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Star Trek and the Multi-Racial Future

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The new Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams, raises interesting questions about the future of multiculturalism.  The film sends two strong messages:

1)    Diversity is normal.  As in the original television series, the cast of characters is a menagerie of distinct races and cultures: Kirk, a White man from rural Iowa; Scotty, a Scotsman with a heavy Scottish accent; Chekhov, a Russian with a heavy Russian accent; Sulu, an Asian; Uhura, a African-American; and Spock, a super-smart, green-blooded Vulcan.  The producers of Star Trek assume that in the year 2248 (239 years in the future), people will still exhibit distinct racial, cultural, and linguistic traits. Non-Whites are depicted as no less competent and no less likely to hold positions of authority than White people, and diverse workforces on spaceships are highly functional.

2)    Interracial relationships are normal.  All of the sexual/romantic relationships depicted in the film are interracial except for one (Kirk’s father and mother).  Kirk, apparently, is sexually attracted only to non-Whites and non-humans.  Interracial relationships are depicted not only as common, but as unquestionably right.  Spock, who has a Vulcan father and a human mother, reacts emotionally to nothing except criticism of his mixed parentage.  In a poignant moment in the movie, Spock’s father teaches him that one’s choice of a mate should be based more on “love” than on “logic” — or genetic similarity, we can assume.  Spock himself has a black romantic partner in the movie.

The Multi-Racial World of Star Trek

I wonder how many viewers perceive the incompatibility of these two messages. Star Trek’s fictional world is set 10 generations in the future. It’s a world where technology has eliminated geographical barriers, where people live and work in well-functioning, diverse environments, where interracial relationships are normal, and where any social controls against exogamy are considered morally wrong. In such a world, the races and cultures would have had plenty of time to blend together.

The producers of Star Trek are essentially suggesting that the races and cultures of the world today should not only celebrate diversity, but practice exogamy to a very high degree — at least to the degree, presumably, that groups of White people have practiced exogamy with other White groups in the United States.

In considering the suggestion, imagine if a colonial American playwright, writing in 1770 (239 years in the past), made a prediction that the descendants of the distinct groups of Swedish, German, and English White people then living in America would, in 2009, continue to constitute three distinct groups with preserved genetic and linguistic traits.  Having the benefit of hindsight, we would think this playwright was a fool.

So what should we think of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the writers of the new Star Trek movie, and J.J. Abrams, the director?

Isn’t it obvious that in the long term, you can have diversity or free-wheeling exogamy, but you can’t have both?  If you want genetic and cultural distinctiveness, you will have to tolerate social controls against exogamy and a “good fences make good neighbors” attitude to cultural interaction.  If you want to remove all barriers to exogamy, on the other hand, you should expect a genetically blended society of people who won’t know their historical roots without conducting extensive genealogical research.

I think this is obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to me just a few years ago, before I started reading publications like The Occidental Observer.  I remember hearing an interview of an Iraqi man who had been imprisoned by U.S. forces during the Iraq War.  He said (I paraphrase), “I have a message for the American people: Iraqis are happy to interact with Americans in diplomatic settings, in trade, at academic and scientific conferences, and the like. But I want to make one thing clear: You can never have our women!”

At the time, I thought perhaps he was joking, or if he was not, then he was probably an intolerant religious fundamentalist who had not learned the benefits of diversity and thus hated America and clung to backward views about women. If “his” women wanted to move to America and marry Americans, I thought, they should be allowed to pursue their happiness.

Now, however, I think this man’s attitude (or the gender-neutral essence of it) may be the only hope earth has for the conservation of diversity into the twenty-third century.  It’s a standoffish position, certainly, but not a “hateful” one.  It allows for intercultural friendships, just not miscegenation.  And while this attitude may not seem as “positive” and conflict-free as the no-barriers stance exemplified in the Star Trek movie, isn’t it better to risk hurt feelings in the short term in exchange for protecting against cultural loss in the long term?

Of course, any attempt to re-legitimate social controls against exogamy would undermine decades of efforts to pathologize these social controls, especially those practiced by Whites. Perhaps it is interesting that the ethnicities of the movie’s creators — Abrams and Kurtzman are Jewish, while Orci is Latino — are ethnicities that are relatively insulated from the integrationist zeitgeist. There is no popular criticism of Rahm Emmanuel’s decision to volunteer at an Israeli Defense Force base during the Persian Gulf War, for example, or Sonia Sotomayor’s decision to join La Raza. Meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan is considered dangerous, all forms of explicit White collectivism are considered evil, and Barack Obama’s mixed parentage is celebrated.

If the two messages of the Star Trek movie dominate American culture over the next ten generations, perhaps the only distinctive groups left standing will be those that are able to control culture in order to exempt themselves from the universal moral norm of miscegenation and continue to maintain social controls against exogamy among their own group members. Whites, of course, being considered the historically “dominant” group against which other groups define themselves, will be least able to obtain such exemptions, and thus, perhaps, the least likely to be around to command the Starship Enterprise.

Jonathan Pyle (email him) is a lawyer in Philadelphia.

The Sotomayor Nomination: More Glimpses of Jewish Activism — and a Warning to Republicans

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The campaign by some Jews with access to the media to get Elena Kagan nominated for the soon-to-be vacant Supreme Court position failed —but will probably be resurrected the next time around. VDARE.com’s Patrick Cleburne has also noted the Jewish angle to the pro-Kagan campaign — suggesting that the article by Jeffrey Rosen questioning Sotomayor’s intellectual qualifications was really an attempt to promote Kagan by default. In a follow-up article, Rosen stressed the need for the next Supreme Court nominee to be “not merely impressive but absolutely stellar.”

You can see where this is going: Kagan = brilliant — despite her less than lackluster record of academic scholarship en route to the most prestigious position in legal academia.

Writing in the LA Times, David Greenberg does his part, describing Elena Kagan as “manifestly brilliant,” and also agreeing with Cleburne that criticisms of Sotomayor were motivated by the desire to promote people like Kagan.

Of course, Jews need not fear that Sotomayor would disappoint them in her voting. Representatives of Jewish groups were actively involved in consulting about the nomination. And even though they may have preferred Kagan, they doubtless had no objections to Sotomayor.

Gary McCoy Cartoon

Indeed, Sotomayor has long been courted by Jewish groups. Part of the full court press style of Jewish activism is that any person who is influential or who may at some point in the future become influential will be socialized to be sensitive to Jewish issues. And they will be scrutinized in the process, so that when the time comes, Jews can be confident that people of influence will be on board with their concerns.

In 1986 Sotomayor was invited to participate in Project Interchange, an undertaking of the American Jewish Committee aimed at providing “current and emerging United States and international leaders with an enhanced understanding of, and perspective on, Israel and the pursuit of Middle East peace through introductory educational seminars in Israel” (links in original). The people invited on these junkets are quite diverse — including members of the US military, editors of student newspapers in American universities, presidents and chancellors of American universities, French Muslim civic leaders, Pentacostal Latino clergy, and Indian-Americans.

