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Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-first Century
John Glad
Schuylkill Haven, Penn.: Hermitage Publishers, 2006

As the genetic revolution accelerates its pace, over the last few years there have been numerous books written on eugenics. The majority of these are intended to link eugenics with Adolf Hitler, white supremacy, or the terrible inhumanity of forced sterilizations. Doctor John Glad’s recent book Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century does an excellent job of recalling the primary purpose of past and present eugenics—the ongoing effort to improve the quality of life.

The book begins with an introduction by Seymour W. Itzkoff, who argues that the Holocaust was the result of warfare, not eugenics. Even if there were no genetic differences between ethnic groups, intergroup hatred and genocide would still be possible. The eugenics movement was a global enterprise and had robust programs in Europe and North America in the pre-WW II era. Eugenics policies under the National Socialists reflected similar programs in other Western nations. Eugenic discussion and speculation were commonplace, and only became tainted for political purposes—to deny racial differences.

Glad sums up the times,

The Great War and subsequent Depression undermined the mentality of Empire and class privilege, leaving a vacuum which was filled by an intellectual climate of extreme egalitarianism. Western society of the twentieth century came to be dominated by a new, unified ideology. Freudianism, Marxism, B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorism, Franz Boaz’s cultural history, and Margaret Mead’s anthropology all stressed the marvelous “plasticity” and even “programmability” of Homo sapiens. It was explained over and over that human minds differ little in their innate qualities, and that it is upbringing and education which explain the differences among us. Software is everything; hardware is identical and thus meaningless. The road to utopia lies through improved nurture alone.

Even though the heyday of this radical egalitarianism only lasted a number of decades, the hangover it caused has been very enduring. On the one hand, science has long since turned its back on these failing movements, but the public, still partly intoxicated, is unaware of the facts. Future Human Evolution clarifies the history of race and eugenics in a way that is concise, clear, and enjoyable to read. This book, along with others along parallel lines, has unshackled genetics: “The censorship has now been lifted, and there is agreement even among the most implacable foes of the eugenics movement that the taboo on eugenics can no longer stand.”

A chief merit of Future Human Evolution is its demonstration of how the contemporary explosion in genetic research has established the vast importance of inheritance in who we are and how we behave, without scanting the role of nurture (when there is empirical evidence for it), Glad puts the anti-eugenicists on the hot seat by showing their real problem is not with eugenics, but with biology itself.

Like most eugenicists, Glad believes that raising the average intelligence of humans is the primary objective, and thus he explains intelligence testing, the Flynn Effect, dysgenics, the demographic transition and its impending failure to control the reproduction of the less mentally endowed, etc. He also discusses the eugenic practices of Jews, and discusses the link between eugenic aspects of the Jewish religion and the State of Israel’s active eugenics program, which far surpasses any other nation’s attempt to control declining birth rates.

My only objection with Glad’s eugenics is his effort to make it a universal program, thus raising everyone’s intelligence. That seems unlikely, because races with higher average intelligence will embrace eugenics, while those that cannot understand genetics will continue to breed as they always have—often and without forethought. This will eventually lead to an arms race towards human quality (IQ, good looks, health, stature, etc.), and as in all races, not everyone will finish first.

Future Human Evolution avoids lengthy historical recapitulations and marginal characters, so that readers seeking a history of eugenics should look elsewhere. For anyone seeking a short book on eugenics—past, present, and future—this book is the one I would recommend.

Glad’s book is available free on the web as a download:

www.whatwemaybe.org/txt/glad.john.2006.future_human_evolution.web.003f.en.pdf

TOQ, vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 2007)

Carl Schmitt

Note: The following short synthesis of Schmitt’s classic essay The Concept of the Political stems, in part, from a recent discussion with the Bay Area Nationalist Book Club.

However it is posed, the question of the political is always about the most important issue facing every people.

The political, though, is not to be confused with “politics” or “party-politics,” which speaks to individual or special interest in parliamentary gas houses.

“Politics” is tied to rationalism, materialism, economism, and the rule of Mammon, all of which undermine authority, tradition, and the imperatives of the “political.”

One.

The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security.

Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge.  (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning).

The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (”the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.

Two.

The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend-enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.

Three.

Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.

The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.

An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.

In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.

The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”

Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.

But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.

Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).

Four.

Friends, by contrast, share a commitment to a way of life that binds them together, that gives them a sense of solidarity, a sense transcending matters of economics or morality, something that resembles a shared, homogenous identity reaching beyond the imperatives of private life — even if these “friends” do not know one another.

Friendship — the condition of amity between those making up a large socially or communally cohesive association — is always prior to enmity.  For it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us.”

Indeed, it is only in face of the death and destruction posed by an enemy that “we” become fully conscious of who we are and learn what is truly “rational” for us.

This friendship implies that the “particular” trumps the “universal” and that a compromised convergence of interest, based on qualities shared with the enemy, is inconceivable.

Five.

The political is ultimately, then, a question of life or death — a question that presupposes the existence of an enemy — an enemy comprehended independent of other antitheses (e.g., the moral antitheses of good v. evil) and with conceptually autonomous categories of thought.

In presupposing the political, the state in the Schmittian sense orients to external threats rather than to internal structures of government or social-economic activity (the realms of party politics).  The state anchors itself, instead, in its willingness to defend — with arms, if necessary — its distinct existence.

This gives the state the “right,” in exerting its jus belli authority, to call on its individual members to kill and to risk being killed.

Such an authority makes the state “superior” to all other associations, for it alone compels its members to kill and risk being killed.

Weak peoples afraid of the “trials and risks” that come with the political inevitably disappear from history

It is this determination, implying life or death, that specifically constitutes what Schmitt sees as the essence of the political.

Whoever, moreover, makes this determination, deciding whether an enemy is to be fought or not, possesses the decisive, authoritative political power: Sovereign power.

When the imminent threat of war subsides, so too does the political.

This doesn’t mean that war in itself is the “aim, purpose, or content” of the political, only that the “mode of behavior” — the individual responsibility — the sovereign exercise of authority — that perceives the danger and decides to resist it — constitutes the political.

To be political in Schmitt’s sense requires, then, not just a prior commitment to domestic relations of friendship and the social solidarity it engenders, but also to a particular form of life in which group identity is valued, in the last instance, above physical existence.

Six.

The political, which “neither favors nor opposes war,” is thus not necessarily a function solely of war (the highest expression of the friend-enemy polarity) nor can it be said that it is per se a bellicose nihilism. Rather it is more like something determined by the possibility of armed enmity — even in cases where the parties belligérantes legitimate their belligerency in the name of freedom, justice, or some other abstraction.

War is simply an “ever present possibility,” which Schmitt recognized and designated as the core of the political sphere.

But if war for Schmitt is, above all, a reaction to an external threat, not a sought-after aggression, what does this imply existentially? (On the surface, at least, it suggests a rejection of l’esprit de conquête and the will to power, which one comrade thought was a liberal vestige in Schmitt’s thought and I thought was a Catholic moral one. In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.)

Seven.

Liberalism cannot distinguish between friend and enemy because its individualist, universalist, and pluralist ideology (”conceived in liberty and dedicated to the [abstract] proposition that all men are created equal”) denies that such a designation is conceivable in a world understood in market or moralist terms, where there are only competitors and moral entities, with whom one negotiates or reasons on the basis of universal rights and interests.

Compromise, not conflict, is accordingly the principal aim of the liberal state. Hence, its propensity for exchange, negotiation, and business.

But however it may try, liberalism cannot elude the “political.”

In cases where it is forced to designate an enemy, it is conceived as being outside “humanity” and thus something not simply to be defeated, but ruthlessly annihilated — for, by definition, the liberal’s enemy is non-human.

Eight.

Because it sees the state as essentially an instrument of society and economy, dedicated to the greatest happiness (material well-being) of the greatest number, liberalism lacks a political theory – having, in effect, only a critique of the political.

Indeed, liberal individualism and universalism negate the very possibility of the political, at least in principle. For nothing in its view should compel an individual to die for the sake of the state, which it understands in economic and ethical, instead of political terms.

Such a compulsion, it holds, would not only violate the individual’s freedom, it would make his nation/state association primary — whereas liberalism, in its humanism and rationalism, irrationally and inhumanely claims that only individualistic matters of ethics and economics are primary.

The liberal state, as such, is ethically committed to the rights and interests of individuals seen as self-contained units, whose sum is humanity — and economically, committed to untrammeled production and trade.

In practice, this has meant that the old ordered estates, along with the “prerogatives” of tradition, were forced to bow to the wishes of formless, manipulable masses, as quantity trumped quality and money overthrew the divine right of kings — a right, incidentally, that subsequently passed to the money men, this ethnic minority whose rule has proven to be more devastating than that of any former tyrant.

It has also meant that the usurer could evoke property rights to dispossess farmers of their land; that the personal interests represented by politicians takes priority over the nation’s Destiny; and that the brotherhood of man entails the greatest, most violent, and vigilant of wars to stifle expressions of political polarity.

Nine.

The political, though, cannot be done away with or evaded — it is immune to depoliticizing procedure — it is the essence of sovereignty.

In cases of war, the state, as the instrument of the political, is the ultimate authority — above the law — and as long as a state of emergency lasts.

Legal systems are based, in fact, not on legal reason, but on an authority that speaks to an existential/ontological situation needing no justification other than its own existence.

Ten.

“The protego ergo oblige [I protect therefore I oblige] is the cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] of the state.”

The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.

Protection and obedience, in healthy bondage to one another, are in this way mutually entwined.

Eleven.

Ultimately, the political is an existential matter of the highest degree.

In the face of death, one is forced to take sides and thus to take responsibility for one’s life. The enemy, in this strife, invariably highlights the true significance of friendship.

At the same time, the enemy defines what it means to be human, for only when faced with death do we confront life as a whole.

The political, then, entails Destiny, for it keeps men in historicity and it takes them beyond their private selves, into the realm of great events.

In the liberal’s envisioned one-world state, in a situation where there is only “humanity” and thus no friend-enemy distinctions (except with extra-terrestrials), there would be no political, only competition between individuals, whose highest concern would be self-enrichment, comfort, and entertainment.

Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.

The first victim of liberal depoliticization is thus always “meaning.”

If Europeans, then, are ever to regain control of their Destiny, it will only come through a political assertion of the identity that distinguishes them from the world’s other peoples.

All else is simply “politics.”

The Art of Jonathan Bowden, vol. 2: 1968-1974
Jonathan Bowden
London: The Spinning Top Club, 2009

Last time I saw Jonathan Bowden, I asked him how he was. His answer, delivered with bared teeth and so typical of him, elicited peals of laughter from Bowden himself, “I am always superb and getting stronger!” Bowden, you see, loves an audience, but he is quite able to entertain himself without one, as the second volume of his art eloquently shows.

The present volume differs substantially from the first, which I reviewed last November: where the latter compiled the artist’s adult work, the former compiles his juvenilia, covering his childhood through to his majority.

And what is it that we find between its covers? Anybody who has met Jonathan Bowden and spoken to him for any length of time will easily guess the answer: comic strips, of course! What we have here is a 200-page coffee table book bulging with comic strips, or graphic novels, drawn by a fervid, truculent little boy, obsessed with power and violence, with a brain the size of a planet balanced on a toothpick.

Unfortunately, as in Volume 1, we are deprived of a full-length, scholarly introduction, so, to gain a deeper understanding of his early output, one has to go directly to the artist’s maw. My initial attempts resulted in a couple of profuse emails from Bowden, replete with erudite references and overflowing with theoretical verbiage.

His efforts were highly entertaining, of course, and gave me a flavor of the sort of introduction he would like to have added to a future edition of his art books: obviously, a lengthy, esoteric text of such impenetrable density as to require nanonic circuitry implanted on the brain to permit a modicum of comprehension; a text, needless to say, bursting with quotes from, or mention of, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Thomas Carlyle, D. H. Lawrence, Grünewald, Balthus, Bacon, and Buffet, and comprised of epic, syntactically-complex sentences with enough sesquipedalophilia to titillate even an excessive logovore like Alexander Theroux.

Yet, to me this was insufficient, for such introductions, interesting as they may be on a hyper-intellectual plane, often obscure more than they clarify. A game of cat and mouse thus ensued, with me attempting to corkscrew useful biographical data from Bowden, an insatiable orator who is permanently on stage, even when he has an audience of one. My efforts yielded interesting results.

It is impossible to imagine Bowden as a child. For one, he has looked forty years of age since he was eighteen (visit his website and browse through his gallery, if you doubt me). For another, he appears barely human: whereas Tomislav Sunic is so down to earth that he will happily receive visitors in slippers and pajama, Jonathan Bowden is the exact opposite, to the point where one decides that he probably sleeps with his shoes on, wearing a suit and tie, in a coffin, with his eyes wide open.

But a boy he was, once upon the time, and the following anecdote will give you an idea of the kind of little monster his patient parents had to put up with. In 1972, when Bowden was 10, he witnessed a man slip on a banana peel, strategically placed by life on a high street pavement. The man, morbidly obese, fell with such force that he dove straight into a shop window, which shattered and rained a million pieces all over the man’s face. The demon child burst out laughing, of course, and roared with gleeful hilarity, his short body convulsing in a paroxysm of decachinating sadism as his pointed finger drew attention to the source. Bowden tells that this went on for so long that his mother deemed it necessary to scold him publicly. “Don’t laugh, Jonathan” she apparently said, “Don’t you see that the poor man is suffering?” Like a true Nietzschean, Jonathan replied, “But that’s why it’s funny!”

Such scorn for the Christian values of empathy and compassion is evident in every story contained in this volume. It is clear that Bowden was heavily influenced by Marvel comics, and his graphic novels faithfully reproduce all the expected tropes: ghoulish, power-crazed villains; mad science; ornamental women; a tardy and rather useless police force; and an indefatigable, unconquerable hero.

What is significant, however, is that his chosen alter ego happens to be Iron Man. (One smiles knowingly at the thought: how could it be any different?)

What is more, his stories are crammed, and indeed self-consciously make a virtue of, ruthless violence – and this violence does not result from a moral struggle of good versus evil, but from a struggle for power between subhuman and superhuman. Where the villains possess superhuman powers, they are specializations suggestive of science or nature pushed to its most grotesque limits. In this titanic struggle, ordinary citizens are, needless to say, helpless, and political leaders weak, corrupt, and irrelevant.

Indeed, there is evidence of political as well as linguistic precocity, as we find here references to American political crises from the early 1970s, such as the energy crisis and the Watergate Tapes. It is impossible not to notice that these references are all negative, all linked to weak and/or corrupt political leadership, so we can conclude also that political precocity and contempt towards democratic politics came at an early age. (Then again, is this surprising, when one considers that Bowden grew up in a decade when there were brownouts, three-day weeks, and frequent labor strikes?) This is where we notice the divergence between the Marvel original and Bowden’s reinterpretation.

Another area where Bowden’s personality is felt is in two facets that in his adulthood were channeled into segregated media: coloring technique and torrential verbosity. The latter is just as prominent as the violence, and each page carries a great deal of text, coming from three sources: the character’s mouths, the character’s minds, and Jonathan Bowden, the invisible and irrepressible narrator. The individual stories follow relatively elaborate plots, carrying narrative threads that are – or were intended to be – ongoing and involving numerous, interacting characters.

The coloring technique, on the other hand, attempts to mimic that of the old Marvel strips, but ends up being almost an abstraction: Bowden used color pencils rather lightly before applying a black marker to highlight outlines and shadows. This he did very intricately and belaboredly, to the point where each page ended up looking like Roy Lichtenstein doing an impression of Jackson Pollock. Save for the vignette outlines, we find few straight lines and it is all executed rather nervously and obsessively.

This reveals the dual nature of Bowden’s personality: one side is inclined towards madness, chaos, brute force, excess, raw emotion, and hyper-individualism; the other side is inclined towards meticulousness, fastidiousness, authority, and order (the latter is quite apparent in his electronic communication, where even mobile text messages are impeccably formatted, punctuated, and grammatical). These two tendencies form a tense and turbulent nexus that many probably perceive as dangerously unstable and volatile: I would not be surprised if, while in education, his coevals saw him as a gifted loner and a loose cannon. He certainly seems to have spent a great deal of time drawing these graphic novels.

Is it original? Evidently, like most children, Bowden had no conception of copyright – and like most gifted children, his brain was like a sponge, like that alien blob that gobbles and grows, ready to absorb anything that came in its way. In this case, it was, for reasons as yet unclear, Marvel comics. That he responded to them in the way that he did seems now almost inevitable, given what we know about him now: this is the man, after all, who caricatures everyone, cartoonifies every situation, and extrapolates and exaggerates everything to the limits of the absurd, the monstrous, and the insane; for whom each moment in life is a vignette in a Nietzschean comic strip.

Yet, as can be inferred from my discussion, it is possible to see where Bowden departs from his original inspiration and begins to assert his own vision, however derivative it might have been in his childhood years. This is really the most important aspect of this volume, for, otherwise, it is all quite haphazard, with the unfinished and overlapping plotlines, the randomness, and the omissions that are typical of an age when one tends to bore easily and divert attention each time a novel stimulus comes along.

The preservation of this early work is rather remarkable, given its age (indeed some of it is quite degraded) and the fact that parents tend to dispose of at least a part of a child’s possessions every time they move. Obviously, this proto-portfolio was both jealously guarded by Bowden and ignored by his progenitors. Bowden tells me that his parents were never really interested in his pop art and that, in fact, they rather disapproved of it. They thought that it would “warp” his mind. If Bowden was anything like me, he would have replied: “The fact that I am drawing it suggests my mind is already warped; and since you made me, you only have yourselves to blame!”

The Art of Jonathan Bowden, vol. 2 can be obtained through the artist’s website for a modest sum. The miser, the hostile, and the impecunious, however, can view the totality of the images, entirely free of charge as well.

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935
Emmanuel Faye
Trans. Michael B. Smith, foreword Tom Rockmore
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

Three.
Race and State

From the above, the reader might conclude that Faye’s Heidegger is a wreck of a book.  And, in large part, it is, as I will discuss in the conclusion.

However, even the most disastrous wrecks (and this one bears the impressive moniker of Yale University Press) usually leave something to be salvaged.  There are, as such, discussions on the subjects of “race” and “the state,” which I thought might interest TOQ readers.

A) Race

National Socialism, especially its Hitlerian distillation, was a racial nationalism.

Yet Heidegger, as even his enemies acknowledge, was contemptuous of what at the time was called “biologism.”

Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.

Quite naturally, Heidegger’s anti-biologism was a problem for Faye, for how was it possible to claim that Heidegger was a “Nazi racist,” if he rejected this seemingly defining aspect of racial thought?

In an earlier piece (”Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” TOQ, vol. 6, no. 3), I reconstructed the racial dimension of Heidegger’s thought solely on the basis of his philosophy.

But Faye, who obviously doesn’t put the same credence in Heidegger’s thought, is forced, as an alternative, to historically investigate the different currents of NSDAP racial doctrine.

In his account (which should be taken as suggestive rather than authoritative), the party, in the year after the revolution, divided into two camps vis-à-vis racial matters: the camp of the Nordicists and that of the Germanists.

The Nordicists were led by Hans K. Günther, a former philologist, and had a “biologist” notion of race, based on evolutionary biology, which sought, through eugenics, to enhance the “Nordic blood” in the German population.

By contrast, the Germanists, led by the biologist Fritz Merkenschlager and supported especially by the less Nordic South Germans, held that blood implied spirit and that spirit played the greater role in determining a people’s character.  (This ought not to be confused with Klages’ “psychologism.”)

