Chapter 16 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together is available here. Again, donations are of critical importance for finishing this important project. This immensely interesting and important chapter is the topic of the current TOO article. I solicit comments here.
There’s a phenomenon among cave explorers called “the rapture“, akin to “an anxiety attack on methamphetamines”, that can overcome people in the claustrophobic depths. I believe a similar thing happens in the claustrophobic depths of our own struggle: some are overcome with frustration and desperation so overwhelming that they panic and abandon the movement altogether.
A spirit of relentless optimism and experimentation is a prerequisite for anybody taking on this cause. Thomas Edison epitomized that spirit when he famously quipped, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” George Washington Plunkitt, also born in the 1840’s, was a hustler in New York City’s notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. While Plunkitt was nowhere near as innovative or admirable as Edison, these men both typified the boundless ambition and optimism that White Americans would do well to revive.
His memoir, entitled Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, is a brutally honest and unapologetic tour through the sausage factory of American politics. In it, he describes how the democratic process is invariably driven by graft and special interests. He explains how to build and maintain a constituency. He lampoons patriotism and idealism in American politics as shams perpetuated by self-promoters. He calls out the “reformers” and “the civil service” for being more dishonest and corrupt than the machine politicians they were sent to replace.
His folksy meanderings can be at times amusing and obnoxious distractions, but the style is what one might expect to find from a bright and gregarious man who’s devoted himself to politics and eschewed academics. Even the parts that seem completely parochial or personal can be gleaned for thoughtful insight from a life of experience. He drives home his most important points, like the importance of loyalty, multiple times and from multiple angles.
The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie. Richard Croker used to say that tellin’ the truth and stickin’ to his friends was the political leader’s stock in trade. Nobody ever said anything truer, and nobody lived up to it better than Croker. That is why he remained leader of Tammany Hall as long as he wanted to. Every man in the organization trusted him. Sometimes he made mistakes that hurt in campaigns, but they were always on the side of servin’ his friends.
This book is antiquated and many of his prescriptions are outright immoral and/or illegal, but few other books have so thoroughly influenced my understanding of how the world actually works. My foray into political activism and “community organization” has confirmed over and over again how little has changed in the century since this book was written.
On one memorable occasion, a local GOP operative I met with lurched over the table at Steak ‘n Shake and confided that he’s really only in it to scrape lists and make contacts for his mortgage gig. There was the passionate tea party organizer who bellowed about taxes and principles through her megaphone…her husband was plotting a run for office. At the national level, the whole Obamacare distraction is little more than a transfer of “honest” graft from the private corporations that benefited under the Republican administration to the bureaucracies and organizations that benefit under this Democratic administration.
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Too many idealists attempt to cram their ideals onto reality, then become frustrated when reality fails to comply. To make any real progress, we need to use reality as the starting point and engage in practical politics to pull reality toward our ideals. It’s not about compromising or selling out, but about building a base of constituents who look to you as their most credible and competent advocate.
We White Advocates are in a curious position, as our ideology ultimately boils down to being advocates for our constituents. In theory, our job should be easy: White Americans want what’s best for themselves and that’s what we’re all about. Unfortunately, this simple formula has broken down at both ends: with White Americans being bamboozled into wanting what’s not best for themselves and White Advocates failing to be be credible and competent advocates.
The first half of this equation, persuading Whites to think for themselves, might even take care of itself as demographic, social, and economic realities impose themselves on the somnambulant masses. But even if there were some sort of mass awakening, the mob would have no credible and competent political machine to turn to. This is where practical street-level politics, community organizing, comes in. This is where we get to the point: fighting for our people.
William L. Riordan, the scholar who compiled Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, explained how Plunkitt put this theory into practice…
Everybody in the district knows him. Everybody knows where to find him, and nearly everybody goes to him for assistance of one sort or another, especially the poor of the tenements.
He is always obliging. He will go to the police courts to put in a good word for the “drunks and disorderlies” or pay their fines, if a good word is not effective. He will attend christenings, weddings, and funerals. He will feed the hungry and help bury the dead.
A philanthropist? Not at all He is playing politics all the time.
Brought up in Tammany Hall, he has learned how to reach the hearts of the great mass of voters. He does not bother about reaching their heads. It is his belief that arguments and campaign literature have never gained votes.
