Immigration, nationalism, and our fellow travelers.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on April 23, 2005, 02:35 PM | #

“I consider myself as belonging to the ‘Far Right’ [...]”  (—from the log entry)

I consider myself normal, not “conservative,” “far-rightist,” or anything else.  It’s not normal to want your race to undergo genocide whether the means of the genocide be gas chambers or race-replacement immigration, it’s not normal to think two men can get married to each other, it’s not normal to see no inborn difference between the thinking, behavior, aptitudes, and likes and dislikes of men and women, it’s not normal to think there are no such things as races or to insist that all races are exactly the same, it’s not normal to deny the high non-white crime rate or to try to force whites to live in proximity to, or under the control of, races that harm them through crime, it’s not normal to favor the killing of healthy term or near-term babies about to get born by pulling them part-way out of their mother, punching a hole through their skulls as they struggle with flailing arms and legs, sticking a vacuum cleaner through the hole you’ve punched in their skulls and vacuuming their brains out into a plastic bag as they stop struggling, then pulling the limp corpses the rest of the way out and throwing them in the garbage, telling the mother all went well and she’s now OK, and sending her home as if nothing had happened, it’s not normal to claim that teaching schoolchildren there’s a right and wrong answer to arithmetic problems is a racist thing to do, and so on.  I don’t see why I need to call myself by some special name to find the above not normal.  Can a person who’s just normal—who’s neither to the right nor to the left—oppose this stuff?  If a political party came along that promoted behavior like Jeffrey Dahmer’s and decreed that all who opposed them had to be called “far rightist” I’d refuse to go along with that, but would continue to call myself simply normal:  if all you are is normal you will oppose Jeffrey Dahmer and the left-wing, both.  You needn’t be anything in particular to oppose them both. 

“science teaches us that there is no purpose in the universe”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but science doesn’t teach anything about ultimate purposes or claim to teach any such thing.  If people take science to unintentionally imply there’s no purpose in the universe, that inference is goundless.

“Now, after a long and behind-closed-doors debate, [the neocon honchos] are starting to relax that particular dogma. Legal or illegal immigrants, if they come here from the Middle East, could be a destabilizing force in the war on terror.”

Good point:  this probably does explain why Hannity and Limbaugh have begun making noises about immigration recently—especially Hannity, who talks about it every day now, and recently interviewed J.D. Hayward and Tom Tancredo.  Notice that if this thesis is true, these guys won’t criticize race-replacement itself—which seems perfectly OK to them— but only the Moslem contribution to it. 

”[...] We could have begun our war on terrorism by starting with closing our borders, [...]”

Exactly right, which proves Bush hasn’t been motivated entirely by fending off terrorism.  A big part of his motivation seems to be to change the race of the U.S. from white to non-white.  Of course, this goal is also highly desired by Country-Club Republicans and Wall Streeters in general, by a huge portion of the Christian and Jewish establishments, and by most women voters.

“Neoconservatives embrace an elitist led imperialist nationalism, whereas Salter’s universal nationalism embraces a non-belligerent race-based nationalism. The differences are radical because they are the difference between an ideology that is for the people versus one that is for the elite; an elite that is international, despotic, nepotistic, and alien to any people who finds fraternity in genetic interests.”

I haven’t read Salter’s book but if the above characterizations of it are accurate, that closing paragraph of the log entry sounds like an exceedingly good statement of part of what’s been going on in the world.

Posted by GayLikeAFox on April 23, 2005, 03:45 PM | #

Any theories as to WHY Bush is so bent on Mexicanizing our nation?  I always suspected that it was a result of his own megalomania:  He wants to remake the nation in the image of his own bi-racial family.  The idea that he just wants what is good for the elite in this country doesn’t seem to explain his completely irrational obsession with the issue, which suggests to me that there must be some sort of deep-rooted psychological complex at its source.

Posted by Stuka on April 23, 2005, 04:05 PM | #

A big part of his motivation seems to be to change the race of the U.S. from white to non-white.  Of course, this goal is also highly desired by Country-Club Republicans and Wall Streeters in general, by a huge portion of the Christian and Jewish establishments, and by most women voters.

I agree that the race-replacement agenda is real. But, what do white country club Republicans and white Wall Street professionals get out of replacing whites with non-whites? Is there a specific motivation at work? Or, do these people just not think about race that much? Or, have they been taught that the races are interchangeable?

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 23, 2005, 04:29 PM | #

what do white country club Republicans and white Wall Street professionals get out of replacing whites with non-whites?

Delusion. Also, a combination of material comfort, decadent moralism and self-interest.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 23, 2005, 04:36 PM | #

Not many among us realise how far back the rot actually goes. Can someone guess who said the following:

Minorities are rich assets of a democracy . . . minorities are the constant spring of new ideas, stimulating new thought and action, the constant source of vigour. Our way of living together in America is a strong but delicate fabric. It is made up of many threads . . . It serves as a cloak for the protection of poor and rich, of black and white, of Jew and gentile, of foreign- and native-born. Let us not tear it asunder..

Guesses anyone?

Posted by Mark Richardson on April 23, 2005, 06:22 PM | #

Phil, I won’t spoil the quiz as I cheated and googled for the answer.

What’s just as interesting as the date of the statement is the fact that the writer was embraced by both the left and the right of American politics.

