“Professor Abramovsky asserts that ‘no-one seriously questions the severity of the problem [of bias crime]. We do. The uncritical acceptance of a hate crime epidemic is unfortunate.”
Barrett Jacobs and J. Henry “The Social Construction of a Hate Crime Epidemic,” 1996.^[1]

“Obviously the hate label is a blunt one. It’s one of the things that gives it power.”
Richard Cohen, SPLC, November 2018.

“Utterly fake.” This was my opinion when a colleague mentioned the recent assault on two Jews in London by a Black teenager. “What do you mean, fake? It was caught on camera,” he shot back. My colleague was correct, but had missed the finer point. The video footage shows two bearded Orthodox Jews locking up their shop for the night before a tall Black male walks towards them. The Black male then utters something, which seems to panic the Jews, before a fumbling and awkward physical encounter ensues. The violence, which is over in about four seconds, is minimal, even comical. Its ultimate cause or provocation, beyond the chaotic and impulsive qualities common to Black criminality, remains unknown. This random and primitive quality, however, hasn’t prevented the incident from being portrayed as systematic, or as involving a complexity not seen outside Asian books of war. It quickly became headline news, drawing condemnations of the scourge of “anti-Semitic” violence from both the British Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.

The fake framing of this banal and predictable instance of Black youth violence as “anti-Semitism” has fallen very swiftly into a pattern we are now familiar with: the state of “permanent hate emergency.” Back in August, the FBI reported that hate crimes in the US has reached their highest levels in 12 years. San Francisco police have just today announced that there has been a 567% increase in hate crimes against Asians and Pacific Islanders. Joe Biden has called on Congress to “urgently” pass harsher hate crime legislation. The UK reported “soaring” homophobic hate crimes during 2021. Canada announced last year that hate crimes against Asians rose 717%, while hate crimes of all kinds rose “sharply.” Ireland reports that hate crimes have risen 80%. France has alleged a 53% increase in Islamophobic hate crime, a 36% rise in homophobic hate crime, and a 75% increase in anti-Semitic hate crime. I could go on. The White world, it seems, is suddenly consumed with hate; a boiling cauldron of reactionary aggression. Or is it?

The real state of the hate crime epidemic? Utterly fake.

There are countless people in our culture today who would resent this hate denialism as Far Right propaganda or, in the terminology ushered in during the Trump presidency, as a “war on Truth.” And yet the state of “permanent hate emergency” that we are being subjected to by politicians and the media has been debunked for more than 25 years, in no less a journal than Northwestern University’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. In “The Social Construction of a Hate Crime Epidemic,” published in 1996 by James Barrett Jacobs and Jessica Henry,^[2] we see all the hallmarks of the present panic as well as a very clear analysis of how the panic is manufactured by organizations like the ADL, justified by (very often Jewish) academics, and maintained through media lies and political corruption.

Jacobs and Henry begin their article by pointing out that

Politicians, journalists, interest groups, and some criminologists insist that the United States is experiencing an across-the-board hate crime “epidemic.” The use of the epidemic metaphor is meant to dramatize a sharply accelerating hate crime rate. Assertions that a hate crime epidemic exists are almost always accompanied by recommendations for new “hate crime laws” that increase minimum and/or maximum punishment for offenders.

The fundamental nature of the “hate crime epidemic” is therefore that it is a politically motivated social construct intended to provoke freedom-reducing legal changes. Jacobs and Henry write that they intend

to deconstruct the claim that the United States is experiencing a hate crime epidemic. Drawing on the “social construction of reality” perspective, we attempt to show how the “reality” of a hate crime epidemic has come to prevail. First, we examine the hate crime epidemic hypothesis and identify its proponents, including advocacy groups, the media, academics, and politicians. Second, we examine the hate crime data collection efforts of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch Project (Klanwatch) and the FBI; figures from these groups are widely used to confirm the existence of the hate crime epidemic. Third, we demonstrate the political and subjective nature of counting hate crimes. Fourth, we offer some contrarian observations on the status of hate crimes.

The Language of Disease

By the mid-1990s it had become common for commentators to “assert that the rates of all types of hate crimes taken individually and together have reached epidemic levels.” Then, as now, prominent politicians and public figures employed metaphors designed to imply that “hate crimes” had suddenly exploded and were spiraling out of control. In many cases, the language was closely related to the growing fashion of referring to anti-Semitism as a contagious disease, and the most prominent of the “hate crime epidemic” propagandists were themselves Jewish. In 1994,  for example, Steven Spielberg, still riding the crest of the Schindler’s List wave, told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that “hate crimes are an epidemic.”^[3] Describing “hate crimes” in such a way not only induces a sense of panic and crisis conducive to legal change, but also dehumanizes both the phenomenon of ethnic conflict, in whatever honest form it may take, and the “hater.” No-one questions the context or motives of a virus, and in the same way describing any form of ethnic conflict in terms of disease or virology is intended to inhibit any discussion of prior causality. People become so agitated by the thought of something negative spreading in a viral fashion that the emphasis is placed on eradication (criminalization and punishment) rather than analysis or understanding.

The entire concept of “hate” and “hate crime” can be seen as little more than a self-interested and dishonest attempt by minority groups to obtain resources from the majority group. Jacobs and Henry write that

The leading proponents of a hate crime epidemic thesis are advocacy groups representing gays and lesbians, Jews, and blacks; advocates for women, Asian-Americans, and the disabled also have demanded explicit inclusion in hate crime legislation. By calling attention to the criminal victimization of their members, these advocates may hope to mobilize law enforcement resources on behalf of their members, and, more broadly, to make out a moral and political claim in furtherance of their groups’ agenda of social and political goals.

Strategic Victimhood

Rather than being rooted in reality, “hate epidemic” allegations are predominately tactical or, in the words of Jacobs and Henry, “functional.” They point in particular to the example of the ADL and the SPLC, and stress that the basic function of these groups is not to “fight hate” or any other nebulous goal, but rather to “eradicate all bias against those whom they represent.” In other words, when the ADL speaks about “fighting hate” or “building hope” or any other such nonsense, it is merely a cover for the basic goal of shaping the culture, the law, and politics in such a fashion that will ultimately benefit the constituents of that group: in the case of the ADL, Jews. Jacobs and Henry comment that “whatever the actual number of hate crimes, these groups’ assertion of a hate crime epidemic effectively gains them political support.” Hate epidemic propaganda does this by focusing public attention and resources on the manipulating minority group in question, and helps create social and behavioral changes that will ultimately benefit that minority group at the expense of the majority.

Gays, Jews, and Blacks are noted by Jacobs and Henry as employing a fundamentally identical strategy — that of irrationally pursuing a zero-sum scenario in which they accrue no negativity. Any instance of violence or murder affecting their group, regardless of context or motivation, is liable to be integrated into a narrative of mass persecution and rampant hate crime. I was baffled recently, for example, to read an article in The Guardian alleging that the homosexual British serial killer Dennis Nilsen had committed “homophobic” crimes because his victims were gays — this despite the fact Nilsen was himself a lifelong homosexual and that homosexuals are so radically overrepresented in necrophilic homicide^[4] of the kind that Nilsen engaged in (see also the high-profile examples of Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Stephen Port) that it could be described as a gay problem or an aspect of the homosexual mind. The narrative of a hate crime epidemic is dependent on total omission of context and the privileging of “victim” perspectives beyond all rational measure. Jacobs and Henry cite a case where a report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force includes frequent claims that, in terms of anti-gay violence, “we have an epidemic on our hands, one that is in need of a remedy.” But in the same report the actual statistics revealed that violence against gays had decreased 12% in the six cities surveyed.

