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Kevin MacDonald: The Homosexual Lobby: A Prime Example of the Loony Left

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) is a rare disorder that has shed a lot of light on how biology shapes sex differences. Girls with the disorder have a defective enzyme, and as a result their adrenal glands begin secreting male hormones well before they are born. The result is that to varying degrees their sexual organs are masculinzed at birth, often resulting in surgical repair. More interestingly, their behavior is masculinized: They are more aggressive, more likely to prefer rough, active play, less attracted to taking care of children, and prefer functional clothing to feminine finery. And even more interestingly, they are more likely to be lesbian. It’s the lesbian thing that has the homosexual activists all worked up.

The reason for their ire is that there is a promising treatment for the disorder. (”A rare disorder, a rarer debate“; LA Times, Aug. 15, 2010). The problem for the activists is that as a side effect of treatment, the girl would be less likely to be lesbian. Horrors! The inside headline in the  print edition screams, “Side effect outrages gay advocates.” Their greatest worry is that “some doctors might tell parents that a reduced chance of homosexuality is one of the therapy’s benefits.”

One activist group, Advocates for Informed Choice, “favors allowing children born with intersex conditions to participate in decisions about their gender identity, including delaying a decision until adolescence.”

But by that time the girl would already be masculinized and biologically predisposed to lesbianism. It’s obvious what her “choice” would be. The effects of the hormones during the prenatal period could not be undone at that point. In effect, the girl’s choice would have already been made for her.

So the child cannot meaningfully make a choice. Who can?

Amazingly, there is not one word in the article about what interests the parents have–or even what the real interests of the child are. You don’t have to be an evolutionist to realize that parents have a huge stake in the sexual orientation of their children. It’s likely to be the difference between having grandchildren and not having grandchildren, especially given that these girls have relatively little interest in nurturing children. Even without an evolutionary analysis, it’s obvious that most parents want grandchildren eventually and take great pride and joy in having them. Don’t they have a say?

And what about the child? These gay activists want the child to be just like them. But how does that benefit the child? For an evolutionist, the true interests of the child are clear: Heterosexuality and femininity are far more likely to result in children and well-cared for children at that.  But even apart from that, there is no reason to suppose that lesbians are happier than heterosexual women.

The attitudes of the gay activists here are yet another example of how far the culture of the  left has departed sanity and common sense. For these people, lesbianism  has a value for its own sake, independent of the interests and desires of the parents, and independent of the interests of the child.

As a biologically oriented psychologist, I am not surprised that research indicates the importance of biological influences on homosexuality. The fact that homosexuals have become pillars of the cultural left is deplorable —and quite unnecessary. Homosexuals have ethnic interests just like everyone else, and they can promote those interests even if they don’t themselves have children. It seems to me that one way for homosexuals to promote their ethnic interests is to acknowledge heterosexual marriage as a specially protected cultural norm — its special status guaranteed because of its critical importance in creating and nurturing children.

And they should be very happy that there is a promising treatment that would allow girls affected with CAH to grow up wanting to be wives, mothers, and grandmothers.

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Posted in Ethnic Genetic Interests, Evolutionary Psychology | 46 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Hormonal regulation of ingroup altruism

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

A recent paper by Carsten K. W. De Dreu and colleagues in Science shows that the hormone oxytocin makes people more inclined to help their ingroup (”The Neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans”; Science, June 11, 2010; not available online without subscription). The paper is important for several issues related to group conflict. It begins with the simple statement that more than 210 million people were killed by state action in the 20th century, typically because they were seen in ingroup/outgroup terms. It also cites Darwin’s famous statement that “groups with a greater number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other … would spread and be victorious over other tribes” — a classic argument for group selection. They also cite several studies showing that oxytocin is linked to trust: people with high levels of trust have more oxytocin receptors in their brain, and receiving oxytocin makes people more empathic and generous.

The contribution of De Dreu et al. is to show that all this niceness is reserved for the ingroup — what they call “ingroup love.” Oxytocin increased people’s willingness to contribute to a common fund even though they would lose money in the process. However, it didn’t make them more likely to contribute to a fund where the they would benefit their ingroup at the expense of an outgroup. Oxytocin therefore promotes “ingroup love,” not “outgroup hate.” A second experiment showed that this effect occurred even for people who were not personally inclined toward altruism.

The third experiment is particularly important. Here the game was rigged to distinguish the motives of greed (large upside to non-cooperation if the other person cooperates compared to the downside if they do not cooperate) and fear (large downside to cooperation if the other person doesn’t reciprocate compared to the upside if they do reciprocate).

The greed motive is exploitative: it represents the desire to take advantage of a trusting outgroup; the fear motive is defensive: it represents the desire to protect the ingroup against possible exploitation by a non-cooperating outgroup. Oxytocin activated the fear motive: Under the influence of the drug people were more inclined to not cooperate with the outgroup, especially in the fear condition. In other words, they were defending their ingroup. Oxytocin did not affect greed.

So what does this all mean? First, realize that the ingroups and outgroups in the study are not genetically based, say, on ethnic differences. It would be interesting to see if the ingroup defensive effects of oxytocin would be increased if the ingroup and outgroup were racially homogeneous but of different races. We would also expect that there would be less altruistic donating to the ingroup in the first two experiments if the ingroups were ethnically diverse.

But because ethnicity was not manipulated and groups were randomly constructed, it means that the research is relevant to understanding the biological basis of social identity theory.  Social identity research shows that even randomly composed ingroups show ingroup biases — what De Dreu et al. term “ingroup love.” The ingroup and outgroup are like two ethnically-based football teams with different colored uniforms rather than two groups that differ on the basis of ethnicity. I have argued on the basis of several pieces of evidence that social identity mechanisms are an evolutionary adaptation for between-group conflict, and these results certainly provide further support for that.

The results don’t really provide any reason for optimism for White advocacy. We already know that whatever psychological mechanisms we have for loving our racial ingroup are failing miserably throughout the Western world. One reason is that Whites do not identify with other Whites as an ingroup, so they don’t show ingroup love specifically toward Whites. In the experiments, it’s quite clear who the ingroup is, but at least for the last several decades few Whites seem to consider their race as an ingroup. Whereas the experimenters made it very clear who the ingroup was, in the real world we are constantly be told by the media that Whites are not a legitimate ingroup–once again, “it’s the culture, stupid.”

The result is that Whites do not feel empathy for other Whites who have been victimzed — as noted in a previous blog on empathy research (”Whites lack of empathy for other Whites“). Discussions of the consequences of public policy never mention negative effects on Whites, only the negative effects on other groups. For example, the effects of amnesty are discussed only in terms of what’s good for the illegals as an oppressed, deserving group — not on the long term political and cultural viability of Whites. When public policy results might have positive consequences specifically for Whites, there is enormous anxiety among the chattering class. (This happened not long ago when people realized that tweaking the University of California admission standards to help Latinos and Blacks would likely inadvertently help Whites at the expense of Asians. Asian activists were not happy.) Whites have come to see themselves as an illegitimate ingroup.

The problem with social identity mechanisms is that because ethnicity is not relevant to defining ingroups and outgroups, these mechanisms are manipulable by the wider culture, and that is exactly what we are seeing.

The result is that the most empathic and altruistic among us fail to defend their racial ingroup. I suspect that most Whites with naturally high levels of oxytocin are expending their empathy and altruism on people quite a bit unlike themselves — adopting African babies and other such altruistic acts. And besides the gratification they get from helping others, they also get a great deal of social approval as an added bonus.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, White Racial Consciousness and Advocacy | 81 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Some thoughts on Richard Wrangham

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: My last blog (”Chimpanzees don’t believe in open borders“) necessarily highlighted the work of Richard Wrangham, the Harvard primatologist whose theory on coalitional aggression by male chimpanzees was strongly supported by the study of Mantini et al. Wrangham argues that chimps and humans have both inherited a propensity for aggressive territoriality from a chimplike ancestor. War engaged in by cooperating males was adaptive in our evolutionary past and therefore left its mark in the human mind.

This is a remarkably unsentimental view of the human past–Darwinism red in tooth and claw. And it provides strong support for a biological basis for some of the nastier human qualities that the intellectual left wants to see as grounded solely in pathological cultures.

So one would think that someone like Wrangham would be open to a theory of group competition such as my theory of group evolutionary strategies. Wrangham’s work shows that group competition predated human culture. My theory expands on that to between-group competition not by warfare but over other resources: social dominance, financial resources, and–most centrally–over the construction of culture. My approach is combined with theory and data showing that the higher mental processes central to culture can regulate the more ancient evolved systems of the brain (e.g., ethnocentrism) like the ones that Wrangham’s research points to.

Unlike chimpanzees, humans are therefore quite prone to maladaptive cultures. In contemporary human societies, a large part of group competition becomes intellectual warfare over the construction of culture. Hence my book The Culture of Critique which shows that several important intellectual movements dominated by strongly identified Jews who were acting to advance Jewish interests collectively managed to dominate intellectual discourse on race and ethnicity beginning in the early 20th century. Interacting with the individualistic proclivities of White Europeans, these movements  have been critical to overriding the biologically-based natural tendencies toward aggressive territoriality uncovered by Wrangham’s work.