Interesting too that the same man once wrote that “American liberty is a religion.” This is the most direct and open statement I’ve come across of the liberal tendency to follow their first principles like a substitute religion.

Posted by Kubilai on April 23, 2005, 06:34 PM | #

Phil,

My guess is:

Dumbahss, A. Real

Am I correct? 

Posted by Mark Richardson on April 23, 2005, 06:44 PM | #

The motivation for race replacers? The problem, I think, is that they’ve been brought up in a political tradition which says the important thing is that we be unimpeded in our wills to do what we want and to be what we want. For Republican right-liberals, this means in particular being able to pursue our economic activities without impediment.

There’s nothing in this tradition which would recognise the value of race. It begins by being race-blind, and logically this tradition makes it immoral to limit someone by discriminating against them on the basis of race.

Why, for instance, in this tradition should an employer be stopped from hiring cheap Mexican labour? And why should a Mexican be stopped from offering his labour? Why not, in Bush’s own words, allow the two to follow their economic choices and match up?

The fact that there are apparent economic benefits for individual employers in doing this no doubt further encourages the adoption of this view.

What we need is an alternative political tradition which says that there is a positive good to unchosen forms of human relatedness or connectedness, like family and race, and it’s only within this social context that an individual sense of freedom can truly be realised.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 23, 2005, 06:52 PM | #

The politician who said that was Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie in 1943.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 23, 2005, 06:55 PM | #

Kubilai,

As you will begin to see, the bromides that now constitute the state religion of the United States (whatever happened to the separation of Church and state?:)) were uttered numerous times by Northern WASPs as far back as sixty yeas ago when racial consciousness was live and well.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 23, 2005, 06:59 PM | #

Another Wilkie quote:

Our nation is composed of no one race, faith, or cultural heritage. It is a grouping of some thirty peoples possessing varying religious concepts, philosophies, and historical backgrounds. They are linked together by their confidence in our democratic institutions as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the Constitution for themselves and their children. The keystone of our union of states is freedom.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 23, 2005, 07:04 PM | #

This book makes for interesting reading. Quotes from the book:

“As early as 1943, Republican Presidential nominee Wendell Willkie penned a best-seller entitled One World, which bore the impress of cosmopolitan-humanist ideas of both Liberal-Progressive and ecumenical Protestant origin. His conclusions echo those of the post-World War I generation of Protestant elites: “We must come to a better understanding of what is happening in the East . . . of their loss of faith in Western imperialism and in the superiority of the white man,” Willkie wrote (Willkie 1943: 89). He also shone the light on humanitarian reform on the United States itself, criticizing its failure to live up to its ethical standards while celebrating its new, streamlined identity based solely on the common denominator of liberalism…..

Although the liberal and religious egalitarianism of ecumenical Protestantism and Liberal Progressivism appears to have been the clearest influence on Willkie, elements of modernist thought, reminiscent of Bourne or Kallen were also apparent.”

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 23, 2005, 07:08 PM | #

Not surprised Wilke said that. He was a man with a serious drinking problem, and a man under FDR’s thumb.

A good book about FDR, Wilkie, and American war effort is

A New Dealer’s War

, by Thomas Fleming

Posted by Guessedworker on April 24, 2005, 04:51 AM | #

Phil,

From the blurb to Kaufmann’s book:-

from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey.

I guess “Kleanands” Kaufmann belongs to one of those “subaltern groups.”  But, that aside, his history may be more accurate than, say, Disraeli’s.  Of course, it is not transformative in intent as was Coningsby, either.

There is one common thread in both late 19th/early 20th century America and pre-1832 England, and that is the emergence of a bustling class of, essentially, outsiders.  In America, these were literally outsiders - the non-British immigrants crowding American cities.  In England it was the arising of an educated urban working class.  The immigrants demanded cultural and political recognition.  The English working class demanded the franchise.

Kaufmann argues that this demand was answered within Anglo-Saxon Protestant America by the “liberal and religious egalitarianism of ecumenical Protestantism and Liberal Progressivism”.  In England, the demand for extention of the franchise was answered by the Whigs (and assisted by a great and untimely series of Tory misjudgements, misfortunes, duplicities and accidents).

In both cases the seeds of destruction were planted in fertile soil within the establishment under attack.  One can already make out the mindset of Anglo-Saxons, be they Americans or British, who prefer what you call decadent morality to particularism.  The tide of history favoured the wrong side in both cases.  We are facing the consequences of that.  We are like Houdini, chained inside his tank of water.  How the hell do we wriggle out of this!!

Posted by Guessedworker on April 24, 2005, 06:39 AM | #

Nobody up and about to offer a response to that on a Sunday morning, so I’ll hazzard an admittedly rather conventional answer to my own question.

In both America and Britain the reform process has evolved into what we call advanced liberalism (the active element in which, actually, is cultural marxism).  The ubermensch has evolved into the eponymous white heterosexual male and the untermensch into the usual minorities.  So essentially, the old divisions are gone.  A commonality of interest exists, even if it is not currently articulated in the mainstream and, therefore, understood by all those whom it might benefit.

This is a formative hour, therefore.  The formation of a political concensus for change must be the objective.  Now there are two methods in which this can come about.  One is fast ... revolutionary, in fact.  The energy for that is stored up by a long period of declension with manifold opportunities for all to observe the dystopian delights which emerge.  Weimar Germany is an example.  But we are approaching our own Weimar, the resolution to which is deeply uncertain and a cause for pause for all those who advocate pure WN - because almost certainly WN cannot effect a stable resolution by popular consent.

