Jewish Influence

Part 2 of Connelly on White Victimization

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Part 2 of Edmund Connelly’s article on White victimization is posted. I was unaware of the following quote from Solzhenitsyn that Connelly found on Israel Shamir’s website:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summed up the process during the Bolshevik Revolution, when the

executed army officers were Russians, the noblemen, priests, monks, deputies were  Russians. . . . In 1920s, the pre-revolutionary engineers and scientists were exiled or killed. They were Russians, while their place was taken by Jews. The best Russian Psychiatric institute in Moscow, its Russian members were arrested or exiled, while their place was taken by the Jews. Important Jewish doctors blocked the advancement of Russian medical scientists. The best intellectual and artistic elites of Russian people were killed, while the Jews grew and flourished in these (deadly for Russians) years.

It’s passages like this that make an English translation of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together essential. Americans must be made aware of the enormous risks that lie ahead when White political power diminishes and Jews continue to be a hostile elite.

Solzhenitsyn shows that the Bolshevik revolution meant the rise of Jews in psychiatry. The following passage from Ch. 4 of Culture of Critique shows that the result of Jewish domination of psychiatry in the USSR was that psychoanalysis became official dogma. It also shows the strong overlap among Jews, psychoanalysis, and political radicalism. As noted throughout CofC, psychoanalysis proved to be a very useful tool in constructing theories in which White identity and interests were analyzed as a sign of psychiatric disorder. To some extent, this revolution has already occurred bloodlessly in the West since WWII, given the influence of the Frankfurt School and other Jewish intellectual movements in the contemporary world. Psychoanalysis has died a well-deserved death and for that we should all be grateful. But the theoretical basis for rejecting White identity and interests has simply migrated to other pathologies of the academic left.

This belief in the curative powers of sexual freedom coincided with a leftist political agenda common to the vast majority of Jewish intellectuals of the period and reviewed throughout this book. This leftist political agenda proved to be a recurrent theme throughout the history of psychoanalysis. Support of radical and Marxist ideals was common among Freud’s early followers, and leftist attitudes were common in later years among psychoanalysts (Hale 1995, 31; Kurzweil 1989, 36, 46–47, 284; Torrey 1992, 33, 93ff, 122–123), as well as in Freudian inspired offshoots such as Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich (see below) and Alfred Adler. (Kurzweil [1989, 287] terms Adler the leader of “far left” psychoanalysis, noting that Adler wanted to immediately politicize teachers as radicals rather than wait for the perfection of psychoanalysis to do so.) The apex of the association between Marxism and psychoanalysis came in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, where all the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks, Trotsky supporters, and among the most powerful political figures in the country (see Chamberlain 1995). (Trotsky himself was an ardent enthusiast of psychoanalysis.) This group organized a government-sponsored State Psychoanalytical Institute and developed a program of “pedology” aimed at producing the “new Soviet man” on the basis of psychoanalytic principles applied to the education of children. The program, which encouraged sexual precocity in children, was put into practice in state-run schools.

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Kevin MacDonald: The Genteel Mr. Bradlaugh

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I agree with everything in Christopher Donovan’s blog on Bradlaugh’s take on the AmRen cancellation. But a couple of things Bradlaugh wrote stick in my craw. It used to be that Jews complained about genteel anti-Semites. Now we have people like Bradlaugh who spout genteel philo-Semitism: He complains about “the antisemitism of the AR followers, which rubs me the wrong way. I fall in line with the long tradition of British philosemitism (Cromwell, Victoria, Lloyd George, Maggie Thatcher), and just have no patience with the other thing.” He could have included Winston Churchill who was philo-Semitic to the point of corruption.

It seems to me that anyone writing on politics has a responsibility to write honestly about the various forces that influence public policy. For Bradlaugh, it’s simply not genteel to discuss embarrassing things like Jewish power. I suppose Mearshimer and Walt rub him the wrong way as well. I had this to say about John Derbyshire, Bradlaugh’s alter ego:

Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. … Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses.

I think that Bradlaugh’s problem is that he sees himself as genteel and that being genteel is a very good thing. (Definition: 1. Refined in manner; well-bred and polite. 2. Free from vulgarity or rudeness. 3. Elegantly stylish: genteel manners and appearance. 4. a. Striving to convey a manner or appearance of refinement and respectability. See Synonyms at polite. b. Marked by affected and somewhat prudish refinement.)

He seems very impressed with good manners, a well-rounded education, and being polite. Genteel people simply don’t discuss Jewish power and influence for fear of offending the Jews. In the same way, genteel people would not want to offend others by calling attention to their garish clothes. To do so would make one impolite and vulgar and therefore consign one to a lower order of society.

