Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England”—Translated and with an Introduction by Alexander Jacob

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Introduction

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) is best known for his cultural history Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century; Munich, 1899) as well as for his studies of Kant, Goethe, Wagner, and Heinrich von Stein. But his several tracts written during World War I[1] are interesting in their own right as documents of German nationalist literature that prefigure the doctrines of German supremacy propounded by the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar Republic as well as by the National Socialists. Of the works dating from the war, Kriegsaufsätze (War Essays; Munich, 1914)—from which the present essay is taken—was indeed the first.[2]

Chamberlain’s essay on England is a study of the psychological bases of England’s imperial edifice as well as of its war aims in World War I. He notes that, whereas the world has been accustomed to considering Germany as a militaristic aggressor, it is in fact the imperial ambitions of England that are the principal impetus of the war. This exercise in psychological study of national character Chamberlain undertakes by highlighting, first, the social divisions in England that have informed the aristocracy and the rest of the population and, secondly, the gradual transformation of an originally insular people into an ocean-faring people intent on international trade and colonial exploitation.

The ruling class in England has, since the Norman invasion, been the French aristocracy, which, being a minority that accepted only a few Saxon and Danish families into its rather exclusive circle, did not mingle fully with the local Anglo-Saxon population. There was little interaction between them and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population, and the social superiority of the Normans was established in a clear and unmistakable manner expressed not only in their different physiognomies but also in their linguistic expression. The aloofness of the French rulers, however, later seeped down to the classes below the aristocracy as well so that the well-known English ‘reserve’ was eventually observable throughout the population.

The government of the nation was always in the hands of the aristocracy alone and the Lower House never represented the people even when, around 1600, it gained more powers, for these powers were to benefit only the lesser aristocracy, constituted of the younger sons of nobles, and not the population as a whole. The attitude of both the traditional rulers, represented by the Conservative Party, and the relative newcomers, represented by the Liberals, was, further, one of open hostility. This is especially observable during elections when both parties customarily employed armed ruffians to intimidate the supporters of their opponents. Thus, as Chamberlain, declares:

In England’s politics two brutalities stand opposite and complement each other: the raw violence of the class used to ruling and the elementary brutality of the entire uncultivated masses who, as described above, are nowhere associated with anything higher.

Chamberlain’s description of English parliamentarianism indeed contradicts Oswald Spengler’s idealisation of the ‘old style’ of English politics dominated by aristocrats and gentlemen (see below).

More significant is the transformation of the entire nation into a sea-faring one even though the Anglo-Saxons originally had little interest in marine activities and had to be forced to develop a taste for the sea through legislation under the Tudors. However, once they had discovered the advantages of overseas trade by observing the successes of the Spanish, Dutch, and French colonial enterprises, England too began to develop its own merchant navy. What is important to note is that, in its international adventures, the English evidenced a singular proclivity to underhanded means of conquest involving piracy and cheating. When the English went to war, it was always to protect their trade interests. As Chamberlain points out, the English

have founded colonies where the countries stood empty or were inhabited only by naked savages; others they snatched through contracts from the Dutch, French, Spanish or—for example, Malta—through breach of contract. India was subjugated by Indian troops; England has never undertaken campaigns of conquest through force of arms, like the Spanish and the French. The Englishman does not, like Alexander or Caesar, conduct wars for the sake of glory. ‘To England’, says Seeley, ‘war is throughout an industry, a way to wealth, the most thriving business, the most prosperous investment, of the time.

The battles that Marlborough distinguished himself in during the eighteenth century were conducted to maintain a base slave-trade and Bolingbroke’s avowed foreign policy with regard to the continent in the same period was to contrive crises that would lead the European powers to war mutually against one another.

The immorality that marked England’s commercial undertakings was accompanied by a rapid decline in the traditional agricultural life of the nation. This resulted in a degeneration of the moral character of the English population as a whole:

With the total decline of country life and with the equally perfect victory of the sole God of trade and industry, Mammon, the genuine, harmless, naïve, heart-warming cheerfulness has disappeared from England.

Thus, nowadays

one finds in England no stateliness, no broad good-natured humour, no cheerfulness; everything is hatred, noise, pomp, pretentiousness, vulgarity, arrogance, sullenness and envy.

Meanwhile, the increased wealth of the nation allowed the English colonialist to be converted into a Nietzschean bully:

As soon as the brave Anglo-Saxon peasant was transformed into a pirate the blond beast appeared, as the German philologist glimpsed in his crazy dream; and as soon as the refined noble of the 15th century had lost ‘intellectual interests’ and had become covetous of gold, there arose the heartless slave trader who was different from the Spanish men of violence only in his hypocrisy. There is nothing more brutal in the world than a crude Englishman; he indeed possesses no other support than his crudeness. Mostly he is not a bad man; he has openness and energy and optimism; but he is ignorant as a kaffir, does not undergo any schooling in obedience and respect, knows no other ideal than ‘to fight his way through’.

Simultaneously, the coarsening of manners that took place abroad was reflected at home in the dissipation of the traditional aristocracy in base commercial activities:

This crudeness has slowly imbued almost the entire nation from the bottom to the top—as is always the case. Even fifty years ago it was an offence against class dignity if a member of the nobility took part in industry, trade and finance; today, the head of the oldest and greatest house of Scotland, brother-in-law of the king, a banker!

And the refined manners of the aristocracy came to serve only as a disguise for people whose ‘moral compass has lost its north.’ A further level of immorality was attained when the British government allowed the British East India Company to acquire colonial territory through devious, if not criminal, means that were justified only by the increased revenues of the Company and the steadily increasing rank of Britain among the European nations:

the temptation to enormous power on the basis of immeasurable wealth was too strong; in the nobility and in the circles related to it one soon was not able to distinguish between right and wrong. The same man who would never have deviated from scrupulous decency committed every crime in the supposed defence of the fatherland.

Chamberlain gives as examples of this indecent conduct of the British imperialists the case of Warren Hastings, who felt no qualms at all in committing all manner of political atrocities by allying himself with unscrupulous Indian potentates until, in 1788, he was formally arraigned in a famous impeachment trial that included the Member of Parliament Edmund Burke as the lead prosecutor. However, the trial was forced to drag on for ten years and ended with a final acquittal of Hastings. Hastings’ misconduct, indeed, was not unique to the eighteenth century and foreshadowed the deception exercised by Sir Edward Grey during World War I, when Britain sought to depict Germany as the aggressors whereas there was evidence, according to Chamberlain, that Britain had indeed been contemplating an attack on Belgium even before the Germans undertook one.

*   *   *

The relation between the ruthless nature of the politics and foreign policy of Britain and its evolving national character that Chamberlain highlights in this essay was reiterated by the German conservative thinkers Werner Sombart (1863–1941) and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936). Sombart, the German economist and social philosopher, is noted today for his several pioneering works on the capitalistic ethos. However, in his war-time tract Händler und Helden (Munich, 1915), he focused on the vital difference between the English character and the German that Chamberlain had pointed to in the first year of the war.

Writing to inspire young German soldiers in their combat against the English forces, Sombart considers the world war started in Central Europe between Austria-Hungary, in July 1914, to be essentially one between England and Germany.[3] For it is, in his view, an ideological, or even ‘religious’, war between the English worldview and the German. The sociological and cultural significance of the war, according to Sombart, is the radical difference existing between the English “trader spirit,” which aims at achieving mere “happiness” through the negative virtues of “temperance, contentedness, industry, sincerity, fairness, austerity … humility, patience, etc.,” all of which will facilitate a “peaceful cohabitation of traders,” and the “heroic spirit” of the Germans which aims at fulfilling the mission of the higher self-realisation of humanity through the positive, ‘giving’ virtues of “the will to sacrifice, loyalty, guilelessness, reverence, bravery, piety, obedience, goodness”—as well as the ‘military virtues’, for “all heroism first fully develops in war and through war.”[4]

War for the English has always been a chiefly commercial enterprise, whereas for the German it is a defence of his soul from the deadening influence of this same commercial spirit. In order to reveal the essential mercantile nature of the English nation, as well as of the war that it had recently embarked on in Europe, Sombart first points to the fact that the English have, through the ages, had no higher philosophy than a utilitarian and eudaimonistic one.[5] This is demonstrable by a perusal of the works of the major English thinkers from the Elizabethan empiricist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) to the more recent evolutionary biologist and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

Bacon’s utilitarian views are indeed geared to the acquisition of comfort as a source of human happiness. And it is this desire for comfort that, according to Sombart, informed the British trading enterprises around the world from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards which, in turn, consolidated the mercantile mentality of the British nation as a whole. The British empire built on these considerations is thus only a mechanical aggregation of commercial interests and not informed by any ideal civilizing impulses. The wars conducted by the British are also essentially trade wars that seek to punish violations of the ‘contracts’ established by them with other nations for their international commercial purposes. Sombart thus maintains that one of the principal causes of the First World War was Britain’s need to eliminate the threat posed by German industry to its colonial empire.

Like Chamberlain and Sombart, the Neoconservative Oswald Spengler too, in his essay, “Preussentum und Sozialismus” (“Prussianism and Socialism,” 1919), considered the so-called Marxist socialism as one based on alien, English and Jewish understandings of society and generically different from the genuine socialism of the Prussian state. The socialism of the English is demonstrated by Spengler to be a Viking-like individualism which has encouraged the colonial rapacity of the British Empire and the mercantile ruthlessness of its leaders. The Norman conquest of England had put an end to the Anglo-Saxon way of life and introduced the “piracy principle” whereby “the barons exploited the land apportioned to them, and were in turn exploited by the duke.”[6] The modern English and American trade companies are indeed enchained to the same motives of profiteering:

Their aim is not to work steadily to raise the entire nation’s standard of living, it is rather to produce private fortunes by the use of private capital, to overcome private competition, and to exploit the public through the use of advertising, price wars, control of the ratio of supply and demand.[7]

The Marxist doctrine, being a product of the Jewish mind, which is characterised by ‘resentment,’ is based on envy of those who have wealth and privileges without work, and so it advocates revolt against those who possess these advantages. It is thus essentially a negative variant of the English ethos. It is not surprising, therefore, that the worker in the Marxist doctrine is encouraged to amass his own profits through private business, so that, as Spengler puts it, “Marxism is” indeed “the capitalism of the working class.” The Marxian solution to boundless private property is also a negative one: “expropriation of the expropriators, robbery of the robbers.”[8] This is based on the “English” view of capital, wherein

the billionaire demands absolute freedom to arrange world affairs by his private decisions, with no other ethical standard in mind than success. He beats down his opponents with credit and speculation as his weapons.

The Marxist system is thus the “final chapter of a philosophy with roots in the English Revolution, whose biblical moods have remained dominant in English thought.”[9] In fact, as he goes on to say, “a biblical interpretation of questionable business dealings can ease the conscience and greatly increase ambition and initiative.”[10] While the industrialists engage in commerce with “money” as a commodity, the workers do the same with “work.”

In the Prussian state, on the other hand, work is not a commodity, but a “duty towards the common interest, and there is no gradation—this is Prussian style democratisation—of ethical values among the various kinds of work.” The Prussian sees property not as private booty, but as part of a common weal, “not as a means of expression of personal power but as goods placed in trust, for the administration of which he, as a property owner, is responsible to the state.”

The significance of the notion of the national state is completely ignored by Marx in his focus on “society.” Parliamentarianism is not only inappropriate in a monarchical state such as the Prussian but it is a tired and outmoded system which has lost the glory lent it by the “gentlemen” and aristocrats who once ruled German and British politics. Now

the institutions, the sense of tact and cautious observance of the amenities, are dying out with the old-style people of good breeding. . . . The relationship between party leaders and party, between party and masses, will be tougher, more transparent, and more brazen. That is the beginning of Caesarism.[11]

On the other hand, the Prussian form of socialism is based entirely on the notion of the primacy of the state, which is indeed the ideal of the Teutonic knight, diametrically opposed to the roving plunder of the Viking:

The Teutonic knights that settled and colonised the eastern borderlands of Germany in the Middle Ages had a genuine feeling for the authority of the state in economic matters, and later Prussians have inherited that feeling. The individual is informed of his economic obligations by Destiny, by God, by the state, or by his own talent . . . Rights and privileges of producing and consuming goods are equally distributed. The aim is not ever greater wealth of the individual or for every individual, but rather the flourishing of the totality.[12]

While English society is devoted to “success” and wealth, the Prussian is devoted to work for a common national goal:

The Prussian style of living . . . has produced a profound rank-consciousness, a feeling of unity based on an ethos of work, not of leisure. It unites the members of each professional group—military, civil service, and labour—by infusing them with a pride of vocation, and dedicates them to activity that benefits all others, the totality, the state.[13]

We see therefore that Chamberlain’s war essay on England had a major influence on the emphasis on the immoral nature of English commerce that is evident in the Neoconservative thinkers of the Weimar Republic.[14] More comprehensively than Sombart or Spengler, however, Chamberlain offers us insights also into the historical transformations of the British national character that underlay the several ill effects of this empire.

Part 2: Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “England.”

Alexander Jacob obtained his Master’s in English Literature from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the Pennsylvania State University His post-doctoral research was conducted at the University of Toronto while he was a Visiting Fellow at the departments of Political Science, Philosophy, and English Literature of the University of Toronto.

His scholarly publications include De Naturae Natura: A Study of Idealistic Conceptions of Nature and the Unconscious, Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1992, (2nd ed. Arktos Media, 2011), Indo-European Mythology and Religion: Essays, Melbourne, Manticore Press, 2019, Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the Early Twentieth Century, University Press of America, Lanham, MD, 2001, and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State: Essays, Manticore Press, 2021.

He has also published several English editions of European thinkers such as H.S. Chamberlain, Edgar Julius Jung, Alfred Rosenberg, Charles Maurras and Jean-François Thiriart.

[1] These include Politische Ideale (1915) [tr. A. Jacob, Political Ideals, University Press of America, 2005], Die Zuversicht (1915), Deutsches Wesen (1916) and Ideal und Macht (1916).

[2] This collection was translated by Charles H. Clarke as The Ravings of a Renegade (London, 1915). The other essays in it are ‘German Love of Peace’, ‘German Freedom’, ‘The German language’, ‘Germany as the leading power of the world’, and ‘Germany’.

[3][3] Germany joined forces with Austria-Hungary against Russia in August 1914, and Britain declared war against Germany when the latter invaded Belgium in the same month in order to gain access to France.

[4] Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen, Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1915 [translated A. Jacob, Traders and Heroes, London: Arktos, 2021].

[5] Sombart particularly recalls Nietzsche’s similar low evaluation of the English mind and its typical representatives: They are not a philosophical race, these English. Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit in general, Hobbes, Hume and Locke a degradation and devaluation of the concept of a ‘philosopher’ for over more than a century.[5]

[6] Oswald Spengler, ‘Prussianism and Socialism’, in Selected Essays, tr. D.O. White, Chicago, 1967, p.62.

[7] Ibid., p. 63. This is the essential evil of the modern geopolitical phenomenon of Atlanticism.

[8] Ibid., p. 118.

[9] Ibid., p. 97. What Spengler does not explicitly observe here is that the biblical mode of thought which directed Puritan capitlistic industry is in fact a basically Jewish, voluntaristic one deriving from the conception of the universe as created by a Pantokrator who rules the creation with his Will as a personal Lord (see E. Zilsel, ‘The Genesis of the Concept of Physical Law’, in Philosophical Review, no. 51 [1942], p. 247ff). For a discussion of the Jewish origins of this concept as well, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. T. Parsons (London : George Allen & Unwin, 1930).

[10] ‘Prussianism and Socialism’, loc.cit., p. 97.

[11] Ibid., p. 89. This depiction of European parliamentarianism is derived from Chamberlain’s other essay on ‘Germany as the leading power of the world’ in Kriegsaufsätze.

[12] Ibid., p. 62.

[13] Ibid., p. 47.

[14] Unfortunately, the moral corruption infusing the British Empire up to the First World War has continued beyond this war into the present day through the shadowy commercial empire that the Bank of England has maintained on the basis of revenues secretly channelled into the banks in the City of London from the tax havens in the former colonies of Britain in the Caribbean and elsewhere (see Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who stole the World, London, 2011.)