He seeks direct contact with the people, does them good turns when he can, and relies on their not forgetting him on election day. His heart is always in his work, too, for his subsistence depends on its results.
Plunkitt’s most memorable phrase, “I seen my opportunities, and I took ’em!”, epitomizes practical politics. Plunkitt, like most contemporary politicians, was a morally bankrupt ideological vacuum. But one needn’t abide our movement’s false dichotomy between the crooked winners and “beautiful losers”. We can adapt practical political tactics from him, Saul Alinsky, or whoever else offers a good idea.
Like Thomas Edison, we must never give up, even when it seems hopeless. In Edison’s own words, “Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.”
Matt Parrott is an analyst and family man in suburban Indianapolis. He is the chairman of the CofCC’s Indiana chapter, Hoosier Nation, and blogs at Fair and Delightsome. He hosts a copy of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall at his website for your reading pleasure.
In the wake of a series of shooting deaths by local police forces in Seattle, Tacoma and the metropolitan region, most clearly justified, but with at least one seemingly something of a tragic mistake, local Anarchist groups are going wild, calling for more copkillings. (This in fact echoes the call of local NAACP Pres. James Bible justifying the killing of “occupying force” cops, in the midst of a copkilling spree that left five local European-American police officers dead at the hands of two Black Supremacists. Of course, the only real racists, the Seattle Police Chief gravely intoned as five of his officers lay dead at the hands of Black Supremacists, are those who think race played a role in the Black Supremacist rampages.)
One rather nasty local anarchist group, the Arctic Circle Collective, simply calls for the massacre of Cops. (see their Seattle Cops Kill; Fuck the Police, and Fuck Calming Down! at arcticcirclecollective.info, August 31).
I have read through all of the Arctic Circle Collective website and it is clear that this group is Zionist. On their Distro page they have a document called “Bloom Theory”, an ideological statement (41 pages no less, written in an incoherent Situationist/Joycean style) in which they state their goal that every member of the working class should evolve into a Elser/Bloom (Bloom is the main character of Ulysses). Elser/Bloom, to be specific, is Johann Georg Elser, who, the Arctic Circle Collective asserts, is “an exemplary Bloom in every respect”; he was a German Jew who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1939. For Arctic Circle, assassinating Hitler is the decisive act of revolution and anyone killing a cop is both assassinating Hitler and increasing anarchy. In a very real sense, Arctic Circle argues, to live under a [non-Jewish] state is to be, like Elser/Bloom, a Fuhrerssonderhaftling (an exceptional prisoner of the Fuhrer). Of course, as Zionists, by definition, they worship Israel, the Jewish state: This is clear because while anarchist groups are constantly demanding the murder of police everywhere in the world, but no anarchist group ever advocates assassinating Israeli police.
In their manifesto “About Us” they describe anarchism as a fog that obscures and ultimately obliterates the State: It is through the process of killing Hitler again and again that the “fog” of anarchism can be thickened, ultimately creating the worldwide Anarcho-Zionist utopia, a sort of Israeli world empire, the ultimate, final and eternal Tiqqun (they use the French transliteration from Hebrew, Tiqqun, instead of the English transliteration Tikkun). I think calling it “fog” is a kind of in-joke, because one of their overriding operational goals is to conceal the fact that they are Zionists.
Oddly enough, this is essentially the same ideology as that of Neo-Con Christophobe David Frum (George W. Bush’s speechwriter who put the word “Crusade” in Bush’s mouth to describe the Wars for Israel and the phrase “Axis-of-Evil” to designate the enemies of Israel). Frum is obsessed with cop killer Leonard Peltier. Even after Jews have become the ruling class in the United States, their young cannot resist the temptation to play revolutionary, always aware that they will never be faced with the consequences of their racial terrorism.
As the then Acting Chief of Police stated after the murder of Seattle police officer by a self-avowed Black Supremacist, anyone who thinks there is anything to be learned from this act of terrorism is a racist. And in the silence imposed by the Government to protect those who stand behind this terrorism, more police will be murdered.
Roots came out in 1977. The made for TV film told the story of the now famous African, Kunta Kinte, who was captured and enslaved by White men and brought to America where he lived as a slave. He is captured while out in the forest looking for the proper log with which to make his younger brother a drum. He is free and happy, having just finished his training as a man. Roots became a classic. It would even be fair to say it defined the understanding of slavery by the American public.
