Kevin MacDonald
Kevin MacDonald,
because his research and writings contain themes and findings
which are reminiscent of a part of
the anti-Semitism which led to the Holocaust,
is quite controversial;
for his side of the story see his extensive web site, especially its
list of his publications,
reviews and summaries of his books and
selected replies to his critics;
for his more current and popular articles see his blog.
Perhaps because the issues that he discusses so ardently are so controversial,
they are also quite interesting,
I dare say to most everyone interested in ideas and conflict,
even the most politically-correct among us.
In this document are some highlights (or lowlights) from his articles,
and also some reviews and criticisms of his views.
Of especial interest, I believe,
are some exchanges between MacDonald and his critics,
typically where a critic will criticize something he has written
and he will respond, often in great detail, to that criticism.
(Might we call this “disputation” [cf.]?)
The most interesting are with
Gottfried in 2000,
Derbyshire in 2003, and
Gottfried again in 2009.
by Paul Gottfried (with replies by Kevin MacDonald)
originally published in Chronicles, 2000-06 and -09
[MacDonald’s web page includes
a review by Gottfried
of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique (original, 1998, hardback edition)
published in the June 2000 Chronicles,
a reply by MacDonald,
a reply by Gottfried, and
a reply by MacDonald.
MacDonald’s excerpt of the review by Gottfried is reproduced here.
(Somehow I doubt that this will get either Gottfried or MacDonald
on Abraham Foxman’s Buddy List.)
The emphasis is added.]
A Race Apart by Paul Gottfried
[G1.1]
Kevin MacDonald’s study of the Jewish people in sociobiological perspective
[PTSDA, SAID, CC]
will not likely help his career,
for reasons having nothing to do with the author’s scholarship
or his accumulation of pertinent evidence.
While treating his subjects respectfully,
attributing to Ashkenazic Jews a mean I.Q.
one standard deviation higher than that of white gentiles,
he commits the indiscretion of
describing Jewish behavioral characteristics
noted as well by anti-Semites:
for example,
an aggressive demeanor toward the core cultures of host peoples
in combination with
the practice of ritually and socially prescribed separation from gentiles,
which he ascribes to
a form of collective consciousness
that may be inborn
as well as culturally acquired.
MacDonald presents this consciousness as endemic to
a group that has worked strenuously to preserve its genotypal identity....
[G1.2]
Since Jews supposedly
have acquired a cognitive advantage over most other groups
through careful eugenic practices,
competition yields them remarkable success.
In the past,
their group performance was hindered by the host people’s possession of
a degree of ethnic consciousness comparable to their own.
In these circumstances—medieval Europe, say, or 20th-century Russia—
Jews have been limited in their collective and individual ambitions.
As MacDonald explains in the second two volumes of his trilogy [SAID, CC],
such obstacles forced them to adopt daring strategies,
most fatefully the embrace of revolutionary ideologies and programs.
As an embattled out-group,
Jews supported and led revolutionary movements
in vast disproportion to their numbers.
And while tensions have existed over the last 200 years
between Rabbinic and revolutionary Jews,
MacDonald is correct in suggesting that
the conflict has not been as sharp as is commonly believed....
[G1.3]
MacDonald shows how persistent
the issue of open borders has been for his subjects.
Jews have combined intervention on behalf of immigration
and the demonization of immigration restrictionists
[as “xenophobes,” “nativists,” “racists”]
with the promotion of “diversity education.” ...
MacDonald does not present such advocacy as
the misguided humanitarian design of those whose ancestors suffered dispersion
and who are therefore receptive to later strangers.
Instead he locates Jewish support for multiculturalism
in the context of an already venerable strategy:
“De-ethnicizing” the once majority population
while insisting on the right of Jews as righteous victims to persist
as an ethnic cluster....
My guess from reading Chilton Williamson, Peter Brimelow, and Lawrence Auster
is that the reassessment of immigration,
especially from the Third World,
was part of
a general cultural change that beset Western societies
and was pushed by the managerial state.
While Jews contributed to cultural change and immigrationism
energetically and disproportionately,
they were far from constituting a sufficient cause....
[G1.4]
The “culture of critique” has done best
among those whom James Kurth (himself a Presbyterian) calls
“progressively deformed” Protestant peoples.
Starting with
the theologically based individualistic and anti-hierarchical bias
of classical Protestantism,
this deformation of Reformationist thought has expressed itself
in various late-modernist obsessions,
most of them linked to Protestant sources
but without the sobering notions of Original Sin and divine redemption.
These Protestant variants
emphasize moral subjectivity and self-esteem,
while replacing the concept of sin with that of social guilt.
[G1.5]
Fits of self-rejection are also characteristic of deformed Protestants,
and in the United States, Canada, Germany, and England,
[G1.6]
For me, the most engrossing part of MacDonald’s trilogy
is a long, learned section in the third volume [Chapter 5] on
the Pathologization [of Gentile Group Allegiances]....
The pivotal themes in The Authoritarian Personality,
as emphasized by MacDonald,
were nothing new to those who assisted in the project:
Rather, they represented the same complaints directed against Western—
and not only German—society
by the youthful radicals grouped around Adorno
at the University of Frankfurt in the early 30’s.
From Frankfurt, these “anti-Nazis” emigrated to the United States;
later they reestablished their ideas in postwar Germany
in the context of Allied denazification.
Little attention was paid to the fact that
the proposed antidotes for Nazism were not exactly disease-specific:
They targeted anything that gave cohesion to
middle-class families and societies.
[G1.7]
MacDonald argues that
continued to resonate among Jewish “social scientists”
who shared Adorno’s fears;
both it and the rhetoric in which it was couched live on in
[End of excerpt from Gottfried’s review.
MacDonald provides an extensive discussion and rebuttal at
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/review-gottfried.html and
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/review-gottfried.html
(they are essentially identical).
Here is just the beginning of
MacDonald’s response to what Gottfried wrote above,
followed by all of
Gottfried’s response to MacDonald’s response:]
Kevin MacDonald Replies to Paul Gottfried’s Review
[M1.1]
I thank Paul Gottfried for his generally accurate and positive review of my book, The Culture of Critique.
Nevertheless, there are a few issues that bear discussion,
the most important of which is
Jewish intellectual and political movements
were a necessary condition for these changes,
not a sufficient condition as suggested by Gottfried.
In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy,
there simply were no other pressure groups
that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration
during the period under consideration (up to 1965).
[M1.2]
Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to
‘a general cultural change that beset Western societies
and was pushed by the managerial state.’ [G1.3]
I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift
but
we still must develop theories for the origin of this shift,
and in my view
the Jewish intellectual and political movements
discussed in The Culture of Critique
were a necessary condition for this transformation.
...
Dr. Gottfried Replies:
[G2.1]
My differences with Kevin MacDonald
are ones of emphasis more than of substance.
Like him, I recognize the existence of a double standard
in the way
American and other Jews stress ethnic solidarity for themselves
but the moral necessity of multiculturalism for white Christians.
This double standard offers the hermeneutic key
to the comments of Slate editor Judy Shulevitz (May 2, 2000).
In response to a complaint that American Jews
denounced Bob Jones University for discouraging interracial dating
but stubbornly practice tribalism in their own group,
Shulevitz contrasted white Christian “racism” to
the “ethnic chauvinism” characteristic of blacks and Jews.
Because of their “historical burdens,”
the distaste for outsiders felt by Jews and blacks is excusable
and not to be compared to
the “reprehensible” objection of
a white Southerner contemplating his child’s marriage to a black.
(Shulevitz’s critic happens to be Jewish.)
American Christians with mainstream journalistic respectability
do not choose to raise embarrassing questions
about Jewish claims to ethnic exceptionalism,
despite the fact that Jews have risen far in the United States,
encountering on the whole less discrimination than most ethnic Catholics.
[G2.2]
Where I do disagree with MacDonald is on
the importance assigned to
Jewish efforts to “de-ethnicize” Western Christian societies.
Although both the Frankfurt School and Boasian anthropologists
have pushed for an engineered and misnamed “open” society,
as have the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress,
such groups do not provide a sufficient or even “necessary” cause
for the changes in question.
[G2.3]
Between the 1920’s,
when immigration into the United States was restricted,
and the watershed immigration act of 1965,
there were political and cultural developments that strongly shaped
the present attitudes toward diversity as a civil religion.
The two most critical of these developments were
the consolidation of a managerial state
committed to broad social reconstruction
and, ultimately, the eradication of national loyalties, and
the collapse of WASPdom into its present culture of self mortification.
MacDonald rightly notes that
Jewish intellectuals and organizations worked to advance both trends,
but that point does not provide a comprehensive explanation of what happened.
Vast social engineering occurred in Scandinavia
before it reached the United States
and unfolded there largely in the absence of Jews.
Moreover,
as amply demonstrated by Ray Honeyford, Claus Nordbruch, and René Girard,
Christian clergy in Europe have tirelessly endorsed
the multicultural agenda long identified here with Jews and liberal Protestants.
Indeed, the radicalizing function attributed to Jews
has been effectively incarnated by
different minorities in different places at different times:
Huguenots in France,
Old Believers in Russia, and
Irish Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants in England
have all stirred the pot of social discontent
because of their sense of marginalization.
Today in Canada, ethnic Catholics support the left
as enthusiastically and one-sidedly as do
the descendants of Eastern European Jews.
[G2.4]
MacDonald’s insistence that
Ashkenazic Jews are naturally more intelligent than other European Americans
gives me pause.
If true, that might justify
(certainly from the standpoint of racial nationalists
who seem to accept this cognitive disparity)
the social subordination of white gentiles to a Jewish master race.
In this view, Jewish domination of relatively dull-witted goyim
should be hailed as an intellectual step forward,
particularly if white gentiles, as measured by IQ tests,
are somewhere midway between Jews and American blacks.
What is hard to figure out is why racialists assume
they have a right to control less intelligent races
but that whites should not be subject to cognitively superior Jews.
For all I know,
MacDonald may be right about
the genetic advantages of my ethnic kin in relation to his,
but there is another explanation for the observed disparities in achievements.
Jews, like Asians,
try harder than most WASPs to succeed on standardized tests,
as well as in professions.
The striking feature is not how well others do,
but how totally WASPdom has collapsed.
In One Nation Under God (1993),
authors Barry A. Kosmin and S.P. Lachman demonstrate that
even the highest WASP group achievers, Episcopalians and Presbyterians,
now lag behind white Catholics as well as Jews
in educational advancement and family income.
Until convinced by further evidence,
I assume that the reason for this lag is cultural.
Protestants who wallow in social guilt
and have lost the Puritan virtues
are headed for self destruction.
But they have certainly not been cognitively shortchanged.
Nor have the other scions of a rich European civilization,
which has been indispensable for
the intellectual and artistic enrichment of Jews and other groups.
...
MacDonald replies:
[M2.1]
Shulevitz’s comments [G2.1] justifying Jewish exceptionalism
are excellent examples of rationalization and presumably self-deception.
I record many other examples in Separation and Its Discontents,
Chapters 7 and 8.
My view is that
Jewish endogamy is fundamental to thinking about Judaism and anti-Semitism,
and I view the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans
(a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique)
as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies.
There is a long list of similar double standards,
especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel
versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S.,
including issues of church-state separation and
immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups.
[M2.2]
This double standard is fairly pervasive.
I was recently struck by the following letters that appeared in
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (September 15, 2000):
media directed at European-Americans,
except in media characterized as hateful and extremist.
[M2.3]
Gottfried may be correct that other groups have had a radicalizing role
in different times and places.
The question is whether I am right in my assessment of
the role of Jewish intellectual movements and Jewish organizations
in the transformation of the U.S.
I agree that
“between the 1920’s,
when immigration into the United States was restricted,
and the watershed immigration act of 1965,
there were political and cultural developments that strongly shaped
the present attitudes toward diversity as a civil religion.
The two most critical of these developments were
the consolidation of a managerial state
committed to broad social reconstruction
and, ultimately, the eradication of national loyalties,
and the collapse of WASPdom into its present culture of self mortification.”
[G2.3]
However, Gottfried once again fails to provide any evidence that
these events were the result of internal WASP developments
rather than the movements I focus on.
For example,
regarding immigration there is simply no evidence that any other group
had the funding, the organization, or the persistence
to overcome the enormous barriers to change
erected by the WASPS in 1924 and 1952.
There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction,
but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance
was overcome by the movements I discuss in my book.
[M2.4]
A recent book, The Jewish Threat (Bendersky, 2000),
is interesting in this regard.
Bendersky paints a vanished world of Northern Europeans
as a proud and confident people
self-consciously intent on retaining control of the U.S.
Bendersky’s sense of intellectual and moral superiority
and his hatred for his Northern European subjects
ooze from every page.
It is a triumphalist history, written by a member of
a group that won the intellectual and political wars of the 20th century.
But he does show that
the natives put up a spirited defense of their culture and way of life,
at least well into the post-World War II era.
[M2.5]
And in the end,
the only reason the 1965 law passed was because it was advertized as
nothing more than a moral gesture
that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S.
In other words,
the WASPS did not actively pursue their own destruction,
as supposed by Gottfried;
they were deceived into supposing that the immigration law
would have no real effect
but that its passage would absolve them of
the incessant (and false) charges that
the North-Western European bias of the older U.S. policy
implied a theory of Nordic racial superiority.
Finally, it is surely of critical importance that
the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives
described in The Culture of Critique
did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties.
The broad trends toward de-ethnicizing somehow
occurred among the WASPs
but spared the Jews.
...
By John Derbyshire
The American Conservative, 2008-03-10
[A review of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique.
Be sure to note, if not read, MacDonald’s reply below.]
[1]
One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the USA,
I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types
standing around in groups and gossiping.
Because I was new to the scene,
many of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me,
so I could not take much part in the conversation.
Then I caught one name that I recognized.
I had just recently read and admired
a piece published in Chronicles under that name.
I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name
had once been a regular contributor
to much more widely read conservative publications,
the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents
and full-service LexisNexis accounts,
but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer.
In all innocence, I asked why this was so.
“Oh,” explained one of my companions,
“he got the Jew thing.”
The others in our group all nodded their understanding.
Apparently no further explanation was required.
The Jew thing.
It was said in the kind of tone you might use
of an automobile with a cracked engine block,
or a house with subsiding foundations.
Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow.
No use to anybody now.
Got the Jew thing.
They shoot horses, don’t they?
[2]
Plainly,
getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard
of conservative journalism in the United States,
an exceptionally lethal one,
which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid.
I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed,
not to get the Jew thing.
I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing,
I have not yet got the Jew thing—
that I am in fact a philoSemite and a well-wisher of Israel,
for reasons I have explained in various places,
none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.
[3]
If, however, you have got the Jew thing,
or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it,
Kevin MacDonald is your man.
MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology
at California State University in Long Beach.
He is best known for his three books [PTSDA, SAID, CC] about the Jews,
developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so
been a “group evolutionary strategy.”
The subject of this review is a [2002] re-issue, in soft cover,
of the third and most controversial of these books,
The Culture of Critique, first published in 1998.
Its subtitle is,
“An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement
in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements.”
The re-issue differs from the original
mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface,
which covers some more recent developments in the field
and offers responses to some of the criticisms that appeared
when the book was first published.
The number of footnotes has also been increased from 135 to 181,
and they have all been moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book.
A small amount of extra material has been added to the text.
So far as I could tell from a cursory comparison of the two editions,
nothing has been subtracted.
[4]
The main thrust of this book’s argument is that
Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements
engaged in a deliberate campaign
to delegitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations—
most particularly the USA—
through the twentieth century and that
this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy
for the Jews as an ethnicity.
In MacDonald’s own words [Section 1 of the preface],
“[T]he rise of Jewish power and
the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S.
are the real topics of CofC.”
He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis
of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena
[The numbers in the following list are those of the chapters in the book;
for completeness I have added the first and last chapters as well,
giving effectively a table of contents for all eight chapters of the book;
what Derbyshire actually wrote,
his “six distinct intellectual and political phenomena”,
is what appears as numbers 2 through 7.]:
[5]
MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary psychology—
a term that many writers would put in quotes,
as the epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate.
I have a few doubts of my own on this score
and sometimes wonder whether
evolutionary psychology may eventually turn out to be
one of those odd fads that the human sciences, especially in the USA,
are susceptible to.
The twentieth century saw quite a menagerie of these fads:
Behaviorism,
Sheldonian personality-typing by body shape
(ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph),
the parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine,
the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, and so on.
I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably on to something,
but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be
improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic.
Here, for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book:
“The human mind was not designed to seek truth
but rather to attain evolutionary goals.”
[In defense of MacDonald’s statement,
anyone who doubts that, for example,
some elements in the social sciences departments of our elite universities
have all but forsworn their presumed duty
to find and teach truth rather than
self-serving and/or politically correct lies, fads, and theories
should read carefully and critically
the rather astounding second-from-last paragraph
(starting with “The late twentieth century”)
in the article “The Last Temptation of Risk” by Barry Eichengreen.]
This trembles on the edge of
deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism,
of the kind that philosopher David Stove called “puppetry theory,”
and that MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully
in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique.
After all, if it is so,
should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists
are pursuing their own “group evolutionary strategy”?
And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine?
And that there is, therefore,
no point at all in my writing, or your reading,
any further?
[6]
To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that.
The Culture of Critique includes many good things.
There is a spirited defense of the scientific method, for example.
One of the sub-themes of the book is that
persisted in through long pre-Enlightenment centuries,
of immersing young men in
the study of a vast body of argumentative writing,
with status in the community—
and marriage options, and breeding opportunities—
awarded to those who have best mastered
this mass of meaningless esoterica.
(This is not an original observation,
and the author does not claim it as such.
In fact he quotes historian Paul Johnson to the same effect,
and earlier comments along these lines
were made by Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper.)
MacDonald is very scathing about these
circular and self-referential thought-systems,
especially in the case of psychoanalysis and
the “pathologization of Gentile culture” promoted by the Frankfurt School.
Here he was precisely on my wavelength, and I found myself cheering him on.
Whatever you may think of MacDonald and his theories,
there is no doubt he believes himself to be doing careful objective science.
The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine, Kinsey, et al.
[7]
It is good to be reminded, too [Chapter 7], with forceful supporting data,
that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S.
were not driven by
any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority
but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance,
which is by no means the same thing.
(In fact, as MacDonald points out,
one of the worries of the restrictionists was that
more clever and energetic races like the Japanese
would, if allowed to enter, have negative effects on social harmony.)
MacDonald’s chapter on
“Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy”
is a detailed survey of a topic I have not seen discussed elsewhere.
is understandable.
That their agitation
was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy
seems to me more doubtful.
And if it is true, we must believe that
97 percent of the U.S. population ended up dancing
to the tune of the other three percent.
If that is true, the only thing to say
is the one Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said:
“The more fool they.”
[8]
Similarly with MacDonald’s discussion [Chapter 3] of
Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire
and the many horrors that ensued.
This was until recently another taboo topic,
though the aged Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose,
has recently taken a crack at it.
I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity here.
Having posited that
Jews are out to “destroy” (this is his own word) Gentile society,
he was open to the riposte that if, after 2,000 years of trying,
the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even one instance,
Gentiles don’t actually have much to worry about.
So: the Jews destroyed Russia.
Though MacDonald’s discussion of this topic is interesting and illuminating,
it left me unconvinced.
As he says,
“The issue of
the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth
is complex.”
Paul Johnson
gives only 15-20 percent of the delegates at early Party congresses
as Jewish.
If the other 80-85 percent were permitting themselves
to be manipulated by such a small minority,
then we are back with Bianca.
[9]
Since the notion of “group evolutionary strategy”
is central to MacDonald’s case,
I wish he had been better able to convince me of its validity.
For instance,
I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China,
a nation that, like the diaspora Jews,
awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities
to young men who had shown mastery of
great masses of content-free written material.
Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history
knows that the guy who gets the girl—
who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives”
who are thereby denied to less intellectual males—
is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations
and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position.
This went on for two thousand years.
Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews,
display an average intelligence higher by several points
than the white-Gentile mean.
So: was Confucianism a “group evolutionary strategy”?
If so, then plainly the Chinese of China were, in MacDonald’s jargon,
the “ingroup”.
But then … what was the “outgroup”?
[The answer to that seems pretty obvious: The “Barbarians”.]
[10]
The more I think about the term “group evolutionary strategy,” in fact,
the more I wonder if it is not complete nonsense.
From an evolutionary point of view,
would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew
at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so
have been conversion to Christianity?
Rather than learning to argue fine points of theology,
would not a better strategy have been to learn, say, fencing or Latin?
Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years.
The gypsies held together pretty well, too, across many centuries,
yet their “group evolutionary strategy”
was the opposite of the Jews’ at almost every point.
And the Jewish over-representation
in important power centers of Gentile host societies
became possible only after Jewish emancipation—
which, like abolition of the slave trade,
was an entirely white-Gentile project!
Did the genes of 12th-century Jews “know”
emancipation was going to happen 700 years on? How?
If they did not, what was the point of their “evolutionary strategy”?
There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.
[11]
Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field.
There is no disputing that we need to understand
much more than we now do
about how common-ancestry groups react with each other.
Group conflicts are a key problem for multiracial and multicultural societies.
Up till about 1960, the U.S. coped with these problems
by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic dominance,
very much as Israel copes with them today
by asserting Jewish ethnic dominance.
This proved to be quite a stable arrangement,
as social arrangements go.
It was obviously objectionable to some American Jews,
and it is not surprising that
they played an enthusiastic part in undermining it;
but they were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in its downfall.
It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement,
characterized by racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense,
accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (“affirmative action”).
This system, I think it is becoming clear,
has proved less stable than what went before
and has probably now reached the point
where it cannot be sustained much longer.
What will replace it? What will the new arrangement be?
[12]
At times of flux like this,
there are naturally people whose preference is for
a return to the older dispensation.
It is obvious that Kevin MacDonald is one of these people.
If this is not so, he has some heavy explaining to do about phrases like
“the ethnic interests of white Americans
to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.”
Personally, I think he’s dreaming.
The older dispensation was not as bad
as liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe,
but it is gone forever and will not return.
For America, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
[13]
And on the point of Israel having something very much like
the old American dispensation,
I am unimpressed by MacDonald’s oft-repeated argument—
it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and anti-Semites—
that it is hypocritical for Jews
to promote multiculturalism in the U.S.
while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel.
Unless you think that ethnic dominance, under appropriate restraining laws,
is immoral per se—
and I don’t, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn’t either—
it can be the foundation of a stable and successful nation.
A nation that can establish it and maintain it would be wise to do so.
The USA was not able to maintain it because too many Americans—
far more than three percent—
came to think it violated Constitutional principles.
Israel, however, was founded on different principles,
and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that country
for dismantling Jewish-ethnic dominance,
as there was in Lyndon Johnson’s America for dismantling European dominance.
The Israelis, most of them,
are happy with Jewish-ethnic dominance and intend to keep it going.
Good luck to them.
[14]
The aspect of Macdonald’s thesis that I find least digestible
is his underlying assumption that
group conflict is a zero-sum game rooted in
an evolutionary tussle over finite resources.
This is not even true on an international scale,
as the growing wealth of the whole world during this past few decades has shown.
[Perhaps Derbyshire would revise that statement in later years.]
On the scale of a single nation, it is absurd.
These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena
that The Culture of Critique is concerned with—
Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on—
were they a net negative for America?
Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were.
Now conduct the following thought experiment.
Suppose the great post-1881 immigration of Ashkenazi Jews had never occurred.
Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003
were not the two to four percent (depending on your definitions) that it is,
but the 0.3 percent it was at the start of the Civil War.
Would anything have been lost?
Would America be richer or poorer?
Would our cultural and intellectual life be busier or duller?
[15]
It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have been lost:
entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists,
entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars:
not mere psychoanalysts and “critical theorists,”
but physicists, mathematicians, medical researchers, historians, economists—
even, as MacDonald notes honestly in his new preface,
evolutionary psychologists!
The first American song whose words I knew was “White Christmas,”
written by a first-generation Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant.
The first boss I ever had in this country was
a Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Perhaps it is true, as MacDonald claims, that
“most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union
[i.e., in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews.”
It is also true, however, that
much of the secret research they betrayed to their country’s enemies
was the work of Jewish scientists.
The Rosenbergs sold the Bomb to the Soviets;
but without Jewish physicists, there would have been no Bomb to sell.
[But, Derbyshire would have been more honest to have noted,
the Allies did not need “the Bomb” to win World War II.]
Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians
attempting to crack
a particularly intractable problem in analytic number theory.
A high proportion of the 200-some attendees were Jews,
including at least two from Israel.
Sowers of discord there have certainly been,
but on balance I cannot see how anyone could deny that
this country is enormously better off for the contributions of Jews.
Similarly for every other nation
that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish citizens.
Was Hungary better off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich?
Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions?
“To ask the question is to answer it.”
[16]
Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social scientist,
is not obliged to provide any such balance in his works,
any more than a clinical pathologist writing about disease
should be expected to include an acknowledgment that
most of his readers will be healthy for most of their lives.
I agree.
A scientist, even a social scientist,
need not present any facts other than
those he has uncovered by diligent inquiry in his particular narrow field.
He is under no obligation, as a scientist,
to soothe the feelings of
those whose sensibilities might be offended by his discoveries.
Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald’s material, however,
it wouldn’t have hurt to point out
the huge, indisputably net-positive, contributions of Jews to America,
right at the beginning of his book and again at the end.
MacDonald has in any case been fairly free in CofC with his own opinions
on such matters as U.S. support for Israel, immigration policy, and so on.
He is entitled to those opinions, but having included them in this book,
his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of cold scientific objectivity
does not sound very convincing.
[17]
This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term,
an anti-Semitic book.
Its entire argument is that the Jews, collectively, are up to no good.
This may of course be true,
and MacDonald is entitled to say that
the issue of whether his results are anti-Semitic is nugatory,
from a social-science point of view,
by comparison with the issue of their truth content.
I agree with that, too: but given the well-known history of this topic,
it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald
not to try to calm the troubled waters
his work is bound to stir up.
From my own indirect, and rather scanty, knowledge of the man,
I would put this down to
a personality combination of prickliness and unworldliness,
but I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls
that my interpretation is the correct one,
and that there is not malice lurking behind
MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.
By Kevin MacDonald
www.kevinmacdonald.net, 2003-03
[As stated,
a reply by MacDonald to Derbyshire’s review of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique.
MacDonald squarely and, I think, effectively
addresses practically all of Derbyshire’s major criticisms;
therefore all of his reply,
sans the first few stage-setting paragraphs and the notes,
appears below.]
[4]
As a result of his generally positive attitude about Jews and Judaism,
Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations,
quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence,
even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself.
He implies that
non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation
to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies
while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate.
We non-Jews should understand such Jewish behavior because
these outcomes are good for Jews.
But, somehow he fails to follow through with this logic,
imputing malice to people like me
who are concerned about the future of their own people
in societies where they are becoming minorities
surrounded by groups that, like Jews,
harbor deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them.
It is quite an extraordinary omission and lapse in consistency by Derbyshire.
In the end, the logic is as follows:
Jews have made wonderful contributions to civilization.
Therefore,
non-Jews should welcome Jewish efforts to advance their interests
even when they conflict with their own.
As Derbyshire himself says in another context,
the only thing to say of those who voice such sentiments
is what Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said: “The more fool they.”
[5]
Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world
in which Jewish interests are legitimate and
where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests,
though they may occasionally be irritating,
are not really a cause for concern much less malice.
It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that
good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest,
and that the results of conflicts of interest
can be devastating to the side that loses.
My view is that modern evolutionary theory gives us
a powerful way of understanding why this must be so.
Anti-Semites have often portrayed Jews as the embodiment of evil.
Consistent with evolutionary theory, however,
I have documented that Jews tend to be
highly intelligent,
good parents, and
patriots fighting to preserve their people
and extend their people’s power and influence —
sometimes at the expense of the interests of other peoples.
Many organized groups of Jews have pursued such conservative goals
by resisting other groups and behaving aggressively against them.
By the same logic,
it is legitimate for non-Jews to defend their own ethnic interests.
Is this a formula for perpetual conflict?
Hopefully not, but the only hope for a just resolution
is to recognize the nature of the situation and agree on terms,
not to deny the importance of one’s own interests.
[6]
Derbyshire’s review begins with a chilling account of how
critics of Jews simply disappear from sight
— their professional horizons diminished if not entirely ended.
One thinks of people like
Joe Sobran, William Cash,
[Charles Freeman, Norman Finkelstein (who is Jewish!) ]5
and a host of politicians
who have had the temerity to criticize Israel or American support for Israel,
or
who have called attention to Jewish power and influence in particular areas.
Jewish groups have made any critical discussion of Jewish issues off limits,
and that’s vitally important because, yes, Jews are a very powerful group.
[It is perhaps useful to recall that MacDonald wrote this in 2003.]
What Derbyshire refers to as Jewish “world-perfecting idealism”
is very much with us and is still wreaking havoc in the modern world,
everywhere from
the erection of a multi-cultural police state in the United States —
the origins of which are the general topic of The Culture of Critique —
to the current war for the “liberation” and “democratization” of Iraq,
a war that is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in
the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.6
As with other examples of Jewish idealism,
the destruction of Iraq is shrouded in a lofty moral idealism
aimed ultimately at securing a rather obvious Jewish ethnic goal —
Israeli hegemony throughout the Middle East.
That these latest examples of Jewish “world perfecting idealism”
also happen to conform rather obviously to Jewish ethnic interests
should be of concern to all non-Jews.
[A point that our “conservative” leaders constantly seem to ignore.]
[7]
Derbyshire dismisses evolutionary psychology as a passing fad,
and asks, sarcastically,
if in criticizing evolutionary psychology,
he is pursuing his own evolutionary goals.
Well, maybe.
Most of what we humans do is connected only distantly to evolutionary goals.
For example, quite a few evolutionary psychologists propose
an evolved goal of social status
based on commonly accepted standards of scientific evidence,7
but we are very flexible in how we achieve such goals.
And it does occur to me that
writing critiques of evolutionary psychology and
dismissing those who criticize Jews
might be one way to attain social status
among the predominantly Jewish neo-conservative elite
that dominates so much of the conservative media.
[8]
Derbyshire complains about my statement that,
“The human mind was not designed to seek truth
but rather to attain evolutionary goals.”
I was merely expressing a principle of evolutionary biology
that has been of fundamental importance
since the revolution inaugurated by G. C. Williams
and culminating in E. O. Wilson’s synthesis:
Organisms are not designed to communicate truthfully with others
but to persuade them —
to manipulate them to serve their interests.
We should expect deception and self-deception
to be at the very heart of interactions among organisms.
This is the subtext of The Culture of Critique:
The beguilingly irresistible theories masking an ethnic agenda.
I too was once enthralled by psychoanalysis and Marxism.
[9]
Derbyshire supposes that
the idea of a group evolutionary strategy may be “complete nonsense.”
Freed of technical jargon,
[15]
And beyond the transformations being wrought by
the sea change in immigration policy,
I think it inconceivable that the current regime of what Derbyshire terms
“racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense,
accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (‘affirmative action’)”
could have been built without the influence of
the intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique.
As Derbyshire notes, this regime is inherently far less stable
than what went before,
and one can only shudder at
what the future holds throughout the Western world.
[16]
It is always difficult to imagine that 3% of the population
could have such enormous influence on culture and public policy,
but successful lobbying efforts by small, committed special interests
are commonplace in American politics,
not only among ethnic lobbies
but among business interests, farming groups, unions,
professional organizations, and even gun enthusiasts.
An obvious example is U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Here we have a record of an incredibly effective, well-funded, intensive lobbying effort carried out over several decades.
The historical evidence reviewed in Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique
shows that
Jewish organizations carried out a similar campaign
in an effort to alter U.S. immigration laws
and that
they were by far the most important force in changing these laws,
often taking pride in the part they played.
[17]
Derbyshire does not think it hypocritical for
Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S.
while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel.
The hypocrisy comes from the fact that,
as I note in Chapter 8 of The Culture of Critique,
the Jewish advocacy of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate
coincided with a major effort by Jewish organizations
and Jewish-dominated intellectual and political movements
to supplant the prevailing view of the United States as
a European Christian civilization with a European ethnic base.
Especially hypocritical is that
the disestablishment of the European basis of American identity
was performed with appeal to
universalist Enlightenment ideals of justice and individual rights,
while it pathologized the ethnocultural basis of American civilization
that had become an important foundation of American identity
by the early decades of the 20th century.
Although it is common for defenders of Israel
to describe Israel as a democracy based on Western political ideals,
I have yet to see any important Jewish organization or intellectual movement
pathologize the ethnic basis of Israeli society
or challenge the many ways in which Jewish ethnic interests
are officially recognized in Israeli law and custom (e.g., the Law of Return).
Indeed, the American Jewish community has been complicit in
the ongoing ethnic warfare in the Middle East
that has resulted in the dispossession, degradation, and large-scale murder
of the Palestinians.
[18]
Derbyshire accuses me of being one of those who would prefer
“a return to the older dispensation” —
the older cultural and ethnic mix characteristic of the United States
until the changes inaugurated in the last 35 years.
I plead guilty to this charge.
That regime was stable and it was good for people like me (and Derbyshire),
and even for the American Jewish community
who saw the modest, low-profile, non-violent character of anti-Jewish attitudes
that were fairly common prior to World War II
dwindle to irrelevance in the postwar period.
Nothing wrong with that.
[19]
The dispossession of Europeans is the ultimate defeat —
an evolutionary event of catastrophic proportions
for people of European descent.
Whatever the contributions of Jewish
“entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers,
and legions upon legions of scholars,”
they could never make up for this cataclysmic loss
and for the political instability and chronic ethnic tensions
that have been unleashed by
the Jewish intellectual and political movements
discussed in The Culture of Critique.
Further, as The Culture of Critique attempts to document,
a very high percentage of the Jewish contribution to culture
has been used to advance Jewish ethnic interests.
The only exceptions are advances in technology and basic science,
but does anyone seriously suppose that
technological advances like the atomic bomb mentioned by Derbyshire
would never have been discovered without Jews?
(Germany, certainly, was very close.)
It may be that these advances would have taken longer,
but there is no question that they would have happened without Jews.
After all, with a mean IQ of 100 and far larger numbers,
European populations undoubtedly have
far more individuals of the requisite IQ
to make the stupendous contributions to culture
that have occurred in recent centuries.
[20]
Western cultures have produced a long list of ethnically European geniuses
in every field of science and art,
from Plato and Aristotle down to the present.
Pity the poor English who expelled the Jews in the Middle Ages
and were thus restricted to
the meager cultural contributions of
Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin
even as they vastly expanded their numbers
and the territory controlled by their people.
Can anyone seriously suppose that
the West would be unable to produce a brilliant high culture without Jews
or that the Jewish contribution is of irreplaceable value?
And recall that my argument in The Culture of Critique is that
many of the most important Jewish contributions to culture
were facilitated not only by high IQ
but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews
who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.
In other words, their accomplishments are due in large part to
the fundamental cultural forms of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy,
not to any inherent worth in what was produced.
The sorry records of
psychoanalysis, Boasian anthropology, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School
are far more a testimony to Jewish identity and group cohesion
than they are to anything resembling science.
[21]
Derbyshire acknowledges that
the Jewish contributions to culture discussed in The Culture of Critique
have been made with an eye to advancing Jewish ethnic interests.
This is certainly
a very sizeable portion of the entire Jewish contribution to culture
during the period I discuss,
but advancing Jewish interests by contributing to culture
goes far beyond these movements.
As I attempt to show
in the preface to the recent paperback edition of The Culture of Critique,
Jewish contributions to entertainment and the media
have often had the function of
promoting positive images of Judaism and multi-culturalism
and negative images of Christianity
and European ethnic interests and identification.
Derbyshire describes his love of songs like White Christmas
that have come to define how Christmas is experienced.
However, such songs are also part of the Kulturkampf in which
Christmas has been converted into a secular and commercialized event;
as such it represents a kind of cultural subversion.
As Philip Roth noted,
“God gave Moses the Ten Commandments
and then he gave Irving Berlin Easter Parade and White Christmas,
the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ ...
and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do?
He de-Christs them both!
Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.”13
In recent decades, a major thrust of Jewish influence on culture has been
the promotion of the Holocaust as
the fundamental moral touchstone and intellectual paradigm
of the contemporary Western world.
(I recently came across a reference stating
that there have been over 170 Holocaust films since 1989.14)
[22]
Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists
may have indeed contributed to economic growth,
but they have also lavishly funded Jewish causes —
causes that typically oppose the ethnic interests of European Americans.
Jews constitute
more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes Magazine list
of the richest four hundred Americans,
45% of the top 40 richest Americans,
and one-third of all American multimillionaires.15
The beneficiaries of this wealth include
4000 foundations controlled by Jews and
300 national Jewish organizations,
the latter with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion --
a sum greater than
the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations.
Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists like
hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt,
Charles and Edgar Bronfman (co-chairs of the Seagram Company),
bingo parlor magnate Irving Moskowitz
(who funds the settler movement in Israel),
the notorious Marc Rich (who funds Birthright Israel,
a program aimed at raising Jewish consciousness),
George Soros (who funds pro-immigration organizations in the United States
and in a variety of European countries),
film maker Steven Spielberg
(head of the Shoah and Righteous Persons foundations),
Leslie Wexner (owner of the Limited and Victoria’s Secret),
Laurence Tisch (chairman of the Loews Corporation),
Charles Schusterman (owner of an oil-and-gas business in Tulsa), and
Mort Mandel of Cleveland (former distributor of electronics parts)
[also Sheldon Adelson]
have used their money to advance Jewish causes
such as Israel and increasing Jewish consciousness and commitment among Jews.16
Wealthy Jews are by far the largest contributors to the Democratic Party
and are very significant contributors to the Republican party,17
ensuring that Jewish interests will be heeded
throughout the U.S. political spectrum.
Whether Jewish success in business
has had a measurable effect on economic growth
is difficult to know.
What we do know is that it has come with an enormous cost
to the ethnic interests of European Americans.
[23]
In concluding,
I call attention to the challenge for evolutionary psychology
in trying to understand the complete lack of ethnic identification
of so many elite Europeans such as John Derbyshire.
He is only the tip of a massive iceberg.
I have sketched a theory of why this might be
in the Preface to the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique:
a relatively weak sense of ethnocentrism
resulting from our European evolutionary past
combined with
the influence of the Jewish intellectual and political movements I describe
and its amplification in the media;
the powerful opprobrium and, increasingly, police state controls
that have become attached to criticism of Jews and Israel; and
the heady inducements to conform to
the interests and views of a powerful minority.
Having read Derbyshire’s account of his childhood,
one might add to the model two more variables:
socialization in a very benign Jewish milieu and
deep reverence for the cultural accomplishments of Jews.
In the end, Derbyshire is the epitome of that sad and paradoxical figure,
the Judaized intellectual discussed in The Culture of Critique
for whom Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes,
now constitute the culture of the West,
internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike.
It is a mindset that is leading Europeans directly to
the fate of the Israelites who stray from God’s way
as described in Deuteronomy (28:62):
“And ye shall be left few in number,
whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude.”
Here is an exchange between Joey Kurtzman of Jewcy and John Derbyshire concerning Kevin MacDonald.
2007-02-26-Kurtzman: Is Kevin MacDonald Right?
The evolutionary psychologist argues Jews evolved to triumph over Gentiles.
2007-02-27-Derbyshire: Wrestling with Derbyshire's Law
Yes, I'm afraid of offending Jews
2007-02-27-Kurtzman: There is No Cabal
Don't sell yourself as a martyr to world Jewry
2007-02-28-Derbyshire: Be Nice, or We'll Crush You
Criticizing Jews is professional suicide.
2007-03-01-Kurtzman: The Jewish Media Goliath
He's fat, lazy, and not terribly intimidating
2007-03-01-Derbyshire: A Black and a Chinaman Walk Into a Bar...
Admit it: ethnic humor is satsifying
2007-03-01-Kurtzman: A Break from Hooray-for-us Historiography
MacDonald's trilogy is worth a read
2007-03-01-Derbyshire: War-Winning, Disease-Curing, And Life-Improving
The Jews have made America a better place
by Garnet James Wolseley
The Occidental Quarterly, Spring 2008
[As stated,
a review by “Garnet James Wolseley” of MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections.]
by Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Quarterly, Spring 2008
[As stated, a reply by MacDonald
to “Garnet James Wolseley” review of MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections.]
Kevin MacDonald, Cal State Long Beach,
and the downside of academic freedom
By Brad A. Greenberg
Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, 2008-05-08
[This is a long (4600 word) story.]
[1.1]
Kevin MacDonald had just completed the first in a series of books that would come to define him. Awaiting feedback from his publisher 15 years ago, MacDonald sent his manuscript to a colleague in the psychology department at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The feedback was not encouraging.
[1.2]
“What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews,” Martin Fiebert wrote in a 12-point reply. “Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I’m sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with ‘Mein Kampf’ and the ‘Protocols of Zion.’ ”
[1.3]
How prophetic Fiebert’s insight turned out to be.
[1.4]
MacDonald, 64, has been deemed America’s “foremost anti-Semitic thinker” by civil rights experts. A tenured psychology professor who lent his expertise to Holocaust denier David Irving, MacDonald has suggested restricting college enrollment and increasing taxes for Jews to mediate what he perceives as inequities with non-Jewish whites.
[1.5]
His three-volume critique of Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” -- known collectively as “The Culture of Critique” and published by Praeger in 1994, 1998 and 1998 -- claims the religion discourages inclusion, eggs on anti-Semitism and uses study of Talmud to thin the reproduction of less intelligent members. The books have become sacred scripture for white supremacists, and a growing number of MacDonald’s colleagues have urged the university to denounce his writings.
[1.6]
“He is repackaging traditional anti-Jewish beliefs in contemporary pseudo-scientific language,” said Jeffrey Blutinger, a history professor leading the push against MacDonald. “If you think of classic anti-Jewish tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial, opposed to Christendom, a threat to the nation, using contemporary ideas as a way of undermining traditional beliefs -- all of these show up in his writing.”
[1.7]
These are strange credentials for a man who in person seems every bit a slice of Midwest Americana. Part German, part Scottish, raised to be a traditional Catholic, though he is now agnostic, MacDonald was reared in a small Wisconsin town best known for the children’s clothes that carry its name.
[1.8]
“Oshkosh was a great town to grow up in,” MacDonald said in a recent conversation. “There weren’t any Jewish families at all. I guess there was one; I knew one Jewish kid in high school. Nobody talked about Jews. There was no anti-Semitism in town. It was an unknown.”
[1.9]
He first discovered his future research subjects as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He had a few Jews as roommates, and many more were fellow travelers in the anti-war movement. Almost three decades later, when MacDonald began connecting Jewish power and success to evolutionary strategies, he would identify his leftist years as the first time Jews used his gentile face to promote what he considered their group agenda. It wasn’t until the ‘90s that MacDonald began to see Jewish communities as inimical entities slowly destroying their hosts.
[1.10]
“Jews are inevitably going to be an elite,” he said. “They are smart; they are well organized. The problem, from my point of view, is that there is a hostility there, a fear and hostility, that over the past 40 years has resulted in some changes that have not been in the interest of people like me. As simple as that.”
[1.11]
MacDonald’s core complaint is Jewish influence on immigration laws. He blames passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas and made immigration easier for non-Westerners, on a Jewish desire to oust European Americans from the majority.
[1.12]
“European people in this country will be a minority in a few years,” MacDonald said. “I don’t think that would have happened if we had had a sense of ourselves as a culture worth defending. Now, everything is up for grabs.”
[1.13]
He sat for the first of two interviews in his cramped office on campus. Tall and lanky, with white hair and a disarming smile, MacDonald hardly looks like America’s scariest academic. He is affable, even in light of the vilification he’s received, much of it from -- and this shouldn’t surprise -- Jewish peers and organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
[1.14]
“Everybody who crosses them, they are going to have a price to pay,” MacDonald said. “People won’t be seen with me; they won’t talk to me; they won’t have lunch with me. I am pretty much a nonentity around here.”
[1.15]
Until 2000, MacDonald was largely unknown on campus. Testifying for Irving in a lawsuit against Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt attracted a flurry of attention. But then the storm quieted, and MacDonald was left alone to develop and detail his theories on Jewish strategies to “destroy” Western culture, typing out page after page in his office on the fourth floor of CSULB’s 1970s-era psych building.
[1.16]
“He is not the type of guy who is going to dress up in a KKK outfit or swastika armband. The truth is that with his Ph.D and this veneer of respectability, he’s very dangerous,” said Heidi Beirich, who directs SPLC’s research and special projects.
[1.17]
“The Nazi types are reading his stuff like it is the Bible,” Beirich continued, “and they’re using it to say why Jews should be exterminated, why they should be thrown out of the country -- because he says Jews are responsible for all this immigration that is destroying white culture. His books are like the new Bible of the movement.”
[1.18]
Last spring, Beirich wrote a scathing profile of MacDonald for SPLC’s magazine, Intelligence Report, and the local chapter of the ADL became more active in raising awareness. Then earlier this year, the ground ruptured beneath MacDonald when a few uneasy colleagues from a range of academic departments coalesced and began to urge CSULB President F. King Alexander to distance the school from its infamous academic.
[1.19]
Alexander so far has declined all such requests on the basis of academic freedom. “Despite the fact that I personally disagree and even find deplorable some beliefs and opinions expressed by a few individuals on our campus, particularly those ideas that are hurtful of certain groups, I believe as Thomas Jefferson stated, that ‘errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it,’“ Alexander, who declined to be interviewed, said in a written statement.
[1.20]
“Universities should always ensure that good ideas always outweigh bad ideas,” he continued. “Universities should also be firmly committed, even at times when it is against popular opinion, to freedom of thought, and when we act to restrict opinion from the far right or the far left, then it will not be long before we can no longer call ourselves a university.”
[1.21]
But the pressure from the academic community to condemn MacDonald continues. During the past six weeks, the anthropology and history departments, as well as the Jewish studies program, all have issued statements denouncing MacDonald’s work as “professionally irresponsible and morally untenable”; the psychology department voted to disassociate from his writings because of their popularity with “extremist groups.”
[1.22]
“His approach to historical investigation is antithetical to our discipline in that he selects only those materials that support his preconceived thesis, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary,” the history faculty’s statement said. “MacDonald’s misuse of historical methodology would be unacceptable in an undergraduate history paper; how much more disturbing, therefore, is the fact that in these writings he is identified as a professor at CSULB.”
[2.1]
MacDonald’s intellectual pursuits began innocently. In 1990, he’d been at Cal State Long Beach five years, teaching and researching child psychological development, when he read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the tight-knit 19th century Jewish community of Cheyenne, Wyo.
[2.2]
“They came with a distinct culture, community activities and forms of cooperation, and they practiced their religious rituals even in the most isolated conditions,” the Times reported. “One child tells how before there was a rabbi in Cheyenne, his father dressed meat in the kosher tradition in the back of his furniture store.”
[2.3]
The article made MacDonald think of animals.
[2.4]
He had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1966 with a degree in philosophy and dreams of being a jazz musician. When reality sank in, MacDonald entered graduate school at the University of Connecticut in the mid-’70s, earning a master’s in biology and then, four years later, a doctorate in biobehavorial science.
[2.5]
His research focused on the personalities of wolves, and by the time he left UConn in 1981 to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois, MacDonald was convinced that, like the lab wolves he’d studied, human behavioral tendencies also led back to specific genetic blueprints. And that is where his mind wandered when he read about Cheyenne’s Jews.
[2.6]
“My adviser, Benson Ginsburg, wrote an article saying that wolves would be a better model for human behavior than chimpanzees, because of social bonds and their acting like a family,” MacDonald said. “They have to police the boundaries and police in-group behavior; you can’t have freeloaders. My earliest research on the behavior of Jews focused on that, and you see wolf packs do that.”
[2.7]
MacDonald began to think of Judaism as the vehicle through which an evolutionary strategy was mechanized. He decided to read Paul M. Johnston’s “A History of the Jews” and the Tanakh, or as MacDonald knew it, the Old Testament, and within short order, he was mentally outlining “A People that Shall Dwell Alone.”
[2.8]
The book became the first in his series, “The Culture of Critique.” “A People that Shall Dwell Alone” lays the foundation for MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy and briefly discusses other groups that he believes employ similar strategies: Gypsies, the Amish, Chinese living abroad.
[2.9]
Jews, he pointed out, are taught they are different -- God’s chosen -- and they are encouraged to live lives that benefit other Jews. They also marry within the Tribe, and more often their neighbors within their extended family, MacDonald wrote. Focusing on the Ashkenazim of Central and Eastern Europe, he argued that competition for resources benefited Jews who chose niche businesses, like trading and banking. And in one of his most controversial claims, MacDonald wrote that, over time Jews have grown increasingly successful because of a eugenics program built into the religion -- Talmud study, which helped determine which men got the prettiest wives, the best business opportunities and the most children.
[2.10]
“These documents contain a vast amount of material for which there are no practical functions at all,” MacDonald wrote. “The incredible elaboration of Jewish religious law in these writings suggests that this mass of material is the result of intense intellectual competition within the Jewish community and that the resulting Torah then provided an arena for intellectual competition within the Jewish community.”
[2.11]
The second volume, “Separation and its Discontents,” offers an evolutionary explanation for anti-Semitism, from the late Roman Empire to modern Diaspora life, and discusses Jewish strategies for combating discrimination. The most controversial portion of this book, Chapter 5, compares Nazism to Judaism.
[2.12]
“The National Socialist movement in Germany from 1933-1945 is a departure from Western tendencies toward universalism and muted individualism in the direction of racial nationalism and cohesive collectivism.... It may be usefully conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy that was characterized by several key features that mirrored Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.”
[2.13]
MacDonald concluded that Nazi ideology “may well have been caused or at least greatly facilitated by the presence of Judaism as a very salient and successful racially exclusive antithetical group strategy within German society.”
[2.14]
His final volume in the series, “The Culture of Critique,” focuses on Judaism as a culture of belittling non-Jews and makes broad claims about Jewish dominance in media and the social sciences, identification with radical leftist politics and influence over immigration laws. He argues in the preface to the paperback edition (2002) that Jewish intellectuals and influentials have discovered, and are committed to, the best strategy for “destroying Europeans”: convincing them of their own moral bankruptcy. “And thus,” he wrote, “the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West.”
