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Culture: The Missing Link in Euro-American Nationalism

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The term ‘nationalism’ has become obsolete. And it should remain so: both in America and Europe. It was promising, modern, revolutionary, and it went hand in hand with the liberal and socialist revolutions in 1848. Later on, due to semantic shifts in the aftermath of WWII, it became a monster word in Europe, squarely equated with the term ‘Nazism’. And since Nazism stands in modern discourse as a synonym for absolute evil, no wonder that its milder etymological derivative, such as the adjective ‘national’ is avoided.

Of course, there are respectable nationalist parties in Europe such as the BNP in the United Kingdom, Le Front National in France, L’Alleanza Nazionale in Italy, or the NPD in Germany, with all of them sporting the adjective “national” in their party logos or in their letterheads. But this is a far cry from the noun ‘nationalist’ — which they all prudently avoid. Neither Nick Griffin, nor Jean Marie le Pen, nor Udo Voigt, will ever publicly exclaim: “I am proud of being a French, or British, or German nationalist!” However, even with their toned down rhetoric aimed at hiding the pesky qualifier “national,” there is no way they can dodge the smear campaign by the European media, which depicts them all as closet crypto- Nazis.

Such a lexical malaise only causes further semantic confusions in view of the fact that the word ‘Nazi’ was never in official use in the Third Reich. It has always been a derogatory word in the arsenal of former or current opponents of National Socialism. How for instance would neocon luminaries such as Irving Kristol or Norman Podhoretz like being tagged as “former commie” sympathizers? No serious scholar would ever resort the pejorative word ‘commie’ when describing past communist terror. The only exception is the pejorative word ‘Nazi’.

As a German legal scholar Josef Schüsselburner in his much acclaimed recent book points out, it is no wonder that contemporary leftist and liberal scholars avoid the German compound noun “National Socialism” (Nationalsozialismus), given that the noun “Sozialismus” (and not the preceding adjective “National” ) is conspicuously reminiscent of humane, socialist do-good theories which liberals and communists like to brag about. It’s hard for modern liberal and leftist opinion makers to swallow the fact that in the mid-1930s, National Socialist Germany tapped into the socialist heritage, which resulted in the first modern welfare state in Europe —  a state that achieved an awesome economic miracle. Germany had lifted its currency off the gold standard and began using a mixture of command and free market economy.

Politically and ideologically, Hitler made a visible effort to co-opt the SPD (Social Democratic Party) electorate and integrate it in his regime, an effort that was largely successful with his “social-state-socialist” economic policies. Even the exiled SPD observed in 1934 that the Hitler regime was labor-oriented and therefore could lean much on former SPD voters. … What appears obvious is the deliberate classification in the socialist tradition, because otherwise National Socialism would have not named itself “national-socialist,” but possibly “social-nationalist.” …

The main acknowledgment of the chief NS propagandist, Joseph Goebbels was: “When I think in terms of socialism, I must be an anti-Semite, because the Jew is the incarnation of capitalism.” (Josef Schüsselburner, Roter, brauner und grüner Sozialismus (Red, Brown, and Green Socialism), 2008).

America: The White Revival?

The term “White nationalist” that is so common in America is a misnomer. Often it is used as a code word for White racialists, although the term “patriot” would be more digestible because it is less value-loaded. Nor can American nationalism be historically or sociologically the equivalent of European nationalism. Despite its evident verbal shortcoming, the expression “White nationalism” in America has conceptually, but also in terms of its political feasibility, a distinct advantage over a multitude of European nationalisms which are often at odds which each other. The North American continent represents a unique land mass in the world in which over 200 million citizens of European ancestry live side by side without being embroiled in linguistic disputes or other quarrels among White subgroups. as is common in Europe. America, or at least some part of it, is, therefore, geopolitically and racially better positioned in the near future to be in the forefront of the European cultural revival than any other aspiring nation state in Europe.

Moreover, unlike in Europe, American White nationalists do not have to justify their nationalism by resorting to “negative identity” — that is, by seeking political legitimacy through the exclusion or demonization of other neighboring White nationalisms.

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The major flaw of contemporary American nationalists, racialists, or (crudely put) “right-wingers” is that they often define their national awareness by harping on one single issue while neglecting the broader picture of cultural hegemony. Pat Buchanan is one of the rare American patriots who understands the vital point of culture warfare as a tool in obtaining political power. Many American nationalists and self-proclaimed racialists, including even some cultivated racialists, cannot help but framing their nationalism in terms of race discourse only. Some, on the other hand seem to be solely obsessed with Jews. Some will rave and rant eternally against illegal Mexicans.

These types of one-issue conservatism are repellant to the broad American masses and they definitely cripple the credibility of American White nationalists. As laudable as any of these single-issue approaches may be, when taken separately they are non-starters for obtaining cultural hegemony. A single-issue approach makes American nationalists appear in the eyes of European nationalists as too reductionistic, to put it academically — or as a laughing stock, to put it non-academically. 

Many American sociobiologists and race theoreticians of staggering erudition have made path-breaking inroads in the study of human behavior and particularly in the role of IQ in politics. But there is a common tendency of overspecialization and the neglect of a sense of the sacred, the role of myths, the role of art, or the social and political factor of European sagas. Such a purely mechanistic attitude can never elicit a positive response among White American masses at large, who in their vast majority have a poor sense of racial consciousness and are badly in need of a true role model. Whoever visited MENSA gatherings knows that these meetings can be incredibly boring.

In fact many American ‘classy’ racialists fall in the same trap as Marxist intellectuals when they replace economic determinism with genetic determinism. The reality is that man, or for that matter White man, is more than his IQ or his genetic  endowment. The spirit of the Parthenon in Greece or the spiritual modesty of General Lee amply demonstrates that there are also other venues that need to be explored.

The Parthenon

A blue collar worker nationalist in the United Kingdom knows very well the meaning of the name Geoffrey Chaucer or William Shakespeare — although he may have never read them. A German farmer knows perfectly well the transcendental meaning of the names Richard Wagner or Goethe. Not so in America, where White nationalists look for role models in fleeting creatures of often dubious morality and often semi-criminal record — and who usually last only a short time. In hindsight it appears that on the political front, ever since Huey Long or George Wallace American nationalists, whether on the political front or on the intellectual front, have had zero success.

By neglecting the broader picture that would include other related fields, stretching from philosophy to literature and linguistics, American nationalists and racialists provide a perfect target for leftist and Jewish watchdog groups who know deadly well the crucial role of cultural hegemony in wielding political power.

American self- proclaimed “Nazis” are a case in point, presenting the grotesque picture of what historically National Socialism had never been in Germany. With their caricatured imagery and posted insignia harkening back to National Socialist Germany, American Nazis fit perfectly into the preconceived monster picture of their zealous detractors, such as the $PLC or the ADL.

The Main Foe of Nationalism: Capitalism

Many American right wingers are deeply concerned about out-of-ocontrol non-European immigration while at the same time having a quasi-religious veneration of the free market. As I wrote a long time ago in a well annotated piece, the free market, or capitalism, is by definition “raceless.” Unless it is controlled by a racially conscious political class, it is bound to destroy America’s White racial stock faster than all illegals from all parts of the world combined. Capitalism rejects the race factor and despises any form or ethnocentrism. A merchant does not like borders and could not care less whether his customer is black, brown, or yellow. All European nationalists, despite being virulent anti-Marxists, and in contrast to American nationalists, are without exception highly critical of the free market and capitalism.

On a more intimate level, it would be interesting to carry out a study as to the percentage of “proud White” Americans who resort furtively to illegal cheap labor from across the Rio Grande. By extension, this equation could also apply to boisterous “proud White males” from Australia, who in search of cheap flesh and dope travel to Thailand for a quick out-group sexual escapade.

While it is more than commendable to mate within the same in-group, there is always a cultural element that needs to be factored in. Over the last twenty years many American nationalist men seem to have found a treasure trove among East European and Russian women — whose sense of tradition and womanhood is unquestionably better preserved than among American women. American nationalist men also look to these areas for wives because American women are likely to view their nationalist beliefs as toxic. By contrast, the legacy of communist barbarism has turned many of Eastern European nationalist males into a crass and uncouth flock — hardly appealing to women.

What is to be done?

Among post-communist East European and Russian nationalists, despite animosity towards American individualism, there is a dose of hidden awe and servility toward all things American. This inferiority complex works on both sides of the Atlantic, and if not bridged by aggressive cultural and linguistic exchange, it won’t solidify White peoples around the globe.