However, Wrangham was one of the star performers in a tumultuous meeting of the  Human Behavior and Evolution Society at Amherst College in 2000. He presided over a forum devoted to discussing my work, described by Richard Faussette who witnessed the events. In my talk I stressed issues such as the maintenance of group boundaries that are so essential to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy and central to Wrangham’s theory of chimpanzee behavior. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of my remarks (reprinted in Faussette’s article), Wrangham called for an ethics investigation into me and my work and asked me to condemn the use of my work by “right wing extremists” and “rabid anti-Semites.” I forget what my response was, but my usual response to that sort of thing is to state that anyone is free to use any scientist’s work. And a lot of these “extremists” and “anti-Semites” have legitimate concerns, whether or not they express them in a language suitable to an academic.

The sad reality is that even hard-headed evolutionary scientists become completely unable to grasp the reality of human competition as it exists in contemporary societies. The chimpanzee neighboring groups that are aggressively defending and trying to expand their borders are doubtless more closely related to each other than the millions of people swarming over the borders of all the countries of the West are related to the traditional White people who have dominated these countries for hundreds or even thousands of years. There are very large genetic distances among human groups compared to the distances between these chimpanzee neighbors–and hence an even greater evolutionary imperative for us to defend our territory against human invaders–Frank Salter’s concept of ethnic genetic interests. But for evolutionary scientists like Wrangham, these relatively large genetic distances suddenly become meaningless when they refer to human groups, and it becomes irrational or even evil to be concerned about the eclipse and displacement of one’s racial group as millions of unlike others pour over the border.

The pall of political correctness hangs over even the best-known evolutionary scientists. Another hostile member of the audience at Amherst was John Tooby of the University of California-Santa Barbara who is prominently associated with the evolutionary psychology movement — a movement that neatly avoids any consideration of traits like IQ or unpleasant issues like race differences in IQ and aggression. (See my “Evolutionary psychology: The really dangerous idea is that it is wrong.”) And then there’s Steven Pinker whom I characterize as having assumed “the Stephen Jay Gould Chair for Politically Correct Popularization of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.

Once again, it’s obvious that the success of the  left derives from having taken over the elite institutions of the society, particularly the media and the academic world. It is a triumph with a very large ethnic component at its core — both in the  ethnic aggression of the Jewish-dominated intellectual movements that have seized the academic high ground and in the ethnic vulnerabilities of the Anglo-Saxons whom they displaced. The remnants of the WASP intellectual elite, like Wrangham, cower in fear of being ostracized while they watch the inexorable logic of evolution work against people like themselves. Certainly a chimpanzee would not be so stupid or cowardly.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, White pathology/guilt | 47 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Chimpanzees don’t believe in open borders

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: I began my chapter on Jewish involvement in shaping US immigration policy as follows:

Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflicts of interest between ethnic groups because immigration policy determines the future demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced by groups able to accomplish this goal. Immigration policy is thus of fundamental interest to an evolutionist.

So it’s not surprising that animals defend territories. Territories provide resources that can be turned into reproduction. But of course the intellectual left is very uncomfortable with the thought that animals might defend territories — especially if the animals are closely related to us. So they make up stories about chimpanzees as peaceful hippie types living at one with nature.

All this came together in a recent article “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees” in Current Biology (LA Times version; New York Times version). John Mitani and colleagues found that chimpanzee males patrol their territories in deadly serious single file lines with no feeding or socializing. Deadly because there were 18 fatal attacks in a nine-year period, almost all of them by male bands patrolling their territory.

The chimpanzees at Ngogo have expanded their territory at the expense of a neighboring community. Territorial expansion followed a series of lethal coalitionary attacks that formed an especially large source of mortality. … our findings support the hypothesis that killing neighboring conspecifics is adaptive. … [The most likely explanation is that] by acquiring new territory through lethal coalitionary aggression, male chimpanzees improve the feeding success of individuals in their own community, which in turn can lead to increased female reproduction.

Significantly, the authors go out of their way to point out that their results are contrary to the hypothesis that chimpanzee aggression is the result of contact with humans, citing a paper by Robert W. Sussman titled “The myth of man the hunter, man the killer, and the evolution of morality.” Sussman’s paper in Zygon (not available online) shows someone seemingly on a crusade against standard views in evolutionary anthropology.

The “soft” interpretation of the article (mentioned in the LA Times version) is that it tells us something about the evolution of cooperation. But clearly the cooperation is for the purpose of war. The really dangerous idea is that it suggests that organized warfare between males preceded human culture–the view of Harvard’s Richard Wrangham whose views are discussed in the NYTimes article:

Warfare among human groups that still live by hunting and gathering resembles chimp warfare in several ways. Foragers emphasize raids and ambushes in which few people are killed, yet casualties can mount up with incessant skirmishes. Dr. Wrangham argues that chimps and humans have both inherited a propensity for aggressive territoriality from a chimplike ancestor.

Sussman’s hostility to humans as naturally prone to warfare reminds one of the Boasian school of anthropology (Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique) and its attempt to invent a “pacified past” in which humans were depicted as peaceful myth makers and gift givers. (Sussman was president of the American Anthropological Association.) The truth is quite the opposite.

But the real question is why are White people throughout the Western world failing to patrol their borders and behaving in an evolutionarily maladaptive manner by allowing millions of people unlike themselves into their countries and often subsidizing them to boot? The answer has to be culture. Our evolutionary proclivities tell us to keep out the foreigner and to try to take his territory if possible.

Unfortunately, there are lots of reasons to think that culture can trump our evolutionary tendencies. (See here.) To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the culture, stupid. Xenophobia is an adaptive response, whether it’s for chimpanzees or for humans. But for the better part of a century, our intellectual elites have been telling us that xenophobia is a psychiatric disorder, little more than irrational hatred. This ideology has been spread throughout the school system and saturates the mainstream media. Those who disagree with it are subjected to economic penalties and social ostracism.

A big part of what is needed is to reverse this intellectual onslaught. The paper by Mitani and colleges is certainly a step in the right direction.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology | 38 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Whites’ lack of empathy for other Whites

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: There are doubtless a great many factors accounting for the general willingness of Whites to allow themselves to be pushed aside and to voluntarily become a minority amid a sea of non-Whites, most of whom hold historical grudges against them. My general view is that these cultural transformations are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting tendencies of Europeans toward individualism interacting with the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.

The problem with individualism is that we have weak ties to other Whites and we don’t have a sense (yet) of common fate. In other words, we are low on ethnocentrism. We hear about a White person who was victimized by a Black criminal or denied a promotion or admission to a university in favor of an “underrepresented minority”, and we don’t feel empathy for the victims simply because they are White. We don’t feel any psychological pain when we hear that White working class men have moved out of an area because their jobs have been taken by illegal Mexican immigrants.

At a rational level, Whites may well think that victimization of Whites is morally wrong. Hence the finding that Whites support ending affirmative action and ending immigration (especially illegal immigration) as has been shown in California and other states. But I suspect that there isn’t any real gut feeling of empathy with other Whites. And it’s the gut feeling of empathy that in the end motivates the sort of behavior that can really begin to alter things politically.

This was demonstrated recently in a study that scanned the brains of Black and White subjects viewing Black and White victims of Hurricane Katrina (Race and Empathy Matter on Neural Level, Science Daily). Everyone reported empathy for the victims. This is a verbal judgment that reflects nothing more than conventional morality. People certainly would not want to tell the experimenter that they have callous disregard for suffering.

But the brain’s emotion centers told a different story. Black subjects had empathic responses to Black victims, and the more ethnocentric Blacks had stronger emotional responses. Whites on the other hand, did not show any empathic responses to people of either race.

It’s not that Whites are incapable of empathy. Images of family members would doubtless result in strong empathic responses among Whites — responses that would motivate helping family members. Indeed, all the research shows much stronger family bonds among Whites than among Blacks — bonds that are motivated at least in part by empathic concern for family. But in general, we just  don’t get emotionally aroused when we see Whites  suffering or victimized.

And it also suggests that the many Whites who do behave altruistically toward Blacks or other non-Whites are not acting out of an emotional imperative of empathy, but for some other  reason — quite possibly social approval. What better way these days to show you are a good person?  I thought about this today when viewing a photo of Sandra Bullock with her newly adopted Black baby. Of course, it may be misplaced maternal affection.


But this lack of empathy for other Whites is a problem for political action on behalf of Whites. People are motivated far more by emotions than by rational appraisals. The  empathy among Jews for Jewish suffering is legendary. As Walter Benjamin once said, Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, 1968, 262)

There is undoubtedly variation among Whites for ethnocentrism, implying that at least some Whites would be upset by the suffering of other Whites more than by the suffering of, say, Blacks. In other words, they would have the same pattern that Blacks show, only reversed.

