Kevin MacDonald

Tag Archive for: Kevin MacDonald

Implicit Whiteness in Scott Brown’s campaign

/12 Comments/in , , , , /by

The day before the election I happened to catch Keith Olbmermann at his smirking best — looking intensely into the camera and declaring that Scott Brown and all the people voting for him are racists. What’s the evidence for this? You see, Brown used a pick-up truck in his commercials. (Gasp!!) You know, pick-up trucks are pretty much the same as men in pointy hoods burning crosses. Next thing you know, candidates will seek endorsements from country music singers and NASCAR drivers.

What’s going on here, of course, is implicit Whiteness — implicit whiteness of a certain sort, that basically says “I, Scott Brown, am the candidate of the White working class.”

As I noted previously, the enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class. These people are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.They are very angry — but they can’t discuss the real reason they are angry: mass immigration and the dispossession of people like themselves and their culture.

Unfortunately, there were no exit polls for this election. It would be fascinating to see the racial breakdown. In the 2008 presidential election, 80% of the electorate in Massachusetts was White. Working class Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama: 75% for incomes between $30-50K; 65% for incomes betwen $50-75K.

Obviously, that did not happen this time around. Although it’s still a long shot, we can hope that eventually candidates will be able to explicitly assert the legitimacy of White identity and White interests.

Bookmark and Share

Kevin Lamb’s review of Tucker on Cattell

/14 Comments/in , /by

Kevin Lamb’s TOO review of William Tucker’s book on Raymond Cattell is a microcosm of how far the academic world has sunk. (“The Malicious Smearing of a Psychological Pioneer”) Tucker, who calls himself a psychologist,  is no better than the $PLC or the ADL, substituting guilt-by-association arguments for intellectual engagement with Raymond Cattell on issues like eugenics and race differences. Richard Lynn’s review of Cattell’s Beyondism shows why the left hates Cattell.  Cattell viewed racial hybridization as leading to a genetic potential for IQ that is midway between the two parent races, leading to a decline from the IQ of the superior group. This is basic behavior genetics for a trait like IQ — and well supported by the results of White/African admixture in the US.

As a result, races should remain separate, and incompetent peoples should be allowed to die out. (Haiti comes to mind.)

For Cattell the basic principles for a scientific ethics are these: diverse societies and types; competition between societies and between individuals; survival of the fittest, extinction of the unfit. This is the way to a better world. How different from most prescriptions for Utopia, with their socialistic world states in which competition is extinguished and all men work together in a spirit of co-operation, brotherly love and, no doubt, boredom.

The most pathetic thing is that Cattell spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Illinois, and yet the U of I Press published Tucker’s book. Tucker should be ashamed, but he will doubtless be praised effusively by his colleagues.

In my last blog I conceded the humanities departments to the political left while acknowleding the power of the left throughout the university. The sordid tale of Raymond Cattell and the story of the denial of his lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association shows that the political pressures are very strong in the social sciences and that scientific rigor can easily be pushed aside for political purposes.

Bookmark and Share

Haiti the quintessential dysfunctional society

/36 Comments/in , /by

In doing some reading of Tom Watson’s writing on the Leo Frank case I came across an interesting comment on Haiti from 1915. (Watson was the only media figure who argued for Frank’s guilt and for the justice of Frank’s lynching.) Watson quotes a passage from a New Republic article on Frank’s lynching that illustrates the common perception of Haiti at the time. Like the rest of the mainstream media of the time, The New Republic was condemning the lynching of Leo Frank, comparing Georgia with Haiti, which is pretty much the worst thing you could say about a society:

A people which cannot preserve its legal fabric from violence is unfit for self-government. It belongs in the category of communities like Haiti, comunities which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized powers. Georgia is in that humiliating position today. If the Frank case is evidence of Georgia’s political development, then Georgia deserves to be known as the black sheep of the American Union.

In short, nothing much has changed in Haiti in 100 years. The only exception is the attitudes of the liberal media: The New Republic‘s liberal politics didn’t prevent it from attributing Haiti’s troubles to its lack of civilization.

