Semitism and Capitalism: The Merits and Inadequacies of Middleman Minority Theory in Explaining the Jews, Part II

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“American Jews do not fit the sojourner pattern, since their political involvement goes far beyond the support of Jewish causes. … Much Jewish political activity, whether right, center, or left, can be related to a perception of how to make America and the world safe for Jews. American Jewish support for domestic liberalism and internationalism can be interpreted in this way.”
Walter Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of Middleman Minority Theories,” 1980.[1]

Merits of Middleman Minority Theory

The most obvious merit of middleman minority theory is that, like Kevin MacDonald’s theory of a group evolutionary strategy, it places an unusual and welcome emphasis on rational resource competition as the basis for social conflict involving certain minorities. By offering a socio-economic explanation for hostility toward Jews, middleman minority theory represents a unique space within academia where the otherwise ubiquitous “pure prejudice” idea that host hostility is self-generated (from psychological problems or cultural traditions) is summarily and comprehensively dismissed. Although this has not come without criticism, as seen in Robert Cherry’s denunciation of Edna Bonacich’s work as reinforcing bigotry[2], this emphasis has been able to continue largely untroubled thanks to its advancement under a hardline traditional Marxist interpretive veneer.

Middleman minority theory, especially the variant advanced by Bonacich, also insists that host populations do have interests, and that these interests are genuinely and seriously threatened by middleman minorities who drain away resources. These minorities then use their accumulated resources to build up power and influence, sometimes even to the extent of gaining considerable economic, social, and political monopolies over the hosts. Since these monopolies can be very difficult to dislodge, and since monopolies may satisfy some interests of host populations or segments of host populations, middleman minority theory insists that it is rational and somewhat inevitable that increasingly harsh and even violent measures will be taken against the offending minority. As a result, middleman minority theory offers a far more plausible and objective understanding of group conflict than many of the ideas that dominate the academic discussion of group conflict, especially conflict involving Jews. In addition, the outright rejection of “scapegoat” theories as “superficial,” and the lack of appeals to concepts of victimhood in such a framework, can only be described in the context of the current academic climate as utterly refreshing.

A second major merit of middleman minority theory is the emphasis that some strands place on the characteristics of the minorities themselves. Middleman minority theory contains within it three basic theoretical approaches. Context-based theories like that of Roscher, and revived to some degree by Nathan Cofnas (who is particularly concerned with the urban environment-context), argue that middleman minorities are essentially creatures of the societies in which they are found, and are for the most part created by opportunities, status gaps, and vacuums over which they have no control and which have nothing to do with their inherent characteristics (a slight advantage in intelligence being the only characteristic that Cofnas feels comfortable in applying). Situational theories, like that advanced by Simmel are similar, but place more emphasis on the culturally-located role of the trader, the Stranger, and the “sojourner as trader,” as the determinant factor in the creation of middleman minorities. Culture-based, or characteristic-based, middleman minority theories, however, tend to be more numerous, and more convincing. These theories, like that advanced by Weber and given tacit assent by Bonacich and Zenner, place strong emphasis on the broad range of traditions, ideologies, behaviors, and aptitudes of middleman minority groups.

The most frequently highlighted of such traits within middleman minority theory is ethnocentrism, which again dovetails with the primary emphasis of Kevin MacDonald’s theory. Ethnocentrism is acknowledged as a central factor in the maintenance of self-segregation among middleman minority groups, and is often supported by ideological beliefs such as the caste system, or what Zenner describes as “the Chosen People complex.”[3] Ethnocentrism in middleman minorities is presented as crucial to understanding host hostility not only because of the way it facilitates the draining of resources from the host population, but also because of highly antagonistic correlates such as dual loyalty and a willingness to engage in lucrative but morally destructive (for the host) trading. Walter Zenner speaks of a “double standard of morality” that is

Expressed in dealings with outsiders, such as lending to them with interest, unscrupulous selling practices, and providing outsiders with illicit means of gratifying their appetites, while at the same time, denying the same means to in-group members.[4]

An excellent example of this process in action is the fact Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites, while making it illegal for its own citizens to use such sites. Of course, we are talking here about a nation state rather than a minority population, but this contradiction, and the nature of Israel within the international community, will be discussed in a critique of the narrowness of middleman minority theory later.

A further merit of middleman minority theory is the heavy emphasis the cultural-characteristic interpretation places on group strategies. Middleman minorities, again with Jews being held up by both Zenner and Bonacich as an exemplar or especially acute case, are said to engage in constantly adaptive activity in order to manage their visibility, ensure their safety, advance their interests, accumulate power and wealth, and entrench themselves ever deeper within the host. Bonacich has indicated that Jews are especially keen to remain entrenched in the West, and the United States in particular, because it is financially and politically lucrative, and only a catastrophic weakening of their monopolies would bring an end to existing strategies.[5] Zenner goes as far as to claim that “much of the content of American Jewish life can be seen as visibility strategies. Strategy here includes both unconscious mechanisms of coping with situations and consciously formulated plans.”[6] Zenner speaks of a “dynamic process” whereby Jews minimise visibility to avoid hostility, maximise visibility when pursuing certain interests, and generally work unceasingly to make their image more favorable in the minds of the host. Again, all of this corresponds very well with one of the central themes of the Culture of Critique — the idea that Jewish involvement in certain intellectual movements could be seen in the context of a pursuit of Jewish interests either consciously or in ways that involved unconscious motivations and self-deception. It also maps very closely to MacDonald’s framework on Jewish crypsis and other attempts to mitigate anti-Semitism, advanced in the sixth chapter of Separation and Its Discontents.

Problems in Middleman Minority Theory

Given the prevalence of Jews in the development and promotion of the modern incarnation of middleman minority theory, including Georg Simmel, Edna Bonacich, Abner Cohen, Abram Leon, Walter Zenner, Werner Cahnman,[7] Donald Horowitz,[8] Gideon Reuveni,[9] Ivan Light, Steven J. Gold,[10] and Robert Silverman,[11] a reasonable concern might be that middleman minority theory is itself an intellectual “visibility strategy.” Just as it has been posited that Jews tend to support mass migration because it will result in Jews becoming “one among many” ethnic minorities, and thus in their logic less conspicuous and therefore safer, middleman minority theory can act to reduce Jewish visibility by offering the idea that Jews are just one among many diaspora trading groups and their history and behavior is therefore not unique or worthy of special attention. It remains the case that even in those interpretations which highlight negative Jewish behavior and portray host responses as rational (e.g. the work of Bonacich and Zenner), the proposed framework still insists on some level of commonality, no matter how tenuous, with the experiences of other minority groups, and it ultimately places the blame for conflict on a much broader context, often the impersonal historical development of capitalism.

In other words, while the framework can deny that Jews are “victims” of host nations, these theories also deny that host nations are truly the victims of Jewish exploitation. Both are simply argued to be the victims of capitalism, and any sense of individual or group agency is rhetorically dissolved. Again, this acts to lower Jewish visibility and culpability and remains attractive for that reason. There are certainly good reasons along this line of thought for proposing that Steven Pinker’s promotion of the theory over Kevin MacDonald’s ideas has less to do with a serious engagement with the content of the work of Bonacich et al. and significantly more to do with deflecting the entire conversation into an area of discussion in which Pinker feels Jews are less visible.

A major problem with middleman minority theory is that it has a very uncomfortable and unsatisfactory way of handling the obviously unique aspects of the Jewish experience, especially in relation to the unprecedented involvement of Jews in post-Enlightenment Western culture and politics, something for which there is absolutely no parallel among other diaspora trading groups anywhere. As has been discussed, middleman minority theory was essentially first created, consciously or unconsciously, by scholars anxious to find a way to explain the Jewish experience. Attempts to connect this experience, amounting to some two millennia of history, with the much more modern and straightforward experiences of, for example, the Chinese in the Philippines or the Japanese in America, have been doomed to the grossest of generalizations and the clumsiest of associations. This has resulted in a steady stream of admissions within the field that the best way to interpret middleman minority theory is simply that it proposes an “ideal type” (essentially the Jews) with unfortunate “problems of fit between any actual ethnic group and this picture [the Jewish experience].”[12] Zenner has conceded that the concept has been very “difficult to define so as to cover all groups so designated.”[13] All of which calls into question whether this concept possesses any real efficacy as an analytical or predictive tool in a comparative sense at all.

An interesting point of difference between the Jewish experience and that of other diaspora trading peoples is that the latter are acknowledged as possessing a genuine sense of sojourn. In other words, their first generations tend to be truly temporary, semi-nomadic groups who aim to make money before eventually returning to a homeland. A subtly different experience is observed in the Jews, as noted by Jack Kugelmass in his 1981 PhD thesis Native Aliens: The Jews of Poland as a Middleman Minority. For Kugelmass, “the so-called “middleman” character of the Jew is seen as an aspect of the Jewish sense of sojourn, which unlike most sojourns is ideological rather than sociological in nature.” [emphasis added] Another way of phrasing this would be to say that the Jewish sense of sojourn is cultural-biological rather than contextual, and since the concept of sojourning has been a major feature of Jewish life since at least the writing of the Exodus, this difference between other groups is really so stark as to require a distinct analysis — something offered to an unparalleled degree in Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone. In this analysis, it would appear that, unlike a relatively small number of other peoples who have merely adopted some tactics in order to pursue a specific diaspora trade role, Jews have, from time immemorial, given themselves over entirely to these strategies as an entire way of life — the “middleman minority” as a raison d’être.

This absolutely crucial distinction is linked to the remarkable fact of contemporary political life that the state of Israel exists largely according to the same strategies employed by Jews when in a diaspora condition. As stated above, an excellent example of the dual morality process in action is the fact Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites, while making it illegal for its own citizens to use such sites. The creation of the state of Israel has also exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, issues of dual loyalty in Jewish minority populations, even if these issues are more or less kept out of the public eye through diplomatic soothing around Israeli spying and the maintenance of certain taboos in the mass media. Israel itself would appear to be a kind of middleman minority archetype within the international community, cultivating close and lucrative ties with the elite (the United States), while engaging in more or less unchallenged exploitative and oppressive activities against lower social orders (Palestinians, and other vulnerable or indebted population groups in South America).

Like the “ideal type” of middleman minority, Israel heavily drains the resources even of its allies (U.S. military and diplomatic aid) and pursues its strategies in a ceaseless quest for security, while maintaining moral double standards and being rather shameless in engaging in what Zenner has described as the classic overrepresentation of middleman minorities in “morally shady” activities.[14] Even in recent years, Israel has become notorious in the international organ trade, moneylending, and allegations of humanitarian atrocities. Israeli newspapers have also described their country as a “monopoly nation” due to the intense tendency towards economic monopoly in the country’s business life — a key feature of middleman minority life that Jews appear to continue to embody to an extent unparalleled in any other ethnic group. Further evidence for the apparently deep-seated, rather than contextual, nature of “middleman” traits in Jews might be found in studies indicative of a biological underpinning to Jewish ethnocentrism, such as that described by Kevin MacDonald in the Preface to the Culture of Critique:

Developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany. The Israeli infants were much more likely to become “inconsolably upset” in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite — findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

As well as dealing poorly with obviously unique aspects of the Jewish experience, a significant portion of middleman minority theory is devoted to context-based narratives that are often in stark contrast to, or completely disproven by, the historical record. With the exception of the work of Kevin MacDonald, which demonstrates a very extensive engagement with works of history, a general weakness in all of the late twentieth-century sociological studies discussed above is the fact that, despite their incredibly ambitious claims about the historical trajectory of capitalism or middleman minority populations, there is a quite serious neglect of any of the relevant historiography. This leads, in the case of the modern adherents of Simmel, Roscher, and Leon, to the constant repetition of error-laden tropes such as the idea that Jews turned to commerce because they were prohibited from owning land (rather than arriving as profit-seeking financiers), that Jews were most often invited into nations by elites seeking a financial stimulus, or that Jews were banished from countries once their position as loan merchant was superfluous. In fact, these three tropes, all of which remove Jewish agency and characteristics from consideration, are essentially the pillars of context-based middleman minority theory pertaining to Jews, and are absolutely crucial to Roscher’s ideas in particular.

The historical record is now acknowledged as more or less complete in relation to the issue of the Jewish ownership of land. It has been conclusively established, for example, that the general trend across Europe was that Jews were in fact able to possess and own land during the centuries immediately following their initial spread and expansion in Europe (c.1000–1300). Restrictions on land ownership were later enacted as penalties for exploitation or as part of a system of elite land transfer—e.g., the desire of the English kings to obtain the land of indebted lesser knights, and doing so by financially compensating Jewish moneylenders for forfeited lands they could no longer legally hold.

One of the correlates of the land ownership trope is the astonishingly naive assumption that land ownership would preclude involvement in financial speculation. Again, the historical record contradicts this. Mark Meyerson’s Princeton-published A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (2010), for example, offers an expansive analysis of Jewish landowners in Spain who “did not necessarily cultivate the land themselves” and combined wine production operations worked by non-Jewish peasants with “lending operations and tax farming.”[15] Pointing to the prevalence of early Jewish land ownership in Poland, France, and Germany, in which Jews enjoyed a “privileged status available to few Christians,” Norman Roth has described the trope that Jews were forced out of agriculture by restrictive laws and the violence of the Crusades as “patently absurd.”[16]

The theory that Jews, and by tenuous implication other middleman minorities, were most often invited into nations by elites seeking a financial stimulus or to fill a “status gap,” is also contradicted by the historical record. The early entry and expansion of Jews in Europe is relatively well-documented, the dominant trend being that Jews either presented themselves before elites in order to solicit business, or that they acted as financiers for conquest and then followed in the wake of the conquerors (e.g., the well-documented role of Jewish financiers in Norman Conquest of England and Strongbow’s conquest of Ireland).[17] Ireland’s Annals of Innisfallen (1079 A.D.) record: “Five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [King of Munster], and they were sent back again over sea.” Unless Tairdelbach (Turlough O’Brien, 1009–86) had undergone a dramatic change of mind, it’s likely that the arrival of the Jews hadn’t been preceded by an invitation. In fact, unsolicited approaches for request to settle and establish financial activities are in evidence from the time of O’Brien to the 1655 “Humble Address” of Manasse ben Israel to the English government.

