Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling.
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
When ignorant armies clash by night.

Each race (or variety) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, behavioral, physiological traits . . . Formation of a new race takes place when, over several generations, individuals in one group reproduce more frequently among themselves than they do with individuals in other groups. This process is most apparent when the individuals live in diverse geographic areas and therefore evolve unique, recognizable adaptations (such as skin color) that are advantageous in their specific environments.⁴

These examples indicate that, within the academic context (where those who still believe in “race” are fighting a losing battle with the hierophants of cultural anthropology), a race is simply a human group with distinct common physical and mental traits that are inherited.

Among white racialists, where race has more than a merely scientific importance, a deeper dimension was added to the concept: that of the spirit. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler set forth the idea of the Apollinian, Faustian, and Magian “soul forms,” which can be understood as spiritual racial types.⁵ In this highly influential Spenglerian tome Imperium, Francis Parker Yockey elaborated this notion, asserting that while there are genetically related individuals within any particular human group, race itself is spiritual: it is a deeply felt sense of identity connected with a drive to perpetuate not just genes, but a whole way of life. “Race impels toward self-preservation, continuance of the cycle of generations, increase of power.”⁶ Spiritual race is a drive toward a collective destiny.

The spiritual side of race, however, was never systematically explained to the same extent as the physical. Its existence was, rather, merely suggested and taken for granted. It was only in the writings of the much overlooked Italian Radical Traditionalist and esotericist Julius Evola that the spiritual dimension was finally articulated in detail. One who has studied race from the biological, psychological, and social perspectives should turn to Evola’s writings for a culminating lesson on the subject. Evola’s writings provide a wealth of information that one cannot get elsewhere. Through a careful analysis of ancient literature and myths, along with anthropology, biology, history, and related subjects, Evola has pieced together a comprehensive explanation of the racial spirit.

My purpose here is simply to outline Evola’s doctrine of race. Since Evola’s life and career have been thoroughly examined elsewhere,⁷ the only biographical fact relevant here is that Evola’s thoughts on race were officially adopted as policy by Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1942.⁸

Body and Mind

Evola’s precise definition of “race” is similar to Yockey’s: it is an inner essence that a person must “have”; this will be explained further below. In the meantime, a good starting point is Evola’s understanding of distinct human groups.

Evola agrees with the physical anthropologists that there are distinct groups with common physical traits produced by a common genotype: “the external form . . . which, from birth to birth, derives from the ‘gene’ . . . is called phenotype.”⁹ He refers to these groups as “races of the body,” and concurs with Gunther that suitable examples include the Nordic, Mediterranean, East Baltic, Orientalid, Negroid, and many others.¹⁰

Evola describes the “race of the soul” as the collective mental and behavioral traits of a human stock, and the outward “style” through which these are exhibited. Every race has essentially the same mental predispositions; all human peoples, for example, desire sexual satisfaction from a mate. However, each human stock manifests these inner instincts externally in a different way, and it is this “style,” as Evola terms it, which is the key component of the “race of the soul.”

To illustrate this point, compare the Spartan strategos (Nordic soul) to the Carthaginian shofet (Levantine soul)¹¹: the Spartan considers it heroic to fight hand-to-hand with shield and spear and cowardly to attack from a distance with projectiles, whereas the Carthaginian finds it natural to employ elephants and grand siege equipment to utterly shock and scatter his enemies for an expedient victory.

The names of these races of the soul correspond to those of the body, hence a Nordic soul, a Mediterranean soul, Levantine soul, etc. Evola devotes an entire chapter in Men Among the Ruins to comparing the “Nordic” or “Aryo-Roman” soul to the “Mediterranean.” The Nordic soul is that of “‘the race of active man,’ of the man who feels that the world is presented to him as material for possession and attack.”¹² It is the character of the quintessential “strong and silent type”:

Among them we should include self-control, an enlightened boldness, a concise speech and determined and coherent conduct, and a cold dominating attitude, exempt from personalism and vanity . . . The same style is characterized by deliberate actions, without grand gestures; a realism that is not materialism, but rather love for the essential . . . the readiness to unite, as free human beings and without losing one’s identity, in view of a higher goal or for an idea.¹³

Evola also quotes Helmuth Graf von Moltke (the Elder) on the Nordic ethos: “Talk little, do much, and be more than you appear to be.”¹⁴

The Mediterranean soul is the antithesis of the Nordic. This sort of person is a vain, noisy show-off who does things just to be noticed. Such a person might even do great deeds sometimes, but they are not done primarily for their positive value, but merely to draw attention. In addition, the Mediterranean makes sexuality the focal point of his existence.¹⁵ The resemblance of this picture to the average narcissistic, sex- and celebrity-obsessed American of today – whether genetically Nordic or Mediterranean – is striking. One need only watch American Idol or browse through the profiles of Myspace.com to see this.