The other means to formulate a political consensus is the top-down method.  One academic or one brave politician can do far more than a thousand ... ten thousand BNP activists.  Think of MacDonald, Rushton, Lynn and, now, Salter.  Think of Enoch Powell, Tom Tancredo, “the three tenors” of Vlaams Belang, Fortuyn ... even the brazenly populist Geert Wilders in post-Theo Holland.

Ultimately, though, we need these people to enunciate a new political vision which is non-liberal and which answers to the instincts and loyalties of white Europe and America.  Note, I do not say we need a new political party.  It is much broader than that, indeed that’s the one thing we should avoid.  I happen to think that a new non-liberal vision will look much like an old one that garlanded the lives of Englishmen before reform.  But that will do for now.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 09:41 AM | #

Guessedworker,

You have nailed the issue to a great extent. This is perhaps one way for me to put it when I say that my opinions on the Jewish Question are complicated. And this is a perfect example of why the atypical WN response of pinning all blame on Jews doesn’t wash in my opinion. There is guilt on both sides and on the Anglo-Saxon side it is rather heavy.

I have said many times on this blog that there needs to be a political alternative to Liberalism. I have no doubt that Liberalism is on its last legs. Its inherent contradictions are bound to destroy it.

The crucial thing for us is to ensure that it doesn’t end up taking us with it. It most certainly will if we keep clinging to it as though it were dear life.

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 10:20 AM | #

Phil:

I just looked at the book you linked to, very interesting. As a remnant of the WASP group (though with German and Irish blood) I am angry over what has happened to America.

But I’m more worried about the cultural anarchy building in the US. I look soberly at the future it seems frightening to me.

BTW: The German and Irish parts of my family arrived in the USA before the American Revolution. Not that it matters now.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 10:31 AM | #

Geoff,

This is the other story that needs to be told. No analysis of whats gone wrong is complete without it. Kevin MacDonald gives us one aspect of the decline. But as even he would agree (I think), the explanation is not complete.

As you will recall, I did a post on Sweden and noted some of the worst progressive tendencies there. Actually its the best example of the progressive disease anyone can come up with today. And the common factor with Sweden is also the same ecumenical Protestantism that Kaufmann identifies in the US among Northern WASPs.

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 10:47 AM | #

Phil,

Yes. As you know I give great credence to the work of Kevin MacDonald.

But the collapse of Protestantism is also deserving of attention. This evangelical non-sense is last and terminal stage of Protestantism, imho.

Paul Gottfried has written about the collapse:

America’s National Question Problem: Decaying Protestantism…America’s National Question:

http://www.vdare.com/gottfried/decay_Protestantism.htm

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 10:49 AM | #

Phil,

Would you agree that the UK is ‘post collapse’ Protestant society?

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 10:50 AM | #

The German and Irish parts of my family arrived in the USA before the American Revolution. Not that it matters now.

Purely academic question: were the Irish parts of your family Catholic (I mean the ones that arrived before the Revolution)?

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 10:51 AM | #

Would you agree that the UK is ‘post collapse’ Protestant society?

Yup.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 10:52 AM | #

Gottfried’s analysis is excellent. Kaufmann’s book augments it superbly.

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 11:06 AM | #

> Catholic

No. They were Scots-Irish actually. So, they were Protestant. I spent a good deal of time researching my family past.

I was aided by a second cousin that has become ‘mormanized’. She did a lot of research too.

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 11:11 AM | #

Folks,

If anyone hasn’t read

The Culture of Critique

, by Kevin MacDonald I recommend it.

I’m sure others would say the same. I know this sounds overblown, but I consider it one of the best books written in the century.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 11:34 AM | #

I know this sounds overblown, but I consider it one of the best books written in the century.

It is certainly one of the best researched that I have ever encountered.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 11:38 AM | #

They were Scots-Irish actually.

The Scots-Irish element has always been a bit of a mystery to me to be honest. I have been under the impression that the Scots-Irish were actually from the border districts of northern England. Neither Scottish nor Irish so to speak:

Finally, the bellicose folks from the violent Scottish-English border region - and especially their descendents who had settled Ulster - came to the Appalachian backcountry from 1718 to 1775. Their descendents spread west across the upper South. The prototype: the ferocious Andy Jackson. They’re typically called “Scots-Irish,” although Fischer doesn’t like the term because it makes them sound as if they spoke Celtic languages, when they actually spoke English and were culturally quite different from Scottish Highlanders or Irish Catholics.

Posted by Guessedworker on April 24, 2005, 12:09 PM | #

What we need is an alternative political tradition which says that there is a positive good to unchosen forms of human relatedness or connectedness, like family and race, and it’s only within this social context that an individual sense of freedom can truly be realised.

Mark Richardson

Yes, freedom can only arise within the context of stability, personal and social.  Indeed, the pursuit of the chimera of liberal freedom IS the destruction of stability, and nothing more.  The alternative political tradition for which Mark yearns, therefore, should aim to rebuild stability and real freedoms that flow therefrom.

Also, whilst the problem of pondering freedom we should not lose sight of the fact that liberalism is a three-legged animal.  The other two legs are equality and democracy, and both must be addressed to the same end of rebuilding stable stable individuals and a stable society, out of which lasting freedoms may flow.