Media Hype

Because the “hate crime epidemic” strategy is so successful, it has been mimicked by almost every minority group. Jacobs and Henry point out that, although pioneered by Jews, other groups̶—Blacks, and gays, feminists and East Asian advocacy organizations—soon started complaining about a violent war on women and an explosion in anti-Asian hate. Jacobs and Henry point out that the success of such strategies is dependent on media hype that saturates the public conversation and prompts panicked calls for action from minorities as well as muted acquiescence from a morally sham–ed majority. Headlines cited by Jacobs and Henry include “A Cancer of Hatred Afflicts America,” and “Rise in Hate Crimes Signals Alarming Resurgence of Bigotry.” Often these are shameless misrepresentations of data contained within the body of the article in question, with Jacobs and Henry pointing out that one headline, “Bias Crimes Flare Up in City’s Heat,” was followed several paragraphs later by the sentence “the number of bias-related incidents in the city dropped in the first half of this year from the same period last year.”

As noted by Jacobs and Henry, the media salivates at the slightest hint of bias-related crime in which the majority (White, heterosexual) culture can be implicated:

The media seem almost enthusiastic in presuming the worst about the state of inter-group relationships in American society. For example, a Florida newspaper presented a horrifying attack on an African-American tourist as “a dramatic example of the growing problem of hate crime,” but the writer provided no basis for the assertion that there is a “growing problem of hate.” Sometimes the media may even be responsible for triggering hate crimes. When two African-American children in New York City reported that several whites had sprayed them with white shoe polish, the media gave the incident endless publicity. The week after the alleged attack, sixty-one bias incidents [attacks on Whites] were reported. When, weeks later, the New York Police Department effectively abandoned the investigation amid speculation that the original accusation was fabricated, the media hardly covered the story.

Academic Fraud

Particularly interesting is the exploration by Jacob and Henry of academic involvement in creating and perpetuating the state of “permanent hate emergency.” They single out figures like Jack Levin, Joan Weiss (Executive Director for the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence), and Abraham Abramovsky, for selectively applying “data that do not support ‘the facts’ they claim to establish.” That these figures are Jewish should not be surprising, and their academic activity should be regarded as extensions of the ethnically self-interested activism of the ADL and similar organizations in perpetuating the hate crime hoax. Even today, Jews remain at the forefront of the production of pseudo-scholarly works claiming to explain “hate” and offering methods of countering it. These inevitably involve a reduction in the freedoms of the White heterosexual majority. One need only consider Robert Sternberg’s 2020 Perspectives on Hate, Deborah Levine’s 2019 When Hate Groups March Down Main Street, Keith Kahn-Harris’s 2019 Strange Hate, Jonathan Greenblatt’s 2022 It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable, Melissa Abramowitz’s 2016 Hate Crimes in America, Sally Kohn’s 2018 The Opposite of Hate, and Jeffrey Israel’s 2019 Living with Hate in American Politics and Religion. It’s true we are facing an epidemic, not of hate but of Jewish hogwash.

Jacobs and Henry point out that academia overwhelmingly lends its support “to the social construction of hate crime as an epidemic.” Academics engage in a semi-industrial level of production of texts involving the reproduction of statistics and reports gathered from organizations like the ADL that have a vested interest in perpetuating the hate hoax. These texts also tend heavily towards propagandistic tactics such as an emphasis on particularly emotive or salacious cases of violence, no matter how rare. Jacobs and Henry remark on the proportion of discussion often “devoted to detailed descriptions of particular horrific hate crimes.” There is little to no attempt at obtaining a genuine and nuanced understanding of inter-ethnic conflict, with most academics in the field resorting to psychoanalysis, pop psychology, or accusations of “resentment” in the majority population. Jacobs and Henry comment that such explanations are

not based on any empirical studies but on the authors’ social speculation. The most significant problem with the authors’ speculation is the absence of any data on the hate crime rate. In short, the authors may have created a theory in search of a problem.

Often there is a blatant dismissal in these texts of even the need for statistics. It seems to be enough that the academics themselves merely intuitively “know” that a hate crime epidemic is ongoing. Joan Weiss, for example, once remarked “the problem is so pervasive that, even without accurate data, we know that thousands upon thousands of incidents occur throughout the country every year.” Weiss doesn’t possess any data, but she’s sure that many thousands of attacks have occurred. This, apparently, is bona fide social science. Abramovsky, in a 1992 peer-reviewed law journal article, wrote that “the most alarming statistic is that in 1990 the number of bias-related attacks on Asians almost doubled from the number reported in 1989.” Jacobs and Henry point out that the 1990 total was 11 incidents, and ask “Is a total of eleven bias incidents against Asian-Americans truly ‘alarming’ in a city with a 1990 Asian-American population of 512,719, and with a total of 710,222 FBI index crimes?” Either Abramovsky is an especially sensitive fellow, or he’s a bullshit artist of a particularly acute, and alarmingly common, kind.

Political Implications

Once public opinion has been sufficiently manipulated by ethnic interest groups, the media, and their allies in academia, the pathway is cleared for activism by political actors. This activism takes two forms. In the first instance, minority actors in politics (gays, Jews, Blacks etc.) pursue their own vested interests. In the second instance, those from the White heterosexual majority may support or even initiate measures that reduce the freedoms of their co-ethnic constituents due to social fashion (“fighting bigotry”), guilt (genuine belief in the hate epidemic), or material incentive (financial or electoral support from influential minorities). Jacobs and Henry write:

Politicians have enthusiastically climbed aboard the hate crime epidemic bandwagon. Denouncing hate crime and passing sentencing enhancement laws provides elected officials with an opportunity to decry bigotry. Politicians can propose anti-hate legislation as a cheap, quick-fix solution that sends powerful symbolic messages to important groups of constituents. Recognizing the political and symbolic importance of legislation, politicians embrace anti-bias laws, routinely citing advocacy groups’ statements and statistics.

