Kevin MacDonald

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"A Corrosive Loss of Confidence"

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Ron Brownstein’s latest suggests that a political crisis is on the horizon, spurred by the disaffection of White voters and possibly leading to revolutionary stirrings and a movement toward a third party (“A Corrosive Loss of Confidence“).

Even as voters prepare to send more Republicans to Washington, polls show that Americans are not enthusiastic about the GOP. Indeed, the arc of disillusionment spreads beyond the two parties to virtually every major American institution. If November’s election allowed Americans the opportunity to fire not only members of Congress, but also the nation’s entire public and private leadership class, they might take it. This deep, broad, and visceral discontent is a recipe for social and political volatility.

Whites are more alienated from both major parties than non-Whites. Brownstein proposes that this is solely due to the economic downturn. I suspect that White disaffection also involves racial anxiety about the non-White future. Non-Whites doubtless feel optimistic about the long term future in a White-minority America, even if their present circumstances are difficult.

There is an apocalyptic tone to Brownstein’s essay—a belief that our new elite is out of touch with the great majority of Americans, that revolution may be just around the corner, and that third parties may be swept into power:

If polls existed just before the French Revolution, they might have returned results such as these. They point toward a widely shared conviction that the country’s public and private leadership is protecting its own interest at the expense of average (and even comfortable) Americans.

Because he sees the economic downturn as central, Brownstein sees a successful third party as headed by “a non-politician with a problem-solver pedigree” who is seen as able to turn the economy around.

He may be right, but the American Third Position believes that a prime mover of White disaffection is racial anxiety—amplified by the recession and by the perception that elites are completely out of touch with the interests and attitudes of the great majority of Americans. Good examples of the latter are recent court rulings that nullify popular sentiment on issues like the Arizona immigration law and California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Indeed, today’s op-ed page in the  LA Times shows the divide: The pro-homosexual marriage piece piously defending the courts and the anti-homosexual marriage piece emphasizing the undemocratic nature of the ruling: The “people’s will” was violated.

There is a feeling of powerlessness–that even strong majorities don’t matter any more. And that is indeed what revolutions are made of.

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Another Attempt to Control Historical Writing on the Role of Jews in the USSR

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Apropos the recent series on chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (especially Chapter 18), a new textbook for university students in Russia emphasizes the elite status of Jews in the early decades of the USSR. (JTA, August 8, 2010:  “Russian Textbook Seen as Anti-Semitic“) The Foreword states, “For the greater part of its 70-year history, the USSR was ruled by people of non-Russian nationality.” The book also states that, “By the 1930s, the Jewish nation was the leader among those represented in the Communist party and the state machinery, in Science and Art.”

At this point, the elite status of Soviet Jews during this period is common knowledge among scholars (e.g., Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century), but that doesn’t mean that scholars are free to draw attention to ethnicity in textbooks intended for university students. Predictably, any such effort is regarded as “anti-Semitic”: “some are calling [the book] anti-Semitic because it counts the number of Jews in Soviet governments.” As in the US, Jews are the elite that “cannot tell its name.”

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 New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist“

The theme of the textbook is that the Russians were ruled by non-Russians. Rule by outsiders had predictably disastrous results for those without power: it was during this period that the most horrific mass murders of Russians occurred. The common sense of it is that Russians would not have murdered huge numbers of their own people in the name of international socialism.  (It takes Puritans to do that.) This leads to an often-repeated theme on this website: It is the ultimate folly to allow non-Whites — especially non-Whites with powerful historic grudges — to become a majority and develop the power to rule over Whites.

Also predictably, the article uses guilt-by-association arguments. An author of the textbook was the advisor to a student who is now on trial for murdering two anti-fascists, and the university where the text is used is “tainted by anti-Semitism” because it invited a Holocaust dissident to speak.

