Schopenhauer and Judeo-Christian Life-Denial, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

Sexual Abstinence as Jewish Ethnic Strategy

Among many other things, Schopenhauer was fascinated by human sexuality, which for him assumed deep metaphysical importance. The human essence, the will-to-live, finds “as its kernel and greatest concentration, the act of generation”—which is to say, sexual reproduction. Here is the beginning of everything, not only of biology but of the whole great charade that is human existence. With a biting sense of humor, he explains it this way:

Seriously speaking, this is due to the fact that sexual desire, especially when, through fixation on a definite woman, it is concentrated to amorous infatuation, is the quintessence of the whole fraud of this noble world; for it promises so unspeakably, infinitely, and excessively much, and then performs so contemptibly little.[1]

Appropriately, then, sexual desire is the prime urging that must be suppressed by any real ascetic. Hence, by rights, we should find this admonition in the New Testament; and in fact, we do. Schopenhauer examines this matter in his exceptionally important Chapter 48 of Volume Two of World as Will and Representation:

The ascetic tendency is certainly unmistakable in genuine and original Christianity… We find, as its principal teaching, the recommendation of genuine and pure celibacy (that first and most important step in the denial of the will-to-live) already expressed in the New Testament.[2]

And he means, not only for single men and women, but for the married as well. Schopenhauer’s astonishing claim, that he proceeds to adduce from primary evidence, is that good Christians should not have sex—ever. He then dedicates the next several pages to building his case for this “perpetual chastity,” which includes these lines from an 1832 book by the Catholic author Friedrich Carove:

By virtue of the Church view…perpetual chastity is called a divine, heavenly, angelic virtue. … [Quoting a Catholic periodical,] “In Catholicism, the observance of a perpetual chastity, for God’s sake, appears in itself as the highest merit of man.” … To both [Paul and the author of Hebrews], virginity was perfection, marriage only a makeshift for the weaker. … The self should turn away and refrain from everything that contributes only to its pleasure. … We agree with Abbe Zaccaria, who asserts that celibacy … is derived above all from the teaching of Christ and of the Apostle Paul.[3]

At this point we want to exclaim: Can this be true? Could original Christianity actually expect its followers to adhere to “perpetual chastity,” even when married? And what would prompt such a call?

Evidence for this claim must ultimately come from our primary source, the New Testament. We further know that the earliest NT writings are the letters of Paul, which predate the four Gospels by two or three decades, at least. Let’s briefly look at the evidence, both that which Schopenhauer offers and that which we may supplement on our own.

Schopenhauer cites two passages from Paul. The first and earliest is 1 Thessalonians (4:3), an oddly cryptic passage. Paul says, “For it is the will of God, for your sanctification, that you abstain from porneias.” I cite here the Greek original—but what is porneias? Among the 70-odd English translations we find a range of terms, such as “immorality” (RSV), “sexual immorality” (NKJV), and “fornication” (KJV), all of which suggest illegitimate sex, perhaps unmarried sex, perhaps adultery. But we also find broader terms, like “all sexual vice” (AMPC), “sexual sins” (ERV), “sexual defilement” (TPT), and even “unchastity” (RSV). Paul goes on to say that “each one of you knows how to take a wife in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like a heathen.” Can he be suggesting that men take wives as “partners in Christ” all while abstaining from the sexual lust of heathens?

The second passage is a lengthy portion from 1 Corinthians 7. Again, it is oddly conflicted. At the start of the chapter, Paul says, bluntly, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman” (7:1, ESV). But owing to “the temptation to immorality”—presumably meaning sexual intercourse—a man may take a wife. Affirming his own unmarried status, Paul then says “I wish that all were as I myself am. … To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do” (7:7-8). “But if they cannot exercise self-control”—that is, if they are weak—“they should marry.” Later in the chapter, Paul returns to the subject: “Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage” (7:27). Two lines later he warns, “those who marry will have worldly troubles [!], and I would spare you that.” Paul goes on to state that married people are worried about worldly matters and about pleasing each other, which distracts them from their “undivided devotion to the Lord.” A married man may do well, says Paul, “but he who refrains from marriage will do better” (7:38). These are striking words from our “Apostle.” It seems clear—Paul will accept you if you marry, but he would much prefer that you did not.

There are other Pauline passages that Schopenhauer might have cited. For example, Colossians 3:5: “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry” (NIV). Or Galatians 5:16-19: “Do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit… The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery.” Or 1 Corinthians 6:18: “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.” Or Romans 13:14: “Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.” We might also include the pseudepigraphic Ephesians 5:3: “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.” This is prudish Puritanism in the extreme. Paul, indeed, seems to strongly prefer that his fellow Christians have no sexual relations at all.

There are other related suggestions in the Gospels. Schopenhauer refers to Matthew 19:10, where the disciples offer to Jesus the idea that “perhaps it is better not to marry.” Jesus gives a typically cryptic reply, suggesting that chastity may be best:

Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

The apparent suggestion here is that we all should ‘be like a eunuch,’ and not have sex. In Luke 20:34 Jesus addresses the future resurrection of married people: “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come, and in the resurrection from the dead, will neither marry nor be given in marriage.” Indeed, the unmarried are “equal to angels and are sons of God.” It’s clear who the preferred people are.

Outside the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, we have 1 John 2:15: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. … For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, is not of the Father but is of the world.” Or we could cite 1 Peter 2:11: “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul” (NSRV). And in the late-written Revelations, we read that the Lamb of God will return to Earth only with those “who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are chaste” (14:4).

What is one to conclude? It seems that Schopenhauer is right—that perpetual chastity is the prescribed course of action for all good Christians.

But why? Why would Paul, for example, encourage his would-be followers to abstain from sex? Obviously he did not get this suggestion from “Jesus” or from God; it was clearly his own doing. Obviously he did not get it from the Old Testament, with its many calls to “be fruitful and multiply.”[4] The idea itself of a celibate religious group was not unknown to him, as it was characteristic of a number of esoteric cults and secretive groups over the centuries. But Paul wasn’t aiming at some clandestine cult; he wanted a mass movement. He must have known that it was poor organizational strategy to ask people to commit to chastity. Clearly, he had some compelling reason for introducing this component into his new religion.

Schopenhauer had no real knowledge of evolution, having been born a few decades too early, and so it is understandable that he had no idea of group evolutionary strategy. If he had, he might have discerned something in Paul’s motive—an overriding concern for the welfare of his fellow Jews. As an elite Pharisee Jew, Paul (born Saul) clearly resented the incursion of the Roman Empire into Palestine in the decades prior to his birth. He also surely shared the long-standing Jewish antipathy for his neighboring Gentile masses—Arabs, Greeks, and Egyptians.[5] Seeing the futility of violent resistance to Rome, Paul was surely searching for nonviolent, indirect, psychological or moral means of undermining the enemy. Then he hit upon a plan: Why not play up the alleged divinity of a recently-crucified Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, turning him into the savior of all humanity? This way, all of Paul’s exhortations—in his self-assigned role as “Apostle to the Gentiles”—could be turned into an anti-Gentile morality and placed into the mouth of God himself. “It’s not my idea,” implies Paul; “God wants you to be chaste—forever.”

But is “perpetual chastity” anti-Gentile? Yes—if, by proscribing future children, it erodes Gentile families. This, in fact, is the only practical consequence: fewer Gentile children. Seen this way, as a Jewish ethnic evolutionary strategy, Paul found a way to inhibit the growth of the non-Jewish population. If there is any historical basis to the concept of “White genocide,” this is it.

And it wasn’t only Paul. Above I gave two chastity quotations from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Those same two books also contain, unsurprisingly, a number of explicitly anti-family passages. In Matthew 10:21, Jesus says, “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.” At Matthew 19:29, Jesus proclaims, “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much, and will inherit eternal life.” In the Gospel of Luke (12:52) we read, “From now on, there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three.” And later (14:26) we find that Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” What is this but a family-destroying message, an admonition to tear apart familial ties, all while staying chaste, simply for the sake of “Jesus”? The Jewish Gospel writers seem to have clearly endorsed Paul’s anti-Gentile strategy.

In the end, of course, this anti-family stance had to be abandoned, as Schopenhauer makes clear. Beginning with Clement of Alexandria, circa 200 AD—especially in book 3 of his Stromata—Gentile Christian Fathers rejected the anti-marriage, anti-family, and anti-child stance of the early Jewish Christians. Clement rails against earlier Church Fathers like Marcion and Tatian, who held to the literal, anti-natalist reading: “they teach that one should not enter into matrimony and beget children, should not bring further unhappy beings into the world, and produce fresh fodder for death.”[6] Writing two centuries later, Augustine too recognized this dilemma in the early Christian Fathers: “They reject marriage and put it on a level with fornication and other vices.” By way of modest defense, and with perhaps a touch of irony, he adds that, with mass abstention, “the kingdom of God would be realized far more quickly, since the end of the world would be hastened.”[7]

Still, it was clear that mass perpetual chastity was not a practical way to build a worldwide religion, and in the end it had to be abandoned or “reinterpreted” by Catholics and Protestants alike. They had to adopt the Jewish optimism, the pánta kalá lían, and surrender the central aspect of Christian asceticism, its perpetual chastity. But in doing so, they drained away the key elements of their own religion. As Schopenhauer says, summing up the situation, “From all this, it seems to me that Catholicism is a disgracefully abused, and Protestantism a degenerate, Christianity.”[8]

On the Jews

Where, then, does all this leave us? For Schopenhauer, Christianity had an original and profound core in its inherently life-denying outlook, something which was consistent with his own philosophical stance. But it got subverted and contaminated with the detestable Jewish optimism, and thus lost to history. For all his skepticism, Schopenhauer seems to believe that an historical (but non-miraculous) Jesus really existed, and that Paul was an honest interpreter of his message. In retrospect, this seems utterly naïve. Far more likely is that Paul and the Jewish Gospel writers were master deceivers—“artful liars,” as Hitler might have put it[9]—who were only interested in Jewish power and Jewish well-being, and who thus instituted an effective Jewish group-strategy to confuse and weaken the Gentile masses. And in the end, and even though some aspects had to be jettisoned, it worked. Rome collapsed and Christianity went global. Given that we have some 2 billion Christians on Earth today, the implications are enormous.

Schopenhauer’s many reflections on religion, and his negative assessment of Judaism in particular, furthermore allowed him the opportunity to offer a number of critical comments on Jews generally. Even in his early writing, in volume one of World as Will and Representation, he offered harsh commentary. In a passage on the development of the arts, he briefly addresses “the history of a small, isolated, capricious, hierarchical (i.e. ruled by false notions), obscure people, like the Jews, despised by the great contemporary nations of the East and of the West.”[10] “It is to be regarded generally as a great misfortune,” he adds, “that the people whose former culture was to serve mainly as the basis of our own were not, say, the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Romans, but just these Jews.”

For the next three decades, he said little about them. But he returned to the topic, in a very pointed manner, in Parerga and Paralipomena. Volume 1 begins with a sketch of the history of idealism and the limitations of that metaphysical view. The classic idealists are closely allied with Judeo-Christian theology, and thus “are all marred by that Jewish theism which is impervious to any investigation, dead to all research, and thus actually appears as a fixed idea.”[11] But the subsequent essay, on the history of philosophy, brings the occasion for an extended digression on the subject:

The real religion of the Jews, as presented and taught in Genesis and all the historical books up to the end of Chronicles, is the crudest of all religions because it is the only one that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, not even a trace thereof. … The contempt in which the Jews were always held by contemporary peoples may have been due in great measure to the poor character of their religion. … Now this wretched religion of the Jews does not [offer any conception of an afterlife], in fact it does not even attempt it. It is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism. … While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols and parables the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent, and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations.[12]

Here we see real insight: Judaism is not a religion at all, but rather a war-manual in the competition with other peoples. It serves to sustain and promote the Jewish race in their material well-being, nothing more.

Volume 2 elaborates on these ideas, especially in the chapter titled “On Religion,” which brings this observation:

Also we should not forget God’s chosen people who, after they had stolen, by Jehovah’s express command, the gold and silver vessels lent to them by their old and trusty friends in Egypt, now made their murderous and predatory attack on the ‘Promised Land,’ with the murderer Moses at their head, in order to tear away from the rightful owners, by the same Jehovah’s express and constantly repeated command, showing no mercy, and ruthlessly murdering and exterminating all the inhabitants, even the women and children.[13]

A footnote to the above passage adds this widely-cited remark:

Tacitus and Justinus have handed down to us the historical basis of the Exodus. … We see from the two Roman authors how much the Jews were at all times and by all nations loathed and despised. This may be partly due to the fact that they were the only people on earth who did not credit man with any existence beyond this life and were, therefore, regarded as beasts. … Scum of humanity—but great master of lies [grosse Meister im Lügen].[14]

The ultimate tragedy, for Schopenhauer, is that the pathetic Judeo-Christian culture dominated the history of Europe, rather than the nobler Greco-Roman: “The religion of the Greeks and Romans, those world-powers, has perished. The religion of the contemptible little Jewish race [verachteten Judenvölkchens], on the other hand, has been preserved…”[15]

But, as noted, the Hebrew tribe is not simply defined by a religion; “it is an extremely superficial and false view to regard the Jews merely as a religious sect. … On the contrary, ‘Jewish Nation’ is the correct expression.”[16] Like Johann Fichte and Johann Herder, Schopenhauer was also concerned about the political consequences of integrating and granting rights to, this Jewish Nation. The Jews were a “gens extorris” (refugee race), eternally uprooted, always searching for but never finding a homeland:

Till then, it lives parasitically on other nations and their soil; but yet it is inspired with the liveliest patriotism for its own nation. This is seen in the very firm way in which Jews stick together…and no community on earth sticks so firmly together as does this. It follows that it is absurd to want to concede to them a share in the government or administration of any country.[17]

Schopenhauer was more moderate than Fichte; banishment was not necessary. He was willing to grant them limited rights, provided they took no role in government. “Justice demands that they should enjoy with others equal civil rights; but to concede to them a share in the running of the State is absurd. They are and remain a foreign oriental race.”[18] The race could be tolerated, but the corrupt ideology had to go: “We may therefore hope that one day even Europe will be purified of all Jewish mythology.”[19]

Finally, Schopenhauer found much use in an intriguing little phrase, foetor Judaicus—the “Jewish stench.” For him, the stench represents not so much a literal smell but rather an intellectual odor of stale Jewish thought, arising primarily from the Old Testament. Oddly enough, he applies it most often in his critique of Jewish approaches to animal rights.[20] In the Parerga he criticizes Spinoza (and his view of animals) as a man who speaks “just as a Jew knows how to do, so that we others, who are accustomed to purer and worthier doctrines, are here overcome by the foetor Judaicus.”[21] Of the Genesis account that God created animals for man’s use, Schopenhauer exclaims, “Such stories have on me the same effect as do Jew’s pitch and foetor Judaicus![22] Somewhat later he refers to “Europe, the continent that is so permeated with the foetor Judaicus.[23] And on the same subject: “It is obviously high time that in Europe, Jewish views on nature were brought to an end. … A man must be bereft of all his senses or completely chloroformed by the foetor Judaicus not to see [this].”[24]

Members of the alt-right, no longer “chloroformed by the foetor Judaicus” nor deceived by the “great master of lies,” can see the evident truth in such statements—statements that were years ahead of their time, and written in a period when a great thinker could still speak the truth. Sadly, and thanks to Jewish domination of our society, we can no longer openly say such things without harsh recriminations. True free speech no longer exists. Hence we are locked into a long struggle with the Jewish race, simply to achieve basic freedoms of speech and expression, and to live our lives out from under the dominance of the Jewish hand.