A very common form of government documentation found in the study of Early Modern Jewish communities are the charters outlining their terms of settlement, and these are very revealing. Rather than act as economic catalysts, Jews are more frequently observed following the trail of already economically improving areas, hoping to profit from their advancement. As Felicitas Schmeider has pointed out, in terms of the German context, “permission to settle Jews in a newly privileged town is one thing kings were frequently, if not regularly, asked for, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”[18]

The theory that Jews were banished from countries once their position as loan merchant or general role as a middleman minority was superfluous is also forcefully contradicted by the historical record. Just as medieval Jews perceived that they were the innocent victims of evil Gentiles, so Jewish historiography has overwhelmingly portrayed the expulsions as the result of “rumors, prejudices, and insinuating and irrational accusations.”[19] Context-based middleman minorities theories absorbed these tropes and reinvented them in narratives that blamed the expulsions on the fact that Capital had simply exhausted the usefulness of the Jews. Such understandings of the expulsions have only very recently come to be revised, most saliently in the work of Harvard historian Rowan W. Dorin, whose 2015 doctoral thesis and subsequent publications have for the first time helped to fully contextualize the mass expulsions of Jews in Europe during the medieval period, 1200–1450.[20]

Dorin points out that Jews were never specifically targeted for expulsion qua Jews, but as usurers, and notes that the vast majority of expulsions in the period targeted “Christians hailing from northern Italy.” Jews were expelled, like these Christian usurers, for their actions, choices, and behaviors. What the period witnessed was not a wave of irrational anti-Jewish actions, or for that matter an impersonal reflex of glutted Capital, but rather a widespread ecclesiastical reaction against the spread of moneylending among Christians that eventually absorbed Jews into its considerations for common sense reasons. A number of laws and statutes, for example Usuranum voraginem, were designed in order to provide a schedule of punishments for foreign/travelling Christian moneylenders. These laws contained provisions for excommunication and a prohibition on renting property in certain locales. The latter effectively prohibited such moneylenders from taking up residence in those locations, and compelled their expulsion in cases where they were already domiciled. It was only after these laws were in effect that some theologians and clerics began to question why they weren’t also applied to Jews who, in the words of historian Gavin Langmuir, were then “disproportionately engaged in moneylending in northern Europe by the late 12th century.”[21] The Church had historically objected to the expulsion of Jews in the belief that their scattered presence fulfilled theological and eschatological functions. It was only via the broader, largely common sense, application of newly developed anti-usury laws that such obstructions to confrontations with Jews became theologically and ecclesiastically permissible, if not entirely desirable. And once this Rubicon had been crossed, it paved the way for a rapid series of expulsions of Jewish usury colonies from European towns and cities, a process that accelerated rapidly between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The lack of engagement with developments in historiography is worsened to a large extent by the absence of a truly cross-disciplinary approach in most, if not all, existing middleman minority analyses. This is particularly glaring in the works of Bonacich and Zenner which, while making multiple and apparently crucial references to conscious and unconscious group “strategies,” fail to engage in any kind of historiographical or psychological scholarly contextualization. How exactly such strategies as “visibility strategies” can operate at group level are left completely unexplained and without any substantial evidence beyond common sense observations of Jewish behavior. The lack of a cross-disciplinary approach in such instances doesn’t necessarily mean that these ideas are wrong, or that “visibility strategies” don’t exist, but it does mean that explanations and evidence are still required. To date, the only convincing attempt to fill in such gaps, and offer a truly cross-disciplinary approach (incorporating history, sociology, and psychology) to the idea of group strategies, is found in the work of Kevin MacDonald.

Conclusion

As stated at the outset of this essay, it isn’t at all clear how any of the aspects of middleman minority theory obviate the need for a deeper theoretical framework in which to understand the behaviors and contexts under study. Middleman minority theory, as remarked above, is an incomplete tool, and has little to offer in terms of deeper explanatory value for such relevant key concepts under discussion as resource competition, ecological strategies, visibility strategies, and social identity theory. Middleman minority theory, or at least some strands of it, is useful and valuable in the study of Jews to the extent that it places an unusual emphasis on group conflict as arising from resource competition, the characteristics of Jews (including Jewish ethnocentrism), and the existence of group strategies. There are, however, multiple, serious inadequacies in middleman minority theory, including the possibility that it is in part itself a “visibility strategy,” that is has a general problem of definitions, that it fails to adequately deal with unique qualities of the Jews and their experiences, that it generally fails to engage with the historical record, and that it has no real explanatory or predictive frameworks for many of the ideas it discusses, including group strategies. I am forced to concur with Edna Bonacich that, in regards to the study of Jews, middleman minority theory should be conceived, at best, as “a useful sensitiser to a host of interrelated variables.”[22]

[1] W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 18.

[2] R. Cherry, “American Jewry and Bonacich’s Middleman Minority Theory,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 22 (2-3), 158-173, 161.

[3] W. P. Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 18.

[4] Ibid.

[5] E. Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583-94, 592.

[6] W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 23.

[7] W. Cahnman, ”Pariahs, Strangers and Court Jews,” Sociological Analysis 35, 3 (1974): 155-66.

[8] D. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

[9] G. Reuveni (ed) The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship Between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn, 2011).

[10] I. Light & S. J. Gold, Ethnic Economies (Bingley: Emerald, 2000).

[11] R. Silverman, Doing Business in Minority Markets (New York: Garland, 2000).

[12] E. Bonacich, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980), 22.

[13] W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11-30, 13.

[14] Ibid, 15.

[15] M. D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 111.

[16] N. Roth, Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003),

[17]  J. Hillaby, “Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century,” in P. Skinner (ed), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 36.

[18] F. Schmeider, “Various Ethnic and Religious Groups in Medieval German Towns? Some Evidence and Reflections,” in, Segregation, Integration, Assimilation: Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 15.

[19] Joseph Pérez, History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60.

[20] R. W. Dorin, Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200—1450 (Harvard PhD dissertation, 2015); R. W. Dorin, “Once the Jews have been Expelled,” Intent and Interpretation in Late Medieval Canon Law,” Law and History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2016), 335-362.

[21] G. Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 304.

[22] Ibid, 24.

Semitism and Capitalism: The Merits and Inadequacies of Middleman Minority Theory in Explaining the Jews Part I

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“The middleman and the host society come in conflict because elements in each group have incompatible goals. To say this is to deny the viewpoint common in the sociological literature that host hostility is self-generated (from psychological problems or cultural traditions).”
Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” 1973.[1]

An interesting accompaniment to Nathan Cofnas’s 2018 attempted debunking of Kevin MacDonald’s work on Jews was the subtle resurfacing of Steven Pinker’s claim that a more plausible theory of the Jewish historical experience can be found in “Thomas Sowell’s convincing analysis of ‘middleman minorities’ such as the Jews, presented in his magisterial study of migration, race, conquest, and culture.” Pinker first involved himself in criticism of MacDonald’s work in a letter to Slate, in January 2000, where he made the above comment. A mere teenager in January 2000, it was only in the wake of the Cofnas affair that I first discovered and read Pinker’s initial response to MacDonald’s theory. It goes without saying that I disagreed with almost everything Pinker had to say, but I was especially vexed by his invocation of the “middleman minority” theory, something I’ve been familiar with for over a decade and always found strongly lacking. Pinker himself, of course, has relatively little expertise in the area, his only comment on the theme coming from a quasi-memoir on Jewish intelligence written for New Republic. Additionally, his gushing use of persuasive language (“convincing,” “magisterial”) to describe Thomas Sowell’s extremely derivative and now rather dated Migrations and Cultures: A World View (1996) struck me as a wholly contrived inflation of what isn’t really a rival theory at all, and certainly not a Sowell innovation. In fact, the history of “middleman minority” theory, and especially its application to the Jews, has a patchy, chequered, and ambiguous history that is worth exploring in its own right. The following essay is intended to provide such a history, as well as to broadly assess the merits and inadequacies of exploring Jewish history through this lens, and also the ways it complements, and falls short of, Kevin MacDonald’s theory.

History of the Theory

The comparing of Jews with other sojourning or diaspora trading peoples is far from new, and has even been a staple of anti-Jewish writing since at least the Enlightenment. Voltaire, for example, wrote in his Oeuvres Complètes (Geneva, 1756) and Dictionnaire Philosophique (Basle, 1764) that “The Guebers [Parsis in the modern terminology], the Banyans [Indian merchants] and the Jews, are the only nations which exist dispersed, having no alliance with any people, are perpetuated among foreign nations, and continue apart from the rest of the world.”[2] In the course of his essay, however, Voltaire concluded that, some surface similarities aside, “It is certain that the Jewish nation is the most singular that the world has ever seen.” Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), the German Protestant theologian, philosopher and historian, also used the example of the Parsis and Overseas Indians, writing in The Jewish Problem (1843),

The base [of the tenacity of the Jewish national spirit] is lack of ability to develop with history, it is the reason of the quite unhistorical character of that nation, and this again is due to its oriental nature. Such stationary nations exist in the Orient, because there human liberty and the possibility of progress are still limited. In the Orient and in India, we still find Parsees [sic] living in dispersion and worshipping the holy fire of Ormuz.[3]

After Voltaire, commentary on the relationship between the economic activity of the Jews and other aspects of their behavior and history, a key theme in modern middleman minority theory, were common points of discussion and debate. Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), an avowedly anti-Semitic German philosopher, argued in his essay On the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the Germans Presented by the Jews (1816), that Jews adopted their historical middleman role willingly, out of a hunger for profit and an innate sense of separateness, rather than being forced into it by broader economic structures and contexts (which again are a major focus of modern middleman minority theory). For Fries,

Both in Germany and abroad the Jews had free states where they enjoyed every right, and even countries where they reigned—but their sordidness, their mania for deceitful, second-hand dealing always remained the same. They shy away from industrious occupations not because they are hindered from pursuing them but simply because they do not want to.

Following Bauer and Fries—and before modern scholarship on the subject, the most prominent invocation of ideas similar to modern middleman minority theory can be observed in the work of Karl Marx. In fact, Marx’s essay On the Jewish Problem is an explicit reply to Bauer, with Marx accusing Bauer of “a one-sided conception of the Jewish problem.”[4] Marx decried Bauer’s focus on religious matters, perceiving the roots of the Jewish problem to reside instead in resource competition and raw economics. In many of his arguments and assessments of the economic and sociological position of the Jews, Marx anticipated Edna Bonacich (1940–), the Jewish Marxist anti-Zionist sociologist who essentially invented middleman minority theory in its modern form (and whose work will be discussed below), in arguing for a structural-contextual explanation of the middleman role of the Jews. In this view, the historical development of Capital essentially invites and entices certain sojourning or diaspora groups, including the Jews, to adopt lucrative but exploitative and antagonistic roles within society. In the words of Marx, “we recognize therefore in Judaism a generally present anti-social element which has been raised to its present peak by historical development, in which the Jews eagerly assisted.” [emphasis added] These antagonistic roles then generate host hostility, which reinforces ethnocentrism and negative characteristics in the minority, accelerating and deepening conflict.

Marx’s emphasis on economic opportunity and the capitalist superstructure influenced later writers such as the German economist Wilhelm Roscher (1817–1894), Werner Sombart (1863–1941), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Georg Simmel (1858–1918), all of whom attempted in some form to trace the relationship of ethnicity to occupational choice (a major concern of modern middleman minority theory), with particular attention paid to the Jews. In keeping with his flamboyant Marxism, Sombart was closest to Marx’s ideas on the Jews, arguing in The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911) that Capital had drawn Jews into their influential, exploitative, and lucrative roles in such a comprehensive manner that Jews had become a kind of ur-middleman minority, and thus were both the prime movers of modern capitalism and the very embodiment of exploitative capital itself. Later, in Der moderne Kapitalismus (1913), Sombart claimed that the middleman nature of the Jews had become endemic in society, creating generations of mere “traders,” a bourgeois “Jewish species” whose entire intellectual and emotional world is “directed to the money value of conditions and dealings, who therefore calculates everything in terms of money.” This “spirit of Moloch” compelled the entrepreneur to “make money relentlessly until at last he conceives this as the real goal of all activity and all existence.”[5]  For Sombart, the origins of the worst of modern capitalism can be found in the early middleman role of the Jews, their medieval semi-nomadic quest for usury-derived profit and Victorian hawking of shoddy goods being a precursor to modern advertising and the mass production of superfluous and quickly obsolete consumer products.

Max Weber’s interpretation of the Jewish middleman role was slightly softer, with Weber advancing the notion of “pariah capitalism.” Pariah capitalists, who include the Jews as well as the Parsis, the Overseas Indians, and the Overseas Chinese, are groups whose characteristics and situational contexts make them prone to willingly adopt socially negative positions in order to obtain wealth and influence. For Weber, capitalism itself was not intrinsically bad. The Puritans, with their industry and hard work, were held up in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/5) as exemplars of positive, “rational” capitalism. Jews, and other pariah capitalists, however, invariably advanced a negative “irrational” capitalism typified by consumer credit, speculation, and colonialism. According to Weber, middleman minorities or “pariah capitalist groups” perverted the essentially good nature of capitalism because of their practice of “dual ethics,” or moral double-standards, which was itself a product of their sojourning nature and situational context. Weber also perceived Judaism itself as reinforcing the Jewish preference for pariah capitalism.[6]

Softer still were the ideas of Wilhelm Roscher, one of the founders of the historical school of political economy. Roscher was part of the historical economist or European Institutionalist movement (which also influenced Weber) that argued for a study of economics based on empirical work that laid special methodological emphasis on context, rather than logical philosophy. Roscher’s emphasis on context and the historical development of capitalism are exemplified in his 1875 essay “The Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages Considered from the Standpoint of Commercial Policy.”[7] In this essay, Roscher presented capitalism as neither inherently good or bad, and he made the argument that Jews, who like other middleman minorities were economic modernizers, were positive influences and crucial to the development of a burgeoning economic trading system. Gideon Reuveni offers the following summary:

According to Roscher, the modernizing role of the Jews explains the change in attitudes within the social majority: from tolerance and acceptance to exclusion and persecution. In other words, once, in the eyes of the majority the role of the Jews becomes superfluous, resentments towards the Jews become more prevalent. This cycle in relations towards Jews, Roscher observed, was not specific to the relationship between Jews and non-Jews but was rather a general development among many peoples who allow their economies to be administered by a foreign and more highly cultivated people, but later, upon having reached the necessary level of development themselves, often after intense struggles, try to emancipate themselves from this tutelage. According to Roscher, “one may defiantly speak in this connection of a historical law here.”[8]

Similar to Roscher’s ideas were the theories of the Jewish Marxist anti-Zionist Abram Leon (1918–1944). Leon, a Polish Jew said to have been executed at Auschwitz at the age of 26, published The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation around 1942, in which he proposed that Jews were a “people-class.” For Leon, “Judaism mirrors the interests of a pre-capitalist mercantile class.” He explains,

Judaism was an indispensable factor in precapitalist society. It was a fundamental organism within it. That is what explains the two-thousand-year existence of Judaism in the Diaspora. The Jew was as characteristic a personage in feudal society as the lord and the serf. It was no accident that a foreign element played the role of “capital” in feudal society. Feudal society as such could not create a capitalist element; as soon as it was able to do so, precisely then it ceased being feudal. Nor was it accidental that the Jew remained a foreigner in the midst of feudal society. The “capital” of precapitalist society existed outside of its economic system. From the moment that capital begins to emerge from the womb of this social system and takes the place of the borrowed organ, the Jew is eliminated and feudal society ceases to be feudal. It is modern capitalism that has posed the Jewish problem. Not because the Jews today number close to twenty million people (the proportion of Jews to non-Jews has declined greatly since the Roman era) but because capitalism destroyed the secular basis for the existence of Judaism. Capitalism destroyed feudal society; and with it the function of the Jewish people-class. History doomed this people-class to disappearance; and thus the Jewish problem arose. The Jewish problem is the problem of adapting Judaism to modern society.