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 12:11 PM | #

Yes. This group immigrated from Ireland, yet originated in the border lands of England (Low Scots ?).

BTW, I’ve visited Andrew Jackson’s home, just outside of Nashville. A good tour, a bit *costly - $12, and a bit PC sanitized. Jackson was a violent man. I believe had engaged in six pistol duels, killing 3 men, I believe one of those men he shot in the forehead.

* With our debased currency it ought to be a good deal for you fellas overseas.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 01:17 PM | #

a bit *costly - $12

The price of an apple in London.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 01:24 PM | #

I can think of only one reason. Most the above conservative pundits are aligned with the neoconservatives who have made open immigration a doctrinaire position for anyone to be considered a member of the party. That is, if you were going to claim membership in the club, open immigration was not to be questioned. Now, after a long and behind-closed-doors debate, they are starting to relax that particular dogma. Legal or illegal immigrants, if they come here from the Middle East, could be a destabilizing force in the war on terror. If they actually engaged in acts of terror on our own soil, after we stated we would stop them in Iraq, it would bring down the whole charade of why we really went to war. We could have begun our war on terrorism by starting with closing our borders, leaving Saddam Hussein to eventually self-destruct. But open immigration was such a hardened position embraced by conservatives and liberals alike, that it could only be turned around once the high priests started questioning its doctrinal validity.

Right on the money.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 01:29 PM | #

Jackson was a violent man. I believe had engaged in six pistol duels, killing 3 men, I believe one of those men he shot in the forehead.

Men of Jackson’s generation had a certain conception of honour that people would find incomprehensible in our time.

That conception of honour was very aristocratic and though Jackson wasn’t from a family of aristocrats, he acquired those traits from men who were of a quasi-aristocracy in the old colonial South. 

I know that one of the men Jackson shot had cast aspersions on his wife’s character. In those days, that was enough to send men to duel in the open. Today, they simply say “He’s not a nice person”. (chuckle)

Posted by Geoff Beck on April 24, 2005, 01:44 PM | #

> honour

Yes. The decline of chivalry and codes of honour and its replacement by ideology is a cause of great decline in Western civilization.

A good book on this subject is

The Bullet’s Song : Romantic Violence and Utopia

, by William Pfaff

Two people he examines are T.E. Laurence and Ernst Junger. Fascinating.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 01:53 PM | #

Geoff,

The death of chivalry traces itself to three things:

(1) the egalitarianism of democracy which looks askance at the inequalities of Aristocracy (the Northern hatred of slavery in the South was a very democratic prejudice);

(2) the rise of the political power of women. What place do codes of honour and chivalry have in a society where a woman can sleep with 10 different men in a month and still be considered normal? Chivalry existed in a time when women had a certain character. Men had to rise to a certain level for women to become attainable. Today, kids have sex at the age of 14 in schools. Girls consider it a matter of shame to have not slept with somebody by the time they finish high school. Its a different world; and

(3) the influence of Negro music and Negro tastes. I cannot imagine anything more opposed to modern tastes than a conception of honour and chivalry which was a real western tradition - rooted among a great people and refined over centuries.

Posted by DissidentMan on April 24, 2005, 02:02 PM | #

I know that one of the men Jackson shot had cast aspersions on his wife’s character. In those days, that was enough to send men to duel in the open. Today, they simply say “He’s not a nice person”. (chuckle)

How do we know that some of the men Jackson shot hadn’t simply spoken their minds saying only what they believed to be true? I have no idea what really happened but shooting people out of a sense of honour doesn’t necessarily make it right. Genghis Kahn shot his half brother (with a bow) for stealing a fish from him. He may have been the world’s firmest believer in honour killing, but he didn’t exactly further the cause of civilisation, (but i should point out that the the forces of PC are now trying to repackage him as a good guy.)

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 24, 2005, 02:28 PM | #

How do we know that some of the men Jackson shot hadn’t simply spoken their minds saying only what they believed to be true?

We don’t.

What we do know is that they were willing to duel to defend what they said. Not doing so would have cast aspersions on their courage and honour. Those men would sooner die than lose their honour.

Posted by DissidentMan on April 24, 2005, 06:14 PM | #

Phil,
With the risk of offending your honour, let me suggest that these men were immoral if they put personal honour ahead of truth, which, btw has been a hallmark of tyrants down through the ages. “Always avenge an insult” can just mean kill whoever says something bad about you (or your wife). I thought those who write (and comment) on this blog thought that Stalin and Genghis were bad, no?

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 02:20 AM | #

let me suggest that these men were immoral if they put personal honour ahead of truth

Thats a liberal democratic perspective. We live in very democratic times.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 02:22 AM | #

Stalin was a democratic tyrant - the product of a democratic movement. Genghis Khan was a barbarian. In both cases you will note that they had men killed. They didn’t face them in duels where there would be a risk of them getting killed. In one of the duels Jackson was involved in, he was actually shot in the chest but sufficiently away from his heart to allow him to survive.

I cant see much commonality between Stalin (and Genghis Khan) and a European aristocracy with its refined codes of behaviour. That said, it is an academic argument now because Aristocracy is dead. It belongs to the past.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 03:35 AM | #

“Always avenge an insult” can just mean kill whoever says something bad about you (or your wife)

In order to prevent too many duels from taking place, the law was refined to include within the tort of “libel”, character assasination. In the early years, the tort of “libel” was used most often to adjudicate disputes such as the one we are talking about. So if someone spread a false rumour about the character of a woman, her husband (or father) could sue in court and recover damages. In some cases the damages recovered were punitive (meant to punish the tort-feaser rather than simply compensate the victim of the tort).