His gentility is probably also why he doesn’t resonate with AmRen’s “ethos of the South, which I don’t really … get. I wonder if a foreigner ever can get it. It’s as odd and particular, in its own way, as Tibetan Buddhism.”

The reality is that White Southerners are by far the largest identifiable group of White Americans who have held onto their culture and identity in the face of the onslaughts of the last 50 years. The White vote for Obama was nearly in the single digits in three southern states, and lopsidedly Republican in the others. White Southerners understand, at least implicitly, that it’s about racial and ethnic conflict. As the racialization of American politics continues, all Whites will tend even more in this direction. (The recent election in Massachusetts certainly supports this). Conservatives who think they can take back the country without Southern Whites are seriously deluded.

Bradlaugh’s gentility also leads him to entirely avoid framing the issue in ethnic or racial terms at all:

My own strong preference, as I argued in that debate with Jared, would be for everybody to shut up with the race business. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of this happening, though, so it’s not hard to see the AR-ers point of view. In any case, I say again, whatever you think of that point of view, it’s a point of view. It shouldn’t be shut out of the public square; and if it is so shut out, by goons phoning in death threats to hotel employees, there ought to be a fuss made. Well, here I am on Secular Right, making a fuss as best I can. Freedom of speech! Freedom of assembly! Liberty! Liberty!

This is “proposition conservatism” at its finest. If only people would stop talking about racial and ethnic conflict, then we could frame everything in terms of principles like free speech without soiling ourselves like the AR crowd. For people like Bradlaugh, massive immigration would presumably be fine if the immigrants were all principled people like himself.

The reality, of course, is that whether or not we talk about it, racial and ethnic conflict will continue. There is no other possible outcome given that 100 million more non-Whites are to be added to the population of the US in the next few decades.

The bottom line is that no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. And in the process of losing the ethnic battle, the society will be less and less committed to Bradlaugh’s cherished principles because, in the end, the principles of free speech, individual liberty, and the rest of the corpus of Western individualism are ethnic creations.

But people like Bradlaugh are more willing to lose the ethnic battle than to become anything less than genteel by mentioning the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the political divisions in the US. It just wouldn’t seem proper.

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Second Fundraising Appeal: Why support The Occidental Observer?

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Kevin MacDonald: The United States is headed for a political crisis. Patrick Buchanan wonders “Is this how democracy ends?”  Debt is skyrocketing and it is politically impossible for the Democrats or Republicans to deal with it — at least partly because of the rage of the tea partiers. These are the middle and lower middle class Whites who feel that the country is being taken away from them.

On the other hand, while rage builds among the middle and lower middle class Whites, the message has not reached educated Whites. George Will points out that the Republican Party “recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites.”

The Republican Party can’t win without their populist base, and yet it’s virtually certain that the Republicans will do nothing to give them what they really need. The Beltway Conservatives don’t even mention immigration as an issue, even though, as the Center for Immigration Studies tells us, wherever immigrants settle the percentage of the vote going to Republicans has declined. The Republican Party has become a White party. Whatever short term successes they have — and they figure to do well this year by milking the rage and the money of the tea partiers, they are doomed to electoral defeat in the long run.

American politics has become racialized. The United States and the rest of the Western world are undergoing an existential crisis. Our culture is coming under intense pressure with the rise of multiculturalism and continuing high levels of non-White immigration. We can see the changes all around us, and yet discussion of public policy related to these issues in the mainstream media is contained within a hopelessly narrow space.

We at The Occidental Observer are determined to change this. In this, our second fundraising appeal, we are asking readers to contribute financially to TOO’s success and increased visibility. It is important to get our message out in the most professional manner possible.

Western societies have become cauldrons of competing ethnic groups where only one group — White people of European descent — may not explicitly assert their interests.  The tea partiers want something like the America they grew up in, but they may not say this because they will be tagged as racists by the media. These people are being pushed out economically and politically. They are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.

But without direction and leadership, this movement will not be effective. The fact is that the domination of the mass media and the academic world by elites that are hostile to White identity and interests makes it very difficult for educated Whites to sign on to a White ethnonationalist movement. Such people are often vulnerable to economic pressures where they work, and, as college-educated people, they have a respect for mainstream academic and media institutions. Having been treated fairly in general, they trust the integrity of the basic institutions of the society. They identify with its basic ideology — America as emerging from its long dark night of evil into the glorious goodness and virtue of the multicultural future.