The Germanists, as such, pointed out that Scandinavians were far more Nordic than Germans, yet their greater racial “purity” did not make them a greater people than the Germans, as Günther’s criteria would lead one to believe.

Rather, it was the Germans’ extraordinary Prussian spirit (this wonder of nature and Being) that made them a great nation.

This is not to say that the Germanists rejected the corporal or biological basis of their Volk — only that they believed their people’s blood could not be separated from their spirit without misunderstanding what makes them a people.

For the Germanists, then, race was not exclusively a matter of biological considerations alone, as Günther held, but rather a matter of blood and spirit.

(As an aside, I might mention that Julius Evola, whose idea of race represents, in my view, the highest point in the development of 20th-century racial thought, was much influenced by this debate, especially by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, whose raciology was a key component of the Germanist conception, emphasizing as it does the fact that one’s idea of race is ultimately determined by one’s conception of human being.)

Faye claims that, in a speech delivered in August 1933, Hitler emphasized the spiritual determinants of race, in language similar to Heidegger’s, and that he thus came down on the side of the Germanists.

The key point here is that, for Faye, the “völkisch racism” of the Germanists was no less “racist” than that of the biological racialists — implying that Heidegger’s Germanism was also as “racist.”

The Germanist conception, I might add, was especially well-suited to a “blubo” (a Blut-und-Boden nationalist) like Heidegger. Seeing man as Dasein (a being-there), situated not only in a specific life world (Umwelt), but in exchange with beings (Mitdasein) specific to his kind, his existence has meaning only in terms of the particularities native to his milieu, (which is why Heidegger rejected universalism and the individualist conception of man as a free-floating consciousness motivated strictly by reason or self-interest).

Darwinian conceptions of race for Heidegger, as they were for other  Germanists in the NSDAP, represented another form of liberalism, based on individualistic and universalist notions of man that reduced him to a disembedded object — refusing to recognize those matters, which, even more than strictly biological differences, make one people unlike another.

Without this recognition, Germanists held that “the Prussian aristocracy was no different from apples on a tree.”

B) The State

As a National Socialist, Faye’s Heidegger was above all concerned with lending legitimacy to the new Führer state.

To this end, Heidegger turned to Carl Schmitt, another of those “Nazi” intellectuals, who, for reasons that are beyond Faye’s ken, is seen by many as a great political thinker.

In his seminar on Hegel, Heidegger, accordingly, begins with the 1933 third edition of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1927).

There Schmitt defines the concept of the state in terms of the political — and the political as those actions and motives that determine who the state’s “friends” and who its “enemies” are.

But though Heidegger begins with Schmitt, he nevertheless tries to go beyond his concept of the political.

Accepting that the “political” constitutes the essence of the state, Heidegger contends that Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is secondary to the actual historical self-affirmation of a people’s being that goes into founding a state true to the nation.

In Heidegger’s view, Schmitt’s concept presupposes a people’s historical self-affirmation and is thus not fundamental but derivative.

It is worth quoting Heidegger here:

There is only friend and enemy where there is self-affirmation. The affirmation of self [i.e., the Volk] taken in this sense requires a specific conception of the historical being of a people and of the state itself. Because the state is that self-affirmation of the historical being of a people and because the state can be called polis, the political consequently appears as the friend/enemy relation. But that relation is not the political.

Rather, it follows the prior self-affirmation.

For libertarians and anarchists in our ranks, Heidegger’s modification of Schmitt’s proposition is probably beside the point.

But for a statist like myself, who believes a future white homeland in North America is inconceivable without a strong centralized political system to defend it, Heidegger’s modification of the Schmittian concept is a welcome affirmation of the state, seeing it as a necessary stage in a people’s self-assertion.

Four.
Conclusion

From the above, it should be obvious that Faye’s Heidegger is not quite the definitive interpretation that his promoters make it out to be.

Specifically, there is little that is philosophical in his critique of Heidegger’s philosophy and, relying on his moralizing attitude rather than on a philosophical deconstruction of Heidegger’s work, he ends up failing to make the argument he seeks to make.

If Faye’s reading of the seminars of 1933-34 are correct, than Heidegger was quite obviously more of a National Socialist than he let on. But this was already known in 1987-88.

Faye also claims that Heidegger’s pioneering work of the 1920s anticipated the National Socialist ideas he developed in the seminars of 1933-34 and that his postwar work simply continued, in a modified guise, what had begun earlier. This claim, though, is rhetorically asserted rather than demonstrated.

Worse, Faye ends up contradicting what he sets out to accomplish. For his criticism of Heidegger is little more than an ad hominem attack, which assumes that the negative adjectives (”abhorrent,” “appalling,” “monstrous,” “dangerous,” etc) he uses to describe his subject are a substitute for either a proper philosophical critique or a historical analysis.

In thus failing to refute the philosophical basis of Heidegger’s National Socialism, his argument fails, in effect.

But even if his adjectives were just, it doesn’t change the fact that however “immoral” a philosopher may be, he is nevertheless still a philosopher. Faye here makes a “category mistake” that confuses the standards of philosophy with those of morality. Besides, Heidegger was right in terms of his morals.

Faye is also a poor example of the philosophical rationalism that he offers as an alternative to Heidegger’s allegedly “irrational” philosophy — a rationalism whose enlightenment has been evident in the great fortunes that Jews have made from it.

Finally, in insisting that Heidegger be banned because of his fascist politics, Faye commits the “sin” that virtuous anti-fascists always accuse their opponents of committing.

In a word, Faye’s Heidegger is something of a hatchet job that, ultimately, reflects more on its author’s peculiarities than on his subject.

Yet after saying this, let me confess that though Faye makes a shoddy argument that doesn’t prove what he thinks he proves, he is nevertheless probably right in seeing Heidegger as a “Nazi.”  He simply doesn’t know how to make his case — or maybe he simply doesn’t want to spend the years it takes to “master” Heidegger’s thought.

Even more ironic is the scandal of Heidegger’s “Nazism” seen from outside Faye’s liberal paradigm. For in this optic, the scandal is not that Heidegger was a National Socialist — but rather that the most powerful philosophical intelligence of the last century believed in this most demonized of all modern ideologies.

But who sees or cares about this real scandal?

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935
Emmanuel Faye
Trans. Michael B. Smith, foreword Tom Rockmore
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

Read Part 1 here.

Two.
Faye’s Argument

Heidegger’s seminars of 1933 and 1934, in Emmanuel Faye’s view, expose the “fiction” that separates Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics. For these seminars reveal a brown-shirted fanatic who threw himself into the National Revolution, hoping to become Hitler’s philosophical mentor.

At the same time, Faye argues that Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, particularly his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was already infected with pre-fascist ideas, just as his postwar work, however much it may have resorted to a slightly different terminology, would continue to propagate National Socialist principles.

Earlier, however, when the young Heidegger was establishing himself in the world of German academic philosophy (the 1920s), there is very little public evidence of racial or anti-Jewish bias in his work. To explain this, Faye quotes Heidegger to the effect that “he wasn’t going to say what he thought until after he became a full professor.” His reticence on these matters was especially necessary given that his “mentor,” Edmund Husserl, was Jewish and that he needed Husserl’s support to replace him at Freiburg.

(For those militant Judeophobes who might think this is somehow compromising, let me point out that Wilhelm Stapel [1882-1954], after also doing a doctorate in Husserlian phenomenology, was a Protestant, nationalist, and anti-Semitic associate of the Conservative Revolution who played an important early role in NSDAP politics.)

Faye nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s early ideas, especially those of Being and Time, were already disposed to themes and principles that were National Socialist in nature.

In Being and Time, for example, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental analytic, Husserlian phenomenology — along with every other bloodless rationalism dominating Western thought since the 18th century — for the sake of an analysis based on “existentials” (i.e., on man’s being in the world).

Like other intellectual members of Hitler’s party, Heidegger disparaged all forms of universalist thought, dismissing not only notions of man as an individual, but notions of the human spirit as pure intellect and reason.

In repudiating universalist, humanist, and individualist thought associated with liberal modernity, Faye’s Heidegger is seen not as contesting the underlying principles of liberal modernity, which he, as a former Catholic traditionalist, thought responsible for the alienation, rootlessness, and meaninglessness of the contemporary world. Rather he is depicted as preparing the way for the “Nazi” notion of an organic national community (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial and anti-Jewish criteria.

Revealingly, this is about as far as Faye goes in treating Heidegger’s early thought. In fact, there is very little philosophical analysis at all of Being and Time or any other work in his book. Every damning criticism he makes of Heidegger is based on Heidegger’s so-called affinity with National Socialist themes or ideas — or what a liberal defending a Communist would call guilt by association.

Worse, Faye lacks any historical understanding of National Socialism, failing to see it as part of a larger anti-liberal movement that had emerged before Hitler was even born and which influenced Heidegger long before he had heard of the Führer.

For our crusading anti-fascist professor, however, the anti-liberal, anti-individualist, and anti-modern contours of Heideggerian thought are simply Hitlerian — because of their later association with Hitler’s movement — unrelated to whatever earlier influences that may have affected the development of his thought. Q.E.D.

Faye, though, fails to make the case that Heidegger’s pre-1933 thought was “Nazi,” both because he’s indifferent to Heidegger’s philosophical argument in Being and Time, which he dismisses in a series of rhetorical strokes, and, secondarily, because he doesn’t understand the historical/cultural context in which Heidegger worked out his thought.

More generally, he claims Heidegger negated “the human truths that are the underlying principle of philosophy” simply because whatever doesn’t accord with Faye’s own liberal understanding of philosophy (which, incidentally, rationalizes the radical destructurations that have come with the “Disneyfication, MacDonaldization, and globalization” of our coffee-colored world) is treated as inherently suspect.

Only on the basis of the 1933-34 and ‘34-35 seminars does Faye have a case to make.

For the Winter term of 1933-34 Heidegger led a seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State.” If Faye’s account of the unpublished seminar report is accurate (and it’s hard to say given the endless exaggerations and distortions that run through his book), Heidegger outdid himself in presenting National Socialist doctrines as the philosophical basis for the new relationship that was to develop between the German people and their new state.

Like other National Socialists, Heidegger in this seminar views the “people” in völkisch terms presuming their “unity of blood and stock.”

Faye is particularly scandalized by the fact that Heidegger values the “people” (Volk) more than the “individual” and that the people, as an organic community of blood and spirit, excludes Jews and exalts its own particularity.

In this seminar, Heidegger goes even further, calling for a “Germanic state for the German nation,” extending his racial notion of the people to the political system, as he envisages the “will of the people” as finding embodiment in the will of the state’s leader (Führer).

Faye contends that people and state exist for Heidegger in the same relation as beings exist in relation to Being.

As such, Heidegger links ontology to politics, as the “question of all questions” (the “question of being”) is identified with the question of Germany’s political destiny.

Heidegger’s rejection of the humanist notion of the individual and of Enlightenment universalism in his treatment of Volk and Staat are, Faye thinks, synonymous with Hitlerism.

Though Faye’s argument here is more credible, it might also be pointed out that Heidegger’s privileging of the national community over the interests and freedoms of the individual has a long genealogy in German thought (unlike Anglo-American thought, which privileges the rational individual seeking to maximize his self-interest in the market).

The second seminar, in the Winter term of 1934-35, “On the State: Hegel,” again supports Faye’s case that Heidegger was essentially a “Nazi” propagandist and not a true philosopher. For in this seminar, he affirms the spirit of the new National Socialist state in Hegelian terms, spreading the “racist and human-life destroying conceptions that make up the foundations of Hitlerism.”

In both courses, Faye sees Heidegger associating and merging philosophy with National Socialism.

For this reason, his work ought not to be considered a philosophy at all, but rather a noxious political ideology.

Faye, in fact, cannot understand how Heidegger’s insidious project has managed to “procure a planetary public” or why he is so widely accepted as a great philosopher.

Apparently, Heidegger had the power to seduce the public — though on the basis of Faye’s account, it’s difficult to see how the political hack he describes could have pulled this off.

In any case, Faye warns that if Heidegger isn’t exposed for the political charlatan he is, terrible things are again possible. “Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to germinate through Heidegger’s writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.”

To be continued . . .

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935
Emmanuel Faye
Trans. Michael B. Smith, foreword Tom Rockmore
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

National Socialism was defeated on the field of battle, but it wasn’t defeated in the realm of thought.

Indeed, it’s undefeatable there because the only thing its enemies can do to counter its insidious ideas is to ban those thinkers, like Martin Heidegger, whose works might attract those wanting to know why National Socialism is undefeatable and why its world view continues to seduce the incredulous.

Or, at least, so thinks Emmanuel Faye in his recently translated Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).

Why, though, all this alarmed concern about a difficult, some say unreadable, philosopher of the last century?

The reason, Tom Rockmore says, is that he lent “philosophical cover to some of the darkest impulses that later led to Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust.”

One.
The Scandal

Faye’s book is part of a larger publishing phenomenon — in all the major European languages — related to the alleged National Socialism of the great Freiburg philosopher.

Like many prominent German academics of his age, Heidegger joined Hitler’s NSDAP shortly after the National Revolution of 1933.

He was subsequently made rector of the University of Freiburg, partly on the basis of his party affiliation, and in a famous rectorial address — “The Self-Assertion of the German University” — proposed certain reforms that sought to free German universities from “Jewish and modernist influences,” reorienting it in this way to the needs and destiny of the newly liberated Volksgemeinschaft.

Heidegger’s role as a public advocate of National Socialist principles did not, however, last very long.  Within a year of his appointment, he resigned the rectorship.

As he told the de-Nazification tribunal in 1945, his resignation was due to his frustration in preventing state interference in university affairs, a frustration that soon turned him away from all political engagements.

The story he told to the liberal inquisitors (which most Heideggerians accepted up to about 1988) was one in which a politically naive academic, swept up in the revolution’s excitement, had impulsively joined the party, only to become quickly disillusioned.

The story’s “dissimulations and falsehoods” were, indeed, good enough to spare him detention in a Yankee prison — unlike, say, Carl Schmitt who was incarcerated for two years after the war (though the only “Americans” Schmitt ever encountered there were German Jews in the conquerors’ uniform) — but not good enough to avoid a five-year ban on teaching.

In any case, it has always been known that Heidegger had at least a brief “flirtation” with “Nazism.”

Given the so-called “negligibility” of his National Socialism, he was able, after his ban, to resume his position as Germany’s leading philosopher.  By the time of his death (1976), he had become the most influential philosopher in the Western world.  His books have since been translated into all the European languages (and some non-European ones), his ideas have come to dominate contemporary continental thought, and they have even established a beachhead in the stultifying world of the Anglo-American academy, renowned for its indifference to philosophical issues.

Despite Heidegger’s enormous influence as “the century’s greatest philosopher,” he never quite shed the stigma of his early brush with National Socialism.  This was especially the case after 1987 and 1988.

Martin Heidegger, 1889 – 1976

For in late 1987 a little known Chilean-Jewish scholar, Victor Farìas, produced the first book-length examination of Heidegger’s “brush” with National Socialist politics.

His Heidegger and Nazism was not a particularly well-researched work, and there was a good deal of speculation and error in it.

It nevertheless blew apart the story Heidegger had told his American inquisitors in 1945, revealing that he had been a party member between 1933 and 1945; that his National Socialism was something more than the flirtation of a politically naive philosopher; and that his affiliation with the Third Reich was anything but “fleeting, casual, or accidental but [rather] central to his philosophical enterprise.”

This “revelation” — that the greatest philosophical mind of the 20th century had been a devoted Hitlerite — provoked a worldwide scandal.

In the year following Farìas’ work, at least seven books appeared on the subject.

The most impressive of these was by Hugo Ott, a German historian, whose Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1994) lent a good deal of historically-documented substance to Farìas’ charges.

In the decades since the appearance of Farìas’ and Ott’s work, a “slew” of books and articles (no one is counting any more) have continued to probe the dark recesses of Heidegger’s scandalous politics.

Almost every work in the vast literature devoted to Heideggerian philosophy must now, in testament to the impact of these studies, begin with some sort of “reckoning” with his “Nazism” — a reckoning that usually ends up erecting a wall between his philosophy and his politics.

In this context, Emmanuel Faye’s book is presently being touted as the “best researched and most damaging” work on Heidegger’s National Socialism — one that aims to tear down the wall compartmentalizing his politics and to brand him, once and for all, as an apologist for “the greatest crime of the 20th century.”

It’s fitting that Faye, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, is French, for nowhere else have Heidegger’s ideas been as influential as in France.

Heidegger began appearing in French translation as early as the late 1930s.  The publication in 1943 of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, based on a misreading of Heidegger, gave birth to “existentialism,” which dominated Western thought in the late 1940s and 1950s, helping thus to popularize certain Heideggerian ideas.

At the same time, French thinkers were the first to pursue the issue of Heidegger’s alleged National Socialism.

Karl Löwith, one of the philosopher’s former Jewish students exiled in France, argued in 1946 that Heidegger’s politics was inseparable from his philosophical thought. Others soon joined him in making similar arguments.

Though Löwith’s critique of Heidegger appeared in Les Temps Modernes, Sartre’s famous journal, the ensuing, often quite heated, French controversy was mainly restricted to scholarly journals.  Faye’s father, Jean-Pierre Faye, also a philosopher, figured prominently in these debates during the 1960s.

It was, though, only with Farìas and Ott that the debate over Heidegger’s relationship to the Third Reich spread beyond the academic journals and touched the larger intellectual public.

This debate continues to this day.

Part of the difficulty in determining the exact degree and nature of Heidegger’s political commitment after 1933 is due to the fact that Heidegger’s thought bears on virtually every realm of contemporary European intellectual endeavor, on the right as well as the left, and that there’s been, as a consequence, a thoughtful unwillingness to see Heidegger’s National Socialism as anything other than contingent — and thus without philosophical implication.

This unwillingness has been compounded by the fact that the Heidegger archives at Marbach are under the control of Heidegger’s son, Hermann, who controls scholarly access to them, hindering, supposedly, an authoritative account of Heidegger’s thinking in the period 1933-1945.

Moreover, only eighty of the planned 120 volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe have thus far appeared and, as Faye contends, these are not “complete,” for the family has allegedly prevented the more “compromising” works from being published.

The authority of Faye’s Heidegger — which endeavors to eliminate everything separating his politics from his philosophy — rests on two previously unavailable seminars reports from the key 1933-34 period, as well as certain documents, letters, and other evidence, which have appeared in little known or obscure German publications — evidence he sees as “proving” that Heidegger’s “Nazism” was anything but contingent — and that this “Nazism” was, in fact, not only inseparable from his thought, but formative of its core.

On this basis, along with Heidegger’s collaboration with certain NSDAP thinkers, Faye claims that the philosophy of the famous Swabian is so infused with National Socialist principles that it ought no longer to be treated as philosophy at all, but, instead, banned as “Nazi propaganda.”

To be continued . . .

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
B. R. Myers
Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010

It’s always seemed to me that if human beings were naturally more inclined to buy into a blood based nationalism than some kind of universalistic ideology than this would be strong evidence that racial loyalty had a genetic basis. According to B. R. Myers in The Cleanest Race the secret to the behavior and survival of the North Korean regime can be found in its ideology, one which not only ignores Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy but directly contradicts it.

Both Koreas teach that the peninsula was taken over by the Japanese in 1905 and stayed under the imperialist power’s thumb until the end of World War II. While most historians take the view that the colonized were heavily oppressed, Myers disagrees at least as far as the elites are concerned. He sees the Korean intelligentsia as having been co-opted by the conquerors. The Japanese come across as relatively benign in this book, encouraging the use of the Korean language and even regional peculiarities. To Japanese researcher Yuko Mastumura, on the other hand, the occupation was a classic case of cultural genocide.