The only thing they have in common is that at some point they may be able to influence policy toward issues important to the organized Jewish community, even if that time is a long way in the future.

Project Interchange isn’t the only such organization. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs has long promoted ties between the US and Israeli military establishments. JINSA pays for trips to Israel for retired U.S. generals and admirals who then write op-ed pieces and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line. JINSA also has programs for sending US law enforcement personnel to Israel and for providing speakers at US military academies.

Since her 1986 visit to Israel, Sotomayor visited Israel again in 1996 and participated in a recent U.S.-Israel forum on immigration. She is also close friends with Project Interchange founder Debbie Berger and her husband, Paul.

Such courting of future leaders is doubtless an important aspect of Jewish activism. Whenever someone is mentioned for high office, Jewish newspapers report on his or her Jewish connections. In effect, there is a vetting process based on issues of importance to the Jewish community. And a critical part of that process is first hand, face-to-face relationships with Jews who are well-known and trusted by the wider Jewish community.  In effect, Debbie and Paul Berger are vouching for Sonia Sotomayor.

The JTA article “Life story, trips to Israel tie Sotomayor to Jews” is also of interest because it sheds light on how Jews think of themselves and their role in ethnic politics in America.

The story of her life — the daughter of a Puerto Rican single mother from the Bronx, N.Y., whose ambitions knew no bounds — resounded with a community that has made the story of immigrant triumph over struggle a template of Jewish American success.

“It was impossible not to moved by her personal story,” said Mark Pelavin, the associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center. “To see her mother sitting there and think about what this says about her and her country — the combination of someone who grew up in a housing project, who has been on the bench for a long time, but who has been a prosecutor as well, that combination is very powerful.”

“It was thrilling,” said Sammie Moshenberg, the Washington director of the National Council of Jewish Women.

These comments are quite similar to what Jews say when asked about why they support African Americans. As noted by historian Hasia Diner, Jews “believe that Jewish concern for black people was ‘natural,’ growing out of parallel experiences of suffering and oppression.”

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There is an element of self-deception in this. The Jewish rise from immigrant poverty to elite status has virtually nothing in common with the rise of people like Sotomayor who are the beneficiaries of the post-1960s affirmative action culture of America. Whatever Jewish self conceptions of their role in American ethnic politics, the only consistent thread has been to oppose the interests of the White, European-derived majority. In addition to favoring massive non-White immigration and promoting programs that pathologize White identity and interests, making alliances with other minority groups has been a critically important part of that effort.

The main Jewish organizations taking a leadership role in building alliances with non-White groups are the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, and the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. For example, the FFEU was cofounded by Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the North American Boards of Rabbis; Russell Simmons of hip hop fame is the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The FFEU is closely tied to the World Jewish Congress, which cosponsors the Foundation’s Washington, DC office and several of its programs.

These Jewish organizations have sought close relationships with Latino organizations such as the National Council of La Raza and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). For example, one project of the FFEU is to organize an annual meeting of the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the World Jewish Congress, and the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

Quite clearly the various non-European ethnic groups are developing close ties, and Jewish organizations are taking the lead in this effort. As Paul Gottfried said about minority groups opposing dominant cultures (and I agreed), it’s not that Jews are unique in playing this game. They are just better at it than others.

I point out this rich tapestry of Jewish ethnic activism to give some idea of what those who advocate for White identity and interests are up against. Like the Obama presidency, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is exactly the sort of thing favored by the activist Jewish community because it is yet another marker in the march toward the dispossession of Whites in America.

Finally, it’s interesting that the standard line from some party strategists is that Republicans need to be very cautious in their opposition to Sotomayor because Latinos are an emerging political force. Of course, this is the same advice that these strategists give on immigration: Don’t do anything to anger the Latinos.

But of course, the reality is that Latinos are never going to be attracted to a Republican Party that is in any sense conservative, much less oriented to the interests of Whites in a way that is comparable to how the Democratic Party is oriented to the interests of non-Whites. Polls in California show that Latinos favor high levels of government services and are willing to raise taxes to get them. California is now in a historic budget crisis in which government services to its ever-expanding population of poor and uneducated — fueled massively by legal and illegal immigration — simply cannot be sustained without huge increases in taxes. But massive tax increases will drive out businesses and White taxpayers in droves — indeed they have already done so.

White people might well be willing to pay higher taxes if the beneficiaries were people like themselves. But most Whites are not going to vote for higher taxes when the main beneficiaries are Latinos and other non-White poor — a straightforward result of our evolutionary psychology, as Frank Salter (see also here) and J. Philippe Rushton have shown. Instead, Whites voted overwhelmingly for a ballot proposition that would have denied services to illegal immigrants — only to be thwarted by the courts and other political elites.

Like all the great social trends, the Third Worldization of America begins in California.

A far better strategy for Republicans is to realize that their only long term hope is to become a party that explicitly (or at least implicitly) favors White people and their interests. A critical part of that process is to acknowledge that ethnic identity politics is not just for people like Sotomayor (who is a member of La Raza), Obama, and the Democratic Party.

Nate Beeler Cartoon

Sotomayor is quite blunt about the role of ethnic identity in influencing judicial temperament, famously stating “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” This is from someone who owes pretty much her whole career to her ethnic identity and the willingness of American elites to ease her path into Princeton, Yale Law, the Circuit Court of Appeals, and now the Supreme Court of the United States.

We have to adopt the same explicit sense of White identity and interests. The Republicans seem bent on committing suicide rather than abandoning their principled hostility to ethnic identity politics for Whites. But, as Peter Brimelow notes, if that is the policy of the Republican Party, another party must and will be formed that do exactly that.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.  Email him.

Who is an anti-Semite?

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Someday the word “anti-Semite” will be studied as an example of distorted political discourse — as a signifier attached to somebody who advocates the reign of demonology. How does one dare critically talk about the extraordinary influence the Jews in the West without running the risk of social opprobrium?

We certainly cannot expect that Jewish intellectuals will think critically about Jewish influence. As a French author Hervé Ryssen writes, “internationally-known Jewish authors, haunted by the either real or surreal specter of anti-Semitism, consider it a sickness, which enables them to avoid any form of introspection.”

While it is a commonplace for White Europeans and Americans to critically talk in private about Arabs, Mexicans, Africans or, for that matter, deride their fellow White citizens, a critical comment about the influence of Jews, even if founded on empirical facts, is viewed as an insult to Jews. If a serious European and American scholar or a politician ventures into this minefield, his gesture is interpreted as a sign of somebody who writes his obituary.

Such a schizophrenic climate of self-censorship in the West will sooner or later lead to dramatic consequences for both Jews and non-Jews. The lack of healthy dialogue can last for decades, but feigned conviviality between opposing groups cannot last forever.  Mendacity carries the germ of civil war.

While many authors in the West sport staggering erudition in unabashedly challenging modern myths, the most sensitive point of reference of the twentieth century — Jewish influence — is carefully avoided. If the subject of Jews is ever brought up in a European or American public forum, it is in a laudatory fashion — a clear indication of the morbid desire of White ruling elites to curry favor with the Jews.