Personally, I have found that I do have an emotional reaction to Whites being victimized. This could be because I am more genetically inclined toward ethnocentrism than most Whites. But it could also be influenced by living in Southern California where Whites are now a minority. Social psychologists have shown that members of majority groups do not have the same sense of an ingroup feeling as do members of minority groups.

The good news is that as Whites become a minority, ingroup solidarity–and empathy for other Whites–would be expected to increase. And getting involved in White advocacy with like-minded others doubtless has the effect of reinforcing and increasing those tendencies, especially when it is not at all difficult to imagine nightmarish scenarios of the future for Whites. Such nightmarish scenarios have a great deal of emotional impact, especially when they are graphically depicted. That is the reason why we will not see such depictions in the media.

The bad news is that even with empathy for other Whites, there are still huge barriers for Whites to really get involved in White advocacy — barriers such as losing one’s job and social ostracism. The power of the left to inflict economic pain is huge, as recently shown by the burgeoning movement to inflict economic sanctions on Arizona for having the temerity to enact a law aimed at getting rid of illegal aliens.

But having empathy for other Whites would certainly be a great first step in the right direction–and probably a step that is necessary if we are going to see really intense commitment by Whites to change the current regime.

My view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
EuropeMy view is that these cultural transformations
are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted
Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23
tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)
and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of
Europe..

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Posted in Ethnocentrism, Evolutionary Psychology, White pathology/guilt | 68 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Jews Embarrassed by Jews: Slumlords — and Goldman Sachs

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Jill Jacobs writing in the Forward presents an interesting comment on Jewish ethics  (“When the Slumlords Are Us”). She essentially corroborates Edmund Connelly’s work on “The Culture of Deceit”:  Not only are sharp business practices common among religious Jews, they are encouraged in the sense that Jews with a well-deserved reputation for unethical business behavior are welcomed into the highest reaches of the Jewish community: “Some of these offending landlords have more than Jewish names. At least a couple have been accorded positions of leadership and prominence in their Jewish communities because of the money they give to Jewish groups and causes.”

That’s the important point. It’s certainly the case that all religions have their bad apples. But with Judaism, being a bad apple is quite compatible with being a pillar of the community, as long as you continue to donate generously to communal causes.

Because she has such a strong sense of being Jewish, she feels personally embarrassed because of the behavior of her landlord: “One day, the landlord himself dropped by the building. I shuddered when I saw his long black coat, black hat and bushy beard. Would the other tenants, mostly Latino families, think that all Jews treated others with such neglect?”

Yes, they probably would. That’s how human stereotyping works. The fact is that most people who develop negative attitudes about Jews probably do so as a result of personal interactions with Jews, not by delving into Jewish history or ruminating on the causes of our current malaise. Jacobs notes that she could talk all she wanted about lofty Jewish ethical principles, but it didn’t do much good when reality was so at odds with the lofty theory:

Inevitably, heartbreakingly, someone would say to me, “Jill, you’re telling us that Judaism says all of these great things about how landlords should treat their tenants. So why is it that my landlord, a religious Jew, won’t turn on the heat?” Or worse: “You’re the first Jew I’ve ever met who’s not a slumlord.”

Anti-Semitism among Blacks has often been the result of similar negative personal experiences during the period when Jews owned the stores and apartment buildings in Black communities. Jews have mainly moved on to higher callings than running stores and apartments in Black areas, their places taken by newer arrivals. Similarly, a survey conducted by the Jewish Labor Committee in 1945 indicated that the attitudes of working class Americans were shaped by actual experience with Jews. They saw

the Jew as a cheating storekeeper, a merciless landlord or rental agent, an unscrupulous pawn-broker, or an installment salesman and insurance collector who will take away the collateral or let the insurance lapse at the first delinquency. To this is added the idea that the Jews own all business and that at least most Jews are in business. All this is so because the Jews are money-crazy, selfish, grabby, take advantage of others, cheat, chisel, lie, are ruthless, unscrupulous, and so on. (See here, p. 50).

Jacobs recounts some attempts to make such unethical behavior unaccaptable within the Jewish community. She mentions some successes, but such efforts are up against the particularist, ingroup morality that has always characterized Jewish behavior and is clearly spelled out in Jewish religious writing: One moral standard within the group, and a completely different standard outside the group. Beginning with the Enlightenment, Jews put in a great deal of intellectual work inventing a universalist ethics for Judaism as a “light unto the nations” — a moral exemplar for the rest of humanity. But it was always a sham and continues to be so in the contemporary world. As reported by Haaretz, just recently, a rabbi on the West Bank wrote about how it’s permissible for Jews to kill pretty much any non-Jew even if they are not responsible for threats to Jews:

“It is permissable to kill the Righteous among Nations even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote, adding: “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments — because we care about the commandments — there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

Several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Yithak Ginzburg and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, have recommended the book to their students and followers.

The result of this Judeocentric ethics is that, apart from the efforts of Ms. Jacobs, there is far more concern about molding public perceptions than about altering Jewish behavior. This came up with the Bernie Madoff affair:

As in the [Michael] Milken case, the default  strategy is to proscribe any mention that a person like Madoff, who feeds into all the negative Jewish stereotypes, is Jewish. Indeed, some voices within the Jewish community are bemoaning the fact that Madoff’s Jewishness is so central to the media coverage. For example, in a letter to the New York Times, David A. Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee wrote, “Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?”

It’s well known that when the financial meltdown first hit, the ADL was concerned about “a dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on Internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release is predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complained darkly that in times of economic downturns, “The age-old canards [the ADL's favorite word is 'canard'] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.”

The recent indictment of Goldman Sachs for security fraud is doubtless causing similar angst in Jewish circles. Yesterday’s front page headline in the LA Times screamed “E-mails show Goldman traders rushed to bet against the mortgage market as crisis spread.” [Addendum, headline for 4/27, print edition: Senate Evidence Mounts against Goldman; online: Goldman Played Key Role in Mortgage Meltdown, Senate Investigators Say] Based on documents released prior to Senate hearings this week, the article and the impending Senate hearings are sure to once again place Goldman and  Jewishness front and center in the public’s mind as the main villain in the meltdown — whether this is deserved or not. After all, despite the fact that any mention of the Jewishness of the key figures is verboten in the MSM, Goldman Sachs is an icon of Jewish financial power. Everyone knows that its basically a Jewish firm. It certainly doesn’t help that Lloyd Blankfein heads Goldman and is its publicly visible face. Nor does it help that the deal that brought the charges netted the firm of another Jew, John Paulson, $1 billion. (Paulson is worth $12 billion and is #45 on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans.)

Nor does it help that another firm that is being prominently mentioned as engaging in practices that exacerbated the mortgage meltdown is Magnetar whose principals, including founder Alec Litowitz, are all Jewish.  According to this article, Magnetar actively sought to include the worst possible mortgages into its CDO’s, then managed to get them rated as AAA investments, and then bet massively against them, leaving large financial institutions holding the bag.

Given the enormity of the repercussions of the economic crisis, it is only natural to seek the culprits. The fact that Goldman is  the most prominently featured firm and that other Jews also profited so greatly from the crisis while engaging in questionable practices will naturally feed into the stereotype of Jewish financial perfidy — a stereotype that goes back at least to the 19th century. (See Edmund Connelly’s discussion of Albert Lindemann’s historical research.)

But one thing we can be sure of, if anyone breathes a mention of Jewish involvement in the financial collapse in the mainstream media, the ADL will come out with its guns blazing. Truth is no defense.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Jews and the financial collapse | 31 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: More on Dual Loyalty — Dr. Lani Kass and Gen. Norton Schwartz

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Dual loyalty issues have once again arisen, this time in conjunction with Philip Giraldi’s astonishing essay on antiwar.com. Giraldi discusses the curious career of Dr. Lani Kass — formerly a senior military officer in the Israeli Defense Force, and now the  senior Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz. “Kass appears to have close and continuing ties to her country of birth, frequently spicing her public statements with comments about life in Israel while parroting simplistic views of the nature of the Islamic threat that might have been scripted in Tel Aviv’s Foreign Ministry.”

Giraldi notes that her appointment raises a host of issues, including the possibility that she is an Israeli spy and exactly how she managed to get security clearance. Given that the official policy of the Israeli government is to advocate a war with Iran, it is more than interesting that she has an important influence on US policy and that she is involved in Project CHECKMATE responsible for drawing up war plans. She is quoted as having what Giraldi characterizes as a “dismissive” comment on a possible war with Iran, and has the views on the Islamic threat usually associated with neocons.

The role of Kass in the Defense Department is at least as questionable as the role of Dennis Ross in the State Department. In fact, it would seem to be an even more clear-cut case because Kass was actually born and raised in Israel and rose to the rank of major in the IDF. Although she is a naturalized US citizen, she has doubtless retained her Israeli citizenship. It would more than a bit surprising if she did not retain an allegiance to Israel. And is there any evidence at all that she has allegiance to the US? When asked about possible war with Iran, she responded, “We can defeat Iran, but are Americans willing to pay the price?” — as if she is not an American.

