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2003-03-08 16:43 | User Profile

MacDonald Responds To Derbyshire And The Original Derbyshire Nuttiness

3/7/03 5:39:03 PM Discuss this story in the forum Kevin MacDonald / John Derbyshire

Commentary / Book Review -- [url=http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/derbyshire.htm]http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/derbyshire.htm[/url] The Conservatism of Fools: A Response to John Derbyshire1

Kevin MacDonald2

This is a response to a review by John Derbyshire of my book, The Culture of Critique, that appeared in The American Conservative. Derbyshire is a self- described philo-Semite who traces his philo-Semitism to his pleasant childhood memories of a local Jewish family and “the numberless kindnesses that I have received at the hands of Jews, friendships I treasure and lessons I have learnt. I cherish those recollections.”3

**I find myself now, in middle age, with complicated and sometimes self-contradictory feelings about the Jews. Those early impressions —    culture, wit, intelligence, kindness, and hospitality — are still dominant, and I have read enough to know what a stupendous      debt    our civilization owes to the Jews. At the same time, there are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted in the most fundamental premises of Judaism, has, it seems to me, done great harm in the modern age. . . .

I also find the theories of Kevin Macdonald (The Culture of Critique) about the partly malign influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive — though this is not an endorsement of Macdonald's theory of “group evolutionary strategies" which I do not understand. And like (I suppose) every other Gentile, I have often been irritated by Jewish sensibilities, and occasionally angered by them.4 **

These earlier comments on The Culture of Critique appeared in April, 2001. Derbyshire’s evaluation of the book (and its author) has changed a bit, perhaps because the edition reviewed in The American Conservative contains a new preface that tilts the balance in my writing even more on the side of the negative.

For Derbyshire, evaluating Jews is like a business ledger: There are positives and negatives, and for him, the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. However, providing a balance ledger of credits and debits is not a purpose of The Culture of Critique. My purpose is to document Jewish intellectual and political movements—movements led by Jews and motivated by perceptions that these movements would advance Jewish interests. I have tried to document all such movements that I am aware of, but this is not the same as documenting Jewish contributions to civilization or culture. As I note in the Preface, Albert Einstein’s work—obviously an important contribution to physics— does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement because it was not motivated by advancing Jewish interests (even though Einstein was a strongly identified Jew). Similarly, my book has no interest in recording fond memories of individual Jews that seem to have formed Derbyshire’s intellectual outlook.

As a result of his generally positive attitude about Jews and Judaism, Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. We non-Jews should understand such Jewish behavior because these outcomes are good for Jews. But, somehow he fails to follow through with this logic, imputing malice to people like me who are concerned about the future of their own people in societies where they are becoming minorities surrounded by groups that, like Jews, harbor deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. It is quite an extraordinary omission and lapse in consistency by Derbyshire. In the end, the logic is as follows: Jews have made wonderful contributions to civilization. Therefore, non-Jews should welcome Jewish efforts to advance their interests even when they conflict with others. As Derbyshire himself says in another context, the only thing to say of those who voice such sentiments is what Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said: “The more fool they.”

Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses. My view is that modern evolutionary theory gives us a powerful way of understanding why this must be so. Anti-Semites have often portrayed Jews as the embodiment of evil. Consistent with evolutionary theory, however, I have documented that Jews tend to be highly intelligent, good parents, and patriots fighting to preserve their people and extend their people’s power and influence—sometimes at the expense of the interests of other peoples. Many organized groups of Jews have pursued such conservative goals by resisting other groups and behaving aggressively against them. By the same logic, it is legitimate for non-Jews to defend their own ethnic interests. Is this a formula for perpetual conflict? Hopefully not, but the only hope for a just resolution is to recognize the nature of the situation and agree on terms, not to deny the importance of one’s own interests.

Derbyshire’s review begins with a chilling account of how critics of Jews simply disappear from sight—their professional horizons diminished if not entirely ended. One thinks of people like Joe Sobran, William Cash,5 and a host of politicians who have had the temerity to criticize Israel or American support for Israel, or who have called attention to Jewish power and influence in particular areas. Jewish groups have made any critical discussion of Jewish issues off limits, and that’s vitally important because, yes, Jews are a very powerful group. What Derbyshire refers to as Jewish “world-perfecting idealism” is very much with us and is still wreaking havoc in the modern world, everywhere from the erection of a multi-cultural police state in the United States—the origins of which are the general topic of The Culture of Critique—to the current war for the “liberation” and “democratization” of Iraq, a war that is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media. As with other examples of Jewish idealism, the destruction of Iraq is shrouded in a lofty moral idealism aimed ultimately at securing a rather obvious Jewish ethnic goal — Israeli hegemony throughout the Middle East. That these latest examples of Jewish “world perfecting idealism” also happen to conform rather obviously to Jewish ethnic interests should be of concern to all non-Jews.

Derbyshire dismisses evolutionary psychology as a passing fad. He sarcastically asks, “in criticizing [evolutionary psychologists], I am pursuing [my evolutionary goals]?” Well, maybe, but most of what we humans do is connected only distantly to evolutionary goals. For example, quite a few evolutionary psychologists propose an evolved goal of social status based on commonly accepted standards of scientific evidence,6 but we are very flexible in how we achieve such goals. And it does occur to me that writing critiques of evolutionary psychology and dismissing those who criticize Jews might be one way to attain social status among the predominantly Jewish neo- conservative elite that dominates so much of the conservative media.