Race of the Spirit

The deepest and therefore most complicated aspect of race for Evola is that of the “spirit.” He defines it as a human stock’s “varying attitude towards the spiritual, supra-human, and divine world, as expressed in the form of speculative systems, myths, and symbols, and the diversity of religious experience itself.”¹⁶ In other words, it is the manner in which different peoples interact with the gods as conveyed through their cultures; a “culture” would include rituals, temple architecture, the role of a priesthood (or complete lack thereof), social hierarchy, the status of women, religious symbolism, sexuality, art, etc. This culture, or worldview, is not simply the product of sociological causes, however. It is the product of something innate within a stock, a “meta-biological force, which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures” of its individual members.¹⁷

The “meta-biological force” in question has two different forms. The first corresponds to an id or a collective unconscious, a son of group mind-spirit that splinters off into individual spirits and enters a group member’s body upon birth. Evola describes it as “subpersonal” and belonging “to nature and the infernal world.”¹⁸ Most ancient peoples, as he explains, depicted this force symbolically in their myths and sagas; examples would include the animal totems of American aborigines, the ka of the Pharaonic Egyptians, or the lares of the Latin peoples. The “infernal” nature of the latter example was emphasized by the fact that the lares were believed to be ruled over by the underground deity named Mania.¹⁹ When a person died, this metaphysical element would be absorbed back into the collective from whence it came, only to be recycled into another body, but devoid of a recollection of its former life.

The second form, superior to the first, is one that does not exist in every stock naturally, or in every member of a given stock; it is an otherworldly force that must be drawn into the blood of a people through the practice of certain rites. This action corresponds to the Hindu notion of “realizing the Self,” or experiencing a oneness with the divine source of all existence and order (Brahman). Such a task can only be accomplished by a gifted few, who by making this divine connection undergo an inner transformation. They became aware of immutable principles, in the name of which they go on to forge their ethnic kin into holistic States – microcosmic versions of the transcendental principle of Order itself. Thus, the Brahmins and Kshatriyas of India, the patricians of Rome, and the samurai of Japan had a “race of the spirit,” which is essential to “having race” itself. Others may have the races of body and soul, but race of the spirit is race par excellence.

Transcendence is experienced differently by different ethnic groups. As a result, different understandings of the immutable arise across the world; from these differences emerge several “races of the spirit.” Evola focuses on two in particular. The first is the “telluric spirit” characterized by a deep “connection to the soul.” This race worships the Earth in its various cultural manifestations (Cybele, Gaia, Magna Mater, Ishtar, Inanna, etc.) and a consort of “demons.” Their view of the afterlife is fatalistic: the individual spirit is spawned from the Earth and the returns to the Earth, or to the infernal realm of Mania, upon death, with no possibility.²⁰ Their society is matriarchal, with men often taking the last names of their mothers and familial descent being traced through the mother. In addition, women often serve as high priestesses. The priesthood, in fact, is given preeminence, whereas the aristocratic warrior element is subordinated, if it exists at all.

This race has had representatives in all the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa that were first populated by pre-Aryans: the Iberians, Etruscans, Pelasgic-Minoans, Phoenicians, the Indus Valley peoples, and all others of Mediterranean, Oriental, and Negroid origin. The invasions of Aryan stock would introduce to these peoples a diametrically opposed racial spirit: the “Solar” or “Olympian” race.

The latter race worships the heavenly god of Order, manifested as Brahman, Ahura-Mazda, Tuisto (the antecedent of Odin), Chronos, Saturn, and the various sun deities from America to Japan. Its method of worship is not the self-prostration and humility practiced by Semites, or the ecstatic orgies of Mediterraneans, but heroic action (for the warriors) and meditative contemplation (for the priests), both of which establish a direct link with the divine. Olympian societies are hierarchical, with a priestly caste at the top, followed by a warrior caste, then a caste of tradesmen, and finally a laboring caste. The ruler himself assumes the dual role of priest and warrior, which demonstrates that the priesthood did not occupy the helm of society as they did among telluric peoples. Finally, the afterlife was not seen as an inescapable dissolution into nothingness, but as one of two potential conclusions of a test. Those who live according to the principles of their caste, without straying totally from the path, and who come to “realize the Self,” experience a oneness with God and enter a heavenly realm that is beyond death. Those who live a worthless, restless existence that places all emphasis on material and physical things, without ever realizing the presence of the divine Self within all life,, undergoes the “second death,”²¹ or the return to the collective racial mind-spirit mentioned earlier.