I doubt if the tort of “libel” is used for this purpose nowadays. Being called a “racist” perhaps carries far greater opprobium in our time than have aspersions cast on someone’s character.

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 02:11 PM | #

I know that one of the men Jackson shot had cast aspersions on his wife’s character.

Well, she was married to two men at the same time….

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 03:08 PM | #

Being called a “racist” perhaps carries far greater opprobium in our time than have aspersions cast on someone’s character.

The bogus characterization of “racism” as a psychopathology places it squarely within the traditional libel-per-se category of a “loathsome and communicable disease”.

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 03:41 PM | #

As you will recall, I did a post on Sweden and noted some of the worst progressive tendencies there….  And the common factor with Sweden is also the same ecumenical Protestantism that Kaufmann identifies in the US among Northern WASPs.

It is more accurate to state that that is “a” common factor, and that factor is probably more interesting as a result than as a cause.  In “Separation and Its Discontents”, MacDonald portrays corporate catholicism as a group strategy responsive to the Jewish group strategy. 

It was also noted in the comments to your post on Sweden that, despite its tiny size, the Jewish community in Sweden exercised a control over the mass communications media similar to that exercised in the US.  I would also point out another similarity:  Swedish culture, like English culture, developed for long periods of time without a significant Jewish presence within the community.  In England, this period lasted from 1290-1656 (although it is presumed that there were always some marranos, and occasionally small groups practiced openly; a community of several dozen Jews existed in London during the reign of Henry VIII, for example); in Sweden, Jews could not immigrate without converting until 1782.  This would help to explain why religious diversity and individualism found more fertile ground in those countries and why the native populations find themselves so poorly equipped to resist the Jewish group strategy.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 05:07 PM | #

Well, she was married to two men at the same time….

That was disputed.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 05:10 PM | #

Ben,

The destructive trends in Sweden preceded the Jewish takeover of the media in Sweden.

Sweden was already in the “love the world” crowd before Jewish media influence gained a sufficient foothold.

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 05:48 PM | #

I don’t think that’s true in any meaningful sense.  The paragon of evil for the “love the world” crowd is Hitler & his political program.  Yet during the war against Nazi Germany, Sweden remained neutral. 

What you call destructive trends are better thought of as predispositions or, better yet, simple characteristics.  It is in the nature of northern & western Europeans to be susceptible to manipulation that induces maladaptive altruism.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 05:59 PM | #

Ben,

Sweden stayed Neutral not because of it loved Hitler but simply because it was the sensible thing to do. It was spared the colossal destruction that befell almost all German occupied territories (as well the colossal destruction that befell Soviet occupied territories under Nazi attack).

Gunnar Myrdal wrote “An American Dilemma” in 1944 - even before the war ended. Mydal’s writings had a good following and after the war, he became something of an intellectual icon. Many other Swedish intellectuals followed in his footsteps.

The rot set in long before Jews ever bought a significant chunk of the Swedish media. I must say, I dont find the Jewish explanation convincing for many countries. I am convinced that it is a very strong factor in the United States. But it isn’t in many other nations that have made the same (or worse) mistakes that the US committed.

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 06:08 PM | #

Sweden stayed Neutral not because of it loved Hitler but simply because it was the sensible thing to do.

It’s sensible only for a nation that cares about self-preservation.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 06:29 PM | #

It’s sensible only for a nation that cares about self-preservation

And the Germans went along with Hitler because they hated themselves?

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 06:38 PM | #

It is in the nature of northern & western Europeans to be susceptible to manipulation that induces maladaptive altruism.

There is almost no evidence of what you call “maladaptive altruism” among Northern Europeans pre-18th century. You could cite the example of Cromwell giving refuge to Jews but that wasn’t altruism. It was based on Protestant doctrine.

The “maladaptive altruism” is a result of what Guessedworker most appropriately refers to as “Advanced Liberalism”.

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 06:39 PM | #

Gunnar Myrdal wrote “An American Dilemma” in 1944 - even before the war ended.

And Franz Boas published “The Mind of Primitive Man” in 1911. 

The rot set in long before Jews ever bought a significant chunk of the Swedish media.

Do you mean that some Swedes held silly beliefs that were doing them no harm at the time?  Or do you mean that the Swedes were actively committing suicide?  I am aware of no evidence for the latter proposition.  You will have to enlighten me.

Moreover, Myrdal’s displayed explicit concern for precisely the same thing that Salter’s book is devoted to:  ethnic evolutionary interests:

“I have never met a Negro who drew the conclusion from this that a decrease of the American Negro population would be advantageous….  [A]lmost every Negro, who is brought to think about the problem, wants the Negro population to be as large as possible.”

“An American Dilemma” at 168-69.  This is a rebuke of American whites for their handling of a situation that he as a Swede did not understand, but—acknowledging as it does the notion of racial evolutionary interest—it does not support a belief that Swedes do not have evolutionary interests or that Swedes should import Africans into their own land.  Such beliefs lay much further down the intellectual road.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 06:48 PM | #

Do you mean that some Swedes held silly beliefs that were doing them no harm at the time?