Derbyshire complains about my statement that, “The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals.” I was merely expressing a principle of evolutionary biology that has been of fundamental importance since the revolution inaugurated by G. C. Williams and culminating in E. O. Wilson’s synthesis: Organisms are not designed to communicate truthfully with others but to persuade them—to manipulate them to serve their interests. We should expect deception and self-deception to be at the very heart of interactions among organisms. This is the subtext of The Culture of Critique: The beguilingly irresistible theories masking an ethnic agenda. I too was once enthralled by psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Derbyshire supposes that the idea of a group evolutionary strategy may be “complete nonsense.” Freed of technical jargon, a group evolutionary strategy refers to the ways people structure groups in order to get on in the world—to attain group goals such regulating their own members (e.g., preventing them from defecting, promoting cooperation with ingroup members, promoting eugenic marriages) and dealing with outsiders (e.g., having different ethical standards for ingroup versus outgroup). I discuss how Jews accomplished these tasks in traditional societies in my book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, and I recently applied this sort of analysis to several other groups, including the Overseas Chinese, in the paperback version of that book.7 There are several other good sources, including David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral,8 where, among other examples, the early Christian Church is described as a non-ethnic form of Judaism that was adaptive at the level of the group in navigating the uncertainties of the ancient world.

My analysis describes the powerful social and psychological forces that have maintained Jewish group loyalty. Derbyshire asks, “From an evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so have been conversion to Christianity?” But the question is not whether an omniscient Jew in the Middle Ages would choose to remain a Jew, but what forces have kept Jewish groups together over the centuries while other groups have been assimilated or otherwise disappeared. Even if individual Jews would have been better off defecting (some did!), the vast majority did not because of sanctions against relatives who remained Jews, because of powerful, psychologically salient ethnic and kinship ties to other Jews, because of the high level of social and material support available in Jewish communities, because of hostility toward Jews emanating from the wider society, and probably because, despite periodic troubles, Jews were remarkably successful in many times and places, including the medieval period.

Despite Derbyshire’s claim, it is simply not the case that Jews have only been successful since “emancipation.” Jews have very frequently achieved powerful positions: ancient Alexandria and the late Roman Empire; parts of Western Europe during the Middle Ages prior to the expulsions of Jews from most of Western Europe; the Turkish Empire after the fall of the Byzantine Christians and many other places where Jews served alien ruling elites, especially in the Muslim world (e.g., Spain after the Muslim conquest); Christian Spain beginning at least by the late 14th century and extending well into the period of the Inquisition; Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe beginning in the early modern period and extending into the 20th century.9 Perhaps most notably, the elite status of Jews in the Soviet Union had little or nothing to do with the opportunities made available by the Enlightenment, since the Enlightenment had little impact on the Russian Empire.

Group strategies don’t need outgroups. The main thing is that there is group-level organization that regulates individual behavior to conform to group goals. Derbyshire mentions Chinese eugenics, but as important as eugenics may be for understanding the Chinese, it does not necessarily imply a group evolutionary strategy. The most obvious explanation is that the emperor wanted the more intelligent people to run the civil service, and, given the Chinese practice of polygyny and the benefits of high social status, this had a eugenic effect. But this can be easily explained by self-interest on the part of everyone involved; no need to invoke the effects of group structure on individual behavior. On the other hand, in the recent paperback edition of A People that Shall Dwell Alone, I argue that the Overseas Chinese qualify as a group strategy because they live as an organized group among outgroups; they have a consciousness of themselves as being of a different ethnic group than their hosts, they are internally organized (but not nearly so tightly as traditional Jewish communities), and they cooperate in economic enterprises.

Derbyshire rejects my argument that without Jewish involvement, the Bolshevik Revolution and its horrific aftermath would not have happened. The percentage of Jews in early Bolshevik Party congresses is irrelevant to this issue. The questions I ask are: Would the Revolution have occurred without the key involvement of a relatively small number of very talented Jews like Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Uritsky who played such prominent roles in the Bolshevik Revolution and the early Soviet government? (In the same way, one can reasonably ask whether the neo-conservative revolution in U.S. foreign policy would have happened without the critical contributions of Richard Perle, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, to name only some of the most prominent Jews involved. Small numbers of highly talented, closely cooperating people can have enormous influence.) Would the Revolution have been sustainable in its early stages without the involvement of large sections of the Jewish community who came to staff the Soviet bureaucracy, most notably the Secret Police? Were Jews an elite group in the Soviet Union at least until anti-Jewish attitudes began to be government policy after World War II? Did Jewish Communists and other leftists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere identify as Jews? I see no reason to change my views on these issues as a result of Derbyshire’s comments.

Similarly, Derbyshire states that Jews “were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in [the] downfall” of European dominance in the U.S. without providing a concrete alternative. I have never stated that Jewish intellectual movements and interest groups were the sole force, but I do indeed maintain that they were by far the most important. On the critical topic of immigration, there simply was no other force that energetically pursued the goal of multi-ethnic immigration in the period prior to 1965 apart from Jewish organizations or organizations composed partly of non-Jews that were funded, organized and staffed by Jews.10 And beyond the transformations being wrought by the sea change in immigration policy, I think it inconceivable that the current regime of what Derbyshire terms “racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense, accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (‘affirmative action’)” could have been built without the influence of the intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique. As Derbyshire notes, this regime is inherently far less stable than what went before, and one can only shudder at what the future holds throughout the Western world.

It is always difficult to imagine that 3% of the population could have such enormous influence on culture and public policy, but successful lobbying efforts by small, committed special interests are commonplace in American politics, not only among ethnic lobbies but among business interests, farming groups, unions, professional organizations, and even gun enthusiasts. An obvious example is U.S. policy in the Middle East. Here we have a record of an incredibly effective, well-funded, intensive lobbying effort carried out over several decades. The historical evidence reviewed in Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique shows that Jewish organizations carried out a similar campaign in an effort to alter U.S. immigration laws and that they were by far the most important force in changing these laws, often taking pride in the part they played.