Perhaps this is our lot in life—and indeed, the lot of all people everywhere. This calls to mind a well-known quotation from Schopenhauer, which I cite here in context:

History shows us the life of nations and can find nothing to relate except wars and insurrections; the years of peace appear here and there only as short pauses, as intervals between the acts. And in the same way, the life of the individual is a perpetual struggle, not merely metaphorically with want or boredom, but actually with others. Everywhere he finds an opponent, lives in constant conflict, and dies weapon in hand.[25]

Less known is that the concluding thought appears earlier in the book, in different form, and is attributed to Voltaire. The words are apt:

In this world where “the dice are loaded,” we need a temper of iron, armor against fate, and weapons against mankind. For the whole of life is a struggle, every step contested, and Voltaire rightly says, on ne réussit dans ce monde qu’à la pointe de l’épée, et on meurt les armes à la main (“In this world, we succeed only at the point of the sword, and we die with weapons in hand.”)[26]

In such a world, says Schopenhauer, our motto should be (quoting Virgil): tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito (“Do not give way to evil, but face it more boldly”—Aeneid 6.95). The situation demands courage and resolve; “we should not think of nervousness or hesitation, but only of resistance.” We must harden ourselves, and stiffen our resolve; he cites Horace: Si fractus illabatur orbis, Impavidum ferient ruinae (“Even if the world collapses over a man, the ruins still leave him undismayed”—Odes III, 3.7). The future is there for those who are willing to face the battle head-on: Quocirca vivite fortes, Fortiaque adversis opponite pectora rebus (“Therefore he lives bravely and presents a bold front to the blows of fate”—Satires II, 2.135). As they say, timeless wisdom is eternally valuable.

But perhaps we leave the last word to Schopenhauer himself. His pessimistic realism held true to the end. In volume two of the Parerga, he sums up all the strivings of our lives:

A happy life is impossible; the best that man can attain is a heroic life, such as is lived by one who struggles against overwhelming odds in some way and in some affair that will benefit the whole of mankind, and who, in the end, triumphs—although he obtains a poor reward, or none at all.[27]

The message is clear: Have low expectations of life; as a rule, things will not go as we wish. Any victories will be rare, hard-fought, fleeting, and unacknowledged. Life is perpetual struggle; therefore, never give up. Above all, strive to be heroic.

Words to ponder, for all those who would fight for justice in this unjust world.

Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books, including a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the book Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020). For all his works, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com


[1] P&P, vol. 2, p. 316.

[2] WWR, vol. 2, p. 616.

[3] WWR, vol. 2, p. 619-620.

[4] Genesis 1:28, 9:1, 9:7, 17:20, 28:3, 35:11; Exodus 1:7; Leviticus 26:9; Jeremiah 23:3.

[5] Jewish misanthropy is notorious and well-documented. It dates back at least to Hecateus of Abdera, circa 300 BC, who observed that “Moses introduced a way of life [for the Jews] which was to a certain extent misanthropic and hostile to foreigners.” Apollonius Molon, circa 75 BC, “reviled the Jews as atheists and misanthropes.” In 50 BC, Diodorus Siculus remarked that “the nation of Jews had made their hatred of mankind into a tradition.” The list of such commentaries is extensive; for details, see my work Eternal Strangers (Castle Hill, 2020).

[6] Cited by Schopenhauer in WWR, vol. 2, p. 622 note.

[7] Cited in WWR, vol. 2, p. 618 note.

[8] WWR, vol. 2, p. 626.

[9] In Mein Kampf, vol. 1, section 2.25, he expresses his amazement at the Jews’ “art of lying” (Kunst der Lüge). And later in chapter 10 (section 10.4), he employs the explicit phrase “artful liars” (Lügenkünstler). See my new translation (Clemens & Blair, 2017).

[10] WWR, vol. 1, p. 232.

[11] P&P, vol. 1, p. 15.

[12] P&P, vol. 1, p. 125-126.

[13] P&P, vol. 2, p. 357.

[14] Payne mistranslates this sentence, interpreting the final phrase as “past master at telling lies.”

[15] P&P, vol. 2, p. 393.

[16] P&P, vol. 2, p. 263.

[17] P&P, vol. 2, p. 262.

[18] P&P, vol. 2, p. 264.

[19] P&P, vol. 2, p. 226.

[20] Schopenhauer was a passionate advocate for animal welfare, far ahead of his time on that count. He was the first major philosopher to incorporate them into his ethical schema.

[21] P&P, vol. 1, p. 73.

[22] P&P, vol. 2, p. 370. “Jew’s pitch” is a naturally-occurring bituminous asphalt, found in ancient times around the Dead Sea and other parts of Judea.

[23] P&P, vol. 2, p. 372.

[24] P&P, vol. 2, p. 375.

[25] P&P, vol. 2, p. 292.

[26] P&P, vol. 1, p. 475. Original source for Voltaire is Les pensées et maximes (1821).

[27] P&P, vol. 2, p. 322.

Schopenhauer and Judeo-Christian Life-Denial, Part 1

Vitam impendere vero (“Dedicate one’s life to truth.”)
—Juvenal, Satire IV, 91[1]

Every movement needs its icons, the alt-right no less than any other social-political ideology. Any icon—a term deriving from the Greek eikôn, meaning a likeness or image—serves to embody key elements or aspects of a particular outlook, or to encapsulate certain key values. Within Christianity, the image of a crucified Jesus serves this purpose, as does an empty cross, which signifies his alleged resurrection. Within the alt-right, we have our own secular heroes, often drawn from among the great philosophers and intellectual figures of Western history, among whom I would include Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; French thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire; and leading German intellectuals like Kant, Goethe, and Nietzsche. All have contributed seminal and indispensable ideas to the Western project.

But special standing is reserved for Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), a man of exceptional insight and courage. At once a brilliant metaphysician and a visionary social critic, Schopenhauer combined both aspects of his persona in his two main works, The World as Will and Representation (1818)[2] and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)[3]. It is worthwhile examining his views on life and death, Christianity, and the Jews. There are valuable lessons here for us all.

Metaphysics of the Will

Let’s start with the big metaphysical picture. In its broad outline, Schopenhauer’s worldview consists of a universe of struggle, strife, and conflict—of tension and opposition which is only ever temporarily relieved, except to resume once more later on, in new and more potent forms. We see this clearly, he said, in the human realm, in the guise of war, oppression, and criminality. We see it in the mundane struggles of daily life, for money, friends, influence, power. We see it in countless minor actions and decisions that we all make, every day, aiming at something new, something better, something more. Every human action, even the most trivial, is a manifestation of a want, a desire, an urging, a striving—in short, of the will. As such, all social conflict reduces, ultimately, to a battle of wills.

But this situation is not limited to humans. We see a comparable picture in the animal kingdom, in the struggle for existence, for mates, for food, and for survival. We see it in plants, in their battle for sunlight and water, and for nutrients in the soil. And we see it even in inanimate nature, via such forces as gravitation, magnetism, and electrostatics. All the world, said Schopenhauer, is comprised, in its essence, of struggle, strife, frustration, and opposition; all the world is a manifestation of the will. The metaphysics here are fascinating and strikingly original, but I won’t elaborate for now. Here, we are most concerned with the social realm and the far-reaching implications of seeing “the world as will.”

For we humans, as mentioned, our daily life is a constant expression of our will. We want: want food, want drink, want material goods, want sex, want prestige, want power. Different people express their wills differently, but the essential nature of all people is the same: a constant striving or desiring for something. This has two important consequences. First, since we all are constantly striving—often for the same limited things—we are thereby engaged in an endless competition with others. As in any competition, there are (a few) winners and (many) losers. The losers become frustrated, disappointed, depressed, perhaps angry, perhaps aggressive. They either vow to try harder next time, or they give up altogether. Even the winners—and we all do win, from time to time—are not really satisfied. After a short-lived sense of relief or satisfaction, we immediately settle into a new sense of desiring and wanting. The sweetness of victory is fleeting. Soon we are either fending off jealous rivals, or we are constructing new, higher desires that we hope to fulfill. At best, we are simply bored.

Hence the second consequence: the basic reality of human life is a condition of unsatisfied want, endless craving, relentless competition, and unfulfilled desire—in other words, of suffering. Our lot in life is a constant striving for things that we can never really possess, least of all ‘happiness,’ and therefore the tangible reality of life is pain, suffering, and want. ‘Happiness’ or ‘satisfaction’ are merely temporary releases from such pain; therefore, happiness and pleasure are negative in their nature, and pain and suffering are the positive realities of the world.

Thus we arrive at Schopenhauer’s infamous pessimism. Life is a task, a chore, indeed, a punishment. We are all condemned to lives of greater or lesser suffering, sometimes physical, sometimes psychological, sometimes intense, sometimes mild—but ever-present and always looming greater in the future. The end of this life of suffering comes only with the ‘great suffering’ of physical death, which we all dread, and which therefore weighs upon our heads as yet more suffering. It would have been better, he concludes, if we had never been born.

What to do? Such a depressing picture almost inclines one to suicide. And yet Schopenhauer masterfully turns the picture around for us, finding a way through the morass of existence. First, he says, we are strangely fortunate that the world is as it is. Were it otherwise—if we somehow attained fulfillment and satisfaction on a regular basis, life would become truly pointless. We would either be driven insane by boredom, or would create artificial conflicts and struggles, wars and mass atrocities, simply to have a reason for being. Failing these, we might simply end our own lives—ironic, that the suicidal person is the one who has all his desires satisfied, not the one, like us, condemned to a life of struggle and pain. Suffering, said Schopenhauer, was like the ballast of a ship; it keeps us on the straight-and-narrow, keeps us focused, and drives us forward. Paradoxically, we ought to be grateful for our condition; if nothing else, it leads us to the ultimate metaphysical truths about the world.

Be that as it may, we still need to live our lives, preferably with a minimum of suffering. Hence we are faced with a profound dilemma: Life is desire, and desire leads to the very suffering that we seek to avoid. On the one hand, then, we ought logically to minimize or reduce (“deny”) our desires. But this is tantamount to denying life. This may be a theoretical possibility for a saint or a god, but it is an unworkable plan for the real world. At its worst, a ‘life of life-denial’ is an incoherent and self-annihilating concept, one appropriate only for a pathological individual.[4]

Therefore, to live, we must accept the struggle and pain of life, keep our expectations low, press ahead, and hope for the best. This is the only practical conclusion. Yes, we ought to minimize our desires where possible: avoid a fixation on money, material things, status—all those things that Jews, for example, obsess about, and thus foist upon the public mind as the ultimate goals in life. We should not be too concerned about a nebulous and facile goal like ‘happiness,’ which in any case is virtually impossible in a world of perpetual strife. We ought not expect that things will necessarily turn out well, and therefore not be disappointed when they don’t. Life goes on, the struggle goes on—such it is.

It’s a striking moral picture that Schopenhauer paints for us, one that is hard to refute. I think we all can relate to such thinking in our everyday experience. Much of this rings true, and yet we rarely follow the logic out to the full implications.

If it all sounds vaguely Buddhist, that’s because it is. One of Schopenhauer’s great surprises, and greatest satisfactions, was his discovery of Buddhist philosophy in the 1830s, well after he had written volume one of his monumental work, World as Will and Representation. There are many obvious affinities, and Schopenhauer viewed himself as independently coming to the same eternal truths as the Buddha but from an entirely different route, and with a much firmer philosophical foundation. Their prescriptions were essentially the same: end suffering via an elimination of desire and attachment, which is the source of that suffering.[5] But Buddhism was entangled in a mythological schema involving samsara or a cycle of endless reincarnation and rebirth, and of nirvana, conceived as an end to that cycle. Schopenhauer had no patience for such mythology but he respected the metaphysical insight, and placed it, in his mind, on a superior rational footing.

‘One True Christian’

But it wasn’t only Buddhism that Schopenhauer found affinity with; it was also there, to a surprising degree, in Christianity. In fact, his alignment with ‘original’ or ‘true’ Christianity was so strong that Schopenhauer considered himself the ‘one true Christian,’ and the only such person in all of modern history: “my teaching could be called Christian philosophy proper, paradoxical as this may seem to those who do not go to the root of the matter, but stick merely to the surface.”[6] This astonishing conclusion demands some examination.

Consider, he says, the basic creation myths of the major religions. In Hinduism, the god Brahma is said to have created the world “through a kind of original sin”[7]—a mistake or error, one in which Brahma himself must atone for. (Schopenhauer adds with emphasis: “This is quite a good idea!”) Buddhism, for its part, sees the world as coming into being “in consequence of an inexplicable disturbance in the crystal clearness of the blessed…state of Nirvana.” (“An excellent idea!”) The ancient Greeks saw the formation of the cosmos as an act of “unfathomable necessity,” that which simply had to be. This too was reasonable. All such views saw the act of cosmic creation as a negation, as a failing—an error, a mistake, or an unfortunate necessity.

But the Judaic view was altogether different. There, the Jewish god Jehovah creates this world “of misery and woe,” stands back on the seventh day, and declares it “all good”—what is this? Utter nonsense, declares Schopenhauer, and in fact “something intolerable.” Recall the key passage from Genesis 1:31: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Schopenhauer repeatedly mocks this idea, drawing from and paraphrasing the Greek Septuagint version by use of the phrase πάντα καλὰ λίαν (pánta kalá lían),[8] “all was very good.” This was pure nonsense, utterly disproven by common sense, philosophical insight, and even a modicum of a realist view of the world. Indeed, says Schopenhauer elsewhere, the world could hardly be any worse than it is.[9] To proclaim the opposite is sheer stupidity.