The Occidental Observer occupies a unique space on the Internet because it attempts to appeal to educated Whites. There is simply no other outlet that discusses the full range of issues related to White survival and interests with the same level of intelligence and intellectual honesty that can be found here. All of the theory and the data are on our side. There is no reason at all why educated Whites cannot be persuaded to see the world as we do and to explicitly advocate for a White identity and for White interests.

It is no secret that many of our articles deal with Jewish power and influence. Jews have become a financial, media, and academic elite, and the organized Jewish community is a pillar of the multicultural left that has transformed Western societies. The multicultural left has abandoned the White middle and working classes in favor of promoting policies that will completely eclipse the people and culture of traditional America. An important theme of many of our articles  has been that Jewish influence in the media has resulted in the denigration of all of our cultural traditions, especially the strong Christian religious traditions of our people. It has resulted in invidious portrayals of White people and their accomplishments that have become internalized among a very large number of our people.

Educated Whites must realize that whatever their current prosperity, their long term prospects for themselves and their children are going to be severely compromised in multicultural America. It makes no sense whatever for these people to ally themselves with the looming non-White majority and against the great majority of their own people.

This is a very difficult topic to discuss fairly and honestly. A large part of the problem is that even well-argued, factually-based discussions of Jewish power and influence are typically labeled “anti-Semitic” and are banned from mainstream discussion. The occasional lapses from this public decorum are aggressively policed by an imposing array of well-financed activist organizations. These organizations have no scruples about ruining careers or doing whatever else they see as necessary to maintain the status quo. They typically operate by creating moral panics aimed at shutting down any discussion of Jewish power and any discussion of the Jewish role in the decline of Whites in America and other Western societies.

Prior to the Internet, it was possible to relegate all discussions of Jewish power and influence to the fringes of the culture. But that is no longer the case. The Occidental Observer has a place on the web that is just as accessible as the New York Times or the Washington Post.

It doesn’t take billions or even millions of dollars to develop a presence in this new medium. But it does require a sound financial foundation. We have set up TOO on a shoe-string budget. The great majority of the writing and all of the technical work have been done as a labor of love by people who are self-motivated to contribute to this effort.

We have posted some exceptional material within these constraints. But volunteer labor can only go so far. Good writers are a rarity. For the reasons discussed above, It is difficult to find writers with the requisite expertise and commitment to the historical American nation and the West. It is only natural that writers would appreciate some compensation — even if it is far less than they would need to earn a living. Quite simply, they need the money.

Huge numbers of readers are not critical for our success. The anti-White revolution that has so far triumphed in America has been a top-down phenomenon. The next revolution will also likely be a top-down phenomenon in which ideas that are completely outside the mainstream are disseminated and gradually take hold among people who can make a difference, whether because they have money, writing ability, or skills in the political arena. 

The point is not how many people are reading TOO, although we are certainly growing in readership. (This pdf file of readership from February, 2009 through January 2010 shows that around 2500 unique users per day in the most recent month — over twice the readership of a year ago.)

The point is that some of the people reading it may be able to make a difference in the future.

I ask for your support on behalf of The Occidental Observer’s dedicated writers.

A significant number of small donations make a huge difference. Realize that at this time we are not a 501C3 tax-deductible organization.

At present, we have several ways to make donations. Click on this link.

Thank you.

Kevin MacDonald, Editor

Kevin MacDonald (Email him) is Editor of The Occidental Observer and is Professor of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

Why Has Mahler Become a Cultural Icon?

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R. J. Stove has a delightful article on Mahler posted at the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation:

The Mahler symphonies … get me out of here. I keep surreptitiously cheering Kingsley Amis’s verdict “Mahler lacks talent even more spectacularly than he lacks genius.” …

The leap in Mahler’s stature from near-oblivion in 1960 (when, as Britain’s Spectatornoted on January 13, “[H]is impact on the general public was roughly the equivalent of, say, [Poland’s Karol] Szymanowski today”) to deification after that date, has little or nothing to do with musical merits and almost everything to do with external considerations.

And what might these external circumstances be?

Once it became widely known that Mahler had lamented being “a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a Jew in the world,” his identity-politics credentials became the aesthetic equivalent of a nuclear warhead, lacking only homosexuality to complete his posthumous triumph.

With the exception of a few musicians enthralled with the challenge of playing his music, the people who love Mahler love him because of who he is, not because they enjoy listening to his music.

