Philip Weiss: "The American Jewish revolution is over"

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Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice — a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them. A recent piece of his, titled “This is how the world now sees Jews,” consisted simply of this photo, with a note that it probably depicted Israeli settlers:

How the world now sees Jews

Below is a Palestinian woman whose house in East Jerusalem has been occupied by settlers. She is arguing with nationalist Jews.

Making the case for seizing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem

The photo is from Weiss’s article, “Making the case for Zionism,” which quotes Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books:

In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning.

Weiss comments: “Why? Because the territorialist-nationalists have won, and from Deir Yassin to Al-Atatra to Sheikh Jarrah, they have uprooted and humiliated Palestinian women.”

The point is that Israelis are  thugs with machine guns and ethnic cleansers. More importantly, all Jews, including the organized American Jewish community which supports Israel to the hilt, have lost the moral high ground.

This is familiar territory for Weiss, but his article “Lame Specter, Blumenthal, and Kagan show — the American Jewish revolution is over” extends his critique of Jews to their role in the contemporary American elite.  The basic message is that Jews in America started out as morally aggrieved outsiders who have ultimately morphed into symbols of the worn out establishment (Arlen Specter), liars (Richard Blumenthal), and calculating achievers and hacks (Elena Kagan).

Although I am far less romantic about the Jewish left and its moral imperative of revolution against the traditional people and culture of America than Weiss is, he certainly does understand that the new Jewish elite is fundamentally corrupt. This Jewish elite consists of people like Adam Kirsch “who steps into the New Yorker and all the other magazines with an air of entitlement, and who can blame him, Jews run the important magazines, with all the passion of printing a train timetable.”

Notice that Kirsch “steps into” his job at the New Yorker — his position as the editor of an elite publication simply handed to him as part of his Jewish entitlement. No need for struggle or for particularly great qualifications. Jews have arrived.

Kagan too “stepped into” her position as Supreme Court nominee. Her only qualifications are being Jewish and knowing the right people. The entire passage bears quoting:

Kagan is the ultimate sign that our brand is finished. She is the best of breed, as they say at Westminster. According to this Times profile, she comes out of the same hothouse I came out of, in her case the Upper West Side. Achievement, liberalism, and no partying. Arguing at the dinner table. Presumably no physical life. [Interesting comment on what it means to be Jewish. On the other hand, there’s that famous photo in the WSJ of her playing softball.] …

Kagan’s world is the Jewish success world, she stepped into it like Kirsch did. She loved the hothouse. She emulated Felix Frankfurter, who didn’t stand for much either, and is pals with Sarah Walzer,daughter of Michael Walzer, the political theorist and Jewish parochialist. She went to Jeffrey Toobin’s wedding, she was picked by Larry Summers at Harvard around the time he was saying that divestment was anti-semitic. Eliot Spitzer, Ted Weiss and Elizabeth Holtzman were among her backers. She clerked for Abner Mikva, a Chicago macher who backed Obama.

It’s a Jewish world — a world where being in the right circles counts far more than genuine talent. Kagan, the Harriet Miers of the Obama Administration, simply “steps into” her position in the top court in the land.

This reminds me of Jews as an elite in the Soviet Union, where a nascent Jewish elite motivated by moral fervor  and hatred unleashed by their exclusion under the Czar morphed easily into a corrupt, nepotistic elite that was hostile to the traditional people and culture of Russia. A report to the Soviet Central Committee reminds me of Kagan’s route to success: “They gather around themselves people of the same nationality, impose the habit of praising one another (while making others erroneously believe that they are indispensable), and force their protégés through to high posts” (see here, p. 78). Another report, from 1942, noted that elite cultural institutions “turned out to be filled by non-Russian people (mainly by Jews)” (see here , p. 51, ff). For example, of the ten top executives of the Bolshoi Theater—the most prestigious Soviet cultural institution—there were eight Jews and one Russian. Similar disproportions were reported in prestigious musical conservatories, the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Literature, and among art and music reviewers in elite publications. Ethnic nepotism, not IQ, is the only way to explain these disproportions.

So now we are looking at a Supreme Court that is one-third Jewish–another disproportion that can’t be explained by Jewish IQ but reeks of ethnic nepotism. The ADL will of course attempt to squelch anyone who talks about the new Jewish elite publicly. But as time goes on, it’s going to be more and more apparent who runs the US.

Fundamentally, White Americans have to wrap their minds around the fact that this new elite is corrupted by nepotism,that it supports policies like massive non-White immigration aimed at the racial dispossession of Whites, and that it has no moral standing, most obviously because of the gap between its moral posturings in the US versus the reality Israel as a an aggressive, ethnonationalist state.



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The New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist

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In my last blog I suggested that the new elite will not be as prone to surrendering its position as  the old one was.  One big difference is that Jewish activist organizations go ballistic over any mention that Jews are a disproportionate portion of American elites–truth is irrelevant. Those who stray into this forbidden territory soon learn that their lives have just gotten a lot more complicated. The result is that people behave like well-conditioned rats in a psychology experiment and keep their mouths shut no matter how obvious Jewish overrepresentation is.

The latest instance  is the reaction to Pat Buchanan’s column “Are Liberals Anti-WASP?” where Buchanan wrote: “If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?”