Derbyshire does not think it hypocritical for Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S. while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. The hypocrisy comes from the fact that, as I note in Chapter 8 of The Culture of Critique, the Jewish advocacy of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate coincided with a major effort by Jewish organizations and Jewish-dominated intellectual and political movements to supplant the prevailing view of the United States as a European Christian civilization with a European ethnic base. Especially hypocritical is that the disestablishment of the European basis of American identity was performed with appeal to universalist Enlightenment ideals of justice and individual rights, while it pathologized the ethnocultural basis of American civilization that had become an important foundation of American identity by the early decades of the 20th century. Although it is common for defenders of Israel to describe Israel as a democracy based on Western political ideals, I have yet to see any important Jewish organization or intellectual movement pathologize the ethnic basis of Israeli society or challenge the many ways in which Jewish ethnic interests are officially recognized in Israeli law and custom (e.g., the Law of Return). Indeed, the American Jewish community has been complicit in the ongoing ethnic warfare in the Middle East that has resulted in the dispossession, degradation, and large-scale murder of the Palestinians.

Derbyshire accuses me of being one of those who would prefer “a return to the older dispensation” — the older cultural and ethnic mix characteristic of the United States until the changes inaugurated in the last 35 years. I plead guilty to this charge. That regime was stable and it was good for people like me (and Derbyshire), and even for the American Jewish community who saw the modest, low-profile, non-violent character of anti-Jewish attitudes that were fairly common prior to World War II dwindle to irrelevance in the postwar period. Nothing wrong with that.

The dispossession of Europeans is the ultimate defeat—an evolutionary event of catastrophic proportions for people of European descent. Whatever the contributions of Jewish “entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars,” they could never make up for this cataclysmic loss and for the political instability and chronic ethnic tensions that have been unleashed by the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. Further, as The Culture of Critique attempts to document, a very high percentage of the Jewish contribution to culture has been used to advance Jewish ethnic interests. The only exceptions are advances in technology and basic science, but does anyone seriously suppose that technological advances like the atomic bomb mentioned by Derbyshire would never have been discovered without Jews? (Germany, certainly, was very close.) It may be that these advances would have taken longer, but there is no question that they would have happened without Jews. After all, with a mean IQ of 100 and far larger numbers, European populations undoubtedly have far more individuals of the requisite IQ to make the stupendous contributions to culture that have occurred in recent centuries. Western cultures have produced a long list of ethnically European geniuses in every field of science and art, from Plato and Aristotle down to the present. Pity the poor English who expelled the Jews in the Middle Ages and were thus restricted to the meager cultural contributions of Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin even as they vastly expanded their numbers and the territory controlled by their people. Can anyone seriously suppose that the West would be unable to produce a brilliant high culture without Jews or that the Jewish contribution is of irreplaceable value? And recall that my argument in The Culture of Critique is that many of the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters. In other words, their accomplishments are due in large part to the fundamental cultural forms of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, not to any inherent worth in what was produced. The sorry records of psychoanalysis, Boasian anthropology, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School are far more a testimony to Jewish identity and group cohesion than they are to anything resembling science.

Derbyshire acknowledges that the Jewish contributions to culture discussed in The Culture of Critique have been made with an eye to advancing Jewish ethnic interests. This is certainly a very sizeable portion of the entire Jewish contribution to culture during the period I discuss, but advancing Jewish interests by contributing to culture goes far beyond these movements. As I attempt to show in the preface to the recent paperback edition of The Culture of Critique, Jewish contributions to entertainment and the media have often had the function of promoting positive images of Judaism and multi- culturalism and negative images of Christianity and European ethnic interests and identification. Derbyshire describes his love of songs like White Christmas that have come to define how Christmas is experienced. However, such songs are also part of the Kulturkampf in which Christmas has been converted into a secular and commercialized event; as such it represents a kind of cultural subversion. As Philip Roth noted, “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave Irving Berlin Easter Parade and White Christmas, the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.”11 In recent decades, a major thrust of Jewish influence on culture has been the promotion of the Holocaust as the fundamental moral touchstone and intellectual paradigm of the contemporary Western world. (I recently came across a reference stating that there have been over 170 Holocaust films since 1989.12)

Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists may have indeed contributed to economic growth, but they have also lavishly funded Jewish causes—causes that typically oppose the ethnic interests of European Americans. Jews constitute more than a quarter of the people on the ForbesMagazine list of the richest four hundred Americans, 45% of the top 40 richest Americans, and one-third of all American multimillionaires.13The beneficiaries of this wealth include 4000 foundations controlled by Jews and 300 national Jewish organizations, the latter with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion—a sum greater than the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations. Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists like hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt, Charles and Edgar Bronfman (co-chairs of the Seagram Company), bingo parlor magnate Irving Moskowitz (who funds the settler movement in Israel), the notorious Marc Rich (who funds Birthright Israel, a program aimed at raising Jewish consciousness), George Soros (who funds pro- immigration organizations in the United States and in a variety of European countries), film maker Steven Spielberg (head of the Shoah and Righteous Persons foundations), Leslie Wexner (owner of the Limited and Victoria's Secret), Laurence Tisch (chairman of the Loews Corporation), Charles Schusterman (owner of an oil-and-gas business in Tulsa), and Mort Mandel of Cleveland (former distributor of electronics parts) have used their money to advance Jewish causes such as Israel and increasing Jewish consciousness and commitment among Jews.14 Wealthy Jews are by far the largest contributors to the Democratic Party and are very significant contributors to the Republican party,15 ensuring that Jewish interests will be heeded throughout the U.S. political spectrum. Whether Jewish success in business has had a measurable effect on economic growth is difficult to know. What we do know is that it has come with an enormous cost to the ethnic interests of European Americans.