It remains a puzzle why American nationalists do not use an interdisciplinary culture-bound approach in their activism or in their self-promotion. But first and foremost they need to make a sharp distinction between political activism and intellectual proselytizing. The latter must always precede the former — something that Western European nationalists grasped a long time ago. The left — from the early Bolsheviks to the 1960s countercultural protestors — have been well aware of this over the last century.

American nationalists have enough cultural firepower for reasonable intellectual debates. Although important, the race factor cannot be the only carrier of national identity. Numerous gatherings of American nationalists could for a change address topics of literature and politics and discuss authors like Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, HL Mencken and the meaning of American prometheanism. The great telluric and symbolist poems by a great postmodern American poet, Joseph D. Pryce, could attract many potential fellow Euro-American patriots and greatly dissipate the ambiance of fear, suspicion and “guilt by association.”

The South has its intellectual heavyweights too. One only needs to bring up the name of the great antebellum thinker George Fitzhugh in order to grasp the mendacity of liberals. In many ways his prose is far more revealing than that of the Brit George Orwell writing a hundred years later. John Calhoun’s views on race are as refreshing today as they were two centuries ago.

In many ways the intellectual heritage of the American nationalists is on par with the European nationalist tradition and sometimes even surpasses it, as demonstrated by the Southern agrarians, who early on demolished the liberal myth of economic progress and whose intellectual diversity spreads out from literature to poetry and linguistics.

Modern American nationalists are still privileged by the First Amendment and have the means of communicating from Alabama to Alaska in one vernacular. If better organized and with folks of impeccable modesty and sincerity at the helm, they could resuscitate the impressive Euro-American cultural heritage and use it as a tool against liberal and leftist smear campaigners.

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).

Controlling Anti-Jewish Stereotypes: The Case of the “Hook-Nosed Jew”

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One of my interests in life is the bizarre phenomenon of anti-Jewish propaganda manufactured by elite and well-organized cadres of Jews.

Israel Shamir, in his controversial book Cabbala of Power, makes an interesting point about “hook-nosed Jews.” It seems that many Jews, far from shrinking from mention of their noses, never lose an opportunity to reinforce this particular stereotype by referring to their own noses negatively if there is no one else around to do so. When Jewish cemeteries are vandalized or swastikas are found defacing walls, the culprits on numerous occasions have turned out to be Jews. (See, e.g., here and here.) So it is with the legendary “Jewish nose”: a protected species of stereotype deliberately nurtured and kept alive by organized Jewry for propaganda purposes.

Shamir recounts several of these instances. David Mamet, Jewish American playwright, once noticed a bumper sticker on a car: “Israel, Out of the Settlements!” Mamet took umbrage. “This could well be translated,” he huffed, “as Hook-nosed Jews, Die!” Writing an article for The Age, a Jewish publication, Graham Barrett slyly invoked the same carefully cultivated stereotype. “The retired Malaysian Prime Minister,” he told his readers, “took a parting snipe at the ‘hook-nosed Jews’ who rule the world by proxy.”

But this is ridiculous. The Malaysian Prime Minister, as everyone knows, made no reference to “hooked-nosed Jews.” And Mamet is simply fantasizing about the attitudes of someone who was taking an entirely reasonable point of view on the Middle East. In his twisted world, any criticism of Israel, no matter how reasonable, is just another crazed statement of a Jew-hater whose images of Jews come right out of a Der Sturmer cartoon.

David Mamet  Imagines  How Critics of Israel See Jews

With the reader’s permission, I shall continue my disquisition on Jewish noses for a bit. The legendary ‘Jewish nose’, though fairly common among non-Jews, appears to cause our Jewish cousins extra special anguish. Rhinoplasty, invented by German-Jewish surgeon Jacques Joseph in the 1890s, largely caught on because its earliest and most enthusiastic customers were Jews. When Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice had her nose job, Dorothy Parker (herself half Jewish) quipped: “Fanny has cut off her nose to spite her race!”  Since then, many famous Jews have gone under the knife, including Natalie Portman (Herschlag), Winona Ryder (Horowitz), Gwyneth Paltrow (Paltrowitz), and Sarah Jessica Parker (Bar-Kahn).

Though this would appear to be a relatively frivolous subject, the intelligent reader will understand that it is not the Jewish nose per se that is of interest to me. I am really interested in Jewish power — in this case, the power to suppress any public discussion of a Jewish stereotype based to a considerable extent on the reality of Jewish noses. It’s really the same as Jewish ability to suppress statements that Jews have inordinate influence on the media. Truth is irrelevant.

In fact, it is the whole cluster of alleged anti-Semitic stereotypes and fabricated “canards“ that hover over any discussion of organized Jewry, or of Israel, and which make it almost impossible for anyone to discuss Jewish issues without being branded “anti-Semitic.”

“Eagle County is on the lookout for a Big-nosed Jew!” screams the inflammatory headline in a recent edition of the Denver Post.  Apparently a man who broke into someone’s house was spotted by a member of the public who then went on to give the police a description of the burglar: a man of medium height, medium weight, nondescript looking face, baseball cap pulled low. Helpful? The cops didn’t seem to think so — until the witness suddenly blurts, “Oh yeah, he had this big Jewish nose!”  Light suddenly dawns. The cops grin. The pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to slip into place. Hey, with a description like that you can’t go wrong! You’ve more or less got your man.

Denver Post reporter Susan Greene, who describes herself as Jewish, tackles the story with considerable aplomb, making all the right politically correct noises. First of all, the witness who described the burglar as having a “big Jewish nose” was clearly an anti-Semite. He should have watched his language, the bigoted lout. The cops were equally insensitive for taking down the witness’s toxic words without so much as a murmur. As for the local newspapers, how could their editors have been so stupid as to legitimize anti-Semitism by giving traction to the stereotype that Jews had funny cartoon noses? 

One Adam Sutner, quoted in the Denver Post, is beside himself with rage. The whole sordid affair reminds him of “one of Joseph Goebbels’ finer works of propaganda.” Reporter Greene notes caustically: If the “scary Semitic sneakthief” (burglar) had horns, the bigoted witness “failed to mention it.”

Needless to say, the ADL has been quick to complain. The editors of local rags, beating their breasts in anguish at their own insensitivity, offer unparalleled apologies. “This has shaken my confidence in my own ability,” one of them confides dolefully. Being Jewish, however, he hopes to be forgiven. The remainder, the goyim contingent, need to grovel a bit longer before absolution is granted.

“As a Jew with a nose, I’m sitting out this debate,” reporter Greene concludes on a wistful note.

What is the point of this storm-in-a-teacup brouhaha? Is it the need to create distractions? Are the goyim being lured into thinking about Jewish noses in order to deflect their attention from Jewish crimes? Forget Madoff, mister, think about our goddamn noses! No, I don’t think so.

The point I am making is this: if you can brainwash the lumpengoyim to such an extent that they dare not even refer to a “Jewish nose” for fear of offending Jews, then you have nothing to worry about in regard to the Jews’ real sins: hijacking US foreign policy in the interests of serving the racialist, apartheid state of Israel while at the same time being the main force responsible for erecting the culture of Western suicide, including especially the attack on traditional values and the sacral core of life. These, after all, are the things that matter. Not the Jewish nose.

But let’s get back to Jewish noses.

In Cabbala of Power Shamir describes an email from a stranger called ‘Sam Jones’. It said: “Your valiant efforts and writings are appreciated throughout this nation. I deeply share your contempt for the hook-nosed Zionist vermin. Every dirty Jew should be put back into the ovens. Thanks once again for your help in conveying this vital message.”

Shamir reveals that his unknown correspondent’s email address was finally traced to a certain Zionist provocateur. The same mischief maker had been bombarding Jeff Blankfort with similar emails, but Jeff saw through his game. The phrase “hook-nosed Jew” is always a giveaway, Shamir notes — “a clear sign of the Jewish effort to turn antizionist or anti-Judaic polemics into racist ones.”

If the “Jewish nose” ceased to exist, organized Jewry would be all the poorer for the loss of a valuable propaganda tool. In fact, if anti-Semitism didn’t exist, it might have to be invented.

Many of these bogus “insults” to Jews follow a predictable pattern. An initial gaffe that purportedly wounds the feelings of millions of traumatized Jews all over the world is invariably followed by howls of protest from Jew and gentile alike. Apologize, or be damned! A groveling apology follows.

Here are two cases which help to illustrate the point that Jew and gentile, these ancient ideological enemies, are now locked in a sadomasochistic bondage game in which the Jew wields the whip and the non-Jew cowers and cringes.