Jewish activists immediately went to work. The National Jewish Democratic Council complained about Buchanan’s “over-the-top, conspiratorial screeds.” Abe Foxman was at his most colorful, calling Buchanan a “recidivist anti-Semite who doesn’t miss an opportunity to show his fangs.” Foxman also gave his expert, unbiased opinion that Kagan “is a highly qualified candidate for the judiciary, an exemplary Solicitor General and a great legal mind.”

Liberals are fond of making arguments that ethnic and religious diversity affect people’s judgments and therefore we should do everything we can to promote diversity. For example, Sonia Sotomayor’s famous “Wise Latina” comment was doubtless a huge asset for her among her liberal supporters. But Foxman is implying that Kagan’s  Jewishness will have no influence at all on her judgments and anyone who says otherwise is a rabid anti-Semite.

Of course, this is ridiculous. There are a whole lot of reasons to believe that Kagan’s Jewishness will indeed affect her judgments. The fact that Elena Kagan is the product of New York’s Jewish leftist sub-culture makes a huge difference in what we can expect from her — particularly given her views on the First Amendment and executive power that are in line with the mainstream Jewish community. All the research shows that Jewish attitudes are far different from the American majority on a wide range of hot button issues, particularly social issues such as immigration, homosexuality, controls on sexual behavior, abortion, Christianity in the public square, and gun control. Particularly when there is such a thin paper trail (contrary to Foxman, there is no tangible evidence that Kagan has a “great legal mind”), the most rational expectation is that Kagan’s views reflect the views of the wider Jewish community.

Foxman is exercised because he is well aware that there is a recurring pattern in history in which Jews become highly overrepresented among elites. This then feeds into anti-Jewish sentiment from people who feel underrepresented, especially if they think that the elites are opposing their interests in other ways. Patrick Cleburne was hinting as much when he noted that “all three of Obama’s recent nominations to be Federal Reserve Governors were Jews, bringing their representation on that body to 5 out of 7″ (his emphasis). The Abe Foxmans of the world see this coming and hope to nip the process in the bud by squelching any mention of Jewish overrepresentation.

Notice that  Foxman could have responded by saying “Yeah, three Jewish Supreme Court justices are probably a bit much, given that Jews are already vastly overrepresented among all American elites–media, academic, financial, etc. Kagan should discreetly take herself out of the process.”

But instead, the reflex is to suppress such expressions. The strategy is that people may well be thinking that three Jews on the Supreme Court is too much, but we will win if we can keep such thoughts out of the media.

Again, this is an old pattern. I collected several examples in Chapter 2 of Separation and Its Discontents. My favorite is from Joe Sobran, who lost his position with National Review because of his views on the influence of American Jews on U. S. policy toward Israel. Appropriately, he mentions Pat Buchanan:

The full story of [Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls. Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it’s highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don’t respect their victimhood, they’ll destroy you. It’s a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism.

The result is that there is an ever increasing gap between people’s thoughts about Jewish influence and what they can say about it.  It reminds one of the USSR where people were well aware that there were a whole lot of things that were routinely left out of the news.

I think there comes a point, however, where Jewish power is so obvious that people will start discussing it, at first furtively and anonymously. But the historical pattern is that eventually there is some push back.

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Elena Kagan and the Decline of WASP America

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Elena Kagan’s impending confirmation on the Supreme Court has produced several comments on the decline of WASP America. Writing in the Wall Street Journal (“That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP”), Robert Frank’s article is an expression of Jewish triumphalism and contempt for WASPs. Discussing the New York banking elite, he points to the bad old days when “the strictly homogenous crowd of Protestant blue-bloods spent their mornings comparing golf scores and vacation homes.” Among several causes for the decline of the WASPs, Frank mentions the decline of family connections and the rise of a meritocracy.

This is a favorite aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conception — the idea that Jews replaced WASPs because they are smarter and work harder. But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience. Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her impending confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here).

So we are replacing one type of ethnic networking with another. At least the WASPs’ ethnic networking had a certain legitimacy given their percentage of the population and their role in founding the country and defining its culture for much of US history.

Frank also quotes a passage from E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment:

A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment’s unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks.

Perhaps. But that wouldn’t explain the eclipse of the WASPs, only that they resisted the inroads of others — futilely, as it turns out. Mr. Frank, of course, finds the passage useful because he sees himself as a member of a certain upwardly mobile minority group that he feels was not greeted warmly enough by the WASPs.

Baltzell’s comment is quite consistent with my view that that the WASPs did not voluntarily cede control but were pushed out by a rising Jewish group whose base of influence was the academic world, finance, the legal profession, personal wealth, and the media (where anti-WASP movies became a staple at least by the 1960s; see also here).

Frank says that as a result of its downfall, “WASP culture has been left to live out its days as a fashion statement, on the shelves of Ralph Lauren stores, or as a social badge at defiantly old-world clubs like the Knickerbocker Club in New York or the Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach.” A triumphalist statement if ever there was one. The battle is over and we won.

Frank quotes an Episcopalian bishop who acknowledges defeat, but isn’t much concerned: “tracking the ups and downs of socioreligious groups like WASPs [is] no longer relevant: ‘That kind of calibration of ‘what members of my team are on the front lines’ seems to me to be an antique kind of thing to do.’”

