Western Greatness and Its Enemies  

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Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age
by Ricardo Duchesne
London: Arktos, 2017

Prof. Ricardo Duchesne’s first book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (reviewed by Kevin MacDonald in TOQ 11:3, Fall 2011) argued that the West was already a uniquely creative culture several millennia before the industrial revolution led to today’s vast differences in wealth and living standards between it and most of the rest of the world. The West’s uniqueness lay not in institutions such as democracy and representative government, nor in great books and abundant artistic production, nor in free markets and a ‘work ethic’—but in a more primordial Faustian drive to overcome obstacles and achieve great things. The original historical expression of this drive is the heroic ethos which informs Homer’s Iliad and Germanic heroic poetry: the overriding ambition of the aristocratic warrior to achieve immortal fame by engaging in battles for prestige in contempt of his own mortality. This ethos the author traces back to the Proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the Pontic steppes.

Following publication of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, the author turned his attention to the decline of the West. He notes the prescience of Oswald Spengler, the major theorist of civilizational decline of the past century, who anticipated

the eventual exhaustion of the West’s energies in the rise of internationalism, quasi-pacifism, declining birth rates, hedonistic lifestyles, coupled with the spread of Western technology in the non-Western world and the rise of ‘deadly competition’ from Asia.

All this is, of course, right on target. But Duchesne sensed something missing from Spengler’s account. There is one major factor at work in the contemporary West which goes well beyond the spiritual, political, economic or geopolitical exhaustion that was the fate of Rome, China and other ‘old’ civilizations: the massive immigration of cultural and racial aliens. As he remarks, this is “a new variable with truly permanent implications.” Read more

Eric Turkheimer: Jewish Ethnic Interests Masquerading as Ethical Concerns

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Recently behavior geneticist Eric Turkheimer participated in a commentary on Charles Murray and the issue of race differences in intelligence. Since I am not a behavior geneticist, I won’t argue the point that there is no present methodology to test for group differences in traits like IQ, although the recent method of estimating group IQ on the basis of the frequencies of the all the known genes associated with IQ seems promising. I focus here on Turkheimer’s claims on the ethics of studying race differences.

In previous comments on the science of race differences, Turkheimer noted:

Why Race Science is Objectionable

If I may address my fellow Jews for a moment, consider this. How would you feel about a line of research into the question of whether Jews have a genetic tendency to be more concerned with money than other groups? Nothing anti-semitic, mind you, just a rational investigation of the scientific evidence. It wouldn’t be difficult to measure interest in money and materialism, and it wouldn’t surprise me if as an empirical matter Jews scored a little higher on the resulting test than other groups. As a behavioral geneticist I can assure you without reservation that the trait would be heritable, and, if anyone bothered to take the time to find out, specific genes would have small associations with it. Of course, this research program has already been carried out, at least to the extent the relevant technology was available in 1939. While we are at it we could open a whole scientific institute for the scientific study of racial stereotypes, and finally pull together the evidence on sneaky Japanese, drunken Irish, unintelligent Poles, overemotional women and lazy Italians.

This is a naked appeal to the ethnic interests of his ethnic group — exactly the problem with the “scientists” reviewed in The Culture of Critique. Race realists associated with the Alt Right, on the other hand, have tended to go with the data. They accept the findings that the IQs of Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians are higher than White means. The main issue, after all is White identity and White interests in being able to construct their own societies as other groups around the world have done and continue to do — whatever their talents or deficiencies compared to other groups.

Turkheimer continues:

Hopefully I am beginning to offend you. Why? Why don’t we accept racial stereotypes as reasonable hypotheses, okay to consider until they have been scientifically proven false? They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings. No reasonable person would be offended by the observation that African people have curlier hair than the Chinese, notwithstanding the possibility of some future environment in which it is no longer true. But we can recognize a contention that Chinese people are genetically predisposed to be better table tennis players than Africans as silly, and the contention that they are smarter than Africans as ugly, because it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

The reason we must not delve in to race science thus depends on “intuition.” Unfortunately, we all have different intuitions. Perhaps he is talking about the intuitions of liberal university professors. Or activist Jews. Read more

In Post-Mortem of Election, Clinton Learns Literally Nothing

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Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.
New York: Crown, 2017.

