An article of mine from 2010

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Originally published at Dissident Voice.

Faithful Circle

A Response to Noam Chomsky’s Book “Fateful Triangle”

by Jay Knott / September 18th, 2010


Hypotheses and Tests

1. Hypotheses

Dear Mr. President: We write to affirm our support for our strategic partnership with Israel, and encourage you to continue to do before international organizations such as the United Nations. The United States has traditionally stood with Israel because it is in our national security interest and must continue to do so. Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East and a vibrant democracy. Israel is also a partner to the United States on military and intelligence issues in this critical region. That is why it is our national interest to support Israel at a moment when Israel faces multiple threats from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the current regime in Iran.
– Jewish Virtual Library1

This is the beginning of the resolution passed by the US Senate on June 21 2010, supporting Israel’s attack on a convoy of unarmed aid ships headed toward Gaza, which killed nine people.

It begins with four sentences, each one of which asserts that Israel is a strategic asset of the USA. But if Israel is such an ally, why the need to emphasise it? It’s as if the senators are arguing with someone who says that Israel is NOT as useful as we tend to believe. Whoever that is, it’s not Noam Chomsky. Both left-wing thinkers like Chomsky and establishment politicians reinforce the idea that US interests coincide with those of Israel, though they differ on how good US interests are. Sometimes, when people say something too stridently, it is because they secretly know that it is false.

This review was sparked off by an online critique of Noam Chomsky’s views on the Middle East by Jeff Blankfort, a reply to it, and the internet discussions around them.2 , 3 Several contributors to these discussions come from traditional anti-racist left-wing backgrounds, but, unlike most of the left, have taken it to its logical conclusion, opposing Jewish power as the most important form of ethnically-based oppression in the West today.

Chomsky fan Hammond3 urges Blankfort’s supporters to read Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle.4 So I did. I am not impressed by Chomsky’s fame nor by the book’s approximately two thousand references. I look at the arguments.

Professor Chomsky made one of the greatest discoveries in twentieth-century science, the language instinct, in a 1959 critique of psychologist B. F. Skinner.5 Because he’s a genius, we expect more of him than unsubstantiated platitudes. But everyone makes mistakes. Einstein spent the better part of his career trying to explain why the universe is not expanding, and Chomsky didn’t figure out that there are genes for grammar.6

He flayed Skinner on the vagueness of his terms, and for changing the meaning of words when convenient. Chomsky therefore knows that vagueness makes a hypothesis untestable, and therefore unscientific.

Chomsky brought clarity to the science of language development, but he is surprisingly contradictory on the politics of the Middle East, for a man with such a scientific, logical brain. For example, on the one hand, he denies the importance of the Israel Lobby. After all, if Israel is helping US ‘elites’ maintain their ‘hegemony’ in the ‘region’, they would hardly need a lobby to remind them of it. Universities and co-operatives are tentatively discussing a boycott of Israel. Chomsky argues against a boycott of Israeli produce, because the Lobby would call us ‘hypocrites’, unless we boycott the US too.7 So he thinks this ‘unimportant’ Lobby could undermine a boycott of Israel by mere accusations.

By page 4, Chomsky already makes it clear that he defends the Jewish State. He criticizes its current policies, which he says are caused by American Zionists, who cause its “moral degeneration and ultimate destruction”. In my pamphlet The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism, I sarcastically cited Stephen Zunes8 for claiming America was responsible for pushing poor little Israel into Lebanon in 2006. I didn’t realize how close Zunes’s attempt to make excuses for Jewish murderers was to Chomsky’s position until I read Fateful Triangle. Chomsky and his followers want us to believe that Israeli ethnic cleansing has ‘degenerated’ since 1948 because of American influence. This means the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 was morally superior to those in Lebanon in 1982, but the Hanukkah slaughter of 2008-9 was worse.

He says US ‘support’ has blocked Israel trying more moral policies, to the ‘despair’ of progressive Israeli Jews, on page 442. There is a cruder version of this ‘corruption’ narrative. It is part of the almost universally believed story of Jews as eternal victims. It enables Jewish Americans to support apartheid whilst thinking of themselves as liberals. They blackmail the left into accepting a much softer attitude toward Jewish supremacy than toward white identity.

Chomsky is by no means the worst example of chutzpah in the left. He is contradictory rather than duplicitous. He exposes Jewish emotional blackmail. He is contemptuous of professional Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel. He is fearless and merciless at ridiculing the hypocrisy and hysteria for which American Jewish organizations are notorious, who claim that critics of the Lobby are anti-Semitic. Some on the left also harass and slander pro-Palestinian peace activists. Since Israel is the only beneficiary of these divisive tactics, we call them ‘crypto-Zionists’.

But Chomsky’s main weakness is his failure to scientifically test his assertion that Israel is an ally of the USA. On page 3, without evidence, he says that US policy favors “a Greater Israel that will dominate the region in the interests of American power”.

To this end, Chomsky assumes that Arab nationalism is anti-West, whereas Jewish nationalism is pro-West. The former was allied to the Soviet Union. But this is at root a circular argument – the US supports Israel because it is an ally, and Israel is an ally because the US supports it. The reason some Arab leaders temporarily turned to Russia is because they were rejected by America, and the main reason for that is the influence of Israel. Chomsky confuses cause and effect.

The phrase ‘control of the oil’ is thrown around by Chomsky and his circle as liberally as the word ‘region’. It’s a vague leftist feel-good dumbing-down designed to prevent us from thinking through exactly what ‘control’ means, why precisely cruise missiles are useful to oil companies, and if killing Palestinian children helps US interests.

At this point, I should define ‘US interests’. I mean the interests of the US capitalist class. Unconditional support for Israel is obviously against the interests of the majority of Americans, who belong to the proletariat. But in that respect, it doesn’t differ from other unethical US foreign policies. What differentiates Zionism is that it is opposed to the interests of most of the ruling class too.

I used a Marxist phrase there. Chomsky prefers saying ‘elites’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’ in his bestselling books. Even if the ‘elites’ really do ‘perceive’ it is in US interests to throw seven million dollars a day into a black hole, they are mistaken, and Palestine Solidarity has the task of explaining that to them and to those who work and vote for them.

Chomsky claims that the US supports Israel because Israel supports US war crimes – “Israel showed how to treat third-world upstarts properly” (page 29). This puts the cart before the horse. Right after World War II, Zionists were third-world upstarts themselves, engaged in terrorism in Palestine against an imperialist power. President Truman supported these upstarts, and later, when they were no longer upstarts, president Eisenhower supported upstarts against them.

This shows two things:
1. America doesn’t automatically oppose upstarts, and
2. Israel persuaded America to support its fight against upstarts which threaten Israel, rather than America supporting Israel because it combats upstarts which oppose America.

Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests. But its friends in the media make it look as if the two countries’ enemies are the same, by amalgamating very different Arab and Muslim causes and parties. Most of these oppose Israel in principle – only a very small subset are inherently anti-American. It is in America’s interests to divide them. It is in Israel’s interests to prevent this. And it is in humanity’s interest to divorce America and Israel.

Chomsky’s claim to be a Zionist means a binational state, with the right of ‘self-determination’ of the two nations within Palestine. It’s clear which of the nations would dominate the other, but Chomsky appears to be unaware of this.

To his credit, on page 442 of his book, Chomsky predicted the defeat of the Israeli Defense Forces, which didn’t happen until seven years later, in Lebanon, in 2006. The Gaza flotilla massacre of 2010 was another disastrous error for Israel, leading to a split with Turkey, formerly its most important ally in the ‘region’. There is an opportunity to start to undermine Zionism, the only remaining example of serious racial oppression in the Western world. Is Chomsky on board?

Contradicting his view that Israel obeys America, Chomsky refers to the normal state of politics in the USA as ‘complete obedience’ to Zionist opposition to freedom of speech, on page 337, under the heading ‘The West Falls Into Line’. He also says how the allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to blackmail the elite political spectrum in Western countries into supporting Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, but then he drops the ball, reiterating hackneyed rhetoric about US policy. It’s not really US policy. It is the policy of supporters of a foreign power pretending to be pro-American.

Note that my argument does not imply promoting patriotism. It means saying, in effect, IF you are a patriotic American, you should oppose your country’s ardent support for Israel. Neither does it imply anti-Semitism. It means recognizing that the interests of most of the inhabitants of the USA would be served by reducing support to Israel. The interests of the Jewish minority would be served by increasing it. This should not be controversial. In particular, the American left, with its keen awareness of ‘privilege’, should be able to listen to this argument. But mostly, it cannot.

At one point, Chomsky discusses the hypocrisy of the Israeli leaders in using pogroms against Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century as an excuse for doing the same thing in Lebanon in 1982. But he doesn’t try to question the view that Jews have always been victims, wherever they have wandered. This myth was reiterated by Republican president George Bush Senior when he was trying to defend himself against the ‘anti-Semitism’ slur by groveling to the Lobby in 1991.

On page 446, Chomsky describes young American Jews, raised on the handouts of the Anti-Defamation League, having a ‘corrupting’ effect on Israel. He must also be very aware of the corruption of Israeli teenagers effected by taking them to the ruins of German concentration camps and teaching them to hate,9 or the Hillel Jewish campus organization which teaches young American Jews that Israel is their homeland. He doesn’t go far enough in criticizing the obsession with ‘the’ Holocaust which gets more intense the further it recedes into history.

After complaining about Israel’s rape of Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties for a few hundred pages, Chomsky resorts to the ‘region’ trick to try to explain it. Page 442:

The US has been more than pleased to acquire a militarized dependency, technologically advanced and ready to undertake tasks that few are willing to endure – support for the Guatemalan genocide, for example – while helping to contain threats to American dominance in the most critical region in the world, where ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ [the Saudi oilfields] must be firmly held.

On page 462, he regrets Israel’s “dependence on the US with the concomitant pressure to serve US interests”. One would expect that the USA would not give a country $7 million a day, more than all other countries combined – without demanding that it serves its interests. But the predictions of this hypothesis fail. Israel feels no pressure at all to serve US interests, and Israeli politicians boast of American subservience, whilst their American accomplices harass those who state this simple truth. This is true whether you are a media mogul, a movie star, a politician, or an anti-war activist.

At the beginning of his book, Chomsky claims that Israel helps the US by protecting the Saudi oilfields. At the end, he says it blackmails the US by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on this great material prize. Iran could also greatly harm the Western world by blocking the Strait of Hormuz through which fleets of oil tankers pass – but somehow, America stands up to Iran. Why can’t it stand up to Israel? Because it’s an asset?

Chomsky expounds a deal of effort showing how the US media is biased in favor of Israel and against Palestinians, but he doesn’t call a spade a spade: the only serious racial prejudice left in America is pro-Jewish bias. That is why Israeli children’s deaths are reported at a rate seven times higher than those of Palestinians.10

2. Tests

I propose testing Chomsky’s views using the time-honored methods of asking

  • what does the theory predict will happen, and does it actually happen?
  • is the theory the simplest explanation of what happens?
  • what would we expect to happen if the theory was not true, and does it actually happen?
  • is there an alternative theory which better explains what happens?

There are two rival hypotheses:
1. The main reason for the USA’s unconditional support for Israel’s unique persistence in imposing apartheid is that it is in US capitalist interests
2. The main reason for this support is the power of American Jewish organizations

Chomsky defends, with contradictions, the first hypothesis. Mearsheimer and Walt defend the second.

Let’s test each theory using scientific methods. Politics is not an exact science like physics, but we can at least try.

1. The basic principle of science: does Chomsky’s hypothesis4 lead to a simpler explanation of events than Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel Lobby theory11 ?

2. An abstract test. ‘Abstract’ does not mean ‘vague’, but is scientifically respectable. Without any concrete examples, one can test the Chomsky hypothesis as follows: it is reasonable to say that, for any two nations, they have areas where their interests coincide, and areas where they clash. The USA never acts against Israel’s interests, with some very minor exceptions. This means that, without giving any examples, we can say that America always supports Israel’s interests when their interests collide.

3. Falsification: ask what would be the case if Chomsky’s hypothesis is wrong. What would poor little Israel do if it were NOT serving US interests, if Americans ceased to corrupt it? Would it let the Palestinians back, decommission its nuclear weapons, and abandon its racial definition of citizenship?

4. Which of the arguments depends on the scientific methods outlined above, and which on vague, shifting definitions?

Chomsky makes, without argument, the assertion that if it were not for Israel’s ‘perceived geopolitical role’, a trite, content-free phrase, the Israel Lobby would ‘probably’ be unable to persuade the ‘elite’ to support Israel (page 22). So why do they bother, then? Why do Jews rant and rave in the media about ‘anti-semitic incidents’ whenever anyone in the US makes timid criticism of their country? It’s not that politicians perceive that Israel is an asset, it’s just that they know what happens to those who perceive otherwise – the Lobby makes some calls, and they lose their jobs.12 Chomsky’s theory that Israel is an ally would predict the Israel Lobby would barely exist – real allies of the US like Japan don’t have energetic, well-funded lobbies in Washington DC, ready to call on hordes of faithful followers to phone politicians and write letters to newspapers defending their nations’ interests. They don’t need them. Chomsky’s theory fails the test.

There is more to it than just rich Jewish organizations like the ADL and AIPAC. There is social pressure not to mention the Lobby. Whereas no-one accuses Chomsky of racism for claiming that Jews suffer for the interests of other Western peoples, in complete defiance of the evidence, those of us who point out that the reverse is true, with the facts on our side, are accused of anti-Semitism. If Israel were an asset, there would be no need for this manipulation of our Western European culture, which has a unique record of abandoning racism, despite what the left tells us.

The ‘Israeli Sparta’ argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal etc. by Jewish neo-conservatives posing as classical scholars can easily be disposed of. Sparta defended Greece. Israel does not defend America. On page 21, ignoring the evidence, Chomsky agrees with the pseudo-Hellenists, saying that the Israeli Defence Forces provides a backup for the US armed forces. In fact Israel has never been able to supply soldiers for any US operation in the region. In the Iraq crisis of 1990, Syria gave military support to the US, but not Israel. Israel was unable to respond even when Iraqi missiles landed on Tel Aviv, because it would have split the coalition invading Iraq. Chomsky’s argument fails the test.

Chomsky reviewed The Israel Lobby when it broke through the censors of the US liberal left.13 “Another problem that Mearsheimer and Walt do not address is the role of the energy corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life… How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby?” he asks.14 Chomsky’s review of The Israel Lobby implies the oil companies CANNOT be powerless in the face of a mere lobby. But the assumptions behind Chomsky’s question don’t stand up. Mearsheimer and Walt DO address the role of these companies, explaining how, if they had their way, US policy in the Middle East would change. Leftists in America half-adopt Karl Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ without naming it (they say ‘corporate greed’ instead). It is one of the few aspects of Marxism which can be tested, and it fails miserably to explain the US position on the Israel/Palestine question. The interests of big corporations do not lead to invading Lebanon, persecuting Palestine, and stirring up Islamic extremism.