The film does indicate that there were African “traitors” who sold their fellow Africans into slavery, presumably a peculiarly White institution. However, recent scholarship challenges this limited view.
As these scholars see it, slavery was widespread and indigenous in African society, as was, naturally enough, a commerce in slaves. The demographic impact, although important, was local and difficult to disentangle from losses due to internal wars and slave trading on the domestic African market. In any case, the decision makers who allowed the trade to continue, whether merchants or political leaders, did not suffer the larger scale losses and were able to maintain their operations. Consequently, one need not accept that they were forced into participation against their will or made decisions irrationally.
This quote is from the book entitled Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 by Prof. John Thornton. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 1992.
The book goes on to explain that unlike, the concept of land as wealth in Europe, people were the form of wealth on the African continent.
Slavery was widespread in Atlantic Africa because slaves were the only form of private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law. By contrast, in European legal systems, land was the primary form of revenue-producing property, and slavery was relatively minor. . . .
Thus it was the absence of landed private property – or, to be more precise, it was the corporate ownership of land – that made slavery so pervasive an aspect of African society. …
One common way to reconcile African law and the concept that landed property was a natural and essential part of civilization was to describe African land in Africa as being owned by the king (as a substitute for corporate ownership by the state).
And the use of slaves was not an infrequent or incidental part of African society. This text referring to Kongo indicated that tax was charged by the “head.” And in Benin the entire population was regarded as being “slaves of the king.”
In Africa people, rather than land, were taxed. In one scene of Roots it is made clear that Kunta loves a woman who has been raped on the passage to the colonies. But concubinage or the use of enslaved women for sex did not start in the new land. The film depicts the village life of Africa in an idyllic manner but there were other realities.
And I quote:
Another important institution of dependency was marriage, where wives were generally subordinated to their husbands. Sometimes women might be used on a large scale as a labor force. For example, in Warri, Bonaventura de Firenze noted in 1656 that the ruler had a substantial harem of wives who produced cloth for sale. Similarly the King of Whydah’s wives, reputed to number over a thousand, were employed constantly in making a special cloth that was exported.
There are those who will admit that slavery was practiced in Africa but contend that the slavery of the New World was uniquely and relentlessly brutal and that of Africa almost benign by comparison.
But again, I quote:
In any case, Valentim Fernandes’s description of slave labor in Senengambia around 1500, one of the few explicit texts on the nature of slave labor, shows that slaves working in agricultural production worked one day a week for their own account and the rest for their master, a regime that was identical for slaves serving in Portuguese sugar mills on the island colony of Sao Tome in the same period.
Kunte Kinte is a Mandingo. The word itself means warrior as well as connoting sexual prowess. The fact that so many warriors were held as slaves in Africa’s inter-tribal wars may have had an indirect influence in the use of Africans in South America as mercenaries later on in history.
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In discussing wars on the African continent at the time, Prof. John Thornton says:
These wars do not appear to have been waged for territorial expansion; although we lack the chronicle sources of the Sudanese region to confirm this, certainly there was no consolidation in Sierra Leon as a result of warfare. But as Velor also testified, slaves were used in the domestic economy to increase the ruler’s personal income, and perhaps this in itself can explain the propensity for wars that did not increase wealth by the annexation of land but by the annexation and transport of people.
And again it must be made clear that slavery in Africa was not merely a response to European demand but existed prior to such a demand and was quite independent of it.
Again, I quote:
Although some of these raids may have also been undertaken to supply European demand; this demand was in addition to the greater demand for slaves to be used domestically as well as for export.
Many Africans retained females from the raids and sold off males, because the Atlantic trade often demanded more males than females. The Bissagos Islanders held many female slaves, and observers believed that virtually all the productive work was done by women.
And once the slaves were brought to the Americas, they changed the landscape of the society. The indentured workers, which, according to some estimates, made up 70 per cent of the Europeans who immigrated to America, were slowly replaced by African slaves.
In Barbados, for example, once sugar took off as an export crop, it made fortunes for those who invested in it, allowing them to replace their indentured work forces with the more expensive but more satisfactory slaves, and then buy up available land from the remaining free farmers, gradually transforming the demography of the island from one of European settlement to one of African slaves and European owners.
