Sir Richard Francis Burton, in 1864

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) was a nineteenth-century British explorer made famous by being one of the first White men to venture into the forbidden city of Mecca, plumb the depths of Africa with Sir Jonathan Speke in search of the source of the Nile, and to complete a translation of the Arabian Nights.

Most descriptions of him tick off his long list of accomplishments:  world-class fencer, army officer, linguist reputed to have mastered dozens of languages, author of countless articles and books.

Burton, though born in England a thoroughly identified as an Englishman, was at the same time a Continentalist, preferring the cuisine and climate of France and Italy (where he had spent much of his childhood) to the deprivations of British boarding school.

He cultivated a reputation for bucking authority.  He was expelled from Oxford for leading a group of students on a day trip to a steeplechase, and refusing to apologize for it.

With the British army in the Sind, he was assigned to investigate a “boy brothel” in Karachi that command feared was frequented by some soldiers.  His report was so thorough, it generated whispers, though scholars do not think Burton was a participant—merely unafraid to roll up his sleeves and get the bottom of anything anthropological, no matter how taboo.

On religion, he was probably an atheist, and only played along with being a Catholic to satisfy his wife, Isabel.  He thought Christian missionary efforts were foolish.  At parties, he delighted in shocking his listeners with his exploits.  It was rumored that during his exploration of Mecca, he’d killed an Arab who’d discovered him to be merely posing as a faithful Muslim.  Whether this happened or not, he never denied it.

He is sometimes pictured in uniform;  other times, disguised as an Arab.  The National Portrait Gallery in London shows him with a massive scar on his cheek, the result of a Somali spear that pierced his entire face and smashed out two molars[1].

The spear-piercing was re-enacted in Mountains of the Moon, a 1990 movie starring Patrick Bergin as the rakish and mustachioed Burton.[2]   The same movie shows him ducking in and out of huts with African women, a nod to suspicions that when exploring a foreign land, he left nothing unexplored.

An interest in Burton is easy to indulge.  In addition to his own writings, which include some 43 volumes on his own explorations, there are countless biographies of him and his wife (including one by his wife), scholarly articles, and even societies dedicated to Burton’s life and works.

In many ways, Richard Burton might be described as one of the West’s first ethnologists.  What fascinated Burton more than the geography of the lands he explored was the people.  But one must dive deep to discover that Burton was a race realist of the first order.

He was emphatically not a racial egalitarian, but escapes the tag of crude “racist” by virtue of being an erudite and worldly Briton.  Whatever the scientific explanation for racial difference, Burton believed in it unreservedly.  What is more, he mocked those who held fast to visions of equality for putting sentiment over fact.

As much as he loved to explore, he did not think highly of colonial attempts to control foreign peoples.  To him, it was a deck of cards waiting for a stiff wind.  Miscegenation as a colonial strategy was a complete failure.

Jews, meanwhile, were seen as a sharply distinct people who, despite a long history in England, had the capacity to exercise outsized control of White societies.  The “Aryan”, Burton said, has a poor understanding of Jews.

Black Africans

Burton had extensive travels into the heart of Africa.  Perhaps most famous was his journey south with Sir Jonathan Speke in search of the source of the Nile, which brought him into contact with several different types of Africans and the Arab slave traders who bought and sold them.

He was unsparing in his descriptions.  In the biography The Devil Drives, author Fawn Brodie[3] wrote that while Burton had some respect for the Arabs he encountered in travels, Black Africans “fascinated but mostly repelled him.”[4]

Coastal Black tribes Burton called “supersubtle and systematic liars” who “deceive when duller men would tell the truth.”  The Wanyika of east Africa he called a “futile race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive; boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy and thriftless.”[5]

The Wagago men he described as “idle and debauched, spending their days in unbroken crapulence and drunkenness,” “celebrated as thieves” who would “rather die under the stick than level themselves with women by using a hoe.”[6]

Brodie notes that “this sounds like rabid racial hatred, but Burton was first of all an exact observer.  There was filth, mutilation, ignorance, indolence, drunkenness and violence.  The natives did live in huts populated with ‘a menagerie of hens, pigeons and rates of peculiar impudence’, just like the poor in Ireland, as Burton was careful to add.

Another famous explorer, David Livingstone, is described by Brodie as loving the African natives.  “Unlike Burton, he had faith in the Negro’s educability, industry, and capacity for moral improvement through Christianity.”[7]

Burton was a contemporary of Francis Galton,[8] and, along with James Hunt and Monckton Milnes, founded the Anthropological Society of London.  Burton hoped the society would publish ethnological studies and operate as “a refuge for Destitute Truth,” permitting a “liberty of thought and a freedom of speech unknown to any other society in Great Britain.”[9]

More specifically, Burton was likely imagining frank talk about racial differences, sexual practices, and other forbidden topics.

In one early article for the society, Hunt wrote that “Negro cranial sutures closed earlier than those of the White man, therefore his brain was smaller.”  Brodie writes that Burton, “long puzzled by his own observation that the Negro child, though as quick if not quicker in learning than the White child, seemed to stop developing in adolescence, accepted this.”[10]

Burton, in a letter to Hunt in response to his paper “The Negro’s Place in Nature”, wrote:  “Like other students of anthropology, I am truly grateful to you for having so graphically shown the great gulf, moral and physical, separating the Black from the White races of men, and for having placed in so striking a light the physiological cause of the difference—namely, the arrested physical development of the negro.”[11]

Burton ascribes this, like Hunt, to an insight that the sutures of the cranium of “lower breeds of mankind” close at an earlier age, such that his “physical and mental powers become stationary at an age when, in nobler races, the perceptive and reflective principles begin to claim ascendency.”[12]

This letter is reprinted in one of Burton’s books, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, which describes Burton’s experiences in what is now modern-day Benin.  He had been sent there by the British government to persuade the king to stop participating in the slave trade.

In the letter, Burton indicates that as early as the 1800’s, “wishy-washy sentimentality” was affecting the Western mind on race.  He suspects that “my statements will be far from popular” and writes that “the pure negro ranks in the human family below the two great Arab and Aryan races. … The propensities and passions are tolerably well grown, the perceptives and reflectives are of inferior power, and the sentimental or moral regions remain almost undeveloped.”[13]

The chapter containing the letter to Hunt begins with a quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1797 entry on Blacks:  “Vice the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race—idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience.  They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful of example of the corruption of man when left to himself.”[14]

Africans freely adopt foreign customs, manners and costumes, “however incongruous,” Burton observes, and they despise agriculture.  In descriptions that echo modern-day Black behavior, he says that “the cruelty of the negro is, like that of a schoolboy, the blind impulse of rage combined with want of sympathy.  Thus he thoughtlessly tortures and slays his prisoners, as the youth of England torment and kill cats.”[15]

Burton predicted that the “negro, in mass, will not improve beyond a certain point” and remains, mentally, a child.  He seems to suggest climate influence here, where the tropics “engender but few wants” and do not compel its inhabitants to hard work and foresight.

Blacks are terrible with animals, Burton observes.  They never invented an alphabet, a musical scale, or “any other element of knowledge.”[16]  “The negro, in his wild state, makes his wives work; he will not, or rather he cannot, labour, except by individual compulsion, as in the Confederate States; or by necessity, as in Barbadoes.”[17]

Burton visited Sierra Leone, a British colony of free Blacks, and came away horrified by the spectacle of Whites living under Black rule.  The juries were “a machinery for tyranny” where “the worst of the Aku criminals were invariably found innocent and most of the innocent Whites guilty.”[18]   The best approach, thought Burton, was White juries for Whites and Black juries for Blacks.

