Occidental Quarterly 16.4 (Winter 2016-17)

7/2/2021 Fish Species Are Not the Only Ones Under Threat :: Reader View
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Fish Species Are Not the Only Ones

Under Threat
20-26 minutes
The Occidental Quarterly vol. 16, no. 4, Winter

2016-2017, pp. 3-22
Nelson Rosit
Excerpts from Part III
Postwar and
Contemporary Issues
Racial Ecologism (Dec. 2019)

repeats some of these themes.
POPULATION AND MIGRATION
In many circles today the limits to growth argument of ecologists is

out of favor, being dismissed by neo-Marxists, religious
fundamentalists, and capitalist technocrats. Yet a cardinal principle
of environmentalism remains sustainability, and by this measure
America, not to mention the world, is already overpopulated.
In 2011 world population passed the seven billion mark. In 1927

the world held two billion persons. “Some people alive today have
seen the population triple in their lifetimes.” Those who minimize
the problem point out that the pace of increase has declined.
chrome-extension://gjhmajellcaeediogokhjjgffojhcnkb/reader/index.html?id=1578 1/11
Although the rate of population growth is slowing, in sixty years the

human population is projected to reach ten billion.20
Of course, the growth in population is very uneven among the races.

Black African populations are growing rapidly. Most Asian and Latin
American populations are experiencing moderate growth, while
Whites worldwide are reproducing below replacement level –
negative population growth. This phenomenon of racial
replacement is one reason why population growth cannot be
viewed objectively. To see burgeoning non-White populations as a
problem is to elicit charges of racism: Any policy that limit the
fertility of Third World women is seen as both racist and sexist,
while at the same time the fact that aging White populations of
Europe and North America are being replaced by expanding
numbers of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans should not be
viewed with alarm. The current dogma is that all peoples have the
same capacity for cultural development, so there is no reason to
object to this demographic transformation. In fact, greater diversity
in the West is seen as an advantage.
Another argument used to dismiss environmental concerns about

population growth is that Third World peoples use fewer resources
than peoples of the West, thus their populations have a smaller
environmental impact.
All three arguments used to deny the population problem – slowing

of the rate of population growth, the balanced replacement of White
with non-White populations, and the low resource use by non-
Whites – are specious.
We can take no comfort from the fact the rate of population

increase has declined if, as many believe, present levels of resource
use are already at unsustainable levels. The exploitation of soil,
water, and mineral resources today is the equivalent of deficit
spending. In this case population reduction, not the slowing of
growth, is required. This is the position of Finnish fisherman,
philosopher, and ecologist Pentti Linkola.21 Linkola believes the
world’s current population is 2.5 times greater than a sustainable
level.
The belief that races and cultures are essentially interchangeable,

thus making ethnic change of little consequence, has been
consistently disproven by history, social science, and current events
– e.g., by the tendencies of African-derived peoples in a wide range

of contemporary cultures.22 Culture has a racial/ethnic basis, and
ethnic change inevitably produces profound cultural change.
It is often stated that Westerners use many times the energy and
other resources per capita as do non-Western peoples. If somehow
the entire world had the standard of living of Americans, global
resource consumption would be five times greater than today.23 The
conclusion some draw from this is that Westerners must accept a
lower standard of living as non-Western populations increase their
consumption. This is the logical outcome of globalization and the
free movement of goods, labor, and finance worldwide.
The idea that non-Western peoples tread lightly on the environment

due to low consumption is also erroneous. Consider two countries
with approximately the same population densities – Belgium and
Haiti.24 The mixed Walloon and Flemish population of Belgium is
able to produce enough wealth from their small land area to
support their population at a high standard of living. Their
environmental protection is exemplary.
Unfortunately, in recent decades Belgium has permitted large

numbers of Asians and Africans to settle in their country and their
presence now threatens Belgium’s peace and prosperity.
Along with being a political and economic failed state that people
are desperate to leave, Haiti is also an environmental disaster. Once
called the “Pearl of the Antilles,” Haiti had lush forested hills and
fertile valleys. Generations of rapid population growth supported by
subsistence agriculture has led to deforestation, overgrazing and
soil erosion and depletion. Water running off bare hillsides choke
the valleys with mud and debris. “In the last five decades, more
than 90 percent of [Haiti’s] tree cover has been lost... The resulting
erosion has destroyed an estimated two-thirds of the country’s
fertile farmland since 1940, while its population has quadrupled.”25
The UN has declared that Haiti simply has “too many people living
on land that can no longer support them.”26
Belgium is able to comfortably support a population density that in

Haiti produces extreme poverty. Haitians find large-scale
cooperation and long-term planning difficult or impossible, while
Belgium has used its social capital to produce goods and services
needed in foreign and domestic commerce. Haiti is severely

overpopulated, Belgium is not. This is race realism.
Haiti is just one example of non-White overpopulation. It has been

suggested that the upheavals produced by the Arab Spring were a
result, in part, of raising commodity prices. As Mideast populations
grow, they have become more dependent on buying grain from
abroad. As food prices rose in the 2010-2011 period, so did unrest.
Every contentious contemporary issue has a racial component, and

the inability of the environmental movement to deal forthrightly and
honestly with population and migration problems is certainly the
result of the anti-White bias of the prevailing ideology. An example
can be seen in the changing position of the Sierra Club on the issues
of migration and population growth. Founded by racial ecologist
John Muir in 1892, the Sierra Club is one of the oldest and largest
environmental organizations in the world, with approximately two
million overwhelmingly White members. It has betrayed both the
environmental cause and the racial interests of its members by
supporting amnesty for illegal aliens and continued high levels of
“legal” immigration.
For decades the Sierra Club’s position on population had been

based on the premise “that immigration drives unsustainable
population growth, which then drains resources and harms the
environment.”27 Growing pressure from the left led then-executive
director Carl Pope to duck the topic of population by claiming it was
too controversial to deal with. Pope told an interviewer in 2004 that
“this issue is so deeply charged with a lot of issues, including
xenophobia and racism, that you can’t get into it and have a clean
debate, and therefore you just couldn’t try.”28
By 2013, under the present executive director Michael Brune, the

Sierra Club had fully embraced a pro-immigration policy that
includes amnesty for illegal immigrants. In addition, it opposes
building “border walls in the Southwest” because of the
environmental damage they may cause.29
So over the last several decades the Sierra Club’s position on

population and immigration has evolved from advocating
population and immigration control, to neutrality, to promoting an
essential open-borders policy.
Some see the change in the Sierra Club’s position driven by greed as
much as ideology. In the 1990s billionaire Wall Street investor
David Gelbaum approached Carl Pope with an offer to contribute
millions of dollars if it adopted a pro-immigration position.
Eventually, Gelbaum got his way and “the organization received
over $100 million dollars in a couple of donations over the years
2000 and 2001. In any normal circumstances, such a transaction
would be considered a bribe and roundly condemned. But the
leadership kept the source of the new riches secret, until a 2004
Los Angeles Times article revealed Gelbaum as the sugar daddy.”30
Today those who support rational policies on population and

migration have an uphill fight. They are opposed by religious
fundamentalists and radical feminists making common cause
against birth control aimed at poor women, while cultural Marxists,
ethnic activists, and global capitalists work in tandem to promote
quantitative population growth and the free movement of labor.
For more on the corruption of the environmentalist movement see

Jewish Environmentalism
HYBRIDIZATION
In most cases it is still possible for professional wildlife managers

to formulate policy on the basis of science and reason. However, the
sort of muddle-headed sentimentality that dominates Whites’
thinking on race has now spread to their views on wild creatures.
People who should know better have a Disneyland understanding of
fauna. Animals in the wild do not die comfortably medicated in bed.
They are killed by predators or die of injury, disease, or starvation. A
bullet is a relatively humane way to go, and hunting is a valuable
tool to keep populations within the carrying capacity of the
environment.
Hybridization can occur in the wild when new species or subspecies

are introduced into an environment. Below are some examples of
state and federal government efforts to prevent or reverse
hybridization in the wild, thus preserving biodiversity.
For centuries trout, a beautiful fish that requires cool, clean water to
survive, have inspired admiration from anglers and naturalists alike.
In The Compleat Angler, a book still widely read today, Englishman
Izaak Walton (1594-1683) wrote: “The trout is a fish highly valued

both in this and foreign nations.”31 This is still true today.
Unfortunately, this aristocrat is now threatened by miscegenation.

Decades of promiscuous stocking of non-native species, to provide
more “sport” for fishermen, has damaged native trout populations
in both the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains. State fish and
game departments, the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as
sportsmen/conservation groups such as Trout Unlimited are
concerned about the genetic integrity of the eastern brook trout and
the western cutthroat trout. In both cases the culprit is often
hatchery-raised rainbow trout. The problem is twofold. The stocked
fish drive out and replace the natives, and they can also interbreed
with them, destroying valuable genotypes. Racial ecologist Robert
Beverley compares the mixing of stocked fish and natives with “that
of a South Los Angles street gang and a Mennonite farming
community” 32 – an analogy that would likely be frowned on by the
politically correct, given that it implies genetically based differences
between human groups.
Dr. Harold Kincaid, a researcher for the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
explains that with stocking, “the genetic transformafion of an entire
valuable strain gathers a fatal momentum over time.” “We gradually
lose genetic material,” he says, as native genomes are “basically
broken up” by wave upon wave of introduced hatchery fish.33
Aquatic biologist John Epifanio is also interested in protecting

native fish. “Genetic conservation principles are formulated on the
premise that it is prudent to protect rare, unique, and natural gene
combinations.”34 According to an article in the New York Times,
“38% of North American fish species which became extinct during
the past century died out at least partly because of genetic mixing
with other species, [and] 68% of the extinct species succumbed at
least in part due to replacement by introduced rival species.”35
The National Park Service has taken steps to preserve the native
brook trout in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. After decades
of stocking rainbow trout, they discontinued the practice in the
1970s. Park personnel found that this was not enough to save the
remaining native fish. Only segregation, the physical separation of
the species, could do the job. “Since rainbow trout will usually
progressively displace brook trout where the two species occur
together, the best hope for saving brookies... is to identify those

headwaters with lower limits marked by vertical barriers too high
for trout to normally leap.”36 In other words, the pure, remote
headwaters will be reserved for the brook trout, down-stream for
the rainbows.
Similar efforts are being made to save the cutthroat trout native to
the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin regions. As with the eastern
brook trout, part of the problem has been stocking non-native
rainbow trout. One subspecies, the greenback cutthroat, the native
trout of the eastern drainage of the Colorado Rockies, is particularly
threatened. The loss of habitat and the introduction of “other spring
spawning trout species [e.g., rainbows] that hybridize with
greenbacks, and fall spawning species that compete with
greenbacks for food and space” have depleted cutthroat
populations.37
So over the last several decades the states, the federal government,
as well as sportsmen and conservation groups have spent millions
of dollars in an effort to save various species and subspecies of
trout. While the analogy between trout populations and human
populations is not perfect, certain principles apply to both. The
introduction of new species or subspecies often results in loss of
habitat, genetic integrity, and even extinction for the indigenous
species.
To tie the political and cultural to the ecological, we can

summarize that Whites need physically secure and culturally
supportive habitat for pair bonding and successfully raising
children. Custom and law provided such an environment in
prewar America. The de facto segregation offered by White flight
and privatization in postwar America created a suitable
environment for White families for a couple of decades. The
precipitous fall in White birth rate following the baby boom
generation can be attributed, in part, to the loss of a physical
and cultural environment that protected and supported
domesticity within the nuclear family and other White
behavioral norms.
THE COMMONS
Both environmentalism and racialism have a collectivist

component. Several decades ago, Garrett Hardin made the case
that the environment is analogous to the village commons of
medieval and early modern times.52 The commons refers to
collectively used resources. The traditional commons consisted of
pasture and woodlands used by the village. The new commons are
global resources – air and water, especially the oceans. Unregulated
commons inevitably become degraded, and are eventually
destroyed.
The commons can also be understood as what eighteenth-century

political philosophers called the common weal or commonwealth.
Racial neologism considers the health and integrity of the folk or
ethny as part of the commonwealth of a nation. A core function of
the state should be to protect and improve its ethny. The
commonwealth consists of those who contribute to the welfare of
society. It excludes parasites and freeloaders. Racial ecologism
would restrict the freedom of the individual to do harm to the ethny,
just as it would restrict the individual from harming the physical
environment.
CONCLUSIONS
The three essays concluding here have been an attempt to

influence the ideology of contemporary racialism toward a
naturalist direction. This is in the tradition of Ernst Haeckel,
Madison Grant, et al. Racialism and neologism have been linked in
the past in both America and Europe, and we have seen how
present environmental issues, such as stocking rainbow trout in the
natural habitat of other species, have racial analogies. Several
fields, including social ecology and political ethnology, have been
suggested as possible approaches to future research and
ideological development.
Many topics have been covered here, none in depth. Rather the
objective has been aspirational and suggestive, pointing to areas of
further study.
In a 2014 essay Greg Johnson identified four ecological ideas

useful in thinking about race: habitat, invasive species,
hybridization, and predation.53
First, all species and subspecies require a specific habitat, a

compatible environment for survival and reproduction. We saw how
White flight to the suburbs after World War II created a social and
physical environment for the largely White baby boom. By the mid-
1960s, integration and immigration, among other factors, began to
depress the White birth rate.
Second, when non-native species are introduced to a new

environment, they can proliferate using resources needed by native
species. Thus non-Whites thrive in White environments, often
leading to high birth rates, while the newcomers make
disproportionate use of collective resources.
Third, in the case of trout and bison, when non-native species or

subspecies are introduced to an environment, unique genotypes
can be wrecked by interbreeding. In multiethnic societies
miscegenation blends races, destroying distinct and valuable
characteristics.
Fourth, predation in the human context includes crime and perhaps

the abortion of viable White focuses.
Finally, psychological factors, which Johnson’s essay does not

explicitly address, should be mentioned. Psychic stress can cause
pathology. Many animals, for example, are difficult to breed in
captivity. Human societies can be affected by collective morale
problems. For the West today these psychological problems include
narcissism, alienation, sexual confusion, drug addiction, and racial
guilt. The Center for Disease Control recently reported a decline in
life expectancy among White Americans driven largely by self-
destructive behaviors.54 As documented by Charles Murray, there
has been an alarming deterioration of the culture of the White
working class as social supports for marriage and high-investment
patenting have disappeared.55
Most Whites seem unaware of the hostile forces working to destroy

our people and culture. Most Whites have difficulty comprehending
the possibility of White extinction, or why that might even matter.
Framing the discussion in ecological terms may clarify the issues.
White communities are as much a part of the natural order as a pod
of orcas or a herd of caribou – and even more worthy of cherishing.
References
1 Nelson Rosit, ‘Racial Ecology, Part I: Early Environmentalists,

1843-1937,’ The Occidental Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 2015-
2016): 43-61.
2 Nelson Rosit, ‘Racial Ecology, Part II: Brown and Green, 1920-
1945,’ The Occidental Quarterly 16, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 31-51.
20 Quote and population figures from Cody Crane, ‘Crowded

Planet,’ Science World 68, no. 9 (February 13, 2012): 12-13.
21 Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail? A Radical Approach to the

Environmental Crisis, 2nd rev ed. (London: Arktos Media, 2011).
22 J. Philippe Rushton and Glayde Whitney, ‘Cross-National

Variation in Violent Crime Rates: Race, r-K Theory, and Income,’
Population and Environment 23, no. 6 (July 2002): 501-11.
23 Crane, ‘Crowded Planet,’ 13.
24 Haiti has an area of 27,750 square kilometers, a population of

10.1 million, and a population density of 375 persons per square
kilometer. Belgium has an area of 30,500 square kilometers, a
population of 11.3 million, and a population density of 368 persons
per square kilometer. Figures are approximate.
25 Tim Collie, ‘Haiti: The World Doesn’t Have Any Idea How Bad
This Situation Is Getting,’ South Florida Sun-Sentinel (December 7,
2003). http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-
haiti1dec0703
26 Ibid.
27 Brentin Mock, ‘How the Sierra Club Learned to Love

Immigration,’ Color Lines: News for Action (May 8, 2013).
http://colorlines.com/archive/2013/05/how_sierra_club_learned_to_love_imm
28 Felicity Barringer, ‘Bitter Divisions for Sierra Club on

Immigration,’ The New York Times (March 16, 2004).
http://www.nyt.com/2004/03/16/us/bitter-divisions-for-sierra-
club-on-immigration
29 Michael Brune, ‘A Path to the Future,’ Coming Clean: The Blog of

Executive Director Michael Brune (April 25, 2013).
http://sierraclub.typepad.com/michaelbrune/2013/04/immigration.html
30 Brenda Walker, ‘The Sierra Club’s Profitable Descent into

Leftism,’ The Social Contract 21, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 47-49.
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_2l_3/tsc-
21-3-walker-sierra-club.shtml
31 Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, The Compleat Angler, or the

Contemplative Man’s Recreation, 5th ed. (London: Brocken Books,
1985 [1676]), 79.
32 Robert Beverley, The East Tennessee Almanac (Franklin, NC:

Sanctuary Press, 1992), 16.
33 Ibid., 17.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., 19.
37 Greenback Trout Recovery Plan (Denver, CO: US Fish and Wildlife

Service, 1998), 111. http://ecos.fws.gov/docs/recovery-
plan/980301.pdf
52 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ Science 162, no.

3859 (December 1968).
http://dk.doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
53 Greg Johnson, ‘White Extinction,’ Counter-Currents (February

14, 2014). http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/02/white-
extinction/
54 Betsy McKay, ‘Life Expectancy for White Americans Declines,’

Wall Street Journal (April 20, 2016). www.wsj.com/article/life-
expectancy-for-white-americans-declines-1461124861
55 Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America,

1960-2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012); see review by F. Roger
Devlin, ‘Review Essay on Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State
of White America, 1960-2010,’ The Occidental Quarterly 12, no. 1
(Spring 2012): 31-51.
7/2/2021 Why Have We Unlearned What We Knew in 1900? - American Renaissance :: Reader View
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Why Have We Unlearned What We Knew

in 1900? - American Renaissance
29-36 minutes
Some years ago evolutionary psychologist J. Philippe Rushton

asked me, as a historian, the following question:
Why have modern historians ‘unlearned’ so much that was

known and understood in 1900? Why has knowledge about
the evolutionary basis of race regressed while the
understanding of other matters has increased?
I did not have a good answer at the time, but I’d like to try again. Let
me begin with a brief summary of the prevailing wisdom of 1900.
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, and by
1900 his theory of evolution had become the dominant opinion in
academic and scientific circles. In 1900, most scholars understood
evolution in terms of the sub-title of Darwin’s book: The
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.[1]
Origin of Species maintained that evolution toward higher forms of

life stemmed from adaptations to different environments and from
conflict and competition that led to ‘‘survival of the fittest” (though
it was the philosopher Herbert Spencer who coined that phrase).
Darwin specifically applied this concept to mankind in his 1871
sequel, The Descent of Man. He wrote: “At some future period, not
very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man
will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races
throughout the world.” “Looking at the world at no very distant date,
an endless number of lower races will be eliminated by the higher
civilized races . . . .“[2]
By 1900, Darwin’s prediction had been seconded by mainstream

American writers and scientists. Novelist John De Forest (1826 –
1906) conceded that superior blacks might continue to dominate in
some territories, “that portion being probably the lowlands where
the whites cannot or will not labor.” But De Forest also predicted
that what he called “the low-down Negro” would pass “into sure
and deserved oblivion.” Francis Walker (1840 – 1897), a prominent
demographer and economist, studied the census figures of 1870,
1880, and 1890 and concluded that the black population was
already declining because black slaves had been freed and thrust
into competition with white people. Lord James Bryce (1838 –
1922), a distinguished British student of the United States,
seconded this opinion. Joseph Le Conte (1823 – 1901), a highly
regarded biologist and geologist, summed up the Darwinian
consensus: “The struggle for life and the survival of the fittest”
were “applicable to the races of men.” The destiny of weaker
varieties of humanity was either “extinction . . . or . . . relegation to a
subordinate place in the economy of nature; the weaker is either
destroyed or seeks safety by avoiding competition.”[3]
The failure of Reconstruction had reinforced this consensus. After

the Civil War, Southern blacks were enfranchised. Then, with
cooperation from so-called Southern “scalawags” and Northern
“carpetbaggers,” blacks became influential in the governments of

several states of the former Confederacy. However, Reconstruction
ended in the 1870s, most blacks were disfranchised, and by 1900 a
great many whites, in the North as well as the South, considered
Reconstruction to have been a failure. They attributed the failure to
blacks’ presumed inability to restrain spending, balance budgets, or
control crime.
According to historian George W. Stocking, Jr., “In turn-of-the

[twentieth] century evolutionary thinking, savagery, dark skin, and a
small brain and incoherent mind were, for many, all parts of a single
evolutionary picture of ‘primitive’ man, who even yet walks the
earth.” Darwinists believed there was a racial hierarchy–that

evolutionary adaptations to different climates and environments
caused human nature to differ somewhat from one continent to
another. They thought blacks had proclivities toward crime,
promiscuity, and sloth; and that these tendencies had to be held in
check by white supervision.[4]
Evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald notes that:
The early part of the twentieth century was the high water
mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at
that time to think that there were important differences
between the races–that races differed in intelligence and
moral qualities. Not only did races differ, but they were in
competition with each other for supremacy.[5]
The eminent black historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois

recognized racial differences in behavior, but disagreed on the
cause. In his famous study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), he
reported that blacks in Philadelphia, although only four percent of
the population, committed 22 percent of the serious crimes. He
also called attention to what he called “the unchastity of a large
number of women.” “The great weakness of the Negro family,” Du
Bois wrote, “is . . . lack of respect for the marriage bond. . . . . Sexual
looseness then arises as a secondary consequence, bringing
adultery and prostitution in its train.” In a talk to one group of
blacks, Du Bois declared that “the first and greatest step [toward
solving America’s racial problems] is the correction of the
immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves.”[6]
At the same time, Du Bois shifted the paradigm by arguing that

racial discrimination by whites was largely responsible for the
condition of blacks. He emphasized that whites, because they
established racial barriers to good jobs, were responsible for black
failure. Du Bois did not ignore the weaknesses of blacks, but he

emphasized the culpability of whites.
A century later, it is Du Bois’s view that prevails. Most people

attribute racial disparities to the influence of history, culture, and
discrimination. This is “the sovereign doctrine of twentieth century
social theory,” naturalist E. O. Wilson has written, adding that this
modern consensus eschews the importance of biology, pays “little
attention to the foundation of human nature,” and has “almost no
interest in its deep origins.”[7]
George M. Fredrickson, who taught history at Stanford until 2002,

acknowledged that earlier generations of scientists and scholars
often mentioned evolution as the source of racial disparities, but he
insisted they were motivated by racism. They “raised prejudice to
the level of science; thereby giving it respectability.” Fortunately,
Fredrickson wrote, in the 20th century there occurred a
“fundamental change . . . in white racial thinking.” In “respectable”
circles, “liberal environmentalism” emerged as a pervasive “racial
creed,” and most mainstream social scientists now maintain that
there are “no differences between the races which [are] likely to
affect their social, cultural, and intellectual performance; all
apparent differences [are] the result of environment.”[8]
This is what I was taught when I was a student at Stanford and

Berkeley from 1956 to 1965. My professors implied that with the
right social reforms, ethnic and racial gaps could be abolished. They
implied that emphasis on biology was a sign of bigotry. My
professors subscribed to the blank-slate theory that all races of
humanity have the same innate distribution of aptitudes and talent.
One of my favorite professors, historian Kenneth M. Stampp,
summed up the prevailing wisdom in a memorable sentence:
“Negroes are after all only white men with black skins, nothing
more, nothing less.”[9]
What caused this turnabout? I believe four considerations are

especially important. One is a phenomenon that has been called
“Hitler’s posthumous revenge.” Then there is the logic and legacy of
the civil rights movement. There was also a new pattern of thinking
in social science. And, eventually, there were programs to re-
educate–or indoctrinate–students.
I first became acquainted with the term “Hitler’s posthumous

revenge” when I read Peter Brimelow’s 1995 book, Alien Nation.
[10] Mr. Brimelow noted that during the Second World War most
Americans came to loathe Nazi Germany. After the war, the United
States and its allies decided to put as much distance as possible
between their nations and Nazism, which they came to define as
the refusal to accept diversity. In retrospect, we can see that this
set the stage for dismantling the existing particularisms in Western
societies. Rejecting nationalism and distinctions between racial
groups as retrograde–and even as akin to Nazism–eventually led to
the Immigration Act of 1965. Repudiation of national traditions
paved the way for massive immigration of non-whites into Europe
as well as North America–immigration that is transforming and
could ultimately destroy the victors in World War II. In the last few
years, Angela Merkel has opened Germany to massive Third-World
immigration as well, so the vanquished may be submerged along
with the victors.
The Civil Rights Movement also led many whites toward

egalitarianism and a hyper-critical attitude toward their ancestors.
In some circles, this attitude has come to be known as
“ethnomasochism.”
The Civil Rights Movement began long ago, but its high point came
in the 1950s and 1960s, when blacks demanded the right to vote,
an end to formal segregation, and the abolition of racial
discrimination in public accommodations. Most white people
thought these demands were reasonable, especially since civil
rights leaders insisted that their movement be nonviolent and

dignified. As journalist James J. Kilpatrick noted, for tactical
reasons the leaders of the Movement emphasized the contrast
between “well-dressed, studious blacks peacefully protesting” and
violent mobs of whites, “a ragtail rabble, slackjawed, black
jacketed, grinning fit to kill.”[11] According to legal historian
Michael Klarman, the freedom riders “count[ed] upon the racists of
the South to create a crisis,” and black leaders “calculated for the
stupidity of Bull Connor.” Conner did not disappoint. He and his
police dogs became the most widely recognized symbols of white
opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights leaders
carefully chose to hold demonstrations in areas where local
authorities were likely to over-react. Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma,
Alabama, was one of many examples.[12] Meanwhile, the racial
implications of evolution were relegated to a few scholarly journals
and some small academic societies.
The roots of this new paradigm went deeper, however, back to the
work of anthropologist Franz Boas, who was at Columbia University
from 1896 to 1942. It was Boas who, more than anyone else,
persuaded anthropologists and other social scientists that racial
differences were not the result of genetic inheritance but were
shaped by historical events.[13]
Franz Boas
Early in his career, Boas had reported that “the average size of the
Negro brain is slightly smaller than the average size of the brain of
the white race,” and therefore Boas thought it likely “that
differences in mental characteristics of the two races exist.”[14] But
by the 1920s, he was teaching that “the variations in cultural
development” could be explained “by a consideration of the general
course of historical events” and without recourse to innate racial
differences.[15] Instead of stressing the importance of race, he
insisted that “patterns of culture” were primarily responsible for
differences in behavior.
Carl Degler (1921 – 2014), a Pulitzer-prize winning historian at