Georg Simmel, an ethnically Jewish sociologist, philosopher, and critic, moved in much the same theoretical direction as Roscher and Leon, as evidenced in his famous and still influential essay “Der Fremde” (“The Stranger”) (1908). Simmel argued that certain groups like Jews and other diaspora peoples may be members of host nations in a spatial sense but not in a social sense. They may be in the nation, but not of it. These groups are both near and far, familiar and foreign. This contextual scenario influences the behavior of “stranger” groups by permitting them freedom from convention and allowing them access to an alleged greater objectivity. For Simmel, “the Stranger,” the classic example of which in his estimation is the Jew, is “the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going.”[9] This freedom, argues Simmel, makes “the Stranger” ideally suited to fulfil the role of middleman minority.[10] As with Roscher’s theory, which is markedly contradicted in several key areas of the historical record, there are a number of obvious logical and evidential problems with Simmel’s theory, and these will be discussed later.

Between Simmel’s 1908 essay and the 1970s, middleman minority theories continued to be advanced. With the exception of Philip Curtin and his Cross-cultural Trade in World History (1984), these efforts were developed primarily by Jewish scholars, and overwhelmingly within the context of trying to explicitly or implicitly explore, explain, or offer apologetics for the Jewish experience. For example, Abner Cohen (1921–2001), was an anthropologist at the University of London, who advanced, in his influential work Urban Ethnicity (1974) and numerous other publications, the idea that there are “trading diasporas.”[11] Of particular interest are Cohen’s ideas about “visibility strategies” pursued by such groups:

The use of symbols to maintain group boundaries can thus be seen as a cultural strategy. In fact, many groups in traditional and modern societies find that their interests are guarded better through invisible organisations such as cousinhoods, membership in a common set of social clubs, religious ties, and informal networks, than through a highly visible, formally recognised institution. At times, ethnic groups may need to heighten their visibility as strangers to maintain their interests while in other instances they may wish to lower their profile and appear to be an integral part of the society.[12]

This bears a striking similarity to the sixth chapter of Kevin MacDonald’s Separation and Its Discontents, which is concerned with visibility strategies, especially among crypto-Jews, and concludes with the argument that “this attempt to maintain separatism while nevertheless making the barriers less visible is the crux of the problem of post-Enlightenment Judaism.”[13] In fact, beginning in the 1970s, middleman minority theory began to develop several ideas that dovetail very well with the concept of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Edna Bonacich.

Although the modern refinement of middleman minority theory is often traced to Hubert Blalock’s 1967 Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations, the greater scholarly interest has been shown in Edna Bonacich’s 1973 American Sociological Review article “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.”[14] Bonacich sought to refine and systematize Blalock’s theory within an anti-capitalist framework, essentially making the argument that all group conflict in such scenarios is the result of a rational competition for resources in which group characteristics and interests play a crucial role. A Jewish Marxist and anti-Zionist, Bonacich’s interpretations borrow heavily from Marx, Sombart, Weber, Roscher, and Leon, to the extent that Bonacich essentially concurs that capitalism created opportunities for exploitative middleman communities and the Jews and other middleman minorities, who possess certain predisposing characteristics including dual loyalty and a level of unscrupulousness, willingly and enthusiastically engaged in these roles.

Bonacich is well-known for her work on East Asian middleman minorities in the United States, especially her 1980 monograph The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community, but her earliest work on middleman minorities clearly demonstrates a concern with the Jewish experience.[15] In her discussion of middleman minorities in the 1973 article, Bonacich describes Jews as “perhaps the epitome of the form.” Some of the key features of the 1973 article include the arguments that Jews and other middleman minorities are essentially economic “teams,” and that these teams rely upon very high levels of ethnocentrism and related social and economic strategies, which in turn enable them to succeed in individualistic societies. Bonacich writes,

The modern industrial capitalist treats his workers impartially as economic instruments; he is as willing to exploit his own son as he is a stranger. This universalism, the isolation of each competitor, is absent in middleman economic activity, where primordial ties of family, region, sect, and ethnicity unite people against the surrounding, often individualistic economy. [emphasis added][16]

Bonacich makes some very interesting, and controversial, remarks on the nature of conflict between middleman minorities and their hosts, with special reference to Jews. For Bonacich, accusations that Jews have simply been scapegoats for the woes of Europeans are based on nothing more than a “surface impression.”[17] While noting that middleman minorities “are noteworthy for the acute hostility they have faced,” it remains that,

host members have reason for feeling hostile toward middleman groups. … Even the extremity of the host reaction can be understood as “conflict” behavior. The reason is that the economic and organisational power of middleman groups makes them extremely difficult to dislodge. … The difficulty of breaking entrenched middleman monopolies, the difficulty of controlling the growth and extension of their economic power, pushes host countries to ever more extreme reactions. One finds increasingly harsh measures, piled on one another, until, when all else fails, “final solutions” are enacted.[18] [emphasis added]

Bonacich has also argued that Jews and other middleman minorities do engage in economic and social “dual loyalty,” and that middleman minorities do in fact “drain” resources away from host populations and can become very powerful as a result. This then frequently causes host elites and masses to unite against the sojourning element, a conflict that can escalate rapidly if the sojourning element refuses to give up its monopolies. Bonacich explicitly rejects any idea that “host hostility is self-generated (from psychological problems or cultural traditions),” arguing instead that “the middleman and the host society come in conflict because elements in each group have incompatible goals.” With her apparent justification of host violence against middleman minorities, including Jews, as well as her objective view of certain Jewish characteristics, Bonacich’s theory has been heavily criticized in some quarters, despite its ongoing influence in contemporary sociology. Robert Cherry, for example, has lamented that Bonacich’s ideas on middleman minorities “reinforce persistent, negative Jewish stereotypes.”[19]

Discussion

Before moving to an assessment of the merits and inadequacies of middleman minority theory in explaining Jewish history, it’s worth reflecting on the history of the theory in light of Steven Pinker’s claim that it represents a rival, or “more convincing,” analysis of the Jewish historical trajectory. The first problem, of course, is that, despite Pinker’s lavish praise, Thomas Sowell is not remotely regarded within scholarship as a leading or original thinker in the area of middleman minority theory. Not only does discussion of middleman minorities form a relatively small element of Sowell’s Migrations And Cultures, but what does appear is highly derivative of the work of Edna Bonacich, Walter Zenner, and others.

A further problem is Pinker’s assumption that there exists a single, unified theory on middleman minorities that will help explain the Jewish historical experience, and that somehow this will also be sufficient to counter the theory of Kevin MacDonald, or at least offer a more convincing framework that would allow MacDonald’s ideas to be dispensed with. As should already be clear from this brief, and incomplete, bibliographical overview, within middleman minority theory there is a plethora of often competing interpretations, as well as a general problem of definitions. Walter Zenner, a key proponent of middleman minority theory, concedes that “we tend to make our definitions and models fit the prototypical group. For decades, the Jews were the archetype.”[20] In other words, for a considerable time, middleman minority theory was built around trying to explain the experience of Jews, with other groups haphazardly mapped onto the theory in way that tried to give the impression of similarity, even where these similarities were thin to non-existent. Bonacich has made roughly the same argument, asserting that middleman minority theory should be regarded as incomplete because it can only point to an “ideal type,” and

In reality there are problems of fit between any actual ethnic group and this picture, problems in establishing which or how many of the traits a population need have before it can be classified as a middleman minority.[21]

Bonacich, very reasonably in my opinion, proposes that middleman minority theory, of which she herself is a pioneer, is something of a misnomer and should be regarded as little more than “a useful sensitiser to a host of interrelated variables.”[22] One is therefore pressed by Pinker’s claim to ask not only which of the many strands of middleman minority theories Steven Pinker is praising, but also just how “convincing” and “magisterial” he can find it given the field’s leading contemporary thinkers regard their work in such ambiguous terms.

Finally, it is not at all clear how any of the aspects of middleman minority theory obviate the need for a deeper theoretical framework in which to understand the behaviors and contexts under study. Middleman minority theory, as remarked above, is an incomplete tool, and has little to offer in terms of deeper explanatory value for such relevant key concepts under discussion as resource competition, ecological strategies, visibility strategies, psychological attitudes toward the majority, and social identity theory. One of the strong points of Kevin MacDonald’s work, which is truly cross-disciplinary and unusually well-equipped in terms of the relevant historical literature, is that is does offer such an analysis, and can be argued to fill a lot of the logical and evidential gaps of middleman minority theory. This is not to say that the two frameworks are in opposition, but that the concept of a group evolutionary strategy can be usefully and seamlessly integrated into middleman minority theory, especially in relation to Jews.

It’s been continually remarked by many scholars in the field that Jews should be regarded as either an “ideal type,” “the epitome of the form,” a singular example, or otherwise unique case—even within the context of broad comparative approaches with other trading diaspora peoples. The qualities that have made Jews so unique — cultural, historical, religious, and even biological — are rarely remarked or elaborated upon in sociological studies of middleman minorities, which are often lacking in depth in terms of their historical analysis. As will be discussed below, Zenner, in particular, has highlighted ways in which Jews do not fit the standard middleman minority pattern, especially in terms of their extravagant and influential involvement in the culture and politics of the host nation (see also MacDonald’s Diaspora Peoples on the Overseas Chinese, xlii ff). Unfortunately, middleman minority literature has little to say in terms of further explanatory theory on how or why Jews came to both define and exceed the middleman typology. Here, middleman minority theory not only isn’t a rival for MacDonald’s work, it positively cries out for it.

Continued in Part II

[1] Bonacich, Edna. “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583–94, (589).

[2] Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes (Geneva, 1756), Vol. 7. Ch.1. See also Dictionnaire Philosophique (Basle, 1764), Vol. 14.

[3] B. Bauer, The Jewish Problem (Die Judenfrage, 1843) ed Ellis Rivkin and trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, 1958).

[4] K. Marx, On the Jewish Problem (Zur Judenfrage, 1844) ed Ellis Rivkin and trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, 1958).

[5] W. Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, Munich and Leipzig 1913. This work was published in an English translation by E. Epstein under the title, The Quintessence of Capitalism, London, 1915.

[6] W. P. Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 5.

[7] W. Roscher, “Die Stellung der Juden im Mittelalter, betrachtet vom Standpunkt der allgemeine Handelspolitik,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft Bd. 31 (1875) S. 503–526.

[8] G. Reuveni, “Prolegomena to an “Economic Turn” in Jewish History,” in G. Reuveni (ed) The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship Between Ethnicity and Economic Life (Berghahn, 2011), 3.

[9] As the son of Catholic and Lutheran converts from Judaism, Simmel’s relationship to his Jewishness is fascinating in itself. See A. Morris-Reich, The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science, (New York: Routledge, 2008), chapter 4. For the influence of Simmel’s stranger minority theory see Werner Cahnman, “Pariahs, Strangers, and Court Jews — A Conceptual Classification,” Sociological Analysis, 35 (1974); C. R. Hallpike, “Some problems in Cross-Cultural Comparison,” in The Translation of Culture, T. Beidelman (ed), (London: Tavistock, 1971); Hilda Kuper, “Strangers in Plural Societies: Asians in South Africa and Uganda,” in Pluralism in Africa, Leo Kuper and M. G. Smith (eds) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Jack H. Porter, “The Urban Middleman: A Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Social Research, 4 (1981);  R. A. Reminick, “The Evil Eye Belief among the Amhara of Ethiopia,” Ethnology, 13 (1974), W. Shack and E. Skinner, Strangers in African Societies (Berkelely: University of California Press, 1979); Paul Siu, “The Sojourner,” American Journal of Sociology, 58, (1952).

[10] J. Stone, Racial Conflict in Contemporary Society, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 96.

[11] This coinage is frequently attributed to Philip Curtin, who employs the term in his Cross-cultural Trade in World History (1984), but the term was in use by Cohen, within a strict thematic sense, as early as the latter’s 1974 chapter “Cultural Strategies in the Organisation of Trading Diasporas,” in C. Meillassoux (ed) The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971).

[12] Quoted in W. P. Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 8.

[13] K. MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, 187.

[14] E. Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583–94.

[15] E. Bonacich, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980).

[16] Ibid, 589.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid, 592.

[19] R. Cherry, “American Jewry and Bonacich’s Middleman Minority Theory,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 22 (2–3), 158–173, 161.

[20] W. P. Zenner, Minorities in the Middle: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 10. See also W. Zenner, “American Jewry in the light of middleman minority theories,” Contemporary Jewry, 5:1 (1980), 11–30, 18. Zenner argues that “As a synthetic concept, the phrase “middleman minority” is difficult to define so as to cover all groups so designated.”

[21] E. Bonacich, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berekely: University of California Press, 1980), 22. See also E. Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities.” American Sociological Review 38, no. 5 (1973): 583–94, 585.

[22] Ibid, 24.

A sociologia como religião

/in /by

The Sacred Project of American Sociology
Smith, Christian
New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Já se sabia, faz algum tempo, que a esquerda mantém a academia sob sequestro. O livro de Christian Smith O projeto sagrado da sociologia americana é um estudo de caso sobre esse fenômeno numa disciplina em que o controle da esquerda é quase total, analisado da perspectiva de sua especialidade — a sociologia da religião.

Smith, professor da Universidade de Notre Dame, acredita que a sociologia acadêmica teve auspicioso começo enquanto empresa científica, secular e naturalística. Com o passar do tempo, entretanto, ela perdeu muito de sua objetividade acadêmica. Atualmente, “A sociologia americana é melhor compreendida como projeto profundamente sagrado” (p. X). O autor emprega o termo “Sagrado” no sentido que lhe dá Durkheim, ou seja, alguma coisa sacrossanta, reverencial e inquestionável.1

Na minha opinião, o projeto sagrado que Smith descreve no Capítulo 1 mostra impressionante semelhança com a ideologia do marxismo cultural ou da justiça social, embora ele não faça uso dessas expressões. Esse projeto sagrado (daí as maiúsculas: O Projeto) consiste numa perquirição espiritual, num tipo de religião secular que busca abolir a desigualdade humana, as hierarquias humanas, os constrangimentos sobre os homens da parte de outros homens ou até mesma da natureza. Tais objetivos inalcançáveis e utópicos provocaram frustração e fanatismo no passado, não se podendo esperar efeito diverso da mesma causa no futuro.