The left, Clinton, and the media are defiant, and refuse to learn anything from the 2016 presidential election — root causes, messaging, or anything else which would hint at self-awareness.  They still want us to believe that the Russkies did it. Or they point towards breaches against PC doctrine about race and gender they think somehow proves their case.  How can we get through to people who are at once so sensitive about words and speech, and yet so dull in perceiving cause and effect?

Some documentation has emerged recently which gives us a more intimate look into the Clinton campaign’s strategy and the thought process of Clinton herself, both post-election and during the campaign.  Some of this we already know: that she is arrogant, entitled, and so forth; but what is in particular amusing is that she still seems to think that the “argument” of referring to Trump and his supporters as “racist” is an a priori proposition — no evidence needed, rather than a contentious characterization of which people have grown weary.

For example, it may be underestimated how devastating Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech was to her campaign.  This is described in Shattered, a book which gives an inside look at the Clinton campaign (though through an annoyingly partisan Democrat perspective).  The authors, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, compare “basket of deplorables” to Romney’s “47 percent” remark, which may well have cost him the election: “Hillary had become the 2016 cycle’s Mitt Romney […] For all the messaging she’d done on inclusiveness, she now sounded like not only an elite but an elitist” (316).  While it was hard to gauge the political effects at the time due to the constant spin from the MSM, that may well have been the moment that she lost the election.  Shattered shows that the Clinton campaign was more cognizant of her mistake than they let on.  At any rate, the remark certainly demonstrated Clinton’s cavalier attitude towards non-ethnomasochistic Whites (for those who weren’t already aware).   Read more

Animal Conservation or Bison Supremacism?

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I have a general rule in dealing with the politically-correct: look at what they do, not what they say.

I was very struck when I recently came across the efforts to restore the “genetic purity” of North American bison, the overwhelming majority of which have been tainted by cattle DNA through cross-species interbreeding. While it is dogma in the humanities and social sciences that race, gender, and everything else human are social constructs with no biological basis, conservation biologists are determined to preserve the unique genetic architecture of the American bison.

The leader in the crusade to restore the genetic integrity of bison is Dr. James Derr, a geneticist at Texas A&M University. An article in Nature on Derr’s efforts had this to say:

What does it mean to save a species? For some, preserving the American bison means keeping its genome pure . . .

Derr has almost single-handedly started a movement to preserve the original bison, complete with its unadulterated genome. He has managed to persuade everyone from federal officials to private conservation leaders that they should care about the cattle genes hiding in bison. And he is convinced that his approach — managing the genome rather than the animals — could be a model for conserving other large mammals.

Most people see preserving wildlife as a matter of saving individuals; if all the individuals die out, the species becomes extinct. But that reasoning looks simplistic when considered at the genomic level. If the genes of a species change enough — through interbreeding, for example — that species will cease to exist even if individuals that look something like the original continue to thrive.

Although some species interbreed naturally, humans have forced other mix-ups, and those are the cases that most worry Derr. “Species conservation is more than skin deep,” he says. “It is more than how they look, it is how they are — that’s the genome.” . . .

Although behaviour and morphology are important, Derr contends that a species is its genome. “If you don’t have the genome, nothing else you do makes a damn difference,” he says. “What you are preserving isn’t the species; it is something the hell else — a shadow.”

There is no obligation to save every version of every gene, but wildlife managers should keep pure herds from mixing with those that have cattle genes, he says. It is a simple formulation that has caught on with a number of conservationists.