Of these various motivations and approaches, it must be made clear that Jewish activism in the politics of “hate crime” is sufficiently prominent to merit special attention. Jewish politicians were involved in almost every attempt since 1945 to introduce hate speech legislation in the UK. Canadian hate legislation has its origins in the 1965 Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada, known more popularly as the Cohen Committee because it was created and steered by the Jewish lawyer Maxwell Cohen. In America, specific hate crime legislation was first attempted in the 1980s by the Jewish New York Attorney General Robert Abrams, who developed and attempted to pass the Bias Related Violence and Intimidation Act, which would heighten the punishment scale by one degree for every crime if a “hate” component was found to be involved. Abrams’s legislation was in part prompted by media-fuelled outrage over the 1987 case of Tawana Brawley, a 16-year-old Black teenager who alleged she had been raped, defecated on, and wrapped in a plastic bag by four White men. As with the “white shoe polish” incident, a jury later found that Brawley’s story was a work of pure fiction. Jews, including the American Jewish Committee and lawyers attached to the SPLC, were prominent at every stage of the 1988 Hate Crimes Statistics Act. One of the most vocal proponents of hate crime legislation in America since the 1968 Civil Rights Act is Tennessee’s Steve Cohen. In his own words:

I support the hate crimes bill and I was a sponsor of the bill that has gone through Congress. I also was a sponsor of the hate crimes legislation in Tennessee that was passed as well, when I was a Senator. In addition, as a Senator in Tennessee, I passed a bill in 1989 which dealt specifically with symbols of hate, religious and racial intimidation. Right now, I am looking into a federal law that would be stronger than what we have.

Statistics

Jacobs and Henry have an excellent section describing how the ADL produces statistics that are, from an objective scholarly perspective, totally worthless. They remark that although the ADL annually announces its data on “hate” with much fanfare “one cannot rely on the ADL audit as an indicator of hate crime.” The ADL’s methodology is heavily criticized, and a number of examples are provided. It was found, for example, that any damage caused by another person to a Jewish building would be regarded as an anti-Semitic attack, even if the context was something like a child throwing a rock at another child and missing, striking a synagogue window. One ADL-recorded “hate crime” involved a business owner in Georgia accusing a Jewish woman who questioned the price increase of a service of “trying to Jew me down.”

Jacobs and Henry point out that even though the ADL system of data collection is deeply flawed and agenda-driven, it has been emulated by other minority groups, especially homosexual lobby groups. After the passing of the 1988 Hate Crimes Statistics Act, the FBI was tasked with gathering hate crimes data. It’s noteworthy that the FBI was put under early pressure after its original methodology resulted in 73% of its reporting departments stating that there had been no hate crime incidences. The same groups who had been demanding FBI involvement (ADL, SPLC, gay groups) suddenly started denouncing the FBI. Jacobs and Henry comment:

The FBI statistics did not square with the much more alarmist reports put forward by advocacy groups for the same time period. For example, the FBI reported that 425 hate crimes nationwide were motivated by sexual-orientation bias. For the same period, the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project reported 592 bias incidents based on sexual orientation in New York City alone. Similarly, while the FBI for 1991 reported twelve “hate” murders based upon all federally-recognized prejudices,’ Klanwatch reported twenty-seven murders motivated by bias. Ironically, this statistical divergence led some of the groups which campaigned most vigorously for the passage of the Hate Crime Statistics Act to denounce the whole federal data collection project. Klanwatch, among the most ardent campaigners for the passage of the federal law, dismissed the first FBI statistics as “inadequate and nearly worthless.”

Jacobs and Henry, after finding that “hate” crimes average a representation of approximately 0.039% of all reported crimes, counter that it is in fact the ADL, SPLC, Klanwatch, and associated groups who are producing worthless statistics.

Conclusion

Jacobs and Henry conclude by stressing that while it is “possible to understand how and why the picture of a “hate crime epidemic” has come to dominate the American imagination, it is

doubtful that this picture depicts reality.” It is an indictment of our culture that over a quarter of a century later, we are still in the midst of the “permanent state of hate emergency.” Self-interested minority groups are still producing worthless statistics that are taken up and amplified by the media. Manipulated public opinion is fodder for activist politicians who use a handful of cases to gag us, shame us, reduce our freedoms and, ultimately, rule over us.

To return to the introduction of this essay, yes, the footage my colleague alluded to does show a Black teenager scuffling with a couple of Jews for a few seconds. But everything else? The cries of anti-Semitism? The calls for political action? The headlines and media panic? The whispers of new laws? A massive fraud. The gullible will eat it up, and find themselves backed ever further into a corner. The astute and the informed will look on, incredulous at the stupidity of their peers. I could have throttled my colleague, but for the fact that somewhere, in some godforsaken stain upon this earth, a lying cretin would have chalked it up as a hate crime.

^[1] Jacobs, James B., and Jessica S. Henry. “The Social Construction of a Hate Crime Epidemic.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-) 86, no. 2 (1996): 366–91.

[2] Both academics might be Jewish. Jacobs is a Jewish name, but is also English. I can find no information suggesting that James B. Jacobs had Jewish ancestry. He married a non-Jewish English woman, and does not appear to have involved himself in any Jewish causes. He did, however, mingle in a heavily Jewish academic milieu, though this may have been due to the general Jewish prevalence in law and sociology. Jessica Henry has spoken at a very small number of Jewish events, and has delivered a presentation on Jewish Americans.

[3]  J. Batsell, “Spielberg Speaks Out Against Hate” FBI Data Show Report on Rise in Arizona; Arizona Republic, 29, 1994.

^[4]  Rosman JP, Resnick PJ. Sexual attraction to corpses: a psychiatric review of necrophilia. Bull Am Acad Psychiatry Law. 1989;17(2):153-63.

What is beauty?  Specifically, what is it to be a beautiful person?  This has long been considered one of those imponderable questions, akin to asking about the meaning of life.  But this does not mean that we cannot have a valuable and substantive discussion.  Beauty, of course, is partly subjective, but it is also partly universal.  There are good reasons, biological reasons, for this.  Hence we can make a meaningful inquiry into the matter.  This, despite the fact that discussing beauty in the context of the White race is politically incorrect in the extreme.  Western political elites are currently doing all they can to push the supposed virtues of dark-skin aesthetics, and to offset or displace any visible presence of White beauty.  Despite this, they will fail—for good biological reasons.

When we observe peoples all around the world, we find at least one thing in common:  people everywhere value lightness.  People want light-skinned partners, light-skinned children, and they do everything possible to lighten their own skin.  Skin-whitening is big business globally, growing from around $8 billion to nearly $12 billion within the next few years.  (I set aside for the moment the desire of Whites for a tanned-body look; this is a special case that I will examine later.)  Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all seek light skin, either of their own races or of the truly White-skinned north Europeans.  Along with this come ancillary values:  blond hair and blue eyes.  People of dark-skinned races frequently dye or lighten their hair, wear blond wigs or hairpieces, and otherwise employ various tactics to appear light-haired or blondish.  Blond hair is indeed rare; only around 5% of White adults are naturally blond.  And yet, some 60% to 70% of White women dye their hair blond at some point.

Blue eyes are more common, existing in something like a quarter of White Americans and perhaps half of White Britons.  And they do appear in many other racial groups; approximately 10% of all humans globally have some shade of blue eyes.  The percentage is highest, unsurprisingly, in the Scandinavian countries, where up to 90% are blue.  As with blond hair, blue eyes are almost universally seen as attractive.  We can rest assured, if there was some way to change eye color as there is with hair, millions would do it.

It is striking, then, that these universally-accepted qualities of beauty derive from, and primarily reside in, Whites of northern Europe.  The White race, it seems, contains within itself the global standard of beauty.  Whites could indeed be justifiably seen as the most beautiful race in the world.  This fact should be a source of pride for Whites everywhere, something they should never want to hide or diminish.