Mahler has been the subject of TOO articles by E. R. E. Knutsson and Elizabeth Whitcombe. Knutsson described the Jewishness of Mahler’s music in the context of the fin de siècle cultural scene of Vienna: “It has been arguedthat Mahler’s music has links back to the Hasidic music of Eastern European ghettos of the eighteenth century in which dance music is deployed as a remedy to misery.” An anti-Jewish critic at the complained, “What I find so utterly repellent about Mahler’s music is the pronounced Jewishness of its underlying character. … It is abhorrent to me because it speaks Yiddish. In other words it speaks the language of German music but with an accent, with the intonation and above all with the gestures of the Easterner, the all-too-Eastern Jew.”

Whitcombe links Mahler to T. W. Adorno: “Adorno claimed that the bourgeois musical world was repressing Mahler’s work because Mahler shunned ‘moderate peacefulness.’ In Adorno’s words: ‘The genuine significance of Mahler that can be discovered for today lies in the very violence with which he broke out of the same musical space that today wants to forget him’ (Mahler Today,” 1930).”

Stove’s comment does not get into the details of how Mahler became so important. I suspect that an argument can be made that Mahler’s incredible success since the 1960s has to do with ethnic networking and with peculiarly Jewish attitudes toward culture. The topic deserves a full treatment.

Mahler’s visibility these days is truly phenomenal. Leon Botstein labels Mahler “the most visible figure from the high-art classical music tradition since Mozart.” Whereas in the 1930s Adorno complained that Mahler was on the verge of being forgotten, by the 1960s the intellectual landscape had changed dramatically, bringing to the fore the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique, including Adorno’s Frankfurt School.  By several accounts, the two most important advocates of Mahler during the 1960s were Adorno and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Adorno’s campaign on behalf of Mahler did not bear fruit until his influential 1960 book Mahler: A Musical Physiognamy. An historian notes, “The effect [of Adorno’s book] on the cultivated, on many musicologists, on composers, has been immense.” The Culture of Critique shows that Adorno had a strong Jewish identity and a hostility toward traditional Western culture (viewed as inevitably leading to fascism and anti-Semitism) that colored all of his writing.  In his view, Mahler was attractive because he was the antithesis of the traditional muscial culture of the West. (The same can be said of Adorno’s attempt to promote Arnold Schoenberg; see TOO’s Knutsson and Whitcombe.)  Re Bernstein, Botstein notes that “Bernstein was Mahler’s most prodigious advocate in the seminal 1960s…. Bernstein implicitly set Mahler’s ambivalence to his fate as a Jew alongside his own proud assertion of Jewish identity and faith.”

The result was that Mahler has become a sainted icon of the new culture — another example of Jewish genius. Even if no one really enjoys listening to his music.

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The New Republic’s “High Shul phase”

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Andrew Sullivan is busy attempting to exonerate himself from charges of anti-Semitism — always a difficult chore, and likely to consume quite a bit of his time given Leon Wieseltier’s rather long accusatory piece. Sullivan’s offense is that he circulated a comment of poet W. H. Auden that it would be to explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to the secular leftist TNR writers of the 1940s. How anyone could think of that as “anti-Semitic” is beyond me.

Sullivan’s first line of defense is to link to his “passionate defense of the Jewish people from Catholic bigotry.” I’m sure Sullivan is thinking, “Hey, I earned my stripes as a goy in the media by defending Jews. How dare you question my motives!”

But then it gets interesting. We find that Jews think of TNR as a Jewish publication. Wieseltier himself is quoted as saying that TNR is a kind of “Jewish version of Commentary.” (Update: HelenChicago, a commenter on this blog writes, “”A Jewish version of Commentary“?!? Isn’t that a bit like “a kosher version of matzoh”? Wish I had thought of that. As we all know, Commentary is published by the American Jewish Committee.)

Sullivan notes that “my old friend, Frank Foer” (translation: “some of my best friends are Jews”) commented that Auden made his statement “before we entered our High Shul phase.” And he goes on to describe the “joke ubiquitous at TNR when I worked there . … We teased each other for years about my being one of the few goyim at the place, that I was a function of affirmative action, etc. Leon was particularly and often mordantly hilarious on this kind of theme.”

This reminds me of Michael Wreszin’s comment that Dwight Macdonald, a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to Partisan Review, was “a distinguished goy among the Partisanskies.” He stood out because he was a goy in a Jewish-dominated movement. Always good to have a few goyim for window dressing.