The habit of hiring out slaves trained in the trades at below market rates by the wealthy landowners also cut into the income of the free workers. So, although freedom was certainly preferable to slavery, the practical reality for the indentured servant, once freed, in colonial America was one of hardship, struggle against great odds, and sun-up to sun-down labor, much like that of the African slave.
A Huguenot traveler in Virginia in 1648 noted that on one estate he visited, the master kept large barracks for both his slaves and his indentured workers, presupposing little community life and close discipline for both types of workers.
The book goes on to explain the complexity of life for all types of workers in colonial America, where no one model describes all the realities of the era. Sometimes slave families were split up, but often, due to the influence of Christianity, there was an attempt to create and sustain family life among the slaves. Certain economic enterprises such as mining were dominant by males while others such as farming had workers more evenly distributed between the sexes. But that is pretty much the way it would have been on the non-slave side of the economy as well.
In the opening scenes of the story of Roots, the audience is introduced to Thomas Davies, the captain of the slave ship, the Lord Liganier. His devout Christianity is underscored as is his discomfort with the treatment of slaves aboard the vessel. But what is also made clear is that despite his Christianity he does not stand up for the slaves in any way. Thus the audience is being told that Christians simply ignored the dictates of Christianity in their practice of slavery. It is also implies that that the importation of slaves into colonial America was a White Christian phenomenon.
But that is not, in fact, historically accurate. Slavery has never been exclusively a European institution. The only unique thing about Europeans and slavery is that they were the only group to end it.
Penelope Thornton (email her) is a freelance writer and a serious student of the media and its games.
As noted in Chapter 22, Jews began to be purged from prominent positions in the government after World War II up to the time of Stalin’s death. Thereafter, things improved for the Jews but deteriorated again. Chapter 23 has several familiar themes:
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A central message is the power of Jewish ethnocentrism. Yuri Slezkine and a host of Jewish activist organizations make much of the idea that Jewish Communists in the USSR had no Jewish identity at all, at least until WWII. (See my rebuttal here, p. 75ff.) To some extent Solzhenitsyn buys into this, since he charts an increasing sense of Jewish identity beginning with WWII and the Holocaust and culminating in the Six-Day War. But, as the example of the self-deceptive Jewish scientist shows, Jewish identity is pliable. Jews continued to associate with Jews, marry Jews, and participate in and benefit from Jewish ethnic networks during the entire period—as Solzhenitsyn shows elsewhere, e.g., in his chapter on the 1920s.
Solzhenitsyn’s example of the Jewish scientist reminded me of the self-deception of Jewish radicals described in Ch. 3 of The Culture of Critique:
Most Jewish Communists wear their Jewishness very casually but experience it deeply. It is not a religious or even an institutional Jewishness for most; nevertheless, it is rooted in a subculture of identity, style, language, and social network. . . . In fact, this second-generation Jewishness was antiethnic and yet the height of ethnicity. The emperor believed that he was clothed in transethnic, American garb, but Gentiles saw the nuances and details of his naked ethnicity…. Evidence of the importance of ethnicity in general and Jewishness in particular permeates the available record. Many Communists, for example, state that they could never have married a spouse who was not a leftist. When Jews were asked if they could have married Gentiles, many hesitated, surprised by the question, and found it difficult to answer. Upon reflection, many concluded that they had always taken marriage to someone Jewish for granted. The alternative was never really considered, particularly among Jewish men. (Paul Lyons (1982). Philadelphia Communists, 1936–1956. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 73, 74)
Jewish self-deception is a critical feature of trying to understand Jewish behavior and the topic of a chapter in Separation and Its Discontents. Jews sincerely believed that they had no ethnic identity even though it was apparent to everyone else. The general point is that Jewish ethnocentrism creates a blindness to things that are completely obvious to neutral observers.