In concluding, I call attention to the challenge for evolutionary psychology in trying to understand the complete lack of ethnic identification of so many elite Europeans such as John Derbyshire. He is only the tip of a massive iceberg. I have sketched a theory of why this might be in the Preface to the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique: a relatively weak sense of ethnocentrism resulting from our European evolutionary past combined with the propaganda emanating from the Jewish intellectual and political movements I describe and its amplification in the media; the powerful opprobrium and, increasingly, police state controls that have become attached to criticism of Jews and Israel; and the heady inducements to conform to the interests and views of a powerful minority. Having read Derbyshire’s account of his childhood, one might add to the model two more variables: socialization in a very benign Jewish milieu and deep reverence for the cultural accomplishments of Jews. In the end, Derbyshire is the epitome of that sad and paradoxical figure, the Judaized intellectual discussed in The Culture of Critique for whom Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. It is a mindset that is leading Europeans directly to the fate of the Israelites who stray from God’s way as described in Deuteronomy (28:62): “And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude.”

Footnotes

1. J. Derbyshire, The Marx of the Anti-Semites, The American Conservative, March 10, 2003. [url=http://www.amconmag.com/03_10_03/review.html]http://www.amconmag.com/03_10_03/review.html[/url]

2. Please send correspondence to Kevin MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California State University–Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901; email: kmacd@csulb.edu

3. J. Derbyshire: The Jews and I, National Review Online, April 10, 2001. [url=http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshireprint041001.html]http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/d...rint041001.html[/url]

4. Ibid.

5. Derbyshire (ibid.) is critical of the response to the “thoughtful and entirely unthreatening way” in which William Cash described the dominance of Jews like Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg in Hollywood. To the amazement of the Spectator’s editor (who was Dominic Lawson — a Jew!) this innocuous article caused a storm of outrage in the U.S.A. The young author, William Cash, was denounced from the pulpits of political correctness — that is, from the Op-Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Prominent American Jews like Leon Wieseltier went into high-hysterical mode, denouncing Cash as the new Julius Streicher and so on. The storm went on for weeks, led by a howling mob of buffoons — Barbra Streisand, for example — who had certainly never read, nor probably even heard of the Spectator up to that point. (I have been reading it for 30 years, and have also written for it.) It was a display of arrogance, cruelty, ignorance, stupidity, and sheer bad manners by rich and powerful people towards a harmless, helpless young writer, and the Jews who whipped up this preposterous storm should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

6. E.g., J. Barkow (1989). Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Perspectives on Mind and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Buss, D. (1999). Evolutionary Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon; MacDonald, K. B. (1998). Evolution, Culture, and the Five-Factor Model. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 29, 119–149.

7. K. MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Books, 2002. [url=http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0%2D595%2D22838%]http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_de...%2D595%2D22838%[/url] 2D0

8. D. S. Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. See also: Hilton, A. & Obermeyer, G. (1999). Evolutionary strategies of religious groups: Kinship and altruism, cultural segregation and migration in early and modern Anabaptist communities in Europe and America. Paper presented at a conference, sponsored by the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies (Jordan), on: Migration and Culture Contact: patterns of confrontation and coexistence in a changing world. October 11–15, 1999, The Meridien Hotel, Amman; Miele, F. (2000). To Populate is to Rule: Review of The Cousins' Wars by Kevin Phillips. Population and Environment. 21 (3) 347 – 358.

9. See K. MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

10. I recently became aware of the following in Hugh Davis Graham’s Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 56– 57):

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

1. In: J. Rosen. White Christmas: The Story of a Song. London: 4th Estate (A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers), 2002. Rosen comments: “There is a word for [how a Jew could write a song about Christmas], and it is Yiddish: chutzpah. In its own subtle way, White Christmas is a musical gesture as aggressive as Anarchy in the UK or anything on Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP.”

2. Sterritt, D. The one serious subject Hollywood doesn’t avoid. The Christian Science Monitor, November 22, 2002.

3. Silbiger, S. (2000). The Jewish Phenomenon : Seven Keys to the Enduring Wealth of a People. Atlanta, GA: Longstreet Press.

4. Goldberg, J. J. (1996). Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; M. Massing, Should Jews be parochial? The American Prospect. [url=http://www.prospect.org/print/V11/23/massing-]http://www.prospect.org/print/V11/23/massing-[/url] m.html

5. Lipset, S. M., & Raab, E. (1995). Jews and the New American Scene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

[url=http://www.amconmag.com/03_10_03/review.html]http://www.amconmag.com/03_10_03/review.html[/url]

The Marx of the Anti-Semites

[The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald, 1stBooks, 466 pages]

By John Derbyshire

One evening early on in my career as an opinion journalist in the USA, I found myself in a roomful of mainstream conservative types standing around in groups and gossiping. Because I was new to the scene, many of the names they were tossing about were unknown to me, so I could not take much part in the conversation. Then I caught one name that I recognized. I had just recently read and admired a piece published in Chronicles under that name. I gathered from the conversation that the owner of the name had once been a regular contributor to much more widely read conservative publications, the kind that have salaried congressional correspondents and full-service LexisNexis accounts, but that he was welcome at those august portals no longer. In all innocence, I asked why this was so. “Oh,” explained one of my companions, “he got the Jew thing.” The others in our group all nodded their understanding. Apparently no further explanation was required. The Jew thing. It was said in the kind of tone you might use of an automobile with a cracked engine block, or a house with subsiding foundations. Nothing to be done with him, poor fellow. No use to anybody now. Got the Jew thing. They shoot horses, don’t they?

Plainly, getting the Jew thing was a sort of occupational hazard of conservative journalism in the United States, an exceptionally lethal one, which the career-wise writer should strive to avoid. I resolved that I would do my best, so far as personal integrity allowed, not to get the Jew thing. I had better make it clear to the reader that at the time of writing, I have not yet got the Jew thing—that I am in fact a philoSemite and a well-wisher of Israel, for reasons I have explained in various places, none of them difficult for the nimble web surfer to find.