[2.15]
MacDonald’s newest addition to this library, “Cultural Insurrections,” was published last month by Occidental Press. The book is a compilation of his essays from the past few years, with topics ranging from “Stalin’s Willing Executioners” to “What Makes Western Culture Unique.” In the book’s final essay -- “Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?” -- MacDonald embraces Jewish “hyper-ethnocentrism” as a strategy to fight the “onslaught” of immigration that he believes has increased ethnic competition for resources and threatens white European American culture. “We already see numerous examples in which coalitions of minority groups attempt to influence public policy, including immigration policy, against the interests of the European majority. And we must realize that placing ourselves in a position of vulnerability would be extremely risky, given the deep sense of historical grievance harbored by many ethnic activists toward Europeans,” MacDonald wrote.
[2.16]
“This is especially the case with Jews, and of course Jews have shown a tendency to become part of the elite in Western societies. We have recently seen reports in the press of religious Jews spitting on Christian symbols in Israel, thereby resurrecting an age-old Jewish practice. Indeed, hatred toward all things European is normative among a great many strongly identified Jews.”
[2.17]
In fact, there were reports from Ha’aretz and Christianity Today in 2004 of a spate of spitting incidents in Jerusalem, in which ultra-Orthodox Jews allegedly assaulted Christians. However, spitting, like the blood libel that claims Jews ritually slaughter Christian children and bake their blood into matzah, is not and never has been an “age-old Jewish practice.”
[2.18]
Most of the essays for “Cultural Insurrections” appeared in The Occidental Quarterly, a Mount Airy, Md.-based journal that “unapologetically defends the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples.” In 2004, the journal awarded MacDonald a $10,000 prize.
[2.19]
“MacDonald’s ‘racism’ is nothing more than the idea that European-descended peoples have as much right as any other people, including Jews, to preserve their people and their culture,” Virginia Abernethy, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and, like MacDonald, an editorial adviser to The Occidental Quarterly, wrote in the book’s foreword.
[3.1]
MacDonald’s research rests on the assumption, based on interpretations of intelligence tests, that Jews are born with superior brains. The intelligence quotient sits on a sliding scale, with the average IQ at 100. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, however, is a whopping 107 to 115, at the median higher than 70 percent of people, according to a few contested, though oft-cited, studies by Margaret E. Backman (1972), Julius S. Romanoff (1976) and Richard Lynn (2004).
[3.2]
The results have been dramatic: Freud, Einstein, Dylan. In the second half of the 20th century, Jews received 29 percent of the Nobel Prizes, while accounting for only 13 million of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants -- about two-tenths of a percent.
[3.3]
“The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data,” Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which discussed the socioeconomic consequences of racial differences in intelligence, wrote in Commentary magazine last year. “And so we come to the great question: How and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?”
[3.4]
There is no accepted explanation. Some researchers have attributed higher IQ to medieval persecution, others to Jewish identity as the People of the Book and a few, maybe flippantly, to the fruits of being God’s chosen.
[3.5]
But how researchers answer that same question depends heavily upon what school of thought they come from. Evolutionary psychologists like MacDonald credit better Jewish genes, while traditional biologists argue heightened IQ is the result of nurture, not nature.
[3.6]
“Jews may have been able to actualize their intelligence differently than other groups because we have an enormous, 5,000-year cultural history prizing learning and achievement,” said Richard M. Lerner, a critic of MacDonald who directs the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University. “There is no innateness.”
[3.7]
Few people would deny that Jews number strongly among the American elite, but very few American Jews want to talk about it. Among those who will is J.J. Goldberg, author of the authoritative 1996 book, “Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment.”
[3.8]
“A lot of the politics of Jewish advocacy, minority advocacy in general, is victimhood,” Goldberg said in an interview. “You can’t do that if you are not actually a victim. There are some people who think Jews are powerless and others, like Kevin MacDonald, think that Jews control everything. In fact, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
[3.9]
Another journalist eager to discuss this topic is Philip Weiss, who writes the blog, Mondoweiss, and, unlike Goldberg, is an anti-Zionist who can be a brutal critic of his co-religionists. In December, MacDonald mentioned Weiss on his Web site, kevinmacdonald.net, where he links to his articles about Jews and Western culture and writes lengthy responses to critics. MacDonald praised Weiss as a fellow traveler. On his own blog, Weiss quickly rejected the embrace.
[3.10]
“He is trying to examine some important ideas. I just wish he wasn’t racist about it,” Weiss said in an interview, adding, “There was scrutiny of Jewish power in Central Europe when the Nazis arose. Therefore there is no ability to scrutinize Jewish power now because it makes you a Nazi. But I think that it is a legitimate intellectual and journalistic exercise to scrutinize Jewish power. I know MacDonald is engaged in that, and I respect that. But it is his generalizations about Jews that I find disturbing.”
[3.11]
Broad brushing, a central criticism of MacDonald’s work, is a professional hazard in evolutionary psychology, a field of study whose legitimacy has been fiercely contested. For its advocates, it is scientific research that applies Darwinian principles to human behavior. Opponents liken it to Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories, “ which explained contemporary phenomena with fantastic ontological accounts that traced the maze backward.
[3.12]
Nevertheless, MacDonald was once a respected member of this community. His first book was fairly well reviewed, though the second less so and the third almost not at all. From 1995 to 2001, he served as the elected secretary-archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. That organization’s president would come to repudiate MacDonald as an “embarrassment.” “The theoretical viewpoint expressed in MacDonald’s books stands in the most extreme contradiction to nearly every contentful core claim of evolutionary psychology,” said John Tooby, co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara and a pioneer in the field.
[3.13]
Tooby’s comment, which appeared on Slate.com, was prompted by MacDonald’s decision on Jan. 31, 2000, to enter a British courtroom as an expert witness on Jewish behavior. On that day, MacDonald explained his belief that Jewish activists conspire against individuals who threaten the group interest, a model he alleged had been used to suppress, after publication, Irving’s biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
[3.14]
“Yes, I think that anti-Semitism is, you know, a perennial problem, and Jewish organizations have developed very sophisticated ways of dealing with it,” MacDonald said, in what ended up being a very short testimony. “This is one way of dealing with it. Anti-Semitism or any anti-Semitism is fought very, very intensely. They take it very seriously, and they do quite a job, obviously, of suppressing it, yes.”
[3.15]
That statement surprised Irving, who didn’t like being called an anti-Semite in court, and those few minutes have dogged MacDonald since. On his Web site and that of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a Holocaust-denying organizatin based in Newport Beach, MacDonald presented a lengthy explanation for why he agreed to testify.
[3.16]
He claimed that Lipstadt, following a pattern of Jewish activism, had “attempted to prevent the publication of writings conflicting with their constructions of reality” and exaggerated Irving’s Holocaust denial. MacDonald also appealed to the academic importance of Irving’s book, “Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich.”
[3.17]
“He had access to original documents in the Soviet Union that nobody knew about. It was the kind of thing that any historian would have to read. And yet it was rescinded; they actually took it off the shelf. I thought that was ridiculous, just activism stuff,” MacDonald added in an interview. “It was just suppression of free speech.”
[3.18]
In Lipstadt’s memoir, “History on Trial,” she recalled the surprise of learning an expert on anti-Semitism would be a witness against her.
[3.19]
“I could not fathom,” she wrote, “how a specialist on anti-Semitism would voluntarily testify on Irving’s behalf, unless, I thought -- facetiously -- somehow he’s for it.”
[4.1]
Cal State Long Beach’s Jewish studies program is located about 100 yards from Psych 417 on the second floor of a collection of history and sociology offices that looks 70 years old and smells older. The program is identified by a corkboard adjacent to the office of co-director Jeffrey Blutinger, who teaches Jewish intellectual and cultural history and post-communist Holocaust memorialization. Waiting outside, visitors are entertained by the printed phrases of “Jewish Buddhists” -- “If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?” and “Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.” -- and satirical headlines from a backdated issue of The Onion -- “Furher’s Slaughter of Millions Blamed on Serious Self-Esteem Issues.”
[4.2]
Blutinger’s office is stuffed with six bookcases full of Jewish history, from Heinrich Graetz to pioneer Jews of the American West. And lumped on a pile of binders beneath the Encyclopedia Judaica lay first editions of MacDonald’s first two books, checked out from the university library, and borrowed copies of “The Culture of Critique” and “Understanding Jewish Influence,” an Occidental Quarterly monograph containing three MacDonald essays.
[4.3]
A former lawyer who joined the faculty four years ago, Blutinger has emerged as a leader in the battle against MacDonald, urging colleagues across campus to join the fight and authoring the Jewish studies’ program statement denouncing MacDonald’s research and the appended 18-page explanation.
[4.4]
“It’s important that we take a stand,” Blutinger said. “I teach the Holocaust every fall, and the thing I always end the course with is that, God willing, we will never have to make the choice people did back then, but all of us face the choice between what’s right and doing what is easy or convenient. I tell them that I hope they will do what is right.”
[4.5]
“If we are not willing to stand up when the risks are small,” he continued, “why would we be willing to take a stand when the risks are big?”
[4.6]
Unpopular as MacDonald’s views are, there appears little the university can do. He is protected by his status as a tenured professor, which he achieved in 1994, the year the first book in his “Culture of Critique” series was published. MacDonald also received a distinguished faculty award in 1995, and there is no record of any student complaint about anything MacDonald has said in 23 years, the administration, ADL and Hillel all reported.
[4.7]
Cal Sate Long Beach has been down this road before.
[4.8]
Nearly 30 years ago, Reinhard K. Buchner, a physics professor who from 1980 to 1983 was an editorial adviser for IHR’s now-defunct Journal of Historical Review, drew protests from the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center. The journal carried such Buchner essays as “The Problem of Cremator Hours and Incineration Time,” which argued, using time-space calculations, that the number of Jews who possibly could have been killed at Auschwitz has been exaggerated.
[4.9]
Buchner eventually returned to Germany, but a former colleague on the editorial board, Arthur R. Butz, remains in American academia. A long-time associate professor of engineering at Northwestern University, Butz was an early Holocaust denier. In 1976, he wrote “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.”
[4.10]
Many other tenured scholars, from the lowest to highest levels of academia, use their position to share unsavory opinions. The issue is one of academic freedom, designed to encourage bold research by protecting faculty from the political whims of capricious administrators. And even as it promotes experimental research in every discipline, it also frequently puts universities in uncomfortable positions.
[4.11]
MacDonald has publicly warned Cal State Long Beach administrators, responsible for the second-largest student body (population: 37,000) in the country’s largest university system (23 campuses scattered from Arcata to San Diego), that the school could expect a lawsuit if he was terminated without just cause.
[4.12]
This is why faculty statements have urged only that the university distance itself from his theories about Jews and his support for ethnostates that create a haven for European American interests. Each of the four departmental statements professed a belief in his freedom to write about whatever he wants.
[4.13]
“We wish to make it clear that we do not seek to impede Kevin MacDonald’s First Amendment rights,” proclaimed the statement from the anthropology department, released April 28. “However, just as he has rights, we have the right, if not the obligation, to denounce his writings on race, ethnicity and intelligence that promote intolerance, as not only inaccurate, but as professionally irresponsible and morally untenable.”
[4.14]
In the second of two recent interviews, MacDonald said he is not a fan of anti-Semitism. But he also described his opinions on a Palestinian American TV news program in 2005 as “rational” anti-Semitism and has joked that being branded a Jew hater was a “badge of honor,” the knee-jerk reaction of a scared Jewish establishment.
[4.15]
The chief concern over MacDonald’s writings about Jews is directed at his fan base: white supremacists like Stormfront.org and Vanguard News Network -- whose motto is “No Jews. Just Right.” The members of these online communities have become his loudest defenders, often in language that is as offensive as possible.
[4.16]
“So the goddam Kikes are getting their way yet again, putting the thumbscrews to a White scholar whose ass they are not worthy to lick.... At least this oppression proves that Prof. MacDonald’s great work is hitting the scum hard,” a Vanguard commenter wrote in February below a republished story about MacDonald from CSULB’s student paper.
[4.17]
“How much more of this humiliation is our race going to take? How long before this motherf---ing plague of repulsive, hook-snouted ticks is given a real Zyklon fumigation, as opposed to the fairy tale one?”
[4.18]
MacDonald repudiated such rhetoric as “crazy stuff” but said he supports the ideology behind it.
[4.19]
“White people have legitimate ethnic interests. To the extent that that is all they believe, then we are on the same page,” he said. “I don’t like to use words like white supremacists. You could say that Koreans in Korea are Korean supremacists if they want to maintain their culture. It is kind of a loaded word; it is a politically charged word of the left, basically, to pathologize any sense of having an ethnicity and culture by people like me. I reject that.”
[4.20]
“I certainly reject the tactics and the rhetoric of these people. It’s very crude,” MacDonald added. “But to the extent that David Duke is trying to advance a white ethnic interest and so on, I don’t have any problem with that.”
by Paul Gottfried (note: Gottfried is Jewish, of German Jewish descent)
Taki’s Magazine (Taki’s Top Drawer), 2009-04-06
[The ostensible purpose for this article
is to review Kevin MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections,
but it really describes and criticizes
some broad themes in MacDonald’s writings on Jews.
In the following, most (but not all) of the emphasis is added.]
[1]
Among those authors considered politically incorrect,
and even those considered really politically incorrect,
Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame.
A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal
describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology
at California State University at Long Beach as
“the professor anti-Semites love.”
Alluding to the fact that
university authorities have been trying
to force the outspoken MacDonald
out of his tenured position,
the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.”
We also learn that this clinical psychologist is
“considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.”
[2]
It would be ridiculous to imagine the same ignominy
would be visited on MacDonald
if he were a black sociologist making critical remarks about white people.
Assuming that he were a designated victim,
he would be allowed to compose for profit and prestige
diatribes against white Christian males,
possibly from a cushy university post at whatever salary
illustrious defamers of Euro-Americans [e.g.] are now earning.
And if he were a Jew or Christian
attacking Christians as the agents of human evil,
the now browbeaten MacDonald
could make a king’s ransom at some well-heeled institute
or as a feature writer for The New Republic or New York Times.
[3]
Readers of this website are aware of
the lunatic double standard
that has been imposed on intellectuals throughout the Western world,
almost always by Westerners themselves,
for the purpose of determining
who can criticize whom.
(By now this has become a permanent aspect of “democratic” regimes.)
[4]
Plainly MacDonald is not playing by the establishment rules
when he observes that
Jews have worked at weakening those non-Jewish societies
in which they have lived.
Although this thesis seems to me to be a bit too generalized,
I have no objection to letting MacDonald go on trying to prove it.
[5]
In his recently published anthology of essays, Cultural Insurrections,
it would be proper to note that MacDonald makes assumptions here
that I have questioned in my review of
his three-volume, monumental work on the Jews since Moses
[PTSDA, SAID, CC].
I continue to find some of the cognitive disparities he stresses
between Ashkenazi Jews and Euro-Americans
to be overstated or at least under-demonstrated.
If they were in fact as stark as MacDonald insists they are,
I would believe that Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans
as natural inferiors or
as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization
(or what remains of it) without a Jewish master class.
I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating
from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved
in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.
[6]
It also seems that certain Jewish behavioral patterns MacDonald outlines
are not uniquely Jewish.
Other minorities such as
Protestant non-conformists
and later Irish Catholics in England (and in the U.S.),
Huguenots in France, and
Old Believers in Tsarist Russia,
have shown exactly the same propensity for radical social causes,
partly as acts of defiance against what they viewed as
regimes that had failed to accord them full legal and/or social recognition.
[7]
Sephardic and German Jews
who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
seemed hell-bent on joining upper-class Protestants
and they usually disappeared into the dominant gene pool
within a few generations.
I am not convinced that Jewish behavior toward Christians
follows a biologically determined strategy
aimed at the control of resources.
My lifelong impression from being around them is that
Jews don’t like Christians because of historical grievances,
just the way Irish Catholics continue to rage against Protestant Yankees
for real amd imaginary offenses inflicted on their ancestors.
[8]
Although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here,
it is doubtful that these dividing lines
operate strictly according to biological conditioning.
And it seems even less likely that they are shaped by
the natural desire to control resources, in competition against other groups.
Much of what MacDonald cites as Jewish behavior
is hostility, mixed with anxiety, rather than competitiveness.
MacDonald is illustrating culturally subversive activities
that go well beyond
any attempt to achieve group competitive advantage
measured by socio-economic success.
Assailing the moral foundations of a Christian middle-class society
as pathological and anti-Semitic,
a tendency MacDonald proves Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly engaged in,
is not simply an attack on the material resources of the dominant society.
What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior;
and one may certainly question the biological reductionism used to explain it.
[9]
Having raised these critical points,
I should also mention that
Jews are not the only minority
that has attempted to subvert dominant outside cultures.
They’re just better at doing this than any other group.
Jewish intellectuals and activists excel at agitating
in the name of some presumed moral high ground,
acting like the cunning or resentful priestly class,
to which Nietzsche compared the Jews in Genealogy of Morals.
In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jews are good at transmitting “slave morality,”
without being (immediately) infected themselves.
[10]
MacDonald’s newest anthology offers further evidence
of what he understands as
the Jewish practice of burrowing from within
to weaken the cultural coherence of gentile societies.
[A prime example is revealed in the
Washington Post’s 2009-05-14 coverage
of the explosion of illegitimate births in America.]
And he offers abundant proof that this burrowing has and is continuing to occur.
Whether he is dealing with the predominantly Jewish Frankfurt School
and its cultural influences,
the role played by Jewish activists in opposing controls on immigration
throughout the last hundred years,
the penetration and takeover of the American Right
by the neoconservatives, or
the pressures placed on politicians and political parties
by Zionist organizations,
MacDonald creates the impression that
Jews have worked collectively toward two ends:
lessening the cohesion of gentile society and
promoting specifically Jewish national ends.
[11]
An argument I have used in the past to counter his generalizations is that
“not every Jewish community at all times and in all places
has acted in this way”;
nonetheless,
MacDonald could respond to my objections
by pointing out that
his analysis applies to American Jews for at least the last several generations.
And he offers evidence that the same behavioral patterns
as the one he discerns
among the predominantly Eastern European Jews in the U.S.
could already be seen among the relatively assimilated German Jews
since their emancipation in Europe.
[12]
The same radicalization could be perceived
among German Jewish intellectuals
going back to the beginnings of Marxian socialism.
And the cultural Marxism that has now taken off in a big way
had its origin among
alienated or embittered German Jews of the interwar period,
who later emigrated to the U.S.
The present multicultural fixation
that has taken Western Europe, Canada and the U.S. by storm
was largely the creation of German Jews.
[13]
But the group MacDonald’s brief leaves me wondering about most
is the white Christian majority:
They are jerked around because
they have accepted this role for themselves.
My own works on the politics of guilt underlines this tendency:
Euro-Americans have become
emotionally and sociologically predisposed toward aggrieved minorities
that condemn them for politically incorrect attitudes.
But have Jewish priests been necessary to get the Christian majority
to practice slave morality?
My answer is that “it helps but isn’t absolutely necessary.”
[14]
The institution of learning [viz.] at which I work
and the German Anabaptist denomination to which it was long connected
are paradigmatically PC.
Furthermore, Lancaster County, where our college is located,
registered the largest vote for Obama in the Democratic primary
of any county in Pennsylvania that’s not predominantly black.
This result was owed much to Church of the Brethren,
whose members in their zany anti-racism and open-borders postures
make Abe Foxman sound relatively sane.
The chance that such radicalized Protestants,
who live in their own social bubble,
would have picked up their lunacies from any Jew (me perhaps?)
is next to nil.
They came by their madness on their own, as a “peace church,”
and as late entrees into the modern age
after having spent an eternity on
isolated farms in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Like Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis, Bill Moyers,
and most of the Catholic hierarchy on the question of immigration,
these Anabaptists exemplify aspects of Christianity
that are totally compatible with
cultural Marxism and the politics of Western suicide.
They do not need Jews, blacks, or North African Muslims
to teach them self-destructive behavior,
any more than Swedes or Spaniards need the villains in MacDonald’s script
to hand over their countries to hostile Muslims from North Africa.
[15]
The most interesting point for me in MacDonald’s volume
is his presentation of
movement conservative goyim.
He is absolutely on the money in documenting
their servility
in relation to
their neoconservative puppet-masters.
The most startling aspect of this relation is the degree to which
the servile class allows itself to be instructed.
Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith,
and other neoconservative spokesmen
have indeed convinced their pliant enablers that
Israel is to be defended as an “ethno-cultural creation,”
while
the American nation is to be seen as
possessing an “ideological identity,”
founded on global human rights principles
and on an expansionist foreign policy.
MacDonald cites the remarkable tribute produced for neocon guru Leo Strauss
by his admiring disciple Werner Dannhauser,
a tribute that extols Strauss, the famous mentor to global democrats,
as “a good Jew.
He knew the dignity and worth of love of one’s own.
Love of the good is higher than love of one’s own,
but there is only one road to truth
and it leads through love of one’s own.”
MacDonald asks rhetorically whether Anglo-Saxon Protestant “conservatives”
could express such sentiments about their own group
without Jewish liberals or neocons
attacking them as nativists or incipient Nazis.
[16]
McDonald cites the public letter
drafted by William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century in 2002,
calling for a “move against Saddam Hussein,” on the grounds that
“Israel’s fight against terrorism is ours.”
MacDonald calls special attention to the prominent Jewish neoconservatives
who appended their signatures
to this call for a war of aggression on behalf of Israel.
But what is perhaps even more striking are the non-Jewish signatories,
such as William J. Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ellen Bork,
and the professionally insecure, very young editor of National Review,
Rich Lowry.
In most of these cases one encounters demonstrations of fealty paid to
the neoconservative barons who run
FOX News, Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, ISI,
and the minds of a majority of Republican voters.
[17]
But pace MacDonald, these neocon lords and their servants
are not the voices of the entire Likud coalition in Israel.
They speak for Natan Sharansky, Benjamin Netanyahu,
and others even further on the Israeli nationalist right,
many of whom have been taught to mumble neocon gibberish
about how “democracies have never fought wars” and
about how “only democracies are legitimate governments.”
A point Israeli political analysts
Leon Hadar (see especially his book Sandstorm) and Martin van Creveld
have argued for several years now is that
neoconservatives and their gentile policy-think-tank hangers-on
do not speak for the majority of Israelis,
who certainly did not favor the American invasion of Iraq.
[If one restricts from “Israelis” to “Israeli Jews,”
which of course is the critical block for influencing American policy,
the picture is quite different.
In fact, according to the polls just cited, they certainly did.]
(Iran might well be a different matter.)
It was American neoconservatives,
supported by the Christian Right and their Israeli contacts,
who planned Bush’s Middle Eastern policy.
In the end, MacDonald demonstrates the same when he investigates
the Israeli associations of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.
[18]
The Evangelical Cal Thomas
and the “conservative Catholic” “theologian” Michael Novak
invariably cite in their columns and speeches
the alleged return of anti-Semitism on the antiwar left.
When Novak came to speak at my college six years ago,
he attacked movie producers in Hollywood—Jewish leftists to a man—
as “anti-Semites.”
The audience listened to him in understandable astonishment,
for it could not escape even our news-averse trustees
that Novak was saying something glaringly ridiculous.
[19]
Moreover, in their invectives against Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright,
FOX News analysts and announcers
played on Wright’s association with the “anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.”
That Wright and Farrakhan don’t much like Jews and Judaism
seemed to matter more than the more obvious fact that
the pair hate the Jews specifically as subgroup of Whitey.
[20]
Such pandering may result from the fact that
movement conservative gentiles are almost as infected as other gentiles
by the politics of white Christian guilt.
They can only embrace their country
to the extent that it renounces an “ethnic-cultural” identity,
a character that they happily concede to Jews and others,
but which they have collectively renounced
for the dubious honor of being a “propositional nation.”
Naturally (what else?) the assumption of this contrived identity
sets the stage for
their country being overwhelmed by legal and illegal Third World immigrants.
It also means
waging whatever wars
the neocon master race tells their gentile collaborators
[are] “good for Israel” and/or help to spread “democracy.”
Unlike MacDonald,
I see no compelling reason to blame this lunacy
exclusively or even predominantly on
the two percent of the population which is Jewish,
without noticing that
the majority group,
including those who describe themselves as “conservatives,”
have lost their cotton-picking minds.
by Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Observer, 2009-04-18
[This answers some points in the Gottfried review cited above.
Here is a copy of MacDonald's response,
without the many links in the original.
What appeared to me to be certain typos have been silently corrected.]
[0.1]
Paul Gottfried is outside the mainstream of Jewish intellectuals
in being associated with paleoconservatives rather than
either the left or the neoconservative right.
In my eyes, therefore, he is a force for relative good
in a world where paleocons like Pat Buchanan have been relegated to
the fringes of intellectual debate in the US
and have long rap sheets at powerful, well-endowed organizations
like the $PLC and the ADL.
[0.2]
Another reason I am predisposed to be positive about Gottfried is that
he reviewed Cultural Insurrections respectfully,
noting pointedly that there are completely different standards
in discussing the activities and influence of other ethnic groups or religions.
And he agrees with much of my analysis that
Jews have in fact been deeply involved in erecting
the culture of critique that now pervades the West.