Stanford, has noted that Boas did not present “conclusive
evidence” that “unambiguously disproved” the Darwinists. Instead,
Boas managed to substitute his own “unproved (though strongly
held) assumption.” Boas established a new orthodoxy, one that held
that “the well-recognized diversity among human groups derived
not from race but from different histories and environments.”[16]
How did Boas do it? According to Degler “changes in the ethnic

makeup of the social science community”–that is, the increasing
numbers of Jewish scholars, which led eventually to Jewish
domination of the social sciences–explained “a large part of the
explanation for this shift in outlook on race.”[17] Degler was,
himself, Jewish. Kevin MacDonald adds that “ethnic networking by
Jews with access to prestigious academic institutions, academic
presses, and the elite media created dominant intellectual and
political movements that effectively excluded dissenters from
positions of authority and influence.”[18]
George Stocking (1928 – 2013) had a different argument. He

conceded that Boas had a strong sense of Jewish identity; that
Boas was sensitive to anti-Semitism in his native Germany; that he
“bore scars from several duels he had fought with fellow students
who had made anti-Semitic remarks.” But Stocking believes that
Boas’ fieldwork with Eskimos in northern Alaska was even more
influential. There Boas found himself living as “as a true Eskimo,”
eating and hunting with the natives, and celebrating “the sea-
change that comes from immersion in another . . . culture.” It was
“a beautiful custom,” Boas wrote, “that these ‘savages’ suffer all
deprivation in common, but in happy times when someone has
brought back booty from the hunt, all join in eating and drinking.”
Boas concluded that men and women who knew so much about
surviving against the odds, about ice fishing, dog sledding, and
polar bears, were not intellectually inferior. They, and other
supposedly “inferior” groups, were not shaped by Darwinian

adaptations but by their own history, climate, and culture.[19]
Whatever the reasons for Boas’ “culturism,” he instilled this views

in scores of graduate students who eventually came to dominate
anthropology. One of these students, Margaret Mead, wrote the
best-selling anthropology book of the 20h century, Coming of Age in
Samoa (1928). Another, Ruth Benedict, wrote the most influential
“culturist” book of the era, Patterns of Culture (1934). A third,
Ashley Montague, was the principal author of UNESCO’s influential
1950 “Statement on Race,” which argued that race was
unimportant.
Ruth Benedict
Meanwhile, other Boas students became heads of the anthropology

departments at such places as Berkeley (Alfred Kroeber and Robert
Lowie), Chicago (Edward Sapir and Fay Cooper Cole), Northwestern
(Melville Herskovits). In addition, between the 1920s and the
1950s, several of Boas’s students served as editors of the American
Anthropological Association’s flagship journal,American
Anthropologist, (John Swanton, Robert Lowie, Leslie Spier, Melville
Herskovits). From these perches, Boas’s former students made it
difficult for biologically-oriented anthropologists to publish or find
jobs. Boas, it seems, employed the Gramscian strategy of
infiltration by means of a “long march” through his profession.[20]
Beginning in 1934 with funding from the American Jewish

Committee (AJC), Boas and his proteges also launched a campaign
to persuade teachers and administrators to revise the standard
curriculum in social studies. They wanted grade school and high
school students “to learn that it was [not evolution but] the concept
of culture, learned customs in a specific social and historical
context, that explained the extraordinary diversity of human life.” To
that end, Ruth Benedict wrote an influential pamphlet, The Races of
Mankind, which was used as a textbook to explain that “differences
between individuals of any group . . . were due to variations in social
environment and historical circumstances and [were] not
biologically determined.“ Margaret Mead explained the goal, saying,
“[C]hanging the climate of opinion in which young people are reared
. . . will inevitably have profound reverberations in the social order . .
. . [It] is well within the power of educational leaders.”[21]
This proved to be the case. According to Zoe Burkholder, the author

of a solid academic monograph on this effort to reform the public
schools, Boas and his “early civil rights warriors . . . forever
change[d] the way American schools taught about [the] human race
. . . .”[22] They showed that there was a measure of truth in a
statement that has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “The

philosophy taught in the classrooms in one generation will become
the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Many of those who taught Boas’s program believed what they were
teaching. Boas, however, admitted that the program was a form of
propaganda. At one point in the 1930s, even Ruth Benedict
lamented that Boas had “given up science for good works . . . such a
waste!” In 1939, after concluding that Boas had become more a
propagandist than a scientist, the American Jewish Committee
stopped funding Boas’s work for school reform.[23]
During the Cold War, when the Boasian program came to be

associated with the propaganda of the Communist Party, there was
a decline in the public schools’ use of what Boasians called
“tolerance education.”[24] But in recent decades the left-liberal,
culturist version of race relations has been revived and has become
the dominant, central theme in America’s elementary and high
school classes. For the last 50 years, America’s elementary
students have been taught that different races have the same
distribution of innate aptitudes and talent.
Culturism also gave rise to a new form of intolerance. In some

colleges there have been efforts to silence those who give
Darwinian or biological explanations for race and sex differences in
achievement. Meanwhile, many colleges and school districts pay
the expenses of students and teachers who attend conferences
where leftist fanatics maintain that persistent racial and ethnic
disparities are the result of “white privilege.” Culturists have also
silenced candid discussion of other topics, especially feminism,
homosexuality, trans-genderism, and gay marriage. We have moved
beyond the days when the exceptions to free speech were limited
to incitement, sedition, pornography, and blasphemy.
According to one recent poll, 71 percent of college freshmen now

think universities should “prohibit racist [and] sexist speech on
campus.”[25] Since these freshmen had only recently arrived at
college, their opinions were most likely not the result of
indoctrination by professors, but were shaped earlier through the
modern counterpart of the Franz Boas’s “tolerance education” of
the 1930s. America’s schools, as well as its major media, claim that
all group disparities can be eliminated only if whites get over their
racism, renounce their privilege, and reshape their culture.
However, since the 1950s there has been a slow revival of

Darwinism among scholars in biology and psychology and even in
anthropology and sociology. In 1975, the eminent Harvard
naturalist, E. O. Wilson, reviewed and added to this research in his
magnum opus, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. This synthesis
united social and natural science. It conceded that history matters,
but also maintained that there is a biological basis for culture.
In 1991, Carl Degler published a 400-page book that described

scores of recent academic studies that also have pointed toward a
Darwinian understanding of the biological basis of social behavior.
[26] By the time a 25th anniversary edition of E. O. Wilson’s
Sociobiology was published in 2000, Amazon.com listed 416 titles
under “sociobiology” and 1,218 under “human evolution.”[27]
Three years later, New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade
explained that racial differences arose “because after the ancestral
human population in Africa spread throughout the world . . . ,
geographical barriers prevented interbreeding. Consequently, under
the influence of natural selection . . . people . . . diverged away from
the ancestral population, creating new races.” In his 2014 book, A
Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Mr.
Wade summarized a large body of research that indicates that
evolution in different environments has led to different distributions
of genes that influence not just skin color but also behavior,
intelligence, and personality.[28]
The climate of educated opinion is shifting, but the neo-Darwinians

have by no means supplanted the culturists. In part, this is because
some of the Darwinian sociobiology is provisional and debatable.
But there is also stiff resistance, not so much from scientists as
from politicians, the media, students, many professors, and
doctrinaire reformers. Culturism has become dogma, not only in the
United States but in Canada and Europe as well.
Nevertheless, genetic information continues to slip out of the

laboratories, and this information is showing that people with
different ancestries have different distributions of DNA. Thanks to
these studies and to better methods for dating ancient remains, the
vast majority of scholars agree that mankind separated into two
parts well over 50,000 years ago. One part remained in Africa, the
ancestral homeland, and the other crossed into Southwest Asia.
The second group separated again and again until there were
human populations living in reproductive isolation in almost all
parts of the world. This continued for hundreds of generations and,
over time, there were numerous adaptations to differing climates
and conditions.
This is how racial and other group differences evolved. Groups with
different ancestries or different ways of living developed different
genes because those genes were suited to their respective
environments. Anthropologist Greg Cochran says someone would
have to be an “idiot” to believe that “the optimum mental
phenotype . . . [is] the same in the tropical hunter-gatherers, arctic
hunter-gatherers, Neolithic peasants, and medieval moneylenders.”
[29]
As an historian, I am primarily a story teller. I describe and try to

explain what others have done, said, written, or thought.
Nevertheless, my students sometimes ask what I think. They may
ask, “What was the major cause of the American Civil War?” Or,
“What do you think about Woodrow Wilson’s plan for a new world
order?” Or, “Did Roosevelt’s economic policies end the Great

Depression or did they prolong it?”
These questions give me pause. They can be answered plausibly

but not definitively. Of course, I have opinions. In fact, now that I
am retired I seem to have more opinions than I did when I taught
full-time at the University of Delaware.
I think the Darwinists of 1900 were correct when they said the
characters of different races had been influenced by natural
selection, but I believe they went too far in dismissing the
significance of “culture.”[30]
I also think Boasian culturists went too far in discounting the

importance of heredity. It is not correct to affirm, as one college
textbook does, that “there is no logical reason to expect that the
number of minority students [in advanced classes] would not be
proportional to their representation in the general population.” It is
a mistake to write, as one New York Times columnist has, that
“given the opportunities, most people could do most anything.”[31]
I think we should acknowledge that in accounting for racial

disparities “the data . . . tip toward a mixture of genetic and
environmental influences.”[32] Heredity and culture are both
important. Human behavior should be understood as the product of
an interplay between biology and culture.
We should also recognize that this balanced view prevails among

many scholars and scientists, although most politicians, the media,
and most schools are mired in politically correct culturism. The task
before us, I believe, is to inculcate in our teachers, social scientists,
journalists, and politicians a realistic, scientifically-based
understanding of racial disparities.
Phil Rushton passed on in 2012 at the age of 68. If Phil were with
us today, I would have a mixed message: one part gloom and the
other more hopeful. Gloom because our culturist establishment has

embraced a sentimental, scientifically-unwarranted egalitarianism
that, if it continues, will doom the white race and its civilizations.
J. Philippe Rushton
But there is also good news. I would tell Phil that informed scientific
opinion is shifting. I would tell him that Darwinism is regaining its
cachet with scientists, although not yet with molders of opinion. I
would tell him that his own work is now recognized as a significant
contribution to the revival of Darwinism in our time.[33] And I would
remind him of a statement that Martin Luther King made at the end
of his famous march from Selma to Montgomery, “Truth crushed to

earth will rise again.”
When King said that in 1965, he was drawing on William Cullen

Bryant’s work of 1839, “The Battlefield.” But history is replete with
ironies, and King was not the first to paraphrase Bryant. Among his
predecessors was Jefferson Davis, the president of the
Confederacy, who, in 1868, declared, “Truth crushed to earth is
truth still and like a seed will rise again.”[34]
[1] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species (London: Murray,

1859).
[2] Charles Darwin, quoted by George M. Fredrickson, The Black

Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers,
1971), 230. Also see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the
Darwinian Revolution (London, 1969) 343; George W. Stocking,
Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York: 1968), 113. Admittedly,
Origin of the Species focused on the animal kingdom, but in his
sequel, The Descent of Man (London: Murray, 1871) Darwin
emphasized that mankind was part of this kingdom.
[3] John De Forest, Francis Walker, James Bryce, and Joseph Le

Conte, quoted and paraphrased by George M. Fredrickson, ibid.,
241-43, 238, 245, 246, 247.
[4] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival
of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 62.
[5] George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York:
Free Press, 1968), 132; Kevin MacDonald, Review of Joseph. W.
Bendersky, The ‘Jewish’ Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S.
Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), at Kevin MacDonald.net.
[6] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899; reprint,

Millwood, N. Y.: Kraus-Thompson Organization, 1973), 50, 249; Du
Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897), reprinted in Herbert
Aptheker, ed., Pamphles and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois (White
Plains, N.Y.: Kraus Thomson Organization, 1986), 8, 7, 6.
[7] E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998),

2004.
[8] George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New
York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 89, 255, 320-332, and
passim. Writing twenty years later, however, another historian, Carl
Degler, noted that since the 1950s there has been a decided
“revival” of Darwinian thought among scholars. Degler, In Search of
Human Nature.
[9] Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York: Alfred

A. Knopf, 1956) vii.
[10] Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation (New York: Random House,

1995).
[11] James J. Kilpatrick, quoted by Randall Kennedy, “Lifting as We

Climb,” Harpers (October 2015).
[12] Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 385, 429; Klarman, “How Brown
Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American
History 81 (June 1994) 81-118) .
[13] Sol Tax, “Franz Boas,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed on-

line, March 6, 2016.
[14] Franz Boas, “The Real Race Problem, Crisis 1 (November

1910), 2, 23. One of Boas’ most prominent Ph.D. students, Alfred
Kroeber of Berkeley, made a similar point. “. . . the anatomical
differences between races would appear to render it likely that at

least some corresponding congenital differences of psychological
quality exist. These differences might not be profound, compared
with the sum total of common human faculties, much as the
physical variations of mankind fall within the limits of a single
species. Yet they would preclude identity. As for the vexed question
of superiority, lack of identity would involve at least some degree of
greater power in certain respects in some races. These pre-
eminences might be rather evenly distributed so that no one race
would notably excel the others in the sum total or average of its
capacities; or they might show some minor tendency to cluster on
one rather than on another race. . . . “ A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 204.
[15] Franz Boas, “The Real Race Problem,” Crisis 1 (November

1910), 2, 23; Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: McMillan,
1911), 5, 11, 22, 29.
[16] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and

Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 187, 192.
[17] Ibid., 202.
[18]Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Westport: Praeger,

1998, First Paperback Edition, 2002), Chapter 2 and passim;
MacDonald, “The Alt Right,” VDare.com, 18 April 2016.
[19] George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New

York: The Free Press, 1968), 147, 148, 150, 204 and passim.
[20] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Chapter 2; Gary

Bullert, “Franz Boas as Citizen Scientist,” smashcm[cultural
Marxism].blogspot.com.
[21] Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, paraphrased

by Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 7-8, 76, 85.
[22] Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, 11, 45.
[23] Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, 67, 63.
[24] Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, 153.
[25] See Victor S. Skinner, “Thousands of Teachers Flock to ‘White

Privilege’ Conference, EAG News, 15 April 2016; and to the articles
listed under “indoctrination” at AmRen.com and under “white
privilege” at DailerCaller.com; Catherine Rampell, “Liberal
Intolerance Is on the Rise on America’s College Campuses,
Washington Post, February 11, 2016).
[26] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and

Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
[27] Steve Sailer, “Sociobiology at Age 25,” National Review, 19

June 2000.
[28] Nicholas Wade, “’Two Scholarly Articles,” New York Times, 20

March 2003); Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and
Human History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014). Also see
Kevin Lamb, “The Reality of Race: Understanding the Nature of
Racial Differences,” in Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American
Prospect (Mt. Airy, Maryland: The Occidental Press 2006), 21-65.
[29] See William Saletan, “Created Equal, Slate.com (28 November

2007); Gregory Cochran, “Pygmification,” posted at
Westhunt.wordpress.com (August 24, 2014).
[30] Paul B. Barringer and Joseph A. Tillinghast, quoted and

paraphrased by George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the
White Mind, 253-54.
[31] Mary M. Frasier, “Gifted Minority Students,” in Nicholas

Colangelo and Gary A. David, Handbook of Gifted Education
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997) 498; Deborah Solomon, interview
with Charles Murray, quoted by John Derbyshire, “The Straggler” (1
December 2008) at JohnDerbyshire.com/Opinions/Straggler;
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
[32] Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New
York: Free Press, 1994), 311.
[33] Helmuth Nyborg, ed., The Life History Approach to Human

Differences: A Tribute to J. Philippe Rushton (London: Ulster
Institute for Social Research, 2015).
[34] Bryant put it this way: “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again;
The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with
pain, And dies among his worshippers.”
7/2/2021 The Six Stages of Enlightenment – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
www.theoccidentalobserver.net
The Six Stages of Enlightenment – The

Occidental Observer
Thomas Dalton, Ph.D.
34-42 minutes
Anyone who has spent even a short time battling against the
Judeocracy has surely experienced the frustration of attempting to
persuade a trusted friend or colleague of the gravity of the situation
—only to fail. This is undoubtedly one of the most discouraging and
troubling aspects of those who take up the mission for truth and
justice. We repeatedly encounter intelligent and well-read
individuals who, we believe, surely must share our sense of concern
and outrage. If they do not, it can only be from lack of knowledge;
therefore, a short chat or a targeted reading or two, we think, will do
the trick. The facts are indisputable, and hence it is merely a matter
of information. Once our friends have the requisite facts, they will
surely—surely—see things our way. And yet, time after time, they do
not.
Why is this? What are they thinking? What is their logic? How is it
that they can fail to be fully convinced of the severity of the Jewish
Question? Or even just be sympathetic to our stance? Why is it that
they occasionally even become outright hostile—not to them, but to
us? How can they be in denial of what is, from a rational and
objective standpoint, surely one of the major problems facing
civilized humanity? Undoubtedly this could be the topic of a book-
length treatment, and I can only outline a few basic ideas here. But
I think there is some merit in examining the basic categories of
response and denial by those confronted, perhaps for the first time
in a serious manner, with the Jewish Question and with the many
problems of living under de facto Jewish rule.
At its most basic level, the situation is one in which the relative
novice is confronted with a difficult, troubling, and potentially
catastrophic scenario: profound social corruption by wealthy and
powerful Jews. (I stress the ‘relative’ here; everyone, even the
functionally illiterate, has heard something negative about the
Jews, likely many negative things.) It is a ‘bad news’ story of the
highest magnitude. And the last thing many people want in their
lives these days is another bad news story. God knows we’ve had
enough troubles in recent years: political upheaval, riots in the
streets, a global pandemic, economic gyrations, unrestrained
immigration, environmental decline, opioid crises, surging crime,
falling lifespans. Who needs yet one more disaster heaped upon
their plates? The Jews? Really? Are you serious? And I suppose
the Holocaust never happened! (Hint: it didn’t—not in the way
described.) What are you, some kind of Nazi? A White
supremacist? On and on.
Despite all this, many of us persevere. We realize that public

education is one of our primary weapons in the Great Struggle, and
we are bound and determined to press ahead and inform as many
as possible of the nature of the problem. Therefore, it is of some
use to understand more precisely how people typically respond to
our overtures, in order to be more effective in our communication.
After all, we are pursuing a noble cause, and we sincerely want
people to be well-informed and, ideally, to join us in our mission.
Apart from our opponents, we genuinely want people to like and
appreciate us. You don’t get very far coming off like a fanatic or a
jerk. I’m quite confident that virtually none of us relish making
enemies for the sake of making enemies. We have no driving urge
to be antagonistic or rabble-rousing. Generally speaking, what we
have are facts, experiences, and informed opinions on the Jews;
these, combined with a general sense of concern for social welfare,

justice, and the state of the world, incline us to undertake unusual,
unpopular, but highly valuable actions to educate others, and to
articulate possible solutions. It is the prototypical ‘thankless task,’
and yet we do it all the same.
That said, it is helpful to have a model of how people react to the

Jewish Question. The approach I will outline here derives from
another famous model describing how people react to a different
crisis situation: death. In the 1950s and 60s, Swiss (later,
American) psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed a well-
known scheme that came to be known as “the five stages of grief.”
When confronted with imminent death, she said, people typically
progress through five relatively distinct mental phases: denial,
anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Denial: “No, this
isn’t true, it can’t be happening. There must be some mistake.”
Anger: “How could this happen to me? It’s just not fair! Someone
is to blame. God, how could you let this happen!” Bargaining:
“Please, God, get me through this and I promise to do x, y, z. Or,
doc, you have to help me; I’ll do whatever it takes.” Depression:
“There’s no use, nothing will work. I’m doomed. What’s the use of
even trying?” And finally, Acceptance: “Everyone dies, and I guess
my time is up. So be it. Time to meet my Maker.” This schema was
first described in her initial book, On Death and Dying (1969).
I’ll not debate the merits or demerits of Kübler-Ross’ theory here.

Some have found it helpful, and others dismiss it as largely
irrelevant or at least unsubstantiated. Still, based only on common
sense, I think we can see that there is some insight here, and that
many people—perhaps some we have known personally—indeed
experience such stages in varying degrees. Obviously not everyone
passes through all five stages, and not necessarily in the prescribed
order, but nonetheless, these stages do describe some essential
aspects of human response to the looming tragedy of one’s own
demise.
Inspired by this model, let me then propose something analogous:

The Six Stages of Enlightenment on the Jewish Question. I claim no
real scientific grounding here, and I have done no exhaustive
surveys or interviews. This is based simply on my own personal
experience, over several years, of confronting people—students,
family, friends, strangers—on the dangers of the Judeocracy. My six
stages are as follows:
1. Denial
2. Irrelevance
3. Impotence
4. Misplaced Anger
5. Acceptance
6. Righteous Anger and Action
As with Kübler-Ross’s theory, I do not claim that all people

experience all of these stages, nor that they necessarily progress
through them in order. But I do think that many people, when
confronted with the data, do experience some or most of these
stages. Let me briefly describe each in turn, and then outline some
of the relevant facts that make the case for enlightenment.
DENIAL. Upon first hearing a serious claim that Jews have outsized
and detrimental influence in society, or dominate the ranks of the
wealthy, or run the media, or control politics, the usual initial
response is denial: “No they don’t. That’s ridiculous. There are no
more Jews in power than anyone else. That’s just an anti-Semitic
canard.” This, even from highly-educated people. Fortunately, this
is an empirical question; an overwhelming Jewish presence can be
easily proven, given the relevant data. Below I offer a concise
version of this argument.
IRRELEVANCE. Once it is shown that Jews are massively over-

represented in key sectors of society, the standard reply is that this
fact does not matter. “Ok, there are lots of Jews in media, finance,
and politics, but this doesn’t really matter. People are just people.
There are good ones and there are bad ones. If Jews hold lots of
influential positions, that only means that they worked hard and
succeeded. And anyway, they’re just doing their jobs. If they didn’t
do them, someone else would.”
This seems like a common-sense view, but to make such a claim is

to hold an extremely naïve and ill-informed view of the world. It’s
true that most decent people, and especially most Whites, tend to
view others as individuals; there are likely evolutionary reasons for
this, which I won’t elaborate here, but see Kevin MacDonald’s book
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition for a good recent
account. If we judge everyone as basically well-intentioned
individuals, then of course, it doesn’t really matter if Jews or any
other minority dominates society. If Jews are disproportionate,
then it can only mean that they are that much smarter or
industrious than others, and thus they deserve their standing.
(Nathan Cofnas is doing his best to make this thesis academically
respectable—refuted in several places, most recently by Andrew
Joyce). And if some Jews commit crimes or other unethical actions,
we have to judge and punish them individually, on a case-by-case
basis. Or so they say.
The Jewish critic must then respond to this stance with a

demonstration that it does matter, that Jewish over-representation
has a long-standing and deep-rooted grounding in anti-White and
even anti-human actions, and that it is remarkably detrimental to
social and human well-being. This is a longer and more difficult
argument to make, but it can be done; again, I outline this case
below.
IMPOTENCE. Once we have shown the deleterious effect of Jewish

dominance, the next reply is typically something like this: “Ok, if
Jews have so much power and influence, then you can’t possibly
win. They are just too strong. So why fight them? It can only hurt
yourself and your family. Better to just ignore the whole situation
and live your life as best you can.”
Certainly this is a pragmatic view, and many otherwise well-

intentioned critics adopt this line. But ultimately it means
surrender: a moral capitulation to a malevolent ruling power. To
yield to evil is itself a great evil. It is to condemn one’s own future,
and that of your children and grandchildren, to a life of increasing
brutality and coarseness, of deprivation and suffering, of conflict
and war. No truly concerned person can accept this. We must
confront the situation head-on. To fight against evil, even in the
face of likely defeat, is noble; it actually makes life worth living.
Even if victory is a long way off—and ultimate victory for our side is
inevitable, once we understand the history—it is still a fight worth
pursuing. Living in a Judeocracy means that every major aspect of
society is affected. If you have any concerns or causes in this world
that you think are worth fighting for—the environment, social
justice, education, human rights, health, democracy—then you need
to engage in the fight against Jewish rule because it has a negative
impact on virtually every other social issue. To paraphrase
Spengler, impotence is cowardice.
MISPLACED ANGER. At this point, your friend is likely to start

getting irritated—with you. As a typical semi-thoughtful but
uncritical television viewer, he has likely absorbed and internalized
the conventional pro-Jewish mantra: Jews are a beleaguered and
innocent people who have been unjustly attacked over the
centuries, most notably during the Holocaust, and thus we owe
them vast amends. Furthermore, being a typically decent person,
he thinks that anyone attacking Jews, or any minorities, is a
morally-deficient racist or neo-Nazi—and now, this is you! For God’s
sake, everybody hates a racist! Even Tucker Carlson hates racists!—
as he informs us every night, in his unthinking, dim-witted, and
duplicitous manner. Since you clearly hate Jews, you are now
officially a ‘hater.’ And everyone hates a hater—don’t they?
Sensing that he has lost the argument, your friend then launches
into either subtle or overt ad hominem attacks against you.
Rational discussion is out the window, and emotion rules the day.
You are now simply a ‘bad person’; no further need to debate with
you. Having demonstrated your incivility and cruel-heartedness,
you are either pitied or detested. Critically, the focus has shifted to
you; Jews are suddenly nowhere in sight, even though this was the
sole issue at hand. They are suddenly off the hook. How
convenient; the Jews themselves couldn’t have scripted a better
outcome.
Sadly, many people remain stuck in this mode for a long time,
perhaps for their entire lives. They never address the real issue, but
continue only to think negatively of you and you alone. This is a
relatively good outcome for them; the social problem is not a
multitude of wealthy, powerful, and ethnocentric Jews, but little ol’
you, and perhaps a few of your like-minded hater friends. It’s much
easier, and much less threatening, to deal with you and your “ilk,”
rather than a potent, dispersed, malevolent force like world Jewry.
Sometimes, though, and often in surprising ways, there is a shift in

attitude. Your friend becomes curious. He investigates, he reads,
he asks questions. Slowly, slowly, he comes around to your side.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, and I think you’re on to something.
Those Jews are everywhere, once you learn how to spot them. No
one criticizes them. No one questions the Holocaust. No one is
even willing to simply name the Jews. They get away with
everything…” Thus we arrive, with luck, at ACCEPTANCE. Yes, Jews
in fact dominate key sectors of society. Yes, Jews in fact are the
major wire-pullers in politics and business. Yes, Jews couldn’t care
less about human well-being, and they would just as soon cause
mass suffering and even death, if it profited them in any way. The
denialism has been overcome.
Once at this phase, it is only a short step to the final stage:

RIGHTEOUS ANGER—now against the real enemy—and
corresponding ACTION. Anyone with a conscience, with a sense of
moral outrage, and with a larger sense of justice, will be utterly
appalled at the situation. They will now become activist, speaking
out, writing, informing others. They will develop the moral
backbone to confront Jewish power and its proxies directly. Being
truly knowledgeable and well-informed, they will make a formidable
opponent. The movement will have taken one more small step
forward. And victory will be one day closer.
Constructing the Case
Given that nearly everyone begins at some level of the ‘denial’

stage, it is worthwhile to offer some specific facts that can help
build the case against it. The goal, again, is to show that Jews are
massively disproportionate amongst the wealthy and powerful in
society. This is the core truth from which all the rest proceeds.
Fortunately, as I said, this is an entirely empirical matter. Basic
research will reveal the truth. Of course, the names vary from
nation to nation, and they change constantly over time. A specific
case must be made at a given point in time, and in a specific nation
of interest. Since I am an American, and the data here is extensive,
let me briefly review the case in the present-day USA. Even a
cursory overview demonstrates the failure of denial.
We can separately examine four sectors of American society:

politics, academia, finance, and media. In politics, we have a strong
Jewish presence in all three branches of government–Congress, the
White House, and the Supreme Court. Regarding the latter, we
currently have 2 Jews among the 9 justices: Elena Kagan and
Stephen Breyer. Until the recent death of Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, the
figure was 3 of 9, and if President Obama had had his way late in his
final term, it would have been an astonishing 4 of 9, with Merrick
Garland. (We can be sure that any future Biden nominee will be
Jewish.)
The current US Congress has 38 Jews among its combined 535

members, with 10 in the Senate and 28 in the House. This
constitutes around 7% of the Congressional total, versus an
American Jewish population of some 6 million, or just under 2% of
the nation. Hence Jews are over-represented in Congress by a
factor of 3.5, and in the Senate by a factor of 5. The record high for
Jewish representation, incidentally, occurred in the aftermath of the
2008 federal election, when fully 48 Jews held seats in Congress
(15 Senate, 33 House).
The Biden administration, like that of Trump, Obama, Bush, and

Clinton, has an extensive Jewish presence. Start with the families
of Biden and Kamala Harris. Remarkably, all three of Biden’s adult
children married Jews: daughter Ashley married Howard Krein, son
Hunter married “filmmaker” Melissa Cohen, and now-deceased son
Beau married Hallie Olivere. Correspondingly, three of Biden’s six
grandchildren are half-Jews. Biracial VP Kamala Harris married a
Jewish lawyer, Doug Emhoff, back in 2014; thankfully, they have no
children.
Biden’s sympathies to the Jews extend, of course, to his highest-

level administrative positions. Of 25 cabinet or cabinet-level
positions, eight (32%) are held by Jews: Tony Blinken, Alejandro
Mayorkas, Janet Yellen, Merrick Garland (yes, that Merrick Garland),
Ron Klain, Avril Haines (half), Isabel Guzman (half), and Eric
Lander. Other high-ranking Biden Jews include John Kerry (half),
Rochelle Walensky of the CDC, Jeff Zients, Wendy Sherman, Gary
Gensler of the SEC, David Cohen, “Rachel” Levine, Anne Neuberger,
Andy Slavitt, Victoria Nuland, and Roberta Jacobson. And this is not
to mention Judeophilic Gentiles like Jake Sullivan, or Gentiles with
Jewish spouses, like Samantha Power. Below I offer some thoughts
about why, exactly, this situation came to be.
What about academia? Here is one remarkable indication: It was

recently noted that of the eight Ivy League schools—Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell, and Dartmouth—fully
seven have Jewish presidents. In other words, 88% of these elite
schools are run by Jews. We can be sure that this Jewish
orientation then extends down into provosts and deans who are
disproportionately Jewish, into faculty members who are
disproportionately Jewish, and into the very curriculum itself, which
undoubtedly caters to liberal-left Jewish interests.
Then consider university faculty more broadly. In an article

published in 2006, Schuster and Finkelstein found that “25% of
research university faculty are Jewish, compared to 10% of all
faculty.”[1] An older study by Steinberg[2] found that 17.2 percent
of faculty at “high ranking” universities were Jewish. By a different
assessment, Harriett Zuckerman[3] examined just the “elite”
scientific and research faculty. She found the following, by major
discipline:
Law 36% Jewish
Sociology 34% Jewish
Economics 28% Jewish
Physics 26% Jewish
Poli Sci 24% Jewish
What about students? Experience shows that when Jews constitute

more than just a few percent of the student body, they begin to
dominate campus life. As it happens, there are nine major
American universities with over 20% Jewish undergrads (in
descending order: Brandeis, Tulane, CUNY-Brooklyn, Binghamton,
Queens College, George Washington University, Columbia, Boston
University, and Washington University-St. Louis). And there are
another 23 major schools with more than 10% Jews (Maryland,
American University, Brown, University of Miami, Rutgers, University
of Florida, Cornell, Penn, Syracuse, Michigan, New York University,
Northwestern, University of Hartford, Wisconsin, Yale, Indiana, UC-

Santa Barbara, Duke, University at Albany, Harvard, Cal State-
Northridge, Florida State, and USC). Hence we have 32 major
American universities, representing the intellectual elite of the
nation, with a hugely disproportionate Jewish presence, top to
bottom. Again, this in a nation of scarcely 2% Jews.
Consider, next, the realm of finance and wealth. When we run down
the list of wealthiest Americans, we find a striking fact: around half
of them are Jews. Among the top ten, we find five Jews: Mark
Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Michael
Bloomberg. Of the top 50 richest men, at least 27 are Jews,
including Steve Ballmer, Michael Dell, Carl Icahn, David Newhouse,
Micki Arison, and Stephen Ross.[4] The combined wealth of these
27 individuals comes to roughly $635 billion. Note: If Jews were
proportionately represented among the top 50, there would be one
individual; instead, there are 27.
More broadly, we can infer that this “50% rule” holds throughout
much of the wealth hierarchy. In support, we may cite Benjamin
Ginsberg, who wrote, “Today, though barely 2% of the [American]
nation’s population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are
Jews.”[5] At present, there are something like 615 American
billionaires, which implies around 300 Jewish billionaires.
Or perhaps the figures are even worse than we suspect. A recent

study of the most malicious “vulture” capitalists showed a heavy
preponderance of Jewish names, far more than half. And one
ranking from a few years ago of the richest hedge fund managers in
the US listed 32 individuals by name; of these, at least 24 (75%) are
Jews. It seems that the more we look, the worse it gets.
Even more impressively, consider total private wealth. In 2018, the

total assets of all private households in the US hit $100 trillion for
the first time ever. The 50% rule suggests that the 6 million or so
American Jews own or control, in total, some $50 trillion. This

works out to an average of $8 million for every Jewish man, woman,
and child—a truly astonishing figure.
So much for Jewish wealth. More importantly, these various

sectors are deeply interconnected. Jewish wealth is directly related
to Jewish political influence. Take, for example, Joe Biden’s top
political donors. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the vast majority
of Biden’s political donations came from Jewish billionaires. As
Andrew Joyce writes, “of [his] top 22 donors, at least 18 are Jews,”
followed by the list of names. This is perhaps extreme but not
surprising, given that Jews overall provide at least 50% of
Democratic political funding, and at least 25% of Republican funds.
These are truly disturbing numbers for anyone who cares about
political corruption. Note that there are literally hundreds of lobby
groups, all donating to their favored candidates. And yet one lobby
—the Jewish Lobby—provides 25 to 50%, or more, of major
candidate funding. Imagine if, say, half of your income came from
one person, and the other half came from a mix of 200 other
individuals; who would you listen to? The answer is obvious.
Finally, take the media. Hollywood, as we all know, has long been a
Jewish domain—reaching back to its origins in the 1910s and
1920s. It was constructed by the likes of Carl Laemmle (Universal
Pictures), Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Daniel and Charles Frohman,
and Samuel Goldwyn (Paramount), William Fox (Fox Films, later
20th Century Fox), and the four “Warner” Brothers—in reality, the
Wonskolaser clan: Jack, Harry, Albert, and Sam. They were soon
followed by Marcus Loew (MGM), William Paley (CBS), and Harry
and Jack Cohn (Columbia), establishing nearly complete Jewish
control over the film business.
Today the situation is little changed—and is neither disputed nor

even controversial. A notable story published in the LA Times in
2008 openly proclaimed that “Jews totally run Hollywood”.[6] It
investigated every major studio and found nothing but Jewish

bosses. Today the names have changed, but not the ethnicities. A
recent survey of major executives or owners reveals the following:
20th Century Studios (S. Asbell)
Paramount (S. Redstone)
Disney Studies (A. Bergman, A. Horn)
Warner Bros Studios (T. Emmerich, A. Sarnoff, R. Kavanaugh)
MGM (M. De Luca)
Sony Pictures (T. Rothman, S. Panitch, J. Greenstein)
Lionsgate (M. Rachesky, J. Feltheimer)
Relativity Media (D. Robbins)
Millennium Media (A. Lerner)
The Chernin Group (P. Chernin)
Amblin Partners (S. Spielberg)
Participant (J. Skoll, D. Linde)
Sister (S. Snider, E. Murdoch)
Spyglass (G. Barber)
Glickmania (J. Glickman)
As before, all of these individuals are Jews.[7] With such

dominance, we should scarcely be surprised to find pro-Jewish
themes repeatedly appear in film: from the Holocaust and the ‘evil
Nazis,’ to the Arab and Muslim ‘terrorists,’ to the ignorant and
corrupt Whites, to support for various socially and ethically
degrading behavior such as casual sex, homosexuality, interracial
couples and families, recreational drug use, crude materialism, and
rampant multiculturalism. All these themes serve Jewish interests.
The overall media situation is even more telling. The five largest
media conglomerates in the US are: 1) Disney, 2) Warner Media, 3)
NBC Universal, 4) Viacom CBS, and 5) Fox Corporation. A look at
their owners, largest shareholders, and top officers is revealing:
Disney: Robert Iger, executive chairman; Alan Horn, Chair,

Disney Studios; Alan Braverman, exec VP; Peter Rice, chair,
Content; Dana Walden, chair, ABC; Lowell Singer, senior VP.
Warner: Jason Kilar, CEO; David Levy, Pres, Turner
Broadcasting; Jeff Zucker, Pres, CNN; Ann Sarnoff, CEO, Warner
Pictures; Michael Lynton, chair, Warner Music (Parent company:
AT&T: John Stankey, CEO).
NBC Universal: Jeff Shell, CEO; Robert Greenblatt, Chair, NBC
Entertainment; Bonnie Hammer, Chair, Cable Entertainment;
Noah Oppenheim, president, NBC News; Mark Lazarus, Chair,
Sports; Ron Meyer, Vice Chair, NBCUniversal (Parent company:
Comcast: Brian Roberts, CEO).
Viacom CBS: An unusual situation: Viacom is a “public”
company but voting stock is 100% owned by Shari Redstone
and the heirs of Sumner Redstone. Leading individuals include
David Nevins, CCO; Susan Zirinsky, president, CBS News; David
Stapf, president, CBS TV.
Fox Corporation: Similar to Viacom, a public company but 39%
of voting stock is owned by Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan
Murdoch.
All of these individuals are Jewish, with the possible exception of

the Murdochs—although it seems certain that they are at least part-
Jewish.[8] And given the difficulty in ascertaining ethnicity, Jewish
influence is certainly greater than shown here. Hence the above is
undoubtedly a conservative estimate. It furthermore says nothing
about the many Jewish underlings who implement day-to-day
decisions. Once again, it’s difficult to convey the degree of
dominance here. These five corporations produce the vast majority
of all media consumed in the US, which includes all of the major
news outlets and most of the major Hollywood studios. In fact,
Jewish leadership or ownership at the top translates all throughout
the organization, to middle-managers, staffers, reporters, television
personalities, and editors. It has a very concrete effect on how the
media is produced, what is presented, and what is not presented. It

affects who we see, and who we don’t see.
And it’s not only the so-called liberal media outlets. The
conservative venues also are dominated by Jewish interests—
typically, via right-wing or neo-conservative Jews. Fox News, and
its parent corporation Fox, owned and operated by the Murdoch
family, is every bit as pro-Jewish and pro-Israel as the liberal
outlets. Fox News anchors disagree vehemently with just about
every liberal position, and yet, remarkably, they are fully on-board
with all Jewish issues. They struggle to outdo their peers at CNN
and MSNBC in their obeisance to Jewish and Israeli interests.[9]
This, again, is no coincidence. It is evidence of Jewish domination
of American media, across the political spectrum and across all
venues.
In addition to the above, various other media are also well-

represented by American Jews. Among newspapers, the New York
Times has been Jewish-owned and -managed since Adolph Ochs
bought the paper in 1896; the current owner, publisher, and
chairman is Arthur G. Sulzberger. US News and World Report is
owned by Mort Zuckerman. Time magazine is owned by Warner
Media, and its current chief editor is Edward Felsenthal. Advance
Publications is a mini media conglomerate entirely owned and
operated by the Jewish Newhouse family; it manages a wide array
of venues including Conde Nast (Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ,
Glamour, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Pitchfork, Wired, and Bon
Appetit), Discovery Channel, Lycos, and Redditt. And in broadcast
media, we have National Public Radio (NPR), which has long been a
Jewish preserve; its on-air staff is unquestionably more than half
Jewish.[10]
I think we can put to rest all thoughts of denialism here.
Is Jewish Dominance Irrelevant?

If we then proceed to stage two, Irrelevance, we must counter the

view that Jewish dominance is inconsequential. Again, from the
naïve standpoint, Jews predominating in government, academia,
finance, and media seems not to matter. These Jews are largely
invisible as Jews, and their Jewishness is rarely displayed
explicitly. As before, the influence is generally manifest in myriad
subtle ways—in which voices and views are presented (and which
not presented), which individuals are allowed to speak (and which
not allowed), which values are projected as good and positive,
which causes are worthy of attention, and so on.
The central issues here are (a) that Jews tend to work collectively,
in their own best interests, and (b) that they tend to have little
regard for all non-Jews, and they tend to hold particular contempt
for White Europeans, who have, historically speaking, proven to be
their most formidable opponents. Jews work tribally, as a pack;
they assist each other in attacking and undermining all perceived
enemies. Jews in finance and academic Jews can count on media
Jews to give them positive coverage and to downplay or bury any
negative stories. Media Jews will slander an enemy even as finance
Jews put the squeeze to that person’s employer. It can be very
effective when multiple actors in a trillion-dollar cabal are arrayed
against you.
On occasion, these dominant Jews will indeed fight with each other,
as when conservative right-wing Jews spar with their liberal
leftwing brethren—such as the recent rift between the rightwing
Murdoch Jews and the left-wing ADL Jews, especially Jonathan
Greenblatt, over comments by Tucker Carlson. But this is only an
internal dispute about the best way to promote Jewish interests,
nothing more. Much of current political confrontation is mere show;
Democratic-Republican squabbles are meaningless when both
sides are backed by wealthy Jews. And Jews across the political
spectrum love to use Gentile lackeys like Anderson Cooper, Chris
Cuomo, Chris Hayes, Sean Hannity, and yes, Tucker Carlson, to
cover for them. This again serves to obscure the real power
structure.
But the fact that powerful Jews work with each other, against all
others, is a well-established historical fact that has been well-
attested, over the centuries, by some of the West’s most brilliant
thinkers. This topic literally requires a book-length treatment—see
my book Eternal Strangers: Critical Views of Jews and Judaism
through the Ages (2020), which is the first to fully document the
historical record. It dates back over 2,000 years, at least to
remarks by Hecateus of Abdera and Theophrastus circa 300 BC,
proceeding to the likes of Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Porphyry, Thomas
Aquinas, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Rousseau, Fichte, Kant, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Bakunin, Nietzsche, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells,
Heidegger, and chess genius (and half-Jew) Bobby Fischer, among
many others. It is an impressive list.
The criticisms are uniformly blunt and damning. Jews are

“misanthropic and hostile to foreigners,” “the very vilest of
mankind,” “look upon all other men as their enemies,” “an accursed
race,” “the basest of peoples.” They are profoundly and deeply
different—in a bad way—from the rest of humanity. Medieval
theologians condemned the Jews for their usury and their abuse of
Christians and Christianity. Luther called them “a heavy burden, a
plague, a pestilence, a sheer misfortune,” adding that “we are at
fault in not slaying them.” For Voltaire, they “display an
irreconcilable hatred against all nations”; for Rousseau, the Jewish
race was “always a foreigner amongst other men.” German
philosopher Johann Herder called them “a widely diffused republic
of cunning usurers.” Kant saw them as “a nation of deceivers.”
Schopenhauer was especially blunt: “scum of humanity—but great
master of lies.” Heidegger captured the situation well in just three
words: “planetary master criminals”.[11]
This 2,000-year history of hatred and contempt for the rest of

humanity is played out in the present day, though with much stealth
and deception. Jews often work in the background, hidden, out of
the limelight; they are, as Hitler said, the “wire-pullers”
(Drahtzieher) of contemporary society, using money and power to
steer events in their favor. History tells us that Jews will stoop to
anything—the most heinous, the most egregious, the most unethical
—to promote their ends. Even war: there is an equally long and
damning history of Jewish involvement in wars, from the Jewish-
Roman wars in the first and second centuries to the present-day
“war on terror”.[12] This is not speculation; all these facts are well-
attested and well-documented. We need only do a basic bit of
reading, from reputable sources.
The bottom line, of course, is that Jewish over-representation in

major sectors of society does matter—it matters very much.
Arguably it is the root cause of virtually all our present-day social
problems, all of which have been created or exacerbated by
powerful Jews. We can scarcely imagine what life could be like
without their manipulating and malevolent presence.
This brief account of pernicious Jewish influence should help lay to

rest the “irrelevance” stage. But impotence need not be the
consequence. Accept the reality, and turn your anger onto the real
targets. And then act. Bear in mind: Every Jewish victory in past
centuries has been ephemeral, and has instead been transformed
into concrete action against the Hebrews—isolation, ghettoization,
incarceration, expulsion, or worse. And so it will be this time.
Either the Jews themselves will recognize that they are on the brink
and voluntarily retreat to their “homeland” in Palestine, or else
native peoples around the world will, once again, take action.
The path to enlightenment is hard. And yet it must be pursued, if

humanity is to flourish and prosper.
Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and

articles on politics, history, and religion, with a special focus on
National Socialism in Germany. His works include a new translation
series of Mein Kampf, and the books Eternal Strangers (2020), The
Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019), and Debating the Holocaust
(4th ed, 2020), all available at www.clemensandblair.com. For all
his writings, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.
[1] J. Schuster and M. Finkelstein, The American Faculty (2006), p.

66.
[2] S. Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot (1974), p. 103.
[3] H. Zuckerman, Scientific Elite (1977).
[4] Bloomberg Billionaires Index (2018).
[5] The Fatal Embrace (1993), p. 1.
[6] “How Jewish is Hollywood?” (19 Dec 2008).
[7] Until recently, we could have included the Weinstein Company

(aka Lantern Entertainment), but the sex scandal surrounding
Harvey Weinstein drove the corporation into bankruptcy in early
2018.
[8] Rupert’s mother, Elisabeth Joy Greene, appears to have been

Jewish. See here, here, and here. We could also cite Rupert
Murdoch’s award from the heavily-Jewish group ADL in 2010, and
his son James’ $1 million donation to the same group in 2017. If
the Murdochs are not Jewish, they are in very good graces with
them.
[9] Sean Hannity is particularly egregious in this respect.
[10] Current and recent individuals include, at a minimum: N.