It takes time for “silly beliefs” to acquire a destructive force. Not many who followed John Dewey in the 1920s thought his suggestions were going to cause the damage they did to American education. They were, at the time, “silly beliefs” that harmed no one. But the harm did occur eventually.

With societies, to repeat Nietzsche, “ideas have consequences”. The consequences may occur later but they do eventually occur. Early Swedish liberalism laid the foundations of later advanced Swedish liberalism.

As for Myrdal, why does Myrdal advocate the interests of blacks from whom he is obviously more distant genetically than American whites (who are his close cousins in a genetic sense)? The same vain moralism that led Myrdal to moralise American whites led Sweden to later admit lots of third world immigrants - vanity, moralism, advanced liberalism. Lethal combination.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 06:50 PM | #

Actually let me also add that Myrdal advocated race mixing between southern blacks and southern whites. That, I don’t think, is consistent with “Ethnic Genetic Interests”.

Why did Americans persist in violating the creed? In the South, Myrdal discovered elaborate mechanisms of racial separation that he called the “caste system.” He notes that although caste rules govern virtually all contact between blacks and whites they serve one central function: to keep blacks from marrying or having sex with whites. In both the North and the South Myrdal found a universal revulsion among whites for miscegenation and the “amalgamation of the races” that this would bring. In virtually all the states, this revulsion was reflected in laws that forbade interracial marriage.

Myrdal scoffs at this. He even “jestingly argues” that amalgamation “might create a race of unsurpassed excellence: a people with just a little sunburn without extra trouble and even through the winter; with some curl in the hair without the cost of a permanent wave; with, perhaps, a little more emotional warmth in their souls; and a little more religion, music, laughter, and carefreeness in their lives.”

Myrdal never even accepted white opposition to amalgamation as genuine. With no data to support his view, he insisted that opposition was nothing more than a pretext for keeping blacks out of economic competition. He went on to call it “an irrational escape on the part of the whites from voicing an open demand for difference in social status between the two groups for its own sake.” Whites, he said, have a purely tyrannical desire for supremacy, but claim that they are trying to prevent miscegenation.

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 06:54 PM | #

There is almost no evidence of what you call “maladaptive altruism” among Northern Europeans pre-18th century.

That is my point.  I was careful to say that we are susceptible to *manipulation* to induce maladaptive altruism.  And the gradual progression of maladaptive altruism coincides with the growing influence of the Jewish communities within these lands that were previously free of Jews.  The great acceleration of the degeneration of our communities due to maladaptive notions then followed the advent of history’s most powerful indoctrination medium, which followed closely on the heels of history’s greatest guilt-inducing event:  The Holocaust.

You could cite the example of Cromwell giving refuge to Jews but that wasn’t altruism. It was based on Protestant doctrine.

I have not completed my study of the Readmission, but I know enough to say that your assertion is debatable.

The “maladaptive altruism” is a result of what Guessedworker most appropriately refers to as “Advanced Liberalism”.

Maladaptive altruism *is* advanced liberalism.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 25, 2005, 07:00 PM | #

Ben,

I think we’ve got a chicken or egg problem here. In your opinion, the coming of Jews precedes the causes of self-destruction in every case.

In my opinion, Jewish political activism occurs in an environment that is favourable to it (an environment created before the entry of Jews into a nation. Therefore, Jews had nothing to do with its creation).

Note that Jews lived for almost 1800 years in Europe before the enlightenment in many nations from time to time but no nations showed the self-destructive tendencies they show now. Why?

Posted by ben tillman on April 25, 2005, 07:47 PM | #

With societies, to repeat Nietzsche, “ideas have consequences”. The consequences may occur later but they do eventually occur. Early Swedish liberalism laid the foundations of later advanced Swedish liberalism.

This notion is false and, may I add, quintessentially liberal.  Ideas may have corollaries, but they do not—by themselves—have consequences.  An abstraction like “liberalism” cannot lay foundations, and it cannot build anything on itself.  Someone must put the ideas into practice; someone must “discover” how a new destructive notion “follows” from the old; someone must promote the new silliness as truth.  Simple biological principles suggest that this agent would be, or be directed by, something other than the organism being destroyed.  This is essentially the germ theory of disease applied to human social organisms. 

This is all theoretically sound, but there’s also plenty of empirical evidence supporting this conclusion.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 26, 2005, 03:07 AM | #

Ben,

Jews did not invent the enlightenment. It is after the enlightenment that Jews were emancipated by western nations. 

Almost all of the philosophers of the enlightement, from John Locke to the writers of the 19th century were European Gentiles.

How does “germ theory” explain why the enlightenment came in the 17th/18th century instead of the 12th? How does it explain why it came at all? How does it explain the survivial of European nations despite the existence of Jews in those nations for many centuries?

Posted by Guessedworker on April 26, 2005, 05:44 AM | #

ben, Phil,

The question is how or by what agencies did liberalism advance?  My answer, for which tedium I hereby apologise, is to look to liberalism’s own nature.

By degrees liberalism replaced Conservatism as the principle influence on political thinking until, from the period after the WW1, it had usurped the entirety of modern political thinking. 

A significant hardening of certainties followed upon that.  This flowed from the opening up of markedly more extreme marxist and (reactive) national socialist politics, essentially moving the debate leftward.  The pursuit of freedom in a generally liberal sense was thereby entrenched as the moderate politic.  The prior politic of Conservatism - or the promotion of stability as the pre-eminent basis for advancing economic and social interests, including individual freedom - simply receded from memory.