By Stephen Walt’s criteria, therefore, Kass should not have any policy-making role on any issue that relates to Israel. A more difficult case is that of her boss, Gen. Norton Schwartz. Schwartz is also Jewish, although does not have the close ties to Jewish activist organizations like Ross or the strong connections to Israel like Kass. As reported in the Forward,

Schwartz’s Jewish identity did not go unnoticed after his appointment, particularly given the current military tensions with Iran. Press TV, an Iranian English language media outlet, wrote an article last week, titled “U.S. Names Jewish [sic — presumably an intentionally awkward translation] as Air Force Chief.”

There have long been rumors that Schwartz’s predecessor, Michael Moseley, was opposed to a military attack on Iran. The appointment of Schwartz has prompted speculation in the Iranian press and on some blogs that the Bush administration is yet again seriously considering the military option to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Unlike the vast majority of Americans, the Iranians assume that Schwartz’s ethnic identity would make a difference, and I must agree that it should raise red flags. The vast majority of American Jews have a very strong emotional commitment to Israel that may bias their judgment even if they are not consciously aware of their biases.

As I noted elsewhere,

In my ideal world, Jonah Goldberg’s op-eds and Paul Wolfowitz’s advice to presidents and defense secretaries should be accompanied by a disclaimer: “You should be cautious in following my advice or even believing what I say about Israel. Deception and manipulation are very common tactics in ethnic conflict, so that my pose as an American patriot should be taken with a grain of salt. And even if I am entirely sincere in what I say, the fact is that I have a deep psychological and ethnic commitment to Israel and Judaism. Psychologists have shown that this sort of deep commitment is likely to bias my perceptions of any policy that could possibly affect Israel even though I am not aware of it.”

We would certainly like to know the details of Schwartz’s ties with Jewish organizations and activist groups, as well as any ties that he has with Israel. (For example, Paul Wolfowitz has family members living in Israel.) The fact that Schwartz has hired Kass as his senior Special Assistant suggests that the taboo against discussing Jewish loyalty issues is so strong that they feel free to be entirely public about it. (There might be some sensitivity, however, since the Pentagon has removed Kass’s biography from its website.)

Nevertheless, a war with Iran would be very costly for the US and may well have huge long term implications for the region and the world. Surely if the government wanted to project the image that US policy was not being shaped by people with a strong personal ethnic attachment to Israel (as clearly happened in the war with Iraq), they would remove people like Ross, Kass, and Schwartz from any role in making policy.

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Posted in Dual loyalty, Evolutionary Psychology, Israel, Israel Lobby | 28 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Robert Satloff and the Jewish Culture of Deceit

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt had the audacity to suggest, given Dennis Ross’s close ties to WINEP, that Ross should not have a policy-making position on Middle East issues in the Obama Administration. Neocon Robert Satloff responded with outrage, claiming that Ross has been doing nothing but promoting “U.S. interests in peace and security for the past quarter-century.” And he disingenuously asks, “To which country do we allegedly have a ’strong attachment’?  Our foreign-born scholars hail from virtually every country in the Middle East — Turkey, Iran, Israel, and at least a dozen different Arab countries.”

The best response is by M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that advocates a two-state solution to the conflict: 

Steve Rosen [who was acquited on charges of spying for Israel in 2009] … cleverly came up with the idea for an AIPAC controlled think-tank that would put forth the AIPAC line but in a way that would disguise its connections.

There was no question that WINEP was to be AIPAC’s cutout. It was funded by AIPAC donors, staffed by AIPAC employees, and located one door away, down the hall, from AIPAC Headquarters (no more. It has its own digs). It would also hire all kinds of people not identified with Israel as a cover and would encourage them to write whatever they liked on matters not related to Israel. “Say what you want on Morocco, kid.” But on Israel, never deviate more than a degree or two.

In other words, Satloff’s claims that WINEP is not tied to any particular lobby or country are part of an ongoing subterfuge that fools no one except the mainstream media: “It matters because the media has totally fallen for this sleight of hand and WINEP spokespersons appear (especially on PBS) as if WINEP was not part of the Israel lobby. Some truth-in-labeling is warranted.”

This sort of subterfuge is central to Jewish efforts at influencing policy in a wide range of areas. Because they are a small minority in the US and other Western societies, Jews must recruit support from the wider community. Their positions cannot be phrased as benefiting Jews, but as benefiting the interests of the society as a whole. As a result, these movements cannot tell their name.

A great example is the $PLC, an organization that we now know is funded by Jews and, apart from the sociopathic Morris Dees, is also largely staffed by Jews. Yet whenever there is a story about “immigrant rights” or angry White people, the SPLC is called on by the mainstream media as a “respected civil rights organization” rather than for what it is: A Jewish activist organization actively attempting to further the ethnic  interests of Jews, typically at the expense of White Americans.

This sort of subterfuge was true of all the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. As I noted in Ch. 6:

It is thus not surprising that although these theories were directed at achieving specific Jewish interests in the manipulation of culture, they “could not tell their name”; that is, they were forced to minimize any overt indication that Jewish group identity or that Jewish group interests were involved …. Because of the need for invisibility, the theories and movements discussed here were forced to deemphasize Judaism as a social category—a form of crypsis discussed extensively in SAID (Ch. 6) as a common Jewish technique in combating anti-Semitism. In the case of the Frankfurt School, “What strikes the current observer is the intensity with which many of the Institute’s members denied, and in some cases still deny, any meaning at all to their Jewish identities” (Jay 1973, 32). The originators and practitioners of these theories attempted to conceal their Jewish identities, as in the case of Freud, and to engage in massive self-deception, as appears to have been common among many Jewish political radicals. Recall the Jewish radicals who believed in their own invisibility as Jews while nevertheless appearing as the quintessential ethnics to outside observers and at the same time taking steps to ensure that [non-Jews] would have highly visible positions in the movement (pp. 91–93). The technique of having non-Jews] as highly visible exemplars of Jewish-dominated movements has been commonly used by Jewish groups attempting to appeal to gentiles on a wide range of Jewish issues (SAID, Ch. 6) and is apparent in the discussion of Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy. …  [Chap. 7]: Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments [on immigration]  developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, [non-Jews] from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1971, 92).

It’s an old technique, arguably present (see also here)  from the origins of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The sad thing is that people who should know better continue to be deceived.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Israel Lobby, Neoconservatism, SPLC, White pathology/guilt | 32 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: The Dissolution of the Family among Non-Elite Whites

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

The Whites in non-urban Red State America have a lot to be angry about. The present economic crisis is just the most recent disaster in the long pattern of dispossession of Whites who are less educated. Good jobs in the private sector have pretty much evaporated — the unions are gone and the jobs have been shipped overseas. These people see their communities invaded by racial and cultural aliens, many of them illegal, making a middle class life impossible. They see themselves losing political power to the coalition of minorities and elite Whites that has become the Democratic Party.

As The Bell Curve emphasized, since World War II the cognitive elite are pulling away from the rest of America. Hard economic times only make it worse.

And hard times are always difficult on families. As Cahn and Carbone note, “the latest studies show that as the economy has gone south, teen and nonmarital births and abortions have all increased. … Employment figures also demonstrate that male employment has fallen even further than female employment, making youthful weddings that much riskier.”

In evolutionary terms, the high-investment style of reproduction becomes non-viable as men are unable to provide for their families. Women start having babies sooner and don’t expect to receive support from males over a long period of time, especially where welfare programs are available.

Being on the left, however, C & C use this opportunity to propose that the real culprit is traditional family values. If we could just get rid of those Bible Belt ideas, all would be well:

Missing from this debate is recognition of the bankruptcy of traditionalist family values as policy for the postindustrial era. …

In the United States, states that emphasize abstinence-only education, limit public subsidies of contraception, restrict access to abortion – and, yes, oppose gay marriage – have higher teen birth and divorce rates.

Yet the failure of the family values movement simply produces another round of moral panic and calls for more draconian restrictions.

Their solution combines typical leftist utopianism with a very real program of lowering the birth rate of people with traditional values.

The solution? As we outline in great detail in our book “Red Families v. Blue Families,” there are three critical steps we can take: (1) promote access to contraception – within marriage as well as outside it; (2) develop a greater ability to combine not only work and family, but family and education; and (3) make sure the next generation stays in school, learns the skills to be employed, and cultivates values that can adapt to the future.

This is a nice distillation of the bizarre idea that all Americans have the potential to be college graduates with lots of skills suitable for a post-industrial economy. IQ never enters the equation. But this utopian future is just not going to happen. A far better program would be to provide better economic opportunities for White people, especially White males, whose prospects have been blunted by the present regime.

The fact is that traditional sexual attitudes worked perfectly well in the West to produce a very adaptive culture of high-investment parenting combined with individualist social institutions. C & C attempt to tar traditional values with the stigma of Muslim and African societies where female virtue is prized: “We are entirely sympathetic with those inclined to lock up their daughters from puberty until marriage, but we do recognize that the societies abroad most insistent on policing women’s virtue are locked into cycles of poverty.”