No Country for White Children

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I’ve recently enjoyed an exchange of emails with a very intelligent and articulate former White Nationalist who is now dedicated to anti-natalism, the philosophy expounded by the Jewish South African philosopher David Benatar. Summed up, anti-natalism argues that life entails suffering, sometimes terrible amounts of it, and therefore that non-existence is always better than living and dying. Benatar’s 2006 Oxford-published book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence is the influential key text of this growing movement. In the course of the book, Benatar advances the idea that humans should accept that procreation is inherently immoral because it involves creating sentient beings who will suffer and die. The text is thus a moral injunction against having children, and Benatar’s ideal scenario is one in which a barren mankind goes voluntarily extinct. In the course of the email exchange on these ideas, I raised a number of concerns with my correspondent about the logic, theory, and growth of anti-natalism, one of them being that, given the already problematic propensity among Whites to attach themselves to abstract moral concerns, and social fads based on guilt, there was likely to be a practical ethnic disparity in the adoption of anti-natalism at group level. In other words, I argued that anti-natalism, regardless of its philosophical merits or lack thereof (and quite apart from any consideration of Benatar’s intentions or ethnic origins), could contribute to the Culture of Sterility already prevalent in the West by providing yet more philosophical-cultural support for the demographic decline of Whites everywhere.

The minutiae of our broader debate of Benatar’s logic, and our shared rumination on existence and Being, isn’t worth covering here but, as our exchange narrowed in focus, two issues emerged which have relevance for this website. The first was whether life on earth was really a prize worth winning for Whites. The second was whether it was good to bring White children into an increasingly hostile world. My correspondent remains firmly in the camp that argues that life is most definitely not worth it, while I argued against Benatar and made the more optimistic case. This was a novel position for me given my longstanding appreciation of the deep pessimism of Schopenhauer and my general tendency to the “Black Pill” side of things. In this instance, however, I argued that, when it came to life, the game was indeed worth the candle. In fact, I believe that we should not only play the game of life, regardless of suffering, but play to win. I cannot say that I have arrived at this position rationally or logically. I can only say that the drive to life is firmly implanted in me, something that Benatar has argued is simply a trick of Nature. And yet, trick or not, I am a product of this earth, and not something alien to it and subjected to its whims. I am here. I exist. And I believe my best existence can be achieved with those most like me and especially, following in the thought of Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests, those related to me. In a sense I am on a boat in rough seas—I need those who will reliably grab an oar alongside me, rather than throw me overboard.

My own attitudes to anti-natalism aside, my correspondent is correct in highlighting the increasingly difficult, and almost impossible, position of White children. Despair in this regard is always within touching distance. Just this morning it was brought to my attention that the ADL has extended its considerable tentacles across the Atlantic, and will now be involved in a three-year project in England to provide “lessons and activities to schools and pupils to talk about difference and diversity, celebrate inclusion, and understand discrimination and its effects.” The project is part of a deal with Chelsea Football Club, owned by Russian-Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich, and will involve significant funding flowing from Chelsea to the ADL. In summary then, English fans are paying not only to see millionaires kick a ball for 90 minutes, but also for their children to be told they’re bigots by a gang of American Jews. That’s quite a deal. The interest of a body of New York Jews in English children is strange to say the least, especially when the ADL currently operates no such scheme in Israel where segregated education is still largely ongoing and, in the words of Israel’s own state comptroller, “racism and discrimination” are still prevalent in Israeli schools.

‘A Twig to be Straightened’: Jewish ‘Anti-Bias’ Research on White Children

I first wrote about the ADL’s strange and obsessive “interest” in White children in 2014, noting at that time their development of “Anti-Bias Lesson Plans and Resources for K-12 Educators.” The ADL program fit neatly into the broader history of Freudian attempts to portray anti-Semitism as a virulent mental pathology that careful education strategies could ‘inoculate’ against. That this process of “inoculation” has targeted White children and no others is an open secret. Although the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes are a form of disease with roots in childhood goes back to Freud, it has been prominent in Jewish activism for over a century and remains current today. Take, for example, the closing remarks from Abraham Foxman’s Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype, where parents and teachers are urged to “try to help the next generation grow up freer from the infection of intolerance. [emphasis added]” The goal, as Mr. Foxman himself once articulated, is to “make America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.” Theodore Isaac Rubin’s equally self-interested diatribe, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, describes anti-Jewish feeling as a “contagious, malignant disease,” and concludes by stating, “extremely active application of insight and education is necessary to check the disease. Checkmate and eradication is [sic] extremely difficult and probably only possible if applied to the very young before roots of the disease take hold. [emphasis added]” To Rubin, and his like-minded co-ethnics at the ADL, the solution to the problem of anti-Jewish feeling is one of “prophylaxis” and “approaches to children.” The ADL-sponsored tome Anti-Semitism in America (1979), concluded that “It is apparent that the schools are the most appropriate and potentially effective agent to carry out the instructional strategy just outlined.”[1]

The 1979 ADL study was itself following in the footsteps of a series of social engineering experiments carried out on White children over several decades by scores of Jewish psychiatrists and sociologists. Research into the racial attitudes of White children in America began as early as 1929, in Bruno Lasker’s Race Attitudes in Children (New York: H. Holt & Company). Lasker was a Hamburg-born Jew who moved first to England before arriving in the United States in 1914 where he established himself as a pro-immigration social worker. Lasker’s work was furthered in the 1930s by Eugene and Ruth Horowitz[2], whose work was highly influential on probably the most high-profile “child racism” test of the twentieth century — the “doll tests” of Black psychiatrists Kenneth and Mamie Clark that helped end segregation via Brown v. Board of Education. The “doll tests” didn’t just have a Jewish academic heritage; the research of the Clarks was funded by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the pair were closely connected to the Northside Center for Child Development which had a “mostly Jewish Board of Directors.”[3]

Research into the putative racism of White children was furthered in the 1960s by Donald Mosher,[4] but it was in the 1970s that an intensification took place, partly as a result of its blending with discoveries of the importance of television in shaping attitudes, and other social behavior ‘modification’ techniques. In 1972, for example, Bradley Greenberg was allowed access to 300 White children from Michigan to see if consistently watching Blacks on television could improve their attitude to “diversity.”[5] The development of Sesame Street, “a program that exposes young children to a variety of attractive black and Hispanic models,”[6] at the start of the decade owed much to the interventions and analyses of Jewish sociologists like Greenberg, as well as Gerry Bogatz,[7] Gerald Gorn,[8] Marvin Goldberg,[9] and Gordon Cantor.[10]

In a glowing walk down memory lane in Tablet, it’s made explicit that “idealistic urban Jews were integral to Sesame Street’s origins. … Its genesis was a 1966 dinner at Joan Ganz Cooney’s apartment, attended by Carnegie Corporation VP Lloyd Morrisett and NYC Channel 13’s program manager Louis Freedman.” As with many social experiments at the time, there was a blend of Jewish activism, government backing, and the financial support of Big Capital. In the case of Sesame Street,

The Carnegie Corporation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Ford Foundation donated most of the seed money for the launch of Children’s Television Workshop (today called Sesame Workshop). Harvard Ed School professor Gerald Lesser, one of the few people conducting research on kids and TV at the time, became the chair of CTW’s advisory board. He worked with the startup team and offered guidelines. … The show was racially and culturally diverse from the get-go.

These efforts to modify the behavior of White children via television were closely related to earlier Jewish efforts, in the 1950s and 1960s, to modify White racial attitudes. The most notable academics in the field of altering public opinion and White ingroup attitudes including Joseph Klapper, Bernard Berelson, Fritz Heider, Leo Bogart, Elihu Katz, Marie Jahoda, Joseph Gittler, Morris Rosenberg, Ernest Dichter, Walter Weiss, Nathan Glazer, Bernard J. Fine, Bruno Bettelheim, Wallace Mandell, Hertha Hertzog, Dororthy Blumenstock, Stanley Schachter, David Caplovitz, Walter Lippmann, Sol Ginsburg, Harry Alpert, Leon Festinger, Michael Gurevitch, Edward Shils, Eugene Gaier, Joseph Goldsen, Julius Schreiber, Daniel Levinson, Herbert Blumer, I. M. A. Myers, Irving Janis, Miriam Reimann, Edward Sapir, Solomon Asch, Gerald Wieder, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Morris Janowitz.

Someone once said that “when everyone thinks the same, conspiracy is unnecessary.” This is essentially the dynamic at work in this field of research, which was dominated by people from the same ethno-religious background, all of them bringing more or less the same anxieties, assumptions and enmities to their chosen field. The result was a very uniform approach among Jewish psychiatrists and sociologists to the “problem” of the White population, especially White children.

Following in the footsteps of many co-ethnics, in 1976 Irwin and Phylis Katz and their colleague Shirley Cohen moved away from the usefulness of television and into the testing of other “modification” techniques that specifically targeted White children. In one experiment, after gathering 80 White kindergarteners and fourth graders, attitudes to Blacks and the disabled were measured by, for example, confronting the youngsters with a Black man moving around a room in a wheelchair and observing their reactions.[11] Two years after this stunning leap forward for science, Phylis Katz returned to experimenting on White children with colleague Sue Rosenberg Zalk, in a project designed to achieve a “modification” of White children’s attitudes to race.[12] Katz justified the focus on children because, in White adults, “attitudes are relatively intransigent and much more difficult to change.” For Katz, to paraphrase the title of one of her essays, White children were a problematic and warped twig that emerged from a rotten tree and had to be “straightened.”[13]

Today, the same trend is very much in evidence. One of the more influential texts in the field is Louise Derman-Sparks’s 2011 What If All the Kids Are White? Anti-bias Multicultural Education with Young Children and Families. Derman-Sparks, who opened her speech to a multicultural conference in Berlin in 2010 with the statement that Germany’s shift to multiculturalism “has been especially moving and inspiring to me … as a Jewish woman,” adorns the cover of her book with the images of 14 White children gathered together above the distasteful title as if they’re criminal mugshots. The expressed intention of the book is to “pique the interest of Whites to examine themselves,” and it opens with reference to “many authors” who have published texts since the 1990s on how Whites perpetuate racism. The cited “many authors” includes Paul Kivel the Jewish author of Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice and founder of the (far from subtle) “Challenging Christian Hegemony Project.” Other examples of these “many authors” include Paula Rothenberg and her 2004 White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, Shirley Steinberg and her 2000 White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, and Tim Wise and his 2004 White Like Me. Although not mentioned by Derman-Sparks, one of the most influential academic texts in this field in recent years is developmental psychologist Lawrence Hirschfeld’s 1998 MIT-published Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds.

Derman-Sparks’s text is one of those truly vulgar texts that maintains a cheery air even as it portrays the innocent as sinister. How else are we to react to the ethnic paranoia inherent in complaints that White children aged between 3 and 4 in one class were perceived as “avoiding dark colors in their artwork”[14] and thus demonstrated a deep-seated racism imbibed from their parents since infancy? The revelation that these White children preferred to draw paintings with bright, cheerful colors was apparently so devastating that a team of anti-bias “educators” was brought in. Derman-Sparks lauds the team for “brainstorming” techniques to adapt the children’s behavior, including providing them with excesses of black and brown paper, providing them with black and brown toys, and creating “relaxation” spaces that were dark. When the children, who weren’t much older than toddlers, complained that the dark spaces were scaring them, they were told that darkness “wasn’t scary” and were made to simply endure it. The ideology behind this mental saturation in darkness was that “White children’s learning to be “White” is part of the maintenance of systemic racism.”[15] The goal therefore, in all cases, is to prevent White children from adopting their natural racial identity. Derman-Sparks stresses her ambition to create not just generations of Whites who tolerate multiculturalism, but who become active warriors for “social justice.”

Getting the ADL Out of Schools

All of which is to say that Jewish activism in this area is intended to pervert the in-born natural affinity of White children for their own kind. Even Hirschfeld (1998) admits that

race is one of the earliest-emerging social dimensions to which children attend and this pattern of development appears to be stable across diverse cultures. Furthermore racial thinking clearly develops into a theory-like knowledge structure, representing a coherent body of explanatory knowledge sustaining inferences about category members that go far beyond the range of direct experience.[16]

The aforementioned ‘anti-bias training,’ which has been developed over the course of the past century, is designed to overcome the natural instincts of White children and to deprive them of the knowledge structures, explanatory knowledge, and inferences that are essential to the protection of their interests. When these aspects of their development are done away with, and when they are instead brainwashed into becoming “social justice warriors” on behalf of foreign groups, White children are essentially turned upon themselves and their own people.

A promising sign in recent times, however, has been the backlash against the ADL’s involvement in education, which is in turn part of a broader realization of the harmful nature of Critical Race Theory and its encroachment at all levels of the education system. In July, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation initiated a “Get ADL Out of Schools” campaign after the ADL began state-wide measures that dictated that schools should “notify ADL when any incident of bias, bullying, discrimination or harassment occurs”—presumably so they could refer the offending youth to their “Center on Extremism” as soon as possible. The campaign is led in part by Stuart H. Hurlbert, Professor of Biology Emeritus, San Diego State University, who argues that “the Anti-Defamation League has inserted itself into American politics in a variety of ways over the decades primarily in the guise of a non-partisan, civil rights organization.” As part of his gathering of information revealing the true nature of the ADL, Hurlbert very helpfully directs readers to Kevin MacDonald’s work “Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review.”

In August, California’s Newport-Mesa Unified School District voted to continue its relationship with the ADL, but “with modifications.” The school district was the victim of an ADL shakedown in March 2019, after it was revealed that some drunken students from Newport Harbor High School arranged cups in the shape of a swastika at an off-campus party. After the prank was made viral by a malcontent, the ADL swooped on the instance of “abhorrent anti-Semitic activity” and shamed the nervous school board into accepting a rapidly escalating series of contracts for anti-bias training for staff and students.

The minutes of the school boards meetings are publicly available, and contain the actual contracts with the ADL which run to the value of some $96,650 over a two-year period for anti-bias and pro-immigration training sessions. The shakedown started to come apart in August, when board members began to question the transparency and cost of their agreements with the ADL, as well as the content of ADL training courses. In response to parents objecting to the school district’s relationship with the ADL on the grounds that it was “bringing critical race theory into the classroom,” the school district “reviewed the proposed contract and recommended eliminating second-level anti-bias courses for school employees.” Unfortunately, the most damaging aspect of ADL ‘training”—their lessons for children—remain in place (at a cost of $27,800), prompting Anti-Defamation League Regional Director Peter Levi to gloat, “We have long believed education is the best antidote to hate and bias.”

More and more objections are being raised, however. Back in June, in Alabama, the Mountain Brook School Board severed ties with the ADL after a parent-led protest against Critical Race Theory being pushed into schools via the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” program. In a familiar pattern, Mountain Brook’s involvement with the ADL began with a teenage prank involving swastikas. A Jewish parent, Elizabeth Goldstein, then claimed that Mountain Brook needed ADL training, providing as supporting evidence the undoubtedly truthful statement: “As a child, as a Jewish child growing up in Mountain Brook, [when I was in second grade] a girl told me she could not play with me because I killed Jesus.”

The shakedown began, but on July 8 Mountain Brook Schools issued a statement in response to parent pressure, announcing that “Mountain Brook Schools will not be using “No Place for Hate” and will no longer be using the services of the Anti-Defamation League.” The ADL, rather than gracefully bowing out of the affair, attacked Mountain Brook Schools in an open letter, accusing the city of “many issues of antisemitism and hatred over the past several years.” Sinister motives were implied to lie behind the Board’s

intentional and unexplained distancing from ADL. … In response to a serious 2020 antisemitic incident involving its students … the Mountain Brook Diversity Committee invited ADL to give a presentation on our educational resources in July 2020. This meeting resulted in the Diversity Committee choosing to use ADL’s No Place for Hate® education framework and A World of Difference Institute® programs for its goal of making MBS students globally responsible and conscious citizens by helping to foster a more welcoming and inclusive school community. … The treatment of ADL as a partner of the district and a resource to the community has been both disrespectful and lacking transparency and communication. We are leaving Mountain Brook Schools with no indication that the issues of antisemitism in the community are being addressed. Indeed, they feel worse. … Mountain Brook Schools’ failure to consider implementing anti-bias education in schools could serve to allow antisemitism and other forms of hatred to fester in the school community.

The ADL could have just cut to the chase and said “A world where bigoted White children aren’t put through our Brainwashing Seminar® and Anti-Identity Institute® (and all for the bargain price of less than $100,000!) is a world in which we’re deeply terrified.”

*****

We’ve come full circle. Is the ADL looking across the Atlantic because it’s being rebuffed in America? I doubt it. The group is international in origin and intent. It is simply expanding its modus operandi in accordance with its ideology—an ideology in respect to “child racism” in the West that has been a century in the making. This ideology dictates that the “twigs” must be snapped off from the White tree and reshaped. This ideology hasn’t required a conspiracy, only a tremendous similarity in thought and action over one hundred years. Defeating this pattern will require a similar uniformity of thought. White parents coming together to expel brainwashers is a great place to start.

[1] Quinley, Harold E. & Glock, Charles Y. Anti-Semitism in America (Michigan: The Free Press, 1979), 202.