And yet, in our PC world of today, we are not allowed to speak this way.  It sounds far too “supremacist,” far too “racist,” for sensitive ears.  Our media and academic elites are far more concerned that the races and ethnicities lacking such qualities—virtually all blacks, and the vast majority of Arabs, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews—might “feel bad” if we highlight or praise White beauty, so they do everything conceivable to accentuate black, dark brown, and mulatto characteristics.  The result is that White beauty is disparaged, and the world everywhere becomes that much uglier.

One might ask:  Why is this even important?  Why the emphasis on blueness of eye color?  Or on blond hair?  Are such things just “pretty”?  And even if they are, why do so many people find blue eyes and blond hair attractive—as they undeniably do?  These are pregnant questions.  I will argue here that such features are not “just” appealing; or rather, they are appealing for very real and consequential reasons.  In this essay, I want to examine a number of diverse but related aspects of the blond-haired, blue-eyed ideal—an ideal that also goes by such names as ‘Nordic,’ ‘Scandinavian,’ and more controversially, ‘Aryan.’  Let’s first start by taking a look at the physiology of the Aryan people.

The Science of ‘Aryanism’

The Aryans have an interesting history, no doubt.  Consider the basic etymology involved here.  The root of the word, arya, is Sanskrit.  Originally, circa 2000 BC, it meant simply speakers of Sanskrit language; later it became associated with the lighter-skinned peoples of central Asia.  Due to their superior abilities and intelligence, and capacity for culture-building, the term ‘Aryan’ became synonymous with ‘the best’ or ‘the noble.’  As they expanded southward and eastward, they became the dominant ruling people.  In this sense, the Aryans are indeed rulers or masters of others; but it was by dint of their superior skills, intelligence, and morality.  In a way, it was a justly-earned dominance.

Scientists today almost uniformly avoid all talk of Aryans, preferring to reserve that term for linguistic and perhaps cultural groups of people.  And of course, the Nazi association makes the term largely taboo, in any case.  But science, thankfully, has the power to overcome taboos.  Recent scientific research has shed new light on the biological and historical origins of the light-skinned people of the north.

Let’s take the long view for a moment.  The human legacy goes back at least 7 million years, to the earliest appearance of the genera Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.  These were not yet of the genus Homo—‘human’—which would appear only around 2.5 million years ago.  But they were proto-humans, and were our common link to chimpanzees, who are our closest genetic relatives.  These proto-humans were, like modern chimps, fully hair-covered, with silky black hair.  Their skin, though, was light—even white.  Even today, if we were to shave bare a chimpanzee, he would be white.  The biological reasons for this are clear:  dark skin, like dark hair, is an evolved characteristic to protect from strong sun.  The dark pigmentation comes from melanin, which exists in two forms:  eumelanin and pheomelanin.  The former has a dark brown tone, the latter reddish.  The amount and combination of these two determine the actual color of one’s skin, hair, and eyes.  Functionally, melanin protects the body, the eyes, and specifically the DNA from damage by intense ultraviolet solar radiation.  It can be produced in a short-term and temporary manner, as in tanning, but over millennia, it can come to be a genetically-heritable, and thus “permanent,” change in skin tone or hair or eye color.

Melanin production, though, is biologically costly.  It takes effort and energy for the body to produce and maintain melanin, something it would rather not do, so to speak.  Having evolved in the equatorial regions of central Africa, proto-humans would have needed to incur the cost of heavy melanin production in their hair and eyes—but not their skin, being fully hair-covered.  Hence they, like modern chimps, would have had white skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes.

By around 2 million years ago, the first humans began to appear, in the form of Homo habilis and Homo ergaster.  They started to walk upright and to run, and perhaps as result, began to lose body hair—when the thermal cost became too high.  (Rather like wearing a fur coat in summer.)  But shedding hair exposed the skin.  Thus, melanin production increased, and our skin became black.

Black-skinned early humans migrated into Eurasia around 1.8 million years ago, and as they moved north, likely experienced a lightening of their skin.  They would have first travelled through the Middle East, at about 30 or 35 degrees north latitude, and then on into Europe, at 45 or 50 degrees north.  There is a substantially weaker sun at such latitudes, and thus within a few thousand years, humans would have gradually lost melanin—in skin, in hair, and in eyes.  In a sense, human skin began to revert to its evolutionary natural tone—white.

In the North, something else happened:  humans first experienced winter.  That is, cold weather, ice, and snow.  As black Africans, we had no evolutionary experience with such things; but now, these intrepid northerners needed to adapt:  to stay warm, to cook and preserve food, and to build suitable shelters.  The intellectual and cognitive burden increased, and undoubtedly this new evolutionary pressure pushed us to think more, to think in more sophisticated ways, and thus to have more-evolved brain functions.  It also increased the need to cooperate, to trust one’s neighbors, and to create reliable and durable social networks.  In short, the northerners became more sociable, and they became smarter.[1]

Today we have evidence of light-skinned, ‘white’ people that lived in the Middle East around 25,000 years ago.  (Undoubtedly they existed long before that, but we lack the evidence to prove it.)  A separate group of humans apparently entered Europe via Spain around 19,000 years ago, and we have evidence that they had bluish eyes; this is our earliest indication that eye color had begun to lighten, upon reaching 40 degrees latitude or so.  (I note here that hominid eyes are “naturally” blue, that is, when lacking the protective melanin.  Blue is not a pigment or color per se, not like a ‘dye,’ but rather simply the absence of the darkening melanin.)

As people pressed further north into central Eurasia—say, above 50 degrees north latitude—skin and eyes would have naturally continued to lighten, and eventually the hair as well.  About the same time as bluish eyes appeared in Spain, blondish hair began to appear in north-central Asia.  By 8,000 BC, the ‘westerners’ that had come up through Spain, and the ‘easterners’ that came via the Middle East, met and began to interbreed in north-central Europe.  These people, now called Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers, would have had all-white skin and a predominance of blue eyes and blond hair.  A final wave of immigrants, the Yamnaya, arrived around 3,000 BC; as they blended into the existing hunter-gatherers and began to settle into fixed agricultural communities, they formed the core of modern-day north Europeans.  These people, circa 3,000 BC, would have been the first true Aryans.  Over the next 2,000 years, they would come to dominate the scene in all of north-central Europe.