In October 2007, celeb actress Halle Berry appeared on “The Tonight Show” where she made an innocuous joke about the Jewish nose. Berry had been showing photographs of herself taken the previous day, using the Mac program Photo Booth, which distorts images like in a fun-house mirror. Commenting on the first picture, in which her nose looked like an enormous gherkin, Berry foolishly blurted: “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin!”

A stunned silence. Host Leno blinks and veils his troubled eyes. “I’m glad you said that and not me,” he sighs. Berry tenses, her eyes literally popping out on stalks. “Ohmigod,” she whispers, “have I just like ruined my career?”

Let’s assume it was a genuine gaffe and not a publicity stunt for Jewish noses.

Wasn’t it a subtle kind of cat-and-mouse cruelty to put this lovely actress through her subsequent humiliation? To force her to grovel? For a start, why, pray tell, does her career have to depend on the Jews? How come the Jews have managed to achieve a position of such total transcendence in America that they can now ruin someone’s career just for referring to their noses?

After a long and unnecessary apology for offending precisely no one, Berry concluded pathetically on this note of abject contrition: “It just came out of my mouth. I didn’t mean to offend anybody. I didn’t. I didn’t mean any harm. I am so sorry, and I apologize.

Oh Mr. Foxman, why weren’t you there to receive the lady’s kiss on the sole of your sainted foot?

The second incident of goy humiliation has nothing to do with the Jewish nose—a subject which, I confess, is now beginning to fatigue me. It is the famous incident involving one of America’s most hated men, the monster who made that unforgettable movie in Latin and Aramaic celebrating the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Because he’d had the chutzpah to make this “anti-Semitic” movie which in every way was the antithesis of the type of filth and feculence that now oozes from the sewers of Hollywood, Mel Gibson was a marked man. They were waiting for him to slip up. And slip up he did — big time.

I hardly need to repeat the story. I will summarize. Gibson got drunk. He was then arrested, and in the course of his close encounter with the cops, he made a few unhelpful and inappropriate remarks. He didn’t tell the cops that it might be a good idea to boil Jesus Christ in excrement.  No, he left that to the Talmud. He didn’t call the Virgin Mary a whore, either, though it’s true he referred to a female cop as “sugar tits.” He didn’t tell anyone to cut off other people’s testicles, as Ariel Sharon, “man of peace,” told Israeli soldiers to cut off the testicles of Palestinian demonstrators in the West Bank. (See here, Chapter 4, note 111.)

No, Mel went one step further. He insulted the police officer arresting him by asking him the politically incorrect question, “Are you a Jew?” And then he spewed forth these sacrilegious words: “F***ing Jews! The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world! You mother****er, I’m gonna  f*** you!”

Such a torrent of vile abuse was clearly unprecedented, only made bearable in subsequent newspaper reports by the judicious use of asterisks.

Poor Mel! His doom was sealed. He might as well have thrown himself into a tank full of piranhas. His abject apology to the Jews, like Halle Berry’s, could hardly have provided a clearer testament to the almost totalitarian power of the kings of contemporary America.

Here, in slightly abbreviated form, is Gibson’s groveling apology:

After drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I acted like a person completely out of control and said things which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed  of everything I said and I apologize to anyone who I have offended. I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry. I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state.

Six apologies one after the other! Mel Gibson: Model of contrition. Paradigm of penitence. And here now is Abe Foxman, one of the New Masters, a cold and implacable Caiaphas:

Mel Gibson’s apology is unremorseful and insufficient. It’s not a proper apology. His tirade reveals his true self. We hope that Hollywood now realize the bigot in their midst and distance themselves from this anti-Semite.

Jesus wept.

Meanwhile, the courageous and insightful James Petras expresses his concern that in the land where Jesus walked, Jews were recently seen to picnic round the blood-spattered gates of Gaza. Here they were free to participate in the gory bloodfest of the 2008-09 Palestinian mini-genocide enjoying their favorite sport of shooting fish in a barrel. Israeli T-shirts, some showing a pregnant Palestinian woman with a crosshairs over her stomach, bore the heartless slogan, “One Shot Two kills!”  And IDF soldiers were instructed by their superior officers, “Do anything you want!”

This has now been further documented in the booklet “Breaking the Silence” which compiles testimonies of soldiers in “the most moral army in the world“:

Among the 54 testimonies are stories revealing the use of “accepted practices,” the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorous gas in the direction of populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions.

Don’t expect this report to be discussed in the New York Times any time soon.

I am too distressed to make any further observations on the Jewish nose, so let me conclude with these prophetic words by Palestinian Christian and ex-Jew Israel Shamir, as presented by TOO‘s Edmund Connelly:

“The Jews” — Shamir makes a distinction between organized Jewry and individual Jews — “intend to turn Jerusalem into the supreme capital of the world, and its rebuilt temple into the focal point of the Spirit on Earth.” Should they succeed, unspeakable despair will follow. “Christianity will die, the spirit will depart from the nations in our part of the world, and our present dubious democracy will be supplanted by a vast theocratic state. . . . De-spiritualized and uprooted, homeless and lonely, yesterday’s Masters of the World [non-Jews] will become slaves in all but name.”

Even as I write, Americans are being dispossessed of their country. It is being stolen from under their noses and most of them do not know it.  Europeans, too, are losing control of their  homelands.

We are all Palestinians now.

Dr. Lasha Darkmoon (email her) is an academic, age 31, with higher degrees in classics.  A published poet and translator, she is also a political  activist with a special interest in Middle Eastern affairs. ‘Lasha Darkmoon’ is a pen name.

Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com/2009/07/controlling-anti-jewish-stereotypes-the-case-of-the-hook-nosed-jew/

Notes From Central Pennsylvania: The Very Long Arm of Egalitarian Propaganda

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Life events have brought me into increasing contact with Central Pennsylvania, a vast tract of mountainous, rolling farmland stretching between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  I think it was James Carville who derided Pennsylvania as those two cities “and Alabama without Blacks in between.”

There is something to that description.  It is not a wealthy area, and it is mostly white.  In many ways, it is indeed “Appalachian America,” both by the mountains and the markers.  I see more Confederate flags here than in many places south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Are these the Scots-Irish of David Hackett Fisher’s wonderful book Albion’s Seed, the later German farmers, or a mixture?  I don’t know, but I am discovering.

As I am wont to do, I take the opportunity where I can to explore.  One thing I’ve discovered is just how far the reach of egalitarian propaganda goes.

For instance, recently I attended a Mennonite church service.  Mennonites are a pacifistic but extremely conservative religious sect, similar to the Amish but not as rejecting of technology like cars.  On the day I went to service, I was surprised to see that men and women sat on separate sides of the church.  I certainly stuck out, despite my attempts to dress conservatively. The men looked very uniform in appearance — and very ethnically German, to my eye.

You would think that if any group could resist the messages of modern America, it would be the Mennonites.  Yet I was surprised to hear, during a portion of the service that included comment from the men’s section, that the Mennonites were keen to compare themselves to the Jews:  as suffering outsiders.  The leader (he occupied the pulpit but was not quite a preacher) did a little math, comparing the (supposed) six million Jews who died in World War II to the number of Mennonites who’d been killed for their beliefs.  What he meant to show was that the Jews suffered much more than the Mennonites, and that we should bow our heads to that.

Man after man (the women did not speak) wanted to talk about how bad Hitler was, each one seeming eager to top the other with what they’d heard of Hitler’s evil.

Now, I am not here to defend Hitler or question the Holocaust, but only to note that everyone, no matter how far removed from modern culture, seems to be caught up with “Nazi fever” and the eagerness to denounce militaristic German nationalism.  To me, that’s a testament to the extreme effectiveness of Jews in their message-making efforts.

Were the Amish any different?  Our family rented a video, amusingly, from a PBS-like series on “Multiculturalism in America”, about the Amish.  One Amish spokesman defended his people by saying, roughly, “We’re all just people.  We are all human beings.  We may look a little different, but we’re all the same.”

Now that is truly amazing.  An Amish man — who presumably does not watch television or listen to the radio or even read “English” periodicals — employs egalitarianism in defense of his sect.  (The series ended with an absolutely absurd train of academics talking about the Amish as adding to the diversity of America, when the Amish are pretty much the antithesis of diversity.)
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I came away from the video bemused and a little disappointed.  What dangerous ridiculousness our society has fallen to.