If, however, you have got the Jew thing, or if, for reasons unfathomable to me, you would like to get it, Kevin MacDonald is your man. MacDonald is a tenured professor of psychology at California State University in Long Beach. He is best known for his three books about the Jews, developing the idea that Judaism has for 2,000 years or so been a “group evolutionary strategy.” The subject of this review is a re-issue, in soft cover, of the third and most controversial of these books, The Culture of Critique, first published in 1998. Its subtitle is, “An evolutionary analysis of Jewish involvement in twentieth-century intellectual and political movements.” The re-issue differs from the original mainly by the addition of a 66-page preface, which covers some more recent developments in the field and offers responses to some of the criticisms that appeared when the book was first published. The number of footnotes has also been increased from 135 to 181, and they have all been moved from the chapter-ends to the back of the book. A small amount of extra material has been added to the text. So far as I could tell from a cursory comparison of the two editions, nothing has been subtracted.

The main thrust of this book’s argument is that Jewish or Jewish-dominated organizations and movements engaged in a deliberate campaign to delegitimize the Gentile culture of their host nations —most particularly the USA—through the twentieth century and that this campaign is one aspect of a long-term survival strategy for the Jews as an ethnicity. In MacDonald’s own words, “[T] he rise of Jewish power and the disestablishment of the specifically European nature of the U.S. are the real topics of CofC.” He illustrates his thesis by a close analysis of six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian movement in the social sciences (most particularly the no-such- thing-as-race school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews in left-wing politics, the psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of individual psychopathology), the “New York intellectuals” centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy.

MacDonald writes from the point of view of evolutionary psychology—a term that many writers would put in quotes, as the epistemological status of this field is still a subject of debate. I have a few doubts of my own on this score and sometimes wonder whether evolutionary psychology may eventually turn out to be one of those odd fads that the human sciences, especially in the USA, are susceptible to. The twentieth century saw quite a menagerie of these fads: Behaviorism, Sheldonian personality-typing by body shape (ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph), the parapsychological reseaches of Dr. J.B. Rhine, the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, and so on. I think that the evolutionary psychologists are probably on to something, but some of their more extreme claims seem to me to be improbable and unpleasantly nihilistic. Here, for example, is Kevin MacDonald in a previous book: “The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals.” This trembles on the edge of deconstructionist words-have-no-meaning relativism, of the kind that philosopher David Stove called “puppetry theory,” and that MacDonald himself debunks very forcefully in Chapter 5 of The Culture of Critique. After all, if it is so, should we not suppose that evolutionary psychologists are pursuing their own “group evolutionary strategy”? And that, in criticizing them, I am pursuing mine? And that there is, therefore, no point at all in my writing, or your reading, any further?

To be fair to Kevin MacDonald, not all of his writing is as silly as that. The Culture of Critique includes many good things. There is a spirited defense of the scientific method, for example. One of the sub-themes of the book is that Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences—elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content—and that this peculiar talent must be connected somehow with the custom, persisted in through long pre-Enlightenment centuries, of immersing young men in the study of a vast body of argumentative writing, with status in the community—and marriage options, and breeding opportunities—awarded to those who have best mastered this mass of meaningless esoterica. (This is not an original observation, and the author does not claim it as such. In fact he quotes historian Paul Johnson to the same effect, and earlier comments along these lines were made by Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper.) MacDonald is very scathing about these circular and self-referential thought-systems, especially in the case of psychoanalysis and the “pathologization of Gentile culture” promoted by the Frankfurt School. Here he was precisely on my wavelength, and I found myself cheering him on. Whatever you may think of MacDonald and his theories, there is no doubt he believes himself to be doing careful objective science. The same could, of course, be said of Sheldon, Rhine, Kinsey, et al.

It is good to be reminded, too, with forceful supporting data, that the 1924 restrictions on immigration to the U.S. were not driven by any belief on the part of the restrictionists in their own racial superiority but by a desire to stabilize the nation’s ethnic balance, which is by no means the same thing. (In fact, as MacDonald points out, one of the worries of the restrictionists was that more clever and energetic races like the Japanese would, if allowed to enter, have negative effects on social harmony.) MacDonald’s chapter on “Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy” is a detailed survey of a topic I have not seen discussed elsewhere. If the Jews learned anything from the 20th century, it was surely the peril inherent in being the only identifiable minority in a society that is otherwise ethnically homogeneous. That thoughtful Jewish-Americans should seek to avoid this fate is understandable. That their agitation was the main determinant of postwar U.S. immigration policy seems to me more doubtful. And if it is true, we must believe that 97 percent of the U.S. population ended up dancing to the tune of the other three percent. If that is true, the only thing to say is the one Shakespeare’s Bianca would have said: “The more fool they.”

Similarly with MacDonald’s discussion of Jewish involvement in the

Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire and the many horrors that ensued. This was until recently another taboo topic, though the aged Alexander Solzhenitsyn, presumably feeling he has nothing much to lose, has recently taken a crack at it. I believe MacDonald was driven by necessity here. Having posited that Jews are out to “destroy” (this is his own word) Gentile society, he was open to the riposte that if, after 2,000 years of trying, the Jews had failed to accomplish this objective in even one instance, Gentiles don’t actually have much to worry about. So: the Jews destroyed Russia. Though MacDonald’s discussion of this topic is interesting and illuminating, it left me unconvinced. As he says, “The issue of the Jewish identification of Bolsheviks who were Jews by birth is complex.” Paul Johnson gives only 15-20 percent of the delegates at early Party congresses as Jewish. If the other 80- 85 percent were permitting themselves to be manipulated by such a small minority, then we are back with Bianca.

Since the notion of “group evolutionary strategy” is central to MacDonald’s case, I wish he had been better able to convince me of its validity. For instance, I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation that, like the diaspora Jews, awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material. Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history knows that the guy who gets the girl—who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives” who are thereby denied to less intellectual males—is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position. This went on for two thousand years. Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean. So: was Confucianism a “group evolutionary strategy”? If so, then plainly the Chinese of China were, in MacDonald’s jargon, the “ingroup”. But then … what was the “outgroup”?