For our purposes anyway, what’s important is that the Japanese saw the Koreans as racially similar to them and thus worthy of respect. The residents of the peninsula were encouraged to hold two identities. After the Empire of Japan surrendered, North Korea became occupied by the Soviets and South Korea by the US. In the communist area those that had supported the Japanese were forgiven and became part of the new elite. The Korean war began when the North invaded the South in 1950 and ended with a stalemate in 1953. That’s where we remain until today.

According to the author, the new North Korea intelligentsia knew nothing about Marxism. They were given a crash course in its concepts by the Soviets. Kim Il Sung, a man who according to one diplomat appeared to have never read a serious book, was appointed leader of the country. He had been a resistance fighter against the Japanese.

The author pieced together his picture of North Korean ideology from domestic art and propaganda accessible at the Unification Ministry’s North Korea Resource Center in Seoul. Myers claims that the DPRK tries to hide the racialist aspects of what they believe and that Marxism is a facade. He found that the English language Korean Central News Agency tended to talk about peace, imperialism, and couch its reports in the terms of universal human rights. But the more one gets into what’s meant for domestic consumption the more racialist the material becomes. The author studied North Korean film, news releases, novels, short stories, poetry, newspapers, etc and refers to it all collectively as the Text. He speculates there’s harder stuff that was never made available to researchers.

The Koreans seem to have kicked the Japanese out of their race and held on to their view of themselves as a unique people. They don’t necessarily see themselves as more intelligent or athletic than anybody else, but beings of superior virtue, too innocent to survive in this world without a strong leader. But Kim Sung Il is more of a maternal than a paternal figure. He is always portrayed as caring and showing good cheer, never imparting wisdom, as being too erudite it seen as anti-Korean. Race includes paintings of children gathering around this jolly fat man, holding on to his leg or playing with his shoes. The arts have never attempted to hide the belly of either Kim and even occasionally show one of them smoking a cigarette. After all, a good Korean is spontaneous and in touch with his pure instincts. There is some tension between portraying Sung as a masterful tactician who single-handedly repelled the Japanese and a jolly mother that loves her children. The latter is always emphasized and reinforced while the former image is simply processed at a cerebral level. There’s a picture in the book of a young Sung receiving a gun from his mother. The viewer is supposed to take away the blank expression on his face; he’s an innocent child rather than a soldier deeply pondering the gravity of the situation.

The first leader of the country is said to have invented the ideology of juche, which means something like self-reliance. Myers considers it a tool to justify the continuation of the regime to the outside world. He finds the juche text so convoluted and meaningless that there must be nothing there. Its ideas are never presented in domestic art or the media. As a matter of fact, the nation is far from self-reliant, living off of imports and foreign aid. The leadership doesn’t seem to want to change that. Interestingly there has never been a magnum opus or central text of the philosophy that one can go to to to find what it’s about. The author believes that this is by design. Other Western scholars have taken what the North Koreans have said about themselves at face value.

When Sung died in 1994 his son Kim Jong Il took over. While the father was said to be an expert in all things, the son is presented as a military commander forced to focus all his energy on foreign relations. There is a genre of fiction made up of tales of the Kims that are understood not to be based on real events but reflect the spirit of the men. In a 1999 short story called “Transitions” Kim Jong Il blames hard times on a failure to implement his father’s teachings.

“Long ago the Leader [i.e. Kim Il Sung] was already calling agriculture the foundation of the universe. . . But we have not farmed well in recent years, and we have failed to implement his teachings properly. To make matters worse, we have suffered damages from floods and drought, so that now the people are enduring difficulty because of the food problem. But still no one complains. Even while eating gruel they are steadfastly surmounting difficulties. They’re worried they might otherwise cause me pain, you see. When I think of how much the Leader wanted to give our people white rice and meat soup, I find it hard to bear . . .”

“We have not properly taken on the work you gave us to do, General,” Kyong’u said as he hung his head.

Notice how both North Koreans and their leaders are presented as morally pure. Since the DPRK is no longer a Marxist-Leninist state there isn’t much pressure to increase the living standard of the population. As seen in the story above, economic problems are freely admitted to. All references to communism were taken out of the country’s constitution in 2009 and a military-first policy was enshrined. While in the 70s and 80s the regime could lie and say that the South lived in abject poverty the facade became impossible to maintain in the 90s when North Koreans near the border started watching Republic of Korea television and DVDs were smuggled in from outside the country. The story now fed to the population is that the ROK may be wealthy on the outside but is really crippled by shame on the inside. Some leftists in the capitalist nation even agree with this and see the Spartan existence of their poorer brethren as admirable. Since there are two Koreas, the less wealthy one with a smaller population needs a justification for its existence, which it finds in deriding the ROK as a Yankee colony. In the North Korean novel Encounter, a girl from the South says

(Korea) is making its world debut as the flashiest of American colonies, so much so that the Americans tout it as a model. But look under the silk encasing, and you see the body of what has degenerated to a foul whore of America. Here and there covered in bruises from where it has been kicked black and blue by the American soldiers’ boots, or decaying from where sewage has seeped in. And out of all of that has come a rotten “president,” a rotten “government,” rotten media. . . . (It) turns the stomach just to imagine it.

The DPRK isn’t just worried about political or cultural corruption, but biological. In May 2006 the two Koreas met to discuss the maritime border between the states. Someone from the ROK mentioned that farmers in his country were taking foreign brides. A general from the North replied “Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance. I’m concerned that our singularity will disappear.” His counterpart answered that the unions were nothing more than a “drop of ink in the Han river.” The DPRK representative disagreed, saying that “Since ancient times our land has been one of abundant natural beauty. Not one drop of ink must be allowed.” Lest the reader think this was an isolated incident, weeks earlier the party daily had taken the South to task for the welcome they gave to a half-Korean American soccer player.

Mono-ethnicity is something that our nation and no other on earth can pride itself on. . . . There is no suppressing the nation’s shame and anger at the talk of a “multi-ethnic, multi-racial” society . . . which would dilute even the bloodline of our people.

Women coming back from China are given forced abortions and the state encourages large families in order to eventually be able to match the population of the ROK.

Before reading Race I had high hopes that the racism of the Koreans had a more scientific basis. Maybe locked away and only for domestic reading there are translated works of Rushton and Lynn that North Korean leaders study. More likely this nationalism is the kind of “We are the best!” ethnocentrism found at all times and everywhere before the present era.

The popular 1951 anti-American novella Jackals describes the revolting physical features of Caucasians. The following is a description of an American family.

The old jackal’s spade-shaped eagle’s nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen’s teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf-cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake that has just swallowed its skin.

Homosexuality is presented as an American perversion. In 1968 the North Koreans captured the USS Pueblo off their coast. A picture of the American shipmen being taken now graces postage stamps. The 2000 short story Snowstorm in Pyongyang tells of captured soldiers begging the North Koreans to let them engage in sodomy.

“Captain, sir, homosexuality is how I fulfill myself as a person. Since it does no harm to your esteemed government or esteemed nation, it is unfair for Jonathan and me to be prevented from doing something that is part of our private life.”

[The North Korean soldier responds,] “This is the territory of our republic, where people enjoy lives befitting human beings. On this soil none of that sort of activity will be tolerated.”

The survivability of the DPRK seems to stem from the genuine popularity that the regime enjoys. While it’s well known that many citizens flee to China what’s less often reported that 50 percent of them come back. This racialist state has survived while the dictatorships based on communism all collapsed. Unsurprisingly, people like being told they’re virtuous and better than others. They like having a God, or a perfect human being, to look up to. (While it’s been reported in the Western press that North Koreans consider the two Kims magical, in the Text it’s always a foreigner who is so impressed that he attributes supernatural powers to the father or son.) Myers relies on Freudian quackery to explain all this (I felt annoyed until I read the author studied in Germany and felt pity for him) but genetic similarity theory works better. Nothing North Koreans believe comes close to matching the absurdity of Christianity, Marxism, Freudism, Diversityism, feminism or racial egalitarianism. Even refugees who don’t like the North Korean regime express great admiration for the nation’s leaders and tear up when talking about them. As even the author acknowledges, the DPRK has never proposed invading an inch of territory outside the peninsula. But he still takes even the South Koreans to task for their chauvinistic attitudes. Are mentally healthy human beings anywhere too much for the liberal mind to bear?

In the end, the author is a typical member of the globalist elite: horrified that a non-Jewish state could be based on blood or a romantic nationalism that connects the people to the land. He seems to credit North Korea with a degree of cunning that strains credibility: understanding that a racialist state won’t fly in today’s world and inventing an alternative reality to present to other nations. If that’s the plan then there is no way that there will ever be peace between the US and the DPRK. Kim needs a threat to justify his rule and putting the military above all, and the US has a pathological need to bring political correctness to the entire globe. A free and racially pure united Korea will have to wait until the American empire collapses. Best of luck to them. While the DPRK may be an evil regime what they do is none of the business of the United States. How much of the starvation in the DPRK can be blamed on that country’s government and how much on ours? I don’t know, but what I’m sure of is that the future of the Korean peninsula would best be worked out by the people who live there. And if when they are united they choose to reject all aspects of multiculturalism I will be the first ones to cheer them on.

HBD Books, January 29, 2010

The Road to Disunion:
Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861
William W. Freehling
New York: Oxford University Press

In his second volume of The Road to Disunion, William W. Freehling explores the climax of the secessionist movement in the American South. Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 takes the reader from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reignited anti-slavery controversy in the territories, to the opening shots of the War Between the States at Fort Sumter. Long a thwarted minority, secessionists emerged from the political wilderness in these years and fatefully tore the White Republic asunder.

White Nationalists will be surprised to learn that Freehling’s revisionist interpretation of secession challenges the conventional wisdom on the topic. Every American teenager is taught in high school that Southerners stormed out of the Union over their failure to expand slavery in the territories. The Republican Party would have carved out new free states in the West. Eventually, free soilers would have achieved the necessary 3/4th majority to abolish slavery in the South. Thus, Southerners had no choice but to secede and form their own independent nation, as slavery was doomed within the Union.

Freehling uses multiple lines of evidence to undermine this argument. He points out that the most important secessionists, the South Carolina hotspurs, were the least enthusiastic about national expansion. Their champion John C. Calhoun had warned that the Mexican Cession would poison the Union. Likewise, the most important expansionists, the New Orleans imperialists, were among the strongest unionists. South Carolina had wanted to secede from the Union since 1850 and was deterred only because no other state would follow. The Kansas controversy that ensued in the mid-1850s didn’t precipitate the crisis. In the hearts and minds of South Carolinians, the fateful decision for disunion had been made long ago.

Far from being a beleagured minority, the Slave Power had been chalking up one victory after another, and making ever more extreme demands on their Northern colleagues. Texas was annexed to the Union in 1846. The Far Southwest was acquired in the Mexican Cession. The Wilmot Proviso was repeatedly defeated. In the Compromise of 1850, slaveholders had won a new fugitive slave law. The Whig Party was tried and convicted of treason to slavery in the Lower South. In the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Missouri Compromise was repealed and all the territories were flung open to slavery. In the Dred Scott decision, Congress was stripped of its power to abolish slavery in the territories and free blacks lost their citizenship. Finally, Stephen Douglas defeated Abraham Lincoln in an 1858 Illinois Senate race. The Republican Party grew only because of the seemingly insatiable demands of slaveholders who had never been more powerful.

The Western territories which allegedly were the cause of disunion were largely unsuited for plantation agriculture. Slavery wasn’t about to establish itself in New Mexico, Utah, or Nebraska. This was no real loss: planters had an overabundance of land in more tropical Arkansas and Texas waiting to be exploited. Free states like California and Oregon also usually voted with the South in Congress. In Kansas, a mere 200 slaves were imported into the territory. Southerners knew the North would settle the region with their far larger population. Even if Kansas had been admitted as a slave state under the Lecompton constitution, it wouldn’t have remained one a dozen years later.

Under close examination, disunion seems even more bizarre. Southerners were outraged at Northerners who wanted to ban slavery in the territories, but in seceding from the Union they renounced their claim to all the territories. Southerners worried about the erosion of slavery in the Border South, but in seceding from the Union they abolished slavery in the region. Southerners were worried that non-slaveholders would flock to a Southern Republican Party, but secession divided Virginia and produced thousands of anti-Confederates in East Tennessee, North Alabama, and Western North Carolina. Southerners worried about servile insurrection, but nothing was more likely to produce that result than a Civil War!

The ”Black Republican” threat was vastly exaggerated. Only 2% of Northerners wanted to abolish slavery where it already existed. The Republicans only wished to ban slavery in places it could never take root. They had lost on that point in the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott decision. In 1860/1861, the Republicans were willing to pass an irrevocable constitutional amendment that would have legalized slavery forever in the Southern states, including the Border South where it was imperiled. Abraham Lincoln even conceded that he wouldn’t use patronage to create a Southern Republican Party in the Lower South.

Lincoln’s election, the proximate cause of disunion, was desired by secessionists like William Lowndes Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett. Yancey deliberately used an abstract debate over a congressional slave code to divide the Democratic Party, defeat Stephen Douglas’ candidacy, and ensure a Lincoln victory. This outrage could then be exploited to drive a handful of the most radical states out the Union. The more reluctant Gulf States would then be forced to secede with their brethren. If Lincoln chose to coerce a seceded state, this would force Upper South (and hopefully the Border South) into a Southern Confederacy.

It boggles the mind: secessionists diligently went to work destroying their national political party through which they had lately controlled the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. If the Democrats had united behind Douglas, they could have defeated the Republicans in 1860. If slaveholders had conceded inhospitable and unwinnable territories within the Union, as they did by leaving the Union, the Republican Party would have faded. Slavery would have been ensconced in an impregnable constitutional fortress. There is no telling when it may have ultimately been abolished.

The revolution the secessionists incited thrust men into power who had not championed disunion. Jefferson Davis, Confederate President, had been a Washington insider and favorite of James Buchanan. He had opposed secession until 1860. Alexander Stephens, Confederate Vice President, opposed Georgia’s secession from the Union. Robert Toombs, Confederate Secretary of State, was a unionist who opposed Georgia secession in 1850. Christopher Memminger, Confederate Treasury Secretary, had been a Cooperationist. The Confederate government was stacked with other late comers. Noticeably absent were the Fire Eaters (Robert Barnwell Rhett and William Lowndes Yancey) who prodded the South to disunion.

These men exploited several issues to drive a wedge between North and South. Robert Barnwell Rhett hoped the Republicans would revisit the issue of abolishing slavery in Washington, DC. Maybe that could be used to dissolve the Union. Yancey argued for reopening the African slave trade in the hope that it would alienate Northern Democrats. Kansas and Caribbean expansion were also seen as useful devices for justifying disunion. Ultimately, the congressional slave code with the abstract “when necessary” language proved the most lethal and effective weapon.

South Carolina set the chain of dominos in motion. There haughty lowcountry aristocrats had long despised American mobocracy and yearned for deliverance. Touchy Southwesterners in Alabama and Mississippi could not tolerate the dishonor of being morally stigmatized or excluded from any territory. They could also not tolerate the decision of the Buchanan administration to coerce South Carolina by sending the Star of the West to resupply Fort Sumter. Florida and Georgia followed their neighbors. Louisiana and Texas cast their lot with their sister states.

The Upper South decisively rejected secession until Lincoln decided to coerce the Confederacy. The Whites in these states felt South Carolinians had been foolish and unwise, but did not contest their right to secede. Lincoln’s violation of states’ rights took Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee out of the Union. In the Border South, 1/3 of Whites sided with the Confederacy; 2/3 with the Union. Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland degenerated into civil war.

William W. Freehling searched in vain for a rational explanation for disunion. Wasn’t there an “irrepressible conflict” between the Free States and Slave States? His research uncovered an untidy variety of causes as divergent as the various subregions of the South. Some Southerners were swept along by the excitement and momentum of events beyond their control. Some felt they were being treated as less than equals. Some despised Yankee holier-than-thous. Some felt that slavery would be safer in a Southern Confederacy. Some believed that Northern protectionists were fleecing them with high tariffs. Some would side with their own misguided kin. Some did not believe the federal government could coerce a seceded state. Most subscribed to some combination of these grievances.

It is worth noting that the demise of the White Republic was a self inflicted blow on American civilization. Northerners and Southerners heaped up their own funeral pyre over insoluble sectional differences. Jews did not play an important role in the final unraveling. The reconstructed nation that emerged from the carnage would elevate Negroes to civil and political equality. A few years earlier, this had been an unthinkable scenario except in the minds of the wildest fanatics like John Brown. If there is any useful lesson that White Nationalists can draw from this, it is that White fratricide always works to the advantage of our racial enemies.

Occidental Dissent, January 29, 2010

Lucian Freud, "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping"

Psychanalyse de judaïme
Hervé Ryssen
Levallois: Éds. Baskerville, 2006

“The Psychoanalysis of Judaism” is Hervé Ryssen’s second book on the Jews.

For Ryssen, who rejects neither the ethnoracial nor the religious designation of Jews, it is their mentality that most distinguishes them from other peoples.

To understand this mentality, his first book, Les Espérances planétariennes (2005), looked at the “planetary ideology” dominating the work of contemporary Jewish intellectuals.

Ryssen’s second work approaches the Jews in a related but somewhat different way — in order to uncover the characterological or psychological foundations of their mentality. (His is not actually a “psychoanalysis” in the Freudian sense).

And like his first work, Psychanalyse de judaïme is argued through extensive quotations from the various writers who are its subject — quotations which are often pages long and comprise more than half the book. This makes its 400 pages a rather tedious read, especially given that the argument lies buried amidst the endless quotations. (Those enamored of French clarity and eloquence will find this particularly challenging).

I’ve gained, though, a greater patience with his “method.”

For it’s clearer to me now, especially after Greg Johnson’s translation of Ryssen’s Mechanopolis interview, that his “method” is dictated in large part by the political restrictions imposed on his type of “discourse.”

Nearly everywhere in the EU, it is a crime to “incite racial hatred.”

To avoid the inquisitor, Ryssen must proceed carefully.

By extensively quoting and documenting what the Jews say about themselves and their intentions, while implying rather than explicitly stating what he thinks, he is able to publish his incendiary books.

The downside is that this makes them a chore to read and blunts his arguments.

* * *

In his characterological analysis of the Jewish intellectual, Ryssen re-visits the planetary ideology he examined in his first work.

Given the centrality of this ideology to their mentality, Ryssen claims Judaism is as much a political project as it is a religion — a project inspired by the messianic expectations that make up Judaism’s religious core — as Jews endeavor to break down borders, unify the earth, and establish the universal peace announced by their vengeful prophets.

Religious Jews understand this aspiration for a unified, peaceful world order in terms of their millennial longing for the messiah and the restoration of David’s ancient kingdom. Non-religious Jews, Ryssen’s focus, see it in secular terms — as a multiracial planetary Utopia based on Jewish values (assumed to be those of a unified humanity).

Their compulsion to realize this planetary ideology has made the Jews a people preeminently defined by their priests, prophets, and publicists.

Every Jewish intellectual or artistic production aims, as such, to instill planetary expectations in others.

In this spirit, they urge gentiles to deny their race, religion, heritage — in effect, every particularistic identity that divides them from the rest of humanity.

From the Europeans’ most intimate personal relations to the cultural fundament of their civilization — everything particular to them becomes a monstrosity, obstructing the advent of the Jews’ perfectly planned world.