As ideologias políticas podem, às vezes, reunir conceitos nebulosos, e a alguns estudiosos não agrada a tentativa de entendê-las segundo o esquema de esquerda e direita. Mas esse é um modelo útil aqui para efeito de contraste. A autêntica Direita acredita na nobreza dos laços do dever e da lealdade que ligam um homem à sua família, à sua comunidade e à sua etnia. Antes que a igualdade, a Direita celebra a excelência — força, beleza, inteligência. A desigualdade e a hierarquia são intrínsecas à condição humana, e alguma coação sobre indivíduos e grupos é, com frequência, necessidade positiva. E a Direita, quando no poder, busca acabar com a injustiça, a exploração e a pobreza, mas seus esforços nesse sentido não são de alcance global, limitando-se ao âmbito de suas próprias comunidades étnicas.

Ao contrário, O Projeto consiste num individualismo autocentrado. Ele procura “a emancipação, a igualdade, a afirmação moral de toda a humanidade como conjunto de indivíduos enquanto agentes autônomos de si mesmos […] que devem viver suas vidas como bem entenderem e construir para si a identidade que desejarem, estabelecendo as relações e vivências como for de sua vontade […]” (p. 7-8). Embora Smith reconheça que O Projeto tenha recebido conteúdo “revolucionário e socialmente utópico” da “tradição marxista”, como também “sentido terapêutico   […] da tradição freudiana”, de não poucas consequências em termos de influência, esse autor acredita que O Projeto consiste, essencialmente, em simples individualismo ocidental, no contexto maior da tradição iluminista (p. 9). Esse é um ponto de vista, ou seja, O Projeto como o liberalismo levado ao extremo da sua falta de lógica. Eu discordo dessa perspectiva, e Smith volta a tratar da origem do Projeto no Capítulo 4, assim falaremos disso mais adiante.2

O autor não pertence, certamente, à Direita dissidente, e embora ele pareça se enquadrar em algumas visões sociais tradicionais, ele mesmo diz não ser conservador. Eu o situaria, talvez, como um centrista cristão no espectro ideológico. Embora altamente crítico quanto ao Projeto, Smith tem sentimentos ambíguos em relação aos seus fins. Ele decerto censure mais os meios do que os fins. A agenda atual do Projeto é simplesmente uma ponte longe demais. Pior ainda, O Projeto sequestrou a sociologia, “a rainha das ciências sociais”, fazendo dela sua ancila, com o que comprometeu a imparcialidade científica da disciplina e a integridade acadêmica.3

Smith caracteriza O Projeto como “transformador”, “radical,” até “revolucionário”, mas não como remediador ou reformista. Isso parece contraditar a afirmação dele acima referida sobre a inserção do Projeto em tradições anteriores. O Projeto é elitista porque “afinal, as pessoas comuns não são confiáveis (já que não pegam o ‘espírito da coisa’)”. (p. 13).

Um dos objetivos do Projeto é a redefinição da família. Meias-medidas, a exemplo da união civil para casais homossexuais, são inaceitáveis. Só o casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo pode “assegurar o devido reconhecimento moral e social oficialmente formulado, com a aprovação, a validação, a apreciação de que as pessoas precisam para que se sintam bem consigo mesmas” (p. 14). O Projeto tem por certo que identidades herdadas e adscritivas tais como a raça e o sexo podem ser reconstruídas conforme se queira. Daí que Rachel Dolezal possa ser uma ativista negra; e a senadora Elizabeth Warren, uma princesa xeroqui — bem, pelo menos por um tempinho. De qualquer forma, esse é um objetivo que os “religiosos” continuam a perseguir.

Quão hegemônico é O Projeto na sociologia acadêmica? Smith estima o número de fiéis dogmatizados entre 30% e 40% dos sociólogos. Entre 50% e 60% seriam aderentes, mas não tão zelosos de sua fé. Esses números indicam que, no máximo, 20% podem não seguir o credo, mas se comportam como Maria vai com as outras para levar algum tipo de vantagem.

No Capítulo 2, de longe o mais extenso, Smith aponta as evidências de que O Projeto apoderou-se da sociologia. Ele começa examinando os títulos numa exposição de livros durante uma conferência anual da Associação Americana de Sociologia (sigla inglesa: ASA). Alguns desses títulos: The price of paradise: the cost of inequality and a vision for a more equitable America; Breaking women: gender, race and the new politics of imprisonment; The hip-hop generation fights back: youth activism and post-civil rights politics; e Punished: policing the lives of black and latino boys (p. 32). Muitos livros defendiam explicitamente O Projeto; nenhum deles opunha-se explicitamente.

A seguir o autor examina os livros resenhados numa edição recente da Contemporary Sociology, a revista oficial da ASA. Poucos livros são selecionados para resenha, assim a ASA considera os escolhidos como especialmente importantes. Entre os títulos, constavam estes dois: Equality with a vengeance: men’s rights groups, battered women, and the antifeminist backlash; e Creating a new racial order: how immigration, multiracialism, genomics, and the young can remake race in America (p. 38).

Além de livros e resenhas de livros, O Projeto abrange ainda artigos em periódicos. Smith nota que os artigos podem parecer “mais científicos” do que as monografias supracitadas, mas muitos deles também são lanças e escudos da causa sagrada. O autor examina ainda trabalhos recentes saídos na American Sociology Review (ASR). Assim como a Contemporary Sociology, a ASR é publicação oficial da ASA, sendo geralmente considerada “a melhor revista americana de sociologia” (p. 47). Qualquer área de pesquisa é um campo aberto para o avanço da Cruzada. O trabalho de Robert Putman, por exemplo, sofre campanha de descrédito. Tudo porque ele indica a “perda de capital social” e o crescente isolamento social nos Estados Unidos. Alegam mil e uma questiúnculas metodológicas, “denunciando” supostas falhas que vão da coleta dos dados à sua interpretação. Alguns dos alvos visados estudam “o colapso das famílias nucleares estáveis” e “a perda de linguagem cultural compartida de comunidade e responsabilidade” (p. 48). Porquanto estas sejam preocupações associadas aos conservadores, e em virtude de O Projeto “estar implicado nas mudanças socioculturais que podem ser criticadas por seu caráter socialmente destrutivo”, os Projetistas tentam fazer crer que “todas as mudanças socioculturais operadas desde os anos sessentas — as quais críticos situam na origem do declínio do capital social, da conectividade e da comunidade — não representam, na realidade, nenhum tipo de problema” (p. 49).

Continuando, Smith observa que O Projeto envolve não apenas “academismo”, mas também ativismo. “A ASA tem organizado uma série de programas de conferências para ativistas nos seus encontros nacionais” com a finalidade de promover mudanças sociais e inclusão como forma de combate à opressão e à desigualdade. (p. 60). “The ASA declara sem meias-palavras que a sociologia americana não se ocupa apenas com a condução e a divulgação de trabalhos acadêmicos, mas também com a indução da mudança social por meio do ativismo (p. 62).

Outro conjunto de evidências é apontado nos livros didáticos de sociologia. Geralmente, os cursos de introdução à sociologia integram o currículo básico exigido nos cursos universitários de graduação. Assim, a cada semestre, milhares de estudantes de 18 a 21 anos, portanto muito sugestionáveis, seguem esses cursos. Eu não me lembro muito do curso de introdução à sociologia que fiz há muitos anos, mas hoje esses cursos mais se parecem como classes de doutrinação para a formação de marxistas culturais. De acordo com Smith, num típico curso de sociologia, os estudantes são “despojados da visão de senso comum sobre a liberdade e a responsabilidade […], são ‘habilitados’ para a tarefa de se juntar a outros para mudar a sociedade […] e são desconvencidos do valor do modo de vida de sua cultura, o que pavimenta o caminho para um tolerante multiculturalismo” (p. 73). O capítulo sobre “Sexo e sexualidade” de um livro de sociologia bastante usado inclui tópicos como “homofobia, teoria queer, transas eventuais (suas vantagens e desvantagens)” e sexo extramarital (em tempos de mais “repressão”, chamado de adultério) (p. 84).

Deixando os livros-textos, Smith passa a tratar de outro conjunto de provas que ele chamou de “histórias reveladoras”. Aqui ele escreve que a obtenção de estabilidade no magistério superior pode depender da “correta perspectiva” do candidato sobre questões sociais e políticas. Cabe mencionar que a estabilidade é o último obstáculo para se chegar ao cargo de professor universitário em tempo integral. Primeiramente um estudante deve ser admitido num programa de doutorado, deve escrever e ter aprovada a sua tese sob a orientação (vigilância, na verdade) de um titular, para então ser contratado como professor, depois do que ele poderá conseguir jornada de trabalho de tempo integral. Cada uma dessas fases serve de grade epistemológica para impedir o ingresso de acadêmicos dissidentes nas universidades. Trata-se de um sistema fechado com pouca ou nenhuma forma de responsabilização externa. Ao longo dos anos esse esquema conduziu à hegemonia esquerdista nas profissões liberais e ciências sociais.

Desse consenso institucional excludente [no original: groupthink] resultam pesquisas fraudulentas que só são descobertas depois de anos; e, depois de décadas, refutadas. O melhor (ou pior) exemplo disso é o “estudo” de Lenore Weitzman sobre as consequências do divórcio. Weitzman, judia e feminista radical, publicou trabalho “concluindo” que, após o divórcio, o nível de vida das mulheres cai 73%, e o dos homens sobe 42%.4 “A pesquisa dela mereceu premiação da ASA em 1986 por ‘importante contribuição à investigação acadêmica’. Foi resenhada em pelo menos 22 revistas de ciência social e 11 revistas jurídicas. As revelações de Weitzman foram citadas em mais de 170 artigos de revistas e jornais, 348 artigos de ciências sociais, 250 artigos jurídicos, 24 causas de cortes estaduais e numa decisão da Suprema Corte. (p. 100).

Pelo menos um sociólogo, Richard Peterson, permaneceu altamente céptico em relação às “descobertas” de Weitzman. Ele pediu os dados da pesquisa para revisão. Weitzman negou-se a atender à solicitação, tergiversando. Depois de resistir por 10 anos, Weitzman finalmente cedeu e cedeu os dados, ao ser advertida pela “National Science Foundation, financiadora do trabalho, de que não receberia mais recursos se não o fizesse” (p. 98). O que Peterson constatou foi um emaranhado de muitas incorreções, inconsistências e dados omitidos. Então ele refez todo o trabalho como melhor podia. Os resultados a que chegou: uma queda de 27% no padrão de vida da mulher e uma elevação de apenas 10% no padrão de vida do homem. Nesse meio tempo, outra investigação, maior e realizada em melhores condições, revelaria que tanto os homens quanto as mulheres saíam mais pobres de um divórcio.

Smith destaca que a pesquisa sobre o divórcio que ele contestou não esteve restrita ao debate acadêmico. Ela teve consequências no mundo real. As “informações” de Weitzman subsidiaram cortes e legislaturas na reformulação do marco legal do divórcio e acarretaram perdas financeiras sérias para os homens. “No final das contas, os enormes erros reconhecidos no trabalho de Weitzman — os quais motivaram grandes mudanças legais e culturais quanto ao divórcio, inclusive algumas que afetaram profunda e negativamente os homens divorciados — não prejudicaram a carreira dela. Atualmente ela integra o programa Clarence J. Robinson da George Mason University, Fairfax, Virgínia, como professora de Sociologia e Direito” (p. 101). E agora o remate de toda essa encenação: 20 anos depois de ter caído em descrédito, “o desarrazoado de Weitzman continua a ser citado ainda hoje no mais vendido livro de introdução à sociologia do mercado” (p. 104).

O escândalo de Weitzman é exemplo frisante do viés confirmatório e dos dois pesos e duas medidas para a avaliação da pesquisa nas ciências sociais. Se acontece, como costuma acontecer, de a pesquisa chegar às conclusões “corretas” — isto é, aquelas de acordo com a agenda do Projeto, como foi o caso assustador do que Weitzman “descobriu” sobre o divórcio — então a investigação é aceita de olhos fechados. Por outro lado, se os resultados da pesquisa estiverem em desacordo com O Projeto, isso indicará erros de concepção e análise no trabalho. Neste caso, nem todas as evidências do mundo bastarão para livrar qualquer trabalho de resultados indesejados da condenação como “pseudociência”, termo de que os esquerdistas gostam muito, aliás. Mas, na realidade, pseudociência é a deles, que rasgam seda para os “irmãos” do Projeto pelo testemunho de sua “fé” acadêmica, enquanto atacam com as críticas mais extremas os trabalhos dos “hereges” que lhes profanam a “divindade”.

No Capítulo 3, Smith trata desse aspecto religioso, mostrando a forte semelhança entre as práticas dos sociólogos acadêmicos e aquelas do que seria uma comunidade mística de espíritos iluminados. Primeiramente, aqueles iniciados chegados à pós-graduação, portanto já adiantados no palmilhar da senda luminosa, são aí submetidos a “longo e rigoroso processo de ensino-aprendizagem, no qual assimilam o conhecimento da verdade última sobre a realidade do mundo. Então, da posição elevada que alcançam pela contemplação da Essência superior, os iniciados chegam a transcender a inteligência desprezível dos homens e mulheres profanos” (p. 115). Uma vez integrados plenamente ao corpo eclesiástico, os pastores buscam novas ovelhas entre os mais promissores catecúmenos de seu redil, aqueles que mais claramente obedecem ao Chamado e se mostram capazes de melhor servir aos desígnios sagrados do Projeto (p. 116). Finalmente, os eleitos devem estar “sempre alerta e vigilantes contra os lobos em pele de ovelha, os hereges, os infiéis, os traidores que podem estar à espreita dentro da própria congregação e levar o Projeto à perdição”. (p. 118).

O autor volta a falar das origens do Projeto no Capítulo 4, e aqui eu discordo da análise de Smith. Como mencionado na discussão do Capítulo 1, o autor vê O Projeto como a última fase do desenvolvimento do liberalismo ocidental e do individualismo. Eu vejo O Projeto mais como descontinuidade, não apenas em relação à tradição ocidental em geral, como também, especificamente, em relação aos homens que criaram a sociologia enquanto disciplina acadêmica no fim do século XIX e no começo do século XX.