The more I think about the term “group evolutionary strategy,” in fact, the more I wonder if it is not complete nonsense. From an evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so have been conversion to Christianity? Rather than learning to argue fine points of theology, would not a better strategy have been to learn, say, fencing or Latin? Sure, the Jews held together as a group across 2,000 years. The gypsies held together pretty well, too, across many centuries, yet their “group evolutionary strategy” was the opposite of the Jews’ at almost every point. And the Jewish over-representation in important power centers of Gentile host societies became possible only after Jewish emancipation—which, like abolition of the slave trade, was an entirely white-Gentile project! Did the genes of 12th-century Jews “know” emancipation was going to happen 700 years on? How? If they did not, what was the point of their “evolutionary strategy”? There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.

Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field. There is no disputing that we need to understand much more than we now do about how common-ancestry groups react with each other. Group conflicts are a key problem for multiracial and multicultural societies. Up till about 1960, the U.S. coped with these problems by a frank assertion of white-Gentile ethnic dominance, very much as Israel copes with them today by asserting Jewish ethnic dominance. This proved to be quite a stable arrangement, as social arrangements go. It was obviously objectionable to some American Jews, and it is not surprising that they played an enthusiastic part in undermining it; but they were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in its downfall. It was replaced, from the 1960s on, by a different arrangement, characterized by racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense, accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering (“affirmative action”). This system, I think it is becoming clear, has proved less stable than what went before and has probably now reached the point where it cannot be sustained much longer. What will replace it? What will the new arrangement be?

At times of flux like this, there are naturally people whose preference is for a return to the older dispensation. It is obvious that Kevin MacDonald is one of these people. If this is not so, he has some heavy explaining to do about phrases like “the ethnic interests of white Americans to develop an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society.” Personally, I think he’s dreaming. The older dispensation was not as bad as liberal commentators and story-tellers would have us believe, but it is gone forever and will not return. For America, the toothpaste is out of the tube.

And on the point of Israel having something very much like the old American dispensation, I am unimpressed by MacDonald’s oft-repeated argument—it is a favorite with both Israelophobes and anti-Semites—that it is hypocritical for Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S. while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. Unless you think that ethnic dominance, under appropriate restraining laws, is immoral per se—and I don’t, and Kevin MacDonald plainly doesn’t either—it can be the foundation of a stable and successful nation. A nation that can establish it and maintain it would be wise to do so. The USA was not able to maintain it because too many Americans— far more than three percent—came to think it violated Constitutional principles. Israel, however, was founded on different principles, and there seems to be no large popular feeling in that country for dismantling Jewish- ethnic dominance, as there was in Lyndon Johnson’s America for dismantling European dominance. The Israelis, most of them, are happy with Jewish-ethnic dominance and intend to keep it going. Good luck to them.

The aspect of Macdonald’s thesis that I find least digestible is his underlying assumption that group conflict is a zero-sum game rooted in an evolutionary tussle over finite resources. This is not even true on an international scale, as the growing wealth of the whole world during this past few decades has shown. On the scale of a single nation, it is absurd. These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with—Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on—were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were. Now conduct the following thought experiment. Suppose the great post- 1881 immigration of Ashkenazi Jews had never occurred. Suppose the Jewish population of the U.S. in 2003 were not the two to four percent (depending on your definitions) that it is, but the 0.3 percent it was at the start of the Civil War. Would anything have been lost? Would America be richer or poorer? Would our cultural and intellectual life be busier or duller?

It seems incontrovertible to me that a great deal would have been lost: entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars: not mere psychoanalysts and “critical theorists,” but physicists, mathematicians, medical research- ers, historians, economists— even, as MacDonald notes honestly in his new preface, evolutionary psychologists! The first American song whose words I knew was “White Christmas,” written by a first-generation Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant. The first boss I ever had in this country was a Jew who had served honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps. Perhaps it is true, as MacDonald claims, that “most of those prosecuted for spying for the Soviet Union [i.e., in the 1940s and 1950s] were Jews.” It is also true, however, that much of the secret research they betrayed to their country’s enemies was the work of Jewish scientists. The Rosenbergs sold the Bomb to the Soviets; but without Jewish physicists, there would have been no Bomb to sell. Last spring I attended a conference of mathematicians attempting to crack a particularly intractable problem in analytic number theory. A high proportion of the 200-some attendees were Jews, including at least two from Israel. Sowers of discord there have certainly been, but on balance I cannot see how anyone could deny that this country is enormously better off for the contributions of Jews. Similarly for every other nation that has liberated the energies and intelligence of Jewish citizens. Was Hungary better off, or worse off, after the 1867 Ausgleich? Was Spain better off, or worse off, before the 1492 expulsions? “To ask the question is to answer it.”

Now, Kevin MacDonald might argue that he, as a social scientist, is not obliged to provide any such balance in his works, any more than a clinical pathologist writing about disease should be expected to include an acknowledgment that most of his readers will be healthy for most of their lives. I agree. A scientist, even a social scientist, need not present any facts other than those he has uncovered by diligent inquiry in his particular narrow field. He is under no obligation, as a scientist, to soothe the feelings of those whose sensibilities might be offended by his discoveries. Given the highly combustible nature of MacDonald’s material, however, it wouldn’t have hurt to point out the huge, indisputably net-positive, contributions of Jews to America, right at the beginning of his book and again at the end. MacDonald has in any case been fairly free in CofC with his own opinions on such matters as U.S. support for Israel, immigration policy, and so on. He is entitled to those opinions, but having included them in this book, his claim to dwell only in the aery realm of cold scientific objectivity does not sound very convincing.

This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term, an anti- Semitic book. Its entire argument is that the Jews, collectively, are up to no good. This may of course be true, and MacDonald is entitled to say that the issue of whether his results are anti-Semitic is nugatory, from a social- science point of view, by comparison with the issue of their truth content. I agree with that, too: but given the well-known history of this topic, it seems singularly obtuse of MacDonald not to try to calm the troubled waters his work is bound to stir up. From my own indirect, and rather scanty, knowledge of the man, I would put this down to a personality combination of prickliness and unworldliness, but I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and that there is not malice lurking behind MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.