[0.3]
Inevitably, however,
despite a great many good things in Gottfried’s review,
my reply must necessarily discuss points of disagreement.
As Gottfried notes,
he has previously reviewed Culture of Critique in Chronicles,
and we went back and forth on it in print,
with a final rejoinder by me on my website.
(The entire thread is here.)
He makes some of the same points in his recent review,
but it’s worth discussing them again
because we have both refined our arguments a bit in the last decade.
Section 1
[1.1]
The area of Jewish IQ has attracted quite a bit of research
since my review in 1994.
My estimate of an IQ of 115 for Ashkenazi Jews
is higher than estimates based on more recent data.
Richard Lynn’s work is exemplary:
Lynn finds that Ashkenazi Jews in Britain and the US
have average IQ’s of 110.7 and 110.4 respectively,
and I am happy to accept those figures.
[1.2]
Assuming those averages,
then one would expect there would be
4 times the proportion of Jews with >130 IQ and
6 times the proportion of Jews with >145 IQ.
As Lynn notes,
this goes some way to explaining Jewish overrepresentation
among academic elites in the US and Britain
(by factors of 7.0 and 7.6 respectively)
and among winners of Nobel prizes
(by factors of 8.0 and 12.3 respectively).
[1.3]
But none of these data shows that, as Gottfried phrases it,
“Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans as natural inferiors
or as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization (or what remains of it)
without a Jewish master class.”
[Gottfried definitely did not assert that
that was Jewish behavior or attitudes,
rather it was part of a hypothetical he posed.]
[1.4]
In fact, even assuming those proportions,
because Jews are such a small percentage of the population,
there are far more European-Americans and native Brits
with IQ’s above either 130 or 145.
And, also consistent with my 1994 analysis,
there are far more non-Jews among Nobel prize winners than Jews.
[1.5]
In fact, if we take an IQ of 145 as a cutoff for genius
and assume that Jews were around 3.4% of the White US population in 1950,
there were nearly 4 times more non-Jewish White geniuses in the US
than Jewish geniuses.
If we use 130 as a benchmark
for at least vastly easing the path to upward mobility,
there were over 6 times more non-Jewish Whites in this category than Jews.
And there would have been a much greater disparity in England
where Jews were less than 1% of the population.
[1.6]
Europeans certainly do not need Jews to develop or maintain their civilization.
The successful erection of the culture of critique
is much more about ethnic networking
and dominating key points in the cultural food chain —
especially elite academic institutions and the media —
than it is about IQ.
[1.7]
For example,
even correcting for IQ,
Jews are massively overrepresented at Ivy League universities
compared to Whites.
In 1998,
Jews represented around 25–33% of Harvard undergraduates
compared to around 25% non-Jewish Whites.
In 2000 the Jewish population was around 3%
of the non-Hispanic White population.
On the basis of IQ,
the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around
7 to 1 (IQ >130) or
4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145).
Instead, the ratio was at most 1 to 1.
But even this may underestimate the gap
because it’s hard to believe that
all Harvard students have at least an IQ of 130.
Could it be that that Jared Kushner’s route to Harvard
is not at all unusual for Jews these days?
[Frankly I think that last is probably a bit of a cheap shot.
While a few Jews no doubt now are getting into prestigious universities
based on their family’s wealth and/or prestige,
as surely some gentiles have done in the past,
I have the greatest confidence in the combination of
high intelligence and dedicated work ethic possessed by many, if not most, Jews.
That, plus the profound allegiance to the principles of political correctness
(which were practically invented by Jews) which is being indoctrinated into Jews,
gives them a leg up on getting into the prestigious universities.
Whether those universities should be using political correctness as a litmus test for entry is another story.]
[1.8]
And what, then, to make of Jewish representation of 60%
in studies of the American media elite? (See here.)
Pretty clearly, IQ has very little to do with it.
This is entirely compatible with
Merlin Miller’s recent TOO article on Hollywood where he notes that
Jewish graduates of USC’s film production program
were able to achieve much more with the same credentials
than their non-Jewish counterparts.
[1.9]
Indeed, the larger point is that
the rise of the West happened without any significant Jewish contribution.
The age of Spanish conquest and exploration began
in the same year that the Jews were expelled from Spain
and not long after the Inquisition was launched in 1481.
During this period,
Spain became the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe.
Eventually,
the main competitors with Spain were Western European countries —
especially England —
that had expelled Jews in the Middle Ages.
[1.10]
The “rise of the Jews” — Albert Lindemann’s term —
resulted ultimately from
a Jewish population explosion
among Hasidic and other fundamentalist Jews in Eastern Europe.
But Eastern Europe remained a relative backwater
compared to Western Europe and America
despite the fact that, as Yuri Slezkine has shown,
Jews completely dominated the economic and cultural life in those areas,
at least until World War II.
Section 2
[2.1]
Gottfried writes [¶5],
“I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating
from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved
in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.”
[2.2]
But I am not making any such claim.
Each country must be analyzed separately,
and one can never make generalizations across time and place
without examining the data.
[2.3]
Nevertheless,
an important aspect of traditional Jewish attitudes has been
animosity toward the wider, non-Jewish culture.
In reviewing Cultural Insurrections,
Gottfried presumably noticed Chapter 2 —
my review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century,
subtitled “Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR.”
That essay reviews
Jewish hostility toward non-Jewish national cultures
throughout Eastern and Central Europe
beginning in the latter 19th century and extending into
the mass murders of cultural non-conformists of the Soviet period.
Cultural subversion was also an important theme of
the essays on Henry Ford and The International Jew
which also appear in Cultural Insurrections.
[2.4]
The first chapter of Culture of Critique
also traces a long history of Jewish hostility
toward the people and culture of surrounding societies —
Muslim, Christian and pagan —
beginning in the ancient world.
For the most part
this hostility remained within the confines of the Jewish community —
especially in Jewish religious writing.
But this was due solely to the undeveloped state of the media
and the self-segregation or exclusion of Jews from the wider society.
[2.5]
However, when Jews did enter the wider society, as in 15th-century Spain,
the radical critiques of Jewish intellectuals appeared in
the most prestigious academic and popular media.
This has been the pattern in the contemporary history of the West,
at least since the mid-19th century.
[2.6]
The point is that we should not minimize
the tendency for Jews to create movements
that are highly critical of the people and culture of non-Jews.
One shouldn’t over-generalize this to all Jews.
Paul Gottfried is certainly an exception,
and he is doubtless correct that
this tendency was at least muted
in the contingent of German Jews who came to America in the mid-19th century.
(In Germany, however, the association of Jews with cultural criticism
was an important ingredient in anti-Jewish attitudes
from the late 19th century up until the rise of National Socialism.)
[2.7]
Nevertheless, despite their relative lack of hostility,
it should be noted that German Jews like
Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and Louis Brandeis
were effective activists on behalf of Jewish causes
that were at least arguably not in the interests of the United States
or its non-Jewish citizens.
For example, Jewish activists led by the American Jewish Committee
influenced US immigration policy so that Eastern European Jews
were allowed to immigrate two decades after
the American public opposed further immigration.
This group also successfully influenced US foreign policy
to oppose Russia until the triumph of the Bolsheviks,
and Brandeis was an influential Zionist.
[2.8]
In these cases,
their motivation was not so much hostility toward the US
as simply their perception of Jewish interests.
On the other hand, Franz Boas,
a German Jew with a great deal of animosity toward Prussian culture,
was a seminal figure in erecting the culture of critique in America.
And then there’s the Frankfurt School of German-Jewish émigrés who,
after being expelled from National Socialist Germany,
brought to America their poisonous ideology
that the group allegiances of non-Jews is a sign of psychopathology.
[2.9]
But in any case,
there has been a clear tendency
for at least some groups of strongly identified Jews
to create influential intellectual movements
that subject non-Jewish society to radical critique,
and Gottfried seems to agree with this.
[2.10]
As reviewed in The Culture of Critique,
the psychological basis for this is straightforward:
Members of strongly identified ingroups
tend to have negative views of outgroups,
especially outgroups seen as historical enemies.
And for many activist Jews —
the ones who end up having so much influence on culture,
Western history begins with
the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans,
fast forwards to marauding Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition,
and expulsions from Western Europe,
and culminates in Czarist persecutions, Henry Ford, and the Holocaust.
[2.11]
In saying that,
I am agreeing with Gottfried that
the animosity of Jewish intellectual movements
is firmly rooted in their perception of history.
(Ironically perhaps,
this makes Gottfried much more on board with the general thrust of my writing
than the review by “Garnet James Wolseley”
that appeared in The Occidental Quarterly.
See my reply.)
I do not use the phrase “resource competition”
to describe conflicts between Jews and non-Jews
in Culture of Critique.
The use of this phrase stems from my earlier books
on historical patterns of Jewish behavior
(e.g., the tendency of Jews to make alliances with oppressive elites)
and historical anti-Semitism
(e.g., hatred toward Jews competing for similar economic niches).
[2.12]
Culture of Critique formulates the conflict quite differently.
The main framework is the psychology of ingroup/outgroup conflict,
and there is little question that historical grudges
have played a major role in that.
Indeed, the theme of Jewish historical grudges
is prominent in Chapter 1 of Cultural Insurrections:
“Background Traits for Jewish Activism.”
[2.13]
Incidentally, others who have thought long and hard about Jews
ave come to a similar conclusion about
the role of Jewish hatred as a motivating force.
Consider Pat Buchanan’s pointed analogy between
the hatred that is driving the persecution of John Demjanjuk and
the hatred that drove the crucifixion of Christ:
“The spirit behind this un-American persecution
has never been that of justice tempered by mercy.
It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge
that drove another innocent Man up Calvary
that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.”
[2.14]
This is clearly a barely veiled reference to
the “blood libel” of classic Catholic theology.
But the point here is that
the persecution of Demjanjuk is motivated by
hatred and revenge for historical grievances—
exactly the motives that Gottfried and I are ascribing to
the creators of the culture of critique.
[2.15]
But having said that,
there is little question that besides hatred and revenge,
another very important part of the equation is displacement and domination.
As I noted in my recent VDARE.com article on the Jewish left,
it is more than the hostility of former ghetto dwellers
suddenly released into the modern Western world —
the phenomenon that was described so well by John Murray Cuddihy.
It is about displacement and domination:
[2.16]
Ultimately, it is about resources — political, economic, and cultural.
When Whites become a minority in the US
as a result of
the mass immigration unleashed by Jewish activism and the culture of critique,
they will come to realize how devastatingly true this is.
[2.17]
I also agree with Gottfried that other historically aggrieved groups
have been hostile toward societies seen as oppressing them.
The only difference is that, as Gottfried, notes,
Jews are so much better at this game than other groups —
much better at becoming an influential component of elite and popular culture.
[2.18]
There is no question that African Americans
have legitimate historical grudges against the American past.
However, there can be little doubt that, by themselves,
they would not have had much of an influence in erecting a culture of critique.
The culture of critique was successful
because it emanated from
Harvard, Hollywood, well-connected law firms, and the New York Times —
the most prestigious academic and media institutions.
[2.19]
But of course this is exactly why we have to concentrate on Jewish influence,
not Black influence or Latino influence, much less Huguenot influence.
Section 3
[3.1]
In commenting on this general ethnic tendency, Gottfried states that
“although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here,
it is doubtful that these dividing lines
operate strictly according to biological conditioning.”
And again:
“What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior;
and one may certainly question
the biological reductionism used to explain it.”
[3.2]
My theory is that the tendency for hostility toward outgroups
is indeed a psychological universal stemming from our evolutionary past,
although it is doubtless true that
Jews are far more motivated by ingroup/outgroup distinctions
than typical Westerners —
what I term Jewish “hyper-ethnocentrism.”
But even so,
invoking the evolutionary psychology of group competition
certainly does not make me a biological reductionist.
[3.3]
I wish that Gottfried had read and commented on
“Psychology and White Ethnocentrism” —
another chapter in Cultural Insurrections
and one that I think is perhaps the most important in the book.
(This is the academic version of that chapter.)
[3.4]
Viewed as a whole,
my work is much more about culture than it is about biology —
else why write a book titled The Culture of Critique?
Hostility toward outgroups is indeed a biological universal,
but the result is that
Jewish intellectual movements then create a culture
that is hostile to White people, their culture and their history.
This culture of critique then has important consequences
because culture is able to have a strong influence on human behavior
for the reasons described in “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism”:
[3.5]
Whatever else one might call me,
‘biological reductionist’ is not one of them.
(Nor is it likely that anyone who has seen me would call me “small-boned.”
And, for the record, I am not a clinical psychologist: Evolutionary/developmental/personality psychologist
would be more or less accurate.
Section 4
[4.1]
Finally, we come to perhaps the most important and difficult point —
the fact that, as Gottfried says,
“the majority group,
including those who describe themselves as ‘conservatives,’
have lost their cotton-picking minds.”
I completely agree with this,
and it is certainly something that I have thought a lot about.
[4.2]
For starters,
this is why I have always phrased my claims about Jewish influence
as a necessary condition
rather than a sufficient condition.
[4.3]
Secondly, I have emphasized
how the reward and punishment structure of multi-cultural America
provides a great many opportunities for self-interested Whites
who have no concern for their own people.
Gottfried does a good job in recounting my emphasis on goyish careerists
who flock to neocon think tanks,
with the result that American conservatism is pretty much non-existent.
(The “conservative” Heritage Foundation recently advocated
a massive increase in H1B visas in the middle of a recession.
Sometimes it seems as if “conservatives” and liberals are competing to see
which group can speed up the displacement of Whites the fastest.)
[4.4]
But it’s not just about careerism
in a world where Jews are a very substantial component of the American elite.
As Gottfried notes, it’s also about White guilt.
But here Gottfried ignores the chapters of Cultural Insurrections
where I develop my ideas on the psychological tendencies of Whites
that make them predisposed to support the culture of critique,
particularly “What Makes Western Culture Unique?”
and “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism.”
This builds on earlier work,
particularly the Preface to the Paperback Edition of Culture of Critique.
[4.5]
In general, my view is that
these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between
preexisting deep-rooted tendencies of Europeans
(individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite
hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.
At the psychological level, I have proposed that
because Whites evolved in small groups
where individual reputation rather than kinship relatedness
was of the upmost importance,
Whites are more prone to guilt for transgressing social norms.
One’s reputation rather than one’s place in a kinship structure
became of exaggerated importance for Europeans.
[4.6]
Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like has the following example showing
the powerful sense of guilt at transgressing social norms
that seems to haunt most whites,
even for trivial things like not recycling:
[4.7]
Following the social norm of recycling is motivated by
avoiding guilt that will “eat at them for days.”
White people are easily shamed if they think they are violating a social norm.
It’s easy to see how this was adaptive in small groups that we evolved in,
where your place in the kinship structure was less important than
your reputation as a team player.
But when
the most important social norms in the West
demand suicidal behavior by whites,
upholding them becomes a pathology.
[4.8]
Recently, I have expanded on these ideas in my essay on
how the Puritans erected a home-grown culture of critique
in 19th-century America.
There I discuss the psychology of moralistic self-punishment
exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants,
but also apparent in a great many other whites.
[4.9]
Gottfried is correct that the culture of critique
could have developed without Jews in 20th-century America.
But it didn’t.
The Puritan culture of moralistic aggression
that rationalized the Civil War and the utopian idealism of the 19th century
lost out to Darwinism by the early 20th century.
(Hence the opposition to Darwinism
that is at the heart of all the Jewish intellectual movements
discussed in The Culture of Critique.)
[4.10]
At that time it was common for intellectual elites to believe in
the reality of racial differences
and the reality of competition between races and ethnic groups.
Bluebloods like Henry Cabot Lodge and Madison Grant
who descended from the Puritans
were extolling the virtues of Northern Europeans
and funding the movement to end immigration —
a battle that ended with the restrictive immigration law of 1924.
A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard
and Vice President of the Immigration Restriction League,
opposed the nomination of Louis Brandeis as a Supreme Court Justice
because of Brandeis’
ardent Zionism,
supported quotas on Jewish students (15%),
supported racial segregation,
and opposed homosexuality.
[4.11]
As recounted by Jerome Karabel,
Lowell lost the battle to explicitly restrict Jewish enrollment
to a coalition of elite German Jews (notably Walter Lippmann)
and elite Protestants led by former Harvard President Charles W. Eliot
representing the older strand of Yankee universalism.
Nevertheless, Jewish enrollment
was reduced from a high of around 27% to around 15%
by instituting a more covert process of student selection.
[4.12]
I think that my research shows that
the destruction of this world was the result of
the Jewish intellectual and political movements I describe in
The Culture of Critique and Cultural Insurrections.
Gottfried is skeptical of this:
[4.13]
I think that at this point the fair thing is
for skeptics like Gottfried to show precisely where I am wrong.
This requires far more than
simple assertions of skepticism
and claims that my claims are “too generalized.”
[4.14]
For example, over a decade after I originally showed that
Jewish activism was by far the most important force behind
the changes in US immigration law that have resulted in
dramatically altering the politics and ethnic composition of the US,
no one has even attempted to show that I am wrong.
Yet this is by far the most important conclusion of The Culture of Critique
because, quite simply,
immigration is at the absolute center of the rise of multiculturalism
and the displacement of Whites.
[4.15]
Critics like Gottfried
need to mire themselves in the details of the historical record, as I did.
And if they show I am wrong, I will be the first to rescind my views.
[4.16]
Realize, however, that my views are entirely mainstream.
Thus, my conclusion has been reinforced by
Vanderbilt University historian Hugh Davis Graham:
[4.17]
To be sure,
the destruction of the Darwinian world of early 20th-century America
would not have been possible with
a group less prone to guilt and moralistic aggression against their own people.
But without the establishment of
a hostile elite dominated by strongly identified Jews,
it simply would not have happened.
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology
at California State University–Long Beach.
by Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Observer Blot, 2014-12-24
The New York Times has reacted with predictable umbrage to any suggestion that the media deluge on the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases had anything to do with the murder of the two policemen in Brooklyn.
...
It’s a strange argument, especially coming from the certifiably left — that Mr. Brinsley acted in a complete vacuum, that his cultural surroundings played no role. It didn’t matter that there were protest marches chanting “What do we want? Dead cops!” (ignored by Al Sharpton). It didn’t matter that all the statements and actions by Obama, Holder, and de Blasio supported the protesters and blamed the police for the “climate of distrust” in Black communities.
In general, the left loves arguments that culture is important. They have no problem attributing the behavior of police officers killing Blacks, the performance of Black schoolchildren, Black criminality and every other pathology to a poisonous racism that pervades White society. Discussion of genetic influences are off limits, and unfortunately there are no cultural/environmental cures for low IQ. Black children are therefore not responsible for academic failure and we have to be understanding about the levels of criminality among Blacks.
...
The left has always seen control of the culture as a critical goal because they are well aware that attitudes and behavior are indeed influenced by culture. Purging media figures who stray away from political correctness is high on their list of priorities, from Pat Buchanan getting fired at MSNBC to eliminating voices critical of Israel or Jewish power — people like Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas, and M. J. Rosenberg. They have left no stone unturned in ferreting out dissent on racial issues and on whether a non-White America is a good thing for Whites. Dissenting views on race are banned from the mainstream media because the left correctly fears that exposure would grant legitimacy, and Whites would gravitate to attitudes that are in line with their interests rather than the interests of the hostile elites who run the media. They avoid any hint that intelligent, well-spoken people oppose immigration and White dispossession in favor of the putting out the image that such Whites are uneducated and morally defective.
Their belief in the power of culture explains why the school curriculum from kindergarten through the university is all about inculcating White guilt — the culture of the holocaust and tendentious readings of the American past. The culture of the left looks with great approval on the zombie, self-hating social activists that emerge from this indoctrination, eager to carry out the wisdom of their college professors and cleanse themselves of White guilt.
...
because his research and writings contain themes and findings
which are reminiscent of a part of
the anti-Semitism which led to the Holocaust,
is quite controversial;
for his side of the story see his extensive web site, especially its
list of his publications,
reviews and summaries of his books and
selected replies to his critics;
for his more current and popular articles see his blog.
Perhaps because the issues that he discusses so ardently are so controversial,
they are also quite interesting,
I dare say to most everyone interested in ideas and conflict,
even the most politically-correct among us.
In this document are some highlights (or lowlights) from his articles,
and also some reviews and criticisms of his views.
Of especial interest, I believe,
are some exchanges between MacDonald and his critics,
typically where a critic will criticize something he has written
and he will respond, often in great detail, to that criticism.
(Might we call this “disputation” [cf.]?)
The most interesting are with
Gottfried in 2000,
Derbyshire in 2003, and
Gottfried again in 2009.
2000
2000-06-Gottfried-MacDonald-Culture-of-Critique
A Race Apartby Paul Gottfried (with replies by Kevin MacDonald)
originally published in Chronicles, 2000-06 and -09
[MacDonald’s web page includes
a review by Gottfried
of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique (original, 1998, hardback edition)
published in the June 2000 Chronicles,
a reply by MacDonald,
a reply by Gottfried, and
a reply by MacDonald.
MacDonald’s excerpt of the review by Gottfried is reproduced here.
(Somehow I doubt that this will get either Gottfried or MacDonald
on Abraham Foxman’s Buddy List.)
The emphasis is added.]
A Race Apart by Paul Gottfried
Chronicles, June 2000, pages 27-29
[G1.1]Kevin MacDonald’s study of the Jewish people in sociobiological perspective
[PTSDA, SAID, CC]
will not likely help his career,
for reasons having nothing to do with the author’s scholarship
or his accumulation of pertinent evidence.
While treating his subjects respectfully,
attributing to Ashkenazic Jews a mean I.Q.
one standard deviation higher than that of white gentiles,
he commits the indiscretion of
describing Jewish behavioral characteristics
noted as well by anti-Semites:
for example,
an aggressive demeanor toward the core cultures of host peoples
in combination with
the practice of ritually and socially prescribed separation from gentiles,
which he ascribes to
a form of collective consciousness
that may be inborn
as well as culturally acquired.
MacDonald presents this consciousness as endemic to
a group that has worked strenuously to preserve its genotypal identity....
[G1.2]
Since Jews supposedly
have acquired a cognitive advantage over most other groups
through careful eugenic practices,
competition yields them remarkable success.
In the past,
their group performance was hindered by the host people’s possession of
a degree of ethnic consciousness comparable to their own.
In these circumstances—medieval Europe, say, or 20th-century Russia—
Jews have been limited in their collective and individual ambitions.
As MacDonald explains in the second two volumes of his trilogy [SAID, CC],
such obstacles forced them to adopt daring strategies,
most fatefully the embrace of revolutionary ideologies and programs.
As an embattled out-group,
Jews supported and led revolutionary movements
in vast disproportion to their numbers.
And while tensions have existed over the last 200 years
between Rabbinic and revolutionary Jews,
MacDonald is correct in suggesting that
the conflict has not been as sharp as is commonly believed....
[G1.3]
MacDonald shows how persistent
the issue of open borders has been for his subjects.
Jews have combined intervention on behalf of immigration
and the demonization of immigration restrictionists
[as “xenophobes,” “nativists,” “racists”]
with the promotion of “diversity education.” ...
MacDonald does not present such advocacy as
the misguided humanitarian design of those whose ancestors suffered dispersion
and who are therefore receptive to later strangers.
Instead he locates Jewish support for multiculturalism
in the context of an already venerable strategy:
“De-ethnicizing” the once majority population
while insisting on the right of Jews as righteous victims to persist
as an ethnic cluster....
My guess from reading Chilton Williamson, Peter Brimelow, and Lawrence Auster
is that the reassessment of immigration,
especially from the Third World,
was part of
a general cultural change that beset Western societies
and was pushed by the managerial state.
While Jews contributed to cultural change and immigrationism
energetically and disproportionately,
they were far from constituting a sufficient cause....
[G1.4]
The “culture of critique” has done best
among those whom James Kurth (himself a Presbyterian) calls
“progressively deformed” Protestant peoples.
Starting with
the theologically based individualistic and anti-hierarchical bias
of classical Protestantism,
this deformation of Reformationist thought has expressed itself
in various late-modernist obsessions,
most of them linked to Protestant sources
but without the sobering notions of Original Sin and divine redemption.
These Protestant variants
emphasize moral subjectivity and self-esteem,
while replacing the concept of sin with that of social guilt.
[G1.5]
Fits of self-rejection are also characteristic of deformed Protestants,
and in the United States, Canada, Germany, and England,
Protestant clergy have been in the forefront of
those demanding atonement for
racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia....
[G1.6]
For me, the most engrossing part of MacDonald’s trilogy
is a long, learned section in the third volume [Chapter 5] on
the Pathologization [of Gentile Group Allegiances]....
The pivotal themes in The Authoritarian Personality,
as emphasized by MacDonald,
were nothing new to those who assisted in the project:
Rather, they represented the same complaints directed against Western—
and not only German—society
by the youthful radicals grouped around Adorno
at the University of Frankfurt in the early 30’s.
From Frankfurt, these “anti-Nazis” emigrated to the United States;
later they reestablished their ideas in postwar Germany
in the context of Allied denazification.
Little attention was paid to the fact that
the proposed antidotes for Nazism were not exactly disease-specific:
They targeted anything that gave cohesion to
middle-class families and societies.