Okay. But does that show that the USSR was not ruled by non-Russians during this period or that Jews  were not an elite during the worst excesses of the  Soviet regime? The same can be said about the comment from the Jewish apologist attacking the idea that deportation of the Crimean Tatars was caused by the necessity of clearing the territory for the proposed Jewish republic. Even if true, it doesn’t go to the heart of the matter. Here’s what Solzhenitsyn says in Chapter 18:

The settlement of the Jews in the Crimea provoked the hostility of the Tatars (“Are they giving Crimea to the Jews?”) and dissatisfaction of local landless peasants. Larin writes “evil and false rumors are circulating throughout the country about removal of land from non-Jews, the expulsion of non-Jews and the particularly strong support the authorities have given to the Jewish settlers”. It went so far that the chairman of the CIK of the Crimean ASSR, Veli Ibraimov published an interview in the Simferopol paper Red Crimea (Sept 26, 1926) which Larin does not quote from, but which he claims was a manifestation of “evil bourgeois chauvinism” and a call for a pogrom.

Solzhenitsyn seems to agree that the Jews were treated very well by the government (with the help of foreign Jewish organizations), and he amply documents the resentments this caused among non-Jews. But he does not state that the Tatars were expelled because of Jewish settlement.

Of course, for all I know, the textbook doesn’t say that either. The Tatars weren’t deported until 1944, long after the project for Jewish settlement had fizzled.

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Gregory Rodriguez on White Racial Anxiety

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There are signs that the left is beginning to realize that White dispossession is not going to happen without a few bumps in the road. Recently Gregory Rodriguez wrote in the LA Times:

I believe that white racial anxiety, not immigration, will be the most significant and potentially dangerous socio-demographic trend of the coming decade. The combination of changing demographics and symbolic political victories on the part of nonwhites will inspire in whites a greater racial consciousness, a growing sense of beleagurement and louder calls to end affirmative action or to be included in it.

He’s right, except for the ridiculous implication that immigration is not the fundamental issue. After all, it was immigration that has resulted in the affirmative action crisis–along with  a host of other costs to White America, including the very real prospect that a hostile non-White coalition will be able to shape public policy against the interests of Whites. Even without affirmative action, Whites will suffer as all the other costs of ethnic diversity escalate–increasing ethnic conflict, less civic mindedness, greater psychological alienation.

Rodriguez proposes that Whites will be happy if affirmative action is ended:

I am so convinced of [impending White racial consciousness] that I think to avoid a destructive white backlash in the face of a rapidly diversifying society, the president should call for an end to affirmative action. In a “Nixon goes to China” sort of way, Obama — by virtue of his racial background, party affiliation and political temperament — is better poised to pull off such a difficult task more gracefully than any other politician.

Whites would indeed like to see an end to affirmative action, but that won’t be enough to save them from all the other costs of immigration noted above. Predictably, Rodriguez asserts (with no supporting data) that Whites have not suffered from affirmative action. (For some real data, see the National Policy Institute’s report, “The Costs of Diversity“; see also “Jewish Qverrepresentation at Elite Universities Explained” showing that already Whites are vastly underrepresented at elite institutions on the basis of IQ.) And the reality is that elites have been able to preserve affirmative action even in the face of laws that forbid it, as in California where there has been endless tinkering with university admissions criteria aimed at increasing Black and Latino admissions to the University of California.

Quite simply, because of lower average IQ, Blacks and Latinos can’t do without affirmative action; their percentage representation in elite institutions based on intellectual merit would be nil. (See “End Affirmative Action, End the Black Upper Class: The Case of Law“) So the pressure for affirmative action will continue far into the future, with the result that Whites will be increasingly caught between affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos on the low end, and Asians and Jews on the high end–all exacerbated by the exploding non-White population and ethnic networking by highly ethnocentric minority groups.

For the left, there’s no going back. The only solution is to continue to pathologize White racial consciousness and keep the costs to Whites of our multi-racial future out of the media.

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Hans Prinzhorn’s Aphorisms

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The current TOO article is an introduction to the thought of Hans Prinzhorn, a German (“Leadership and the Vital Order: Selected Aphorisms by Hans Prinzhorn,” translated by Joseph D. Pryce). Quite a few of his ideas resonate with recent essays here. Perhaps most central is this:

We can hold out no hope whatever for the successful creation of the sort of community that is constructed by ideologists on the basis of purely rational considerations, for the projects that are hatched out in the mind of the rationalist are most definitely not analogous to the development of living forms in nature, no matter how often the contrary position has been proclaimed by false prophets.

