Chinese infanticide and polygyny

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Ron Unz has commented on my comments on China in my article on monogamy as a unique aspect of European civilization. First, I hope I didn’t give the impression that the only source for my views on China came from a novel. Actually, China was much on the minds of evolutionists when I got into the field in the early 1980s, particularly with the work of Mildred Dickemann, Richard Alexander, Bill Irons (and later Laura Betzig) on how elite males were able to have very high reproductive success via polygyny. Evolutionary anthropologists like Dickemann (“The ecology of mating systems in hypergynous dowry societies” [Social Science Information 18(2), 163-195) were showing that the stratified societies of Asia — China was an exemplar — were typified by wealthy males having large numbers of wives of different rank as well as concubines.

For example, in China during Former Chou Dynasty, the king was permitted one queen, three consorts, nine wives of second rank, twenty-seven wives of third rank and eighty-one concubines. One Tang Dynasty text reports that there were 3,000 women in the Palace seraglio; other estimates range from 1200 to 10,000 (van Gulik, 1974, p. 17, 206). …

Van Gulik’s (1974, pp. 17-18) description of Chinese Imperial Harem procedures, involving copulation of concubines on a rotating basis at appropriate times in their menstrual cycles, all carefully regulated by female supervisors to prevent deception and error, shows what could be achieved with a well-organized bureaucracy. Given nine-month pregnancies and two- or three-year lactations, it is not inconceivable that a hardworking Emperor might manage to service a  thousand women.

Such societies are hypergynous—that is, women tend to move up the social ladder, while men tend to move down. Families compete to purchase inheritance rights for their daughters via dowries; but dowries are expensive, contributing to high rates of female infanticide.  Poor families would be unable to provide dowries, but would be paid brideprice—their daughters becoming concubines with much lower prospects of inheritance. This is precisely the situation portrayed in the novel Jin Ping Mei mentioned in my article. Read more

Paul Fromm on the Demise of Free Speech in Canada

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Paul Fromm, a pro-White activist who writes for his CAFE (Canadian Association for Free Expression) website, has an article on a recent ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court that once again indicates the power of the cultural left at the highest reaches of Western societies “The Whatcott Decision – A Grim Day for Christians and Freedom of Speech“). The case involves a $15000 fine (plus court costs likely to be north of $150,000) imposed on an evangelical Christian who distributed leaflets containing criticism of homosexuality based on Biblical teachings. Some excerpts and comments:

The decision is pure cultural Marxism. It reflects the triumph of *Frankfurt School* social science which has captured most Western universities. While economic communism collapsed and was defeated, cultural communism was spread by the *Frankfurt School*. Basically, it sees the world divided up into two classes: oppressors – those would be White Christians, and especially sexually healthy White males – and the oppressed – those would be women, homosexuals, Jews, and certain other racial minorities. To overthrow the “oppressors” and to establish universal equality – not of opportunity but results – the *Frankfurt School* targeted loyalty to family, country and religion. There began a concerted campaign of “deconstruction” whereby political heroes, cultural heroes – the dismissal of traditional English literature as the writing of dead, White males – and traditional Christianity were mocked and attacked. These ideas have captured the upper echelons of Canada’s judiciary and bode poorly for freedom of speech.

The Whatcott decision holds that in human rights cases:

· Truth is no defence;
· Intent is no defence;
· No harm needs to be proven to have been caused to a “vulnerable” minority;
· A minority is designated as “vulnerable” not because of any evidence – the court admits concrete evidence is often lacking, but on the mere say-so of a human rights commission or court;
· Christians are not protected from hatred as they are not a “vulnerable minority.”  Read more

Historiographical Refutation of Patrick O’Brien’s Global Perspective on the Scientific Revolution

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The current issue of The Journal of Global History (March 2013) has an opening article by Patrick O’Brien, Professor of Global History at the London School of Economics and Political Science,  with a long title, “Historical foundations for a global perspective on the emergence of a western European regime for the discovery, development, and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge,” which concludes, rather diffidently, that “historians of global economic development might wish to retain the ‘older’ view of the ‘Scientific Revolution’” (15). The global historians O’Brien has in mind are Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Ian Morris, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, A. Gunder Frank, Patrick Manning, David Christian, and indeed almost the entire world and global history professoriate and the multiculturalists who dominate our educational institutions.  The research of these historians has been invariably about the so-called “similarities” — economic and institutional — between Europe and Asia before the Industrial Revolution, not the Scientific Revolution.

Nevertheless, altogether they have generally insisted that the rise of modern science was a global phenomenon. For example, Frank has written that Newtonian science was not peculiar to Europe but “existed and continued to develop elsewhere as well” (1998: 188–89).  Armesto has shown no hesitation stating that the science and philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler, Laplace, Descartes and Bacon was no more original than the neo-Confucian “scientific” revival of the seventeenth century — both were “comparable in kind” (2007: 630). Morris has also said that an intellectual movement in 17th to 18th century China known as Kaozheng “paralleled western Europe’s scientific revolution in every way – except one: it did not develop a mechanical model of nature” (2010: 473)—a rather large difference  given that nature can’t be understood scientifically without such models. Parthasarathi, in his recent book, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (2011) has rejected the ‘older’ claim that Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions, tracing the divergence instead to different competitive and ecological pressures structured by global dynamics.