As a putative religion, however, Judaism is even worse. There is a god in it, of course, but this deity is merely a brutal enforcer of the Law. He praises and cajoles his “chosen” and smites their enemies, nothing more. In this metaphysical system there is no immortal soul, no real afterlife, no heaven, no hell; all such things are utterly lacking in the Old Testament. Schopenhauer concludes,

And so in this respect, we see the religion of the Jews occupy the lowest place among the dogmas of the civilized world, which is wholly in keeping with the fact that it is also the only religion that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, nor has it even any trace thereof.[10]

Not that Schopenhauer endorsed the concept of an immortal soul; far from it. But he realized that any honest religion must include some such doctrine. Judaism, as we will see, evidently served a different purpose.

Nor did he accept anything like a moral, omnipotent, all-good god. “Such a view…is too flagrantly contradicted by the misery and wretchedness that fill the world, on the one hand, and by the obvious imperfection and even burlesque distortion of the most ‘perfect’ phenomenon…of man.” The evil inherent in worldly existence, and the many failings of humanity, decisively disprove the existence of any such god. In fact, the great suffering of the world is proof of the opposite, namely, that it came into being in “sin,” as the other religions have it. There remains a trace of this original sin, of course, in the Bible, in the myth of the Fall, of Adam and Eve—which stands as the only philosophically valid insight in Judaism: “it is only the story of the Fall of Man that reconciles me to the Old Testament. In fact, in my eyes, it is the only metaphysical truth that appears in the book.”

Schopenhauer next turns to a central issue: the view of earthly life in the various religions. For emphasis, he contrasts the ancient Greek view with that of Christianity. Consider first the distinction between Greek and Christian views of death, as seen in images engraved on ancient sarcophagi. For the Greeks, the dead man’s life is depicted in happy, optimistic terms: his birth, family, marriage, occupation, and so on. It is, says Schopenhauer, an essentially positive, life-affirming outlook; life is good, life is to be lived to its fullest, and people can indeed attain happiness. Then look at the Christian coffin: draped in black, and topped by the cross, the symbol of ultimate suffering and death. This, he said, is an essentially life-denying outlook. But it is fitting: for the Christian, this temporal life of sin and suffering is superseded by eternal life in heaven. What is life for a Christian, after all, but a test, a burden, indeed, a “cross to bear”?

From the perspective of a modern-day secular philosopher, one looks at this distinction and says: “Of course, the Greeks were right; you have one life, it can be good, so live it to the fullest. Those foolish Christians, with their mindless belief in an afterlife, disavow the value of earthly existence. They are always looking ahead, to heaven, never to the here and now.” But Schopenhauer again turns the tables on us:

Between the spirit of Graeco-Roman paganism and that of Christianity is the proper contrast of the affirmation and denial of the will-to-live, according to which, in the last resort, Christianity is fundamentally right.[11]

(I note here parenthetically that he frequently clarified his concept of the will as, more specifically, the will-to-live [der Wille zum Leben].) Christianity is “right” in the sense that the world is suffering, it is ‘sin’—not for Christian reasons, of course, but because that is the nature of a world of pure willing. Even more, the Christian ‘solution’ is nearly the same as Schopenhauer’s: deny the will, be life-denying. Will is will-to-live, and thus to deny the will is to deny life. Deny your material desires, deny bodily pleasures. Become an ascetic. “Take up your cross and follow me.”[12] This is the path of redemption.

Hence Schopenhauer sees his philosophical worldview as aligned with the Christian New Testament and its ‘pessimism’ about the world, whereas other philosophers are inherently more consistent with the ‘optimistic’ view of Judaism and the Old Testament:

My ethics is related to all the ethical systems of European philosophy as the New Testament to the Old, according to the ecclesiastical conception of this relation. Thus the Old Testament puts man under the authority of the Law [of Moses] which, however, does not lead to salvation. The New Testament, on the other hand, declares the Law to be inadequate, in fact repudiates it. On the contrary, it preaches the kingdom of grace which is attained by faith, love of one’s neighbor, and complete denial of oneself; this is the path to salvation from evil and the world. For in spite of all protestant-rationalistic distortions and misrepresentations, the ascetic spirit is assuredly and quite properly the soul of the New Testament. But this is just the denial of the will-to-live…

He then places his own outlook in historical context:

Now all the philosophical systems of ethics prior to mine have kept to the spirit of the Old Testament, with their absolute moral law and all their moral commandments and prohibitions, to which the commanding Jehovah is secretly added in thought. … My ethics, on the other hand, … frankly and sincerely admits the abominable nature of the world, and points to the denial of the will as the path to redemption therefrom. It is, accordingly, actually in the spirit of the New Testament, whereas all the others are in that of the Old, and thus theoretically amount to mere Judaism (plain despotic theism). In this sense, my teaching could be called Christian philosophy proper, paradoxical as this may seem to those who do not go to the root of the matter, but stick merely to the surface.[13]

Thus he arrives back at the quotation I cited above. Judaism, with its pánta kalá lían, an all-good God, and a promise of material prosperity, is a pathetic form of optimism, utterly at odds with the real world. (Of course, for the Jews themselves over the past century at least, and excepting a few years during World War II, the world has been exceptionally good; it’s good to be king. I will return to this shortly.) Christianity, with its sufferings of the world, its sin and misery and death, and its “you will be hated by all,”[14] is realistic pessimism—albeit, as with Schopenhauer, with an escape route, namely, denial of the will and the consequent asceticism. The analogy is imperfect but sufficient to allow for an instructive comparison. It permitted Schopenhauer to draw out some fascinating implications but it also blinded him to a likely deeper truth about Christianity.

Go to Part 2.


[1] Opening quotation in Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1851/1974; E. F. J. Payne, trans.). Original from Juvenal, circa 110 AD.

[2] World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1969; E. F. J. Payne, trans.) The German title is also rendered in English as The World as Will and Idea, owing to the ambiguity of the word Vorstellung.

[3] A ‘parergon’ is a supplement or addition, and a ‘paralipomenon’ is something omitted or overlooked. Hence this book comprises a number of essays and aphorisms on a variety of topics that are supplemental to Schopenhauer’s main work. As an aside, I note that some of Schopenhauer’s other “books,” such as Essays and Aphorisms and On the Suffering of the World, are just extracts from Parerga and Paralipomena.

[4] Nietzsche recognized and acknowledged this very point: “For an ascetic, life is a self-contradiction. … [For such a man,] life somehow turns against itself, denies itself” (Genealogy of Morals III, sec. 11). And again: “Morality, as it has so far been understood—as it has in the end been formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as ‘negation of the will to live’—is the very instinct of decadence, which makes an imperative of itself. It says: ‘Perish!’” (Twilight of the Idols V, sec. 5).

[5] Putting an end to personal desires and attachment to material things was in fact the third of the Buddha’s “four noble truths”.

[6] Parerga and Paralipomena (hereafter, P&P), vol. 2, p. 315.

[7] P&P, vol. 2, p. 300.

[8] The full phrase in Genesis is: kaí eíden o theós tá pánta ósa epoíisen kaí idoú kalá lían kaí egéneto espéra kaí egéneto proí iméra ékti.

[9] “Now this world is arranged as it had to be, if it were to be capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would no longer be capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds. … Consequently, the world is as bad as it can possibly be, if it is to exist at all.” (WWR, vol. 2, pp. 583-584).

[10] P&P, vol. 2, p. 301.

[11] P&P, vol. 2, p. 314.

[12] Mark 8:34; Matthew 16:24.

[13] P&P, vol. 2, p. 314.

[14] Matthew 10:22, Luke 6:22, John 15:19.

Coronavirus and the Crisis of Neoliberalism

Introduction:

Many of the world’s contemporary ills are a direct result of the philosophies, actions and policies of the mainstream establishment, its elites, and their bizarre ideology-cum-religion of liberalism, more recently dubbed “neoliberalism” in its most extreme incarnation. Figuratively speaking, it’s more than fair to posit that the dangerously interconnected and interdependent neoliberalized world is like a giant network server, ever perilously teetering on the verge of a cataclysmic failure. When writing of the excesses of the liberal system, and most notably the dangerous interconnectivity of the globalized world Guillaume Faye acutely summarizes our current predicament when he writes:

A series of ‘dramatic lines’ are approaching one another and converging like a river’s tributaries with perfect accord (between 2010 and 2020) towards a breaking point and a descent into chaos (Faye 2012, 12)

Continuing Faye then offers a glimmer of hope when he writes:

From this chaos — which will be extremely painful on the global scale — can emerge the new order of the post-catastrophe era and therefore a new civilization born in pain (Faye 2012, 12)

The accelerationists among our ranks will chortle that collapse is a good thing. They believe that civilizational collapse will pave the way for a “new world order,” images of valiant last stands reminiscent of those envisioned by William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries or James Mason’s Siege first and foremost in their minds. While the more grounded elements of our movement—those interested in gradual, and realistic metapolitical, and eventual political change—tend to take another view. Realistically speaking, collapse would be a nightmare, wrought with unimaginable suffering and death. Moreover, presumably many of the victims would be our fellow Whites. Political disintegration is a recurring theme throughout world history, and as the study of history has taught, its seldom a pleasant phenomenon.

Bringing matters to a head, and intensifying the instability of the Western world, is the Chinese coronavirus. In true Huxleyan dystopian fashion, with each passing day the fate of the liberalized world rests atop “a pale tenuous membrane,” veering ever closer towards systemic planetary collapse. I cannot help but liken the current crisis to a near-death experience and like any near-death experience, I am cautiously optimistic that some good may arise from our collective veering so close to the proverbial edge. More precisely, I’m hoping that all the fear, misery and uncertainty engendered by the Wuhan pestilence elicits a bona fide existential crisis in whatever’s left of the dwindling soul of the European variant of homo economicus. Let’s hope that with what is tantamount to a national quarantine here in America and most of Europe, that the racially unenlightened kindred among us begin to contemplate just how we got here. The current litany of crises afflicting the West appeared long before the emergence of the Chinese coronavirus, but the virus has managed to bring many of the systems weaknesses to the world’s attention.

War is peace / freedom is slavery / ignorance is strength

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph A. Tainter argues that societies become unsustainable when the their problem-solving structures diminish (Tainter 1988). Liberalism as a way of life, has precipitated a number of calamities, on a global scale, many of which remain unresolved, and in fact, are growing to monstrous proportions, immigration chief among them.

Related to the above, the true severity underpinning the coronavirus crisis is a direct result of the extreme uncertainty as to how or when it will end. This uncertainty in turn endows the virus with a potency much more immediately felt than, say, mass immigration or overpopulation, both of which take years for their effects to be realized by the mainstream. Generally speaking, risk can be quantified, in fact, there’s a whole science of risk quantification present within the field of project management devoted solely to the evaluation of risk. Uncertainty, however, isn’t quantifiable, and by its nature is completely unpredictable, and it is this unpredictability which imbues the Chinese virus with so much psychological stress. From this the question arises, how will European man, and ultimately European civilization react to the uncertainty of the Chinese scourge? Will this crisis be the springboard which propels European man towards real ontological, and by extension, civilizational transformation? Or will the retracting empire of European civilization drift closer to the precipice of total racial annihilation? Only time will tell what the future will bring, but some optimism is warranted.

Regardless of outcome, it’s obvious to even the dimmest among us that tangible civilizational change is necessary, at least if the European race is to persevere beyond the twenty-first century. At present, the Chinese scourge is doing a fantastic job of illuminating the real contagion infecting the atrophied West, that of neoliberalism. From atop their echo chambers, a number of mainstream pundits have parroted the statement that the Chinese virus is a global problem. The Chinese virus is a global issue, but presumably much to their chagrin, it is a problem directly caused by neoliberal ideology, and more specifically by its intrinsic preference for and reliance upon globalism. It is the global reach and totalitarian nature of liberalism that has endowed its ideology with such pernicious virulence. It’s probably more than safe to say that if the West wasn’t enthralled by the deranged ideology that is liberalism, that there would be no coronavirus ravaging our homelands and endangering the lives of our folk.

Liberalism isn’t a precise ideology, unlike nationalism which is based on a simple, and fundamental truth, like the love for one’s nation, or an all-encompassing, consensual worldview, like National Socialism. Neoliberalism, unlike its more tolerant ancestor, is more akin to a Rabelaisian salmagundi of rigidly intolerant dogmas and precepts, which are slowly assuming all the accoutrements of a secularized mystery religion. For all practical purposes, liberalism is a loose-knit, ideology-cum-religion, premised upon an axiomatic dogma dedicated to fulfilling individual human wants and desires. Liberalism seeks to satiate these wants and desires, the so-called “happiness” of those under its sway, via the specious “freedoms” diffused by the market-economy.

Like all things en-vogue in contemporary in the West, there is a degree of utopian millenarianism present within neoliberal thought, which promises salvation from the cruel sufferings of this world via its fetish for free-market economics. Like all successful swindles, the unconscious pull of neoliberal thought comes from its ability to present and manipulate half-truths. The long and varied successes of the European race are derived from both the individualism and the competitive nature of our civilization, and it is this truth which neoliberalism insidiously exploits. To the neoliberal order, competition is the defining characteristic of human relations. However, competition is framed not as the conquest, or attainment of individual glory or achievement, but primarily as an economic process, of buying and selling, and thus of a hypertrophied free-market. Liberalism has apotheosized the free-market system by portraying it as the most effective, the most rational, and the most natural of social institutions, capable of producing the most “happiness,” and by extension arousing the most “freedoms” for the greatest number of people. These statements aren’t meant to say that free-market capitalism isn’t a profoundly powerful economic system, but rather to illustrate the point that as a concept, it is just a system of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, and not the totality of a civilization. As Alain de Benoist has correctly pointed out over the years, a society is not a market, and this notion has been twisted by liberalism for decades.

Adding to and intensifying the already perplexing liberal ideological milieu is the establishment’s confusion over the very real differences that exist between a capitalist system and a free-market system. A capitalist system focuses on the creation of wealth and the ownership of capital. In the traditional capitalist system of America, the economy was an industrially oriented economy, as opposed to the so-called “knowledge-economy” of present times in which growth is seen as dependent on the quantity, quality, and accessibility of the information available, rather than the means of production. The industrial orientation of the American economy ensured that economic growth occurred largely in the sectors of farming, mining, construction and manufacturing. Moreover, it was during the industrial period of American economic history, and by extension European economic history, that the middle-class was ascendant, and the private ownership of capital (i.e., small businesses) was disbursed among a much larger percentage of the population.

