guerra no Oriente Médio depois de se opor à guerra no Iraque quando era senador. O mesmo presidente que tem uma relação gélida com Benjamin Netanyahu e repetidas vezes ficou aquém das exigências do lobby israelense.

NKVD: Excerpt from Sergei Semanov, The Russian Club

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Editor’s note: The horrific events of the first decades of the Soviet Union are an object lesson in the likely consequences of an ethnic majority being ruled by ethnic outsiders, especially ethnic outsiders with historical grudges. As discussed repeatedly on TOO, the West is entering a very dangerous period because its elites have shown repeatedly that they are hostile to its traditional people and culture and that a major aspect of the strategy of these elites is to import millions of ethnic outsiders, lessening the power of European-derived majorities, encouraging non-assimilation, and thus setting the stage for a very grim future for the traditional peoples of the West.

Nationalities of NKVD Purge Officials Identified

By Sergei Semanov

Translated and edited by Dan Michaels from Sergei Semanov, The Russian Club: Why the Jews Will Not Win. Algoritm Publisher, Moscow, 2012, pp. 169-179.

Following is the official list of the most notorious NKVD officials operating during the Stalinist purges (1934-1938) under Yagoda and Yezhov. By the time Beria took charge of the NKVD in 1940 hardly a single individual from the original list remained alive. On Stalin’s order, most of the purgers were – in time – themselves purged, thereby leaving no witnesses to incriminate the top political leaders.

In November 1935 NKVD agents were assigned military ranks, like those in the Red Army. Yagoda, the head of the NKVD, was the only official to receive the highest SS (State Security) rank of marshal-general, the others received “general” ranks, i.e., SS Commissar of the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd ranks. The following individuals initiated and conducted the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938, but by 1941 only two of the original purgers still remained alive and Stalin was at liberty to replace the NKVD leadership with Beria’s Georgian mafia. Read more

Sergei Semanov and the “Russianists”

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semanovRecently deceased Sergei Semanov (1934–2011), Russian writer and editor, was at times in his life a Stalinist, a critic of the post-Stalinist Soviet governments, an historian, and a public political commentator closely associated with the nationalist Russian political parties and the Russian Club, all of which peaked in popularity in the late 1960s under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The Russian people generally approved of Brezhnev’s 18-year rule (1964–1982). Although known derisively in the West as a period of stagnation, it gave the people time finally to take stock of Russia’s postwar position in the world and plan for a future such as circumstances would permit.

However, even these early subdued expressions of the Russian people’s desire to influence the governance of their country ended abruptly when newly appointed Secretary General Yuri Andropov, an enemy of the nationalists whom he called “Russianists,” had Semanov arrested, interrogated in Lefortovo prison, removed from all his editorial and writing positions, and threatened with expulsion from the Party for the crime of propagating dangerous, possibly treasonous nationalist ideas.

Following the deaths of Stalin and Beria and the gradual disappearance of the military heroes of the Great Patriotic War, the USSR was obliged to choose new leaders to manage the affairs of the Russian State in the nuclear age. Unfortunately, because of the enormity of the wartime destruction and the dearth of energetic youthful Party leaders possessing even a fraction of the stature and authority of Stalin, the Soviet Union found itself lacking strong leadership. Although many native Russian intellectuals personally despised Communism, they nonetheless continued to support it as State doctrine for fear that many of the peripheral countries taken over hundreds of years by the Imperial Russian Empire would break away from Moscow if the combined centripetal forces of Moscow, the Party, and State security were not kept strongly in evidence. This façade of the all-powerful USSR was retained as a protective shield even though Russia was bereft of strong leadership, an effective economy, a reliable agricultural base, and a unified nation.

The enigmatic subtitle of Semanov’s posthumous The Russian Club: Why the Jews Will Not Win refers to a clandestine society of Russian intellectuals – members of the so-called Russian Club.[1] Semanov was one of the Club’s founding officers who met weekly from the 1960s to the early 1980s to discuss the existing state of native Russian cultural and political affairs, often critical of the official Marxist government positions. So influential had the Russian Club become by 1981 that it can take some credit for the collapse of Communism. Read more

The United States of Syria: Domestic Lessons in a Distant War

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Description and Prediction. It’s a richly vibrant police-state. It’s ruled by a paranoid, self-pitying minority. The minority is trying to crush a rebellion by the dispossessed majority. That is a description of Syria. It’s also a prediction for the United States, the United Kingdom, France and other Western nations. The mainstream media are talking a lot about Syria nowadays. But one thing you won’t hear from the mainstream is this: the civil war in Syria demolishes the Three Great Lies on which the modern West is founded.
Lie #1: Diversity Is Our Strength. Syria is a very diverse country, full of different ethnic and religious groups who have a long history of conflict and mutual hatred. That’s why it has to be a police-state: only harsh repression keeps the different groups from each other’s throats. At present, Bashar al-Assad is fighting to maintain his tyranny. His enemies are fighting to replace it with their own tyranny. And some would be happy to keep the pot boiling:

“Our ‘best-case scenario’ is that they continue to busy themselves fighting each other and don’t turn their attention to us,” an Israeli intelligence officer told BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel. “Better the devil we know than the devils we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there,” the officer said. (The Horrifying Secret Of Syria Policy, Buzzfeed, 9th September, 2013)

Lie #2: Minorities Are Saintly Victims. Liberal organizations like Amnesty International have been protesting for decades against the repression and torture used by the Syrian dictators Hafiz al-Assad and his son Bashar. But they don’t mention that the repression and torture are natural consequences of minority control. Since the 1960s, Syria has been ruled by members of a small and impoverished Shiah sect called the Alawi, who have a long history of persecution by the Sunni majority. When they came to power, the Alawi did not forgive, forget and govern for the benefit of everyone. Instead, they took the opportunity to enrich themselves and to persecute in their turn. The cycle of repression and resentment has inevitably ended in civil war. And if the rebels win, the prospect is for expulsion and genocide:  “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” Read more

Prof. Ralph Scott on the costs of not mentioning race differences

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I recently had a conversation with an academic woman who was strongly against any discussion of racial differences in academic ability even though she seemed to believe they exist. I countered that in the absence of such a discussion, the conversation usually reverts to charges that the reason for the racial achievement gap (RAG) is because of White racism, either directly or indirectly (e.g., by causing Black poverty).

Now Prof. Ralph Scott of the University of Northern Iowa has written an article in Mankind Quarterly describing the victims of this rigorously enforced silence (“The Late Arthur Jensen: A latter-Day ‘Enemy of the People’?“). Dr. Scott was prominently involved in the public discussion of the effects of desegregation, including a stint as the Iowa chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights. His article presents Arthur Jensen as the consummate scientist. For example, Jensen only included heritability in his groundbreaking 1969  Harvard Educational Review article on boosting IQ because the editor requested him to do so. His finding that there was no evidence for lasting gains in IQ and that IQ differences are substantially heritable resulted in a firestorm, not only for Jensen but for others, such as Prof. Scott, who accepted these findings.

Scott emphasizes findings by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman (The IQ Controversy [1988]) that there is a gap between (covertly held) professional opinion on IQ and the views disseminated by the elite media. “They found that, despite the common understanding to the contrary, most experts continue to believe that intelligence can be measured, and that genetic endowment plays an important role in IQ.” The following is from an abstract for the book:

The central question addressed in this book is why expert opinion and public views toward intelligence and its measurement are so widely divergent. The authors conclude that the public’s view of the IQ controversy has been shaped by inaccurate media coverage; and more importantly, by changes in the nature of American liberalism as well as the key role of civil rights issues in American life. The increasing influence of new strategic elites in the United States, and the changing role of the mass media, have profoundly affected the character of scientific information communicated to the general public and how it is communicated. (See here)

(Parenthetically, The Culture of Critique references 8 works co-authored by Stanley Rothman, including the groundbreaking Roots of Radicalism: Christians, Jews and the Left [which documents the predominant Jewish role in the 1960s countercultural revolution]. Rothman’s writings on the attitudes of the new elite and on the Jewish representation in the new elite are of seminal importance.)

Scott emphasizes Jensen’s finding that the one standard deviation difference between Black and White students persisted through the school years, implying that the problem was not the schools. As a result, Jensen emphasized that remediation should be aimed at the preschool years:

Colorblind emphasis therefore should be placed on prenatal and perinatal events taking place within families in the course of daily living, such as poor nutrition and intrafamily stress, as well as biophysical considerations, including maternal ingestion of illegal drugs during pregnancy, single parenting, crimes, and sickle cell anemia.

Needless to say, this remains an unpopular message in an age where it seems the blame is now directed mainly at teachers.  Jensen advocated placing children into ability groups based on their scores on standardized tests—a proposal that clearly conflicts with egalitarian dogma. Instead, the education establishment pinned their hopes of reducing the racial achievement gap (RAG) on desegregation—not merely de jure desegregation (in which Blacks had the right to attend neighborhood schools), but de facto segregation (which actively changed the racial balance of schools by forced busing). Read more

Is Tom Wolfe a Race Realist? Part 3 of 3

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mauve

Part 1; Part 2.

Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, a collection of short fiction and non-fiction, includes a very sympathetic portrait of US pilots operating over North Vietnam during the years 1965 to 1967. But by far the most notable essay in the book is, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Wolfe’s critique of the Baby Boom generation, the Me Generation. The Baby Boomers have been rightly criticized for being self-absorbed to the point of narcissism; though subsequent cohorts have not been more virtuous. It is worth quoting at length from this essay, for Wolfe exhibits his conservative bona fides as he faults Baby Boomers for discarding what he describes as the “age-old belief in serial immortality.”

The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide a ‘better future’ for their children … the soldier who risks his life or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for ‘his people’ that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community – for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on. Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead, they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offsprings’ lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshipped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of nature.[1] (Ellipses in original)

Read more