That’s the kind of broad-minded, liberal thinking that got the WASPs into trouble in the first place. There was always a tension between the WASPs as a clubby, snobbish elite cemented by family connections and their very liberal, broad minded world view stemming from their New England base. Writing in the LA Times, Gregory Rodriguez credits Kagan’s nomination to “The triumph of WASP culture.” Whereas Frank is filled with contempt for his vanquished ethnic rivals, Rodriguez seems quite thankful that the liberalism of the WASP elite was triumphant, presumably so that his people can now swarm over the border and aspire to power while WASP principles still count for something. He summarizes Eric Kaufmann’s view of WASP culture:

The Yankee sense of ethnic superiority often competed with their belief in universalist liberal ideology — equality, liberty and human rights. One way that worked itself out is that non-Yankees could aspire and acculturate to the Yankee norm and ideal — by gaining entrance to their schools primarily, but also by joining their churches, appreciating their art forms and imbibing their ideas, adopting their aesthetic.

Rodriguez concludes:

Students don’t just strive to attend Harvard and Yale for their educational excellence. There is also the matter of absorbing those universities’ sense of authority, legitimacy and historical legacy that leads back to their Yankee founders. If Kagan is confirmed, as seems likely, don’t cry for the WASPs. The educational pedigree of the Supreme Court will be a powerful example that their culture abides and still anoints power. The only thing that has changed is that today’s “WASP elites” are just as likely to be Jews and Catholics as they are to be Yankees.

I do cry a bit for the WASPs because I think they were more public spirited than our current elite and less likely to welcome a radical change in the ethnic balance of the country that they built. After all, the WASP elite did make common cause with the rest of White America in fashioning the 1924 immigration law (the “period of ethnic defense”). But they ultimately fell to the rise of a new Jewish elite that has shown itself as intent on establishing alliances with non-White ethnic groups and has taken an oppositional stance toward the traditional people and culture of America — including the WASPs. The “Jews as a hostile elite” theme of much of my writing.

And to claim that it really doesn’t matter what people’s ethnic or religious identity are as long as they graduate from an Ivy League university is completely nutty. Ethnicity matters a great deal, no matter what university one graduates from. The fact that Elena Kagan is the product of New York’s Jewish leftist sub-culture makes a huge difference in what we can expect from her — particularly given her views on the First Amendment and executive power that are in line with the mainstream Jewish community.

The Jewish leftist subculture is light years away from traditional WASP culture. Indeed, in her article on Thurgood Marshall, Kagan completely rejects the WASP cultural influence:

The Constitution today … contains a great deal to be proud of. But the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality.’

The fact that Kagan’s Jewish leftist subculture has become ensconced at Harvard and other elite academic institutions speaks volumes on the massive changes that have taken place in the academy and WASP America generally. Rodriguez is deluded (in a self-interested way) to suppose that changing the ethnicity of Supreme Court justices won’t change anything as long as they graduated from Ivy League colleges.

The WASPs had their faults certainly. But their main one was their failure to block the emergence of a non-WASP elite — to go down with their principles. I rather doubt that this new elite will be as willing to see itself eclipsed as the old one was. It will hang on to power with no regard at all for principles. Indeed, a good example of corruption and lack of principle among the new elite are the many defenses we now see of Kagan emanating from elite opinion makers despite her being the poster girl for ethnic nepotism and lack of real accomplishment.

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Race and Immigration in the Writings of Michele Wucker

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Michele Wucker

Michele Wucker is Executive Director of the World Policy Institute, a nonpartisan center for “progressive global policy research.” Her writing is an interesting insight into what passes for thinking about race and ethnicity among contemporary mainstream American intellectuals.

Wucker’s social and racial history of the peoples of Hispaniola, Why the CocksFight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola is an important indicator of how she sees immigration for the United States, a topic explored in her 2006 plea for open borders, Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right.

In Why the Cock Fights, Wucker artfully combines both the physical and the cultural anthropology of the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola, an island divided between  Black French-speaking Haiti and mulatto Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. She describes the ethnic conflicts that have troubled that unfortunate island for centuries. The Dominicans finally won their independence from Haiti in 1844 after a 22-year brutal and corrupt occupation.

The dividing line separating the two peoples runs along Rio Massacre, so named because of the thousands of Haitians and Dominicans slaughtered at the border. In 1933 alone, the Dominicans massacred 25,000 Haitians on the river border.

Wucker sees the political and sociological situation on that perpetually troubled island as a continual cockfight enjoyed by both parties. Although cockfights are strictly in the male domain, Wucker manages to gain a true appreciation of the cockfighters (galleros), the arenas (galleras, gagaires), and even the triumphant strutting cock (gallo), and to convey that understanding and appreciation to her readers. Equally popular in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the cockfights are highly symbolic of the cross-cultural violence between the two major population groups — the  Blacks of Haiti and the mulattos of the Dominican Republic.

Wucker has great respect for the peoples she discusses. For example, when referring to Haiti’s folk religion, a mixture of African animism and Roman Catholicism, she uses the spelling ‘Vodou’ to distinguish it from what she calls Hollywood’s grotesque portrayal of ‘Voodoo’. In depicting Vodou practices, Hollywood typically cannot refrain from including a scene in which the priest or priestess drives a needle into a doll image of an individual the priest intends to harm. In reality, the doll piercing is very much like Chinese acupuncture in which the practice is aimed at healing not harming the targeted area.

Likewise she uses the term ‘Kreyol’ when referring to Haiti’s language, better suggesting its origin as one of the group of languages called creoles and reflecting that they are a mixture of African and European languages. Language, Wucker observes, can be a divisive political force as on Hispaniola, or a unifying force as English is in the project of globalization.