Other notes:

* A late twenty-something white woman who, despite living in a fairly rural area, casually dismisses the idea of having children as “like having dogs”, i.e., not a big deal, you’re either a dog person or you’re not, etc.  Despite being smart and cute (and with a boyfriend), she declares she’s not interested in having children.

* A late teens white man who has his hair cut to resemble the style of Hispanic gangsters.

* The white daughter of a prominent local couple who runs off with a black man and has several children by him, and in most respects ends up living the “ghetto life”:  He does not support the children, engages in criminal activity, etc.

* A middle-aged white man from a conservative (and mostly white) religious tradition who has “pulled a Madonna” by adopting what appears to be one child from every continent on Earth (except Europe, off course).

* In what constitutes a nearby urban area, several sightings of white women canoodling with or accompanied by black men and who attempt to imitate the black ghetto style in their speech and appearance.

* A campaign worker for an aspiring Republican who tells me that she works on “coalitions… reaching out to Hispanics and women.”

This is not to say that Central Pennsylvania is completely lost as a racial matter, but I see all of this as examples of the seemingly limitless reach of liberal or egalitarian message-making.  It has proven effective even in the hardest-to-penetrate of areas.  In reversing this course, we have a long road ahead of us.

Christopher Donovan (email him) is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, by Leonard Zeskind

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Blood and Politics, published this May, is a history of “White nationalist” political activity between 1974 and 2004 by Leonard Zeskind, an anti-racist writer and activist who has monitored White political groups since the 1970s.  The book consists of a chronologically ordered series of chapters on phenomena including Willis Carto‘s Liberty Lobby, William Pierce‘s National Alliance, David Duke‘s campaigns, Klan groups, Holocaust deniers, survivalists, Christian Identity adherents, Aryan Nations, White separatist compounds, bank robberies and murders by White criminal conspiracies, the Populist Party,skinheads, Pat Buchanan‘s campaigns, Ruby Ridge, Waco, White power music, militias, common law courts, American Renaissance, The Bell Curve, the Oklahoma City bombing trials, the Council of Conservative Citizens, Sam Francis, and 9/11.

While it may be unfair of Zeskind to lump these diverse phenomena into a unitary “White nationalist movement,” one can avoid quibbling about terminology by simply assuming, as I will in this review, that by “white nationalist” Zeskind means a White who identifies in a positive manner as White, or any Jewish or White proponent of the reality and importance of IQ .

Zeskind places White nationalists along a spectrum between “mainstreamers” and “vanguardists.”  Mainstreamers, exemplified by Willis Carto and his Liberty Lobby, believe that a majority of Whites can be convinced to support their cause. They participate in the political process and try to develop messages that resonate with a wide audience.  Vanguardists, exemplified by William Pierce and his National Alliance, seek “a few good men,” a small “vanguard” of energetic revolutionaries who do not care if the public hates them.

Zeskind’s account makes clear that not all White nationalists are of one mind. Some are atheists, while others are Christian Identity adherents; some question the Holocaust, while others do not; some detest Neo-Nazis, while others idolize Hitler; some favor criminality and revolutionary violence, while others advocate political solutions.

Despite these differences, Zeskind shows, there is also a great deal of ideological overlap among the segments of the movement.  White nationalists who are otherwise political opponents will agree that Jews have disproportionate control over the media, or that David Duke’s political campaigns were a positive development.

Zeskind also shows that individuals in one segment of the movement often have connections to individuals in other segments of the movement.  For example, he points out that Jared Taylor, whose American Renaissance conferences welcome Jews, is a close friend of Mark Weber, who runs the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust revisionist organization.  Zeskind also describes how Willis Carto (a mainstreamer), William Pierce (a vanguardist), and Tom Metzger (a Klan leader) all tried to develop connections to the White power music scene, despite having little in common with the fans of the music. Within the network of connections among individuals in the White nationalist movement Zeskind describes, Willis Carto and William Pierce were major hubs, while other individuals, such as Sam Dickson, Bo Gritz, and Louis Beam, appeared as recurring characters in a variety of significant events.

Not surprisingly, Zeskind’s point of view is firmly grounded in the conventional wisdom of the political left.  His commentary reveals that he considers the following propositions to be firmly established:

1) The idea that the Jews “control the media” is plain nonsense.

2) The media is more than willing to give White nationalists a voice. Therefore, it is not the media that marginalizes White nationalists; rather, White nationalists marginalize themselves by saying crazy things.

3) The history of the United States is a story of progress from slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement to an ideal realization of the principle that all people are created equal.

4) The civil rights movement was a product of the genius of Black people. (Zeskind knows this from first-hand experience; though he is Jewish, he has been a “life time member of the NAACP”.)

5) The relative material and occupational advantages enjoyed by White people are a product of historical inertia and the “prerogatives of white skin.”

6) Minorities who organize along racial lines are merely seeking equal rights, while Whites who organize as Whites see politics as a “zero sum game” in which minority progress toward equal rights harms Whites.

Nevertheless, Zeskind’s book is interesting because it departs from the conventional wisdom in a number of ways.  When he began writing the book in the 1990s, the working title was “Hate Mongers,” but around 1996, Zeskind says, he “abandoned the usual discourse with which this topic is discussed.  The so-called paranoid style, scapegoating and other such ideas simply did not fit the facts as they presented themselves.”

For instance, Zeskind provides abundant evidence that White nationalist activity is not the result of stupidity.  He is clearly impressed by the intelligence of individuals like William Pierce, who was a physics professor before he was a vanguardist.  He notes that Sam Francis, who was formerly a Washington Timescolumnist, “demonstrated a keen grasp” of Antonio Gramsci‘s idea of “ideological hegemony.”

Moreover, Zeskind does not beat up on White nationalists for lacking credentials.  He explains that Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance, was raised in Japan and graduated from Yale.  Zeskind tells the story of Eveyln Rich, a woman who wrote her PhD dissertation on the Klan while supplying information about Klan activities to anti-racist watchdog organizations.  Though she “grasped the subject of her inquiry like few others” and was later active in opposing David Duke, “[a]t some point Evelyn Rich must have dropped any scholarly distance she had from white nationalists” because she married Jared Taylor.

In contrast to liberals who assume that occasional acts of violence are the only threat posed by White nationalists, Zeskind argues that White nationalism is a serious threat because the mainstreaming wing of the movement, led by politicians, lawyers and PhDs, is capable of having an effect on mainstream politics.

For example, he argues that David Duke’s political campaigns, while unsuccessful, awakened a constituency concerned with White dispossession and thereby “opened the door” for Patrick Buchanan, a relatively mainstream figure, to bring Duke’s political issues into the Republican party.  Zeskind quotes Buchanan:

The way to do battle with David Duke is not to go ballistic because Duke, as a teenager, paraded around in a Nazi costume to protest William Kunstler during Vietnam, or to shout to the heavens that Duke had the same phone number last year as the Ku Klux Klan.  Everybody in Metairie [Duke’s district] knew that.  The way to deal with Mr. Duke is the way the GOP dealt with the more formidable challenge of George Wallace.  Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues; and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.

Buchanan went on to win the New Hampshire primary in 1996 and to take over Ross Perot‘s Reform Party in 2000.

Zeskind also departs from conventional wisdom in explaining White voter behavior.  He rejects the idea that White voters voted for Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant ballot initiative in California, because they were opposed to illegal as opposed to legal immigration, or because they used immigrants as a scapegoat for the bad economy.  He explains that statistical analysis of the polling data showed only a slight correlation between voting for Proposition 187 and income level, education level, or financial worries.  There was a strong correlation, however, between a person’s likelihood of voting for Proposition 187 and the percentage of immigrants in the person’s neighborhood.  The distinction between legal and illegal immigrants did not matter to White voters.  What did matter was race and culture.

The David Duke campaigns demonstrated the same phenomenon.  The polling data showed that White voters were likely to vote against David Duke if the percentage of Black people in the neighborhood was small, but as the percentage of Black residents increased, the likelihood of voting for David Duke increased.  After carefully analyzing why Duke received the support he did, Zeskind quotes with approval a study that concluded, “Supporters in part saw Duke as a voice for whites, in the same sense that minorities have spokespersons.”  (Incidentally, that is exactly what David Duke says.)

Zeskind concludes that White nationalism is on the rise.  He argues that the end of the Cold War created a vacuum in American identity that many White people filled with an ethnic identity.  White nationalists, he says, are “committed to overturning American society rather than seeking to return it to some previous era.”  By possessing “significant resources” and giving voice and coherence to “grievances real and imagined,” White nationalists over the past three decades have succeeded in creating an “opposition to the status quo that will not go away in the near future,” Zeskind concludes.