In the same vein, many intelligent White American and European racialists frequently decorate themselves with their “token Jews” in hopes of achieving some legitimacy in the mainstream media and seeking some camouflage in their opposition to non-European immigration or to various other myths of multicultural ideology. These individuals will likely be the first to declare themselves anti-Semites if the wind changes and critiques of Jewish influence become part of a new Zeitgeist.

The lack of open discussion about Jewish influence corroborates the thesis that Jews play a crucial role in opinion making in Western societies.  True power shows itself by not being open to discussion. Hypothetically speaking, if Jews, by some miracle, were to play a marginal role in Europe or America — as they publicly claim they do, then logically, they would not object to being the subjects of critical discussion, or for that matter derision — just as it is legitimate to discuss the power of other groups. But Americans are far more likely to read books about the nefarious power of Christian conservatives or “white racism” than they are to hear about the far greater power of the organized Jewish community.

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A common trait among many liberal Whites is intellectual servility — to look up to Jews as paragons of intelligence and moral rectitude. In the beginning of the 21st century there is no worse insult than qualifying a White politician or a White academic as an “anti-Semite.”

This intellectual servility of the Western political and academic class toward Jewry provides legitimacy to Jews in their endless search for a real or surreal anti-Jewish straw man. Organizations like the ADL trumpet even the most minor and deranged bit of anti-Semitism as heralding the next Holocaust.

The strange compound noun ‘anti-Semitism’ only gives Jews an additional alibi to project themselves as victims of prejudice. If anti-Semitism were non-existent it would have to be invented. The buzzword ‘anti-Semitism’ bestows upon the Jews a role of the moral and intellectual super-ego for White Europeans and Americans and by proxy for the entire world.

The frightened attitude of American and European intellectuals, who often extol the concept of “intellectual freedom,” is best seen in their schizoid attitude toward Jews. This was noted a long time ago by Wilmot Robertson, in his The Dispossessed Majority: “the pro-Semite has …made himself a mirror image of the anti-Semite.”  The danger of this fatal embrace lies not with Jews, but with Whites. An American anti-Semite must appear in the eyes of Jews as a very bizarre species. On the one hand, he hates this alien Jew; yet on the other, he lugs behind himself the Levantine mindset of hatred toward outgroups that is not of European cultural origin.

A prominent Jewish-French politician and author, Jacques Attali, in his much acclaimed book Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent, writes: “As Russian Jews invented socialism, and as Austrian Jews invented psychoanalysis, American Jews in the forefront, participated in the birth of American capitalism and in the Americanization of the entire world.” Because he is Jewish, Attali can make such comments without incurring the wrath of the Jewish activist organizations. If a White racialist author made a similar comment, he or she would be immediately shouted down as an “anti-Semite.”

That is why when a Jewish author talks openly and critically about Judaism — especially the strong Jewish role in social and political affairs in the postmodern West, his prose will elicit awe and respect. His words may be sometimes met with apprehension and irritation by his fellow Jews, as witnessed by Norman Finkelstein or to some extent Noam Chomsky, but his words will nevertheless find their place in the ears and eyes of mainstream audience.

The Necessity of ‘Kulturvolk’

A Jewish author, preferably of liberal or leftist pedigree, who tackles this greatest taboo of all times, will have a safe passage to media success. Such is the case with the liberal Jewish-Russian-American scholar, Yuri Slezkine, whose research does not reveal anything new regarding the Jewish role in the  ex-Soviet Union and elsewhere. Yet Slezkine has the privilege of saying what is forbidden to the goyim.

Slezkine notes that America, unlike Europe, with its relatively strong tribal allegiances, knew only “vestigial establishment tribalism.” From its inception, America was far more propitious for Jews than Europe; it became a laboratory of ideas for diverse multicultural and academic experiments — be they of infra-, intra-European, or extra-European nature. ”What Jewish intellectuals could not attain in Europe, or later in the Soviet Union, was at hand in America where Jewish power, economic status and cultural influence have increased dramatically since 1960.”

It should not come as a surprise that similar views about Jews were elaborated much earlier by many German scholars affiliated with the Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage in National Socialist Germany, but who for obvious reasons are squarely denounced as proverbial Nazis and anti-Semites. The Institute, whose director was Eberhard Taubert , had a large number of scholars whose goal was the detailed anthropological, political and psychological research of the Jewish question. Taubert, after WWII, was not purged but worked for a while for US intelligence.  In passing, it is worth noting that unlike the English and the French language, the rich German language does not have a single vulgar or slang word for the word “the Jew” (“Jude”).

Many Jewish scholars are aware of the schizoid White European mentality.  As Shmuel Trigano noted, while setting itself up as “new Israel,” the West recognized in Judaism a factual, if not a juridical jurisdiction over itself. And this boils down to saying that the West has become Jewish to the extent that for centuries it kept forbidding to Jews their own identity. It follows from this that the strange verbal construct “Judeo-Christianity” is an elusive oxymoron; it imprisons the West, which by its own act of submission accepts a different mindset — which is not its own.

One could argue that the West is subconsciously anti-Semitic to the extent that it has always yearned — be it in a theological or ideological fashion — to become Jewish. The thesis can be put forward that the West will cease to be obsessed with Jews and anti-Semitism once it leaves this neurosis, once it returns to its own local European traditions, and by stopping to be what it is not and allowing the “Other” to continue what he is.

What has been missing in the West, and particularly in America over the last 50 years is a strong sense of cultural identity. The German word Kulturvolk, stands for a rooted cultural and national community (and not just the adherence to White race), and it is a prerequisite for a sound White identity. In contrast to Germans, Russians, French, etc., the weak cultural identity among White elites in America was a major flaw among American nationalists, racialists and conservatives who, while being aware of Jewish influence, were unable to muster up cultural energy to counter it. However, with rapid racial changes in America there are signs that the common cultural identity among Whites in America is on the rise.

The feigned fraternity between the postmodern Euro-American “shabbos goyim” and American Jews is veiled in mendacity and mutual make-belief mimicry which can be spotted in the Western political establishment and the media at all times. It is too grotesque to last forever. Admittedly, it only gives rise to proverbial Jewish hubris which will continue to grow as long as it receives servile fodder from self-censored European academics and politicians.

Tom Sunic (www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com/) is an author, former political science professor in the USA, translator and former Croat diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age ( 2007).

Elena Kagan: Jewish Ethnic Networking Eases the Path of a Liberal/Leftist to the Supreme Court

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A recent LA Times article, “Supreme Court Nominee has admirers left and right,” by David G. Savage and James Oliphant, although masquerading as news, is a brief for the candidacy of Elena Kagan for the position on the Supreme Court vacated by David H. Souter.  The article notes that she is well connected to top people in the Obama Administration, and there is effusive praise from two legal bigwigs, Laurence Tribe and Charles Fried, both of Harvard.

Kagan’s candidacy raises a number of issues. If nominated and confirmed, there would be three Jewish justices on the Supreme Court — all on the left. Jews are of course always overrepresented among elites — especially on the left, but 33% is high by any standard given that Jews constitute less than 3% of the US population. This is much higher than Jewish representation in the US Senate (13%) and the House of Representatives (~7%).  The last time I checked, if there were three Jews on the Supreme Court, the percentage would be about the same as the percentage of Jews among the wealthiest Americans.

