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
In this article, I consider three books which claim races and nations are “constructed”: Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson,2The 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
Shlomo 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?
The 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.
For 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 – anddescribes 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.
The Frankfurt School, or Institute for Social Research, received a sympathetic review on Quillette:
As the full horror of Nazi crimes became ever more apparent, they adapted their philosophical synthesis of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in an effort to understand why millions of Germans and European collaborators submitted with very little resistance to what Hannah Arendt would call “the banality of evil.” Their conclusions are sobering. – The Frankfurt School and the Allure of Submission, Matt McManus [2].
In his most well-known work, The Culture of Critique [3], professor Kevin MacDonald is less sympathetic.
Having read The Culture of Critique several times, I acquired a copy of the magnum opus of the School’s “philosophical synthesis of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory”, The Authoritarian Personality [4], published in 1950, and I had to admit that MacDonald’s critique of it has merit. The Frankfurt School didn’t just oppose fascism, it pathologized ordinary American families. And his criticisms of other intellectual movements, such as the Franz Boas school of anthropology, appeared to have some truth in them. One of the reasons Boas’s student Margaret Mead produced a fantasy about sexual relations among teenagers in Coming of Age in Samoa [5], published in 1928, was the school’s political bias in favor of non-Western societies. Whether his claim, that the fact that the founders of these movements are self-identified Jews, is relevant, I find more controversial.
It was twenty years before The Culture of Critique received its first serious review, from Nathan Cofnas – Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy – A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory, March 2018 [6]. Then Amazon deleted MacDonald’s book from its catalogue. But it hasn’t removed MacDonald’s new book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, yet. It is superficially as impressive as the Culture of Critique – reasonably argued, well-referenced, and its assertions tested by showing that they predict the known facts better than the alternatives. For example, the Indo-Europeans did not convert collectivist cultures they conquered to their own individualism, but individualism, uniquely on earth, flourished in the Western Europe they also conquered.
Individualism’s central argument is that the superiority of Western civilization is the result of natural selection. The specific environment of Western Europe selected for individualism, objectivity, fairness, guilt, marriage based on personal attraction, and moral communities, as opposed to most of the world, which suffers from collectivism and the assumption that truth is what is good for the collective.
As described below, the Western world remains the only culture area characterized by all of the markers of individualism. Taken together, these tendencies are unique to the Western European culture area and the argument here is that they have an ethnic basis. I do not suppose that Western Europeans have any unique biological adaptations, only that we differ in degree in adaptations characteristic of all humans and that the differences are sufficient to enable the evolution of a unique human culture. – chapter two, page 91
And no society outside the West developed a “deductive method of rigorous demonstration according to which a conclusion, a theorem, was proven by reasoning from a series of self-evident axioms.” – chapter five, page 212
So the professor thinks Western civilization is worth defending. And because he thinks many of its virtues are genetically-based, he thinks it’s worth defending against what he calls “replacement-level migration”.
In chapter five, “The Church in European History”, in the middle of a passage explaining the effect of Christianity on Western civilization, via leaders who mostly practiced what they preached, referring to the moral standards derived by Paul from Jesus, and championed by Augustine and Kant, MacDonald says
In any case, moral perfection becomes the ultimate measure of a person’s worth – something that should be kept in mind in the present age when subscribing to a multicultural ideology and replacement-level migration has been successfully propagated as a moral imperative throughout the West. – chapter five, page 199
Chapter five defends the claim that the Catholic Church – which I’ve always regarded as a bastion of reaction – helped develop the basis of the modern Western liberal world, because its interests countered various forms of collectivism, and helped the genetically-based nuclear-family-plus-individualism characteristics of the West to survive and thrive.
Relative monogamy and sometime celibacy, even for the powerful, were essential for the success of the West, in contrast to its competitors. Obviously, societies which allow rich men to accumulate wives contain serious conflicts. For every extra wife a man has, another man has none. And the ladies didn’t like it either. One sultan of Morocco sired over eight hundred children, according to the Guinness Book of World Records [7]. Polygyny would be highly adaptive, except that most people have a genetic interest in abolishing it.
The basis of ability to control sexual desire originates in the female of the species. To put it simply, a man can have many children in one year, but a woman cannot. It’s not adaptive for a woman to “just have sex”. The female strategy “playing hard to get” evolved as a solution to the widely divergent reproductive abilities and interests of the two sexes. This is one of the adaptations which distinguishes homo sapiens from the other ape species, and contributes to its overwhelming success in contrast to all the others. But it required the development of culture to condition men, too, to respect, and even to practice, restraint.
Christianity is a late example of one of these cultures. But according to MacDonald, the record also shows that Germanic tribes, who took over the Roman Empire after its conversion to Christianity, already had achieved some of the elements of advanced sexual restraint.
MacDonald sometimes gratuitously inserts his political viewpoint. But he usually backs it up. An example is this, in chapter seven, “Moral Idealism in the British Antislavery Movement and the ‘Second British Empire’”:
Further, if Charles Dickens is to be believed, Exeter Hall was quite similar to the contemporary left, which typically ignores the wage-lowering and community-destroying effects of mass non-White migration on the native working class, particularly the White working class. It also illustrates how contemporary academic historians, some likely motivated by ethnic animosity toward traditional White majorities and acting similarly to the Jewish intellectuals discussed in ‘Culture of Critique’, are committed to inducing guilt over the Western part among White people. To the extent that such campaigns are successful, they depend on pre-existing tendencies toward guilt and empathy that characterize an important subset of Western Europeans – tendencies deriving from the unique evolutionary history and culture of the West, as discussed elsewhere in this volume. – chapter 7, page 351
“Exeter Hall” was an informal group of wealthy individuals identified in the public mind “with what Charles Dickens described as ‘platform sympathy for the Black and … platform indifference to our own countrymen’”.
Some of this may be true, but not all of it. I believe it is possible to remove the racial politics from the above conclusion and end up with a more rigorous analysis. For example, it’s not “particularly the White working class” which is negatively affected by mass immigration from poorer countries. It is in the economic interests of Mexican Americans to oppose illegal immigration from Mexico. Afro-Caribbean Britons have an economic interest in reducing immigration from Poland. One needn’t oppose the racial identity politics of the left with more racial identity politics. But MacDonald’s work does help us understand the genetic and cultural bases of white guilt and related pathological tendencies in Western peoples.
The author tries to test his theories by asking “is there a simpler explanation?”, sometimes successfully, but one case he omits is the notion that the elites work against their own ethnic group because class trumps race. In chapter eight, “The Psychology of Moral Communities”, he describes a meeting of part of the British establishment, apparently exhibiting “a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham”, and repeats Dickens’ description of educated elites’ sympathy for foreigners and indifference to their own countrymen, parodied in the person of Mrs Jellyby, who neglected her own daughter in favor of distant Africans (pages 383-384).