John Derbyshire (http://www.olimu. com) is a Contributing Editor of National Review and a twice-weekly columnist for National Review Online. His book Prime Obsession, an account of the Riemann Hypothesis, will be published April 18 by National Academies Press.

Bardamu

2003-03-08 16:55 | User Profile

I am surprised no one else posted this.

I took it off overthrow.com.

I am currently reading the paperback edition of Culture of Critique. Except for being somewhat dry reading, I can't think of a better book to send to your old college buddies that you are attempting to debate into political enlightenment. I went through a zen buddhism stage back in the seventies. I was attracted to the idea of "sudden enlightenment", where the Buddhist master whacks his meditating students on the head with a bamboo stick. Maybe Macdonald's work can be the intellectual equivalent of those bamboo sticks.

Okiereddust

2003-03-08 17:34 | User Profile

Derbyshire dismisses evolutionary psychology as a passing fad. He sarcastically asks, “in criticizing [evolutionary psychologists], I am pursuing [my evolutionary goals]?” ........And it does occur to me that writing critiques of evolutionary psychology and dismissing those who criticize Jews might be one way to attain social status among the predominantly Jewish neo- conservative elite that dominates so much of the conservative media.

In other words yes, obviously.

:lol:

mwdallas

2003-03-08 17:54 | User Profile

I'm going to be sending my comments to MacDonald in the next couple days, so if you have any thoughts, let's hear 'em.

Okiereddust

2003-03-08 18:47 | User Profile

MacDonald it strikes me from a political point of view is entirely too solicitous and polite to Derbyshire, although in an academic setting a Professor expounding at length about his pet theory to a class that plainly lacks the proper degree of respect and intellectual gravity, the proverbial pearls going before the swine occasionally occurs.

Whenever I read an introduction like Derbyshire puts on his review, I am reminded of a story about a British spy in WWII, explaining a certain code he had for public communications. Whenever he said "the fact of the matter is" it was code for saying the rest of this is all lies, look at the coded message.

Why even bother to respond to people who hint broadly that what they are saying is not even their personal opinion anyway, but what they are being paid to write, in other words people who are self-admitted propagandists, not real journalists?

Much of journalism is that way admittedly, and propaganda arguments I suppose still must be met on principle, but when I see disclaimers like Derbyshire's I see the story less in the article and more in the writer. Which I note MacDonald does focus on somewhat.

Ragnar

2003-03-08 20:56 | User Profile

MacDonald here seems to be using Derbyshire's non-review as an excuse to clarify and add ammo to his basic position, which is always sensible; it would be pointless to do anything else as Derbyshire is simply a dishonest propagandist.

The discussion started by CofC has got to dwell more on the "anti-evolutionary" strategy of Europeans because this is no longer an issue of Host + Parasite. A close examination of American elites encourage the belief that if every American Jew took the Cloud Trolley tomorrow, Euro-Americans would destroy themselves regardless in favor of Mexicans, Hmongs, Chinese, Somalis and so on forevermore.

Okiereddust

2003-03-09 06:36 | User Profile

Originally posted by Ragnar@Mar 8 2003, 20:56 The discussion started by CofC has got to dwell more on the "anti-evolutionary" strategy of Europeans because this is no longer an issue of Host + Parasite.

Accepting for the sake of argument your terminology, what's changed? Seems like the same host, same parasite's still there to me.

** A close examination of American elites encourage the belief that if every American Jew took the Cloud Trolley tomorrow, Euro-Americans would destroy themselves regardless in favor of Mexicans, Hmongs, Chinese, Somalis and so on forevermore.**

Well 1. They aren't going away, and 2. If they did, we wouldn't have much of an elite left, and the mirror elite we have wouldn't last nearly as long without their protectors. They'd definitely have to modify their behavior.

Ragnar

2003-03-09 20:42 | User Profile

Originally posted by Okiereddust@Mar 9 2003, 06:36 **

Accepting for the sake of argument your terminology, what's changed? Seems like the same host, same parasite's still there to me. **

Thirty years since the 60s I think a serious ossification has taken place within the spirit of the Euro majority. I hope I'm wrong too, but the areas my work takes me to contains lots of "new Americans" on the dole, no Jews at all, and the same worship-the-Third-World-we-are-all-guilty-white-oppressors mentality.

Call it learned helplessness or even induced self-hate, but at this point it seems to be a machine that runs by itself.

Okiereddust

2003-03-10 02:01 | User Profile

Originally posted by Ragnar@Mar 9 2003, 20:42 > Originally posted by Okiereddust@Mar 9 2003, 06:36 **

Accepting for the sake of argument your terminology, what's changed?  Seems like the same host, same parasite's still there to me. **

Thirty years since the 60s I think a serious ossification has taken place within the spirit of the Euro majority. I hope I'm wrong too, but the areas my work takes me to contains lots of "new Americans" on the dole, no Jews at all, and the same worship-the-Third-World-we-are-all-guilty-white-oppressors mentality.

Call it learned helplessness or even induced self-hate, but at this point it seems to be a machine that runs by itself.**

Well there's no doubt that Gentiles are affected by these movements too. Indeed that is the whole thrust of CoC. These intellectual movements are "top down" movements, controlled of course by Jews at the top, but with Gentiles occupying the bottom rungs who have been indoctrinated socialized and to accept these ideologies. MacDonald gives one specific example in the indoctrination process, that of gentile graduate students studying under Jewish scholars. You can expect this process of course to be repeated down the line - graduate students to undergraduate students in colleges, teachers to students in primary and secondary schools, management to labor in organizations, etc.