Why has the US consistently supported Israel, and inconsistently supported Arab nationalists? Egypt’s Nasser, Iraq’s Hussein and Syria’s al-Assad all had a pretty good record of keeping down ‘upstarts’, particularly radical Islamic ones, so why not, according to Chomsky’s logic, ally with the radical Arab nationalist states? The US has allied with various Middle Eastern states at various times, but only its support for Israel is invariant. Again, these questions constitute a test of Chomsky’s hypothesis. You try to figure out what the hypothesis would predict, then try to find counter-examples, where the actual events are incompatible with the predicted ones. It isn’t difficult, particularly in this case.

Chomsky claims that one reason America supports Israel is because it is a ‘laboratory’ for US military and surveillance technology. This is easily tested by asking if any other country would be eager to take Israel’s place.

The argument that oil is the main reason for US support for Israel is too trivial to waste time on. When America attacks a Middle Eastern country, the left chants ‘no war for oil’. If the policy causes the price of oil to drop, capitalism benefits. If the price rises, the oil companies benefit. Either way, the left trumpets the evidence. The ‘oil’ explanation cannot be falsified. It is not wrong – it is not even a valid hypothesis.

In a similar violation of scientific methodology, Chomsky tries to use the fact that the USA approves of Israeli war crimes as evidence that the dog wags the tail, that Israel serves Uncle Sam. In fact, this ‘evidence’ contributes nothing at all to our understanding of the relationship between the two states. It is equally compatible with the two opposing arguments, so it is not a test which selects which of them are true. Chomsky does give some of the same examples of American subservience as Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby:

– US presidents mildly criticize Israel building settlements on Palestinian land
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘The Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass
but Chomsky doesn’t ask the obvious question: is this all

1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel in order to cover up for white/US/capitalist hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most elegant/economical/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps Western European interests in the USA?

By means of the Lobby, the tail wags the dog. Its the simplest, clearest, and most economical explanation of the facts. This is how science progresses. A good example of why simpler is better can be found in a recent paper on the evolution of social insects such as ants and bees.15 We should try to use the same criterion in the study of human societies.

Like everything else, the question of Jewish control of the media can be approached emotionally. I prefer the scientific approach. I approach the argument about Jewish control of the press, etc., on its merits, not on how much it reminds people of ancient Tsarist calumnies. Surely the most simple explanation of the fact that

Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship. (page 31)

is because Jews are overrepresented in mainstream journalism and scholarship, and quite a few of these Jews defend Jewish interests. This kind of statement is acceptable in Israel, whose inhabitants are mostly proud of what they call ‘the Jewish Lobby’ in America. It is acceptable in countries like Malaysia. Why is it so difficult for us?

The answer is obvious. We are afraid of being anti-Semitic. I found a solution to this problem. I stopped caring about it.

  • First published at Palestine Think Tank.
    1. US Senate Resolution. [↩]
    2. Jeff Blankfort. [↩]
    3. Jeremy Hammond. [↩] [↩]
    4. Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky, South End Press, 1999. [↩] [↩]
    5. “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Noam Chomsky. [↩]
    6. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, November 2000. [↩]
    7. Alison Weir, radio interview with Noam Chomsky. [↩]
    8. “How Washington Goaded Israel Into War,” Stephen Zunes, August 2006. [↩]
    9. Defamation – a movie about the Anti-Defamation League [↩]
    10. If Americans Knew media analyses. [↩]
    11. The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2007. [↩]
    12. They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Paul Findlay, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989. [↩]
    13. The Atlantic magazine rejected the original ‘Israel Lobby’ paper, on the transparently false grounds of ‘poor scholarship’. When it came out as a book, the authors toured the USA to promote it, but found that local papers didn’t send reporters to cover it. The Lobby demonstrated the authors’ hypothesis by trying to suppress it. [↩]
    14. “The Israel Lobby?” Noam Chomsky, 2006. [↩]
    15. “Natural selection alone can explain eusociality,” Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson. [↩]
    Jay Knott wrote The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism. Read other articles by Jay.

    This article was posted on Saturday, September 18th, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Israel/Palestine, The Lobby, Zionism.

    An article of mine from 2013

    Featured Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Originally published at Dissident Voice.

    Invention, Imagination, Race, and Nation

    by Jay Knott / October 3rd, 2013

    A Victorian bishop’s wife allegedly reacted to Darwin’s findings as follows: “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”1

    imagined_DVIn this article, I consider three books which claim races and nations are “constructed”: Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson,2 The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand,3 and The Invention of the White Race, by Theodore Allen.4 The latter work was positively reviewed on Counterpunch.5 However, I aim to show that evolutionary approaches are better at explaining both ethnic and national identity than the methodology used by these authors.

    Benedict Anderson’s famous account of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities begins with an extract from a poem by Daniel Defoe:

          Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
          That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
          In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
          Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot…
          From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, …
          Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane…

    Defoe’s intention was to defend the king of England, who was Dutch, against xenophobic criticism: “we don’t belong to one race, so how can we demand that our king belongs to it?”

    More recently, John Barnes made a strong case for rejecting the concept of biological race: ‘Racism came from the idea of race, which is a man-made construct. Race is not scientific or genetic. It does not actually exist. Race came about to validate and justify colonialism and slavery.’6

    sand_DVShlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People agrees with the idea that race is a “construct” which deceives people into believing they have common interests. Sand’s specific claim is that the majority of the world’s Jews have no ancestors who lived in Palestine, and that therefore the state of Israel is based on a lie. For a few centuries after Christ, he claims, Judaism actively sought converts. He says it’s not true that Jews were thrown out of Palestine and then wandered the world for two thousand years – rather, a few who left voluntarily converted many, including the whole nation of the Khazars, located by the Crimean sea. Many of the Khazars’ descendants ended up in Europe.

    Though popular in Palestine solidarity circles, Sand accepts that his work has had no effect on Israeli nationalism nor on Jewish identity worldwide. Why is this so? If you expose a delusion, wouldn’t you expect significant numbers to abandon it, and thank you?

    whiterace_DVThe argument of Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, is another contribution to the view that racial identity is a cultural construction. He argues that white Americans weren’t originally “racist” toward black ones, but they were taught to be by their rulers, because the latter had an interest in keeping their subjects divided.

    Anderson, Sand, and Allen are all left-wing academics. In attempting to show weaknesses in their arguments, I am going to make selective use of the work of two very right-wing scholars, Frank Salter and Kevin MacDonald. This should not be seen as an endorsement of their politics.

    aborigine-boat-peopleFor example, Frank Salter, the author of Genetic Interests,7 is a white Australian who opposes immigration from the developing world into “his” country. I completely reject this opinion, agreeing instead with left-wing Australian journalist John Pilger on this question.8 Considering how white Australia was founded, it’s unethical to try to stop third world refugees settling there.

    American evolutionary historian professor Kevin MacDonald is also a right-winger. His Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior9 argues that “ethnic affiliations are extraordinarily robust” and that this is because racial identity is biologically beneficial to the genes which cause it.

    But the notion that racial identity is adaptive does not imply that it is morally justifiable, any more than accepting the obvious fact that heterosexuality is more adaptive than homosexuality has any consequences whatever for one’s views on gay rights.

    To put it another way, lack of empathy with Salter’s and MacDonald’s political views is no reason at all to reject their factual assertions, which they claim are based on science.

    Salter’s demonstration that ethnic identity is adaptive,7 and MacDonald’s attempt to use evolutionary psychology to explain ethnic conflict,9 stand independently, and have to be approached like any other theory which claims to be scientific.

    And regardless of the views of MacDonald and Salter, a more fundamental influence on my perspective is the work of evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, who happens to be a leftist. His recent book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life10 provides a solid foundation for understanding the Darwinian approach to human beliefs and behavior. Genes “deceive” us into working to make copies of themselves. This is a key to working out a scientific explanation for the appeal of nationalism.

    Benedict Anderson argues that nations are “imagined communities.” But, if you claim that some national identities are completely invented, for example, Indonesian, you concede that some are less so. The fact that nations, unlike tribes, have the characteristic that most of its members will never meet each other – one of Anderson’s central motifs – doesn’t seem to me to be as important as it does to him.

    Human beings may feel strong ethnic identity with people whom they’ll never meet. For example, white Britons often feel above-average empathy with white Australians, on the other side of the world. This feeling is conceivably an extension of tribal identity, which might be explained as an adaptive trait which evolved during the Stone Age.

    Theodore Allen’s argument is the antithesis of the above speculation; an uncompromising example of class-based leftism. He believes that “whiteness” is an “ideology”. He thinks working-class Americans of European origin have often been victims of a capitalist strategy to divide the poor by making some of them feel they have “white privilege.” He tries to prove his thesis by aggregating facts which he thinks conform to it. On page 215, he claims that because there was a revolt of both African and European laborers against their employers in 1676 this is “supreme proof that the white race did not exist.” It proves nothing of the sort. The fact that the degree of white identity went up and down says nothing about whether it ever corresponded to real interests.

    Why did some poor Americans accept that they belong to “the white race” if their only interests were class interests, as Allen argues? How did the ruling class manage to persuade them they have ethnic interests too?

    In complete contrast, Kevin MacDonald tries to show that ethnic identity has a biological basis. Among other examples, he cites Pierre van den Berghe to the effect that “many ethnic groupings are remarkably stable; the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium are ‘almost exactly where their ancestors were when Julius Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico.‘”

    Frank Salter relocates this argument on scientific grounds, in his book, Genetic Interests.7

    Most readers will have no difficulty with the argument that the maternal instinct can be explained by the fact that, since large female mammals have few offspring, it is adaptive for the genes in those mammals to produce caring for each of those offspring, in preference to non-relatives.

    Yet we know that we share most of our genes – over ninety-nine percent – with all other human beings, and up to ninety-six percent with other apes.

    Salter’s theory says that what makes our genes code for preferring one individual over another is the difference in our relatedness to each of those two individuals.11

    It’s only the genes which differ between individuals which count. Of the genes which differ, those in our relatives are more likely to be copies of our own.

    This is why we are altruistic to our kin.

    Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane worked out that it makes genetic sense to die for two or more brothers or sisters, or eight or more first cousins, but not fewer.

    But the percentage genetic advantage in choosing to be altruistic toward an individual from among millions of people somewhat related to you, over someone much more distantly related, is about the same as that in choosing to be altruistic to your relatives over individuals in those millions of somewhat related people. That is one explanation of ethnic identity.

    So what about nationalism?

    Anderson claims that nationalism arose among the creoles – upper-class colonials like Washington and Bolivar – and describes in great detail the appropriation of ancient buildings by modern nations, the rise of national languages via newspapers and novels, and so on. But this all fails to answer the question with which he begins his book – why are so many people prepared to die for “their” nation?

    “This style of imagining did not come out of thin air” he writes (page 189) but he doesn’t explain where it did come from. Anderson argues nationalism evolved in Latin America partly as a result of the way the Spanish Empire was administered. For example, a functionary from Medellin (in Colombia) was able to win promotion to Bogota (also in Colombia), but not to Caracas (in Venezuela). But why would this lead to deep feelings of identity with Colombia and not Venezuela?

    Wars between the “liberated” South American states have been among the worst in history. Why would anyone risk their life for Paraguay versus Uruguay? Saying that the poor are victims of “bourgeois ideology” when they line up outside recruiting stations merely says that some people manage to convince others that their interests coincide, when they don’t. It doesn’t say how they manage to achieve this.

    In chapter five of his book, Shlomo Sand tries to discredit Zionism and the conception of Jews as a race, by showing how it had much in common with the crude racist theories of its time, including National Socialism. Sand puts “language and culture” before “biology”, and expresses as much instinctive hostility to Darwinism as a bishop’s wife. But where do language and culture come from, if not from our genes? You can’t say cultural artifacts are produced by culture ad infinitum; at some point, you have to explain culture without reference to itself.

    Sand’s dismissal of a Darwinist approach relies heavily on selecting the worst of its mistakes from the early 20th century. But evolutionary theory, applied to human beings, has made advances subsequently. On page 266 Sand disagrees with Sandler’s claim that Jews in effect have become a “racial entity”. But strong feelings of Jewish identity exist. Will informing Western Jews they are really Khazars, and have no connection with Palestine, undermine support among many of them for the ongoing ethnic cleansing of that country?

    Isn’t it possible that, “in effect”, genes for ethnic identity which arose during the Stone Age because it was adaptive, can “deceive”10 individuals into feeling more related than they really are? And that this is the most economical explanation of the old lie “dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”?

    Feelings of ethnic identity can be mistaken. But if there is ethnic solidarity among initially unrelated people, intramarriage will gradually make that solidarity more adaptive.

    The fact that races difficult to define and are fuzzy at the edges doesn’t make the concept “race” meaningless, as “anti-racists” often aver. Families are fuzzy too. Do your second cousins, who share two great-grandparents with you, belong to your family? It’s a question of degree.

    But one can be more precise. Just as one can calculate exactly how many cousins it is worth (from the point of view of genes) laying down one’s life for, one’s race is the set of people with whom it is adaptive for one to ethnically identify.

    Thus, in peaceful times, it might be adaptive for Walloons to distinguish themselves from Flemings. But when the Romans invaded, this may have changed.

    This approach would have explanatory power even if the whole of humankind could be arranged in a spectrum in which any two neighboring people were genetically equidistant. By this, I mean that, for any individual, copies of his genes would be as likely to survive, if he died for the person to his left, as for the person to his right. Of course, this is a thought experiment.

    When Genghis Khan’s grandsons invaded Europe, alleles in Europe’s inhabitants which coded for European identity would be more likely to cause copies of themselves than alleles which did not.

    The reader may doubt that such genes exist. Further research, if the political climate allowed, might be able to find out.

    Some leftists have had an uneasy relationship with defenders of an evolutionary approach to human nature.

    Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s autobiography describes a lifetime of facing up to left-wing hostility to Darwinism in academia.12 In chapter 14, Chagnon gives a detailed account of what he calls “Twilight in Cultural Anthropology: Postmodernism and Radical Anthropology Supplant Science”. He details unscholarly attacks on his findings, which were inconvenient for the dominant trend in anthropology, the school of Franz Boas and his followers, like Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins. On pages 386-387, Chagnon describes a particular low point, an organized physical attack on leading Darwinist scholar Edward Wilson. In 2000, a left-wing journalist published a book of outrageous libels against Chagnon. Though the claims of the book were ridiculous, and the American Anthropological Association’s leaders knew they were ridiculous, they nevertheless had to pretend to take them seriously, for political reasons. I witnessed this first-hand at their meeting in San Francisco.

    This is unfortunate. A realistic view of race and nation should begin with the observation that human beings are the products of evolution by means of natural selection.