The liberalization of trade, and the expansion of globalism as an ideology rather than just as a byproduct of technological advancement, acted to deindustrialize large swathes of America, resulting in the mass economic dislocation of workers, specifically within import-competing economic sectors. The decades long process of the deindustrialization of America resulted in an economic restructuring of the economy, which precipitated a shift of the locus of American economic output from the generative (e.g., manufacturing) to the parasitic (e.g., financialization). The resulting postindustrial, “knowledge-based” economies of both contemporary America and the West, are focused on the services, finance, and technology, and as such are parasitic in nature, focusing on the exchange of wealth, rather than its creation. Obviously, creation does occur in the knowledge economy—say, for example, a new technology, but the actual production of the new technology will likely end up going to low-wage countries. This outsourcing of manufacturing has resulted in what one might term the intangibleization of the economies of the West, which has in turn led to stagnant wages for the working class and increasing economic inequality. This ongoing economic process has transformed Western civilization, with the its ancestral European peoples being gradually turned into a postmodern servile class dominated by a globalist elite that recognizes no borders. To wit, the current incarnation of the parasitic, free-market economy is a system most vehemently embraced by a Judaized “Western” elite, who profit off of the labor of others, and who have little in common with the new servile class that they now lord over.

The Eschewal of Inequality and the Perversion of the Natural Order:

Central to the noxious confusion of liberalism is its denunciation of inequality. European civilizational agency—the capacity to act in accordance with one’s own will rather than being a victim of some immutable external force or circumstance—is one of the hallmarks of Western civilization. However, the liberal conceptualization of “agency” ignores the fact that there are differences between individuals in the capacity for agency. These differences reliably produce different economic outcomes, and liberalism, despite decades of trying one panacea after another, has been unable to eradicate these differences at the group level: Blacks, e.g., are still underperforming academically as a group despite decades of interventions aimed at “closing the gap.”

From Jean Bodin to John Stuart Mills to Friedrich Hayek and beyond, classical liberal thought posits that freedom stems from the impartiality of economic markets and its role as the great equalizer, which in turn allows people to reach their maximum potential. In an attempt to reconcile the reality of inequality with their ideology, liberal elites have taken to a program of elevating those individuals, and groups, whole racial groups in fact, whose outcomes don’t coalesce with the egalitarian, and thus utopian aspirations of liberal ideology. In terms of general intelligence (the g factor) for example, numerous studies have shown that Sub-Saharan Blacks on average score a whole standard deviation (or more) below that of Whites. IQ is correlated highly to measures of academic achievement, and better academic achievement, more often than not, results in better life outcomes, in terms of social status. Objectively speaking, the higher an individual’s (or groups) status, the more socially valuable they are. This is an empirical fact, which is rooted primarily in genetics and phenotypic expression, and thus a facet of the inequality of the natural world. Liberalism has elevated hordes of the worthless in a confusing attempt to artificially improve their social status, despite their actual lack of tangible societal value. The relatively new concept of “human rights” is a product of this delusional logic.

To the typical liberal, the Black-White IQ gap is a matter of material inequality, an economic problem, and thus completely unrelated to genes or biology. Charles Murray summed up not only the differences in racial intelligence, but also the futility of the utopian neoliberal project perfectly when he wrote: There is this notion that if traits are genetically determined, that’s bad, and if traits are environmentally determined, that’s good, because we can do something about them if they are environmental. And if there is one lesson that we have learned from the last 70 years of social policy, it is that changing environments in ways that produce measurable results is really, really hard and we actually don’t know how to do it, no matter how much money we spend (Harris 2017). Thus, the neoliberal perspective is immanently flawed as it conceptualizes reality in a way which posits that all negative outcomes are a result of material or economic inequality—which is routinely glossed as the result of White racism—and not an issue of ability or capacity, and by extension a facet of objective reality. Liberalism as the reigning ideology has blurred the lines between the real and unreal, between subjectivism and objectivism. Our current age is characterized by a radical subjectivism, where any notion of absolute, objective truth has been deliberately disregarded and replaced by a facetious tapestry of plural “my truths.”

As the oft-used adage goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. It is the philosophical inadequacy of liberalism that reduces all things to the level of material and underlies the multitudes of fallacies present within the many “truths” which make up its pseudo-ideology. As Martin Heidegger posited throughout the entirety of his works, the factual world is perfectly real; it is the human, and by extension, the hyper-liberal propensity to base reality on “projection” (ideal) rather than on “facticity,” (fact) which corrupts the liberal mind and wreaks havoc upon the world.

It is neoliberalism’s adherence to the alleged agency of man, achieved solely by possessing economic and thus political rights, which limits its ability to successfully cope with actual real-world issues. Bridging the gaps in wealth and achievement and abolishing inequality is always just another trillion dollars away. Or it is just a matter of refining our laws to enforce equal outcomes between groups in areas such as income and academic achievement.

And because purely economic adjustments have proved ineffective, political solutions must be found. Policies like quota systems must be enacted and if they are threatened by public opinion—as they most assuredly are— liberalism necessarily morphs into a totalitarian ideology. Bertrand de Jouvenel described the liberal paradox as the cause of what he called “totalitarian democracy.” In the totalitarian democracies of the West, individual decision making, and the explicit “democratic” political processes, maintain the guise of political representation, while in reality decision making is a process done largely by groups of unelected donors—the oligarchs—and their politician minions who really run the system. This is a system which seeks only to maintain and enrich itself. And because its fundamental ideology conflicts with the realities of human nature, such as race differences in IQ, it must necessarily seek total hegemony because that is the only way it can attempt to exempt itself from the realities of nature. It must crush all dissent. Religion, the nation-state, and the family, are all obstacles to the smooth operating of the economy and are ground to dust beneath the machine of market economy. Race is useful only as a means of subverting the traditional power of White majorities, so that only the traditional White majorities are prohibited to have a racial identity or pursue racial interests.

Freedom as an ideal is so ambiguous in orientation that as an abstract notion it can be manipulated to represent anything. It is the economic determinism intrinsic to liberalism which endows it with the myopia of its reductionist tendencies and which, by extension, degrades all things which are real, true and beautiful. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord asserts that just as industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing (Debord 1995). Postmodern neoliberalism isn’t about reality, it’s about the maintaining of appearances to perpetuate the farce of reality—lies, injustice and ugliness masquerading as truth, justice and beauty.

In the degeneration that is the liberal age, presentism is the rule of the day. The generally low-IQ, high-time preference “men without chests” of the postmodern world sacrifice all future gains, whether they be economic, political, racial or otherwise, in favor of high-risk, and often fleeting, short-term gains. As GOP Senator Ron Johnson recently phrased it, we have to reopen portions of the American economy post-haste because “death is an unavoidable part of life.” This train of thought is exemplary of the philosophical weaknesses of liberalism, particularly as it relates to its overreliance on presentism. The behavior of individuals currently living will generally have long-term consequences that affect the well-being of those who will come to live in the future. In this age of dissolution, many people pay lip service to future generations, but act as if it’s not necessary to treat the interests of future generations as equivalent to those of their own. Again, this lack of future-mindedness, and overall lack of care for others beyond oneself, specifically for one’s racial kin, is baked into the giant shit cake which is the liberal establishment.

Conclusion:

The money-grubbing elites of the West have willfully, and quite deliberately forgotten that the purpose of the economy is to serve a people, and not vice-versa. It is this inversion, Nietzschean in its transvaluation of reality, that has led to the series of crises and conflicts destabilizing the West. However, in America, and throughout Europe, people of European descent are gradually awakening to the hostility of these elites. Each new crisis spurred by neoliberalism both edges our people one step closer to the proverbial edge and potentially one step closer to civilizational transformation. In fact, over the past several weeks many legacy media outlets have been publishing stories about the need to suppress the natural, “nationalistic instinct” which has arisen in response to the China plague. Like the farce of multiculturalism, the pervasiveness and popularity of this “nationalistic instinct” is rendered self-evident by the obvious fact that the talking heads in the media are actively working to suppress it. If the works of George Orwell have taught us anything, the more preposterous an untruth, the more vigorously it must be defended.

In times of turmoil like these, it’s important to remember that the disease of liberalism, and those who perpetuate it, are the true enemy of all European people. If America and the West weren’t dominated by the perversion that is money-power, then the coronavirus wouldn’t have happened. If the hostile elites hadn’t sold out the American people and gleefully deindustrialized America, then the coronavirus wouldn’t have happened. If we weren’t dominated by a ruthless and rootless, predominantly Semitic, transnational elite whose only interest is the “almighty dollar,” then the coronavirus wouldn’t have happened. If the borders of America were closed and if immigration was biased toward Europeans, as it was before 1965, then the coronavirus wouldn’t have happened. If we lived in a racially homogenous nation-state, populated by people of European descent, then the coronavirus wouldn’t have happened. In other words, if neoliberalism wasn’t the rule of the day, then the coronavirus wouldn’t have happened. Regardless of what emerges from these times of trouble, let’s hope that the loss of life isn’t great, and that the Wuhan scourge is one more nail in the coffin which is the absurdity of postmodern neoliberalism.


Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. Cambridge: Zone Books.

Faye, Guillaume. 2012. Convergence of Catastrophes. Budapest: Arktos Media Ltd.

Harris, Sam. 2017. Forbidden Knowledge – A Conversation with Charles Murray. https://samharris.org/podcasts/forbidden-knowledge/.

Tainter, Joseph A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Review: Agitprop in America

“Agitprop has been the method for destroying America’s culture and rebuilding it as Cultural Marxism.”
      John Harmon McElroy, Agitprop in America

Agitprop in America
John Harmon McElroy

Arktos, 2020 

“You can live with the loss of certainty, but not of belief.” So begins John Harmon McElroy’s recently-published Agitprop in America, an almost 400-page book on America’s increasing distance from former beliefs, wholesale adoption of new ones, and the methods by which this transformation was brought about. A cultural historian, McElroy is a professor emeritus of the University of Arizona and was a Fulbright scholar at universities in Spain and Brazil. I suspect Agitprop in America is an exercise in catharsis for the author. During the course of the volume McElroy is clearly, to borrow Melville’s famous words, “driving off the spleen,” by which I mean that he is dispensing with many years of excess feelings of irritation, built up over a career in decaying academia. In Agitprop in America, McElroy takes aim at a succession of modern academia’s sacred cows, with chapters covering Marxist history and propaganda techniques, “social justice” activism, mandatory diversity, political correctness, free speech, snowflake culture, government spending, and the dominance of Cultural Marxism in the American education system. One of the book’s more unique features is a 107-page lexicon of 234 terms (from Ableism to Xenophobia) explaining the invention and employment of language as a method of cultural transformation via agitprop. The book is written in a terse, urgent style reminiscent of Hillaire Belloc, and McElroy comes across confident, bullish, and confrontational, all of which contributes character to what is one of the more original and interesting books I’ve read thus far in 2020.

My first impression of Agitprop in America was that it was a kind of throwback to older anti-Communist texts. I mean this in neither a strictly positive nor strictly negative sense, but an understanding and appreciation of the overall intellectual trajectory of the book will demand that this is acknowledged. In the absence of biographical details, I would estimate McElroy to be in his 80s. He comes across as a thoroughly committed Christian and capitalist, and the book itself is dedicated to “Cuba’s Escambray guerrillas who died fighting Fidel Castro’s Marxist tyranny in the 1960s.” As such, the psychology of the book is underpinned by tensions and memories that are either unknown or significantly faded among younger generations, such as McCarthyism, the Bay of Pigs incident, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. That being said, the book is still incredibly contemporary and relevant. This is in large part due to McElroy’s keen ear for contemporary society and politics, as well as the evolving lexicon of Cultural Marxism, which enables him to discuss “woke” culture with the same accuracy and vigor as “class struggle.” I also think that, in an age where it’s becoming commonplace among Rightist millennials to dismiss “Boomers” and throw themselves headlong into a “NazBol” Third Positionism that in some respects rehabilitates or repurposes aspects of Marxism and even the Frankfurt School, it’s beneficial to listen to those with decades of experience in the culture wars. Although I don’t agree with everything McElroy has to say, he is one such individual and he has produced a very useful text.

The book opens with the contention that “since the 1960s Marxists and their sympathizers in America have been using agitprop (an integration of intense agitation and propaganda invented by Lenin) to destroy America’s culture and build Cultural Marxism. To do this, agitprop has changed American speech and manipulated cultural values and beliefs.”  American history has been rewritten “to make it into a Marxian tale of unmitigated oppression.” American contemporary society has been reinterpreted as the story of “one biologically defined ruling class (straight White males) “victimizing” all other biologically defined classes.” These Marxist dogmas “are causing the destruction of America’s exceptional culture.”

Part I of the book consists of a brief sketch of the historical context of agitprop in America. McElroy does a very capable job of following political correctness from its Soviet and Maoist origins, through the campus agitations of the 1960s, to the “woke” culture warriors of today. Early in the chapter he indulges in some of the “antifa are the real fascists” fluff that one unfortunately expects from older anti-Communists, and he makes one positive reference to the tainted writings of the Jewish neoconservative academic Richard Pipes. But these are brief divergences from an otherwise steady and interesting invective against the corruption of language and the introduction of politically correct culture in the United States. McElroy is at his best when he focuses on the methodology of Culture Marxism, writing:

Instead of overturning the U.S government by force and taking comprehensive control of the United States all at once, the Counter Culture/Political Correctness Movement has been engaged for the last fifty years in gradually but relentlessly transforming the United States from within little by little, by co-opting its institutions and destroying existing cultural beliefs slowly and methodically, and replacing them with the dogmas of Marxism. (8)

In our current age of declining optimism and rising nihilism, I found McElroy’s persistent belief in American exceptionalism to be somewhat heartening. Although the America of today has thickened and bubbled into a globalist empire, it was indeed founded, as McElroy reminds us “on belief in man’s unalienable birthright to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and government by consent of the governed.” The author is both saddened and angered to see the promise of the “American Dream” come under sustained attack from both internal and external enemies, and while we can make the argument for a more critical or nuanced interrogation of such concepts as the “American Dream” (Tom Sunic’s excellent Homo Americanus is probably unsurpassed in this area), it’s difficult to argue that something special and precious hasn’t been lost in America since the 1950s. Where Sunic and McElroy might agree, with radically different implications, is in their assessment of the nature of American culture through history. Both assert the European origins of American culture, and both assert that it later became essentially non-European. For McElroy, this transition (c. 1800–1950) represents a triumph, with America defining itself against “the aristocratic cultures of Europe based on belief in ruling classes constituted by “noble” and “royal” blood.” For Sunic, the drift away from European culture resulted in hostility to European traditions, and an obsession with “rights” and individualistic consumerism, that has dogged America for over a century and has contributed heavily to its current cultural malaise. Both scholars would find agreement again in the fact America post-1950 has been in the throes of a cultural catastrophe in which Marxism has been pivotal.