Jews as one-third of the Supreme Court seems sure to raise the eyebrows among people like me who think that Jewish identity often makes a big difference in attitudes and behavior. And if there is one area where mainstream Jewish political identity has had a huge effect (besides anything related to Israel), it’s in attitudes and behavior related to multiculturalism. This is true of the Jewish mainstream across the entire Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neoconservative right. A major theme of The Culture of Critique is that Jewish identities and interests were apparent in all the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements of the left that have rationalized multiculturalism, massive non-White immigration, and the general displacement of Europeans:

Viewed at its most abstract level, a fundamental agenda is thus to influence the European-derived peoples of the United States to view concern about their own demographic and cultural eclipse as irrational and as an indication of psychopathology. (Ch. 5 of The Culture of Critique; emphasis in original)

Kagan seems to have lived a charmed life, with perhaps a whiff (or even a stench) of ethnic networking. At least one of the journalists writing the LA Timespanegyric is Jewish (David G. Savage), and the two legal scholars who are quoted in the article (Fried and Tribe) are both Jews. In addition, Kagan was appointed Dean of Harvard Law by Lawrence Summers — also Jewish and with a strong Jewish identity. Summers and Kagan covered for Laurence Tribe when he lifted a passage from another scholar’s book without attribution. Ethnic networking is nothing if not reciprocal.

While Jewish activists are doing all they can to promote a Jew for this position, we don’t hear a peep from White Protestants — a group that dominated the Supreme Court for 150 years.  With Souter’s departure, the only White Protestant left on the court is the superannuated Stevens, who is 89 and will doubtless be replaced by an ethnic minority if he retires during the Obama administration. (White males need not apply.)  When it comes to playing help-my-tribe battles, White Protestants are completely inept — in fact, they don’t even play at all.

Tribe’s praise for Kagan is particularly interesting: “She has an excellent chance, and she would be terrific. … She has a masterful command of so many areas of law. And she’s been vetted and recently confirmed. Her writing is not voluminous, which is also a plus.”

Indeed, her writing is not voluminous at all. In her entire career at the University of Chicago and Harvard — the very apex of elite academic institutions — she has written a grand total of 9 articles. Actually, her scholarly output is even less than that because two of these publications are book reviews and one is a tribute to Thurgood Marshall. When she received tenure at the University of Chicago in 1995, she had exactly two scholarly articles published in law journals — a record that would ordinarily not get her tenure even at quite a few third tier universities much less an elite institution like the University of Chicago.

But on the basis of this record and later work in the Clinton Administration, in 2003 she became the dean of Harvard Law School, the most prestigious law school in the country. She has yet to publish any articles or books since becoming dean. But now her lack of scholarship is called a plus by Laurence Tribe, presumably because her positions on many issues are unknown. (Doubtless if Kagan had a stellar scholarly record, Tribe would have seen it as a major plus.)

Not only does she have a weak record as a scholar, she has yet to argue a case as Solicitor General even though she had the opportunity to do so. Her next opportunity to argue a case will not happen until after the Supreme Court nomination process is over, so we will have no information on how effective she would be in fending off the arguments of the conservative intellectual heavyweights on the Court before this weighty decision is made. On the basis of the arguments she endorsed in the Solomon Amendment case (see below), one must assume that she would not fare well.

Nor are there any other discernible positives. As Savage and Oliphant note, “Kagan does not have the ‘real world’ experience in politics. …  It is not clear whether she has the “quality of empathy” Obama has said he wants in a nominee. But she has had an uncanny knack for winning important admirers and avoiding enemies in a series of top legal jobs.”

The only thing Kagan has going for her seems to be that important people admire her. She’s good at networking, and it would seem that many of her most prominent admirers are other Jews — liberal and conservative. (Tribe and Summers are liberals; Charles Fried is considered a conservative. Fried was Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration but voted for Obama.) Ethnic networking indeed!

This points to corruption in the Jewish sector of the American academic elite. Kagan’s path to the academic heights of the legal profession and perhaps to a position on the Supreme Court is not based on a solid record of scholarship or any other relevant experience, but on ethnic boosterism from other Jews. As I noted elsewhere, Jews are represented in elite American academic institutions at levels far higher than can be explained by IQ.

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Kagan is a poster girl for Jewish affirmative action. Not only does she have no discernible skills that would warrant her high position as dean of Harvard Law — much less an appointment to the Supreme Court, she is boosted by another Harvard professor (Laurence Tribe) who plagiarized another scholar’s work. (Plagiarism seems to run rampant at Harvard Law. Norman Finkelstein provides a credible case that Alan Dershowitz plagiarized others’ work in writingThe Case for Israel. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., an African American, was involved in double plagiarism: foisting off the plagiarized work of his assistants as his own.) And Kagan was appointed dean of Harvard Law by then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers who has massive ethical problems of his own related to shielding another Harvard professor, his friend and protégé Andrei Shleifer. Shleifer  was found liable by a federal court in 2004 for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government for his activities during the transition to capitalism in Russia in the 1990s. Summers also accepted $2.7 million in speaking fees from companies that received government bailout money when he later became head of the National Economic Council.

What could we expect from Kagan on the Supreme Court? Kagan has been flagged by conservatives because of an amicus brief she and other law professors wrote seeking to strike down a law that prohibited colleges and universities that ban military recruiting on campus from receiving federal funds. The motive behind the brief signed by Kagan was to protest the military’s policy on homosexuality. Their arguments were rejected 8-0 by the Supreme Court, indicating that even the Court liberals thought it was completely outside the mainstream.

This strongly suggests that Kagan would be quite willing to fashion her legal arguments to attain her liberal/left policy goals, and that is exactly what her other writings show. Her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” (60 University of Chicago Law Review 873; available on Lexis/Nexis) indicates someone who is entirely on board with seeking ways to circumscribe free speech in the interests of multicultural virtue: “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.” She acknowledges that the Supreme Court is unlikely to alter its stance that speech based on viewpoint is protected by the First Amendment, but she sees that as subject to change with a different majority: The Supreme Court “will not in the foreseeable future” adopt the view that “all governmental efforts to regulate suchspeech … accord with the Constitution.” But in her view there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Clearly, she does not see the protection of viewpoint-based speech as a principle worth preserving or set in stone. Rather, she believes that a new majority could rule that “all government efforts to regulate such speech” would be constitutional. All government efforts.

And until that day comes — doubtless speeded by her arrival on the court, she advocates finding ways to rationalize restrictions on free speech within the current guidelines of the court.  Her article proposes a variety of ways that “hate speech” may be restricted without running afoul of current Supreme Court guidelines. For example, she supports the constitutionality of “hate crime” laws that enhance penalties for crimes motivated by racial bias — precisely the sort of law recently passed by the House and now being considered by the Senate. Such laws have been strongly promoted by the organized Jewish community and condemned by conservative legal scholars as creating special victim categories and destroying federalism because they punish acts that are already illegal in the states.