    1. Alleged quotation from the Bishop of Worcester’s wife, 1860. [↩]
    2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983 (new edition 2006). [↩]
    3. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2010. [↩]
    4. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, volumes I and II, 1994 and 1997. [↩]
    5. Jeffrey B. Perry, review of The Invention of the White Race, Counterpunch, 2013. [↩]
    6. John Barnes, A Nation of ‘Passive Racists’, Daily Telegraph, 2012. [↩]
    7. Frank Salter, Genetic Interests, Transaction Press, 2007. [↩] [↩] [↩]
    8. John Pilger, Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ policy is cynical and lawless, The Guardian, 2013. [↩]
    9. Kevin MacDonald, Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior (PDF), Rutgers University, 2002. [↩] [↩]
    10. Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, 2011. [↩] [↩]
    11. Answer to the question ‘If I share 98% of my genes with a chimpanzee and 60% with a banana, how come I only share 50% of my genes with my own daughter?‘ [↩]
    12. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes–The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, Simon & Schuster, 2013. [↩]
    Jay Knott wrote The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism. Read other articles by Jay.

    This article was posted on Thursday, October 3rd, 2013 at 5:32pm and is filed under Book Review, History, Philosophy, Science/Technology.

    The Poverty of Antiracism

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Sep 26, 2021

    “Contact the administration and the Board of Trustees and demand an end to the destructive and anti-intellectual claptrap known as antiracism” — Andrew Gutmann, withdrawing his daughter from Brearley School, New York.

    This is a critique of the collection of ideas known as “antiracism”, after Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and of its practical consequences. It appears to have originated in American academia, which, its advocates claim, is marred by racism.

    Consider a college campus boiling with racial and gender sensitivity, with courses in victimization, organizations for victims, a constant barrage of victimization propaganda — but no immediate and palpable victims. “Anti-racist” vigilantes with no racists (or misogynists and homophobes) to hang had better get busy and make some, and as we see, they often do. — Laird Wilcox, Crying Wolf, 1994.

    At Duke University, Durham NC, in March 2006, the district attorney prosecuted three white students, following the claim of a black woman that they’d raped her, ignoring clear evidence that it was false. The college president said it was an example of “racism”, and eighty-eight professors signed a “Listening Statement”, defending the woman’s allegation. One of them is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. After the students were acquitted, and the DA jailed, he didn’t apologise; he doubled down. His Racism Without Racistsclaims

    “Shielded by color blindness whites can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values and work ethic; and even claim to be the victims of ‘reverse racism’”.

    At San Diego State, Maryland, Oberlin, North Park, Drake, Evergreen, and dozens of other higher education institutions, over the last three decades, the authorities accepted the claims of minority activists. Even after discovering that most of these claims are false, they usually failed to rein in their credulity. In July 2018, at Smith College, Northampton MA, a black student falsely accused white employees of racial profiling. Even after the hoax was exposed, the college president, Kathleen McCartney, subjected some of her white subordinates to actual racial profiling, driving one of them, Jodi Shaw, to resign and go public — “Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College”, National Review, February 24th 2021.

    “Woke racism” has also infected primary and secondary education. In one Manhattan school, the headmaster had to resign over its race-based curriculum. At a second, a parent withdrew his daughter because “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs”. A teacher at a third school objected to racial segregation, claiming this objection risks his career. A teacher at a New Jersey school has resigned for the same reason. Two Los Angeles schools have been accused of the same thing. Antiracism activists in the Virginia public school system conspired against parents who disagree.

    Antiracism crossed the Atlantic at least thirty years ago. It influenced the 1993 Macpherson inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen Lawrence, and the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act. Macpherson’s definition of a racist incident was “any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. This phrase, which shifts the burden of proof from the shoulders of the accuser to those of the accused, originates in “Standpoint Theory” and “Critical Race Theory”. “Listen first to the voice of the victims” urged American academic Mari Matsuda, in Words That Wound, 1993. As we shall see, some victims’ voices are more equal than others.

    The book Cynical Theories, by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, 2020, critically examines these theories. Detailed critiques of Sir William Macpherson’s methods and conclusions can be found in the Civitas publications Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, by Norman Dennis, George Erdos, and Ahmed Al-Shahi, September 2000, and That’s Racist!: How the Regulation of Speech and Thought Divides Us All, by Adrian Hart, November 2014.

    Following the publication of Macpherson’s report, antiracism became de rigeur in the police and other institutions. One of the consequences was the grooming gang scandal. It was not the only problem; it’s not why some coppers believe minors can be prostitutes; but it contributed to the authorities’ failure to keep sexual offenders away from vulnerable girls. Some of them prioritised combatting white racism over protecting white girls from Pakistani gangs.

    Jayne Senior, the Rotherham scandal whistleblower, describes a white man telling the police a gang was “grooming” his 14-year-old daughter. They ignored him, until he shouted a racist word at the men’s house. Then the police quickly appeared, and found the girl getting out of bed with a man, but they did not arrest him — instead, they charged father and daughter with disorderly behaviour.

    “Jessica subsequently told me that when she was driving around with her abuser in his flashy car, he’d often play the ‘race card’ if stopped by the police.” — Broken and Betrayed, March 2016, pages 91–92.

    In his book The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, July 2018, Ben Cobley explains how several British institutions denied the nature of the gangs in Rotherham, and at least seventeen other towns and cities. In January 2011, eight years after Andrew Norfolk’s first report in the Times, three years after Julie Bindel’s exposé, and three years before the Alexis Jay report on the scandal, Libby Brooks argued in the Guardian that “Dubious claims about Muslim men grooming white girls hide legitimate worries about a system that fails victims of abuse.” Even after the truth came out, in the form of the convictions of hundreds of men, most of whom have Muslim names, some left-wing and Muslim organisations tried, in effect, to continue the cover-up, by subjecting the whistleblowers to allegations of racism.

    The 2020 antiracist upsurge

    The launchpad for the worldwide upsurge of 2020 was the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25th. Protests and riots started that night, and soon spread around America and overseas. On April 20th 2021, officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder.

    My point is not to criticise hostility to the police. Rather, I take aim at the movement’s political framework. This framework assumes that, because Floyd was African-American, and the man who killed him is white, it was a racist murder, so what is needed is “racial justice”.

    I sympathised with protests about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, but outside my window in Portland, I saw some protestors were carrying signs saying “White Silence Is Violence”. This doesn’t just mean that people of a particular race should not disagree with the antiracist movement; it means they must proactively agree with it. It could even imply that they can be forced to agree, since their silence is a violent act.

    Signs like this indicate that defenders of antiracism are sure of their beliefs; I don’t think their confidence is justified.

    Take, for example, Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling February 2019 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism. DiAngelo’s title gives a clue to the logic she develops in the book: if you’re white, and you don’t want to talk about racism, or at least, not in the way approved of by DiAngelo, you have something wrong with you which needs fixing. Because any refusal to accept it can be explained away by the theory itself, it is therefore unfalsifiable; anything which attempts to show it is flawed, including this sentence, is an example of the problem it pretends to identify.

    After the Smith College racism hoax was exposed, president McCartney said “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias”. Indeed: that’s the point of it.

    What is the evidence of police racism in the USA?

    On April 27th 2021, a week after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, I became aware of a document entitled “Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence Against People of African Descent in the United States”. The PDF of the report on the commission’s website simply gives “March 2021” as its date, and its references to the Chauvin case show it was completed before his conviction.

    The title tells us it was written by lawyers, and its Executive Summary makes their methodology clear.

    “All cases selected for the hearings involved the egregious and unjustified killing or maiming of individuals of African descent in the U.S.” (page 13)

    The authors try to justify this selection of data by contrasting the rate of police shootings of black people with those of white people.

    “Today one out of every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police violence over the course of his life, which is approximately 2.5 times the likelihood of white men being killed by police.” (page 20)

    The claim that black people are overrepresented in the victims of police brutality is clearly demonstrated. What is not so clear is how this is evidence of racial discrimination.

    1,021 people were killed by the American police in 2020. 25 per cent were black, almost double their percentage in the population. But, as Wilfred Reilly demonstrated, adjusting for the black rate of crime, 2.4 times the white rate, eliminates this gap, and debunks the claim of racial discrimination (Spiked Online, May 5th 2021).

    In spite of the poverty of the theoretical basis of the antiracism movement, many suffer from a weakness which makes it difficult to defy it. At the Macpherson inquiry, lawyers tried to pressure London police commissioner Paul Condon, and he explained how it would be easier to give in than to resist:

    ‘You have told us 10 times you are not in denial’, said Macpherson’s adviser: ‘I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police …”.’ Condon was clearly reluctant to say his force was institutionally racist. So Macpherson’s adviser pushed Condon harder: ‘I say to you now, just say, “Yes, I acknowledge institutional racism in the police” and then in a way the whole thing is over… Could you do that today?’ Condon responded: ‘It would be very easy to please the panel, to please the audience… it would be dishonest….’ — Sir William Macpherson: a divisive legacy, Adrian Hart, Spiked Online, March 6th 2021.

    Many people find it harder to resist the pressure. Reasons for capitulating to mobs include

    – Cowardice

    – The urge to please

    – Fear of losing one’s job

    – The urge to appear moral

    – Fear of social media storms

    – Ignorance of the scientific method

    – Thinking that apologising will appease the mob

    – Shame at raising logical objections to the claims of angry people

    “Most human beings would temper their ideas, because normally, people like to fit in” — Brexit architect Nigel Farage, Triggernometry, Youtube, March 10th 2021.

    Standing up to woke racism

    Antiracists sometimes define racism as “power plus prejudice”, and add that only white people have this power. But Chris Rufo pointed out that “Ibram Kendi could cancel you, but you can’t cancel Ibram Kendi” — Spiked Online, YouTube, February 25th 2021. James Lindsay put it like this, on Facebook, on March 13th:

    An important difference between you and the Woke is that if they see the opening, they’ll demand your resignation or firing in a heartbeat and won’t stop until they get it. You, meanwhile, will argue against removing from their positions even when they abuse them, and you.

    On March 31st he added:

    I believe Woke people and even the Woke ideology has a place in society (as with other types of racism), but in that I am fundamentally classically liberal, it must be totally removed from access to power in society.

    The problem is not that antiracists have freedom of speech, it’s that some of them have power. Removing advocates of racial discrimination from positions where they are able to implement it should be easy, but in the current political climate, it is an uphill struggle.

    Why Critical Race Theory Is Not Marxist

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Sep 27, 2021

    Herein, I question the hypothesis that the latest fashionable nonsense from American academia is in any significant way influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). It is generally known as “Critical Race Theory,” henceforth, “CRT.” It alleges that the Anglo-Saxon nations are saturated with “systemic racism,” and that their white inhabitants benefit from it — they have “white privilege”. Some critics believe this is a variant of Marxism. I explain why this is not the case, and introduce a Marxist critique of CRT.

    Introducing Critical Race Theory

    Some defenders of the “white privilege” hypothesis say we should reserve the term “Critical Race Theory” for the original scholarship by Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, et al., excluding recent work, such as the bestselling books White Fragility and How To Be an Antiracist, and the New York Times’ 1619 Project. However, CRT has become an umbrella term, under which I include all defences of the existence of white privilege, and the practical consequences of these critiques.

    Helen Pluckrose, in her essay Demystifying Critical Race Theory So We Can Get to the Point, says

    Many of the people advocating for CRT seem to believe it is any historically literate understanding of racial history in the USA, how horrendously it oppressed black Americans, why this was bad and how its aftermath is still felt today. Some even seem to think that CRT just means ‘talking about racism.’

    It’s true that advocates of CRT “seem” to believe this, and there is considerable effort to make the rest of us believe it. But American schoolchildren are already taught all of the above, so we are entitled to be sceptical of the activists’ sincerity.

    The Guardian published an article on 14th September 2021 entitled ‘These are the facts’: Black educators silenced from teaching America’s racist past, referring to twenty-two proposed laws against CRT in primary and secondary (K-12) education. But none of the laws are aimed at black teachers in particular; nor do they ban teaching about America’s racist past.

    In the podcast series First Name Basis, anti-racist educator Jasmine Bradshaw tells us that CRT is nothing more than “teaching truth about history”. If you question this, she asks “What makes you nervous? Why are you so anxious about CRT?”

    In Texas, some teachers claim “nobody in K-12 is teaching critical race theory,” while others say the opposite.

    On July 6th 2021, the head of the American Federation of Teachers denied that CRT was being taught in schools. During the same week, another teachers union conference passed a resolution conveying its support for teaching CRT in schools. The resolution was disappeared from the website of the National Education Association. Here is the missing resolution at web.archive.org.

    Radical teachers have been caught red-handed trying to make white children believe there is something wrong with them, and some have conspired to sabotage opposition — “anyone know any hackers?”

    The advocates of CRT are among the practitioners of “cancel culture,” and among those being cancelled are good left-liberals whose only sin is being white. A couple of examples: a lawyer named Maud Maron was driven out of the US Legal Aid Society in 2020 because she refused to recognise her “whiteness”. Jodi Shaw had a similar experience at Smith College in 2018.

    The philosopher Karl Popper thought there is a “paradox of tolerance”, where tolerance of the intolerant leads to intolerance. For me, the solution seems to be quite simple. The opponents of CRT should put into practice the words of the activist students who forced Nicholas Christakis out of Yale in November 2015: “I want your job to be taken from you.”

    The fightback against CRT

    Around the country, and beyond, parents are holding meetings to fire activists from school boards which practice racial discrimination. Here is an example from Brighton, UK, The Argus, Sarah Booker-Lewis, 24th June 2021. This is a YouTube video of a parents’ meeting in Colorado Springs in August 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG3s4mkHGzI

    On September 15th 2021, a superintendent in Rockland County, New York, who was pushing for a CRT-based curriculum, was forced to resign.

    Investigative journalist Christopher Rufo has made a major contribution to this fightback by enabling victims of CRT to anonymously submit evidence of its harmful effects: see his website christopherrufo.com.

    However, I think he makes one mistake. He writes

    Critical race theory reformulates the old Marxist dialectic of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and Black. But the basic conclusion is the same: In order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic and political revolution.

    In simple terms, critical race theory can be seen as a form of “race-based Marxism”; they share a common conceptual framework. Critical race theory was derived from “critical theory,” a 20th century ideology sometimes called “neo-Marxism.”

    – States are right to pass CRT laws, USA Today, July 8th 2021.

    Dialectical or otherwise, a theory of struggle between races is not “basically” the same as the notion that there are differences of interest between social, economic classes. National Socialism emphasised conflict between races too, but this does not make it a variant of Marxism.

    Perhaps Rufo’s strongest point is

    the basic conclusion is the same: In order to liberate man, society must be fundamentally transformed through moral, economic and political revolution.

    It is true that Marxism and CRT both defend this “basic conclusion,” but this does not show that one is a subset of the other. A variety of non-Marxist movements defend some version of this utopian ideal. For example, Rufo is aware of the “Antifa” movement. Marxists might be found picketing an Amazon warehouse for better pay and conditions; Antifa is more likely to protest outside a spa in favour of allowing men into the women’s changing room. I’m not making this up.