Now liberalism, being the pursuit of freedom in toto, is a dynamic in a sense that Conservatism can never be.  It is forward-leaning, reaching for its lodestar but never, of course, actually closing its hand around it.  It does not stay the same, since its lodestar requires the perpetual and impossible abolition of stability and, by extention, Nature in Man.

Liberalism, therefore, will advance.  It will take on new forms, many of which are proposed by Jewish thinkers mainly, no doubt, for Jewish reasons.  But it makes no difference.  It is the zeitgeist that is the problem.  There isn’t a healthy, gentile liberalism waiting in the wings to replace the dystopian Jewish one.

On other threads I have used the symbolism of a mad, driverless train not just careering out of control down the track but smashing down the sleepers and rails as it goes.  And that remains my view of liberalism.  We are prisoners on the infernal machine and it will not let us return to the sweet station of our departure, and venture out into the pleasant town to take our ease.

Posted by ben tillman on April 26, 2005, 01:40 PM | #

Jews did not invent the enlightenment.

I would suggest that you reserve judgment on that point.

Posted by ben tillman on April 26, 2005, 01:54 PM | #

It is the zeitgeist that is the problem.  There isn’t a healthy, gentile liberalism waiting in the wings to replace the dystopian Jewish one.

I agree with the latter statement.  But the first prompts me to ask:  where does the Zeitgeist come from?

Posted by ben tillman on April 26, 2005, 04:30 PM | #

How does “germ theory” explain why the enlightenment came in the 17th/18th century instead of the 12th? How does it explain why it came at all? How does it explain the survival of European nations despite the existence of Jews in those nations for many centuries?

These are good questions, of course.  In regard to the first and second questions (the third will have to wait, as this comment will grow very long as it is), it is important to understand that pathogens and their hosts evolve as other organisms do.  Human culture means that our understanding of the world and our behavioral repertoire grow and evolve over time as well, even in the absence of fully corresponding genetic change.  Our cultural environment also changes because of our own actions and the resulting “events”.  For instance, between 1290 and the mid-17th century we saw the Reformation, translation of the Bible into the vernacular and increased interest in the Old Testament, the Hebrew language, other Hebrew texts, and Jews in general. 

Two books that appear to shed light on the origins of Enlightenment thought are Jonathan I. Israel’s Radical Enlightenment:  Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2003).  Both of these authors are of Jewish ancestry, and the latter studied under the former at University College London. 

From a review of Sutcliffe’s book by Steven Nadler of the U. of Wisconsin (you can find it on Google, but it is cached so I cannot easily provide a link):

Sutcliffe begins his investigation with the Hebraism to be found in scholarly and religious milieux, especially in the Netherlands of the early seventeenth-century. It was not an unadulterated “philosemitism” — in fact, Sutcliffe explicitly declines to use the terms “philosemitism” and “antisemitism” to frame the terms of his discussion — but rather a profound interest in the texts, languages, culture and history of the ancient Hebrews, sometimes from academic motives, often as preparation for anti-Jewish polemics. The reader is introduced here to tensions that reappear later in Sutcliffe’s account, between, on the one hand, fascination for and use of res Judaica, and, on the other hand, antipathy toward and fear of Jews and Judaism. The same individuals who had a scholarly and sometimes even a religious respect for Jewish sources also believed in the obsolescence of Judaism itself.

For readers coming from philosophy and its history, the real interest of this book lies in Sutcliffe’s analysis of the role played by the Jewish material in the rise of Enlightenment rationalism. As we know from Israel’s study, the real culprit here is Spinoza, as well as the city of Amsterdam itself and the Portuguese-Jewish community that thrived in its cosmopolitan and relatively tolerant environment. Sutcliffe argues that Jewish Amsterdam was practically a breeding ground of the radical Enlightenment.

Posted by ben tillman on April 26, 2005, 04:31 PM | #

Continuation of previous post:

From another review:

At the center of Mr. Sutcliffe’s narrative is Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), the Dutch-Jewish rationalist who, because he was not a Christian to begin with, occupied a unique position in the religious-intellectual landscape of the early Enlightenment. Regarded as a heretic by Amsterdam’s rabbis for his confounding formulation that God and nature should be understood as one, he was formally expelled from the Jewish community. Uncertain what to make of his theological views, Jewish and Christian religious authorities alike decided that he was either a pantheist or an atheist—and, in either case, anathema. Widely banned, his writings went underground, where they were translated into several languages and disseminated across Europe. The dangerous doctrine that came to be known as “Spinozism” left a colossal footprint on the Enlightenment, and on modern sensibilities more broadly.

The significance of this way of thinking “as an early forerunner of quintessentially modern modes of religious doubt and rebellion has seldom been acknowledged” in the historiographical literature, Mr. Sutcliffe writes. Standard accounts of the Enlightenment have tended to locate the main action either in Paris (around the philosophes), or in Germany (around Kant and the Kantians), or in the English-Scottish matrix. This understanding received major corrective surgery in Jonathan I. Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2001), which focused a zoom lens on 17th-century Sephardic Amsterdam and the transnational influence of Spinoza’s circle. (Mr. Israel was Mr. Sutcliffe’s professor at University College London and supervised his dissertation, on which Judaism and Enlightenment is based.)