Blood loyalty, tradition, established institutions and practices — in their resistance to globalism’s leveling impetus — are deemed “racist,” designated thus for crucifixion.

The only thing European they have any real appreciation of is the beauty of Europe’s women.

Similarly, their ideology assumes that all men are brothers under the skin — and that the ideal human state is a nomadic one, unattached to anything or any place.

They favor for this reason mass Third World immigration, publicizing it as a “chance” for Europe — to undermine the old ways, mix different populations, and create the coffee-colored world of their Utopian expectations.

Above all, they stand as champions of America’s international order, with its capitalist obsessions, its inherent pluralism and openness, and its profound affinity with the Jewish spirit.

Indeed, anti-Americanism is a kind of anti-Semitism to them.

Yet no matter how inspiring Jewish messianic strivings are to their intellectuals, they remain an illusion that distorts their view of the world, sets them apart from other peoples, and nurtures certain psychological disorders in them.

As such, the Jews’ planetary ideology is both reflective and formative of who they are, shaping their national character, as their ideologues endeavor to re-shape the world in their own image.

* * *

How does Ryssen characterize the cosmopolitans as a people?

First, he sees them as a people full of overweening pride. Having a world-historical mission to unite humanity, they consider themselves not just “chosen,” but superior, imbued with humanity’s highest, most lofty spirit.

This makes them the pivot of all things.

Unable to conceive of the world without themselves and their extraordinary spirit, they are convinced of their self-designated moral superiority, even if others fail to recognize it. They think, in this vein, that nothing compares to Jewish suffering: The tragedy of World War Two’s 50 million dead is hardly commensurate in their eyes to that of the fabled “Six Million.”

Despite the great persecutions they have suffered from all the various peoples amongst whom they have dwelled, these persecutions never seem to have anything to do with who they are or with the way they relate to others. They are always innocent.

When they do fail, their failure is that of “man” in general.

If they suffer “oedipal” feelings or other neurotic sexual neuroses, then it’s something universal, not Jewish; if their culture is misogynist, then all cultures are; if they are money-grubbing, then economics, as Marx held, is everywhere and in every time enthroned.

They can do no wrong — that’s the goy’s specialty.

Having once been what sociologists call “service nomads,” acting as civilizational or religious “go-betweens,” their planetary ideology is linked to their cosmopolitan heritage, just as this heritage enhances the plasticity of their character, enabling them to adapt to new surroundings, while retaining their Jewish identity. In this way, they easily “assimilate” the culture of their host, though they never actually assimilate in the sense of developing an organic attachment to it that demotes the centrality of their Jewish identity.

Rooted solely in themselves, as their great thinker Franz Rosenzweig noted, they lack attachment to exterior things — to a land or a locality, a transcendent reference or a defining folklore.

They are noted for being “mobile, clever, articulate, flexible, and good at being a stranger.” Their thought and behavior are often audacious — stimulating, complex, effervescent, full of chutzpah, but rarely great in its achievements, lacking as they do the well-nourished depth of rooted sentiments and an intrinsic, life-affirming standard of value.

More negatively, the Jewish sense of mission causes their more unstable members to become megalomaniacal in their ethnocentrism.

This makes them prone to grandiose reasoning, exaggerating, dramatizing, even lying without the slightest hesitation.

If this is not enough, they are inclined to pontificate on everything, even those things of which they know nothing, telling us what’s best for us and what we ought to think or do.

They are wont, as the French say, to “drown the fish” (noyer le poisson), overwhelming every situation with contradictory discourses, justifying, as they dissimulate.

They are similarly disposed to inversion (making the noble common and vice versa), to materialism, and to low-mindedness — as they drag everything and everyone down to their veiled, usurious level.

As planetary cultists, they pursue lives of constant agitation, with their existence being a carousel, which revolves around the disturbances, disorders, and irritations they bring to their host, as they plot, scheme, and subvert.

The bad faith they sow inevitably yields hostile reactions, poisoning their relations with gentiles, whose potential violence is an endless source of anxiety to them.

Whenever they bring down persecution on themselves (which they can’t seem to help), they rarely understand why — though they are quick to seek revenge.

They are, relatedly, ridden with fears of separation, expulsion, disaster — seeing monsters everywhere.

Stuck between the grandiose idea they have of themselves and the hostility they inevitably provoke in the real world, Jews have become extremely neurotic about their identity (often going to therapy for years to reconcile themselves with who they are).

Anxiety, paranoia, ambiguity, and a good deal of hatred comes with being “chosen.”

* * *

What does Ryssen make of this complex of specifically Jewish characteristics?

He sees it in terms of the psychological disorder known in French as histrionisme.

In English, this is called (I think) “histrionic personality disorder” or what, up to a few decades ago, was known as “hysteria.”

The hysteria studied by its pioneering student, Jean-Martin Charcot, or discussed in Freud’s early case studies — such as that of emotionally distraught women swooning or losing control of themselves in the period’s Victorian and Viennese salons — is rarely encountered today.

The contemporary definition describes hysteria as a condition marked by excessive emotionality — evident, for example, in those who seek to please others or draw attention to themselves, or in those who try to “seduce” in an “excessive and invading” way. (Hence, its “histrionic” nature).

Hyperemotional, hysterics tend, as a consequence, to the fragile, impulsive, highly subjective, but also to the seductive, egocentric, and exhibitionist — prone as they are to self-engrandizing delusion.  This goes with their extremely “plastic” personalities that bend and form in the presence of others.  Their social activities are accordingly inauthentic and they are usually incapable of imagining the perspectives of others, let alone respecting them.

* * *

Ryssen argues that the “histrionic personality disorder,” though not applicable to all, matches that of many cosmopolitan intellectuals.

He then suggests (sincerely or not, I don’t know) that given the disorder’s severity Jews should start looking in the mirror, to confront who they really are, not what their illusions imagine them to be.

To “cure” themselves and their elites of this debilitating disorder, they must fight, therefore, against the fantasies that keep them in their mental ghetto.

He claims that numerous Jews over the last century have, in fact, preferred to abandon their neuroses and root themselves among European peoples, even if this has taken several generations to complete.

Real assimilation is possible, Ryssen claims, — if Jews are willing to reject their judéité.

* * *

By this reasoning, those who aren’t actually Jews, but who have assimilated their intellectual reflexes, become such, in spirit.

If Judaism, then, is above all “a particular psychic disposition,” as Ryssen contends, it helps to explain why so many white Americans live today under the influence of their planetary expectations and why even some of their most ardent critics bear elements of their distinct “histrionic personality disorder.”

The conclusion I take from this is that the struggle against the cosmopolitans’ anti-white jihad will be as much a struggle against a certain mentality, associated with “Judaization,” as it will be a struggle against Jewish power.

What Hath God Wrought:
The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
Daniel Walker Howe
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009

In the Oxford History of the United States series, Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought picks up where Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty left off in the War of 1812. It takes the reader from Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 to Zachary Taylor’s election as President of the United States in 1848. The period can aptly be described as America’s adolescence. It was also the Golden Age of the White Republic.

The telegraph, steamboat, and railroad appeared and revolutionized transportation and communication across the young nation. From Alexander the Great to Benjamin Franklin, previous generations had communicated only at the speed of a galloping horse. Within a single lifetime, the ancient ”tyranny of distance” was overthrown. The construction of canals and advances in printing fueled this process and led to the emergence of mass based political parties and an integrated national market economy. America would experience its first financial panic in 1819 and first depression from 1837 to 1843.

Under James Madison and James Monroe, the Democratic-Republican Party quietly absorbed the remaining Federalists in the short lived “Era of Good Feelings,” but later split apart into “Old Republicans” and “National Republicans” in the 1824 and 1828 national elections. These divisions within the Republican Party quickly solidified into the second two party system, the Democrats and Whigs, which dominated national politics until 1856.

The Democrats became the party of national expansion, white supremacy, states’ rights, defense of slavery, cultural pluralism, agrarianism, and free trade. The Whigs favored a protective tariff, internal improvements, economic diversification, a national bank, soft money, nativism, and moral reform. They opposed national expansion and the extension of slavery. Throughout this period, the Whigs consistently took the more liberal position on race. For the time being, partisanship had the salutary effect of papering over the sectional crack in the Union that emerged in the Missouri Crisis. The Senate experienced its own Golden Age with the debates of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun.

In the Great Migration, American settlers poured across the Appalachians into the Old Northwest and Old Southwest and rapidly settled the Mississippi Valley. They became known to posterity as the “pioneers.” From 1789 to 1815, American civilization was Atlanticist and looked toward Europe. From 1815 to 1848, Americans became Continentalists and turned their gaze westward across North America. They followed the Oregon Trail in Conestoga wagons into the Pacific Northwest. The Mormons left the Midwest in an exodus and settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Stephen Austin and other American colonists settled in the Mexican state of Texas.

The migration of the pioneers to the frontier had a parallel in the migration of European immigrants and country folk into the cities. In 1820, there were only five cities in America with a population of more than 25,000 and one over a 100,000. By 1850, there were 26 cities with a population over 25,000 and six with a population over 100,000. The urban percentage of the population increased from 7% to 18%. From 1815 to 1850, about five million European immigrants (Germans, Scot-Irish, Irish Catholics) settled in America. The median age was 16. Only 1 of 8 Americans was over the age of 43. The White birthrate was so high that the American population doubled every 20 years.

In spite of their growing diversity, Americans explicitly disavowed the notion that they lived in a multiracial or multicultural society. Free blacks in the Upper South (North Carolina, 1835), New England (Connecticut, 1818, Rhode Island, 1822), and Mid-Atlantic states (Pennsylvania, 1838) lost the voting rights they had previously enjoyed. After 1819, every new state admitted to the Union with the exception of Maine would disenfranchise black voters. Missouri, Ohio, Illinois and several other states banned free blacks altogether. Blacks developed their own separate churches. Women lost the right to vote in New Jersey which was the only state that had granted them suffrage.

In 1815, Southerners didn’t have much passion for defending slavery. They usually said it was a regrettable institution that had been foisted on the South in its infancy by the British. The Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner rebellions changed that. By 1848, John C. Calhoun and others like him had come around to defending slavery as a “positive good.” Josiah Nott, a Mobile physician who wrote about racial differences, denied that negroes and Whites belonged to the same species. In the 1850s, George Fitzhugh rejected Jeffersonianism in favor of a comprehensive political theory based on slavery and hierarchy. By that time, the Enlightenment had long since faded and died in the South.

Americans in the North and South alike had come to believe that the United States was a “white man’s country.” The logical implication was that free blacks were a blot on the American experiment. In 1817, the American Colonization Society was founded for the purpose of deporting them to Africa. 4,291 American negroes were ultimately repatriated to Liberia in West Africa. 10,000 more would emigrate there from the United States by the end of the Civil War. African colonization was endorsed by the Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians as well as by the states of Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Delaware, Ohio and six other Northern states.

The Indians weren’t held in much higher esteem. After smashing the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, Andrew Jackson forced huge territorial concessions on the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) that led to them surrendering most of their territory in the Old Southwest. Florida was invaded and annexed to destroy a bastion of multiracial freedom that had become a haven for runaway slaves. The later Seminole Wars were fought for the same reason.

Old Hickory’s proudest accomplishment as President of the United States was the Indian Removal bill which ordered the deportation of all Indians east of the Mississippi to the Oklahoma Territory. His successor Martin Van Buren zealously carried on Indian Removal. In the Northwest, a small race war was fought against the Black Hawk Indians. The Texas Revolution evolved into a race war between Anglos and Mexicans. By 1846, Florida, Oregon, and Texas had fallen like ripe fruit into the American orbit. Everywhere White men could be found asserting their racial interests in a way that is virtually unknown today.

“Manifest Destiny” was in the air. This imperialistic sentiment culminated in the Mexican War under James K. Polk (”Young Hickory”) which resulted in the acquisition of California and the Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. After the Mexican Cession, the Far Southwest was considered the racial patrimony of White men. In some parts of Texas, Mexicans were ethnically cleansed and a new law was passed that racialized property rights. Mestizos in New Mexico didn’t acquire full rights as American citizens until statehood was finally achieved in 1912. California didn’t recognize Mexicans as citizens until 1870.

Culturally speaking, Jacksonian America was a fertile period. The most popular form of entertainment was the minstrel show. Americans jumped Jim Crow and laughed at Zip Coon, a pretentious negro who liked to dress in fancy clothes and use big words he didn’t understand, a precursor of Barack Obama in some ways. Dime novels which glorified the American Revolution and Indian Wars were popular. The roots of country music can be traced back to the Anglo-Celtic folk songs of this era. Edgar Allan Poe and the Transcendentalists laid the foundation of American poetry and literature.

The Second Great Awakening reinvigorated American religion. By 1850, twice as many Americans were affiliated with a church as had been the case in 1815. Evangelicals sought to hasten the millennium by supporting a series of reform movements: abolitionism, women’s suffrage, temperance, world peace, and opposition to Indian Removal. Cockfighting, dueling, and drinking became controversial as middle class mores spread. Utopian communes were founded in New Harmony, Indiana, Nashoba, Tennessee, and Oneida, New York. Joseph Smith founded the Church of Latter Day Saints.

A radical left hatched out of the fringes of Christianity: Unitarians, Hicksite Quakers, Evangelicals, and Protestant missionaries. Oberlin College (the first integrated co-ed university in the world) was founded in Ohio. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass preached against slavery in The Liberator and The North Star, but the abolitionists remained mired in the swamps of third party politics. In 1848, the women’s suffrage movement kicked off with the famous Seneca Falls convention. Henry David Thoreau wrote his famous essay “Civil Disobedience” in his disgust with the Mexican War, Indian Removal, and the expansion of slavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson found Polynesians and Africans worthy of the American melting pot. The Whig Party vigorously opposed the Mexican War and Indian Removal. Without the Jews, America produced its own leftist radicals.

These are but a few of the topics that are given treatment in What Hath God Wrought. There are also discussions of the Bank War, Monroe Doctrine, the South Carolina Nullification Crisis, the Wilmot Proviso, California Gold Rush and much else. Although it is written from a humanist perspective, I found What Hath God Wrought to be the most comprehensive introduction to Jacksonian America available. In my next review, I will explore the subject further in Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.

White Nationalism is an attempt to recreate the lost world of the White Republic. It is unintelligible outside of its roots in the American Colonization Society, Indian Removal, Wilmot Proviso, and the Free Soil movement. If for no other reason, White Nationalists (and anti-racists) should read this book to understand their own complex origins.

From Occidental Dissent, January 21, 2010

Empire of Liberty
A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
by Gordon S. Wood
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009

I have always enjoyed the escapism of reading a good book about the White Republic. It is a relief to return on occasion to an earlier chapter of American history when the racial and cultural foundations of our national identity were unquestioned. White men once enjoyed the luxury of being able to engage in real politics. Back then our nation was not yet under the control of alien parasites.

Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty is a chronicle of America’s youthful innocence. It was a very different time from our own. From 1789 to 1815, the United States was unquestionably a “white man’s country.” The first several naturalization laws restricted citizenship to “free white persons.” Neither major political party considered women fit for the political responsibilities of republican citizenship. The Indians were not thought of as “Native Americans,” but as savages and foreigners allied with America’s enemies, Britain and Spain. Blacks were considered an inferior race best enslaved, dominated, or deported.

Racial attitudes hardened in this period. After 1800, Jefferson’s hereditarian account of racial differences overwhelmed Samuel Stanhope Smith’s naive environmentalism. In the North, several states passed anti-miscegenation laws, black codes, and restricted black voting rights. Southerners passed new laws against free blacks and placed new restrictions on black voting rights and civil liberties. Antislavery sentiment in the South waned and collapsed after the Haitian Revolution and Gabriel’s Rebellion.

In spite of the American government’s professed benevolent intentions toward the Indians, White settlers poured across the Appalachians into the Northwest and Southwest, violated Indian treaties, and soaked the frontier in low level warfare. The Indians suffered several major defeats against the U.S. Army at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), Battle of Tippecanoe (1811), and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814). By 1815, the various Indian tribes of Transappalachia had surrendered most of their land, and philanthropists were advocating their resettlement on Western reservations.

I believe it was Leonard Zeskind who recently said that America has always had two hearts: one beating heart is White and Christian, the other heart is liberal and democratic. The two have often been at odds. Wood’s Empire of Liberty is more about the latter than the former. Although every major figure in this period was a White male, Wood doesn’t really draw attention to this. The irreducible whiteness of the Early Republic is taken for granted. It is assumed like the water in an aquarium.

The real story that Gordon Wood wants to tell is the division of Americans into Federalists and Republicans. The America of 1815 wasn’t envisioned by the Founders. They didn’t anticipate the rise of political parties or the partisan press. They created a republic, not a liberal democracy. When the Constitution was ratified, “democracy” was still held in disrepute. It was a discredited political theory. “Democrat” was a pejorative term.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the Federalists began to have second thoughts about the popular forces they had unleashed. Their ideal was a strong European style nation-state with a formidable military and commercial economy. They looked forward to the day when America would mature into a class based society like England. The Federalists wanted a republic presided over by the better sort of men: the wise, learned, propertied, well born, cosmopolitan. They believed hierarchy was the foundation of civilization and moral virtue the bedrock of the social order.

Some Federalists wanted America to become a monarchy. They advised George Washington to imitate the British court throughout his presidency. John Adams was obsessed with titles and the trappings of aristocracy. Alexander Hamilton called democracy a “disease.” After American independence was secured and a strong national government was created, the Federalists wanted all the revolutionary jargon to go away. They often spoke about bringing “erroneous notions of liberty and equality” to heel.

The U.S. Constitution was designed to reverse the democratic excesses of the state legislatures. The Federalists were appalled by the Jacobinism and licentiousness they saw spreading through American society. Commoners were refusing to show their customary deference. Parvenus were everywhere aspiring to gentlemen status. “Aristocrat” was becoming an abusive term. It was a charge the Federalists were often slimed with.

The Republican social revolution that followed the ratification of the Constitution was a time of ferment and chaos more profound than the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. By the time it was over, the traditional social hierarchy of the eighteenth century was in shambles. Slavery fell in the Northern states. Patriarchy took a hit. Honor was on the way out. Divorce laws were liberalized. Primogeniture was abandoned. The prison system replaced the mutilation that prevailed in colonial times. Illegitimacy and alcoholism skyrocketed. The mainline Protestant churches were disestablished. Jews were extended rights they previously had not enjoyed.

The acid of liberty and equality systematically eroded every hierarchical institution. The Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians lost their former dominance to Baptists and Methodists. America became the most commercialized society in the world. Wealth became the primary determinant of social status, not birth, blood, or education. After the triumph of the Democratic-Republicans, a wave of egalitarianism swept away the distinctions that had once existed between White men.

By 1815, America had evolved from an aristocratic republic to the liberal capitalist democracy that it remains to this day. Corporations were sprouting up everywhere. In the North, a middling commercialized society of religious fundamentalists had emerged. In the South, the invention of the cotton gin was creating the Cotton Kingdom of the Antebellum era. Slaveowners had lost their previous enthusiasm for revolutionary liberalism. In Congress, the familiar sort of politicians (ex. Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren) were being elected to public office.

Much of Empire of Liberty is given over to what you would expect: the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the XYZ Affair, the Quasi War with France, the Crisis of 1798/1799, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Court and judicial review, the Louis and Clark expedition, the Burr conspiracy, Jefferson’s embargo on Britain, and the War of 1812. I found it to be an excellent introduction to all of these topics.