Zeskind has condensed into narrative form a great deal of information about different White nationalist political phenomena, the overlaps among the segments, and the social connections among the individuals involved.  Reading Zeskind’s history, it was hard for me to keep straight in my head all of the meetings that took place in back woods compounds and hotel conference rooms, the large cast of recurring characters, the spiteful intra- and inter-organizational disputes, and other details that Zeskind recounts in 542 pages and supports with 77 pages of endnotes.

I created the figure below to represent visually the complexity of what Blood and Politics describes.  The overlapping colored circles constitute a Venn diagramof the White nationalist ideologies that Zeskind describes.  The dots represent individuals who hold particular combinations of views, and the lines represent social connections among the individuals.  The dots and lines in my figure are random, and the collection of ideologies is not complete, but the messy network conveys a schematic image of the world Zeskind describes: a complicated social network of individuals who inhabit different points in ideological space — what one reviewer on the dust-jacket called “a sprawling and shadowy world of racist leaders and their communities.”

Many of Zeskind’s readers will think this type of evidence proves that mainstreamers are just as dangerous as vanguardists.  But does it really show anything?  So what if every individual in the Venn circle of White nationalism, including Bell Curve author Richard Herrnstein, is connected to Timothy McVeigh by only a few degrees of separation?  So what if every White nationalist ideology, even one as tame as Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservatism, is connected by a series of overlapping ideologies to “RAHOWA” (Racial Holy War)?

Whenever there is some overlap between two ideologies, adherents of each are likely to develop a connection (one-way or two-way) on the basis of common understandings.  For example, Vanguard News Network, a web site that opposes Jews, immigration, and miscegenation (among many other things), currently has a link to a blog post by Bradley Smith, whose modus operandi is publishing advertisements in college newspapers asking for proof of Auschwitz gas chambers.  Given that Smith, a White man from Los Angeles, is married to a Mexican woman and lives south of the border, Vanguard News Network probably considers him a “race traitor,” but it promotes his work anyway.  Connections exist everywhere, but their significance is limited.

If I investigated, a la Zeskind, the social networks and political phenomena of the political left, perhaps my findings could be reduced to a diagram like the following:

Maybe George Soros plays the role of Willis Carto for the left.  Perhaps everyone on the left is only one or two degrees of separation away from such undesirables as 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who like to attend ACLU events, or leftist bomb-planters like Bill Ayers, who glom on to Barack Obama.  Liberals would think this kind of political connection-mapping is unimportant to understanding the left as a political movement.  So why does Zeskind want the left to understand White nationalists in this manner?

Zeskind actually does not want his readers to understand White nationalism; he wants his readers to defeat White nationalists politically.  For that reason, he provides details about the sneaky ways Willis Carto structured his non-profit corporations, but rarely allows his subjects to speak a complete thought. Readers are left with the impression that White nationalist ideas are mere instrumentalities of a political movement motivated by “prerational thoughts and feelings.”  Thus, the weapons to use against the White nationalists must be political, not intellectual.

Collecting seemingly trivial details about the social networks of White nationalists is necessary for building up ammunition for an important political weapon: guilt by association.  If an up-and-coming politician makes the mistake of attending a dinner where one of the speakers suggests that Jews control the media, his or her attendance will be duly noted in the anti-racist watchdogs’ databases.  Then, some time in the future, the politician will be accused of anti-Semitism, he will deny it, and the watchdogs will produce the factoid as rebuttal evidence.

Such ‘gotcha moments’ might not win political battles, but the aggregate effect of the politics of guilt by association is to quarantine White nationalist ideas. Respectable conservative politicians develop a fear of contracting a permanent case of political cooties by coming within earshot of anyone who talks about Jews having too much power or Blacks committing too many crimes.  As a result, White nationalist political organizations fail to attract the cultural indicia of legitimacy, and the media treats them as illegitimate.

Zeskind is concerned that White nationalist ideas will gain legitimacy by piggybacking on the goodwill of legitimate political institutions.  This can happen when legitimate institutions co-opt White nationalist political issues, as the Republican Party did by letting Pat Buchanan deliver his “Culture War” speechat the 1992 convention.  This can also happen when White nationalists infiltrate a legitimate institution, as when Pat Buchanan took over the Reform Party in 2000, or, as Zeskind warned recently, when Stormfront members decide to leaflet at libertarian Tea Parties.  By ringing alarm bells about the political activities of the mainstreaming end of the White nationalist spectrum, Zeskind helps to ensure that the boundary of the quarantine is drawn wide: not just around attention-getters like Kluxers and Neo-Nazis, not just around Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, but around Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster (and maybe even the Tea Parties).

There are risks to Zeskind’s approach.  By honestly admitting that the rhetoric of White nationalists as “haters” and “extremists” does not fit the facts, Zeskind undermines the popular stereotype, inculcated as early as elementary school, that Whites who organize as Whites are psychopaths seething with “hate.” Zeskind does not need this silly stereotype in order to believe that White nationalists are wrong; he is immune to their ideas because he has an unshakeable faith in egalitarianism and the falsity of all forms of “anti-Semitism.” But when ordinary, well-meaning White people realize the “hater” stereotype is a sham and that mainstreaming White nationalists are people just like themselves, will they stop and listen?  If they do, Zeskind can only hope that their faith is as strong as his.  In the course of trying to warn people not to underestimate the White nationalist threat, Zeskind might be helping to destroy a useful stereotype that, perhaps more than anything else, prevents ordinary White people from becoming apostates like Evelyn Rich.

Do I recommend this book?  Yes.  It is long but highly readable.  It is full of facts and stories, with a minimum of commentary; only rarely does Zeskind depart from a dispassionate perspective.  The book can be read in the intended fashion as a history of White nationalist political phenomena, but it can also be read as an account of experiments in creating a self-sustaining White culture in the midst of a hostile majority culture.  Occidental Observer readers may find it interesting to think about which strategies worked, which failed, and why.

Some of these experiments relate to Kevin MacDonald’s question, “Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?”  The Christian Identity religion, for example, considers Whites to be the real chosen people.  Some groups have promoted a White Zionism of sorts, arguing for the creation of a White homeland in the northwest United States.

Many of the experiments will seem strange, but it is important to remember that designing a successful political message is entirely different from constructing a logical intellectual argument.  Consider, for example, what constitutes a successful political message for the left: the 2008 “Yes We Can” Barack Obama promotional video, which featured a multicultural cast of celebrities incanting selected phrases of an otherwise uninspiring Obama campaign speech, punctuated by “Yes we can” in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and American Sign Language.  In just three weeks, this dumb yet very poignant video was downloaded 26 million times.  Thus, if many of the unsuccessful political stunts attempted by White nationalists in the past do not seem to make sense, consider that they might not have made sense even if they were successful.

There is no way to be certain about what kinds of White cultural experiments will succeed in outcompeting the culture of Western suicide.  What is more certain, however, is that one or more of them will succeed — or at least that is the impression I have after reading Blood and Politics.  Zeskind argues:

[W]hite nationalists consistently misunderstand the larger world around them.  A significant number of White people remain determined to live and live happily in a multiracial, multicultural United States.  And they do not regard themselves as “race traitors.”

Fair enough.  But as Zeskind shows with his analysis of David Duke and Proposition 187 voting patterns, these White people who are happy with “a multiracial, multicultural United States” tend to live in relatively homogeneous White communities.  As Zeskind further shows, as the percentage of non-Whites in the community increases, White people become less happy with the “multiracial, multicultural” community closing in around them, and start to vote for their race and culture.  What has happened to some neighborhoods in past decades is happening to the entire United States this century.  Thus, while the term “race traitor” might never enter their vocabulary, Whites in the future are likely find meaning in a culture and politics of Western survival, especially if the mainstream media follows Zeskind in admitting that the vocabulary of “haters” and “extremists” does not describe the reality of White nationalism.

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

Pat Buchanan on Darwin

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Pat Buchanan is without doubt the most incisive political commentator that we have. His writings on the death of the West, immigration, the neocon influence in the Republican Party, and the Israel Lobby are brilliant and courageous, and they certainly have won him no friends among the most powerful forces in the Republican Party or among the watchdogs of political correctness.