[2] Horowitz, Eugene L., and Ruth E. Horowitz. “Development of Social Attitudes in Children.” Sociometry 1, no. 3/4 (1938): 301–38.

[3] Markowitz, Gerald E. and Rosner, David, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

[4] Mosher, Donald L., and Alvin Scodel. “Relationships between Ethnocentrism in Children and the Ethnocentrism and Authoritarian Rearing Practices of Their Mothers.” Child Development 31, no. 2 (1960): 369–76.

[5] Greenberg, B. S. (1972) ‘Children’s Reactions to TV Blacks’, Journalism Quarterly, 49(1), pp. 5–14.

[6] Katz, Phyllis A.; Zalk, Sue R. (1978). Modification of children’s racial attitudes.. , 14(5), 447–461.

[7] Bogatz, G. A., & Ball, S. The second year of Sesame Street: A continuing evaluation. Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 1971.

[8] Gorn, Gerald J., Marvin E. Goldberg, and Rabindra N. Kanungo. “The Role of Educational Television in Changing the Intergroup Attitudes of Children.” Child Development 47, no. 1 (1976): 277–80.

[9] Marvin E. Goldberg & Gerald J. Gorn (1979) Television’s impact on preferences for non‐white playmates: Canadian “Sesame Street” inserts, Journal of Broadcasting, 23:1, 27-32.

[10] Gordon N. Cantor. “White Boys’ Ratings of Pictures of Whites and Blacks as Related to Amount of Familiarization.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 39, no. 2 (December 1974); Cantor, Gordon N. “Effects of Familiarization on Children’s Ratings of Pictures of Whites and Blacks.” Child Development 43, no. 4 (1972): 1219–29.

[11] Katz, P. A., Katz, I., & Cohen, S. (1976). White children’s attitudes toward Blacks and the physically handicapped: A developmental study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 68(1), 20–24.

[12] Katz, Phyllis A.; Zalk, Sue R. (1978). Modification of children’s racial attitudes.. , 14(5), 447–461.

[13] Katz, P. A. ‘Attitude change in children: Can the twig be straightened?’ In P. A. Katz (Ed.), Towards the elimination of racism. New York: Pergamon Press,1976.

[14] Derman-Sparks, 25.

[15] Ibid,. 31.

[16] Hirschfeld, L.A. Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 83.

Guillaume Durocher’s “The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Ancient Greece”

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The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Ancient Greece
Guillaume Durocher
Amazon Createspace, 2021

This is an extended version of the foreword to The Ancient Ethnostate.

Guillaume Durocher has produced an authoritative, beautifully written, and even inspirational account of the ancient Greeks. Although relying on mainstream academic sources, he adds an evolutionary perspective that is sorely lacking in contemporary academia at a time when the ancient Greek civilization, like the Western canon in toto, has been subjected to intense criticism reflecting the values of the contemporary academic left. To get a flavor of the current state of classics scholarship, consider the following from the New York Times:

Long revered as the foundation of “Western civilization,” the field [of classics] was trying to shed its self-imposed reputation as an elitist subject overwhelmingly taught and studied by white men. Recently the effort had gained a new sense of urgency: Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.” …

For several years, [Dan-el Padilla] has been speaking openly about the harm caused by practitioners of classics in the two millenniums since antiquity: the classical justifications of slavery, race science, colonialism, Nazism and other 20th-century fascisms. Classics was a discipline around which the modern Western university grew, and Padilla believes that it has sown racism through the entirety of higher education. Last summer, after Princeton decided to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its School of Public and International Affairs, Padilla was a co-author of an open letter that pushed the university to do more. “We call upon the university to amplify its commitment to Black people,” it read, “and to become, for the first time in its history, an anti-racist institution.” Surveying the damage done by people who lay claim to the classical tradition, Padilla argues, one can only conclude that classics has been instrumental to the invention of “whiteness” and its continued domination.

In recent years, like-minded classicists have come together to dispel harmful myths about antiquity. On social media and in journal articles and blog posts, they have clarified that contrary to right-wing propaganda, the Greeks and Romans did not consider themselves “white,” and their marble sculptures, whose pale flesh has been fetishized since the 18th century, would often have been painted in antiquity. They have noted that in fifth-century-B.C. Athens, which has been celebrated as the birthplace of democracy, participation in politics was restricted to male citizens; thousands of enslaved people worked and died in silver mines south of the city, and custom dictated that upper-class women could not leave the house unless they were veiled and accompanied by a male relative. They have shown that the concept of Western civilization emerged as a euphemism for “white civilization” in the writing of men like Lothrop Stoddard, a Klansman and eugenicist. Some classicists have come around to the idea that their discipline forms part of the scaffold of white supremacy — a traumatic process one described to me as “reverse red-pilling” — but they are also starting to see an opportunity in their position. Because classics played a role in constructing whiteness, they believed, perhaps the field also had a role to play in its dismantling.[1]

Durocher’s treatment is a refreshing antidote to this contemporary academic orthodoxy. Unlike so many scholars, whose main concern is to score political points useful to the anti-White left and thereby improve their standing in the profession, he has attempted to present an accurate account of these writers and the world they were trying to understand and survive in. The phrase “so-called white culture” in the above quotation from Rachel Poser’s New York Times article is indicative of this mindset. Durocher does not shy away from discussing slavery, the relatively confined role of women, or the cruelty that Greeks could exhibit even toward their fellow Greeks. But he also emphasizes the relative freedom of the Greeks, their intellectual brilliance, and the ability of the two principal city-states, Athens and Sparta, to pull together to defeat a common foe and thereby save their people and culture from utter destruction.

The contemporary academic left has abandoned any attempt to understand the Greeks on their own terms in favor of comparing Western cultures (and typically only Western cultures) to what they see as timeless moral criteria—criteria that reflect the current sacralization of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But even the most cursory reflection makes it obvious that moral ideals such as valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion are not justified because of their value in establishing a society that can survive in a hostile world. They are valued as intrinsic goods, and societies that depart from these ideals are condemned as evil. Recently there was something of a stir when a video was released by the website of Russia Today, a television station linked to the Russian government, comparing ads for military service in Russia and the United States.[2] Ads directed at Russians show determined, physically fit young men engaged in disciplined military units and difficult, dangerous activities under adverse conditions. On the other hand, the recruitment ad for the U.S. military features a woman who, although physically fit, dwells on her pride in participating in the marriage of her two “mothers.” The contrast couldn’t be more striking. The Russian military is seeking the best way to survive in a hostile world, while the American military is virtue-signaling its commitment to the gender dogmas of the left.

Durocher emphasizes that the Greeks lived in a very cruel world, a world where “the fate of the vanquished was often supremely grim: the men could be exterminated, the women and children enslaved as so much war booty. Our generation too often forgets that our political order exists by virtue of a succession of wars — from the revolutionary wars of the Enlightenment to the World Wars of the Twentieth Century — and it cannot be otherwise.” We in the contemporary West have a life of relative ease, wealth, and security that was unknown to the ancient Greeks who were threatened not only by other Greek poleis, but by foreign powers, particularly the aggressive and much more populous Persian Empire. In such an environment, there is no room for virtue signaling. Survival in a hostile, threatening world was the only worthwhile goal:

Before anything else, a good city-state was one with the qualities necessary to survive in the face of aggressive foreign powers. This was ensured by solidarity among the citizens, each being willing to fight and die beside the other. Hence the citizen was also a soldier-citizen.

 Aristocratic Individualism. Ancient Greece was an Indo-European culture, and thus prized military virtues, heroism, and the quest for honor, fame, and glory. Homer “tells of a terrible war for sexual competition, for the heart of beautiful Helen, and its inevitable tragedies. But the maudlin self-pity and effeminacy of our time are unknown to Homer: if tragedy is inevitable in the human experience, the poet’s role is to give meaning and beauty to the ordeal, and to inspire men to struggle for a glorious destiny.” “Their way of life is one of ‘vital barbarism,’ having the values of ruthless conquerors, prizing loot, honor, and glory above all.” Achilles “prefers a brief but glorious life to one of lengthy obscurity.” “Quick, better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches, slowly crushed to death – helpless against the hulls in the bloody press, by far inferior men!” (Iliad, 15.510). Trust was confined to people within one’s social circle. Strangers and foreigners could not be trusted: “As in the Iliad, in the Odyssey strangers and foreign lands are synonymous with uncertainty and violence. This is a world without mutual confidence. Even the gods do not trust in one another.”

This sense of heroic struggle in a hostile environment is central to the classical world of Greece and Rome, and was evident among the Germanic peoples who inherited the West after the fall of the Roman Empire. As Ricardo Duchesne notes, the Indo-European legacy is key to understanding the restless, aggressive, questing, innovative, “Faustian” soul of Europe. Indo-Europeans were a “uniquely aristocratic people dominated by emerging chieftains for whom fighting to gain prestige was the all-pervading ethos. This culture [is] interpreted as ‘the Western state of nature’ and as the primordial source of Western restlessness.”[3] Durocher expands on this beautifully:

This Aryan ethos is what so appealed to Nietzsche: a people not animated by pity or guilt, nor trying to achieve impossible or fictitious equality in an endlessly vain attempt to assuage feelings. Rather, Hellenic culture, driven by that aristocratic and competitive spirit, held up the ideal of being the best: the best athlete, the best warrior, the best poet, the best philosopher, or the most beautiful. This culture also held up the collective ideal of being the best as a whole society, for they understood that man as a species only flourishes as a community.

This competitive ethic so central to the West is fundamentally individualistic, not based on extended kinship. It is in strong contrast to the contemporary West where the main goal of far too many of its traditional peoples is to uphold moral principles and to feel guilt for differences in wealth and accomplishment. In individualist Western culture, reputation is paramount, and in the modern West, reputation revolves mainly around being an honest, morally upstanding, trustworthy person, with moral rectitude defined by media and academic elites hostile to the Western tradition. In my Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition I ascribe this fundamental shift in Western culture to the rise of the values of an egalitarian individualist ethic that originated among the northwestern European hunter-gatherers—an ethic that is in many ways the diametrical opposite of the Indo-European aristocratic tradition.[4] This new ethic began its rise to predominance with the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and remains most prominent in northwest Europe, particularly Scandinavian cultures.

The aristocratic individualism of the ancient Western world implies a hierarchy in which aristocrats have power over underlings (although there was the expectation of reciprocity), but there is egalitarianism among peers. “The kings … are not tyrants: they are expected to welcome legitimate criticism from their peers and even tolerate a good deal of backtalk.” In the Iliad, the Achaean army is made of several kings and is therefore fractious, with no one having absolute power over the rest. Decisions therefore require consensus and consultation. Aristocratic individualism is always threatened by what one might term a degenerate aristocracy—the ancient tyrants and early modern European monarchs kings who aspired to complete control. For example, King Louis XIV of France (reigned 1643-1715) had power over the nobility undreamed of in the Middle Ages while his legacy of absolute rule led ultimately to the French Revolution.

Herodotus notes that a common strategy for ruling elites was to form a distinct and solidary extended family by only marrying among themselves, for example by the ruling Bacchiadae clan of Corinth (Herodotus, 5.92). This also occurred in the European Middle Ages and later as elites severed ties with their wider kinship groups and married among themselves—likely a tendency for any aristocratic society.

But even apart from peers, there was an ideal of reciprocity within the hierarchy—a fundamental feature of Indo-European culture. As I noted in Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition:

Oath-bound contracts of reciprocal relationships were characteristic of [Proto-Indo-Europeans] and [Indo-Europeans] and this practice continued with the various I-E groups that invaded Europe. These contracts formed the basis of patron-client relationships based on reputation—leaders could expect loyal service from their followers, and followers could expect equitable rewards for their service to the leader. This is critical because these relationships are based on talent and accomplishment, not ethnicity (i.e., rewarding people on the basis of closeness of kinship) or despotic subservience (where followers are essentially unfree). (p. 34)

Such reciprocity is apparent in Homer’s world: “The Homeric ideal of kingship is one of familial solidarity, moderation, trust, piety, strength, and reciprocal duties between king and people, to the benefit of one another. Hierarchy and community are fundamentally necessary in Homer’s world. Followers require leadership and, indeed, servitude in a sense makes them foolish.”   

Greek Collectivism: The Necessity of Social Cohesion

Given the exigencies of survival in a hostile world, Greek conceptions of the ideal society were firmly based on realistic assessments of what was necessary to survive and flourish. In my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition,[5] I noted that the Puritan-descended intellectuals of the nineteenth century, like today’s academic and media left, were moral idealists, constructing ideal societies on the basis of universalist moral principles, such as abolitionist ideology based on the evil of enslaving Africans. The Greeks also had ideas on the ideal society, but they were not based on moral abstractions independent of survival value. And among those values, social cohesion was paramount. Because of its inherent individualism and the practical necessity of social cohesion, Western culture has always been a balance between its individualism and some form of social glue that binds people together to achieve common interests, including forms of social control that impinge on the self-interest of at least some individuals, but also providing citizens with a stake in the system.

There is thus a major contrast between the Greeks and a slave-type society such as the Persian Empire—a contrast the Greeks were well aware of. For example, Aristotle wrote “these barbarian peoples are more servile in character than Greeks (as the peoples of Asia are more servile than those of Europe); and they therefore tolerate despotic rule without any complaint” (Politics, 1285a16). The social cohesion of the West has typically resulted from all citizens having a stake in the system. In the world of Homer, kings understood that they would benefit if the citizens are willing to fight and die for their homeland: “The Odyssey reaffirms the Iliad’s tragic message: that good order and the community can only be guaranteed by the willingness to fight and die for family and fatherland.” And Herodotus noted that Athens became a superior military power after getting rid of tyrants and developing a citizenry with a stake in the system: “while they were under an oppressive regime they fought below their best because they were working for a master, whereas as free men each individual wanted to achieve something for himself” (Herodotus, 5.78).

My interest in understanding the West has always revolved around kinship, marriage, and the family as bedrock institutions amenable to an evolutionary analysis. An important aspect of social cohesion in the West has been institutions that result in relative sexual egalitarianism among males, in contrast to the common practice (e.g., in classical China, and the Middle East, including Greece’s main foreign enemy, the Persian Empire) where wealthy, powerful males maintained large harems, while many men were unable to procreate. In ancient Greece, the importance of social cohesion can be seen in Solon’s laws on marriage (early sixth century BC). Solon’s laws had a strongly egalitarian thrust, and indeed, the purpose of his laws was to “resolve problems of deep-seated social unrest involving the aristocratic monopoly on political power and landholding practices under which the ‘many were becoming enslaved to the few.’”[6] As Durocher notes, Solon “abolished existing private and public debts and banned usurious loans for which the penalty for defaulting was enslavement. In his poems, Solon condemns the nation-shattering effects of usury and poverty, which lead unfree citizens to wander the world, homeless.”

The concern therefore was that such practices were leading to a lack of social cohesion—with people not believing they had a stake in the system. As in the case of the medieval Church, the focus of Solon’s laws on marriage was to rein in the power of the aristocracy by limiting the benefits to be gained by extra-marital sexual relationships. In Solon’s laws, legitimate children with the possibility of inheritance were the product of two Athenian citizens, a policy approved by popular vote in 451 B.C. As Pericles noted, bastards were to be “excluded from both the responsibilities and privileges of membership in the public household” (in Patterson, 2001, 1378). Given that wealthy males are in the best position to father extramarital children and provide for multiple sexual partners, it’s critical that Solon’s legislation (like the Church’s policies in the Middle Ages) was explicitly aimed at creating sexual egalitarianism among men—giving all male citizens a stake in the system.

Greek thinkers and lawgivers thus had no compunctions about reining in individual self-interest in the interest of the common good. For example, “Aristotle’s discussion of population policy and eugenics reflects the view which the Greeks took for granted: that the biological reproduction and quality of the citizenry was a fundamental matter of public interest. The citizen had a duty to act and the lawmaker to regulate by whatever means necessary to achieve these goals.” The public interest in achieving a society able to withstand the hostile forces arrayed against it was paramount, not the interests of any particular person or segment of the society, including the wealthy.

Greek cultures therefore often had strong social controls aimed at creating cohesive, powerful groups where cohesion was maintained by regulating individual behavior, effectively making them group evolutionary strategies. These cultures certainly did not eradicate individual self-interest, but they regulated and channeled it in such a manner that the group as a whole benefited. For example, in constructing an ideal society, Aristotle rejected a mindless libertarianism in favor of a system that had concern for the good of the society as a whole. Anything that interfered with social cohesion or any other feature that contributed to an adaptive culture had to be dealt with—by whatever means necessary.