The seeds of America’s racial decline were sown in the earliest years of the White Republic. In these years, the Republicans began the practice of celebrating the Declaration of Independence. Centuries later, Americanism would be redefined by their successors as the ideological principles of liberty and equality. The degenerate society that our generation inherited evolved out of the flaws inherent in that document. Empire of Liberty is a useful resource in understanding how that ball was set into motion.

From Occidental Dissent, January 15, 2010

Action!
Race War to Door Wars
Joe Owens
Lulu, 2007

Joe Owens was “on the door,” working as a bouncer at a popular Liverpool nightspot called The Garage when three fun-seekers came in: a blind man and his two companions. Sitting the blind man down, one of his friends went to the bar, the other to the men’s room. As Owens writes:

It didn’t take too long before the white trash noticed this, as well as the fact that he was blind. One scumbag went over to the blind guy and sat next to him, while removing his own shoe. He then waved this obviously smelly shoe under the nose of the blind guy and held it there. This was to the great merriment of his friends . . . (p. 193)

The bullying continued, and at last Owens was made aware of the situation:

Never have I witnessed such a despicable spectacle. Running over as fast as my legs could carry me, I kicked this low life in the face and put him to sleep. I have seldom, if ever enjoyed dishing out the ultra-violence as much as I did to this dog. (p. 193)

Joe Owens is known up and down the United Kingdom as a veteran nationalist street-fighter, a genuinely “hard man” feared and loathed by the far left, who called him the “Nazi Assassin” for the vicious, almost clinical punishment he meted out to communist and anarchist thugs who preyed on politically incorrect activists, often with the connivance of the police and special interests.

Owens’ new tell-all book Action! Race War to Door Wars, is an absorbing, fascinating glimpse inside the mind of a segment of nationalist politics many would prefer to ignore or pretend doesn’t exist: young working-class men animated not by theory and books but by tribal instinct and first-hand experience of the effects of nonwhite immigration and a changing world that leaves their kind behind.

Action! takes the reader through Joe Owens’ political awakening in the 1970s; the violence, jail time, and eventual disillusionment that followed; his career at some of the best-known night clubs of the English rave scene; and his re-engagement with politics, rising to become the bodyguard of Nick Griffin, present leader of the British National Party.

The incident with the blind man and the bully, which Owens calls “a depressing story,” is perhaps the best example of what draws many of the men of Owens’ class to nationalism. They hate bullies, despise unfairness and hypocrisy, and see nationalism less as politics than as a survival strategy. Poorer whites are the first to feel the effects of nonwhite immigration, with the crime and competition for scarce social resources that come along with it. Their response is often explosive.

Certainly the violence Joe Owens confesses to is extreme, but it didn’t come out of thin air. Owens was at the height of his game at a very important point in the racial history of the UK, the 1970s and 1980s, as the effects of the government’s open door immigration policy, never consented to by the electorate, was becoming evident to a growing number of people.

The result: a resistance movement that sank roots deep into the public housing council estates of white Britain. This pro-white group was the National Front (NF), an organization that mixed an uncompromising call for ending immigration and beginning repatriation with a defense of the welfare state and working class social gains, from the eight-hour day to the National Health Service. The NF program had the potential, largely realized, of drawing off hundreds of thousands of blue collar whites from support of the Labour Party, which had long taken them for granted. The sight of thousands of white working people marching in England’s streets to international attention terrified the Establishment, from the Tories’ corporate owners craving cheap non-white workers to the Labour Party and special interest groups who supported Third World immigration on ideological grounds.

In the 1977 London election, the NF scored an astounding 119,000 votes, with even the Labour Party admitting that the NF had put out “the most dynamic, exciting, and hard-hitting leaflet of the campaign.” The tally was a shock to the system, which felt that something clearly had to be done: calling the NF “Nazis” and “racists” hadn’t worked.

The UK’s equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League is the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which met in 1977 with Labour Party officials to devise a strategy. A small Trotskyite sect called the Socialist Workers’ Party was approached with a view to a plan to destroy the National Front.

Like all Trotskyite groupuscles the SWP was (and still is) marginal at best, but their leader “Tony Cliff” had a nose for business. Born Yigael Gluckstein in 1917 in what would soon (in 1920) be British Mandate Palestine, Cliff had earlier on made an ideological concession to “imperialism” over the Korean War and had no problem with concocting an ideologically correct formula to benefit the corporate immigration agenda by agreeing to help form the Anti-Nazi League, the ANL, which with swift inevitability was called ANAL by its detractors.

(American readers will recall the outcry in 2006 over “Nuestro Himno,” the version of “Star-Spangled Banner” sung en Español by famous Hispanic artists as part of the run-up to the illegal alien amnesty campaign. The man behind the record was Adam Kidron, none other than the nephew of Tony Cliff/Yigael Gluckstein.)

Among the ANL’s initiatives was Rock Against Racism, which enlisted popular bands for well-financed carnivals and concerts to draw large numbers of kids in the hope of overshadowing the NF’s self-financed events.

These machinations were high level, but the effects were soon felt on the streets of the United Kingdom by the likes of Joe Owens, who discusses a nationalist Liverpool sidewalk paper sale when he saw a group of “Reds” coming. “The leaflet they were distributing was advertising a Rock Against Racism Carnival. . . . I had not even had time to read it when all hell broke loose. . . . Immediately dropping my papers I ran to the aid of my comrades” (p. 16). What followed was merely one of many brutal physical confrontations with communists who, empowered by the connection their leadership had to power and finance, were in fact the paramilitary arm of corporate/state policy enabling Third World immigration.

The people involved in attacking nationalism were not only weedy lefty students, but hardened criminals and killers, drawn from the demimonde of drugs and organized crime. One who actually pulled a gun on a local BNP organizer was Dessie Noonan, head of a Manchester crime family and responsible, police say, for numerous murders. Noonan himself was eventually to die on a sidewalk, stabbed to death by his black crack dealer.

Members of the ANL, and spin-offs like Red Action (some of whom were Irish Republican Army terrorists) had no compunction about attempting to kill dissidents, emboldened as they were by the official protection they enjoyed. The most famous nationalist victim was probably Albert Marriner, an old-age pensioner, Second World War veteran, and NF member who was hit on the head with a brick and killed in 1983.

The aim of the orchestrated violence was to send a message to white Britons that they could engage nationalist politics only at their own physical peril. As a result, nationalism became isolated and attracted a number of people who thrived on the atmosphere of intimidation.

What is interesting in Owens’ account of his early political career is how small a role ideology played in the “action” the book is named for. He confesses that he was ignorant of the ideological identity of the political thugs he punished so mercilessly. “I knew what Communist meant and associated it with Russia. I could not understand why they were concerned” (p. 15). Three decades after one beating he says that “I am now aware that they were the Socialist Workers Party. This was a violent Trotskyite grouping, whose aim was revolution and the smashing of the UK state. We commonly knew them as Reds.” Indeed, Owens’ disgust for the “Reds” often seems more elemental than ideological: “Like some scripted scene from a TV show they moved in in unison in our direction shrieking, ’NAZI! NAZI! NAZI!’ . . . What a bunch of sad bastards and total misfits they were” (p. 27).

Ideological considerations were also only secondary in the curious life-or-death lash-ups that occurred among the street-level nationalists Owens talks about. The National Front had a number of “more hard-line” grouplets on its coattails, each claiming to be more extreme than the next. One such organization was the British Movement, founded in 1968 by Colin Jordan, uniforms and Hitler worship included. Another group was the National Socialist Party of the UK (NSPUK), run by an elderly lady in Eire, where speech laws were liberal by UK standards, and where US-derived National Socialist propaganda was run off with abandon.

The NF was a fanatically “loyalist” group, totally opposed to the Irish Republican Army and what it stood for. It openly renounced Nazism, pointing to its numerous war hero members, but despite the BM’s Nazism and the NSPUK’s support for the IRA (which goes unmentioned by Owens), none of these details of history and politics stopped cooperation in Liverpool against the common “Red enemy.” After one punch-up, Owens had to explain his alliances to a larger NF meeting. “I . . . explained what had happened on Church Street. I gave a very detailed account of the British Movement lads being arrested . . . that without the British Movement guys we would surely have  taken a very bad beating” (p. 18). It is unknown how much further the violence of the controlled left played a role in determining nationalist policy like this, but still, straight up neo-Nazis, in the Hollywood sense, were able to work side-by-side with working class white patriots like Joe Owens, driven together by common need.

One explanation for such cooperation is that the fetishism of Third Reich symbols and slogans among some white blue collar youth does not necessarily indicate a commitment to, or even real understanding of National Socialism. Instead, swastikas and lightning bolts are often seen as the most powerful sigils available to evoke a sense of militancy in the face of often-immediate physical danger. To youth raised on media portrayals of “Nazism” as ominous and evil, these symbols become the ultimate expression of brawn and rebellion.

It is often ineffective to point out that their use defeats the overall purpose, because for many of these kids the purpose is to intimidate, and even offend, not to transform society. Many older activists have responded either by catering to this short-sightedness or by rejecting this class of young people out of hand. A more sensible course, followed by many European groups, has been to wean young people from Third Reich fetishism by giving them a substantive ideological education.

Similar ideological looseness can be seen in the schizophrenic response of Owens’ circle when it came to political action. Owens understood that the racial crisis in the UK was the result of official, government policy, enforced at all bureaucratic levels, right down to the police, who protected the Reds and arrested nationalists. Yet when the black Liverpool slum of Toxteth exploded in riots against the police, Owens found himself fighting on the side of the cops and their chief, a politically correct creature named Chief Constable Ken Oxford. “Now don’t get me wrong, I was no Oxford fan. I looked upon him and the rest of his kind as sellouts to the mob and the Reds. Shouting ‘Oxford in’ was just to wind the Reds up and get a bit of publicity” (p. 41). Provoking reactions from political enemies had the expected result for Owens’ new political group, John Tyndall’s New National Front (NNF), which even planned a pro-police march. “The NNF gained a lot of local publicity from all this, but sadly failed to make real political headway . . . In hindsight, it is a shame that confrontation was our only approach to politics” (p. 43).

In those days before the internet, the NF had to make news to be seen, and marches were key to raising their profile. In the end, by being physical deterrents to leftist/state violence, men like Joe Owens prevented the NF from being wiped out. That task, once again, fell to better-schooled people at much higher echelons. Owens touches on one aspect, the self-destruction the NF underwent, “with infighting in every quarter” (p. 23).

Efforts with names like the “British Campaign Against the Boat People” seemed to calculate an accommodation to the leftist image of nationalists as heartless people bullying the weak. “In retrospect I wonder what those Vietnamese must have made of it all. A small army of assorted skinheads who screamed abuse at them, attacked them. Did anyone explain to them who we were? Why we were there?” (p. 21). While the system that allowed the immigration crisis to deepen was at fault, people widely viewed as clearly helpless were, if anything, easily manipulated into being made into the victims of a carefully controlled image of intolerance.

Eventually, the all-around pressure on the National Front, among which was a lack of strategic focus, led to dissolution from within. Joe Owens touches on the numerous splits and purges and how he stayed with the “hard-line,” ideologically committed to John Tyndall.

While the Board of Deputies of British Jews sank undoubted millions into defeating the National Front, and internal mayhem weakened it, Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 nod to the concerns the NF had aroused is widely assumed to have gelded the NF and won Thatcher the 1979 election. “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture,” she said, receiving thousands of supporting letters and gaining an immediate 5 percent jump in opinion polls. The NF, “associated with violence” that had been manufactured, and incapable of constructing a coherent profile, never recovered. Nationalism sank into sectarianism, extremism, and irrelevancy, consumed by the confrontationalist politics that had been so skillfully imposed on it.

While Owens had never been a physical slouch, and the National Front was physically fearless, Owens was eventually overtaken by the actions and thinking of his extreme associates. In 1983, “a silly thing to do,” as he admits, was sending “envelopes lined with razor blades to prominent members of Liverpool’s Jewish community.” Despite the fact that he was motivated by the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatilla in Lebanon, he admits that “they were just the straws that broke the camel’s back as far as I was concerned” (pp. 52, 53). He was jailed for a year.

Back on the street, Joe Owens’ political commitments weakened. In the early 1970s he had been influenced by the Bruce Lee juggernaut, a fad that also fascinated another hard man of Owens’ generation, Andy McNab, whose book Bravo Two Zero on his SAS Special Forces experiences has a lot in common with Owens’ own account of another kind of active life (see note 1). Owens parlayed his interest into competition fighting, where he excelled, and then into a lucrative career as a bouncer.

The long, fascinating section of his book detailing his nightclub life has little if any political interest for readers, but does say a lot about Owens’ character as a genuinely tough man. He doesn’t brag or gloat, but gives worthy opponents respect, part of the honor ethos he says he learned in martial arts. A stoic approach was certainly called for. In those days, Liverpool’s nightlife was plagued by organized crime, and the feuds and violence saw the police attempt to frame him for various crimes, most seriously murder. People like Owens see a side to policing most of us don’t: the corruption and brutality that pervades the operations of many police forces.

Owens’ sense of personal honor shines throughout his book. The mix of objective political events and the hard work of a new generation of serious nationalist leaders had made the British National Party into a viable political force, the first such nationalist group in the UK since those heady days of Joe Owens’ youth in the 1970s. With the advent of the internet, marches became unimportant, and with them went the organized opposition nationalism had faced in the 70s. But that didn’t mean people weren’t still gunning for the BNP. Nick Griffin, the new BNP chief, needed protecting, and Joe Owens offered himself, an absorbing tale he tells in the final chapters of the book. Among his adventures is a tale of how he bravely helped fend off a Red mob anxious to tear Griffin and French leader Jean-Marie Le Pen limb from limb.

Owens’ personal code made his engagement with the politics of the possible difficult. Far from the hard streets of his political youth, Owens faced the disillusionment many feel among professional politicians. And while his problems with the new BNP seem personal, he definitely shows a high degree of insight into modern nationalist thinking. With biting candor he points out that we “only have to look at the white power movement in the USA, to see how far off track our cause has gone . . . If our race has to rely on swastika tattooed skinheads to survive then we are finished.” But Owens’ main insight has to do with those who should know better and yet haven’t broken out of the old fashioned thinking that has held the cause back.

He is also honest: “I have led a very mixed-up life, without any real sense of purpose. . . . My life has been both exciting and dangerous but sadly, I have nothing to show other than plenty of odd and amusing memories” (p. 291). But Owens, despite his disillusionment, remains unrepentant, something that was in question when news that he planned to release a book came out, especially since he had had a public falling out with the BNP. There was some concern that his memoirs would be a “prodigal son” recantation in the style of Führer Ex and the tattooed convicts paraded regularly on daytime television to bemoan their past lives of “hatred”(see note 2). Searchlight even greeted the news of Owens’ pending book with a headline, “Nazi Godfather Spills the Beans.”

The mainstream author Owens initially worked with had something like that in mind. Since the late 1990s the UK has seen a renewed and lucrative interest in “lad” programs, books, and films, a reaction to the engineered emasculation of white males over the course of the previous three decades. Tell-alls from former gangsters, soccer hooligans, and Special Forces veterans fly off the shelves. Author Graham Johnson saw a chance to benefit from this market, and he and Owens began work on the project. But there was a catch:

Graham explained to me that the book would have to show that I had now changed my views, and looked back on my life with disdain. I compromised saying I wouldn’t change a thing in my life but would admit the path I’d taken hadn’t really changed anything. (p. 272)

Owens’ well-honed sense of suspicion—the hotel room meetings Owens suspected may have been bugged and the leading questions about Owens’ alleged crimes—finally led Owens to drop out of the project, returning a cash advance in the process, something he didn’t have to do but which was demanded by his personal code. Owens struck out on his own, penning a highly readable, politically uncompromising memoir as a result.

It is a testament to the rise of the new media—the same media that ended the old nationalist confrontational politics—that Action! Race Wars to Door Wars even appeared. Instead of hoping to find a main-stream publisher, Owens turned to Lulu, an on-demand internet publishing service (see note 3). Action! suffers from a clumsy title and the lack of a seasoned editor. It also could use an index. But as an absorbing read, Action! is difficult to put down.

(2) Ingo Hasselbach, with Tom Reiss, Führer Ex (New York: Random House, 1996). Among similar “confessional” snitchographies are Thomas Martinez with John Guinther, Brotherhood Of Murder (New York: Pocket Books, 1990) and Ray Hill and Andrew Bell, The Other Face of Terror (London: Collins, 1988). In all three books, the protagonists claimed to have experienced epiphanies about the odious nature of their “hatred” when faced with serious criminal charges. Needless to say, their accounts are deemed highly suspect by some readers, and their denunciations of their former “comrades” often revolve around illegal behavior they themselves instigated or otherwise enabled.

(3) Available in three formats, download, paperback, and hardcover, from the Lulu website:  http://www.lulu.com/content/985684.

There has been some discussion on the Internet about the book Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate by South Asian intellectual Kenan Malik, a book in which the work of Frank Salter is sharply critiqued. Now, the person best suited to answer Malik is Salter himself; further, I don’t see Malik introducing any novel arguments beyond that already presented by other anti-Salterian critics, arguments that I have answered in the past. Nevertheless, it is worth briefly looking at Malik’s remarkable suggestion that humans (and life itself!) do not have an interest in genetic continuity; only our “wants, needs, and desires” constitute real human interests.

However, there are really two types of human interests. With respect to the present discussion, these can be defined as follows. As the name suggests, preference interests describe a concern for objects or activities that a person or group has a conscious preference for; e.g., “my friend Joe has an interest in baseball.” This is the type of interest most people are familiar with, and Malik exploits this familiarity by framing his “argument” in these terms. However, such a narrow definition of “interest” as our “wants, needs, and desires” leads us to conclude that non-sentient organisms have no interests and that, for example, a recent heart attack victim can have an interest in smoking, eating deep fried Twinkies, and drinking melted lard – if he so “wants” and “desires.”

Therefore, we must consider welfare interests – which describes those objects and activities that contribute to the well being (defined in very broad terms, including the evolutionary) of any organism, independent of their “wants or desires” (if they are even capable of having “wants and desires”). Therefore, although a bacterium does not have preference interests, it does indeed have welfare interests in its survival and reproduction – reproduction contributing to genetic continuity, which is the core measure of “success” or “fitness” from an evolutionary perspective. And it should also be noted that Salter refers to the interests of evolved organisms (individual organisms and groups thereof), not the “interests” of genes per se. If Malik or anyone else wants to critique the “genes have interests” paradigm, I refer them to Richard Dawkins.

One of the defining characteristics of life on Earth is reproduction; indeed, as stated above, genetic continuity is so fundamental to evolutionary theory that biological “fitness” itself is defined in terms of reproductive success and genetic representation in future generations. It is therefore a quite unusual definition of “interests” that excludes as a fundamental concern the central tendency of all evolved organisms. It is more reasonable to see genetic continuity as one of – if not the – most important aspect of welfare interests for all life on Earth. After all, “welfare” presupposes existence; a group that does not exist cannot have “welfare” for any of its non-existent members to have an interest in. Thus, in a real sense, life does have a welfare interest in genetic continuity. All life on Earth reproduces using genetic material; therefore, genetic continuity of life equals the existence of life itself.