But there is no reason to suppose that the problem with Muslim and African societies is policing the sexual behavior of women. Other traits of these cultures are far more likely culprits,  including low average IQ and social institutions like cousin marriage and clan-based social and political systems.

The reality is that social support for high-investment parenting has always been a critical feature of Western social structure until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, all of the markers of family stability have headed south  — including divorce rates and births out of wedlock for all races and ethnic groups. (Nevertheless, there are very large differences between races and ethnic groups in conformity with Rushton’s lifespan theory of race differences.)

But this relative lack of social support for marriage has had very different effects depending on traits like IQ. For example, a well-known study in behavior genetics shows that the heritability of age of first sexual intercourse increased dramatically after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In other words, after the social supports for traditional sexuality disappeared, genetic influences became more important. Before the sexual revolution, traditional sexual mores applied to everyone. After the revolution, genes mattered more. People with higher IQ were able to produce stable families and marriages, but lower IQ people were less prone to doing so, and these trends have been exacerbated by the current economic climate. Hence the Red State/Blue State dichotomy among White people observed by C & C.

And this brings me to thinking about Jews and particularly Jewish influence on sexual culture. In their book, C & C note that Jews tend to exhibit  the Blue State pattern— an unsurprising result given Jewish IQ patterns. A theme of Chapter 4 of The Culture of Critique is that the psychoanalytic assault on traditional Western sexual culture had a disparate impact on different IQ groups and benefited Jews:

Jews suffer to a lesser extent than [non-Jews] from the erosion of cultural supports for high-investment parenting, and Jews benefit by the decline in religious belief among [non-Jws]. As [Norman] Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union … have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the public strength of Christianity, and have led the fight for unrestricted pornography. The evidence of this chapter indicates that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement is a central component of this war on [non-Jewish] cultural supports for high-investment parenting. …

Although other factors are undoubtedly involved, it is remarkable that the increasing trend toward low-investment parenting in the United States largely coincides with the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of American culture represented by the political and cultural success of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s.

I then go into the academic version of the ideas presented here, especially the greater importance of social controls and traditional religious beliefs for people on the left side of the Bell Curve. (See here, in the  Conclusion).

There is nothing wrong with traditional Western sexual codes. C & C are trying to rationalize the destruction of the last vestiges of that culture by noting that people with traditional religious ideas on sexuality increasingly behave in ways that are contrary to those beliefs. But the problem is not the traditional culture. Rather it is the economic dispossession of non-elite Whites combined with a media culture that glorifies expressive individualism and uninhibited sexuality (i.e., drugs, sex, and Rock ‘n’ Roll) — a media culture that, in my view, was critically shaped by the Jewish intellectual movements reviewed in The  Culture of Critique

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Jewish influence, Race differences in behavior, White anger | 37 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt on Dennis Ross

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Stephen Walt has once again raised the issue of dual loyalty of American Jews — this time in the context of the role of Dennis Ross in shaping Obama Administration policy in the direction of Israel. As I have argued previously, I think that Walt (and Mearsheimer) tend to underestimate the problem of Jewish dual loyalty. It’s often been said of Jews that they are just like everyone else, only more so. In the case of dual loyalty, it’s certainly true that other people have various loyalties, but no other group has had such a passionate attachment to a foreign country. As The Israel Lobby shows, the American Jewish community is galvanized around doing the bidding of a foreign government. Dissent within the Jewish community has been effectively silenced, and the most energized, radical elements of the Jewish community determine the direction of the entire community.

Given all that, it is certainly not surprising that issues of loyalty would be raised. And, because of their status as a wealthy, powerful elite, Jews, far more than other minority groups, have been able to influence American foreign policy in the direction of Israel despite making up less than 3% of the population.

The charge of dual loyalty is an ancient one (reviewed here under the heading “The Theme of Disloyalty”), present in Jewish religious writing. In the Book of Exodus, Pharaoh states, “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are too mighty for us; come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there befalleth us any war, they also join themselves unto our enemies, and fight against us, and get them up out of the land” (Exod. 1:9–10).

Walt writes that the accusation of dual loyalty was “a nasty anti-Semitic canard in old Europe.” But, then as now, dual loyalty accusations had much more than a grain of truth. For example, between the mid-19th century and the Bolshevik Revolution, there can be little doubt that the Jewish Diaspora throughout Europe and America opposed the Russian government and often influenced policy in other countries to oppose Russia — often in opposition to the governments of those countries. In 1911, long before Jews attained the level of power in the US that they have now, there was a successful Jewish campaign to abrogate a US trade agreement with Russia aimed at getting Russia to change its policies on Jews in opposition to the views of the Taft Administration.

The similarities to today are striking: AIPAC has rammed through punitive trade restrictions on Iran not because such restrictions benefit the US, but because Iran is seen as threatening Israel. And now there is a major push to get the US to bomb Iran — again promoted by Israel’s friends in the US. (Here’s Bill Kristol stating that it’s better for the US to attack Iran than for Israel to have to do it.)

Walt writes:

Needless to say, in a melting-pot society like the United States, it was inevitable that many Americans would also have strong attachments to other countries. These different attachments may reflect ancestry, religious affiliation, personal experience (such as overseas study), or any number of other sources. The key point, however, is that in the United States it is entirely legitimate to manifest such attachments in political life.  Americans can hold dual citizenship, for example, or form an interest group whose avowed purpose is to shape U.S. policy towards a specific country. This is how the American system of government works, and there is nothing “disloyal” about such conduct.

Dual loyalty issues therefore mesh with America as a multicultural society. Jewish dual loyalties are no different, say, from Mexican dual loyalties. But, whatever its legitimacy in multicultural America, dual loyalties are surely not ideal for the country as a whole because they detract from cohesion and sense of common interest and purpose. Whereas in the past assimilation was the norm (and was easy because the vast majority of immigrants were European ethnically), immigrants now are encouraged to retain their own language and culture, and they are encouraged to retrain powerful ties to their countries of origin.

Historically, this ideology of multiculturalism was the product of Jewish intellectuals (prominently Horace Kallen) designed to legitimize Jewish separateness in America while at the same time legitimizing the continuing ties between American Jews and the rest of the Diaspora. (Kallen, for example, was a strong Zionist and activist on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe.) In the future we can expect that the US will be increasingly Balkanized as different ethnic and national groups jockey for political power in the US and seek to influence foreign policy in favor of the countries they left behind.

But I have to agree with Walt that even accepting the legitimacy of a multicultural model, people like Dennis Ross should not be allowed to have a voice within the administration. Walt points out that Ross has a long involvement with pro-Israel activist organizations, such as being director of WINEP.

But Ross’s ties to Israel are even deeper than that. Until his appointment as Middle East envoy in the Obama Administration, from 2002–2009 Ross was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. This organization has assumed the role of long term planning for the Jewish people, not only in Israel but also the Diaspora. The JPPPI is an independent think tank that reports to the Israeli government and has close ties with other Jewish organizations. Its mission is “to promote the thriving of the Jewish people via professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry. JPPPI’s work is based on deep commitment to the future of the Jewish people with Israel as its core state.”

The JPPPI’s report Facing Tomorrow 2008 is interesting because it focuses on the threat of Iran and but also because it sees people like Stephen Walt as a threat to Israel:

The Jewish people must, as the highest priority, develop an appropriate response to the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel and to global stability as a whole. While there is no ambiguity about the need to do so in Israel, it is necessary to mobilize Jewish opinion around the world as well. The American Jewish community cannot be intimidated either by a post Iraq syndrome in the United States, or by the false and pernicious allegations of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, or former President Carter.

In other words, Jews around the world are encouraged to mobilize to combat the threat to Israel represented by Iran. The assumption is that Jews have common interests as Jews no matter what country they happen to live in. Dennis Ross is doing his best to promote exactly this view within the Obama administration.

One might think that such a view would leave Jews in the Diaspora open to the charge of disloyalty, but the problem is easily finessed: Jews in the Diaspora are told to frame Israel’s concerns about Iran as a global threat, not simply as a threat to Israel.

Of course, that’s what we are seeing now. But we needn’t be naïve. Jews like Dennis Ross are clearly far more loyal to Israel than to the US. Speaking as a psychologist, they wouldn’t be able to see a conflict of interest between the US and Israel if it was staring them in the face. Indeed, as Gore Vidal said of Norman Podhoretz, they are unregistered agents of a foreign government.

In a sane society, there would be a huge groundswell of public opposition to Ross’s appointment–as there has been for a number of Obama’s appointments. But that won’t happen.

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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Dual loyalty, Evolutionary Psychology, Israel Lobby | 18 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Racial Conflict and the Health Care Bill

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Of all the op-ed writers in the MSM these days, Ronald Brownstein seems most aware of the emerging racial fault lines in American politics — which means that his work has been a rich lode of material for my blog (see The looming racial chasm and Further Evidence for the Racial Polarization of American Politics).