Kagan’s conclusion shows where her heart is:

[Efforts to draft restrictions on speech] will not eradicate all pornography or all hate speech from our society, but they can achieve much worth achieving. They, and other new solutions, ought to be debated and tested in a continuing and multi-faceted effort to enhance the rights of minorities and women, while also respecting core principles of the First Amendment.

For Kagan, the crusade to restrict speech is motivated by her feminist and leftist political attitudes. Indeed, her 1993 paper was originally presented at a conference titled, “Speech, Equality, and Harm: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda.” She sees her job as a legal scholar to find a way to ensure that these goals are achieved while paying lip service to the legal tradition of the First Amendment. Indeed, she sees heavy-handed attempts to restrict free speech, such as the Stanford speech code, as counter-productive because they make “the forces of hatred into defenders of Constitutional liberty” and because they are so unreasonable they invite criticisms of the rest of Stanford’s race and gender policies.

In a revealing comment, she notes that those who want to restrict speech in heavy-handed and unconstitutional ways are motivated by the stubborn failure to close the racial gap:

The magnitude and duration of these inequalities may make them impervious to political (let alone to academic) efforts. We do not know how to solve these problems; we may not even know how to talk (or perhaps we are afraid to talk) about them. So some succumb to the allure of sideshows such as the one involving the Stanford Policy.

Given what many believe is the biological basis of these racial differencesand recent reports that the racial gap in education is not narrowing despite the No Child Left Behind law aimed at raising the scores of Blacks and Latinos, I suspect that this temptation to restrict speech will be increasingly irresistible in the future. And if Kagan is on the Supreme Court, we can certainly expect that she would vote for such restrictions. Her heart, as I am sure Obama must know, is definitely in the right place.

They say politics is the art of the possible. For Kagan, law is also the art of the possible. There are no principles. Only better or worse tactics for achieving her policy goals.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.  Email him.

Small Towns, Football and Close-Knit Whites: Monolith of Evil to the New York Times

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Last August, I wrote about CNN’s predictably biased coverage of the beating death of Luís Ramírez, an illegal alien in the small Pennsylvania town of Shenandoah.

The young White men prosecuted beat some of the charges, leading to yet another round of predictable media coverage.  Most stories I read began with that most ominous of phrases:  “An all-White jury…”

Of course, to a media that considers itself Atticus Finch, nothing good can ever issue from “an all-White jury.”  A Google News search reveals endless hits for “all-White jury”;  none for “all-black jury” or “all-Hispanic jury.”  Really, you needn’t read the rest of the story.  I’ll finish off the paragraph for your convenience:  “An all-White jury today ignored all evidence presented at trial and handed down an utterly racist verdict that totally affirms the incurably backward, bigoted nature of American society.”

If an “all-White jury” decided to award slavery reparations to all living blacks, it wouldn’t be “an all-White jury” — it would simply be “a jury.”  And a sensible, fair-minded one at that.

The media telegraphs a lot by using “all-White jury.”  If a few blacks or Hispanics had been on it, the media is saying, they naturally would have been able to appeal to the Whites’ better angels, and thus come back with the correct decision.

The media is barely interested in such trivialities as the burden of proof or the evidence presented at trial — otherwise, it would announce a shocking verdict by saying “despite overwhelming evidence of innocence, Tom Robinson was convicted of rape.”  Whites are presumed to be defective jurors.  And anything “all-White,” whether a barbershop quartet or local school, is of course illegitimate.  An “all-White jury” may be the most illegitimate thing going.

These presumptions guided the coverage by Ian Urbina, the New York Times reporter sent to sniff out and send up for mockery the White reaction to the verdict in Shenandoah.

Urbina goes at his task with gusto, starting off with a claim by a Hispanic student that Whites threatened him with the next beating.  It would be easy for a Hispanic student to falsify such a claim, and I wonder whether Urbina followed up with a request for the names of those White students.  Probably not — minority claims of victimization usually go unchallenged by reporters.  The claim might be true, but the New York Times would never allow a similar claim by a White to serve as the lead sentence of a story, even if it were confirmed by multiple sources.  (Later on in the story, we see that the student himself was suspended after being given “permission” by his father to respond to the Whites with violence, a scenario description that cries out for deeper questioning.)

Good Guys: The Bermejo family. The boy in the background claimed that  White students told him he would be beaten next.

Naturally, Urbina quotes Hispanic advocacy groups, but does not bother reaching out to a White advocacy group like the National Policy Institute.  He quotes a Hispanic advocacy attorney as saying that “this case is not just about what happened to Luis;  it’s about what Latinos nationally are facing.”  Needless to say, Mr. Urbina is not interested in what Whites nationally are facing, nor does he question the sense of shared racial fate felt by Hispanics.

Urbina quotes Hispanics — by name, of course (see my earlier column for a discussion of this) — trumpeting that the Whites only dislike them because they represent “change” and are “different.”  They thus channel back to the reporter exactly what he believes about White attitudes toward Hispanics or illegal immigrants — kind of like a Mobius strip message circuit.  White advocates, take note:  When speaking to a reporter, it’s best to frame your message in terms of things the reporter already believes.

Urbina winds up with a sucker punch.  He quotes a White man, Ed Rolko, on his reaction to the verdict as follows:

“‘This is a tight-knit place, and everyone knows each other,’ said Mr. Rolko, adding that he, like everyone else in town, knows the defendants personally.

Asked whether he knew Mr. Ramírez, Mr. Rolko said no.” 

Bad Guy: Ed Rolko at his styling salon

It’s doubtful that any of the happy-to-talk Hispanics knew any of the White defendants, but Mr. Urbina doesn’t pose this question to them.  He’s only interested in setting up Whites like Ed Rolko as close-minded bigots.  We can safely assume this:  If Mr. Urbina had information that the Hispanics in town knew the White defendants, he would have happily put it out there — further proof of White wickedness in comparison to Hispanic friendliness.  So he either asked the question and got the same answer, or didn’t ask the question at all.

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Such is the power of a reporter to shape a story.  Ian Urbina instinctively feels that small towns, football and close-knit Whites are bad things, and he narrates accordingly.  Having moved from one much-hated career to another (journalism to law), I can testify to the dirty tricks of both.

But the law, at least, has accounted for the tendency of a particular party to shape the story to advance his interests:  the trial, with objections, cross-examinations and separate opportunities to present evidence.

Sadly for Whites, they sit in the defendant’s chair with the media as prosecutor — and no defense counsel in sight.

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

On the Visual Displacement of the White Race

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I’ve been observing and studying the fall of Western man for about two decades now. For a number of years I could not really understand the process, but eventually I caught on. I’ve shared my fears and observations about our displacement with friends and family in a haphazard way but it was not until this winter that I systematically reached out to try to warn them. More than the election of the first African American president last fall, it was the sudden implosion of the economy that convinced me that my minimum duty was to at least pass on my estimation that a few basic measures of preventive self defense were in order.