The result is striking, even today, and especially in the Nordic countries—those that lie above 55 or 60 degrees latitude.  I have spent some time in these countries in recent years, and the predominance of very blond people, especially blond women, is obvious.  (Women tend to have lighter blond hair than men, and children more than adults due to relative lack of testosterone.)  In my travels, it was not uncommon to see groups of three or four college-aged women, all of whom had long, flowing, pure blond hair.  I have seen young children with astonishingly blond hair—so depigmented as to be almost white.  They almost appear as albinos, but of course they are not.  The effect of the sun on human appearance and human genetics is truly amazing.[2]

Divine Northerners

For all of recorded history, people have told myths and stories of others living in the far-off lands of the north.  These would have been based on actual experience with these mysterious and striking people, some of whom would have traveled south.  Hardened to the rigorous climate, intrepid, smart, and able to construct civilizations and cultures, it is no wonder that such people took on a mythic quality.  And their striking physical appearance came to be the visible sign of such a noble personage.  In this way, blue eyes, blondness, and very white skin came to be seen as good, rare, desirable, and beautiful—perhaps divinely-inspired, perhaps godly.[3]

When it came to formalizing the official gods and myths of the various European cultures, then, it is unsurprising to find that the southern Europeans, in particular, would construct their gods and heroes in the image of these divine northerners.  This is reflected, very explicitly, in their writings.  Consider, for example, the incomparably important writings of Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey, circa 800 BC.[4]

When we review the Iliad for relevant references, we find around 15 mentions of light-colored hair.  Most of these are applied to the Spartan king Menelaus, but also to the gods Apollo and Demeter, to the demigod hero Achilles, and to the figures of Meleager and the woman Agamede.  In all cases, Homer uses the same Greek word: xanthos.  Formally, xanthos means ‘yellow’ or ‘bright’, as in our English word ‘xanthic’ (“of, or relating to, a yellow color”).  Technically, every usage by Homer of xanthos should be translated as ‘blond.’  But, for poetic effect, the various translators of Homer have chosen a variety of related terms and phrases.  Thus, for example, we find reference to the “fiery hair” of Apollo (1.235), the “golden hair” of Meleager (2.737), the “red-haired Menelaus” (3.338), “blond Demeter” (5.575), “blond Agamede” (11.880), and the “red-gold” hair of Achilles (23.162)—all xanthos.  And this, in a single translator’s edition![5]

One also finds other translated references to “fair hair,” which we might presume to mean ‘blond.’  But in these instances, Homer uses the word eukomos, which literally means “good hair.”  This, of course, need not be blond, so we are left with an uncertain picture in mind.

Regarding light-colored or blue eyes, we find in the Iliad a single reference:  in Chapter One, Homer refers to the goddess Athena and her “clear grey eyes.”  In Greek, the word is glaukopis—literally, blue or blue-green (glaukon) eyes.  More often today we might refer to someone with “steel-blue” eyes, which is more flattering than “grey”—but the point is the same.

In the Odyssey, we find fewer references to xanthos hair (e.g., the “yellow locks” or “russet curls” of Odysseus [13.455]), but more to the glaukopis of Athena (e.g. 2.424, 2.475, 13.325).  In all there are about half as many such references as in the Iliad.  But notably, in both works, the characteristic features belong to gods, goddesses, and heroes.  They are clearly marks of distinction and noble birth.

Homer’s contemporary, Hesiod, makes a handful of similar references in his much-shorter Theogony.  There we find four mentions of the glaukopis of Athena (lines 10, 575, 890, and 924), and he also writes of the “xanthos Ariadne” (line 950), presumably meaning her hair.  He then adds one new term:  khrusokomes, or ‘golden-haired.’  This is applied to the god Dionysus (line 950).

Other such ‘Aryan’ references would follow in subsequent centuries.  Around 525 BC, the philosopher Xenophanes examined the customs of the Thracian people—modern-day Bulgarians, roughly.  He wrote that “their gods are blue-eyed (glaukos) and red-haired (pyrros)”.[6]  The use of the word pyrros—from pyr, ‘fire’—is interesting; the gods no doubt had “fiery-red hair.”

Into the 400s BC, two great lyric poets of the ancient world, Pindar and Bacchylides, made several relevant references.  In Pindar we find mention of the xanthos Graces, xanthos Achilles, xanthos Danaans, khrusokomes Apollo, xanthos Menelaus, and for the first time ever, xanthos Athena—blond gods and heroes all.[7]  Regarding blue eyes, Pindar makes only three such mentions, all of the glaukopis of Athena.[8]  For his part, Bacchylides writes of xanthos Briseis, xanthos Athena, khrusokomes Apollo, khrusean Aphrodite, the surprisingly xanthai Spartans, and more generally of “the mortal men who crown their golden (xanthan) hair.”[9]  Bacchylides makes no reference to the blueness or greyness of anyone’s eyes.

Pindar, furthermore, was among the first to give the mysterious blond and blue-eyed northerners a name; he called them Hyperboreans.  This name means, literally, those dwelling beyond (hyper) the north winds (boreas).  His first and oldest ode (Pythian 10), circa 498 BC, provides an extended and fascinating account of these people:

Neither by ship nor on foot could you find the marvelous road to the meeting-place of the Hyperboreans.  Once Perseus, the leader of his people, entered their homes and feasted among them, when he found them sacrificing glorious hecatombs of donkeys to the god.  In the festivities of those people and in their praises, Apollo rejoices most, and he laughs when he sees the outright arrogance of the beasts.  The Muse is not absent from their customs; all around swirl the dances of girls, the lyre’s loud chords, and the cries of flutes.  They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully.  No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles, they live without fear of strict Nemesis.  Breathing boldness of spirit, the son of Danae [Perseus] once went to that gathering of blessed men, and Athena led him there.  (lines 29-46)[10]

The Hyperboreans are thus beloved by the gods, happy and joyful, full of life, and free from pain and strife.  They are, indeed, a “sacred race” (hiera genea).

Sometime around 425 BC, the great historian Herodotus issued his classic text, Histories.  There he discusses the characteristics of many peoples and nations across the known world, including those of the Budinians, who were marked by their glaukos eyes and pyrron hair (4.108).  The specific location of these people is unclear, but they apparently hailed from just north of the Black Sea, in the southern part of modern-day Ukraine, an area identified as the original staging ground for the Indo-Europeans/Aryans on the basis of recent population genetic research.

Notably, Herodotus too elaborated on the Hyperboreans.  In his same work, he details a story of two Hyperborean girls who travelled south bearing gifts for the Greeks, only to end up dead in Delos—accident or murder, we are not sure.  A portion of his tale is as follows:

Concerning the Hyperborean people, neither the Scythians nor any other inhabitants of these lands tell us anything, except perhaps the Issedones. …  But Hesiod speaks of Hyperboreans, and Homer too in his poem The Heroes’ Sons, if that is truly the work of Homer.[11]

But the Delians say much more about them than any others do.  They say that offerings wrapped in straw are brought from the Hyperboreans to Scythia; when these have passed Scythia, each nation in turn receives them from its neighbors until they are carried to the Adriatic Sea, which is the most westerly limit of their journey; from there, they are brought on to the south, the people of Dodona being the first Greeks to receive them.  From Dodona they come down to the Melian gulf, and [ultimately] to Delos.  Thus, they say, these offerings come to Delos.