Racial dislike in Africa seemed to run both ways.  Burton could not help but note that African demons were depicted as White and ugly, while European demons were depicted as Black and ugly.[19]  “The Africans will say that the White man is an old ape, and doubt that he is human.   Thus we observe, that whilst the Caucasian doubts the humanity of the Hamite, the latter repays the compliment in kind.”

Burton mocked the efforts of the Christian missionaries to Africa.  What must have been going through the Africans’ minds, he laughed, when the missionaries commanded them to replace their magic teeth, bones and wizard’s mats with consecrated palm leaves?

Burton observed the strong tendency of Black Africans toward unnecessary torture, something we see played out in news articles of today.[20]  Wrote Burton, “Cruelty seems to be with him a necessary way of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death.  His religious rites—a strong contrast with those of the modern Hindoo—are ever causelessly bloody.[21]

Some European explorers, like race-deniers of today, wanted to attribute the Africans’ lack of progress to a simple lack of civilizational infrastructure.  Burton dabbled with this thinking, but ultimately concluded that the problem was in their very bodies and brains.

Of their cruelty, he wrote, “I can hardly believe … this abnormal cruelty to be the mere result of unciviliation; it appears to me the effect of an arrested development, which leaves to man all the ferocity of the carnivore, the unreflecting cruelty of the child.”[22]

Some Burton biographers attribute his views on Black Africans to the “prejudices of the time” or a colonialism-inspired sense of superiority.  The problem with this dismissal is that Burton was very much the iconoclast:  he was often cross-wise with the mores of Victorian England, and willing—even at the expense of his career and reputation—to openly challenge them.

He was a sexual liberationist who thought British women were entitled to more than just lying back and thinking of England.  He was a religious skeptic who thought Christian missionary efforts did not actually convert foreign peoples to Christianity.  He predicted that Britain would be unable to maintain its empire in the face of constantly rebelling natives, as with India.

Later, as we will see, he was even willing to challenge Jews—which seems to have been as suicidal a mission to take in the 1800’s as today.  So to say that he was simply echoing the small-minded racial bigotry of the time is incorrect.  Burton was beholden to no man.  He did and said as he pleased.

Nor can it be said that Burton lacked first-hand experience.  He was in Africa.  He interacted directly with Black Africans, observed their ceremonies, lived in their camps.  He may well have spoken some of their languages.  Add to all this the fact that Burton styled himself a professional observer, as a member of the military and later, the Royal Geographical Society.

Finally, the truth of Burton’s observations are backed up by more modern research.  On the issue of rapid development of Black children followed by an abrupt leveling-off, J. Phillippe Rushton has written extensively.[23]

Whatever can observed of Africa and Africans, for Burton, it was no place for White Western man.  “There is a time to leave the Dark Continent. … Madness comes from Africa.”[24]

Native Americans

A visit to the United States took Burton to Utah, where he intended to observe the Mormons.  Along the way he observed American Indians, who were not “red” but reminded him of “a Tartar or an Afghan after a summer march” or the Mongolians he had seen in northern India.[25]

The Indian rode his horse “like the Abyssinian eunuch, as if born upon and bred to become part of the animal.”  He saw their proximity to Whites as corrupting to them:  the Indians closest to emigrant routes had become “beggars, liars, horse-stealers and prostitutes.”  He doubted that Indians ever truly became Christians.[26]

Yet another journey—this one, through a diplomatic post to Brazil, brought him into contact with South American natives.  Paraguayans, he said, were “a palaeozoic humanity,” but he took a dim view, as well, of the Jesuits trying to turn them into Whites.[27]

Burton, more eager than perhaps any man alive to explore foreign cultures, detested unnatural culture-mixing.  Writes Brodie, “Though he himself delighted in burying his identity in an alien culture, the spectacle of others crossing over into a different society always troubled him, whether it was the Hindu in Goa who had become Christian, the African who wore the White man’s clothes, or the mountain man in the Rockies who, Burton wrote, ‘Betrays a remarkable aptitude for facile descent into savagery.’”[28]

Goa

The small province of Goa is a territory on the western edge of India.  After travels there, it became the subject of Burton’s first book, Goa and the Blue Mountains.  Published in 1851, it describes the racial decline of a colony owing to interbreeding with the locals.

Recounting the glory of old Goa under Portuguese viceroys, Burton wrote:  “The introduction of the Jesuits, the Holy Tribunal, and its fatal offspring, religious persecution; pestilence, and wars with European and native powers, disturbances arising from an unsettled home government, and, above all things, the slow but sure workings of the short-sighted policy of the Portuguese in intermarrying and identifying themselves with the Hindoos of the lowest castes, made her fall as rapid as her rise was sudden and prodigious.”[29]

Intermarriage and interbreeding, while perhaps considered strategic by some European colonizers, plunged Goa into a morass.  “The reader may remember that it was Albuquerque who advocated marriages between the European settlers and the natives of India.  However reasonable it might have been to expect the amalgamation of the races in the persons of their descendants, experience and stern facts condemn the measure as a most delusive and treacherous daydream. … It has lost the Portuguese almost everything in Africa as well as Asia.  May Heaven preserve our rulers from following their example!”[30]

Burton found the offspring ugly. “The Mestici, or mixed breed, composes the great mass of society at Goa. … It would be, we believe, difficult to find in Asia an uglier or more degraded looking race than that which we are now describing.”[31]

Rather than creating “hybrid vigor,” Burton saw the offspring as worse than either parent.  “Their characters may be briefly described as passionate and cowardly, jealous and revengeful, with more of the vices than the virtues belonging to the two races from which they are descended.”[32]

The starting material was not great, Burton wrote of native Goans.  “This race is decidedly the lowest in the scale of civilized humanity we have yet seen.  In appearance they are short, heavy, meagre, and very dark;  their features are uncomely in the extreme;  they are dirtier than Pariahs, and abound in cutaneous diseases.”[33]

Burton took the view that long exposure to cold climates helped to forge White men into what they are today, and that some degeneration can be caused by climate alone, “All who have sojourned long in the southern parts of Europe, such as Italy or Spain, must have remarked the deleterious effects of a hot and dry climate upon a race that thrives only in a cold and damp one.  An English child brought up in Italy is, generally speaking, more sickly, more liable to nervous and hepatic complaints, and, consequently, more weakened in mind as well as body, than even the natives of the country.”[34]

Goa and the Blue Mountains caught the attention of a professor at the University of Delhi, who described the book as pure racism, a mindset meant to justify British colonialism.[35]  The professor describes Burton as a dedicated imperialist, which is not the impression I got while researching.  Burton certainly availed himself of the exploration and employment opportunities of the British empire, but did not endorse the enterprise in its entirety.

In fact, Burton concludes, regarding European colonization of India generally, that it was an unsustainable proposition.  The Indians, whatever they said or did under colonial rule, hated the White English.  “Everyone knows that if the people of India could be unanimous for a day, they might sweep us from their country as dust before a whirlwind.”[36]

Sir Richard Burton disguised as a Muslim Arab 

Muslims/Arabs

Burton seemed to think that Islam was a healthy influence for Bedouin and Arab peoples, who before Mohammed were given to gambling, drinking and other vices.  Like so many other religions, Islam’s influence was ethnically bounded.

While “El Islam prospered amongst the kindred races, it fell flat elsewhere.  No power of propagandism prevailed in China.  In Southern Spain the faith maintained itself for a long time;  its letter and spirit, however, were almost lost.  The Zegris and Abencerrages were European knights, not Eastern.  And when pushed forward into a Northern people, a single destructive defeat sufficed to set for it bounds which it has never attempted to cross.”