Now reread the same passage, substituting the White European genome for the American bison genome. Be prepared to be called bad names or lose your job if you do this in public. Read more

‘Heaping Up Its Own Funeral Pyre’: Britain, Islamic Terror, and the Cult of Pacifism

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“Fail, and that history turns into rubbish,
All that great past to a trouble of fools.”
—­ W.B. Yeats, Three Marching Songs

In 1937 the great Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats was visited by a professor from India who, after lengthy discussion over lunch, requested a message to his country. ‘Let ten thousand men of one side meet the other. That is my message to India,’ replied Yeats, who then seized a Japanese sword and shouted, ‘Conflict, more conflict!’ To twenty-first-century ears, the message might seem bizarre, and may even have jarred the constitution of Yeats’s visitor. It was rooted, however, in the context of the poet’s Romantic and nationalistic belief system — a belief system in which conflict was both natural and good, and essential to the prevention of tribal decay, pollution, and decadence.

We are now, of course, far removed from such an understanding. It has been exiled from artistic and political expression, and driven from instinct by a weak and perverted culture. In the present, to be angry is ‘to let your enemy win.’ To hate is to commit the most grievous of sins of personality. To assert yourself and your interests is to perpetrate a pathological level of selfishness. Yeats would be repulsed. He would have understood that whereas conflict offers at least the opportunity for victory, and thus assumes a heroic quality, the pacifism currently inculcated in the West offers only ignoble defeat and death.

The Yeats anecdote recurred to me in the early hours of the morning as I cast my eyes over emerging media commentary on the latest jihadist attack in London. With depressing regularity the mainstream media, politicians, and cultural personalities ascended into the airwaves like insects disturbed from a nest, all carrying the same poison. To be sure, no-one dared express surprise at the latest Muslim atrocity — we are, perhaps fortunately, getting to the point where that particular affront has exhausted its viability, although faux expressions of ‘shock’ continue to reverberate. Instead, the narrative advanced by these elites was based around the idea that terrorism “should not divide us.” Quite apart from the fact that a multicultural society means that there is no longer any ‘us,’ and the fact that terrorism aims to terrorise rather than ‘divide’ a population, the statement itself should be read as containing a subliminal message: “Do nothing.” It is an enjoinder to pacifism — to surrender.

There is nothing noble about refusing to be moved or motivated by terrorism. If a man broke into my home and assaulted my family I am not made heroic by standing in the corner and pretending that nothing has happened or pretending we’re brothers after all. In the last twenty-four hours social media has been awash with liberals appealing to images of British stoicism during the Blitz of the Second World War. Such allusions are flawed for two reasons, the first being that the stoical, ‘stiff upper lip’ Blitz narrative is nothing more than a myth and a cultural trope. The late British historian Angus Calder’s masterpiece, The Myth of the Blitz, clearly demonstrated that far from showing the British at their finest hour, the Blitz disrupted the lives and broke the will of the vast majority of Londoners, causing a quarter of the population to flee to the countryside.[1] And rather than encouraging national solidarity, both Winston Churchill and the Royal Family were booed while touring the aftermath of air-raids. If the aim of the German air raids was to instill genuine terror, weaken morale, and disrupt the life of the city, it largely succeeded in these goals. And if contemporary Britons believe that they can survive Islamic terror by appealing to a fictional ‘Blitz spirit,’ then they are horribly mistaken. Read more

Brave New Britain: Vibrant Enrichment in Manchester and London

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“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not before.” The patriotic Israeli Rahm Emanual didn’t actually say that, but it perfectly reflects his Machiavellian character. It also describes how free speech in Britain is now going to be attacked by the shabbos shiksa Theresa May under the guidance of Moshe Kantor, the Board of Deputies, and other goyophobic Jews.