Solon’s laws on marriage and inheritance would therefore have been analyzed by Aristotle for their effect on social cohesion. Egalitarianism, like everything else, had to be subjected to the criterion of what was best for the community as a whole, and that meant that societies should be ethnically homogeneous and led by the best people. Aristotle’s arguments for moderate democracy are not founded on abstract “rights” or a moral vision, ideas that have dominated Western thinking since the Enlightenment, “but rather, are based on what benefits the community as a whole. … Aristotle’s citizens rule and are ruled in turn, this reciprocity fostering a spirit of friendship between social classes.” “Aristotle is clear … that private property is not a right enabling individuals to be as capricious and selfish as they please, but merely a sensible way of producing wealth, whose aim must ultimately be the well-being of the community.” The social cohesion needed in a hostile world was a fundamental value that trumped any concern for individual rights. Durocher:

Aristotle’s unabashed ethics are typically Hellenic: there is no egalitarian consolation for the ugly and the misbegotten, there is no pretense that all human beings can be happy and actualized. Rather, Aristotle, like the Greeks in general, celebrates excellence. … This vision is in fact unabashedly communitarian and aristocratic: Firstly, the human species cannot flourish and fulfill its natural role unless it survives and reproduces itself in the right conditions; secondly, the society must be organized so as to grant the intellectually-gifted and culturally-educated minority the leisure to exercise their reason.

Sparta was even more egalitarian among the Spartiates, giving the citizens a stake in the system, but with an ethic that rejected effeminacy and weakness and in which individuals strived to achieve excellence in military skills. Also likely promoting social cohesion was that the Helot slave class was an outgroup that Spartans understood needed to be rigorously controlled, setting up a very robust ingroup-outgroup psychology that promoted social cohesion and high positive regard for the ingroup along with disparagement and even abuse of the outgroup. Spartan social cohesion is legendary and likely contributed to the intense solidarity needed to defeat the far more numerous Persian Empire:

By their triumph in the Persian Wars, the Greeks preserved their sovereignty and identity, setting the stage for the Golden Age of Athenian power and philosophy. The Greeks triumphed because of the winning combination of their culture of civic freedom and solidarity, and the successful alliance between Athens and Sparta, which required both cities to adopt a conciliatory attitude. Herodotus’s Histories are a poignant commemoration of the fragility and value of Greek unity.

The results have resounded down the ages:

In the Persian Wars, the Greeks showed that a small and scattered nation could, with luck, skill, and determination, triumph even over the greatest empire of the day. This example can still inspire us today and discredit all defeatism. In their victory, the Greeks were able to pass down an enormous political, cultural, and scientific heritage to generations ever since. No wonder John Stuart Mill could claim: “The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.”

This emphasis on giving individuals a stake in the system as a mechanism for social cohesion thus has strong roots in Western culture. The political system of the Roman Republic was far from democratic, but it was also far from a narrow oligarchy, and the representation and power of the lower classes gradually increased throughout the Republic (e.g., with the office of tribune of the plebs). The highest offices, consuls and praetors with military and judicial functions, were elected by the comitia centuriata, a convocation of the military, divided into centuries, where people with property had the majority of the vote (people were assigned to a century depending on five classes of property ownership, with the lower classes voting after the wealthy; the election was typically decided before the poorer centuries could vote).

A deep concern with social cohesion enabled by having a stake in the system was also apparent in the Germanic world after the fall of the Roman Empire. Although unquestionably hierarchical, early medieval European societies had a strong sense that cultures ought to build a sense of social cohesion on the basis of reciprocity, so that, with the exception of slaves, even humble members near the bottom of the social hierarchy had a stake in the system. The ideal (and the considerable reality) is what Spanish historian Américo Castro labeled “hierarchic harmony.”[7]

For example, the Visigothic Code promulgated by seventh-century King Chindasuinth of Spain illustrates the desire for a non-despotic government and for social cohesion that results from taking account of the interests of everyone (except slaves). Regarding despotism:

It should be required that [the king] make diligent inquiry as to the soundness of his opinions. Then, it should be evident that he has acted not for private gain but for the benefit of the people; so that it may conclusively appear that the law has not been made for any private or personal advantage, but for the protection and profit of the whole body of citizens. (Title I, II)[8]

Thus the concern with social cohesion is a strong current in Western history.

Ethnic Diversity and Lack of Social Cohesion.

Aristotle was well aware that extreme individualism may benefit some individuals who gain when a culture discourages common identities. I recall being puzzled when doing research on the Frankfurt School that intellectuals who had been steeped in classical Marxism had developed an ideology that prized individualism—jettisoning ethnic and religious identities in favor of self-actualization and acceptance of differences.

In the end the ideology of the Frankfurt School may be described as a form of radical individualism that nevertheless despised capitalism—an individualism in which all forms of gentile collectivism are condemned as an indication of social or individual pathology. … The prescription for gentile society is radical individualism and the acceptance of pluralism. People have an inherent right to be different from others and to be accepted by others as different. Indeed, to become differentiated from others is to achieve the highest level of humanity. The result is that “no party and no movement, neither the Old Left nor the New, indeed no collectivity of any sort was on the side of truth. . . . [T]he residue of the forces of true change was located in the critical individual alone.”[9]

Aristotle understood this logic, noting that both extreme democrats and tyrants encouraged the mixing of peoples and losing old identities and loyalties. Aristotle:

Other measures which are also useful in constructing this last and most extreme type of democracy are measures like those introduced by Cleisthenes at Athens, when he sought to advance the cause of democracy, or those which were taken by the founders of [the] popular government at Cyrene. A number of new tribes and clans should be instituted by the side of the old; private cults should be reduced in number and conducted at common centers; and every contrivance should be employed to make all the citizens mix, as much as they possibly can, and to break down their old loyalties. All the measures adopted by tyrants may equally be regarded as congenial to democracy. We may cite as examples the license allowed to slaves (which, up to a point, may be advantageous as well as congenial), the license permitted to women and children, and the policy of conniving at the practice of “living as you like.” There is much to assist a constitution of this sort, for most people find more pleasure in living without discipline than they find in a life of temperance. (Politics, 1319b19)

The ancient Greeks were also aware that ethnic diversity leads to conflict and lack of common identity. As Aristotle noted, “Heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction – at any rate until they have had time to assimilate. A city cannot be constituted from any chance collection of people, or in any chance period of time. Most of the cities which have admitted settlers, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by faction.” Realizing this, tyrants often took advantage of this evolutionary reality by importing people in order to undermine the solidarity of the people they ruled over.

It’s interesting in this regard that such efforts to undermine the homogeneity of populations continue in the contemporary West. In the wake of World War II, the activist Jewish community, in part inspired by the writings of the Frankfurt School,[10] made a major push to open up immigration of Western countries to all the peoples of the world, their motive being a fear of ethnically homogeneous White populations of the type that had turned against Jews in Germany after 1933.[11] Corroborating this assessment, historian Otis Graham notes that the Jewish lobby on immigration “was aimed not just at open doors for Jews, but also for a diversification of the immigration stream sufficient to eliminate the majority status of western European so that a fascist regime in America would be more unlikely.”[12] The motivating role of fear and insecurity on the part of the activist Jewish community thus differed from other groups and individuals promoting an end to the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws which dramatically lowered immigration and restricted immigration to people largely from northwestern Europe. These same intellectuals and activists have also pathologized any sense of White identity or sense of White interests to the point that it’s common for White liberals to have negative attitudes about White people.

 

Greek Race Realism. The ancient Greeks were vitally concerned with leaving descendants and they understood that heredity was important in shaping individuals—a view that is obviously adaptive in an evolutionary sense. Aristotle writes that “good birth, for a people and a state, is to be indigenous or ancient and to have distinguished founders with many descendants distinguished in matters that excite envy” (Rhetoric, 1.5). The Greeks also had a sense that they shared a common ethnicity and culture with other Greeks, resulting in common expressions of the need for ethnic solidarity, particularly in the wars with Persia. Durocher notes that “One cannot exaggerate the pervasiveness of the rhetoric of kinship and pan-Hellenic identity throughout the conflict.”

The Greeks were thus proud of their lineage and had a sense of common kinship. However, it was not the sort of extensive kinship that is typical of so much of the rest of the world. There was an individualist core to Greek culture stemming from its Indo-European roots, resulting in the famously fractious Greek culture, with wars between Greek city-states. Even during the Persian wars, several Greek city-states failed to join the coalition against Persia, and “the sentimental love for Hellas was often overridden by personal or political interests. Prominent Greek leaders and cities frequently collaborated with the Persians, either because the alternative was oblivion or simply for profit.”

As in individualist cultures generally, lineage is confined to close relatives, and there are no corporate kinship-based groups that own property or where brothers live together in common households: “Despite typically vague modern notions of a primitive clan-based society as the predecessor to the historical society of the polis, early Greek society seems securely rooted in individual households—and in the relationships focused on and extending from those households.[13]

And congruent with contemporary behavior genetic research, there was an expectation that children would inherit the traits of parents: King Menelaus is impressed by Odysseus’s son Telemachus: “Surely you two have not shamed your parentage; you belong to the race of heaven-protected and sceptered kings; no lesser parents could have such sons” (4.35-122). Menelaus later adds: “What you say, dear child, is proof of the good stock you come from” (4.549-643).

Reflecting the common Greek view that it was necessary to regulate society in order to achieve adaptive goals of the city as a whole, the Greeks accepted the idea that individual behavior needed to be regulated in the common interest, resulting in eugenic proposals by philosophers and, in the case of Sparta at least, practices such as killing weak infants. Both Plato and Aristotle accepted eugenics as an aspect of public policy. Plato was particularly enthusiastic about eugenics—Durocher labels it “an obsession,” and, like many evolutionists, such as Sir Francis Galton, he was much impressed by animal breeding as a paradigm for eugenic policies for humans. For Plato, eugenics was part of a broader group evolutionary strategy he proposed for the Greeks. As Durocher notes, Plato advocated

a great reform of convention grounded in reason and expertise, to transform Greece into a patchwork of enlightened, non-grasping city-states, cultivating themselves intellectually and culturally, reproducing themselves in perpetuity through systematic and eugenic population policies, avoiding fratricidal war and imperialism among themselves, and working together against the barbarians, under the leadership of the best city-states. Taken together, I dare say we can speak of a Platonic Group Evolutionary Strategy for Greece.

It’s worth noting in this context that the basic premises of eugenics are well-grounded in evolutionary and genetic science and were broadly accepted in Western culture, even among progressives, from the late nineteenth century until after World War II when the entire field became tarred by association with National Socialism. It is thus part of the broad transformation among Western intellectuals away from thinking in terms of racial differences and the genetic basis of individual differences—to the point that it’s currently fashionable to deny the reality of race and any suggestion that race differences in socially important traits such as intelligence could possibly be influenced genetically. As Durocher notes, “Race is, especially in geographically contiguous land masses, typically a clinal phenomenon, with gradual change in genetic characteristics (i.e., allele frequencies) as one moves, for instance, from northern Europe to central Africa.” However, in the contemporary West, intellectual and cultural elites have sought “to suppress cultural chauvinism and ethnic solidarity, for example by glorifying foreign cultures and shaming native ethnic pride. Such nations are unlikely to survive long however.” So true. 

Scientific Think as Characteristic of the West

In his discussion of Herodotus, Durocher describes the “beginnings of scientific thought concerning both nature and society, for instance with plausible speculations about the formation of the Nile Delta, micro-climates, and the effect of the natural environment on human biology and culture.” Analogical thinking is fundamental to science (e.g., Christiaan Huygens’s use of light and sound to support his wave theory of light; Darwin’s analogy between artificial selection and natural selection—with obvious implications for eugenics; the mind as a blank slate or computer). Scientific thinking is thus apparent in the eugenic recommendations noted by Greek philosophers based, as they were, on analogies with animal breeding.

Such scientific thinking is a unique characteristic of Western individualist culture. In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich describes “WEIRD psychology”—i.e., the psychology of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic people. A major point is that the psychology of Western peoples is unique in the context of the rest of the world: “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. … When reasoning WEIRD people tend to look for universal categories and rules with which to organize the world.” (21)

Henrich notes that people from cultures with intensive kinship are more prone to holistic thinking that takes into account contexts and relationships, whereas Westerners are more prone to analytic thinking in which background information and context are ignored, leading ultimately to universal laws of nature and formal logic. I agree with this,[14] but, while Henrich argues that analytical thinking began as a result of the policies on marriage enforced by the medieval Church, this style of thinking can clearly be found among the ancient Greeks. Consider Aristotle’s logic, a masterpiece of field independence and ignoring context, in which logical relationships can be deduced from the purely formal properties of sentences (e.g., All x’s are y; this is an x; therefore, this is a y); indeed, in Prior Analytics Aristotle used the first three letters of the Greek alphabet as placeholders instead of concrete examples. Or consider Euclidean geometry, in which theorems could be deduced from a small set of self-evident axioms and in which the axioms themselves were based on decontextualized figures, such as perfect circles and triangles, and infinite straight lines. Despite its decontextualized nature, the Euclidean system has had huge applications in the real world and dominated thinking in geometry in the West until the twentieth century.

Ancient Greece was an Indo-European-derived culture (Individualism, Ch. 2) and, beginning in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity, logical argument and competitive disputation have been far more characteristic of Western cultures than any other culture area. As Duchesne notes, “the ultimate basis of Greek civic and cultural life was the aristocratic ethos of individualism and competitive conflict which pervaded [Indo-European] culture. … There were no Possessors of the Way in aristocratic Greece; no Chinese Sages decorously deferential to their superiors and expecting appropriate deference from their inferiors. The search for the truth was a free-for-all with each philosopher competing for intellectual prestige in a polemical tone that sought to discredit the theories of others while promoting one’s own.”[15]

In such a context, rational, decontextualized arguments that appeal to disinterested observers and are subject to refutation win out. They do not depend on group discipline or group interests for their effectiveness because in Western cultures, the groups are permeable and defections based on individual beliefs are far more the norm than in other cultures. As Duchesne notes, although the Chinese made many practical discoveries, they never developed the idea of a rational, orderly universe guided by universal laws comprehensible to humans. Nor did they ever develop a “deductive method of rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms,”[16] as seen in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. Indeed, I can’t resist noting the intelligence and creativity that went into creating the incredibly intricate Antikythera Mechanism designed by an unknown Greek (or Greeks). Dated to around 150–100 B.C. and “technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterwards,” it was able to predict eclipses and planetary motions decades in advance.[17] Western scientific and technological creativity did not begin after the influence of Christianity, the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution.

Schematic of the Antikythera Mechanism

As Durocher notes, “The fruits of Hellenic civilization are all around us, down to our very vocabulary.”

 

Conclusion

The Ancient Ethnostate should be at the top of everyone’s reading for those interested in understanding Western origins and the uniqueness of the West. It is also an inspiring work for those of us who seek to reinvigorate the West as a unique biocultural entity. The contemporary West, burdened by loss of confidence and moral and spiritual decay, cannot be redeemed by a fresh influx of ethnically Western barbarians as happened with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Germanic Europe. There are no more such peoples waiting in the wings to revive our ancient civilization.

Reinvigoration must come from within, but now it must do so in the context of massive immigration of non-Western peoples who are addicted to identity politics and are proving to be unwilling and likely unable to continue the Western traditions of individualism and all that that implies in terms of representative, non-despotic government, freedom of speech and association, and scientific inquiry. Indeed, we are seeing increasing hatred toward the people and culture of the West that is now well entrenched among Western elites and eagerly accepted by many of the non-Western peoples who have been imported into Western nations, many with historical grudges against the West. It will be a long, arduous road back. The Ancient Ethnostate contains roadmaps for the type of society that we should seek to establish.

[1] Rachel Poser, “He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?,” New York Times (February 2, 2011). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html;  see also Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEnxmzqXJN8

[3] Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 51.

[4] Kevin MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the Future (Seattle: CreateSpace, 2019).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Susan Lape, “Solon and the institution of ‘democratic’ family form. Classical Journal 98.2 (2002–2003), pp. 117-139, p. 117.

[7] Américo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 497; see also Américo Castro, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, trans. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

[8] The Visigothic Code (Forum judicum), trans. S. P. Scott (Boston, MA: Boston Book Company, 1910; online version: The Library of Iberian Resources Online, unpaginated).

http://libro.uca.edu/vcode/visigoths.htm

[9] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political movements (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2002; originally published: Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 165, quoting J. B. Maier, “Contribution to a critique of Critical Theory,” in Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, ed. J. Marcus & Z. Tar (New Brunswick, NJ: 1984, Transaction Books).

[10] Ibid., Ch. 5.

[11] Ibid., Ch. 7.

[12] Otis Graham (2004). Unguarded Gates: A History of American’s Immigration Crisis. (Rowman & Littlefield), p. 80.