Prinzhorn is warning about the creation of blueprints for society without any concern for human nature. In the language of current psychology, intellectuals have constructed various utopian scenarios, taking advantage of explicit processing and often ignoring our evolved psychology (my academic version is here; see particularly the Discussion section).

Prinzhorn is also quite aware that these blueprints for utopian societies are typically couched in moral terms, historically often with a large flavor of Christianity–“the nihilistic Will to Power that conceals its true nature behind the cloak of such humanitarian ideals as humility, solicitude for the weak, the awakening of the oppressed masses, the plans for universal happiness, and the fever-swamp vision of perpetual progress.” As noted especially with the Puritans and their descendants, these moral prescriptions have a unique appeal to Western peoples–an aspect of Western individualism and concomitant moral universalism.

Reflecting the concerns of his time, Prinzhorn is most concerned with socialism, seeing it as “demagogic assault on the part of the inferior rabble against the nobler type of human being.” In our time, the greatest concern is the invasion of traditionally White nations by massive numbers of non-Whites.

This raises an interesting issue:  White advocates tend to gloss over social class and  IQ differences among Whites, seeing Whites as having interests in common as Whites. National Socialism bridged this gap, seeing the society as an organic whole based ultimately on a long cultural tradition and shared biological kinship, while nevertheless preserving a hierarchical structure of inclusiveness for all social classes. Because of the appeal of National Socialism to the German working class, the left shifted gears: In the post-World War II era, the most influential intellectual movements (e.g., the Frankfurt School, the New York Intellectuals, and pretty much the entire intellectual left) have championed mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the dispossession of Whites.

It is no accident that the  White working class has suffered the most from these changes–or that they are the most angered by the current regime. Nor is it an accident that this shift toward White dispossession by the left was championed mainly by Jewish intellectual movements given the very strong overtones of anti-Semitism characteristic of National Socialism and its conception of society based on blood kinship with roots in traditional German culture.

The result is a new elite, substantially Jewish but with a considerable component of deracinated Whites–many of them people like the sociopathic Morris Dees whose championing of  “oppressed” non-Whites has paid off handsomely for himself (see Steve Sailer’s “Morris Dees’ Poverty Palace“).

The question now is whether this new utopia of multiculturalism premised on White dispossession will ultimately fail because of the lack of fit with our evolved psychology–as Prinzhorn suggests. The research strongly suggests that multi-ethnic societies have a number of built-in costs–particularly greater conflict, greater psychological alienation from the society as a whole, and less willingness to contribute to public goods like health care.

There are signs that the left is beginning to be aware that the utopian transformations they have in mind are not going to be easily achieved in the long run and that there is a backlash brewing from dispossessed Whites. Nevertheless, for the left there is no going back–only an increasing commitment to manage these tensions, by force if need be.

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Kevin MacDonald: Chapter 5 of 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II”

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Chapter 5 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II” has now been translated and is the topic of the current TOO article. Again, the project is worthy of financial support for the translators. (I am not involved except as publicizing and commenting on the chapters.) This is an important background chapter for thinking about the Jewish role leading up to and after the Bolshevik Revolution. I encourage comments here. Kevin M

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Oliver Stone

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The only movie by Oliver Stone  I remember is Natural Born Killers which I thought was horrifyingly ugly–a crude attempt to shock people, much like his recent comments. Stone always struck me as mainly a controversialist, and his comments on Hitler and Jewish media domination are no exception. I suppose he thought it would be a great way to promote his soon-to-be-released documentary. “Any publicity is good publicity.” But it’s hard to believe he doesn’t now think that this was an unwise move. Even if you are half Jewish, you just can’t say such things. And of course now he has apologized–under a great deal of pressure.