His latest column (”Dems caught in populist crossfire“) gets at the racial nexus of the health care debate. Despite intensive attempts by the Democrats to pitch the health care bill as benefiting the middle class, White people don’t buy it. Most Whites (52%) think the law will benefit poor people, but only one-third think it will help the country and only 20% think it will help them. On the other hand, much higher percentages of non-Whites think that it will help them and help the country.

Further, he cites more evidence that White people are starting to believe in the Sam Francis analysis, as colored by contemporary events: The country is ruled by an elite of very wealthy people who created the financial disaster and are now benefiting from the government’s bailouts. While wealth is going steadily upward and increasing the gap with the middle class, the White middle class and the White working class are increasingly alienated and angry because wealth is going to non-White minorities at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Indeed, physical threats and vandalism directed against lawmakers in the wake of the bill’s passage has drawn the attention of the media and the political class. White rage has been a theme ever since Obama became president, but the temperature continues to rise.

Democrats are doing all they can to change public perceptions of the bill, but “skepticism that government will ever deliver for them is bred in the bone for many white voters, especially those in the working class.” Exactly. And it’s difficult to see how the Democrats are going to change that when these are the same people who want to legalize millions of mainly poor non-White immigrants who will then legally import tens of millions of their impoverished relatives — all of whom will then qualify for benefits like healthcare paid for mainly by White people.

These trends show once again that people are unwilling to contribute to public goods like government health care when the so many of the recipients who benefit the most are ethnically different than themselves. Liberals wring their hands and talk about how the White working class is not voting its economic interests, but these White people are definitely acting in tune with their ethnic interests, if only implicitly. Only a brain dead Marxist still worshiping at the altar of class warfare could fail to see that the political fault lines are fast becoming based on race, not social class. The fact that the Obama administration is widely and correctly seen as having rammed this down the throats of the American public is only going to make the anger more intense. November should be very interesting indeed.

America is entering the age when it will obvious to everyone that the much advertised era of racial harmony isn’t going to happen and that we are faced with an ever escalating if undeclared race war. It is a good sign that Whites seem to be realizing that the forces arrayed against them are a wealthy elite in alliance with a racially alien, predominantly poor underclass. In fact, the forces arrayed against Whites are even more starkly racial than that. The backbone of the Democratic Party is a coalition of  non-Whites — an alliance that includes a large Black and Latino underclass, as well as middle class and elite non-Whites, most importantly a large contingent of wealthy Jews and Jews with influence on the media.

The big picture is that beginning with Jewish intellectual movements — particularly the Frankfurt School, Jews have rejected a traditional Marxist analysis and began to see the White middle and working class as their enemy. After all, these classes had not embraced a communist revolution but had joined the fascist movement in Germany.

It is encouraging that polls indicate that Whites are aware that the elites are arrayed against them. It is a short step for them to develop an explicit understanding that Jews are vastly overrepresented among this elite, not only in the financial sector that created the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and continues to benefit from the bailouts, but also in the elite media that promotes non-White immigration, rationalizes the multicultural status quo, and religiously avoids the topic of Jewish influence.  And they will become explicitly aware that wealthy Jews are the financial backbone of the Democratic Party and its coalition of non-White minorities.

With the failure of the traditional Marxist analysis, Jewish intellectuals became aware that racial and ethnic conflict is the name of the game. The post-WWII commitment of the organized Jewish community to massive non-White immigration in all Western countries is really an acknowledgment that it is, after all, a race war. It has taken some time, but it seems that White people are catching onto this as well, if only implicitly. Control of the cultural high ground by this hostile ethnic elite creates enormous barriers to making explicit the reality of racial conflict that is at the heart of the current political culture. But if very large percentages of Whites coalesce together politically, even if it is in the corrupt Republican Party, the reality of racial conflict will be simply too obvious for anyone to ignore. And then it will get really interesting.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Implicit Whiteness, Jews as an elite, Political processes, White anger | 21 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Brain imaging evidence for the genetic basis of IQ and behavioral restraint

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: A UCLA study points to very high heritability of IQ and behavioral restraint–probably the two most important traits in the modern world. It also points to the brain mechanisms responsible for differences in these traits. Paul Thompson and his colleagues

used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain’s axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain’s wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of “insulation” that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.

For example, the connections in the parietal lobe associated with math and logic are 85% heritable, while the connections in the frontal lobe responsible for working memory and  for inhibiting impulsive behavior are 65% heritable. Behavioral restraint not really IQ  but relate to behavioral control–things like being able to inhibit immediate gratification and plan for the future . These are traits that show important race differences associated with criminality, especially impulsive criminality (as opposed, say, to most white collar crime).

The difficulty for the left will be to convincingly argue that the sorts of interventions they have been championing will really change brain myelination. As noted in my previous blog, they seem to be running out of ideas on how to improve educability of low-IQ populations, and Head Start doesn’t work either. They may take comfort in the possibility that genetic engineering could actually do the trick:

And could this someday lead to a therapy that could make us smarter, enhancing our intelligence?
“It’s a long way off but within the realm of the possible,” Thompson said.
This sort of gene therapy would be socially beneficial because it would increase educability and behavioral restraint. But it certainly would not be a panacea for White ethnic interests. Indeed, it would make these groups more competitive while not making them less ethnocentric.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Race differences in behavior | 31 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: When will they finally start talking about IQ?

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Diane Ravitch’s recent LA Times op-ed (”The Big Idea — it’s bad education policy“) opposes “Big Ideas” in education policy, but what it is really saying is that the educational establishment is running out of ideas. “We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.” She argues that none of this is working:

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform — codified in its signature Race to the Top program — that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better. …

On the federal tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from 2003 to 2009, charters have never outperformed public schools. Nor have black and Latino students in charter schools performed better than their counterparts in public schools.

When charter schools have performed well, it’s because of selection: Better, more motivated children attend them, and this does  nothing for the masses of Black and Latino children. Holding teachers accountable doesn’t work either.

But if course, Ravitch can’t really come to grips with the problem. In pointing to things that could affect student achievement besides teachers, she comes up with this list:  “students’ motivation, the schools’ curriculum, family support, poverty and distractions on testing day, such as the weather or even a dog barking in the school’s parking lot.”

No mention of IQ — 16 years after The Bell Curve placed IQ and the intractability of changing became front and center for the American public. Coming on the heels of the finding that the Head Start pre-school program has no demonstrable effects on IQ or academic achievement, one would think that at long last it would start to dawn on people that there are no easy solutions because no one has come up with a way to improve IQ. The result is that race differences in achievement are going to be here long into the future. And that means that importing millions of low-IQ people is a long term disaster for the country.

Ravitch herself seems to have given up the fight. There are no Big Ideas that will work, so she advocates returning to a well-rounded curriculum rather than the Obama Administration’s focus on math and reading. If you can’t teach them to read or do math, you might as well entertain them by having them do art and music.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Race differences in behavior | 48 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Alex Kurtagic’s “It’s Not the Arguments”

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Alex Kurtagic’s current TOO piece (It’s not the arguments“) is an argument for the importance of solid funding for the success of any media venture, TOO included. The basic idea is an important one to discuss — that high status confers influence. Indeed, the importance of high status is a critical ingredient of theories of influence in sociology, and psychologists have argued that attraction to high status is part of our evolutionary heritage.

We see this repeatedly in the key institutions throughout the West, including the media and the academic world. Jewish influence basically stems from their influence on all of the high ground of the culture. The revolution of the Left was a top-down revolution that began in the most prestigious academic and media institutions and then spread to the lower reaches of the media and the K-12 educational system.

For all its espousal of egalitarianism, the academic world is a hierarchical system in which the highest levels are rigorously policed to ensure ideological conformity because any leak in the system would mean that non-conformists would benefit from institutional prestige. This, of course, is exactly why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused such a panic attack in the ranks of the Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt weren’t just two easy-to-ignore guys from some college no one heard of; nor were they members of an easily marginalized group, such as Arabs. They were well-known and academically productive professors from prestigious institutions — the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively. This resulted in a full-fledged smear campaign emphasizing “shoddy scholarship” (typically made by Jewish activist organizations or others without the least experience as scholars) and charges of being anti-Semites on a par with the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When all else fails, …

Another example is E. O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans — a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s. Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist, and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode, led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould — both of whom were also at Harvard and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.

The Israel Lobby and the Left won these battles ultimately. Politicians are loathe to cite Mearsheimer and Walt, and it is unthinkable that they could attain positions in the government where they could directly influence US foreign policy. Tamer versions of evolutionary psychology are tolerated, but arguments related to ethnic interests (Salter), the reality of ethnic and racial differences (Jensen, Lynn, Rushton), and my writing on Jewish influence on culture have been expunged from the mainstream media. I have sometimes thought that my ideas would be more influential if I held a position at Harvard. But the reality is that occasional lapses from decorum have been managed quite effectively.

The result is that Whites are intellectually and culturally insecure. Any cultural confidence they have must buck the tide of elite opinion which is constantly telling them they are racists who owe whatever success they have in life to “White privelege” or other inventions of the Left. As I noted elsewhere, “one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status.”