[13] C.B. Patterson, The Family in Greek History (Cambridge, MA: 2001, Harvard University Press), pp. 46–47.

[14] MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 112–113.

[15] Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, 452,

[16] Ibid.

[17] S. Freeth, et al. (2006). Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Nature 444: 587-591, 587.

The Karen Epidemic

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“Came to in an abandoned house, nothing in its place
How do the strangers watching know my name?

A real ‘party’s over’ atmosphere
You can’t go home, but you can’t stay here
There’s too many ghosts, not nearly enough spirit.” — Every Time I Die, “Hostile Architecture”

It really does feel like we’re living a script these days, doesn’t it? Aside from the obvious Dark Winter programming which has now plopped the Omicron variant down on the world’s head just in time to cancel Christmas, there are other plot lines which intersect with the omnipresent hydra-like virus and its variants. Consider that Mr. Great Reset Klaus Schwab, for example, favorably cites the work of “Skynet” firms in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution. In what is exceedingly unlikely to be a coincidence, the Belgian digital media company Skynet was launched in 1995—the naming was, in fact, a direct reference to the malevolent AI that comes online in the Terminator film franchise and tries to annihilate the human race. China has a national surveillance system of hundreds of millions of CCTV cameras and much more, also called Skynet, which is, according to the ruling communist party, in place to keep the public safe—just like the “vaccines” from Pfizer and Moderna (their mRNA research has been subsidized in part by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are to keep you safe, or the dozens of tracking applications that have suddenly emerged to do the same! Cheng Jing, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Medical Systems Biology Research Center, believes that Skynet should be expanded upon and should integrate pathogen detection, big data, AI, and 5G. For the population’s safety, of course!

Similarly, the NSA has a machine learning analysis program called—wait for it—SKYNET, which is designed to “extract information about possible terror suspects”—you know, like those soccer moms at school board meetings who are disgusted with their children being taught to hate themselves.[1] SKYNET uses graphs that consist of a set of nodes and edges to visually represent social networks. MIT’s Lincoln Lab and Harvard University have worked with the NSA on SKYNET (MIT’s Lincoln Lab, which is a Department of Defense-funded research and development center, has also worked with NASA). Interestingly, we also see that there was in May 2016 in the MIT Technology Review an article entitled “How to Create a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence.”

Skynet is also a family of military communications satellites operated by Airbus Defence and Space on behalf of the UK’s Ministry of Defence to provide strategic communication services to the three branches of the British Armed Forces and to NATO (this may become relevant in the great chessboard of geopolitics along the fracture lines of East and West on the Poland-Belarus border and in the Ukraine). The latest upgrade, Skynet 6, is now in the works; plans for 6G internet are also already in the works. That this 6G, or Genesis Six, has Biblical significance may well be exceedingly relevant at the rate we’re going. Plan accordingly.

In any case, unaware that systems logic and inertia will soon render them effectively obsolete—just like the rank-and-file of the medical establishment in the COVID Era—the rival faction of soccer moms known as “Karens” are still out there, diligently policing mask policies and ruining Thanksgiving because some of their relatives decided to pass on the forty-seventh booster. Maybe those walking biological time bombs should be chased down and forcibly injected, or else whisked off to a camp like in Australia (or a “quarantine hotel” as in Canada) to keep their biological (and let’s face it—ideological) poison separate from the rest of the population. The “elites” unapologetically using what are effectively concentration camps is a grotesque irony certainly not lost on the reader.

The role of these Karens as the intelligence arm of the paramilitary outfits in BLM and Antifa is almost exactly analogous to that of the East German Stasi and its nearly 200,000 informants as extensions of Big Brother with their smartphones, their neuroses, and their “Xanax and chill” philosophy. Make no mistake—they are true believers in the state orthodoxy, trusting the science and all that entails. But what, exactly, does the science say? Well, in faint whispers, the vaccinated do transmit the virus and also get infected with it. Checkmate, Karen? Not so fast. It’s decidedly not about the science, it’s about compliance and public displays of affection for the regime. As Curtis Yarvin noted, these people worship power. They are the Outer Party. These are the exact same people who feel compelled to put “Black Lives Matter” signs on their well-manicured lawns in the hopes they won’t be looted like a sick social justice Passover when something triggers the mob into its Two Minutes Hate. We have always been at war with COVID/White supremacy/Russia/Orange Man. That the Orange Man is the one who greenlit Operation Warp Speed seems to have been memory holed. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Indeed, writing for Foreign Affairs (November/December 2020) in “A National Security Reckoning: How Washington Should Think About Power,” Hillary Clinton admits that in addition to “the country [being] dangerously unprepared for a range of threats, not just future pandemics but also an escalating climate crisis and multidimensional challenges from China and Russia…the COVID-19 crisis should be a big enough jolt to rouse the country from its sleep, so that it can summon its strength and meet the challenges ahead.” In favorably citing studies from MIT and George Marshall, Clinton includes among these challenges the need to inject even more steroids into the military-industrial complex and to follow the example of Pittsburgh, “once a center of steel production, [which] has become a hub for health care, robotics, and research on autonomous vehicles.” For Clinton, “These two agendas…should be integrated,” and, crucially, “the United States’ security also depends on the control of pharmaceuticals, clean energy, 5G networks, and artificial intelligence.” Contact tracing takes on a different hue in this light, doesn’t it?

It is not exactly the US control of these realms, however, but that of the Regime the Quintessential Karen Clinton is talking about. The US has simply been the spearhead of this project for some time in taking the lead from the tail-wagging-the-dog of the City of London before it. Now it seems there is no more use for America as we knew it, as we have entered the realm of medical tyranny for a virus where a “study of thousands of hospitalized coronavirus patients in the New York City area [in 2020]…found that nearly all of them had at least one major chronic health condition, and most — 88 percent — had at least two. … The ubiquity of serious medical conditions in these patients was striking: Only 6 percent of them had no underlying health conditions.” Shut it all down, including the supply chains and the gas pipelines, and keep printing money until the dollar is worthless, though, right?

Dollars are like op-eds from The Atlantic, where apparently the Corona Karens are opposed to lock-downs ad infinitum and ruining the lives of those who object to being treated as human pincushions. You know a product works when the makers get blanket immunity from lawsuits (immunity you don’t get from the product, amiright?) and the FDA proposes it should be given until 2076 “to review and release the trove of vaccine-related documents responsive to the [Freedom of Information Act request]. … seeking expedited access to the records.” All of this is not to say, however, that you should throw caution to the wind, especially if you are older or have co-morbidities; there are also future factors to consider as well as past evidence for increased virulence and/or other opportunistic viruses finding the immune system’s drawbridge down, all of which are beyond the purview of this piece.[2] Basically, use caution and common sense, and I suggest abstaining from their gene therapies masquerading as vaccines!

Now as I mentioned, there are these different plot lines that intersect with the virus, one of which is climate change and the other of course the “double pandemic” of COVID-19 and White supremacy (remember, though, you can’t get COVID if you’re out protesting for racial justice, in the same way you can’t get it if you’re sitting down at a restaurant; nor can you get it from someone who crossed the border illegally). Though a Canadian woman was recently the first to officially receive a diagnosis of “suffering from climate change,” seemingly every major institution on board with the globalist agenda—from Carnegie Europe to Harvard University to the World Bank—has come out with some word-salad connecting COVID-19 and climate change. Even our Great Reset overlords at the World Economic Forum lament that “Nearly half of the respondents from a global survey do not understand the link between climate change and infectious diseases such as COVID-19.” This clearly illustrates that any and all rhetorical and narrative means are being used to get as many people on board with the project as possible before turning to more coercive methods. And finally, naked force. In considering particularly the second option, your local Karen isn’t just a laughingstock and a nuisance, she’s a node in a global network looking to standardize and systematize the humanity right out of us.

[1] Also a possibility: in the midst of the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns in 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency began deploying extra resources to advising telecommunications companies on steps to increase the security of their 5G towers citing “conspiracy theories” about their connection to the pandemic. With a number of targeted destructions of these towers by individuals in Western Europe, government officials in the US leaked to the press that any attacks by Americans on these towers could be classified as terrorism—with the definition of terrorism constantly expanding to the point where, according to the DHS: “Extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks…Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets have repeatedly amplified conspiracy theories concerning the origins of COVID-19 and effectiveness of vaccines…DHS is also advancing authoritative sources of information to debunk and, when possible, preempt false narratives and intentional disinformation.”

[2] Although suggested research might start with: Spanish Influenza, antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), HIV/AIDS, Franc Zalewski, and more.

“What If?” Thinking: Imagining Alternative Histories as a Way to Know

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I’ve found it useful to engage in a “What if?” thought exercise. The idea is to imagine what it would be like now if what happened in the past had happened in some other way, to envision an alternative history and see what it implies.  I find it heuristic to do: it makes what has gone on in the past, and what’s going on now, and what could and should go on in the future, clearer; it puts things in better perspective.  In this context, I’m dealing with public, or collective, history, the kinds of events and ideas and people that historians and other social scientists write about, but this thought technique can also be employed with private, personal matters.  For example, I have been reflecting on what my life might have been like if at age thirteen I had chucked my all-consuming organized sport interest—playing on the teams and attending to the exploits of college and pro athletes—and focused instead on developing my mind.

Philip Roth

I’ll use a 2004 novel by the highly honored Philip Roth (1933–2018), The Plot Against America, to illustrate what I’m referring to by public What if? thinking.1 Roth imagined what it would have been like for Jews in the U.S., including his own family—the book is written from fictional character Philip Roth’s perspective—if aviator hero Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940 defeating Franklin Roosevelt.

In the novel, as he did in real life, Lindbergh speaks out against U.S. intervention in the war then raging in Europe and criticizes the “Jewish race” for promoting it to serve its interest in destroying Germany.  Lindbergh wins in a landslide as the Republican candidate with the slogan “Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war.”

Once in office, Lindbergh signs a treaty with Germany agreeing not to interfere with that country’s expansion in Europe and a similar treaty with Japan with reference to its expansion in Asia.  Lindbergh’s heretofore concealed anti-Semitism comes out in the open.  A new government program, the Office of American Absorption (OAA), sends Jews, including Philip’s older brother, to live with families in the Midwest and South to “Americanize” them.  The brother comes to view his family contemptuously as “ghetto Jews.”  In time, entire Jewish families are uprooted and relocated.  Prominent Jewish radio personality Walter Winchell criticizes the Lindbergh administration’s actions and is fired by his sponsors and then murdered.2

When returning to Washington after delivering a speech, Lindbergh’s plane goes missing and German State Radio provides evidence that it is part of a Jewish plot to take control of the U.S. government.  Jewish public figures including Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Herbert Lehman are arrested.

These events unleash anti-Semitic hatred throughout America and wide-spread anti-Semitic rioting ensues.  Close to home, the mother of a Roth family friend is robbed and beaten by Ku Klux Klan members who then kill her by setting fire to her car with her in it.  And so on; you get the idea.

The New York Times review of The Plot Against America called it “a terrific political novel” and “creepily plausible.”  It won the Society of American Historians’ James Fennimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction and the Sidewise Award for Alternative History.

Roth’s novel and the idea of alternative history came to mind for me while reading a biography of Madison Grant (1865–1937), Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant by Jonathan Peter Spiro.3 The book is Spiro’s doctoral dissertation and is as even-handed as can reasonably be expected if one expects to get a Ph.D in today’s highly politicized-to-the-left university.  Spiro obviously was highly diligent researching his topic, and he thinks and writes clearly.   He could have been more disciplined about what to leave out of the book—the term “too much information” came to mind—and I would have liked more story-telling flair; I felt as if I were reading, well, a doctoral dissertation.  But the book was worth my time, and it prompted this writing.  Take this as a qualified recommendation to check it out, probably at a university library.  It’s expensive at Amazon.

Madison Grant was a Yale-educated, independently wealthy, American patrician.  He had a law degree, but he never practiced law or pursued any conventional career.  The best label I can think of for him is republican (with a small “r”) citizen, rather like the Founders were; Washington and Jefferson didn’t see themselves as career politicians like, say, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, but rather as citizens of the republic.

Madison Grant as a young man.

Madison was tirelessly active in conservation efforts and a proponent of what was called scientific racism.  Reading along in the Spiro book, I couldn’t keep up with all the organizations he started or participated in to promote his causes, which was particularly admirable because, though he didn’t announce it, he was crippled with arthritis.  He is best known for founding the Bronx Zoo; his conservation work, including saving the redwoods in California; and, in 1916, authoring the book The Passing of the Great Race.4   The great race referred to is the White race, or more particularly northern European-heritage Whites Grant called Nordics.

Grant was based in New York City and hobnobbed with everybody who was anybody, most notably Teddy Roosevelt.  As I got into the Spiro book, I became intrigued about Grant’s personal life —who he was, what he was like, how he lived —but I got next to nothing about that.  Spiro noted that the usual personal sources historians rely on—letters, diaries, recollections, etc.—were very sparse with Grant.  While he was well known in his time, he was guarded about his personal life and tended to stay behind the scenes.  Grant never married and by his pictures looked to be a bit of a dandy.  I wondered if was gay and wanted to keep that quiet.  I flashed on Bayard Rustin, the gay black civil rights activist from the ‘60s, who also was well known but at the same time unknown, both prominent and hidden.  Just a thought for what it’s worth

What I’ll do for the rest of this writing is use Grant to represent a perspective on who Whites are and what they ought to be, and on what America is and ought to be.  To that, I’ll add an account of a failed Civil War-era proposal by Abraham Lincoln to repatriate freed slaves to Africa or Central America.  Then some rhetorical What if? questions that come to my mind.  All of this is to set up some What if? reflection for you to do that I hope will be of worth to you.

*   *   *

Drawing on The Passing of the Great Race and Spiro’s biography, I see three main ideas capturing the essence of Madison Grant’s outlook:  a focus on race with the contention that Whites are the most admirable one; Nordics as an endangered species; and the affirmation that the U.S. is a Nordic nation and should stay that way.

 Focus on race, Whites the most admirable.   Grant offered that to make sense of human history it is best to look at things through a racial lens.  It’s race that makes the whole thing go, as it were.  He wasn’t an egalitarian; he viewed races as hierarchically ordered.  In today’s parlance, Grant would be labeled a White supremacist, or more particularly. a Nordic supremacist.   He deemed Nordics to be the best of the best: explorers, adventurers, aristocrats, artists, poets, philosophers, original thinkers, creators, organizers, civilization builders.  His big qualifier: Nordics are all that if they aren’t duped and maneuvered into being less than they are.

From the Spiro book:

Whereas other historians have looked at the past and seen everything from nations clashing to genders attaining consciousness, Grant’s gaze penetrates beneath those surface irruptions to perceive that the history of mankind is actually a tale of the evolution, migration, and confrontation of races.   Thus, for example, he explains that the empire of Alexander crumbled when the pure Macedonian blood mixed with Asiatic blood; he shows that the division of Roman society into patricians and plebeians was actually a manifestation of the racial conflict between Nordics and Mediterraneans; he demonstrates that the long decline of the empire of Spain was caused by the progressive dilution of the germ plasm of the Gothic race; and so forth.  Indeed, the more Grant contemplates the longue durée, the clearer he sees that the lesson is always the same, namely, that race is everything. . . . The evolutionary explanation for [Nordic’s] splendor is [the harsh] climatic conditions that produced a strong, virile, and self-contained race. Grant invests his masterful Nordics with overwhelming masculine attributes.  Other traits that are peculiarly Nordic are loyalty, chivalry, and veracity, as well as a love of efficiency.  The Nordics are inherently individualistic, self-reliant, and jealous of their personal freedom.  Nordics excel in literature and in scientific research.  “In fact,” declares Grant, “the amount of Nordic blood in each nation is a fair measure of its standing in civilization.”5

Nordics are an endangered species.  Grant was trained as a lawyer, but at heart he was a zoologist.  To him, human beings were animals in a habitat.  While he saw the physical make-up of races as the prime determining factor in what the human animal is like, he didn’t discount the impact of environmental conditions.  The human environment—habitat—includes social and cultural as well as economic and political conditions.  Grant saw Nordics as a species in danger that needed to be protected just as do elks and caribou.  In his time, he saw them being overrun and outbred and submerged by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.  He saw Nordics adopting what he viewed as base desires, passions, and behaviors and becoming less dignified and honorable.