Judas Goats are rudely interrupted

The vibrancy in London, hard on the heels of the vibrancy in Manchester, is a crisis that isn’t going to be wasted. Too many people are speaking some or all of the truth about the disastrous situation Britain now finds itself in. Our vibrant enrichers from the Third World are starting to vibrate too much and enrich too fast. After the suicide-bombing up north in Manchester, the next item on the multi-culti agenda was a “tribute concert,” as Ariana Grande and Camila-Batmanghelidjh fans Coldplay and other Judas Goats brought thousands of sheeple together for a tearful wallow in a pink-tinted, rose-scented bath of sentimentality and reality-evasion. The highlight of the night: Grande and Coldplay singing “Don’t look back in anger.”

Vibrant enrichment in London

But three more vibrant enrichers rudely interrupted proceedings by slaughtering and mutilating yet more kaffir down south in London. “If the current trend in Islamic terror attacks continues, candlelit vigils will soon be the number one cause of global warming,” as an evil White racist put it on Twitter. Having got us into this fine mess, Britain’s liberal elite are now assuring us that they’re the ideal people to get us out of it. To do that, they want to silence “extremism” on the internet. The dedicated shabbos goy John Mann, chair of the British Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism, has tweeted thus: “I repeat, yet again, my call for the internet companies who terrorists have again used to communicate to be held legally liable for content.” Read more

Doused and Denounced

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A cold civil war has been brewing within academe, a war between “biologians” and “culturists.” Many modern biologists, genomic scientists, and physical anthropologists are biologians.  They think evolutionary adaptations are partly responsible for some racial disparities.   On the other hand, most historians, social scientists, public leaders, and mainstream journalists are culturists.  They minimize the importance of biology and evolution and say that history and culture explain the variations in the distribution of human characteristics.

One of the landmark events in this academic civil war occurred in 1975, when E. O. Wilson, a biology professor at Harvard, published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.  Professor Wilson presented a mountain of evidence to establish that biology influenced many forms of social behavior in the animal kingdom.  Then, in the last chapter of the book, Professor Wilson maintained that this was also true for human beings.

Among biologists, the initial reaction to Sociobiology was overwhelmingly favorable.  The response of many historians and social scientists, however, was quite critical.  This was not surprising, for most historians and social scientists regard human nature as relatively unaffected by our evolutionary past, as something that is shaped by social forces.  Some scholars, especially those with Marxist beliefs, have emphasized the special importance of economic forces that are extraneous to human biology.

As it happened, a Marxist group at Harvard, Science for the People, responded to Sociobiology with printed leaflets and teach-ins that were harshly critical of Professor Wilson.  For a few days a protester in Harvard Square used a bullhorn to demand that the university fire Professor Wilson, and on one occasion two students invaded the professor’s class on evolutionary biology to shout slogans and deliver anti-sociobiology monologues.  To make matters worse, Professor Wilson received little support from his colleagues on the Harvard faculty, and to avoid embarrassment he stayed away from department meetings for an entire year.

Professor Wilson considered offers to move to other universities, but he decided to stay at Harvard.  “The pressure was tolerable,” he has written, “since I was a senior professor with tenure . . . and could not bear to leave Harvard’s ant collection, the world’s largest and best.”

The opposition reached something of a climax in 1979, when Professor Wilson was scheduled to speak at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.    As he sat at a table near the lectern, a young man from the audience grabbed the microphone and harangued the assembled scholars.  A young woman then poured a pitcher of water over Professor Wilson’s head and demonstrators chanted, “Wilson, you’re all wet,” and “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”

Despite the vilification he received in the 1970s, things eventually turned out well for Professor Wilson.  By the turn of the twenty-first century, he was widely celebrated as the pioneering founder of two new academic fields, the evolutionary biology of humans and evolutionary psychology.  He was the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, and he received many academic awards.  When Harvard University Press published a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Sociobiology in 2000, it was evident that Professor Wilson’s theory appealed to many of the best minds in science.  By then Amazon.com listed 416 titles under “sociobiology” and 1, 218 under “human evolution.”

Nevertheless, as I have recently learned the hard way, many historians know little or nothing about sociobiology, evolutionary biology, or evolutionary psychology.

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