Adams, H. Berkes, M. Block, D. Brooks, A. Cheuse, A. Codrescu, K.
Coleman, O. Eisenberg, D. Elliott, D. Estrin, S. Fatsis, P. Fessler, C.
Flintoff, D. Folkenflik, R. Garfield, T. Gjelten, B. Gladstone, I. Glass,
T. Goldman, J. Goldstein, J. Goldstein, R. Goldstein, D. Greene, N.
Greenfieldboyce, T. Gross, M. Hirsh, S. Inskeep, I. Jaffe, A. Kahn, C.
Kahn, M. Kaste, A. Katz, M. Keleman, D. Kestenbaum, N. King, B.
Klein, T. Koppel, A. Kuhn, B. Littlefield, N. King, N. Pearl, P. Sagal, M.
Schaub, A. Shapiro, J. Shapiro, W. Shortz, R. Siegel, A. Silverman, S.
Simon, A. Spiegel, S. Stamberg, R. Stein, L. Sydell, D. Temple-
Raston, N. Totenberg, G. Warner, D. Welna, L. Wertheimer, D.
Wessel, E. Westervelt, B. Wolf, and D. Zwerdling.
[11] For an enlightening list of some 50 such quotations, see the

website of Clemens and Blair, LLC publishing (here).
[12] See my book The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019).
7/2/2021 Jews and Competitive Victimhood – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
Jews and Competitive Victimhood – The

Occidental Observer
Brenton Sanderson
34-42 minutes
Despite being the wealthiest, most politically well-connected and

influential group in Western nations, Jews have assiduously (and
successfully) cultivated the notion they have always been, and
remain, a cruelly-persecuted victim group deserving of everyone’s
profound sympathy. The “Holocaust” narrative has, of course, been
central to this endeavor. The entire social and political order of the
contemporary West — based on the alleged virtues of racial
diversity and multiculturalism — has been erected on the moral
foundations of “the Holocaust.” White people cannot be recognized
as a group with interests because “never again.” Western nations

have a moral obligation to accept unlimited non-White immigration
because “never again.” Whites should meekly accept their
deliberate displacement (and ultimate extinction) because “never
again.”
Numerous studies have demonstrated the power that can accrue to

individuals and groups who successfully cultivate their status as
victims and underdogs. Social psychologists have labelled the
tendency to see one’s group as having suffered more than an
outgroup as “competitive victimhood.” While conflicting groups
have engaged in competitive victimhood for centuries, this is largely
a modern phenomenon that should be understood against the
backdrop of contemporary culture. Friedrich Nietzsche remains the
first and best theorist of competitive victimhood, proposing that
historical developments in Western culture, ranging from
Christianity to the Enlightenment, led to a reversal of values where
old notions of “might makes right” were transformed. Today, our
knee-jerk reaction to powerful groups is to assume they are
immoral and corrupt, while members of victimized groups are
assumed to be innocent and morally superior.
Activist Jews are acutely aware of the power of competitive

victimhood in contemporary culture, and much of the research into
the subject has been carried out in Israel. A study by Schnabel and
colleagues found that groups are motivated to engage in
competitive victimhood for two reasons: the need for moral identity
and the need for social power.
With regards to the first motivation, people generally

associate victimization with innocence. Therefore, if one’s
ingroup ‘wins’ the victim status, it means that it is also
perceived as moral. With regards to the second motivation,
people generally view victims as entitled for compensation.
Therefore, if one’s ingroup ‘wins’ the victim status, it means
that it is entitled to various resources such as policies to

empower it or higher budgets. Groups struggle over both
power (budgets, influence, etc.) and moral identity (i.e.,
group members typically see themselves as ‘the good guys’
and members of the other group as ‘the bad guys’). This
struggle makes them engage in competitive victimhood.[1]
These studies, often framed around the difficulties presented to

Israel by the victim status of the Palestinians, shed light on the
psychological motivations behind attempts to gain
acknowledgement that one’s ingroup has been subjected to more
injustice than an adversarial social group. The findings show that
desire for power plays a key role, and that victimhood experiences
(real, perceived or fabricated) have far-reaching consequences for
the relations between groups, and “especially in contexts where
material and social resources are scarce, group members actively
attempt to affirm that one’s own group has been victimized more
than the other.”[2]
Given the group evolutionary stakes involved, it’s unsurprising that

discourse in many countries is often characterized by competitive
victimhood—of different social groups competing over who suffers
more. Young and Sullivan note that competitive victimhood is an
adaptive behavior through which “groups can unilaterally achieve
greater group cohesiveness, provide justification for violence
performed in the past, reduce feelings of responsibility for harm
doing, increase perceived control through the elicitation of social
guilt from the outgroup, and elicit support from third parties.”[3]
The political and economic (and therefore biological) benefits

derived from competitive victimhood account for the ubiquity of
Jewish victim narratives in contemporary Western culture, and why
Jewish historiography is replete with exaggerated accounts of
historical calamities, persecution, exile, deportations, and pogroms.
According to the standard Jewish account, the biblical Pharaoh,
Amalek, and Haman of Persia all attempted to annihilate the Jews,

followed by a long sequence of enemies, massacres, deportations,
inquisitions, and pogroms. Through this lachrymose Jewish
victimhood prism, “the Holocaust” is just the latest in this series of
recurring victimizations.
Competitive victimhood is built into the liturgical fabric of Judaism

through observances like the fast day of Tisha B’Av (the tenth day of
the Hebrew month of Av, usually in the middle of August) when
Jews reflect on the history of Jewish trauma from the destruction of
the First and Second Temples to the medieval expulsions, the
Spanish Inquisition, through to “the Holocaust.” One Jewish source
notes how “references to the Holocaust, Nazis, Hitler, WWII,
Germany etc. seep into the conversation amongst Jews, regardless
of age, religious observance, or political affiliation.” Ashkenazi Jews
in particular “continue to internalize and carry the trauma of the
Holocaust in a way that shapes how we think and behave as Jews in
America (and maybe throughout the rest of the world).” Carrying
such feelings while comprising an ethnic ruling elite means Jews
often feel “both entitlement and victimhood at the same time”
which “can become unsettling and paradoxical.”
Jewish activist
organizations protest enforcement of the southern border in the
U.S. during Tisha B’Av in 2019
This Jewish victimhood mentality is nourished by socialization

processes that teach Jews “that victimhood has potential gains,
and that aggressiveness can be legitimate and just if one party has
suffered from its adversary.”[4] In Israel, victimhood-oriented
socialization begins as early as kindergarten and Israeli children are
taught that Israelis suffer more than Palestinians, and that they
have to protect themselves and fight for their very existence.[5]
Research has found the presence of the Holocaust in Israeli school
curricula, cultural products, and political discourse has increased,
rather than decreased over the years, and that Israelis are
increasingly more preoccupied with the Holocaust, constantly dwell
on it, and fear that it will “happen again.”[6] One study, moreover,
found that:
Jewish Israelis tend to harbor a “perpetual victimhood”

representation of their history, as a group that has suffered
persecution, discrimination, and threats of annihilation
throughout generations, culminating in the Holocaust.
Today the presence of the Holocaust in Israel is pervasive,
and most Jewish Israelis acknowledge the Holocaust as
part of their collective identity and have internalized this
victimization as a core feature of their Israeli identity. Thus,
Jewish Israelis are raised in a culture that emphasizes the
continuity between past suffering and present suffering.[7]
Studies have found that a focus on an ingroup’s victimization (real

or perceived) reduces sympathy toward the adversary allegedly
responsible for this victimization, as well as toward unrelated
adversaries.[8] A group completely preoccupied with its own
suffering can develop an “egotism of victimhood” where members
are unable to see things from the perspective of the rival group, are
unable or unwilling to empathize with the suffering of the rival
group, and are unwilling to accept any responsibility for harm
inflicted by their own group. Researchers questioned Israeli Jews

about their memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception
to the present, and found their “consciousness is characterized by a
sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism,
belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the
Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering.”[9] They found a
close connection between that collective memory and the memory
of “past persecution of Jews” and the Holocaust. That is, the more
deeply Israeli Jews have internalized a narrative of historic Jewish
persecution, the less sympathy they have for Palestinians. It was
this victimhood lens that led Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin, on the eve of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, to declare
“The alternative to this is Treblinka.’”
Jewish Indifference to Harming Whites
The harm done to White group interests by Jewish activism in the

post-World War II era has been enormous. Jews have used their
domination of the commanding heights of Western societies to
effectively sabotage the successful biological and cultural
reproduction of White people, whom they regard, based on their
ethnocentric and jaundiced reading of history, as their foremost
ethnic adversaries. This sabotage takes many forms, including:
lobbying for mass non-White immigration into Western countries;
the entrenchment of multiculturalism and diversity as central and
unchallengeable pillars of social policy; the hypersexualization of
popular culture and championing of sexual and gender non-
conformity; the deplatforming and censoring of all dissident
opinion; and, lately, the diffusion and mainstreaming of Critical Race
Theory through all sections of society, and the designation of any
pro-White advocacy as a form of terrorism. The net result of these
policies has been the rapid demographic and cultural decline of
White people in countries they founded and dominated for
hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of years.
All of these policies, so zealously supported by Jewish activist

organizations, and reinforced by the Jewish-dominated education
and media sectors, have their ultimate conceptual basis in the
Jewish intellectual movements chronicled by Kevin MacDonald in
Culture of Critique. These movements were preoccupied with
undermining the evolutionarily-adaptive precepts and practices that
had historically dominated Western societies, with the implicit
objective being to render White Europeans less effective
competitors to Jews for access to resources and reproductive
success.
Boasian anthropology, for example, overturned established notions

regarding the importance of racial differences, and the need to
maintain immigration restrictions and instill a strong racial identity
in White children (and a strong aversion to miscegenation) as part of
their socialization. The ideas of Boasian anthropology were infused
(through the determined efforts of Ashley Montagu) into the 1950
UNESCO Statement on Race (which contributed to the 1954 U.S.
Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of
Education in Topeka).[10] This Statement (and later UN statements
based on it) was described by Robert Wald Sussman (The Myth of
Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, Harvard
University Press, 2014, 207), as “the triumph of Boasian
anthropology on a world-historical scale.”[11] This is because of its
role in providing an intellectual justification for pressuring the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to abandon their
policies favoring their founding racial stock and ending racial
restrictions on immigration.
Reporting on the UNESCO Statement on Race in 1950
Equally damaging to White interests was the assault on the family

from the 1960s onwards—part of a great cultural shift from the
affirmation to the repudiation of inherited values. The familial,
religious and ethnic ties of White people were presented as an
oppressive burden imposed by the past—a way in which parents
encumber their offspring with an inheritance of dysfunctional
norms. Frankfurt School intellectuals insisted the traditional
European family structure was pathogenic and a breeding ground
“for the production of ‘authoritarian personalities’ who are inclined
to submit to dominant authorities, however irrational.” This view
echoed Jewish post-Freudian intellectual Wilhelm Reich, who
insisted the authoritarian family is of critical importance for the
authoritarian state because the family “becomes the factory in
which the state’s structure and ideology are molded.”[12] Crucial
for Reich was the repression of childhood sexuality, which, in his
view, created children who are docile, fearful of authority, and in
general anxious and submissive. Reich claimed the role of
traditional “repressive” Western sexual morality was “to produce
acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are
adjusted to the authoritarian order.” Herbert Marcuse agreed,
insisting that the “liberation of sexuality and the creation of non-

hierarchical democratic structures in the family, workplace and
society at large would create personalities resistant to fascism.”[13]
Such ideas motivated the Jewish hypersexualization of Western

culture from the 1960s onwards—which led to a revolution in
Western sexual mores, family structure and child-rearing practices
that have had dire consequences for White group interests. Kevin
MacDonald notes that: “Applied to gentile culture, the subversive
program of psychoanalysis would have the expected effect of
resulting in less-competitive children; in the long term, gentile
culture would be increasingly characterized by low-investment
parenting, and… there is evidence that the sexual
revolution inaugurated, or at least greatly facilitated, by
psychoanalysis has indeed had this effect.”[14]
While denouncing the traditional White family as proto-fascistic,

Frankfurt School intellectuals also championed radical
individualism as the quintessence of psychological health for White
people. The “sane” individual was promoted as someone who had
broken free from the pathogenic norms of Western culture, and
realized his or her human potential without relying on membership
in collectivist groups. Jewish Frankfurt School theorist Erich
Fromm argued, for instance, in his book The Sane Society (1956)
that: “Mental health is characterized by the ability to love and
create, by the emergence from incestuous ties to clan and soil, by a
sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject
and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside
of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and
reason.”[15] The embrace of radical individualism by White people,
promoted by the likes of Fromm, was, not surprisingly, conducive
(through inhibiting anti-Semitism) to the continuation of Judaism as
a cohesive group.
Ethnic Defense or Attack?

Jews, to the extent they admit their involvement in these and other
damaging intellectual movements and social policies shaped by
them, often portray them as a necessary ethnic “defense” against
anti-Semitism. Jewish movie director Jill Soloway claimed, for
instance, that Hollywood’s Jews were “recreating culture to defend
ourselves post-Holocaust.” From the perspective of White people,
however, this “defense” is an incredibly aggressive ethnic attack
that threatens our very biological survival in the long term.
Research has found that aggressiveness toward outgroups is more
likely to be considered legitimate and fair if one’s ingroup is
believed to have suffered. For instance, Jewish Canadians who were
reminded of the Holocaust accepted less collective guilt for Jews’
harmful actions toward Palestinians than those not reminded of it.
[16]
Individuals who identify more strongly with their ingroup engage

ever more fiercely in competitive victimhood. As Jews are an
extremely ethnocentric group, it is unsurprising that they are
particularly prone to engage in competitive victimhood. This
behavior is also self-reinforcing in offering psychological payoffs:
safe explanations about who is responsible for inter-group conflict
and clear boundaries between good and evil.[17] Moreover:
Perceiving one’s own group as the primary victim of the

conflict can reduce feelings of guilt that arise when people
witness misdeeds perpetrated by ingroup members. By the
same token, it may help to rationalize and legitimize acts of
revenge against rivals, especially in the post-conflict era.
Finally, portraying one’s own group as the “real” victim of
the conflict may also serve material purposes, as it frames
the group the worthy recipient of sympathy and assistance.
Thus, encouraging the perception of one’s own group as the
victim may enhance the possibility of receiving moral and
practical support from the international community. For all
these reasons, it is no wonder that each of the parties
involved in a conflict makes great efforts to persuade

themselves, rivals, and third parties that their suffering has
been the greatest.
A strong sense of collective victimhood (such as that possessed by

Jews) is associated with a low willingness to forgive and an
increased desire for revenge. The research shows that people with
heightened victimhood express “an increased desire for revenge
rather than mere avoidance, and actually were more likely to
behave in a revengeful manner.” Such individuals and groups “tend
to see their use of violence and aggression as more moral and
justified, while seeing the use of violence of the outgroup as
unjustified and morally wrong.”[18]
Activist Jews well know the policies they espouse for Western
societies harm the group interests of White populations (that’s the
whole point). Thus, while the stated mission of the Australian Anti-
Defamation Commission (ADC) is to make Australia a “better place”
by “promoting tolerance, justice and multiculturalism,” when it
comes to the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians this
supposed commitment to “inclusion,” “diversity” and
“multiculturalism” suddenly gives way to hardnosed biological
realism. The problem with Israel adopting the diverse, multicultural
approach to nation-building so zealously advocated by the ADC for
Australia (and the entire West) is that while it may sound “simple
and fair,” it is actually “code for the destruction of Israel and its
replacement with a majority Palestinian state.” The ADC insists “It
is naïve and dangerous to believe such a situation will not occur if
Israel is taken over by a growing Palestinian population.”
This rank hypocrisy (and barely-concealed malice) is standard

across the gamut of Jewish activist organizations in the West. While
promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution
of the racial and ethnic identification of White people, Jews
endeavor to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity
they decry as immoral in Whites. They have initiated and led

movements that discredit the traditional foundations of Western
society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social
homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their
own communities and in Israel, they have supported the very
institutions they attack in Western societies.
Competitive Victimhood through the Construction of Culture
In their quest to outcompete their ethnic adversaries (i.e., White

people), diasporic Jews have poured enormous energy into
competitive victimhood. Jewish historian Peter Novick has
described how today’s culture of “the Holocaust” emerged as part
of the collective Jewish response to the Eichmann trial in 1961–62,
the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967, and, in particular, the
Yom Kippur War in 1973. While the foundation was laid at
Nuremberg in 1946, it was with these later events, and the
anxieties they engendered among Jews throughout the world, that
“there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the
Holocaust’—an event in its own right,” and with it a term that
entered the English language as a description of all manner of
horrors. From that time on, he notes, “the Holocaust” has become
“ever more central in American public discourse—particularly, of
course, among Jews, but also in the culture at large” and has since
“attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or
lessons that could be derived from contemplating it.”[19]
Throughout the West, the proliferating “Holocaust” memorials and

museums are lavishly funded by taxpayers, and study of “the
Holocaust” in schools is mandated by law in many jurisdictions. As
well as serving to morally disarm Whites concerned about their own
immigrant-led displacement, the culture of “the Holocaust” is a key
part of Jewish efforts to prevent intermarriage in the diaspora. Eric
Goldstein, for instance, notes how “Jews discuss, read about, and
memorialize the Holocaust with zeal as a means of keeping their
sense of difference from non-Jews alive.”[20] “The Holocaust” has

become, in the words of Nicholas Kollerstrom, “an ersatz substitute
for genuine metaphysical knowledge,” with Auschwitz now serving
as the spiritual center of a new religion and a place of awed
pilgrimage for millions of penitent Europeans. The narrative has
also unleashed an endless flow of money from Germany to Israel
and to compensate more “Holocaust” survivors than there were
ever Jews in countries under German control.[21]
Novick made the point that that the ubiquity and metaphysical pre-
eminence of the Holocaust in Western culture is not a spontaneous
phenomenon but the result of highly focused, well-funded efforts of
Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major
media:
We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of
the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the
magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic
book and the academic symposium. When a high level of
concern with the Holocaust became widespread in
American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews
play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only
natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread
throughout the culture at large.[22]
Establishing and maintaining the narrative of pre-eminent Jewish

victimhood is supremely important for the cadres of Jewish
“diversity” activists and propagandists throughout the West, given
the status of the Holocaust as the moral and rhetorical foundation
of today’s White displacement agenda. Invocation of this narrative
is reflexively used to stifle opposition to the Jewish diaspora
strategies of mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism.
Suppressing Counter-narratives
The flipside of this constant invocation of the Holocaust as a

testament to unsurpassed Jewish victimhood are efforts to
suppress discussion of the unsavory Jewish role in the Bolshevik
Revolution and communism. This is because free discussion of the
Jewish role in communist crimes undermines Jewish pretentions to
moral authority grounded in their self-designated status as history’s
preeminent victims. For Jewish academic Daniel Goldhagen, for
example, any claim Jews were responsible for the Bolshevik
Revolution and its predations is morally reprehensible because “If
you associate Jews with communism, or worse, hold communism to
be a Jewish invention and weapon, every time the theme, let alone
the threat, of communism, Marxism, revolution, or the Soviet Union
comes up, it also conjures, reinforces, even deepens thinking
prejudicially about Jews and the animus against Jews in one’s
country.”[23] It is therefore imperative the topic remain taboo and
discussion of it suppressed—regardless of how many historians
(Jewish and non-Jewish) confirm the decisive role Jews played in
providing the ideological basis for, and the establishment,
governance and administration of, the former communist
dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe.
Jewish competitive victimhood accounts for the fact that, since

1945, over 150 feature films have been made about “the
Holocaust” while the number of films that have been made about
the genocide of millions of Eastern Europeans can be counted on
one hand—and none have been produced by Hollywood. Those
Jewish intellectuals who are willing to admit the obvious—that Jews
played a large (probably decisive) role in the Bolshevik Revolution
and its bloody aftermath—rationalize this by claiming this
involvement was an understandable response to tsarist “anti-
Semitism” and “pogroms.” Andrew Joyce has explored how Jewish
historians and activists have systematically distorted and
weaponized the history of “pogroms” in the former Russian Empire.
Uncritically drawing on this bogus narrative, establishment

historians typically ascribe the pogroms to irrational manifestations
of hate against Jews, tsarist malevolence, the pathological jealousy
and primitive barbarity of the Russian mob, and the “blood libel.”
The real underlying causes of peasant uprisings against Jews, such
as the Jewish monopolization of entire industries (including the sale
of liquor to peasants on credit), predatory moneylending, and
radical political agitation, are completely ignored, despite tsarist
authorities having repeatedly expressed alarm over how “Jews
were exploiting the unsophisticated and ignorant rural inhabitants,
reducing them to a Jewish serfdom.”[24] Initiatives to move Jews
into less socially damaging economic niches, through extending
educational opportunities and drafting Jews into the army, were
ineffective in altering this basic pattern. With this in mind, the
revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin concluded that Jews were
“an exploiting sect, a blood-sucking people, a unique, devouring
parasite tightly and intimately organized … cutting across all the
differences in political opinion.”[25]
Rather than seeing Jewish communist militants as willing agents of

ethnically-motivated oppression and mass murder, Jewish
intellectuals, like the authors of the book Revolutionary Yiddishland
Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg, attempt to depict them as noble
victims who tragically “linked their fate to the grand narrative of
working-class emancipation, fraternity between peoples, socialist
egalitarianism,” and that the militancy of Jewish communists “was
always messianic, optimistic, oriented to the Good—a fundamental
and irreducible difference from that of the fascists with which some
people have been tempted to compare it, on the pretext that one
‘militant ideal’ is equivalent to any other.”[26] In other words,
millions may have died due to the actions of Jewish communist
militants, but their hearts were pure. Kevin MacDonald notes how
Jewish involvement with Bolshevism “is perhaps the most
egregious example of Jewish moral particularism in all of history.
The horrific consequences of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish
Soviet citizens do not seem to have been an issue for Jewish leftists
—a pattern that continues into the present.”[27]
Jewish Competitive Victimhood on Behalf of Non-Whites
Jewish activists not only engage in competitive victimhood on

behalf of their ingroup (while suppressing all counter-narratives),
but wage competitive victimhood on behalf of other non-White
groups (except, of course, for the Palestinians and other groups
opposed to Israel). This is plainly motivated by the desire to harm
White interests. Through founding and promoting intellectual
movements like Critical Race Theory, funding anti-White activism,
and deploying anti-White media narratives, Jews stoke non-White
grievance and physically endanger White people.
An instructive example of Jews engaging in competitive victimhood

on behalf of non-Whites concerns Australia’s Aborigines. Jewish
intellectual activists Tony Barta and Colin Tatz, for example,
originated the “genocide charge” against White Australians, and
have largely succeeded in ensuring that “genocide is now in the
vocabulary of Australian politics.” Barta insists that “all white
people in Australia” are implicated in a “relationship of genocide”
with Aborigines even if they (or their ancestors) lacked any such
intention, had only benevolent interactions with Aborigines, or no
contact with Aborigines at all. When colonial, and later state and
federal governments implemented policies designed to protect
Aboriginal people, “genocide” was, for Barta, still “inherent in the
very nature of the society.” He advocates this be the “credo taught
to every generation of schoolchildren—the key recognition of
Australia as a nation founded on genocide.”[28]
Jewish intellectual activist Colin Tatz
Barta’s activism inspired Colin Tatz who, embracing and

weaponizing the bogus notion of the “Stolen Generations,” claimed
that as a result of “the public’s first knowledge of the wholesale
removal of Aboriginal children, the dreaded ‘g’ word is firmly with
us,” affirming that the “purpose of my university and public
courses” is “to keep it here.”[29] The Sydney Jewish Museum is
proudly playing its part in training Australian teachers “not only
about the Holocaust” but also about “the Australian genocide.”
Inevitably, Barta and Tatz liken rejection of, or even ambivalence
toward, their assertion that “Australia is a nation built on genocide”
to “Holocaust denial.” In deploying the “genocide” charge against
White Australians, they seek to exert the same kind of psychological
leverage used to such devastating effect against Germans, who, as
Tatz notes, are “weighed down by the Schuldfrage (guilt question)”
to such an extent that “guilt, remorse, shame permeate today’s
Germany.”[30]
Jewish activists like Barta and Tatz have dedicated their

professional lives to ensuring an analogous guilt permeates and
becomes indissolubly linked with White Australian identity. In
keeping with the exigencies of competitive victimhood, they are,
however, careful to not thereby detract from the pre-eminence of
the Holocaust.[31] One Jewish source notes how “painful memories
of the Holocaust still resonate and make us sensitive to
comparisons,” emphasizing the supreme importance of ensuring
that “recognising the genocide of the Aboriginal inhabitants of
Australia does not diminish the horror of the Holocaust.” To mitigate
this danger, Tatz insists that, in discussing other putative genocides,
scholars have a moral obligation to never “ignore, or evade, the
lessons and legacies of the Holocaust in pursuit of other case
histories.” The Holocaust must forever remain “the paradigm case,
the one more analysed, studied, dissected, filmed, dramatized than
all other cases put together.” It must endure as “the yardstick by
which we measure many things” and be the highest point on “a
‘Richter Scale’ that can help us to locate the intensity, immensity of
a case so that we don’t equate all genocides.”[32] This statement is
the embodiment of competitive victimhood.
Conclusion
“Competitive victimhood” is a useful intellectual framework for

conceptualizing a key strand of Jewish ethnic activism and can be
viewed as an important aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary
strategy. This strategy is multipronged: promote Jews as the
world’s foremost victims (despite their status as an ethnic ruling
class in Western societies); aggressively suppress all narratives that
challenge this status (particularly those that accurately represent
Jews as victimizers); and, finally, engage in competitive victimhood
on behalf of non-White groups against Whites—while
simultaneously seeking to deny the latter any positive collective
identity. This multi-layered strategy ultimately conduces to the
same overriding goal: to deprive White people of moral authority,
confidence, political power, economic resources and reproductive

opportunities. While many Jews regard this as a necessary ethnic
defense, from the perspective of White people this an aggressive
(and intensifying) attack that threatens our long-term survival as a
people.
Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on

Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism,
available here and here.
[1] Eric W, Dolan, “Study finds the need for power predicts engaging
in competitive victimhood,” PsyPost, February 6, 2021.
https://www.psypost.org/2021/02/study-finds-the-need-for-
power-predicts-engaging-in-competitive-victimhood-59552
[2] Luca Andrighetto, “The victim wars: How competitive victimhood

stymies reconciliation between conflicting groups,” The Inquisitive
Mind, Issue 5, 2012. https://www.in-mind.org/article/the-victim-
wars-how-competitive-victimhood-stymies-reconciliation-
between-conflicting-groups
[3] Isaac F. Young & Daniel Sullivan, “Competitive victimhood: a

review of the theoretical and empirical literature,” Current Opinion
in Psychology, 11, 2016, 31.
[4] M. Nasie, A.H. Diamond & D. Bar-Tal, “Young children in

intractable conflict: The Israeli case,” Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 20, 2016, 365-92.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Y. Klar, N. Schori-Eyal, N. & Y. Klar, “The ‘never again’ State of

Israel: The emergence of the Holocaust as a core feature of Israeli
identity and its four incongruent voices,” Journal of Social Issues,
69, 2013, 125-43.
[7] Johanna Ray Vollhardt, The Social Psychology of Collective

Victimhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 372.
[8] See: S. Cehajic & R. Brown, “Not in my name: A social

psychological study of antecedents and consequences of
acknowledgement of ingroup atrocities,” Genocide Studies and
Prevention, 3, 2008, 195-211 and M.J. Wohl & N.R. Branscombe,
“Remembering historical victimization: Collective guilt for current
ingroup transgressions,” Journal or Personality and Social
Psychology,” 94, 2008, 988-1006.
[9] D. Bar-Tal, L. Chernyak-Hai, N. Schori & A Gundar, “A sense of

self-perceived collective victimhood in intractable conflicts,”
International Review of the Red Cross, 91, 2009, 229.
[10] Anthony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States,

UNESCO, and “Race,”1945-1968 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2012), 38.
[11] Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling

Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 2014), 207.
[12] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London:

Penguin, 1970) 64.
[13] Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 111.
[14] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary

Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual
and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised
Paperback edition, 2001), 151.
[15] Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London & New York:
Routledge, 1956/1991), 67.
[16] M.J. Wohl & N.R. Branscombe, “Remembering historical

victimization: Collective guilt for current ingroup transgressions,”
Journal or Personality and Social Psychology,” 94, 2008,
[17] M. Noor, N. Schnabel, S. Halabi & A. Nadler, “When suffering

begets suffering: The psychology of competitive victimhood
between adversarial groups in violent conflicts,” Personality and
Social Psychology Review, 16, 2012, 351-74.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London:

Bloomsbury, 2000), 144.
[20] Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and

American Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008),
211.
[21] Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth

& Reality (Uckfield: Castle Hill, 2014), 133.
[22] Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, 12.
[23] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Devil That Never Dies (New York
NY; Little, Brown & Co., 2013), 291; 126.
[24] John Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.
[25] Robert Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: the Left, the

Jews and Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 186.
[26] Alain Brossat & Sylvie Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A

History of Jewish Radicalism (London; Verso, 2016), 56.
[27] MacDonald, Culture of Critique, xl.
[28] Tony Barta, “Realities, Surrealities and the Membrane of

Innocence,” In: Genocide Perspectives: A Global Crime, Australian
Voices, Ed. Nikki Marczak & Kirril Shields (Sydney: UTS ePress,
2017), 174.
[29] Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide

(London; Verso, 2003), xvi.
[30] Colin Tatz, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Xlibris; 2017),

3009.
[31] Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, xiii.
[32] Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life

Confronting Racism (Clayton, Victoria; Monash University
Publishing, 2015), 261.
7/2/2021 Nationalist Themes in “Democracy in America,” Part 1 – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
Nationalist Themes in “Democracy in

America,” Part 1 – The Occidental
Observer
Guillaume Durocher
20-24 minutes
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America[1] is one of the great

classics of the American political tradition, alongside the best
writings of Thomas Jefferson or the Federalist Papers. This is no
small achievement for a Frenchman. Indeed, Tocqueville’s magnum
opus is, I believe, the only foreign-language book to be included in
the Library of America series.
One can see why Democracy in America was so popular in American

civics classes. The book is a highly nuanced portrait of the early
American Republic, with many insights which help to explain the
differences that endure to this day between Europe and North

America, such as why the United States is “a nation of lawyers” or
how America has steadily risen to being a global superpower. The
work, being about Americanism and democracy, is highly relevant
both for understanding the world’s leading superpower and indeed
the nature of today’s heavily Americanized and “democratic”
Europe.
Beyond this however, Tocqueville’s Democracy is a profound and

subtle meditation on the nature of the ideal society and
government. And unlike many classic works, Tocqueville’s
reflections are eminently easy to grasp. Of interest to the Right is
the fact that Tocqueville believed in the unalterable fact of human
inequality. The work is therefore an education for a would-be
responsible ruling class: some kind of democracy is inevitable in the
modern age, Tocqueville says, but he warns against that system’s
dangers, ultimately providing an apology for having democracy be
informed by an enlightened patriotic elite.
In this article, I would like to examine the place of nationhood

(especially ethno-cultural homogeneity), patriotism, and
(civil-)religious sentiment in Tocqueville’s thought. As we shall see,
Tocqueville believed all three were absolutely essential to the
successful development of the early American Republican. I would
then like to make the case for Tocqueville as a proto-nationalist
thinker. Interestingly, Tocqueville specifically paired nationalism
and religion together as the only two forces which could unite a
society: “there is in this world only patriotism, or religion, which can
make all citizens walk for long towards a common goal” (159).
Tocqueville fits well within the wider Western tradition. His

observations on nationhood can be taken as reflecting the simple
common sense that was omnipresent in Western thought from the
Ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment, until the triumph of
pseudoscientific blank-slate theories in the 1960s cultural
revolution.[2] I will furthermore argue that Tocqueville’s conception

of patriotism and religiosity, and their potentially positive role in
fostering in-group cohesion, largely joins up with later scientific
discoveries concerning ethnocentrism and religion (e.g. Philippe
Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory, Nicholas Wade’s synthesis on
religion[3]).
The Iron Law of Inequality
Tocqueville makes a number of elementary observations which

would, no doubt, save a great deal of time for teenage socialists and
libertarians today. The basic problem he identifies is that of
individuals’ living in society. They clearly depend upon collective
conditions, but their intelligence and will are to a large degree
individual. How can these individuals be reconciled? In particular,
how can they be reconciled when intelligence and wisdom are so
unevenly distributed in the population? How do we ensure that
government is wise and does not abuse its power? He presents his
utopia:
I conceive then a society in which all, considering the law to

be their own work, would love it and submit to it painlessly;
where the authority of the government would be respected
as necessary and not as divine, the love one would have for
the head of State would not be a passion, but a reasoned
and tranquil sentiment. Each would have rights, and having
assured himself of keeping his rights, would be established
among all classes a virile confidence, and a sort of
reciprocal condescension, as far from arrogance as from
lowness. (45)
For Tocqueville, every individual is an atom of intelligence. This

individual, Americans believe (as Tocqueville repeatedly notes),
knows his own affairs best and is thus best equipped to manage
them. At the very least, one must concede the individual is often
best equipped, especially on economic matters, and this is one of

the rationales for a mixed market economy.
Tocqueville however repeatedly notes that men are extremely

unequally endowed with intelligence and wisdom (les lumières or
“enlightenment”). The dreams of egalitarians are utterly vain and
misguided, for “intellectual inequality comes directly from God and
man cannot prevent that it always be there” (103). Cultural action
can certainly improve a people but “it is impossible, whatever one
does, to elevate the enlightenment of the people beyond a certain
level” (299). The inevitability of inequality means democracy is an
inherently enervating and unsatisfying regime: “Democratic
institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever
being able to completely satisfy it” (300).
The best equipped to rule are therefore the exceptional minority —

“this natural aristocracy which stems from enlightenment and
virtue” (101). Aristocracy, echoing the ancient Greeks, is best
according to Tocqueville:
A mass of people can be seduced by its ignorance or its

passions; one can surprise the mind of a king or make him
waver in his project; and incidentally a king is not immortal.
But an aristocratic body is too numerous to be captured, too
few in number to cede easily to the inebriation of
thoughtless passions. An aristocratic body is a firm and
enlightened man who does not die. (345-46)
While the masses are beholden to prejudice, the most thoughtful

and enlightened portion of society is by definition minuscule: “As
for this other kind of belief, thoughtful and master of itself, which is
born of science and elevates itself amidst agitations of doubt, it will
only be within reach of the efforts of a very small number of men”
(285).
Tocqueville strongly emphasizes the benefits of a common identity

and common interests between the governed and those governing,
as a way of preventing abuses (350). Obviously, he would not be a
proponent of multiculturalism or of leadership by alien ethnic elites
hostile to the majority population.
In practice, Tocqueville also sees many advantages in democracy

and disadvantages in centralized rule. A strong central government
is certainly better when the latter is more enlightened than the
people, but the state being inefficient and hardly omniscient, there
are limits to its action. Furthermore, Tocqueville laments that strong
central governments tend to make the people passive and lose civic
virtue. He frequently contrasts the sullen peasants of French
villages with the vigorous settlers of American township democracy.
Through participation in public affairs, the people interest and

invest themselves in the common good. Thus, when the people are
relatively enlightened, they should rule: “Among the Americans, the
strength which administers the State is far less regulated, less
enlightened, less knowledgeable, but a hundred times greater than
in Europe” (156).
Tocqueville saw society as, ideally, developing slowly and

organically towards greater freedom, rather than through brutal,
unpredictable, and often self-destructive revolutions:
What we understand by republic in the United States is the

slow and tranquil action of society on itself. It is a regulated
state genuinely based upon the enlightened will of the
people. It is a conciliatory government, where resolutions
take long to mature, are discussed slowly, and are executed
with maturity. (574)
For Tocqueville there is something of an impasse: the best regime is

one of aristocratic excellence not of the democratic average.
However, in an age of mass communications and modernization, he

does not see how discrete classes could maintain themselves or
how democracy could be avoided. Tocqueville sees one way to, if
not resolve, then at least attenuate the contradictions: the
development of a patriotic civil-religious virtue in all individuals
through daily participation in political life.
Nationhood: An Obvious Prerequisite and Goal
Tocqueville’s ideal takes nationhood — understood here as an

objectively high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity — as both an
obvious good and an equally obvious goal. It almost goes without
saying that such a social condition is a necessary prerequisite, not
only to avoiding the problems that inevitably arise when members
of a society do not identify with one another as part of the same
people, but also to achieving the positive good which is patriotism.
Tocqueville emphasizes on numerous occasions the ethnic,

linguistic, cultural, and religious homogeneity of the Thirteen
Colonies and the later United States:
Almost all the men who inhabit the territory of the Union
stem from the same blood. They speak the same language,
pray to the same God in the same way, submit to the same
material causes, obey the same laws. (454)[4]
Tocqueville also takes “homogeneity of civilization,” meaning the

level of economic prosperity or development, as a good that makes
the sharing of a common government easier (258).
The United States formed then a “great Anglo-American family,”[5]

despite the real differences between North and South, and had a
“national character” (73, 70). This character and its customs,
Tocqueville suggests, are the critical difference with the neighboring
Mexicans who, though they adopted a virtual carbon copy of the
U.S. Constitution, were incapable of producing the same quality of
government. He expresses confidence that even through wars and

revolutions, the Anglo-Americans would maintain “the distinctive
character of their race,” including “the taste for well-being and the
spirit of enterprise” (595).[6]
Tocqueville contrasts Americans’ homogeneity with others’ lack of

it on several occasions. Concerning English and French Canadians:
“Canada has only a million inhabitants, its population is divided into
two hostile nations” (261). Indeed, Tocqueville considers Anglo-
Canadians to be essentially indistinguishable from Americans.
Similarly, he points out that Old World Europeans shared a broad
White racial and Christian religious identity, but are divided
concerning almost everything else (596). Furthermore, Tocqueville
correctly predicted that immigration of Anglo-Americans to then-
Mexican Texas would lead to an Americanization of that region
(490).
The Thirteen Colonies were fortunate in already being very similar

ethno-culturally and politically. However, Tocqueville goes further,
asserting that the Founding Fathers had sought, from this sound
basis, to fuse these into one people: “they had declared that the
confederation formed but one and the same people within the circle
traced by the constitution” (230). While state and regional identities
were obviously real, particularly the worrying division between
North and South, Tocqueville argued the American nation was
indeed maturing: “At the same time as the Americans are mixing,
they are assimilating each other; the differences which climate,
origin, and institutions had made among them, are diminishing.
They are all approaching more and more a common type” (560).
Acknowledging the cultural dominance of New England, this
American nation’s culture, Tocqueville asserted, would be of the
northern, post-puritanical Yankee type. Despite the division into
states, Tocqueville thought the Americans formed “one single
people” to a greater degree than the peoples of certain European
monarchies (544).
Tocqueville’s observations can be taken as a refreshing example of

pre-1960s common sense before the invasion of Western academic
thought with typically Marxist-inspired claims that nations are
essentially imaginary or social constructed.[7] Against this one can
make the elementary observation: early America was fortunate in
already objectively having a great amount of common identity, but
that there was an obvious interest in further reinforcing this so as to
achieve the highest degree of nationhood.[8]
Tocqueville also incidentally strongly emphasizes the importance of

political and economic independence to having any real
sovereignty: “Strength is then often one of the first conditions for
the happiness and even existence of nations. [. . .] I know of no
more deplorable condition than that of a people which cannot
defend or depend upon itself” (249).
Racial Diversity: “The Most Dangerous of Ills”
For Tocqueville, America’s division into three races — White, Red,

and Black — was a terrible danger to the young nation. “The men
spread in this space do not form, as in Europe, so many children of a
same family,” but rather “almost enemy races” (467). Tocqueville
expresses considerable sympathy for the Amerindians and Africans
who suffered in a White man’s America. Both had been deprived of
their “fatherland” and lost their identity (477).
Concerning the Amerindians, Tocqueville regrets the lack of

miscegenation with White Americans, all the while admitting that in
Canada mixing between French and natives had led to poor results
(the métis tended to “go native” and remain wild, 485). He presents
an interesting early example of what we might call “dependency
theory” in explaining Amerindians’ chronic inability to compete
economically with Whites (488). He concludes, however, that there
was little doubt that the Reds will be run out and/or swamped.
The situation of Blacks was far more worrisome for Tocqueville:

“The most dangerous of ills which is threatening the future of the
United States is born of the presence of the Blacks on its soil”
(499). He is rather evasive on the question of racial inequality,
generally satisfying himself with paraphrasing American opinions,
notably Thomas Jefferson’s.
Tocqueville did not believe in the possibility of a harmonious

multiracial society: “I do not think that the white race and the black
race could anywhere live together as equals” (520). He quotes from
Jefferson’s memoirs: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book
of fate than that these people [Blacks] are to be free. Nor is it less
certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same
government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of
distinction between them.” Jefferson justified his pessimistic
position on grounds of White prejudice, Black grievances, and
natural difference.
Tocqueville says racial mixing might be a solution, but argues that

white racial pride made this all but impossible. Only a dictatorship,
he believed, could force integration:
A despot who would put the Americans and their former

slaves under the same yoke could perhaps succeed in
mixing them: so long as American democracy remains in
charge, none would dare attempt such an undertaking, and
one can foresee that, as long as the Whites in the United
States remain free, they will seek to isolate themselves.
(520)
Tocqueville rejects the idea that emancipation would solve the

problem and asserts that Blacks would “abuse” their freedom. He
notes that “everywhere where the Negroes have been the stronger,
they have destroyed the Whites” (502). Tocqueville feared that
slaves’ high fertility meant the South could fall to Black revolution
(as occurred in formerly French Haiti). He even asserts that, without

the Union, “sympathies of race” would probably not lead the North
to the South’s rescue in case of a Black revolution (523).
Tocqueville intriguingly observes: “In America, as in the rest of the
earth, servitude is then born in the South” (504).
White European identity was a simple fact for Tocqueville, evident

for example in Europeans’ physical difficulty in adjusting to tropical
climates. It may be that Tocqueville was vague on racial inequality
because this might have been unpopular among a French public
already famously prone to egalitarian sentiment. What is
unambiguous however is that Tocqueville strongly believed in the
benefits of racial homogeneity and saw no solutions to racial
diversity except a restoration of homogeneity, either through total
separation or through miscegenation. Tocqueville considered the
latter impossible however: “The White man in the United States is
proud of his race and proud of himself” (521).
Go to Part 2.
[1]In this article, I will quote be quoting from Alexis de Tocqueville,

De la Démocratie en Amérique (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), volume 1.
To those seeking to find the equivalent passages in English
translations, I can only say that Tocqueville’s text begins after a
lengthy preface on page 33 and concludes with footnotes at page
625.
[2]See for instance Herodotus, the very first Western historian, and
his concept of nationality: Martin Aurelio, “The Four Elements of
National Identity in Herodotus,” North American New Right, June
15, 2016. The American Founding Fathers similarly universally
praised the homogeneity of the early United States: Jared Taylor,
“What the Founding Fathers Really Thought About Race,” National
Policy Institute, January 17, 2012. Even postwar German leaders,
educated before the 1960s and despite the excesses of National

Socialism, expressed the common-sense position that maintaining
their nation’s ethnic homogeneity was an obvious good: Guillaume
Durocher, “Merkel’s Betrayal: From the Ethno-National Principle to
an Afro-Islamic Germany,” The Occidental Observer, September
16, 2015.
[3]Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and

White It Endures (London: Penguin, 2009).
[4]Other examples:
“The bond of language is perhaps the strongest and the most

durable which can unite men. All the emigrants [to America]
spoke the same language; they were all children of the same
people [the English]” (71-72).
Thirteen Colonies had “the same religion, the same language,
the same customs, almost the same laws” (181-182).
Incidentally, one is struck at the similarities between Tocqueville’s

vocabulary and nuanced conciliatory style on the one hand, and
that of the Jewish-French liberal-conservative thinker Raymond
Aron. Aron too would almost always speak of “Anglo-Americans,”
concerning the British and Americans, rather the more typical
French term “Anglo-Saxon.”
[5]Another example: “All the English colonies had then between

them, at the time of their birth, the look of a family” (73).
[6]Such language of course should not be taken as suggesting that

Anglo-Americans’ traits were 100% genetically-determined, but
Tocqueville evidently sees a hereditary element. He writes
elsewhere that the early explorers and gold-hunters followed by
“workers and farmers, a more moral and tranquil breed [race]” (74).
[7]Example of this include the Jewish historian Eric Hobsbawm,

widely celebrated by mainstream media, and Benedict Anderson.
Students of such thought have often come to absurd conclusions,
arguing that there is no such thing as an ethnically homogenous
society and that claims of historic nationhood are entirely
fantasized. A particularly egregious example of this was provided by
European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, who
argued in a speech: “those politicians trying to sell to their
electorates a society that is exclusively composed of people from
one culture, are trying to portray a future based on a past that never
existed, therefore that future will never be.” This argument was
obviously teleological and politically-motivated, as Timmermans
expounded a dark and bizarre prophecy: “there is not going to be,
even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see
diversity in its future.” Guillaume Durocher, “Feckless European
Leaders,” The Occidental Observer, April 15, 2016.
[8]One is astounded at at the number of people, brainwashed by

Marxoid drivel, who are able to convince themselves that national
identity is entirely imagined and reflects no underlying reality.
Indeed, they are capable of the most incredible rationalizations in
defense of this belief. There are however obviously objective
markers of nationhood or lack thereof: compare monolingual France
with bilingual Belgium, compare monoethnic Poland with
multiethnic Yugoslavia. The reality of nationhood, and the conflict
that results from the lack of it, are obvious from these cases.
Nationality is obviously to a certain degree conventional and

represents a useful simplification of a reality too complex for words.
One could say that humanity’s treatment of nationality is somewhat
analogous to that of the colors of the spectrum: “orange” or
“yellow” do not actually exist in any sense in nature as neatly-
separated categories and in fact blur perfectly into one another,
nonetheless, colors are obviously socially useful human
conventions, as in the case of the traffic light.
Nationalist Themes in “Democracy in

America,” Part 2 – The Occidental
Observer
Guillaume Durocher
18-23 minutes
Part 1
The Centrality of Custom and Religion
Tocqueville strongly emphasizes the role of custom and religion in

determining a society’s character. He notes that colonial America’s
rather oppressive social laws (concerning issues such as adultery)
did not reflect the will of a tyrant but of the people, with its
particular social customs. Contrary to a great deal of “liberal
democratic” and “developmental” hopes today, Tocqueville then
asserts that social conditions and ills often primarily stem from the
people rather than oppressive governments. Legislation and “the
social condition” certainly tend to determine each other in a
dynamic relationship, but Tocqueville asserts that society tends to
be the more powerful factor (94).
Tocqueville takes an expansive definition of customs (mœurs,

related to “mores”): “I understand by this term the entire moral and
intellectual condition of a people” (426). Tocqueville strongly
emphasizes the interrelation between religion and custom. The
norms and behaviors a society consider sacred tend to become
established as custom, often remaining in secularized form. Thus
for Tocqueville: “one cannot establish the reign of liberty without

that of customs, nor found customs without beliefs” (48).
The paradigmatic example of this were the original Pilgrim Fathers

themselves: “they tore themselves from the sweetness of the
fatherland to obey a purely intellectual need; by exposing
themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wanted to make
triumph an idea” (76). Thus we have a powerful case of religion (or
ideology) among humans: first an ideal is established in the mind,
then the individual and society seek to materialize this mental
representation in reality. Tocqueville notes that colonial-era
Americans justified the education of children partly on grounds of
Protestant religious zeal, citing Satan’s love for ignorance: “in
America, it is religion which leads one to enlightenment, it is the
observance of religious laws which leads men to liberty” (88).
Tocqueville again repeatedly emphasizes Americans’ religious

homogeneity. Though they were certainly divided into innumerable
Protestant sects, all tended in fact to broadly worship God in the
same way and, more importantly, have a similar conception of
religion’s role in society.
Tocqueville denies that religion can or should be eliminated from

human affairs. As he explains, an impulse for transcendental
metaphysics is natural if human beings, with their short and limited
lifespans, are to live meaningfully:
Never will the short space of sixty years enclose the entire
imagination of man; the incomplete joys of this world will
never suffice for his heart. Alone among all beings, man
shows a natural disgust for existence and an enormous
desire to exist: he has contempt for life and fears
nothingness. These different instincts constantly push his
soul towards the contemplation of another world, and it is
religion which leads him there. Religion is then but a
particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human

heart as hope itself. It is by a kind of aberration of the mind,
through the help of a kind of moral violence inflicted upon
their own nature, that men distance themselves from
religious beliefs; an invincible slope brings them back there.
Incredulity is an accident; faith alone is the permanent state
of humanity. (439)
Tocqueville furthermore notes that this religious sensibility can be

used to affect social customs and, therefore, improve the “social
and intellectual condition of the people” with good beliefs and
habits.[9] He saw religion as an extremely durable force in human
affairs:
So long as a religion finds its strength in feelings, instincts,

and passions which one sees reproduce themselves in the
same way throughout all historical epochs, it overcomes the
efforts of time, or at least it can be destroyed only by
another religion. (440)
Customs were furthermore the real fundamental basis of a regime

or a people’s character rather than the formal laws: “The laws
always waver so long as they are not supported by customs;
customs form the only durable and lasting power in a people”
(406).
Patriotism: An Extension of Family Feeling, a Means to Altruism
This consideration of religion, as a means of spreading good

customs, naturally brings us to patriotism. Tocqueville considered
patriotism in the United States to be a virtual religious practice: “In
the United States one rightly thinks that love of country is a kind of
cult to which men join in through practices” (123). This assessment
is in accord with a large body of later literature on the so-called
“American civil religion.”[10]
Indeed, American patriotism in general presents elements typical

of religions: sacred texts such as the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence, reverence and commemoration of
saint-like figures such as the Founding Fathers and great
presidents, and pious visits to sacred sites such as the memorial
buildings in Washington DC and elsewhere. American presidents
commonly use uplifting or quasi-religious rhetoric arguing that
whatever they are doing is in line with the sacred national tradition.
In some cases the religious aspects are overt and explicit, as with
the painting on the rotunda of Capitol building: “The Apotheosis of
George Washington.”
But whereas non-patriotic religion appears purely ideological — a

drive to materialize ideas in reality for their own sake, reflecting the
need to find meaning and continuity in man’s brief individual
existence — patriotism depends upon a different mechanism. For
Tocqueville, patriotism is a kind of altruism achieved by extending
one’s selfish interest to one’s family and then further beyond to
one’s entire nation. Tocqueville writes on family sentiment as an
antidote to individualist solipsism:
What we call the family spirit is often based upon an illusion

of individual selfishness. One seeks to perpetuate and
immortalize oneself in a sense in one’s grand-nephews.
Where the spirit of the family ends, individual selfishness
enters in the reality of its tendencies. As the family only
presents itself then as something vague, indeterminate,
uncertain, each concentrates on the convenience of the
present; one only thinks of the establishment of the next
immediate generation, and nothing more. (99)
Family sentiment is a powerful source of group solidarity: “So long

as lasted the spirit of the family, the man who struggled against
tyranny was never alone” (462). This power of resistance
disappears “when the races mix” (though here, Tocqueville seems
to mean the disintegration of [aristocratic?] clans and lineages,

rather than continental races, 463).
Tocqueville explicitly compares love of family and love of country:
In the United States, the fatherland is felt everywhere. [. . .]