The latter section of the first chapter concerns Marxist dogma from Soviet times to the present. McElroy is quite right to point out that historically Marxists argued that deviation from their worldview could represent a “symptom of mental derangement requiring treatment in a psychiatric clinic,” and he places this alongside commentary on how today’s dissidents are presented as “enemies of humanity.” In each case, agitprop develops an environment in which dissent is viewed and portrayed as “a kind of irrational, anti-science behavior.” The key to the success of Cultural Marxist agitprop is its “intrinsic deceptiveness.” McElroy writes,

Political correctness represents itself as a champion of fundamental American values. That brazen pretense, that Marxism is identical to American liberalism and progressivism, is why the Counter Culture/Political Correctness movement has had so much success in the United States. (22)

Drawing on Saul Alinsky’s infamous Rules for Radicals, McElroy explains how Cultural Marxists provoke their opponents into reacting (e.g. threatening to take down historical monuments, ordering “gay cakes”) and then denounce them as irrational “reactionaries.” Another tactic is to create problems, or interpret problems, in such a manner that permits the proposal of Marxist “solutions.” I thought that an analysis of Alinsky’s works might provoke a deeper reading from McElroy, who writes that Alinsky was “an atheist.” In fact, Alinsky was an agnostic who, when asked specifically about religion, would always reply that he was Jewish. This error is indicative of a broader blind spot in the text — the ethnic component of anti-American activism. This blind spot manifests more subtly throughout the lexicon of Cultural Marxist terms that comprises the middle of the book. Quite frankly, when one actually looks at the individuals who have coined or popularized many of these genuinely novel agitprop terms (e.g. ‘homophobia’ by George Weinberg, ‘deconstructionism’ by Jacques Derrida, ‘racism’ by Magnus Hirschfeld and Leon Trotsky, ‘transgender’ by Magnus Hirschfeld and later Harry Benjamin, ‘sex work” and ‘sex worker’ by Carol Leigh, ‘cultural pluralism’ by Horace Kallen), they emerge almost exclusively as Jews. It’s a simple and unavoidable fact that Jews have been at the forefront of changing “ways of seeing” by first changing “ways of describing.” I agree with McElroy that we shouldn’t call anti-American agitators “liberals,” and that “Leftists” also leaves a lot unsaid. McElroy, however, proposes “PC Marxists,” which I feel doesn’t get any closer to the mark.

The question presenting itself is: Does this blind spot hinder the usefulness of the text? I don’t think so. Agitprop in America can be read by the well-informed, such as readers of this website, who can fill in certain blanks (as I have above) from their own extensive reading and derive a great deal of knowledge and pleasure from the book. McElroy opines that the two greatest identifying attitudinal markers of “PC Marxism” are hypocrisy and paranoia. He writes that they vigorously enforce “separation of church and state,” and fully embrace “crony capitalism.” Rather than being genuine Americans, they merely “go about in the guise” of the everyday man, while looking down on those who dissent from their thinking in the belief they’re “stupid.” They “relentlessly insist on social justice.” Who does this sound like? And, so you see, specifics of nomenclature aside, the book lends itself to an open and usable reading.

The second chapter of the book contains some interesting autobiographical material on McElroy’s early academic career. In 1966, the same year our own Kevin MacDonald graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, McElroy, a newly minted PhD, arrived at the college. McElroy writes, “Without knowing it, I was going to one of the two epicenters of the Counter Culture movement in the Midwest, the other being the University of Michigan.” McElroy became especially fascinated with the chants of student protestors, seeing in their uniformity certain indications of “planning for a nationwide campaign of agitation and propaganda against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and against America’s cultural beliefs.” The chapter proceeds with a discussion of the mindset and tactics of this early agitprop campaign, with McElroy commenting:

Normal minds of course find it difficult to believe in a “culture war” that has gone on for half a century and that aims to transform the world’s oldest, most successful republic into a center for Cultural Marxism. Because the project is so audacious, it has taken many middle-class Americans a long time to believe such a movement exists; and many middle-class Americans apparently still refuse to believe a systematic assault is underway on American culture and has been going on in America for fifty years. But whether you believe it or not, a culture war is in progress in America, as evidenced by the fact that many Americans now prefer the dogmas of Marxism to the beliefs of American culture.

The second part of the book consists of the above-mentioned 107-page lexicon of 234 terms explaining the invention and employment of language as a method of cultural transformation via agitprop. The lexicon itself is preceded by two brief explanatory chapters on “Politically Correct Language as a Means of Revolution,” and “Terms Related to and Used by the Counter Culture/Political Correctness Movement.” The first of these chapters is very heavily focused on McElroy’s belief that we should once more refer to Blacks as “Negroes” or “Negro Americans.” For McElroy, the term “African-American” is an “agitprop substitute” designed to make Whites and Blacks constantly aware “that most Negro Americans have remote ancestors brought to America from Africa in chains as slaves.” The author spends several pages thrashing out this issue, which left me quite unsure that this particular issue would be the metaphorical hill I’d personally choose to die on. McElroy comes from a generation in which the term “Negro” probably retained a semblance of tradition and even charm about it, whereas it’s now fallen so completely out of use that a resurrection of the term could only be perceived by all sides as something negative. Again, I actually do sympathize with the central thrust of McElroy’s meaning here. I’m just not convinced I’d base my war on agitprop so strongly in this particular issue.

My misgivings on this point carried through somewhat to the lexicon itself, which is overwhelmingly good but contains some dubious entries. McElroy must first be commended for compiling such an extension list of terms, which is, as far as I’m aware, the only ‘Rightist” lexicon of Cultural Marxist agitprop in existence. Each term comes with commentary, with some only a few sentences in length and others a few pages. A few examples should suffice in order to give a flavor of the style:

Ableism
A faux bias cooked up by PC agitprop, ableism is an alleged prejudice against a person with a disability as, for instance, refusing to hire someone with a stutter or substandard comprehension of spoken English as an office receptionist. Not hiring a person with a patently disqualifying deficiency constitutes the prejudice of “ableism,” according to PC Marxists. See entry on “Sizeism.”

Person of Size
Someone who is extremely obese is a “person of size” in PC talk. The euphemism was invented as part of agitprop’s insistence on the need for sensitive, inoffensive diction.

Relationship
The expression “having a relationship” means in PC parlance having sex with the same partner for a significant length of time without getting married. To a PC Marxist, “having a relationship” is preferable to having a marriage because it forestalls family formation.

Right-Wing Extremism
“Right-wing extremism” is one of the labels PC Marxists use to criticize their opponents, whom they regard as “extreme” because they put the interests of their nation above the revolutionary dogmas of global Marxism.

Sexual Orientation
This is the PC euphemism for homosexuality. The euphemism was coined to avoid the use of the words “homosexual” and “homosexuality.” The phrase “sexual orientation” allows persons who are politically correct to praise and promote homosexual behavior without having to use the terms “homosexual” or “homosexuality,” which are loaded with a historical burden of moral disapproval. The term “sexual orientation,” however, has a scientific ring to it implying that homosexuality is merely one of various “orientations” toward sexual activity, so that no one should object to it. Homosexual practices ought to be considered as any other erotic activity. This is the argument agitprop in America is making in its revolutionary assault.

With over 230 terms covered, many of them very current in contemporary internet culture, McElroy is to be applauded for his effort in both compiling the list and keeping his finger on the agitprop pulse. The few dubious entries emerge from McElroy’s apparently fundamentalist Christian beliefs, which lead him to a few scathing remarks on evolution, the Big Bang theory, etc. This is McElroy’s book, and it’s his right to wax lyrical on some matters that are clearly close to his heart. I’m certainly not disparaging his approach, but I do think that this might alienate readers who are of a more scientific and less spiritual mindset. That being said, he has produced a great piece of work in this lexicon.

The third section of the book is probably my favorite, and McElroy demonstrates the best of his reading and understanding here. The section consists of commentaries/chapters covering “seven related revolutionary concepts that PC agitprop has imposed on America.” These are “Biological Class Consciousness,” “Social Justice,” “Mandatory Diversity,” a politics of double standards, mass indoctrination on “sensitivity,” censorship and the policing of speech, and the promotion of a sterile and self-obsessed atheism. Of these, the first is one of the best, with McElroy remarking:

Now, after five decades of relentless Marxist agitation and propaganda promoting biological class consciousness in America, courses on U.S. history and Western civilization have dwindled and all but disappeared at American colleges and universities while courses on biological class consciousness have proliferated. Everywhere today in U.S. institutions of higher education, one finds courses and degree programs in Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Mexican-American Studies, and LGBT studies. And as college and university faculties have become more uniform in their Political Correctness, the courses on U.S. history and Western civilization which remain in the curriculum are almost invariably taught from the point of view of Marxian class struggle, which is to say from the standpoint that straight “Euro-American” males (SEAMs) comprise a ruling class which has “victimized” women, negro Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, homosexuals, and other biologically defined classes. College students today are being taught to hate SEAMs as a class for the “victimisation” they have allegedly inflicted on all other biological classes in America.(180)

McElroy is equally on point when it comes to “social justice,” suggesting that the term really refers to “the idea of preferential treatment for members of allegedly oppressed classes. It is justice dispensed according to class history … “Social justice” is political justice. It expresses political favoritism that will advance the revolution.” The author is also good on the subject of “Mandatory Diversity,” pointing out just how incentivized this has become in our culture and economy:

A reputation for being “diverse” is something institutions throughout America today are eager to acquire. Being “diverse” has become a political, economic, and academic requirement, a much-coveted accolade, a shibboleth attesting to one’s Political Correctness. (220)

On “sensitivity” agitprop, McElroy observes that “the real purpose of the sensitivity game is intimidation.” Enforced “soft language” for protected groups creates an atmosphere in which deviation into normal speech can be chastized as hateful, unfair, and bigoted. The wider the sensitivity net (e.g. embracing the fat, the ugly, etc.) then the more successful will be the broader cultural strategy. It is an offensive built on “not offending.” The same themes are evident in censorship and the policing of speech.

The final section of the book consists of five short chapters on differing subjects. The first is a commentary on “The Failure of Marxism in the USSR and Successes of PC Marxism in America” which combines an interesting historical overview with a quite strident attack on the Obama years. The next chapter is a brief but lucid essay on how agitprop and PC Marxism has influenced U.S. government spending. The third, and shortest chapter in this section is an attempted rebuttal of the idea that America has become an imperialist nation. I tend to disagree with McElroy somewhat here, not because I believe America has an empire in the conventional sense, but because I believe it’s self-evident that elements of the U.S. government, most notably the neocons, have increasingly steered the country into a foreign interventionist position built around the idea of sustaining global finance capitalism and the state of Israel. Since McElroy’s musings on this topic are limited to a few pages, I was, however, spared any lasting distaste.

—The book then nears its end with a very good chapter on “PC Marxist Dominance in U.S. Public Schools,” before closing with a very pro-Trump chapter on “The Significance of the 2016 Presidential Election.” I was ambivalent about this last chapter because it lacks the nuanced and qualified approach to Trump’s 2016 win that is surely now, in light of a succession of policy failures and absences, much-deserved. Part of me wishes I could share McElroy’s optimism, and I laud any man of his advanced age for avoiding the temptation of observing it all with jaded distance. But I cannot, having considered all available evidence and precedence, share his persistent belief in the MAGA phenomenon.

Final Reflection on Agitprop in America

John Harmon McElroy’s work of catharsis is a worthy addition to the Arktos library, and offers an original and multifaceted new approach to the subject of America’s undeniable and ongoing decay. At almost 400 pages of commentaries on numerous subjects, including a large lexicon of Cultural Marxist terms, the book certainly represents value for money and will consume many hours of study. Of course, it doesn’t have “all the answers,” something it has in common with the vast majority of political texts on the market, but it does approach a normally pessimistic subject with intellectual vigor, aggression, confidence, and even optimism. It’s a book worthy of being “balanced out” by the later reading of another text like Sunic’s Homo Americanus, and I think readers can gain much from such an exercise. Readers could also benefit by conducting some of their own research into the origins of certain agitprop terms. McElroy includes several blank pages at the end of his book for “notes,” which could be put to use in this manner. As hinted at earlier in this review, I guarantee that readers will find some predictable but useful information in the process.

Oregon Governor Advised by Bill Gates and Patent Lawyers

Who is advising our Governor?

Who are these “experts” who issued the latest projections of disease trajectory in Oregon? They are from Washington State, The Institute or Disease Modeling in Bellevue, WA. Computer models! Of course they claim the “aggressive interventions” prevented the spread and “flattened the curve”, or else we’d have almost 4 times as many cases, and “health care systems would be overburdened.” Here is where the Governor got her cartoonish graph projecting a spike in hospitalizations if we shift to “moderate interventions” instead of maintaining the “aggressive interventions” we endure now, and here is where she is getting her main advice: The Institute for Disease Modeling.

“Conclusion to Date” (4/10)

The exact document which informs the Governor’s Executive Orders locking down Oregon is titled COVID-19 intervention effectiveness and epidemic trends for Oregon: a model-based analysis.  We can see their logo at the bottom of every page. They say: “At this stage, any relaxation of the current aggressive control measures is likely to result in epidemic resurgence.” IDM confirms the wisdom of the “aggressive interventions”, and their recommendations include “the urgent need for enormously increased testing capacity, detailed contact tracing… and likely the quarantining of infected individuals away from households…”   But IDM  “acknowledge(s) how strong the impacts of these measures will be across society, especially for low-income families and other vulnerable populations, and we hope Oregon will also act to mitigate the largest societal costs.”

Thanks a lot. What thin sympathy, but this is where the Governor is getting her advice. The Institute of Disease Modeling (Mongering) in Bellevue, WA.

The Authors

The following names are listed as the authors of this document, from a Washington modeling center making “aggressive” pronouncements and recommendations for Oregon: Cliff Kerr, Brittany Hagedorn, Dina Mistry, Daniel Klein. Three of these four (excepting Mistry) are also listed as the authors of a document informing and advising in Washington state. Another co-author of that document, Hao Hu, is listed as representing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and according to Linkedin is “ Interim Senior Program Officer at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Greater Seattle Area Philanthropy.” I will devote some brief study to each of these authors of the document advising Governor Brown in Oregon.