Em primeiro lugar, deve ser considerado que o liberalismo e o Iluminismo foram produtos da mente de homens brancos ocidentais; bem ao contrário, O Projeto é explicitamente antiocidental, antibranco e antimasculino. Em segundo lugar, não obstante tenha o Iluminismo celebrado o indivíduo, ele o fez de forma restrita. Neste ponto cumpre examinar os efeitos políticos e sociais do pensamento iluminista mais do que o Iluminismo como movimento puramente filosófico. Na Europa Ocidental e na América do Norte, o Iluminismo pode ser representado pelo republicanismo dos Patriarcas da Independência Americana e seus precursores. Esses homens frequentemente escreviam e falavam sobre a necessidade da virtude e do autocontrole, sobre a riqueza coletiva, sobre o bem comum. Na Europa Central e na Europa Oriental, o Iluminismo foi incorporado pelos Déspotas Esclarecidos, os monarcas absolutistas dispostos a reformar suas sociedades de cima para baixo. Ambas as variantes eram bem diferentes, talvez a própria antítese do delicado vale-tudo em que todo o mundo pode fazer o que bem entende, conforme preconiza o  individualismo do Projeto. Em terceiro lugar, o Iluminismo e a Revolução Científica desenvolveram-se pári-pássu. Um dos topos de Smith é a perda da objetividade científica na sociologia. O Projeto tem base na fé, trata-se de uma religião secular. Seus alicerces não se constituem cientificamente. Nele opera-se sofisticada manipulação das ciências sociais e biológicas para que sirvam a sua agenda. A Direita Dissidente tem base mais firme na ciência do que a esquerda contemporânea.

O autor tece breves considerações sobre Lester Ward, Edward Ross e outros dos “primeiros sociólogos americanos que escreveram livros didáticos” (p. 122). O que Smith não quis reconhecer foi a profunda influência da teoria evolucionária, do racialismo e da eugenia sobre as nascentes ciências sociais da época. 5 Veja-se, por exemplo, Lester Ward, o primeiro nome na lista de Smith. Ward criou o Departamento de Sociologia da Brown University e foi o primeiro presidente da ASA. Nascido em Illinois de família provinda da Nova Inglaterra, ele lutou na Guerra de Secessão pelo exército da União, chegando a ser gravemente ferido. Não obstante, Ward era dotado de forte consciência racial. Ele “estabeleceu uma distinção entre as raças ‘históricas’ ou ‘mais bem dotadas’ originárias da Europa e outros grandes grupos raciais de negros, vermelhos e amarelos […] Ele falou abertamente de raças ‘superiores’, ‘inferiores’ e ‘decadentes’”. 6  E apesar de seu contexto cultural, Ward mostrava sincera preocupação com a segurança das mulheres brancas do Sul.

As raças inferiores, argumentava Ward, tinham extraordinário apetite sexual por membros das raças superiores, porque obscura e instintivamente nisso percebiam via para o melhoramento da sua própria raça. Um negro que viola a mulher branca, declarou Ward, é compelido por algo mais do que a simples luxúria. “Esta é a voz inaudita mas imperiosa da natureza a comandá-lo, mesmo sob o risco da lei de linchamento”, disse Ward, “para erguer sua raça a nível um pouco mais alto.” Por outro lado, a fúria da comunidade branca onde tal ato tem lugar é da mesma forma natural. 7

Assim pensava o primeiro presidente da Associação Americana de Sociologia.

No passado, quando o estabilismo era confrontado com o racialismo dos fundadores da sociologia, a exemplo de Ward, a reação era tentar minimizar ou desconsiderar tais convicções como meras prevenções ultrapassadas de que já se havia defecado a sociedade, da forma como também se expurgara das visões errôneas no campo da medicina ou astronomia. No ambiente mais polarizado de hoje, tais convicções são vistas como prova de um alastrante racismo, ao mesmo tempo individual e institucional, antigo e novo, de que se deve cortar os ramos e arrancar as raízes.  A consciência racial branca e a preferência pela raça branca eram, obviamente, parte do senso comum no passado. A experiência de Ward como militar da União não enfraqueceu as preocupações dele com o bem-estar das mulheres brancas do Sul. O sangue fala mais alto do que diferenças regionais. É evidente que ele refletiu profundamente sobre a questão e analisou-a de perspectiva evolucionária.

Outro nome na lista de Smith, Edward A. Ross explicitou de forma ainda mais precisa suas visões sobre a raça. Homem alto e forte, defensor de hábitos rigorosos e de uma vida enérgica, amigo de Teddy Roosevelt, Ross foi quem cunhou a expressão “suicídio racial”, depois empregada por Roosevelt e Madison Grant. Ross concluiu o seu curso de doutorado na Universidade Johns Hopkins e a seguir participou da criação do Departamento de Sociologia da Universidade de Wisconsin, onde lecionaria por 31 anos. Ele também presidiu a ASA como o seu terceiro presidente. Ross não via utilidade em dar direitos eleitorais aos negros: “O voto não faz o negão virar Platão”.8 Ele também lutou, com firmeza, pela limitação da imigração. Ele acreditava que “O dinheiro judaico […] estava financiando a campanha pela imigração ilimitada, pretensamente em benefício de todos os imigrantes” e que, na verdade, “Uma só raça estava por trás dessa campanha, agindo pelo próprio interesse”. Conforme Ross, “Os judeus responderam ao benefício do asilo americano com tremendo malefício: eles minaram o controle dos Estados Unidos sobre o seu próprio destino racial”.9 Ross escreveu um dos primeiros livros de introdução à sociologia, Foundations of Sociology (1905). Algumas partes desse livro poderiam ter sido escritas por Madison Grant. Deve-se enfatizar que homens assim como Ward, Ross e mesmo Grant eram progressistas que combatiam o interesse das corporações e apoiavam os trabalhadores, aos quais mostraram-se solidários. Eles eram verdadeiramente progressistas, e o estudo das ciências sociais conduziu-os para o realismo racial. Eu não posso entender por que escritores da Direita chamam hoje os seus oponentes de “progressistas”.

As evidências apontadas acima indicam o revertério havido na sociologia durante o século XX. O Projeto é, de fato, revolucionário. Foi dado um giro de 180 graus nas questões sociais, especialmente quanto a raça e sexo. Embora Smith reconheça a influência do marxismo e do feminismo na sociologia contemporânea, eu não acredito que ele tenha plena consciência de quão graves foram as mudanças operadas. O Projeto adotou elementos da teoria trotskista da revolução permanente para a mudança social, a par de princípios da contínua Revolução Cultural maoísta, as quais não têm prazo de encerramento.

Smith termina o Capítulo 4 dizendo que o sequestro da sociologia pelo Projeto não era inevitável. De novo, as evidências acima confirmam essa conclusão. As ciências sociais como um todo poderiam ter continuado na via do naturalismo ao longo do século XX, tendo por referência as ciências da vida, especialmente a biologia evolucionária. Existe certa tendência natural de leitura da história num sentido reverso, ou seja, da frente para trás, por onde eventos ou processos de décadas ou séculos passados são considerados teleologicamente, assim como se tivessem existido como preparação para o irresistível advento das condições do presente. Uma visão mais equilibrada do passado percebe caminhos abandonados nas encruzilhadas da história que poderiam ter sido os escolhidos.

O Capítulo 5 intitula-se “Consequences”, mas eu acho que um título melhor seria “Os sete pecados capitais da Sociologia”. Estes pecados são os seguintes:

  1. 1. Desonestidade: “A disciplina tem sido desonesta consigo mesma, com os estudantes e seus pais, com os administradores e doadores das universidades e com os contribuintes americanos”. (p.134). Com muita frequência a sociologia torna-se propaganda disfarçada de ciência social.
  2. 2. Hipocrisia: “Apesar de disciplina muito obsedada pela mazela americana da desigualdade social, a sociologia mostra-se elitista, estruturando-se em termos de estratificação segundo hierarquias de status e poder que operam processos sociais excludentes para a proteção de privilégios, tanto quanto qualquer outra instituição na sociedade”. (p. 136).
  3. 3. Proselitismo gramscista: transformada em veículo institucional de propaganda política, o aparato acadêmico-editorial da sociologia tem servido à doutrinação “progressista” em favor de toda sorte de inversão política e social nas guerras culturais pela “revolução”, agora assimilada a uma religião que promete o paraíso a toda minoria descontente. A subversão minoritária volta-se não só contra a sociedade, mas também contra a própria natureza.

Os quatro pecados restantes estão estreitamente relacionados:

  1. 4. Padronização pensamental: toda ideia dissidente é proscrita. A seleção por conformidade e o isolamento e expurgo de estudantes e professores que não pensam da forma politicamente correta são processos conducentes à formação de sociólogos alienados, perdidos na confusão que fazem entre fatos sociais e artigos de uma fé intolerante, embora cultuada em nome da tolerância.
  2. 5. Miopia social: a incapacidade para pensar “fora da caixa”. Tudo o que a religião acadêmica do esquerdismo não pode enquadrar é visto como abominação. Toda resistência política ou cultural ou simplesmente comportamento autônomo de oposição sofre estigmatização como preconceitos diversos: sociais, raciais, sexuais… Estes “males” recebem o castigo expiatório num gradiente que vai do simples ostracismo ao extremo da prisão e até mesmo da pena de morte, passando por censura e multas, no que se configura como processo repressivo dinamizado pelos interesses da burocracia da indústria judiciária a serviço do capital transnacional e outras forças globalistas.

 

  1. Corrupção da avaliação interpares: caso paradigmático deste sexto pecado foi o escândalo de que tratamos, o qual teve Weitzman como impenitente protagonista. “Asinus asinum fricat”, diriam os latinos.
  2. 7. Incapacidade de autocrítica: este sétimo pecado decorre do que parece ser a óbvia correção da teologia do Projeto aos olhos de seus crentes. Estes, em sua cegueira sectária, “não percebem o dogmatismo religioso do Projeto, que assim passa por ser a realidade autoevidente”. (p. 176).

O Capítulo 7 inicia com a interrogação “What Is Sociology Good For?” [“Para que serve a Sociologia?”]. Nota-se que Smith sentiu embaraços na resposta. Às vezes, o autor manifesta que “a sociologia, como uma empresa, deveria ser fechada, simplesmente”, ou que devesse, “talvez, ser enxugada” (p. 184). A Sociologia pode ser muito boa para a descrição das características sociais, os problemas começam quando ideologia e política se misturam “sob o disfarce de teoria e interpretação”, distorcendo a pesquisa sociológica. A solução evidente consiste em substituir a perversa e destrutiva ideologia do Projeto por orientação mais saudável e objetiva que corresponda às necessidades da sociedade.

O Capítulo 8 finaliza o texto recapitulando sumariamente os principais pontos. Há um apêndice onde o autor descreve brevemente suas crenças pessoais. No começo do livro, Smith havia dito que era contrário ao Projeto Sagrado – o qual eu identifico com a Esquerda – mas que não era conservador, que não chegava a ser da verdadeira Direita. Sua própria ideologia – o Personalismo Realista Crítico – valoriza “mais a pessoa do que o indivíduo, defende a solidariedade comunitária contra a atomização” (p. 200). Esta curta descrição não deixa claro o entendimento que tem o autor do conceito de comunidade. O Personalismo Realista Crítico é minudenciado em outro trabalho de Smith: To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, and Evil (2015).

O que então, afinal, podemos aprender com o livro? Eu diria, antes de tudo, que estudantes e professores de sociologia devem ler esse livro, assim como qualquer um simplesmente interessado nessa disciplina ou que pretenda ser aluno ou professor da matéria. Esta rápida resenha, é óbvio, não pode expor de forma abrangente as teses de Smith, nem questionar todas as alegações dele. Além disso, meus pontos de vista e os de meus leitores podem não coincidir. De qualquer forma, cabe indicar aos leigos as principais questões discutidas, o que faço a seguir:

(1) A Esquerda contemporânea é uma religião secular. Esta é, claramente, a principal mensagem do livro, e não há nada de novo nisso. Analistas de um século atrás já haviam comparado o Partido Bolchevista a uma ordem religiosa. As religiões, seculares ou sectárias, pautam-se pela fé, de sorte que a razão ou a evidência empírica não pesa sobre a consciência dos crentes mais apaixonados. Eles não querem o diálogo, eles não aceitam a contradição. Os justiçadores sociais de hoje são tão facciosos quanto aqueles das guerras religiosas do passado.

(2) O livro mostra que aqueles contrários à tomada da sociologia pelo Projeto omitiram-se diante do assalto ou, no máximo, ofereceram resistência passiva. O mesmo se passou na mais ampla arena social e política. A ciência e a razão não bastam. Alguma coisa espiritual está faltando. A Direita precisa de um “intenso engajamento emocional” numa causa comum e de uma “subordinação a propósito coletivo mais alto”, que Smith observa na Esquerda. Os conservadores não têm esse espírito e nunca o terão. É óbvio que, se a Esquerda não for confrontada por contraforça superior, ela irá prevalecer.

(3) Os departamentos acadêmicos são sistemas fechados a par dos quais as guildas medievais deixariam os seus mestres envergonhados. Na contratação e promoção de professores universitários, ou no recrutamento de estudantes para cursos de pós-graduação, prevalecem critérios de base ideológica. Esses departamentos não se sujeitam a nenhuma forma de supervisão ou responsabilidade.

Uma observação final: livros de crítica à academia como os de Christian Smith vão sendo editados cada vez mais e em maior número, indício de que mais gente possa estar tomando consciência do perversivo efeito da Esquerda no labor acadêmico ocidental. Não obstante, entre todas as instituições da sociedade, a educação superior dá mostra de ser, pelas razões vistas acima, a de mais difícil reestruturação.

________________________

(1) O sociólogo Emile Durkheim, judeu francês, escreveu As formas elementares da vida religiosa (1912), obra na qual define o conceito de “Sagrado” de que se valeu Christian Smith.

(2) Eu concordo com o acadêmico canadense dissidente Ricardo Duchesne em que a culpa pelo marxismo cultural não é do Iluminismo. Cf. CANLORBE, Gregoire. A conversation with Ricardo Duchesne. The Occidental Quarterly, v. 19, n. 2, p. 32-35. 2019.

(3) Numa nota de rodapé na página 9, Smith cita aprovativamente Gordon Marshall: “A Sociologia é, algumas vezes,     vista (ao menos pelos sociólogos) como a rainha das ciências sociais, concertando e ampliando o conhecimento e as perspectivas de todas as (conceitualmente mais restritas) ciências afins”.

(4) WEITZMAN, Lenore. The divorce revolution: the unexpected social and economic consequences for women and children in America. New York: The Free Press, 1985.

(5) Cf. LEONARD, Thomas C. Illiberal reformers: race, eugenics, and american economics in the progressive era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Reviewed in: The Occidental Quarterly, v. 16, n.2, p.105-113. 2016.