**Once an organization becomes dominated by a particular intellectual perspective, there is enormous intellectual inertia created by the fact that the informal networks dominating elite universities serve as gatekeepers for the next generation of scholars. Aspiring intellectuals, whether Jewish or gentile are subjected to a high level of indoctrination at the undergraduate and graduate levels; there is enormous psychological pressure to adopt the fundamental intellectual assumptions that lie at the heart of the power hierarchy of the discipline. As discussed in Chapter 1, once a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement attains intellectual predominance, it is not surprising that gentiles would be attracted to Jewish intellectuals as members of a socially dominant and prestigious group and as dispensers of valued resources. **

Such is inevitable. Even the crudest sort of anti-Semite, such as Hitler, recognized such, when he talked about the war between Jewish culture and gentile culture. He did not for instance claim that Marxist socialism (aka the Social Democratic and Communist parties in Germany, Austria, and Russia etc, had no gentile members, only pointed out how they were controlled at the top by Jewish Marxists.

In our country it is the same of course with multiculturalism and diversity.

Texas Dissident

2003-03-10 07:33 | User Profile

Originally posted by Okiereddust@Mar 9 2003, 20:01 ** Such is inevitable. Even the crudest sort of anti-Semite, such as Hitler, recognized such, when he talked about the war between Jewish culture and gentile culture. He did not for instance claim that Marxist socialism (aka the Social Democratic and Communist parties in Germany, Austria, and Russia etc, had no gentile members, only pointed out how they were controlled at the top by Jewish Marxists.

In our country it is the same of course with multiculturalism and diversity. **

And now GOP 'Big-Tent' politics.

Excellent post and point, Okie.

Hugh Lincoln

2003-03-10 22:17 | User Profile

Anyone up for the possibility that Derbyshire's non-review of CofC was SUCH a prevaricating, dissembling, apologetic wink-wink that we, reading between the lines, were supposed to have gotten something else from it? A la A Modest Proposal? I mean, look at that article. "I knew some clever Jews in my day." Yeah, yeah, so do we all. "Jews are great entertainers and jurists." Um, right... and they're doing in those capacities exactly what MacDonald says they do. "So damning is what MacDonald says that he should have put in a good word about Jews." Glory be. Even Derbyshire seems to acknowledge the pathetic limpness of THAT criticism. Kinda reminds me of Robert Locke on FrontPageMag laying down the "rules for criticizing Jews."

Okiereddust

2003-03-11 04:09 | User Profile

Originally posted by Hugh Lincoln@Mar 10 2003, 22:17 ** Anyone up for the possibility that Derbyshire's non-review of CofC was SUCH a prevaricating, dissembling, apologetic wink-wink that we, reading between the lines, were supposed to have gotten something else from it? **

That's what I was saying.

Except that, in the first paragraph, he does sort of give sort of explicit affirmation to at least one "anti-Semitic" concept - that of "for fear of the Jews"

Charles A Lindbergh

2003-03-11 06:52 | User Profile

Call it learned helplessness or even induced self-hate, but at this point it seems to be a machine that runs by itself.  Ragnar

Anyone up for the possibility that Derbyshire's non-review of CofC was SUCH a prevaricating, dissembling, apologetic wink-wink that we, reading between the lines, were supposed to have gotten something else from it?  Hugh Lincoln

[color=blue]Ragnar[/color], my belief is that White self-destruction requires around-the-clock doses of Talmudvision to keep the process running. If the White man can be weaned from his TelAvivision, and moved over to racially-aware White forums on the Web.....the White self-destruction can be stopped in its tracks. ZOG relies utterly on its monopoly control of the means of communication.

[color=blue]Hugh Lincoln[/color], I don't think that Derbyshire is writing it with a wink, but I think that Buchanan and Taki Theodorocopulos may be printing it with a wink. Somebody on Stormfront mentioned that Derbyshire's commitment to miscegenation (Chinese wife) and animus against Prof. MacDonald is real. I hope that Pat Buchanan and Taki have their heads screwed on straight enough to have realized that Prof. MacDonald's work is monumentaly crucial to White racial survival. Assuming that, they may have printed Derbyshire as a ruse whereby Prof. MacDonald's work may take center stage in their magazine. Letters need to be written to the The American Conservative demanding that Kevin MacDonald get a decent chance at rebuttal of the John Derbyshire hatchet work.

Buster

2003-03-11 15:04 | User Profile

When Chronicles discussed McDonald they were careful to have a Jew do the job (P. Gottfried). And, of course, LewRockwell would soil his pants before printing anything on his site.

I don't know. I'll be surprised if McDonald gets any rebuttal, or even a defender in the letters section.

Hugh Lincoln

2003-03-11 17:08 | User Profile

Originally posted by Buster@Mar 11 2003, 09:04 ** I'll be surprised if McDonald gets any rebuttal, or even a defender in the letters section. **

Yes, even if the letter happens to be cogent and well-written. I was thinking of it but this possibility has dampened my enthusiasm for the task. Besides, those who are interested know where to find MacDonald's rebuttal, and it does an excellent job of slicing Derb down to size.

Derb's reaction to CofC reminds me of a reference I saw somewhere to "Jews as tornado," i.e., yes, they're not all moving in the same direction at once (in this context, meaning that some are "cultured" and "hospitable" as Derb fondly recalls) but they are, as a group, moving in one direction across the landscape. Thus, picking out your favorite Jew memory is a woefully inadequate and anecdotal way to parry McDonald's thesis. That business reminds me in turn of the privileged White Manhattanites who wistfully recall their black nannies --- and how they can't be racist because of the sweet recollections.

mwdallas

2003-03-11 18:45 | User Profile

Thus, picking out your favorite Jew memory is a woefully inadequate and anecdotal way to parry McDonald's thesis.

It is not only inadequate; it is wholly irrelevant.

It does not matter that we are capable of engaging in voluntary (and pleasant) exchanges between ourselves and "individual" Jews. The relevant diference is that in the case of a bargained-for exchange, the benefit of your bargain accrues to you as an individual, while the benefit of the Jew's bargain accrues to his group.