[G1.7]
MacDonald argues that
the “pathologization” of normal gentile society
in The Authoritarian Personality
foreshadows
today’s coerced political correctness....
continued to resonate among Jewish “social scientists”
who shared Adorno’s fears;
both it and the rhetoric in which it was couched live on in
the efforts of Jewish organizations
to identify traditional Christian values
with incipient “fascism.”
[End of excerpt from Gottfried’s review.
MacDonald provides an extensive discussion and rebuttal at
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/review-gottfried.html and
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/review-gottfried.html
(they are essentially identical).
Here is just the beginning of
MacDonald’s response to what Gottfried wrote above,
followed by all of
Gottfried’s response to MacDonald’s response:]
Kevin MacDonald Replies to Paul Gottfried’s Review
[M1.1]
I thank Paul Gottfried for his generally accurate and positive review of my book, The Culture of Critique.
Nevertheless, there are a few issues that bear discussion,
the most important of which is
the role of
Jewish organizations and intellectuals with strong Jewish identifications
as agents of change
in the cultural transformations that have occurred
in Western societies over the last 50 years.
Jewish intellectual and political movements
were a necessary condition for these changes,
not a sufficient condition as suggested by Gottfried.
In the case of the reversal in U.S. immigration policy,
there simply were no other pressure groups
that were pushing for liberalized, multi-racial immigration
during the period under consideration (up to 1965).
[M1.2]
Gottfried attributes the sea change in immigration to
‘a general cultural change that beset Western societies
and was pushed by the managerial state.’ [G1.3]
I agree that multi-ethnic immigration resulted from a general cultural shift
but
we still must develop theories for the origin of this shift,
and in my view
the Jewish intellectual and political movements
discussed in The Culture of Critique
were a necessary condition for this transformation.
...
Dr. Gottfried Replies:
[G2.1]
My differences with Kevin MacDonald
are ones of emphasis more than of substance.
Like him, I recognize the existence of a double standard
in the way
American and other Jews stress ethnic solidarity for themselves
but the moral necessity of multiculturalism for white Christians.
This double standard offers the hermeneutic key
to the comments of Slate editor Judy Shulevitz (May 2, 2000).
In response to a complaint that American Jews
denounced Bob Jones University for discouraging interracial dating
but stubbornly practice tribalism in their own group,
Shulevitz contrasted white Christian “racism” to
the “ethnic chauvinism” characteristic of blacks and Jews.
Because of their “historical burdens,”
the distaste for outsiders felt by Jews and blacks is excusable
and not to be compared to
the “reprehensible” objection of
a white Southerner contemplating his child’s marriage to a black.
(Shulevitz’s critic happens to be Jewish.)
American Christians with mainstream journalistic respectability
do not choose to raise embarrassing questions
about Jewish claims to ethnic exceptionalism,
despite the fact that Jews have risen far in the United States,
encountering on the whole less discrimination than most ethnic Catholics.
[G2.2]
Where I do disagree with MacDonald is on
the importance assigned to
Jewish efforts to “de-ethnicize” Western Christian societies.
Although both the Frankfurt School and Boasian anthropologists
have pushed for an engineered and misnamed “open” society,
as have the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress,
such groups do not provide a sufficient or even “necessary” cause
for the changes in question.
[G2.3]
Between the 1920’s,
when immigration into the United States was restricted,
and the watershed immigration act of 1965,
there were political and cultural developments that strongly shaped
the present attitudes toward diversity as a civil religion.
The two most critical of these developments were
the consolidation of a managerial state
committed to broad social reconstruction
and, ultimately, the eradication of national loyalties, and
the collapse of WASPdom into its present culture of self mortification.
MacDonald rightly notes that
Jewish intellectuals and organizations worked to advance both trends,
but that point does not provide a comprehensive explanation of what happened.
Vast social engineering occurred in Scandinavia
before it reached the United States
and unfolded there largely in the absence of Jews.
Moreover,
as amply demonstrated by Ray Honeyford, Claus Nordbruch, and René Girard,
Christian clergy in Europe have tirelessly endorsed
the multicultural agenda long identified here with Jews and liberal Protestants.
Indeed, the radicalizing function attributed to Jews
has been effectively incarnated by
different minorities in different places at different times:
Huguenots in France,
Old Believers in Russia, and
Irish Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants in England
have all stirred the pot of social discontent
because of their sense of marginalization.
Today in Canada, ethnic Catholics support the left
as enthusiastically and one-sidedly as do
the descendants of Eastern European Jews.
[G2.4]
MacDonald’s insistence that
Ashkenazic Jews are naturally more intelligent than other European Americans
gives me pause.
If true, that might justify
(certainly from the standpoint of racial nationalists
who seem to accept this cognitive disparity)
the social subordination of white gentiles to a Jewish master race.
In this view, Jewish domination of relatively dull-witted goyim
should be hailed as an intellectual step forward,
particularly if white gentiles, as measured by IQ tests,
are somewhere midway between Jews and American blacks.
What is hard to figure out is why racialists assume
they have a right to control less intelligent races
but that whites should not be subject to cognitively superior Jews.
For all I know,
MacDonald may be right about
the genetic advantages of my ethnic kin in relation to his,
but there is another explanation for the observed disparities in achievements.
Jews, like Asians,
try harder than most WASPs to succeed on standardized tests,
as well as in professions.
The striking feature is not how well others do,
but how totally WASPdom has collapsed.
In One Nation Under God (1993),
authors Barry A. Kosmin and S.P. Lachman demonstrate that
even the highest WASP group achievers, Episcopalians and Presbyterians,
now lag behind white Catholics as well as Jews
in educational advancement and family income.
Until convinced by further evidence,
I assume that the reason for this lag is cultural.
Protestants who wallow in social guilt
and have lost the Puritan virtues
are headed for self destruction.
But they have certainly not been cognitively shortchanged.
Nor have the other scions of a rich European civilization,
which has been indispensable for
the intellectual and artistic enrichment of Jews and other groups.
...
MacDonald replies:
[M2.1]
Shulevitz’s comments [G2.1] justifying Jewish exceptionalism
are excellent examples of rationalization and presumably self-deception.
I record many other examples in Separation and Its Discontents,
Chapters 7 and 8.
My view is that
Jewish endogamy is fundamental to thinking about Judaism and anti-Semitism,
and I view the advocacy of the de-ethnicization of Europeans
(a common sentiment in the movements I discuss in The Culture of Critique)
as a strategic move against peoples regarded as historical enemies.
There is a long list of similar double standards,
especially with regard to the policies pursued by Israel
versus the policies Jewish organizations have pursued in the U.S.,
including issues of church-state separation and
immigration policies favoring the dominant ethnic groups.
[M2.2]
This double standard is fairly pervasive.
I was recently struck by the following letters that appeared in
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (September 15, 2000):
As a longtime reader of your newspaper,Such attitudes are practically unthinkable in
I was appalled to read Teresa Strasser’s most recent article
and to see the accompanying picture of her mother and new husband.
I consider myself a very unprejudiced person,
but I thought that it was very inappropriate to see
the large photograph of a Jewish woman in the arms of a Black man (her new husband)
published in our Jewish newspaper.
You should be setting a better example for our young Jewish people
who might be reading Ms Strasser’s column.
I hope that in the future you will consider the effects upon your readers
of what you publish.
So Teresa Strasser has a new Black stepfather (“Shotgun Wedding,” Sept. 1).
Are we supposed to wish her Mazel Tov?
What was her purpose in writing such an article in an Anglo Jewish Newspaper?
Is The Jewish Journal trying to promote intermarriage?
media directed at European-Americans,
except in media characterized as hateful and extremist.
[M2.3]
Gottfried may be correct that other groups have had a radicalizing role
in different times and places.
The question is whether I am right in my assessment of
the role of Jewish intellectual movements and Jewish organizations
in the transformation of the U.S.
I agree that
“between the 1920’s,
when immigration into the United States was restricted,
and the watershed immigration act of 1965,
there were political and cultural developments that strongly shaped
the present attitudes toward diversity as a civil religion.
The two most critical of these developments were
the consolidation of a managerial state
committed to broad social reconstruction
and, ultimately, the eradication of national loyalties,
and the collapse of WASPdom into its present culture of self mortification.”
[G2.3]
However, Gottfried once again fails to provide any evidence that
these events were the result of internal WASP developments
rather than the movements I focus on.
For example,
regarding immigration there is simply no evidence that any other group
had the funding, the organization, or the persistence
to overcome the enormous barriers to change
erected by the WASPS in 1924 and 1952.
There is no evidence for internal WASP self-destruction,
but a great deal of evidence that their active resistance
was overcome by the movements I discuss in my book.
[M2.4]
A recent book, The Jewish Threat (Bendersky, 2000),
is interesting in this regard.
Bendersky paints a vanished world of Northern Europeans
as a proud and confident people
self-consciously intent on retaining control of the U.S.
Bendersky’s sense of intellectual and moral superiority
and his hatred for his Northern European subjects
ooze from every page.
It is a triumphalist history, written by a member of
a group that won the intellectual and political wars of the 20th century.
But he does show that
the natives put up a spirited defense of their culture and way of life,
at least well into the post-World War II era.
[M2.5]
And in the end,
the only reason the 1965 law passed was because it was advertized as
nothing more than a moral gesture
that would have no long-term impact on the ethnic balance of the U.S.
In other words,
the WASPS did not actively pursue their own destruction,
as supposed by Gottfried;
they were deceived into supposing that the immigration law
would have no real effect
but that its passage would absolve them of
the incessant (and false) charges that
the North-Western European bias of the older U.S. policy
implied a theory of Nordic racial superiority.
Finally, it is surely of critical importance that
the Jewish intellectuals and political operatives
described in The Culture of Critique
did not lose their national/ethnic loyalties.
The broad trends toward de-ethnicizing somehow
occurred among the WASPs
but spared the Jews.
...
2003
2003-03-10-TAC-Derbyshire-Culture-of-Critique
The Marx of the Anti-SemitesBy John Derbyshire
The American Conservative, 2008-03-10
[A review of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique.
Be sure to note, if not read, MacDonald’s reply below.]
[1]
One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the USA,
I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types
standing around in groups and gossiping.
Because I was new to the scene,
many of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me,
so I could not take much part in the conversation.
Then I caught one name that I recognized.
I had just recently read and admired
a piece published in Chronicles under that name.
I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name
had once been a regular contributor
to much more widely read conservative publications,
the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents
and full-service LexisNexis accounts,
but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer.
In all innocence, I asked why this was so.
“Oh,” explained one of my companions,
“he got the Jew thing.”
The others in our group all nodded their understanding.
Apparently no further explanation was required.
The Jew thing.
It was said in the kind of tone you might use
of an automobile with a cracked engine block,
or a house with subsiding foundations.
Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow.
No use to anybody now.
Got the Jew thing.
They shoot horses, don’t they?
[2]
Plainly,
getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard
of conservative journalism in the United States,
an exceptionally lethal one,
which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid.
I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed,
not to get the Jew thing.
I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing,
I have not yet got the Jew thing—
that I am in fact a philoSemite and a well-wisher of Israel,
for reasons I have explained in various places,
none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.
[3]
If, however, you have got the Jew thing,
or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it,
Kevin MacDonald is your man.
MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology
at California State University in Long Beach.
He is best known for his three books [PTSDA, SAID, CC] about the Jews,
developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so
been a “group evolutionary strategy.”
The subject of this review is a [2002] re-issue, in soft cover,
of the third and most controversial of these books,
The Culture of Critique, first published in 1998.
Its subtitle is,
“An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement
in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements.”
The re-issue differs from the original
mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface,
which covers some more recent developments in the field
and offers responses to some of the criticisms that appeared
when the book was first published.
The number of footnotes has also been increased from 135 to 181,
and they have all been moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book.
A small amount of extra material has been added to the text.
So far as I could tell from a cursory comparison of the two editions,
nothing has been subtracted.
[4]
The main thrust of this book’s argument is that
Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements
engaged in a deliberate campaign
to delegitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations—
most particularly the USA—
through the twentieth century and that
this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy
for the Jews as an ethnicity.
In MacDonald’s own words [Section 1 of the preface],
“[T]he rise of Jewish power and
the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S.
are the real topics of CofC.”
He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis
of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena
[The numbers in the following list are those of the chapters in the book;
for completeness I have added the first and last chapters as well,
giving effectively a table of contents for all eight chapters of the book;
what Derbyshire actually wrote,
his “six distinct intellectual and political phenomena”,
is what appears as numbers 2 through 7.]:
- Introduction
- the anti-Darwinian movement in the social sciences
(most particularly
the no-such-thing-as-race school of anthropology
associated with Franz Boas), - the prominence of Jews in left-wing politics,
- the psychoanalytic movement,
- the Frankfurt School of social science
(which sought to explain social problems
in terms of individual psychopathology, - the “New York intellectuals”
centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, - Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy,
- Conclusion.
[5]
MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary psychology—
a term that many writers would put in quotes,
as the epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate.
I have a few doubts of my own on this score
and sometimes wonder whether
evolutionary psychology may eventually turn out to be
one of those odd fads that the human sciences, especially in the USA,
are susceptible to.
The twentieth century saw quite a menagerie of these fads:
Behaviorism,
Sheldonian personality-typing by body shape
(ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph),
the parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine,
the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, and so on.
I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably on to something,
but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be
improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic.
Here, for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book:
“The human mind was not designed to seek truth
but rather to attain evolutionary goals.”
[In defense of MacDonald’s statement,
anyone who doubts that, for example,
some elements in the social sciences departments of our elite universities
have all but forsworn their presumed duty
to find and teach truth rather than
self-serving and/or politically correct lies, fads, and theories
should read carefully and critically
the rather astounding second-from-last paragraph
(starting with “The late twentieth century”)
in the article “The Last Temptation of Risk” by Barry Eichengreen.]
This trembles on the edge of
deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism,
of the kind that philosopher David Stove called “puppetry theory,”
and that MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully
in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique.
After all, if it is so,
should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists
are pursuing their own “group evolutionary strategy”?
And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine?
And that there is, therefore,
no point at all in my writing, or your reading,
any further?
[6]
To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that.
The Culture of Critique includes many good things.
There is a spirited defense of the scientific method, for example.
One of the sub-themes of the book is that
Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences—
elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems
that do not, in fact, have any truth content—
persisted in through long pre-Enlightenment centuries,
of immersing young men in
the study of a vast body of argumentative writing,
with status in the community—
and marriage options, and breeding opportunities—
awarded to those who have best mastered
this mass of meaningless esoterica.
(This is not an original observation,
and the author does not claim it as such.
In fact he quotes historian Paul Johnson to the same effect,
and earlier comments along these lines
were made by Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper.)
MacDonald is very scathing about these
circular and self-referential thought-systems,
especially in the case of psychoanalysis and
the “pathologization of Gentile culture” promoted by the Frankfurt School.
Here he was precisely on my wavelength, and I found myself cheering him on.
Whatever you may think of MacDonald and his theories,
there is no doubt he believes himself to be doing careful objective science.
The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine, Kinsey, et al.
[7]
It is good to be reminded, too [Chapter 7], with forceful supporting data,
that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S.
were not driven by
any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority
but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance,
which is by no means the same thing.
(In fact, as MacDonald points out,
one of the worries of the restrictionists was that
more clever and energetic races like the Japanese
would, if allowed to enter, have negative effects on social harmony.)
MacDonald’s chapter on
“Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy”
is a detailed survey of a topic I have not seen discussed elsewhere.
If the Jews learned anything from the 20th century,
it was surely the peril inherent in being
the only identifiable minority
in a society that is otherwise ethnically homogeneous.
is understandable.
That their agitation
was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy
seems to me more doubtful.
And if it is true, we must believe that
97 percent of the U.S. population ended up dancing
to the tune of the other three percent.
If that is true, the only thing to say
is the one Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said:
“The more fool they.”
[8]
Similarly with MacDonald’s discussion [Chapter 3] of
Jewish involvement in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire
and the many horrors that ensued.
This was until recently another taboo topic,
though the aged Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose,
has recently taken a crack at it.
I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity here.
Having posited that
Jews are out to “destroy” (this is his own word) Gentile society,
he was open to the riposte that if, after 2,000 years of trying,
the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even one instance,
Gentiles don’t actually have much to worry about.
So: the Jews destroyed Russia.
Though MacDonald’s discussion of this topic is interesting and illuminating,
it left me unconvinced.
As he says,
“The issue of
the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth
is complex.”
Paul Johnson
gives only 15-20 percent of the delegates at early Party congresses
as Jewish.
If the other 80-85 percent were permitting themselves
to be manipulated by such a small minority,
then we are back with Bianca.
[9]
Since the notion of “group evolutionary strategy”
is central to MacDonald’s case,
I wish he had been better able to convince me of its validity.
For instance,
I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China,
a nation that, like the diaspora Jews,
awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities
to young men who had shown mastery of
great masses of content-free written material.
Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history
knows that the guy who gets the girl—
who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives”
who are thereby denied to less intellectual males—
is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations
and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position.
This went on for two thousand years.
Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews,
display an average intelligence higher by several points
than the white-Gentile mean.
So: was Confucianism a “group evolutionary strategy”?
If so, then plainly the Chinese of China were, in MacDonald’s jargon,
the “ingroup”.
But then … what was the “outgroup”?
[The answer to that seems pretty obvious: The “Barbarians”.]
[10]
The more I think about the term “group evolutionary strategy,” in fact,
the more I wonder if it is not complete nonsense.
From an evolutionary point of view,
would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew
at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so
have been conversion to Christianity?
Rather than learning to argue fine points of theology,
would not a better strategy have been to learn, say, fencing or Latin?
Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years.
The gypsies held together pretty well, too, across many centuries,
yet their “group evolutionary strategy”
was the opposite of the Jews’ at almost every point.
And the Jewish over-representation
in important power centers of Gentile host societies
became possible only after Jewish emancipation—
which, like abolition of the slave trade,
was an entirely white-Gentile project!
Did the genes of 12th-century Jews “know”
emancipation was going to happen 700 years on? How?
If they did not, what was the point of their “evolutionary strategy”?
There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.
[11]
Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field.
There is no disputing that we need to understand
much more than we now do
about how common-ancestry groups react with each other.
Group conflicts are a key problem for multiracial and multicultural societies.
Up till about 1960, the U.S. coped with these problems
by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic dominance,
very much as Israel copes with them today
by asserting Jewish ethnic dominance.
This proved to be quite a stable arrangement,
as social arrangements go.
It was obviously objectionable to some American Jews,
and it is not surprising that
they played an enthusiastic part in undermining it;
but they were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in its downfall.
It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement,
characterized by racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense,
accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (“affirmative action”).
This system, I think it is becoming clear,
has proved less stable than what went before
and has probably now reached the point
where it cannot be sustained much longer.
What will replace it? What will the new arrangement be?
[12]
At times of flux like this,
there are naturally people whose preference is for
a return to the older dispensation.
It is obvious that Kevin MacDonald is one of these people.
If this is not so, he has some heavy explaining to do about phrases like
“the ethnic interests of white Americans
to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.”
Personally, I think he’s dreaming.
The older dispensation was not as bad
as liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe,
but it is gone forever and will not return.
For America, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
[13]
And on the point of Israel having something very much like
the old American dispensation,
I am unimpressed by MacDonald’s oft-repeated argument—
it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and anti-Semites—
that it is hypocritical for Jews
to promote multiculturalism in the U.S.
while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel.
Unless you think that ethnic dominance, under appropriate restraining laws,
is immoral per se—
and I don’t, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn’t either—
it can be the foundation of a stable and successful nation.
A nation that can establish it and maintain it would be wise to do so.
The USA was not able to maintain it because too many Americans—
far more than three percent—
came to think it violated Constitutional principles.
Israel, however, was founded on different principles,
and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that country
for dismantling Jewish-ethnic dominance,
as there was in Lyndon Johnson’s America for dismantling European dominance.
The Israelis, most of them,
are happy with Jewish-ethnic dominance and intend to keep it going.
Good luck to them.
[14]
The aspect of Macdonald’s thesis that I find least digestible
is his underlying assumption that
group conflict is a zero-sum game rooted in
an evolutionary tussle over finite resources.
This is not even true on an international scale,
as the growing wealth of the whole world during this past few decades has shown.
[Perhaps Derbyshire would revise that statement in later years.]
On the scale of a single nation, it is absurd.
These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena
that The Culture of Critique is concerned with—
Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on—
were they a net negative for America?
Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were.
Now conduct the following thought experiment.
Suppose the great post-1881 immigration of Ashkenazi Jews had never occurred.
Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003
were not the two to four percent (depending on your definitions) that it is,
but the 0.3 percent it was at the start of the Civil War.
Would anything have been lost?
Would America be richer or poorer?
Would our cultural and intellectual life be busier or duller?
[15]
It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have been lost:
entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists,
entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars:
not mere psychoanalysts and “critical theorists,”
but physicists, mathematicians, medical researchers, historians, economists—
even, as MacDonald notes honestly in his new preface,
evolutionary psychologists!
The first American song whose words I knew was “White Christmas,”
written by a first-generation Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant.
The first boss I ever had in this country was
a Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Perhaps it is true, as MacDonald claims, that
“most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union
[i.e., in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews.”
It is also true, however, that
much of the secret research they betrayed to their country’s enemies
was the work of Jewish scientists.
The Rosenbergs sold the Bomb to the Soviets;
but without Jewish physicists, there would have been no Bomb to sell.
[But, Derbyshire would have been more honest to have noted,
the Allies did not need “the Bomb” to win World War II.]
Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians
attempting to crack
a particularly intractable problem in analytic number theory.
A high proportion of the 200-some attendees were Jews,
including at least two from Israel.
Sowers of discord there have certainly been,
but on balance I cannot see how anyone could deny that
this country is enormously better off for the contributions of Jews.
Similarly for every other nation
that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish citizens.
Was Hungary better off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich?
Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions?
“To ask the question is to answer it.”
[16]
Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social scientist,
is not obliged to provide any such balance in his works,
any more than a clinical pathologist writing about disease
should be expected to include an acknowledgment that
most of his readers will be healthy for most of their lives.
I agree.
A scientist, even a social scientist,
need not present any facts other than
those he has uncovered by diligent inquiry in his particular narrow field.
He is under no obligation, as a scientist,
to soothe the feelings of
those whose sensibilities might be offended by his discoveries.
Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald’s material, however,
it wouldn’t have hurt to point out
the huge, indisputably net-positive, contributions of Jews to America,
right at the beginning of his book and again at the end.
MacDonald has in any case been fairly free in CofC with his own opinions
on such matters as U.S. support for Israel, immigration policy, and so on.
He is entitled to those opinions, but having included them in this book,
his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of cold scientific objectivity
does not sound very convincing.
[17]
This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term,
an anti-Semitic book.
Its entire argument is that the Jews, collectively, are up to no good.
This may of course be true,
and MacDonald is entitled to say that
the issue of whether his results are anti-Semitic is nugatory,
from a social-science point of view,
by comparison with the issue of their truth content.
I agree with that, too: but given the well-known history of this topic,
it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald
not to try to calm the troubled waters
his work is bound to stir up.
From my own indirect, and rather scanty, knowledge of the man,
I would put this down to
a personality combination of prickliness and unworldliness,
but I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls
that my interpretation is the correct one,
and that there is not malice lurking behind
MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.
2003-03-MacDonald-reply-to-Derbyshire
The Conservatism of Fools: A Response to John DerbyshireBy Kevin MacDonald
www.kevinmacdonald.net, 2003-03
[As stated,
a reply by MacDonald to Derbyshire’s review of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique.
MacDonald squarely and, I think, effectively
addresses practically all of Derbyshire’s major criticisms;
therefore all of his reply,
sans the first few stage-setting paragraphs and the notes,
appears below.]
[4]
As a result of his generally positive attitude about Jews and Judaism,
Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations,
quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence,
even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself.
He implies that
non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation
to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies
while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate.
We non-Jews should understand such Jewish behavior because
these outcomes are good for Jews.
But, somehow he fails to follow through with this logic,
imputing malice to people like me
who are concerned about the future of their own people
in societies where they are becoming minorities
surrounded by groups that, like Jews,
harbor deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them.
It is quite an extraordinary omission and lapse in consistency by Derbyshire.
In the end, the logic is as follows:
Jews have made wonderful contributions to civilization.
Therefore,
non-Jews should welcome Jewish efforts to advance their interests
even when they conflict with their own.
As Derbyshire himself says in another context,
the only thing to say of those who voice such sentiments
is what Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said: “The more fool they.”
[5]
Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world
in which Jewish interests are legitimate and
where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests,
though they may occasionally be irritating,
are not really a cause for concern much less malice.
It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that
good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest,
and that the results of conflicts of interest
can be devastating to the side that loses.
My view is that modern evolutionary theory gives us
a powerful way of understanding why this must be so.
Anti-Semites have often portrayed Jews as the embodiment of evil.
Consistent with evolutionary theory, however,
I have documented that Jews tend to be
highly intelligent,
good parents, and
patriots fighting to preserve their people
and extend their people’s power and influence —
sometimes at the expense of the interests of other peoples.
Many organized groups of Jews have pursued such conservative goals
by resisting other groups and behaving aggressively against them.
By the same logic,
it is legitimate for non-Jews to defend their own ethnic interests.