However, the rough classification of Black and mulatto is an oversimplification. Both countries, initially at least, shared the same racial composition, consisting of French, Spanish, English, African, Arawak Indian and Taino Indian blood. Only after the African element revolted against their French rulers, first slaughtering all Whites and then most mulattos, did the complexion of Haiti darken.

Their racial histories are fascinating, reflecting their colonial beginnings, genocidal outbursts, and subsequent racial amalgamation. The peoples of Haiti classify each other by color, fluency in Kreyol and hair texture. Drawing upon the research of Dominican, French and French-Canadian scholars, Wucker provides a detailed racial history of Hispaniola. Particularly interesting is the obsessive detail with which race was categorized and how it influenced every aspect of life:

In the early 16th century, even before the Africans arrived, Nicolas de Ovando, the Spanish colonial governor, had forced many of the colonists to marry Indians. . . . Many of the men, according to Dominican historian Roberto Cassá, were already living with Taino women. In the late 16th century, desperate to keep up the dwindling Spanish population as a last defense against French and English aspirations to shrink Spain’s territory on Hispaniola, the colonial government went so far as to encourage White colonists to marry the former slaves. These mixed-race children were treated as Spanish and White, and brought up with a strong sense of Roman Catholic identity to strengthen their resolve in fighting off Protestant (English) invaders. . . .

Over the centuries, the racial lines within Dominican society blurred, and it became, as it still largely is, mulatto. . . .

As early as 1549, according to the Dominican historian Franklin J. Franco, Santo Domingo’s colonial government defined seven racial types:  Black, or “negro,” slaves brought from Africa; White, Spaniards; mulatto, offspring of  Black and White; mestizo, descended from Indian and White; tercerón, child of a mulatto and a White; cuarterón, child of a tercerón and White; and grifo, mixed Indian and  Black. There does not seem to be a term for tri-racial ( Black-White-Indian) hybrids.

In the early 1970s the Dominican sociologist Daysi Josefina Guzmán identified nine hair colors and 15 main kinds of hair texture on a spectrum between bueno (good) for soft, Caucasian hair and malo (bad) for kinky, Negroid hair. [Among these were] lacio for straight and smooth; achinado for straight, stiff hair; espeso, thick, abundant and very slightly wavy; macho, thick and strong, abundant but without luster; rizado, thick and fine with small waves but dull; muerto, thin and greasy; ondulado, wavy; vivo, thick, dry, and out of control; variable, indescribable; crespo, thick and frizzy; de pimienta, peppery, growing slow and tight to the skull in small balls; motica, like peppery hair but thin, wavy; and pegaíto, so close to the skull that it is impossible to comb. . . .

She identified 12 skin colors: lochoso, “too White,” like milk; blanco, White; cenizo, ashen; descolorido, “without color”; pálido, so pale as to appear sick, desteñido, jaundiced; pecoso, freckled; pinto, mostly light but with large freckles or moles; trigueño, light, with a very slight dark touch; manchado, dark, with light streaks; “negro,” very dark; morado, so  Black as to be “almost purple.” In addition, there were 10 facial structures, six physical types and five general racial types.

Each category could be used as a guide to where any Dominican stood on the social scale. . . . In the Dominican Republic, calling someone “Haitian” is on the surface synonymous with describing them as negro or morado, but with an added psychological weight of fear and hatred.

The early French colonists in Saint-Domingue identified 128 different racial types, defined quite precisely along a mathematical scale determined by simple calculations of ancestral contributions. They ranged from the “true” mulatto (half White, half  Black), through the spectrum of marabou, sacatra, quarterón, all the way to the sang-mêlé (mixed blood: 127 parts White and one part  Black. . . .

The sociologist Micheline Labelle has counted 22 main racial categories and 98 subcategories (for varying hair types, facial structure, color and other distinguishing factors) used among Haiti’s middle class in Port-au-Prince in the 1970s. Within each category, the words are often as imaginative as they are descriptive: café au lait (“coffee with milk”), bonbon siro (“candy syrup”), ti canel (“little cinnamon”), ravet blanch (“White cockroach”), soley levan (“rising Sun”), banane mûre (“ripe banana”), brun pistache (“peanut brown”), mulâtre dix-huit carats (“18-carat mulatto”). . . .

The decidedly darker complexion of the Haitians dates back to 1804, when dictator Jean Jacques Dessalines decided to slaughter all the “Whites” still residing in Haiti. Because some of the “French colonists” already had African blood, Dessalines devised a language test to weed out “Whites” that could pass for  Black on the basis of skin color. The test was simple and effective. Since the colonists spoke continental French, rather than Haiti’s Kreyol, suspected colonists were asked to sing a country tune containing the line, “Nanett alé nan fontain, cheche dlo, crich-a li cassé” (“Nanette went to the fountain, looking for water, but her jug broke”). The “French,” meaning anyone who gave himself or herself away when they could not reproduce the Kreyol sounds or African cadences of the melody, were summarily bayoneted.

After Toussaint had been removed, his successor Henri Christophe mimicked the vanquished French by crowning himself King Henri I, building a magnificent palace and the massive Citadele La Ferrière, and appointing Afro-Haitian dukes and lords to rule over his domain.

Haiti soon began its rapid descent from the richest colony in the Caribbean to the absolute poorest. Lothrop Stoddard, the once famed (now politically incorrect) American scholar whose views very much influenced the U.S. immigration law of 1924, described these early events in his famed The French Revolution in San Domingo, published in 1914 and now available online.