Burton here is likely referring to Charles Martel’s 732 A.D. defeat of the Muslims led by Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi at the Battle of Tours, which effectively stopped the Umayyad invasion of Gaul (and in the view of some, secured Europe for White Christianity.

Jews

Burton once famously wrote that “Had I a choice of race, there is none to which I would more willingly belong than the Jewish.”[37]  Add to this many selected comments from Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam, his foremost work on Jews, and one might get the impression that Burton was philosemitic.

The full picture is more complex, and many of Burton’s conclusions about Jews align with standard White advocacy objections to Jews and their influence in Western societies.  He does not see them as “Whites who go to a different church,” in the popular understanding of today.  They are ethnically distinct, boldly deceptive, and unified.

Among all Jews, he wrote, one finds those who are “fierce-eyed, dark-browed, and hollow-cheeked, with piercing acuteness of glance, and an almost reckless look of purpose.”  He attributed to the Jews immense passion, pugnacity, love of mysticism, symbolism, and the occult arts, as well as “abnormal powers of lying” and “excessive optimism”.[38]

Jews are “bold and resolute, persistent and heroic but, but also subtle and unscrupulous.  They may be guilty of greed and craft, and even ferocity, but rarely weakness and never imbecility.”

A formative experience came for Burton during his consulship in Damascus.  For years, it had been the practice for Jewish moneylenders to use British officials as muscle for the collection of debts.  The moneylenders expected Burton to carry on this tradition, but Burton had other ideas.

As recounted in The Devil Drives, there were three Jewish moneylenders who were especially hated by Burton.  One, who Burton said had “sucked dry 41 villages,” approached him for assistance in collecting 60,000 pounds in debts.  Burton replied:  “I was not sent here as a bailiff, to tap the peasant on the shoulder in such cases as yours.”[39]

This then set off a round of letters to powerful Jews in London, accusing Burton and his wife of anti-Semitism.  These powerful Jews included Sir Moses Montefiore and Sir Francis Goldsmid, the chief rabbi of London.  The Jewish complaints may well have played a part in Burton’s being recalled from the consulship.

But Burton’s thinking on Jews was best set out by one of his own writings, Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam.  Burton had a few negative things to say about Gypsies[40] and Muslims, but about Jews, he had both powerful praise and deep scorn.  Most of what Burton wrote went to print, though Wilkins, his publisher, censored a part dealing the Sephardic Jewish ritual murder of one Padre Tomaso in Damascus in 1840.[41]  Brodie says that this part was “sold” to Manners Sutton, who tried to publish it, but was blocked by a lawsuit filed by Isabel Burton’s literary trustee, D.L. Alexander.[42]

Famously, Isabel Burton burned many of her husband’s papers after his death.  It can only be speculated what papers were burned.  It was the Victorian age, and there was always embarrassment about Burton’s English translation of the Kama Sutra and other erotic material.  We may never know what accounts of Jews may have been burned.

Still, Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam is a treasure trove.

Some descriptions have the Jews as racially pure and, as a result, powerful.  The “oldest family on earth, … indestructible and irrepressible life-power enables this nation without a country to maintain an undying nationality and to nourish a sentiment of caste with a strength and a pertinacity unparalleled in the annals of patriotism.”[43]

Those who drove Jews from Biblical lands are gone.  The Romans, too, are gone.  “Eighteen hundred years after the Fall of Jerusalem, the dispersed Jewish people have a distinct existence, are a power in every European capital, conduct the financial operations of nations and governments, and are to be found wherever civilization has extended and commerce has penetrated; in fact, it has made all the world its home.”[44]

Burton describes Jews as having “reporters in every chief centre of the world, … know all projects set to be undertaken, and entwine themselves in them, dictating that this man should be allowed to participate in these profits, that another should be excluded from those advantages.”[45]

“(The Jew) may confidently look forward to the time when the whole financial system, not only of Europe from one end to the other, but of the whole world, will be in the hands of a few crafty capitalists, whose immense wealth shall, with a few pulsations of the telegraphy, unthrone dynasties and determine the destinies of nations.”[46]  Here, it is almost as if Burton is predicting Jewish Internet, financial, and media control.

Jews’ isolation and separation “justified the Hebrew in treating his brother-men as heathens barely worthy of the title of human.”[47]  “The inevitable conclusion of such a policy was that eventually they came into collision with all around them.”[48]

In one amusing anecdote, Burton describes some back-and-forthing in the House of Commons, where at issue was legislation to lift civil disabilities for Jews.  One William Abbott described how Jews prefer “sordid pursuits,” and is rebuffed by Lord Macaulay, who called opposition to Jews “bigotry.”

Burton himself, however, rebuffs Macaulay, stating that “our European ancestors had other reasons for expelling the Jews than the mere ‘bigotry’ and ‘brutality’ so unphilosophically ascribed to them by Lord Macaulay”.[49]

In a chapter titled “Opinion of the Jew in England,” Burton is puzzled by the respectful treatment of Jews in England, which he regards as naïve. Its “confident ignorance in indiscriminate philanthropy are bestowed upon them equally with the African negro.”

Burton observed wild oscillations in opinion on Jews.  “The Hebrew race is so marked in its characteristics that it has ever been the theme of over-praise or undue blame.”[50]  Changes of English opinion on Jews are “comically abrupt”.

He ridiculed the “vapid utterances” of “the Liberal School,” which declared that happiness and harmony would result from “battering down the ponderous walls of prejudice.”[51]  Because, though the Christian would give up his faith and race, “the Jew … will cling to (faith and race) with greater tenacity, as it will be the very root and main foundation of his power.”

He is repeatedly critical of British writers who defend Jews. “Popular books like The British Jew (Rev. John Mills), for instance, are mostly written in the apologetic tone; they are advocates and missionaries, not describers. … Glowing descriptions of Jews were preferred, these writers would not crowd their pages with the superstitions of the ignorant.”[52]

Better, Burton says, is a quote from Saturday Review magazine, on what makes for Jewish power.  “They are: religion, the capacity for making money, and internal union. … They are like the tenants of a beleaguered fort cut off from the rest of mankind, and obliged to protect themselves and to help each other.”

Financial dealings keep Jews from physical labor, writes Burton.  “He—the ordinary Englishman—may be dimly conscious that the Jew is the one great exception to the general curse upon the sons of Adam, and that he alone eats bread, not in the sweat of his own face, but in the sweat of his neighbor’s face—like the German cuckoo, who does not colonize, but establishes himself in the colonies of other natives.”[53]

Lower-class Jews pursue enterprises “held mean or dishonorable … such as demoralizing usury, receiving stolen goods, buying up old clothes, keeping gambling houses and betting cribs, dealing in a literature calculated to pervert the mind of youth.”[54]

Burton observed a psychological strength in Jews, compared to the ease with which Whites were prone to depression:  “I incline to the opinion that Gentiles have a natural alacrity in sinking—look how heavy I can be—but that the Chosen People have a natural tendency toward buoyancy.”[55]

A few choice items from the book:

• He says that there are “six millions of Jews scattered over the face of the earth,” a number that seems to make multiple appearances throughout history.
• Higher-class Jewish women are “strongly and symmetrically shaped” though their features are not admired by the Christian eye.
• Burton considered Jews, at least the Ashkenazi kind, to be physically hardy. Ancient practices of walking and fasting bred out weakness, he claimed.
• He also thought they were resistant to disease, having avoided typhus in 1505, fevers in Rome in 1691, and cholera in London.
• High achievers among Jews in any field often outdo the high-achieving gentiles.
• Some old English families have Jewish blood.
• Burton describes the two great branches of Jews as the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. The Sephardim are identified with modern Spain and Portugal and claim descent from the tribe of Judah.  Its three sub-orders are the Cohen, the Levites and the “Ammon Israelite.”
• Ashkenazim, meanwhile, are identified with more northern areas, and take their name from Ashkenaz, the son of Gomer. They claim descent from Benjamin.  They were present at the building of the Second Temple, described in the Book of Ezra.
• On the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Israel, Burton says that “wealthy and prosperous Jews openly declare that they take no interest in the matter.”
• But: those who “proved themselves hostile to Israel must be killed at all risk, either by the Jews themselves, or, better still, through the local authorities.”