    Conflict Theory

    In the podcast Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Marxism, Wokeness, and Leninism 4.0, James Lindsay informs us that CRT is a branch of “Critical Theory”, a product of the Frankfurt School of Jürgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, et al.. He argues that they in turn were influenced by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, but doesn’t cite any original sources.

    The book he co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, August 25th 2020, contains three references to Gramsci, but these just consist of name-dropping by trendy postmodernist academics. The same is true of the references to Habermas and Horkheimer.

    On the Quillette podcast, July 13th 2021, Rufo said that his Italian relatives are “Gramscian communist intellectuals,” so he may be able to help clear up Lindsay’s confusion. The scholarly work Amadeo Bordiga and the myth of Antonio Gramsci, by John Chiaradia, November 6th 2013, shows that Gramsci’s principal role was imposing Moscow’s hegemony on recalcitrant Italians. Nothing in Chiaradia, nor Selections from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, nor the contents of the Gramsci archive online, bear any relation to Critical Theory.

    Rufo’s and Lindsay’s fallacy depends on the observation that Marxism and CRT both defend a “conflict theory,” and the claim that Marxists invented it. However, the participants in the Spartacus slave revolt of the first century BC didn’t need a theory to see the conflict inherent in their condition.

    Two thousand years later, for the Spartacus League to persuade people in Berlin to take part in a desperate uprising against the men responsible for world war one, required more than Marxist theory.

    There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere. Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth — there stands bourgeois society.

    – Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, April 1919

    Her skill at defending the theory helped, but the clincher was the fact that what she said was true.

    Critical Theory in general is concerned with various identities such as race and sex. CRT concentrates on the race aspect. Marxism is about the relationships between economic classes, and their members’ consciousness of these relationships; this is not identity politics. Luxemburg didn’t introduce herself by saying “speaking as a disabled Jewish middle-class white woman.”

    Another way of illustrating the difference between CRT and Marxism is to contrast what CRT claims about the relationship between white people and others, with an example of the actual social relationship identified by Marxism. In White Fragility, June 26th 2018, Robin DiAngelo says that white people need “people of color” in order to define their whiteness. The CEO of Amazon needs people working in the company’s warehouses, but neither he nor I need anyone to be of any particular race. DiAngelo’s claim is without merit; it is simply a projection of her psychological issues. Marxism is completely different. A corporation cannot make a profit unless what its employees produce is worth more than they are paid. This is mathematics, not morality.

    Conflict theories in conflict

    In summary, I enumerate some of the correspondences and conflicts between CRT and Marxism.

    The correspondences are easy to list. To paraphrase Rufo:

    • society is divided into oppressors and oppressed
    • there is conflict between them
    • radical change is needed.

    The differences are more numerous — the following are a few of the most obvious.

    The 1619 Project, begun on August 14th 2019 by the New York Times Magazine, is currently being force-fed to children in schools across America. It is clearly an expression of CRT, consisting of a series of articles arguing that anti-black racism is an essential component of the nature of the republic. Historian Sean Wilentz pointed out some of the egregious errors in the Times’ claims, in a lecture on November 4th 2109. The World Socialist Website’s offensive began twenty-four days later, with a series of interviews with several expert historians, highly critical of the Project, and on March 11, 2020, the Times changed the phrase

    one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery

    by inserting “some of” before “the colonists”, which effectively abandons the purpose of the Project, while dialectically preserving it. See 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, Peter Wood, November 17th 2020.

    Some conservative critics of the Project simply ignored these inconvenient Marxists. One exception is historian Phillip W Magness, who is piqued that they published their critique before his (The 1619 Project: a Critique, April 7th 2020, page 102). Another is Charles C W Cooke, a senior writer at the National Review, who is more generous:

    Well, I can’t say I expected it to be the International Committee of the Fourth International that most effectively ripped the New York Times‘s “1619 Project” apart, but here we are.

    — Historians vs. the ‘1619 Project’, National Review, December 2nd 2019

    This “International Committee,” which runs the World Socialist Website, doesn’t mince words either: its March 1st 2021 book is called The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. In addition to ripping the Project apart, it shows that it is not Marxist.

    James Lindsay on Marxism and Critical Race Theory

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Sep 25, 2021

    The latest fashionable nonsense from American academia is known as “Critical Race Theory,” henceforth, “CRT.” It alleges that the Anglo-Saxon nations are saturated with “systemic racism,” and that their white inhabitants benefit from it — they have “white privilege.” Its method of teaching includes treating people differently according to their race. When teachers started using it to abuse schoolchildren, a fightback began. The best source of information about this fightback is Christopher Rufo’s website, christopherrufo.com.

    Two critiques of CRT have been published recently. One of them, James Lindsay’s Race Marxism, claims that CRT is an expression of Marxism. The Amazon page for the book says

    The evidence of this claim is so overwhelming upon even casual examination that it is a shock that it isn’t immediately plain to everyone who encounters it,

    and Lindsay repeats this confident assertion several times in the text.

    The other one, by the International Committee of the Fourth International, claims CRT is completely antithetical to Marxism, and leans on the latter methodology in its demolition of one of CRT’s recent expressions. It’s called The New York Times’ 1619 Project: a Racialist Falsification of History.

    They can’t both be right.

    I probably need to say at the outset that, though I find the Marxist critique to be better than Lindsay’s, I am not defending Marxism per se. In labelling itself “the Fourth International,” the Committee identifies with the Trotskyist tradition. Leon Trotsky didn’t murder as many people as Josef Stalin, but that’s only because he was kicked out of the Soviet Union in 1929.

    My aim is simply to show that Lindsay is wrong — CRT is not a branch of Marxism. It’s important to get it right, because the fightback requires bringing on board as diverse a collection of people as possible. The International Committee realised this, and interviewed leading historians of the American Revolution, slavery and the Civil War, most of them not Marxists. Some conservative critics of CRT also realise this, and give credit to the Committee:

    Well, I can’t say I expected it to be the International Committee of the Fourth International that most effectively ripped the New York Times’s ‘1619 Project’ apart, but here we are.

    — Historians vs. the ‘1619 Project’, Charles CW Cooke, National Review, December 2nd 2019

    Likewise, the National Association of Scholars reprinted an essay by Trotskyist Tom Mackaman on February 22nd 2022:

    nas.org/blogs/article/review-the-new-york-times-1619-project-a-new-origin-story

    The 1619 Project is currently being force-fed to thousands of schoolchildren around the country. There are several other rebuttals of the Project in print, but A Racialist Falsification is the most comprehensive.

    Lindsay does not justify his claim that CRT, and its parent ideology, Critical Theory, is “Marxist,” “Marxian,” or “neo-Marxist” with quotes from Marx or Engels. You might assume, in a book whose title includes the word “Marxism,” it would include many references to the works of Karl Marx.

    An exception is on page 223, where Lindsay quotes Marx’s Introduction to Capital, in order to show his connection to G.W.F. Hegel. This is the beginning of an introduction to the German philosopher’s ideas, which is said to explain a number of phenomena, from mass murder under Stalin and Mao, to Nazi pseudoscience and the neoconservatives, who after all are “former Trotskyites” — page 227. But Lindsay seems unaware that there are faithful Trotskyites who have avoided the ideological traps laid by Hegel.

    Race Marxism came out on February 15th 2022. The essays and interviews which are now collected in A Racialist Falsification began to be posted on the World Socialist Website on November 24th 2019. There is no evidence in Race Marxism that Lindsay has looked at them, though he refers to the 1619 Project as an expression of CRT several times.

    Lindsay called his work “Race Marxism” in the belief that Marxism is a “conflict theory,” and that if you substitute one conflict for another — race for class — it’s still a type of Marxism. Apart from the obvious logical error in claiming that, if two theories have something in common, one is an expression of the other, there is also the question of how much truth there is in either theory.

    Critical race theorist Robin DiAngelo wrote, in 2018, in her bestseller White Fragility, that white people need “people of color” in order to define their “whiteness.” Marxists believe the CEO of Amazon needs people working in the company’s warehouses, but he doesn’t need them to be of any particular race. A corporation cannot make a profit unless what its employees produce is worth more than they are paid. This is simple mathematics. Lindsay never deals with this argument, instead putting Marxist phrases like “exploitation,” “surplus value,” and “alienation” in quotes, as if they are so obviously ridiculous he doesn’t need to explain why — see, for example, page 299.

    The phrase “false consciousness” occurs seventeen times in Lindsay’s 357 pages. It occurs just once in the collected works of Marx and Engels, in a throwaway remark in a letter written by Engels in 1893.

    Lindsay uses the term “conspiracy theory” to describe ideas he disagrees with, without saying what’s wrong per se about a conspiracy theory, and he uses it to describe ideas which have nothing conspiratorial in them. For example, he says on page 35, that CRT analyses race in the same way Marxism analyses class, “with a view to the ‘capitalist superstructure’ that’s upheld by ‘bourgeois values’ (i.e., a vast conspiracy theory).”

    Though he uses quotation marks, he doesn’t say where he gets the quotations from. Neither does he say why the process Marxism allegedly describes is in any way conspiratorial. Marx wrote, in The German Ideology, 1845,

    The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force… The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

    I don’t believe this is correct — but this isn’t a review of the works of Marx.

    Lindsay’s treatment of other communists, such as Antonio Gramsci, is similarly sloppy. He lists Selections from the Prison Notebooks in his references, but his claim that he “spread much of the soil in which Critical Race Theory later germinated” is not backed up by citations. Gramsci’s career was not about infiltrating religion, family, education, media and the law, and “changing those key institutions from within”, as Lindsay alleges on pages 110, 117, 125, and 188.

    In Chapter 3, Lindsay describes the Frankfurt School as “neo-Marxist.” But after the School relocated to America, its work eschewed the materialist conception of history. It owed far more to Freudian psychoanalysis — in their influential work The Authoritarian Personality, these refugees from Nazism used unfalsifiable pseudoscience to paint normal American families as psychologically disturbed, and prone to raising “fascists.” Lindsay’s own quotes from the Frankfurters show that they had broken with Marxism. If there is one central plank of Marxist theory, it is the irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the proletariat. Lindsay quotes Frankfurt scholar Herbert Marcuse at length to the effect that the workers have been bought off, and are no longer revolutionary, so someone else has to take their place. But a theory which substitutes minorities for the proletariat is not Marxist, any more than a theory which puts race in place of class.

    Contrast this with how the International Committee analyses the role of CRT, from a Marxist starting point. From page 292 onward, they claim that CRT is part of “identity politics”, which is used by the Democratic Party to divide the workers by race, etc.. Nothing could be further from Marx’s “workers of the world, unite”.

    The Trotskyists have a “dialectical” approach to history, where, for example, the American Revolution is progressive, but insufficient. They reiterate Marx’s cheerleading for Lincoln in the Civil War. But even if you don’t agree with any of this, the Committee’s interviews with scholars constitute irrefutable evidence that the 1619 Project is an attempt to mislead Americans about their country’s history.

    The Committee’s writers are not surprised that big corporations such as Bank of America have enthusiastically adopted CRT; they think it’s in their “material interests”. This sounds to me more sensible than Lindsay’s claim that they have adopted a variant of Marxism.

    Frankly, I find it hard to understand what happened to James Lindsay. His previous work, with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual roots of CRT, backed with citations and references. Race Marxism is simply preaching to the choir, since the only people who will believe it have already made their minds up.

    3

    Woke Racism and Western Weakness

    Jay KnottLeave a comment


    Sep 28, 2022

    The woke elite, in academia, the media, government, and the personnel departments of various companies tell us, in effect, that Western people and societies are uniquely, ubiquitously, and pathologically ethnocentric. It is my contention that nothing could be further from the truth.

    Introduction — Antiracism in Higher Education — Antiracism’s Claims are the Opposite of the Truth — Why So Much Credulity Toward Antiracism? — Negative Consequences of Antiracism in Britain — Conservative Uses of Antiracism — Definitions — Acknowledgements — References


    Introduction

    Some of the concepts discussed below have contested labels. For example, defenders of Critical Race Theory claim that its critics don’t know what it means.

    I put my definitions, what I mean when I use particular words, under a subheading near the end of the essay.

    Briefly, I use the terms “Wokeness,” and “Critical Social Justice,” to mean the broad range of left-wing views and practices which have spread into the commanding heights of many institutions of the Western world in the last few years. “Antiracism” and “Critical Race Theory” are more specific terms, covering the idea that white Western people need educating to overcome their ethnocentrism. Examples of these claims can be found in the bestselling books of Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. I also call this idea “Woke Racism,” after an article in the National Review by Frederick M Hess, Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College.

    The origins of these ideas can be found in US and Canadian higher education.

    Antiracism in Higher Education

    Consider a college campus boiling with racial and gender sensitivity, with courses in victimization, organizations for victims, a constant barrage of victimization propaganda — but no immediate and palpable victims. ‘Anti-racist’ vigilantes with no racists (or misogynists and homophobes) to hang had better get busy and make some, and as we see, they often do.

    (Laird Wilcox, Crying Wolf, 1994.)

    In March 2006, in, Durham, North Carolina, the district attorney prosecuted three white students, following the claim of a black woman that they had raped her, ignoring clear evidence that it was false. Their college president said the alleged rape was an example of “racism”, and eighty-eight professors signed a “Listening Statement”, defending the woman’s allegation. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is one of them. After the students were acquitted, and the DA imprisoned, he doubled down. His book Racism Without Racists, currently in its 5th edition, claims

    Shielded by color blindness whites can express resentment toward minorities; criticize their morality, values and work ethic; and even claim to be the victims of ‘reverse racism’.

    (Racism Without Racists, page 3.)

    Jodi Shaw doesn’t claim to be a victim of reverse racism. She says “it’s not, it’s very simply racism”. In July 2018, at Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, a black student falsely accused white employees of racial profiling. Even after the hoax was exposed, the college president continued to act as if white racism was a problem, and her solution was to subject her white subordinates to actual racial profiling, driving one of them, Jodi Shaw, to resign and go public — Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College (ibid.). President Kathleen McCartney’s explanation of her policy was “it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias”.

    Indeed: the claims of antiracism cannot be falsified. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility argues that if you’re white, and you don’t acknowledge your racism, you have something wrong with you which needs fixing. Her theory is unfalsifiable; it implies that anything which attempts to show it is flawed, including this sentence, is an example of the problem it pretends to identify.

    At San Diego State, Maryland, Oberlin, North Park, Drake, Evergreen, and dozens of other higher education institutions, the authorities accepted the claims of activists that they are victims of racism. Even after discovering that most of these claims are false, they usually failed to rein in their credulity. In higher education, antiracism is endemic.

    Critical Race Theory (CRT), a variant of antiracism, originated at Harvard. Invented by professor Derrick Bell and developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others, it is a subset of Critical Social Justice, an idea originating in the Frankfurt School. There is not enough room in this essay to give these schools the treatment they deserve — those interested could start by consulting Cynical Theories, by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.