Cliff Kerr

Dr. Kerr has worked extensively on human neurological and brain systems interface with machines, including one project with DARPA, the Defense Advance Research Project Agency. In 2017–18, Kerr used a grant from the Gates Foundation of over $155,000 .”..to identify optimal spending portfolios for investments made by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with particular focus on emerging medical technologies.” This needs no translation. One of the authors of the primary document advising Oregon’s Governor used Gates Foundation money to help Gates figure out how to invest his money more effectively in new medical technologies. Think global COVID-19 vaccines, and much more, as we will see. This alone is a flagrant conflict of interest.

Brittany Hagedorn

This co-author is Senior Financial Analyst at IDM. She has co-authored six research publications, one in 2020 and the rest in 2019, four published in the journal Vaccine, all focused on vaccine cost-effectiveness, and all from her position at IDM. One of her papers explores the cost effectiveness of identifying which Third-World children have already had a few measles vaccines, and whether it would cost less to inject them again without finding out. In other words, the study tried to determine if it was a cost savings to inject children with another measles vaccine without finding out if they already had their required injections. Two of her papers rely on data drawn from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which receives its funding directly from the Gates Foundation as well as many other sources Gates funds, such as World Health Organization (Gates is now the #1 donor), UNICEF, US CDCP, GAVI (Gates is a major donor and has one of only four Board seats), and Rotary International.

Dina Mistry

Dr. Mistry is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at IDM. Her work there “focus(es) on modeling human response to disease awareness and the impact this has on disease spreading”, .”..using digital signals of health information and communication (such as Google, Twitter, Reddit) to model disease awareness and response…” In other words, surveilling our internet activity to track our exposure and spreading of disease. Other papers she has co-authored, one as recent as late February, acknowledge “ The growing need for realism in addressing complex public health questions is however calling for accurate models of the human contact patterns that govern the disease transmission processes.” It is reassuring to know that “realism” is now a research parameter. I hope they got it right for Oregon. These papers were published through Cornell University. Gates is a big donor.

Daniel Klein
Klein is listed as a Senior Research Manager at IDM. He helps develop the computer models and algorithms IDM uses to predict disease progression, like those which produced the graphs our Oregon Governor is using to justify the continued “aggressive measures.” Even though Klein joined IDM in 2010, “During 2018, he led various data science and strategy initiatives as a Senior Program Officer in the Global Development Strategy, Data, and Analytics team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Klein’s co-authors of his most recent papers are both from the University of Washington, Seattle. Gates is a huge funder of this institution, with over $1.6 million just this year, and enormous funding going back over a decade. An earlier paper by Klein saw Hao Hu as a co-author, who, as already shown, is a direct recipient of Gates funding.

Keep in mind that the Gates sponsored vaccine programs have inflicted immense damage and death, especially in the developing world, including hundreds of thousands of children paralyzed, millions of women sterilized, and many thousands dead. “Experts” at IDM are sure to know this.

Studies From China

Six of the nine references listed on the final page of the document (pg 10) used by these IDM personnel for their modeling come from Communist China. These are highly suspect sources and cannot be trusted. We have not been told the truth by our own media much less propaganda out of Communist China. This document based so much on studies out of China and which Governor Brown is using to guide her Executive Orders for Oregon is less disease modeling than disease mongering.

Who Funds Institute for Disease Modeling?

The Institute for Disease Modeling (Mongering) gets lots of its money from—you guessed it—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. IDM is an organization within the Global Good Fund, which is entirely funded by Gates.

Global Good invents technology to solve some of humanity’s most daunting problems. We do this by collaborating with leading humanitarian organizations, forward-looking governments, research institutions, and corporate and private sector partners that bring our inventions to market.

Gates keeps a focus on markets and profits when helping the world’s poor and sick. Gates appears to be a global demagogue trying to vaccinate and chip everyone in the world for power and profit. Global Good features a picture of Gates fiddling with some tech object in a lab while a geek and a woman look on—right after the big banner picture close-up of a mosquito with its proboscis buried face-deep in human flesh and its torso engorged with red blood. Lovely. Which one is the worse pest scourge of humanity?

Funding From Patent Lawyers

The other Corporation that ‘collaborates’ with Gates on Institute for Disease Modeling (Mongering) is Intellectual Ventures. To whit:

Intellectual Ventures is an American private company that centers on the development and licensing of intellectual property. Intellectual Ventures is one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011. Its business model has a focus on buying patents and aggregating them into a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to third parties.

Global Good is so intertwined with Intellectual Ventures that the GG logo says underneath “Ideas by Intellectual Ventures.”

Intellectual Ventures (Vultures) is active in spinning off new companies as it acquires patents, and their pace is accelerating. One of these spinoffs in 2018 is Carillon Technologies, a military contractor “to aid national security and government contractors.” Carillon’s investors include Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft.  Another of many spinoffs is Terra Power, which “provides, safe, affordable and carbon-free energy” (nuclear). Chariman of the Board? Bill Gates. Echodyne is another IV spinoff with military applications for which Gates is an investor. Gates Investments is an investor in spinoff Pivotal Commware, and Lumotive, and AI developer Lexset through Microsoft, and 3D “immersive media” company YouVue…  These are just a sampling of some of the ventures IV spins off, and Gates is invested in most of them if not on the Board.

Main founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures is Nathan Myhrvold, who formerly worked at—wait– Microsoft! Turns out he’s the geek in the picture with Gates and the woman in the lab on the Global Good site.

Edward Jung, Co-founder of IV, also worked formerly at Microsoft, playing major roles as “chief architect and advisor to executive staff” and much else. Before joining Microsoft “he founded the Deep Thought Group, working on neural network chips for learning and parallel computation.” Direct computer mind control? These behind IDM advising Governor Brown are technocrats moving for all forms of technocratic world control. Eddie also worked on AI at Microsoft. was an “advisor” to Harvard Medical School, and “consultant” to Asia Pacific Federation, the China Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and WHO.

IV Executive Vice President, Invention Science Fund Chris Alliegro formerly worked at Microsoft. Executive Vice President, Global Good and Research Maurizio Vecchione leads with the following statement: “In this role, Maurizio oversees Global Good, IV’s collaboration with Bill Gates to invent and deploy technology specifically focused on improving life in developing countries, as well as the research and operations of the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory (IV Lab) and Institute for Disease Modeling.”

Conclusion

The co-founders of the Institute for Disease Modeling (Mongering) are the world’s most currently hated man Bill Gates—for declaring lockdowns have to continue until he develops and deploys his new untested RNA vaccine worldwide—and big-time patent lawyers, corporate CEO’s and tech spin off experts at Intellectual Ventures (Vultures). These people are in it for the money and power, not Oregon’s public health. These are the “experts” from whom Governor Brown is getting her advice in running Oregon during the “state of emergency”: Gates and a bunch of corporate patent lawyers and mad scientists who want to vaccinate and chip the world. These are the technocrats trying to profit and seize power by imposing technological “solutions” they invent and sell. They see money and power in the ongoing destruction of Oregon’s economy, society and people. They get their “studies” from Communist China to inform their tables and graphs, and from these issue their recommendations to our Governor for continued lockdown apocalypse. Their paper which informs Oregon’s Governor Kate Bronw in her remarks and presentation is now exposed for multiple conflicts of interest and domineering control by Bill Gates and his high tech lawyer cronies.

Action

Impeach Governor Brown. If she does not know of these flagrant conflicts of interest among the source of her advice, that is criminal negligence. If she knows, that is criminal malevolence and a crime against the humanity of the State of Oregon. This is not partisan, this is life and death.

And impeach Gates! Wait, he was never elected. If we want real advice, hire Dr. Wittkowski, his thirty-five years experience in epidemiology will be a much better guide for Oregon, though his practical concept of natural herd immunity will not sell the vaccines and other medical tech promoted by Gates and Intellectual Ventures through the Institute for Disease Modeling (Mongering). Wittkowski’s advice would stop the damage the ongoing lockdown is inflicting, and allow us to start to recover. IDM’s will not. I sent IDM an email asking if they are getting paid by Oregon tax money to advise our governor. The reply: “We are an independently funded entity and neither seek nor accept outside funding.” We know where you get your funding.

Something seems rotten in the state of Washington, but it is likely a corruption spread throughout the Northwest by the big money power of Bill Gates.

Let’s bring the good out in Oregon. They have Global Good, we have Oregon Good. Can we get the Governor on our side?

Restart Oregon!

George Mackenzie  is a writer who lives in southern Oregon.

The Logos of E. Michael Jones

E. Michael Jones, a prolific Catholic author and controversialist, is best known as the author of Libido Dominandi and The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. He received his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1979 and went on to become an assistant professor of American Literature at St. Mary’s College. One year into his tenure track position, he was summarily terminated for his public position against abortion. That event spurred him into starting his magazine, Fidelity, later retitled as Culture Wars (his translation of the German Kulturkampf). The magazine set out to explore the problems in the Catholic Church that led to Jones’ loss of his job.[1] How exactly could a professor be fired for opposing abortion at a Catholic university?! Since that time, Jones has gained international notoriety and amassed a considerable following. Besides his co-religionists, he has found a ready audience within several factions of the dissident-right. This is rather surprising, given that Jones strongly disagrees with the broad-strokes of the dissident-right on numerous fundamental issues. His beliefs differ so profoundly that their respective worldviews are impossible to reconcile. In the following, I will attempt to convey to the reader, in as concise a manner as possible, the beliefs of Jones on three core issues, namely: race, intelligence, and civilization.

Race

I fail to understand how converting racists, materialists and Nazis to the Catholic faith, and encouraging young men and women to get baptized, married and have kids could possibly be construed as a bad thing.[2] — E. Michael Jones

Jones believes that race is an abstraction of the mind (“a fiction”) and an obsolete ideology;[3] it appeared, flowered briefly, and died, all within the span of a hundred years (1855–1945). Having characterized this conception as both upstart and failure, he rails against it, arguing that “Race is a creation of the biological materialism which found its most prominent spokesperson in Charles Darwin.”[4] His choice of the Darwinian-Spencerian articulation is convenient; he ignores other definitions that cohere perfectly with his worldview. Unfortunately, this is as far as his reasoning goes. And, if pressed for justification, he will only restate that which he has previously put forward — seeing no reason how anyone on earth, possessed of a right-thinking mind, could doubt him.

What Jones does believe in, however, is “ethnicity”: this trait is defined by social groups that have common cultural traditions. Of course, for Jones, these common cultural traditions are not influenced by genetics to any socially relevant degree. In fact, because he believes racial and genetic influences are absolutely incompatible with the Christian understanding of free will, Jones rejects these as determinants of human behavior. Hence, such theories are also equally incompatible with his critique of Jewish behavior (rooted in cultural-religious failings) proposed in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.[5]

To understand his view on mestizaje, a reader need only examine the description of Ethnos Needs Logos on Amazon’s Kindle Store:

In Mexico, unity happened by miracle overnight. Juan Diego’s tilma, with its depiction of the Virgin Mary, is the symbol of Mexico, the basis for a Mexican culture that has survived the predations of the richer and more powerful neighbor to the north. Our Lady of Guadalupe [the Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary associated with a series of Marian apparitions] appeared as a mestiza, a mixture of European and Native American races. She was the cosmic symbol of the race mixing the English feared since the moment they set foot on the soil of the New World. She was the symbol of Mexican identity. She was the symbol of Catholic race-mixing and the antithesis of England’s and later America’s and still later Germany’s ideology of racial superiority.

Clearly, Jones favors miscegenation, suggesting that it even earns the approval of Heaven itself. And this quote isn’t exactly an outlier; his oeuvre is replete with multiple pages of thought flowing in the same vein.

How then, did so many come to believe that Jones supports, at least to some degree, “ethno-nationalism”? It should be patently obvious at this stage that he does not (and cannot) support any form of racial-nationalism. To elucidate, the Catholic Church is both Catholic and universal — and the historical teachings of the Church clearly affirm that it is for human unity and opposed to division. Jones invariably agrees, diametrically opposing “race,” “racialism,” and “racism.” He believes the first two to be incompatible with Catholicism and factually unsound. Like any other liberal, he believes the third to be a wicked sin. All three are to be rejected for the division they impose on the worldwide human family. Jones, therefore, speaks out against all forms of racial-nationalism. He even rejects monarchy, calling it “an obsolete form of government which will never return.” What Jones does support, however, is a variant of democracy — “Catholic democracy”, an innovation that mixes the neo with the archeo: modern democratic ideas and traditional Christian values.[6]

We will note here — in stark contrast to Jones’s oft-repeated claim that an African could, e.g., become Polish, that not even in the Soviet Union itself was it believed that Turks and Uzbeks, for instance, could become Russian!

Intelligence

Race difference in intelligence was created in America at the beginning of the 20th century… in order to exclude certain groups of people from the United States of America. It was based on immigration. … I’ve never been convinced that the IQ test was an accurate indicator of intelligence.[7]E. Michael Jones  

True to form, Jones believes that IQ tests are virtually useless; rather than measuring intelligence, they only measure an individual’s ability to take IQ tests.

Marching against a hundred years of studies and any remotely reasonable inferences of the data, Jones offers this stunning critique: “Race difference in intelligence was created in America at the beginning of the 20th century.”  As Edward Dutton correctly points out to Jones in their video discussion, “The fact that an IQ test was invented in 1912, and the fact there was a motive for wanting to deploy it, does not mean there are not differences in intelligence between different groups.” (Actually, the IQ test was invented in France by Alfred Binet who had been requested by a government commission to design a test that would identify children who were falling behind in school so that they could receive help; the first version appeared in 1908.) Unable to respond directly, Jones parries with a different line of argument, albeit one that also confuses wishful fiction with fact: “What you see over time is that the test becomes synonymous with intelligence.” Dutton’s polite response returns to the central issue: IQ correlates well with other measures of cognitive ability, such as educational attainment at 0.7 (a good test being one that correlates in the expected direction with other examples of what it is you’re trying to measure and not something else); it also correlates with a host of other real-life variables including job performance, even among people with similar levels of education, health, and social class; there is also a substantial body of research indicating differences in brain structure and brain size associated with differences in IQ. Jones ostensibly acknowledges much of this but stays put in his epistemic foxhole, returning fire. He repeatedly demonstrates his complete lack of knowledge on the topic, seemingly brought about by his inability to accept the idea that intelligence might actually be measurable.

It is abundantly clear that 1) Jones has no acceptable reasoning with which he can back up his stated belief; and 2) he doesn’t know anything about IQ tests, psychometrics, or quantitative psychology.

