Western Civilization

Plato’s Racial Republic

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Plato

Plato
Republic (Robin Waterfield Trans.)
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994

Egalitarians have argued that notions of nation and race are largely modern constructs. Marxists in particular have typically claimed that Western ruling classes invented these ideas to consolidate the power of bourgeois states or as a mere pretext to divide the working class along (supposedly imaginary) racial lines and to oppress their colonial subjects.

It is then important to look at the actual record of discussion of tribe, nation, and race in our European tradition. In fact, hereditarian and ethnocentric themes have been present in Western thought from the beginning. An example of this would be Herodotus, the very first historian, who 2,500 years ago already defined being part of the Greek nation through four criteria: common religion, common blood, common language, and common custom.

In this article, I will give an account of racial and ethnic thought in Plato’s monumental philosophical treatise, The Republic, which is widely recognized as the founding text of the entire tradition of Western thought. I will demonstrate the following points:

  • Inequality: the idea that men are created unequal is absolutely pervasive throughout The Republic and is foundational to its ethics. Plato asserts that individuals have inborn differences in physique, personality, and intelligence, in addition to differences due to upbringing.
  • Heredity and eugenics: Plato notes that human differences are significantly heritable and so often refers to eugenic solutions to improve both society and elites, with explicit comparisons to animal breeding.
  • Patriotism: Plato argues that patriotism is a good and compares it with love for one’s family.
  • Greek racial/ethnic identity: Plato argues that “ties of blood and kinship” meant Greeks should not wage war on one another or enslave each other, reserving this for non-Greeks, and that their common identity should be cultivated through joint religious practices.

Plato’s Republic presents a powerful vision of an aristocratic racially-conscious state.[1] The ruling elite, known as the “guardians,” and to a lesser extent the wider citizenry would steadily improve themselves both culturally through education and biologically through eugenics. The elite would reach for the truth through constant reflection and dialectic, while both elite and masses would be conditioned through (civil-)religious education, being taught to consider the pursuit of these cultural and biological goods as a sacred moral imperative.[2] Read more

Time to Subscribe to The Occidental Quarterly

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The Summer issue was loaded into subscribers’ area on TOQonline 6/16.
Print journals were mailed 6/15 and will take somewhat longer to arrive than they have in the past.

The Occidental Quarterly
6/16: Summer 2016–Vol. 16, No. 2

The Occidental Quarterly - Summer 2016
(Click image to enlarge it.)

The Occidental Quarterly fills a unique niche  in bringing together scholarly articles on a wide range of topics that are mired in political correctness elsewhere.

There are quite a few reasons for the precarious state of our civilization and our people. But one of the main ones is that we have lost the intellectual and moral high ground to a cultural elite that is hostile to our people and our culture.

A main purpose of TOQ is to change the attitudes of White people so that they will feel confident identifying as White and explicitly asserting their interests as Whites. Politically aware Whites must understand that the elites that dominate culture and the political process in the West are intellectually and morally bankrupt.

The domination of the mass media and the academic world by elites that are hostile to White identity and interests is a major barrier for educated Whites to act on behalf of their interests. White people cower in fear of being called a racist for believing and acting in ways that are absolutely normal and natural for all the other peoples of the world. While other peoples defend themselves, their culture and their borders, societies in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand that have been controlled by Whites for hundreds of years are the only ones to accept their demise as a moral imperative. We view this outcome as the result of competition over the construction of culture in which the legitimate interests of Whites have been compromised.

All of the scientific data are on our side. Increased ethnic diversity is associated with a host of societal ills, including decreased support for social welfare programs and lack of public trust. Those who argue that Western societies have a unique moral obligation to cede cultural and political control to non-Whites completely ignore the legitimate interests of Whites. No one argues that countries like Korea or Uganda have a moral obligation to allow other peoples to swamp the native population.

Digital download subscriptions are only $30/year for four issues; subscriptions by mail are only $60/year. Go to www.theoccidentalobserver.net and click on ‘SUBSCRIBE TO TOQ’.

You will not only find the articles fascinating and informative, you will also be supporting the work of scholars who are part of a community defending our people and our culture with the highest level of integrity and intellectual sophistication.

The (very handsome) cover for the Spring 2016 issue can be accessed by clicking here. This issue will be mailed out around March 21.