    Approximately ten years ago, I began to become aware of the exaggeration of racially-motivated crimes in America. I created the website fakehatecrimes.org, which new users can join, and add alleged hate crimes which are likely, or proven, to be fake. It extends the 1990s research of Laird Wilcox (ibid.). Some of this data was used by professor Wilfred Reilly, in his February 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax. The site currently contains hundreds of cases, most of them in US colleges and universities, in which activists invented, or perpetrated against themselves, crimes allegedly motivated by bigotry.

    Antiracism’s Claims are the Opposite of the Truth

    The woke elite, in academia, the media, government, and the personnel departments of various companies tell us, in effect, that Western people and societies are uniquely, ubiquitously, and pathologically ethnocentric. It is my contention that nothing could be further from the truth. First, I will give a list of examples which show Western societies are not particularly racist, then, give examples of credulity toward the allegations of antiracists, then try to explain it. Consider

    – The two most effective forces fighting to abolish slavery during the 19th century: the Royal Navy and the US Army
    – Protests against racism from the 1930s onward
    – The defeat of Nazi Germany 
    – Subsequent support for national and international institutions committed to opposing racism
    – The Civil Rights movement
    – Civil rights legislation 
    – Affirmative action to give black students an advantage in applying for places at US universities

    Contrasting modern Western societies with others gives the lie to the claim that the West is particularly racist.

    In May 2013, the Washington Post published a map of “racial tolerance,”based on research by two Swedish economists, classifying areas of the world according to percentage of inhabitants who would not want to live next to people of a different race. Blue is the most tolerant; red, the least. The tolerant, dark blue areas are the Anglo-Saxon countries, and most of South America. India is bright red. It appears that, on average, Indians are remarkably intolerant of people they consider members of a different race.

    A recent paper from Cambridge University Press, Genetics, Anthropology, and the Politics of Racial Nationalism in China, describes the corruption of human origins research in the interests of Chinese racial mythology. Frank Dikötter’s 2015 book The Discourse of Race in Modern China shows that the People’s Republic of China is more racist than the West, although he follows Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould in denying that races exist. If this were true, the Chinese government claim that Mongols, Uyghurs and Tibetans are part of the same race as the Han, would be neither true nor false. But in fact, it is false. Uyghurs are more closely related to other Turkic-speaking peoples than to the Han Chinese people. This is important, because Chinese claims have consequences — they underpin the destruction of minority cultures.

    Eastern Europe is the only area where the football authorities are still punishing clubs for racist chanting from their fans. English players wear “No Room For Racism” armbands, and various other subtle hints are directed at fans, implying that they need educating. As Brendan O’Neill shows, this is unjustified.

    Westerners are remarkably open to the claim that they are racist. Note

    – The spread of antiracism training in Western institutions
    – Widespread acceptance of the “unmarked graves” hoax, which claims hundreds of native children in Canadian residential homes were murdered and secretly buried
    – The leading science journal Nature has adopted a policy where scientific conclusions can be dropped if they clash with the demands of antiracism — The Fall of Nature, Bo Winegard
    – The term “white supremacy” is often used in the media, and by politicians, without evidence, to describe people they disagree with
    — When, in January 2019, in Washington DC, a group of black adults subjected a group of white schoolboys to racist abuse, the media, for the most part, claimed it was the boys who are racist
    — President Biden called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist, after he shot three white men who were attacking him in Kenosha Wisconsin, during 
    – The protests and riots of 2020

    The 2020 protests for “racial justice” were sparked by the murder, on May 25, of African-American George Floyd, by white policeman Derek Chauvin. Although no evidence of a racial motive for that crime has been produced, large numbers of white people acted as if there was, and some of them acted as if they believe they are responsible for it. I was about to join one of the protests, when I saw signs saying “white silence is violence,” which means, if you’re white, and you don’t proactively agree with antiracism, you are committing violence, so violence can justifiably be used against you.

    It is true that black people are disproportionately targeted by the police in America. But adjusting for the black rate of crime debunks the claim of racial discrimination. 0.8% of whites commit violent crimes, but for blacks, the ratio is more than twice as high (Criminal Victimization, 2018, US Department of Justice, Table 12).

    Given the evidence that Western societies, particularly the English-speaking ones, are institutionally less racist than most others, we can conclude that antiracists are deluded, or dishonest. There is no need to examine their motives any further. But we need to try to understand the weakness in these societies which enables the remarkable success of woke racism.

    Why So Much Credulity Toward Antiracism?

    A complex theory, constructed by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, claims that the specific material conditions of ancient northwestern Europe selected for certain genetic psychological traits, which, today, are maladaptive — “pathological altruism,” or white guilt.

    Another theory, in a work by Benedict Beckeld, locates Western self-contempt — oikophobia — in the inevitable trajectory of civilisations rising and falling, with emphasis on the particular examples of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Britain, France and the USA. On pages 57–58, Beckeld more or less admits that oikophobia is almost exclusively Western.

    I am unable to decide how much truth there is in either theory. I don’t know the cause of Western weakness in the face of wokeness. Currently, I can only ask readers to patiently and politely point out what’s wrong with it, and support the brave people refusing to accept the racism of antiracism. For instance, one can donate to Jodi Shaw’s legal costs in her case against Smith College. Her GoFundMe page is help-jodi-stand-up-to-smith-college.

    Oikophobia, or whatever it is, is deep-rooted. Even some of the people most effective at exposing the harmful consequences of antiracism resist drawing logical conclusions from their findings.

    Jayne Senior is the whistleblower who exposed the Pakistani-origin child-rape gangs of Rotherham, and the role of the Labour party in helping them avoid prosecution. In her book Broken and Betrayed, she writes

    Of course there was a grooming problem in Rotherham involving Asian men and white girls — you’d have to be blind not to see that — but there was no way I was going to contribute to any political point-scoring on behalf of the BNP or the EDL.

    (Broken and Betrayed, page 230). Instead, in chapter 21, from page 321 onwards, she describes her integration into the South Yorkshire Labour machine.

    The word “Islam” occurs twice in Broken and Betrayed, “Muslim” six times, and “Asian” sixty-seven. In the UK, “Asians” usually means people from the Indian subcontinent and their descendants. “Asian grooming gangs” is a phrase used to broaden the scope and fudge the issue. Over 80% of convicted gang members have Muslim names, and hardly any have non-Muslim Indian names.

    Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written extensively on the negative consequences of Islam for women and girls. She herself was a victim as a child in her native Somalia, and her subsequent campaigns in the Netherlands and the USA have necessitated 24-hour security to protect her from Muslims who want to murder her. Her 2021 book Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights explains how, after decades of advances, areas of European countries are becoming less comfortable for women, because of the presence of growing numbers of men from Muslim cultures. But, like Jayne Senior, she has a fear of supporting what she calls “right-wing populism.”

    Only by clarifying what has gone wrong in Europe in recent years can one make a truly credible case for effective integration of immigrants. For that — not the exclusion and repatriation favored by the populists of the Right — is the only feasible way forward.

    (Prey, page xiv). Both of the above quotations make something sound worse, by juxtaposing it with something which really is worse. Senior lists the British National Party and the English Defence League together, although they are quite different. The BNP was racist, whereas the EDL aimed at an ideology — Islam. Ali puts “exclusion” and “repatriation” together. “Repatriation” of non-white citizens, as advocated by the BNP, would be a crime against humanity. “Exclusion” is another matter. Nation states, by definition, include some people and exclude others. It would be “feasible” for some of them to exclude potential immigrants from a specific culture. Her book is full of examples of immigrants who don’t want to be “effectively integrated,” but she doesn’t explain how to deal with this problem.

    Negative Consequences of Antiracism in Britain

    Antiracist ideology landed in the United Kingdom at least thirty years ago. It influenced the 1993 Macpherson inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of a black London teenager, Stephen Lawrence, and the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act. (See Sir William Macpherson: a divisive legacy, Adrian Hart, Spiked Online, March 8, 2021). Macpherson’s definition of a racist incident was “any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.” This phrase, which shifts the burden of proof from the shoulders of the accuser to those of the accused, originates in Critical Race Theory. “Listen first to the voice of the victims” urged American academic Mari Matsuda, in the collection of essays Words That Wound.

    Her phrase is triply misleading. Firstly, anyone investigating an allegation inevitably “listens first” to the accuser, but then they must listen to the accused, assuming his innocence unless and until he is proven guilty. In CRT, “listen” means “believe,” because, secondly, the phrase “the victims” assumes the guilt of the accused — in should be “the alleged victims.” Thirdly, antiracism does not encourage listening to all victims’ voices. Witness the “grooming gang” scandal.

    Following the publication of Macpherson’s report, antiracism spread around the country. It was not the only cause of the grooming gang scandal, but it contributed to the authorities’ failure to keep sexual offenders away from vulnerable minors. Some of them prioritised combatting white racism over protecting underage white girls from Pakistani gangs.

    To cite just one example, Jayne Senior, the Rotherham whistleblower, describes a white man telling the police a gang was “grooming” his 14-year-old daughter. They ignored him, until he shouted a racist word at the men’s house. Then the police quickly appeared, and found the girl getting out of bed with a man, but they did not arrest him — instead, they charged father and daughter with disorderly behaviour.

    Jessica subsequently told me that when she was driving around with her abuser in his flashy car, he’d often play the ‘race card’ if stopped by the police.

    (Broken and Betrayed, page 92.)

    After the story broke, the government appointed professor Alexis Jay to control the damage. Her report was completed in August 2014.

    Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.

    (Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, page 2.)

    In his 2018 book The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, Ben Cobley explains how the Labour party’s embrace of “identity politics” enabled the “race card” described by Jayne Senior above. Each sector was expected to stay in its lane. Muslim “community leaders” were trusted to look after their own. Feminists concentrated on getting all-female shortlists for election candidates, and kept quiet about the grooming gangs.

    Antiracist activists and journalists sometimes help the grooming gangs, by labelling whistleblowers “racist.” An article by Libby Brooks in the Guardian, January 6, 2011 says “claims about Muslim men grooming white girls” is an example of “racialising crime.” This is doubly false; firstly, the claims are true, and secondly, Islam is not a race. Nevertheless, fear of being accused of racism helped delay the exposure and prosecution of the gang members, as Jayne Senior and Alexis Jay make clear.

    Conservative Uses of Antiracism

    One of the techniques used by antiracists is to persuade listeners to accept the substitution of feelings for facts, so that an argument can be dismissed by claiming that it offends, or “harms,” somebody. Another is to pretend disagreement with an ideology is prejudice against a section of the population. For example, liberal lawyer Maud Maron refused to pretend to agree with aspects of antiracism, and was driven out of her job by left-wing activists who wrote that she “is racist, and openly so” — The Courage of Maud Maron, The American Conservative, July 27, 2021.

    Conservatives can also use these techniques. In 2019, an event entitled “Not Backing Down: Israel, Free Speech and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights” took place at the University of Massachusetts. The College Fix, a conservative student-produced online magazine, published an articlequoting Jewish students claiming they “will suffer immediate and irreparable harm” from this conference.

    In March 2019, representative Ilhan Omar claimed, on Twitter, that the Israel Lobby is wealthy: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby”. The response of her critics was to say that this is a “trope.” Little effort was made to show that her claim was factually incorrect, but she apologised, using the woke language customary in the Democratic party, and deleted the tweet. However, there is some truth in her original claim — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spends millions trying to get the most pro-Israel candidates selected for elections. Here is one example — Summer Lee Faces AIPAC Spending Onslaught In Final Days Of Pennsylvania Primary, The Intercept, May 2022. Another article, in the Guardian, August 2022, claims “Aipac has poured more than $24m into defeating Democratic primary candidates critical of Israel”.

    The Anti-Defamation League uses these antiracist techniques, both to exaggerate the danger from right-wing extremists, for example, The Proud Boys, and to smear left-wing critics of Israel as racist.

    Definitions

    Some of these definitions are adapted from the essay Regime Change: Repelling the DEI Assault on Higher Education, by Peter Wood, of the National Association of Scholars.

    Wokeness — the traditional left emphasises economic class as the most important division in humanity. Its leading theorist was Karl Marx. The woke left theorises that other divisions — race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on — matter more. “Critical Social Justice” is a term preferred by the defenders of wokeness, as it conveys an impression of intellectual rigour and moral virtue.

    Critical Race Theory — a theory formulated by Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in the late 1970s and further developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Bell and Crenshaw argued that the Civil Rights Movement had failed to reform American society in any fundamental way and that all American institutions are systemically racist.

    Race — DNA sampling reveals humanity is divided into large clusters of related people, with sparsely populated gaps between them (Charles Murray, Human Diversity). How large a cluster has to be, and how great and sparse the gaps between it and other clusters, for it to be called a “race,” is debatable. This does not mean that race is a meaningless concept; the clusters exist. 

    Racism — inaccurate and negative beliefs about the members of a race, discrimination or violence against the members of a race, or belief in the superiority of one race over others. Although race is real, racism can also attribute imaginary characteristics to imaginary races. The National Socialists’ beliefs about Aryan, Slavic and Jewish races were racist, regardless of whether or not these races exist.

    Antiracism — antiracism, without a hyphen, is a term adopted from the work of Ibram X Kendi. It includes the works of Critical Race Theory and The 1619 Project, begun on August 14th 2019 by the New York Times Magazine, currently being taught to thousands of schoolchildren. Antiracism implicitly makes the racist claim that white Europeans are uniquely racist. It uses Kafkaesque circular reasoning to claim that the denial of racism, by white people, is evidence of racism.

    Acknowledgements

    Of the individuals and organisations which provided me with the evidence which led to this essay, I would like to mention first the Freethinkers of Portland State University, who are taking a brave stand in the lions’ den. The National Association of Scholars has produced a series of papers which informed some of the arguments within. Christopher Rufo has accumulated the most convincing evidence of the spread of Critical Social Justice in American government, corporations, universities, colleges and schools. The website Spiked Online, podcasts including Katie Herzog’s, Bari Weiss’s, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s, and several college-based online magazines, such as Minding the Campus, have all helped. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, the World Socialist Website has produced the most comprehensive demolition of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. None of these sources are responsible for anything I argue herein.