***

[S]cholars are calling Mr. Sutcliffe’s work groundbreaking.  It is “not only new but startling” says Sander L. Gilman, director of the humanities laboratory and of Jewish studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author, most recently, of Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (Palgrave Macmillan). Mr. Sutcliffe is not merely pointing out another way in which the architects of liberal modernity fell short. Rather, he is arguing that the Enlightenment is unintelligible outside the context of its preoccupation with Judaism.

***

In short, the Enlightenment came to define itself, Mr. Sutcliffe argues, as the antithesis of all things Jewish.

Review of Sutcliffe

So, we have a Jewish intellectual milieu (connected by the Jewish neural network to all other such milieux), out of which comes an intellectual movement of atomisation – the ultimate individualist strategy – the absolute worst strategy we could adopt if we were to face subsequent competition with the Jewish or any other competing group.  Might this not be the ultimate in the “culture of critique”?  The counterpoint to chapter 5 of Separation and Its Discontents?

Three possibilities come to mind.  The first is that the Enlightenment ideals that were the “antithesis” of Judaism were conceptualized by the Jewish community and sold to the gullible goyim.  The second is that these ideals were a spontaneous (though ultimately maladaptive) creation of the European intellect reacting to the Jewish presence.  The third, which seems most likely, is some combination of the two.  Each of these possibilities, however, is dependent on the presence of Jews and/or Jewish memes, the putative “germs”.

Posted by Guessedworker on April 26, 2005, 05:41 PM | #

… where does the Zeitgeist come from?

ben, you are a trial lawyer, I take it!

The trite answer to your question is John Locke, possibly even The Leviathan before him.  Marx himself said “We are all Hobbes’ children.”

However, let’s not shirk the task.  I don’t know whether I can make the speculative leap into the metaphysics of the liberal zeitgeist.  Perhaps I should direct you to Hubble’s cold gas clouds.  Certainly, the only way I can see of answering you is to work out what a political zeitgeist – any zeitgeist, not just a liberal one - is made of.  That’s about as close as I think a mere philosophical journeyman like me can get to an answer, and to holding in his imagination a not too fanciful model of the real thing.

So let’s go back to liberalism’s “modern” predecessors: feudalism and Conservatism.  We need to get at the common elements, since it is reasonable to presume these to be the producers of any zeitgeist.  I’d hazard a guess that they are, Trinity-wise:-

Gott der Vater: A creative and sufficiently dominant force.  This can be an armed elite led by and loyal to the monarch (as in feudalism), a combination or balance of interests (as in Conservatism), or “the Party” or State as representative of the individual in transitus to a condition of perfect freedom (as in liberalism).

Gott der Sohn: A responsive constituency which, respectively, is loyal or, anyway, submissive to the Crown, or which belongs to an interest group rewarded by Conservatism, or which is convinced of its own oppression or, indeed, guilt and is in both cases desirous of deliverance therefrom.

Gott der heiliger Geist: A common philosophy, belief or objective which internally sustains the “creative force” and which justifies its actions by its own lights, colouring society and the times accordingly.

Now, obviously, you can word that in a number of ways.  But however you do so your elements must successfully combine, for out of the combination emerges the ruling political environment in which we are interested.  It follows that if any one of the elements is substantially and unsympathetically altered the combination will fail and the environment will change.  That is why political zeitgeists have arisen and fallen by the wayside.

Compared to both feudalism and Conservatism, liberalism is unique because it is by definition a dynamic.  That’s why it has (with much Jewish philosophical assistance, btw) been able to redefine its philosophy.  It has remained formative to change and sustained itself thereby.  Eventually, though, even this great machine will be unable to influence the course of change.  I’ve frequently staked my political shirt on the mid-2020’s as the point where that may become possible.  But at my age I would rather not wait that long!

Posted by ben tillman on April 26, 2005, 06:27 PM | #

ben, you are a trial lawyer, I take it!

Yes, I am, though only before judges—no juries in bankruptcy court.

Thank you for treating my question seriously.

Posted by Phil Peterson on April 26, 2005, 06:55 PM | #

Ben,

Among the philosophers that had a great impact in the “founding” on enlightenment ideas, Spinoza is the only Jewish philosopher I can think of.

All the others: from Francis Bacon to John Stuart Mill, I can’t think of any Jews except Spinoza.

Two philosophers who had the greatest impact on the founding of America were John Locke and Montesquieu. Montesquieu “promotes” the idea of tolerance within western nations and lays the foundations for the separation of Church and State. In addition, he promotes a new kind of Philo-semitism:

The mischief arises from a notion which some people have entertained of revenging the cause of the Deity. But we must honour the Deity and leave him to avenge his own cause. And, indeed, were we to be directed by such a notion, where would be the end of punishments? If human laws are to avenge the cause of an infinite Being, they will be directed by his infinity, and not by the weakness, ignorance, and caprice of man.

An historian of Provence relates a fact which furnishes us with an excellent description of the consequences that may arise in weak capacities from the notion of avenging the Deity’s cause. A Jew was accused of having blasphemed against the Virgin Mary; and upon conviction was condemned to be flayed alive. A strange spectacle was then exhibited: gentlemen masked, with knives in their hands, mounted the scaffold, and drove away the executioner, in order to be the avengers themselves of the honour of the blessed Virgin. I do not here choose to anticipate the reflections of the reader.

Montesquieu’s impact on western political thought simply cannot be overestimated.