Grant worried about the economic reality and urbanization in his time.  Spiro:

In North America, the habitat to which they are well acclimated, the Nordics are passing from the scene.  In colonial times, the environment that confronted the settlers was an untamed continent, and survival entailed clearing the forests and fighting the Indians—tasks for which Nordics were eminently suited.  But the United States has changed from an agricultural to manufacturing society, and the type of man that flourished in the fields is not the type that thrives in the factory.  The truth is that dark, little immigrants can operate a machine and navigate a sweatshop and prevail in a ghetto better than the Nordic blond, who needs exercise and air.  Grant is forced to admit that from the point of view of race, the environment of his homeland is leading to the survival of the unfit.6

Politically, Grant feared Nordics losing their freedom and being dominated and exploited within a corrupt and authoritarian system controlled by a ruling class hostile to them and their interests.

It wasn’t so much that Grant contemplated the literal extinction of Nordics.  More, it was akin to the majestic wolf becoming a tamed, domesticated house pet, rolling over on command and wagging its tail in hopes of being petted and tossed a table scrap.  Metaphorically, that is what will mark the passing of the great race.

 America is a Nordic nation and should stay one.  According to The Passing of the Great Race, the Founding Fathers of the United States were Nordic.  They created a political system—a constitutional republic—suited to Nordic people, who flourished under an arrangement rooted in the values, and virtues, of personal freedom and responsibility.   America offered the opportunity and challenge to make something worthwhile out of one’s life free from government dictates.  While this political arrangement served early America, it wasn’t to be equated with America.  America was a racial stock of people, Nordics.

That changed.  Spiro:

[According to Grant,] Nordic blood was kept pure in the New World because the settlers had a strongly developed sense of race consciousness.  And then, in a fit of humanitarian madness, the old stock threw it all away.   The Civil War put a severe, perhaps fatal, check to the development and expansion of this splendid type.  The reasons were threefold.  First, the rise of sentimentalism during the antislavery agitation proved inimical to Nordic racial consciousness and weakened taboos against miscegenation.  Second, the war itself, like all wars, was dysgenic; it destroyed great numbers of the best breeding stock on both sides [625,000 deaths, one out of four young Southern men].  And third, the prosperity that followed the war attracted hordes of immigrants of inferior racial value. . . .  Grant understands that factory owners have a vested interest in encouraging the New Immigration, but is dumbfounded by the naïve sentimentalists who actually welcome the influx of social discards and provide them all manner of charitable assistance.7

America, contends Grant, is becoming someone else’s place, not Nordics’ place; accommodative to others’ ways and needs, not Nordics’ ways and needs.  America is no longer us.  That has to end.

*   *   *

This writing is about perspectives not specific proposals, but briefly, a couple of examples from the 1920s that reflect a Grantian outlook.

Immigration control.  The Immigration Act of 1924 established immigration quotas based on the composition of the U.S. population in 1890 and had the effect of greatly reducing immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, which especially affected the entry of Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavs, and Jews.  President Calvin Coolidge was quoted as saying, “I am convinced that our present economic and social conditions warrant a limit on those to be admitted.” In an article entitled “Whose Country is This?” Coolidge reflected the White racial consciousness of the time:

There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons.  Biological laws tell us that certain people will not mix or blend.  The Nordics propagate themselves successfully.  With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.  Quality of mind and body suggest that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.8

The Eugenics movement.  Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) coined the term “eugenics” to describe improving the human race through controlled breeding. The eugenics movement was very prominent in ’20s America and involving prominent establishment figures in addition to Grant, such as Margaret Sanger, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Harvey Kellogg.

Spiro:

Eugenics harmonized with Grant’s concurrent development of wildlife management.  There was no duality in his life, no conflict between this espousal of conservation restriction and his preaching on behalf of eugenics and immigration restriction.9

Grant was instrumental in forming the Eugenics Committee of the United States.  Its advisory committee declared its mission to be “protecting America against indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and race suicide.”  Among its activities were promoting miscegenation laws, the sterilization of defectives, and birth control.

*   *   *

Needless to say, if Madison Grant were alive today, he wouldn’t be getting any presidential medals of the sort bestowed on Philip Roth or giving any commencement day speeches.  His outlook and activities are alien, if not downright scary, to modern sensibilities.  He was influential for a time, but his ideas didn‘t win the day. He’s been dropped down the memory hole of history.  A lot of things account for that, including Adolf Hitler declaring that The Passing of the Great Race was his favorite book; that was an endorsement Grant didn’t need.   But the story of Grant’s ultimate disfavor can’t be told without reference to the number one “anti-Grant” of them all, Franz Boas.

Franz Boas

Franz Boas (1858–1942) was a German-born professor at Columbia University for forty years.  He has been called the father of American anthropology.   His many graduate students became faculty members in universities throughout the U.S. and spread his gospel to untold numbers of students, and they controlled the discourse in scholarly journals and dominated the professional association in that field.  Arguably, Boas was the most influential academic in the social sciences ever.

Spiro:

Boas was the antithesis of Madison Grant.  Whereas Grant was the scion of an aristocratic American family and displayed all the attitudes and privileges implied in that heritage, Boas was the product of an upper middle-class German household in which, as he put it, “the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force.”  His progressive Jewish parents raised him with a firm belief in the dignity of the individual and the equipotentiality of all humans.  Boas rejected Grant’s division of mankind into biologically distinct and hierarchical subspecies.  He challenged not only the superiority but the very existence of the Nordic race.  He denied that there was any correlation between the physical characteristics of a population and its mental and moral traits.  The latter, he asserted, were created by the culture in which an individual was raised, not his germ plasm.  On a theoretical level the debate between the Grantians and the Boasians pitted the defenders of heredity against the proponents of environment.  But for all that, it was difficult not to notice that at heart it was a confrontation between the ethos of native Protestants and the zeitgeist of immigrant Jews. 10     

Long story short, Boas won the battle.

*    *    *

As I was reading the Spiro book, I free-associated to something I remember reading years ago writing a review of a book on Abraham Lincoln.  It was to the effect that Lincoln favored repatriation of the freed slaves.  I took a break from reading about Grant to checking it out online.

An article I found said that there is evidence that Lincoln hoped freed slaves would return to Africa or emigrate to Central America.11 In 1862, he met with a delegation of freedmen to lay out his plan.  While at the time, Liberia was the destination for many freed Blacks, Lincoln thought that going south made more practical sense.  He suggested that, with the help of government funds, freed slaves relocate and colonize Central America, noting that its climate was closer to their “native lands.”  He told the delegates:

Your race is suffering in my judgment the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoys. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.   Go where you are treated the best.

You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffers very greatly by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence.   In a word, we suffer on each side.  If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated.

The article I read said the members of the delegation didn’t take to Lincoln’s proposal.

*    *    *

 Now to What if?    Let’s assume an alternative history.  The U.S. is a racially conscious White country with Madison Grant’s mindset, not Franz Boas’s.  Blacks bought Lincoln’s idea and colonized Central America; almost none are in the U.S. now.  What would things have been like in this country and what would they be like now?  What would Americans have been like and what would they be like now, including you and me?   And where does this speculation lead —what do we do collectively, what do you and I do individually?

I planned on doing some heavy duty pondering about all this to put in this section, but that didn’t happen.  Three questions came up, and I really didn’t work with them much at all.

The three:

Would 425,000 have died?  425,000 young Americans died in World War II.   It wasn’t pleasant to do, but I tried to imagine 425, 000 bodies in a huge pile.  I bet Grant wouldn’t have been big on crossing the Atlantic and slaughtering Germans and blowing things up.  What if we had stayed out of it, let Germany and the Soviets fight it out in Europe, and left Japan alone with their oil and everything?

Would I have written that article on Kyle Rittenhouse?   The past couple of weeks, I wrote about the trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  And before that, I wrote about the killing of a black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri and the trial of Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd.

Would Charlie would have felt forced to move?  I grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota and went to grade school and high school with my close friend Charlie in the West End part of the city.  I left the area after grad school and have stayed in touch with Charlie over the years.  He and his wife had a nice home there, which I visited when I came back to town to visit my brother.  The demographics of Saint Paul have changed drastically, and as it’s turned out, diversity has had its downsides for the West End—gangs, crime, clutter, violent protests, and racial animosity toward Whites like Charlie (“Racist!”). Carjackings have gotten especially prevalent recently and Charlie has been looking around every time he got in his car.  It came to the point where Saint Paul wasn’t Charlie’s place anymore and this year he and his wife sold their home and moved to Stillwater, Minnesota, a small town 25 miles away.   Charlie reports that the move has worked out well.  He sent this picture he took during one of his daily walks and it looked good to me.  The thought came to me that maybe for Whites who can manage it, it’d be good to do what Charlie did—pack up and leave.  Apart from getting away from the fussing and fighting, harking back to Grant, perhaps rural and small-town life best suits Whites’ nature.

What did I do about any of that?   I wrote this up, but mostly I responded to my reflections such as they were with “I’m tired of this stuff.”  I suppose that’s why I cut the thinking off short. The most notable things I’ve done recently are stream a documentary on the late Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman and watch a movie he directed back in 1963.12

*    *    *

Back to you.  So: The U.S.  is a racially conscious White country that looks at things like Grant did rather than Boas.  Blacks aren’t around.   What are the implications of that in both the public realm and in your private life?   What do we do?   What do you do?

Endnotes

  1. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
  2. I wrote an article about Winchell. See, “World War II and the Walters (Lippmann and Winchell)” The Occidental Observer, posted October 27, 2017.
  3. Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (University Press of New England, 2009).
  4. Published by Charles Scribner Sons.
  5. Spiro, pp. 145-149.
  6. Spiro, p. 153.
  7. Spiro, p. 150.
  8. See my article, “Where is Calvin Coolidge When We Need Him?” The Occidental Observer, posted March 30, 2019.
  9. Spiro, p. 136.
  10. Spiro, pp. 297-298.
  11. D.L. Chandler, “President Lincoln Urged Freedmen to Return to Africa on This Day in 1862” NewsOne, posted August 14, 2013.

President Lincoln Urged Freedmen To Return To Africa On This Day In 1862

  1. The documentary was “Bergman Island” and the film was “Winter Light.”

 

 

 

Freedom-Fighters for Tyranny!: How “Race-Blind” Libertarianism Is an Ally of Race-Obsessed Wokism

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“The left can be divided into three groups: the stupid, the deluded and the evil.” That’s the best summary of left-wing politics that I know. The only difficulty can be in deciding who on the left belongs where. For example, Hillary Clinton and Merrick Garland are clearly evil. But is the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn merely stupid or deluded? It’s hard to tell. However, I’m becoming clearer about one of the noisiest groups on the British left: the fearless freedom-fighters who gather under the flag of Frank Furedi at the web-zine Spiked Online.

Charismatic crypto-rabbis

I used to think that the Spiked collective might be mostly deluded or stupid rather than evil. But their dishonesty gets more glaring by the day, so it gets harder to give them the benefit of the doubt. And their dishonesty is at its worst on the topics of race and mass migration. Spiked grew out of a Trotskyist cult called the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which had broken away from a larger Trotskyist cult called the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). And just as Leon Trotsky (né Lev Bronshteyn) was Jewish, so were Tony Cliff (né Yigael Gluckstein), the founder of the SWP, and Frank Richards (né Ferenc Füredi), the founder of the RCP. All three men are excellent examples of a long-standing pattern identified by Kevin MacDonald in Jewish intellectual life: that of the charismatic crypto-rabbi-guru who recruits, indoctrinates and closely controls a group of devoted disciples.

In Trotskyism and other branches of communism, the disciples of the crypto-rabbis tend to be either Jewish or drawn from another disaffected minority, like Irish Catholics, that seeks power over and revenge on the racial and religious majority. This attraction to authoritarian leftism may even be partly genetic. For example, the Hitchens brothers, Christopher and Peter, didn’t know that they were half-Jewish until long after both had been members of Yigael Gluckstein’s earlier Trotskyist cult, the International Socialists (IS). The self-important gas-bag Christopher Hitchens never repented his support for the mass-murderer Trotsky. He merely updated it when he became a neo-conservative and cheerleader for Israel-friendly wars in the Middle East. Peter Hitchens, by contrast, has genuinely repented of his Trotskyism and regularly apologized for it. He issued this mea culpa in the Daily Mail back in 2013:

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties. Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly “vibrant communities”. If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots. …

When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as “racists”. What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as “racist”. And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and – later on – cheap builders and plumbers working off the books. It wasn’t our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn’t do the sort of jobs we did.

They were no threat to us. The only threat might have come from the aggrieved British people, but we could always stifle their protests by suggesting that they were modern-day fascists. I have learned since what a spiteful, self-righteous, snobbish and arrogant person I was (and most of my revolutionary comrades were, too). (How I am partly to blame for mass immigration, The Daily Mail, 1st April 2013)

In short, authoritarian leftists love mass immigration because mass immigration strengthens authoritarian leftism. Big business loves mass immigration too, because it drives wages down and destroys the cohesion of the working-class. That’s why the highly authoritarian and business-friendly New Labour opened Britain’s borders to both Eastern Europe and the Third World under the malevolent guidance of the anti-White Jewish immigration minister Barbara Roche. But another Jewish member of Blair’s government, Maurice Glasman, didn’t share Roche’s love of open borders and hatred of the White British. In 2011, Glasman lamented what he called “a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working-class.” He said of mass immigration: “obviously it undermines solidarity, it undermines relationships, and in the scale that it’s been going on in England, it can undermine the possibility of politics entirely.”

A simple solution to any border crisis

Like Peter Hitchens, the Spiked collective know all about authoritarian leftism and why it supports Third-World immigration. After all, they’re former Trotskyists too (or not so former). But do they ever mention their personal experience during their incessant railing against “Critical Race Theory” and other forms of leftist lunacy? Do they explain why authoritarian leftists are such enthusiasts for open borders and the maximum movement of maximum Muslims into Western nations?

No, they don’t. And not only do they keep quiet about why authoritarian leftism loves open borders: they loudly express their own love of open borders. For example, as the Belarussian tyrant Alexander Lukashenko tried to force migrants across the Polish border, Spiked explained how “The EU has brought the border crisis on itself.” Spiked’s solution to the problem is breathtaking in its simplicity: there would be no border crisis if there were no borders. The European Union should simply accept anyone who wants to come here, thereby removing any opportunity for tyrants like Lukashenko to cause trouble.

The last line of the defence

And if some of the vibrant newcomers then try to commit terrorism, well, Spiked has two responses to that. If the attempt isn’t successful, Spiked will celebrate “the incredible heroism of ordinary people” who “are our last line of defence against barbarism.” That was their rhetoric after a failed-but-never-removed asylum-seeker called Emad al-Swealmeen attempted a suicide-bombing in Liverpool and was foiled by a White taxi-driver called Dave Perry. Spiked didn’t, for obvious reasons, consider that ordinary people would not have to be the last line of defence if the first line of defence – secure national borders – were in place. When you don’t have barbarians entering your country, you have no problems with barbarism.

Spiked have another response when the newcomers successfully translate desire into deed and commit terrorism on a large or small scale. After the mass-murder at the Manchester Arena in 2017 and the mensch-murder of a Tory MP in 2021, Spiked had the same response: we must push aside political correctness and have a fierce and fearless “debate” about Islamism and the terrorism it inspires. For obvious reasons, Spiked never mention that the people who don’t want such a debate are the same people who want maximum Muslim migration. And who are those people? Authoritarian leftists, of course. Unlike Spiked, authoritarian leftists can see how good Muslim migration is for authoritarian leftism and its campaign to censor and control public discourse. Or do Spiked see the truth but refuse to admit it? I’m starting to think that dishonesty is a much better explanation of their behavior than delusion.

The power of “parents”

For example, after the Republican Glenn Youngkin won a “shock victory” in the Virginia gubernatorial election, Spiked attributed his success to “the parents’ movement.” But they neglected to qualify the noun “parents” with a certain crucial adjective. They analyzed Youngkin’s victory under the headline “The parents’ revolt in Virginia,” then explained that “parents have had enough of woke education.” The article used the unqualified word “parents” again and again, and triumphantly concluded that “In Virginia at least, the parents’ movement has defied the sneering and derision to secure its first big electoral upset. More power to them.” But who was directing “sneering and derision” at the “parents”? Why, it was the authoritarian left. However, the authoritarian left weren’t sneering at and deriding them simply as “parents,” but specifically as “white parents.”

And the authoritarian left were right: It was Whites in general and White parents in particular who secured the Republican Youngkin’s victory over the Democrat Terry McAuliffe. As the authoritarian leftist Michael Harriott explained in the Guardian: “Nearly nine out of 10 Black Virginians voted for McAuliffe, as did two out of three Hispanic and Asian voters. Youngkin didn’t simply win the white vote; he won only the white vote.” That was Harriott’s emphasis: “only the white vote.” But Spiked dishonestly concealed that crucial truth. Parents in general aren’t revolting against wokism and Critical Race Theory (CRT): White parents are. If only non-Whites voted in Western elections, wokism would win everywhere. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians don’t oppose wokism. Why would they? Wokism demonizes Whites and deifies non-Whites. It says that Whites are greedy, selfish and oppressive, that all their so-called achievements are the result of theft and fraud, and that non-Whites are the moral superiors of Whites and deserve endless compensation for all that they have suffered from White evil.