But the apology isn’t enough. Jewish superpatriot Haim Saban called it “soooo transparently fake” and is trying to get Showtime to cancel an upcoming TV series of Stone’s by talking to Leslie Moonves, the President and CEO of CBS which is scheduled to air the series on its cable channel Showtime. Moonves is Jewish, as is Sumner Redstone who is the largest shareholder of CBS and Chairman of the Board. Ari Emanual, the Jewish superpatriot and premier Hollywood agent who has taken the lead in going after Mel Gibson, also made a call trying to get the series cancelled.

What Jewish media power? Obviously, Stone is way out of line. Even Jewish publications acknowledge the  Jews run Hollywood.

The ADL’s statement is pure Orwell:

Oliver Stone’s apology stops short and is therefore insufficient. While he now admits that Jews do not control Hollywood, the media and other industries, he ignores his assertion that Jews are ‘…the most powerful lobby in Washington’ and that ‘Israel has (expletive) up United States foreign policy.’ This is another conspiratorial anti-Semitic canard that Mr. Stone needs to repudiate.

And while he’s at it, he should declare that Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe that would be enough to get Stone back in the graces of Hollywood media elite.

Nah.

As if it couldn’t get any more Orwellian, Andy Nowicki’s curent TOO article describes an encounter between the ADL’s Abe Foxman and a delegation from the Ukraine eager to suck up to the ADL on Holocaust-related issues. (Foxman insists that the genocide of 7 to 10 million Ukrainians supervised and advocated by Lazar Kaganovich does not rise to the level of a Holocaust, a term that should be exclusively reserved for what the Germans did to the Jews.) The Ukranians act as if Foxman has some power which means, of course, that they are anti-Semites:

Following the meeting, Shamir asks Foxman why, if anti-Semitism is so potent a force in the world today, people care so much about pleasing the ADL and its sister organizations. Dishonest Abe then shows his flair at sophistry: it’s anti-Semitic in itself, he maintains, to even think that the Jews are so powerful as to be feared, so the fact that people like this pitiful delegation of yes-men are so eager to do his bidding just shows how anti-Semitic the world has become! Once more, Shamir dryly acknowledges this “logic,” letting its absurdity speak for itself.

The whole thing reminds me of Joe Sobran’s comment on Jewish media power:

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 Buchanan frenzy. Sobran’s (March):3–4.)

Sobran’s punch line is applicable here: “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.” Powerless people can’t destroy anyone. But Oliver Stone will soon enough find out that Jews are very powerful indeed.

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David Morris on the Pathology of Moral Universalism

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David Morris has a very nice article, “The Contemporary use of Philosophy and Ideas,” on the BNP website. Much of it reflects recent blogs on this site (here and here), with a British twist. A major theme is that the British have a strong attraction to universalist abstractions, often pursued with a moral fervor.

The orthodox views held by progressives encompass Liberalism to Marxism and they believe in universals, but we believe in “particulars.” Universals are abstract terms like humanity whereas a specific people is a particular. Universalist thinking leads to intervention in the internal policies of other sovereign states as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. We particularists are concerned with our own nation and if we were to do any invading it would be to sort out the conflict within our own nation.

The progressives erect a set of idealisations – what we are becoming, what we should think and how we should behave.

Whereas it’s natural to be concerned about family, kin, ethnic group, and race, the universalist embraces abstract ideas, with no concern with how they will affect his natural interest in preserving those closest to him.

The government planned drastic financial cuts for us, but increases in overseas aid! This perverse attitude grew from the Victorian middle class influenced by evangelical Christianity, which believed it had a duty to ‘save’ unchristian natives. It became a preference over the British working class which endures today. Characteristic of this is Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, whose eyes ‘had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off, as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa’. Like the elites she neglected those around her, including notoriously her own children. Her thoughts were directed instead towards the fictitious African possession of Borrioboola Gha and her idealistic plans for its development.

This is the British equivalent of the moral fervor of their American offshoots, the Puritans,  who were intent on freeing Africans by waging a Holy War on their Southern cousins (see Kevin Phillips, Cousin’s Wars).  Morris sees these trends at work in contemporary British society: “the belief that we are progressing to a utopian future – The Brotherhood of Man, a classless society, etc.” It relates to ideas of “the ‘perfectibility of man’ and a supposed God-like ability to transcend nature including their own nature. It is this manifestation … that is destroying our way of life” [his emphasis].