(6) GOSSETT, Thomas F. Race: the history of an idea in America. Dallas TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963. p. 164.

(7) Ibid, 166.

(8) Ross citado em Leonard, Illiberal reformers, p. 50.

(9) Ibid. 158.

Fonte: The Occidental Observer. Autor: Nelson Rosit. Títulos originais: Sociology as Religion, Part 1; e Sociology as Religion, Part 2. Data de publicação: 31 de outubro de 2019 (Part 1) e 1.º de novembro de 2019 (Part 2). Versão brasilesa: Chauke Stephan Filho.

Are These Antifa/ BLM Riots A Jewish Coup?

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Earlier by Kevin MacDonald: The Trump Impeachment: A Clash Between America’s Competing Elites?

It was always obvious to those of us on campus in the Vietnam years that if you fired at random into a mob of student protestors you would hit a lot of Jews, and that is exactly what happened at Kent State in 1970 (three out of the four dead) [Remembering the Jews of Kent State, 45 Years Later, by Anne Cohen, The Forward, May 4, 2015]. Subsequently, Stanley Rothman documented the key Jewish role in the New Left in his definitive 1982 study Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left. Similarly, at least one (Joseph Rosenbaum) and possibly two (Anthony W. Huber) of the Antifa shot in self-defense by Kenosha WI lifeguard Kyle Rittenhouse appear to have been Jews. (In a now-deleted post, the Jewish Chronicle tried to downplay Rosenbaum by saying he was “non-practicing.”) [Rosenbaum, not Jewish but targeted by antisemitism after death during unrest, by Rob Golub, August 27, 2020]. Will scholars eventually find that the Black Lives Matter moral panic that has convulsed the U.S. in 2020 also had a substantial Jewish component—that it is, in fact, a Color Revolution-style attempted Jewish coup?

I raised a similar question during the bizarre (because obviously doomed to failure) impeachment hearings in January:

Is the Trump impeachment a Jewish coup? It’s a dangerous question even to ask…

But undeniably, Jews have taken very prominent, very public roles in impeachment…In effect, impeachment is a project of the numerically dominant Jewish Democrat-voting Left, with the Jewish counsels for the Democrats questioning Jewish witnesses in House committees headed by Jewish representatives, and covered with breathless enthusiasm by Jewish-owned media outlets like MSNBC, CNN, and The New York Times.

The only surprise: that the Jewish role has been so public.

This summer of riots and statue-toppling, like the late-winter impeachment farce, should not be seen as a one-off event. I believe it is part of the struggle between our new, Jewish-dominated elite, mostly stemming from the 1880–1920 First Great Wave of immigration, and the traditional white Christian majority of America, significantly derived from pre-Revolutionary colonial stock but augmented by subsequent white Christian immigration, from which America’s historic so-called WASP elite was derived.

Of course, the people on the street are poor Blacks looting athletic shoes and TV sets, aided and abetted by young Whites playing hooky from their jobs at Starbucks. But the Great 2020 Black Lives Matter Moral Panic is still an elite project. Otherwise the elite Main Stream Media wouldn’t be systematically downplaying the violence resulting from what they label “mainly peaceful” protests; and they wouldn’t be ignoring the huge upsurge in shootings and crimes [Kids Getting Caught in Crossfire as US Gun Violence Surges,  by Don Babwin, AP, August 3, 2020]. And money wouldn’t be flowing into BLM-linked organizations from major corporations like Apple, Nike, Facebook, Coca Cola, and YouTube. [Want to know where all those corporate donations for #BLM are going? Here’s the list, by James Wellemyer, NBC, June 5, 2020]

In other words, the political class in the big cities run by Democrats (i.e., all of them), the lion’s share of the elite media and corporate America, the entire academic Establishment, and both major political parties are complicit.

So how did we come to this? It’s been a long process. But one thing that it is not: a reflection of the objective situation of American blacks.

Since the 1960s, the Ruling Class instituted a variety of programs to erase the gaps in income and wealth between the races. Affirmative Action created a Black middle class—according to a Brookings Institute study, roughly 71% of Blacks are middle- or upper-class [The Black middle class needs political attention, too, Andre M. Perry and Carl Romer, February 27, 2020]). Billions were thrown into Head Start and other programs, like busing students. Colleges bent over backwards to recruit Black students. Private corporations—and even more so the government—hired Black workers. And in 2008 Barack Obama was elected president on a wave of optimism on race relations.

Of course, it wasn’t enough. A recent study replicated Rushton and Jensen’s 2005 conclusion that 50–70 percent of the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is genetic. [Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability by Jordan Lasker, Bryan J. Pesta, John G. R. Fuerst and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Psych, August 30, 2019]. So all these programs could never erase the racial gaps in the genetically-influenced traits needed for success in a 21st-century economy. Indeed, arguably the welfare system and the sexual revolution—both progressive causes—were especially hard on the Black family: The markers of family dysfunction skyrocketed in the 1960s for Blacks and Whites alike, but much worse for Blacks—e.g., around 70 percent of Black babies are now born out of wedlock, over 80 percent for Blacks with a high school education or less [Dramatic increase in the proportion of births outside of marriage in the United States from 1990 to 2016, by Elizabeth Wildsmith, Jennifer Manlove, Elizabeth Cook, ChildTrends.org,  August 08, 2018].

Thus the chart below, presenting data of the sort found in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, show the continuing cultural deterioration since the 1960s: The proportion of out-of-wedlock births among whites in 2016 is around twice the percentage for blacks back in 1960—but blacks have suffered worse.

Significantly, however, the leadership of Black Lives Matter opposes the “Western nuclear family” despite family breakdown’s many correlations with poor outcomes for children. Other Blacks see this paradox (and note Marcellus Wiley’s comments on “white supremacy” at the end of this video):

 

The reason for BLM’s apparently perverse attitude: its leaders are self-proclaimed Marxists—i.e., part of the elite political class. [ Black Lives Matter co-founder describes herself as ‘trained Marxist’, by Yaron Steinbuch, New York Post,  June 25, 2020] Note that BLM co-founder Alicia Garza identifies as Jewish.

So how to conceptualize Jewish involvement? As documented in my book The Culture of Critique, Jews have been the backbone of the American Left since they arrived in America and are central to the new elite that emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s. The Frankfurt School, largely shaped by Jewish refugees from Hitler, reconceptualized anti-Semitism as resulting, not from class conflict as orthodox Marxism had claimed, but from ethnic conflict. Similarly, Jewish activism in the post-World-War-II U.S. focused on importing non-Whites as allies of Jews in opposition to the traditional White American majority. Hence the critical role of Jews and Jewish organizations in the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act.

Jews and Jewish organizations have allied themselves with Blacks since the early twentieth Century with the founding of the NAACP. And, despite a substantial history of Black anti-Semitism (e.g., Louis Farrakhan, the recent spate of attacks on Orthodox Jews in New York, anti-Jewish statements by Black media figures like Nick Cannon—who also thinks Blacks are superior to White people but only apologized to Jews), this alliance continues into the present.

(But the Cannon incident brings into focus that there are limits to Cancel Culture. Steve Sailer has pointed out that previous black insurrections have been stopped when they begin to criticize Jews, which he thinks is happening now).

Some Jews have taken the opportunity of recent developments in Cancel Culture to put forth their own continuing grievances against the West. Hence the Jewish campaign to remove the statue of French king Louis IX (Saint Louis) from a park in his namesake city of St. Louis. [Should St. Louis take down the statue of its anti-Semitic namesake? Activists say yes., by Ben Sales, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 26, 2020]

In this spirit, the Forward’s Aiden Pink helpfully supplied a list of 8 “anti-Semites” who still have memorials in the U.S.: Charles Lindbergh (who correctly identified Jews as one pressure group attempting to get the U.S. into World War II), Gen. George S. Patton (who was unsympathetic to the post-World War II treatment of Germans and Jews), Henry Ford (publisher of The International Jew), Peter Stuyvesant (who tried to prevent Jews from settling in New York), Martin Luther (author of On the Jews and Their Lies), President Ulysses S. Grant (who issued an order expelling Jewish cotton speculators from areas under his command during the Civil War), Mary Elizabeth Lease (who linked Jews with banking as part of her populism), and Thomas E. Watson (who led a campaign against Jewish accused murderer Leo Frank). [8 American monuments celebrating anti-Semites, June 23, 2020]

How long before they too are Cancelled?

But the major new development in this summer’s Cultural Revolution: cleansing the internet of material the Left doesn’t like. Essentially, the Left appears to have figured out a way around the First Amendment, by co-opting the private sector. Jews and Jewish organizations have been heavily involved.

It wasn’t long ago that the tech nerds who developed the internet had a strong ideology of free speech. This gave rise to an online flourishing of dissident ideas, with outlets such as VDARE.com and my own Occidental Observer.

But Jewish organizations, which had loudly favored free speech when Leftists were being blacklisted in the 1950s, had decided even twenty years ago that the internet represented a threat to their interests. Already by 1999 the Jewish enforcer group the Anti-Defamation League had published Poisoning the Web: Hate Online: An ADL Report on Internet Hate, Bigotry, and Violence.

(“Hate,” remember, is simply speech that the Left in general and Jews in particular dislike. Thus Jewish intellectual Susan Sontag’s saying “the white race is the cancer of human history” is OK).

More recently, Andrew Joyce has documented that, in Europe, organizations like Britain’s Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, and the European Jewish Congress have taken the lead in banning speech on Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google+, Snapchat, Dailymotion, and Jeuxvideo.com.

Similarly in the U.S., the ADL has been deeply involved with social media companies. While most companies have been completely compliant, the ADL resorted to organizing a campaign against Facebook regarding messages on the Holocaust. They presented a

series of demands to drop the boycott [that] include the granting of high-level access to ‘civil rights’ (i.e., ADL) officials who will perform regular, independent audits” of “hate” on the platform (which would allow them to engage in intelligence gathering, the collection of IP addresses etc.), immediate removal of “thousands” of White advocacy groups, and the use of Facebook software to “target” “neo-Nazis and White supremacists. [“Secure Tolerance”: The Jewish Plan to Permanently Silence the West, Part 3 of 3,  by Andrew Joyce, Occidental Observer, July 15, 2020]

Facebook is certainly not principled in its opposition to the ADL demands. Recently Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said on an earnings call … that the company agreed with the goal of the boycott, to have Facebook be hate-free.” [Facebook: increased ad revenue even as ADL-led boycott reduced spending, by Marcy Oster/JTA, Jerusalem Post,  August 3, 2020]

And Facebook has just announced a ban on all political advertising in the seven days before the November 3 Presidential election. This obviously hurts the Trump campaign, which has relied heavily on social media advertising to get around Leftist control of the corporate media. But it hasn’t satisfied Leftists, who simply want Facebook to suppress the Right while allowing the Left free rein. Facebook appears desperate to avoid this, probably because making blatant editorial decisions would strengthen forces who want to remove the liability protection it currently enjoys as a supposedly neutral platform. [ Facing immense pressure, Facebook had no choice but to ban new political ads week before election , by Jon Swartz, MarketWatch, September 4, 2020]

It goes without saying that the giants of internet advertising are Jewish-dominated: Facebook (Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg) and Google (founded by Sergei Brin and Larry Page).

Censorship is also rampant at PayPal whose CEO is Dan Schulman. [National Justice Exclusive: Leaked Images From PayPal Seminar Reveals Explicit Racial Bias Against White Customers, Eric Striker, National-Justice.com, July 4, 2020] PayPal, which dominates the internet payment market, has begun to refuse to service accounts linked to White advocacy—or even criticism of mass immigration, although that’s the issue that won Trump the 2016 election.

Given the long involvement of Jewish organizations in suppressing “Hate Speech,” including their recent involvement, in collaboration with BLM-linked Al Sharpton, in censoring the internet, we could well see all dissident sites on the right—particularly those linked to White identity and interests—cancelled [Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt Joins Al Sharpton to Promote Boycott of ‘Hate’]

The only saving grace: this is a group that has a long record of going too far.

Earlier this year, considering the question of why Jewish legislators and media figures were expending so much energy on a far-fetched impeachment theory that had no chance of success, I answered: Because they can’t help themselves.

And, indeed, impeachment did fail.

Similarly, Antifa and the Tech Totalitarians will go too far. It may be the unprovoked murder of a Trump supporter on the streets of Portland or Facebook’s subsequent outrageous blocking the pages of the very group to which this innocent victim belonged. It may be the national MSM’s complete repression of the news that, after a memorial service for the murdered Trump supporter, an Antifa militant ran over and nearly killed Proud Boy member—obviously because of the embarrassing parallel to Charlottesville.

It’s impossible to say. But history says an overreach will happen.

Originally posted at VDARE.com

Kevin MacDonald [email him] is emeritus professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. His research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives in developmental psychology, personality theory, Western culture, and ethnic relations (group evolutionary strategies). He edits and is a frequent contributor to The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly. For his website, click here.

Why Are Whites Cancelling Their Race? Chapter 8 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition

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Whites cleaning messy destruction of blacks in Minneapolis

Do you know why Europeans across the political spectrum — Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists — are morally committed to a politics that is leading to the dissolution of their millennial racial identities while promoting the racial identities of non-white immigrants within their own nations?

There are many answers out there. Whites have been brainwashed by elites in control of our schools, media, and government institutions. The importation of immigrants is a strategic ploy by leftist parties to create a permanent bloc of immigrant voters. Corporations are looking for cheap labor and real estate development.

But the deeper answer puts the blame right in front of White themselves: immigrant diversity is rooted in a culture that takes the individual as its basic ontological principle, disparages any form of ethnic nationalism among Whites in favor of the rights of all humans to become citizens of European nations. The Western ideals of individualism, egalitarianism and moral universalism are the ultimate causes.

White Moral Communities

In our extended review of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition we have seen that for Kevin MacDonald individualism is the core principle of Western civilization. The root of this principle is the separation of the individual from kin-based ties. It would seem, then, that MacDonald would hold this separation responsible for the plight of Whites today. His answer to this question, however, goes beyond a straightforward blaming of liberalism. The West today is not dominated by free-wheeling individuals. It is dominated by extremely powerful “moral communities” in the media, universities, “civil rights” organizations, political parties, and business groups. These moral communities are “pervasive throughout the institutional structures of the West”. The “conventional morality and intellectual discourse” of the West is dominated by “leftist ideologies of race and ethnicity”. While the “cohesion” of these communities is not grounded in ethnic ties, it is still “tribal” in the sense that those who dissent from its values are “socially ostracized” and curtailed in their ability to make a living.