[The citizen] glorifies himself with the glory of his nation; in
the success it obtains [. . .]. He has for his fatherland a
feeling analogous to that which one feels for one’s family,
and it is again by a kind of egoism that he takes an interest
in the State. (159-160)
Tocqueville saw patriotism as largely a positive force, more or less

synonymous with civic virtue and political altruism (within one’s
nation). The “love of the fatherland” was meant to “fight against
these destructive passions” which are the selfishness of ambitious
individuals and corrupt parties (247).
Tocqueville distinguished between the “instinctive” traditional

patriotism associated with monarchies and the “considered”
modern patriotism associated with republics. He argues that the
instinct for patriotic feeling should be carefully appealed to,
polished, and cultivated in order to transcend selfish interest and
serve the common good:
[L]aws must make men interest themselves in the destiny of

their country. Laws must awaken and direct this vague
feeling of the fatherland which never abandons the hearts of
men, and, by binding it to the thoughts, passions, and habits
of each day, to make it a considered and lasting feeling.
(159)
Tocqueville further elaborates on this theme in an insightful

passage, again comparing family love and patriotism:
There exists a love for the fatherland which has its source
principally in this unthought, disinterested, and undefinable
feeling, which binds man’s heart to the places where he was
born. This instinctive love is synonymous with the taste for
old customs, with respect for ancestors and memory of the
past; those who feel it cherish their country like one loves
the paternal household. [. . .] Often this love for the
fatherland is exalted further by religious zeal, and then one
sees it achieve wonders. It is itself a kind of religion; one
does not reason, one believes, one feels, one acts. [. . .]
Like all thoughtless passions, this love of country pushes

one to great short-lived efforts rather than continuity of
efforts. After having saved the State in a time of crisis, it
often lets it wither in the peace.
When peoples are still simple in their customs and firm in

their beliefs; when society rests gently upon an ancient way
of things, whose legitimacy is not contested, one sees this
instinctive love of the fatherland reign.
There is another [patriotism] more rational than this; less

generous, less ardent perhaps, but more fecund and more
lasting; this one is born of enlightenment; it develops thanks
to the laws, it grows with the exercise of rights and it ends,
in a sense, by becoming synonymous with personal interest.
A man understands the influence which the well-being of
the country has on his own; he knows that the law allows
him to contribute to producing this well-being, and he takes
an interest in the prosperity of his country, first as
something which is useful to him, and then as something
which is own work. (353–54)
Whereas the government should cultivate the public’s patriotism,

individual citizens in turn had a duty to participate in the body
politic. Jury duty and township democracy, with the socialization

and time they required, meant citizens would in effect buy into and
come to identify with the political nation as a whole. This taught
each citizen responsibility (407). In America according to
Tocqueville, in a perhaps somewhat idealized fashion, patriotism
then flowed upwards from the township through the state to the
nation: “The public spirit of the Union is in a sense itself a summary
of provincial patriotism” (250).
Tocqueville saw the decline of patriotism and the rise of individual

selfishness as harbingers of national disaster:
I say that such nations [where patriotism and civic virtue

have declined] are ready to be conquered. If they do not
disappear from the world stage, it’s because they are
surrounded by nations similar or inferior to themselves; it’s
because there is still in them some sort of undefinable
instinct for the fatherland, some thoughtless pride in the
name they carry, some vague memory of past glory, which,
without being attached to anything, is sufficient to imprint
upon them if need be with an impulse to conserve. (158)
Conclusions: Tocqueville as a Nationalist, Civil-Religious, and

Aristocratic Thinker
From the above, I believe we can say that Tocqueville has aged very
well as a writer and that his classic book remains highly relevant
today, including for nationalists. Tocqueville was very explicitly a
“negative” nationalist in the sense that he clearly and repeatedly
identified the reality of “national character,” the benefits of ethno-
cultural homogeneity, and the inevitability of conflict in multiracial
societies. For Tocqueville, homogeneity was an obvious prerequisite
of nationhood and an equally obvious goal. These observations
were largely common sense in the Western political tradition prior
to the 1960s.
Tocqueville was however also a nationalist in the “positive” and

constructive sense as well. Whereas diversity entailed a large
number of ills, a strong sense of patriotism enabled positive
outcomes, most notably altruism within the nation. Tocqueville
clearly saw both the power and dangers of democracy, and
proposed means of attenuating them. These means included: a
respect for aristocratic elements (namely for the more
“enlightened” parts of society) and the cultivation of a civil-religious
patriotism to instill good habits and identification with the nation as
a whole among the citizenry.
Many of these insights have been further investigated, expounded

upon, and/or confirmed by later writers and scientists. Philippe
Rushton sought to explain the universal pervasiveness of
ethnocentrism in terms of Genetic Similarity Theory, as an instinct
evolved to defend one’s perceived genetic kin. Nicholas Wade has
described the equally universal religious impulse as evolved during
man’s prehistory, enabling fantastic levels of “social
programming”and group cohesion, both absolutely necessary to
surviving in a context of constant inter-tribal warfare. In both cases,
ethnocentrism and religiosity are described as extremely powerful
emotional systems necessary to overcoming individual self-interest
and achieving in-group altruism. These perspectives are entirely
congruent with Tocqueville’s interpretation of civil-religious
patriotism as an overcoming of individual selfishness by
(emotionally and apparently irrationally) sharing one’s identity with
the nation, as one would with one’s own family.
In my opinion, the ongoing tragedy and angst of Western countries

today — visible for instance in the general unpopularity of
governments and ruling elites[11] — is in the radical separation and
even violent opposition that has emerged between ethnocentrism
and civil-religiosity. The reigning civil-religion of the West —
egalitarianism, anti-racism, the Shoah . . . — effectively demonizes
ethnocentric sentiment and ethno-nationalism for Whites (and only
Whites, minority ethnic activists including Jewish Zionists enjoying

special favor with our governments).
The result is a painful fragmentation, even within individuals’ minds,

as they try to conciliate their natural ethnocentric impulses with a
civil-religion that demonizes them (not dissimilar, perhaps, to the
vilification of the sex drive in certain conservative religious
traditions). Our societies themselves become sharply divided in an
absolutely recurring distribution. White voters become polarized
along a spectrum of ethnocentrism, with majorities typically voting
for implicitly White, dog-whistling conservative parties. White
liberal voters and White media-political elites however, for various
reasons,[12] tend to be lower down the ethnocentrism scale and
higher up the “piety” scale, and are more eager to enforce globalist
orthodoxy by systematically excluding and demonizing nationalist
parties, thus neutralizing the people’s ethnocentric leanings.
Tocqueville’s insights are then highly relevant to the Alternative

Right today. Tocqueville saw that a good society was achieved
foremost by custom, that is to say by long-term cultural action,
rather than laws. Men being unequal, society must be illuminated
by its most intelligent and enlightened minority. That is our task. I
dare say it is a therapeutic one: a radical change can occur if the
reigning culture is turned on its head, so that our people’s moralistic
impulse be used not in a vain and self-destructive war against
ethnocentrism,[13] but in service of the European family of nations,
including European diaspora nations in the Americas, Australasia,
and southern Africa. Destroying the reigning ideology of political
correctness is of course painful for those Whites who have already
emotionally invested themselves in it, but in the long run the
realignment of beliefs with reality and self-interest will be
psychologically and materially beneficial to all.
Tocqueville writes powerfully on the disaster that is the loss of

traditional patriotism and the need to respond with a modern
patriotism that, rather than being backward-looking, is responsive

to historical trends:
But occasionally happens, in the lives of peoples, a time

when the old customs are changed, the mores destroyed,
the beliefs shaken, the prestige of memories dispelled, and
where, however, enlightenment has remained incomplete
and political rights poorly guaranteed or restrained. Men
then only see their fatherland in a weak and dubious light;
they place it no longer in the soil, which has become in their
eyes an inanimate land, nor in the customs of their
forefathers which they have been taught to consider a yoke;
nor in religion, which they doubt; nor in the laws which they
do not make, nor in the legislator which they fear and
despise. They see it nowhere then, no more under its own
traits than under any other, and they withdraw to a narrow
and unenlightened egotism. These men escape prejudices
without recognizing the empire of reason; they have neither
the instinctive patriotism of the monarchy, not the
considered patriotism of the republic; but they have
stopped between the two, amidst confusion and misery.
What is to be done in such a state? To step backward. But

peoples no more return to the feelings of their youth, than
men return to the innocent tastes of their infancy; they can
miss them, but never make them be born again. One must
then continue to march forward and hasten to join together
in the eyes of the people individual interest and national
interest, for disinterested love of the fatherland is fleeing
with no return. (354–55)
Tocqueville, in this passage, was almost certainly referring to the

troubled post-revolutionary France of his day. He specifically
suggested granting political rights to Frenchmen as a way of
restoring patriotism.
Our times are different. Everywhere, ethnic Europeans are deprived

of the right to rule in their own interests and are being
disenfranchised, not by being formally deprived of the vote, but by
being purely and simply reduced to fatal minorityhood in their own
traditional homelands. We can easily imagine a world in which,
Europeans’ right-to-life having been recognized and harmony
having returned to the European soul by re-embracing our Tradition
and our self-interest, our people would learn again to love
themselves and joyously fight for their own survival.
[9]I am struck here by the similar of Tocqueville’s thought with that

of the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who also
believed that wisdom could be spread among the people through
appeal to religious sensibility. See: Guillaume Durocher,
“Schopenhauer & Hitler,” North American New Right, March 9,
2016.
[10]See the classic article: Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in

America,” Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, Winter 1967, vol. 96, no. 1, pp. 1-21.
[11]Conversely, one sees that the ostentatious patriotism of the

Russian and Hungarian governments, for example, has led them to
enjoy high approval ratings.
[12]Higher IQ Whites, on average, appear to be lower down the

ethnocentrism scale. This is apparently because they are better
able to avoid the negative consequences of multiculturalism,
because their relative economic security also relaxes ethnocentric
impulses, and because they are better able to rationalize the
“subtleties” (in fact, contradictions) of the reigning ideology (which,
in itself, has perversely become a marker of higher status).
[13]As the proverb goes: If you cast out nature with a fork, it will
still return.
THE CHURCH IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
________________________________
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism

Larry Siedentop
New York: Penguin Books, 2015 (first published: London: Allen Lane,
2014)
Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald
Sir Larry Siedentop is an Oxford University historian specializing in

intellectual history. A basic premise of Inventing the Individual is that
ideas matter, in particular, that beginning in the ancient world, the ideo-
logies associated with Christianity had a profound effect on the West. As
a culturally oriented evolutionary psychologist, I found it a fascinating
account of the origins of Western individualism. To be sure, as discussed
below, I stress ethnic factors as also playing a major role, but there is cer-
tainly room within evolutionary psychology for an idealist influences on
history. Such a view rests on a powerful intellectual foundation. 1
That foundation is based on psychological research indicating two
very different types of psychological processing: implicit and explicit
processing. These modes of processing may be contrasted on a number
of dimensions. 2 Implicit processing is automatic, effortless, relatively
fast, and involves parallel processing of large amounts of information; it
characterizes the modules described by evolutionary psychologists. Ex-
plicit processing is the opposite: conscious, controllable, effortful, rela-
tively slow, and involves serial processing of relatively small amounts of
information. Explicit processing is involved in the operation of the
1 For an intellectually similar treatment of a historical phenomenon, see Kevin
MacDonald, “The Antislavery Movement as an Expression of the Eighteenth-Century

Affective Revolution in England: An Ethnic Hypothesis,” in Reasoning Beasts: Evolution,
Cognition and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Michael Austin and Kathryn
Stasio (New York: AMS Press, 2016).
2 See, e.g.: David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and Gen-
eral Intelligence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005); Kevin

MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regulation of Human
Evolved Predispositions,” Psychological Review 115, no. 4 (2008): 1012–31; Keith Sta-
novich, Who Is Rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning (Hillsdale, NJ: Erl-
baum, 1999); Keith Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
MacDonald, “The Church in European History” 93
mechanisms of general intelligence 3 as well as controlling emotional

states and action tendencies. 4
Religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability
of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., eternal punishment
in Hell as a result of sin) to control subcortical modular mechanisms
(e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action
tendencies mediated by evolved implicit processing are controllable by
higher brain centers located in the cortex. 5 For example, people are able
to effortfully suppress sexual thoughts, even though there is a strong
evolutionary basis for why males in particular become aroused from
sexually arousing imagery. 6 Thus, under experimental conditions, male
subjects who were instructed to distance themselves from sexually
arousing imagery were able to suppress their sexual arousal. 7 Imagine
that, instead of a psychologist giving instructions, people were subjected
to religious ideas that such thoughts were sinful and would be punished
by God.
Ideologies such as the Christian ideology of the sinfulness of sexual
thoughts are a particularly important form of explicit processing that
may result in top-down control over behavior. That is, explicit constru-
als of the world may motivate behavior. 8 For example, explicit constru-
als of costs and benefits of religiously relevant actions mediated in turn
by human language and the ability of humans to create explicit repre-
sentations of events may influence individuals to act by avoiding reli-
giously proscribed food.
Ideologies, including religious ideologies, characterize a significant
group of people and motivate behavior in a top-down manner. Ideolo-
3 Dan Chiappe and Kevin B. MacDonald, “The Evolution of Domain-General Mech-

anisms in Intelligence and Learning,” Journal of General Psychology 132, no. 1 (2005): 5–
40.
4 MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regulation of Human
Evolved Predispositions.”
5 Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applica-
tions to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy,” Politics and Culture, no. 1 (April
2010); see also Kevin B. MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of
Culture,” Evolutionary Psychology 7, no. 2 (2009): 208–33.
6 See review in MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regula-
tion of Human Evolved Predispositions.”

7 M. Beauregard, J. Lévesque, and P. Bourgouin, “Neural Correlates of Conscious
Self-Regulation of Emotion,” Journal of Neuroscience 21, no. 18 (2001): 1–6.

8 A. G. Sanfey, R. Hastie, M. K. Colvin, and J. Grafman, “Phineas Gauged: Decision-
Making and the Human Prefrontal Cortex,” Neuropsychologia 41, no. 9 (2003): 1218–29.
94 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 4, Winter 2016–2017
gies are coherent sets of beliefs. 9 These explicitly held beliefs are able to
exert a control function over behavior and evolved predispositions.
There is no reason to suppose that ideologies are necessarily adaptive.10
Ideologies often characterize the vast majority of people who belong to
voluntary subgroups within a society (e.g., a particular religious sect).
Ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social con-
trols—rationalizing the controls but also benefitting from the power of
social controls to enforce ideological conformity in schools or in reli-
gious institutions.
In the following I will describe Larry Siedentop’s work on the role of
Christian religious ideology in shaping the West.
THE PRE-CHRISTIAN ANCIENT WORLD

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Inventing the Individual is
Christian views on the family contrasted with the dominant aristocratic
culture of the ancient world. Siedentop labels the dominant pre-
Christian family structure of ancient Greece and Rome as “Indo-
European”(9)—that is, the highly successful warrior culture that spread
out over Europe and many areas of Asia beginning around 4500 BC. 11
It was a world in which “the family was everything,” the paterfamili-
as acting not only as magistrate with power over all family members,
but also as its high priest (9). In effect, the basic unit was “small family
churches” (14). Worship of male ancestors was fundamental, so that in a
very real sense each family had its own religion. Although based on
blood ties among males, an adopted son could become part of a family
by accepting the ancestors of his adoptive family as his own, while “a
son who abandoned the family worship ceased altogether to be a rela-
tion, becoming unknown” (12).
This was a patrilineal system, with women marrying into another
family and adopting the ancestors of the husband. Importantly, the
boundary of the family was also a moral boundary: “Initially at least,
those outside the family circle were not deemed to share any attributes
with those within. No common humanity was acknowledged, an atti-
9John Gerring, “Ideology: A Definitional Analysis,” Political Research Quarterly 50,

no. 4 (December 1997): 957–94; Kathleen Knight, “Transformations of the Concept of
Ideology in the Twentieth Century,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006):
619–25.
10 MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture.”
11 David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from
the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2007).
tude confirmed by the practice of enslavement” (13). Affection and char-

ity were compartmentalized—restricted to within the boundaries of the
family (15). This resulted in a familial sense of duty, affection, and reli-
gious belief—pietas.
Also in opposition to individualism, property belonged not to the in-
dividual but to the family—the eldest son possessing the land in trust
for ancestors and descendants (16). Society was thus an association of
families, not individuals. The fundamental chasm was between public
and familial, not public and private.
While the family so construed formed the base of the social system,
there were also wider groupings, the gens (extended family), clans
(Greek: phratries; Latin: curiae), and tribes in ever wider circles of genetic
distance (14). These were groups of families tied together by religious
ideology: “These wider associations acquired their own priesthood, as-
sembly and rites” (20). Cities developed when several of these larger
groupings (tribes) came together, establishing their own worship. This
did not erase the religious connotations of lower level groups going
down ultimately to the family. “The city that emerged was thus a con-
federation of cults, an association superimposed on other associations,
all modelled on the family and its worship” (21). It was not an associa-
tion of individuals.
The religiously based rules prescribed action in all spheres of life,
leaving no room for individual conscience. Laws were seen as following
from religion rather than voluntary inventions. This produced intense
patriotism, as religion, family, and territory were entwined. “Everything
that was important to him—his ancestors, his worship, his moral life, his
pride and property—depended upon the survival and well-being of the
city” (25). Indeed, attachment to civic gods was the main reason for the
difficulty of combining cities in Greece (27). Exile was therefore an ex-
treme punishment because such a person had no legitimate identity.
This concept of citizenship came under fire from those excluded from
this family-based system in the fifth and sixth centuries BC in both
Greece and Rome (e.g., patricians versus plebeians in Rome), but change
was slow. In Rome, the plebs was originally composed of immigrants
who had no sense of ancestors or relatedness to citizen families. These
people pushed to expand the limits of citizenship, with the result that
from the sixth century to the origins of the Empire the main conflicts
were social class conflicts between the patricians and the plebeians, with
the plebeians gradually obtaining more rights and political power. The
success of these efforts meant that many plebeians achieved upward
mobility and the status of aristocrats themselves. 12 As in other historical

eras, the barriers between Indo-European aristocratic elites and the peo-
ple they ruled over eventually became porous, and upward mobility
was possible, if slow to come. 13 Thus the decline of the aristocratic mod-
el of citizenship and the ethnic basis of the aristocracy had declined well
before Christianity.
There were also gradual changes toward ending primogeniture and
reducing the power of the paterfamilias over extended branches of the
family. Clients (originally little better than slaves) became free to own
property—analogous to the process in Europe in the Middle Ages
whereby slaves became serfs and serfs eventually became owners of
their own land.
These changes did not lead to a concept of individual rights, and
those who were not full citizens were not seen as fully rational (33).
However, the expansion of citizenship led to important changes in pub-
lic culture as the skills required for careful argument and effective per-
suasion in the assembly became valuable.
Logic and rhetoric thus came into existence as public disciplines.

The ability to make a coherent case, defend it and present it per-
suasively to an audience of equals became a sine qua non for lead-
ership in the city. The development of these critical and imagina-
tive capacities contributed by the fifth century BC, to the emer-
gence of abstract, philosophical thinking out of religion and poetry.
Athens became both its centre and a symbol. . . . Reason or ration-
ality—logos, the power of words—became closely identified with
the public sphere, with speaking in the assembly and with the po-
litical role of a superior class. Reason became the attribute of the
class that commanded. (34–35)
The ideas of “natural hierarchy” and “natural inequality” so central

to this system were fundamentally aristocratic attitudes. There is a “su-
perior class entitled by ‘nature’ to rule, constrain and, if need be, to co-
erce” (35). Thus Plato’s “just society” as depicted in The Republic was to
be ruled by philosophers because they were truly rational. There is an
assumption that there are natural differences in rationality. This is the
Gary Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic
12
War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

13 Kevin MacDonald, “The Indo-European Contribution to European Peoples and
Culture,” in Richard Spencer, ed., untitled, in press.

idea, expressed in the modern language of behavior genetics, that there

are genetically based individual differences, but with the added concept
that people are naturally born into their social roles they are best suited
for—natural inequality. For example, Aristotle’s followers believed that
some people were slaves “by nature” (52), resulting in a natural hierar-
chy. Reflecting common themes in Indo-European culture, 14 the ancients
prized fame and glory (positive esteem from others) resulting from gen-
uine virtue and accomplishments, not indolence and love of luxury. La-
bor was not highly valued because laborers were often slaves and the
rightful booty of conquest.
CHRISTIANITY IN OPPOSITION TO THE ANCIENT GRECO-ROMAN SOCIAL

ORDER
Siedentop argues that St. Paul fundamentally turned this world of
natural hierarchy upside down. 15 Western philosophers had developed
the idea of logos in which the universe had a rational structure that even
god could not change or contravene. Most critically, the individual re-
placed the ancient Indo-European family as the seat of moral legitimacy.
Christian ideology was intended for all humans, resulting in a sense of
moral egalitarianism rather than natural hierarchy. Individual souls had
moral agency as having equal value in the eyes of god. Nevertheless,
Christian universalism was built on intellectual developments within
the Greco-Roman world.
[Christian universalism was] profoundly indebted to develop-

ments in Greek thought. For the discourse of citizenship in the po-
lis had initiated a distancing of persons from mere family and trib-
al identities, while later Hellenistic philosophy had introduced an
even more wide-ranging, speculative “universalist” idiom. That in-
tellectual breadth had, in turn, been reinforced by the subjection of
so much of the Mediterranean world to a single power, Rome. (61).
In other words, the tendencies toward individualism were already

developing prior to Christianity within Western societies beyond those
already apparent in ancient aristocratic culture, likely ultimately stem-
ming, as noted above, from the large influx into Greco-Roman societies
14Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

15Siedentop notes that even though many were interested and very positive toward
Judaism in the first century BC, “circumcision and diet preserved the tribal identity of
Judaism” (53).
of peoples with no family connections to the original aristocratic ele-

ments and thus with an interest in developing theories in which family
and tribal elements were relatively unimportant. This is not surprising
given the tendency for group boundaries to become permeable over
time in Indo-European cultures. 16
Thus the social roles ascribed by natural inequality no longer defined
the person; people were now defined subjectively, by their conscience,
and they were free to make voluntary associations and assume volun-
tary roles in a no longer rigidly hierarchical, hereditary system. Individ-
ual identity rather than identity as members of a group became para-
mount. Again, there was a strong assumption of moral equality—“an
almost ferocious moral universalism” (64).
Another subversive aspect of Christianity was that Christian heroes
were martyrs, whereas Indo-European heroes were aristocratic warriors
who came from leading families and were often associated with the
founding cities. The ancient hero was “typically male, strong, wily and
successful” (79). Christian martyrs were the opposite, but they “gained a
hold over the popular imagination” (80).
Siedentop emphasizes the cruelty and lack of restraints on the power-
ful in the ancient world. Christians by the end of the third century be-
came “spokesmen of the lower classes,” developing a “rhetoric founded
on ‘love of the poor’”—“a kind of Christian populism” (82). Bishops
reached out to “the servile, destitute, and foreign-born, to groups with-
out standing in the hierarchy of citizens. They were offered a home. It
was an irresistible offer” (83).
“The equality of souls in search of salvation was at the heart of Chris-
tian beliefs” (88). Such beliefs began to have a wide social influence in
Roman society in the second century. 17 As an indication of how much
Christian attitudes had pervaded Roman society, when Emperor Julian
tried to restore paganism in the 350s, “the new priesthood he sought to
create was to have as its test ‘the love of God and of fellow men,’ while
‘charity’ was to be its vocation” (89)—hardly an aristocratic world view.
Rather, it was a worldview that “at least approximated to Christian
16MacDonald, “The Indo-European Contribution to European Peoples and Cul-

ture.”
17 It is interesting that St. Augustine was motivated to say that the demise of the
older deities was not responsible for Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, “arguing that all
human institutions were subject to decay and disaster” (89). Would a robust aristocrat-
ic society have been better able to defend itself?
moral intuitions” (99). 18

In the fourth century, monasticism began to be organized rather than
restricted to lone ascetics; a group identity based on voluntary associa-
tion was developed. Unlike the aristocratic world view that viewed
work with disdain, work had dignity. St. Basil (c. 330–c. 378) based his
monastic community on equality and reciprocity, lack of personal prop-
erty, and public service (schools, hospitals). The disrepute that monasti-
cism fell into since the sixteenth century,
makes it hard to recapture the prestige it had enjoyed in its earlier

centuries. Yet at the end of antiquity the image it offered of a social
order founded on equality, limiting the role of force and honouring
work, while devoting itself to prayer and acts of charity, gave it a
powerful hold over minds. Monasticism preserved the image of a
regular society when the pax romana was being undermined, first
by the overthrow of the Western empire (476) after the Germanic
invasions, and then by Muslim conquests in the East. (98–99)
St. Augustine’s philosophy was deeply influenced by St. Paul. Be-

cause of his emphasis on the will (which mediated between appetite and
reason), some have attributed the rise of individualism to St. Augustine
(101). Whereas a bedrock proposition of ancient Greek philosophers was
that reason was motivating (113), Augustine argued that reason does not
act in isolation, and is influenced by emotions (e.g., “delight” [102])—a
proposal that any modern psychologist would have to agree with. But
this opens up a need for prayer and grace in order to behave morally.
Humans need “divine support” to act uprightly (105). Yet we can never
achieve moral perfection.
Given this, there is the impression that individualism has the conse-
quence of seeking but never attaining moral perfection. “For Augustine
(and Kant), none of us can ever claim to be a success in moral terms. We
all fail, and it is this failure—tragic, but also humbling—that contains a
powerful egalitarian message” (107). Relative moral perfection becomes
the ultimate measure of a person’s worth—something that should be
kept in mind in the present age when subscribing to multicultural ideol-
ogy and displacement-level immigration has been successfully propa-
gated as a moral imperative throughout the West.
18 In the early church, bishops and presbyters were chosen by “general consent,”
but this was not the case when the Church became wedded to the Empire (93).
Despite a lesser role for reason in Christian thinking, the spirit of dis-
putation and logical argument so apparent among the Greeks persisted:
“Christian convictions were submitted to the disciplines of logic and
metaphysical speculation, to the requirements of disciplined argument”
(113). “The habit of disputation—of disciplined argument—was pre-
served by the church in later antiquity. . . . The habit of disputation be-
came engrained in the life of the church” (113).
Christianity, by lessening the power of the paterfamilias, also meant
less power of fathers over children and a higher status for women (114).
Wealthy women were crucial to the success of the early church, and
adultery was seen as a sin for both men and women. There were also
humanitarian changes in the law of slavery due to Christian influence,
although Siedentop does not claim that Christianity ended slavery.
There were both Christian apologists (e.g., Augustine) and opponents of
slavery (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa 19) (118–19).
Nevertheless, there was a profound egalitarian thrust of Christianity
in the late Roman Empire. The rhetoric of urban bishops was highly in-
clusive: “It was a rhetoric that encouraged women, the urban poor and
even slaves to feel part of the city in a way that had not previously been
possible” (121).
CHRISTIANITY IN POST-ROMAN EUROPE