Now, while O’Brien thinks that these historians have been “successful” in their “assault upon a triumphalist tradition of European global economic history” (2), he questions, guardedly, their claim that the rise of modern science was a global phenomenon. The Scientific Revolution, he writes, was “something less than a short, sharp discontinuity in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, and more a profound conjuncture locatable for its time in the history of western Europe” (23). Yet, O’Brien accepts the idea that world history should be the study of “connections in the human community,” the story of humanity’s “common experience” (Manning, 2003), an idea which precludes seeing historical transformation in terms of the “internal logics” of nations or particular civilizations. The result is one of the most convoluted, awkward, befuddling, and unscholarly papers I have read.  Read more

Peter Hitchens’s Show of Guilt: Enoch Powell Was Right

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Now that Britain has been utterly transformed to the point that turning back the muilticultural assault and reclaiming the traditional British nation would be cataclysmic, we are treated to some hand-wringing in the mainstream media. In his “How I am partly to blame for mass immigration” Peter Hitchens writes that when he was a Trotskyite supporting as much immigration as possible,

it wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.  Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.  If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London). We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins. But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives. When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

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Rotten in Rotherham: Denis MacShane, Doublethink and the Coming Slave-State

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The Right Honourable Denis MacShane

The Right Honourable Denis MacShane

Comrade Catholic

Unstintingly generous with others, Tony Blair’s New Labour were sternly austere with themselves. While toiling to create thousands of new laws and regulations for the rest of us, for themselves they had a single stark and simple rule: “To the pure in heart, all things are permitted.” And who in New Labour came purer-hearted, or more self-permissive, than the Rt. Hon. Denis MacShane, né Matyjascek, a Privy Councillor, “informal envoy” to Tony Blair, and quondam Member of Parliament for the Yorkshire constituency of Rotherham? Saluted as an “old comrade” by a fellow Oxonian, the Trotskyist/neo-conservative Christopher Hitchens, the Roman Catholic MacShane has devoted many decades to the struggle against fascism and for justice, equality and freedom. Alas, in our fallen world, this made him a marked man. On Friday 7th November, 2012, the cross-party House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee suspended him for twelve months for submitting false invoices and fraudulently claiming thousands of pounds in expenses.

The Labour chairman of the committee described his conduct as the “gravest case which has come to the committee for adjudication” and Denis saw no choice but to fall on his anti-fascist sword:

In the light of the Parliamentary Commissioner’s decision, supported by the Committee of Standards and Privileges, to uphold the BNP [British National Party] complaint about expenses claimed in connection with my parliamentary work in Europe and in combating antisemitism, I have decided for the sake of my wonderful constituency of Rotherham and my beloved Labour party to resign as an MP. (“Denis MacShane resigns as MP over expenses,” The Guardian, 2 November 2012)

Denis was not alone in his distress and bewilderment that a complaint from so vile a source should have been upheld. The lawyer Mark Stephens, a friend and fellow anti-fascist, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s World at One to condemn the committee’s finding in these uncompromising terms:

The most important thing here is that if people who are anti-fascist, people who have fought against semitism [sic], then in those sort of circumstances – in those circumstances – people will be deterred from doing that in the future, they will become targets… I have worked with Dr Denis MacShane for over thirty years on campaigns and anti-fascist work. This is a huge victory for racists and fascists who have in my opinion abused the parliamentary complaints system to destroy an honourable member of parliament who is a political opponent of the BNP… the chilling effect of this process will deter principled members of Parliament from rooting out prejudice and fascism wherever it may be found. (See here.) Read more

Monogamy and the Uniqueness of European Civilization

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One of the arguments against gay marriage is that allowing gays to marry would eventually lead to polygamy, or even marriage between man and goat. Or between a man and his son to avoid inheritance taxes. And indeed it might. But the issue  of polygamy has already been before the Supreme Court, and the opinion—which upheld monogamous (heterosexual)  marriage as the only legitimate form of marriage—is of contemporary interest because of how it defended traditional monogamous marriage.

The Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. United States (1878):

Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people. At common law, the second marriage was always void (2 Kent, Com. 79), and from the earliest history of England polygamy has been treated as an offence against society. After the establishment of the ecclesiastical courts, and until the time of James I., it was punished through the instrumentality of those tribunals, not merely because ecclesiastical rights had been violated, but because upon the separation of the ecclesiastical courts from the civil the ecclesiastical were supposed to be the most appropriate for the trial of matrimonial causes and offences against the rights of marriage, just as they were for testamentary causes and the settlement of the estates of deceased persons.

By the statute of 1 James I. (c. 11), the offence, if committed in England or Wales, was made punishable in the civil courts, and the penalty was death. As this statute was limited in its operation to England and Wales, it was at a very early period re-enacted, generally with some modifications, in all the colonies.

The court then points out that the same Virginia convention that recommended religious freedom also enacted James I’s death penalty for bigamy. Read more

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Alex Kurtagic: Masters of the Universe – Speech, September 2011

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https://youtu.be/J7AMMuBWWJY