But the high-ups don’t neglect their daughters – they don’t live in Rotherham. Mass immigration is in their material interests, because it produces cheap labour. MacDonald doesn’t consider whether this class analysis is the solution for the “evolutionist”, who he says “can only marvel at the completely unhinged – pathological – altruism on display here, given that the people making these policies are presumably native White British themselves”. If you “can only marvel” at the fact that your theory fails to predict the data, it’s worth reexamining the theory. And the masses have class interests too:
One might suppose that this resulted in East Anglians having a tendency toward ‘insurrections against arbitrary power’—the risings and rebellions of 1381 led by Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and John Ball, Clarence’s rebellion in 1477, and Robert Kett’s rebellion of 1548, all of which predated the rise of Puritanism. – chapter 6, page 228
Tyler’s rebellion actually began in Kent, and Ball was from St. Albans, but in any case, surely the worldwide phenomenon of struggles like the Peasant’s Revolt, cannot most parsimoniously be explained by genetics.
Neither can criminality in non-white communities. MacDonald cites a study showing how, in one generation, the payment of reparations to Native Americans, by allowing their communities to profit from casinos, reduced drug abuse, violence and so on. In this example, poverty is the main driver of crime, not race. A black comedian asked humorously “can we have casinos too?” Well, why not?
Finally, MacDonald’s conclusion.
On the basis of the evidence of anti-Western media [8], mass immigration, and his genetically-based theory of Western history, he states that creating a whites-only homeland in North America would be “possible” (page 507), though he mentions it would involve the forceful transfer of millions, like the ethnic cleansing of Germans by the Red Army at the end of World War II, and the partition of India and Pakistan. Both of these involved the mass murder of men, women and children. I don’t believe that is what it will take to preserve Western civilization, and if that is what it would take, it wouldn’t be worth preserving.
There were until recently political parties in the UK which called for non-whites to be “sent back”, including those born in the UK. They regarded people of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim backgrounds from the Indian subcontinent, and their descendants, as the same. But it’s only the third of these groups which has contributed the majority of mass murderers and mass child-rapists in the country. In this case, culture is the driver, not race.
One is not obliged to choose between the racial identity politics of the left, and of the right. The former has been taken care of in other articles. I hope this helps deal with the latter.
Isn’t it strange, how in a Western society, you have to argue, on empirical grounds, that the suppression of academic freedom on scientific subjects ‘can do harm’?
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has become so submissive to Jewish power that one of its councils canceled a charity bike ride to raise money for sports equipment for children in Gaza.
Because Labour has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of ‘anti-semitism’, it couldn’t allow speakers who might describe Israel as comparable to apartheid South Africa, or being based on ethnic cleansing.
It’s a dreadful thing when an over-scrupulous interpretation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism is used behind closed doors to prevent awareness raising of the situation in Palestine and the need for humanitarian support
said a spokesperson for the charity which organises the annual ride. The whole point of the IHRA’s definition of anti-semitism is to criminalise opposition to Jewish child-killers, so this statement is rather naive.
Incidentally, Tower Hamlets is a place American right-wingers, including the president, say is overrun with Islamists. That fear appears to be misplaced.
I recommend the online journals mindingthecampus.org, thecollegefix.com, and campusreform.org. Each of them contribute to exposing various totalitarian leftist ideologies, hatched in higher education humanities and social pseudoscience departments, which are spreading into politics, the law, the media, social media, and corporations like Google.
These sites expose daily the lies of student and faculty social justice warriors (SJWs), who invent white supremacy, and who hypocritically claim that opinions they disagree with are “violence”, while aggressively, and sometimes violently, suppressing academic freedom, the principal principle of higher education, with the assistance of grievance studies academics and lickspittle administrators. Sometimes they are called “snowflakes”, as if the problem is hypersensitivity, rather than dishonesty.
For an example of why exaggerating prejudice is problematic, here’s a section from a documentary about the problem. Professor Brett Weinstein, driven out of Evergreen College by a violent mob of students, led by a mad black woman, and their white ally, college president George Bridges, says
it’s spreading, and college campuses may be the first dramatic battle, but of course this is going to find its way into the courts, it’s already found its way into the tech sector, it’s going to find its way to the highest level of governance if we’re not careful, and it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue
But there is one kind of exaggeration which articles on the above-mentioned websites always support, using similar language to the SJWs. That is, they claim that opposition to Israeli policies is racist toward Jews. Here’s an example to start with:
The article’s examples of “anti-Semitism” are simply criticism of a country, and its supporters, none of them on the basis of ethnicity. But the author claims this criticism could lead to a repeat of the Nazi holocaust.
Pink Floyd star Roger Waters participated in a conference at the University of Massachusetts called “Not Backing Down: Israel, Free Speech and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights”.
As if to illustrate the need for this conference, this Campus Reform writer reports
80 civil rights, education, religious, faculty, and student organizations have called on UMass to rescind its sponsorship of the event
Most of these groups are not civil rights, educational and religious, but obscure, pro-Israel, and right-wing. But they have appropriated leftist language, claiming that the ideas expressed at this forum harm students’ “safety and well-being”.
These groups just tried to stop the administration from sponsoring it, but the College Fix reported that some students sued the university to try to get the event called off, on the grounds that it will make them “suffer immediate and irreparable harm”.
I’m not sure when this “snowflakes for Israel” phenomenon began, but it was no later than February 2013. Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who opposes p.c. language when it suits him, claimed that an event at Brooklyn College to defend the movement for Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment against Israel would promote hatred against Jews. Arguing for boycotting a country because you disagree with its policies does not constitute an attempt to stir up racial hatred. These claims are ridiculous, but, just like the claims of racism against black people at Duke, Yale, Evergreen, Middlebury, Oberlin and other institutions of higher education, they are taken seriously by cowardly college administrators.
Attacking the BDS movement is one of the principal aims of Israel’s supporters in the USA currently. Half of American states have laws penalizing people for supporting BDS, despite these laws’ clear unconstitutionality. That is one of the reasons for the UMass forum mentioned above.
Campus Reform and the other two sites generally defend freedom of expression. But there is one exception. Here are two articles praising the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act”:
The new bill would make it illegal to accuse Israel of being more racist than “any other country”. It’s nothing to worry about, though because
this particular legislation does not violate “any First Amendment rights”
which means that saying Israel is racist is not protected speech.
“Anti-Semitic incidents” nearly always means “criticism of Israel and its lobby”. It’s not anti-Semitism which is increasing, it’s how broadly it’s defined – just as the phrase “white supremacy” is used by the left to delegitimize more and more opinions. For example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism is becoming influential, and it includes
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor
Accusing something of being racist, isn’t racist, even if it’s inaccurate. For example, I don’t think Trump’s government is racist, but those who say he is, aren’t being racist. I do happen to think Israel is a racist state (spoiler alert), but whether I’m right or wrong, this opinion isn’t racist.
How do they get away with it? In the same way as the other kind of SJWs. They take advantage of a weakness in Western societies – but that is a subject for another essay.
Eve Mykytyn’s article “Hate speech without hate: Britain and the United States” responds to the recent attempt by Islington Council in London to ban Gilad Atzmon from playing sax with the Blockheads at the Assembly Hall because one Zionist falsely claimed he is a “holocaust denier”. Fortunately, Santa Claus was available to take his place.
At the top of Eve’s article is a picture of the famous Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the sixties, against right-wing McCarthyism. Ironically, Berkeley is now one of the most notoriously anti-free-speech places in the country, in which the police cooperated with anti-fascists to violently deplatform Zionist speakers Milo Yiannopoulos and Pam Geller.
Mykytyn doesn’t mention this, but her piece does broaden the critique of censorship which Atzmon started. Whereas he has concentrated on Zionist, and crypto-Zionist, efforts to censor himself and others, she examines some cases of other kinds of censorship.