Pretty clearly, the Jews who run TNR think of it as a Jewish publication. But one dare not say that Jews influence the media or that Jews attempt to use their position in the media to advance their version of Jewish interests (or that the New York York Intellectuals were a Jewish intellectual movement). Auden’s quote happened before TNR became a High Shul — a presumably the consequence of Martin Peretz buying TNR and turning it into a fanatically pro-Israel publication. This is a passage in The Culture of Critique:

Jews have also been greatly overrepresented as editors, publishers and contributors to a variety of radical and liberal periodicals, including The Nation, The New Republic, and The Progressive (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 105). In 1974 The New Republic (TNR) was purchased by Martin Peretz, son of a “devoted Labor Zionist and right-wing Jabotinskyist” (Alterman 1992, 185) and himself a leftist student activist before moving in the direction of neoconservatism. The only consistent theme in Peretz’s career is a devotion to Jewish causes, particularly Israel. He reflects a major theme of Chapter 3 in that he abandoned the New Left when some in the movement condemned Israel as racist and imperialist. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he told Henry Kissinger that his “dovishness stopped at the delicatessen door” (p. 185), and many among his staff feared that all issues would be decided on the basis of what was “good for the Jews” (p. 186). Indeed, one editor was instructed to obtain material from the Israeli embassy for use in TNR editorials. “It is not enough to say that TNR’s owner is merely obsessed with Israel; he says so himself. But more importantly, Peretz is obsessed with Israel’s critics, Israel’s would-be critics, and people who never heard of Israel, but might one day know someone who might someday become a critic” (p. 195).

Sullivan better watch it — he’s just getting himself in deeper. All those quotes from Jews who joke among themselves about Jewish control of particular media outlets like TNR are for internal consumption only. For someone like him — or me — to mention it will certainly draw the ire of people like Wieseltier and the ADL. Tune in for more on this as it unfolds.

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Mel Gibson to Dean Richards: "I’ve moved on; You’re an asshole"

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Mel Gibson can’t avoid questions about his anti-Jewish comments. Dean Richards, a reporter for WGN in Chicago, brought up the topic once again, probably realizing that it was a great strategy for getting ahead. Gibson is obviously pissed off about it:

“That’s been almost four years, dude. I’ve moved on. But I guess you haven’t. …  That was a while back, and I’ve done all the necessary mea culpas, so … let’s move on, dude.”

Richards wrapped up the interview with a standard thank-you-for-coming, and Gibson, drinking coffee, gave the reporter a thumbs-up before muttering a loud-and-clear [“asshole”] right into his mic before the satellite feed was cut.

The mea culpas don’t matter. Apologizing doesn’t work and never has. This is the kind of realization that radicalizes people. One can only hope that Gibson, with all his wealth, his movie-making ability, his  fan base, and his connections in the movie industry will realize that there is no going back and that he will make movies that can change the world.

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The academic left’s involvement in politics

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In today’s LA Times, the op-ed page was dominated by comments on Howard Zinn (“An experts’ history of Zinn”), who by all accounts was a leftist political activist as well as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn, who probably deserved a chapter in The Culture of Critique as an exemplar of a leftist Jewish intellectual activist, was involved in all the leftist causes of the last 60 years. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and was proud of his lack of neutrality in his writing, titling his memoir You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.  As one of the commentators, Sean Wilentz, notes,

He saw history primarily as a means to motivate people to political action that he found admirable. That’s what he said he did. It’s fine as a form of agitation — agitprop — but it’s not particularly good history.

To a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.

But other historians are much more sympathetic to Zinn. Eric Foner, who is described by one reviewer as the “sainted PC commissar for US history and Reconstruction fabulist” is, like Zinn, an academic radical activist. Foner says about Zinn:

The idea that historians have to be neutral about everything they study is the death of history. Every historian has beliefs and feelings about what they’re studying. Howard made them very explicit. The teachers you remember are the ones with a passion for history who made it clear what they thought. They were not polemicists. They respected the canons of historical scholarship, as Zinn did, but they cared deeply.

Well, I’m not sure how much Zinn respected the canons of scholarship in creating what one commentor called an “eternal struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” The print version of the Times op-ed provides some quotations from Zinn’s work A People’s History of the United States. The Western culture = evil, native peoples = good theme is obvious. Europe of the Renaissance was “dominated … by the religion of the popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western Civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.” The natives, on the other hand, are all about hospitality and sharing, and they have no concept of war. (Imagine the horror if someone made blanket assertions about Jews as having a frenzy for money.)

As an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous, but the idea that it is uniquely evil has been common among Jewish intellectual activists, most notably the Boasian anthropologists. As I noted in The Culture of Critique,

one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers [or, as hospitable, loving, and sharing people, as Zinn would have it]. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfarein 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. 

The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174).

Howard Zinn was obviously in this tradition. But because he plugged into the anti-Western zeitgeist of the academic left, he had a long and happy career at Boston University — untroubled by student activists trying to get him fired.

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