Siedentop notes that, whereas invading Germanic tribes at first had
separate laws for themselves and Roman citizens, there was a gradual
fusion of societies and a general trend toward laws covering a particular
territory as opposed to tribal laws for a particular people (138). Again,
Indo-European cultures in Europe did not maintain barriers between
peoples over long stretches of time.
There were also trends toward egalitarianism influenced by the
church. The Visigothic Code in particular was deeply influenced by the
clergy and was more egalitarian than other Germanic codes. Egalitarian-
19 St. Gregory of Nyssa, who is regarded as a Church Father, was an ardent anti-
Semite. His opposition to slavery was likely partly motivated by his concern about
Jews owning Christian slaves at a time when Jewish enslavement of Christians was a
major issue. See Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolution-
ary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004; originally published:
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), chap. 3, passim. Gregory wrote that “[Jews are] murderers
of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels against God, God haters, . . . advocates of
the devil, race of vipers, slanderers, calumniators, dark-minded people, leaven of the
Pharisees, sanhedrin of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners, and haters of righteous-
ness.”
ism was especially strong in the monasteries—“a moral authority,

founded on and constrained by the consent of the community” (139).
Great effort was expended to influence Germanic customs, but these
were not always successful: “The church and the survivors of the Roman
educated class met with reverses more often than successes in dealing
with the newcomers” (143).
Christian moral intuitions of moral universalism “began to impinge
on the Carolingian conception of the proper relations between rulers
and the ruled. But . . . it did so only within limits” (152). For example,
Charlemagne was famously ruthless against unbelievers—Saxons and
Muslims. Christian influences on the laws on slavery reined in the pow-
er of masters—slaves could only suffer capital punishment with a public
trial; married slaves could not be separated (154). There was thus a
blend of Germanic customs and Christian influences.
Siedentop sees feudalism as “the prelude to modernity rather than its
antithesis” (165), and emphasizes that there was no return to ancient
slavery under feudalism. He follows nineteenth-century French histori-
an François Guizot in suggesting that the conditions of rural laborers
predated the Germanic and Roman conquests, “a social form primitively
established among the peoples of Western Europe, whether Italic, Celtic
or Germanic” (166). This suggests a primitive Indo-European hierar-
chical social structure in which farmers were dominated by a military
elite. These rural laborers were tied to the land as members of a clan or
tribe and could not be bought and sold like real slaves. They owed rents
in kind and military service to their chief. In Roman parlance, they
were coloni, not servi.
There was thus no basic change from Gallic chieftains to Romans to
Germans—suggesting that this is an Indo-European universal, at least
within Europe; perhaps Roman slavery was an adjustment to an urban
situation where rents in kind were not practicable (167). Nevertheless,
slavery persisted, and slaves and coloni coexisted in the ninth and tenth
centuries, the distinction gradually blurring (173). Slavery became less
common, appearing mainly on smaller estates by the end of the tenth
century (168). 20
Despite the general tendency for coloni rather than servi, Siedentop
credits the church with preventing full-blown slavery from emerging
under feudalism. “The church adjusted to an emergent feudalism, but
20 Siedentop suggests that the coloni system was more efficient than slavery because
farming by families tied to the land owing rents to a chief would have encouraged in-
dividual initiative.
could not endorse it” (170). He takes a middle ground between attrib-
uting the end of slavery to the church and supposing it had no role at all
(170). Church attitudes opposed some practices of slavery. For example,
the church defined marriage as applying to everyone, including slaves,
and deplored separating families, as could occur with slavery. Slaves
were welcomed into the fold as Christians. 21
The collapse of the Carolingian Empire created a lack of central au-
thority and increased localism, presenting new challenges for the
church. It responded by attempting to be a unifying, centralizing force,
but this was hampered because during this period (the tenth century),
the church had become compromised by secular elites, the pope a “mere
plaything of local aristocratic families” (179). In West Francia (i.e., proto-
France), bishops were being appointed by secular elites; these bishops
and abbots gave away church properties to the followers of these mili-
tary elites; moreover, church offices were often purchased (simony), and
clergy were often married or had concubines, thus violating the practice
of celibacy.
THE PAPAL REVOLUTION

What followed was incredibly important for the subsequent influence
of Christianity on the West. One can imagine that if secular military
elites continued to be able to control the clergy within their domains,
there would have been a resurgence of some variant of basic Indo-
European social organization.
However, seeing its power and influence on the wane, the church re-
sponded by reforming itself and aggressively claiming sovereignty over
secular authorities. An important harbinger of things to come was the
action of Hincmar (the archbishop of Reims) and Pope Nicholas I (a key
contributor to idea of papal sovereignty [185]) in the mid-ninth century
to prevent the attempt by Lothar, king of Lorraine, to divorce his child-
less wife and marry a woman with whom he had children—a practice
that would have been entirely legitimate in pre-Christian German socie-
ty (183).
Siedentop claims that three things were necessary for the papal revo-
lution: a reformist elite, a credible claim of papal supremacy, and a well-
developed body of canon law (225). Beginning in 1073, the papacy de-
volved to “monkish popes”—popes with a monastic background. There
were major increases in papal councils, papal legates, and papal corre-
21 Some of the peasant uprisings in the tenth century had egalitarian overtones
(176).
spondence (226). The church developed a relatively sophisticated legal

system that was far more predictable and organized than secular legal
systems of the period. The huge amount of litigation strengthened its
claims to supreme legislative and judicial authority.
The monasteries (most importantly, Cluny) took the lead in reform
(early ninth century) at a time when the episcopacy was corrupt (185).
Cluny restored the prestige of monasticism “as a truly Christian life”
(186). Again, as in previous eras, monasticism was most successful in
propagating an emotionally compelling image of the church, stimulating
“a remarkable outburst of lay piety” (189). “From the beginnings of mo-
nasticism in Western Europe monks had enjoyed a special standing
among the poor. They aroused respect and even affection because they
were understood as representing the Christian life more fully than any
other group, including—perhaps especially—the secular clergy” (282).
(The secular clergy were often corrupt, living with concubines, etc.)
Reform was thus energized by the prestige and power of monasteries,
with their ascetic lifestyle, combined with “the creation of a clerical elite
determined on systematic reform” (196). Pope Leo IX was central. Ulti-
mately, the credibility of the church depended on an image of ascetic,
celibate clergy; this was substantially achieved during the High Middle
Ages.
As indicated by the example of King Lothar, a central aspect of the
Papal Revolution was the Church’s stand on marriage: consent between
spouses, no divorce, elaborate rules against consanguineous marriages
(which had the effect of lessening the power of extended kinship rela-
tions, as aristocratic families were forced to look far afield for mates),
and lessening the power of the paterfamilias (192). Essentially, the
church was choosing marriage as a key battleground in its effort to in-
crease its power over secular rulers, presumably because issues of mar-
riage and sexuality lent themselves to moral and religious strictures. By
interpreting marriage as a sacrament and thus within its proper pur-
view, the church had an important weapon in extending its power over
secular rulers.
There is a long history of popes disciplining or at least attempting to
discipline secular rulers. In 390, St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, ex-
communicated Emperor Theodosius because of a massacre in Greece,
with Theodosius submitting by doing penance at a cathedral in Milan.
By the Middle Ages, the church had already had a long history of in-
volvement in civic affairs, stemming from its role in governing during
the political vacuum that often occurred during the barbarian invasions.
But the real revolution began in the mid-eleventh century with stronger
papal control over bishops. Popes came to be elected by the College of
Cardinals (1059), rather than simply auctioned off to powerful Roman
families (202).
Pope Gregory VII (known as Hildebrand before he became pope)
completed the revolution with his conflict with the German emperor,
Henry IV. His Dictatus Papae laid out the claims for papal authority over
investiture of bishops and even claimed the ability to depose emperors
(203); this was often termed plenitudo potestatis—plenitude of power.
Gregory established the church as a legal system based on its “moral
primacy” (204). He not only had power to excommunicate, but at times
encouraged subjects not to obey rulers. There is an assumption of moral
equality in Gregory’s pronouncements, as in his quoting Augustine: “He
who tries to rule over men—who are by nature equal to him—acts with
intolerable pride” (206).
The papal revolution resulted in a clear distinction between secular
and sacred. Whereas prior to the revolution, kings routinely felt able to
appoint clerics and interfere in the affairs of the church, the success of
the revolution meant that this was no longer possible. They withdrew
“their right to govern the sacred” (252). The church never completely
won the battle over investiture, but in general the secular authorities
acknowledged the autonomy of the church.
The perceived need for a legal framework for the church renewed in-
terest in Roman law, but canon law combined Roman law in such a way
that it conformed to Christian moral intuitions. Gratian (mid-twelfth
century), a principal codifier of canon law, assumed that equality and
reciprocity were antecedent to just laws (216); this contrasted with Ro-
man law which prioritized a person’s status (e.g., paterfamilias or not),
therefore assuming natural inequality. Thus Pope Innocent III, writing in
the early thirteenth century, stated: “You shall judge the great as well as
the little and there shall be no difference of persons” (218).
Canon law thus had a strongly egalitarian tenor, while status—so im-
portant to ancient law—was irrelevant. Canon law got rid of trial by or-
deals and privileging testimony from family and friends (which led to
more powerful families getting favorable judgments). In general, “this
moral vantage point [emphasizing ‘equality and reciprocity’] fostered a
mildness in canon law which distinguished it not only from customary
and feudal law but also from Roman civil law” (231). Canon law empha-
sized public punishments aimed at inducing guilt—“to reach and stir
the conscience of the offender” (231).
Other aspects of canon law directly challenged traditional Germanic

practices and thus challenged key privileges of the secular elites. Criti-
cally, there was an emphasis on consent in marriage (which was op-
posed to family strategizing that was often aimed at strengthening kin-
ship ties), prohibiting divorce, and delegitimizing concubinage by pre-
venting bastards from inheriting. For example, in 1202 the pope ruled
against a count who sought a dispensation so that his bastard son could
inherit (233).
In general, consent and voluntary association became key. Unlike the
ancient world, corporations with judicial and legislative authority over
their members did not have to be approved by authorities but were
based simply on associations among members (234). Major decisions
had to be made with consent of members rather than representatives. (In
Roman law, representatives were appointed by authorities.) Corpora-
tions thus were voluntary associations that existed by consent of their
members.
Natural law theorist Gratian and others argued that all humans have
an “intrinsic moral nature” (244). “If Paul and Augustine conjured up a
vision of moral freedom, it was the twelfth-century canonists who con-
verted that vision into a formal legal system founded on natural rights”
(245). By the fourteenth century, several rights were defended—
property, consent to government, self-defense, marriage, and procedural
rights. Further, canonists began arguing that the right to property en-
tailed a duty to share in time of need (248). This led to the idea that the
poor had rights, the intellectual ancestor to the modern welfare state
(249).
The interests of both kings and the church opposed feudalism. Medi-
eval cities, which were often relatively egalitarian, often had bloody con-
flicts with feudal lords, with church policies favoring the former. Thus
people fleeing serfdom went to cities and were protected by the church
(270). Many towns gradually did achieve freedom from feudal overlords
(272)—encouraged by kings wishing to rein in the power of the lords.
These towns did not have complete sovereignty—kings had rights over
them, such as the adjudication of capital offences—but they were often
free of feudal obligations or royal taxes (274). These urban areas resulted
in a middle class that “contained the seeds of a modern constitutional
order” (276), although there certainly were oligarchic tendencies.
By the second half of the eleventh century, Europe “was acquiring a
moral identity” (193) centered around Christian moral intuitions. The
Crusades were defining events, resulting in or implying a shared identi-
ty as Christians despite coming from different areas of Europe. Thus the

murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 had repercussions
throughout Europe, his place of death becoming a pilgrimage site.
Christian Europe had become a moral community based on Christian
religious beliefs rather than one based on, say, an ethnic or national
identity. Correspondingly there was an upsurge of the culture of courtly
love, a code of courtesy and honor, and less brutality among knights.
Identity as a Christian became central to personal identity. Prior to this,
Siedentop claims that knights were little more than hired thugs, but dur-
ing this high point of church influence, they developed a code of honor,
pledging, for example, to protect the weak.
Essentially the church created a moral community, with the papacy at
the top defining morality based on Christian moral intuitions. Siedentop
sees this as a prelude to the modern proposition nation: “The example of
the church as a unified legal system founded on the equal subjection of
individuals thus gave birth to the idea of the modern state” (207).
THE REALISM VERSUS NOMINALISM DEBATE

Siedentop devotes considerable attention to the debate between real-
ism and nominalism associated with two monastic orders, the Domini-
cans and the Franciscans, respectively. These orders had a high profile in
the cities and were very popular among the poor (286). They developed
rapidly in the thirteenth century and had a prominent role in establish-
ing the intellectual milieu at universities.
The Dominican tradition, associated mainly with St. Thomas Aqui-
nas, was Aristotelian and biased toward rationalism, reflecting the
world view of the ancients based on natural inequality. On the other
hand, Siedentop sees the Franciscan tradition beginning in the four-
teenth century with Duns Scotus and especially William of Ockham
(295) as carrying on the tradition of Christian egalitarianism, inspired by
St. Augustine. The Franciscan tradition was based on nominalism (the
philosophy that classes are constructions of the human mind and that
only particular objects exist) and empiricism (that facts must be discov-
ered by experience rather than deduced rationally from first principles).
A morally upright will was under voluntary control and thus accessible
for everyone; hence it was an egalitarian concept. Will was more im-
portant than reasoning ability, which the ancients like Plato saw as une-
venly distributed among people and hence anti-egalitarian (300). Moral-
ly correct action required more than reason; it required grace.
The Franciscan tradition, following Augustine, saw moral inequality
as the common assumption of ancient philosophy. Contrary to the Aris-

totelians, Ockham distrusted the ability of humans to explain the world
as resulting from “rational necessity” (306). God could have made things
differently—“God’s freedom.” Ockham’s nominalism thus “celebrated
contingency rather than rational necessity” (307)—inductive reasoning
that had to be verified by the senses rather than deductive reasoning
from first principles. If God was free to make the world any way He
wanted to, then reality is contingent and must be discovered by observa-
tion and experiment, thus paving the way for modern science.
Because humans are free agents, individuals can make mistakes in
good conscience—a doctrine with profound implications. Within the
church, canonists developed idea that legitimacy depended on consent,
not coercion or power. But this included the power of the church (323),
thus providing a clear path to Protestantism. The principle of non-
coercion also led to theories of representative government and corpora-
tions as consisting of consenting individuals with equal status. (325)
Bishops did not have dominium in the ancient sense (radical subordina-
tion), but rather the entire community of believers had dominion over
the church.
POST-MEDIEVAL EUROPE
Siedentop argues that Christian moral intuitions centered around in-
dividual conscience and moral egalitarianism ultimately caused the
downfall of the church as a hegemonic religious institution. Liberal
thought “emerged as the moral intuitions generated by Christianity
were turned against an authoritarian model of the church” (332). By the
fourteenth century, there were calls for representative government with-
in the church. These were resisted by the papacy, resulting in wide-
spread “agitation” against the church (Pietists in Germany, Lollards in
England) (330). These were essentially democratic movements that dis-
liked the top-down structure of the church, promoted individual devo-
tion, and wanted to be able to read the scriptures in native languages—
obviously harbingers of Protestantism.
Thus basic liberal ideas predated Protestantism but were contradicted
by the church’s own structure (332). In the end, basic liberal ideas—
equality of status, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and repre-
sentative government—opposed the interests of the church as well as
most Protestant sects. This resulted in the religious wars of the Refor-
mation, after which there came to be general skepticism about the wis-
dom of enforcing religious orthodoxy. These trends toward liberalism
continued, so that by the eighteenth century clericalism was seen as the

enemy of liberal secularism (e.g., Montaigne). The attitude developed
that “uncoerced belief provides the true foundation for ‘legitimate’ au-
thority” (335).
Siedentop concludes by arguing that acknowledging and understand-
ing Europe’s Christian roots provide a potent moral weapon in combat-
ing the influence of Islam, which tends to oppose the secular individual-
ism that is a legacy of Christianity. However, intellectuals, and particu-
larly the left, are loath to acknowledge the Christian roots of European
secularism, essentially because in their minds, Christianity was “almost
inseparable from an aristocratic society” (361). He argues that liberalism
must be defined by its moral core, not by consumerist utilitarianism or
by individualism that retreats from social responsibility into a world of
family, friends, and, I would add, pleasure-seeking.
“If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own
tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?”
(363).
DISCUSSION
Siedentop presents a strong case for the role of Christianity in the de-
velopment of Western culture beginning in the ancient world. However,
there is evidence, some of it mentioned by Siedentop, that the roots of
European egalitarianism and individualism are far deeper. As an evolu-
tionary psychologist, my first forays into European history were con-
cerned with the institution of monogamous marriage. With the excep-
tion of European societies, there is a powerful tendency in human socie-
ties beyond the hunter-gatherer level of economic development (i.e., ag-
ricultural and pastoral societies) for powerful males to have large num-
bers of wives and concubines, as in classical China where the emperor
typically had hundreds or thousands of concubines. 22 And yet in Euro-
pean societies, there were strong trends toward monogamy in the an-
cient Roman and Greek world, long before Christianity. This results in a
substantial degree of sexual egalitarianism among males, and from an
evolutionary perspective sexual egalitarianism is a critical component of
any truly egalitarian system. Indeed, the moral egalitarianism empha-
sized by Siedentop would mean little if wealthy males were able to con-
22 Kevin MacDonald, “Mechanisms of Sexual Egalitarianism in Western Europe,”

Ethology and Sociobiology 11, no. 3 (May 1990): 195–238; Kevin MacDonald, “The Estab-
lishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monogamy in Western Europe,” Poli-
tics and the Life Sciences 14, no. 1 (February 1995): 3–23.
trol large numbers of females and have legitimate children with them,
whereas (as in classical China) poorer males would be unable to mate.
Thus early Roman marriage practices departed from Indo-European
patterns by eschewing bridewealth (payment for wives by husbands)
that is common in tribal societies around the world and closely linked to
male sexual competition (wealthy males are able to purchase more fe-
males). Monogamy was maintained by controls on sexual behavior (big-
amy and polygyny were illegal) and laws relating to legitimacy (bas-
tards suffered social opprobrium; marriage with slaves was typically
prohibited); inheritance laws penalized children who were not the
products of monogamous marriage (bastards could not inherit; the chil-
dren of slaves retained the status of the mother). In an intensively po-
lygynous society such as classical China, none of these occurred, so that,
for example, the offspring of a concubine was entirely legitimate and
could inherit property, depending on the wishes of the father.
There were also ideological components of Roman monogamy. High
priests, who were from the patrician class during the Republic, had mo-
nogamous marriages (termed conferreatio) that could only be dissolved
by death. Vestal Virgins, who were highly venerated as part of the state
religion, were daughters of patricians; they were paragons of chastity
who retained their virginity through their reproductive years. Finally,
Stoicism, which became a powerful movement among artists, intellectu-
als, and politicians during the Empire, extolled the ideal of the monog-
amous family based on conjugal affection and sexual restraint for both
sexes. This last comment fits with Siedentop’s point, noted above, that
Christian universalism was built on intellectual developments within
the Greco-Roman world.
There were also egalitarian political trends, as the plebeians gradually
achieved considerable power and opportunities for upward mobility.
These changes parallel the general finding among Indo-European cul-
tures that barriers between groups tended to gradually be erased, and
upward mobility was possible, especially for males who had military
talent. 23 And, as noted above, even from the earliest times, Roman mar-
riage departed in important ways from the earlier Indo-European pat-
tern. Indeed, it should be recalled that Indo-European culture should not
be thought of aristocratic simpliciter. As Ricardo Duchesne emphasizes, 24
Indo-European culture is best thought of as aristocratic-egalitarian—as
23 MacDonald, “The Indo-European Contribution to European Peoples and Cul-
ture.”
24 Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
hierarchical but with egalitarianism among aristocratic peers. Ending

the practice of bridewealth and delegitimizing offspring outside of mo-
nogamous marriage, as occurred in Republican Rome, may then be con-
sidered an extreme version of aristocratic egalitarianism.
Thus, although there is no question that Rome had strong features of
an aristocratic society, as maintained by Siedentop, these features were
by no means absolute, and elements of egalitarianism can be traced from
the very earliest history of Rome. Christianity, then, appearing during
the Empire after the huge influx of peoples to Rome, should be seen as
exacerbating tendencies that were already apparent in Roman culture.
From an evolutionary perspective, these new peoples were unrelated to
the founding aristocratic stock and had an interest in deposing the aris-
tocratic system of natural inequality. Christianity championed their in-
terests in doing so in an emotionally compelling manner.
There are other reasons to emphasize the underlying ethnic compo-
nent of Western individualism and egalitarianism. These trends toward
moral universalism and egalitarianism were not apparent among Chris-
tian groups in the Middle East, which generally remained tribal, thereby
reflecting the culture of the area. 25 Moreover, there were important dif-
ferences between Western and Eastern Christendom, and within West-
ern Christendom. Regarding the latter, from the early Middle Ages, the
Western family pattern delineated by the famous “Hajnal line” 26 was
confined to northwest Europe, particularly the area encompassed by the
Frankish Empire, 27 but found also in Britain and Scandinavia. This fami-
ly structure, which many scholars point to as critical for understanding
the rise of the West, fails to include significant parts of Western Chris-
25 Kevin MacDonald, “Socialization for Ingroup Identity among Assyrians in the

United States.” Paper presented at a symposium on socialization for ingroup identity
at the meetings of the International Society for Human Ethology, Ghent, Belgium, July
29, 2004.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308059453_Socialization_for_Ingroup_
Identity_among_Assyrians_in_the_United_States_Paper_presented_at_a_symposium_
on_socialization_for_ingroup_identity_at_the_meetings_of_the_International_Society_
for_Human_Etho
26 The Hajnal line encompasses territory west of a line from Trieste to St. Petersburg
(but excluding Ireland and southern Spain) characterized by late marriage, the conju-
gal nuclear family separated from other relatives, and large numbers of single adults.
John Hajnal, “European Marriage Pattern in Historical Perspective,” in Population in
History, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London: Arnold, 1965).
27 Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, trans.
Gerald Chapple (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; orig. German edition,
2003), 62.
tendom.
Outside of Western Christendom, a basic problem with supposing
that Christianity per se was the cause of European family practices is
that lineage, compound families (where brothers would set up house-
holds together), and patrilineal patterns retained importance in Chris-
tian southeastern Europe (i.e., the Balkans, where both Eastern and
Western Christianity prevailed) and in Russia. Given that many scholars
attribute Western uniqueness to the unique family patterns of northwest
Europe, 28 Christianity therefore cannot be the sole source of Western
uniqueness, which, after all, Siedentop is attempting to explain.
Parenthetically, it is worth noting that other religions besides Christi-
anity, such as Islam, are universalist and desire all humans to be mem-
bers. However, Christianity, uniquely, worked energetically to achieve
temporal power and to use that power to overcome tribal, clan-type
structures—a major effort during the early Middle Ages. Islam is uni-
versal but it never tried to undermine the tribal, kinship nature of socie-
ty, and Islamic societies throughout the Middle East remain tribal into
contemporary times—a major difficulty for the nation-building pro-
grams, such as the Iraq War, that have been such a prominent feature of
Western foreign policy in recent times.
Nevertheless, the power of the church does seem important to in-
clude in any complete analysis. The church is without doubt unique
among the religious institutions of the world in successfully shaping the
wider culture. 29 In my own writing on the maintenance of monogamy in
post-Roman Europe, the role of the church in being able to control mar-
riage was paramount. 30
The question from an evolutionary perspective is: How does one ex-
plain an institution that seems so obviously contrary to evolutionary
impulses toward kinship and maximizing reproduction? It was noted
above that in the ninth century, the church was sliding toward being a
pawn of the aristocracy, with church offices bought and sold and
churchmen having wives and concubines. The Papal Reform movement
changed all that, but it is important to think about why the reform was
28 See review in Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
29 In his Why Europe? Mitterauer also emphasizes the special role of the imperial
church in establishing Western uniqueness.

30 MacDonald, “The Establishment and Maintenance of Socially Imposed Monoga-
my in Western Europe.”
so popular and so powerful. A central feature seems likely to have been

the image of the church as reproductively altruistic:
The image of reproductive altruism was central to the public image

of the Church. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, thousands
of monasteries were founded. … Whatever the motivations in-
volved, these societies of celibate and ascetic males “set the tone of
the spirituality of the whole church, in education and in art [and]
in the transmission of culture….” 31 Five of the six popes during the
critical reform period of the late eleventh and early twelfth centu-
ries had a monastic background and that their influence
reflected a powerful movement to gain command of all life in

society and organize it according to monastic views. The leg-
acy of the church Fathers and the early Middle Ages was re-
interpreted and reformulated in terms of monastic hegemo-
ny: theology, cosmology, anthropology, morality, and the law
were recast to provide a foundation and justification for the
preeminence of monks with the rigid social categories that
subdivided and disciplined society. 32 …
Genuine reproductive altruism is suggested by the fact that

during the thirteenth century, the mendicant friars, who were
typically recruited from the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and
other affluent families, often had parents who disapproved of their
decision—an indicaton that they often did not view the celibacy of
their children in positive terms: “It was a nightmare for well-to-do
families that their children might become friars” (Southern, 1970:
292). 33 These families began to avoid sending their children to
universities because of well-founded fears that they would be
recruited into religious life… . 34 … Monastic standards of appro-
priate behavior then set the standard for other Christians, includ-
31 Gerd Tellenbach, The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 101.
32 Giovanni Miccoli, “Monks,” in Jacques LeGoff (ed.), Medieval Callings, trans. Lyd-
ia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 53.