It starts by saying “Gilad Atzmon is fighting a battle for free speech in England”, which has some truth in it. He is fighting on one front out of several.
Rather than just selecting examples which seem to confirm Atzmon’s critique of Zionist censorship, Mykytyn finds a few examples of other forces trying to shut down freedom of expression in Western societies.
The one glaring exception is the censorious effect of Islam and its supporters and apologists.
The article defends the freedom of white extremist Richard Spencer, but doesn’t mention the considerable efforts being made to protect us from “Islamophobes”. Robert Spencer, along with a number of others, has just had his Patreon account removed, after pressure from MasterCard. PayPal is also on the offensive against mostly right-wing, often Zionist, internet personalities. If censorship is used at least as much against Islamophobes as Islamophiles, it tends to undermine Atzmon’s view of Western society as dominated by the former.
In different ways, the following prominent individuals on both sides of the Atlantic have had their freedom greatly curtailed by Muslims: Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pam Geller, and the staff of Charlie Hebdo.
Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim, was subject to attempts to stop her speaking to the secular society at Goldsmith’s College in London in November 2015, and Muslim extremists disrupted her talk, with the support of the feminist and LGBT societies at the college.
But not all gay activists are morons. For example, Milo Yiannopoulos opposes Islam. This is one of the reasons leftist mobs violently stop him from speaking – they call him an “Islamophobe”. Gilad Atzmon uses the same debate-crushing neologism. As if LGBT people had set up a Gay State In the Levant (GSIL), and thrown Muslims off roofs.
Then there’s Tommy Robinson. He and his family have to live under police protection – when they can get it – because of his outspoken condemnation of the UK’s numerous Muslim child-rape gangs.
Robinson’s hostility to Islam has led him, via a simplistic binary world-view, to sympathy for Israel. He argues against freedom for the Palestine solidarity movement, which he calls “terrorist”. But Robinson’s persecution has been much worse than what Atzmon has experienced.
On two occasions, the government jailed him on trumped-up charges. In one case, they allowed terrorists to beat him unconscious. On the latest occasion, last year, they imprisoned him for two months, but this time, they put him in isolation. However, he could only get prison meals which Muslim inmates openly bragged of poisoning, so he had to live on tins of tuna for two months.
A UK parliamentary committee has recommended making it illegal to express “Islamophobia”: “Islamophobia Defined” (PDF).
Rejecting the observation that Islam is not a race, these SJWs from all the major parties try to convince us that “Islamophobia” is a form of “racism”.
Atzmon often hints that he thinks Western states are Islamophobic, for example, that the attacks on Middle Eastern countries are something to do with them being Islamic (Being in Time). But Iraq was a secular republic. 9/11 was not retaliation for US involvement in the 1990/91 Gulf War – bin Laden wanted to participate in it too: “Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam” – Jason Burke.
Seeing Zionism and Islam as simple opposites is the same error Tommy Robinson makes. The Western countries support Israel to the hilt, but they are also afraid to criticise Islam. Political correctness is so entrenched in Britain that two conservative prime ministers in succession have said that ISIS is nothing to do with Islam. The opposition goes out of its way to praise Muslims, and all the Muslim child-grooming cases have occurred while Labour councils looked the other way, or sent whistleblowers on diversity courses. America’s a bit less submissive, but what did president George W Bush say six days after September 11th, 2001? He said “Islam is peace”. Barack Obama was just as deluded. Donald Trump is the first president to condemn “radical Islam”.
The European Court of Human Rights recently upheld the conviction of an Austrian woman who stated the simple historical fact that Mohammed was a paedophile. Surely this is worse than being driven out of the Labour Party for reporting the fact that Nazis cooperated with Zionists.
The scope and scale of the growing censorship in Western societies are greater than Atzmon has indicated. His one-sided condemnation of Zionist censorship depends on selecting from the evidence that which appears to conform to his hypothesis. This article by Eve Mykytyn is a step in the right direction. If you defend freedom, you can’t cherry-pick which censorship you oppose.
It says everything I’ve been writing here for years, in greater depth, explaining what diversity is, and why it is so problematic.
One thing missing is any examination of the idea that identities are created by real oppression. The author seems to think that black people are lured into identity politics by politicians, whereas in its origins, black identity was a response to racism.
The other omission is questioning whether there is a genetic basis to the weakness in white European societies which allows the cancer of diversity to get a grip. For that, you have to look beyond disgruntled traditional leftists.
EDIT: 26 September. I have one other major issue with this book. But it would be too predictable for me to say what it is.
“There is just one point where I have encountered a difficulty” – Russell to Frege, 1902.
I introduced a talk by Gilad Atzmon, and organised a reading group to discuss his first book, “The Wandering Who?”, about Jewish identity politics. We had many criticisms of it.
The new book is much broader, and better. I have only one major criticism. This article is about that criticism, but though as a result it’s mostly negative, I actually think this book is a major contribution to understanding the times we live in. It explains Donald Trump, Brexit, the left, identity politics, political correctness, and especially, US support for Jewish supremacy in the Middle East. It is undogmatic, finding inputs from a wide range of sources. Atzmon even manages to get something useful out of the book “The Bell Curve” while rejecting its central premise, IQ. I mostly agreed with much of “Being in Time”.
But chapter four, “United Against Unity”, woke me up with a jolt.
But what about Hammed, a metal worker from Birmingham? Hammed identifies as a ‘Muslim’ – can he join a Left demonstration against the War in Syria? It’s a good question and the answer is not immediately obvious because it’s no secret that many of those who subscribe to ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ ideologies and especially activists, are rather troubled by religion in general and Islam in particular.
You could have fooled me. In 2003, I attended a large Palestine solidarity demonstration in London. There was a small group of Muslim extremists shouting “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!”. They were tolerated. Far milder expressions of white identity are violently excluded from left-wing events.
Shortly after criticising political correctness, Atzmon writes
What about Laura? She’s a Muslim convert who often hides her face behind a veil. Does she feel comfortable in ‘progressive’ or liberal gatherings? Not really.
“Feel comfortable”? This is political correctness!
The progressive left on both sides of the Atlantic is more than tolerant of Islam, the most regressive section of Western society.
The American women’s march against Donald Trump selected Muslim misogynist Linda Sarsour as one of its organisers,
and German feminists applauded Islam too.
Atzmon is right to say that a British patriot would not be welcome at an anti-war protest. But he’s completely wrong about the left and Islam.
One of the reasons Muslim men were allowed to get away with raping hundreds of underage girls for decades in Britain is that most of them live under Labour Party-controlled councils. Paralysed by political correctness, sending social workers who noticed that it was primarily “Asians” trafficking the girls, on “diversity” courses, they ignored the problem, or suppressed attempts to expose it, for fear of being called “racist”.
When Labour’s left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke in the House of Commons about the Grenfell tower disaster, he rightly pointed to Orgreave and Hillsborough as examples of police malfeasance, then he mentioned the Rotherham child-trafficking scandal as another example, again rightly. But he didn’t mention the other major factor: the overwhelming overrepresentation of Muslims among Rotherham’s child traffickers, and the influence of political correctness on allowing them to rape children. Instead, he went out of his way to make a gratuitous remark about Muslims breaking from prayers to help their neighbours in the Grenfell fire:
A more extreme example of the leftist attitude to Islam is the Socialist Workers Party arguing against Islamic terrorism – on the grounds that it wouldn’t work: Socialists Stand With The Oppressed.