But on the first journey, the Hyperboreans sent two maidens bearing the offerings, to whom the Delians give the names Hyperoche and Laodice, and five men of their people with them as escort for safe conduct. …  But when those whom they sent never returned, they took it amiss that they should be condemned always to be sending people and not getting them back, and so they carry the offerings, wrapped in straw, to their borders, and tell their neighbors to send them on from their own country to the next. …  I know that they do this.  The Delian girls and boys cut their hair in honor of these Hyperborean maidens, who died at Delos…  In this way, then, these maidens are honored by the inhabitants of Delos. …

I have said enough of the Hyperboreans.  I won’t tell the story of Abaris, alleged to be a Hyperborean, who carried an arrow over the whole world, fasting all the while.  But if there are men beyond the north wind, then there are others beyond the south.  (4.32–36)

Not quite the “sacred race” of Pindar, but still a people portrayed as generous, noble, and exceptional.[12]

By the late BC and early AD period, Roman writers were making note of the same distinctive qualities.  Horace (23 BC) describes one Pyrrha in terms of her flavam comae—blond hair.  And he speaks of a Phyllis as having similarly flavae hair.[13]  In 100 AD, the great Roman historian Tacitus, in his highly consequential discussion of the Germanic people, refers to their caerulei oculi (“fiery blue eyes”) and their rutilae comae (“red hair”).  Two decades later, in his Satire 13, and speaking of the same people, Juvenal deployed the terms caerula and flavam to refer to the Germans’ blue eyes and (now) blond hair.  These were the first explicit historical connections between Germanism and Aryanism.

Such were the views of the ancient world.  Little changed, biologically, over the next two millennia, given that there were no major waves of migrations, nor yet any high-speed transport that would have enabled rapid population movement.  During this time, the superior Europeans set about creating Western civilization, advancing technology, and creating art and culture on an unprecedented scale.  Into the mid-nineteenth century, Aryanism had gained scientific credibility, and was taken mainstream by such men as Arthur de Gobineau, most notably in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853).  Some decades later, Houston Chamberlain’s influential work Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) further advanced the Aryan thesis.  Chamberlain placed particular emphasis on the Aryan-Germanic peoples who, he argued, had been responsible for the most significant advances in Western culture.  It was this belief in German superiority that led him to join the National Socialist party early on; Chamberlain was in fact a great supporter and advocate of Hitler, until his death in 1927.

It was via such men as Chamberlain and, later, Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, that the concept of ‘Aryan’ became so closely associated with ‘Nazism.’  Thus it was that both the culture-building, idealistic Aryan and the Nordic-Scandinavian blue-eyed blond aesthetic were blended into the overall National Socialist worldview—for good or bad.  From then on, the Aryan ideal of beauty was stained with the supposed Nazi conception of a master race.  I will address this whole topic in a follow-up essay.

Closing Thoughts

What is the legacy of all this today?  Firstly, I think it shows that the Nordic/Aryan aesthetic is not just a matter of “good looks.”  It is a reflection of a long genetic history in northern climates, and is a parallel marker with several positive human qualities:  creative, trusting, culture-building, sociable, intelligent.  The same evolutionary forces that gave people blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin also gave them a number of salutary virtues.

Second, it marks a sharp contrast with the popular, Jewish/Hollywood image of mixed races, Blacks, Asians, mulattos, and generally “people of color.”  Jewish Hollywood wants to foist on Americans—and the whole world—an ideal of random race-mixing.  They do this via many images and storylines that simultaneously promote racial mixing and disparage White ideals, especially the classic Aryan/Nordic aesthetic.

For example, Hollywood loves to play up the “dumb blonde” stereotype.  Blondes are ok, but they have to be stupid, or naïve, or superficial.  But as a factual matter, this seems to be untrue.  In fact, there is some data for the contrary.  In an interesting paper from 2016 titled “Are Blondes Really Dumb?,” author Jay Zagorsky draws from a large national database to show that “blonde women have a higher mean IQ than women with brown, red, and black hair.”  Furthermore, blondes “are more likely classified as geniuses” than people of other hair colors.  The differences were more pronounced among women than men.[14]

Additionally, there is an old study—from almost 100 years ago—that argues for a similar result.  Professor G. Estabrooks compiled data on nearly 1,000 boys and girls, ranging in age from 9 to 16.  Based on a coarse sorting between “light” and “dark” hair, the light-haired children had an average IQ of 109, versus 106 for the dark-haired.  He also looked at correlation with eye color, and by this measure, the blue-eyed group had an average of 109, versus 105 for the brown-eyed.[15]  Obviously we would need further data to draw firm conclusions, but indications are that the ancient Aryan advantage has carried down, in some degree, to the present day.

And then we can look at entire nations.  Not long ago, Lynn and Meisenberg (2010) calculated average IQs for 108 countries.  Looking just within Europe, we find a significant difference between the four Nordic nations (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark) and, for example, four south-European nations (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal); the former average 99, and latter 95.  Not a huge difference, but still significant.[16]  Once again, this is in line with our expectations.

Thus is my brief study of Aryan beauty.  I have no grand and glorious conclusions to offer, other than the simple observation that beauty matters.  Physical appearance is an expression of one’s genetic inheritance, and thus reflects the kind of person one is.  The same genes that give a certain physical appearance also give a certain state of mind, certain behavioral tendencies, and certain motivations and values.  Beauty is not just “skin deep,” as our PC crowd like to say.  Beauty matters.

Classic markers of White, Aryan beauty have been valued for millennia, and this likely was for very real, very objective, and very evolutionary reasons.  The blue-eyed blonds were smarter, more skilled, more industrious, and more robust.  They were more creative.  They were idealistic and altruistic.  They knew how to build and sustain civilizations.  They were, in short, better people.

Jews and leftist liberals don’t want to hear any of this—especially Jews, who are notably lacking in blond hair, blue eyes, and Aryan personality traits.  For leftists and Jews, everyone is “equal.”  For them, skin tone is little more than a biological paint, laid over a physical body that is otherwise identical in all humans.  This is sheer nonsense.  Privately, Jews know this, of course; but outwardly they all maintain a façade of egalitarianism because this significantly aids their cause among the Gentile majority.  When you are a Jewish supremacist, it is best to make outward proclamations of equality even as you project supremacist thinking onto your primary opponents, Aryans and Whites.

Whites everywhere need to relearn about their own glorious legacy and to regain an appreciation for their outstanding physical and intellectual virtues.  As a whole, Whites are the most beautiful, most productive, and most virtuous race on the planet.  This is acknowledged, directly and indirectly, in a million different ways, by people all across the Earth.  We are indeed “children of the gods,” as Plato proclaimed.  We are indeed a “sacred race,” as Pindar recognized.  We need to cast off those who would denigrate and debase us, reestablish our long-lost sense of self-confidence, and reclaim our rightful place in the world community.

===================================

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and articles on politics, history, and religion, with a special focus on National Socialism in Germany.  His works include a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the books Eternal Strangers (2020), The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019), and Debating the Holocaust (4^th ed, 2020).  Most recently he has edited a new edition of Rosenberg’s classic work Myth of the 20^th Century and a new book of political cartoons, Pan-Judah!.  All these are available at www.clemensandblair.com.  See also his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

[1] Today this is known as the ‘Cold Winters Thesis’.  See, for example, “Only in America: Cold Winters Theory, race, IQ, and well-being” (B. Pesta and P. Poznanski, 2014), Intelligence 46; and R. Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence (2015).  This idea is sometimes viewed as a modern reactionary theory, but in fact it goes back at least to Arthur Schopenhauer.  In 1851, he said

Only after man propagated his stock during a long period of time outside his natural [African] habitat between the tropics and extended it…into the more frigid zones, did he become fair and finally white. …  The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races. …  All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.  This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization. (Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, Oxford University Press, pp. 157-159).