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    References

    Lone Whistleblower Takes On the Woke Racists at Smith College — Frederick M Hess, National Review, February 24, 2021 — https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/lone-whistleblower-takes-on-the-woke-racists-at-smith-college/
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    News reports omit race of man arrested for hate crime hoax. College Fix determines he’s black. — Dave Huber, The College Fix, January 18, 2018 — https://www.thecollegefix.com/news-reports-omit-race-man-arrested-hate-crime-hoax-college-fix-determines-hes-black/
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    Broken and Betrayed: The True Story of the Rotherham Abuse Scandal by the Woman Who Fought to Expose It — Jayne Senior, Pan Main Market Editions, March 24, 2016 — https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Betrayed-Rotherham-scandal-fought-ebook/dp/B012TS109U
    Grooming Gang Chronology — Rod McLaughlin, The Poverty of Antiracism website, April 8, 2021 — http://thepovertyofantiracism.com/read/edit/JfE2k
    Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Harper, February 9, 2021 — https://www.amazon.com/Prey-Immigration-Erosion-Womens-Rights/dp/0062857878
    Sir William Macpherson: a divisive legacy — Adrian Hart, Spiked Online, March 8, 2021 — https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/08/sir-william-macpherson-a-divisive-legacy/
    Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment — Mari Matsuda et. al., Westview Press, June 4, 1993 — https://www.amazon.com/Words-That-Wound-Assaultive-Perspectives/dp/0813384281
    The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry — Sir William Macpherson, February 24, 1999 — https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-stephen-lawrence-inquiry
    Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham — Alexis Jay, August 2014 — https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham
    The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity — Ben Cobley, Societas, July 1, 2018 — https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tribe-Liberal-Left-System-Diversity-Societas/dp/1845409752
    Grooming and our ignoble tradition of racialising crime — Libby Brooks, the Guardian, January 6, 2011 — https://web.archive.org/web/20130920234332/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jan/07/grooming-racialising-crime-tradition
    The Courage Of Maud Maron — Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, July 27, 2021 — https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-courage-of-maud-maron-legal-aid-racism-live-not-by-lies/
    UMass Amherst students sue to prevent pro-Palestinian event on campus — College Fix Staff, April 27, 2019 — https://www.thecollegefix.com/umass-amherst-students-sue-to-prevent-pro-palestinian-event-on-campus/
    It’s all about the Benjamins baby — Ilhan Omar, Twitter, February 10, 2019 — https://archive.ph/BUjwu/4e68e6576b40c7cb30ffac552882c4d34c826502/scr.png, web archive backup, retrieved September 16, 2022
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    Pro-Israel groups denounced after pouring funds into primary race — Chris McGreal, The Guardian, August 4, 2022 — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/04/aipac-pro-israel-groups-primary-race
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    Christopher Rufo, Antonio Gramsci, and Social Justice

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Feb 21, 2023

    ‘Social Justice’ is a collection of ideas originating in North American academia. I wish to contribute to the effort to defend my society against it.

    Andrew Doyle’s book, The New Puritans, September 2022, is a recent rigorous critical analysis of this phenomenon.

    Social Justice activists exaggerate the degree of bigotry in modern Western countries. This is especially worrying for members of minorities. They have divided students, including children, by race. They have driven people who failed to use woke language out of their jobs. They screen candidates for academic positions in the humanities and social science, and, increasingly, in science, for contributions to social justice. For a mountain of evidence for this assertion, read Ideological Intensification: A Quantitative Study of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEM Subjects at American Universities, Mason Goad and Bruce R Chartwell, November, 2022:

    https://www.nas.org/reports/ideological-intensification/full-report

    If we want to debunk Social Justice, we need to follow some simple rules. For example, don’t repeat a historical claim you found on the internet, without giving a source.

    Christopher Rufo is an important figure in the fightback. This is a quote from his speech at Hillsdale College, April 2022:

    “This idea is traceable to Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the 1930s of ‘capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.’”

    https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/laying-siege-to-the-institutions

    But did Gramsci really write these words?

    I searched Google and Google Scholar for the phrase, and sections of it, in English and Italian; for example, “catturare la cultura,” “coscienza della società.”

    There were over twenty results. Some of them do not contain anything resembling the phrase. Those which do, either have no source, or refer to each other. The exception is a book by conspiracy theorist William Borst. He claims Gramsci wrote it in the magazine Ordine Nuovo. He doesn’t give a date, but the magazine published its final edition in 1925, not the 1930s, as Rufo said.

    https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog/qt0C77CCQeUC

    I consulted an Italian friend to see if he could track down the quotation. He could not; he said, “it’s probably made up.” I ploughed through the entirety of the English version of Gramsci’s works. I could not find anything like “capturing the culture” or “transforming the consciousness.”

    Rufo is referenced by a growing number of articles. One example is this article in the March 6th 2023 edition of the National Review, The Long March Back, Antonio Gramsci And Us, by Nate Hochman:

    https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/.

    It claims that Rufo “routinely cites” Gramsci, but gives no original source for his citations.

    Rufo has said that he has relatives in Italy who are familiar with Gramsci’s work. I refer to his interview on the Ayaan Hirsi Ali podcast, in June 2021. If his quote exists, surely he could have found the source for it.

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/christopher-rufo-on-critical-race-theory/id1552059697?i=1000526728397

    James Lindsay is another prominent critic of Social Justice. He is the author of the book Race Marxism, March 2022. The phrase ‘false consciousness’ occurs seventeen times. He gives the impression that it is a central Marxist concept. I found it once in the collected works of Marx and Engels, in a throwaway remark in a letter written by Engels. It’s easy to find numerous similar errors in Lindsay’s work.

    Social Justice academics could use these questionable claims to discredit their critics. To avoid this, we need to follow the rules, such as ‘give sources for citations’.

    Pro-Israel Conservatives Go Full Cancel Culture

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Nov 14, 2023

    One of the consequences of the Hamas attack of October 7th, 2023, has been the wholesale conversion of conservative critics of ‘cancel culture’ into its most enthusiastic advocates.

    Up until that event, a cluster of online activists attracted millions of followers and subscribers opposing the excesses of what has come to be called ‘Woke.’ Bari Weiss is a good example. She has defended victims of Woke, including a Palestinian family:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9668937/Palestinian-immigrant-owner-grocery-chain-Minneapolis-rails-against-cancel-culture.html.

    Woke activists encourage doxxing, censorship, and firing, of people with whom they disagree. Examples from the last few years are legion. One can google, for example, ‘Jodi Shaw,’ ‘Colin Wright,’ and ‘Roland Fryer.’ People have been cancelled for questioning whether the police are racist, and claiming that sex is binary.

    In the article Woke Racism and Western Weakness, September 2022, I mentioned conservatives using similar language to the Woke left, in response to a conference entitled “Not Backing Down: Israel, Free Speech and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights.” They said some Jewish students claimed they “will suffer immediate and irreparable harm” from this conference, and tried to get it cancelled:

    https:/thejayreport.com/woke-racism-and-western-weakness-b5ae5970299b.

    Since October 7th, the Woke wave of cancel culture has been dwarfed by a conservative tsunami. KC Johnson is a leading archivist of false allegations of racism on campus. But today, he supports banning pro-Palestinian student groups, because he claims they are antisemitic: https://x.com/kcjohnson9/status/1723159740904018078.

    Without missing a beat, influential conservative intellectuals, on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Megyn Kelly, and Douglas Murray, went full cancel-culture. They falsely claim that protests calling for a ceasefire to save the lives of Palestinian children are pro-terrorism. They say that Jews are scared, ignoring evidence of the sizeable Jewish presence at these protests.

    False accusations of racism, claiming that a minority is frightened, the belief that words are violence — these are the techniques the Woke left has used against conservatives, or even biologists, in higher education, but also in government, corporations, and the media. Conservatives are now trying to intimidate critics of Israel using the same techniques.

    The journalist Glenn Greenwald, a consistent opponent of assaults on freedom, wherever they come from, has chronicled numerous examples of conservative cancel culture on his System Update podcast: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald.

    Conservatives not only claim that defending Palestinian human rights is pro-Hamas, they claim it is a consequence of Woke leftist ideology on campus. But the resistance of the Palestinians predates both. It started when Jewish militias ethnically-cleansed most of the Palestinians, directly after world war two.

    Conservative cancel culture is more similar to Woke cancel culture than the defence of Palestinians is to either. The Western countries, particularly America, back Israel to the hilt. Those trying to suppress critical voices are complicit in mass murder.

    A Critique of Tim Wise’s “White Like Me”

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Tim Wise is a dedicated campaigner against what he calls ‘white supremacy’. He tours the country talking about it, and has written several books on the subject. This book is his personal story, how he came to be who he is now.

    Wise makes three big mistakes:

    1. He confuses CLASS and RACE

    2. He confuses STATISTICS and STEREOTYPES

    3. He ignores the Jewish question.

    He interprets everything in terms of anti-racism. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995? The initial press reaction to this atrocity was to suggest the most likely suspects for terrorism would be Middle Eastern. Then Timothy McVeigh was arrested, and immediately, without waiting for evidence, the anti-racist left celebrated – he was white, right-wing, and had an Army haircut. It turns out that he and his fellow conspirator Terry Nichols were guilty, but the lefties didn’t wait for the verdict before trumpeting their conclusion that the only reason the media thought it might be Middle Eastern terrorists is because the media are racist. So, after Oklahoma City, the press was concerned not to allege Muslims are the most likely people to commit terrorist attacks in America, that it is more likely to be home-grown white extremists.

    If Oklahoma City seemed to confirm Wise’s perspective, the much greater tragedy of September 11th did the opposite. It is testimony to the strength of his convictions that he doesn’t notice this.

    Wise makes much of ethnic or religious profiling since September 11th, failing to notice the effort airport security has made to avoid profiling – because it’s illegal. Any white person made to walk through the ‘sniffing’ machine, as I have on more than one occasion, can testify to this effort. I, another white man, and a middle-aged white woman in a business suit, were the only ones singled out on one flight I particularly remember. Wise is mistaken – even 9/11 didn’t provoke the West into ethnic profiling. Except Israel, but accusing Israel of profiling is like saying Roman Polanski has a penchant for young ladies. In the US, airport security is obliged to prove it is not profiling, just like mortgage lenders were forced to make unwise loans to prove they were not bigoted. Hence what the left calls the ‘capitalist crisis’. But I digress…

    Racism is often described as ‘judging people by the color of their skin‘, after a simplistic homily by Saint Martin Luther King. In practice, it often just means making a statistical calculation. You might avoid a particular street, not because you think all black kids are muggers, but because you know there is a positive correlation between black kids and mugging. Moreover, there is the ‘weighting’ problem. The consequences of erring on the side of liberalism, and being wrong, may be greater than erring on the side of a more conservative standpoint, and being wrong. Many so-called ‘racists’ might just be good statisticians. ‘Anti-racism’ stops us thinking through these hard issues by numbing us and dumbing us down with schmaltzy moralism.

    Profiling is a trade-off. We are prepared  to tolerate considerable inconvenience to avoid airport security singling out Muslim-looking people. I agree with this approach. In the case of baby-sitters, we err in the opposite direction – you are allowed to advertise for a female child-minder, although this profiles against the majority of men, who are not a danger to children. I’m not complaining, though I lose out in both examples!

    In the case of cops stopping people for ‘driving while black’, it’s often simpler than Wise believes. If they are allowed to, the police will indeed discriminate against black people, because, statistically, they are more likely to be criminals, just as men are more likely to be child-molesters. However, if we decide to make the trade-off in the same direction as we do with airport security, the police will not be allowed to make such a statistical calculation, and the white majority will have to tolerate the inconvenience.

    This is not to deny police racism exists. I was stopped by the Portland police for turning without a signal. The pig didn’t even give me a ticket. James Perez, who was black, was not so lucky – they shot him dead for doing the same thing, though he was unarmed. Clearly, that was an example of racial discrimination. To address this problem, the cops could do one of two things

    1. shoot less black people

    2. shoot more white people

    or, if they are really serious about eradicating racism, both. Wise’s logic leads to this conclusion – he argues that, to the extent that black people are oppressed, white people are privileged. At this point, I could talk about how his argument is ‘class-divisive’, and show how it undermines the working class as much as white racism does, but I’m bored with that sort of thing, having tried to do it for thirty years. Karl Marx couldn’t come up with a logically coherent, scientific version of this idea: I doubt if I can. Anyway, deconstructing critical race theory is more fun, and somehow, more anti-establishment.

    Imagine a white woman walking to Los Angeles Greyhound bus station at twilight. A shortcut would take her through an alley containing several young black men. If she avoids the alley, she may miss her bus. What should she do? In this case, I have no hesitation in advocating ethnic and gender profiling. I would advise her not to take the high road, and the dark alley. Many people I know are often faced with this kind of dilemma. I hope they listen to me rather than Tim Wise. Alert readers will ask: why did I say ‘white woman’ – why does her race matter? Because she might worry about being a racist. A young black woman wouldn’t think twice about avoiding that alley. And why did I mention the ethnicity of the young men in the alley? Because it is useful to the woman in making her calculation.

    That’s statistics. I don’t think most Muslims hijack planes, or most black men are muggers. But they are more likely to be these things than their demographic complements.

    If it weren’t for his Jewish background and the relatively benign attitude to Zionism, as opposed to white racism, of he and his ‘anti-racist’ comrades, I’d say Wise is a guilty white man. But its more than that. The American anti-racist industry is too close to Jewish power. It attacks critics of Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’ in alliance with open Zionists. It uncritically copies disinformation from Zionist sources. It disrupts allegedly racist white speakers by cooperating with really racist rabbis. When ‘calling people out’ doesn’t work, these children of Stalinism and Zionism use threats, violence and slander, justifying their tactics by thinking they’re fighting the ultimate evil – white racism.

    Wise’s story contains traces of the use of ‘feelings’ politics, and how some people need a ‘safe space’ etc., politics which have been used to undermine radical groups. Some of us in Portland have been targeted by the safe-space soft-Stalinists lately. It’s so vague, it’s impossible to defend yourself. How can I counter the argument of a ‘minority person’ who says she needs a ‘safe space’ to avoid my ‘racism sexism homophobia able-ism class-ism patriarchy heterosexism and male violence’ (actual quote)?

    Seriously, Wise believes in the technique known as ‘calling out’. This is a way of saying “I disagree with you” without giving the other person the opportunity to reply, as we do in our Anglo-Saxon, liberal, scientific society. It’s an attempt to use moral blackmail to delegitimize your opponent’s view. But the universe was not socially constructed, and factual correctness is completely independent of political correctness.

    Submission to this blackmail paralyzes thinking rationally about social problems. If I explained that I understand that the British working class has been, to some extent, its own worst enemy, nobody would ‘call me out’. This class perpetuated alcoholism, domestic violence, and hedonism, hangovers from its miserable origins in the factories, mills and mines of the industrial revolution, long after its standard of living had improved. But if I said something similar about the black American proletariat, people like Wise would say I’m being racist. They would distort and simplify my words to make it sound like I’m saying that black people are entirely to blame for their problems. He really makes that dishonest simplification in the book. I used to think political correctness was a class strategy – a way of keeping the poor in their place by turning black people against their ‘privileged’ white working class neighbors. But that wouldn’t explain that it is not universal – it is specific to the part of the left which intersects with the most powerful ethnic lobby in America.

    The most influential American leftist is probably Noam Chomsky. He was a keen opponent of South African apartheid, but is much weaker on the Israel question. In particular, he’s a ‘Lobby Denier’. He tries to hold back the one understanding which is essential to save the Palestinians. Jews like Chomsky often try to prevent this insight by claiming that concern about the Lobby is ‘racist’. Leftists will say that what I just said is racist too. The fact that I got my critique of Chomsky’s blind spots from Jewish leftists Neumann and Blankfort proves nothing, of course: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html.