Burton thought Jewish immigration to England was a terrible idea.  Ashkenazi Jews living in the holy land were ordered by the Russian Consulate-General to return home biennially in order to renew their passports or give up their nationality, he wrote.  Many landed in London, the “City of Refuge”, a step that could “hardly be looked upon with satisfaction.”[56]

The Talmud, first published in Venice in 1520, according to Burton, was given a thorough treatment in Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam.  Whatever else can be said of the Talmud, Burton said, Rabbi Ascher’s assertion that it enjoins Jews to treat Christians “as our own brethren” is grossly false.[57]

“The most important and pregnant tenet of modern Jewish belief is that the Ger, or stranger, in fact all those who do not belong to their religion, are brute beasts, having no more rights than the fauna of the field,” Burton wrote[58]

More choice examples:

• Burton describes that in the “tract of Sanhedrin,” it states that a Gentile who strikes a Jew has committed a capital offense; “this ordinance is as old as the sojourn of Moses in Egypt.  He who strikes a Jew strikes the Deity.”
• In tract Ohaleth it says that sitting upon the grave of a gentile does not defile, because “they are not tenanted by human beings.”[59]
• Tract Bechoroth tells us that two things prevent the Jew from keeping the law of God—demons, and dependence on gentiles.

Burton sticks up for Whites in the “who attacked first” debate, writing that “Those who are so ready to admit and deplore the mighty provocations which roused a spirit of retaliation in the Rabbinical mind should equally make allowance for the natural feelings of the unfortunate Gentiles and heathens when the “People of the Synagogue” had their wicked will.”[60]

He lists atrocities against gentiles, such as one in the fifth century near Medina where “thousands of the Christians of the Nejeran” were burned alive in a trench filled with combustibles, or this one:  “A.D. 1135.  The Jews crucified a boy at Norwich.  According to the general report, they hired a Christian lad aged twelve as a leather-sewer, and converted him into a Paschal offering; they placed a bit in his mouth, and after a thousand outrages they crucified him, … leaving the remains hanging upon a tree.”[61]

Whether there is truth to the list, I am not sure, though scholars are naturally disinclined to believe any of it.  Burton wrote that European gentiles were close-minded to the notion that Jews would commit physical atrocities against them.

Burton to me had the right approach.  He appreciated world cultures, wanted to see and write about them, and often had positive things to say about them.  But he never confused cultural appreciation with cultural relativism.  Travel, explore and exchange, he might have advised, but for day-to-day living, keep races in their places.

*Christopher Donovan is a writer and White advocate living somewhere in America.

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[1] This painting, by Sir Frederick Leighton, can be seen hanging on the wall of Professor Henry Higgins’ home in My Fair Lady.

[2] Burton should not be confused with the actor Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth (and sixth) husband.

[3] Brodie herself was descended from the Mormon community, and married a Jewish academic.

[4] Fawn M. Brodie, The Devil Drives (W.W. Norton & Co., 1967), page 150.

[5] Id.

[6] Id.

[7] Id. at 223.

[8] Galton, a eugenicist, was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin.

[9] Devil Drives at 205.

[10]  Id. at 206.

[11] Richard Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, Volume II (Tylston and Edwards, 1893), at 119.

[12] Id. at 119.

[13] Gelele at 132.

[14] Gelele at 118.

[15] Gelele at 134.

[16] Gelele at 134.

[17] Gelele at 136.

[18] Devil Drives at 208.

[19] Id. at 208.

[20] The South African practice of “necklacing”, whereby a burning tire is place around a victim’s neck, comes to mind.

[21] Id. at 211.

[22] Richard Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, 2 vols (London, 1876), I, 217-18.

[23] William Robertson Boggs, Race and Physical Differences, American Renaissance, December 1992.

[24] Richard Burton, Camoens:  His Life and His Lusiads, 2 vols (London, 1881) II, 514-517.

[25] Devil Drives at 183.

[26] Devil Drives at 183.

[27] Devil Drives at 243.

[28] Id. at 183.

[29] Richard Burton, Goa and the Blue Mountains, Digibooks OOD/Demetra Publishing, (Bulgaria), 26.  Book originally published in 1851.

[30] Id. at 48.

[31] Id. at 53.

[32] Id. at 55.

[33] Id. at 57.

[34] Id. at 84.

[35] Khan Aateka, Burton’s Racist Critique of Portuguese Goa, Research Review Journals (March 2019).

[36] Id. at 85.

[37] Richard Burton, The Highlands of Brazil, (London, 1869), Vol. I, 403n.

[38] Devil Drives at 265.

[39] Devil Drives at 256.

[40] Alternatively known as the “Roma” people.

[41] Also, “Father Thomas”, the episode was known as the Damascus Affair.

[42] Devil Drives, footnote 7 to Chapter XXIII.  Brodie cites The Times, March 28, 1911.

[43] Richard Burton, Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam, 5 (Herbert S. Stone & Company, Chicago and New York, 1898) (republished by Kessinger Publishing’s Rare Mystical Reprints, www.kessinger.net)

[44] Id. at 6.

[45] Id. at 61.

[46] Id. at 62.

[47] Id. at 11.

[48] Id. at 12.

[49] Id. at 19.

[50] Id. at 23.

[51] Id. at 62.

[52] Id. at 37.

[53] Id. at 25.

[54] Id. at 28.

[55] Id. at 27.

[56] Id. at 50.

[57] Id. at 106.

[58] Id. at 73.

[59] Id. at 87.

[60] Id. at 115.

[61] Id. at 121.

Go to Part 1.

Argument by Anecdote

As one might suppose given the extensive range of data provided above, testing the Cofnas default hypothesis on contemporary involvement in immigration took a number of months to carry out, and involved a thorough survey of very many organizations and individuals. It was labor-intensive, but stands as an accurate and easily verifiable record of the role of Jews in contemporary American demographic and cultural change. It’s really quite remarkable, then, to see how lightly Cofnas appears to take his own hypothesis, since he refuses to subject it to any intensive testing at all. In fact, as with his brief and inaccurate accusation of MacDonald’s putative misrepresentations and omissions, there is a palpable air of laziness in all of Cofnas’s work in this area. Rather than conducting surveys of organizations, movements, or activities, Cofnas favors a kind of “argument by anecdote,” in which he simply tries to find one or two exceptions to a rule, amplifies their importance, and then reclines to bask in the dubious published glory afforded to him by co-ethnic journal editors.

One of Cofnas’s favorite anecdotes is the first American Renaissance conference, something Cofnas made much of in his original article, and which he has returned to in his 2021 rehash for Philosophia. He writes,

When given the opportunity, Jews have been overrepresented in non-anti-Semitic white nationalist movements, as MacDonald and Joyce inadvertently acknowledge. The one major white nationalist organization in the US that is not explicitly anti-Semitic is American Renaissance. Four-out-of-ten invited speakers at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994 were Jewish (Lawrence Auster, Michael Levin, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, and Eugene Valberg) (American Renaissance 2017), and many of its most prominent supporters were Jewish.