Atzmon’s book is pretty good about the connection between identity politics and Zionist power in the West. He’s also right about the overrepresentation of self-identified Jews in the origins of the most sophisticated variants of movements designed to take advantage of Western self-doubt – Franz Boas’s anthropology, Theodor Adorno’s psychology and sociology (the Frankfurt school), Freud, postmodernism and the “anti-racist” anti-science of Stephen Jay Gould. But it’s not only Jewish activists who exploit this loophole. Political correctness also undermines the West’s defence against the influence of Islam.
Examples
Page 48: “Jewish ethnocentrism and even Jewish racial exclusivity is fully accepted, while other forms of ethnocentrism are bluntly rejected.”
In fact, the left tolerates prejudice from black activists, usually against white people. “African-American Studies” is positive, whereas the study of “Whiteness” is invariably negative. One can easily find dozens of examples by checking out the sites “The College Fix”, “Campus Reform”, Sargon of Akkad’s videos on Youtube, or reading up on the 2006 Duke University Lacrosse rape case. I suspect that’s the main reason for the left’s support for the socially conservative ideology of Islam – most of its adherents have dark skin.
Page 81: Atzmon claims that the Guardian does not mind offending ‘Islamists’, on the basis of its broadcast of one televised debate between two Zionist Jews.
He’s right about the paper’s hostility to the white workers. When hackette Zoe Williams went to Rotherham to investigate Pakistani taxi drivers raping underage white girls, she dismissed the mostly-white English Defence League as “racist”, instead asking for the opinions of… Pakistani taxi drivers. Atzmon doesn’t realise that this is normal. Muslims usually get gold in the Oppression Olympics. Here are six examples of the Guardian’s Islamophilia:
Page 125 – ID Politics – the belief that the personal is political unless you are Muslim or white. This reiterates the idea that the left encourages identity politics for all except Muslims and white Europeans. He’s fifty percent right.
Page 129 – Atzmon argues that Islam and Christianity are similar, but Judaism is different, because it’s based on “an obedience regulatory system”, in which “God-loving is not voluntary”. And again on page 197. He argues that Christianity and Islam are universalist, as opposed to the sectarian attitudes of Judaism – “the chosen few”. He’s right about Judaism, and the myth of “Judaeo-Christian”, but he substitutes the equally false “Islamo-Christian”. The only way Islam is universalist is that anyone can join it, and many had no choice. If you haven’t signed up, or especially if you leave it, it’s not a bit universal. Its God is close to the vengeful monster of the Old Testament, not at all like his son, the pacifist who founded Christianity. “Judaeo-Islamic” is a more accurate neologism.
Social Justice has taken over, not just academic humanities departments, but large sections of the media, and, amazingly, the most important corporations in the world, such as Apple and Google. “Cultural Marxism” is not a paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory.
It’s my contention than Zionists use the same mechanisms as SJWs to manipulate Western societies to do things which are opposed to the interests of most of their inhabitants, rich and poor. Like professors of “African-American Studies”, they use false, or meaningless, allegations of racial prejudice to take advantage of our morality. We can kill both of these birds with one stone.
Support for Israel is a result of political correctness, the expression of a weakness in white European people and societies. The immigration of millions of Muslims, among them many who don’t accept Western values, is another. Atzmon dismisses concern about Islam altogether. But read “Being and Time”. Apart from its blind spot regarding ‘Islamists’, it’s damn good.
Fortunately, James Damore is being inundated with job offers.
We shall overcome.
Scientific support for Damore’s arguments, from professor Jordan Peterson:
Here are a series of references buttressing each and every claim James made in his memo, which has been erroneously deemed pseudo-scientific (full papers linked where possible):
To quote de Bruyn et al: high status predicts more mating opportunities and, thus, increased reproductive success. “This is true for human adults in many cultures, both ‘modern’ as well as ‘primitive’ (Betzig, 1986). In fact, this theory seems to be confirmed for non-human primates (Cheney, 1983; Cowlishaw and Dunbar, 1991; Dewsbury, 1982; Gray, 1985; Maslow, 1936) and other animals from widely differing ecologies (Ellis, 1995) such as squirrels (Farentinos, 1972), cockerels (Kratzer and Craig, 1980), and cockroaches (Breed, Smith, and Gall, 1980).” Status also increases female reproductive success, via a different pathway: “For females, it is generally argued that dominance is not necessarily a path to more copulations, as it is for males. It appears that important benefits bestowed upon dominant women are access to resources and less harassment from rivals (Campbell, 2002). Thus, dominant females tend to have higher offspring survival rates, at least among simians (Pusey, Williams, and Goodall, 1997); thus, dominance among females also appears to be linked to reproductive success.”
Problems with the measurement and concept of unconscious bias:
Fielder (2006): http://bit.ly/2vGzhQP
Blanton (2009): http://bit.ly/2vQuwEP (this one is particularly damning)
And, just for kicks, two links discussing the massive over-representation of the left in, most particularly, the humanities:
Klein (2008): http://bit.ly/2fwdLrS
Langbert (2016): http://bit.ly/2cV53Q8
Tommy Robinson is Britain’s best-known “Islamophobe”. I regard this label as a compliment. I follow him on Facebook, because I agree with some of what he says. I think he should be allowed to say whatever he wants about Islam, without being persecuted by the police, as he is at present. (See Robinson’s biography “Enemy of the State”, and my blog entry “Enemies of the State”).
I don’t sympathise with his attitude to patriotism, monarchy and the armed forces. But I don’t bother to argue with his followers on Facebook about these subjects, since there is one far more important subject on which we disagree, one where his view undermines everything else he says.
He is a keen supporter of Israel, not realising that this little state has a lot to answer for in helping perpetuate the most important problem he is concerned about – Islamic terrorism.
I don’t mean the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 by Jews is a reason for Islamic terrorism in London in 2017. Leftists sometimes hint at this, and Islamic terrorists sometimes refer to it, but this is just an excuse. To use Jewish terrorism to excuse Islamic terrorism is no more logical or ethical than the Israeli argument that the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arabs is a reason for the ethnic cleansing of Arabs by Jews.
The reason Israel is partly responsible for Islamic terrorism is more complicated, and I explain it below.
Having had his freedom of speech suppressed, often violently, by the authorities, leftists and Muslims, on numerous occasions, Robinson is a keen defender of freedom. Except for people he disagrees with – he called on the mayor of London to ban the “al-Quds Day” march on 18 June 2017, smearing all support for Palestinian rights as support for terrorism.
The “anti-fascist” left shout “Nazi” and “white supremacist” at Robinson and his followers, who wave Israeli flags and promote the most mindlessly uncritical Zionist propaganda you can find.
Israel is not a product of white supremacy. It’s a product of Jewish supremacy.
Robinson amalgamates resistance to Israel with Sunni extremist attacks on civilians in the West. But Israel is not an opponent of these Sunni extremists.