Is this a formula for perpetual conflict?
Hopefully not, but the only hope for a just resolution
is to recognize the nature of the situation and agree on terms,
not to deny the importance of one’s own interests.
[6]
Derbyshire’s review begins with a chilling account of how
critics of Jews simply disappear from sight
— their professional horizons diminished if not entirely ended.
One thinks of people like
Joe Sobran, William Cash,
[Charles Freeman, Norman Finkelstein (who is Jewish!) ]5
and a host of politicians
who have had the temerity to criticize Israel or American support for Israel,
or
who have called attention to Jewish power and influence in particular areas.
Jewish groups have made any critical discussion of Jewish issues off limits,
and that’s vitally important because, yes, Jews are a very powerful group.
[It is perhaps useful to recall that MacDonald wrote this in 2003.]
What Derbyshire refers to as Jewish “world-perfecting idealism”
is very much with us and is still wreaking havoc in the modern world,
everywhere from
the erection of a multi-cultural police state in the United States —
the origins of which are the general topic of The Culture of Critique —
to the current war for the “liberation” and “democratization” of Iraq,
a war that is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in
the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.6
As with other examples of Jewish idealism,
the destruction of Iraq is shrouded in a lofty moral idealism
aimed ultimately at securing a rather obvious Jewish ethnic goal —
Israeli hegemony throughout the Middle East.
That these latest examples of Jewish “world perfecting idealism”
also happen to conform rather obviously to Jewish ethnic interests
should be of concern to all non-Jews.
[A point that our “conservative” leaders constantly seem to ignore.]
[7]
Derbyshire dismisses evolutionary psychology as a passing fad,
and asks, sarcastically,
if in criticizing evolutionary psychology,
he is pursuing his own evolutionary goals.
Well, maybe.
Most of what we humans do is connected only distantly to evolutionary goals.
For example, quite a few evolutionary psychologists propose
an evolved goal of social status
based on commonly accepted standards of scientific evidence,7
but we are very flexible in how we achieve such goals.
And it does occur to me that
writing critiques of evolutionary psychology and
dismissing those who criticize Jews
might be one way to attain social status
among the predominantly Jewish neo-conservative elite
that dominates so much of the conservative media.
[8]
Derbyshire complains about my statement that,
“The human mind was not designed to seek truth
but rather to attain evolutionary goals.”
I was merely expressing a principle of evolutionary biology
that has been of fundamental importance
since the revolution inaugurated by G. C. Williams
and culminating in E. O. Wilson’s synthesis:
Organisms are not designed to communicate truthfully with others
but to persuade them —
to manipulate them to serve their interests.
We should expect deception and self-deception
to be at the very heart of interactions among organisms.
This is the subtext of The Culture of Critique:
The beguilingly irresistible theories masking an ethnic agenda.
I too was once enthralled by psychoanalysis and Marxism.
[9]
Derbyshire supposes that
the idea of a group evolutionary strategy may be “complete nonsense.”
Freed of technical jargon,
a group evolutionary strategy
refers to
the ways people structure groups in order to get on in the world
—to attain group goals such regulating their own members
(e.g., preventing them from defecting,
promoting cooperation with ingroup members,
promoting eugenic marriages)
and dealing with outsiders
(e.g., having different ethical standards for ingroup versus outgroup).
I discuss how Jews accomplished these tasks in traditional societies
in my book,
A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy,
and I recently applied this sort of analysis to several other groups,
including the Overseas Chinese,
in the paperback version of that book.8
There are several other good sources,
including David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral,9
where, among other examples, the early Christian Church is described as
a non-ethnic form of Judaism
that was adaptive at the level of the group
in navigating the uncertainties of the ancient world.
[10]
My analysis describes
the powerful social and psychological forces
that have maintained Jewish group loyalty.
Derbyshire asks,
“From an evolutionary point of view,
would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew
at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so
have been conversion to Christianity?”
But the question is not
whether an omniscient Jew in the Middle Ages would choose to remain a Jew,
but
what forces have kept Jewish groups together over the centuries
while other groups have been assimilated or otherwise disappeared.
Even if individual Jews would have been better off defecting (some did!),
the vast majority did not
because of sanctions against relatives who remained Jews,
because of powerful, psychologically salient ethnic and kinship ties
to other Jews,
because of the high level of social and material support available
in Jewish communities,
because of hostility toward Jews emanating from the wider society,
and probably because, despite periodic troubles,
Jews were remarkably successful in many times and places,
including the medieval period.
[11]
Despite Derbyshire’s claim,
it is simply not the case
that Jews have only been successful since “emancipation.”
Jews have very frequently achieved powerful positions:
ancient Alexandria and the late Roman Empire;
parts of Western Europe during the Middle Ages
prior to the expulsions of Jews from most of Western Europe;
the Turkish Empire after the fall of the Byzantine Christians
and many other places where Jews served alien ruling elites,
especially in the Muslim world (e.g., Spain after the Muslim conquest);
Christian Spain beginning at least by the late 14th century
and extending well into the period of the Inquisition;
Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe
beginning in the early modern period and extending into the 20th century.10
Perhaps most notably, the elite status of Jews in the Soviet Union
had little or nothing to do with
the opportunities made available by the Enlightenment,
since the Enlightenment had little impact on the Russian Empire.
[12]
Group strategies don’t need outgroups.
The main thing is that
there is group-level organization
that regulates individual behavior to conform to group goals.
Derbyshire mentions Chinese eugenics,
but as important as eugenics may be for understanding the Chinese,
it does not necessarily imply a group evolutionary strategy.
The most obvious explanation is that
the emperor wanted the more intelligent people to run the civil service,
and,
given the Chinese practice of polygyny and the benefits of high social status,
this had a eugenic effect.
But this can be easily explained
by self-interest on the part of everyone involved;
no need to invoke the effects of group structure on individual behavior.
On the other hand,
in the recent paperback edition of A People that Shall Dwell Alone,
I argue that the Overseas Chinese qualify as a group strategy because
they live as an organized group among outgroups;
they have a consciousness of themselves
as being of a different ethnic group than their hosts,
they are internally organized
(but not nearly so tightly as traditional Jewish communities), and
they cooperate in economic enterprises.
[13]
Derbyshire rejects my argument that without Jewish involvement,
the Bolshevik Revolution and its horrific aftermath would not have happened.
The percentage of Jews in early Bolshevik Party congresses
is irrelevant to this issue.
The questions I ask are:
Would the Revolution have occurred
without the key involvement of a relatively small number of very talented Jews
like Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Uritsky
who played such prominent roles in the Bolshevik Revolution
and the early Soviet government?
(In the same way, one can reasonably ask
whether the neo-conservative revolution in U.S. foreign policy
would have happened without the critical contributions of
Richard Perle, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz,
Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and David Wurmser,
to name only some of the most prominent Jews involved.
Small numbers of highly talented, closely cooperating people
can have enormous influence.)
Would the Revolution have been sustainable in its early stages
without the involvement of large sections of the Jewish community
who came to staff the Soviet bureaucracy, most notably the Secret Police?
Were the most powerful non-Jews accurately described as philo-Semites —
“Jewified non-Jews,” to use Albert S. Lindemann’s term?11
Were Jews an elite group in the Soviet Union
at least until anti-Jewish attitudes began to be government policy
after World War II?
Did Jewish Communists and other leftists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere
identify as Jews?
I see no reason to change my views on these issues
as a result of Derbyshire’s comments.
[14]
Similarly, Derbyshire states that
Jews “were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers
in [the] downfall” of European dominance in the U.S.
without providing a concrete alternative.
I have never stated that Jewish intellectual movements and interest groups
were the sole force,]
but I do indeed maintain that
they were by far the most important.
On the critical topic of immigration,
there simply was no other force
that energetically pursued the goal of multi-ethnic immigration
in the period prior to 1965
apart from Jewish organizations
or organizations composed partly of non-Jews
that were funded, organized and staffed by Jews.12
I am scarcely alone in this opinion.
Consider these comments of Vanderbilt University historian
Hugh Davis Graham:
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 [33] administration,
Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower [34] White House,
and presidential aide Myer Feldman,
assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz,
and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei
in the Kennedy [35]-Johnson [36] administration.
(Hugh Davis Graham,
Collision Course:
The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America,
New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 56–57).
[15]
And beyond the transformations being wrought by
the sea change in immigration policy,
I think it inconceivable that the current regime of what Derbyshire terms
“racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense,
accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (‘affirmative action’)”
could have been built without the influence of
the intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique.
As Derbyshire notes, this regime is inherently far less stable
than what went before,
and one can only shudder at
what the future holds throughout the Western world.
[16]
It is always difficult to imagine that 3% of the population
could have such enormous influence on culture and public policy,
but successful lobbying efforts by small, committed special interests
are commonplace in American politics,
not only among ethnic lobbies
but among business interests, farming groups, unions,
professional organizations, and even gun enthusiasts.
An obvious example is U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Here we have a record of an incredibly effective, well-funded, intensive lobbying effort carried out over several decades.
The historical evidence reviewed in Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique
shows that
Jewish organizations carried out a similar campaign
in an effort to alter U.S. immigration laws
and that
they were by far the most important force in changing these laws,
often taking pride in the part they played.
[17]
Derbyshire does not think it hypocritical for
Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S.
while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel.
The hypocrisy comes from the fact that,
as I note in Chapter 8 of The Culture of Critique,
the Jewish advocacy of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate
coincided with a major effort by Jewish organizations
and Jewish-dominated intellectual and political movements
to supplant the prevailing view of the United States as
a European Christian civilization with a European ethnic base.
Especially hypocritical is that
the disestablishment of the European basis of American identity
was performed with appeal to
universalist Enlightenment ideals of justice and individual rights,
while it pathologized the ethnocultural basis of American civilization
that had become an important foundation of American identity
by the early decades of the 20th century.
Although it is common for defenders of Israel
to describe Israel as a democracy based on Western political ideals,
I have yet to see any important Jewish organization or intellectual movement
pathologize the ethnic basis of Israeli society
or challenge the many ways in which Jewish ethnic interests
are officially recognized in Israeli law and custom (e.g., the Law of Return).
Indeed, the American Jewish community has been complicit in
the ongoing ethnic warfare in the Middle East
that has resulted in the dispossession, degradation, and large-scale murder
of the Palestinians.
[18]
Derbyshire accuses me of being one of those who would prefer
“a return to the older dispensation” —
the older cultural and ethnic mix characteristic of the United States
until the changes inaugurated in the last 35 years.
I plead guilty to this charge.
That regime was stable and it was good for people like me (and Derbyshire),
and even for the American Jewish community
who saw the modest, low-profile, non-violent character of anti-Jewish attitudes
that were fairly common prior to World War II
dwindle to irrelevance in the postwar period.
Nothing wrong with that.
[19]
The dispossession of Europeans is the ultimate defeat —
an evolutionary event of catastrophic proportions
for people of European descent.
Whatever the contributions of Jewish
“entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers,
and legions upon legions of scholars,”
they could never make up for this cataclysmic loss
and for the political instability and chronic ethnic tensions
that have been unleashed by
the Jewish intellectual and political movements
discussed in The Culture of Critique.
Further, as The Culture of Critique attempts to document,
a very high percentage of the Jewish contribution to culture
has been used to advance Jewish ethnic interests.
The only exceptions are advances in technology and basic science,
but does anyone seriously suppose that
technological advances like the atomic bomb mentioned by Derbyshire
would never have been discovered without Jews?
(Germany, certainly, was very close.)
It may be that these advances would have taken longer,
but there is no question that they would have happened without Jews.
After all, with a mean IQ of 100 and far larger numbers,
European populations undoubtedly have
far more individuals of the requisite IQ
to make the stupendous contributions to culture
that have occurred in recent centuries.
[20]
Western cultures have produced a long list of ethnically European geniuses
in every field of science and art,
from Plato and Aristotle down to the present.
Pity the poor English who expelled the Jews in the Middle Ages
and were thus restricted to
the meager cultural contributions of
Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin
even as they vastly expanded their numbers
and the territory controlled by their people.
Can anyone seriously suppose that
the West would be unable to produce a brilliant high culture without Jews
or that the Jewish contribution is of irreplaceable value?
And recall that my argument in The Culture of Critique is that
many of the most important Jewish contributions to culture
were facilitated not only by high IQ
but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews
who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.
In other words, their accomplishments are due in large part to
the fundamental cultural forms of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy,
not to any inherent worth in what was produced.
The sorry records of
psychoanalysis, Boasian anthropology, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School
are far more a testimony to Jewish identity and group cohesion
than they are to anything resembling science.
[21]
Derbyshire acknowledges that
the Jewish contributions to culture discussed in The Culture of Critique
have been made with an eye to advancing Jewish ethnic interests.
This is certainly
a very sizeable portion of the entire Jewish contribution to culture
during the period I discuss,
but advancing Jewish interests by contributing to culture
goes far beyond these movements.
As I attempt to show
in the preface to the recent paperback edition of The Culture of Critique,
Jewish contributions to entertainment and the media
have often had the function of
promoting positive images of Judaism and multi-culturalism
and negative images of Christianity
and European ethnic interests and identification.
Derbyshire describes his love of songs like White Christmas
that have come to define how Christmas is experienced.
However, such songs are also part of the Kulturkampf in which
Christmas has been converted into a secular and commercialized event;
as such it represents a kind of cultural subversion.
As Philip Roth noted,
“God gave Moses the Ten Commandments
and then he gave Irving Berlin Easter Parade and White Christmas,
the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ ...
and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do?
He de-Christs them both!
Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.”13
In recent decades, a major thrust of Jewish influence on culture has been
the promotion of the Holocaust as
the fundamental moral touchstone and intellectual paradigm
of the contemporary Western world.
(I recently came across a reference stating
that there have been over 170 Holocaust films since 1989.14)
[22]
Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists
may have indeed contributed to economic growth,
but they have also lavishly funded Jewish causes —
causes that typically oppose the ethnic interests of European Americans.
Jews constitute
more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes Magazine list
of the richest four hundred Americans,
45% of the top 40 richest Americans,
and one-third of all American multimillionaires.15
The beneficiaries of this wealth include
4000 foundations controlled by Jews and
300 national Jewish organizations,
the latter with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion --
a sum greater than
the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations.
Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists like
hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt,
Charles and Edgar Bronfman (co-chairs of the Seagram Company),
bingo parlor magnate Irving Moskowitz
(who funds the settler movement in Israel),
the notorious Marc Rich (who funds Birthright Israel,
a program aimed at raising Jewish consciousness),
George Soros (who funds pro-immigration organizations in the United States
and in a variety of European countries),
film maker Steven Spielberg
(head of the Shoah and Righteous Persons foundations),
Leslie Wexner (owner of the Limited and Victoria’s Secret),
Laurence Tisch (chairman of the Loews Corporation),
Charles Schusterman (owner of an oil-and-gas business in Tulsa), and
Mort Mandel of Cleveland (former distributor of electronics parts)
[also Sheldon Adelson]
have used their money to advance Jewish causes
such as Israel and increasing Jewish consciousness and commitment among Jews.16
Wealthy Jews are by far the largest contributors to the Democratic Party
and are very significant contributors to the Republican party,17
ensuring that Jewish interests will be heeded
throughout the U.S. political spectrum.
Whether Jewish success in business
has had a measurable effect on economic growth
is difficult to know.
What we do know is that it has come with an enormous cost
to the ethnic interests of European Americans.
[23]
In concluding,
I call attention to the challenge for evolutionary psychology
in trying to understand the complete lack of ethnic identification
of so many elite Europeans such as John Derbyshire.
He is only the tip of a massive iceberg.
I have sketched a theory of why this might be
in the Preface to the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique:
a relatively weak sense of ethnocentrism
resulting from our European evolutionary past
combined with
the influence of the Jewish intellectual and political movements I describe
and its amplification in the media;
the powerful opprobrium and, increasingly, police state controls
that have become attached to criticism of Jews and Israel; and
the heady inducements to conform to
the interests and views of a powerful minority.
Having read Derbyshire’s account of his childhood,
one might add to the model two more variables:
socialization in a very benign Jewish milieu and
deep reverence for the cultural accomplishments of Jews.
In the end, Derbyshire is the epitome of that sad and paradoxical figure,
the Judaized intellectual discussed in The Culture of Critique
for whom Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes,
now constitute the culture of the West,
internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike.
It is a mindset that is leading Europeans directly to
the fate of the Israelites who stray from God’s way
as described in Deuteronomy (28:62):
“And ye shall be left few in number,
whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude.”
2007
2007-Jewcy-Kurtzman-Derbyshire-dialogue
Here is an exchange between Joey Kurtzman of Jewcy and John Derbyshire concerning Kevin MacDonald.
2007-02-26-Kurtzman: Is Kevin MacDonald Right?
The evolutionary psychologist argues Jews evolved to triumph over Gentiles.
2007-02-27-Derbyshire: Wrestling with Derbyshire's Law
Yes, I'm afraid of offending Jews
2007-02-27-Kurtzman: There is No Cabal
Don't sell yourself as a martyr to world Jewry
2007-02-28-Derbyshire: Be Nice, or We'll Crush You
Criticizing Jews is professional suicide.
2007-03-01-Kurtzman: The Jewish Media Goliath
He's fat, lazy, and not terribly intimidating
2007-03-01-Derbyshire: A Black and a Chinaman Walk Into a Bar...
Admit it: ethnic humor is satsifying
2007-03-01-Kurtzman: A Break from Hooray-for-us Historiography
MacDonald's trilogy is worth a read
2007-03-01-Derbyshire: War-Winning, Disease-Curing, And Life-Improving
The Jews have made America a better place
2008
2008-Spring-Wolseley-MacDonald-Cultural-Insurrections
A Superfluous Review: Kevin MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections (PDF)by Garnet James Wolseley
The Occidental Quarterly, Spring 2008
[As stated,
a review by “Garnet James Wolseley” of MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections.]
2008-Spring-MacDonald-Wolseley-MacDonald-Cultural-Insurrections
“A Necessary Reply: Response to Garnet James Wolseley” (PDF)by Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Quarterly, Spring 2008
[As stated, a reply by MacDonald
to “Garnet James Wolseley” review of MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections.]
2008-05-08-Jewish-Journal-LA-bio
The professor the anti-Semites loveKevin MacDonald, Cal State Long Beach,
and the downside of academic freedom
By Brad A. Greenberg
Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, 2008-05-08
[This is a long (4600 word) story.]
[1.1]
Kevin MacDonald had just completed the first in a series of books that would come to define him. Awaiting feedback from his publisher 15 years ago, MacDonald sent his manuscript to a colleague in the psychology department at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The feedback was not encouraging.
[1.2]
“What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews,” Martin Fiebert wrote in a 12-point reply. “Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I’m sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with ‘Mein Kampf’ and the ‘Protocols of Zion.’ ”
[1.3]
How prophetic Fiebert’s insight turned out to be.
[1.4]
MacDonald, 64, has been deemed America’s “foremost anti-Semitic thinker” by civil rights experts. A tenured psychology professor who lent his expertise to Holocaust denier David Irving, MacDonald has suggested restricting college enrollment and increasing taxes for Jews to mediate what he perceives as inequities with non-Jewish whites.
[1.5]
His three-volume critique of Judaism as a “group evolutionary strategy” -- known collectively as “The Culture of Critique” and published by Praeger in 1994, 1998 and 1998 -- claims the religion discourages inclusion, eggs on anti-Semitism and uses study of Talmud to thin the reproduction of less intelligent members. The books have become sacred scripture for white supremacists, and a growing number of MacDonald’s colleagues have urged the university to denounce his writings.
[1.6]
“He is repackaging traditional anti-Jewish beliefs in contemporary pseudo-scientific language,” said Jeffrey Blutinger, a history professor leading the push against MacDonald. “If you think of classic anti-Jewish tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial, opposed to Christendom, a threat to the nation, using contemporary ideas as a way of undermining traditional beliefs -- all of these show up in his writing.”
[1.7]
These are strange credentials for a man who in person seems every bit a slice of Midwest Americana. Part German, part Scottish, raised to be a traditional Catholic, though he is now agnostic, MacDonald was reared in a small Wisconsin town best known for the children’s clothes that carry its name.
[1.8]
“Oshkosh was a great town to grow up in,” MacDonald said in a recent conversation. “There weren’t any Jewish families at all. I guess there was one; I knew one Jewish kid in high school. Nobody talked about Jews. There was no anti-Semitism in town. It was an unknown.”
[1.9]
He first discovered his future research subjects as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He had a few Jews as roommates, and many more were fellow travelers in the anti-war movement. Almost three decades later, when MacDonald began connecting Jewish power and success to evolutionary strategies, he would identify his leftist years as the first time Jews used his gentile face to promote what he considered their group agenda. It wasn’t until the ‘90s that MacDonald began to see Jewish communities as inimical entities slowly destroying their hosts.
[1.10]
“Jews are inevitably going to be an elite,” he said. “They are smart; they are well organized. The problem, from my point of view, is that there is a hostility there, a fear and hostility, that over the past 40 years has resulted in some changes that have not been in the interest of people like me. As simple as that.”
[1.11]
MacDonald’s core complaint is Jewish influence on immigration laws. He blames passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas and made immigration easier for non-Westerners, on a Jewish desire to oust European Americans from the majority.
[1.12]
“European people in this country will be a minority in a few years,” MacDonald said. “I don’t think that would have happened if we had had a sense of ourselves as a culture worth defending. Now, everything is up for grabs.”
[1.13]
He sat for the first of two interviews in his cramped office on campus. Tall and lanky, with white hair and a disarming smile, MacDonald hardly looks like America’s scariest academic. He is affable, even in light of the vilification he’s received, much of it from -- and this shouldn’t surprise -- Jewish peers and organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
[1.14]
“Everybody who crosses them, they are going to have a price to pay,” MacDonald said. “People won’t be seen with me; they won’t talk to me; they won’t have lunch with me. I am pretty much a nonentity around here.”
[1.15]
Until 2000, MacDonald was largely unknown on campus. Testifying for Irving in a lawsuit against Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt attracted a flurry of attention. But then the storm quieted, and MacDonald was left alone to develop and detail his theories on Jewish strategies to “destroy” Western culture, typing out page after page in his office on the fourth floor of CSULB’s 1970s-era psych building.
[1.16]
“He is not the type of guy who is going to dress up in a KKK outfit or swastika armband. The truth is that with his Ph.D and this veneer of respectability, he’s very dangerous,” said Heidi Beirich, who directs SPLC’s research and special projects.
[1.17]
“The Nazi types are reading his stuff like it is the Bible,” Beirich continued, “and they’re using it to say why Jews should be exterminated, why they should be thrown out of the country -- because he says Jews are responsible for all this immigration that is destroying white culture. His books are like the new Bible of the movement.”
[1.18]
Last spring, Beirich wrote a scathing profile of MacDonald for SPLC’s magazine, Intelligence Report, and the local chapter of the ADL became more active in raising awareness. Then earlier this year, the ground ruptured beneath MacDonald when a few uneasy colleagues from a range of academic departments coalesced and began to urge CSULB President F. King Alexander to distance the school from its infamous academic.
[1.19]
Alexander so far has declined all such requests on the basis of academic freedom. “Despite the fact that I personally disagree and even find deplorable some beliefs and opinions expressed by a few individuals on our campus, particularly those ideas that are hurtful of certain groups, I believe as Thomas Jefferson stated, that ‘errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it,’“ Alexander, who declined to be interviewed, said in a written statement.
[1.20]
“Universities should always ensure that good ideas always outweigh bad ideas,” he continued. “Universities should also be firmly committed, even at times when it is against popular opinion, to freedom of thought, and when we act to restrict opinion from the far right or the far left, then it will not be long before we can no longer call ourselves a university.”
[1.21]
But the pressure from the academic community to condemn MacDonald continues. During the past six weeks, the anthropology and history departments, as well as the Jewish studies program, all have issued statements denouncing MacDonald’s work as “professionally irresponsible and morally untenable”; the psychology department voted to disassociate from his writings because of their popularity with “extremist groups.”
[1.22]
“His approach to historical investigation is antithetical to our discipline in that he selects only those materials that support his preconceived thesis, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary,” the history faculty’s statement said. “MacDonald’s misuse of historical methodology would be unacceptable in an undergraduate history paper; how much more disturbing, therefore, is the fact that in these writings he is identified as a professor at CSULB.”
[2.1]
MacDonald’s intellectual pursuits began innocently. In 1990, he’d been at Cal State Long Beach five years, teaching and researching child psychological development, when he read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the tight-knit 19th century Jewish community of Cheyenne, Wyo.
[2.2]
“They came with a distinct culture, community activities and forms of cooperation, and they practiced their religious rituals even in the most isolated conditions,” the Times reported. “One child tells how before there was a rabbi in Cheyenne, his father dressed meat in the kosher tradition in the back of his furniture store.”
[2.3]
The article made MacDonald think of animals.
[2.4]
He had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1966 with a degree in philosophy and dreams of being a jazz musician. When reality sank in, MacDonald entered graduate school at the University of Connecticut in the mid-’70s, earning a master’s in biology and then, four years later, a doctorate in biobehavorial science.
[2.5]
His research focused on the personalities of wolves, and by the time he left UConn in 1981 to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois, MacDonald was convinced that, like the lab wolves he’d studied, human behavioral tendencies also led back to specific genetic blueprints. And that is where his mind wandered when he read about Cheyenne’s Jews.