The same process of a nation’s unnecessary descent into chaos and poverty has been repeated in our own day in the case of Rhodesia, one of the most prosperous states in Africa. When most of the members of the government, who were of European origin, were expelled from the country because of the color of their skin, prosperous Rhodesia became basket case Zimbabwe. The UK, the USA, and the USSR then pressured South Africa to permit the  Blacks to govern that state. As of today over a million Whites have migrated out of the country, which is fast becoming a criminal state.

Early in World War II, President Roosevelt, to aid Jewish refugees from Europe without the need of Congressional consent, made a deal with Rafael Trujillo in which the Dominican leader agreed to take in Jewish refugees from Europe. Trujillo, who had just recently slaughtered about 20,000 Haitians along the Rio Massacre, was under the impression that by admitting the Jews he would be infusing new “White” blood into the Dominican racial stock. As it turned out, however, most of the Jews subsequently entered the United States, and the Dominican Republic remained mostly mulatto.

In recent years, U.S. President Bill Clinton was so captivated by the charms of a renegade priest, the defrocked Jean-Bertrand Aristide, that he used 20,000 U.S. troops to reinstate the expelled demagogue to power. It is not surprising, however, that today, despite an infusion of billions of American dollars, Haiti has returned to its natural state: chaos, lawlessness, postponed or phony elections, corruption, drugs, poverty and the rest. Consequently, as Wucker notes, in the last two decades one out of every eight Haitians and Dominicans has moved to and now resides in the United States. To this day, Clinton remains a friend to Haiti, helping it as best he can. Sadly, Haiti has not yet found a native leader, wise and strong enough to institute a just and effective government.

The French critic and playwright Aimé Césaire once described Haiti as follows:

Poor Africa! I say poor Haiti! It is the same thing. Over there, tribe, languages, rivers, the castes, forest, village against village, hamlet against hamlet. Here,  Blacks, mulattos, griffes, marabouts, what-have-you, clan, caste, color, defiance and conspiracy, fights between cocks, between dogs over a bone, the combat of fleas!

Wucker’s fine study of Hispaniola demonstrates the importance of ethnicity and ethnic conflict as very important determining factors in human affairs. The politics of the island have been one continual cockfight. But perhaps of even greater importance, she also shows the limits of racial analysis and the utter futility of attempting racial classifications based on simple surface appearances after miscegenation has progressed through several generations. Early racial studies were based solely on the color of the skin and hair texture. Modern DNA studies have provided a wealth of new information. 

By 2006, however, following two years at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Ms. Wucker has emerged a more “enlightened” person. Incredibly, in her second book, Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right, written in her new capacity as Executive Director of the World Policy Institute and advisor to the U.S. Government on immigration policy, Wucker disregards ethnicity entirely as a criterion for immigration. Despite the long history of ethnic violence on Hispaniola, Wucker proposes that the things Haitians and Dominicans share in common can lead to reconciliation. For example, she notes that there have been no reports of violent attacks since the recent earthquake. (Of course an earthquake would tend to take your mind off routine everyday squabbles.) Perhaps not coincidentally, after the publication of Lockout Ms. Wucker received a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Institute describes itself as a progressive non-partisan source of informed leadership that develops and champions policies requiring a global point of view. The Institute appears to share the economic and social goals of globalization and operates under the Boasian dogma of racial equality. Ms. Wucker pleads that America not put any restrictions on further immigration. Despite the long history of racial conflict she so ably documents in Why the Cock Fights, she advocates — against all logic and common sense — that diversity need not be divisive in the long run.

Among other solutions for the resolution of possible conflicts resulting from diversity, Ms. Wucker suggests mongrelization. She first disingenuously identifies herself as a mongrel, pointing to her parents and grandparents as having spoken different languages and having lived in different parts of Europe. Then extrapolating wildly makes the completely unfounded statement:

Americans today are as proud of being mongrels as the higher classes of earlier Americans of British and German roots were of their “purebred” family trees. (Lockout, p. 219)

By turning up the heat under the melting pot and encouraging miscegenation, a mongrelized uniformity could indeed be achieved, but older Americans are not yet ready for it. More importantly, such a solution ignores the reality of racial differences in IQ and other valuable traits. A mongrelized population will inevitably be stratified by degree of admixture of genes from groups higher or lower on these traits. Only Draconian laws administered by a police state could possibly result in completely diluting all racial differences to the point where race becomes irrelevant as a way of classifying people. Wucker goes on and on about getting “the best and brightest” as immigrants as necessary for economic progress, but completely ignores the fact that in reality the vast majority of immigrants are uneducated and have low IQ — the sort of people who suck up public services rather than contribute to a modern economy.

But her greatest failing is her lack of appreciation of how massive non-White immigration is likely to lead to ethnic conflict and the Balkanization of America. The fact that immigrants from different parts of Europe did indeed manage to assimilate to America is no sign that this will continue into the future. The recent law in Arizona banning ethnic studies programs in public schools was motivated by the well-founded fear that such programs fuel hatred toward the White majority of America. Such programs are common throughout the American education system.

Far better is the advice of the quintessential American poet Robert Frost who once wrote that “good fences make good neighbors,” a sentiment that most older Americans understand and believe.