The chief inspiration of terrorism is a sub-branch of the Sunni branch, Salafism. The main source of this ideology, the extremely literal interpretation of the Koran and some of the Hadiths which drive ISIS and its ilk, is the Gulf States, with Saudi Arabia at the head. The British government has suppressed a report which explains the link between the Gulf States and terrorism: “Report calls for public inquiry into Gulf funding of British extremism”, Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 5 July 2017.
Most of ISIS’s victims have been Shi’ite civilians in Iraq. The Shi’ite Islamic state, Iran, and the Shi’ite army, Hezbollah, have been determined opponents of ISIS.
The two Islamic groups which concern Israel are the Shi’ite group Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, and the Sunni group Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip. Both are classified by the submissive US government as “terrorist”. Neither of these groups have ever organised attacks in Western Europe or North America. Neither of them are of any concern to Western people, who would be better off taking a neutral stance on their conflict with Israel.
The groups which do attack Western targets are al-Qaeda and its offshoots, including ISIS. Israel supporters have an interest in confusing Westerners about these groups and their relationship to Hamas and Hezbollah. Particularly Hezbollah, which has been fighting against ISIS and al-Qaeda for years, and which is therefore fighting in the interests of Western people, alongside the governments of Syria and Iran, with Russian support.
Yet, incredibly, when president Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May 2017, he unconditionally backed the Sunni monarchy, and identified Iran as the main problem. If the US really wanted to beat ISIS, it could have done so already, simply by giving support to Syria, Iran and Hezbollah. Instead, on 18 June 2017, the USA shot down a Syrian jet. It can’t be that Trump doesn’t have the information – he just has to ask the CIA * and the State Department. There’s only one possible explanation for his seemingly lunatic inversion of the true state of affairs – that is the lobby.
Saudi Arabia does have a well-funded lobby in the USA. But surely it pales in comparison with the Israel Lobby. Senators and congressmen don’t regularly give speeches putting Saudi interests before those of their own country – but they do grovel before Israel.
Israel is in an unstated, de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia and several other Sunni states. The reason for this is they have a common interest in countering Iranian influence. One of the battlegrounds is Yemen, where the Saudis have caused a famine which has killed thousands, and created a cholera epidemic. The other is Syria. There, Israel wants to prevent Iran achieving a “Shi’ite corridor” from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea, by “population transfers” (moving Shi’ite civilians into Sunni areas, and vice-versa).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu… said Israel views “with utmost gravity” Iranian attempts to gain a foothold in Syria or to provide advanced weapons to Hezbollah, its Lebanese proxy
– Breitbart, 25 June 2017
Preventing a decisive Syrian victory is in Israeli interests. A byproduct is fertile ground for the training of terrorists who attack Western countries.
It’s therefore moronic to support Israel because you think it has a common cause with the inhabitants of Western countries – fighting Islamic terrorism. Not all “terrorists” are the same – in fact, they’re not all terrorists. At least one so-called terrorist organisation is potentially an ally of the Western countries. If only Western politicians were as canny and cynical as their Israeli counterparts.
James Watson, Connie St. Louis and Tim Hunt – who wields the most power?
This article is an attempt to bring together various pieces I’ve written about expressions of the misleadingly-named phenomenon known as “Cultural Marxism”, “Political Correctness” and “Social Justice”. It argues that this tendency is opposed to the positive achievements of Western societies.
The article also considers the alleged Jewish role in these tendencies.
First, I’ll explain how one expression of political correctness, “anti-racism”, undermines three key Western values: freedom of speech, presumption of innocence, and the proscription against being tried twice for the same crime.
“Anti-racism”
By the phrase “anti-racism”, in inverted commas, I don’t mean “opposition to racial prejudice, violence and discrimination”. I mean ideas like “Critical Race Theory” and their political implementations.
I’ll start by listing some of the consequences of these ideas.
When eighty-eight professors at a US university falsely accused three of their students of rape because they are white men, and their accusers are black women, they were taken seriously by students, most of the media, the police, the district attorney, and the president of the university.
“Anti-racism” also influenced the 1997-1999 inquiry, led by Sir William Macpherson, on the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, which accused the London police force of various nebulous kinds of “racism”. A consequence was nationwide police oversensitivity to such allegations. This helped Pakistani Muslim child-traffickers to “play the race card” and escape investigation. Some of the offenders also used “anti-racism” to convince underage white girls that the reason their parents were suspicious is because they are white.
I cover these examples in more detail below. They illustrate the effects on Western societies and individuals of persuading them to overcompensate for the racist past by inventing a racist present.
“Words That Wound”, Matsuda et. al., 1993, is a representative collection of essays on the variant of “anti-racism” known as Critical Race Theory. Because, it claims, “racist hate messages are rapidly increasing” in the USA (page 24), and because minorities suffer more from bigoted speech than the white majority, it argues that freedom of expression should be limited.
“Words That Wound” also attempts to undermine another principle of Western civilization, the presumption of innocence:
Matsuda asks that we listen first to the voice of the victims of hate speech (page 9).
This doesn’t mean quite what it says. Note first of all that it claims that one can be a “victim” of “speech”. Secondly, it is true that the police do have to literally “listen first” to the victims of alleged crimes. But from that point on, the defendant is presumed innocent, so what she and her lawyers say is presumed to be the truth until it is proven to be false. This implies that the alleged victims of alleged crimes are disbelieved unless and until their allegations are proven. So to reform the legal system into what they say it should be, the critical race theorists would have to
criminalize some forms of speech
shift the balance of proof from plaintiff to defendant.
As I describe below, in the UK, “anti-racism” has led the law to undermine an ancient right – the injunction against “double jeopardy”: it is no longer necessarily true that, if you are found not guilty of a crime, you cannot be retried for it.
The Duke University alleged rape case of 2006 is one of the most dramatic examples of an attempt to apply the principles outlined in “Words That Wound”. The case was tailor-made for the “anti-racist” left: white fraternity members were accused of rape by black women. Activists organized noisy vigils outside the fraternity house, on the basis that
the daily violence of racism/white supremacy, sexism/transphobia/patriarchy, classism/capitalism, and homophobia/heterosexism are the intersecting sources of sexual violence. –“Serena and the Potbangers”, Johnson, K.C., 9 May 2007.
But the students were innocent. The full story can be found in “Until Proven Innocent: political correctness and the shameful injustices of the Duke lacrosse rape case”, Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C., 2007. A collection of more recent examples of the campus grievance industry’s opposition to due process can be found in the same authors’ “The Campus Rape Frenzy: the attack on due process at America’s universities”, Taylor, S. Jr. & Johnson, K.C., 2017.
The use of anti-racism by Zionists
Another variant of “anti-racism” is the effort to help the state of Israel by suppressing criticism of it in Western countries, by labelling this criticism “anti-semitic”.
A UK parliament committee recommends making illegal, among other thought-crimes, claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour – “Antisemitism in the UK – tenth report of session 2016–17”, House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, 13 October 2016.
A similar law, but applying only to colleges and universities, the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act”, is being considered in the USA, but it is widely regarded as unconstitutional, thus unenforceable:“The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act would damage free speech rights on campus”, Liz Jackson, Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2016.
In the recent article“A Modern Education” in the Dartmouth Review, Jack Mourouzis describes the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment from Israel movement as follows: “Protestors expressing support for the anti-Semitic BDS movement”, without explanation, in the middle of an article criticizing “ideological intolerance” by the left. He criticizes the current wave of student assaults on freedom of speech for alleged “racists”, while using the same technique himself to challenge freedom to criticise Israel.