Before talking to anyone, however, I pondered the likely response to my warnings. Like almost every White racialist out there, I’ve experienced rejection from nearly every White I’ve talked to. Why this is so remains a mystery to me, for the evidence of White decline is everywhere. Sure, humans are prone to denial, but how can it continue this far past the obvious?

Denial or not, I resolved to go one step beyond the writing I’ve been doing to actually talk to specific friends and family members about the elevated risks they face simply by being a White person in today’s America. Of particular concern are the naïve young women in my family.

Looking back on it, the impetus for this personal campaign probably came from a column by the editor of The Occidental Quarterly, Greg Johnson. Mr. Johnson used the occasion of the release of a low-keyed video about race in America to ponder precisely what I’m talking about. In his words: “When a White person awakens to our race’s peril, the first impulse—and the first duty—is to try to awaken others. But where to begin?”

His decision was to “highly recommend Craig Bodeker’s masterful 58 minute documentary A Conversation about Race. It is an ideal first step on the road to racial awakening.” Taking this advice, I started there, ordering a copy for my brother in Virginia. A blue collar man, he’s been hard hit his whole life by stagnant or declining wages, in part due to the massive immigration—legal and illegal—of laborers with little education. Since he’s a nice guy who is at least superficially willing to listen to my ideas on race, I figured he’d react favorably.

A Conversation about Race

I sent him a copy of the documentary, which he acknowledged receiving, but in subsequent e-mails and phone conversations, he’s never brought up the subject. I have to assume then that he simply has chosen not to watch it. And it’s not that he doesn’t like to watch TV. On the contrary, he’s one of those guys who watches hours and hours of it after work and on weekends. I can always get a pretty good idea of what the latest popular sayings or phrases are just by listening to him.

Well, my brother was just a start. Being Irish America of a certain generation, I’ve got a good number of relatives both back in my hometown and spread out across America. Cousin Mike, for one, is about as good as they come. A few years younger than me, he never went to college but has worked hard enough all these years to allow his horse-loving wife to be a stay-at-home mom. (It helps that land and home prices in small town America are still low.)

As a self-employed businessman—a guy who works with his hands but also has to focus on the bottom line—Mike is probably a little more serious about events than the average guy his age. That’s why I approached him in a unique way. In essence, I made him an offer: “Mike, I’ve got cash in a bank that might be going under someday soon and I can’t be sure federal insurance will mean a lot at that point. Thus, I’d rather use some of that money to buy something here and now that could make a big difference in our lives: I’m willing to pay for whatever firearms and ammo you would feel comfortable owning.”

Because Mike knows how to use dangerous tools and has a fairly sharp sense of what human beings can be capable of in a pinch, I thought it better that he rather than more innocent relatives be in charge of legal firearms. Unfortunately, I never heard back from him.

Now before you get worried about this talk of firearms, let me state directly what worries me most: the chance that our society will even more extensively allow our underclass to blame Whites for whatever perceived misdeeds the underclass feels we are responsible for, and worse, to tacitly allow them to act on their sense of resentment or vengeance more than they already do. And it’s not even the carjacking or street crime that most worries me; it’s the rape. 

If you’re reading this column, you don’t have to be reminded of the sources for statistics on this kind of thing. We’ve got the hard science from the likes of Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray. Further, we have the aggregated figures on the highly elevated rates of Black crime as documented in The Color of Crime, which comes from the same team that has consistently brought us the race realism writing of Jared Taylor and his writers at American Renaissance.

VDARE.com has a veritable stable of race realist writers, while the more courageous individual can go to a place like David Duke’s website for unvarnished discussions of the problems we Whites face—and the people who are mainly responsible for our plight. Or you could visit Western Voices World News or maybe Ziopedia. (For the more aurally oriented, one might turn to James Edwards’ radio show The Political Cesspool, which was just mentioned in a front-page story in The London Times.)

My point is this—there are many good sources for finding out about the scourge we Whites generally face today in America (and Canada, England, etc.) And like I said, one of the most fearful is Black-on-White rape. In addition to a brother, I have four sisters, and among the six of us we have a lot of young White girls, mostly blondes. Maybe now you can see why I’m worried.

We race realists all have something that triggered our escape from the imposed lies about racial equality and the ideology of unique White wickedness. For me, it was certainly the Wichita Massacre, in which five young Whites were raped and/or murdered by two Black men in a horrendous attack—one which our national media utterly ignored. For others it may have been the Knoxville slayings, or maybe the way the news media focus far more on the alleged crimes of White men, as in the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax or the Jena 6 fraud.

In any case, you readers know the score about interracial crime, which, as Greg Johnson tells us, Bodeker discusses openly in his race documentary:

In the United States in 2005, 37,000 White women were raped by Blacks, while in the same period “fewer than ten” Black women were raped by Whites. (The odd locution “fewer than ten” rather than a specific number leads me to think that the number could be zero, but that the statistical margin of error is ten.) Bodeker then makes another brilliant point: according to the conventional wisdom on racism, we are supposed to be worried if, on any given day, a White person somewhere in America is harboring racist attitudes towards Blacks; but if one is concerned that, on the very same day, one hundred White women are being raped by Blacks, that is racism most foul.

What I’m trying to do here is understand why what is obvious to me and other race realists is so stubbornly resisted by my friends and family. I mean, what more than is already happening will it take to wake them from their stupor? As an academic, my approach has been through the written word, often in ways that might test the patience of the general reader. Still, I think even my academic prose is accessible and, because it is almost exclusively focused on popular culture, of interest to a wide audience.

For instance, my thirty-something columns at this site cover a broad range of popular culture. My longer works in The Occidental Quarterly do the same but in far more depth. The most popular essay to date seems to be one on television—The Jews of Prime Time. Others can be read here, here and here (this year expect three more essays in my “Understanding Hollywood” series).

My focus on Hollywood comes from the common assumption—heavily supported by an immense body of scholarship—that media influence the way a population thinks and acts. For example, a major thrust of Kevin MacDonald’s recent work (see also here and here) is on showing the power of culture to shape attitudes and control behavior. As he says, “It’s the culture, stupid.”

And it is not only media like film, television and newsprint that do this. It can also be advertising, even in ways that are not directly related to the bottom line.

For instance, the blatantly anti-White male series run by Washington Mutual Bank (WaMu) a few years back is unmistakable in its disdain for traditional White society. The conceit is that a nonthreatening and personable Black man in khaki trousers is superior to the crowd of stuffy White (non-Jewish) male bankers who are “from the last century.” Have a look. As we are introduced to a series of White male faces, the narrator intones, “They’re out of touch. They’re old fashioned. They’re greedy.” In contrast, the audience consists of “regular people.” You know, Black women, Pakistani immigrants, and most of all our Black male emcee.  The White males are imbeciles — one stating “I’m clueless and rich.”

Another commercial in the series has the herd of White male bankers threatening to jump from the roof of the bank because super banker Bill (the African American) has introduced wildly successful new banking products that the White bankers had never dreamed of. The ad closes with the bankers’ wives being hydraulically lifted to the roof to berate their emasculated banker husbands.