So it is with a great deal of ambivalence that I must disagree with his recent op-ed “Making a monkey out of Darwin.” The article and the book it relies on, by Eugene G. Windchy, are a compendium of Creationist ideas claiming that Darwinism has no scientific basis and that it has led to great evil. I have discussed some of these issues in a previous article on Ben Stein’s movieExpelled which links Darwinism to the Holocaust and represents the scientific community of evolutionists as an oppressive Inquisition-like establishment bent on squelching heresy (obviously far more true of the $PLC and the ADL).

One particularly objectionable claim is that Karl Marx was inspired by Darwin. Marxism is far more associated with Lamarck’s idea that people can inherit the characteristics that their ancestors acquired during their lives. The inheritance of acquired characteristics is the exact opposite of Darwin’s view that the basic mechanism of evolution is natural selection — the selective retention of genetic variants because they result in increased survival and reproductive success.

Lamarckism, not Darwinism, became official ideology in the Soviet Union — the idea being that it would be easy to reshape human nature and produce the new Soviet Man. Famously, Trofim Lysenko applied this to agriculture, hoping to get plants to change their genetic characteristics by exposing them to harsh arctic climates.

This set back Soviet agriculture for decades, but the results were far worse for humans. Lamarckians believed that it would be easy to change the culture and train people to be good socialists. Then their children would inherit those traits and voila, it would usher in a golden age where people would not have nasty, capitalist traits like greed, envy, and selfishness. In the meantime, it was eminently reasonable to simply exterminate those who didn’t get with the program and who clung to their pre-revolutionary ways. In the end, the Lamarckians in the Soviet Union rationalized the murder of many millions of their fellow citizens in the name of creating the new Soviet man.

Creationists who link Darwin with evil should also think long and hard about the fact that genocides and a great many other evils have been carried out under religious ideologies. Christiane Amanpour’s God’s Warriors on Jews,Christians, and Muslims certainly shows that religious ideology can motivate the most extreme of fanaticisms, from Jihad to much of the West Bank settler movement (including both its Christian and Jewish supporters) — all of which Buchanan presumably abhors. Is that a reason for getting rid of religion?

The problem of evil is very much with us and continues to haunt all ideologies and scientific theories that address it. For a great many people, it is completely incomprehensible that a God would allow all the violence, pain, and suffering that have always been the fate of so many humans — and animals. Positing a God to explain human behavior and human traits is useless. It doesn’t really explain anything, because we then have to ask why He would make us to be so prone to inflict suffering on others. And why would he create animals that inflict so much suffering on other animals.

The scientific route of explaining human evil as resulting from Darwinian natural selection for traits that were adaptive in spreading the genes of our ancestors is unacceptable to many because it seems to justify violence and aggression. As Buchanan notes, racial nationalism in the period prior to World War I was very much in the air and was invoked by some advocates of war. But wars and genocides occurred long before World War I — without any Darwinian ideology.

And at least some wars would not have occurred if the war mongers had been good Darwinians. For example, the Civil War was a cousin’s war fought between closely related men from different British sub-cultures. Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. (See here.) Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. From a Darwinian perspective it was a disaster in which mass murder of cousins was rationalized by a moral ideal.

Or consider World War II, the subject of Buchanan’s brilliant The Unnecessary War. It was indeed an unnecessary war — and one that would not have been launched by a British Darwinian. Buchanan is quite correct that Winston Churchill should live in infamy for his role in promoting both World War I and World War II. But did Churchill and the rest of the British elite who jumped over the cliff with him act like good Darwinians?

Buchanan is quite correct to point to Churchill’s bellicosity, his vanity, and his desire for personal power; and there are strong hints of his corruption as a result of being rescued from near bankruptcy after the stock market crash of 1929. But if Churchill was a good Darwinian, he would have been able to control these all too human impulses and think rationally about the long term good of his people. (Yes, evolutionists do believe that humans can control their primitive tendencies.) It simply made no sense to go to all out war with the closely related Germans over German hegemony over the continent — especially because in order to win, Britain had to make an alliance with the Soviet Union, the most murderous regime in history. The victory of the Soviet Union, made possible by military aid from the West, then subjected Eastern Europe to decades of brutality and economic stagnation, and it led to a prolonged and destructive Cold War. But from the standpoint of the West, all this sacrifice was endured in order to destroy genetically closer Germans. Churchill himself seems to have reveled in the destruction even of German civilians.

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No Darwinian would have done this. But Churchill — an egomaniacal, short-sighted, vainglorious war monger unaware of his ethnic genetic interests — loved it. 

Buchanan also fails to see how the defeat of Darwinism in the social sciences has led to all the ills that he deplores in the US and the contemporary West. The period from around 1890 to 1924 was a period of ethnic defense in the United States, and Darwinism was a potent tool in the hands of immigration restrictionists. Bluebloods like Henry Cabot Lodge and Madison Grant were extolling the virtues of Northern Europeans and funding the movement to end immigration — a battle that ended with the ethnically defensive immigration law of 1924 that was reaffirmed by the 1952 McCarran-Walter act. But at the same time, academic anthropology was coming under the control of the Boasians for whom the entire idea of race was anathema.

I have argued that Boasian anthropology is a Jewish intellectual movement that had the effect of undercutting Americans’ natural desire for an ethnically homogeneous culture. As immigration historian John Higham noted, by the time of the final victory in 1965, which removed national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that “it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon.”

The demise of Darwinism had major implications because it removed the only intellectually viable source of opposition to cosmopolitan ideology and a cultural pluralist model of America. In the absence of an intellectually respectable defense, ethnic defense was left to conservative religion and the popular attitudes of the less educated. These were no match for the cosmopolitan intellectual elite who quickly became ensconced in all the elite institutions of the US—especially the media and the academic world. In a very real sense, the demise of Darwinism has led to the death of the West that  Buchanan deplores. Without an intellectually compelling and scientifically based ideology of ethnic defense, it was not possible to erect barriers against the invasion of other peoples.

As I noted elsewhere, Darwin did indeed have a dangerous idea.

Evolutionary theory points to the deep structure of genocide as a particularly violent form of ethnic competition. But ethnic competition is ethnic competition whether its carried out in an orgy of violence, or by forcible removal of people from land on the West Bank by Jewish settlers or by forcible removal of Native Americans during the 19th century by white settlers, or by peaceful displacement of whites via current levels of immigration into Western societies. From a Darwinian perspective, the end result is no different. The genetic structure of the population has changed, and there are winners and losers. …

And it could be argued that adopting an explicitly Darwinian perspective would actually lead to less genocide. For example, by understanding that ethnonational aspirations are a normal consequence of our evolutionary psychology, we could at least build societies that, unlike the Soviet Union, are not likely to commit genocide on their own people. Nor would we be saddled with a multicultural cauldron of competing and distrustful ethnic groups. And, as noted in a previous article, societies based on ethnonationalism would have other benefits as well: Greater openness to redistributive policies; greater trust and political participation; and a greater likelihood of adopting democratic political systems based on the rule of law.

My alternate view of the 20th century in America is that if a robust Darwinian intellectual elite had remained in place, the cosmopolitan revolution that opened up America to immigration of all peoples never would have occurred. The immigration restrictionism of the 1920s would have been institutionalized in all the elite institutions of the United States, and it would have developed an increasingly sophisticated theoretical underpinning as the evolutionary understanding of human behavior progressed. Immigration policy would have been carefully formulated to ensure that immigrants were genetically similar to the founding stock — just as American immigration policy was crafted until 1965.

I close with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould where Buchanan follows Windchy in distorting a comment by Stephen Jay Gould. Based on his reading of the fossil record, Gould had proposed that evolution was less gradual than Darwin supposed, while certainly not disagreeing with Darwin’s central view on natural selection.

But most of all I am saddened by a trend I am just beginning to discern among my colleagues. I sense that some now wish to mute the healthy debate about theory that has brought new life to evolutionary biology. It provides grist for creationist mills, they say, even if only by distortion. Perhaps we should lie low and rally around the flag of strict Darwinism, at least for the moment—a kind of old-time religion on our part.

But we should borrow another metaphor and recognize that we too have to tread a straight and narrow path, surrounded by roads to perdition. For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost.

I can’t say that I am a fan of Stephen Jay Gould because of his role in attempting to shape Darwinism to his leftist sympathies and, I think, his sense of Jewish interests. But I certainly agree that we have to continue to attempt to understand nature and let the chips fall where they may.

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

Evolutionary Psychology: The Really Dangerous Idea Is That It’s Wrong

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Sharon Begley is at it again, flailing away at evolutionary psychology because it doesn’t fit well with her feminist, liberal agenda. This is ironic because evolutionary psychology owes its very existence to political correctness.