[2.6]
“My adviser, Benson Ginsburg, wrote an article saying that wolves would be a better model for human behavior than chimpanzees, because of social bonds and their acting like a family,” MacDonald said. “They have to police the boundaries and police in-group behavior; you can’t have freeloaders. My earliest research on the behavior of Jews focused on that, and you see wolf packs do that.”
[2.7]
MacDonald began to think of Judaism as the vehicle through which an evolutionary strategy was mechanized. He decided to read Paul M. Johnston’s “A History of the Jews” and the Tanakh, or as MacDonald knew it, the Old Testament, and within short order, he was mentally outlining “A People that Shall Dwell Alone.”
[2.8]
The book became the first in his series, “The Culture of Critique.” “A People that Shall Dwell Alone” lays the foundation for MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy and briefly discusses other groups that he believes employ similar strategies: Gypsies, the Amish, Chinese living abroad.
[2.9]
Jews, he pointed out, are taught they are different -- God’s chosen -- and they are encouraged to live lives that benefit other Jews. They also marry within the Tribe, and more often their neighbors within their extended family, MacDonald wrote. Focusing on the Ashkenazim of Central and Eastern Europe, he argued that competition for resources benefited Jews who chose niche businesses, like trading and banking. And in one of his most controversial claims, MacDonald wrote that, over time Jews have grown increasingly successful because of a eugenics program built into the religion -- Talmud study, which helped determine which men got the prettiest wives, the best business opportunities and the most children.
[2.10]
“These documents contain a vast amount of material for which there are no practical functions at all,” MacDonald wrote. “The incredible elaboration of Jewish religious law in these writings suggests that this mass of material is the result of intense intellectual competition within the Jewish community and that the resulting Torah then provided an arena for intellectual competition within the Jewish community.”
[2.11]
The second volume, “Separation and its Discontents,” offers an evolutionary explanation for anti-Semitism, from the late Roman Empire to modern Diaspora life, and discusses Jewish strategies for combating discrimination. The most controversial portion of this book, Chapter 5, compares Nazism to Judaism.
[2.12]
“The National Socialist movement in Germany from 1933-1945 is a departure from Western tendencies toward universalism and muted individualism in the direction of racial nationalism and cohesive collectivism.... It may be usefully conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy that was characterized by several key features that mirrored Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.”
[2.13]
MacDonald concluded that Nazi ideology “may well have been caused or at least greatly facilitated by the presence of Judaism as a very salient and successful racially exclusive antithetical group strategy within German society.”
[2.14]
His final volume in the series, “The Culture of Critique,” focuses on Judaism as a culture of belittling non-Jews and makes broad claims about Jewish dominance in media and the social sciences, identification with radical leftist politics and influence over immigration laws. He argues in the preface to the paperback edition (2002) that Jewish intellectuals and influentials have discovered, and are committed to, the best strategy for “destroying Europeans”: convincing them of their own moral bankruptcy. “And thus,” he wrote, “the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West.”
[2.15]
MacDonald’s newest addition to this library, “Cultural Insurrections,” was published last month by Occidental Press. The book is a compilation of his essays from the past few years, with topics ranging from “Stalin’s Willing Executioners” to “What Makes Western Culture Unique.” In the book’s final essay -- “Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?” -- MacDonald embraces Jewish “hyper-ethnocentrism” as a strategy to fight the “onslaught” of immigration that he believes has increased ethnic competition for resources and threatens white European American culture. “We already see numerous examples in which coalitions of minority groups attempt to influence public policy, including immigration policy, against the interests of the European majority. And we must realize that placing ourselves in a position of vulnerability would be extremely risky, given the deep sense of historical grievance harbored by many ethnic activists toward Europeans,” MacDonald wrote.
[2.16]
“This is especially the case with Jews, and of course Jews have shown a tendency to become part of the elite in Western societies. We have recently seen reports in the press of religious Jews spitting on Christian symbols in Israel, thereby resurrecting an age-old Jewish practice. Indeed, hatred toward all things European is normative among a great many strongly identified Jews.”
[2.17]
In fact, there were reports from Ha’aretz and Christianity Today in 2004 of a spate of spitting incidents in Jerusalem, in which ultra-Orthodox Jews allegedly assaulted Christians. However, spitting, like the blood libel that claims Jews ritually slaughter Christian children and bake their blood into matzah, is not and never has been an “age-old Jewish practice.”
[2.18]
Most of the essays for “Cultural Insurrections” appeared in The Occidental Quarterly, a Mount Airy, Md.-based journal that “unapologetically defends the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples.” In 2004, the journal awarded MacDonald a $10,000 prize.
[2.19]
“MacDonald’s ‘racism’ is nothing more than the idea that European-descended peoples have as much right as any other people, including Jews, to preserve their people and their culture,” Virginia Abernethy, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and, like MacDonald, an editorial adviser to The Occidental Quarterly, wrote in the book’s foreword.
[3.1]
MacDonald’s research rests on the assumption, based on interpretations of intelligence tests, that Jews are born with superior brains. The intelligence quotient sits on a sliding scale, with the average IQ at 100. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, however, is a whopping 107 to 115, at the median higher than 70 percent of people, according to a few contested, though oft-cited, studies by Margaret E. Backman (1972), Julius S. Romanoff (1976) and Richard Lynn (2004).
[3.2]
The results have been dramatic: Freud, Einstein, Dylan. In the second half of the 20th century, Jews received 29 percent of the Nobel Prizes, while accounting for only 13 million of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants -- about two-tenths of a percent.
[3.3]
“The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data,” Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which discussed the socioeconomic consequences of racial differences in intelligence, wrote in Commentary magazine last year. “And so we come to the great question: How and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?”
[3.4]
There is no accepted explanation. Some researchers have attributed higher IQ to medieval persecution, others to Jewish identity as the People of the Book and a few, maybe flippantly, to the fruits of being God’s chosen.
[3.5]
But how researchers answer that same question depends heavily upon what school of thought they come from. Evolutionary psychologists like MacDonald credit better Jewish genes, while traditional biologists argue heightened IQ is the result of nurture, not nature.
[3.6]
“Jews may have been able to actualize their intelligence differently than other groups because we have an enormous, 5,000-year cultural history prizing learning and achievement,” said Richard M. Lerner, a critic of MacDonald who directs the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University. “There is no innateness.”
[3.7]
Few people would deny that Jews number strongly among the American elite, but very few American Jews want to talk about it. Among those who will is J.J. Goldberg, author of the authoritative 1996 book, “Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment.”
[3.8]
“A lot of the politics of Jewish advocacy, minority advocacy in general, is victimhood,” Goldberg said in an interview. “You can’t do that if you are not actually a victim. There are some people who think Jews are powerless and others, like Kevin MacDonald, think that Jews control everything. In fact, the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
[3.9]
Another journalist eager to discuss this topic is Philip Weiss, who writes the blog, Mondoweiss, and, unlike Goldberg, is an anti-Zionist who can be a brutal critic of his co-religionists. In December, MacDonald mentioned Weiss on his Web site, kevinmacdonald.net, where he links to his articles about Jews and Western culture and writes lengthy responses to critics. MacDonald praised Weiss as a fellow traveler. On his own blog, Weiss quickly rejected the embrace.
[3.10]
“He is trying to examine some important ideas. I just wish he wasn’t racist about it,” Weiss said in an interview, adding, “There was scrutiny of Jewish power in Central Europe when the Nazis arose. Therefore there is no ability to scrutinize Jewish power now because it makes you a Nazi. But I think that it is a legitimate intellectual and journalistic exercise to scrutinize Jewish power. I know MacDonald is engaged in that, and I respect that. But it is his generalizations about Jews that I find disturbing.”
[3.11]
Broad brushing, a central criticism of MacDonald’s work, is a professional hazard in evolutionary psychology, a field of study whose legitimacy has been fiercely contested. For its advocates, it is scientific research that applies Darwinian principles to human behavior. Opponents liken it to Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories, “ which explained contemporary phenomena with fantastic ontological accounts that traced the maze backward.
[3.12]
Nevertheless, MacDonald was once a respected member of this community. His first book was fairly well reviewed, though the second less so and the third almost not at all. From 1995 to 2001, he served as the elected secretary-archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. That organization’s president would come to repudiate MacDonald as an “embarrassment.” “The theoretical viewpoint expressed in MacDonald’s books stands in the most extreme contradiction to nearly every contentful core claim of evolutionary psychology,” said John Tooby, co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara and a pioneer in the field.
[3.13]
Tooby’s comment, which appeared on Slate.com, was prompted by MacDonald’s decision on Jan. 31, 2000, to enter a British courtroom as an expert witness on Jewish behavior. On that day, MacDonald explained his belief that Jewish activists conspire against individuals who threaten the group interest, a model he alleged had been used to suppress, after publication, Irving’s biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
[3.14]
“Yes, I think that anti-Semitism is, you know, a perennial problem, and Jewish organizations have developed very sophisticated ways of dealing with it,” MacDonald said, in what ended up being a very short testimony. “This is one way of dealing with it. Anti-Semitism or any anti-Semitism is fought very, very intensely. They take it very seriously, and they do quite a job, obviously, of suppressing it, yes.”
[3.15]
That statement surprised Irving, who didn’t like being called an anti-Semite in court, and those few minutes have dogged MacDonald since. On his Web site and that of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a Holocaust-denying organizatin based in Newport Beach, MacDonald presented a lengthy explanation for why he agreed to testify.
[3.16]
He claimed that Lipstadt, following a pattern of Jewish activism, had “attempted to prevent the publication of writings conflicting with their constructions of reality” and exaggerated Irving’s Holocaust denial. MacDonald also appealed to the academic importance of Irving’s book, “Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich.”
[3.17]
“He had access to original documents in the Soviet Union that nobody knew about. It was the kind of thing that any historian would have to read. And yet it was rescinded; they actually took it off the shelf. I thought that was ridiculous, just activism stuff,” MacDonald added in an interview. “It was just suppression of free speech.”
[3.18]
In Lipstadt’s memoir, “History on Trial,” she recalled the surprise of learning an expert on anti-Semitism would be a witness against her.
[3.19]
“I could not fathom,” she wrote, “how a specialist on anti-Semitism would voluntarily testify on Irving’s behalf, unless, I thought -- facetiously -- somehow he’s for it.”
[4.1]
Cal State Long Beach’s Jewish studies program is located about 100 yards from Psych 417 on the second floor of a collection of history and sociology offices that looks 70 years old and smells older. The program is identified by a corkboard adjacent to the office of co-director Jeffrey Blutinger, who teaches Jewish intellectual and cultural history and post-communist Holocaust memorialization. Waiting outside, visitors are entertained by the printed phrases of “Jewish Buddhists” -- “If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?” and “Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.” -- and satirical headlines from a backdated issue of The Onion -- “Furher’s Slaughter of Millions Blamed on Serious Self-Esteem Issues.”
[4.2]
Blutinger’s office is stuffed with six bookcases full of Jewish history, from Heinrich Graetz to pioneer Jews of the American West. And lumped on a pile of binders beneath the Encyclopedia Judaica lay first editions of MacDonald’s first two books, checked out from the university library, and borrowed copies of “The Culture of Critique” and “Understanding Jewish Influence,” an Occidental Quarterly monograph containing three MacDonald essays.
[4.3]
A former lawyer who joined the faculty four years ago, Blutinger has emerged as a leader in the battle against MacDonald, urging colleagues across campus to join the fight and authoring the Jewish studies’ program statement denouncing MacDonald’s research and the appended 18-page explanation.
[4.4]
“It’s important that we take a stand,” Blutinger said. “I teach the Holocaust every fall, and the thing I always end the course with is that, God willing, we will never have to make the choice people did back then, but all of us face the choice between what’s right and doing what is easy or convenient. I tell them that I hope they will do what is right.”
[4.5]
“If we are not willing to stand up when the risks are small,” he continued, “why would we be willing to take a stand when the risks are big?”
[4.6]
Unpopular as MacDonald’s views are, there appears little the university can do. He is protected by his status as a tenured professor, which he achieved in 1994, the year the first book in his “Culture of Critique” series was published. MacDonald also received a distinguished faculty award in 1995, and there is no record of any student complaint about anything MacDonald has said in 23 years, the administration, ADL and Hillel all reported.
[4.7]
Cal Sate Long Beach has been down this road before.
[4.8]
Nearly 30 years ago, Reinhard K. Buchner, a physics professor who from 1980 to 1983 was an editorial adviser for IHR’s now-defunct Journal of Historical Review, drew protests from the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center. The journal carried such Buchner essays as “The Problem of Cremator Hours and Incineration Time,” which argued, using time-space calculations, that the number of Jews who possibly could have been killed at Auschwitz has been exaggerated.
[4.9]
Buchner eventually returned to Germany, but a former colleague on the editorial board, Arthur R. Butz, remains in American academia. A long-time associate professor of engineering at Northwestern University, Butz was an early Holocaust denier. In 1976, he wrote “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.”
[4.10]
Many other tenured scholars, from the lowest to highest levels of academia, use their position to share unsavory opinions. The issue is one of academic freedom, designed to encourage bold research by protecting faculty from the political whims of capricious administrators. And even as it promotes experimental research in every discipline, it also frequently puts universities in uncomfortable positions.
[4.11]
MacDonald has publicly warned Cal State Long Beach administrators, responsible for the second-largest student body (population: 37,000) in the country’s largest university system (23 campuses scattered from Arcata to San Diego), that the school could expect a lawsuit if he was terminated without just cause.
[4.12]
This is why faculty statements have urged only that the university distance itself from his theories about Jews and his support for ethnostates that create a haven for European American interests. Each of the four departmental statements professed a belief in his freedom to write about whatever he wants.
[4.13]
“We wish to make it clear that we do not seek to impede Kevin MacDonald’s First Amendment rights,” proclaimed the statement from the anthropology department, released April 28. “However, just as he has rights, we have the right, if not the obligation, to denounce his writings on race, ethnicity and intelligence that promote intolerance, as not only inaccurate, but as professionally irresponsible and morally untenable.”
[4.14]
In the second of two recent interviews, MacDonald said he is not a fan of anti-Semitism. But he also described his opinions on a Palestinian American TV news program in 2005 as “rational” anti-Semitism and has joked that being branded a Jew hater was a “badge of honor,” the knee-jerk reaction of a scared Jewish establishment.
[4.15]
The chief concern over MacDonald’s writings about Jews is directed at his fan base: white supremacists like Stormfront.org and Vanguard News Network -- whose motto is “No Jews. Just Right.” The members of these online communities have become his loudest defenders, often in language that is as offensive as possible.
[4.16]
“So the goddam Kikes are getting their way yet again, putting the thumbscrews to a White scholar whose ass they are not worthy to lick.... At least this oppression proves that Prof. MacDonald’s great work is hitting the scum hard,” a Vanguard commenter wrote in February below a republished story about MacDonald from CSULB’s student paper.
[4.17]
“How much more of this humiliation is our race going to take? How long before this motherf---ing plague of repulsive, hook-snouted ticks is given a real Zyklon fumigation, as opposed to the fairy tale one?”
[4.18]
MacDonald repudiated such rhetoric as “crazy stuff” but said he supports the ideology behind it.
[4.19]
“White people have legitimate ethnic interests. To the extent that that is all they believe, then we are on the same page,” he said. “I don’t like to use words like white supremacists. You could say that Koreans in Korea are Korean supremacists if they want to maintain their culture. It is kind of a loaded word; it is a politically charged word of the left, basically, to pathologize any sense of having an ethnicity and culture by people like me. I reject that.”
[4.20]
“I certainly reject the tactics and the rhetoric of these people. It’s very crude,” MacDonald added. “But to the extent that David Duke is trying to advance a white ethnic interest and so on, I don’t have any problem with that.”
2009
2009-04-06-Gottfried
In Search of Anti-Semitismby Paul Gottfried (note: Gottfried is Jewish, of German Jewish descent)
Taki’s Magazine (Taki’s Top Drawer), 2009-04-06
[The ostensible purpose for this article
is to review Kevin MacDonald’s Cultural Insurrections,
but it really describes and criticizes
some broad themes in MacDonald’s writings on Jews.
In the following, most (but not all) of the emphasis is added.]
[1]
Among those authors considered politically incorrect,
and even those considered really politically incorrect,
Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame.
A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal
describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology
at California State University at Long Beach as
“the professor anti-Semites love.”
Alluding to the fact that
university authorities have been trying
to force the outspoken MacDonald
out of his tenured position,
the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.”
We also learn that this clinical psychologist is
“considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.”
[2]
It would be ridiculous to imagine the same ignominy
would be visited on MacDonald
if he were a black sociologist making critical remarks about white people.
Assuming that he were a designated victim,
he would be allowed to compose for profit and prestige
diatribes against white Christian males,
possibly from a cushy university post at whatever salary
illustrious defamers of Euro-Americans [e.g.] are now earning.
And if he were a Jew or Christian
attacking Christians as the agents of human evil,
the now browbeaten MacDonald
could make a king’s ransom at some well-heeled institute
or as a feature writer for The New Republic or New York Times.
[3]
Readers of this website are aware of
the lunatic double standard
that has been imposed on intellectuals throughout the Western world,
almost always by Westerners themselves,
for the purpose of determining
who can criticize whom.
(By now this has become a permanent aspect of “democratic” regimes.)
[4]
Plainly MacDonald is not playing by the establishment rules
when he observes that
Jews have worked at weakening those non-Jewish societies
in which they have lived.
Although this thesis seems to me to be a bit too generalized,
I have no objection to letting MacDonald go on trying to prove it.
[5]
In his recently published anthology of essays, Cultural Insurrections,
it would be proper to note that MacDonald makes assumptions here
that I have questioned in my review of
his three-volume, monumental work on the Jews since Moses
[PTSDA, SAID, CC].
I continue to find some of the cognitive disparities he stresses
between Ashkenazi Jews and Euro-Americans
to be overstated or at least under-demonstrated.
If they were in fact as stark as MacDonald insists they are,
I would believe that Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans
as natural inferiors or
as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization
(or what remains of it) without a Jewish master class.
I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating
from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved
in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.
[6]
It also seems that certain Jewish behavioral patterns MacDonald outlines
are not uniquely Jewish.
Other minorities such as
Protestant non-conformists
and later Irish Catholics in England (and in the U.S.),
Huguenots in France, and
Old Believers in Tsarist Russia,
have shown exactly the same propensity for radical social causes,
partly as acts of defiance against what they viewed as
regimes that had failed to accord them full legal and/or social recognition.
[7]
Sephardic and German Jews
who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
seemed hell-bent on joining upper-class Protestants
and they usually disappeared into the dominant gene pool
within a few generations.
I am not convinced that Jewish behavior toward Christians
follows a biologically determined strategy
aimed at the control of resources.
My lifelong impression from being around them is that
Jews don’t like Christians because of historical grievances,
just the way Irish Catholics continue to rage against Protestant Yankees
for real amd imaginary offenses inflicted on their ancestors.
[8]
Although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here,
it is doubtful that these dividing lines
operate strictly according to biological conditioning.
And it seems even less likely that they are shaped by
the natural desire to control resources, in competition against other groups.
Much of what MacDonald cites as Jewish behavior
is hostility, mixed with anxiety, rather than competitiveness.
MacDonald is illustrating culturally subversive activities
that go well beyond
any attempt to achieve group competitive advantage
measured by socio-economic success.
Assailing the moral foundations of a Christian middle-class society
as pathological and anti-Semitic,
a tendency MacDonald proves Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly engaged in,
is not simply an attack on the material resources of the dominant society.
What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior;
and one may certainly question the biological reductionism used to explain it.
[9]
Having raised these critical points,
I should also mention that
MacDonald builds a thoroughly cogent case that
the creation of “modernity” and
the launching of a succession of indignant social crusades
against bourgeois Christian civilization
by Jewish intellectuals and political activists
has usually betokened some degree of malice.
Jews are not the only minority
that has attempted to subvert dominant outside cultures.
They’re just better at doing this than any other group.
Jewish intellectuals and activists excel at agitating
in the name of some presumed moral high ground,
acting like the cunning or resentful priestly class,
to which Nietzsche compared the Jews in Genealogy of Morals.
In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jews are good at transmitting “slave morality,”
without being (immediately) infected themselves.
[10]
MacDonald’s newest anthology offers further evidence
of what he understands as
the Jewish practice of burrowing from within
to weaken the cultural coherence of gentile societies.
[A prime example is revealed in the
Washington Post’s 2009-05-14 coverage
of the explosion of illegitimate births in America.]
And he offers abundant proof that this burrowing has and is continuing to occur.
Whether he is dealing with the predominantly Jewish Frankfurt School
and its cultural influences,
the role played by Jewish activists in opposing controls on immigration
throughout the last hundred years,
the penetration and takeover of the American Right
by the neoconservatives, or
the pressures placed on politicians and political parties
by Zionist organizations,
MacDonald creates the impression that
Jews have worked collectively toward two ends:
lessening the cohesion of gentile society and
promoting specifically Jewish national ends.
[11]
An argument I have used in the past to counter his generalizations is that
“not every Jewish community at all times and in all places
has acted in this way”;
nonetheless,
MacDonald could respond to my objections
by pointing out that
his analysis applies to American Jews for at least the last several generations.
And he offers evidence that the same behavioral patterns
as the one he discerns
among the predominantly Eastern European Jews in the U.S.
could already be seen among the relatively assimilated German Jews
since their emancipation in Europe.
[12]
The same radicalization could be perceived
among German Jewish intellectuals
going back to the beginnings of Marxian socialism.
And the cultural Marxism that has now taken off in a big way
had its origin among
alienated or embittered German Jews of the interwar period,
who later emigrated to the U.S.
The present multicultural fixation
that has taken Western Europe, Canada and the U.S. by storm
was largely the creation of German Jews.
[13]
But the group MacDonald’s brief leaves me wondering about most
is the white Christian majority:
They are jerked around because
they have accepted this role for themselves.
My own works on the politics of guilt underlines this tendency:
Euro-Americans have become
emotionally and sociologically predisposed toward aggrieved minorities
that condemn them for politically incorrect attitudes.
But have Jewish priests been necessary to get the Christian majority
to practice slave morality?
My answer is that “it helps but isn’t absolutely necessary.”
[14]
The institution of learning [viz.] at which I work
and the German Anabaptist denomination to which it was long connected
are paradigmatically PC.
Furthermore, Lancaster County, where our college is located,
registered the largest vote for Obama in the Democratic primary
of any county in Pennsylvania that’s not predominantly black.
This result was owed much to Church of the Brethren,
whose members in their zany anti-racism and open-borders postures
make Abe Foxman sound relatively sane.
The chance that such radicalized Protestants,
who live in their own social bubble,
would have picked up their lunacies from any Jew (me perhaps?)
is next to nil.
They came by their madness on their own, as a “peace church,”
and as late entrees into the modern age
after having spent an eternity on
isolated farms in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Like Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis, Bill Moyers,
and most of the Catholic hierarchy on the question of immigration,
these Anabaptists exemplify aspects of Christianity
that are totally compatible with
cultural Marxism and the politics of Western suicide.
They do not need Jews, blacks, or North African Muslims
to teach them self-destructive behavior,
any more than Swedes or Spaniards need the villains in MacDonald’s script
to hand over their countries to hostile Muslims from North Africa.
[15]
The most interesting point for me in MacDonald’s volume
is his presentation of
movement conservative goyim.
He is absolutely on the money in documenting
their servility
in relation to
their neoconservative puppet-masters.
The most startling aspect of this relation is the degree to which
the servile class allows itself to be instructed.
Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith,
and other neoconservative spokesmen
have indeed convinced their pliant enablers that
Israel is to be defended as an “ethno-cultural creation,”
while
the American nation is to be seen as
possessing an “ideological identity,”
founded on global human rights principles
and on an expansionist foreign policy.
MacDonald cites the remarkable tribute produced for neocon guru Leo Strauss
by his admiring disciple Werner Dannhauser,
a tribute that extols Strauss, the famous mentor to global democrats,
as “a good Jew.
He knew the dignity and worth of love of one’s own.
Love of the good is higher than love of one’s own,
but there is only one road to truth
and it leads through love of one’s own.”
MacDonald asks rhetorically whether Anglo-Saxon Protestant “conservatives”
could express such sentiments about their own group
without Jewish liberals or neocons
attacking them as nativists or incipient Nazis.
[16]
McDonald cites the public letter
drafted by William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century in 2002,
calling for a “move against Saddam Hussein,” on the grounds that
“Israel’s fight against terrorism is ours.”
MacDonald calls special attention to the prominent Jewish neoconservatives
who appended their signatures
to this call for a war of aggression on behalf of Israel.
But what is perhaps even more striking are the non-Jewish signatories,
such as William J. Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ellen Bork,
and the professionally insecure, very young editor of National Review,
Rich Lowry.
In most of these cases one encounters demonstrations of fealty paid to
the neoconservative barons who run
FOX News, Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, ISI,
and the minds of a majority of Republican voters.
[17]
But pace MacDonald, these neocon lords and their servants
are not the voices of the entire Likud coalition in Israel.
They speak for Natan Sharansky, Benjamin Netanyahu,
and others even further on the Israeli nationalist right,
many of whom have been taught to mumble neocon gibberish
about how “democracies have never fought wars” and
about how “only democracies are legitimate governments.”