I have to begin with Cofnas’s habit of inserting claims into the mouths of others. Nowhere have I “inadvertently acknowledged” that Jews have been overrepresented in non-anti-Semitic White nationalist movements. In fact, I find the idea laughable and entirely lacking in evidence. What Cofnas is doing here is twisting MacDonald’s citing of my work, without actually consulting the original piece. Cofnas writes,

MacDonald (2016) says that “there is a historical pattern where Jews have entered putatively nationalist movements and directed them towards positions that make them ‘safe for the Jews’, at the expense of developing a true sense of ethnic interests.” He quotes his protégé, Andrew Joyce: “That Jews would try to co-opt, or attempt to derail, a potentially damaging movement does have many historical precedents.” Joyce goes on to say that “Jews attempted to take key roles” in the German nationalist movement in 1860–1880 until, under the influence of non-Jewish leaders, the “movement adopted an ‘Aryan clause.’” So if Jews want to join white nationalist movements as equals, they are accused of scheming to make the movements “safe for the Jews” and driven out. Then white nationalists ask why Jews don’t support their movements. Haven’t they answered their own question?

In a word, no. As stated above, Cofnas suffers from a serious deficit in understanding the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative data. In brief, if Cofnas can find a Jew in a nationalist movement, even if they’re proven to be subversives, half-Jews, quarter-Jews, or even anti-Semitic Jews, everything else can be discarded. The problem is that biography is absolutely crucial to testing both MacDonald’s thesis and that of Cofnas, and yet Cofnas seems entirely unconcerned with it — a good example being Cofnas’s claiming of Hans Eysenck as a Jewish hereditarian scientist, even though Eysenck was only half-Jewish in parentage, wasn’t raised within Judaism or a Jewish milieu, and made a point of explicitly denying any affinity or connection to Jewishness.^[1] If Cofnas was in fact familiar with the case of Victor Adler and Heinrich Friedjung, referred to above, who competed for leadership of the German nationalist movement in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century, he would be aware that both were promoting a heavily diluted, left-leaning, and multicultural nationalism unrecognisable to those non-Jewish nationalists around them. This is not only a historical fact, but a matter of overwhelming consensus in the relevant historiography. Steven Beller, one of the foremost historians of the Jews of central Europe during this period, described Adler and Friedjung as part of a Jewish intellectual grouping that possessed its own “goals of social and cultural change.” Beller writes that Adler’s politics was inflected through a Jewish liberal lens, in which “socialism, universalist and secularist, [was viewed as a] possible answer to the antisemitism of the other parties. … Adler early on decided to stick to the rules of Austrian constitutionalist politics to bring about the revolution peacefully.”^[2] Adler, who had in any case earlier described nationalism as “tactless”, “madness,” and “based chiefly on envy, misunderstanding, and irrationality,” became an out and out Marxist overnight after leaving the nationalist organization, proving in one stroke the total insincerity of his Austrian “nationalism.”^[3] Friedjung, meanwhile, ostensibly a historian, was later castigated as a fraud not only for his putative political beliefs, but for producing texts based on inauthentic historical materials. Along with Adler, Friedjung was viewed as promoting a republican, anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical, and multiethnic nationalism that diverged significantly from the Austrian nationalism of non-Jews.^[4] The eventual adoption of an Aryan Clause by Austrian nationalists was a response to the dilution of nationalism promoted by Adler and Friedjung and their very Jewish social circles (as well as Jewish movement predecessors like Ignaz Kuranda and Moritz Hartmann). To celebrate the removal of these influences, leading Austrian nationalist Georg von Schönerer published a new nationalist newspaper titled Undiluted German Words. The title says it all.

In short, Jews have been accused of “scheming” to subvert nationalist movements because they are very often proven to be doing just that. The problem with Cofnas is that he insists that these figures should still be considered nationalists, and that we have to ignore all evidence that they associated predominantly with Jewish milieus and often explicitly professed to seek after Jewish interests. Unfortunately, Cofnas doesn’t provide any meaningful reason for doing so, resorting repeatedly only to anecdotes like that of the first American Renaissance conference. In any case, what is the real substance of this anecdote?

Cofnas remarks that “four-out-of-ten invited speakers at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994 were Jewish (Lawrence Auster, Michael Levin, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, and Eugene Valberg) (American Renaissance 2017), and many of its most prominent supporters were Jewish.” He furthermore argues that this is evidence that “Jews have been overrepresented in non-anti-Semitic white nationalist movements.” But the logic here surely breaks down when given even the briefest of considerations. These speakers were not representational, but invited. Their mere presence at the conference reflects in large part the tastes, preferences, and, I would argue, anxieties of the person or persons who invited them. In this regard, I believe it’s been a longstanding position of Jared Taylor that he not be seen as anti-Semitic, and Taylor has himself on many occasions expressed hostility to anti-Semitism. In his own words, Taylor has maintained that “American Renaissance has taken an implicit position on Jews by publishing Jewish authors and inviting Jewish speakers to AR conferences.” Could his selection of these speakers have been an over-compensation to fend off accusations of American Renaissance being anti-Semitic? I believe so. Does the skewed representation of 40% at this one conference indicate that Jews are necessarily over-represented in non-anti-Semitic white nationalist movements? Only a fool would think so. Which brings us finally to biography, that important facet so often neglected by Cofnas. Auster, of course, was an adult convert to Christianity, which doesn’t prove anything conclusively but does suggest a weakened attachment to Jewishness. Moreover, Auster, despite acknowledging the Jewish role in the transformation of America, vigorously condemned MacDonald. All four figures are primarily concerned with race and IQ, a preoccupation of the almost explicitly philo-Semitic Jared Taylor (and one I personally find both distracting and overplayed in the context of broader civilizational collapse), rather than having ties to broader White nationalist ideology. Schiller was an almost comical inclusion given his lack of academic credentials and attachment to certain crackpot fringe ideologies. As for Cofnas’s claim that “many of [AmRen’s] most prominent supporters were Jewish,” I note that he provides no names or data for the claim, or any evidence that such support would amount to an overrepresentation commensurate with his default hypothesis.

Critics might accuse me of picking at a weak spot here in Cofnas’s work, but the point I’m trying to make is that, to Cofnas, the 1994 American Renaissance is a trump card that he sees as worth repeating every time he publishes a critique of MacDonald. I’m not highlighting the conference — Cofnas is, and quite shamelessly.

It’s my belief that Cofnas makes his arguments in bad faith, and I’m led to this belief primarily due to the slowly shifting sands of Cofnas’s own position and the fact he regularly makes claims unsubstantiated by evidence. Without any kind of broad or detailed survey, for example, Cofnas claims that “Jews have also been represented in the leadership of non-anti-Semitic right-wing movements.” Which movements? Which leaders? In which countries? Relative to what? In what time period? We don’t get any such information, just the claim. And where Cofnas does attempt to bridge the gap between claim and evidence, the result is nothing short of laughable. Take the following, from his 2021 Philosophia rehash:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is leading the charge to censor politically incorrect speech, but the most prominent pro-free speech organization in the US—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)—was founded by Jews (Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate).