Wondering if there was anything more to his position on IQ, a request for a greater explanation was mailed to Jones. His response reads:

Standardized tests are a good indication of how well you take standardized tests. They don’t help a doctor diagnose appendicitis or a writer write a sentence. We published an article in Culture Wars a few years back by Chris Rapcewicz on how IQ tests were used to discriminate against certain groups. You find it by searching the index at culturewars.com.

Civilization

“Without the Catholic Church, Europe would resemble Somalia.”[8] – E. Michael Jones

Because Jones denies race, and all that it implies, he consequently rejects the traditional definition of the word “nation” (a race of people) — with its very etymology going back through old French to Latin.[9] He instead accepts the modern post-racial definitions, which can be readily found in any recent mainstream dictionary from any post-Enlightenment Anglophone country.

Regarding the creation of modern Europe, Jones writes, “Ethnos [“ethnicity”] needs Logos, especially if it aspires, as every ethnic group does, to become a nation. Logos, not race, is what allowed the various warring tribes of Europe who plundered the last structures of the Roman Empire to coalesce into the nations that constituted Christian Europe in a process that lasted in some instances over a millennium.[10] Indeed, it was logos alone that was responsible for the immense success of the warring cultural groups of Europe.

As anyone well acquainted with Jones should know, his central intellectual enterprise is Logos, which he defines most simply as “divine order” — the order and harmony of all creation, which serves as evidence of a divine Creator. “God” is also “Logos” according to Jones. Additionally, he affirms that the link between the creator and the created is Logos. And that we can participate in God’s mind, if we are rational creatures, by being rational. By this, he means that we can participate in God’s mind, as rational creatures, by living according to God’s will — i.e., by living a Catholic life.

Logos is the primary factor in Jones’ worldview. It determines whether a group will stew in abject poverty, squalor, and disease or ascend to the abundant and divine comfort of high civilization. The secondary determining factors are geography and physical things like mountain ranges.[11]

It is from this position, having rejected so much of modern science, that Jones puts forward claims such as, “Without the Catholic Church, Europe would resemble Somalia” and “If it weren’t for St. Boniface, my ancestors would still be chasing pigs through the forests of Germany and worshiping trees.[12]  

Beyond any doubt whatsoever, Jones’ Logos is nothing more than the functional equivalent of Magic Dirt Theory, which John Derbyshire adeptly explains:

The core idea is that one’s physical surroundings—the bricks and mortar of the building you’re in, or the actual dirt you are standing on—emit invisible vapors that can change your personality, behavior, and intelligence. That’s why, for example, you read so much about “bad schools” or “failing schools.” The thing to be explained is that schools whose students are overwhelmingly non-Asian minorities—blacks and mestizos—get much worse results on academic tests than schools whose students are majority white and East Asian. This has been so for decades, defying even extravagantly expensive efforts to change it, like the Kansas City fiasco of the 1990s.[13]

For a deeper view on the subject, the reader may turn to one of the many available philosophical critiques of Catholicism or liberalism; however, here we are only concerned with the essence of Jones’ thought.

Summary

In light of this information, we should be careful about how we approach and interpret the work of Jones. While some important ideas may be gleaned from it, it is largely incongruent with the more robust worldviews based on science. We should also be cautious of Jones and his intentions, given that he is clearly opposed to what we believe and appears to be consequently trying to convert us to his Catholicism.

Note: The author wishes to convey that the article is not intended to be anti-Christian and that the author is Russian Orthodox. 


[1] Jones, E. Michael. “About.” Culture Wars. Accessed April 11, 2020. https://culturewars.com/e-michael-jones.

[2] Jones, E. Michael. “Converting Racists.” Twitter, October 1, 2019. https://archive.is/zpBpo.

[3] Religion and the Alt-Right. Oikos Catholic, 2019, 12:06 – 12:17; Jones, E. Michael. Ethnos Needs Logos. Fidelity Press, 2015. Kindle version.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Alexis, Jonas E. “E. Michael Jones on Biological Determinism.” Veterans Today, March 3, 2016. https://archive.is/m7mEn.

[6] “Forge and Anvil Interviews E. Michael Jones.” Forge and Anvil, June 25, 2019. https://archive.is/h7niG.

[7] The Rise of Logos with E. Michael Jones. The Jolly Heretic, 2019, 27:49 – 33:58.

[8] Jones, E. Michael. Ethnos Needs Logos. Fidelity Press, 2015. Kindle version.

[9] Skeat, Walter W. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 396.

[10] Jones, E. Michael. Ethnos Needs Logos. Fidelity Press, 2015. Kindle version.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jones, E. Michael. “My ancestors.” Twitter, April 11, 2020. https://archive.is/mvr0w; Jones has recently deleted this Tweet and a later Tweet attempting to defend it. https://archive.is/IQx64.

[13] Derbyshire, John. “Why Race Realism Makes More Sense Than ‘Magic Dirt’ Theory.” The Unz Review. Accessed May 15, 2019. https://archive.is/etAMU.

Beating Us With Our Own Weapons

Editor’s note: This review appeared in The Occidental Quarterly in the Fall issue of 2013. This is the only online version at this time, and it seemed particularly appropriate to post it now because of China’s role in disseminating the Wuhan virus, as well as their cover-ups and lies about it. Given my interest in individualism, the sections on the lack of creativity among the Chinese and how it is quite possibly linked to their collectivism were also enlightening. It’s as if Chinese espionage is a compensation for their inability to create new ideas and technology. 

Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernization
William C. Hannas, James Mulvenon and Anna B. Puglisi
New York: Routledge, 2013

The People’s Republic of China currently enjoys a $30 billion dollar trade surplus with America. More importantly, say the authors of this important study, she is exporting to us manufactured goods of increasing technological sophistication, while the principal US export to China is, “literally, scrap and rubbish.” China produces a million more automobiles than America and is now outpacing us in domestic computer sales.

Everyone has heard about China’s economic growth since 1978—“one of the fastest and largest accumulations of national wealth in world history” according to our authors—but it is not widely appreciated that this growth has been accelerating rapidly within just the last decade. Chinese GDP recently surpassed that of Japan and stands second only to the US. The long-anticipated rise of China has happened faster than anyone predicted, and many observers are left wondering where the Chinese acquired such capacities so quickly.

The answer is that they acquired them from us. In the authors’ words:

We are talking here of an elaborate, comprehensive system for spotting foreign technologies, acquiring them by every means imaginable, and converting them into weapons and competitive goods. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

Although China’s stated goal is to become a scientifically “creative nation,” its science and technology are overwhelmingly driven by foreign developments; our authors speak of “the paramount role of mimicry.” Not all of this happens through espionage; much foreign knowledge is gathered in entirely transparent and legal ways, with the only distinguishing feature of China’s approach being the thorough and systematic nature of the process.

The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), China’s foremost facility for acquiring, processing and distributing open source scientific and technological (hereafter S&T) materials, opened its doors in 1958. The following year saw the appearance of the first specialized journal on S&T information, “along with a magazine devoted to methods of searching English language periodicals.” By 1966 the system could deliver to Chinese end users

11,000 foreign S&T periodicals; half a million foreign research reports, government publications, conference proceedings and academic theses; over five million foreign patents from over 20 countries; more than 200,000 standards from 40 foreign countries; several hundred thousand foreign product samples; and had S&T document exchange links with more than 50 countries.

Progress was then held up for a decade by the Cultural Revolution.

In the late 1970s, information gathering was resumed and computerized. ISTIC began enrolling graduate students in what was essentially a degree program in exploiting foreign scientific literature. By 1985 China possessed over 400 major S&T intelligence institutes employing more than 25,000 people. Egalitarians will gnash their teeth to learn that 53 of the 60 journals most useful to Chinese researchers at this time came from just two countries: the US and Great Britain.

In 1991, two Chinese information specialists, Huo Zhongwen and Wang Zongxiao, published a 361–page book entitled Sources and Methods of Obtaining National Defense Science and Technology Intelligence. The book candidly describes the structure and methods of China’s open source S&T information gathering system. Among the sources discussed are the Congressional Information Service, the US National Technical Information Service (NTIS), NASA, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Department of Energy and the Lockheed Corporation.

Huo and Wang blandly acknowledge that

there are similarities between what we refer to as ‘information’ and what the foreign intelligence community refers to as intelligence work. … By picking here and there among the vast amount of public materials and accumulating information a drop at a time, often it is possible to basically reveal the outlines of some secret intelligence, and this is particularly true in the case of the Western countries.

Huo and Wang give examples of discoveries of which they are especially proud. One involves the mining of declassified documents from Los Alamos National Laboratory:

[American agents] reviewed a total of 388,000 documents in 33 days, so each reviewer had to review around 1000 documents a day, about two a minute. The pace of the reviews resulted in a large number of errors—around five percent—that is, some 19,400 documents that were mistakenly declassified, and of these there were at least eight highly secret items regarding thermonuclear weapons.

Our authors express surprise that publication of Huo and Wang’s book was ever permitted, and speculate that the Chinese did not realize how unusual their practices were in an international context.

As of 2005, over fifty thousand networks were serving up S&T information to some 27 million Chinese end users. Information is stored not merely on S&T itself, but also on Western S&T organizations and even individual researchers; files on individuals include “biographical notes, work and home addresses, achievements, writings, range of primary activities, recent work circumstances and whether they have visited China.”

The whole system works like a library network, except that it is operated by intelligence officers working for the Chinese government. By relying on foreign models, China shortens its own research and development process, thus freeing resources for commercialization and production. Such is the prosaic reality behind the Chinese “miracle.”

A key element of technology transfer to China involves the presence in the country of foreign research and development (R&D) labs. Multinational corporations have taken to setting up such labs in China both to take advantage of inexpensive local expertise and in order to improve their access to the world’s largest market. In Beijing alone one can find R&D labs operated by Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson, among many others. Shanghai hosts Astra Zenica, Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Dell, Dupont, Eli Lily, General Electric, General Motors, Honeywell, Phillips, Unilever and many more. Whereas in 2000 there were just thirty such foreign R&D labs, by 2010 their number had grown to 1200.

At first, foreign R&D labs mainly concentrate on the adaptation of their products to the local market and offering technical support for local sales. Then they may expand their operations to “identifying and meeting local needs from the beginning of product development”—i.e., creating entirely new products specifically for the Chinese market. Some China-based labs, especially in the field of information technology, have already begun developing products for the global market. Primary research may soon be carried out in China by foreign R&D labs, if this isn’t happening already.

The Chinese government does a great deal to encourage the growth of foreign R&D on its soil. Its rationale is explained in the Ministry of Science and Technology’s 2006 policy statement Medium and Long Term Plan for S&T Development, 2006–2020. This document repeatedly stresses the need to build up “an indigenous innovation capability,” and even proposes to make China an “innovation-oriented” society by the year 2020. Yet, in a seeming paradox, the principal means for achieving this is to appropriate the maximum possible amount of foreign technology now. As our authors put it, “yet another period of acquiring foreign technology and know-how is perceived as critical for China to eventually wean itself from this reliance on foreign technology and know-how, transitioning to indigenous innovation.” This near-term emphasis on acquiring knowledge abroad is such that one observer has described the Medium and Long Term Plan as a “blueprint for technology theft on a scale the world has never seen before.” The authors stress, however, that R&D partnerships with China must be judged on a case-by-case basis, and that much depends on risk mitigation strategies which can be adopted by Western companies themselves well short of a complete pullout.

The authors devote one chapter to cataloguing some of the technology transfer organizations based in the PRC, and another to some of their counterparts in the US. In China itself I counted seven national-level agencies, ten supposedly nongovernmental organizations (some almost certainly fronts for the government) and ten web-based recruiting and placement networks, to which must be added an indeterminate slew of provincial and municipal bodies. The mission of these organizations is to send talented Chinese students to study abroad and to encourage foreign specialists to work or teach in China. Sometimes the latter efforts are focused specifically on ethnic Chinese living abroad.

After cataloguing these organizations as best they can, our authors append the following caveat:

While our account here is lengthy, we have no confidence that it is exhaustive. Entities expand, new ones appear, while others—including those run by technical ministries—stay mostly beneath the radar. Details about their transactions are often unavailable.

The recruitment practices of these organizations are not necessarily constrained by foreign espionage laws. In November 2006, Noshir Gowadia, an Indian-born US citizen, was indicted for divulging military secrets to China. He had visited China six times between 2003 and 2005; the visits were arranged through a representative of China’s State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs (SAFEA), a high-level body which reports directly to the PRC State Council. According to SAFEA’s website, its mission is to facilitate the “introduction of advanced technology and make Chinese industry more competitive internationally” by managing the recruitment of skilled persons from abroad.

Another important recruitment organization is China’s Ministry of Personnel:

In December 2005, there was a banner-type ad posted near the top of the [Ministry’s] home page with the headline “Beijing Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics Invites Talented Persons from All Walks of Life to Join the Alliance.” This was followed by a description of the Institute’s mission in general terms, its facilities, staffing, and the types of skills sought. Details on application and compensation were also provided. For those unfamiliar with China’s S&T infrastructure, the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics is China’s premier nuclear weapons modeling facility. In plain language, the [Ministry of Personnel] was asking ethnic Chinese scientists living abroad to support its atomic weapons program. Noteworthy was a statement requiring applicants to “cherish the socialist fatherland, support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and submit to the needs of the country”—a reminder to applicants that they will undergo security vetting. References to the ancestral country and the lack of an English version indicate that the ad was aimed at overseas Chinese.

China defines “overseas Chinese” to include not merely as PRC expatriates, but also persons of Chinese descent who may never have set foot in China. When such persons supply Western-developed technology to the PRC, Chinese sources matter-of-factly speak of them as bringing the technologies “back” to China. The authors describe one pomp-filled occasion where PRC operatives urged more than a thousand visiting overseas Chinese to set up enterprises in China: “appeals to ‘patriotism’ were thick [and] the event ended with the groups singing the PRC National anthem, performed by the guests ‘with tears in their eyes.’”

In other words, the Chinese concept of nationality is racial—the norm everywhere outside the modern West.

The authors devote their fifth and most important chapter to cataloguing US-based organizations engaged in acquiring technology for China, including “diplomatic offices, a facilitation company, an alleged NGO, and ethnic Chinese professional association and alumni associations.”