A Review of “The Mighty Dead” by Adam Nicolson, Part 3 — Indo-European Population Genetics

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Part 1
Part 2

Indo-European genetics

A major weakness of The Mighty Dead is a lack of any discussion of findings from population genetic studies. In her 2015 book Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings, Jean Manco notes that while it has been widely assumed that the shift to Indo-European languages was triggered “by Indo-European speakers establishing themselves as elites among other peoples,” the genetic evidence points to them having a “much larger impact on the population.”[xi] The earliest sample found of the Y-DNA haplogroup R (the one that today dominates Europe) is from a boy who lived 24,000 years ago in Siberia. Manco notes that this boy “carried a genetic component omnipresent in Europeans today, but found only on the eastern fringes of Europe before the Late Neolithic.” This component, named Ancestral North Eurasian (ANE), was also present in a sample from a 17,000 year old male from much further West, and

most significantly, ANE is strikingly present in a group of [the Indo-European] Yamnaya people buried in the Samara region (all of whom carried variants of the R1b haplogroup). A sample of Corded Ware people in Germany has been modeled as approximately three-quarters Yamnaya, clear evidence of migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. Bell Beaker people in Germany also carried ANE.[xii]     

Another striking fact is the very strong correlation between the distribution of the Y-DNA haplotype R1 and the distribution of the Indo-European languages. Manco notes that “the dramatic genetic heritage of the Indo-Europeans was first suspected from the modern distribution of Y-DNA R1. R1a1a (M17) dominates northern India and is also found in Eastern Europe, particularly in Slavic and Baltic populations, while R1b1a2 (M269) dominates the rest of Europe.” While not the only haplogroup that spread with the Indo-Europeans, R1 is the “part of the picture that leaps to the eye.”PopGen

Another clue to the genetic impact of the Indo-Europeans pastoralists from the steppe is the fact that most European adults can drink milk as a result of a helpful genetic mutation that confers lactase persistence. Manco observes that: “It has been proposed that lactase persistence was the genetic edge that allowed the dairy pastoralists to spread.”[xiii] Evidence of the aggressive demographic expansion of the Indo-Europeans, and the consequent displacement of other ethnic groups in Europe is revealed by the fact that non-Indo-European Y-DNA haplogroups like G2a are today found almost exclusively in mountainous regions of Europe. One source makes the point that:

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A Review of “The Mighty Dead” by Adam Nicolson — Part 2

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A scene from the Odyssey from a Roman mosaic

A scene from the Odyssey from a Roman mosaic

Part 1

Homer was central to the Ancient Greeks’ conception of themselves and their origins. At their most holy and self-conscious moment, the quadrennial festival of the Panathenaia, the Athenians  “gathered for total immersion in the Homeric stories, drinking up the tales from which most of their great tragedies drew their plots and characters, thinking of Homer as the source of what they were.”[i] According to Nicolson, these origins are fundamentally northern. He observes how, particularly in the Odyssey, the Greeks are depicted as outsiders to the Mediterranean world, with Odysseus portrayed as an impoverished northern wanderer not entirely at home in the Mediterranean world, who, after many trials and tribulations, returns home a broken king, an outsider with few allies. While Odysseus and the other Greek chieftains conceive of themselves as noble kings, the civilized states of the Mediterranean see them as barbarians.

When Odysseus and his crew find themselves facing Polyphemus the Cyclops, the notion of the Greeks as outsiders is manifest. “Strangers, who are you?” the man-eating Cyclops asks them. “Where do you come from, sailing over the sea-ways? Are you trading? Or are you roaming wherever luck takes you over the sea? Like pirates?”[ii]  Nicolson notes that, “he may be the king of Ithaca, the son of Laertes, a man whose fame has reached the sky, but that is not how the world of the Odyssey treats him. Everywhere he arrives anonymous, not somebody but ‘nobody.’”[iii] This epithet features prominently in the same episode from the Odyssey when Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name. Odysseus replies that his name is “Nobody.” When Polyphemus is later blinded and cries out for help, the other Cyclops ask who has hurt and blinded him. “Nobody!” he answers to our amusement. Read more

A Review of “The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters” by Adam Nicolson, Part 1

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The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters is an example of that non-fiction genre so reviled by the anti-White establishment: books that celebrate the European past and the rich and world-transforming culture that emerged from it. Foundational to this culture are the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which have long been pillars of the Western literary canon. While their place in intellectual life of the West has waned over the last century (casualties of the generalized decline of a now Jewish-dominated culture), they remain as alive as ever for many readers. For author Adam Nicolson, in addition to their imperishable literary value, the Homeric epics should matter to all Europeans because through them “Homer tells us how we became who we are.”[i]

Nicolson is an English writer and journalist known for his scholarly but passionately expressed works on history, landscape and literature. The grandson of noted (and controversial) writers Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, he recalls being taught Homer at school, where his fumbling knowledge of Greek meant “it was as if the poems were written in maths.” Today most schoolchildren are unlikely to get even that far — with the majority doubtless associating Homer with The Simpsons and its derisive Jewish caricature of the White American father. Nicolson “rediscovered” Homer in middle age when he found himself electrified by the American poet Robert Fagles’ acclaimed verse translation of the Odyssey.