Other examples of Zionist use of left-wing language can be found in the blog of leftist Alex Press: “Left-Wing Language for Your Right-Wing Needs”. The author seems to accept the validity of using alleged hurt feelings to argue for the suppression of ideas, as Zionists do with regard to BDS, but only for the left-wing causes he agrees with.
The hate industry
There has been an effort to exaggerate the amount of racial prejudice endemic to American society since, at the latest, 1950, when the Frankfurt School’s “The Authoritarian Personality”, by Theodor Adorno et al. was published. To be precise, The Authoritarian Personality exaggerated the degree to which white people exhibit ethnocentrism, by interpreting data using different methods for different demographics, with white rural Americans getting the least favourable treatment. Since then, a growing number of academic departments and well-funded political organisations has continued the work of the Frankfurt School.
Laird Wilcox criticised the hate industry in his pamphlet“The Watchdogs” in 1999:
Indeed, there is an anti-racist industry entrenched in the United States that has attracted bullying, moralizing fanatics, whose identity and livelihood depend upon growth and expansion of their particular kind of victimization.
Here are some examples. The National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence alleged there is an epidemic of “ethnoviolence” in higher education facilities – but its definition of the term is so broad it includes any “perceived expression of insensitivity” (“Hate Crimes”, Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998, page 49). Mari Matsuda wrote that “a marked rise of racial harassment, hate speech, and racially-motivated violence marks the beginning of the 1990’s” in “Words That Wound” (1993, page 44). Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s “Hate Crimes” complained of “a rising tide of bigotry and bloodshed” at that time (1993, page xi). Kenneth Stern’s article “Militia Mania, a Growing Danger”, 1996, claimed that local officials in rural America were being threatened with death by right-wing terrorists, and Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote a book entitled “Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat”, in 1997.
These claims are false. Acclaimed populariser of evolutionary psychology professor Steven Pinker took a year off from Harvard to write a history of violence, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: why violence has declined”. He used a chart from James Payne’s “A History of Force”, 2004, which shows how racist lynchings declined steadily from 150 per annum in the 1880s to close to zero by the end of the 1960s (page 385). Another graph in his book covers racist murders, 1996-2008 (page 386), using statistics from the FBI. From five victims per annum in 1996, this went down to one in 2008. One is less than 0.006 percent of the 17,000 murders which occur in the country each year.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the USA on 9 November 2016 also saw a spike in hate crime reports. Many of them were found to be false alarms:http://fakehatecrimes.org/graphs.
A show-trial for the London police
“Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics”, by Norman Dennis, George Erdos and Ahmed Al-Shahi, examines the Macpherson report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager murdered by white thugs in London in 1993. It took eighteen years to convict them. The Macpherson report claimed the reason for the delay was racism in the police. Though the murderers used racist language while committing the crime, they also had a long history of violence against white and other people. But for Macpherson, the failure of many officers to recognise the murder as entirely racially-motivated was evidence of police racism. The fact that the police made mistakes in the investigation, though there was no evidence that these mistakes were caused by racism, was nevertheless adduced as though there was. The use of the old-fashioned word “coloured” instead of “black” by one officer was evidence too. Even denying racism was evidence of racism; an example of what Eric Raymond has characterised as a“Kafkatrap”.
Macpherson’s report liberally throws around phrases like “institutional racism”, “inherent racism”, “systemic racism”, and the like. Police racism is described as “‘concealed’, ‘predominantly hidden’, and yet has the power of ‘an inbuilt persuasiveness’” – Dennis, N., Erdos, G. and Al-Shahi, A., pages 109-110. All these vague phrases have the benefit of being unfalsifiable.
The reason it took eighteen years to convict Gary Dobson and David Norris of the murder of Stephen Lawrence is not police racism, but because the prosecution service thought the evidence was insufficient, given the need to prove defendants’ guilt beyond doubt. It was right: the men could only be convicted after several retrials and an acquittal. The final trial depended on the abolition of the injunction against “double jeopardy” in murder cases– being tried twice for the same crime. The abolition of this right, in murder cases, was a recommendation of the Macpherson report.
Behind Macpherson’s assault on defendants’ rights lies the “anti-racism” industry. Here is Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya’s contribution to vague, unprovable, unfalsifiable definitions of “racism”:
Racism has five typologies. These typologies are overt, polite, subliminal, institutional, and systemic racism…
To take one example:
Subliminal racism involves unconscious prejudice towards other groups. This form of racism is tied to ethnocentric views that most racist people are unaware of, because it has structurally been conditioned and socialized in them through societal forces like their culture, institutions, and media.
Dear reader, if you can’t see why the above passage is an Orwellian assault on freedom, based on pseudo-science, I’m not going to explain it.
With breathtaking chutzpah, Nazemroaya criticizes Critical Race Theory on the grounds that “ironically it is intolerant to diversity of thought and free speech”. There’s nothing ironic about it. Of course it’s intolerant of diversity of thought and free speech: its purpose is to undermine them. And the same is true of any variant of it, including the version Nazemroaya defends.
The above quotes are from Nazemroaya’s introduction to Denis Rancourt’s “Hierarchy and Free Expression in the fight against racism”, 2013. Rancourt’s book recommends student rebellion against “racism” among other grievances. In the last year or so, mobs of leftist students around the USA have prevented talks they disagree with, screamed racist abuse against white people, and forced resignations from academics and administrators.
The conclusion of “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics” is more concrete than Macpherson’s:
Macpherson produces no evidence that racism lay behind the inappropriate behaviour of these police officers. – page 71.
Believe me, I am no admirer of the London police, but I don’t believe in convicting anyone on the basis of false, or meaningless, allegations. Moreover, Macpherson had unintended consequences.
Broken and Betrayed – the effects of the “anti-racism” campaign on the police
The Rotherham scandal proved beyond doubt the poisonous influence of political correctness on Western society. One of the reasons the authorities in Rotherham, UK, and at least seventeen other towns and cities, allowed hundreds of schoolgirls to be groomed, trafficked and raped by Muslim men for decades, was because they thought that, if they investigated, they would be accused of “racism”. When a social worker pointed out that most of the rapists belong to Rotherham’s Asian minority, she was sent on a diversity course.
Another reason the police failed to investigate the rapists was their contempt for working-class people. The South Yorkshire Police, responsible for Rotherham, provides exceptionally good evidence for a Marxist class analysis of the police – witness its behaviour at Orgreave coking plant in 1984, and at Hillsborough football ground in 1989, both of them violent attacks on working-class people. Officers from the force have been reported as having referred to working-class girls below the age of consent (sixteen) as “slags” and “prostitutes”, apparently unaware that sex with a minor is rape, not prostitution. As a result, some pundits have attempted to downplay the “political correctness” aspect, claiming that the only cause of police neglect of underage girls’ welfare is that the girls are working-class.
For example, Suzanne Moore, in“Poor children are seen as worthless, as Rotherham’s abuse scandal shows” – The Guardian, 27 August 2014. On 22 June 2017, the leader of the Labour Party referred to the disasters at Hillsborough football ground and the Grenfell Tower fire:“working-class people’s voices are ignored”. He also brought up “the child sex-abuse scandal” as confirmation of this class analysis. His only reference to Muslims is “young Muslim men banging on the door who had broken from prayers” to awaken people to the Grenfell fire.