This is apparent in contrasting how Jews see their experience in the USSR with how Solzhenitsyn sees it. Jewish intellectuals and activists see the entire Soviet trajectory through ethnocentric blinders. They see Jews as a hapless persecuted minority under the Czar, then rising to well-deserved prosperity after the Revolution. Jewish communists at least until WWII completely lost their ethnic identity, so whatever they did as an elite during the most murderous regime in European history was only due to their being loyal, idealistic communists, not because they were by far the most numerous and most powerful component of a non-Russian ethnic coalition that viewed the traditional people and culture of Russia with murderous hostility. Whatever social status they attained was solely due to Jewish merit—completely unrelated to Jewish ethnic networking and completely unrelated to the active suppression and eradication of the previously existing elites and their descendants. It was only because of the Holocaust and completely irrational anti-Jewish attitudes after WWII that Jewish communists became disenchanted with the USSR and began to identify as Jews, culminating in their embrace of Zionism, particularly after the Six-Day War.
Solzhenitsyn paints a very different picture — a picture that is not only historically accurate but also reflecting the reasonable concerns of a Russian ethnic actor who feels that his people have been done a great injustice. During the Czarist period, Jews aggressively overreacted to reasonable policies of the government designed to protect the Slavic population — the basic duty of any governmentthat pretends to represent the interests of the ethnic majority (Chapter 5). Duringthe 1920s Jews became a hostile elite—Stalin’s “Willing Executioners” —entrenched in all the high ground of Soviet society — the public face of the most brutal regime in history, and provoking a great deal of hostility among the Russian people. Then, after Jews failed to do their fair share of front line fightingduring WWII despite the fact that it was a war against the most deadly anti-Jewish force in history, Russians seeking to improve their social status came up against previously existing, well-entrenched Jewish elites. The purges of Jews that followed were certainly far less violent than the purges of the pre-revolutionary elites during the 1920s and had much to recommend them from the standpoint of ethnic fairness. Nevertheless, even after these purges, Jews remained highly overrepresented in high-status positions requiring education. Jews, however, responded negatively to being removed from their virtual ethnic monopoly on heights of power. With the rise of Israel, they also rediscovered their connections to the international Jewish community and a great many bailed out of Soviet society completely because they were more loyal to the international Jewish community and its identification with Israel than they were to Russia and Russians.
Having been around the block a few times on issues like this where there is a self-serving Jewish consensus on their own history, I realize that communication is impossible. Jewish activist intellectuals and organizations will continue to present their side of the story and do everything they can to vilify or ignore any account that departs from their orthodoxy. As an evolutionist, I am not surprised. That’s what ethnic conflict is all about — just as deadly when it is conflict among intellectuals over interpretations of history as it is in mass murders of Russians and Ukrainians carried out in the name of international socialism.
Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.
The current TOO article discusses Chapter 23 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together. I solicit comments here. The main theme is Jewish self-deception–the inability to see things without ethnic blinders, in particular, the history of the Jews in the USSR. After writing it, another example surfaced—they’re not hard to come by—although, as usual, it’s hard to know if it’s more a matter of aggressive intimidation than self-deception. Yet another government official has gotten in trouble for saying the obvious. This time it’s Karel de Gucht, the EU Trade Commissioner (“EU Trade Commissioner Apologizes for Jewish Comments”).
The European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group, had demanded a retraction of De Gucht’s remarks in which he maintained that Israel frustrates U.S.-led peace efforts and warned not to “underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill.”
“That is the best organized lobby that exists there,” the former Belgian foreign minister said in the interview with the Dutch-speaking VRT radio network.
“Don’t underestimate the opinion … of the average Jew outside of Israel,” he said. “There is, indeed, a belief, I can hardly describe it differently, among most Jews that they are right. So it is not easy to have a rational discussion with a moderate Jew about what is happening in the Middle East. It is a very emotional issue.”
De Gucht was saying (he’s since apologized profusely) that Jews honestly believe what they are saying is true, so it’s pretty much impossible to have a rational discussion–self-deception by any other name. It’s the same with the history of the Jews in the USSR—and a great many other things.
The official Jewish reaction has been to see De Gucht’s comments as an example of “a growing wave of anti-Semitism in Europe,” explicitly said to be on a par with Thilo Sarrazin’s comments on Jewish genetics. Again, there is a blind spot where facts are irrelevant. In a comment that is worthy of Abe Foxman, Moshe Kantor of the European Jewish Congress stated, “It has somehow become acceptable to attack Jews through Israel, even at the highest levels,” said Kantor. “The old anti-Semitic libels of the all-powerful Jewish cabals, the recalcitrant Jew and the irrational Jews only caring for their own, are remade to fit 21st- century hostility to the Jewish State.”