When Jean Raspail published his prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints in the 1960s, American liberal intellectuals called it hate literature. By the 1990s Raspail in his essay The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic had to concede that his France was irretrievably lost and could never return. Without any popular mandate at all, the US government in the past half-century has been derelict in its responsibility to control immigration. As a result, the ethnic composition of the country has rapidly changed from predominantly European to a mixture of races. In effect, the country is being repopulated.

The consequences of this massive transformation are unknown. But if human history is any guide, the result will be a very large increase in ethnic conflict and a very perilous future for the traditional people and culture of America.

Daniel W. Michaels, a native New Yorker, received his BS in geography from Columbia University in 1954. Following five years in the Army (three of which stationed in Germany) and a Fulbright grant for studies in Tuebingen University, Mr. Michaels worked in the Defense Department until his retirement in 1993. He continues to contribute articles to various journals on World War II and Cold War matters. (Email him.)

The Arizona Ethnic Studies Law: The Last Gasp of American Individualism

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Things keep getting more and more interesting in Arizona. Now they have penalized school districts that have ethnic studies courses: As reported by the NYTimes, “any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.”

The people involved in teaching these courses deny that there is any advocacy of ethnic solidarity or racial resentment against Whites. And if you believe that, I’ve got some land I’d like to sell you.

Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, is the main man behind the law. He points to an incident in which all the Mexican students walked outon a speech by his deputy, a Republican Latina who was trying to counter another speaker who said that Republicans hate Latinos: “In the middle of her speech, a group of students that are in the Raza [!] studies program got up, put their fists in the air, turned their back to her. The principal asked them to sit down and listen, and they walked out on their own principal.” Sounds like a hostile act of ethnic solidarity.

The NYTimes article mentions that Horne objects to Pedagogy of the Oppressedby Paulo Freire, and the LATimes mentions Horne’s objection to Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña, a professor and founder of the Chicano studies program at Cal State Northridge. Who would ever think that titles like that could lead to resentment against a certain (very evil) race?

Actually reading these books is well beyond my tolerance level. Friere’s book sounds like straight cultural Marxism right out of the Bill Ayers playbook. A reviewerquotes Friere: “Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indocrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.”

Occupied America emphasizes the evil that Whites have inflicted on Mexicans and Native Americans in the past. An Amazon review titled “Abajo con los Gringos!” (“Down with the Gringos”) states that Acuña’s book “contributes additional heft to the indictment of White settlement and expansion in this hemisphere as the cause of immense suffering by an essentially stone-age culture at the hands of a militarily superior civilization.” Another states that Acuña

pulls up countless accounts of slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, and abuse of Mexican men, women, children, mostly incited as a sort of blood sport by American cavalry, enlisted men, volunteers, and associates, as well as the leveling of Mexican cities and towns just for target practice. To add to the war crimes, most of the Americans involved, even the command of Zachary Taylor, were never brought up on any charges, nor even in the most slightest way, reprimanded for their actions.

One has to agree with Horne and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer that this sort of thing is likely to produce hatred toward Whites. A spokesman for Brewer stated, “Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.” Horne says much the same.

So the ideology underlying the bill is to let bygones be bygones and get on with the project of getting along with each other. The intellectual basis is classic libertarian individualism. Horne puts it this way:

I believe that what’s important about us is what we know, what we can do, what’s our character as individuals, not what race we happen to have been born into. And the function of the public schools is to bring in kids from different backgrounds and teach them to treat each other as individuals. And the Tucson district is doing the opposite. They’re teaching them to emphasize ethnic solidarity, what I call ethnic chauvinism. And I think that’s exactly is the wrong thing to do in the public schools, and that’s why I introduced this legislation to give myself the authority to put a stop to it.

This libertarian ideology is indeed the last hope of those intent on avoiding a race war as the inevitable consequence of present trends. The idea is that the faces will look different as the US absorbs all these immigrants, but we’ll still have a consensus commitment to individualism — nothing but vestigial group loyalties. No group conflict. No retribution for what happened in the past.

But now that America has gone so far down the road of minority ethnic consciousness and has signed on to massive non-White immigration motivated by fear and loathing of the traditional White population, is it really possible to turn back and pretend we are all nothing more than individuals? One reason to think that this is very unlikely to happen is that individualism is a unique creation of Western culture. No other culture has developed individualist institutions, and there is no reason to suppose that the millions of non-Whites who are crowding our shores will do so. Certainly these programs of ethnic consciousness raising will do nothing but strengthen group loyalties and hatred and resentment and hatred of the White majority.

At TOO we have repeatedly emphasized that White Americans are crazy to voluntarily become a minority in a society where the non-White majority has historical grudges against them and continues to have a strong group consciousness. Hostility to the traditional people and culture of America is a powerful current among Jews, spanning the entire Jewish political spectrum, from leftist intellectuals like Susan Sontag (“The white race is the cancer of human history”) and Howard Zinn (whose A People’s History of the United States has been a staple of college history courses for three decades) to neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz (see also here). It goes without saying that these attitudes are common among Blacks, and the fact that Acuña’s work is mainstream among Latino intellectuals is yet another indication, if any were needed, that it is common among Latinos too.

All the indications are that non-Whites are coalescing into a powerful political coalition centered in the Democratic Party. This coalition is formidable in large part because of the prominenc of Jews who are such an important component of American elites in the areas of personal wealth, media and political influence, and in the legal and academic worlds.