It is clear that evolved organisms have interests – welfare interests – in genetic continuity. The idea of kin selection recognizes that it doesn’t matter from an objective standpoint whether the genetic information to be continued is yours or identical, or relatively more similar, information in “kin.” “Kin” is a relative term, so that co-ethnics who share more of your genetic information in a relative sense compared to non-ethnics are also “kin” from the standpoint of genetic continuity. It therefore stands to reason that if genetic continuity constitutes a welfare interest for evolved organisms, and if the continuity of “kin” (including co-ethnics) is part of this continuity, then organisms have a welfare interest in the genetic continuity of their “kin,” relative to others. The word “relative” must be stressed. One does not say that an organism has a greater interest in a random “kin” member compared to self, but it does have an interest in “kin” compared to others of the same (or different) species who are genetically more dissimilar. And, the greater the numbers of co-ethnic kin vs. non-ethnics involved, the greater the welfare interests in the (genetic) continuity of kin over non-kin.

If we accept welfare interests as legitimately encompassing genetic continuity – and, after all, for life on Earth, genetic continuity is continuity itself, and existence must be an interest, is it not? – then the next line of “argument” against Salter involves the “naturalistic fallacy” (see note). In other words, the accusation is that Salter derives a preference interest for genetic continuity directly from welfare interests in that continuity, and one cannot directly derive an “ought” from an “is.” In other words, one cannot directly derive preferred human action from natural laws and biological facts.

However, Salter repeatedly makes clear that he does not do this – he intersperses “values” in between nature and human action. After all, why can’t humans “want” and “need” and “desire” genetic continuity? Why can’t they “want” and “need” and “desire” ethnic/racial continuity? Why is this an invalid value? Why can’t people value biological fitness? We are not saying they are obligated to do so from the reality of biological fitness; however, we are saying that if people choose to behave adaptively, then valuing genetic continuity is the way to achieve that objective.

Therefore:

Preference Interests in Genetic Continuity = Welfare Interests in Genetic Continuity + Values Favoring Fitness

If Malik believes that the values favoring fitness are morally or aesthetically or rationally wrong (at least for whites) then he needs to explicitly say so. He should go on the BBC and tell native Britons that a concern for their own continuity is bad and stupid – in the context of honestly and completely explaining evolutionary theory and biological fitness. He needs to openly express the opinion that native Britons should be unconcerned with their own survival as a (biological) group and that they should be unconcerned with displacement by others. It is clear that any group that takes Malik’s advice and eschews genetic continuity as a value will be replaced by groups that do hold such a value as a fundamental interest. Indeed, a lack of interest in group continuity is not evolutionarily stable – any groups that lack such an interest will replaced by those groups that value that interest, and if all groups lack this interest then the entire species may become extinct.

In addition, issues of preference interests and welfare interests begin to overlap – to declare that people have children only because of “desires and wants” for parenthood misses the point that most prospective parents want their own biological children, sometimes going to extreme lengths to achieve that objective. Isn’t then the preference interest for parenthood – manifested as a “need” and “desire” for one’s own children – an evolved instinct for personal genetic continuity? Can one continue to insist that genetic continuity is not an interest when so much of the “striving” of life is toward that goal?

Further, the idea that ethnocentrism is no longer adaptive today, although it may have been in the past, is ludicrous, since ethnocentrism is most adaptive in the context of ethnic/racial competition – a competition most salient in today’s globalist world, and in multiracial “western” nations. Indeed, ethnocentrism is likely more adaptive (at least for Westerners) today than in any other time in human history. The stakes have never been higher.

While genetic interests, like all ideas, should certainly be subjected to rational critique, the absurd assertion that human groups have no interest in their own continuity – which goes against evolutionary theory – is way beyond the limits of rationality. Why would Malik promote such an idea? Perhaps the first sentence of this abstract holds a clue (emphasis added):

The term Darwinian fitness refers to the capacity of a variant type to invade and displace the resident population in competition for available resources.

Indeed.  Given that Salterism can be viewed as a tool that the “resident population” can use to resist displacement by an invading “variant type,” is it surprising that a representative of a quite variant type wishes to delegitimize that tool so as to facilitate the invasion? Isn’t it in the genetic interests of the variant to deny the very existence of those same genetic interests when addressing the resident population, to disarm that population in the competition for “available resources” (e.g., territory)?

Note:

I in fact have become skeptical of this, and a number of other, commonly cited “fallacies.”  It is too easy for people to dismiss unwelcome ideas by stating that the promoter of those ideas has “committed the XYZ fallacy,” thus ending debate on the topic. It may be useful to, at some point in the future, revisit the idea of whether the “naturalistic” and/or “is/ought” fallacy is indeed a fallacy in the light of modern evolutionary theory.

Review of:
Reinhart Koselleck
Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

“When and whenever [men] are subjects without being citizens, they inevitably endow other concerns and pursuits—economic, social, cultural—with an independent and hence rival authority.” This was the great failing of Absolutism.

In such a situation, the voluntary associations of the bourgeoisie—Masonic lodges, salons, clubs, coffee-houses, academies, sociétés de pensées, the “Republic of Letters”—became rival centers of moral authority and eventually rival models of political authority.

The criticism of these bourgeois organs sought to “test” the validity or truth of its subject, making reason a factor of judgement in its process of pro and con.

Bourgeois judgements critical of the political system set off, in turn, a crisis threatening the existing State.

As scientific materialists, armed with a naive analytic-empiricist epistemology, such bourgeois critics waged their subversive campaign with no appreciation of existing political realities or the imperatives and limits these realities imposed. This would make their moral crusade unrealistic, Utopian, unconcerned with the “contingency, conflict, and compulsion” that occupies and defines the political field.

Their Utopian proposals (their anti-political politics) constituted, as such, no actual political alternative, based as they were on a purely formal, abstract understanding of the political realm, which it subjected to the individual’s moral conscience.

But once the private moral realm started to impinge on the political sphere of the Absolutist State, the State itself was again called into question.

First unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, the bourgeois Enlightenment applied its Utopian and ultimately hypocritical standards to the State, whose political imperatives were ignored rather than recognized for what they were—so as not to complicate its own geometrical schemes of reform.

The Enlightenment, it followed, was wont to see itself in moral terms, not political—not even metapolitical—ones.

This self-deceiving politics could only end in ideological excess and terror—for the sole way to realize its Utopian political theology would be by forcing others to accept and submit to it.

The result, Koselleck concludes, was the advent of the modern condition—this “sense that we are being sucked into an open and unknown future, the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathelessness ever since the dissolution of the traditional ständische societies.”

The turbulent “tribune of reason” bequeathed by the Enlightenment aimed, moreover, at every sphere of human endeavor—not just the Absolutist State, traditional Catholic Christianity, or the numerous corporate restraints inhibiting the market.

Everything historically given was, as such, to be re-conceived as a historical process that had to be re-directed, reformed, and re-planned, as the dictates of fate gave way to the rationalist obliteration of political aporia (i.e., the impasses or challenges posed by exceptional situations determined only by the sovereign).

Through its Règne de la Critique, the bourgeoisie (as prosecutor, judge, and jury) subjected the State to an enlightened conscience that debunked its “rationality” and increasingly advocated, or implied, its replacement.

With this rationalist critique of Absolutism came an unfolding philosophy of history—which promised a victory that was to be gained without struggle or war, that applied to all mankind, and that would bring about a better, more rational, and peaceful future—if only “reason” (i.e., bourgeois interests) was allowed to rule.

Through this critique, politics—the tough decisions fundamental to human existence—was dissolved into an Utopian project indifferent to the historical given. Everything, it followed, was subject to criticism, nothing was taboo—not the “order of human things,” not even life itself would be spared the alienation that came with the critic’s unpolitical reason.

Then, as the critic assumed the right to subject the whole world to his verdict, acting as “the king of kings,” criticism was “transformed into a maelstrom that sucks the present from under the feet of the critic”—for his criticisms amounted to an endless assault on the present in the name of a far-off, but allegedly enlightened future.

4. Modern Pathogenesis

At the highest level, Koselleck offers “a generic theory of the modern world”—one that seeks to explain something of our age to us.

In his view, criticism engendered crisis, calling the future into question.

The Enlightenment’s culture of critique could, however, only culminate in revolution—a revolution whose new order would privilege the rich and powerful (and, in time, the Jews).

By subordinating law to morality, ignoring the differences that divide men over the great questions of existence, the liberal State born of Enlightenment culture stripped sovereignty of its power.

Henceforth bourgeois morality became the invisible framework of the State, as sovereign authority was changed into an act of persuasion and reason—and the essence of politics (no longer the polemic over fundamental problems of human existence) became the non-political rule of a discursive bourgeoisie indifferent to matters of faith and desirous of a fate-less society without a sovereign State.

As social and political realities were indiscriminately mixed and subjected to the invisible opinion of the bourgeois public, based on an ostensively objective reason, everything failing to accord with that opinion became an injustice, subject to reform.

Society here assumed the right to abrogate whatever laws it wished, inadvertently establishing a reign of permanent revolution.

Refusing to recognize the State’s amoral (rather than immoral) character, the emerging bourgeois political system—with its culpablizing, but “value free” politics and its civil ideal taken as the universal destiny of all humanity—not infrequently had to resort to naked force to realize its Utopia: the terror and mass killings that followed 1789, the nuclear holocaust inherent in the Cold War, the on-going, unrelenting destructuration of the local and global today.

The consequence has been liberalism’s non-political State (whether in its 19th-century guise as a Night Watchman State or in its 20th-century Nanny State form). This State replaced politics with morality, tradition with planning, disagreements with a cold indifference to all that matters. It became thus a legal order, a Rechtsstaat, supposedly unattached to any constituting system of ascription or belief, and thus beyond any “exception” that might make visible the actual basis of bourgeois rule.

In this situation, where politics were negated and political problems were reduced to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks,” the world was emptied of “seriousness” and turned into a vast realm of entertainment, where the bourgeois was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his acquisitions.

With liberalism, then, politics ceases to be a destiny and becomes a technique hostile to all who refuse its philistine philosophy of history—for the linear notion of progress inherent in this philosophy undermines and “reforms” everything that has historically ensured the integrity of white life.

Review of:
Reinhart Koselleck
Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988

Read Part 1 here.

2. The Culture of Critique

It was the failure to comprehend the nature of the Absolutist State system (its avoidance of divisive political questions of faith and belief) that gave rise to the Enlightenment and its culture of critique.

For once the religious wars came to an end and authority was secularized, European society “took off.”

By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the bourgeoisie, formerly an important but subordinate stratum of medieval European society, had become the chief economic power of an 18th-century society more and more dependent on its economic prowess. Made up of “merchants, bankers, tax lessees, and other businessmen” who had acquired great wealth and social prestige, this rising class (whose deism and materialism took “political” form in liberalism’s scientistic ideology) was nevertheless kept from State power and powerlessly suffered monarchical infringements on its monied wealth.

Resentful of State authority, the intelligentsia of this rising class took its stand in the private moral realm, which the Absolutist State had set aside for the subject and his moral conscience.

Through this breech between the public and the private, the chief ideologue of this rising bourgeoisie, John Locke, would step. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding – “the Holy Scripture of the modern bourgeoisie” — helped blur the boundary between moral and State law, as the former assumed a new authority and the distinction between the two diminished.

Pace Hobbes, Locke argued that bourgeois moral laws (now divorced from religion and anchored in rationalist notions of self-interest devoid of transcendental reference) had arisen in the human conscience, which the State had exempt from interference. As such, the citizen had a right to pass moral judgements on the State.

Such judgements, whatever the motive, eventually made State law dependent on the consent or rejection — the rule, in effect — of the bourgeoisie’s allegedly “objective” opinion.

In this situation, the bourgeois view of virtue and vice — its “religion of technicity” — took on a political charge, superseding the realm of private individual opinion, as it became “public opinion.”

At the same time, bourgeois critics favored the risk-free sphere of the unpolitical private realm, where they sought to dictate policy. Instead, then, of forthrightly challenging the underlying metaphysical principles of the Absolutist order, they framed their defining metaphysical identity (matters of faith — in this case their godless theology) in moral and economic terms devoid of political responsibility.

Bourgeois morality, not the State’s “reason,” proceeded in this way to take hold of the public — society — and set the standard for the “moral value of human action.”

This opened the way to a reconfiguration of the Absolutist relationship between morality and politics.

The public realm in Locke’s bourgeois philosophy was accordingly re-conceived as a social realm of individual consciences and this realm’s opinion as the “law” that was to bind the public.

Bourgeois morality, as such, not only entered, but soon conquered society, as its private views rose to that of public opinion.

Few, moreover, would be able to resist the pressure of its judgment.

“Reasons of State” were henceforth subject to the secular, calculating “reason” of the bourgeoisie — as “reason” ceased to be the avoidance of civil war and became the self-interest of the rationalist acting individual.

This made society increasingly independent of the State, just as State laws were increasingly subject to the “empowering” moral (and economic) judgments of society.

In the course of the 18th century, the bourgeois as citizen would assume, through his culture of critique, the “rank of a supreme tribunal” — ultimately passing judgment on the State (though doing so safely removed from the day-to-day imperatives of the political realm).

In England, following the oh-so Glorious Revolution of 1688 (a terrible, fateful year, with more to follow, in Irish history), the Whig bourgeoisie, through Parliament, became dominant, entering into an alliance with the constitutionally-bound monarch (William of Orange).

On the more religiously polarized continent, where Absolutist States had a greater role to play, the antithesis between State legislation and bourgeois secular morality (rooted in Protestantism’s critical essence) assumed a different, more antagonistic character.

This continental polarization of morals and politics — compounded by the growing social weight of the bourgeoisie and the discontent generated by its political disenfranchisement — grew in the course of the 18th century, as the bourgeoisie increasingly assumed the leadership of “society.”

Its moral critique of the State and of the ancien régime — a critique posed in secular and rationalist, rather than Christian terms — is what is known as the “Enlightenment,” that metapolitical “culture of critique,” whose light allegedly emanated from the bourgeoisie’s rational conscience (which was modeled in many ways on that of the Jews, for it was based on the dictates of money and its unpolitical affirmation of the private).

Read Part 3 here.

Infidel: My Life
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
London: Simon & Schuster, 2007

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s political career was brief and dramatic. Born in Somalia in 1969, she is the daughter of Hirsi Magan Isse, a scholar and political dissident. She arrived in the Netherlands in 1992 as an asylum-seeker, learned the language, earned degrees in political science at Leiden University, and became an activist in the socialist Labor Party (one of Holland’s biggest parties).

But Hirsi Ali became disillusioned with the Labor Party’s cowardly refusal to confront the threat that unchecked Muslim immigration posed to the Netherlands’ liberal political culture. She then joined the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, renounced Islam for atheism in 2002, and was elected to the Dutch parliament in 2003 (aged 34) as a vociferous critic of Islam in the Netherlands. Her 2004 screenplay about Islam’s attitude to women—Submission—got its producer, Theo van Gogh, murdered. (The note pinned to van Gogh’s body with a knife was a death threat addressed to Hirsi Ali.) She was forced into hiding.

A political crisis surrounding the legality of her asylum application led to the fall of a Dutch government in 2006. Stripped of her citizenship—ironically because of the policies she herself advocated—Hirsi Ali went to work for the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank based in the United States noted for opposing Islam in the Middle East, but not Islamic immigration to the United States and Europe. For all these reasons, she is very well-known in Europe, her fall being headline news all around the continent. Her autobiography, now in paperback, has been a best-seller.

Infidel tells the story of the author’s conversion from fundamentalist Islam to Western liberalism and finally to the “illiberal” desire to defend the Western way of life. The book is compelling reading for anybody interested in understanding Islam and the effect it will have—if unchecked—on the Western world.

Infidel is not an easy read. Much of it is like a horror film: you can’t bear to look, but you can’t bring yourself to look away. The tragedies of Hirsi Ali’s life really have to be read to be believed. And, in some ways, they are made all the more horrific by her cold and detached style of writing (much like her style of speaking in interviews).

The narrative begins when Hirsi Ali is five years old. Infidel is immediately exciting in how it brings Somalia to life. We learn not only about its history, but also its clan-based culture. When Somalis meet, they list off each other’s ancestors until they find a common one. A common ancestor means membership in the same clan, which brings immediate obligations of mutual aid. (Members of other clans can be left to starve.) Being members of different clans might also entail enmity because of feuds that could be centuries old. (This becomes interesting later in a Dutch refugee center where the well-meaning Netherlanders try to house Somalis from different tribes together.) Hirsi Ali recalls having to learn the names of her ancestors by heart, with her grandmother threatening to beat her if she gets them wrong. “Get it right!” the grandmother yells. “The names will make you strong.”

The cruelty of Somali childrearing is sickening: the lack of freedom, the genital mutilation, the almost total absence of genuine love. Hirsi Ali recalls parents forcing their children to fight to make them tough. She was once beaten so badly—by an Islamic teacher and her mother—that she almost died in the hospital. The pervasive superstition is also disturbing: “a father’s curse is . . . a ticket straight to Hell” (p. 12); ancestors are prayed to; her illiterate grandmother, with whom she lived, thought the radio was “magic,” and the like (p. 25).

Because of her father’s involvement in the Somali opposition movement, the family was forced to move to Saudi Arabia while Hirsi Ali was still a child. Saudi Islam is far stricter than Somali Islam. “You weren’t naughty, you were sinful,” she explains. “Taking a bus with a man was haram [sin] . . . boys and girls playing together was haram” (p. 42). Wife-beating was commonplace. Also, “In Saudi Arabia everything was the fault of the Jews. . . . The children next door were taught to pray for the health of their parents and the destruction of the Jews” (p. 47). A rather daring young Somali woman whom Hirsi Ali came to admire was publicly flogged, then deported, because she had no husband, which to the Saudis proved she was a prostitute (p. 51).

When Hirsi Ali was nine, the family fled Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia (which, to her mother’s horror, is Christian) and then to Kenya. It was only in school in Kenya that Hirsi Ali discovered concepts such as “minutes, hours, years” (elegant proof of just how differently Somalis think). It was also in Kenya that her independent temperament first awakened. Having reached puberty (for which her mother beat her), she was a proper woman. She took the veil and involved herself in Islamic fundamentalist activism. But she also learned English, romanticized Western ways of life, and even experimented with them.

Back in Somalia she started to become disillusioned with Islam: “I wanted to be someone, to stand on my own” (p. 132). She eloped with a boyfriend and married him (though Islam did not recognize the marriage). Then she fled an arranged marriage her father tried to impose upon her. (She idolized her father, who was generally absent from her childhood, until their relationship fell apart.) It is at this point that she managed to escape to Europe, eventually receiving asylum in the Netherlands. The second part of the book is entitled “My Freedom.”

The first-hand account of life as an asylum-seeker in the Netherlands in the early 1990s is fascinating. Fluent in English and Somali, Hirsi Ali made herself indispensable as a translator, gaining valuable inside knowledge of the Dutch asylum system. She makes it clear that virtually every asylum seeker, including herself, lied to get into Holland. Once inside, Hirsi Ali came to love Holland and worked for its betterment. This is in stark contrast to most Somalis, who repay the generosity of their hosts with staggering hatred and ingratitude.

And, in truth, the Dutch establishment’s naïve liberalism and suicidal “tolerance” of everything (except the desire to remain Dutch) is contemptible. Why do the Dutch insist on flooding their society with people who hold their permissive values in contempt? Hirsi Ali was able to see Dutch liberalism from the outside and notice, unlike other liberals, its bizarre contradictions and hypocrisy. Ultimately, she parted company with the Left because she came to love Western civilization. Liberals, apparently, do not. Hence their mania to embrace those who would destroy them. The story of her break with the Left is truly inspiring.