It’s worth remarking first that there’s no evidence suggesting that FIRE is the “most prominent pro-free speech organization” in the US, relative to other groups like the Institute for Free Speech, which wasn’t founded by Jews, has no Jewish board members, and does not restrict itself to higher education. FIRE is also certainly not more prominent than the American Civil Liberties Union, which also advocates on free speech issues. The more obvious problem, of course, is once again qualitative in that many “pro-free speech” groups dovetail ideologically with the ADL in many areas, and a lot of these organizations are inherently left-wing dating back to periods in which they fought against the censorship of pornographic or homosexual material (e.g. the Free Speech Coalition), for drug use, or for the rights of students to protest on campus. It goes without saying that the ADL is absolutely in favor of this kind of “free speech,” and that its primary concern is with White nationalist, and similar, content — something FIRE, or any of these groups, have yet to defend. Cofnas’s use of the anecdote of FIRE is interesting because of the (by now predicable) lack of biography for Kors and Silverglate (e.g., do they see a Jewish interest in free speech?), and the total lack of nuance or context in making a comparison between the ADL and FIRE. As with other examples produced above, we simply have an “argument by anecdote” in which an organization is inflated in prominence so that its small number of Jewish founders or members can be raised to the purely rhetorical position of overrepresentation, behind which there is no meaningful substance. The biography and intentions of these Jews doesn’t matter to Cofnas, nor does the huge disparity in Jewish support, material and/or ideological, between them and the ADL. It certainly doesn’t seem to matter to Cofnas that Silverglate is a lifelong leftist married to a dedicated Jewish feminist and AIDS activist. The only significant example of Kors engaging in racial issues is when he came to the defense of a University of Pennsylvania student accused of making racist remarks to a group of Black students. That student’s name was Eden Jacobowitz. Is Kors a dedicated conservative free speech activist? Or is he an ethnocentric Jew “looking out for his own”? Ultimately, when contrasted with Jewish wealth and support behind the ADL (unlike FIRE, an explicitly Jewish organization), it doesn’t really matter, because FIRE is utterly dwarfed by the Jewish behemoth and its unrelenting campaign to smother the freedoms of White Americans.

Shifting Sands

As stated above in relation to the so-called “default hypothesis,” Cofnas argues that, predominantly due to a higher than average IQ and a tendency toward urban living, Jews will naturally be over-represented in all intellectual movements and activities that are not overtly anti-Semitic. While Jews may be overrepresented in pro-immigration, pro-pluralism organizations and movements, the default hypothesis insists that they will also be overrepresented in nationalist, anti-immigration or restrictionist movements (that are not anti-Semitic) also. There is an inherent implication that these over-representations will be, more or less, to the same degree, and Cofnas, for the most part, refuses to discuss the matter in any serious way that might allow for, or explain, why any potential divergence in over-representation might occur. In his new piece for Philosophia, however, Cofnas inserts a minor qualification: “In recent history, Jewish involvement in politics has skewed left because a higher proportion of right-wing than left-wing movements were overtly anti-Semitic.” He also adds that his overall thesis

should not be misinterpreted as a claim that Jews are exactly the same as white gentiles, or that they’re just like high-IQ, urban white gentiles. All groups differ from each other in interesting ways, reflecting their evolutionary and cultural histories. But, in general, anything unusual about Jewish political behavior is mostly a predictable reaction to their historical circumstances.

From my discussion of Jewish involvement in refugee and migrant organizations, it should be clear that Jewish involvement in U.S. politics hasn’t merely “skewed” left, but has been overwhelmingly  encamped in the left, at least since the late nineteenth century. That being said, there are clearly other questions arising even from this one sentence. What are the parameters of “recent history”? Since 1900? Since 1800? In what countries? Other questions quickly surface. Why is Jewish political involvement still “skewing” left even though we are constantly fed narratives of leftist anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism? Most important of all, the sentence marks a departure from Cofnas’s earlier statement that Jews would avoid specific movements due to anti-Semitism, and towards the implication that Jews are suspicious of right-wing movements in general over fears surrounding anti-Semitism on the Right — a concession that would all but render the “default hypothesis” redundant in any political or cultural context, and require several more layers of explanation. Any attempt to insist that Cofnas is still referring to the avoidance of specific movements would need to answer why Jews remain under-represented in non-anti-Semitic right wing movements like the NRA and the gun rights movement, as well as the pro-life movement and attempts to prevent same-sex marriage.

The tiny Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) has a membership of just 7,000 with no paid staff and annual revenue of less than $130,000. Since members are not required to be Jewish, it would be reasonable to assume that the organization boasts fewer than 7,000 members in a Jewish population of 6 and 7 million. In other words, a Jewish crusade for gun freedom in America resonates with less than 0.1% of American Jews. The National Rifle Association has had only one Jewish President (Sandra Froman) since it was founded in 1871, and, as one commentator put it “the vast majority of American Jews and much of the organized Jewish community consistently support gun control measures. Hadassah, B’nai B’rith, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the American Jewish Committee and others have been essentially “blacklisted” by the National Rifle Association on its website.” There are apparently no Jews on the NRA Board of Directors. Interestingly, Froman, the NRA’s only Jewish President, could hardly be described as strongly identifying with Judaism or Jewishness. She told one interviewer that “her parents didn’t emphasize her Judaism. … She doesn’t remember the denomination of the synagogue near San Francisco where her family occasionally attended services and where she was married the first time. She speaks freely both of her respect for the Jewish spiritual tradition and of her lack of meaningful connection with it.”

By contrast, Jews are dominant in the fight to increase gun control. Jewish lawyers Robyn Thomas and Nina Vinik, executive director and senior counsel, respectively, of the Legal Community Against Violence, are quite prominent in lobbying for gun control legislation, and Thomas also acts as executive director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Within these groups there’s often a crossover between lobbying for gun legislation and lobbying for hate/speech legalization, as evidenced by Giffords Law Center’s Ari Freilich, a Jewish lawyer who acts as State Policy Director and as a specialist in “hate crimes.” The strongest supporter of gun control measures in Connecticut in recent years is Jewish Senator Richard Blumenthal. The biggest gun control group in Pennsylvania is CeaseFirePA. The board of CeaseFirePA is dominated by Jews (around 80-90%) and includes such figures as Nancy Gordon, a member of the Jewish Social Policy Action Group, and Shira Goodman, Che Saitta-Zelterman and Fred Kaplan-Mayer. In New York, Michael Bloomberg formed and financed Everytown, a new gun control organization, and pledged $50 million to the cause of making it harder for citizens to purchase arms and ammunition. The Huffington Post reports that in California Dianne Feinstein has “long been one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for gun control.” In Michigan, Jewish Senator Carl Levin has been at the forefront of gun control efforts, earning him an “F” score from Gun Owners of America.

Again, in line with his “argument by anecdote” approach, Cofnas would likely balance this with the 0.1% Jews in the JPFO (“Jews are leaders in the pro-gun movement too!”) and insist that Jews have merely “skewed” left. Since no evidence has been brought to light that the gun freedom movement has been historically anti-Semitic, the “default hypothesis” is entirely inadequate to explain the balance of Jewish representation inside and outside the gun rights movement. The only reasonable conclusion would be that Jews are overwhelmingly suspicious of this predominantly White right-wing movement with strong roots in small-town and rural America—if not openly and intensely hostile to it and its members, and are correspondingly to be found in much larger numbers in those movements that restrict the freedoms or otherwise harm the interests of the White demographic (e.g., gun control and hate speech laws), than those movements that seek to improve them.

Similarly stark disparities can be found in other contemporary right-wing political and cultural movements with no history of anti-Semitism. Studies from the Pew Research Center show that Jews overwhelmingly (83%) support abortion rights (compared with 57% of the general population). In fact, Jews support abortion at a higher rate than any other religious group in America. The National Council of Jewish Women, a 126-year-old organization that helped establish some of the first birth control and abortion clinics across the country, considers reproductive rights a cornerstone issue and has publicly condemned the strict abortion bans recently handed down in Alabama and Mississippi. Cecily Routman, the founder of the tiny Jewish Pro-Life Foundation, the only such group within the American Jewish community, has said that her position is essentially “counter-cultural” within Judaism and that, after being horrified by a radio show on the details of abortion, was prompted to examine the Jewish role in what was happening in America.