The US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a de facto occupation again. Haiti is already on welfare — a “Republic of NGOs” where half the budget comes from foreign aid and 3000 NGOs operate most government services, including education and health care. (A search on Haiti and NGOs turns up lot of articles blaming Haiti’s problems on poorly managed charity or  as a modern form of imperialism! See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

The other thing that has changed in 100 years is that now there is a very real danger is that Haitians will now be allowed to immigrate in huge numbers to the US. VDARE.com’s blog is an indispensable source of information on this. As Rob Sanchez writes, Haiti is about to become our Camp of the Saints. There are sure to be hundreds of thousands of orphaned children and others pulling at America’s heart strings. And as Patrick Cleburne notes, their neighbors in the Dominican Republic are not so stupid, but already there are calls for mass airlifts of Haitian children to the US. Will the first Black president in American history stop it. I rather doubt it.

But if there is a huge influx of Haitians, I do think that the great majority of Whites (apart from the Angelina Jolie types and professors in the humanities and social sciences) will recoil against it. It would be a politically risky move for an administration that already has little support among White Americans.

Bookmark and Share

Kevin MacDonald: Minnesota's German Studies Disaster

/26 Comments/in , /by

Kevin MacDonald: My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left. Trudie Pert’s current TOO article shows that in the humanities right now it’s all about queer theory and the Frankfurt School, with supporting roles for psychoanalysis and Marxism. Prof. Ruth Joeres describes her course:

In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”? 

We can guess that it has nothing to do with being ethnically German. In the eyes of these people, Germany too has doubtless become yet another proposition society.

And then there’s professor Morris (Moskowitz) and her idea that fraudulent Holocaust memoirs are to be preferred to the real thing because they are more moving. (Why does a Jewish activist in a department of Jewish/German Studies use a non-Jewish sounding name? I can understand why Jewish communists did it in the 1930s or post-WWII Eastern Europe, but why now?) And Prof. Zipes and his campaign to  the minds of young children. My favorite title: “Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution: Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany.” In other words, down with every vestige of traditional German culture. 

The academic food chain is starkly obvious here. Pert notes that the professors at Minnesota received their doctorates at elite Eastern universities, and their students will staff the second-level colleges, universities, and K-12 schools throughout the mid-West. It’s a top-down system, with zombie-like grad students emerging to carry on the revolution of the left at the lower levels of the educational system.

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

It’s easy enough intellectually to point out that gays and women have ethnic interests too, and that White identity and interests are entirely legitimate. But getting academics to think and act on that basis means disrupting mutually reinforcing networks where all the rewards come from allying oneself with the culture of victimhood.

And it means that real change must start at the top of the academic food chain. In the social sciences, one clings to a hope that this could happen because there is still a scientific tradition with some power. But in the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change. The revolution will have to happen without a very large part of the educational system.

Bookmark and Share

The Persian Jewish Community in Beverly Hills

/5 Comments/in , /by

Ashkenazi Jews are the dominant group of Jews in the US and Europe, but I think it’s worthwhile to discuss other Jewish groups, particularly those from the Middle East because Middle Eastern Jewish groups  illustrate Judaism in its purest forms. Middle Eastern Jewish groups are quite similar to Ashkenazi groups as they existed in traditional Europe. Among contemporary Ashkenazim, they resemble the more Orthodox and fundamentalist segments of the community.

A good example are the Syrian Jews that were the subject of a previous blog. Despite living in the US for over 100 years, they remain hermetically sealed off from the rest of America, including other Jews. They aggressively police group boundaries, particularly intermarriage. Their business relationships are with other Syrian Jews, particularly family members. Recently, the Syrian Jewish community has been implicated in scandals involving money laundering, drug and organ trafficking, and tax evasion (See here and here). Reflecting practices in traditional Jewish communities, a community member who ratted out other Syrian Jews to the police was renounced by his own father.

A recent article, “The Persian Conquest” describes  a more recently arrived group of Oriental Jews who emigrated from Iran since the fall of the Shah and mostly settled in Southern California, particularly Beverly Hills. This is an elite group:

Although dispossessed, the thousands of Iranian Jews who flocked to Beverly Hills … had assets most immigrants lack: advanced education, business experience and, in the majority of cases, some cash in overseas accounts.

The following paragraph gets at the insular, clannish nature of these Jews.

A complaint sounded by Beverly Hills old-timers was that the Persians could be clannish, self-segregating and indifferent to the established norms of the community they were entering. … Thanks to their wealth and numbers, Persians didn’t need to adapt. Instead, they developed a self-sufficient Farsi-speaking enclave, complete with grocery stores, restaurants and even taxi services. And rather than courting the local social establishment, rich Persians stuck to their own social world, which revolved around lavish 1,000-person bar mitzvahs and weddings. “My mother really doesn’t need to speak English, although she does,” says Nazarian.