Water-pistols at a gun-fight

By being dishonest about the true nature of CRT and the other “excesses” of anti-racism, Spiked are assisting the cause of the authoritarian left. They are freedom-fighting for tyranny. In another article, they’ve announced: “If we are to rediscover a sense of social solidarity, we need to reject racial thinking in all its forms.” In other words, Spiked want Whites to attend a gun-fight armed with water-pistols. Leftists are not going to abandon “racial thinking.” Why would they? It has been very successful in advancing their authoritarian agenda and it appeals strongly to an ever-growing part of Western electorates: non-Whites. Why would Blacks accept responsibility for their own failures when they can blame Whitey? Why would successful Chinese and Indians abandon wokism when it guarantees them more success, more power and more opportunity to import their relatives from abroad?

But Spiked do occasionally (albeit obliquely) admit the truth about the harm caused to social solidarity and traditional Western freedoms by mass immigration and ethnic enrichment. As I’ve described previously, their crypto-rabbi Frank Furedi has praised Eastern European nations like Poland and his birthplace Hungary for successfully resisting “woke politics.” But he doesn’t explain why Poland and Hungary are resistant to an ideological infection that is ravaging Western nations like Britain, America and France. He’s being dishonest, just as he’s trained his disciples to be. He won’t admit that Poland and Hungary resist wokism because they have not been ethnically enriched. They are still true nations whose secure borders contain overwhelming majorities of Whites with a common history, genetics, language, culture and religion.

“Getting real about Islamist terrorism”

Suppose that the European Union took Spiked’s insane advice and solved every “border crisis” by abolishing its borders, whereupon Poland, Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe became enriched with millions of Muslims and other non-Whites. What would happen? It’s obvious: woke politics would begin to flourish there and so would Third-World pathologies like terrorism and violent crime. And Poland and Hungary wouldn’t be able to follow more of Spiked’s advice and have a fearless “debate” about their newly acquired pathologies. Why not? Because the woke left there would use the same non-Whites who were causing the pathologies to argue that any such debate would be “divisive” and “discriminatory.”

That’s how it works in Britain and all other ethnically enriched Western nations. The more non-Whites you have, the less you are able to “debate” the pathologies caused by non-Whites. But suppose that we could somehow have such a debate. According to libertarian Spiked, “We need to get real about Islamist terrorism.” There are serious problems festering in our vibrant Muslim communities thanks (they claim) to mistaken leftist policies. So what can the solution be except much stricter policing and monitoring of Muslims and much more interference in their lives? It seems that Spiked want us to strengthen the authoritarian security and surveillance state. I don’t think Muslims will react well to that. And I myself don’t want to police and monitor Muslims more strictly. I don’t want to police and monitor them at all.

No Third-World people, no Third-World pathologies

I want to do what Hungarians and Poles do: admire Muslims and their vibrant behavior from afar. That is, I want Muslim immigration to end and all Muslims currently on Western soil to return where they belong. As Hungary and Poland clearly demonstrate, when you have no Third-World people on your soil, you have no Third-World pathologies and no justification for authoritarian leftists to maintain an aggressively anti-racist, anti-White security state. Just as it’s impossible to make omelettes without eggs, it’s impossible to justify “Critical Race Theory” and “Islamophobia Awareness” when there are no vulnerable non-Whites to be protected from White oppression. When Spiked simultaneously support limitless liberty and maximum Muslim migration, they are supporting an obvious contradiction. And it becomes harder and harder to believe that they don’t realize this. Take these stirring words by the Spikedster-in-Chief Brendan O’Neill, as he explains “why the elites are so desperate to avoid discussing radical Islam”:

At root, they want to protect their ideology of multiculturalism from serious democratic interrogation. And thus they must quell, with distraction and dire warnings, any kind of public scrutiny of how divided and tense Britain has become under this system of cultural and ethnic separatism, to such an extent that religious violence is now a fairly regular occurrence in our society. (David Amess and the terrorism amnesia industry, Spiked-Online, 29th October 2021)

Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill

O’Neill must be well aware that “the elites” began evading “serious democratic interrogation” way back in the 1950s, when mass immigration from the Third World was imposed on the unwilling White majority. After the far-sighted Enoch Powell spoke out against the Third-World invasion in 1968 and prophesied the ever-growing conflict it would cause, he became the most popular politician in the country. But traitorous politicians in all the mainstream parties vilified Powell as a “racist” and refused to listen either to him or to the White majority that supported him. The former Labour deputy-leader Roy Hattersley has openly boasted that “For most of my 33 years in Westminster, I was able to resist [my White constituents’] demands about the great issues of national policy — otherwise, my first decade would have been spent opposing all [Third-World] immigration and my last calling for withdrawal from the European Union.”

Supporting what they oppose

And New Labour, the most woke and authoritarian British government to date, opened the borders precisely because, in Maurice Glassman’s words, it “was hostile to the English working-class.” The elites wanted Third-World immigration to advance an authoritarian, anti-White agenda. And their plan has worked perfectly. The same people behind the “multiculturalism” so passionately opposed by O’Neill and his comrades are behind the mass immigration so passionately supported by O’Neill and his comrades. Spiked claim to support ordinary people and to oppose the elite and its wokism. In fact, they are enemies of ordinary people and allies of the elite and its wokism.

O’Neill has also said this: “Solidarity is incredibly important in people’s everyday lives, as are the communal networks that tie people together. Anything that threatens solidarity is incredibly dangerous.” If O’Neill looks at any ethnically enriched Western nation, he will see that nothing does more harm to “solidarity” and “communal networks” than mass immigration by non-Whites practising radically different cultures, speaking unintelligible languages, following alien religions, and committing far higher levels of violent and acquisitive crime. But solidarity-supporting O’Neill doesn’t oppose solidarity-destroying immigration: he passionately supports it.

Freedom-fighting Bolsheviks

This leads me to apply some simple logic. There are three possibilities: either Brendan O’Neill and his comrades are stupid or they’re deluded or they’re evil. I don’t think they’re stupid and they aren’t deluded when, among many other examples, they deliberately conceal the true nature of the “parents’ revolt” in Virginia. So I conclude that Spiked are evil.

I also conclude that I was stupid ever to think otherwise. After all, Spiked are unrepentant disciples of the mass-murderer Leon Trotsky. If they’d come to power as the Revolutionary Communist Party, they would have created the same horrors as the freedom-fighting Bolsheviks created in the Soviet Union. And you can be sure that if the mass-murdering tyrants Lenin and Trotsky were alive today, they would be passionate supporters of open borders. After all, nothing is better for authoritarian leftism than Third-World immigration. Why else do authoritarian leftists love open borders so much?

A Response to Francis M. Naumann

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My attention was recently drawn to a critical review of two of the essays that appear in my book Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism (which, probably not coincidentally, was recently banned by Amazon). This review was penned by art writer and dealer Francis M. Naumann in the online and print journal The Brooklyn Rail. This website and publication claim to “provide an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond.” The ideological tenor of The Brooklyn Rail is captured in the banner across the top of the website’s homepage which declares “Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with those affected by generations of structural violence.” Readers will be shocked to learn that individuals with common Jewish names feature very prominently among the contributors to this journal.

Naumann, who is not Jewish, offers a review replete with ad hominem and straw man arguments, and nit-picking, inconsequential argumentation. Unable to debunk the central thesis of either essay, he resorts to ascribing malign motives and psychological imbalances to myself and Professor MacDonald. In his review, Naumann deploys the standard rhetorical devices arrayed against those critical of Jewish influence, or who just stand up for White interests: the tendentious terms “white supremacist” and “conspiracy” featuring prominently. He claims Kevin MacDonald is “accurately described” in his Wikipedia entry as “an American anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist” and “white supremacist.” Naumann, who doubtless has never actually read any of MacDonald’s academic work, claims this description is validated by MacDonald’s simple statement of fact in his foreword to Battle Lines that: “We simply can’t avoid discussing the Jews. Honest discussions of Jewish influence are absolutely necessary if White people are going to have a future.”

Naumann’s apparent a priori assumption is that Jewish influence on Western societies and culture is necessarily benevolent, and that, consequently, any criticism of this influence is inherently invalid and reflects negatively on the psychological health of the critic (hence the title of his review, “Pure Meshuggah: Anti-Semitism Invades Art History” with “Meshuggah” being the Yiddish word for crazy). This kind of illogic and intellectual dishonesty spills over into his discussion of my work.

Francis M. Naumann

In my essay entitled “Tristan Tzara and the Jewish Roots of Dada,” I argue that the Jewish origins and identities of prominent figures in the Dada movement (c. 1916–1924), and particularly of its founder, Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock), were critical in shaping its intellectual tenor as a movement arrayed against every cultural tradition of the European past, including rationality itself. I describe Dada’s destructive influence in feeding into the conceptual art that has blighted Western art since the 1960s. I also note the conceptual parallels between Dada and the deconstruction of the Jewish poststructuralist intellectual Jacques Derrida. Both attempted to foster subjective individualism to disconnect Europeans from their familial, religious and ethnic bonds—reducing the salience of Jews as an outgroup and, consequently, the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Western societies.

Offering no real counter-arguments (or critical analysis of my sources), Naumann summarily dismisses this as a “conspiracy theory,” claiming that “Sanderson casts aside logic and reasoning in order to convince us that what he is saying is true.” While a prominent Israeli art historian admitted my essay “is well written and excellently researched” and from an “academic research viewpoint it is without reproach,” Naumann eschews any pretensions to objective analysis and resorts to amateur psychoanalysis. He proposes that my thesis reflects “Sanderson’s fear of the intellectual achievement of these Jewish writers; for like Hitler before him, the exceptional intelligence and success of so many Jews in all professions clearly terrifies him and threatens to undermine his painfully flawed illusion of white supremacy.” Naumann here unintentionally confesses to an ideologically-problematic (for him) strain of race realism: accepting that certain ethnic groups possess “exceptional intelligence” and thus achieve more than others. He is, however, unable to cite a single sentence from Battle Lines that demonstrates my alleged belief in “white supremacy.”

Appalled that anyone would draw negative conclusions about the influence of Dada, which he calls “a playful movement,” or of the Jews who dominated the movement, Naumann insists that “The revolutionary spirit that fueled Dada and abstract art has continued to affect the course of contemporary art, to the good fortune of all reasonable and sentient people.” In addition to being neither reasonable nor sentient, this author is also, according to Naumann, a contaminant. He sanctimoniously claims to never have “imagined that racist politics and white supremacist viewpoints could contaminate my profession.” His self-righteous indignation at the very existence of my work is compounded, moreover, by the fact that Battle Lines had “been awarded five stars from Amazon’s customer reviews.” Naumann sees my work as a “threat to civility and justice” that, left unchallenged, will “grow and fester like an unattended wound. And if we have learned anything from history, that is too dangerous a course of action to follow.”

While leaving the actual thesis of my Dada essay unchallenged, Naumann constructs a straw man from a passing reference I make to Lenin. I note that “living across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire [a Dadaist venue] in Zurich [in 1916] were Lenin, Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev who were preparing for the Bolshevik Revolution.” Naumann cavils at the supposed geographical imprecision of this statement (despite its ubiquity in the literature), and falsely claims my objective here is “to implicate Dadaists as Communists whose influence was felt in Russia, and later in Western Europe and America.” I never claim Dadaists were important political actors in the interwar period, but I do stress their destructive artistic and intellectual legacy. That Tzara and the other leading Dadaists were communists or radical leftists is, however, incontrovertible, and is illustrated by their own actions and statements (which are cited at length in my essay). Even the Wikipedia entry for “Dada” states plainly that the Dadaists “maintained political affinities with radical left-wing and far-left politics.”

Tzara joined the French Communist Party and interpreted both Dada and Surrealism as revolutionary currents, and presented them as such to the public.[1] The leading Dadaists in Germany were self-declared communists: Richard Huelsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann affirmed that Dada “is German Bolshevism”[2] and that “Dadaism demands: the international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism.”[3] Robert Short notes that, among the German Dadaists, were those for whom: “Dada was a political weapon and those for whom communism was a Dadaistical weapon.”[4]

Dada leader Tristan Tzara

Naumann insists it is “now well known” in the literature on Dada that “Lenin was a frequent visitor to the Cabaret Voltaire, where he went to see if what was going on there could contribute to his political aspirations.” Actually, this notion is widely disputed in the literature. Huelsenbeck stated that Lenin once visited the Café Voltaire, and Marcel Janko later made a similar claim. The veracity of these accounts is, however, strongly doubted. Jones, for example, questions “the wistful reminiscing on Richard Huelsenbeck’s part to suggest that Lenin actually visited the Cabaret Voltaire; similarly, Marcel Janko’s distant and apocryphal retrospection of the cabaret room, thick with smoke, ‘where some sudden apparition would loom up every now and then, like the impressive Mongol features of Lenin.’”[5] Rappaport is similarly unconvinced, wondering if “the subversive nature of Dada as performance” was enough to arouse “Lenin’s curiosity enough to prompt him to cross the road and take a look.”[6] The official website of the city of Zurich is similarly skeptical, noting: “Whether Lenin visited the Cabaret Voltaire, the birthplace of Dadaism, is still unknown but has fueled speculation as to whether Lenin was a secret Dadaist.”

Naumann falsely alleges that I claim that Lenin influenced Dada and abstract art, and, correcting a point I don’t make, declares: “But in reality, Lenin had no effect whatsoever on Dada or abstract art. In fact, he and the other Bolsheviks were against abstract art, since its emphasis on individualism was diametrically opposed to Communist ideals.” The first statement is correct, but things are more complicated than Naumann’s second point would suggest. The new Soviet state led by Lenin that emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 initially adopted a policy in favor of radical experimentation. As Christine Lindey notes:

Initially, most avant-garde artists welcomed the revolution because Lenin’s idea of a political avant-garde as an agent for social change legitimised their own calls for radical action to combat conservative attitudes to art and society. For Marxists like [the Russian painter Vladimir] Tatlin, here was an opportunity to make real and meaningful change. … Others, like Kandinsky, were not sympathetic to Bolshevik politics, but welcomed the artistic freedom which it brought, while aesthetically or/and politically conservative artists feared a loss of private patronage and critical status. Contrary to western propaganda, no artist was sent to the salt mines: Lenin and Lunacharsky, (Commissar of Enlightenment 1917–1929) pursued a pluralist arts policy.

With Stalin’s rise in power the avant-garde artists who flourished under Lenin were silenced. All avant-garde movements were forced out of the Soviet Union (or forced underground) until Stalin’s death in 1953. Locke observes that “Stalin squashed the entire evolution of avant-garde ingenuity in Russia and replaced it with his own brand of art, Soviet Realism.”

Naumann quibbles at the supposed chronological imprecision of my assertion that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf as Dada peaked in Paris. Hitler’s comments on Dada were written (or at least dictated to Rudolf Hess) in 1923 and Paris Dada was officially ended in 1924. Naumann insists that “Hitler knew virtually nothing about Dada, which he lumped together with Cubism and called an ‘artistic aberration.’” I make no assessment of Hitler’s knowledge of the movement in the essay besides quoting his brief statements about it in Mein Kampf. Naumann does make a single valid (though inconsequential) criticism: the American art collector Walter Arensberg is incorrectly identified as Jewish. This is something I will amend in future editions of Battle Lines.

In my essay I draw parallels between the ideas underpinning Dada and those of poststructuralist Jewish intellectual and founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Naumann takes issue with my description of Derrida as a “crypto-Jew intensely preoccupied with his own Jewish identity and the evils of European anti-Semitism.” He claims “By crypto-Jew, he implies that Derrida hid his Jewish identity.” Some basic research by Naumann would have revealed that my epithet is correct, and while Derrida posed as a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist, he descended from a long line of crypto-Jews, and explicitly identified himself as such: “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.”[7]

Derrida was born into a Sephardic Jewish family that immigrated to Algeria from Spain in the nineteenth century. His family were crypto-Jews who retained their Jewish identity for 400 years in Spain during the period of the Inquisition. Derrida changed his first name to the French Christian sounding ‘Jacques’ in order better blend into the French scene. Furthermore, he took his crypto-Judaism to the grave:

When Derrida was buried, his elder brother, René, wore a tallit at the suburban French cemetery and recited the Kaddish to himself inwardly, since Jacques had asked for no public prayers. This discreet, highly personal, yet emotionally and spiritually meaningful approach to recognizing Derrida’s Judaism seems emblematic of this complex, imperfect, yet valuably nuanced thinker.