I remember the excitement when, as a graduate student, E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology came on the scene. People talked about nothing else. Because of my background in philosophy and in leftist politics, I was a skeptical of sociobiology. But I was converted finally by Robert Trivers’ evolutionary theory of sex. The basic idea is that reproduction is very costly for women because of the huge amount of time and energy involved in pregnancy, lactation, and child care. On the other hand, the basic act of reproduction for males is quite inexpensive, requiring only a small amount of time and energy. This means that in the same time period that a female could raise one child, a male could sire a huge number of offspring. Males benefit from having multiple mates because that raises the probability of their leaving many offspring, i.e., of having reproductive success.

E. O. Wilson

It follows, theoretically, that a principal male motive for seeking wealth and power is gaining access to multiple sexual partners. And this has indeed been the pattern throughout the world.  From Chinese emperors to African chieftains, males at the top of the social hierarchy were able to mate with many females. Most famously, Sultan Moulay Ismail (the Bloodthirsty) of Morocco sired 888 children with his many wives and concubines. This is an enormously powerful theory, and it continues to be the workhorse in the field of  evolutionary psychology.

Once one starts to see the world as shaped by our evolutionary history, it’s impossible to go back. And it was impossible not to notice that sociobiology was being viciously attacked by academics like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, both of whom were Harvard professors associated with the far left and both of whom, as I later thought significant, were Jewish.

The Book That Changed It All

The vicious assault on sociobiology by the left was a sight to behold—culminating in a woman pouring a pitcher of ice water over Wilson’s head at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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But the left succeeded. Evolutionary psychology became ensconced as the heir of sociobiology. The word ‘sociobiology’ was virtually expunged from the lexicon, and the most important academic journal in the field changed its name from Ethology and Sociobiology to Evolution and Human Behavior. I heard it on good authority that Wilson described those who carried out this coup as acting like “beaten dogs.”

Without the baggage of the term ‘sociobiology,’ the field was free to reinvent itself.  The trick was to loudly proclaim the idea that evolution did indeed sculpt the mind, but that all humans were alike because we all evolved in the same environment. This takes issues like race differences completely off the table.

And since we were all the same, the only source of differences between humans was that people were exposed to different environmental contexts. Why is one person more aggressive than another? The evolutionary psych answer is that some people are exposed to contexts that bring out aggression, such as poverty and low social status — explanations that fit well with a leftist zeitgeist. The  fact that some people have genes that predispose them to be more aggressive than others was out of bounds.

Evolutionary psychology also posited the “massively modular” mind — the idea that the mind was nothing more than a set of mechanisms each designed to solve a specific problem in our evolutionary past: a mechanism for falling in love, a mechanism for finding someone sexually attractive, one for fearing snakes, etc.

This neatly avoids talking about IQ — the one measure that is most feared by the left. That’s because differences in IQ are powerfully associated with success in modern societies, because IQ is strongly genetically influenced,  and, most importantly, because we don’t have any environmental interventions capable of getting rid of race differences in IQ in developed societies. IQ doesn’t fit well with evolutionary psychology because intelligence was not designed to solve any particular problem from our evolutionary past. Rather, it was designed to integrate information from a wide range of areas and use this information to solve novel problems. Humans can solve a whole lot of problems that were not around in the environments we evolved in. That’s why it’s important  for success in school — and modern life.

But despite doing its best to stay in the good graces of the  left, evolutionary psych never quite succeeded. For the left, any hint of biological influence must be resisted at all costs. Hence people like Begley.

The real irony is that taking the power of culture seriously is something that is a double-edged sword for the left. The reason is that if culture can control human behavior, then becomes important for biological fitness. And then we must begin ask ourselves how the culture of the left affects the biological fitness of different groups of people — such as White people in America.

For example, in thinking about the history of sociobiology, we would ask questions like the following:

  • How did the Jewish leftist background of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin figure into their critique of sociobiology? Did they think of themselves as Jews and see their work as advancing the interests of Jews?
  • Was the demise of Darwinism in the social sciences the result of Jewish intellectual activists like Frank Boas who saw themselves as Jews and thought that destroying Darwinism would be good for Jews?
  • How did the triumph of the culture of the left leave Western societies defenseless against massive non-White immigration so that in the long run Whites will suffer an enormous loss of biological fitness?
  • How does leftist control of the media make White people feel guilty for having positive attitudes about their own group and negative attitudes about non-Whites? Do Jews have any particular influence on the media that conflicts with the interests of European-derived people?
  • Is ethnic conflict over the construction of culture between Jews and formerly dominant Anglo-Saxons the key to understanding the decline of Whites in America?

This, of course, is the direction that I have taken, most notably with my book The Culture of Critique, but also more recently with my academic papers on the theory of cultural control at the psychological level and with elaborating my conflict  theory of culture.

Obviously, it is massively ironic that I am  being hounded as a “racist” by organizations such as the $PLC and the ADL. My background as a cultural leftist led me to interpret human behavior as very much influenced by culture. My early work showed how culture could shape the behavior of men in ways that contradicted the predictions of the evolutionary theory of sex. And if culture can contribute to making men monogamous (or nearly so), it can also cement humans together into cohesive groups. A group evolutionary strategy,  such as Judaism in historical societies, is only possible because people can monitor other group members and punish those who violate group norms (such as marrying outside the group) — and that’s culture, not biology. A viable group strategy requires a belief system in which the aims and practices of the group are rationalized — Judaism as the Chosen People, the Light Unto the Nations, etc.

That’s fairly innocuous and unlikely to get people riled up. But the more I read about Judaism, the more I realized the Jewish role in developing cultural movements that have been so influential in controlling human behavior in recent times and for the decline of Whites throughout the Western world: ideology and culture as ethnic competition. And that is a very dangerous idea indeed.

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

The EU Rip-Off

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The June 2009 elections for the European Parliament were held against the backdrop of global recession and a serious economic crisis. The behavior of voters in Western Europe was also influenced by a large number of non-European residents whose number now exceeds 20 million people. Given these circumstances, it was expected that nationalist parties from 27 member states would score major gains. In fact, they won 30 parliamentary seats in Brussels. The worst nightmares of establishment Euro politicians and their well-paid scribes came true.

Despite an uncivilized media smear campaign against “rising neo-fascist parties,” accompanied by non-stop stories of the “danger of anti-Semitism,” and despite taxpayer-funded advertising against the so-called right-wing radicalism, the prose and the sermons of EU insiders did not have much effect on the behavior of a sizable chunk of the European population.

In addition, the entire EU election was a joke as the voter turnout all across Europe did not exceed 30 percent. With more than 70 percent of voters not showing up at the polls, the credibility of the EU is now in serious jeopardy.

Jobbik: The Movement for a Better Hungary

In Eastern Europe, nationalist parties, such as the Jobbik in Hungary and thePRM in Romania, are quite happy after securing two seats each respectively in the EU parliament. Their constituency is finally discovering that the answer to former communist mind control is not the Western pipe dream about the end of history or quick Hollywood-like prosperity. Unlike docile West Europeans, voters in Slovakia, Hungary and Romania were less constrained by the canons of ethnic sensitivity training and media self-censorship. Many of them want to keep their countries racially and culturally homogenous and appear to have had enough of Western prattling about free market miracles.

Krisztina Morvai, the attractive Christian nationalist lawyer and head of the Hungarian Jobbik,did not hesitate to reply to a comment by a “proud Hungarian Jew” that she fomented hatred and should be banned from politics:

I would be greatly pleased if those who call themselves proud Hungarian Jews played in their leisure with their tiny circumcised dicks, instead of besmirching me. Your kind of people are used to seeing all of our kind of people stand to attention and adjust to you every time you fart. Would you kindly acknowledge this is now OVER. We have raised our head up high and we shall no longer tolerate your kind of terror. We shall take back our country.

Krisztina Morvai, MEP for Jobbik

Communist terror in post-WWII Hungary, whose main ringleader was a communist strongman of Jewish origin, Mátyás Rosenfeld aka Rákosi, is still too fresh in the collective memory of the Hungarian people, making the country less susceptible to being intimidated by the pc vernacular, which has become a trademark of Western Europe.