The comment on lack of concern for established norms recalls the behavior of Lubavitcher Jews in Postville, Iowa: No concern for even trivial things like mowing lawns or shoveling sidewalks.  More importantly, it reminds one of the lack of respect for Christian traditions that has been so characteristic of the mainstream Jewish community in the US, as recounted, for example, by Edmund Connelly (see here, here and here).

An informant goes on to say, “Cultural preservation is one part of the experience of being displaced, and as with any immigrant community, we naturally want to associate with one another. Middle Eastern countries also tend to be very tribal.”

This comment on the tribal nature of Middle Eastern societies is right on the mark — a critical difference between Jewish and Western cultural traditions. It’s no surprise then that marriage with another Persian Jew is the norm. In the following quote, notice that marriage is at least as much about fitting into the other person’s family as it is about finding someone who satisfies your psychological needs as an individual — a clear marker of the collectivist mindset:

Likewise, a majority in the younger generation choose to marry fellow Persians—much to their parents’ relief. “They don’t have to marry Persian,” says Jasmine Yadegar, in a tone suggesting that she hopes her two twentysomething daughters—both of whom still live at home—eventually will. “All I want for them is to be happy and find people with the same background.”

“For me,” says daughter Sabrina, an aspiring fashion designer, “I think it’s a lot easier to fall in love with someone who has the same ideas and experiences.”

“I need to love their family, and they need to love mine,” adds older sister Jessica, a documentary filmmaker. “Some of my American friends have told me that you’re not dating the parents. They say you don’t need to meet the parents on the first, second or third date. That’s not my view. I think the longer you postpone the introduction to the family, the longer it takes you to get to know if this is someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

If you married an outsider, you would be completely cut off from the intense social life of the community.

It will be interesting to see if this group is as able as the Syrian Jews to remain separate in the American context.

Bookmark and Share

Controlling Historical Memory

/22 Comments/in , , /by

Dovid Katz’s article in The Guardian “Halting Holocaust Obfuscation” is yet another example of Jewish intellectual activists with access to the media attempting to control historical memory in a way that highlights Jewish suffering and presents Jewish behavior as nothing more than innocent victimhood. Katz is determined to disallow any equivalence between the horrors inflicted on the populations of Eastern Europe by the Germans and by the Soviets. He condemns Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, linking to this article, for bringing up Jewish behavior in the Jedwabne incident in which Jews were murdered during the German occupation of Poland during WWII:

One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: “I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn’t respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this.”

At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who’d killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: “Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles.”

Would a British politician who’d behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics?

Probably not. But that’s only because mentioning Jewish behavior as contributing in even the slightest way to anti-Jewish attitudes is off limits, even if they collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles or against the Baltic peoples. The following is from a review of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (italicized quotes are translations of Solzhenitsyn):

“Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way.”

In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne.Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.

Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan “Revenge for the Soviet Occupation”? Solzhenitsyn:

“In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule.” (p. 329)

In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:

“Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia.” (p. 310)

See here for a comment on the distortions of Jan Gross’s Neighbors which attempts to blame the massacre solely on the irrational anti-Semitism of Poles. This compilation notes, among other things, that “There was significant collaboration on the part of some Jedwabne Jews with the Soviet invaders from 1939 to June 1941; the victims were primarily the town’s Polish population, several hundred of whom were deported to the Gulag.”

When a significant percentage of people from an alien ethnic group support an invader and collaborate in the deportation of people from one’s own ethnic group, it is not at all surprising that there would be reprisals when there is a shift of power; nor would be be surprising if the reprisals were directed all Jews, not just the ones known to collaborate or sympathize. That’s how our evolved psychology of ethnic competition works.

I notice in my notes that Checinski (1982, 9) writes that “even then [in 1943] there was an attempt to rationalize this blind hatred [of Jews] by recalling the ‘improper’ attitude of the Jewish population in eastern Poland towards the Bolsheviks in September 1939 when the Soviet army, in connivance with the Nazis, occupied their territories.” Checinski also notes that immediately after WWII Jews welcomed the Soviet army and the new regime “with favor if not with outright enthusiasm” and that “the small Jewish community was seen by friends and foes alike as one of the mainstays of the Soviet sponsored regime. This only further alienated it from the great majority of the Polish population” (p. 8). This comment  is highly compatible with Jaff Schatz’s (1991) treatment which I discuss extensively in Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique. It is interesting that American Jewish representatives visiting Poland after the war presented the new Polish regime as “a paragon of liberalism and tolerance, unequaled in Eastern Europe” (Checinski, p. 11).