Of course, besides self-deception there is the very real possibility in this case that Kantor knows full well that this is just bluster and intimidation attempting to prevent public discussion of Jewish power and relying for its effectiveness on cowed European elites whose defining characteristic since WWII has been terror at being labeled an anti-Semite. Tough call.
Just recently Thilo Sarrazin, a director of Germany’s central bank, made headlines because he wrote a book critical of immigration, basically saying that Germany is commiting suicide. He says (reasonable and popular) things like “I don’t want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in a mostly Muslim country where Turkish and Arabic are widely spoken, women wear headscarves and the day is measured out by the muezzin’s call to prayer.” He also thinks that Turks aren’t as smart as Germans (they’re not; Richard Lynn on IQ: Germany=102; Turkey = 90); and he thinks that Jews have significant genetic commonality (also true). (A Jewish spokesman said, “Whoever tries to define Jews by their genetic makeup, even when it is superficially positive in tone, is in the grip of a race mania that Jews do not share.” No need to discuss the fact that Jewish genetic commonality discovered by (Jewish) population geneticists can only be explained ultimately by the fact that the Jews have always had a race mania.)
Sarrazin attracted a deluge of criticism for expressing his views. “The German elite is united in its criticism [of Sarrazin]. Sarrazin is representative of a latent Islamophobia, but one which has not been able to take shape in any political formation as we have seen in the Netherlands and Austria.” Sarrazin has now been sacked because of his views–even though they have nothing to do with his position as a banker; his fate will doubtless be a cautionary tale for similarly inclined others.
It reminds us that the consensus among elites throughout the West is maintained not by force of argument but by brute force, although it’s not uncommon for the media to confidently assert that the facts are on their side. (Time magazine: “Experts reject his argument that innate low intelligence is the culprit.”) Another tack is to gleefully assert that Europe has no choice but to admit immigrants because its birthrate is so low—while at the same time noting that the German government won’t do anything to encourage births because that’s what the National Socialists did: “Crucially, however, the memory of Nazi schemes to promote motherhood continues to inhibit governments in Berlin from urging women to have more children.”
But in the end, elites are not willing to let dissident views simply compete for adherents or let people be exposed to scientists like Richard Lynn who, by any reasonable account, is also an expert. It’s all about enforcing orthodoxy.
The question is how to break through this elite monopoly on discourse on immigration and race. I confess I don’t have a clue. That’s what makes the Glenn Beck phenomenon so pathetic. Here’s a guy who has an immense following of angry White people yearning for leadership that would really help their plight. And all he can come up with is a vague commitment to traditional values and the Constitution. I’ve got news for you Glenn: The only important issue is that Whites are becoming a minority and seeing their political power and cultural influence disappearing. The Constitution will be completely irrelevant when Whites become a minority.
But that’s the thing. Idiots like Beck get exposure on the national media. And if Beck somehow strayed off the reservation and started worrying about explicitly White issues, he’d be gone, just like Sarrazin. He probably understands that.
The elites realize that there are large percentages of Whites who would sign on to anti-immigration attitudes with just a little encouragement. Polls in Germany found that 35% disagreed with Sarrazin, while 30% agreed–a substantial minority, especially given that they receive no encouragement from “respectable” sources. Elites understand that a conflagration could be very easily ignited with a bit of encouragement from the top. Sarrazin’s sacking means that 30% of Germans have just been told that their views are completely illegitimate–so much so, that people who hold them should be fired, even if their beliefs are completely irrelevant to their job description.
Policing elite discourse is the name of the game. It doesn’t matter if an anonymous person writes a well-reasoned article on the internet. But it matters a great deal if the director of the Bundesbank writes a book that resonates with popular attitudes and, because of his position, gets a great deal of publicity in the mainstream media. That’s why there was such outrage when James Watson got off the reservation on Black IQ. That’s why the Israel Lobby went crazy when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt–professors at elite institutions–wrote that the Israel Lobby was a very powerful force that routinely acted against the interests of the US.
Elite consensus is not threatened by people like Sarrazin. Even Mearsheimer and Walt have been effectively contained if votes in Congress are any indication. It’s been shown over and over again that the consensus can be maintained, despite the occasional miscreant. Until we find a way to break through it, we are not going to get anywhere.