In perhaps the most offensive version, our Black banker Bill explains the source of WaMu’s success. Taking a secret elevator down into the basement, he reveals his secret: “Here at WaMu we have the bankers’ pen. It’s simple—If these stodgy old bankers think an idea is wrong, then we know it’s right.” When the pen of White bankers gets riled up over the new business practices Bill has overseen, he placates them by having a large champagne dispenser lowered into the cage, just as baby calves are bottle fed out in the barn.

(Far be it from me to gloat over the failures of multiculturalism, but I did notice that last fall WaMu went bankrupt. I guess Black banker Bill’s ideas were not that applicable in the real world.)

I know my friends and relatives are watching such advertising all the time. In addition to a similar message of White displacement being preached at all levels of education (ever look at the textbooks your kids are assigned?), the meaning is crystal clear. Why the denial, then?

Honestly, this kind of image is now part of the furniture that is found in the American living room. Think about Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show for starters. For many Americans — especially young adults, he sets the stage for viewing reality. Now, I know what the response of the vast majority of Whites is to anti-White images: as long as they are funny, anything goes. It doesn’t’ matter how vile, untrue or damaging the images are, just as long as they are funny. Needless to say, Blacks, Jews, women, and a string of other minorities long ago learned that humor was one of the most effective ways to attack, belittle and disenfranchise a target group. Whites in general, however, are clueless.

For instance, The Daily Show recently ran a skit called White in America—the Children, which operated on a number of levels. The most basic message was that Whites’ days as majority Americans were numbered. Stewart opens the skit by announcing that “President Obama was elected on a message of change. But is that change good for everyone?” Light-skinned Black Larry Wilmore adopts the role of reporter, introducing one set of Americans at risk: “There is one group of Americans who are now facing the biggest challenge in their history: White people.”

This “once proud race” faces dispossession at the hands of Blacks, Asians “and most rapidly, Latinos” (the transition being represented in the skit by White minivans being replaced by Black cars, Asian motorcycles and low-rider Mexican American cars). In a faux-serious interview, Wilmore faces a group of eight White children and tries to make them understand that their future is bleak. The children—brainwashed already by a steady diet of multiculturalism—are not only in denial about their prospects, they positively welcome the coming change.

The only blonde young girl, for instance, testily responds to observations about her group’s decline, blurting out “We’re not upset in any way, shape or form.” More realistic about race realities, interviewer Wilmore solemnly informs them: “You will be.”

Of course he is absolutely right. Displacement and loss of power have been utterly devastating to groups throughout history. Think how well Americans Indians have fared. Or modern Palestinians. To fail to be upset by such a prospect goes far beyond mere denial, it seems to me. To give up power in a situation where the groups who inherit power (particularly Jews, Blacks, and Latinos) have historical grudges against Whites seems the ultimate folly.

Showing his well-rehearsed multicultural response to the “inevitable” coming changes in America, a White boy quizzes Wilmore, asking “What if this happens and only good change occurs in America?” What kind of Kool-Aid are such young White children already drinking? Perhaps it’s understandable that White children believe these things. The truly pathetic part is that such childish fantasies of about the future of Whites in multicultural America are believed by White adults.

Again, I want to stress the pervasiveness of such images of White dispossession. As mentioned, I’ve written extensively about Hollywood’s scripted replacement of Whites, but you can find it just about everywhere. The venerable Atlantic Monthly, for instance, has for some years now been running prominent ads from the top corporations in America—Microsoft, UPS, Lockheed Martin, etc.—that visually celebrate the coming diversity they see in our future.

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, for example, envisions their future rockets being built by a whole range of races — completely unlike the real history of rocketry, where White males did all the thinking, designing and building.

Lockheed Martin ad with future rocket scientists

Microsoft took an even more blatant approach to the same idea, announcing: “We see a rocket scientist.” In the picture, a Black youth is the future rocket scientist. (The odds of someone from a population with an average IQ of 85 producing a rocket scientist are miniscule.) Around him are an Asian boy, a presumably Hispanic boy, a mulatto girl, and two White girls. Real White male rocket scientists and astronauts need not apply.

Microsoft ad: “We see a rocket scientist” (I don’t)

To be sure, NASA itself has been part of this lunge toward diversity, scrapping its all-White male pool of Apollo astronauts for a predictably diverse cast, such as we see here in a crew photo of the space shuttle astronauts who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion:

Space Shuttle Challenger Crew

Space Shuttle Columbia Crew, with Israeli flag

(Nearly two decades later, the multicultural look was still in force at NASA, though the second time a shuttle orbiter was lost, an Israeli was among the crew. This made for a good photo op with both nations’ flags.)

My favorite ad is another Lockheed Martin creation, this one celebrating the joys of diversity in (allegedly) fostering unique perspectives and innovation — which is why the world has seen such stunning fighter jets conceived and produced in places ranging from Mozambique to Polynesia to Ecuador. Here are the people who will be responsible for Lockheed Martin’s future jets. You go, girls!

Lockheed Martin ad featuring non-White female space scientists

The gauntlet laid down for the White race is formidable: demographics, immigration, affirmative action, White self-hate, and the relentless efforts of Jewish groups to eliminate Whites as rivals for world domination.

But I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is room for optimism, such as that displayed by VDARE’s Steve Sailer, who recently wrote, “The interaction of government-sponsored non-traditional immigration and “disparate impact” affirmative action constitutes a doomsday machine the will rapidly dispossess, and probably seriously radicalize, White America. It’s a recipe for revolution.”

Obviously, I don’t see our dispossession as positive, but I sure would be happy if Sailer is right about a coming White revolution. Sadly, I just don’t see it—and the non-responses of my friends and family discussed above strikes me as typical.

No doubt what really turns people off is when I persist in discussing what I see as the root cause of White dispossession: Jewish activism. We at The Occidental Observer have focused on this cause since the inception of the website last year. I insist on this because I believe political philosopher Carl Schmitt was right: “It’s not only you who chooses your enemy, it’s more often your enemy who chooses you.”

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

Money Talks

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Never has money been so important in human relations. Never has it so much affected the destiny of so many Americans and Europeans. Today money has become a civil religion that makes it the centerpiece of discourse in all cultures and subcultures. At European and American cafes, on the Champs Élysées, or on Sunset Boulevard, at concert halls, and even in parliaments, one hears and smells its verbal derivatives such as “moulah,” “dough,” “fric,” “Kohle,” “pognon.”  It is a language understood by all. In all segments of their lives Western citizens invariably talk about money and what money can buy. The great respite may come with the current financial crisis, which is finally undoing the liberal system with all its conventional wisdoms and lies. The ongoing economic depression may be the sign that the reign of money and the dictatorship of well-being are coming to an end.

Sounds familiar? No, it does not.  In ancient European traditions money and commerce were looked down upon and at times these two activities were in principle forbidden to Europeans. Merchants were often foreigners and considered second class citizens.

The famous English poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence — a “revolutionary nationalist” — talks about “money madness” in his collection of poems Pansies. His poem “Kill money” summarizes best this facet of 20th-century mores: Kill money/put money out of existence/It is a perverted instinct/A hidden thought /which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul.