However, consider this passage from “Broken and Betrayed”, by Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior:
One evening he set out to find her, having been told by police that “it wasn’t their problem”. He quickly located her and banged on the door of a terraced house, demanding that whoever was in should open up and give him his daughter back. Unfortunately as he was shouting he used a racist comment towards the people inside. He shouldn’t have said it, and it’s unforgivable, but that’s what happened. Neighbours heard the fracas and reported that someone was racially abusing people in their street. The police arrived pretty damned quickly, the door was opened and they went inside. By all accounts, Jessica was just getting out of bed with her abuser when the police came through the front door. She hid under the bed while the man was caught putting on his trousers. When they finally brought her out from under the bed she was intoxicated, semi-naked and clutching a police truncheon. She didn’t come out quietly, apparently, which led to her being arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour, as was her father. And although the house was full of men, one of whom had just been in bed with a fourteen-year-old girl, not one of them was spoken to, arrested or charged with anything.
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, Jayne Senior, pages 91-92
How would class prejudice lead to the police arresting a white working-class man for racist language, but letting Pakistani working-class child-rapists off scot-free? The data is more compatible with the hypothesis that the police has been corrupted by political correctness than the notion that it is just using it as an excuse for exercising its real function, the defence of capitalist society.
Jayne Senior is also concerned about “racism”:
Of course there was a grooming problem 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 (pages 229-230).
She doesn’t explain why not. The local Labour council allowed girls in its care to be raped, and tried to suppress the evidence, and ruin the career, of whistleblower Jayne Senior. But after all this, she “contributed to political point-scoring” on Labour’s behalf. She campaigned for it, while dismissing the rival United Kingdom Independence Party’s “1,400 reasons not to trust Labour” poster (page 353). If UKIP pointing out Labour’s responsibility for mass child-rape was “a disgraceful attempt to make political gain”, what was Labour’s campaign? And why did she support it?
Like many others, she uses the euphemism “Asian” to avoid the more specific and accurate term “Muslim”. The word “Islam” occurs just twice in the book – in both cases to refer to girls who were forced to convert after being raped (pages 77 and 263). “Muslim” occurs six times, and “Asian” sixty-seven.
Only once does she use the word “Muslim” in a negative way, despite the overwhelming overrepresentation of men with Muslim names among child-traffickers. Her solution is a plea to “the Muslim community”:
If the Muslim community has a problem with abusers – and it clearly does – then people inside those communities need to accept that and have the confidence to report matters to the authorities (pages 357-358).
If I’d ever met anyone who had proposed drugging underage girls and gang-raping them, I would have reported him to the police, and if it did nothing about it, would have campaigned until it did. But in some Muslim communities, there’s solidarity between the child-rapists, often family members, and there’s solidarity with them from other Muslims. It’s no good telling them they need to “have the confidence”. It’s not confidence they lack. Something about particular branches of Islamic culture – not all of them – makes some Muslims complicit in child abuse, and something about British society makes it hard to stop them. Jayne Senior clearly expresses that weakness.
Rotherham is the tip of an iceberg. Senior’s book, together with Peter McLoughlin’s account (“Easy Meat”), Alexis Jay’s official Rotherham report (“Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham”), Andrew Norfolk’s and Julie Bindel’s articles in the Times, and the reactions to them, exposed
hundreds of girls under sixteen in dozens of towns being trafficked and raped by gangs of men with mostly Muslim names
police collusion with these child-rapists
political correctness in the social services preventing social workers from exposing the narrow demographic of most of the offenders
the destruction of evidence of child rape by city council workers
little feminist concern with the problem
leftist violence, with police collusion, against people protesting against the rape gangs
media suppression of evidence, for fear of stirring up “racism”
the promotion of Muslims into positions of power, where they protect their co-religionists
Because feminism is close to the left, because the left is “anti-racist” to a fault, and because most of the Muslims in Britain are darker-coloured than the indigenous population, hardly any feminists noticed the problem of Muslim rape gangs targeting underage white girls. One of the few exceptions is Julie Bindel:
The pimps are adept at trading on teenage rebellion and use similar methods, according to Crop, of convincing the girls all white people are racist… “Like most teenagers, I was going through a phase of arguing with my mum,” says Gemma. “Amir told me they didn’t understand me and were racist and ignorant. I believed him.” –“Mothers of prevention”, The Times, 30 September 2007.
Feminists often accept rape claims uncritically –“it wasn’t Jackie’s job to get the details of her rape correct”wrote Jessica Valenti, even after Jackie’s claim to have been raped at the University of Virginia, published uncritically in Rolling Stone magazine, was exposed as completely false.
Chelsey Wright of Sunderland claims to have been raped by refugees, and ignored by the authorities. There is a petition to support her (May 2017): “Would you please sign this petition and help the UK overthrow its rape culture?”. In this case, because the alleged offenders are Middle Eastern, and the woman and her supporters white, she gets little support from feminists. Some of them claim that the only reason white men are concerned about the case is because they believe they “have a duty to protect “their” women from the rape-crazed hordes of non-white men”. Feminists ignored the march to support Chelsey Wright pressuring the police to take action. Here is a typical feminist reaction, froma discussion on “Ask Feminists” on reddit.com, 20 May 2017:
This is not protecting women’s rights. It’s asserting white men’s ownership over white women. It’s a total denial of women’s rights.
The assault on science
In June 2015, Nobel Laureate and cancer researcher, Sir Tim Hunt, formerly of University College London, made a self-deprecating joke about sexist scientists at a conference in South Korea. A feminist, Connie St. Louis, didn’t see the joke, and tweeted approximately some of what he said. When he returned to the UK, he thought he’d flown to North Korea by mistake. He was told to resign, or be fired:Tim Hunt: “I’ve been hung out to dry. They haven’t even bothered to ask for my side of affairs”, Robin McKie, The Guardian, 13 June 2015.
Back in October 2007, another Nobel Laureate, James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was forced out of his job because he said that the underdevelopment of Africa may be related to average differences in intelligence between the races of humanity:“Watson Loses Cold Spring Harbor Post”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Science, 19 October 2007. If America is still in the grip of “white supremacy”, as the social justice warriors claim, why would the greatest living geneticist get the sack for defending a scientific hypothesis which may offend black people?
Toward the end of 2015, the assault on reason continued to grow when students on both sides of the Atlantic, demanded, and in most cases, got, apologies and resignations from academics and administrators at numerous colleges and universities for vaguely specified thought crimes.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the intensity and scale of this campaign. At the time of writing, the campaign continues unabated. Mobs of “anti-fascists” in Britain and the USA try to stop anyone they disagree with speaking, from feminist Germaine Greer to “The Bell Curve” co-author Charles Murray. In two cases, in Berkeley, CA, the city has instructed the police to allow leftists to assault people attempting to attend meetings addressed by politically incorrect speakers.
Students at Evergreen College in Washington demanded white people be excluded from the campus for a day, and invaded a lecture by a professor who doesn’t agree, shouting the allegation that he is “racist” for not leaving campus. The president of the college, instead of telling the campus police to defend this professor’s freedom to teach, has capitulated to threats of violence. Self-censorship is endemic. You can express politically incorrect ideas more freely anywhere than in a department of sociology, or in any whose name ends in the word “studies”.