These moral communities, moreover, are not bereft of a biological basis — they are anchored in an evolved psychological need humans have to seek a “social identity” inside groups where they are positively valued. The members of these moral communities are no less inclined than kin groups to view outgroup members in negative terms. The negatively evaluated outgroup is defined primarily as a white who has an ingroup attachment to his ethnic group or race. The individual rights of those who dissent from these moral communities can be curtailed since they are members of a hated outgroup.

While the moral communities of Whites are not based on kinship ties but on morally approved principles, MacDonald brings up research studies, including his own, showing that ingroup favoritism and discrimination against outgroups remain very powerful biological drives. Experiments have shown that Western individualists will favor their own group even when those groups are “constructed using random labels for ingroup and outgroup…and even if there are no conflicts of interest between the groups”. The need to identify with a group, to wish to be validated by ingroup members and discriminate against outgroup members is an evolved result of natural selection, and it is a tendency that continues to prevail among Whites despite their condemnation of biologically based identities. The mental processing that goes on in the expression of these identities is “not the result of conscious reflection but more like an innate psychological reflex”.

In the same vein, MacDonald draws a distinction between implicit and explicit processing of social or ingroup identities among Whites. Just as Whites have an instinctive need to form ingroups that exclude outsiders, they have an instinctive inclination to prefer members of their own race, as is evident in white flight, choice of neighborhoods and schools, and in what some have identified as “stuff White people like to do”. But since these biases are prohibited in White communities, these behaviors are manifested implicitly rather than expressed consciously or explicitly. Whites have been socialized to control their ethnocentric tendencies. Their evolved ethnocentric inclinations are thus kept in check by their conscious “higher brain centers located in the cortex”, which is the area of the brain that reasons and assimilates the values of society. Since Western culture is “hostile to white ethnocentrism”, the higher brain inhibits the instinctive ethnocentrism of Whites.

White moral communities also provide lucrative jobs, security, and emotional comfort to White individuals who abide by the ideological rules. We are not dealing with ethereal beings motivated by high minded principles. Those who engage in “competitive virtue signaling” are self-interested creatures with highly charged emotional feelings of moral righteousness. These feelings are very pleasurable and may lead to an irrational addiction for incessant moral approval from one’s ingroup members. MacDonald cites an authority about “the pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong…that your method of helping others is so purely motivated and correct that all criticism can be dismissed with a shrug, along with any contradicting evidence”.

PM Justin Trudeau’s political career has been all about virtue signalling

In other words, to understand why Whites are so vehemently obsessed with diversity and so keen (or at least indifferent) about their own replacement, one needs to keep in mind the powerful economic incentives and emotional comforts which characterize the supposedly “conscientious” communities of Whites. The “empathy” whites have for non-whites is backed up by “a very elaborate infrastructure” that provides multiple opportunities for Whites. Whites have been “incentivized” economically and emotionally.

Some in the dissident right think the way to overcome these moral communities is to encourage Whites to exhibit stronger ethnic identities just like blacks and other minorities. But this message would go against the central thesis of MacDonald’s book, which is that White individualism has a genetic basis. The moral communities Whites created in the past were not antithetical to their interests but were indeed the most successful communities created in history, the basis of immense achievements. As I argued in earlier parts, following MacDonald’s line of thought, the city-states created by the ancient Greeks, the incredibly successful republican form of government created by the Romans, the highly dominant nation states of modern Europe, can all be seen as “moral communities” created beyond the old tribal and highly nepotistic communities of non-whites.

Personality of Whites

This chapter has a very insightful section showing that Whites have unusual personality traits. Insomuch as Whites developed relations with wider tribal networks and went on to create city-states and institutions based on merit, their concern for reputation did not end “at the border of the family and the wider kinship group”. Whites sought “a moral reputation as capable, honest, trustworthy and fair” in the wider society and nation. There were evolutionary pressures for conscientiousness, responsibility, reliability, trustworthiness, dutifulness, and honesty outside the kin group. It is not accident that all the moral philosophies seeking concepts with universal validity (fairness, impartiality, due process) were developed by Whites.

I can’t recall a historian of civilizations writing about this fundamental contrast in personalities. Modernization theorists in the 1950s identified these personality traits as products of modernity per se. Educational experts and aid packages were lauded as the way to create multiple Switzerlands in the African continent. But personality systems run deep. Corruption and ethnic nepotism are pervasive in modernized Third World nations.

This lack of trust beyond the kinship group is the fundamental problem that prevents the development of civil societies in much of Asia and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. People who have good jobs are expected to help their relatives, leading to high levels of corruption.

But if we can’t remake our personalities in an African way, how are we going to counter the suicidal moral communities of the West? MacDonald’s answer is that Whites do have an implicit inclination to favor their own race, to be ethnocentric. The problem is that the left controls the moral communities. These communities were not anti-White in the recent past. But the “culture of critique” is currently in charge of “programming the higher areas of the brain” of Whites, so the explicit culture is continually suppressing the “implicit ethnocentric tendencies of White people”. This is what the ADL and the SPLC are about: policing the thoughts and behavior of Whites while promoting the ethnic interests of Jews.

MacDonald anticipates that as Whites become aware of their “impending minority status” this will trigger White ethnocentrism. Whites will come to the realization that their culture of individualism, rule of law, and social trust require them to create moral communities that are “adaptive in a Darwinian sense”. Whites will come to the realization that in nations that are committed to multiculturalism and the celebration of the ingroup identities of non-whites, their only hope for survival is to create strong ingroups based on moral principles that value white history, traditions, and family — and exclude those who seek the destruction of Whites.

Reposted from EuroCanadian.ca

A White Nationalist Constitution

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As our nation comes apart at the seams, shoddily sewn together in the first place, we must finally acknowledge that conservatism was not enough. The United States Constitution was not enough. As Revilo Oliver observed, “the document must have borne within itself the seed of its own dissolution.” Our compromised Constitution was indeed a compromise, and thus it failed to avert “the decline and fall of the American Republic, which it was designed to establish and preserve.” Abraham Lincoln ripped it into shreds, consigning the Southern States to an eternally impoverished tyranny for good measure. Franklin Roosevelt and his cabal of Jews incinerated its tattered remnants. Every year, Oliver noted, “archaeologists open the graves of dead civilizations and exhume the pathetic remains of forgotten nations that once thought themselves deathless.” For those of us who still hope, against all odds, to retrieve the land that once was ours, “it behooves us to understand the errors of our forefathers so that we will not doom ourselves to repeating them.” One such error was that, despite their Christian recognition of the fallen status of man, the Framers wrote a Constitution for a virtuous people, a Constitution with gaps that would quickly be said to be “open to interpretation” by demoniac lizard-men.

In all fairness, how could they have anticipated the morass of Jewish filth that has drowned our people? A more glaring fault of our forefathers was their use of quasi-egalitarian language in the Revolution. The Constitutional Republic replaced the Articles of Confederation in large part to correct the burgeoning appearance of democracy, a disgusting system which even the most ardent Anti-Federalists abhorred. That said, it was not long before the march toward universal suffrage got underway, the limited franchise made meaningless. No serious nation would permit the gutter dysgenic flotsam and jetsam of American cities to vote, unless that nation was suicidal. By giving the vote to the worst of us, we dug ourselves into a pit and cast away the ladder. As Oliver acknowledged, had the franchise remained limited to White propertied men, “the United States would not have become the political and racial cesspool it is today, and decent Americans could still own property.” Not rent, mind you, but own; Oliver elaborated that “many witlings today think they have property because they rent houses and land from the usurers and tax-collectors of the vast engine of organized crime that governs them and tells them what to ‘think.’” A man with land can provide for himself and his family, “and so cannot be reduced to total slavery and abject dependence on the whims of their alien rulers.”

Racial conservatism, White Nationalism, is the only solution to regenerate our vanishing race. I do not here attempt to draft the new Constitution that we need, but rather humbly offer some of my own big-picture policy proposals for a potential White Nationalist Constitution, assuming that we model our ethnostate on some form of a constitutional republic. Many of you may disagree, perhaps vehemently, with some of my suggestions. I welcome you to submit your own ideas in the comments; surely, this is a worthwhile intellectual challenge. We cannot dam this hurricane; the totalitarian New World Order has arrived, and it is here to stay for now, the occupant of the White House be damned. We must focus on resistance and, above all, on what comes next. Before we can seize victory, we must have a clear vision of the White ethnostate that we wish to build. Of course, the first step in securing the ethnostate is to purchase as much land as we can. Remote, rugged, and rural are our watchwords. The cities will burn first. The countryside offers no quarter to the Blacks, the Browns, or their Jewish overlords. Again, though, a clear political program is a necessary — if not sufficient — prerequisite to victory. I hope that my proposals ignite this much-needed conversation.

 

Citizenship, Foreign Policy, Immigration, and Suffrage

 

  1. All citizens shall have the franchise.
  2. Citizenship, and all attached rights, shall be limited to White men aged 25 and over with freely held property (i.e., real property that is owned, not rented, with no exceptions) and who have earned a 100% score on a civilizational competency exam which includes questions of civics, government, and history. Citizenship may be stripped for a number of crimes against the race and the nation.
  3. Whites proven to have assisted in any manner the anti-White egalitarian Judeocracy, including by directly or indirectly engaging in private and/or public support of the cultural and/or physical destruction of the Historic American Nation and/or the White race shall be expelled from our nation, along with their families.
  4. Asians (Central Asians, East Asians, Pacific Islanders and South and Southeast Asians), Blacks (African, American, and Caribbean), Non-White Hispanics (Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans), Jews, and North Africans and Middle Easterners shall not be permitted entry into our nation for any purpose whatsoever, nor shall the aforesaid be permitted to hold any property or other interest therein. North American Amerindian individuals shall be permitted to remain on one reservation of their ancestral tribe(s), provided that said individuals do not leave said reservation. Tribal sovereignty shall be dissolved.
  5. Individuals of the forbidden groups in (4) who held citizenship in the geographic unit formerly known as the United States will be expelled, unless that individual qualifies as the non-White parent of a half-White citizen, as set forth in (9). Individuals of the forbidden groups in (4) who resided in the geographic unit formerly known as the United States without holding U.S. citizenship will be expelled, with no exceptions. Individuals of the forbidden groups in (4) who were imprisoned by the polity formerly known as the United States for violent crimes against Whites will be executed immediately. All other individuals of the forbidden groups in (4) who were imprisoned by the polity formerly known as the United States will be expelled alongside their other racial kinsmen.
  6. Individuals expelled in (5) will be repatriated to their country of ancestral origin at their own expense. If an individual cannot afford this cost, another member of his racial group will do so on his behalf.
  7. Individuals expelled in (5) will surrender all wealth earned as the result of harming Whites, including but not limited to wealth earned from government welfare programs, private and public affirmative action quotas, the promulgation of illicit and/or immoral activity, wage deflation, and usury.
  8. Immigration procedures shall be available only to Whites of European ancestry, including Europeans, White Hispanics, and White South Africans.
  9. In the case of mixed-race men, only those with at least 50% White ancestry shall be permitted to gain citizenship, provided that the other 50% contains no Black or Jewish ancestry. For the aforementioned qualifying mixed-race, half-White citizens, their non-White parent may reside in our nation, but cannot gain citizenship and cannot own property. The aforementioned qualifying mixed-race, half-White citizens may also marry full-blooded Whites. All other forms of miscegenation shall be forbidden, punishable by expulsion.
  10. The practice of Judaism or Islam in any form shall be forbidden, punishable by expulsion.
  11. All borders of our nation shall be patrolled, in their entirety, by armed soldiers or private militiamen, our land boundaries further secured by a wall.
  12. Our nation shall maintain no foreign military alliances or installations.
  13. Our nation shall make no foreign aid expenditures, and shall conduct no cultural or economic exchange with any directly or indirectly hostile nation.

 

Criminal Justice, Culture, and Environment

 

  1. The sentence of life, with or without the possibility of parole, shall be replaced with the sentence of death. Convicts sentenced to death shall receive one appeal only, upon the failure of which the convict shall be executed within one week, by firing squad alone.
  2. All drugs criminalized by the polity formerly known as the United States, including marijuana in all of its forms, shall be prohibited. Substance abuse shall be punishable by prison sentence, while drug manufacture, distribution, and/or sale shall be punishable by expulsion. Drug manufacturers, distributors, or sellers whose “clients” go on to die, if proven that said manufacturer, distributor, or seller’s drugs were a necessary condition of said death, shall be punished by death.
  3. Infanticide shall be prohibited in all cases, except in the extremely improbable scenario wherein the life of the mother would be placed in mortal peril, subject to the permission of both father and mother.
  4. Marriage shall be available to noncitizens, but shall only be between White men and White women, including half-White citizens as set forth in (9). Mixed-race couples with half-White children which qualify as citizens under (9) shall have their marriage recognized, so long as said marriage was performed prior to the formation of our nation.
  5. Divorce may only be obtained if sought by both husband and wife, unless one party can provide a high standard of evidence of substantial fault on the part of the other to justify a unilateral divorce. If divorce is granted, both mother and father shall evenly split the custody of the children conceived within their marriage, unless a strong showing can be made that, for the good of the child, one parent should be granted full custody.
  6. Homosexuality shall be forbidden, punishable by expulsion. Any individual found to have encouraged, facilitated, promoted, or participated in homosexuality shall be expelled.
  7. Transgenderism shall be forbidden, punishable by expulsion. Any individual found to have encouraged, facilitated, promoted, or participated in transgenderism shall be expelled.
  8. Pornography, in any and all forms, shall be forbidden. The manufacture, consumption, distribution, and/or sale of pornography shall be punishable by expulsion. If involving minors, rape, and/or sexual trafficking, the violator shall be punishable by death.
  9. Pedophilia shall be forbidden, punishable by death.
  10. Subversive anti-White speech, protest, or other action shall be punishable by expulsion.
  11. Firearms shall be available to all citizens, and each community with a population of 100 or more must maintain a well-drilled militia, or “neighborhood watch.” Citizenship shall be withheld from any man who has not served for at least 2 years in the national military, State militia, or community militia.
  12. Generous childbirth bounties shall be offered on a targeted basis to eugenic White couples.
  13. Publicly-funded welfare shall be available only if conditioned upon daily sobriety tests, daily evidence that the applicant is actively seeking employment, and a term of public infrastructural work, the length of which shall be proportional to the receipt of welfare.
  14. Our nation shall not subsidize “green energy”, including but not limited to “biomass”, ethanol, solar, and wind energy. Protected wilderness areas shall be expanded and rigorously patrolled against poaching and pollution, while clean air and water legislation shall be thoroughly enforced, punishable by imprisonment.
  15. Animal cruelty, including animal testing, vivisection, and factory farming, shall be punishable by death. Factory farming practices that do not rise to the standard for animal cruelty shall be prohibited, punishable by economic seizure and imprisonment.