    Wise confuses cause and effect. Much is said about ‘environmental racism’. For example, if the authorities build a new freeway through a city, they usually go through the most black area, dividing communities, cutting people off from their relatives, shops, hospitals, etc.. But this is not because the urban planners don’t like black people, it’s because it’s cheaper to go through the poorest area, to compulsorily purchase the houses they are going to knock down. Police officers, if they are allowed to, will practice ethnic profiling. So would airport security. It’s not necessarily because they are xenophobic, its just more efficient to use whatever statistical methods you can when you are allowed to. Policemen intercept gangs of boys more readily than gangs of girls, and for good reason.

    Oxford Town, Oxford Town…

    Wise’s confusion of class and race is almost too obvious to point out. It used to be a commonplace in England that the police would treat students at prestigious Oxford university completely differently to the local working-class lads. The students in the old days were invariably well-off, and the police would let them get away with all manner of nocturnal pranks, but not the horny-handed sons of Oxford’s auto workers. All – pigs, patricians and plebs – were white. The police knew their job – suck up to the rich, and oppress the poor. American cops, treating black kids differently, are partially exhibiting a class distinction, a result of their role, enforcing property relations in a capitalist society. In Oxford, England, class is clear, but in Oxford, Mississippi, people like Wise can claim that American society is based more on race than on class. If the rulers of the country really had made more money out of slavery than wage labor, it’s surprising that they replaced the former with the latter.

    He advises white people to “refuse to accept jobs that came your way thanks to personal connections, unless those same connections are also open to persons of color” – but – do I need to spell it out? – he doesn’t appeal to Jews to make the same sacrifice. He doesn’t need to – he can rely on paranoia about anti-Semitism to stop people from muttering about clannish behavior. He appeals to whites to make sacrifices (page 118) but says nothing about Jewish privilege; only about the history of the oppression of Jews. It would be difficult to discuss with Wise the issue of whether Jews have always been victims, a fair subject if you really want to oppose racism, especially Zionism.

    But Western Civilization today generally errs on the side of political correctness. The major exception is Israel, the only overtly racist country in the Western world. The only country whose immigration controls are so ethnocentric, it won’t even let the original inhabitants back in – but it would welcome Tim Wise with open arms. The only country which depends on white guilt, the ideology promoted by Tim Wise. German politicians are quite explicit about this guilt, but it is also a powerful force in the other Western countries, especially the USA.

    In his chapter on what he calls ‘White Denial’, Wise describes a ‘psychologist’ from the 1850’s who claimed that runaway slaves were suffering from a mental illness, which he called ‘drapetomania’ (page 63). Wise rightly condemns this self-serving nonsense. But more influential in psychology today is a book written a hundred years later by a group of Jewish-identified left-wing anti-racists, “The Authoritarian Personality“. This work blatantly pathologizes normal white American families, which it claims suffer from ‘ego-alien dependency syndrome’ and all sorts of other things. Concern to marry within one’s ethnic group is pathological in white Europeans, according to this work, but normal in Jews. Wanting to marry a girl who seems uninterested in sex – thus more likely to remain faithful – is not a manifestation of a man’s genetic interest in certainty of paternity. No, it’s the result of sexual repression. Especially if you’re white. Gentile suspicion of Jews is a sign of mental instability, but not the other way round. And so on.

    Wise only goes into his Jewish background twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. In both cases, it is in the context of the history of oppression against Jews. Despite being Jewish, he tells us, he has the ‘privileges’ of being white. The idea that Jews have specific privileges in Western societies today doesn’t cross his mind. He is proud of his grandparents who were so much more liberal toward black people than most of Nashville’s white people. Jews were way over-represented in the civil rights movement – they perceived it was in their interests. 

    White Europeans today are among the least xenophobic people who have ever lived. No other ethnic group has been recorded voluntarily relinquishing so much privilege. Look at the fate of apartheid South Africa compared to apartheid Israel. Wise does not notice this, for some reason. Obviously, this does not mean I am saying that white people should become racist. Naturally, leftists will claim that this is exactly what I am saying.

    Like all left-wing ‘anti-racists’, Wise goes on about ‘hate crimes’ like burning crosses and swastikas without once mentioning that the majority of these crimes are committed by black, Jewish and white anti-racist activists. In the last year, at the time of writing (April 2010), there have been swastikas painted inside two colleges in Portland, UC Davis, and the University of Oregon. A ‘minority student’ confessed to hanging a noose and a white hood at UC San Diego. This is certainly a fake hate crime, and the others, probably. Universities are not full of Nazis.

    He mentions college fraternities being hotbeds of racism without discussing the campaign against the white frat-boys at Duke University in 2006, carried out by black activists, feminists and guilty white liberals, banging pots outside their house, and calling for them to be castrated, for a crime they didn’t commit. To not care about this terrible injustice, which happened in his neck of the woods, spurred on by the ideology he spends his life defending, Tim Wise must seethe with hate.

    Wise isn’t just Jewish, he’s also descended from British white people. But when he describes the achievement of these ancestors, sailing from Britain to Bermuda and Virginia, it is only to put them down as racists – in noticeable contrast to his pride in his Russian Jewish forebears. He grudgingly admits that the British abolished slavery in 1833, but says nothing of the white men who died liberating the slaves in the war between the states, 1861-64. The only comparable conflict for American white working class men was World War Two, when again they fought and died fighting against a cause more racist than their own, at Omaha Beach and the Bulge, 1944. Admittedly, they didn’t exactly volunteer for either of these crusades, but then, why should they, for a cause not theirs? This statement is true from both a class and a racial perspective – why assume the consequences of these approaches are mutually exclusive? Since then, white Americans have made many more concessions to other ethnic groups – but still Wise lashes them with guilt.

    According to Wise, the authorities in Bermuda are racist because they import white guest workers to keep the island white. Brimming with chutzpah, he doesn’t notice the supreme irony of this remark. He has to travel a thousand miles to find a place which imports whites, when there are already local black people able to do the jobs – everywhere else in the Western world, it’s the opposite! When you have to go out of your way to clutch desperately at the one example which conforms to your hypothesis, it’s time to try falsifying it. He wouldn’t have to go far to do that.

    He grew up in the South in the seventies. It was racist, he says. If there’s one thing we already know, that’s it. The dominant culture sneers at white Southerners. Even Zionist comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen’s movies spend more time parodying white people than Muslims. It’s not just humor. It’s not just lightweight popular culture. It has a message. Wise claims there are no negative stereotypes about white people’s intelligence, only black people’s. In fact, Hollywood is a production-line of prejudice against Christian white people, especially Germans. The media attacks the Pope but make excuses for Roman Polanski, who was convicted of what the His Holiness is merely alleged to have covered up. They had a field day with George W Bush’s Texan accent and verbal ineptitude. This Jewish anti-white prejudice is openly discussed by honest Jewish writers like Philip Roth, whose upbringing treated white gentiles as being intellectually inferior to Jews. Wise illustrates what he writes about – the blindness of privilege – but he suffers from ‘denial’.

    The South was racist. Compared to today. That means it got better. Compared to today, Lincoln was a racist. So what do we call the people who died fighting for his cause? It is ahistorical to say “this is racist, that’s racist”. In what direction has the USA and the rest of Western Society evolved over the last 150 years? With fits and starts, it has traveled in a progressive direction. Actually, there is one exception, and it’s not Bermuda. The West is unique in this respect. Chinese people don’t have a problem being xenophobic (travel to Western China if you want to find out). Neither do the inhabitants of the Amazon jungle. Nor Jews. Wise thinks his contempt for Minnesotans is pro-black, but in fact, it’s pro-Jewish.

    Wiesel Words

    Instead of going round the country honestly promoting his ethnic agenda like a Zionist, or discussing his theory with its critics in accord with the Western academic tradition, it’s all about ‘educating’ and ‘doing anti-racist work’. This sounds reasonable enough, but look more closely: it assumes he is right. True researchers defending a theory don’t say they are educating people. They invite others to attack the theory as hard as possible. That’s the scientific approach. In contrast, Wise wants to be a guru. Ever so nicely, he’s telling you he’s right, and you’d better agree, otherwise you are ‘in white denial’. It’s an approach favored by cults like psychoanalysis or the Communist Party. It’s alien to our open, Anglo-Saxon culture, and we should be aware of this.

    He complains that for most white folks, resisting white supremacy is probably the last thing on their minds. It’s true that they find it hard to resist – they already abolished it! Now we need to get to work on Jewish power, the one remaining racialist force in the Western world.

    If Wise really were a self-identified white European as he claims, he would have a lot of problems. In a way, I prefer that he is a Jew defending his ethnic interests by deception (which includes self-deception) – at least there is a Darwinian explanation – it’s healthy. It’s also healthy for the rest of us to oppose it.

    Otherwise, it would be nauseating, rather than amusing, to read his painstaking account of how parents ought to teach children to deconstruct Disney movies: “Pocahontas… appeals to European standards of beauty and to remain acceptable to a mostly white viewing audience. And of course, she shows a lot of leg… It is a stunning lesson in the way white supremacy works”.

    Some of Disney’s movies are deeper than crude leftists like Wise, always on the lookout for stereotypes, realize. Armed with a more sophisticated approach, based on the work of Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight, I was able to enjoy “Beauty and the Beast” and relate it to Levi-Strauss’s story of the origins of mythology.

    Wise supports affirmative action to promote black people and Latinos into places which might otherwise go to white people, but he does not advocate the same to raise white people into positions held, unfairly, if we apply his criteria consistenly, by Jews. These include a disproportionate number of college places and professorships, legal positions, Hollywood owners and directors, and newspaper and TV executives. Why not advocate affirmative action to address this imbalance?

    Naturally, this argument will be called ‘anti-Semitic’. But that only proves my point. Applying exactly the same principles Wise applies to one privileged group, we are not allowed to apply to another. Jews are more privileged, because, in addition to the usual privileges, they have the privilege that no-one dare call them privileged.

    “White Like Me” is a painful book. It says a lot about Wise’s family background in Tennessee, how he is raising his children to be aware, etc.. He doesn’t subscribe to the view that parents are entitled to be less progressive raising their children than they are in society in general. For example, I would argue that a white couple should feel no guilt about sending their children across town to avoid a largely black school. This would be the exact opposite of the ‘busing’ disaster of the seventies and eighties, which promoted racism by forcing middle-class white children to be exposed to bad black ghetto kids. Sorry for the bluntness, but that’s what happened. The reason I defend retrogressive parents is that genes are reactionary. What you want for your own children is the best, and your liberal principles can take a rain check. I’d go so far as to say I would try to maneuver a daughter into meeting nice white boys to avoid the potential damage of interracial marriage, though I have no objection to race-mixing in principle. This society demonizes attitudes in white people which it allows in Jews. The Los Angeles Times reports calmly that a Jewish newspaper publishes letters criticizing interracial marriage between Jews and blacks, but the Times would not publish a letter criticizing white/black hookups. So much for ‘institutionalized white racism‘. So much for Wise’s hypocritical theory.

    His analysis of the tendency of young teenage black kids to gang up misses a lot. It assumes they are reacting to real racism, disregarding the fact that this behavior is hardly less prominent than it was when white society was more ethnocentric. This behavior was as pronounced in London in the nineties as it was in Nashville in the seventies (I base this on my experience as well as Wise’s). He makes no allowance for the idea that kids can be manipulative, but their crude attempts to manipulate guilt are easier to see through than some of their adult counterparts, like Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco, who was always ready to play the race card at the drop of a hat, knowing the city was populated mostly with white liberals raised on the educational efforts of people like Wise. Furthermore, Wise’s story doesn’t raise the notion that there might be a Darwinian basis to ethnic identity. Those black kids might be expressing their genes. Such behavior might have been adaptive during our evolution. Perhaps it wasn’t the Garden of Eden after all.

    Wise was a campaigner against white apartheid in South Africa, but he only pays token attention to apartheid in Israel. He boasts of a communication from Desmond Tutu. Is he aware that Tutu said Israel is worse than apartheid? Recently, the leader of South Africa’s Afrikaaner movement, Eugene Terre`Blanche, was murdered. He was the most extreme white leader in South Africa. He advocated a two-state solution; a small white state next to a large black one. South Africa chose a one-state solution, in which each citizen is theoretically equal. An Israeli equivalent of Terre`Blanche would be considered a progressive – apartheid Israel resists a two-state solution, in which the Jews would get the lion’s share. Even that is too radical for them. A far-right white Afrikaaner is the equivalent of a progressive Israeli Jew. You won’t hear that from the likes of Wise. In fact he would condemn me as bigoted for saying this, and some of his followers would threaten me. So much for ‘white supremacy‘. So much for Wise’s dishonest theory.

    “By 1985, the divestment movement, as it came to be known, was in full swing on dozens of college and university campuses across the country” (page 137)

    Twenty-five years later, it is hard to get a similar divestment movement against Jewish apartheid, because rich right-wing Jews like Alan Dershowitz sue any college which even thinks about it, and left-wing Jews like Wise confuse the issue by telling us to worry about ‘anti-Semites in our midst‘, though they were not concerned about ‘anti-whites’ during the struggle against white apartheid.

    When he tells how a black student asks ‘what are you doing about apartheid in Nashville?‘, he admits that he and his white comrades concentrated on apartheid in South Africa, forgetting to lobby for affirmative action and the creation of an African American studies center at the university – not because the first was infinitely more significant than the other two, but because, he claims, it was ‘easier’. Easier still is his privileging of the fight against white apartheid over the much more difficult task of the defeat of Jewish apartheid. The first of these only required persuading the US government to ditch an important ally; the second involves confronting the Lobby. It also involves criticizing the current version of anti-racism. It’s oddly counter-intuitive and un-Marxist, the way capitalism works.

    Wise responded to the black student’s pointed remark by linking the battle against apartheid to the struggle against racism in the USA by means of advocating the intensification of affirmative action. Imagine campaigning for the equivalent, linking Israeli apartheid to Jewish ethnic power in the USA by advocating affirmative action against Jews. Affirmative action is always against someone to exactly the same degree it is for someone else. Suppose I showed up at one of his talks and said ‘what are you doing about Jewish power’? Do you think he’d listen respectfully?

    He criticizes ‘white leftists‘ for “marching against a war on the other side of the world” and refusing to draw the connection between this war and “racism at home“. But when we talk about the connection between the war in Iraq and the Jewish neo-conservative movement, these same white leftists defend the status quo by calling us ‘anti-Semitic’.

    By the way, I am not complaining about Jewish success on behalf of white Europeans. That’s not my style, not my schtick, though I know that is exactly what I will be accused of. I just don’t like chutzpah, that’s all. Some of the far right say, in effect, “The Jews have apartheid, so why shouldn’t we?“. I say “We don’t have apartheid, so why should the Jews?“. The conclusion is the opposite, but the positions have in common the call for consistency. When critics amalgamate my arguments with those of the far right, they are saying, in effect “how dare you call for consistency?“! As if logic is inherently racist. The lack of consistency with regard to Jewish racism is why the American left is ineffective on the Israel question, when it was effective in campaigning for a boycott of South Africa.