The main problem I have with Infidel is that I just can’t help wondering how accurate it is. Any autobiography is likely to be selective with the truth and cast its author in a positive light. Furthermore, Hirsi Ali is an admitted and proven liar (and not even particularly ashamed of it). As she points out, in Islamic culture lying is far more acceptable than in the West if done for the sake of Jihad, family, or clan. The Hadith makes this fairly clear (Hadith 6303-05).

Hirsi Ali may, of course, have considered the possibility that the problem is not Islam per se but, as Alain de Benoist suggests, any monotheistic religion, which ipso facto entails not merely the affirmation that a god exists, but also the denial of the existence of other gods. This claim to an exclusive truth is the royal road to religious intolerance. The problem is compounded by the Biblical claim to provide revealed laws for governing ordinary life. In fact, considering that Hirsi Ali lived in the Netherlands, I’m surprised she didn’t observe at least some parallels between Muslims and the conservative Calvinists in the north, where everybody wears black and women are not permitted to speak in church.

Reviewers have accused Infidel of simplistically lumping all Muslims together and of being “Islamophobic” which seems to mean “it hurts fundamentalist Muslims’ feelings.” Such criticisms are to be expected when a writer demonstrates that the liberal view of Islam is inaccurate. In most cases, these criticisms were anticipated and answered in the final chapter.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is evidently an intelligent and courageous woman. Often only an outsider can see a society with relative objectivity, and this is what Hirsi Ali does with Islam and the West’s (especially Holland’s) dealings with it. Infidel is undoubtedly emotive in tone, but its critiques of Islam and Western decadence are quite logical. Islam (like any monotheistic religion) is oppressive, anti-intellectual, and a threat to Western progress and freedom. We must stop it from gaining greater influence in Europe. We must overturn the restrictions on free speech imposed to insulate Islam and its European sponsors from criticism. Infidel may well persuade more people that we can’t just sit back and hope Islam and other oppressors of free inquiry will go away. Like her, we must fight them. We will regret it if we ignore Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Edward Dutton has a Ph.D. in the Anthropology of Religion. His book Meeting Jesus at University: Rites of Passage and Student Evangelicals (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008) includes a chapter on religion in the Netherlands.

Reinhart Koselleck
Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988

La politique, c’est le destin. — Napoleon

Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis (1959) is one of the great dissertations of the 20th-century German university system.

It cast new light not just on the past it re-presented, but on the present, whose own light informed its re-presentation.

This was especially the case with the potentially cataclysmic standoff between American liberalism and Russian Communism and the perspective it gave to Koselleck’s study of the Enlightenment origins of the Modern World.

How was it, he asked, that these two Cold War super-powers seemed bent on turning Europe, especially Germany, into a nuclear wasteland?

The answer, he suspected, had something to do with the moralizing Utopianism of 18th-century rationalism, whose heritage ideologically animated each hegemon.

1. The Absolutist Origins of the Modern State

Koselleck was one of Carl Schmitt’s postwar “students” and his work is indebted to Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938).

Like his mentor, Koselleck saw modern ideologies, despite their atheistic rejection of faith, as forms of “political theology” that spoke to the faith-based heart that decides how one is to live.

In this sense, the self-proclaimed Enlightenment of the 18th century was a philosophical rebuttal to political Absolutism, whose institutional response to the breakdown of medieval Christendom occurred in ways that frustrated the liberal aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie.

In the century-long blood-letting that had followed the Protestant critique of medieval Catholicism, Europe’s ecclesiastical unity and its traditional social supports were everywhere shattered.

As the old estates broke down and old ties and loyalties were severed, there followed a period of anarchy, in which Catholics and Protestants zealously shed each others blood in the name of their contending truths.

In this sectarian strife — this bellum omnium contra omnes — where ecclesiastical authority ceased to exist and each man was thrown back upon his individual conscience, morality became a banner of war and the public observance of morality a justification for murdering Europeans with dissenting beliefs.

It was the advent of the Absolutist State system, philosophically anticipated in Hobbes’ Leviathan, that brought these bloody religious conflicts to a halt, establishing a peaceful basis to European life — by “privatizing” morality, secularizing authority, and depriving individual mentalities of political effect.

The neutralization of religious belief that came with the Absolutist secularization of the State would secure conditions requisite to the citizen’s peaceful pursuit of his private will or gain, as private ideals ceased to be obligatory duties and the State became “the artifact of atomized individuals.”

Absolutist regimes succeeded in this way in “reducing measures of contingency, conflict, and compulsion” to the status of differences of opinion — bare, in effect, of religious significance, as “external compulsion” imposed restraints on the individual’s “inner freedom.”

The historians’ designated Age of Absolutism and Enlightenment begins, then, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which brought not just the Thirty Years War in the German-speaking lands, but all Europe’s religious wars to an end (except on the borderlands of Ireland and the Balkans) — and ends only with the advent of another European civil war, which opened with the liberal revolutions of 1776/1789 and closed with the English triumph over Napoleon in 1814.

History, though, rarely conforms to the tidy categories scholars make of it.

Unlike the Continent, England went from religious war to Absolutism and then to bourgeois revolution and finally to a bourgeois Restoration all in the course of a half-century (c. 1642 – 1688), experiencing an intense though only brief period of Absolutism.

England’s expanding maritime power, opened to all the world it dominated, had, in fact, merely a transitional need of Absolutism, for it would soon become the first implicitly liberal of the “modern” regimes.

Koselleck focuses on the longer, more pronounced Continental developments, treating England as a variant of the larger trend.

In his depiction, the Absolutist State system emerging after the Treaty of Westphalia was based on a transformation of political authority — which divided the “public sphere” into two sharply separate domains: That of political authority proper (the sovereign State) and that of society, conceived as a subaltern realm of individual “subjects.”

The subject’s moral conscience in this system was subordinated to the requirements of political necessity — what Hobbes called “reason.”  This restricted morality to the social realm of private opinion, depriving it of political effect.

With Absolutism, the public interest, about which the sovereign alone had the right to decide, ceased to lay under the jurisdiction of the individual’s moral conscience.

The Continent’s new monarchical States — with Louis XIV’s France the model of the others — would govern according to a raison d’état (Staatsräson), which made no reference to religious considerations.

Law here was severed from special interests and religious factions, becoming part of a domain whose political decisions — ideally — transcended “Church, estate, and party.”

“To traditional moral doctrines, [Hobbes] opposes one whose theme is political reason.”

Persecuting churches and religiously bound social fractions were hereby forced to give way to the sovereign authority of the Absolutist monarch, who recognized no higher authority than God Himself.

As Absolutist peace took priority to faith, the individual subject — previously situated in a loose medieval hierarchy, imbued with certain corporate rights and responsibilities — was transformed into an apolitical subject.

He had, as such, to submerge his conscience to reasons of State — to reasons necessary for maintaining the peace.

This privatization of morality dictated by the State’s secularization was not directed against religion per se, but against a religious conscience whose political claims, in a period of general breakdown, threatened war.

What the Absolutist State did — and what Hobbes theoretically legitimated in the Leviathan — was to transform the individual’s conscience into a matter of “opinion,” of subjective belief, separate from politics — and thus from the political reasons of the State.

This was accomplished by making the public interest the prerogative of the sovereign, not that of the individual’s religious conscience, for the latter inevitably led to religious strife.

In this secular political system, State policy and laws became the sole concern of the sovereign monarch, who stood above religion, anchoring his laws not in a higher transcendence, but in State imperatives.

In Hobbes’ famous formulation: “Laws are made by authority, not by truth.”

Hereafter, State policy and laws would be legislated by reasons of State — not the moral conscience and not self-interest and faction.  For the State could fulfill its function of securing peace and maintaining order only if individuals ceded their rights to the sovereign, who was to embody their larger welfare.

Contested issues were thereby reduced to differences of opinion that could be resolved by reasons of State.

Through Absolute sovereignty, it was possible again to create an internal realm of peace, separate from other Absolutist State systems, each of which possessed a similar peaceful interior, where the individual was free to believe whatever he wished as long as no effort was made to impose his “private” belief on the public, whether Catholic or Protestant.

This would keep religious fanaticism from trespassing on domestic tranquility and, at the same time, guarantee the State’s integrity.

Among Absolutist States, relations remained, of course, that of “a state of nature” — for each upheld and pursued policies based on their own rational sense of self-interest (raison d’état).

Conflict and war between Absolutist States were nevertheless minimized — not just by the fact that they accepted the integrity of the other’s moral conscience — but also by a sense of sharing the same Christian civilization, the same standards of significance and style, the same general, interrelated history that distinguished them from non-Europeans.

On this basis, the community of European States after 1648 grew into a family of sovereign powers, each respectful of the others’ domestic integrity, each of whose kings or queens shared the blood of other royal families, each of whose wars with other Europeans was governed by a jus publicum europaeum.

Read Part 2 here.

Shackleton’s Forgotten Men: The Untold Tragedy of the Endurance Epic
Lennard Bickel
London: Pimlico, 2001

The heroic age of Antarctic exploration ended with Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition of 1914-1916. And this, no doubt because of the relatively recent film starring Kenneth Branagh, is nowadays probably the best known of the many incredible adventures experienced by the early Antarctic explorers.

Ernest Shackleton took part in Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition of 1901-1904, during which the two men, plus Dr. Edward Wilson, attempted unsuccessfully to reach the South Pole. Shackleton’s physical collapse caused Scott to send him back, invalided on a supply ship, in 1903. The former, however, was far from giving up exploring and returned to Antarctica as leader of the Nimrod expedition in 1907, establishing his base, like Scott before him, on Ross Island. His own bid for the pole would take Scott’s route across the Ross Ice Shelf and would vastly improve on Scott’s southernmost latitude of 82º 17S; it would also lead to the discovery of the 100-mile-long Beardmore Glacier, via which the explorers would be able to reach the Antarctic plateau, access to which in 1902 the Scott team had found blocked by what is now known as the trans-Antarctic mountains. After crossing the ice shelf, however, ascending the 10,000 feet up to the plateau, and sledging hundreds of miles at high-altitude and in conditions of extreme cold and fearsome blizzards, Shackleton, was forced to turn around at 88º 23S, 97 nautical miles short of the South Pole, having ascertained that there was not enough food left to sustain the party on the return journey, even if on starvation rations.

Next to return to the Antarctic was Robert Falcon Scott, who led the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1913. As I already related in my review of Scott’s fellow expeditioner Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account, The Worst Journey in the World, Scott succeeded in his bid for the South Pole, only to find that he had been beaten by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen (who had reached it a month earlier) and to eventually die, along with the rest of his party, on the Ross Ice Shelf during return journey.

With the South Pole already conquered, there was no great feat left for Shackleton to do but to attempt a crossing of the Southern continent. To this effect he organized the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917. This new venture was to consist of two parties: one, led by Shackleton himself, was to sail aboard the Endurance and approach the continent via the Weddell Sea; the other, led by Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, was to sail aboard the Aurora, and land on Ross Island. Shackleton was to lead his party up onto the plateau, through to the South Pole, down the Beardmore Glacier, across the Ross Ice Shelf, and right through to Mackintosh’s base on Ross Island. Mackintosh, on the other hand, was to lead a team across the Ross Ice Shelf, laying supply depots to support the latter stages of Shackleton’s march, at regular intervals, all the way to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier.

This was to be accomplished in an era when there were no radio or satellite communications and where there was no possibility of an air rescue or re-supply. Each party was to accomplish its mission in the expectation that the other party would do their part, but without any way of knowing whether they were still alive and without any means of contacting civilization.

Lennard Bickell’s book tells the harrowing and mostly unknown story of the Ross Sea Party.

The Aurora reached Ross Island early in 1915, during the Austral Summer (Northerners should remember that seasons are reversed in the Southern hemisphere). Mackintosh decided to set up in Cave Evans. Cape Evans is some 13 miles North of Hut Point, where Scott’s Discovery hut is situated, and where there the snow slopes provide easiest access to the Ross Ice Shelf (or Barrier, as it was known back then, since it ends in a sheer, sea-facing cliff some 150 feet high). Shackleton, however, had forbidden mooring the boat any further South than the Glacier Point, aware that when the Discovery did so some 14 years earlier the sea froze the ship in, and rendered it immoveable, for two years. Scott’s Terra Nova hut was to be used, and, accordingly, the dogs, some coal, and minimal supplies were brought ashore; but the Aurora was intended to remain the main base of operations.

Mackintosh, unaware that Shackleton was not planning to attempt the crossing until the following year (the cable that was to inform Mackintosh was never sent), and thinking it conceivable that Shackleton might attempt the Antarctic crossing that same season, ordered the laying of depots to begin immediately. At the very least, two depots were to be laid: one at the Minna Bluff (at 79º S) and another at 80º S. Mackintosh was impetuous and lacked experience on the ice, so the depot laying began without allowing the dogs to acclimatize and at a grueling pace; the operation was beset with problems and imperfect organization. As a result, the 80º S depot ended up incomplete and, after two months, the party returned to Hut Point frostbitten, exhausted, and demoralized, having worked to death all the dogs that they had taken with them.

The route back to Cape Evans involved crossing the sea ice, but, due to the seasonal thinness of the latter, the party was forced to remain at Hut Point, living in Spartan conditions and with inadequate supplies, until deep into the Winter (June). When they finally were able to return to Cape Evans, they found that the Aurora had been blown away in a blizzard, and was presumably lost with all hands. Along with it went their scientific equipment, clothing, soap, sledging gear, and food supplies. The remains of the Ross Sea Party thus found themselves marooned in the Antarctic, and facing a minimum of two years on the ice, without food, fuel, or adequate supplies, before any possible rescue.

Knowing that Shackleton’s party depended on them, Mackintosh ordered the depot laying mission to go ahead regardless. To this effect, the men plundered all the huts, looking for whatever supplies had been left behind from the previous three expeditions. This amounted to very little: 15-year-old dog biscuits, a few tins here and there, and a few items of old, used, battered, discarded gear. To survive, it was concluded, they would have to rely of seals for both food and fuel; and they would have to use available materials to improvise extra clothing.

What follows in the book is a horrific account of the 1,200-mile depot-laying journey across the world’s largest ice shelf – and the world’s most inhospitable terrain. For most people a 12-mile walk is considered very long, even in good weather, when well fed, sufficiently hydrated, and adequately attired. Imagine, then, doing that a hundred times over, while pulling 200-pound sledges across rugged and sticky surfaces, sinking up to your waist in snow, at temperatures of 60 or more degrees of frost, beset by freezing winds and blizzards, on starvation rations (consisting of months-old meat and biscuits every day, for every meal), wearing threadbare and ragged clothing, with painfully frostbitten hands and face, sleeping in bags that have frozen solid, unable to bathe, shaking violently with cold every night, having to defecate into a hole in the ice inside a freezing tent, and, eventually, with a severe case of scurvy, without access to medicine, analgesics, or fresh food. Consider that at –4º F (-20º C) , boiling water freezes instantly if thrown up in the air; –4º F was considered a warm day for the old Antarctic explorers. If you think this is bad, this is just the beginning.

Page after page, the situation for the depot-laying party gets worse and worse, ever grimmer and more desperate; wasting away, excruciatingly cold, in agonizing pain, clinically depressed, drained of vitality, sick, and with no option but to carry on pulling for hundreds of miles, one cannot help but shake one’s head in wonder every five or so pages, as the men are hit by new and ever-more-horrible setbacks and are forced to brave the most unimaginable conditions. This is truly grim and brutal reading.

And things do not end there, because, although all minus one of the men eventually manage to crawl back to Hut Point, they, by then little more than wide-eyed wraiths, skin and bones, with beards down to their chests and hair down to their shoulders and gums swollen out of their mouths and blistered skin as black as coal, then are forced to winter in what was little more than a bare cupboard, or drafty shed, battered by blizzards and eking a troglodytic existence by eating seals and heating themselves with a grimy, fuliginous, pungent bubbler stove that was barely able to keep their living space above freezing within a one-foot radius. This, without any idea of whether they would ever be rescued – or whether Shackleton had survived the trans-Antarctic crossing; without any idea, in fact, of what was happening at all, except that there was a war going on in Europe and that rescue operations to remote Antarctica would probably not be a priority.

To find out how it all ends, you will have to read the book.

But one thing that is clear when reading these chronicles of the early Antarctic explorers is that, whatever their faults, it is clear from their behavior and their speech that the citizens of the British Empire had a clearer sense themselves and their place in the world than their modern counterparts do today. Moreover, they seem much harder, on average, than our coevals: despite the numerous reverses, and despite having, at times, fierce disagreements on how to proceed given their circumstances, it is evident from the narrative that civility, mutual respect, and a sense of responsibility were always maintained. The narrative does not suggest at any point that there was ever any panic, hysterics, back-stabbing, or selfish dog-eat-dog behavior, like that which we see so often and so convincingly depicted in modern films. There was a mission here, and, despite the extreme adversity and zero external support, it was accomplished. The depots were laid.

Compare and contrast what you read here against what you see in the 2006 BBC reality series Blizzard: Race to the Pole, with Bruce Parry (of Tribe and Amazon fame), where a team of modern explorers attempt to replicate (in Greenland) Robert Falcon’s Scott march to the South Pole – and fail, despite shortcuts, modern gear, and comparatively benign conditions. In the end, it did not matter that the extreme suffering of Mackintosh’s men (and the deaths of three of them) was in vain (Shackleton never made it): as one of the survivors remarked years afterwards, it showed what white men can accomplish, even with everything going against them.

I must point out that Lennard Bickel’s prose has some shortcomings: I would personally punctuate more than he does, and his rhythm can be, at times, awkward. However, he is sufficiently adept at conjuring the bleak atmosphere and evoking the desperateness of the plight of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expeditions’ Ross Sea party to overcome said shortcomings: the reader is sucked into the white-knuckle tale almost instantly, and the book is difficult to put down. Even if you never thought of reading about early 20th century Antarctic exploration, you may well find yourself craving for more after this tome.

Certainly, there is much we can learn from the great British exploits in the white continent at a time when the Empire was at its zenith. And one can easily see, when reading accounts such as Bickell’s and Cherry’s, why a certain German chancellor whom I will not name held the British Empire and the British in as high regard as he did.

Read Alex Kurtagic’s review of The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, another true story of Antarctic exploration, here.

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
Second Edition
Norman Finkelstein
New York: Verso, 2003

If you’re like me and have been through the American education system, you as a child may have never learned a word of Greek or Latin, the history of the Bible or been assigned to read a work by a great philosopher. You probably do remember, however, learning about Martin Luther King, the Klan and the “six million who perished.” What gets placed in a curriculum is a zero-sum game and Western civilization had to lose for the cult of victimhood to win.

But unlike other unfortunates we’re supposed to feel sorry for, the Jews are successful, and the crimes against them didn’t take place in the United States. For them to become a protected class, the holocaust, a historical event, had to be turned into The Holocaust, a religious one. Liberal professor Norman Finkelstein wrote The Holocaust Industry to bring to the world’s attention the exploitation of Jewish suffering in World War II. His book also explains how we got here. Thanks to the Industry, Israel, “one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status.”

This is a recent phenomenon. In 1963 Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the time there were only two other English language scholarly books on the Holocaust. One of them was Raul Hillberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. His thesis advisor at Columbia University told him “It’s your funeral” to discourage him from touching the subject. Until the late 1960s, there was only one university course offering on the holocaust in the United States.

Jews themselves were indifferent to the events many of them had fled. In a 1961 Commentary symposium on the subject of “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” no more that two of thirty-one writers stressed the holocaust. It was almost completely ignored in a 1961 roundtable sponsored by the journal Judaism on “My Jewish Affirmation.” There were no museums, no monuments and no organizations dedicated to keeping the memory alive.