This plea for individualism is really the last gasp of hope for avoiding a racial bloodbath in the future. It is simply inconceivable that a non-White majority led by racial and ethnic activists filled with anti-White hatred of the sort that we see every day now will somehow be magically transformed into an idyllic Neverland of individualists of all races, ethnicities and religions. Unless Whites manage to develop a separatist state or manage to massively reverse the changes of the last 45 years, they will be in a physical fight for survival.

This is not to deny that Whites have been brutal towards other peoples in the past. But it is naïve to suppose that non-Whites would behave any differently if they could have. Speaking as an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous.

But the idea that Western culture and White people are uniquely evil have been common among the intellectual activists of the left that now dominate in the academic world, beginning with the Boasian anthropologists who dominated anthropology for most of the 20th century. The Boasians created an imaginary past expunged of ethnic violence and warfare (see here, p. 29 ff.) Non-Whites were portrayed as gift-givers and myth-makers, not at all prone to ethnic warfare.

Non-White intellectual activists are now celebrating their ethnocentrism and hostility toward Whites. Legions of them are tenured professors in departments of ethnic studies. Acuña’s department of Chicano studies at CSU-Northridge has 28 professors, and it’s the same pretty much everywhere. The Arizona legislation shows that this sort of intellectual ethnic activism also pervades the K-12 curriculum.

So Whites really have three choices:

  • Reverse the trends of minority empowerment by getting rid of ethnic studies programs and deporting illegal immigrants, as Arizona is doing. However, that won’t be enough, unless they succeed in getting the very large numbers of legal non-White immigrants to leave.
  • Stake out a White separatist area in North America.
  • Get ready for the coming race war.


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The Christian Question in White Nationalism

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There is a strong anti-Christian tendency in contemporary White Nationalism.

The argument goes something like this: Christianity is one of the primary causes of the decline of the White race for two reasons. First, it gives the Jews a privileged place in the sacred history of mankind, a role that they have used to gain their enormous power over us today. Second, Christian moral teachings—inborn collective guilt, magical redemption, universalism, altruism, humility, meekness, turning the other check, etc.—are the primary cause of the White race’s ongoing suicide and the main impediment to turning the tide. These values are no less Christian in origin just because secular liberals and socialists discard their supernatural trappings. The usual conclusion is that the White race will not be able to save itself unless it rejects Christianity.

I think that this argument is half right. I do believe that Christianity is one of the main causes of White decline, for the reasons given above. But I do not believe that discarding Christianity is a necessary condition of White revival. I am not a Christian. But the fact that I am not a Christian might lend credibility to my argument that the White Nationalist movement need not and indeed should not be anti-Christian.

First, although intellectual debate is definitely part of White Nationalism (perhaps too large a part), we must never lose sight of the fact that White Nationalism is a political movement, not an intellectual one. Intellectual movements require agreement on first principles as well as ultimate goals. Political movements require agreement only on practical goals.

Our goal is a White homeland in North America. This political goal is, as a matter of fact, shared by Christians and non-Christians alike. To achieve a White homeland, we have to work with our allies, not against them. We might wish that they agree with us on other matters besides the goal of a White homeland. But this is not necessary, and emphasizing differences of opinion is not productive. When one is on the barricades, one does not turn to one’s comrades and start finding fault.

Not emphasizing differences of opinion is not the same thing as hiding them, however. A mature and healthy White Nationalist movement should cultivate a culture of openness and frankness. We need to be as willing to express our differences in a civil manner as we are to put them aside to work for the common good.

Second, Christianity may be a necessary condition of White racial suicide, but it is not really the driving force. Christianity has long ceased to be the ruling power in Western societies or individual Christian lives. Instead, the churches preach White suicide and Christian Zionism because they wish to suck up to the real intellectual and political power structure, and today that power structure is overwhelmingly dominated and defined by Jews and Jewish interests.

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This is not a new phenomenon, either. The church has long trimmed its sails to the winds of expediency. When there were absolute monarchs, the church preached the divine right of kings. When there was slavery, it bade slaves to obey their masters. When there was patriarchy, it taught wives to obey their husbands.

It is tempting to condemn this tendency as mere political opportunism, but that would be a mistake. The church has always been supple at bending to the reigning political and intellectual orthodoxies because, ultimately, its kingdom is not of this world. In spite of aberrations like the Social Gospel movement, the church has always been more concerned with saving individual souls than with social justice. Thus churchmen regard sucking up to the secular powers as a small price to pay to stay in the soul-saving business.

What this implies for White Nationalism is that the church will resist us less fervently than those whose aims are primarily secular, such as Jewish organizations, non-White ethnic organizations, and the secular left. And when we gain power, ministers will begin hunting for Bible verses to justify the new regime. There is no reason why a White Nationalist regime cannot become a new Caesar, to whom Christians render their secular loyalty while reserving their religious loyalty for God. 

Third, it is a basic principle of political struggle that one should always work to preserve the unity of one’s ranks while sowing division among the enemy. Christian resistance to White Nationalism will be weaker if the churches are divided, and they can be divided if there are Christians in our ranks, especially Christians with personal ties to church leaders. Resistance will be stronger, however, if White Nationalism ceases being a merely political movement and takes on the aspect of an anti-Christian crusade.

Once a White Nationalist regime emerges, White Nationalist Christians can use their ties with the churches to better bring them into compliance with the new order.

Although the presence of Christians in the White Nationalist movement will help split the churches and weaken their resistance, their presence will not split or weaken White Nationalism as long as it remains a purely political movement unified solely by the pursuit of a White homeland.