In The Mighty Dead Nicolson argues that the mainstream historical account of Homer is wrong. The current orthodoxy has the Iliad and the Odyssey as products of the early Iron Age Greece of the eighth century BC, or thereabouts. This was a time, often labelled the Greek Renaissance, when Greek civilization, after five centuries of decline and stagnation, saw a revival that culminated in the golden age of classical Athens in the fifth century BC. This rebirth, yet to be fully explained, coincided with a population boom and the rediscovery of bronze-making, a skill that had fallen into disuse in the preceding four centuries. This was a time in Greek history that saw the growth of

colonies, trade, improved ships, gymnasiums, coinage, temples, cities, pan-Hellenic competitions at Olympia (the first, traditionally, in 776 BC), the art of writing, of depicting the human figure on pottery and in the round, the first written law codes, the dating of history. The first tentative moves towards the formation of city-states: every one of these aspects of a renewed civilization quite suddenly appeared all over the eighth-century Aegean. Homer, in this view, was the product of a new, dynamic, politically inventive and culturally burgeoning moment in Greek history. Homer was the poet of a boom.[ii]

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The Testament of a European Patriot: A Review of Dominique Venner’s “Breviary of the Unvanquished” (Part 1)

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Venner

Dominique Venner, Un samouraï d’Occident: Le Bréviaire des insoumis (A Samurai of the West: Breviary of the Unvanquished; Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2013).

All Europeans, whether they are of the Old World or the New, are suffering today. Their very existence is demonized by a reigning culture which would prefer to see them blended into oblivion. Whereas the old beliefs — Christianity, communism, fascism — are dead or dying, no new faith has replaced them. We, ourselves, are dying as peoples, slowly vanishing from the face of the Earth. But some Europeans refuse to go down quietly, notwithstanding the base allures of comfort. So it was with Dominique Venner, an erudite historian and European patriot, who lived, fought, and died by the pen and the sword.

Venner’s last book — which translates as A Samurai of the West: The Breviary of the Unvanquished — presents itself as his political testament and his final attempt to reconnect Europeans with their tradition and thus awaken them ethnically and politically. This Breviary is not a traditional prayer book but rather presents “the substantive core” of the European tradition and is “a collection of writings, thoughts, and examples to which one can turn to every day to nourish one’s thoughts, one’s acts, and one’s life” (34). Venner says that the world-view implicit in this work can form the basis “to build the personal life of each of us, of families, of nations, and of living communities” (36).

The Breviary is then not only a wonderful introduction to Homeric and Stoic wisdom, but also has practical advice on day-to-day life: On establishing one’s own “breviary” of quotes from sacred texts and great thinkers, on communing with nature in the woods, on traveling across Europe like the Wandervögel, on cultivating beauty in one’s own life, or on the reconstruction of one’s family tree. Read more

Hybrid Fabrications versus Greek Originality

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The Guardian was beaming with confidence this July 11 announcing Tim Whitmarsh’s edited book, The Romance Between Greece and the East, as a major breakthrough in scholarship recasting the ancient Greek world “from an isolated entity to one of many hybrid cultures in Africa and in the East”. Whitmarsh’s book is framed along the same lines as Martin Bernal’s earlier attempt in Black Athena (1989) to place the origins of Greece in Africa and the Semitic Near East. Whitmarsh’s calls the argument that the Greeks owed their brilliance to themselves, their own ethnicity as Indo-Europeans, a “massive cultural deception”.

In our Western world of immigrant multiculturalism any idea which attributes to Greeks, Romans, medieval Christians or modern Europeans any achievement — without including as co-partners the Moslems, Africans and Orientals — is designated as a massive deception. The scholarship promoted by our current elites demands a view in which Europeans don’t exist except as hybrids, borrowers, and imitators.  But the historical and archeological evidence adduced by Whitmarsh and multiculturalists in general never goes beyond showing that there were connections between the Greeks (or Europeans generally) and their neighbours. They have an easy time showing what many have shown before, that the Greek mainland was connected to the Mediterranean world via trade, travelling, colonizing activities, and the residence of some Greeks outside Greece.

They also repeat as new discoveries what European scholars had already started showing in the eighteenth century, that ancient Greece was preceded by Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations and that the Indo-Europeans who arrived in the Greek mainland and established the Mycenaean civilization in the early second millennium borrowed some basic civilizational tools from these older civilizations, including some mythological motifs and the alphabet from the Phoenicians.  From these general borrowings, and without even caring to understand the unique world out of which the Mycenaeans came, a world which originated in the steppes and was characterized by horse riding, chariot fighting, aristocratic liberalism, and an ethos of heroism, which was vividly captured in the Homeric epics of the eighth century (an ethos utterly absent in the Epic of Gilgamesh), the multicultics rush to conclude that the achievements of the archaic and classical Greeks — such as Pindar, Sophocles, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Euripides, Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — were “hybrid” achievements.  Read more