[2] In notable contrast to the native Scandinavians are the imported black African and Middle-Eastern “refugees” that are now quite visible in all major cities there.  One cannot help but feel that there is something profoundly anti-natural about this situation, that somehow these recent immigrants simply do not belong there.  It feels like a crime against nature.

[3] This, in fact, was exactly Plato’s view.  In his Republic we find a passage in which he is discussing various physical attributes of boys and young men, including skin tone.  Some boys are swarthy and dark-toned, but “the pale ones are children of the gods (leukous de theōn paidas einai)” (474d).

[4] We believe that Homer lived sometime around 800 BC in the region called Ionia, comprising the far west coast of modern-day Turkey.  This area had been part of the Greek proto-empire since at least the 1000s BC.

[5] Robert Fagles’ translation (1990).  The line numberings of Fagles are slightly different than other translations, unfortunately.

[6] Fragment 3, from Clement, Miscellanies.

[7] Source information:  xanthos Graces (Nem 5.55), xanthos Achilles (Nem 3.45), xanthos Danaans (Nem 9.15), khrusokomes Apollo (Olym 6.42; Pyth 2.15; Olym 7.34; Isth 7.49), xanthos Menelaus (Nem 7.30), and, xanthos Athena (Nem 10.8).

[8] Source information: Nem 7.30; Olym 7.34; Nem 10.8.  Note:  If Athena is now both blond-haired and blue-eyed, she is surely the definitive Aryan goddess.

[9] Source information:  xanthos Briseis (Ode 13.135), xanthos Athena (Ode 5.90), khrusokomes Apollo (Ode 4.1), khrusean Aphrodite (Ode 9.70), xanthai Spartans (Ode 20.1), and “the mortal men who crown their golden (xanthan) hair” (Ode 9.20).

[10] Further brief references to Hyperboreans occur in Isthmian 6 (circa 484 BC) and Olympian 3 (circa 476 BC).

[11] Any such references by Hesiod or Homer are lost to history.

[12] I note in passing that no less a figure than Nietzsche was evidently inspired by this same northern people.  At the very beginning of his landmark essay Antichrist, he states “We are Hyperboreans.”  “We”—Nietzsche and his followers—intellectually dwell among the ice and snow, far away from the comfortable, complacent, so-called civilized people; “we know very well how far off we live,” he says.

[13] In Odes 1.5 and 2.4, respectively.

[14] In Economics Bulletin, 36(1): 401-410 (2016).

[15] “Intelligence and pigmentation of hair and eyes in elementary school children,” American Journal of Psychology 41(1): 106-108 (1929).

[16] “National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations,” Intelligence 38:353-360 (2010).  Particularly striking is a comparison of ‘light-skinned nations’ with ‘dark-skinned nations.’  But I will leave this for another time.

The conservative French-Jewish pundit Éric Zemmour may well become France’s next president. The centerpiece of his campaign is opposition to the Great Replacement. The latter means the ongoing trend of substitution of the indigenous populations of France and Europe by non-European immigrants, in particular by Africans and Muslims.

In his most recent book, Zemmour writes the following on the Great Replacement:

I have the impression that no politician rightly apprehends what is at stake: the death of France as we knew her. . . . One simply needs to look at the films of [the 1960s and 70s] to realize this. The “great replacement” is not a myth, nor a conspiracy, but an implacable process. This vital identitarian question renders all other questions subsidiary, even the most essential such as education, industry, social protection, or the place of France in the world. I am sure that no candidate – not even Marine Le Pen – will dare to impose this identitarian and civilizational quarrel in the campaign. . . . Only [the far-left] Jean-Luc Mélenchon dares to mention the subject, but only to glorify the future of a mixed-race, “creolized” France …[1]

Zemmour’s central campaign promise is “zero immigration” to France (presumably not including immigration from the European Union). In addition, he would deport foreign criminals and would deprive criminal dual nationals of French citizenship (a suitable prelude to deportation). Significantly, French citizens of Turkish or Arab origin typically are dual nationals by default.

The key measures on immigration would be submitted to a national referendum. If successful, this clear expression of the people’s will would enable the government to punch through the predictable opposition of globalist elites in the media and judiciary. Great Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, despite the kicking and screaming of globalist elites, shows that referenda can lead to concrete results going against Establishment preferences.

In addition to his opposition to the Great Replacement, Zemmour is a forthright civic nationalist. He wants migrants to “assimilate,” by which he means to become culturally indistinguishable from Frenchmen. He is opposed to Islam as a “totalitarian” religion and wants Muslims to have a purely interiorized private spirituality, like Christianity, with no role in French public life. Zemmour’s assimilationist zeal goes so far as to propose restoring an old law mandating that children born in France be given only traditional French names.

Clearly there are serious contradictions here. The French “assimilationist” model has already failed, producing about the same results that we see in the United States or Great Britain: a society marked by ethnic stratification, clustering, and conflict. Today, around a third of newborns in France are African or Muslim, simply making assimilation obsolete. No doubt Zemmour can see this. His clinging to assimilation may be due to a combination of personal reasons (his own position as a proudly assimilated French Jew) and political ones (electoral palatability). Significantly, Zemmour has previously said that he understands why young French whites no longer believe in assimilation and that his attachment to it is due to his belonging to an older generation.

The Great Replacement in Practice: Kosovo and Seine-Saint-Denis

A typical street scene in Seine-Saint-Denis

In his book, Zemmour goes into vivid detail on the existential threat that the Great Replacement poses for France. He often compares the emerging new France to Kosovo or Lebanon, where besieged Christian minorities live at the mercy of the new Muslim majorities. He notes that in Kosovo, a highly important province in the history of Serbia, Muslim Albanians became the majority by the early twentieth century. With the 1999 NATO bombings the Muslim Albanians became the rulers over the Serb minority:

[I]n the 1970s, Orthodox Serbs represented only 13% of the population. Today they are only 5%, expulsed from the capital, Pristina, confined to enclaves, as ostracized second-class citizens, when they are not persecuted, martyrized, chased out of the land of their ancestors. The ethnic cleansing is accompanied of course by a religious and cultural great replacement. Medieval churches are burned down by ecstatic Muslim crowds, mosques dripping with gold-leaf are built in their place, financed by the nabobs of Saudi Arabia and Qatar: the inexorable and cruel reality of a great replacement that does not exist![2]

Zemmour often sarcastically remarks on the alleged “non existence” of these demographic and civilizational changes. He denounces the academic “sophists” who claim no significant change has occurred, falsely arguing that populations have always been in complete flux. The mainstream media-political establishment in France claims the Great Replacement is a mere “conspiracy theory.”

On the contrary, the demographic Great Replacement is prepared by a symbolic replacement in the cultural sphere. France, we are told, has “always” been a diverse land of immigration and thus there is nothing novel at all about the Afro-Islamization of the country. A museum of immigration celebrating these changes was installed precisely in … the building of the 1931 colonial expo celebrating France’s intercontinental empire in Africa and Indochina! Zemmour observes: “In the museums of France, too, it is the hour of the great replacement.”[3]

In France, the shape of things to come is announced by the département (county) of Seine-Saint-Denis, which makes up the northeast suburb of greater Paris, a significant place in French history as the resting place of our kings. For Zemmour, “Seine-Saint-Denis is the symbol of this great replacement which does not exist.”[4] Over two thirds of newborns have at least one foreign parent. Over 60% of youths are of foreign origin. But these figures are merely indicative: the administration simply doesn’t know how big the population is or how many illegal immigrants there are (estimated between 8 and 20% of the population).