“I knew very little, she said, “but what I learned horrified me. And I realized in my heart that it was a ghastly business and I didn’t understand how Jewish people had gotten so involved in it.” Jews were not only outspoken in favor of the right to choose, she said, but were also “charitable donors for Planned Parenthood, and hosting fundraisers for Planned Parenthood. I did not understand that.”

In the area of same-sex marriage, Pew Research Center found that 77% of Jews were in favor/strongly in favor, while a further 5% were not opposed. Even accounting for the explicitly Christian nature of many, but not all, of the major bodies opposed to abortion and the marriage of gays, no Jewish leaders or board members could be found in their ranks.

The fact that Jews don’t just “skew” left on social, cultural, and political issues like this, and in fact overwhelmingly take up dominant positions within the left while being almost totally absent from meaningful positions on the right, has a direct relation to Cofnas’s argument that Jews have avoided right-wing movements because of historical anti-Semitism. As mentioned above, there is no historical anti-Semitism in the gun freedom, anti-abortion, and anti-gay marriage movements. What Cofnas in fact appeals to with such a claim is a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario in which anti-Semitism is always said to precede Jewish political attitudes and activity when actually, as in the case of the subversives Adler and Friedjung mentioned above, the opposite is the case. In this light, the most surprising thing about Jewish activity against gun freedom, and on behalf of abortion and gay marriage, isn’t the simple fact of Jewish overrepresentation, but that this overrepresentation hasn’t already led to an increase in anti-Semitism on the American Right.

Cofnas’s attribution to Jewish political “skewing” is also an example of a common approach in Jewish apologetics within historiography and scholarship more generally — a tactic I’ve described as the “cropped timeline explanation.” When faced with an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact involving negative Jewish behavior (Leftism, usury, financial crime, pornography, etc.) the reader of the apologetic is encouraged to begin with assumptions of anti-Jewish prejudice, and to work exclusively from there. Jews are on the Left? The only explanation offered is that they were excluded from the Right. In historiography, we are often subjected to a process of historical gerrymandering. This most often involves beginning and ending all explanations for anti-Jewish animosity with a timeline most befitting the idea of blameless Jewish victimhood and predatory Europeans. Problems begin to arise, however, when the question is asked why Jews were excluded or viewed as socially or culturally oppositional in the first place. Here, “irrational prejudice” is the last resort, but beyond it, when faced with further interrogation of that idea and the even deeper historical context, nothing is there. One is confronted with blank stares, rhetorical dead ends, and a factual wasteland. The essays of Nathan Cofnas offer nothing more than this, which sits extremely uneasily alongside his admission that groups differ in “interesting ways, reflecting their evolutionary and cultural histories.” By reducing all nuances in Jewish political activity to the aggression of non-Jews, Cofnas makes the remarkable argument that where Jews are seen to cluster in a “positive” manner it is simply because they have a IQ and high ability, but where they cluster “negatively,” it is purely due to exclusion or prejudice. In either case, the assumption seems to be that Jews ultimately have no individual political inclinations of their own. By advancing such an argument, Cofnas is firmly within a dubious, and quite shamelessly deceptive, Jewish scholarly tradition.

Go to Part 3 of 3.

---

^[1] “Hans Eysenck’s Controversial Career,” The Lancet, Vol. 376, August 7 2010, 407.

^[2] S. Beller, The Habsburg Monarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 177.

^[3] S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 162. See also A.G. Whiteside, Austrian National Socialism before 1918 (Martinus Nijhof, 1962), 67; and also J.M. Fischer, Gustav Mahler (Yale University Press, 2011), 344.

^[4] R.S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Plunkett Lake Press, 2019).

The policy formerly known as the War on Drugs has been widely criticized in recent years. Some of these criticisms are well-founded. However, I have been disappointed to see anti-Drug War rhetoric focus more on race and victimology as it has recently. The currently popular race angle is one of the weakest arguments against drug prohibition and is only supported by societal taboos against more honest examination of the issue. What follows is based on my own experience in this area.

I first became interested in the subject in high school, when I first heard of marijuana and started reading about the marijuana laws online. Knowing very little about race or crime at the time, I was outraged by what I found, which seemed to be corruption, “racism” and fanaticism far beyond the norms of politics. I felt like a detective and found it fascinating to learn how I had been deceived. I was also personally insulted by the knowledge that there were laws telling me what I could not put into my own body. I wrote several papers for school and many articles for various websites, and also did various other low-level activist work.

During all this time I had very little contact with the opposition. I never paid much attention to the views of law enforcement on the issue, with the exception of those in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a pro-legalization group full of mostly former law enforcement officials. I knew that top anti-drug officials such as Barry McCaffrey had been known for making outrageous claims, and that official anti-drug propaganda was laughable. Their side’s distortion of the numbers was often noted and was even the subject of an entire book entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and Drug War Statistics. However, I read very little writing from the prohibitionist side. “The War on Drugs has never been about drugs,” says an anti-prohibitionist documentary released in 2012, and I believe this is true but not quite in the sense the director intended.

Growing up, I had absorbed the usual liberal line on race. All conflict between Whites and others was the fault of Whites. “Racists” were evil people who we should be ashamed to even share a national history with; references to them normally included an expression of something like rage or disgust. In our society we can say things about “bigots” that could probably get us prosecuted if we said them about people who had actually wronged us personally, and I accepted this as normal.

In high school I met a White teacher from South Africa. She felt that the African National Congress’s terrorist attacks were justified simply because the victims were “racist,” and appeared to have no shame about saying so. This was at a nominally Christian school, but this was probably the most un-Christian thing I heard anyone say while I was there.

I was never given any reason at all to believe that Whites and other races were fundamentally equal or similar. It was simply assumed that they were somehow the same, and that equal life outcomes between Blacks and Whites would thus be fair. This was considered so obvious that it was practically never stated explicitly, let alone argued for rationally. For a very long time, I did not question this, and strained my mind to ignore the evidence of my own senses concerning the dramatic differences in intelligence between Blacks and Whites.

Jared Taylor’s comment that “it is pleasant to feel oneself superior to mean-spirited conservatives” applies here. I never met anyone who openly disagreed with the standard view, and this meant that I could have a sort of pleasure in being a righteous opponent of evil without the risk of ever facing that evil in reality.

It is often alleged, not only by drug policy reform organizations but others such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, that the War on Drugs is “racist.” The title of a 2012 book by the Black law professor and attorney Michelle Alexander was The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This complaint is partly based on explicitly racial propaganda which served to support the drug prohibition laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and partly on the current “disparate impact” of the drug laws on Blacks and Hispanics. Blacks have long been far more likely than Whites to be arrested or incarcerated on drug charges, with Blacks about four times as likely as Whites to be arrested on marijuana charges according to 2010 data. It was implied, and sometimes stated more explicitly, that the behaviors police should be focusing on in this context were not significantly different between the races.

The issue of predatory crime and criminals was rarely mentioned in the anti-prohibitionist literature except to suggest that it was exacerbated by prohibition. At most there was a reference to “fears of crime,” including early 1900s propaganda themes such as “Negro cocaine fiends,” creatures which allegedly could not be stopped with the usual caliber of bullet. Similar propaganda was mentioned in connection with opium smoking by Chinese and marijuana use by Mexican immigrants, but the question of how or if these people’s behavior actually differed from that of native Whites outside of drug use was not seriously raised. I read of H.R. Haldeman’s infamous quote that in President Nixon’s opinion, “the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to,” and I had the response I had been taught to have. I saw all of this as “racist” and proof of the absurdity of the whole anti-drug project.