Similar views were held by the long forgotten American Southern agrarians in the 30’s, who viciously attacked American money madness and the belief in progress. They had dark premonitions about the future of America. As noted by John Crowe Ransom, “Along with the gospel of progress goes the gospel of service. Americans are still dreaming the materialistic dreams of their youth.” And further he writes: “The concept of Progress is the concept of man’s increasing command, and eventually a perfect command over the forces of nature: a concept which enhances too readily our conceit and brutalizes our life.”

Thousands of book titles and thousands of poems from antiquity all the way to early modernity bear witness to a tradition of deep revulsion Europeans had for money and merchants. Charles Dickens’ description of the character Fagin the Jew in his novel Oliver Twist may be soon cut out from the mandatory school curriculum. Fagin’s physical repulsiveness, his strange name, and most of all his Jewish identity do not square with modern ukases on ethnic and diversity training in American schools. The crook Fagin illustrates boundless human greed when he sings to himself and his young  captive boys: “In this life, one thing counts / In the bank, large amounts / I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees, / You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two / You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys, / You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.”

Already Ezra Pound, a connoisseur of the English language and a visionary on the methods of usury, and his contemporary,  Norwegian Nobel prize winnerKnut Hamsun, have disappeared from library shelves. Their fault? They critically examined the crisis of financial capitalism, or what we call more euphemistically today “global recession” and the main movers and shakers behind it.

In medieval times, money and the merchant class were social outcasts solely needed to run the economy of a country. Yet today they have morphed into role models of the West represented by a slick and successful banker dressed in an Armani suit and sporting a broad smile on his face. What a change from traditional Europe in which an intelligent man was destined for priesthood, sainthood, or a military career!

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It is with the rising tide of modernity that the value system began to change. Even nowadays the word ‘merchant’ in the French and the German languages (marchand, Händler) has a slightly pejorative meaning, associated with a foreigner, prototypically a Jew. The early Catholic Church had an ambiguous attitude toward money — and toward Jews. Well known are St. Luke’s parables (16:19–31) that it “is easier for a camel to go thru the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

But the Church chose a less pious way to power. In 1179, the Third Lateran Council forbade Jews from living in Christian communities and exiled them to ghettos — with full rights to practice usury and tax collecting. To a large extent the Church, while providing the best shelter for Jews against frequent bouts of popular anti-Jewish anger, also greatly amassed wealth — courtesy of Jewish tax collectors.

The father of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire, is often quoted as a first spokesman of tolerance and human rights in Western civilization. But it is often forgotten that Voltaire was also an unabashed anti-Semite. Voltaire’s critical remarks about Jews and their love for money were recently expunged from his books, or simply not translated. But some still thrive such as “always superstitious and greedy for the good of others, always barbarous, crawling when in misfortune and insolent in prosperity, that is what the Jews were in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans..”  (Essais sur les mœurs) 

The ancient European ruling class certainly had its share of corruption and greed. But in principle, until the Enlightenment, the social roles of money and merchants were subjugated to the role of the prince and power politics. Until then, the entire value system had been based on spiritual transcendence and not on economic growth — at least in its appearance. In ancient Greece, King Midas who was a kind man, could not resist the temptation of turning everything into gold with his magic fingers, until he ruined his family, turned water into undrinkable metal, and his face assumed the shape of a donkey. King Croesus went berserk after amassing so much wealth that he could not devote his time and his thoughts to the impending war with the Persians.

In the ancient European tradition, revulsion against money pervades the sagas and the old popular legends, teaching everybody that piety prospers over prosperity. Material wealth brings disaster.

Today, by contrast, official advocacy of frugality and modesty is perceived as a sign of the early stage of lunacy. If a well-educated and well-cultivated man comes along and starts preaching modesty or rejects honoraria for his work, he is considered a failure, a person who does not respect his own worth. How on earth can some well-read and well-bred person offer his services for free?  How on earth can a well-educated man refuse using his mental resources to generate the almighty dollar? The answer is not difficult to discover. In capitalism everything has its price, but nothing has value.

The modern liberal capitalist system is a deeply inhuman system, based on fraudulent teaching that everybody is equal in economic competition. In reality though, it rewards only those whose skills and talents happen to be marketable. Those rare Whites who decide to retain some vestiges of old European traditions are squarely pronounced incompetent.  Liberal capitalism both in America and in Europe has turned all humans into perishable commodities.

Nobody summarized this better than the Italian philosopher Julius Evola,another revolutionary nationalist who wrote: “Facing the classical dilemma ‘your money or your life,’ the bourgeois will answer: ‘Take my life but leave me my money.’”

Greed, passionate greed eclipses all elements of human decency. Until relatively recently avarice was laughed at and its chief protagonists were considered immoral people, so well represented in Molière’s comedy L’Avare. Today the greedier the better: The money maker is the ultimate role model.

Both East and West participate in this ethic of greed. The richest people in post-communist Eastern Europe are former communist hacks who converted themselves in a twinkle of an eye from disciples of Marx into acolytes of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Finance capitalism provides the perception of limitless possibility of how to get rich out of the blue. This is a typical Bernie Madoff syndrome, namely that affluence can be created by sheer speculation. The entire banking system in Eastern Europe has been sold to foreigners over the last 10 years.

Modern capitalism and a penchant for finance owe much to Judaism.  Werner Sombart, a German disciple of Max Weber, who can in no way be called an anti-Semite wrote in The Jews and Modern Capitalism that “money was their sole companion when they were thrust naked into the street, and their sole protector when the hand of the oppressor was heavy upon them. So they learned to love it, seeing that by its aid alone they could subdue the mighty ones of the earth. Money became the means whereby they — and through them all mankind — might wield power without themselves being strong.”

Money changes social mores too. Young White couples put off having children until they achieve their economic dreams, while Mexicans and Blacks begin having children as impoverished teenagers, and Muslims place a high value on fertility. This is one of the main causes of our malaise, as White societies with declining fertility are inundated by highly fertile non-White populations with value systems that prize fertility over the accumulation of the accouterments of economic success.

And in this economic recession these Whites are not interested in a pay raise but rather in how to keep their job — security at all cost, even if it means working for lower wages. Neither are young job market entrants interested in saving money. Instead they live on credit in their petty little niche with their petty little pleasures and without incurring any risks.

What a difference from early American pioneers described by Jack London, who braved the vagaries of weather and who totally ignored the meaning of “hedge funds”! The attractions of money and the necessity of making money mean that everybody in our postmodern world becomes prey to the system.

It is a fundamental mistake among many so called right wingers and racialists to assume that capitalism is the only answer to communism. Both systems are in fact similar because they preach the same religion of progress and the unfolding of earthly paradise — albeit in different gears.  But this time liberal capitalism has nobody to hide behind in order to conceal its vulgar depravity. The likely hypothesis is that the crumbling capitalist system will fall apart as a result of its own victory. One dies always from those who give him birth.

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info/; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com/) is an author, former political science professor in the USA, translator and former Croat diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age ( 2007).