The perfectibility of man was also fundamental to the Puritan tradition that has been so influential in American culture and politics.

The result is a failure to face reality:

Even though once luxuriant African states fall into crime and poverty, while once prosperous, economically successful Detroit descends in to crime and poverty, even hunger is there now, progressives pretend we are progressing. Even New Orleans didn’t penetrate their bubbles. They go on holiday to Jamaica where safe areas are sectioned off for tourists, but do not connect that reality with Brixton or other inner cities which are no-go areas for Whites. Even when Muslims blow up trains and there are almost weekly terror trials going on, they dream that we are all coming together. … Our cities are being colonized by people with Medieval mindsets and there are no spontaneous colonies of nice liberal progressives springing up in Nairobi and Beijing.

Exactly. While the West pursues its utopian fantasies with great moral fervor, the rest of the world continues as it has always been—except that they are now colonizing us. “Our cities are being colonized by people with Medieval mindsets and there are no spontaneous colonies of nice liberal progressives springing up in Nairobi and Beijing.”

When you invite people in, they will take territory, assert their interests, and ultimately displace you. But the utopian universalist is unable to consider the obvious practical consequences: “To think practically about this would be to reflect on what is really happening from examples and, not, like progressives and the Soviet Union, propagandise people into believing that what they wish would happen is happening. It is to consider the consequences of actions and not socially engineer people for a future utopia; it is not to pretend human nature is a social construct, but by accurate judgement of how people really behave in given situations to make wise judgements of others.”

Morris is a race realist: “Our Englishness is our essence as it is in our genes which created our culture which in turn moulds our descendants.” Unfortunately, one of the ethnic traits of a great many Englishmen and other Europeans is to be prone to moral universalism and utopian thinking. Morris is quite aware of the ability of culture to exert control over more natural emotions — a theme that fits well with contemporary psychology. Nevertheless, there are limits. Indeed, “The contemporary totalitarian elites are actively suppressing natural feelings and risking a mass break out of negative emotion” — exactly the sort of anger that is resulting in public furor over illegal immigration in America.

In other words, these attempts at erecting utopias will ultimately result in huge psychological tension as people are expected to swear allegiance to universalist abstractions even as they see their neighborhoods invaded by non-Whites, even as their jobs are outsourced to foreign countries or taken away by immigrants, and even as they see the political and cultural power of their own group declining — in a word, displacement. In these circumstances, the more selfish and particularlist emotions centered around family and ethnic group inevitably bubble to the surface to compete with the universalist abstractions. In the contemporary world these abstractions are being imposed on us by elites—including the Jewish component of the elite which manages to aggressively promote moral universalism in the Diaspora in the West while also aggressively supporting its neo-fascist ethnostate in the Middle East. Indeed, as noted previously, promoting multiculturalism as a moral imperative in Western societies (but not Israel) is reasonably seen as a Jewish ethnic strategy. No moral universalism there–just the facade.

By all accounts, particularlist anger is welling up in White Americans — especially among the middle and working class — outraged at the changes they see; they are also the ones are are more negatively affected by these upheavals. (It’s always easier for elites to pledge fealty to moral abstractions when there a no costs to them personally; they seem blissfully unaware of their ethnic costs.)

There are certainly legitimate doubts that this anger will be productively directed given the record of elites in the Republican Party. Part of what we need is an intellectual revolution that challenges the unique Western proclivity toward moral universalism and fratricidal aggression against morally defined outgroups. We’ve got to stop thinking like the Puritans and base our attitudes on a foundation that is in tune with biological reality. All the data show that multiethnic societies are prone to conflict and to less of a sense of civic responsibility, among other things.

The good news is that culture can trump biology (see also here). The conflict between the universalist strands and the particularlist strands of our ethnic nature as Westerners may be resolved if we realize the folly of a universalism that results in the dystopian nightmares we are seeing form before our eyes. Culture and our rational thought processes can indeed suppress biological urges — including our urge to wage holy war on behalf of abstract principles. And right now we have to realize that it is entirely rational to suppress our biological urge toward moral universalism. Our survival is at stake.

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