To conclude, anti-Jewish attitudes in Eastern Europe had a basis in the real behavior of Jews. No doubt the events of 1939 and thereafter were influenced by traditional grievances between Poles and Jews, but actual Jewish behavior during this period is also relevant. Jews were correctly perceived as more welcoming to the Soviets after the 1939 invasion and as more loyal to the Communist regime and as willing executioners of the remnants of Polish nationalism after 1945. (As I and others have noted, the common denominator of the behavior of Diaspora Jews in European countries has been to oppose nationalist movements; further, during this period, Jews throughout Europe and in America saw communism as good for the Jews at least partly because Jews had become an elite in the USSR and the USSR had outlawed anti-Semitism.)

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jews were also highly placed in the government and in the security forces. Under these circumstances, social identity theory predicts that Poles would develop the well-attested stereotype of “zydokomuna” (Judeo-Communism) and exaggerate the differences between themselves and all Jews in Poland. It simply reflects typical ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout the ages — nothing more than a reflection of our evolved psychology.

In the West, Jewish activists have had a relatively easy time erecting the image of innocent Jews and evil Nazis as a complete explanation of the events of World War II. This message is much more difficult in Eastern Europe where there is a collective memory of collaboration of Jews with the horrors of communism and in the extermination of nationalist elements of the non-Jewish population.

Bookmark and Share

Jews and immigration policy — Again

/35 Comments/in , , , , , /by

A friend sent along Steve Sailer’s review of historian Otis L. Graham’s  Immigration Reform and America’s Unchosen Future. Misleading title. American immigration policy was chosen. It just wasn’t chosen by the vast majority of the American people, and this is Graham’s point. As I have tried to show, it was chosen by the organized Jewish community and put into action as a result of Jewish political pressure and financial wherewithal. Graham notes that the successful immigration restriction of 1924 was seen by historians as one of the reforms of the Progressive Era’s campaign against the excesses of capitalism, since immigration lowered wages.

It’s fair to say, however, that Jews never saw it that way and there’s at least a fair amount of truth in the idea that the 1924 law was enacted to achieve an ethnic status quo that Jews saw as unfair to them. (Jewish immigrants were correctly seen by restrictionists as disproportionately involved in political radicalism, and it was generally a period of ethnic defense of White America.)

As Sailer’s review shows, Jews have not ceased seeing the 1924 law as exclusion of Jews. Graham points out that Jews live in the past when it comes to thinking about immigration: “the “filiopietistic” urge (“of or relating to an often excessive veneration of ancestors …”) is particularly strong among Jewish media figures. Italian-Americans, in contrast, tend to approach the immigration policy question by thinking about the future rather than by obsessing over the past. This anti-rational emotional reflex about immigration contributes to the kitschy quality of MSM discourse on the topic.”

In other words, Jews see the 1924 immigration law as part of their lachrymose history among Europeans, It’s just another example of irrational anti-Semitism — an example that warrants the evil nature of  the people and culture who created it. Since, as Sailer notes, Jews constitute half of the most influential media figures, and since the other half are rigorously vetted to exclude anyone who opposes what amounts to the Jewish consensus on immigration, there really isn’t much real debate in the above-ground media.

Of course, there is a lot of self-censorship. Graham recounts the example of Theodore White, then the most influential journalist in America (and a Jew), refusing to publish his views on immigration. “‘My New York friends would never forgive me. No, you guys are right [on immigration], but I can’t go public on this.’ ” Sailer quotes Graham:

Hearing White’s agitated response, I had my first glimpse of the especially intense emotional Jewish version of that taboo [against immigration skepticism]. His whole heritage, and his standing with all his Jewish friends, was imperiled (he was certain) if he went public with his worries about the state of immigration. …

I did not suspect it then, but this would become an important subtheme of our experience as immigration reformers. American Jews were exceptionally irrational about immigration for well-known reasons. They were also formidable opponents, or allies, in any issue of public policy in America.

In a nutshell, that’s the problem with Jews: They get what they want and what they want is not necessarily what others want (leading to conflicts of interest) or what is good for the country as a whole. It really wouldn’t matter if the only group that wanted open borders was African Americans. But it matters greatly that Jews do.

Incidentally, Otis Graham’s brother Hugh Davis Graham, agrees with me on the forces behind the 1965 law. He wrote in his 2002 book Collision Course (pp. 56-57):

Most important for the content of immigration reform [i.e., loosening], the driving force at the core of the movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of the Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s…. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

Bookmark and Share