The revolution may well begin because of the rage of non-elite Whites. But it won’t be successful until the elite bastions of anti-White opinion are breached. And that will not be an easy fight to win.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Israel Lobby, Jews as an elite, Race differences in behavior, The Left | 38 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Race Bias and Conception Risk: Implicit and Explicit Whiteness in Action

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: A recent article in a top psychology journal (“Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle” shows that women have more race bias when they are most at risk for conception. Further, it shows that race bias is even stronger if the woman feels more vulnerable to sexual coercion.

The study once again shows a difference between implicit and explicit race bias. Implicit bias is unconscious. Implicit bias was shown by subjects taking longer to associate negative words like ‘horrible’ or ‘evil’ with photos of Whites than with photos of Blacks. (You can take a similar test here to see if you have implicit biases toward Blacks; around 80% of Whites do)  The study is saying that White women are more likely to have unconscious negative thoughts about Blacks when they are ovulating and this is especially the case if they think they are vulnerable to being raped.

Explicit bias, on the other hand, is assessed by rating how strongly subjects endorse negative racial stereotypes of Blacks (e.g., ‘‘Generally, Blacks are not as smart as Whites’’; ‘‘It is likely that Blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in’’). People tend to give more socially acceptable answers on race bias items compared to their unconscious, implicit attitudes.

Usually the differences between conscious and unconscious race bias are very large — especially for liberals. Liberals are supreme hypocrites when it comes to race. My favorite is the White affirmative action officer at a university who was horrified to find that she had strong unconscious biases toward Blacks.  Unconscious biases have been shown to have subtle effects on behavior.

What was surprising here was that these White women were also more likely to explicitly endorse negative stereotypes of Blacks when they were ovulating. The effect was weaker than for unconscious attitudes, but it was in the same direction and nearly as strong as for unconscious attitudes — what statisticians call a trend. 

In other words, the hormones that make them ovulate are also making them less politically correct. Their unconscious negative attitudes about Blacks are more likely to leak out in their conscious opinions. The primitive brain wins out over the politically correct censor in the higher part of the brain, so that they become more conscious of their negative attitudes toward Blacks. They would therefore be better able to consciously plan ways to avoid them. 

The other two tests of race bias were also quite explicit. In fact, the strongest single predictor of conception risk was explicitly stated fear of Black males. The subjects rated how “scary” photos of Black men and White men were. In general, these White women found photos of Black men scarier around the time they are ovulating — especially if they feel vulnerable to rape.

This shows that despite all the propaganda to the contrary, White women retain defensive attitudes — both consciously and unconsciously — about Blacks as potential rapists. The authors suggest that this psychological mechanism may work by being sensitive to the stereotype that Blacks are dangerous. In other words, White women’s evolutionary psychology is making them behave adaptively based on the stereotype that Blacks are more likely to rape. It works by making them avoid Black men, especially if they are ovulating and especially if they are in a situation where there is a danger of rape. And it is making them more conscious of the real threats posed by Black men and less likely to suppress these attitudes in order to be socially acceptable. 

Of course, the stereotype has more than a grain of truth: The 2005 FBI Uniform Crime Report show that though Blacks are only 12.4% of the US population, they commit 33.6% of the rapes of White females.

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Posted in African Americans, Evolutionary Psychology, Implicit Whiteness, Race differences in behavior | 52 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Edmund Connelly’s “Farewell, My Dear WASP”

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Edmund Connelly’s current TOO article “Farewell, My Dear WASP” again raises the conundrum of why the WASPs collectively abdicated their position of power in the US. He mentions the Stockholm Syndrome and other possibilities — all of which should provide for an interesting discussion here. What strikes me most is the quote from Scott McConnell’s review:

While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement.  

This severe proneness to guilt has always struck me as the defining feature of the Puritan strand of American culture. And with excessive guilt comes moralistic aggression aimed at ingroups and outgroups alike. As I noted elsewhere, the Puritans have a unique ethnic background among Anglo-Saxons generally. They have a strong tendency toward moral idealism, whether expressed as opposition to slavery in the 19th century, or as anti-anti-Semitism in the 21st. Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins — perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as the term is used in the scientific literature.   

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms . . . are punished by altruistic aggression. 

And since Gilder has never quite forgiven himself for a minor ethnic slur, he has become a soldier on behalf of righteousness. Like a Puritan magistrate of old, he is ready to do battle against the sinners among his own people. Of course, in the current environment, people like Gilder also benefit in terms of fame and fortune. But their feelings of moral righteousness make them feel good about what they are doing. Happiness for a Puritan is when self-interest coincides with a feeling of moral righteousness.

 Once Jewish intellectuals achieved the moral high ground in the US and elsewhere, people like Gilder lost their resolve to defend their own ethnic interests; the game was over. Fundamentally, we have to stamp out Puritanism among Whites, or at least find a form of therapy for people like Gilder:  

Given this state of affairs, what sorts of therapy might one suggest? To an evolutionary psychologist, this moralistic aggression seems obviously adaptive for maintaining the boundaries and policing the behavior of a close-knit group.  … Groups of Angles, Jutes, and their Puritan descendants doubtlessly benefited greatly from moralistic aggression  because of its effectiveness in enforcing group norms and punishing cheaters and defectors. There is nothing inherently wrong with moralistic aggression. The key is to convince whites to alter their moralistic aggression in a more adaptive direction in light of Darwinism. 

 The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans [like George Gilder] won’t be around to witness it.

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Posted in Anti-Semitism, Decline of Whites, Evolutionary Psychology, White pathology/guilt | 94 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: The Failure of Head Start — Another Blow for IQ Realism

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: I teach courses on child psychology, and every textbook has a chapter on IQ. It’s always a bit touchy talking about it — I’ve got to be on my best behavior. I discuss the data showing genetic influences and then I point out that most of the “environmental influences” on IQ could equally well be explained by parent-child genetic correlations: Smart parents are genetically inclined to high IQ and they talk to their kids more. This results in correlations between IQ and parents talking to their kids. 

But the chapter always ends on an optimistic note for the environmentalists because of the Head Start data. The standard line is that Head Start has a positive effect on IQ for a while and then tapers off to nothing after a few years. But the good news for environmentalists is that there are lots of other great things Head Start does, like improve academic achievement, prevent school dropout, etc.

However, the recent report on Head Start shows that there are no positive effects at all on academic achievement, social and emotional functioning, or health, even in the first grade. These are overwhelmingly poor non-White children — the future of America

As the Brookings Institute’s Russ Whitehurst notes,

The children in Head Start are overwhelmingly poor and minority. They are at high risk of starting school far behind their more advantaged peers, and falling further behind over time. They tune-out and drop-out at alarming rates. In a world in which nearly everything we value, from a long lifespan to financial wealth to family stability, is associated with educational attainment, these children’s lives are in danger.

So the ever hopeful left is back to square one. No positive effects at all. Indeed, things seem to have gotten worse: “In the critical area of vocabulary, 3-year-olds entered the study at the 29th percentile in terms of national norms and finished first grade at the 24th percentile whether or not they attended Head Start.” They might as well have stayed home with grandma.

Vocabulary is a good measure of IQ. But because the ever hopeful educational establishment didn’t want the word to get out, they delayed the report for three years. During this time they sweated the data (as we psychologists say) to try to come up with some positive results. Not possible. And believe me, they were motivated. There are lots of private contractors and entire bureaucracy to feed. They pulled out all the stops.

Actually, it’s quite surprising that they couldn’t come up with something positive, since, as Whitehurst points out, the same federal agencies that administer the programs are in charge of evaluating them. Short of  making up the data, they couldn’t come up with what they wanted. It’s something of a miracle that they didn’t falsify the data. All for a good cause.

But, as Whitehurst notes, when the report was finally released there was absolute silence in the MSM. The New York Times did not think it was news fit to print, nor did the Washington Post. I am still waiting for an article to appear in the LA Times.

Reports like this are just not the sort of thing that the left wants to hear, because it does not augur well for the future of the impending multicultural paradise we are heading into. I wonder if the next edition of my textbook will even bother to note it.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Race differences in behavior | 9 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: The academic left’s involvement in politics

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Right now some radical students at the university where I work are having a major anxiety attack about the fact that I continue to teach there. They are promising a long campaign to get me fired. The big new issue is my involvement with the A3P. As a student leader said, this may have “upped the ante … Now you’re going from belief to action.”

Ah yes, the horror that a professor would actually be involved in politics. In today’s LA Times, the op-ed page was dominated by comments on Howard Zinn (“An experts’ history of Zinn”), who by all accounts was a leftist political activist as well as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn, who probably deserved a chapter in The Culture of Critique as an exemplar of a leftist Jewish intellectual activist, was involved in all the leftist causes of the last 60 years. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and was proud of his lack of neutrality in his writing, titling his memoir You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.  As one of the commentators, Sean Wilentz, notes,

He saw history primarily as a means to motivate people to political action that he found admirable. That’s what he said he did. It’s fine as a form of agitation — agitprop — but it’s not particularly good history.