It did not occur to me to seriously consider the character of many people involved on what Bill Hicks would call the winning side of the War on Drugs. The natural thing was to assume that the claims about the connection between drugs and antisocial behavior were at best rumors developed by the fevered imaginations of racist anti-drug fanatics. I had certainly learned of the corruption of many who worked on the prohibitionist side, and of infamous examples of brutality such as the drug treatment program Straight Inc. I had also read about the shady legal (arguably illegal) maneuvers which were the foundation of drug prohibition. If I ever thought about the offenders, though, it was only to feel outraged by their treatment. I was even proud to think that I did not care about whose interests I was defending or what type of people they were.

In one book—I cannot recall the name of it— there was a quote from a gang member on why he and his associates engaged in violence. The author was trying to argue that there was more behind the violence than the pressures of prohibition. Not only did I not give it much credence at the time, but I felt racist just to be reading it, and tried to put it out of my mind. The offender’s description was something like “you know, we be just funnin’, gunnin’ and funnin’.” In other words they shot people for the lulz. This was at odds with one anti-prohibitionist explanation for much of the violence of the drug market, namely the lack of access to courts to settle their differences peacefully. It did not occur to me that these were not the type of people to prefer the briefcase to the handgun method of dispute resolution.

I was initially puzzled when I read about Black leaders in Congress going along with the hysteria around crack cocaine in the 1980s. Most of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, including the infamous 100-1 disparity in mandatory minimum sentences between crack and powder cocaine. Similar support for other anti-drug policies has come from the CBC and many other Blacks over the course of the Drug War, and this has included essentially blaming crack for crime. I knew that the usually reported effects of cocaine—crack or powder—were not as dramatic as popularly claimed, and that no drug could simply make respectable people into criminals. Again, I did not read between the lines.

I had more hints of what was really going on, which I similarly did not think much of. One article in the compilation After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, edited by Timothy Lynch, was written by a former law enforcement officer. Although a supporter of drug policy reform himself, the author explained that the charge that they were targeting and incarcerating people solely for drug possession was laughed at by police. They only targeted suspected dealers for arrest, but found that it was difficult to prove a distribution charge in court, while possession was easy. This accounted for the figures¹ which some on our side took to mean that the police were mainly wasting their time on harmless users. This should have been a hint to me that offenders have likely committed many offenses for which they were not convicted or even charged, so the frequent references to “nonviolent drug offenders” were not presenting the full picture.

I do not doubt that the War on Drugs has punished some people who were no threat to society. I assume Norm Stamper is telling the truth when he discusses his experience as a DEA informant, stating that those he informed on were normal college students rather than dangerous criminals. But not everyone can be targeting peaceful college kids, particularly in areas where college education is practically unheard of.

I cannot point to a single “eureka” moment in which I changed my views on crime or race. I was however particularly moved by Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, a collection of essays on the British underclass. Dalrymple, a former prison doctor, argued against drug legalization in a debate in 2012. The people in the neighborhoods Dalrymple discusses are White, but no less dysfunctional for it, similar to what is on display on The Jeremy Kyle Show. Long-term gainful employment is rare, domestic violence is the norm, and local police have essentially given up prosecuting many serious offenses.

I understood while reading this that any sane person living in or around this sort of hell would rightly fear for their safety or even their lives. I also understood that poverty and general backwardness was not a condition imposed on some by the rest of society, but the product of a self-destructive worldview which could not but guarantee essentially Third-World living conditions. These were people who not only showed very little interest in improving their own situation but violently discouraged the more sensible among them from bettering themselves.

Reading Inside the Criminal Mind by Stanton Samenow, a Virginia psychiatrist who ran an intensive attitude-modification program for inmates, was also important. Samenow described the predominant personality type among criminals, explaining that they love to hear and repeat sociological excuses for their crimes. The mantra of “society is at fault” allows them to deny responsibility for their actions, which frees them from any obligation to change their behavior, let alone the attitudes behind it. The norm for these people is a victim mentality, often coupled with an aversion to work and a grandiose conception of themselves. With this mindset, of course, they feel little obligation to respect the rights of others. By rejecting their excuses and focusing on correcting their distorted worldview, he had some success in changing the behavior of a large minority of participants in his program.

In light of all this, I could not see such people as victims over whose treatment I should feel outraged. On the contrary, I could understand the desperation of police and citizens to do something about this incredible degeneracy.

Rhetorical victory over many prohibitionists such as former DEA head Asa Hutchinson is remarkably easy, as can be seen in various articles, books and televised debates. At first I thought this was simply because our side was overwhelmingly righteous and the other side was a bunch of idiotic bigots. As it turns out, it is essentially a fight against a disarmed opponent.

The character of violent criminals, let alone Black or underclass criminals in particular, is off the table as a topic in public discussion of the drug policies. This is despite it being the most compelling justification for a policy which manages to put away many of these people, restricting their ability to commit further crimes. Explaining that we are dealing with people from a different culture who have no interest in being a productive part of our society would be out of the question. It would violate the orthodox view that all men are created equal, and that society is at fault when they do not turn out that way. The taboo against “hate” is also relevant, as an honest description of these people’s attitudes and behavior would inspire such feelings in many normal people.

Not being able to honestly describe the nature of the people they are targeting leaves the prohibitionist side defenseless in debate. They are required to fall back on exaggerations of the dangers of drugs themselves when the issue is essentially the dangers of criminals, which to a large extent means Blacks. An honest desire to remove violent offenders from the neighborhoods they prey on ends up looking like some capricious crusade to eradicate offensive plant products.

Growing up, I was exposed to a fearful worldview which essentially stated that, especially concerning anything political, it was wiser to suspect someone of lying to you than to believe them. Of course, I never applied this rule consistently, but I did to some degree believe it. It did not occur to me for some time that we live in what has been described as a “trust society,” in stark contrast to much of the world. Despite our declining trust in institutions, people in the West can still count on a high degree of honest behavior in day-to-day life, and without this we would be much more like Somalia.

Without a suspicious attitude towards much of society it is much more difficult to maintain an egalitarian worldview. The idea that the races are equal in criminality or in other critical personality traits implies belief in massive dishonesty in a “racist” direction, both by those who have had the most experience of different races in their own lives and by generations of scientists. I have never had to deal with racial differences in a professional capacity, but neither have I ever found any reason to believe that those that have are lying.

I recall reading the popular article by Thomas Jackson, “What It’s Like to Teach Black Children,” and finding a seemingly endless string of comments from many different people claiming that their own experience had been similar to his, along with various details. One comment accused all of the others of lying, and another even accused the author of never having any experience teaching Blacks. Another commenter sarcastically responded with “yeah, all those people are lying.”

There was no dramatic epiphany, but I remember at this point thinking about the absurdity of my “consider the source” pretensions. Of course, in reading about the issue further, I found the evidence against the orthodox view on race to be just as overwhelming as I had earlier found the arguments against the War on Drugs.

It is true that the effects of illegal drugs themselves are commonly exaggerated. Many anti-drug authorities have made absurd claims about drugs, and about their own effectiveness in combating them. The average drug user is not a violent threat to others, even while under the influence. None of this means, though, that the authorities are imagining the threat of certain people for whom the best the prosecution can get is a drug possession charge.

Many violent criminals use and/or sell drugs. They often belong to a culture which does not accept values which many Whites assume are universal. This is an environment in which cooperation with the police is not the norm. Unlike some offenses, drug possession does not require a victim or other witnesses to assist the police, so cases can be prosecuted regardless. The War on Drugs is not some malicious attempt to punish Blacks out of jealousy for their resemblance to chocolate. Drug prohibition, despite its flaws, is an understandable attempt to put away dangerous people.

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1. See pages 14, 15, 39.