All PRC diplomatic offices on US soil—including the embassy in Washington, consulates in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston, as well as its UN mission—contain an S&T office. According to their self-description, the Washington, DC, office “makes full use of its resources to raise the level of service it provides to China’s domestic S&T plans.” They are involved in negotiating S&T agreements between the US and PRC governments, and also meet with high-tech US companies, universities and S&T consortia in the US, “the heads of which are typically ethnic Chinese who have demonstrated commitment to China’s S&T development.” The authors recount how one Los Angeles S&T official invited 220 members of local Chinese S&T groups to a meeting with a “policy advising and reporting group” from the PRC. Attendees, whom the S&T official described as people who live abroad but whose “hearts and minds belong to China,” were informed “in detail” how they could participate in China’s S&T development.

These diplomatic S&T offices maintain websites with detailed information, much of it in Chinese, on how to support PRC S&T projects. Readers are encouraged to “use multiple means to develop multi-channel, multi-layer, all-around international cooperation and exchange” and to contribute research of a “practical nature.” S&T officers also engage in public discourse to “rally sentiment against ‘obstacles’ the US government places in the way of ‘free scientific exchange.’”

In 1993, the Chinese government established Triway Enterprise, Inc. in Falls Church, VA. The company hosts events around the country for Chinese recruiters and talent scouts, as well as “talks and exchanges” with ethnic Chinese scholars, overseas students and professionals. “Triway boasts ‘a one-stop, fully integrated solution’ to technology transfer that includes handling ‘complex travel arrangements’ and providing ‘top-quality translators.’”

Triway was also hired to help establish a Washington liaison office for the Shanghai Association for the International Exchange of Personnel (SAIEP), an alleged non-governmental organization with close links to SAFEA. In our authors’ words, “[n]ominal ‘non-governmental’ offices such as this provide PRC state and provincial units with direct access to US S&T talent while insulating the latter from the stigma of supporting a foreign state whose goals are often inimical to US interests.” The distinction between ‘governmental’ and ‘private’ is necessarily unclear in an authoritarian state such as China.

SAIEP’s Washington office serves to connect East Coast Chinese S&T personnel with appropriate partners in Shanghai. They maintain a separate office in Silicon Valley and six other cities around the world. Some idea of the scale of SAIEP’s operation is evident in its ’10,000 Overseas Scholars Convergence Program’ which aims at raising the level of Shanghai’s S&T talent and ‘breaking conceptual restraints on using overseas scholars.’ The program boasts ‘new methods’ [of] using foreign experts to fill posts ’at all levels of Party and government.’

Another major player in tech transfer is the Chinese Association for Science and Technology USA (CAST-USA), a supposedly non-political professional association founded in New York City in 1992. The organization claims to “serve as a ‘bridge’ between the United States and China for both personnel and information exchanges, and for cooperation in science and technology,” overtly listing “technology transfer” as one of its most important activities. CAST-USA now maintains eleven regional chapters and eight disciplinary subcommittees.

High-level PRC officials serve on CAST-USA’s board of advisers and attend their business meetings and social events in the US. Indeed, “many CAST-USA members who live in the US [also] occupy PRC positions.” Besides hosting PRC delegations to the United States, CAST-USA sends missions to China for events such as the annual “Returning Overseas Scholars Innovation Week.”

Here is just one anecdote:

At the seventh annual [Guangzhou Overseas Chinese Scholars tech transfer convention] in 2004, CAST-USA sent a 50-person delegation which brought to China “over 40 projects,” more than any other foreign delegation. While at the convention, it joined up with the PRC organizing committee to host the first “High-level Forum on a Strategy to Strengthen China through Knowledge” and to pass a declaration of support for China’s efforts to usher in high-tech industry. The proposal—conceived, drafted and presented by CAST-USA—aimed at positioning China among the world’s top seven countries in innovation by 2010. A report describing it began by affirming “competition between countries in the 21st century is a competition in knowledge.” The irony of helping China prevail in a competition against the country in which one lives seems to have gone unnoticed.

Graduates of Chinese Universities living abroad are organized in alumni associations which, from China’s point of view, amount to “a ready-made support base inside the host country … with the motivation to contribute to China’s technical modernization.” Some of these associations involve both Taiwanese and PRC institutions; in our authors’ words: “alumni from both sides of the Taiwan Straits can put aside their differences for their common interests vis-à-vis the non-Chinese world.”

Chapter Five continues with discussion of some of the “well over 100 US-registered advocacy groups that aim directly at technology transfer or achieve this as a consequence of their organizational structure.” Membership includes “US citizens, green card holders, H-1B visa workers and graduate students” from China.

Evidence of a China bias on the part of these S&T groups is found in their charters, activities and web postings, and in the spirit that pervades their literature. For example, among the dozens of S&T associations examined by the authors, not one failed to solicit money for the 2008 Sichuan earthquake relief—a project that has nothing to do with S&T and everything to do with helping China. By contrast, nowhere did we find concern expressed about contributing technology to a foreign country whose position on issues is often antagonistic to that of the US.

The authors discuss ten of these organizations based in Silicon Valley alone, as well as nine more spread across the US. They maintain

that helping China become a competitive power through “transferred” technology entails for these advocacy groups no contradiction, and the implications of their behavior for the larger body of Americans are to them irrelevant. In addition, while declarations of support for China are common, it is hard to find sentiment, not to mention concrete action taken, in favor of their American host.

As the authors predict, this fifth chapter will not find favor with the persons and organizations discussed, and one can anticipate that the more America-savvy among them will be quick with talk of “racism.”

Another important conduit for Chinese technology acquisition is its citizens studying abroad, of whom there have been some two and a quarter million since 1978. A large proportion of these come to the US: in 2011 there were 194,000 Chinese enrolled at American universities. They study mainly scientific and technical subjects. Between 1988 and 1996, 92 percent of US-earned doctorates by Chinese were in S&T fields, with the favorites being engineering, physical sciences, biological sciences and mathematics. By contrast, the US sent just 14,596 students to China during the 2010-11 academic year, most of whom studied social science or language.

Many Chinese get into American universities under false pretences:

One consultant working for US universities estimates that 90 percent of Chinese applicants submit false recommendations, 70 percent get other people to write their application essays, 50 percent forge their high school transcripts, 30 percent lie on financial aid forms and 10 percent list academic awards and other achievements they did not earn or receive.

Once here, they are monitored carefully by the mother country. China’s US embassy maintains an education section with the mission of “provid[ing] guidance for Chinese students and scholars in the USA.” This may help explain, e.g., the coordinated protests and threats of violence by Chinese students in connection with visits by the Dalai Lama and other Tibet-related events on American campuses.

Recent articles in Chinese S&T journals have openly advocated “expanding the role of Chinese scientists living overseas in conducting research on behalf of Chinese research institutes and facilitating technology transfer.” Sometimes students preparing to study in the US are approached by the Chinese Ministry of State Security in order to establish a clandestine relationship or task them with acquiring information.

The majority of Chinese who go abroad to study end up staying. In America, “according to both observers of and participants in the process, it is relatively easy to obtain a degree and get practical training while on a student visa, then to find a job and eventually to qualify for permanent resident status or even citizenship.” A 2007 survey by the Wall Street Journal found that 92 percent of Chinese doctoral candidates who received their degrees in 2002 were still in the United States, though more recently the number has shrunk to 82 percent. The Chinese government has adopted policies to encourage scholars to return, but has also emphasized the many ways in which Chinese scientists abroad can contribute to China by “serving in place” or by returning only for short visits.

Recently there have been proposals for a formal data center to keep track of overseas Chinese scholars. It would be operated by professional “overseas study management personnel,” a dedicated corps of S&T transfer specialists distinct from the technical experts themselves, whose task would be to identify overseas experts and find use for whatever information they have.

Semi-official sources advocate, in our authors’ words, “nothing less than PRC state control and manipulation of foreign-based ethnic Chinese scientists.” They speak in martial language of building an “overseas S&T corps” of overseas Chinese who have made outstanding contributions on all “battlefronts.” The following note of caution from a recent official publication shows that the Chinese authorities are only beginning to recognize the need for discretion in carrying out such plans:

To protect the personal interests of overseas persons of talent, China should adopt a “do more, talk less” or “do it but don’t talk about it” policy on recruitment and foreign S&T cooperation, especially in sensitive fields, and avoid by all means propagandizing on a large scale in domestic and foreign newspaper reports successes in our cooperation and recruitment, to avoid making them vulnerable and putting these overseas persons of talent in an embarrassing situation.

As already mentioned, an increasing proportion of Chinese studying abroad have been opting to return. Indeed, more than half of those ever to return have done so since 2009. Returnees have long played an important role in Chinese S&T:

81 percent of Science Academy members have studied abroad, as had 21 of the 23 people awarded for their work on China’s “atomic bomb, ballistic missile and earth satellite” projects. Almost the entire upper echelon of scientists responsible for China’s strategic weapons programs learned their skills abroad.

Since 1994, China has established a network of over 150 S&T parks for returnees to work in. Their mission is

not to create new technologies but “to accelerate the commercialization and industrialization of achievements in high technology”—an entirely different mission that depends on access to outside ‘talent’ and the ideas of others…. Experimenting “for its own sake” [is] discouraged in favor of a “practical and realistic” approach that adapted ideas brought in from abroad.

According to China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, some 22,000 overseas Chinese had been brought to work in such S&T parks by 2006; some parks are known to be dedicated to military projects. The authors note: “We know of no other country with a structure that is remotely similar.”

China also engages in outright espionage against the US and other countries, of course: “As early as 2005, Dave Szady, then assistant director of the FBI’s counter-intelligence division, told the Wall Street Journal that ‘China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the US today.’ The authors quote similar statements from Britain’s MI-5, Canadian security services and the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg.

The Chinese-American community is said to be the target of 98 percent of recruitment efforts by China’s Ministry of State Security. By contrast, the Soviet Union targeted ethnic Russians no more than a quarter of the time. The June 2010 arrest of European-American Glenn Duffy Shriver for selling state secrets to the PRC, however, may indicate a broadening of Chinese recruitment efforts in response to growing scrutiny of Chinese-Americans.

Cyber-espionage appears to be a Chinese specialty, “principally because of its logistical advantages and the promise of plausible deniability.” Joel Brenner, then-director of the US National Counterintelligence Executive remarked in 2008 that Chinese hackers are “very good and getting better all the time.”

Some [attacks], we have high confidence, are coming from government-sponsored sites…. The Chinese operate both through government agencies, as we do, but also through sponsoring other organizations that are engaging in this kind of international hacking, whether or not under specific direction. It’s a kind of cyber-militia…. It’s coming in volumes that are just staggering.

Specific infiltrations discussed include that of the US State Department (June 2006), the office email of Defense Secretary Robert Gates (2007), and both the Obama and McCain campaign computer systems (summer 2008).

The authors are to be commended for explicitly raising the issue of the Chinese capacity for innovation. Simply put, East Asian man has yet to show he is capable of continuous innovation on the scale observed in the West. The authors cite data from Charles Murray’s Human Achievement and from Joseph Needham, the preeminent historian of Chinese science, who “spent a lifetime documenting hundreds of clever Chinese inventions.” Needham “puzzled over ‘the lack of theoretical science in China’ despite the ‘high level of technological progress achieved there,’” and reluctantly concluded that the West had a monopoly on

the application of mathematical hypotheses to nature, the full understanding and use of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrisation of space, and the acceptance of the mechanical model of reality.

It is also surely significant that pure science preceded the development of scientific technology by many centuries in the West. The classical view of science is well-expressed in the (probably apocryphal) anecdote in which a student of Euclid asked the master what benefit he would derive from learning geometric theorems; Euclid is said to have told his slave boy to give the fellow a penny “since he must gain by what he learns.” This aristocratic view of knowledge predominated in the West until the enlightenment and remains influential to this day. There is no historical precedent for the successful pursuit of applied science in isolation.

Might the Chinese lack of interest in theoretical science and weak record of innovation have an evolutionary basis? Psychologist Richard Nisbett has demonstrated through controlled experiment a difference in cognitive preferences between East Asians and Europeans which he characterizes as “continuity vs. discreteness, field vs. object, relationship vs. categories, dialectics vs. logic, experienced-based knowledge vs. abstract analysis, interdependence vs. independence and communal vs. individualistic.”

Citing Nisbett’s work, neuroscientists Joan Y. Chiao and Katherine D. Blizinsky have proposed (2010) a sociobiological explanation for the coevolution of collectivist behavior and the dominance in East Asian populations of a genetic variant that codes for the psychotropic drug serotonin, which [has an impact on] cognitive bias:

we speculate that S [East Asian] and L [mostly European] allele carriers of the serotonin transporter gene may possess at least two kinds of information processing biases that enhance their ability to store and transmit collectivistic and individualistic cultural norms, respectively. S allele carriers may be more likely to demonstrate negative cognitive biases, such as engag[ing] in narrow thinking and cognitive focus, which facilitate maintenance [of] collectivistic cultural norms of social conformity and interdependence, whereas L allele carriers may exhibit positive cognitive biases such as open, creative thinking and willingness to take risks, which promote individualistic cultural norms of self-expression and autonomy.

Chiao and Blizinsky note a correlation between the ‘S’ gene and the greater ability of East Asians to resist anxiety and depression, states strongly associated with creativity in the sciences. Our authors write:

It has long been clear that individualism supports radical creativity, which by definition entails a rupture from collective wisdom and, usually, negative affect from peers. Factors cited in the creativity literature as inhibiting novel discovery are conformist education, lack of privacy and political centralism, ethnic homogeneity, and isolation from “diverse sociocultural environments” (such as Internet restrictions). To us, this sounds a lot like China.

Coauthor William C. Hannas has also theorized that the character writing system is an impediment to Chinese creativity:

Unlike Western alphabets that force learners to parse naturally occurring syllables into abstract phonemes and make other types of analytic judgments, [Chinese characters] map directly onto syllables, depriving children of an early life-changing opportunity to move beyond the concrete artifacts served up by nature to an abstract representations of [their] surroundings.

Hannes developed this theme in an article for the Fall 2005 TOQ (5:3).

Yet it would be easy to overstate the practical importance of the question of Chinese creativity for Sino-American competition. Even if “innovative science” end up becoming the Chinese equivalent of controlled fusion—something perpetually ten years in the future—China could still beat us with our own weapons by developing a successful “early adapter” strategy. The principal impression Chinese Industrial Espionage left me with was the contrast between a complacent West amusing itself with consumption and exploring the outermost reaches of antidiscrimination ideology, while on the other side of the world an alien civilization dedicates itself to the single-minded pursuit of power.

In their conclusion, the authors note:

We must recognize that the root cause of the problem [of technology theft] is nothing less than our own individualism and find ways as a nation to take collective action against the common threat, because the same trait that makes us good at creating things makes it hard for us to defend our national interests.