Academia, for the most part, hasn’t just failed in its mission of allowing freedom of expression, it has actively collaborated in its suppression. It has turned into its opposite.
What caused this assault on the bases of Western civilization? Why is it tolerated? How far beyond academia has it spread? How can it be defeated?
Pathological altruism
Above, I discussed how Rotherham whistleblower Jayne Senior continued to support the Labour Party, after she’d exposed its complicity in Islamic child rape, and her reluctance to use the word “Muslim”.
Following the Manchester bombing of 22 May 2017, by the son of a Libyan refugee, the brother of one of the victims asked people not to criticise immigration because of it. Both father and son had fought with an al-Qaeda offshoot in Libya – during an uprising which had Western support:“Victim’s brother: stop using Manchester attack to denounce immigration”, Helen Pidd, The Guardian, 31 May 2017.
Consider also the case of a 14-year-old British girl who wrote an essay arguing against deporting criminals from foreign countries because it’s “racist”. Shortly afterward, she was murdered by a criminal who had already served time in his native Latvia for murdering his wife:“Revealed: Alice Gross argued against banning foreign criminals before her murder”, Jamie Grierson, The Guardian, 11 July 2016.
Even after her murder, her parents urged anti-immigration groups not to “exploit” her death; not to use some of the evidence of the dangers of the policy of importing criminals to argue in favour of not doing it. There could be no more dramatic illustration of the pathological nature of “anti-racism” – except perhaps in Germany, where women assaulted by immigrants have claimed it was white German men, in order to avoid stirring up anti-immigrant feeling.
Another variant of pathological altruism is the tendency of the denizens of universities to abase themselves before the dominant grievance culture. I mentioned above the University of Virginia fake rape case. Rolling Stone magazine has settled the case, offering the libelled students millions of dollars. But they are giving most of it to
organizations that provide sexual assault awareness education, prevention training and victim counseling services on college campuses
in other words, to feminist hate groups.
As K.C. Johnson puts it, in more measured language,
This struck me as a very odd decision, given the specifics of this case (the students were wrongly accused, and these “organizations” joined the crusade against them).
“Show Racism the Red Card” is more than an organisation of social justice warriors trying to police offensive humour at British football matches. It is trying to extend its influence into schools – according to Ged Grebby in The Guardian, 20 May 2015,“England’s young people aren’t racist – but they need better education”.
A specific example of what Grebby calls “racism” is
we have found that there is a large amount of negativity when young people are asked questions about “immigration” or “Muslims”.
Show Racism the Red Card aims to weaken children’s fear of Muslims. Unfortunately, this fear is justified. It’s true that the majority of Muslim men in the UK are not child-traffickers, but it’s also true that a Muslim man is over 170 times more likely than a non-Muslim man of having been convicted of child-trafficking offences.
Being wary of Muslims is analogous to being wary of strange men. Most strange men aren’t child-molesters, but we teach children to use statistics to err on the side of caution, and avoid strange men. It should be exactly the same with Muslim men. If we can use statistics to stigmatise the group “strange men” in the eyes of children, why not the group “Muslim men”? The second follows logically from the first. But our pathological altruism short-circuits logic and endangers children.
There are children who form no racial stereotypes. But they are also too friendly to strangers, according to this report in Nature:“Children who form no racial stereotypes found”, Janelle Weaver, Nature, 12 April 2010.
Here is a map of “racial tolerance” published by the Washington Post in May 2013, classifying areas of the world according to percentage of inhabitants who would not want to live next to people of a different race. The people of the Western countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones, are among the least prone to objecting to neighbours of a more distant ethnic origin.
The implicit claim of Social Justice that white Europeans are uniquely, and ubiquitously, ethnocentric, couldn’t be further from the truth. White guilt is endemic. The reason the hate groups of the left, the multi-million dollar hate industry, the university departments of African-American studies, etc., are allowed to exist, is because so many white Europeans tolerate and support them.
As Douglas Murray argues,
More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past.– “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam”.
The Jewish question
Douglas Murray also writes
it genuinely shocks me to discover… many Jewish groups and Jewish leaders have been taking a conspicuous lead in welcoming refugees.
He seems unaware of the argument that, because it defends their interests, Jews are overrepresented in the leadership of the Social Justice assault on Western values, with Jewish organisations’ support for mass immigration being the icing on the cake. Professor Kevin MacDonald’s “The Culture of Critique” contains the most well-known and well-developed version of this claim.
Gilad Atzmon, a refugee from Israel, is the primary critic of “Jewish power” in Western societies – for example “The Wandering Who?”, Atzmon, G., 2011. He has bravely stood up against the power of his former nation in negatively influencing Western societies.
I agree with him, but think he’s looking at only one part of the problem.
Atzmon and I both support a Palestinian rights activist in Portland, Oregon, who was fired after a campaign by self-described “anti-fascists”. In this case, the leftists were, paradoxically, consciously or otherwise, working for the Israel Lobby. But this is part of a much larger problem, in which the “Antifa” oppose many other examples of freedom of speech, some of them supportive of Israel – for example, they have used violence to stop speeches by pro-Israel speakers Milo Yiannopoulos and Anne Coulter in Berkeley.
Atzmon’s method is to find examples which back up his critique of Jewish power. Where he can’t find them, he makes them up. For example, he gives credibility to attempts to exculpate Muslims from Islamic terrorist crimes. In March 2012, in Toulouse, an assailant murdered seven people, including two French-African soldiers and three Jewish children.
Guardian writer Fiachra Gibbons jumped to the conclusion that white far right extremists were responsible. The newspaper ended up with egg on its face when the killer turned out to be French-Algerian:“Toulouse shootings: race, religion and murder”, The Guardian, 19 March 2012.
There was some slight basis to the Guardian’s assumption. Only one party, in French history, has murdered black soldiers and Jewish children: the Nazis, during the 1940-1945 occupation.
In contrast, Gilad Atzmon speculated that it may have been an Israeli “false flag operation”. This idea was more tentative; it had no basis in fact whatsoever:“Is it an Israeli False Flag Again?”, 22 March 2012.
And unlike the Guardian, Atzmon made his mistake after the fatal shooting of Mohamed Merah by the police. Why would Israel murder Jewish children? Well, argued Atzmon and his followers, by making it look like a Muslim had done it, it could stir up “Islamophobia”.
Political correctness is used by Jewish activists, but it is also used by other political forces – sometimes against Jewish interests. “Anti-racism”, the assault on science and reason, and the rest of the nonsense I have covered in this essay, are not reducible to Jews acting in Jewish interests, even if self-identified Jews played a disproportionate role in their genesis (for example, Franz Boas, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin).
But a more fundamental problem than Jewish power is what makes it – and the other pathologies covered in this article – possible. White Western European societies (including the ones in North America and Australasia) are particularly receptive to criticism, accurate or otherwise. There is a growing realisation of this weakness, and a backlash.
I repeat my prediction that this year will continue to be a good one for freedom, and a bad one for Social Justice. A side-effect will be to make discussion of the Jewish question less taboo.
In 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.
Shlomo 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.
The 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.
For 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.
the jay report 