In 1956 after President Eisenhower pushed Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, his support among American Jews actually increased in that year’s presidential election. Attitudes would be different after the June 1967 war with the Arab states. Norman Podhoretz noted that after the conflict Israel became “the religion of American Jews.” To trace this journey from indifference to obsession, Finkelstein informs us that in 1955 and in 1965 the entries for Israel in The New York Times Index went on for 60 column inches. In 1975 the Israel entries filled 260. Now Jews would compare any situation the Israelis found themselves in to the peril Jewry faced in 1930s Germany. They told themselves they wouldn’t be like those that quietly went into the gas chambers.

Unfortunately, Finkelstein’s liberalism distorts his understanding of the change in Jewish activism. According to him, right after World War II talking about the holocaust was taboo due to US support of West Germany. In later years the Arabs would align with the Soviet Union and Israel became an important ally. The Jews were once again “matching in lockstep with American power.” What the author doesn’t admit is that by the 1960s Jews were American power. Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy demolishes the idea that the alliance with Israel provides any benefit for the United States. It is a nuisance at best and bankrupting the nation at worst.

Secondly, Finkelstein doesn’t seem to see the rise in Jewish activism in the 1960s as part of a larger trend in American culture. He points to a few neo-cons who oppose affirmative action and ignores the critical role of Jewish left wing activism in establishing the culture of victimhood — what has become the culture of Western suicide. Finkelstein writes that of “Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Jews alone are not disadvantaged in American society” — as if who gets to play the identity politics game is decided by an objective measurement of who the victims are!

Despite his blind spots, the author does a fantastic job of exposing the gang of charlatans and frauds that constitute The Holocaust Industry. For a fee of $25,000, survivor Elie Wiesel will tell you that the “secret” of Auschwitz’s “truth lies in silence” and that The Holocaust “leads into darkness,” “negates all answers,” “lies outside, if not beyond, history,” “defies both knowledge and description,” “cannot be explained nor visualized,” and is “never to be explained or transmitted.” To him, to compare Jewish suffering to that of others is a “total betrayal of Jewish history.” A parody of a New York tabloid once had the headline: “Michael Jackson, 60 Million Others, Die in Nuclear Holocaust.” The parody included a letter supposedly from Eli Wiesel in which he protested “How dare people refer to what happened yesterday as a Holocaust? There was only one Holocaust.”

Not only does Wiesel think that Jewish suffering is in a class of its own, but he and organized Jewry guard their unique status in a very creepy way. He withdrew from a conference on genocide because the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks would be mentioned. Jewish organizations have lobbied against a day of remembrance for the Armenians.

Predictably, when the victims of violence are the enemies of Jews, compassion goes out the window.” To Wiesel, Arabs hate Jews for their existence. American Blacks are simply a race of ingrates, unable to appreciate what the Jews have done for them.

Wiesel not only appears to suffer from a histrionic personality disorder, he is also an inveterate liar. After surviving a death camp, he claims to have read Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish. No such translation exists. He once met a “mysterious Talmudic scholar” who “mastered Hungarian in two weeks, just to surprise me.” He told The New York Times that after being hit by a taxi in Times Square he “flew an entire block. I was hit at 45th Street and Broadway, and the ambulance picked me up at 44th.”

While there’s a debate over whether Night by Wiesel is a memoir or novel, other writers have been exposed as frauds. Jerzy Kosinski wrote The Painted Bird, supposedly about his time as a young Polish Jew who wandered alone through rural Poland during the World War II. Finkelstein notes that one reader described the book as “the product of a mind obsessed with sadomasochistic violence.” Poles are depicted as pathological torturers of Jews. Kosinski’s work became required reading in many high school and college classes. On the speaking circuit, Kosinski would describe himself as a “cut-rate Elie Wiesel.”

In reality, the author of the book lived with his parents during the war. The Poles whom he had slandered had sheltered his family at great risk to themselves.

Binjamin’s Wilkomirski’s Fragments is a more recent hoax in the field of Holocaustology. According to Finkelstein the book is similar to The Painted Bird in that the author presents himself as a child victim of The Holocaust and “each chapter . . . climaxes in an orgy of violence.” In this book it’s the Germans who are the irredeemable sadists. After he’s freed, young Benjamin goes to Switzerland, where he’s taunted by the kids at school. They point at him “and make fists and yell ‘He’s raving, there’s no such thing. Liar! He’s crazy, mad, he’s an idiot.’”

Turns out the children were right. Wlkomirski spent the whole war in Switzerland and isn’t even Jewish. Nor is his name Binjamin Wilkomirski. It’s Bruno Dössekker. The fraud wasn’t exposed until the author of Fragments had had his book translated into a dozen languages and become a star through his participation in documentaries, Holocaust fund-raisers, and of course, the speaking scene.

Finkelstein says that with all the lies we’ve been fed, it’s amazing that there are so few Holocaust deniers. But he doesn’t cite the worst of the worst. For example, there’s this 1988 story from the New York Times:

Later, [retired butcher Morris Hubert] was sent to Buchenwald. ”In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. ”Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.” ”But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor. ”It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, ”but it happened.”

I’m surprised they’ve yet to find an eagle to put on trial for the crime.

At least authors of Holocaust memoirs provide entertaining stories. Even worse, Jewish organizations have turned the Holocaust religion into a criminal Industry. In fact, they may have pulled off the biggest robberies in human history.

First, it was claimed that Swiss banks were denying heirs of Jewish holders of accounts their money. In 1995 two Representatives of the World Jewish Congress including President Edgar Bronfman met with Swiss bankers. Bronfman would later humbly tell the Senate Banking Committee that he spoke on behalf of “the 6 million, who cannot speak for themselves.” The Swiss could only find 775 unclaimed dormant accounts, holding $32 million. When the Swiss offered this number as a basis to begin negotiations, the WJC rejected it as too low.

The WJC would mobilize the American political establishment to lobby on its behalf. Bronfman recruited Catholic New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato to his cause — a move that assured D’Amato would receive Jewish money and votes. The House and Senate banking committees took up the issue. An aide to D’Amato would later brag that they forced the Swiss “into the court of public opinion where we controlled the agenda. . . . [w]e were judge, jury, and executioner.” A study supported by D’Amato’s office and the Simon Wiesenthal Center would claim that “dishonesty was a cultural code that individual Swiss had mastered to protect the nation’s image and prosperity” and that “Swiss greed was unique.”

In 1996 a parade of elderly Jews gave testimony before the US Congress on the malevolence of Swiss bankers. They presented no evidence that they actually had assents in the banks. To top off the spectacle, D’Amato for some reason brought none other than Elie Wiesel to address Congress. Testified poor Wiesel: “Is there no limit to pain? No limit to the outrage?”

Even before this event, the Swiss had set up a commission headed by former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker with three members of the World Jewish Restitution Organization and three from the Swiss Bankers Association. They would abide by whatever the group decided. Jewish organizations wouldn’t let up in the media, hoping that the Swiss would settle before the commission issued its report. After stories got out of indigent survivors, the Swiss in 1997 put $200 million into a “Special Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust.”

The commission was dangerous to the Industry for two reasons. First, as with the Holocaust itself, so many ridiculous stories had been told that some of them would inevitably prove to be illegitimate. Second, if the owners of the dormant accounts were identified, they themselves would be compensated, and not Jewish organizations.

When bad mouthing the Swiss through the media failed to extort enough money, the Jews filed class action lawsuits and ordered boycotts of the country. Volcker protested that such actions would interfere with the work of his commission, but that was precisely the point. In January 1997 chair of the Jewish Agency Avraham Burg threatened, “Until now we have held back international Jewish pressure.” New York Governor George Pataki publicly supported sanctions on Swiss banks. Local state governments in Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New York passed resolutions threatening a boycott unless the Swiss settled with organized Jewry. The city of Los Angeles was the first to impose sanctions. Other governments followed suit.

In June 1998 the Swiss made a final offer of $600 million. Head of the ADL Abraham Foxman called it “an insult to the memory of the victims.” By August the bankers finally gave in with a $1.25 billion settlement.

A year after the settlement, no plan was drawn up to distribute the money to actual Holocaust survivors. By December 1999 only half of the $200 million originally given in 1997 had reached the victims. Finkelstein’s last edition of the book was released in 2000 but as of 2009 only $490 million of the $1.25 billion had gone to individual claimants. The rest went to such worthy causes as lawyer fees, Jewish organizations, and Holocaust propaganda, presumably to help create a new generation of suckers. Holocaust programs in schools are recommended or required in seventeen states.

Volcker and his committee’s Report on Dormant Accounts of Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Banks cost $500 million. They took all the accounts found to have belonged to Jewish victims of the Holocaust and modified them to their 1945 value. They then multiplied the number by ten to reflect long term investment rates and came up with a number of $380 million. Moreover, there was “no proof of systematic destruction of records of victim accounts, organized discrimination against the accounts of victims of Nazi persecution, or concerted efforts to divert the funds of victims of Nazi persecution to improper purposes.”

After routing the Swiss, the Holocaust Industry went on to try to steal from the Germans. They demanded $20 billion in compensation from German Industry for WWII slave labor. Full-page newspaper advertisements appeared claiming without evidence that pharmaceutical corporation Bayer “directed” the experiments of Josef Mengele. President Clinton lobbied for restitution. Never mind that monetary agreements reached shortly after WWII already covered slave labor. Germany had given the modern equivalent of close to a billion dollars to the Jewish Claims Conference. The organization characteristically used much of the money for their pet projects. In 1999 German corporations would agree to hand over another $5.1 billion. The country’s government has to date given more than $60 billion to Jewish organizations.

The Holocaust Industry continued East but found it much more difficult to whip up hysteria against impoverished former Soviet countries. The demands against Poland were so great that Jewish Week reported that the parliament was afraid that Jewish claims would bankrupt the nation. The fear of American pressure stops European countries from standing up to this blackmail. A Knesset member recalled his meeting with the uncooperative Prime Minister of Romania: “But I ask one remark, in the middle of the fighting, and it changed the atmosphere. I told him, you know, in two days I am going to be in a hearing here in Congress. What do you want me to tell them in the hearing? Whole atmosphere was changed.” The US is the muscle behind organized Jewry. Bronfman, the WJC president, in 1998 claimed that his organization alone had amassed around $7 billion in Holocaust compensation.

It’s not a coincidence that the only countries who’ve fallen for this scam are White ones, and not Arab nations that expelled Jews in the 20th century. As Kevin Macdonald wrote in The Culture of Critique:

The key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the evil of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy—a manifestation of their much stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers.

Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: 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.

It takes a special sort of goyim to fall for the scam: Holocaust propaganda helps create a people prone to extortion, and the money stolen goes to fund more Holocaust propaganda. Not to excuse the behavior of the thieves themselves, but the success of the Holocaust Industry is simply another symptom of a people that has lost its way.

From The Occidental Observer, December 10, 2009

Medusa Now Ventrix

The Art of Jonathan Bowden, volume 1, 1980 – 2007
Jonathan Bowden
London: The Spinning Top Club, 2007

The first time my wife saw Jonathan Bowden’s art she thought he was insane. I had some days before attended a meeting where he spoke about the German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and his epic, 7-hour production Hitler: A Film from Germany. Due to engineering work on the railway network, I arrived late, in the midst of Lady Michele Renouf’s talk about freedom of speech, the Lisbon Treaty, and the European Constitution. At this time Bowden, who was due to speak next, was leaning on a windowsill, facing the audience. Clad in suit and tie, sporting a wooden pendant carved with a rune, and a pair of small, bottle-bottom spectacles, he stood there with a head of curly hair, arms crossed, and eyes closed, deep in thought. The room was hot, pre-Victorian, crammed to capacity with angry middle-aged men, compressed into tightly packed rows of hard coccyx-crunching chairs–stewing in their fury against the modern world.

As I sat down, a man in the front row, who had already asked a question, asked another. Bowden leapt like an attack dog and forcefully silenced the inquisitor. ‘Questions at the end, please!” he shouted. “Authoritarian men won’t have another’s will imposed upon them,” he said on a different occasion. His manner was harsh, loud, serious, unpleasant, overbearing. This is how I knew he was the chairman.

When his turn came to speak, his vast oral cavity exploded with a hurricane of decibels; the thermonuclear shockwave of intellectual verbiage swept over the heads of the congregated audience, stunning it into paralyzed silence. Bowden turned his head left, then right, then left, then right, his eyes closed, gesticulating, baring his teeth, roaring like a lion. Even if there was anyone present who did not understand his erudite diction, everyone knew where it was coming from: a place of Nietzschean ferocity, Doric hardness, primal purpose, pagan pride, ancient darkness, and unquenchable fury. The discharge of energy was inspiring, and motivated me to visit this man’s website.

Kratos 1

It found he was a prolific writer and an artist with an especially rabid style. His paintings, done in acrylic (for speed), are chaotic mosaics of color, intense, expressionistic, and densely crisscrossed with sadistic lines. It is the work of a schizophrenic patient, who labors at night, hunched over his table, pen in fist, his face red, his eyes wide, perspiring, hyperventilating, furiously attacking the paper surface in an paroxysm of uncontrolled hatred and rage. Otherwise it is the work of an obsessive compulsive, who fills vast surfaces with incomprehensible patchworks and patterns that respect no rhyme or reason, who destroys as he creates, who accretes as he annihilates, cackles as he militates. The art is grotesque, primordial, and rudely contemptuous of bourgeois expectations. It is filled with ghoulish faces, deformity, evil, psychotic stares, lascivious leers, nightmarish sarcasm, and human monstrosity. The portraits offer nothing but a demonic freak show. Where there are women, the images are not flattering: they are obscene, vulgar, violently sexual. This is no derivation from the Classicist figurative tradition: when one looks at Bowden’s art one thinks of Marvel comic strips, blended with Edvard Munch, Otto Dix, and Jackson Pollock. (View a slideshow of Bowden’s paintings here.)

Bowden’s art is modern, or modernist, but he argues that it is no longer so, for what we class as “modern” art has already been around for well over a hundred years. This is obviously true, but all the same it enrages, perplexes, and horrifies some in Bowden’s political constituency: indeed, some years ago, he was vigorously attacked by a number of anonymous posters in Stormfront, in a manner that he later described as “semi-literate and scatological.” But while for some Bowden’s creations are another example of entartete Kunst, others rate it highly; views on its merits are polarized. In a subsequent response to his critics, Bowden wrote:

Jonathan Bowden

Once a classic early photographer like Edward Muybridge produced an interconnected series of images featuring Greco-Roman wrestlers and running horses, the world was forever changed. Fine art now had a choice–it either replicated photography badly or in a stylized way which was loyal to a tradition running from Rembrandt to Orpen or it contrived to do something else. What it did was to go inside the mind and tap all sorts of semi-conscious and unconscious ideas, fantasies, desires and imaginative forays. The point about this art is that it is highly personal and powerful because it comes from inside. This means that people often of a highly rigid and morally defensive character find this work heretical, blasphemous, evil and even degenerate. (Indeed the theory of degenerate art originates from the 1880’s when this change of direction took place).

He explained that “representational, classical, traditional and academic work has been taken over by cinema,” and that he sees the failure of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union to prevent painters and sculptors from producing modernist work as a confirmation of the dynamism of the modernist current. He added:

Turning to my own work, various currents are discernible. These are the demonic, strength and a concern with pure power, ugliness and fury as well as erotica and shape, or purely imaginative formulations. In my own mind the softer material balances the harsher, more violent and aggressive work. Nonetheless, I have also done a large number of relatively traditional pieces which hark back to classic art by Bosch, Rops, and Caravaggio. Some are also based on Hellenistic form. Obviously a subjective element intrudes into art but I believe that modernistic fury is the correct vehicle for elitist and hierarchical values.

Neo-Classic High Jinx

The Art of Jonathan Bowden is the first of two volumes, collecting the 47-year-old artist’s work from 1980 to 2007. In total we have 179 paintings and 25 sketches. The pages are black and the text white, which is what works best with artwork of such vibrant colors. Sadly, it is a softcover edition and a few of the images are slightly out of focus.

Sadly also, there is no introduction or biographical essay: one goes from the table of contents straight to the art. The interaction between the latter and the former, however, provides an unexpected source of entertainment that compensates for these deficiencies, as it proves quite rewarding either to look at the title of a painting in the index and then find the corresponding painting or vice versa.

This is because the titles reflect an obvious, (in Bowden’s own words) “elitist, semi-transcendentalist, hieratic, non-dualist, neo-pagan, ‘politically incorrect’, and inegalitarian” sensibility, and, as Lasha Darkmoon has pointed out in her recent articles for The Occidental Observer, we do not find that very often in the contemporary art world. One cannot read titles like Against Greenpeace, An Apple a Day Keeps Fury at Bay, Depressed Human Reptile, Eugene Sue’s The Eternal Jew, Louisiana Lynching, Flying Vagina Head, Give Me 140 Million Dollars, God Plays with Balls, Happy Hellraiser, I am Disembowelled, Too Many Turkey Twizzlers, and not want to find out what Bowden visualized.

These are, of course, the quirkier titles. Others suggest a number of recurring themes: classical / mythological (Masked Acropolis, Olympia on Blue), demonic (Orange Lucifer, Lycanthropy Now), sexual (Napalm Blonde, Vulvic Head and Ear), fascistic (Adolf & Leni, Mussolini with Bi-Planes), among others.

Artistically unexplored among Bowden’s obsessions are his morbid fear of obesity, for example, and his troglodytic indifference to technology. At a recent event in the United States, I noticed Bowden, who on previous occasions had refused to eat anything at all, dined out of tiny dessert dishes. When questioned on his rather singular temperance, he explained that he comes from the West country, and that people from his part of the world have a tendency to grow sideways.

His worry, however, is wrapped into a certain morbidity of the imagination. At various points he expressed disappointment at the lack of examples of “brontosaurian obesity,” the witnessing of which he had been eagerly anticipating, not without a measure of horrified fascination. Perhaps this is because Bowden, like one Harry Stephen Keeler, appreciates human deformity and freakery of nature: “it adds to the fauna and flora,” he says.

As to his relationship with the electronic marvels of our age, Bowden admits to not owning a CD player, a DVD player, or even a color television; indeed, the communicates with the world via a mobile telephone that must be nearly a decade old–a geological era in technological terms. “I believe in planning your own obsolescence,” he argues.

The Marquis de Sade

I must admit I recognize a bit myself in this rather eccentric character. This is a man who likes extremes, and rushes to them faster than the speed of light the moment an idea is presented to him. Like me, he cartoonifies everything and everybody; he enjoys exaggeration, obscurity, exoticism, rarity, maximal expression–life is a comic strip; he can see humor in even the nadir of the Kali Yuga.

Bowden’s stern appearance (I say he has looked 40 since he was 18) is somewhat deceptive, but his art accurately reflects this personality profile: beneath the hyperchromatic energy there is a gothic sensibility, that is drawn to authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Bram Stoker–not forgetting the Irishman’s more obscure books–blended with an extroverted theatricality. Suddenly his suit and tie and heavy-soled, skull-crushing footwear and the van filled with corpses are not inconsistencies, but parts of an organic–and partly animalistic, partly inhuman–whole. They are consistent with the orator whose meanest and most gleeful insults are “BBC News reader” and “lib-er-alll!”

The Art of Jonathan Bowden will not please everyone and will not confirm the ordinary man in his beliefs (Bowden does not give a damn), but it is without a doubt interesting for those who revel in psychological extremity and would like an insight into the psyche of this Nietzschean beast.

Note: Many of Jonathan Bowden’s books can be purchased or downloaded for free from his website.