    So what does my review of Wise’s book have to offer to African-Americans? Not much, really. Sorry about that. If black people can get out of the trap of self-pity created by people like Wise, so much the better. But I know what I am saying to the white majority: the ethnic interests of white Europeans lead to opposing Zionism. Since I oppose Zionism for moral reasons, and happen to be white, why should I even try to resist this heady cocktail of self-interest and self-righteousness? Isn’t it funny how the one thing which happens to be both good and in your interests is the hardest thing to do?

    On page 148, he asks why privileged white people would want to join ‘the struggle’. This is a difficult question, and he tackles it boldly. How can he appeal to people he doesn’t like to abandon their interests? He uses a tried and tested technique, transforming the concept of ‘privilege’ into its opposite with convoluted mumbo jumbo about alienation and so on which reads like ‘Freud and Marx for dummies’. White people are ‘damaged’ by their own success. This is nonsense – either something benefits you or it doesn’t. On the other hand, persuading America’s white majority to cut off support for Israeli war crimes should be easy – these crimes are a. wrong, and b. against our interests. Surely Wise would do more by campaigning like this? He would achieve more for Palestinians than he can for the inhabitants of Darfur, but in doing so, he would undermine his own ethnic interests. I said Freud and Marx FOR dummies – that doesn’t mean believes, in relation to Jews, the pseudo-scientific psychobabble he preaches to white people.

    People benefit from racial discrimination. That’s why they do it. There is no ‘structure’ of ‘racism’ – there is ethnic interest, which persuades people to discriminate. Ethnic conflict happens, just as there is class struggle and the war of the sexes. Races exist, and their interests conflict. True, their boundaries are vague, but so are families, and nobody expects people to stop defending their relatives. This may sound pessimistic, but avoiding conflict requires honesty.

    What is Racism?

    In contrast, Wise claims “Racism… allows you to think things and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be”  on page 159 of his treatise. How does he know what we were ‘meant to be’? He assumes “racism” is something imposed on us from the outside. We are “conditioned” to be “alienated”, and this is bad. This approach is unscientific. How do you know what you ‘really’ are? Why is only white racism bad? Wise should answer these questions, but he won’t, so I’ve done it for him.

    It is true that elites in the South conned whites into fighting and dying for a cause not theirs, as Wise points out on page 150. But this is equally true of elites in the North. Wise only brings in the concept of class interest when it enables him to attack white identity. If southern whites could have been persuaded to desert by calling for class solidarity, then northern whites could have been persuaded to desert by appealing to their ethnic identity. Racism can lead to war. But so can anti-racism.

    He also worked for “the anti sweatshop movement, the justice for Darfur movement, and the anti-war movement” (page 145). And one more: the Palestine Solidarity Movement. I’m kidding – it was the ‘Stop David Duke’ campaign. Duke is an advocate for white rights, to put it mildly. I don’t think I would like him. I don’t expect Wise to like him either. But he doesn’t have to lie about him. Duke wouldn’t call Wise a Zionist. Why does Wise call Duke a Nazi? Because, in this culture of white guilt, he can get away with it. He claims that Duke’s problem was that he didn’t like black people. But that is not true. He is braver than that – he is a critic of Jewish privilege. But not a Nazi. The left will say I’m defending him. In fact, I’m defending the truth. Whatever I think of Duke and co., I will not lie about them.

    Wise tries to deconstruct crime statistics in an anti-racist way. Sure, there are more homicides by black men, but more white serial killers, he says. It’s all about control, apparently. What about interracial rape? Of course, he doesn’t go there. But you have to be consistent. If you are going on about the relationship between ethnicity and horrible crimes to prove your hypothesis, you have to try to find counter-evidence. Science is not there to give us a warm fuzzy feeling, to quote James Watson, the greatest living biologist, fired as a result of the mob mentality stirred up by activists like Wise.

    He mentions the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan several times. He claims that “white privilege” is what is causing ‘our’ soldiers to die. There are other explanations. The oil industry, for example. What did you think I was going to say?

    Wise finally gets round to defining ‘racism’, the concept on which his thesis depends, on page 169. Racism is a “socially constructed power imbalance at the institutional level, which then tends to foster individual-level biases and racism“.

    Let’s charitably ignore the circularity of this definition, and say it’s just plain wrong. Whiteness is not a social construct. It is easy to demonstrate, using Hamilton’s rule for calculating the circumstances under which it benefits a gene to promote altruism, that ethnic identity is adaptive. Far from being socially generated, then ‘fostering’ its individual expression, it’s just the reverse. Individual expression of ethnic identity, a result of genes following the laws of mathematics, constructs its social manifestation. Which is not to say its a good thing. Heterosexuality is even more adaptive, but one doesn’t have to ‘privilege’ it. One needn’t discriminate against homosexuality because it is maladaptive. But neither should you discriminate against heterosexuality. Or ethnic identity. And you certainly should not discriminate against the ethnic identity of one group in particular by calling it ‘racism’ and promoting violence and state repression against those who feel this genetic urge strongly, and happen to have white skin.

    To conclude: “ethnic identity is adaptive according to Hamilton’s rule“. These eight words summarize my thinking on the question of race.

    Max Blumenthal – a correction

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    In this August 2013 piece
    https://thejayreport.com/2013/08/26/consistency-criticizing-crypto-zionism/,
    I agreed with Gilad Atzmon’s response to Max Blumenthal
    https://gilad.online/writings/max-blumenthal-on-anti-semitism-neo-fascists-and-gilad-atzmo.html.

    I still do agree with Atzmon’s rejection of what Blumenthal said in this video

    Blumenthal, and, apparently, “a Who’s Who of Palestine solidarity activists” called Atzmon an ‘antisemite’, and distorted his analysis of Israel.

    That was then. This is now.

    Since October 2023, Max Blumenthal has been one of Israel’s fiercest opponents. He was the first to demolish the rape hoax
    https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report,
    found a report on the racist Tel Aviv fans’ riot in Amsterdam in November 2024,

    and contributes almost daily to the growing movement for the dismantling of the Jewish state. Whereas Atzmon has had little to say.

    I can’t find the words to praise Blumenthal’s invaluable contribution, on various media, the most important being https://thegrayzone.com. You can subscribe to this site here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/Grayzone.

    Once More on Imperialism and the Jewish Lobby

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    1. Why the best explanation of Western support for Israel is ‘Jewish power,’ not ‘Imperialism’

    I started with Mearsheimer & Walt’s 2007 The Israel Lobby. I used their argument in a critique of Chomsy’s Fateful Triangle, which was published online in 2010, first on Palestine Think Tank, then on Dissident Voice, and finally, The Jay Report: https://thejayreport.com/2020/05/17/an-article-of-mine-from-2010/. Mearsheimer & Walt are more moderate than I am – they don’t talk about ‘Jewish power.’

    But the three of us agree that the main reason the USA backs Israel, is the power of the Israel Lobby. Since all the Western countries, bar Israel, are submissive to the USA, I only discuss the American branch of the Lobby.

    Why do I defend the ‘Jewish power’ explanation? Because it is less complex, and requires fewer assumptions, than the alternative. To summarize:

    American politicians fall over each other to propose laws giving special rights to Jews. The university sector is under assault, driven by the claim that Jews don’t feel safe on campus, following peaceful protests against genocide. Several people have been arrested, and some threatened with deportation, for allegedly saying they support Hamas.

    1. No evidence has been produced showing that any of the accused have said anything in favour of Hamas, and
    2. it is legal to say “up with Hamas.”

    In May 2025, Congress briefly considered a bill which would make it a criminal offence, punishable by up to twenty years imprisonment, to advocate a boycott of Israeli products. The less draconian, but still unconstitutional, Antisemitism Awareness Act, has a better chance of becoming law. 

    These examples of politicians’ behaviour are clear attempts to violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. Legislators know this, yet they continue to attempt to make an exception; to ban speech which might undermine Jewish interests. 

    Is the above

    1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel, or
    2. is the most economical/parsimonious/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps American interests?

    I can’t prove that this grovelling is genuine; one could believe that it’s fake. I can only argue that the more parsimonious explanation is that it is what it appears — the USA’s relationship to Israel is dictated by Jewish interests.

    The right mostly claims Israel is an ally; the left tends to argue it is in the interests of US imperialism to throw money at the Jewish state. The right-wing and left-wing arguments prop each other up.

    Consider the vacuity of the responses from left or right to the question of what Israel actually does for the empire it allegedly serves. They are reduced to waffling about oil, hegemony, democracy… but Israel is not a ‘forward base.’ It does not contribute troops to US adventures. It does not protect oilfields. Caitlin Johnstone, who defends the view that Israel serves the USA, points out that Israel attacks countries in the USA’s crosshairs. What she doesn’t see is that this ‘evidence’ is equally compatible with 

    1. Israel attacks countries the USA considers enemies, on behalf of the USA, or
    2. the countries Israel attacks are considered enemies by the USA, because the USA supports Israel. 

    To find out whether the dog wags the tail, or vice-versa, we need to look at the internals of US politics. Other allies really are allies; they actually serve US interests. Israel needs a powerful, well-funded lobby to bribe, cajole, blackmail and threaten anyone who makes even accurate, mild criticisms – “it’s the Benjamins” – because it is not really an ally. 

    2. Avoidance of the ‘Jewish power’ hypothesis

    I have defended the ‘Jewish power’ hypothesis to left-wing critics of Zionism many times. But they never try to answer it – they just continue assuming that Israel is acting for US imperialism. 

    ‘It is important to stress the primary role of imperialism in this analysis, which means rejecting explanations that emphasize the supposed power of a “Zionist lobby,” or, worse, a “Jewish lobby.”’ – International Socialism 181, 2024, page 45. 

    I suspect the reason for leftists’ inability to respond rationally is that their real motive is emotional. They have internalised the idea that talk of ‘Jewish power’ and a ‘Jewish lobby’ is ‘antisemitic.’ This signals to Jewish supremacists that they take the allegation seriously.

    The Gaza genocide is the greatest crime committed by a Western country since world war two. The most notorious American crime in Vietnam was at My Lai. Since 7/10/2023, there has been a My Lai every day in Palestine. The sadism with which Jews celebrate the deaths and injuries they are causing exceeds that of the Nazis. Jewish racism is in a league of its own.

    It might be objected that the rulers of the Western countries support Israel to the hilt, and are therefore just as culpable. True – but there is a big difference between being a member of the racial group with power, and one of its poodles. Gentile supporters of Israel are like Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu politician who served the white apartheid regime. This means one might be able to help undermine support for Israel by persuading goyim that it is not in their ethnic interests, and that they are being used. It is difficult for the anti-imperialist left to argue like that. 

    3. The eternal victim narrative

    I know that not all Jews are racial supremacists. I just encountered a number of anti-Zionist Jews at the first Jewish Anti-Zionist conference in Vienna, in June 2025: https://www.juedisch-antizionistisch.at/en.

    Reuven Abergel, founder of Israel’s Black Panthers, narrated a variant of the eternal victim story. He is a Moroccan Arab Jew who migrated to Israel in the fifties. His main schtick was to point out how the Arab Jews (Mizrahi) provided cheap labour for Israel, and suffered from racial discrimination. He said the European Jews (Ashkenazi) drove a wedge between the Mizrahi and Palestinian communities – “they sent us to the same villages where Palestinians had been expelled.” The Ashkenazi did this because they suffered from a “disease” which they got from living in Europe. 

    Another contributor argued that, because Arabic is the first language of the Mizrahi, and because they’d lived happily in Arab lands until Western colonialism spoiled everything, the real oppression is Arabs being oppressed by Europeans. This ignores the fact that, as soon as you are born, you are either a Jew or a goy, in the eyes of the Israeli government. You might be Tunisian, but if you are also Jewish, you have the privilege of automatic citizenship of a Western economy, backed to the hilt by all the other Western countries. And, for whatever reason, those people who classify themselves as ‘Jewish’ tend to have a strong sense of ethnic identity.

    Abergel added that, after the 1967 war, the Arab Jews became as racist as the rest. Another speaker, a woman from an Jewish-Egyptian family, said the Mizrahi are the most vicious Zionists.

    At the other extreme, some anti-Zionist analysts appeal to Jews to stop supporting Zionism because it is harmful to Jews:

    • I wrote that Jonathan K Cook tried to persuade influential Jews to “stand foursquare against Israel.” I have a screenshot, but he appears to have deleted the tweet, so I won’t post it.

    For the most part, Jews aren’t listening to these sincere, but naive, anti-Zionist voices. The genocide in Palestine is not antisemitic, but philosemitic – it’s in Jewish interests. By exterminating the untermenschen, they get more lebensraum. 

    It is not necessarily true that, if you give a racial group special rights, it will take advantage. Since the end of world war two, Europeans have voluntarily relinquished all their ethnic advantages. But the same period saw the rise of Jewish privilege; while white apartheid states were abandoned, the Jewish equivalent was backed to the hilt.

    The fear of stating the obvious – the existence of Jewish power – is a consequence of Jewish power. We need to lose that fear. 

    Cancel Culture and Israel

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Here’s the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s database covering attacks on freedom of expression in America, with the keyword ‘Israel’: https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire?orderdir=desc&orderby=year&keyword=Israel. It includes those canceled for being for, and for being critical of, the Jewish state.

    And here is the College Fix’s cancel culture database, with the same keyword: https://www.thecollegefix.com/cancel-culture-database/?gv_search=israel&mode=all.

    The entries are clearly selected to filter out those canceled for criticising Israel.

    The Murder of Stephen Lawrence

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Stephen Lawrence was a black London teenager. He was murdered in 1993 by a gang of white criminals, shouting racial insults. It took twenty years for the legal system to convict his murderers.

    The law’s delay led to the widespread belief that it was because of “institutional racism”. In contrast, this brave investigation, “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics”, questions the consensus view, and argues that the initial failure to prosecute was simply the result of lack of evidence: http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs05.pdf (PDF).

    Lawrence’s murder led the government to set up the Macpherson enquiry, which defined a racial incident as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person“. This gives complete freedom to anyone to define anyone else as a racist: http://spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13127.

    The Mcpherson report used the familiar circular reasoning of Zionists and the p.c. left: “To question whether the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a purely racist crime was, in itself, adduced as evidence of racism.”  – Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, page xix.

    This is the same logic used to attempt to censor any discusssion of the Holocaust, or less extreme examples of violence against minorities. It’s the same logic that made it hard to question whether Tawana Brawley, Crystal Magnum, and various other minority pseudo-victims were telling the truth. It’s the logic that led to the prosecution of George Zimmerman. It’s the false idea that white societies like Britain and America are uniquely prone to racial supremacy, and have to spend the rest of eternity apologizing for it. It leads to the idea that the plaintiff, not the defendant, should be given the benefit of the doubt when the plaintiff is black. This would mean abandoning one of the basic principles of Anglo-Saxon law.