To a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.

But other historians are much more sympathetic to Zinn. Eric Foner, who is described by one reviewer as the “sainted PC commissar for US history and Reconstruction fabulist” is, like Zinn, an academic radical activist. Foner says about Zinn:

The idea that historians have to be neutral about everything they study is the death of history. Every historian has beliefs and feelings about what they’re studying. Howard made them very explicit. The teachers you remember are the ones with a passion for history who made it clear what they thought. They were not polemicists. They respected the canons of historical scholarship, as Zinn did, but they cared deeply.

Well, I’m not sure how much Zinn respected the canons of scholarship in creating what one commentor called an “eternal struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” The print version of the Times op-ed provides some quotations from Zinn’s work A People’s History of the United States. The Western culture = evil, native peoples = good theme is obvious. Europe of the Renaissance was “dominated … by the religion of the popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western Civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.” The natives, on the other hand, are all about hospitality and sharing, and they have no concept of war. (Imagine the horror if someone made blanket assertions about Jews as having a frenzy for money.)

As an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous, but the idea that it is uniquely evil has been common among Jewish intellectual activists, most notably the Boasian anthropologists. As I noted in The Culture of Critique,

one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers [or, as hospitable, loving, and sharing people, as Zinn would have it]. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfarein 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. 

The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174).

Howard Zinn was obviously in this tradition. But because he plugged into the anti-Western zeitgeist of the academic left, he had a long and happy career at Boston University — untroubled by student activists trying to get him fired.

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Posted in Evolutionary Psychology, Jewish influence, The Left | 49 Comments »

Kevin MacDonald: Alex Kurtagic’s “Haiti must not be rebuilt”

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue.

It is yet another example of the power of the media. Imagine if the media simply framed this as what you would expect from a people with an average IQ of 72 and a 200-year record of economic failure and inability to govern themselves. Imagine if the media messages were informed by ethnic genetic interests and if adopting parents were made aware that they would feel less psychological involvement with their African children than to genetically similar others. Imagine if there were no high-status figures on TV advocating Haitian relief  and thereby appealing to our evolved psychology of emulating high-status people. (By adopting a Haitian refugee or making a donation, I can get the approval of people like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.) 

Altruistic Whites who contributed to the relief effort would be scorned as naïve and misguided  — and they would be made aware that they will likely be unhappy in the long run. The aid would dry up. Our explicit processing mechanisms (human rationality) could easily overcome the natural empathy that we feel when we see human suffering. On the other hand, Whites would not at all be surprised that Blacks and other non-Whites (including presumably President Obama given his strong non-White identity) strongly support the immigration of Haitians because in doing so they are supporting their own ethnic genetic interests in a non-White America. Indeed, 70% of Black Americans favor Haitian immigration compared to 45% of Whites.

Alex Kurtagic’s current TOO article (”Haiti must not be rebuilt”) is an anecdote to all that. As he notes, the left has a “profoundly Eurocentric” belief that other peoples are the same. “The result is a campaign for ever more aid and development, fuelled by the belief that, given enough money, education, and opportunity, the Third World (including even Haiti) will eventually converge with Europe.”

From the standpoint of the multicultural left, societies like Haiti can’t be allowed to fail because the failure challenges their whole belief system.

It’s interesting that one of our favourite neocons, Elliott Abrams, wants to increase Haitian immigration to the US so that they can send money back to Haiti. This is a twist on the leftist theory that everyone is equal and that Haiti, given enough support, will be just like Sweden. Abrams’  implicit theory is that Haiti cannot possibly be expected to make itself into a viable society unless it can siphon off wealth from the US. As he points out, this is already happening for a great many countries, prototypically Mexico, Honduras, and, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

As a charter member of the Israel lobby, he knows all about siphoning off wealth (not to mention the lives of US military personnel) from the US on behalf of a foreign country. And as a Jew, he is certainly well within the Jewish mainstream when it comes to immigration policy generally. The implicit model of the US for Abrams is exactly the model advocated by Jewish activists for the last century: A proposition nation composed of different cultures and ethnicities, each with an allegiance to their own people wherever they may live.

Needless to say, this vision of American is profoundly antithetical to the interests of European-descended people in the United States.

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Kevin MacDonald: Controlling Historical Memory

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Kevin MacDonald: Dovid Katz’s article in The Guardian “Halting Holocaust Obfuscation” is yet another example of Jewish intellectual activists with access to the media attempting to control historical memory in a way that highlights Jewish suffering and presents Jewish behavior as nothing more than innocent victimhood. Katz is determined to disallow any equivalence between the horrors inflicted on the populations of Eastern Europe by the Germans and by the Soviets. He condemns Polish MEP Michal Kaminski, linking to this article, for bringing up Jewish behavior in the Jedwabne incident in which Jews were murdered during the German occupation of Poland during WWII:

One of the participants in the 2001 meeting, Maria Mazurczyk, told us: “I think that Mr Kaminski, like us, wanted everything to be revealed: the times before the war when things were good – and the time of the Soviet occupation when the Jews didn’t respect their Polish neighbours – and later the effect of all this.”

At the time Kaminski condemned Poles who’d killed Jews – though he suggested the massacre was principally carried out by Germans. But it appears his principal concern was with alleged Jewish guilt. Anna Bikont of the liberal Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, who spent much time in Jedwabne in 2001 while researching a book, says: “Mr Kaminski came to the place where an incredible crime was committed – and he told not about the women, children, old people who died in this horrible manner, but he told about Jews who collaborated with Soviets and who killed Poles.”

Would a British politician who’d behaved in a similar way survive in the mainstream of British politics?  

Probably not. But that’s only because mentioning Jewish behavior as contributing in even the slightest way to anti-Jewish attitudes is off limits, even if they collaborated with the Soviets against the Poles or against the Baltic peoples. The following is from a review of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (italicized quotes are translations of Solzhenitsyn):

“Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way.”

In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne.Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.

Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan “Revenge for the Soviet Occupation”? Solzhenitsyn:

“In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule.” (p. 329)

In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:

“Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia.” (p. 310)

See here for a comment on the distortions of Jan Gross’s Neighbors which attempts to blame the massacre solely on the irrational anti-Semitism of Poles. This compilation notes, among other things, that “There was significant collaboration on the part of some Jedwabne Jews with the Soviet invaders from 1939 to June 1941; the victims were primarily the town’s Polish population, several hundred of whom were deported to the Gulag.” 

When a significant percentage of people from an alien ethnic group support an invader and collaborate in the deportation of people from one’s own ethnic group, it is not at all surprising that there would be reprisals when there is a shift of power; nor would be be surprising if the reprisals were directed all Jews, not just the ones known to collaborate or sympathize. That’s how our evolved psychology of ethnic competition works.

I notice in my notes that Checinski (1982, 9) writes that “even then [in 1943] there was an attempt to rationalize this blind hatred [of Jews] by recalling the ‘improper’ attitude of the Jewish population in eastern Poland towards the Bolsheviks in September 1939 when the Soviet army, in connivance with the Nazis, occupied their territories.” Checinski also notes that immediately after WWII Jews welcomed the Soviet army and the new regime “with favor if not with outright enthusiasm” and that “the small Jewish community was seen by friends and foes alike as one of the mainstays of the Soviet sponsored regime. This only further alienated it from the great majority of the Polish population” (p. 8). This comment  is highly compatible with Jaff Schatz’s (1991) treatment which I discuss extensively in Ch. 3 of Culture of Critique. It is interesting that American Jewish representatives visiting Poland after the war presented the new Polish regime as “a paragon of liberalism and tolerance, unequaled in Eastern Europe” (Checinski, p. 11). 

To conclude, anti-Jewish attitudes in Eastern Europe had a basis in the real behavior of Jews. No doubt the events of 1939 and thereafter were influenced by traditional grievances between Poles and Jews, but actual Jewish behavior during this period is also relevant. Jews were correctly perceived as more welcoming to the Soviets after the 1939 invasion and as more loyal to the Communist regime and as willing executioners of the remnants of Polish nationalism after 1945. (As I and others have noted, the common denominator of the behavior of Diaspora Jews in European countries has been to oppose nationalist movements; further, during this period, Jews throughout Europe and in America saw communism as good for the Jews at least partly because Jews had become an elite in the USSR and the USSR had outlawed anti-Semitism.)

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Jews were also highly placed in the government and in the security forces. Under these circumstances, social identity theory predicts that Poles would develop the well-attested stereotype of “zydokomuna” (Judeo-Communism) and exaggerate the differences between themselves and all Jews in Poland. It simply reflects typical ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout the ages — nothing more than a reflection of our evolved psychology. 

In the West, Jewish activists have had a relatively easy time erecting the image of innocent Jews and evil Nazis as a complete explanation of the events of World War II. This message is much more difficult in Eastern Europe where there is a collective memory of collaboration of Jews with the horrors of communism and in the extermination of nationalist elements of the non-Jewish population.

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