Today White Nationalism is a movement of the political right. Someday, however, it may become the common sense of White people up and down the political spectrum. To my mind, this would be a positive development, because when it comes to religion and politics, I am very much a liberal: I believe in the separation of religion and politics and in basing political decisions on secular reason.

To me, it seems fortunate that the separation of church and state in the White homeland may well be necessitated by political reality. The White Nationalist movement must unite Whites of widely different religious convictions in the struggle for a homeland. That means we must build religious pluralism and tolerance into our movement today, which means they will be built into our homeland tomorrow.

Greg Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. He can be reached at editor@counter-currents.com.

Alison Weir at UC-Irvine

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It’s Israel Apartheid Week at the University of California-Irvine. I went to see Alison Weir who runs  IfAmericansKnew.org. She gave a great talk, a beautiful combination of data and emotionally compelling comments on her personal experience as a witness to the plight of the Palestinians–very moving.

When  it comes to the data, she is at her best in showing how the US media is corrupted by its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–an issue that extends far beyond the Middle East to include everything related to multiculturalism in America, including coverage of the Kagan nomination. She presented data on the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and National Public Radio. NPR is particularly interesting because it is often the target of pro-Israel activist organizations like CAMERA. Pro-Israel groups have sought to boycott NPR and have pressured it financially. (Corroborating Alison’s work, just today Mondoweiss posted another devastating critique of NPR–this time “on the month-old Israeli ‘military order’ that allows the IDF to deport any Palestinian inhabitant of the West Bank it defines as an ‘infiltrator,’ simply for lacking the paperwork that the Israeli government itself refuses to issue”–Arizona on steroids. But don’t expect American Jewish organizations to get worked up about it even though they are unanimously against the Arizona law.)

And here she lists all the journalists writing for American publications (one hesitates to call them American journalists) who cover the conflict but also have family ties to Israel or have served in the Israeli army (some may still be in the IDF). Two particularly struck me:

• A previous [New York]  Times bureau chief, Joel Greenberg, before he was bureau chief but after he was already publishing in the Times from Israel, actually served in the Israeli army.

• Media pundit and Atlantic staffer Jeffrey Goldberg also served in the Israeli military; it’s unclear when, how, or even if his military service ended.

Weir is optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. She thinks that more and more Americans seem aware of the situation in Israel. The Israel Apartheid week and the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are high-profile efforts on college campuses. Outside the lecture hall was an elaborate display of anti-Israel cartoons and an apartheid wall that had been around to a number of campuses.

Apartheid Wall
Apartheid Wall; Universities are listed on bottom
Mock Israeli tank
Mock Israeli tank
Latuff Cartoon on display
Latuff Cartoon on display

It made me think that my current TOO article on John Mearsheimer may have been too pessimistic. Let’s frame it at its most hopeful: If the Israel Lobby loses its control of the political process in the US, it would mean that Jewish power in general loses. And that would have major implications for a wide range of issues, from immigration to the legitimacy of assertions of White identity.

One thing that struck me was that almost all the ~150  students who came to her talk were Arabs. The women wore scarves, and almost everyone wore a black anti-Israel tee shirt, so the meeting had the air of a uniformed, homogeneous, almost military group, with a couple of White outliers like me. Her talk was sponsored by the Muslim Students Association. It was preceded and followed by the reading of a passage from the Koran in Arabic, followed by an English translation. The event was held in the campus Cross-Cultural Center which has offices for all the ethnic activist student organizations. Immediately following her talk, the MECHA activists set up their meeting, presumably to denounce what’s going on in Arizona. (MECHA and all the other student ethnic lobbies and leftist groups are co-sponsors of Israel Apartheid Week. Hostile Jews have turned up at some of the IAW events, especially Norman Finkelstein’s talk, but I felt cheated by not witnessing any shows of Jewish hostility. They evidently pick their targets, and Finkelstein as a “self-hating Jew” is certainly high on their list.)

So even though I was cheered by the thought that more people are becoming aware of what’s going on in  Israel, it was depressing to think that the anti-Apartheid doings are basically just another ethnic lobby. These students identify with the left, and I rather doubt they would be sympathetic to my view that they really shouldn’t have been allowed into the US in the first place. And they would be rather hostile to the idea that Whites have interests too.

I felt like a foreigner viewing someone else’s show. Outside the lecture hall, I felt like a foreigner even more. Despite the fact that UC-I is in the heart of Orange County (formerly considered a bastion of White Republicanism), spotting a White student was almost a rarity.  Whites officially make up around 23% of the students at UC-I, well below their proportion in the state. UC-I is often called the University of Chinese Immigrants, but Chinese were not particularly noticeable. It was all manner of non-Whites, from every part of the world.

Just walking around campus the percentage of Whites seemed to be far less than what the university says. The official statistics are based on freshman enrollment, and I suspect that a lot of White freshmen decide UC-I is not the place for them and transfer to some other university.

It was actually rare to see a White student. When I got into the student union, there were 2 or three Whites in a total of about a hundred. Four White guys later came in and sat together–probably at least implicitly realizing that their association was based on their race. But it was eerie how Whites stood out because of their minority status–almost like being in Hong Kong or Karachi and noticing a few stray Americans.

Like the Palestinians, I had the feeling of being displaced. Only I very much doubt that the Arab students who were involved in the Israel Apartheid Week would sympathize with my feelings.

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