33 R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmonds-
worth, UK: Penguin, 1970).

34 C. H. Lawrence, The Friars: Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Cul-
ture (London: Longman, 1994).

ing especially the clergy and the members of lay confraternities of

the mendicant orders (many of whom were wealthy and high-
born), who adopted the ascetic lifestyle of mendicant orders—
except they were married 35 … . 36
During the height of its power from the twelfth to the fourteenth cen-
turies, the church had successfully carved out a moral sphere as distinct
from power politics, violence, warfare, etc.—of spiritual versus temporal
power (133). Nevertheless, as Siedentop notes, in fact there is ample evi-
dence that the church often used its spiritual power to achieve temporal
power (e.g., by excommunicating kings who attempted to divorce their
wives or have their illegitimate offspring inherit). “The church persisted
in its moral enterprise, which was, after all, its raison d’être” (146). Ex-
communication only works if the faithful would reliably side with the
church over their aristocratic rulers.
This concern with temporal power was apparent from the origins of
institutionalized Christianity in the fourth century, when the church ex-
erted its power, not to regulate the sex life of aristocrats, but to combat
Jewish power. 37 Indeed, Christian theology as it developed during this
period was at its core anti-Jewish, and the rise of the church to official
status coincided with a decline in Jewish power and enactment of laws
against Jews owning Christian slaves. Moreover, although far from con-
sistent, the church continued to rein in Jewish power as, for example,
with the Lateran Council of 1215 that mandated the wearing of distinc-
tive clothing for Jews. And although the mendicant friars were models
of reproductive altruism, they also spearheaded the anti-Jewish attitudes
of the medieval period. This was also an important part of why Christi-
anity was so compelling during this period.
This ideological shift (in which “Jews were portrayed in a more

malevolent light”) coincided with an active campaign against Juda-
ism. “The friars encroached upon the actual practice of Jewish life,
forcibly entering synagogues and subjecting Jews to offensive ha-
rangues, participation in debates whose outcomes were predeter-
mined, and the violence of the mob. The intent of the friars was
35 Ibid., 112ff.
36 MacDonald, “Mechanisms of Sexual Egalitarianism in Europe,” 9–10.
37 Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of
Anti-Semitism (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004; originally published: Westport,

CT: Praeger, 1998), chap. 3.
obvious: to eliminate the Jewish presence in Christendom—both

by inducing the Jews to convert and by destroying all remnants of
Judaism even after no Jews remained . . . .” 38 A contemporary Jew-
ish writer stated that the Franciscans and Dominicans [which, as
noted above, were the intellectual leaders of the church and domi-
nated universities] “are everywhere oppressing Israel. . . . [T]hey
are more wretched than all mankind” 39 . . . . 40
Devout kings, such as Louis IX of France, were instrumental in pre-

venting Jewish exploitation of non-Jews. A contemporary biographer of
Louis, William of Chartres, quotes him as determined “that [the Jews]
may not oppress Christians through usury and that they not be permit-
ted, under the shelter of my protection, to engage in such pursuits and
to infect my land with their poison.” 41
During the medieval period, the church therefore chose the moral
realm to carve out as an area of influence. The effectiveness of this policy
depended ultimately on belief—kings and aristocrats feared excommu-
nication because they would lose the support of their people. One might
ask, what else could a non-military organization do to attain power over
the aristocracy, kings, etc.? From a strategic perspective, the church
chose areas that were prima facie moral and therefore came under reli-
gious purview.
The church therefore chose the arena of ideology to combat a thor-
oughly militarized aristocracy. Its influence would derive from the
strength of Christian beliefs in controlling lower brain centers, cement-
ing popular allegiance to the church even in opposition to secular mili-
tary power. In doing so, it tapped into deep wellsprings of Western in-
dividualism, whose ethnic basis is particularly robust in northwest Eu-
rope. 42
38 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Emergence of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press), 97.
39 In Ibid., 13.
40 MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, 116.
41 Quoted in Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social
History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 103.

42 Kevin MacDonald, “What Makes Western Culture Unique?,” The Occidental Quar-
terly 2, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 9–38.

7/2/2021 Sam Francis on the Roots of Liberal Hegemony - American Renaissance :: Reader View
www.amren.com
Sam Francis on the Roots of Liberal

Hegemony - American Renaissance
19-24 minutes
F. Roger Devlin, American Renaissance, August 3, 2016
Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization

and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America, Washington
Summit Publishers, 2016, 791 pp., $48.00 (hardcover)
American Renaissance’s audience has been both increasing and

getting younger in recent years, so many readers may not know that
Samuel Francis was a good friend and frequent contributor to this
publication from its founding in 1990 until his death in 2005. Before
he turned to white racial advocacy, Francis was active in the
conservative movement, working at various times for the Heritage
Foundation, the Washington Times and the paleoconservative
flagship publication Chronicles. He was a well-known critic of
neoconservatism.
Leviathan and Its Enemies does not develop Francis’s thinking

about race, which is summarized in his Essential Writings on Race.
This book, published for the first time this year, is his contribution to
the theory of elites.
Sam Francis’s thought was heavily influenced by the American

political theorist James Burnham (1905-1987). And as Francis
himself pointed out, the roots of Burnham’s thinking are highly
unusual for an American conservative. Beginning as a Marxist in the
1930s, Burnham came to believe that the capitalist bourgeoisie,
which dominated the society and politics of the 19th century, had
been displaced from power not by Marx’s proletariat, but by a new
elite of managers and technicians: men with the expertise required

to direct the large enterprises typical of the 20th century economy.
He developed this theory in his best-known book, The Managerial
Revolution (1941).
Burnham later gravitated toward classical elite theory, as developed

by the Italian social and political thinkers Vilfredo Pareto and
Gaetano Mosca, believing it provided a better foundation than
Marxism for understanding the managerial revolution he had
described. The heart of elite theory is the principle that all human
organizations are necessarily oligarchic in structure. Dictators, for
example, cannot truly rule by themselves, but are always
dependent on a group of men who accept their authority; these
men, and not merely the dictator personally, constitute the elite of
such societies. In democracies it appears that the broad masses of
the people choose their leaders, but according to the elite theorists,
it is really the leaders who have themselves chosen by the people.
Even political parties advocating radical forms of democracy are
forced, if they wish to be effective, to take on an oligarchic form,
with a small party elite commanding the allegiance of a larger base.
This has been called the iron law of oligarchy.
But elites are not permanent. Politics is a continual process of

circulation of elites. Much of the history of the early modern era, for
instance, can be interpreted as a process whereby entrepreneurial
capitalists (the “bourgeoisie”) displaced the aristocratic landed
elites inherited from feudal times. And according to Burnham, the
managerial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was
one in which the bourgeois elite inherited from the 19th century
was replaced in its turn by a new managerial elite that continues to
rule us to this day.
Samuel Francis’s Leviathan and Its Enemies is a systematic

development of these ideas, with a few revisions and extensions, as
well as a defense of Burnham against rival schools of thought. The
completed manuscript was discovered after his death, and he is not

known to have made any attempt to publish it while he lived. Bits
and pieces of the theory appeared in his columns of the 1990s, and
I remember at the time wishing he would treat it more fully and
systematically.
During the 19th century, growing population and urbanization led to

what has been called a revolution of mass and scale, which may be
defined as a dramatic process of enlargement in almost all areas of
organized human activity, including producing, consuming,
governing, communicating, fighting, and even worshiping.
Traditional private and local forms of social organization proved
unable to cope with this historically unprecedented growth. At the
same time, new technologies were making larger organizations
feasible, including not only physical technologies such as
telephones and business machines, but also the application of
psychology and the social sciences to human behavior (“scientific
management”).
In Francis’s words: “The rearrangement of human societies within

and under mass organizations was necessary to contain, discipline
and provide services for the new mass populations and the
exponential growth of social interaction.” Francis distinguishes
three principle forms of organized human behavior in which this
transformation occurred: the business corporation, government,
and what he calls “organizations of culture and communication.”
Managerialism in the economy
As Francis noted, the managerial business corporation is “probably

the best understood of these three kinds of mass organization.”
Early capitalist enterprises of the sort Adam Smith wrote about
were generally small enough to be managed by their owners, who
might be individuals, families or partnerships. But over the course
of the 19th century, new industrial techniques came to demand
heavier capital investment than such enterprises could conveniently

summon. In the steel industry, for example, the introduction of
blast furnaces meant that the small enterprise employing ten or a
dozen workmen could not compete. Similar processes were at work
in businesses such as mining, shipping, banking, and perhaps most
importantly, the new railroad industry. To provide the capital for
such vast undertakings, businesses increasingly turned to the sale
of stock.
The modern, publicly-traded company is owned by widely

dispersed stockholders who may have little interest in how the
company is run so long as their stocks grow in value or pay
dividends. The day-to-day operation of such firms are the
responsibility of managers, hired by the owners. This new class of
managers includes the technical specialists with expertise in the
complex equipment and processes characteristic of modern
industrial production. Neither the decision makers nor the technical
experts need own a single share of stock. The distinguishing feature
of the modern corporation is thus the separation of ownership from
control.
The managerial elite, though its individual members may be

descended from the bourgeois elite, acquires a different and
conflicting power base, and different and conflicting
structural interests and goals, and through the dispersion of
ownership, the managers are able to make their interests
and goals predominate over those of the stockholders.
The most important and fascinating aspect of the managerial

revolution as explained by Francis is the shift in mentality and ethos
effected by the rise of managers and the corresponding decline of
entrepreneurial capitalists. The older type of businessman was a
“rugged individualist” who championed an ethic of self-control (“a
penny saved is a penny earned”) and personal responsibility. He
had a strong interest in limiting the power of government and

maintaining property rights.
The manager, by contrast, is an “organization man” mainly

interested in expanding the size of his operations by, for example,
absorbing or driving out competitors. He is far less opposed to
governmental regulation and less devoted to the maintenance of
property rights because his own wealth comes not from private
property but from the high salaries that his specialized skills
command. He likes centralization, uniformity, and homogenization:
Mass production requires not only homogeneous goods and

services but also homogeneous consumers, who cannot
vary in their tastes, values, and patterns of consumption,
and who must consume if the planning of the corporations
is to be effective. The moral formula of managerial
capitalism is [therefore] a justification of mass, the
legitimization of immediate gratification of appetites and
desires, and the rejection of frugality, thrift, and the
postponement of gratification. Mass advertising serves to
articulate an ethic of hedonism, and modern credit devices
and the manipulation of aggregate demand serve to
encourage patterns of hedonistic behavior in the mass
population.
Managerialism in the state
The managerial revolution in the economy was accompanied by the

progressive movement in politics, which was in many ways an
analogous phenomenon driven by massive population growth.
Slums, illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, disease, crime,

and the general insecurity and brutality of the developing
mass society threatened to dissolve the social fabric and
contribute to the radicalization of the masses. The willing
encouragement of the growth of government was partly due

to the new ideologies associated with mass society and to
humanitarian concerns but also to sheer pragmatic
realization that the state was the most obvious instrument
for coping with what appeared to be otherwise
irreconcilable and destructive challenges.
The First World War furthered the cause of the managerial state,
especially in Europe:
Warfare itself became a mass phenomenon, requiring mass

armies equipped with mass produced weaponry, uniforms,
housing, provisions, and services. War required
revolutionary expansion in the scale of state financing and
taxation, the number of civilian and military personnel and
offices, the technical sophistication of state personnel, and
the complexity and scope of the administrative functions of
the state.
Broadly speaking, local government and the legislative branch were

the bastions of the older bourgeois forces, while managerial forces
looked to the central government and the executive branch:
The vehicle for the managerial centralization of power and

the reduction of the legislative assemblies is managerial
Caesarism, the reliance on a single leader allied with the
mass population against the intermediary institutions and
structures of the bourgeois order.
In America, bourgeois forces remained strong enough even after

the First World War to give us the Republican administrations of the
1920s, but Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal marked the definitive
triumph of the managerial state. Since then, rule by unelected
administrators has largely replaced the rule of law. “The difference
between law and administrative procedure,” writes Francis, “is that
the former is formulated for general purposes and the latter to

implement specific policies.”
The variability of administrative procedures is one reason

why bureaucratic administration and the rules it formulates
are so many, so complicated, and often so contradictory.
Each procedure is applied to specific situations rather than
to general relationships, and specific situations are
necessarily variable. The variability of procedure also
enables the managerial elite to disregard legal principles
inconvenient to its interests and to rely on “social needs”
(which happen to correspond to the interests of the elite).
Furthermore, because law deals with general relationships,

it recognizes that some specific situations are beyond the
remedy of law. Administrative procedures recognize no such
limit. Every problem, complaint, and situation is believed to
lie within the competence of the expert to solve through the
application of technical expertise. Thus, crime, war,
ignorance, poverty, disease, slums, etc., become
“problems” to be “solved” by management.
Managerialism in culture and communications
The late 19th and early 20th centuries also witnessed a revolution
in the Western world’s institutions of culture and communication,
including the news media, the entertainment industry, advertising,
education, publishing, and even organized religion, and Francis
considered this the most important aspect of the managerial
revolution. On this point he was following the Marxist theoretician
Antonio Gramsci, who taught that cultural hegemony was an
essential precondition for political hegemony.
In communications as in government and business, the tendency of

managerialism is toward expansion, centralization, and
homogenization:
The very nature of mass media involves a uniformity of

content and style in the communications disseminated
through them, and in order to receive the uniform contents
of mass communications, their audiences must be uniform
in the values, tastes, manners, body of knowledge, and
aspirations it harbors. Thus, the mass media must break
down the social, economic, moral, intellectual, and
emotional distinctions that diversify the bourgeois order
and promote the homogenization of society to create a
uniform mass audience susceptible to the discipline of mass
communications.
The power of the communication elite is well expressed in a

passage Francis quotes from sociologist Dennis Wrong:
The owners or controllers of printing presses, radio and

television transmitters possess enormous persuasive
advantages over the individual citizen. He cannot argue
back, but can only switch off the TV or radio, or refuse to
buy a particular newspaper, and under conditions of modern
urban life he cannot avoid completely becoming a member
of a “captive audience” exposed to the mass persuasion of
those who control the ubiquitous communications media.
This “power of the megaphone,” as columnist Steve Sailer has

called it, has been attenuated somewhat since the time Francis was
writing because of the internet. Ritual denunciations of internet
“hate” in the older media express elite awareness of the threat that
this new, more democratic form of communication poses to their
power.
Managerialists have hit upon education as the great means of

redesigning society in accordance with their interests:
Managerial elements, through control or establishment of

the institutions of elementary education, child
development, family planning, and social work, are able to
challenge the processes of bourgeois socialization. The
educational bureaucracy seeks, often deliberately and
boastfully, to usurp the functions of the bourgeois family
and to instruct the juvenile bourgeois in the anti-bourgeois
ideologies, values, and styles of the managerial regime.
In higher education, the managerial revolution arrived only after the

Second World War, with the GI Bill and the rapid growth of colleges
and universities:
The dependence of mass universities upon large student

bodies and the increasing financial and physical assets to
accommodate them contributed to the gradual
abandonment of bourgeois codes of conduct and
deportment, the erosion of traditional intellectual
disciplines, the adulteration of academic requirements, the
guaranteeing of academic success, and the multiplication of
academic disciplines, faculty, students, and functions.
In place of the older curriculum came “an emphasis on new

disciplines in the physical and social sciences, professional studies,
and programs in technical and applied subjects.” These served to
transmit managerial and technical skills to the rising generation of
the managerial elite. In addition, educational institutions serve to
disseminate to the rising generation as a whole an ideology that
defends and justifies managerial rule. This ideology is cosmopolitan
liberalism:
The underlying myth or idea of the managerial orthodoxy is

that human potential is most nearly fulfilled in collective or
mass activities that reflect the transcendence of or
emancipation from traditional, particularistic, and
separative identities, loyalties, and individualist selfishness

through cosmopolitan interaction, liberation from obsolete
and restrictive morality through a hedonistic and
eudaemonian ethic, and the amelioration of society, man,
and the world through the meliorist or utopian engineering
of social, economic, and political arrangements by the
manipulative application of managerial skills.
Political consequences
It is clear from Francis’s analysis that the conservative movement–

with its call for limited government, the rule of law, and personal
responsibility–is the ideological rearguard action of a bourgeois
social order which now belongs irrevocably to the past. Francis
would not dispute that the bourgeois ideal of delayed gratification,
for example, is more likely to bring out the best in human beings
than credit-fueled consumerist self-indulgence. What he would
dispute is that such a bourgeois ethic could ever regain hegemonic
status in a mass society, no matter how good a case its supporters
make in its favor. Nor could any conservative political victory hope
to restore the dominance of bourgeois values in a society now
irreversibly managerial in structure.
This is not, however, a council of despair. Although the old

bourgeoisie will not rise again, the managers have no more hope of
perpetuating their rule eternally than did the bourgeois or
aristocratic elites who preceded them. Elites will continue to
circulate. The task for opponents of cosmopolitan liberalism is to
learn to think sociologically, to seek out not merely superior ideas
or candidates for office, but rising social forces which might
challenge managerial hegemony.
At least at the time he was writing this book, Francis believed he

had discovered such a force in the Middle American Radicals
studied by sociologist Donald Warren in his book The Radical Centre
(1976). Many of these Americans supported George Wallace in the

1960s and 70s, and as “Reagan Democrats” went on to form an
essential component of Ronald Reagan’s winning coalition in the
1980s.
The Middle American Radicals are overwhelmingly white, but

otherwise very unlike the bourgeois WASP elite of the 19th century.
Many are Catholics who trace their ancestry to Southern or Eastern
Europe. They are alienated by the “squeeze play” of managerial
Caesarism, which unites the elites and the lower classes in
opposition to their interests.
It is impossible to win their support with calls for cutting social

services in the name of limited government, because middle
Americans are themselves dependent on such programs. They are
not the financially independent bourgeoisie of an early age, but a
product of the creeping proletarianization brought about by the
managerial revolution. For this reason, Francis describes them as a
“Post-Bourgeois Resistance.” The political formula that can win
them over is not free market libertarianism, but right-wing
populism.
As Francis’s literary executor Jerry Woodruff notes in his

introduction to Leviathan and Its Enemies, however, references to
Middle American Radicals became less frequent in Francis’s
writings in the years around 2000. Would the rise of Donald Trump
have encouraged him to go back and take a second look? Or will we
have to find another vehicle for challenging the managers?
There will certainly be other challenges. The revolution of mass and

scale is placing unprecedented strain on a species that evolved in
small groups and is stuck with a finite capacity for extending the
attachments nourished in such groups. Middle American Radicals
are not the only ones who feel alienated by mass society. Even left-
wing anti-globalists seem inspired by many of the same concerns,

though their preferred remedies might make things worse.
And the managers themselves are increasingly running up against

obstacles to the further extension of their techniques and
disciplines. Notably, today’s international elite has set itself the task
of integrating even Islam into its system of managerial control and
cosmopolitan liberal thinking. Islamic radicals, however, are doing
an excellent job of teaching all but the willfully blind that there are
still groups that refuse to be absorbed into managerial
cosmopolitanism.
If the indifference to facts and psychotic hatreds of Black Lives

Matter are any indication, race is also proving to be beyond the
capacity of managerial techniques to discipline and contain. And
race is no mere “bourgeois” particularism, but an inescapable fact
of nature. Later in life, Francis increasingly turned to race both as a
natural source of identity and as an obstacle to the homogenizing
tendencies of managerialism. Although there is almost no explicit
discussion of race in Leviathan and Its Enemies, it is clear that the
doctrine of “racial equality” is of one piece with the other
homogenizing tendencies of managerialism. By supporting the work
of American Renaissance, Samuel Francis knew he was striking at
one of the main ideological props of the monstrous Leviathan that
rules over us.
7/14/2021 Christianity and Sociobiology – The Occidental Observer :: Reader View
Christianity and Sociobiology – The

Occidental Observer
Tom Sunic, Ph.D.
4-5 minutes
Human Sin or Social Sin: Evolutionary Psychology, Plato and the

Christian Logic of Sociology
Paul Dachslager
Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2016
The title of a book often best indicates the author’s approach to his
subject matter. For that matter, the somewhat lengthy subtitle of
Paul Dachslager’s book could be replaced by a more explicit
inscription of his, such as “On the White Man’s Mimicry of the
Other,” or “The Inversion of the Truth,” or “The Power of Changing
Paradigms.” The author’s main thesis is that with dominant political

ideas always subject to change, the reader’s conceptual tools are
also bound to undergo change. What many evolutionary
psychologists in their research on race took for granted fifty or sixty
years ago must, as a result of the pressure of new political myths,
be now either discarded, or short of that, wrapped up in a more
hermetic language designed for the eyes and ears of the initiated
only. With the pervasive secular religion of political correctness
reigning now supreme in US academia and the mainstream media,
even the strongest empirical evidence on the disparities of IQs
among races, the role of hereditary genius, and genetic influences
on criminality must be carefully reworded in a more arcane
language.
As Paul Dachslager correctly observes at the outset of his book, in

our hyper-moralistic and hyper-altruistic world, scholarly incursions
into the role of biological influences in explaining human behavior
are met with social opprobrium and are often dubbed with a
derogatory label of “scientism.” Once upon a time Whites had to
expunge their bodily sins by abiding with the carnality-hating
canons of the Church; today Whites have to expunge their social
sins by demolishing traditional racial thinking. “As the body was
once stigmatized or banned, today the social body [i.e., race, class,
and gender] should be banned.” In both cases we can observe the
state of self-denial of penitent Whites, reflecting itself on the one
hand in the excessive display of false piety towards the Other, and
in a subconscious search for the retrieval of their lost racial and
ethical grandeur, on the other.
This can best be seen in contemporary Whites’ self-inflicted

mimicry of African American social comportment, which by
definition demands self-abasement for Whites. This is a classic
example of an inverted form of racism, which always provides a
good conscience. The politics of guilt, or the politics of mimicked
atonement, or the politics of false penitence, or, better yet,
collective self-hate, have become by now a standard ritual of
academics and politicians in the European Union and United States.
The merit of the author is that with his interdisciplinary approach
his analyses touch on a wide range of fields, thus making his book
an easy read for students in different areas of the social sciences.

Of special interest is the author’s description of the link between
Christianity and the genealogy of White penitence, a factor often
neglected by many sociobiologists, who all too often focus on
statistical measurements of cognitive skills of different races while
neglecting the power of sentiments, the importance of political
myths, and the role of religious beliefs that shape the behavior of
different races and peoples. Such a reductionist approach is less
pronounced in Europe than in the United States, a country where
the powerful heritage of the biblical narrative, with its contemporary
legal modalities, often leads to grotesque hyper-moralism among
American decision makers and pathological proclivity to self-hate
among ordinary Whites.
The book is composed of seventeen chapters with clear-cut

themes, although each chapter, with its own central thesis and
impressive bibliography, could be read as a separate essay. The
author must be commended for his analytical approach to the
subject matter, although, toward the end of the book one notices a
didactic tone of his prose, which may be therapeutic to many self-
hating Whites.

Occidental Quarterly 16.4 (Winter 2016-17)

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7/2/2021 Fish Species Are Not the Only Ones Under Threat :: Reader View

Fish Species Are Not the Only Ones

The Occidental Quarterly vol. 16, no. 4, Winter

Excerpts from Part III

Racial Ecologism (Dec. 2019)

POPULATION AND MIGRATION

In many circles today the limits to growth argument of ecologists is

In 2011 world population passed the seven billion mark. In 1927

Although the rate of population growth is slowing, in sixty years the

Of course, the growth in population is very uneven among the races.

Another argument used to dismiss environmental concerns about

All three arguments used to deny the population problem – slowing

We can take no comfort from the fact the rate of population

The belief that races and cultures are essentially interchangeable,

– e.g., by the tendencies of African-derived peoples in a wide range

The idea that non-Western peoples tread lightly on the environment

Unfortunately, in recent decades Belgium has permitted large

Belgium is able to comfortably support a population density that in

needed in foreign and domestic commerce. Haiti is severely

Haiti is just one example of non-White overpopulation. It has been

Every contentious contemporary issue has a racial component, and

For decades the Sierra Club’s position on population had been

By 2013, under the present executive director Michael Brune, the

So over the last several decades the Sierra Club’s position on

Today those who support rational policies on population and

For more on the corruption of the environmentalist movement see

In most cases it is still possible for professional wildlife managers

Hybridization can occur in the wild when new species or subspecies

Izaak Walton (1594-1683) wrote: “The trout is a fish highly valued

Unfortunately, this aristocrat is now threatened by miscegenation.

Aquatic biologist John Epifanio is also interested in protecting

together, the best hope for saving brookies... is to identify those

To tie the political and cultural to the ecological, we can

Both environmentalism and racialism have a collectivist

The commons can also be understood as what eighteenth-century

The three essays concluding here have been an attempt to

In a 2014 essay Greg Johnson identified four ecological ideas

First, all species and subspecies require a specific habitat, a

Second, when non-native species are introduced to a new

Third, in the case of trout and bison, when non-native species or

Fourth, predation in the human context includes crime and perhaps

Finally, psychological factors, which Johnson’s essay does not

Most Whites seem unaware of the hostile forces working to destroy

1 Nelson Rosit, ‘Racial Ecology, Part I: Early Environmentalists,

20 Quote and population figures from Cody Crane, ‘Crowded

21 Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail? A Radical Approach to the

22 J. Philippe Rushton and Glayde Whitney, ‘Cross-National

23 Crane, ‘Crowded Planet,’ 13.

24 Haiti has an area of 27,750 square kilometers, a population of

27 Brentin Mock, ‘How the Sierra Club Learned to Love

28 Felicity Barringer, ‘Bitter Divisions for Sierra Club on

29 Michael Brune, ‘A Path to the Future,’ Coming Clean: The Blog of

30 Brenda Walker, ‘The Sierra Club’s Profitable Descent into

31 Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton, The Compleat Angler, or the

32 Robert Beverley, The East Tennessee Almanac (Franklin, NC:

37 Greenback Trout Recovery Plan (Denver, CO: US Fish and Wildlife

52 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons,’ Science 162, no.

53 Greg Johnson, ‘White Extinction,’ Counter-Currents (February

54 Betsy McKay, ‘Life Expectancy for White Americans Declines,’

55 Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America,

Why Have We Unlearned What We Knew

Some years ago evolutionary psychologist J. Philippe Rushton

Why have modern historians ‘unlearned’ so much that was

Origin of Species maintained that evolution toward higher forms of