Mátyás Rosenfeld aka Rákosi: the “Bald Murderer”

The following description gives a flavor of the public perception of the Jewishness of Hungary’s post-WWII government (links added):

Beginning in 1953 but increasingly since Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, some Hungarian communists claimed that the mood in Hungary was increasingly anti-Semitic, and that it was necessary for a non-Jew (or as they put it delicately someone of “Hungarian nationality”) to replace Rákosi (and later Gerő). Much hatred among the Hungarian population was directed against the “big four” Hungarian communist leaders who dominated Hungary in the postwar period, who all happened to be Jewish: Mátyás Rákosi (Róth), Mihály Farkas (Wolf ), József Révai (Lederer), and Ernő Gerő (Singer). During the June 1953 meeting in Moscow, Beria had derisively alluded to Rákosi as a “Jewish king.” According to a telegram written during his visit to Budapest in June, Suslov also considered the number of Jews in the top leadership to be a real problem. [Vladimir] Kryuchkov, too, reported the issue as a problem …. [János Kádártold [Yuri] Andropov that only during Rákosi’s arbitrary rule did Jewishness become associated with the regime, implying that once Rákosi was dismissed, anti-Semitism would dissipate.

Europeans without Europe

The founding myths of the European Union are the credo of the free market coupled with the civic religion of multiculturalism and antifascism.  The chief architect of this ideology of “Europeism” was the late Jean Monnet, a French-British agent and a big-time arms peddler, who helped secure the Allied invasion in Normandy in 1944. The dominant idea behind the creation of the European Union was to keep Germany harnessed while tapping into its Prussian work ethic and financial largesse. One-third of the EU budget tab is footed by German taxpayers. Seen from perspective of international law, Germany is still at war with the Allies. It is certainly no accident that, unlike any other member state in the European Union, including the other big two — the UK and France — Germany has no privilege of holding a referendum when rejecting or endorsing EU treaties. Germany has no choice but to accept the decisions of the European Commission, with the obligatory nodding of its nondescript parliament, the Bundestag.

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On the institutional level the European Union is shaped very much like the multi-ethnic former Soviet Union or ex-Yugoslavia. European Parliament apparatchiks, whose number has skyrocketed to 736 deputies, all of them paid about $120,000/year and enjoying a multitude of perks, are proportionally elected according to the size of their countries. The EU Parliament resembles the Supreme Soviet, while its powerful 27-member executive body known as the European Commission, mirrors the former Soviet Politburo.

In 1992, shortly after the launching of the founding EU document known as the Maastricht Treaty, and shortly after the beginning of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the European Commission did not hide its unhappiness at the dissolution of the artificial and multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was cherished for decades as a role model of multicultural conviviality for the never-ending growth of the EU.

The proto-totalitarian nature of the European Union was already depicted by the former Soviet dissident Vladmir Bukovsky who saw in it the exact replica of the Soviet Union: “The sooner it collapses the less damage it will have done to us and to other countries.”

There is no such thing as “economic integration,” which the EU likes to brag about on all wavelengths. East European member states sell their goods and services for ridiculously low prices. They also provide low salaries to their domestic workers — between a half and a quarter of the level of Western Europe. The corporate taxes in East Europe are much lower than in Western European member states, where they average between 20 percent and 30 percent.

But the Western European economy is not in much better shape. The European Union is witnessing a new wave of relocations, especially the outsourcing of jobs. This penalizes the West with more unemployment, while transforming the East European states into cheap workshops.

Bad news appears daily. In 2007 the EU enacted harsh “hate speech” laws patterned on the German Criminal Code and its dreaded Section 130, known under the bizarre doublespeak compound noun Volksverhetzung (mistranslated as popular incitement), which can get a scholar or a journalist in jail if he questions the viability of multiracialism, let alone voices doubts about the veracity of the Jewish WWII victimology. By 2010 all EU member states are mandated to apply hate speech legal provisions, which will in practice mean that a European citizen, if convicted of a verbal violation in country A of the European Union can land in jail in country B of the European Union. In fact, this is already the case. Such laws also apply to US and other non-European citizens who show too much curiosity about the details of contemporary history.

The enactment of hate speech laws in the EU is reminiscent of the communist Criminal Code in ex-Yugoslavia. The communist judiciary of this now-defunct artificial state had for decades resorted to similar legal meta-language, best visible in the paragraph highlighting “hostile propaganda” found in Article 133. This Yugoslav communist verbal and legal abstraction — “hostile propaganda” (neprijateljska propaganda) — could mean everything and nothing. It could apply to any suspect — regardless of whether a suspect committed acts of physical violence against communist Yugoslavia or simply cracked a joke critical of communist hacks.

Constitution without Constituency

There are problems with the Euro semantics too. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as “Europeans” or the “European people,” given that most Europeans define themselves by their own genius loci, by their tribe, or by their nation — Irish, Flemings, Brits, Germans, Croats etc. What does the Portuguese EU Commissar, Manuel Barroso, the head of the European Commission, or the forever-unshaven EU “foreign minister” Xavier Solana, who stutters his ukases in broken English, know about the plight of fishermen on the Greek island of Rhodes? A Romanian shepherd from Transylvania could not care less about the Brussels bureaucracy. No wonder that in such an environment huge scams and money embezzlement are not exceptions but the rule — already well reportedby many mainstream media.

In America, by contrast, given the linguistic unity of its population and the absence of inter-European squabbles, White American nationaIism has an advantage over different European nationalisms, which are often at loggerheads with each other. American constitutionalism, despite its often hypermoralistic verbiage, is well-anchored in the heritage of the Founding Fathers and has been barely subject to change, as exemplified by the concise wording of the crucial First Amendment. On top of this, the fact that one single language is spoken in America — however much it can lead to cultural leveling and academic mediocrity — provides an ideal tool for racial unity among all Euro-Americans. By contrast, each attempt to frame a pan-European constitution for all nations in Europe, even if the intention may be good, is well nigh impossible. It would require that the EU ruling class learn of 30 different European languages and develop a sense of empathy for dozens of distinctly different national mythos.

Without a well defined parliament which is fully accountable to an informed constituency, the European constitution turns into an oxymoron.  Alain de Benoist writes that European nations are unable to relate to EU elected representatives, which means that there cannot be a European constitution: “The term ‘constitutional treaty’ is already contradictory. A constitution is a text of a particular type deemed necessary for everyone, while a treaty is a simple contract between states.”

This explains why EU bureaucrats over the last 5 years have been obliged to constantly revamp the first constitution drafted in 2004, often couching this in fancy names or using verbal dissimulations to further con European peoples into a poorly defined entity known as the EU. The new version of the old revamped constitution, presented a few years ago as the “Treaty of Nice” — in an attempt to better lure recalcitrant member states — bears now another pompous code name: the Treaty of Lisbon. Several issues keep delaying its adoption by all EU member states. Under EU rules, a treaty cannot come into force unless all 27 member states ratify it. Constant reshuffling of the verbiage of the draft constitution carried out by Eurocrats is unconstitutional and very undemocratic indeed.

Which European Union?

The idea of a united Europe is as old as Europeans themselves. Caesar toyed with the idea, as did subsequent Roman emperors. In the ninth century the Germanic-European king Charlemagne tried to unite all European tribes from the North Sea all the way to the Danube basin and further down to the Black Sea in an attempt to create a common European bulwark against invading Arabs and Asians. In the sixteenth century the Spanish-Flemish-Germanic King Charles V assessed the apocalyptic Turkish onslaught against central Europe well, and worked desperately to strengthen the united Christian European homeland.

Stalin and his communists had their idea of a united Europe too. So did German Nationalist Socialists and their European allies. Over 400,000 non-German European SS volunteers, from Finland to Albania, from Spain to Belarus, including dozens of Americans and several hundred Brits fought in Waffen SS uniforms. On May 1, 1945, in the Berlin inferno, the remnants of the French Waffen SS division Charlemagne were the last to put up resistance against incoming Bolshevik troops. The French battalion had 320 to 330 men. The high command was held by the French Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Henri Fenet(1919–2002), holder of the Croix de Chevalier de la Croix de Fer(Ritterkreuzträger). Along with the French fighters, there were a few hundred other European Waffen SS fighters, including several dozen Latvians, as well as 350 Spanish Waffen SS under the command of the Sturmbannführer Miguel Ezquerra Sanchez.

Robert Forbes: For Europe: The French Volunteers of the Waffen SS

The fighting for the National Socialist version of a united Europe stopped on the breezy night of May 1, 1945 at 11pm at the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, near the headquarters of the RSHA, which was only a few hundred yards from Adolf Hitler’s bunker. The last shot in the European capital of Berlin was fired by a drunken Soviet soldier, killing the young French Waffen SS volunteer Roger Albert Brunet — on May 2, 1945.

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).