A point Israeli political analysts
Leon Hadar (see especially his book Sandstorm) and Martin van Creveld
have argued for several years now is that
neoconservatives and their gentile policy-think-tank hangers-on
do not speak for the majority of Israelis,
who certainly did not favor the American invasion of Iraq.
[If one restricts from “Israelis” to “Israeli Jews,”
which of course is the critical block for influencing American policy,
the picture is quite different.
In fact, according to the polls just cited, they certainly did.]
(Iran might well be a different matter.)
It was American neoconservatives,
supported by the Christian Right and their Israeli contacts,
who planned Bush’s Middle Eastern policy.
In the end, MacDonald demonstrates the same when he investigates
the Israeli associations of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.
[18]
The Evangelical Cal Thomas
and the “conservative Catholic” “theologian” Michael Novak
invariably cite in their columns and speeches
the alleged return of anti-Semitism on the antiwar left.
When Novak came to speak at my college six years ago,
he attacked movie producers in Hollywood—Jewish leftists to a man—
as “anti-Semites.”
The audience listened to him in understandable astonishment,
for it could not escape even our news-averse trustees
that Novak was saying something glaringly ridiculous.
[19]
Moreover, in their invectives against Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright,
FOX News analysts and announcers
played on Wright’s association with the “anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.”
That Wright and Farrakhan don’t much like Jews and Judaism
seemed to matter more than the more obvious fact that
the pair hate the Jews specifically as subgroup of Whitey.
[20]
Such pandering may result from the fact that
movement conservative gentiles are almost as infected as other gentiles
by the politics of white Christian guilt.
They can only embrace their country
to the extent that it renounces an “ethnic-cultural” identity,
a character that they happily concede to Jews and others,
but which they have collectively renounced
for the dubious honor of being a “propositional nation.”
Naturally (what else?) the assumption of this contrived identity
sets the stage for
their country being overwhelmed by legal and illegal Third World immigrants.
It also means
waging whatever wars
the neocon master race tells their gentile collaborators
[are] “good for Israel” and/or help to spread “democracy.”
Unlike MacDonald,
I see no compelling reason to blame this lunacy
exclusively or even predominantly on
the two percent of the population which is Jewish,
without noticing that
the majority group,
including those who describe themselves as “conservatives,”
have lost their cotton-picking minds.
2009-04-18-reply-to-Gottfried
A comment on Paul Gottfried’s review of Cultural Insurrectionsby Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Observer, 2009-04-18
[This answers some points in the Gottfried review cited above.
Here is a copy of MacDonald's response,
without the many links in the original.
What appeared to me to be certain typos have been silently corrected.]
[0.1]
Paul Gottfried is outside the mainstream of Jewish intellectuals
in being associated with paleoconservatives rather than
either the left or the neoconservative right.
In my eyes, therefore, he is a force for relative good
in a world where paleocons like Pat Buchanan have been relegated to
the fringes of intellectual debate in the US
and have long rap sheets at powerful, well-endowed organizations
like the $PLC and the ADL.
[0.2]
Another reason I am predisposed to be positive about Gottfried is that
he reviewed Cultural Insurrections respectfully,
noting pointedly that there are completely different standards
in discussing the activities and influence of other ethnic groups or religions.
And he agrees with much of my analysis that
Jews have in fact been deeply involved in erecting
the culture of critique that now pervades the West.
[0.3]
Inevitably, however,
despite a great many good things in Gottfried’s review,
my reply must necessarily discuss points of disagreement.
As Gottfried notes,
he has previously reviewed Culture of Critique in Chronicles,
and we went back and forth on it in print,
with a final rejoinder by me on my website.
(The entire thread is here.)
He makes some of the same points in his recent review,
but it’s worth discussing them again
because we have both refined our arguments a bit in the last decade.
Section 1
Jewish IQ
[1.1]The area of Jewish IQ has attracted quite a bit of research
since my review in 1994.
My estimate of an IQ of 115 for Ashkenazi Jews
is higher than estimates based on more recent data.
Richard Lynn’s work is exemplary:
Lynn finds that Ashkenazi Jews in Britain and the US
have average IQ’s of 110.7 and 110.4 respectively,
and I am happy to accept those figures.
[1.2]
Assuming those averages,
then one would expect there would be
4 times the proportion of Jews with >130 IQ and
6 times the proportion of Jews with >145 IQ.
As Lynn notes,
this goes some way to explaining Jewish overrepresentation
among academic elites in the US and Britain
(by factors of 7.0 and 7.6 respectively)
and among winners of Nobel prizes
(by factors of 8.0 and 12.3 respectively).
[1.3]
But none of these data shows that, as Gottfried phrases it,
“Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans as natural inferiors
or as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization (or what remains of it)
without a Jewish master class.”
[Gottfried definitely did not assert that
that was Jewish behavior or attitudes,
rather it was part of a hypothetical he posed.]
[1.4]
In fact, even assuming those proportions,
because Jews are such a small percentage of the population,
there are far more European-Americans and native Brits
with IQ’s above either 130 or 145.
And, also consistent with my 1994 analysis,
there are far more non-Jews among Nobel prize winners than Jews.
[1.5]
In fact, if we take an IQ of 145 as a cutoff for genius
and assume that Jews were around 3.4% of the White US population in 1950,
there were nearly 4 times more non-Jewish White geniuses in the US
than Jewish geniuses.
If we use 130 as a benchmark
for at least vastly easing the path to upward mobility,
there were over 6 times more non-Jewish Whites in this category than Jews.
And there would have been a much greater disparity in England
where Jews were less than 1% of the population.
[1.6]
Europeans certainly do not need Jews to develop or maintain their civilization.
The successful erection of the culture of critique
is much more about ethnic networking
and dominating key points in the cultural food chain —
especially elite academic institutions and the media —
than it is about IQ.
[1.7]
For example,
even correcting for IQ,
Jews are massively overrepresented at Ivy League universities
compared to Whites.
In 1998,
Jews represented around 25–33% of Harvard undergraduates
compared to around 25% non-Jewish Whites.
In 2000 the Jewish population was around 3%
of the non-Hispanic White population.
On the basis of IQ,
the ratio of non-Jewish Whites to Jews should be around
7 to 1 (IQ >130) or
4.5 to 1 (IQ > 145).
Instead, the ratio was at most 1 to 1.
But even this may underestimate the gap
because it’s hard to believe that
all Harvard students have at least an IQ of 130.
Could it be that that Jared Kushner’s route to Harvard
is not at all unusual for Jews these days?
[Frankly I think that last is probably a bit of a cheap shot.
While a few Jews no doubt now are getting into prestigious universities
based on their family’s wealth and/or prestige,
as surely some gentiles have done in the past,
I have the greatest confidence in the combination of
high intelligence and dedicated work ethic possessed by many, if not most, Jews.
That, plus the profound allegiance to the principles of political correctness
(which were practically invented by Jews) which is being indoctrinated into Jews,
gives them a leg up on getting into the prestigious universities.
Whether those universities should be using political correctness as a litmus test for entry is another story.]
[1.8]
And what, then, to make of Jewish representation of 60%
in studies of the American media elite? (See here.)
Pretty clearly, IQ has very little to do with it.
This is entirely compatible with
Merlin Miller’s recent TOO article on Hollywood where he notes that
Jewish graduates of USC’s film production program
were able to achieve much more with the same credentials
than their non-Jewish counterparts.
[1.9]
Indeed, the larger point is that
the rise of the West happened without any significant Jewish contribution.
The age of Spanish conquest and exploration began
in the same year that the Jews were expelled from Spain
and not long after the Inquisition was launched in 1481.
During this period,
Spain became the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe.
Eventually,
the main competitors with Spain were Western European countries —
especially England —
that had expelled Jews in the Middle Ages.
[1.10]
The “rise of the Jews” — Albert Lindemann’s term —
resulted ultimately from
a Jewish population explosion
among Hasidic and other fundamentalist Jews in Eastern Europe.
But Eastern Europe remained a relative backwater
compared to Western Europe and America
despite the fact that, as Yuri Slezkine has shown,
Jews completely dominated the economic and cultural life in those areas,
at least until World War II.
Section 2
Jewish Hostility toward the Peoples and Culture of the West
[2.1]Gottfried writes [¶5],
“I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating
from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved
in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.”
[2.2]
But I am not making any such claim.
Each country must be analyzed separately,
and one can never make generalizations across time and place
without examining the data.
[2.3]
Nevertheless,
an important aspect of traditional Jewish attitudes has been
animosity toward the wider, non-Jewish culture.
In reviewing Cultural Insurrections,
Gottfried presumably noticed Chapter 2 —
my review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century,
subtitled “Jews as a hostile elite in the USSR.”
That essay reviews
Jewish hostility toward non-Jewish national cultures
throughout Eastern and Central Europe
beginning in the latter 19th century and extending into
the mass murders of cultural non-conformists of the Soviet period.
Cultural subversion was also an important theme of
the essays on Henry Ford and The International Jew
which also appear in Cultural Insurrections.
[2.4]
The first chapter of Culture of Critique
also traces a long history of Jewish hostility
toward the people and culture of surrounding societies —
Muslim, Christian and pagan —
beginning in the ancient world.
For the most part
this hostility remained within the confines of the Jewish community —
especially in Jewish religious writing.
But this was due solely to the undeveloped state of the media
and the self-segregation or exclusion of Jews from the wider society.
[2.5]
However, when Jews did enter the wider society, as in 15th-century Spain,
the radical critiques of Jewish intellectuals appeared in
the most prestigious academic and popular media.
This has been the pattern in the contemporary history of the West,
at least since the mid-19th century.
[2.6]
The point is that we should not minimize
the tendency for Jews to create movements
that are highly critical of the people and culture of non-Jews.
One shouldn’t over-generalize this to all Jews.
Paul Gottfried is certainly an exception,
and he is doubtless correct that
this tendency was at least muted
in the contingent of German Jews who came to America in the mid-19th century.
(In Germany, however, the association of Jews with cultural criticism
was an important ingredient in anti-Jewish attitudes
from the late 19th century up until the rise of National Socialism.)
[2.7]
Nevertheless, despite their relative lack of hostility,
it should be noted that German Jews like
Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and Louis Brandeis
were effective activists on behalf of Jewish causes
that were at least arguably not in the interests of the United States
or its non-Jewish citizens.
For example, Jewish activists led by the American Jewish Committee
influenced US immigration policy so that Eastern European Jews
were allowed to immigrate two decades after
the American public opposed further immigration.
This group also successfully influenced US foreign policy
to oppose Russia until the triumph of the Bolsheviks,
and Brandeis was an influential Zionist.
[2.8]
In these cases,
their motivation was not so much hostility toward the US
as simply their perception of Jewish interests.
On the other hand, Franz Boas,
a German Jew with a great deal of animosity toward Prussian culture,
was a seminal figure in erecting the culture of critique in America.
And then there’s the Frankfurt School of German-Jewish émigrés who,
after being expelled from National Socialist Germany,
brought to America their poisonous ideology
that the group allegiances of non-Jews is a sign of psychopathology.
[2.9]
But in any case,
there has been a clear tendency
for at least some groups of strongly identified Jews
to create influential intellectual movements
that subject non-Jewish society to radical critique,
and Gottfried seems to agree with this.
[2.10]
As reviewed in The Culture of Critique,
the psychological basis for this is straightforward:
Members of strongly identified ingroups
tend to have negative views of outgroups,
especially outgroups seen as historical enemies.
And for many activist Jews —
the ones who end up having so much influence on culture,
Western history begins with
the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans,
fast forwards to marauding Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition,
and expulsions from Western Europe,
and culminates in Czarist persecutions, Henry Ford, and the Holocaust.
[2.11]
In saying that,
I am agreeing with Gottfried that
the animosity of Jewish intellectual movements
is firmly rooted in their perception of history.
(Ironically perhaps,
this makes Gottfried much more on board with the general thrust of my writing
than the review by “Garnet James Wolseley”
that appeared in The Occidental Quarterly.
See my reply.)
I do not use the phrase “resource competition”
to describe conflicts between Jews and non-Jews
in Culture of Critique.
The use of this phrase stems from my earlier books
on historical patterns of Jewish behavior
(e.g., the tendency of Jews to make alliances with oppressive elites)
and historical anti-Semitism
(e.g., hatred toward Jews competing for similar economic niches).
[2.12]
Culture of Critique formulates the conflict quite differently.
The main framework is the psychology of ingroup/outgroup conflict,
and there is little question that historical grudges
have played a major role in that.
Indeed, the theme of Jewish historical grudges
is prominent in Chapter 1 of Cultural Insurrections:
“Background Traits for Jewish Activism.”
[2.13]
Incidentally, others who have thought long and hard about Jews
ave come to a similar conclusion about
the role of Jewish hatred as a motivating force.
Consider Pat Buchanan’s pointed analogy between
the hatred that is driving the persecution of John Demjanjuk and
the hatred that drove the crucifixion of Christ:
“The spirit behind this un-American persecution
has never been that of justice tempered by mercy.
It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge
that drove another innocent Man up Calvary
that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.”
[2.14]
This is clearly a barely veiled reference to
the “blood libel” of classic Catholic theology.
But the point here is that
the persecution of Demjanjuk is motivated by
hatred and revenge for historical grievances—
exactly the motives that Gottfried and I are ascribing to
the creators of the culture of critique.
[2.15]
But having said that,
there is little question that besides hatred and revenge,
another very important part of the equation is displacement and domination.
As I noted in my recent VDARE.com article on the Jewish left,
it is more than the hostility of former ghetto dwellers
suddenly released into the modern Western world —
the phenomenon that was described so well by John Murray Cuddihy.
It is about displacement and domination:
The displacement of the genteel white Protestant culture at Columbia
that [Mark] Rudd [Rudnitsky] hated
is part of the general displacement of non-Jewish whites. …
There is no doubt it was bent on a similar displacement of white elites.
All of its policies led inexorably in that direction.
To a considerable extent, the current malaise of whites in the US
can be directly traced to the triumph of the attitudes of the New Left—
especially non-white immigration,
the rise of multiculturalism, and
the steady erosion of whites as a percentage of the electorate.
[2.16]
Ultimately, it is about resources — political, economic, and cultural.
When Whites become a minority in the US
as a result of
the mass immigration unleashed by Jewish activism and the culture of critique,
they will come to realize how devastatingly true this is.
[2.17]
I also agree with Gottfried that other historically aggrieved groups
have been hostile toward societies seen as oppressing them.
The only difference is that, as Gottfried, notes,
Jews are so much better at this game than other groups —
much better at becoming an influential component of elite and popular culture.
[2.18]
There is no question that African Americans
have legitimate historical grudges against the American past.
However, there can be little doubt that, by themselves,
they would not have had much of an influence in erecting a culture of critique.
The culture of critique was successful
because it emanated from
Harvard, Hollywood, well-connected law firms, and the New York Times —
the most prestigious academic and media institutions.
[2.19]
But of course this is exactly why we have to concentrate on Jewish influence,
not Black influence or Latino influence, much less Huguenot influence.
Section 3
Biological Reductionism?
[3.1]In commenting on this general ethnic tendency, Gottfried states that
“although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here,
it is doubtful that these dividing lines
operate strictly according to biological conditioning.”
And again:
“What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior;
and one may certainly question
the biological reductionism used to explain it.”
[3.2]
My theory is that the tendency for hostility toward outgroups
is indeed a psychological universal stemming from our evolutionary past,
although it is doubtless true that
Jews are far more motivated by ingroup/outgroup distinctions
than typical Westerners —
what I term Jewish “hyper-ethnocentrism.”
But even so,
invoking the evolutionary psychology of group competition
certainly does not make me a biological reductionist.
[3.3]
I wish that Gottfried had read and commented on
“Psychology and White Ethnocentrism” —
another chapter in Cultural Insurrections
and one that I think is perhaps the most important in the book.
(This is the academic version of that chapter.)
[3.4]
Viewed as a whole,
my work is much more about culture than it is about biology —
else why write a book titled The Culture of Critique?
Hostility toward outgroups is indeed a biological universal,
but the result is that
Jewish intellectual movements then create a culture
that is hostile to White people, their culture and their history.
This culture of critique then has important consequences
because culture is able to have a strong influence on human behavior
for the reasons described in “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism”:
The culture of critique has become the explicit culture of the West,
endlessly repeated in media messages
but packaged differently
for people of different levels of intelligence and education,
and for people with different interests and from different subcultures.
The message of this paper is that
by programming the higher areas of the brain,
this explicit culture is able to control
the implicit ethnocentric tendencies of white people. …
It’s the explicit culture, stupid!
[3.5]
Whatever else one might call me,
‘biological reductionist’ is not one of them.
(Nor is it likely that anyone who has seen me would call me “small-boned.”
And, for the record, I am not a clinical psychologist: Evolutionary/developmental/personality psychologist
would be more or less accurate.
Section 4
What’s Wrong with White People?
[4.1]Finally, we come to perhaps the most important and difficult point —
the fact that, as Gottfried says,
“the majority group,
including those who describe themselves as ‘conservatives,’
have lost their cotton-picking minds.”
I completely agree with this,
and it is certainly something that I have thought a lot about.
[4.2]
For starters,
this is why I have always phrased my claims about Jewish influence
as a necessary condition
rather than a sufficient condition.
[4.3]
Secondly, I have emphasized
how the reward and punishment structure of multi-cultural America
provides a great many opportunities for self-interested Whites
who have no concern for their own people.
Gottfried does a good job in recounting my emphasis on goyish careerists
who flock to neocon think tanks,
with the result that American conservatism is pretty much non-existent.
(The “conservative” Heritage Foundation recently advocated
a massive increase in H1B visas in the middle of a recession.
Sometimes it seems as if “conservatives” and liberals are competing to see
which group can speed up the displacement of Whites the fastest.)
[4.4]
But it’s not just about careerism
in a world where Jews are a very substantial component of the American elite.
As Gottfried notes, it’s also about White guilt.
But here Gottfried ignores the chapters of Cultural Insurrections
where I develop my ideas on the psychological tendencies of Whites
that make them predisposed to support the culture of critique,
particularly “What Makes Western Culture Unique?”
and “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism.”
This builds on earlier work,
particularly the Preface to the Paperback Edition of Culture of Critique.
[4.5]
In general, my view is that
these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between
preexisting deep-rooted tendencies of Europeans
(individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite
hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.
At the psychological level, I have proposed that
because Whites evolved in small groups
where individual reputation rather than kinship relatedness
was of the upmost importance,
Whites are more prone to guilt for transgressing social norms.
One’s reputation rather than one’s place in a kinship structure
became of exaggerated importance for Europeans.
[4.6]
Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like has the following example showing
the powerful sense of guilt at transgressing social norms
that seems to haunt most whites,
even for trivial things like not recycling:
If you are in a situation where a white person produces an empty bottle,
watch their actions.
They will first say ‘where’s the recycling?’
If you say ‘we don’t recycle,’ prepare for some awkwardness.
They will make a move to throw the bottle away, they will hesitate,
and then ultimately throw the bottle away.
But after they return look in their eyes.
All they can see is the bottle lasting forever in a landfill,
trapping small animals.
It will eat at them for days, at this point you should say
‘I’m just kidding, the recycling is under the sink.
Can you fish out that bottle?’
And they will do it 100% of the time!
[4.7]
Following the social norm of recycling is motivated by
avoiding guilt that will “eat at them for days.”
White people are easily shamed if they think they are violating a social norm.
It’s easy to see how this was adaptive in small groups that we evolved in,
where your place in the kinship structure was less important than
your reputation as a team player.
But when
the most important social norms in the West
demand suicidal behavior by whites,
upholding them becomes a pathology.
[4.8]
Recently, I have expanded on these ideas in my essay on
how the Puritans erected a home-grown culture of critique
in 19th-century America.
There I discuss the psychology of moralistic self-punishment
exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants,
but also apparent in a great many other whites.
[4.9]
Gottfried is correct that the culture of critique
could have developed without Jews in 20th-century America.
But it didn’t.
The Puritan culture of moralistic aggression
that rationalized the Civil War and the utopian idealism of the 19th century
lost out to Darwinism by the early 20th century.
(Hence the opposition to Darwinism
that is at the heart of all the Jewish intellectual movements
discussed in The Culture of Critique.)
[4.10]
At that time it was common for intellectual elites to believe in
the reality of racial differences
and the reality of competition between races and ethnic groups.
Bluebloods like Henry Cabot Lodge and Madison Grant
who descended from the Puritans
were extolling the virtues of Northern Europeans
and funding the movement to end immigration —
a battle that ended with the restrictive immigration law of 1924.
A. Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard
and Vice President of the Immigration Restriction League,
opposed the nomination of Louis Brandeis as a Supreme Court Justice
because of Brandeis’
ardent Zionism,
supported quotas on Jewish students (15%),
supported racial segregation,
and opposed homosexuality.
[4.11]
As recounted by Jerome Karabel,
Lowell lost the battle to explicitly restrict Jewish enrollment
to a coalition of elite German Jews (notably Walter Lippmann)
and elite Protestants led by former Harvard President Charles W. Eliot
representing the older strand of Yankee universalism.
Nevertheless, Jewish enrollment
was reduced from a high of around 27% to around 15%
by instituting a more covert process of student selection.
[4.12]
I think that my research shows that
the destruction of this world was the result of
the Jewish intellectual and political movements I describe in
The Culture of Critique and Cultural Insurrections.
Gottfried is skeptical of this:
Plainly MacDonald is not playing by the establishment rules
when he observes that
Jews have worked at weakening those non-Jewish societies
in which they have lived.
Although this thesis seems to me to be a bit too generalized,
I have no objection to letting MacDonald go on trying to prove it.
[4.13]
I think that at this point the fair thing is
for skeptics like Gottfried to show precisely where I am wrong.
This requires far more than
simple assertions of skepticism
and claims that my claims are “too generalized.”
[4.14]
For example, over a decade after I originally showed that
Jewish activism was by far the most important force behind
the changes in US immigration law that have resulted in
dramatically altering the politics and ethnic composition of the US,
no one has even attempted to show that I am wrong.
Yet this is by far the most important conclusion of The Culture of Critique
because, quite simply,
immigration is at the absolute center of the rise of multiculturalism
and the displacement of Whites.
[4.15]
Critics like Gottfried
need to mire themselves in the details of the historical record, as I did.
And if they show I am wrong, I will be the first to rescind my views.
[4.16]
Realize, however, that my views are entirely mainstream.
Thus, my conclusion has been reinforced by
Vanderbilt University historian Hugh Davis Graham:
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 [33] administration,
Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower [34] White House,
and presidential aide Myer Feldman,
assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz,
and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei
in the Kennedy [35]-Johnson [36] administration.
(Hugh Davis Graham,
Collision Course:
The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America,
New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 56–57).
[4.17]
To be sure,
the destruction of the Darwinian world of early 20th-century America
would not have been possible with
a group less prone to guilt and moralistic aggression against their own people.
But without the establishment of
a hostile elite dominated by strongly identified Jews,
it simply would not have happened.
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology
at California State University–Long Beach.
2014
2014-12-24-yes-the-media-has-blood-on-its-hands
Yes, the Media Has Blood on Its Handsby Kevin MacDonald
The Occidental Observer Blot, 2014-12-24
The New York Times has reacted with predictable umbrage to any suggestion that the media deluge on the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases had anything to do with the murder of the two policemen in Brooklyn.
...
It’s a strange argument, especially coming from the certifiably left — that Mr. Brinsley acted in a complete vacuum, that his cultural surroundings played no role. It didn’t matter that there were protest marches chanting “What do we want? Dead cops!” (ignored by Al Sharpton). It didn’t matter that all the statements and actions by Obama, Holder, and de Blasio supported the protesters and blamed the police for the “climate of distrust” in Black communities.
In general, the left loves arguments that culture is important. They have no problem attributing the behavior of police officers killing Blacks, the performance of Black schoolchildren, Black criminality and every other pathology to a poisonous racism that pervades White society. Discussion of genetic influences are off limits, and unfortunately there are no cultural/environmental cures for low IQ. Black children are therefore not responsible for academic failure and we have to be understanding about the levels of criminality among Blacks.
...
The left has always seen control of the culture as a critical goal because they are well aware that attitudes and behavior are indeed influenced by culture. Purging media figures who stray away from political correctness is high on their list of priorities, from Pat Buchanan getting fired at MSNBC to eliminating voices critical of Israel or Jewish power — people like Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas, and M. J. Rosenberg. They have left no stone unturned in ferreting out dissent on racial issues and on whether a non-White America is a good thing for Whites. Dissenting views on race are banned from the mainstream media because the left correctly fears that exposure would grant legitimacy, and Whites would gravitate to attitudes that are in line with their interests rather than the interests of the hostile elites who run the media. They avoid any hint that intelligent, well-spoken people oppose immigration and White dispossession in favor of the putting out the image that such Whites are uneducated and morally defective.
Their belief in the power of culture explains why the school curriculum from kindergarten through the university is all about inculcating White guilt — the culture of the holocaust and tendentious readings of the American past. The culture of the left looks with great approval on the zombie, self-hating social activists that emerge from this indoctrination, eager to carry out the wisdom of their college professors and cleanse themselves of White guilt.
...
Labels: Jews, Kevin MacDonald
posted by KHarbaugh at 02:00
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