While President Emmanuel Macron may hold up Seine-Saint-Denis as “California without the sea” [sic!], the territory is an economic basket case. National civil servants flee postings there after 2.7 years on average, despite a €10,000 bonus, whereas they last 7 years in the more comfortable département of Essonne. Huge urban renewal projects lead to no lasting change and even the corporate offices set up there (taking advantage of special tax breaks) fail to attract local workers: they are unqualified. Zemmour argues the issue is one of human capital, not infrastructure: “the problem is the content, not the container.”

Zemmour sees the State’s efforts in Seine-Saint-Denis as useless, akin to the myth of Sisyphus. Furthermore, the territory’s mosques have been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, as documented by the sociologist Gilles Keppel. No wonder François Hollande told journalists that France’s multicultural situation will “end with a partition.”[5] For Zemmour, “Kosovo is the future of Seine-Saint-Denis; Seine-Saint-Denis is the future of France.”

Zemmour on the Limits of Civic Nationalism

While an ardent advocate of assimilation, Zemmour can also be quite frank on the failures and weaknesses of civic nationalism. He is critical of the many French Jews who, at the time of the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and the Arabs, suddenly rediscovered their Jewish identity and began publicly agitating in favor of Israel.

For Zemmour, this acting on behalf of one’s sectarian community, as opposed to the national community, is a dangerous faux pas for anyone who claims to be a citizen. However, he is cognizant that it is difficult, even a constant effort, to override ethnic reflexes for the sake of the political community:

Assimilation is a mode of integration which demands cerebral control of one’s most archaic reflexes; a rational detachment which the supreme intelligence of [the Jewish anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss pushed very far when he declared that if Hitler had completed his project of exterminating the Jews, the Earth would not have stopped going round, nor humanity have stopped living, just as it has digested the disappearance of other peoples, in particular the Indians of America.[6]

During the Six Day War, Lévi-Strauss was able to remain a detached French citizen, but not so his fellow citizen and fellow Jew, the normally unflappably dispassionate Raymond Aron. Once scratched, the normally supremely rational and composed Aron discovered wellsprings of ethnic feeling for his fellow Jews. On Aron’s unconscious Jewish identity, Zemmour’s assessment is very similar to my own.

Zemmour draws an interesting parallel between Lévi-Strauss and Jean Raspail: two men who had an intimate knowledge and real appreciation for indigenous peoples across the world, something which contributed to their realization that the peoples of Europe were also worth preserving.[7]

Zemmour’s Jewish identity

Zemmour defines himself as “a Jew of Algeria raised in the Parisian suburbs whose family heritage and readings have transformed into a Frenchman of the land and of the dead.”[8] He contrasts himself with politicians like François Bayrou, a native Frenchmen from rural southeast France, who have enthusiastically embraced globalism.

Zemmour has one interesting argument in favor of his membership of the French nation: he is not an immigrant but his people were granted citizenship after his native Algeria was conquered by the French![9] Thus he considers himself as French as an Alsatian or a Corsican.

Jewish community leaders have unequivocally condemned Zemmour. The chief rabbi of France has called Zemmour an “anti-Semite,” while the official Jewish lobby of France (the CRIF) has called for “not one single Jewish vote” to be cast for him. Zemmour considers the CRIF to be a baleful “State within the State,” influencing policy towards sectarian ends.

The journalist Léa Salamé once criticized Zemmour on television for being an “ashamed Jew” who wanted to be “more goyish than the goy.”[10] Zemmour could only laugh at Salamé’s inconsequence: as a Christian Lebanese, her parents had fled her home country precisely because of the Islamization and resulting civil war that he is precisely trying to prevent in France.

France: death or renewal?

Zemmour says he has seen civil war coming in France since October 1989, when three Moroccan girls in the city of Creil, north of Paris, refused to remove their Islamic headscarves at school.[11] The girls only backed down not when this became a French national scandal, but when the king of Morocco, Hassan II, told them to.[12] With or without Zemmour, I cannot say if and when France will experience violent ethno-religious civil war à la Lebanon or a more gradual decline into third-world violence and social dysfunction à la Brazil.

If elected, Zemmour will not be able to restore the old France. Remigration on that scale is simply not on the cards today, nor can the tremendous social and technological changes of the past decades be wound back. However, Zemmour may well be able to significantly stem the flow of Afro-Islamic immigration. That alone would be a worthy goal: the French would be infinitely more secure as a two-thirds majority in their own country, rather than a minority like the Christians of Kosovo and Lebanon.

Zemmour often remarks on the fundamental asymmetry between atomized post-68 liberal Whites and Muslims who still have a strong sense of religion and clan:

For forty years, the [French] community of citizens has been disintegrating under the blows of a society of individuals who only want to know their rights, and not their duties, and see in the State only a distributor of services and laws to satisfy their smallest caprices. Individuals without roots and without history, who dream of themselves as “citizens of the world” detached from any national mooring. … They call a “republic” this society of individuals which no longer has anything to do with the Republic of citizens. It is in this abyssal void that Islamic diasporas have taken root, increasingly numerous, bound together by the archaic notions of family, clan, and religion, and who import these archaisms into a blind postmodernity which sees in them only isolated individuals. The most skilful representatives of these diasporas have well understood how to use this liberalism to explode what remains of the Nation-State and of the Republic, to emancipate themselves from its now-feeble tutelage, and impose in its place, in foreign enclaves, the archaic law of Allah.[13]

The mass sexual abuse of White girls by Pakistani gangs in Rotherham and other English cities or the 2015–16 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults on White women by Muslims in Cologne[14] are early examples of this clash between clannish Third-World cultures and isolated Western individuals.

Significantly, Zemmour also promises to dismantle at least parts of the legislative and media apparatus persecuting French patriots. In particular, “hate speech” laws are to be abolished and litigious “anti-racists” starved of their generous subsidies at taxpayer expense.

No one can say how stable or effective a nationalist regime in France—under Zemmour or anyone else—would be. However, we can say that such a government might be able to prevent France’s final submersion and eliminate many of the boundaries of discourse imposed on French patriots and defenders of indigenous Europeans. And, if successful, no doubt this example from a founding nation of the European Union would reverberate across the continent.

[1]Ériz Zemmour, La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (Rubempré, 2021), p. 24.

[2]Ibid., p. 72.

[3]Ibid., p. 67.

[4]Ibid., p. 73.

[5]Ibid., p. 77.

[6]Ibid., p. 105.

[7]Ibid., p. 106.

[8]Ibid., p. 49.

[9]Ibid., p. 148.

[10]Ibid., p. 190.

[11]Ibid., p. 139.

[12]Ibid., p. 190.

[13]Ibid., p. 73.

[14]Also denounced by Zemmour, ibid., p. 32.