Derrida was a crypto-Jew until the end, even instructing his family to participate in the charade. Kevin MacDonald notes the obvious reason: “Intellectually one wonders how one could be a postmodernist and a committed Jew at the same time. Intellectual consistency would seem to require that all personal identifications be subjected to the same deconstructing logic, unless, of course, personal identity itself involves deep ambiguities, deception, and self-deception.”[8]

In his notebooks, Derrida underscores the centrality of Jewish issues in his writing: “Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about.” His experience of anti-Semitism during World War II in Algeria was traumatic and resulted in a deep consciousness of his own Jewishness. He was expelled from school at age 13 under the Vichy government because of official caps on the number of Jewish students, describing himself as a “little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it, to whom no one ever gave the slightest reason, neither his parents nor his friends.”[9] Later, in France, his “suffering subsided. I naively thought that anti-Semitism had disappeared. … But during adolescence, it was the tragedy, it was present in everything else.” These experiences led Derrida to develop “an exhausting aptitude to detect signs of racism, in its most discreet configurations or its noisiest disavowals.”[10] Caputo notes how Jewish ethnic activism underpins Derrida’s deconstruction:

The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. … The idea is to disarm the bombs… of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants, … all of whom… are wholly other. Contrary to the claims of Derrida’s more careless critics, the passion of deconstruction is deeply political, for deconstruction is a relentless, if sometimes indirect, discourse on democracy, on a democracy to come. Derrida’s democracy is a radically pluralistic polity that resists the terror of an organic, ethnic, spiritual unity, of the natural, native bonds of the nation (natus, natio), which grind to dust everything that is not a kin of the ruling kind and genus (Geschlecht). He dreams of a nation without nationalist or nativist closure, of a community without identity, of a non-identical community that cannot say I or we, for, after all, the very idea of a community is to fortify (munis, muneris) ourselves in common against the other. His work is driven by a sense of the consummate danger of an identitarian community, of the spirit of the “we” of “Christian Europe,” or of a “Christian politics,” lethal compounds that spell death of Arabs and Jews, for Africans and Asians, for anything other. The heaving and sighing of this Christian European spirit is a lethal air for Jews and Arabs, for all les juifs [i.e., Jews as prototypical others], even if they go back to father Abraham, a way of gassing them according to both the letter and the spirit.[11]

Derrida’s sociological preoccupations (and suggested solutions) replicated those of Tristan Tzara. Sandqvist links Tzara’s profound revolt against European social constraints directly to his Jewish identity, and his anger at the persistence of anti-Semitism. For Sandqvist, the treatment of Jews in Romania fueled the Dada leader’s revolt against Western civilization. Bodenheimer notes that:

As a Jew, Tzara had many reasons to call into question the so-called disastrous truths and rationalizations of European thinking, one result of which was the First World War — with the discrimination of Jews for centuries being another. … He came from a background in which jingoistic and anti-Semitic arguments had long reproached Jews for using impure, falsified language, from early examples in the sixteenth century … all the way to the arguments of the Romanian intellectuals in Tzara’s time, who attacked Jews as “foreigners” importing “diseased ideas” into Romanian literature and culture.

[Tzara consequently] seeks to unmask language itself as a construction that draws its value, and sometimes its claim to superiority, from an equally constructed concept of identities and values. In themselves, all languages are equal, but equal in their differences. This claim to the right of equality while upholding difference is the basic Jewish claim to a secular society. But the European peoples, be it first for religious or later for nationalist reasons, have never managed to actually understand this right, let alone grant it to minority societies.

Both the Dadaists and Derrida attacked the notion that the world really is as our concepts describe it (i.e., philosophical realism), and used nominalism (the view that concepts are nothing more than human artifacts that have no relation to the real world) to deconstruct and subvert Western realism. Both thought the idea of objective truth was dangerous because of the possibility that truth could be deployed against the “other.” For the Dadaists, the principles of Western rationality “were held to be highly problematic, because of its instrumental connections to social repressions and domination.”[12] The Jewish Dadaist Hans Richter declared that the abstract language of the Dadaists would be “beyond all national language frontiers,” and saw in Dadaist abstraction a new kind of communication “free from all kinds of nationalistic alliances.”[13] Like the Dadaists, Derrida decided, if you dislike the prevailing power, then strive to ruin its concepts. Dada used nonsense and absurdity to achieve this goal, while Derrida developed and deployed his methodology of deconstruction.

Jacques Derrida

When the Frankfurt School established itself in the United States, it made a conscious effort to give its Jewish intellectual activism a “scientific” veneer by gathering “empirical data” (such as that which formed the basis for The Authoritarian Personality) in order to challenge existing ideas seen as inimical to Jewish interests (such as Darwinian anthropology). Derrida and the poststructuralists instead sought (like the Jews within Dada) to discredit threatening ideas by undermining the notion of objective truth that underpinned all Western knowledge production.

Despite the difference of critical approach, a common Jewish ethno-political thread runs through Tzara’s Dada, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Each attempted to foster subjective individualism to disconnect the masses from their familial, religious and ethnic bonds in order to lessen the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Western societies. Like the other movements chronicled by Kevin MacDonald in Culture of Critique, these movements were preoccupied with undermining the evolutionarily adaptive precepts and practices that had historically dominated Western societies (e.g., social homogeneity via immigration control, the nuclear family based on ties of love and affection, ethnocentrism, the drawing of clear ingroup and outgroup distinctions, sexual restraint), with the implicit goal being to render White Europeans less effective competitors to Jews for access to resources and reproductive success and less able to develop a cohesive, ethnically homogeneous movement in opposition to Judaism.

I am far from alone in noting the conceptual parallels between Dada and Derrida’s deconstruction. Wicks observes how strongly Dada resonates “with the definitively poststructuralist conception of deconstruction advanced by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s.”[14] Pegrum likewise notes the “strong link between Dada and postmodern artistic theory, the most obvious point of contact being with the work of Derrida.”[15] The literary critic Frank Kermode also traces deconstruction back to Dada influences, while Richard Sheppard regards the poststructuralists “as more introverted, less politicized, and less carnivalesque descendants of their Dada daddies.”[16]

Yet, for Naumann, my thesis is just a “conspiracy theory.” But why wouldn’t Jews (as a highly ethnocentric group) use their high levels of intellectual and cultural influence to advance their group interests at the expense of a group they perceive as an immemorial and existential threat?

Switching attention to my essay on Mark Rothko and Abstract Expressionism, a key theme of which is this artist’s political radicalism and Jewish ethnocentrism (and that of his entire social milieu), Naumann asks: “If Jews were such great supporters of Communism in the 1940s—as both Sanderson and MacDonald posit (and to a certain degree they are right)—then why did they not support the efforts of Regionalist painters (Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry) and the Social Realists (Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera)?” I address this point at length in my essay — which makes me wonder if he actually bothered to read it to the end. Jewish artists like Rothko regarded Regionalism as exactly the kind of American painting they most despised: scenic, provincial, anecdotal, and conservative. They associated rural America with nativism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, and fascism as well as with anti-intellectualism and provincialism.

Jewish gallery owners like Sam Kootz decried the “nationalist” art of the Regionalists and promoted the internationalist art of a rising generation of expressionist, surrealist and abstract artists. “America’s more important artists are consistently shying away from Regionalism and exploring the virtues of internationalism,” he commented in 1943. “This is the painting equivalent of our newly found political and social internationalism.”[17] Incensed by the awarding of an art prize to John Steuart Curry in 1942, Jewish abstract artist Barnett Newman denounced Regionialism as “isolationism” and as akin to National Socialism, declaring: “Isolationist painting, which they named the American Renaissance, is founded on politics and on an even worse aesthetic. Using the traditional chauvinism, isolationist brand of patriotism, and playing on the natural desire of American artists to have their own art, they succeeded in pushing across a false aesthetic that is inhibiting the production of any true art in this country. … Isolationism, we have learned by now, is Hitlerism.”[18]

The Homestead by John Steuart Curry

The hostility of Jewish artists and intellectuals to Regionalism is no great mystery. A subset of Jews did support the work of the Social Realists, but this changed with the failure of socialism to take hold in North America in the 1940s. As I explain in the essay:

For Jewish writer Alain Rogier, it seems “hardly a coincidence that Jews made up a large percentage of the leading Abstract Expressionists.”[19] It was an art movement where the culture of critique of Jewish artists, frustrated that the post-war American prosperity prevented the coming of international socialism, turned inward and instead “proposed individualistic modes of liberation.” This mirrored the ideological shift that occurred among the New York Intellectuals generally who “gradually evolved away from advocacy of socialist revolution toward a shared commitment to anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism [i.e., the multicultural project], ‘a broad and inclusive culture’ in which cultural differences were esteemed.”[20] Doss notes how this ideological shift manifested itself among the artists who became the Abstract Expressionists:

As full employment returned, New Deal programs were terminated — including federal support for the arts — the reformist spirit that had flourished in the 1930s dissipated. Corporate liberalism triumphed: together, big government and big business forged a planned economy and engineered a new social contract based on free market expansion. … With New Deal dreams of reform in ruins, and the better “tomorrow” prophesied at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair having seemingly led only to the carnage of World War II, it is not surprising that post-war artists largely abandoned the art styles and political cultures associated with the Great Depression.[21]

The avant-garde artists of the New York School instead embraced an “inherently ambiguous and unresolved, an open-ended modern art … which encouraged liberation through personal, autonomous acts of expression.” The works of the Abstract Expressionists were “revolutionary attempts” to liberate the larger American culture “from the alienating conformity and pathological fears [especially of communism] that permeated the post-war era.”[22] Rothko claimed that “after the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb you couldn’t paint figures without mutilating them.” His friend and fellow artist Adolph Gottlieb, declared that: “Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind … abstraction is not abstraction at all. … It is the realism of our time.”[23]

At the heart of Abstract Expressionism lay a vision of the artist as alienated from mainstream society, a figure morally compelled to create a new type of art which would confront an irrational, absurd world — a mentality completely in accord with that of the alienated Jewish artists and intellectuals at the heart of the movement who viewed the White Christian society around them with hostility. MacDonald notes that the New York Intellectuals “conceived themselves as alienated, marginalized figures — a modern version of traditional Jewish separateness and alienation from gentile culture. …” Norman Podhoretz was asked in the 1950s “whether there was a special typewriter at Partisan Review with the word ‘alienation’ on a single key.”[24]

During the 1950s, Jewish artists and intellectuals chafed against the social controls enforced by political conservatives and religious and cultural traditionalists who limited Jewish influence on the culture, “much to the chagrin of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals who prided themselves in their alienation from that very culture.” This all ended, together with Abstract Expressionism as an art movement embodying the alienation of the New York Intellectuals, with the triumph of the culture of critique in the 1960s, when Jews and their gentile allies usurped the old WASP establishment, and thus had far less reason to engage in the types of cultural criticism so apparent in the writings of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals. Hollywood and the rest of the American media were unleashed.

Naumann has no actual response to any of this. However, in assessing the Jewish domination of Abstract Expressionism, he claims that I envision “the whole enterprise as nothing short of a Jewish conspiracy, whereby Jews placed themselves in a position to be viewed by the intellectual establishment of the time as ‘self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture.’” A major theme of my essay on Rothko and Abstract Expressionism is the power of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism — which is abundantly demonstrated in Mark Rothko’s rise to fame on the New York art scene. Rothko biographer Annie Cohen-Solal emphasizes the role of Jewish ethnic networking in Rothko’s rise from obscurity to artistic celebrity. More broadly, Jewish artists (Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman), critics (Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Thomas B. Hess), curators (Katherine Kuh, Peter Selz, Henry Geldzahler) and art dealers (Sidney Janis, Peggy Guggenheim, Samuel Kootz), were instrumental in the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Such an overwhelming representation from a group that comprised less than two percent of the American population is utterly remarkable and testament to the power of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism.

Naumann falsely claims I “invent” a Jewish connection to the non-Jewish artist Willem de Kooning when I note that he had to ingratiate himself with the Jewish critics and intellectuals clustered around the leftist journal Partisan Review. It was hardly necessary for me to “invent” a connection between de Kooning and Jews. His wife, Elaine de Kooning, was half-Jewish (born Elaine Fried), and de Kooning shamelessly pimped her out to leading Jewish art critics like Harold Rosenberg and Thomas B. Hess, who, in return, helped further his career.[25] Hess, the editor of Art News, the oldest and most widely-circulated fine arts journal in the world, was hugely influential in promoting Abstract Expressionism. Mentored and promoted by the magazine’s editor in chief, Alfred Frankfurter (also Jewish), Hess was part of the triumvirate of Jews (with Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg) who “were instrumental in championing Abstract Expressionism in the early stages of the movement.” Hess’s Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (1951) was the first book on the movement to be published, and the critic and art historian Barbara E. Rose (also Jewish) described him as running a “propaganda vehicle for launching the New York School internationally.” While Hess’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention his ethnic background, a quick internet search reveals that his mother was buried at the Mount Zion Temple Cemetery in Minnesota.

Naumann claims that in pointing out the prominence of Jews in the art world I give “proof of how important and influential Jews were in shaping the culture of our times. If you were to remove the names of everyone who was Jewish from the roster of twentieth-century artists, writers, critics, collectors, and art dealers, you would find that very little of that history would exist.” Indeed.

He claims to be deeply offended by my custom of placing the word “Holocaust” in quotation marks – which I do to highlight the absurdity (not to say impossibility) of much of the official narrative, and also to protest its use as a tool of psychological warfare against White people. Naumann insists that, rather than Jews engaging in competitive victimhood (as I discuss in a recent article), it is “Sanderson and MacDonald [who] envision themselves as the ultimate victims … since they have found themselves ostracized from mainstream academia.” In all of the writing I have done for The Occidental Observer going back over a decade I have never described or presented myself as a victim.

Naumann concludes his review in the same vein in which he starts it — eschewing rational arguments in favor of baseless speculation about the mental health of yours truly and Professor MacDonald: “It does not take a trained psychiatrist to determine that the biased and racist rants of most white supremacists are the product of an innate psychiatric disorder, one that causes them to hate all people who are not like them.” Naumann’s total reliance on these kind of personal attacks reminds one of how little things have changed since the nineteenth century when Richard Wagner was declared to be suffering from a psychiatric disorder for daring to criticize Jewish influence. No doubt Naumann would lump Wagner in with his “many notable psychotics in history” whose criticisms of Jews he attributes to psychopathology. In the final analysis, none of this name-calling amounts to actual arguments, and only serves to highlight the weakness of his position.

Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, banned by Amazon, but available here.

[1] Irina Livezeanu, “From Dada to Gaga: The Peripatetic Romanian Avant-Garde Confronts Communism,” Mihai Dinu Gheorghiu & Lucia Dragomir (Eds.), Littératures et pouvoir symbolique (Bucharest: Paralela 45, 2005), 245-6.

[2] Bernard Blisténe, A History of Twentieth Century Art (Paris: Fammarion, 2001), 62.

[3] Dawn Ades, “Dada and Surrealism,” David Britt (Ed.) Modern Art – Impressionism to Post-Modernism, (London, Thames & Hudson, 1974), 222.

[4] Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1994), 42.

[5] Daffyd Jones, Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (Liverpool University Press, 2014), 176.

[6] Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (Basic Books; 2012), 256.

[7] Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession,” In Jacques Derrida, Ed. G. Bennington & Jacques Derrida, Trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 170.

[8] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, IN: 1stbooks Library, 2001), 198.

[9] Derrida, “Circumfession,” op. cit., 58)

[10] Jacques Derrida, Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, Trans. P. Kamuf et al (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 120–21.

[11] J.D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 231–2.

[12] Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 154.

[13] Hockensmith, “Artists’ Biographies,” Leah Dickerman (Ed.) Dada (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, 2005), 482.

[14] Robert J. Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 11.

[15] Mark A. Pegrum, Challenging Modernity: Dada between Modern and Postmodern (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 269.

[16] Richard Sheppard, Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1999), 365.

[17] Annie Cohen-Solal, Mark Rothko, Toward the Light in the Chapel (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 90.

[18] Ibid., 88.

[19] Alain Rogier, “Jewish Artist Mark Rothko: An Outsider in Life and Death,” ReformJudaism.org, April 26, 2016. https://reformjudaism.org/blog/2016/04/26/jewish-artist-mark-rothko-outsider-life-and-death

[20] Ibid., 212.

[21] Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 124.

[22] Ibid., 130-1.

[23] Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 128.

[24] MacDonald, Culture of Critique, 212.

[25] See: Lee Hall, Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage (HarperCollins, 1993).