 

Again, this meager list of policy proposals is intended as a challenge. I have left a plethora of issues unaddressed, and my solutions to those issues that I have chosen to address will certainly elicit polarized responses. While I wholeheartedly stand by each word that I write, I also understand that you may have better ideas. Express them in the comments, along with any ideas for other policy problems.

 

Remember the words of Fight Club’s Tyler Durden: “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.” The United States of America is dead. We mustn’t mourn what has been lost, but consider it an opportunity — an opportunity the likes of which come around scarcely more often than once in a century. We have the chance now to wipe it all away and build a better world, to finally and forever secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.

 

How to Survive Communism in the USA?

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Communist Flag Protest

Editor’s Note: This is Tom Sunic’s article in one piece. Still having technical problems, but we’ll survive!

The fundamental mistake made by most American conservatives, both old and new, is to think of communism solely as a violent ideology designed to abolish private property. During the so-called Cold War, they imagined that by mimicking some communist practices they could tone down the very real communist threat and elicit some Soviet sympathy. They should have been more careful what they wished for. The reason why communism fell apart in the early 1990s in the communist East was due to the fact that communist ideologemes, such as the idea of progress, economic equality, and the instauration of a borderless and multiracial society, had been more successfully put into practice in the capitalist West than in the communist East — albeit under a less abrasive name and without resorting to a large scale state terror.

For many Americans, surviving communism is therefore a contradiction in terms given that they have already fully aligned themselves to the System, i.e., “the deep state”, oblivious to its repressive crypto-communistic principles. Unsurviving communism, by contrast, is a destiny of a hapless few who are prepared to live a life of dissent — and also pay a heavy price for their non-conformist views.

Modern day neo-communist BLM and antifascist activists in the US know well that parading with the name of communism could backfire. Their self-ascribed title “antifa” resonates far better in the ears and eyes of the modern media. Many of them, including many of their Democratic party overlords are heirs to a now defunct Homo sovieticus species who once thrived in communist countries of Eastern Europe. The twin brotherhood between former Homo sovieticus and the present Homo americanus has had a very long history irrespective of their often feigned feuds and fake semantic posturing. [i] Given that the US, since its inception, has also been involved in a large number of world-improving projects, not least its century-long messianic virtue-signaling adventures aimed at elevating foreign peoples world-wide to a global City on the Hill, it was to be expected that at some point the communist temptation would gain in popularity in a new garb and hit home in the US. For example, US campuses continue to be the main breeding ground of antifa activists, having now more of their adepts than campuses in Western Europe where, over the last decade, there has been a noticeable recycling to populism and nationalism by many former leftist, but also Jewish authors (Michel Onfray, Alain Soral, Eric Zemmour). In post-communist Eastern Europe, organized antifa groups and their LGBT sidekicks are virtually non-existent, except when temporarily hired and exported by EU or State Department-sponsored NGOs in order to unseat some local populist and anti-globalist ruler. Hatred against antifas in all segments of East European society is understandable given that for many the term antifascism rings the bell of communism. Worth recalling is that words and locutions containing nouns or modifiers related to the word “antifascism” were in surplus in all official communist documents in Eastern Europe, even on marriage certificates, lasting well into the late 1950s. During the Cold War, and without any exception, all East European dissidents were squarely depicted in communist court proceedings as fascist agents.

The brainwashing of young American masses by the word antifascism owes much to the early Bolshevik agitator Leo Trotsky and his collection of essays under the title What is Fascism and how to Fight it,[ii] in which he depicts fascism as the ultimate stage of capitalism and showing how communists in the USA must smash it:

The backwardness of the United State working class is only a relative term. In very many important respects, it is the most progressive working class of the world, technically and in its standard of living…The next historic wave in the United States will be the wave of radicalism of the masses, not fascism. Of course, the war can hinder the radicalization for some time, but then it will give to the radicalization a more tremendous tempo and swing.[iii]

The recent antifa riots in many large cities in USA are also a belated follow-up on riots carried out by antifa “sixty-eigthers” half a century ago all over the West. [iv] They were successful in imposing communist cultural hegemony in higher education and in paving the way, a decade later, for the political takeover by the Left. Sixty-eighters spawned the modern-day antifa. However, neither the psychology of sixty-eighters, nor their modern antifa offshoots can be fully grasped if one loses sight of the world order created jointly by the capitalist US and the communist Soviet Union in 1945, both being part of the common antifascist block. In the final analysis, the entire West, with America at the helm, is unable to repudiate modern antifa activists, let alone declare them a terrorist organisation, unless it first revises its own writing of the history of World War II and overhauls its own system of liberal governance.

The antifa mindset

Apart from the Gulag system and the topography of its countless killing fields, Communism must first and foremost be analysed as an anthropology, or better yet as a widespread social pathology, albeit savored and craved subconsciously by a very large number of its future victims. The obsession with the idea of equality and equal redistribution of goods and capital is as old as humanity itself irrespective of the name this obsession may carry in different countries and epochs. Several undeservedly forgotten authors such as Claude Polin and Alexander Zinoviev, already quoted in TOO on several occasions, long ago noted that it is a deadly mistake to view communism as the terror of the few against many; rather, “it is the terror of all against all at every moment.”

As the flower and crowning glory of communality, communism represents a type of society which is nearest and dearest to the masses no matter how dreadful the potential consequences for them might be.[v]

Long ago I wrote, based on the analyses of these and other authors dealing with the communist anthropology, that the faith in communism presupposes first and foremost a peculiar mindset whose historical realization has been made possible by primordial egalitarian impulses followed by negative socio-biological selection. Throughout man’s biocultural evolution egalitarian instincts have been held in check by cultural institutions and racial in-group constraints. With the advent of the mass multiracial system, deceptively called democracy, resistance to these animalistic and inborn instincts is becoming virtually impossible.

The contemporary USA is a good place to study the proto-communist mindset. The very abstract eighteenth-century Enlightenment-egalitarian-inspired statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was bound to open up a Pandora box of wishful thinking all over Europe, also opening, two hundred years later, the floodgates of non-European immigration. Those do-good romantic Jeffersonian words had a specific meaning in his epoch and for his fellow travellers; today they are being differently interpreted by US lawyers of Mexican, Asian or African ancestry, let alone by their illiterate or semi-literate, lowe-IQ clients arriving in droves to America from Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

It is also a great self-delusion common to many American conservatives, both old and new, to imagine that they can avert the rise of communism by preaching the capitalist gospel of permanent economic growth. Contrary to a well-entrenched communist-Trotskyite dogma, communism can very well thrive in and within a capitalist free market economy. In view of the coming shortages of resources and the surge in the surplus of uprooted people, the communist experiment seems to be the only functional and viable system for the future of the world. Unlike any system hitherto in the history of mankind communism offers an effortless society, psychological predictability and economic security, however meager, bleak or frugal they may all be. Worse, communism increases the basest human instincts, which can best be seen in the violent behavior of US antifa rioters. Communism is the ideal system for any multiracial state composed of gregarious masses, consumer-minded citizens and lower-IQ individuals.

It is another well-spread hoax doctored up by Leon Trotsky that communists are archenemies of capitalism. The case of modern China, a country the size of the US, bears witness that in an overpopulated society facing scarce resources, the communist ruling oligarchy can work hand in hand with liberal free marketeers, creating large differences in wealth. Similar to Germany’s numerous antifa organisations, including the powerful and well-funded German Amadeu Antonio Stiftung , the activities of modern day antifa in America are also profusely funded by wealthy financiers, international corporations, and individuals, with a billionaire George Soros being the best known. Finally, from the geopolitical perspective it must not be forgotten that antifascist guerillas during World War II in Europe would have not lasted a week had they not been supported by the US and UK massive financial and military aid handed out to their sponsor in the Soviet Union.

Most American conservatives are supportive of communistic legal practices such as affirmative action, forgetting that the same “positive” racial discrimination legislation, albeit differently worded, was part and parcel of the Soviet system whose goal was to strike a balance between 16 former Soviet republics containing dozens of competing and feuding nationalities and ethnic groups. The passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was quite in line with the American Cold War wish to neutralize the Soviet threat by doubling down on the same Soviet legal practices, that is, the re-enactment of the multiracial system already laid down in the Soviet constitution of 1936. But, unlike in the Soviet Union — the dogma of multiculturalism and legal provisions on affirmative action are still alive and kicking in America.

The good news is that even if American communists, under the banner of Antifascism or Democratism, or Liberalism come to power in the US they will soon start eliminating each other. This would be fully in accordance with the iron law of egalitarian entropy, a fact often overlooked by many analysts of communism. The still-strong myth that communists and antifas only enjoyed killing anti-communists and fascists during and after World War II must be dismissed. In fact, ever since their coming to power communists and antifas in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in 1917 and 1945 respectively, were involved in the orgy of mutual purges and killings. It must be expected that American antifas or liberals, or whatever they may name themselves in the near future, will start, once in power, with similar mutual killings. Virtually all big masterminds of communist mass killings during the pre-WWII and the post-WWII Soviet era, heads of powerful Soviet secret police agencies ( Genrikh Yagoda, Lavrentiy Beria, Nikolai Yezhov, Lev Kamenev ) were at some point demoted or ended up themselves on the gallows erected by their former communist comrades. A fresh example of latent communist entropy transpiring in incessant intra-communist warfare could be observed on the eve of the violent break-up of multicultural communist Yugoslavia in 1991, falsely ascribed by the foreign media to local nationalists. However, a closer look at the profile of major decision makers in seceding ex-Yugoslav republics points to their common communist past. Similarly, on a positive side, if one carefully looks at the pedigree, or reads the early works of some of the best and brightest anti-Communist analysts and writers (Boris Souvarine, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ante Ciliga), one can notice that they were at some point in their life ardent supporters of antifascism and communism.

Reductio ad hitlerum; reductio ad iudaeorom

The language arsenal of modern American antifa activists is another field of study that merits closer psycholinguistic attention. Antifa rioters and their college mentors, along with pro-communist US main media outlets, including a large number of their Democratic party coaches are using a revised communist jargon borrowed from the defunct Soviet Union. The Soviet talk was once the daily menu of the communist propaganda in Eastern Europe, its goal being to dehumanize, demonize and criminalize political opponents. The language processing was simple — it consisted in reversing the meaning of words and redefining political concepts. Similar practice can be observed today in the US amongst modern antifa activists and main media outlets who resort to the principles of reductio ad absurdum, that is, they posit propositions that elicit contradictory yet self-serving conclusions. Along these reductionist lines of verbal sophistry, the process of vilifying Whites as fascists is being facilitated by the methodological tool of reductio ad hitlerum. By now this equation, i.e., Whites = Fascists has become a standard practice in social science studies and in the media in the US. For modern antifa rioters in the US, the word fascism is a pivotal killer-shut-up word. Once uttered it disables any communication. This word, however, has completely lost its original political designation, standing now instead for a synonym of the absolute cosmic evil.

The same verbal demonizing wordings apply to another killer-word i.e. “Nazism,” a derogatory hyperbolic abbreviation of the word in usage since 1945. The word ‘Nazi’, however, was never used in the official National-Socialist documents or academic journals in Germany from 1933–45. Ironically, it first appeared in the late 1920s as a deriding title of the book Der Nazi-Sozi [vi] written as a short lampooning manifesto against Jews, Communists and capitalists by Joseph Goebbels, who was to become in 1933 the main figure of the NS German propaganda war.

Using the pejorative word ‘Nazi’ today is the equivalent of the pejorative word “commie”, the difference being, however, that in a polite academic company in the US, or in academic journals nobody would ever use the word ‘commie’ in the description of communists. The whole array of new euphemisms, as well as torrents of killer-words have been manufactured over the last fifty years in the US , such as “white supremacism,” “ hate speech,” “affirmative action,” “Afro-Americans” instead of Negroes, the modifying adjective “Jewish” instead of a more piercing noun ‘Jew’, with most of these words being taken now as a commonplace either when criminalizing political opponents or when praising non-Europeans to the skies. When inspecting the prose of many leftist or Jewish-run journals or pro-Jewish news agencies in the USA, such as the SPLC or ADL, it becomes obvious that they function primarily as antifa educational loudspeakers when blaring on all frequencies the demonizing labels neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or fascists.

Historical amicability of a large number of Jewish-American intellectuals for antifascist projects have been amply documented by Kevin MacDonald. Most Jewish-American authors, for obvious reasons, are pretty tacit when it comes to analyzing the high percentage of leading Communists officials of Jewish origin in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and their role in early communist-antifa movements, as well as their role in the establishment of repressive communist regimes. The very large overrepresentation of liberal-leftist Jews in the major media and elite academic institutions, as well as in financial contributions to political causes of the left, has also been critical in creating the culture of White guilt and fanning the flames of the communist temptation in contemporary America.

However, reducing the birth and the spread of communism, including its modern version of antifascism to Jewish intellectuals and activists is not the whole story; it means ignoring the all-encompassing, indeed democratic reality of the communist temptation. Gentile communist auxiliaries, reared in the culture of White guilt, operate as willing executioners; they fear being suspected of a lax attitude toward non-communist foes, or harboring themselves latent anti-Semitic feelings, and they often outperform their Jewish-communist comrades. It is no accident that the frontmen in modern antifa riots in US cities today are mostly troubled White individuals who have lost the sense of identity and who, driven by feelings of historical guilt (as is the case with most academics in Germany), look for atonement by becoming the loudest sympathizers or standard-bearers of antifascism.

Removing the communist temptation presupposes cleaning up the swamp, first in American higher education and then in defunding departments of humanities in all colleges. In order to do that, the fallacy of multiculturalism needs to be discarded; it has never worked anywhere in the world. It has always been a recipe for disaster and civil wars all over the world. Abandoned policies of racial segregation must be reconsidered as a viable option for a functional society. It is better to have fences than cohabiting with an alien partner in a fake marriage. Prior to that, however, the whole idea of progress, still strongly embedded in the American dream, needs to be re-examined. Of course, this may all sound like wishful thinking because, as we have seen thousands of times in history, it is the size of someone’s sword which only makes the difference between good and evil.

Notes:

[i] T. Sunic, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, Homo americanus; Child of the Postmodern Age (Arktos, 2018), pp. 34-70.

[ii] Leon Trotsky (Pathfinder, 1969).

[iii] Ibid. „The Perspective in the United States,“ published first in Fourth International, October 1940.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

[iv] T. Sunic, „Sixty-Eighters“, Chronicles of American Culture, March 1999.

[v] Alexander Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism (London: Victor Gollancz), p.28.

[vi] Joseph Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi; Fragen und Antworten für den Nationalsozialisten, (Elberfeld, 1926). In Egnlsih trans.: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/nazi-sozi.htm