The Olympian race has appeared throughout history in the following forms: in America as the Incas; in Europe and Asia as the Indo-European speaking peoples; in Africa as the Egyptians, and in the Far East as the Japanese. Generally, this race of the spirit has been carried by waves of phenotypically Nordic peoples, which will be explained further below.

Racial Genesis

Of considerable importance to Evola’s racial worldview is his explanation of human history. Contrary to the views of most physical anthropologists and archaeologists, and even many intellectual white racialists, humanity did not evolve from a primitive, simian ancestor, and then branch off into different genetic populations. Evolution itself is a fallacy to Evola, who believed it to be rooted in the equally false ideology of progressivism: “We do not believe that man is derived from the ape by evolution. We belive that the ape is derived from man by involution. We agree with De Maistre that savage peoples are not primitive peoples, but rather the degenerating remnants of more ancient races that have disappeared.²²

Evola argues in many of his works, like Bal Ganghadar Tilak and Rene Guenon before him, that the Aryan peoples of the world descend from a race that once inhabited the Arctic. In “distant prehistory” this land was the seat of a super-civilization – “super” not for its material attainments, but for its connection to the gods – that has been remembered by various peoples as Hyperborea, Airyana-Vaego, Mount Meru, Tullan, Eden, and other labels; Evola uses the Hellenic rendition “Hyperborea” more than the rest, probably to remain consistent and avoid confusion among his readers. The Hyperboreans themselves, as he explains, were the original bearers of the Olympian racial spirit.

Due to a horrific cataclysm, the primordial seat was destroyed, and the Hyperboreans were forced to migrate. A heavy concentration of refugees ended up at a now lost continent somewhere in the Atlantic, where they established a new civilization that corresponded to the “Atlantis” of Plato and the “Western land” of the Celts and other peoples. History repeated itself, and ultimately this seat was also destroyed, sending forth and Eastward-Westward wave of migrants. As Evola notes, this particular wave “[corresponded[ to Cro-Magnon man, who made his appearance toward the end of the glacial age in the Western part of Europe,"²³ thus leading some historical evidence to his account. This "pure Aryan" stock would ultimately become the proto-Nordic race of Europe, which would then locally evolve into the multitude of Nordic stocks who traveled across the world and founded the grandest civilizations, from Incan Peru to Shintoist Japan.

Evola spends less time tracing the genesis of nonwhite peoples, which he consistently refers to as "autochthonous," "bestial," and "Southern" races." In his seminal work Revolt Against the Modern World, he says that the "proto-Mongoloid and Negroid races ... probably represented the last residues of the inhabitants of a second prehistoric continent, now lost, which was located in the South, and which some designated as Lemuria."²⁴ In contrast to the superior Nordic-Olympians, these stocks were telluric worshippers of the Earth and its elemental demons. Semites and other mixed races, Evola asserts, are the products of miscegenation between Atlantean settlers and these Lemurian races. Civilizations such as those of the pre-Hellenes, Mohenjo-Daro, pre-dynastic Egyptians, and Phoenicians, among countless others, were founded by mixed peoples.

Racialism in Practice

Racialist movements from National Socialist Germany to contemporary America have tended to emphasize preserving physical racial types. While phenotypes were important to Evola, his foremost goal for racialism was to safeguard the Olympian racial spirit of European man. It was from this spirit that the greatest Indo-European civilizations received the source of their leadership, the principles around which they centered their lives, and thus the wellspring of their vitality. While de Gobineau, Grant, and Hitler argued that blood purity was the determining factor in the life of a civilization, Evola contended that "Only when a civilization's 'spiritual race' is worn out or broken does its decline set in."²⁵ Any people who manages to maintain a physical racial ideal with no inner spiritual substance is a race of "very beautiful animals destined to work,"²⁶ but not destined to produce a higher civilization.

The importance of phenotypes is described thusly: "The physical from is the instrument, expression, and symbol of the psychic form."²⁷ Evola felt that it would only be possible to discover the desired spiritual type (Olympian) through a systematic examination of physical types. Even to Evola, a Sicilian born, the best place to look in this regard was the "Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body"; as he mentions on several occasions, it was, after all, this race that carried the Olympian Tradition across the world. He called this process of physical selection "racism of the first degree," which was the first of three stages.

Once the proper Nordic phenotype was identified, various "appropriate" tests comprising racism of the second and third degrees would be implemented to determine a person's racial soul and spirit.²⁸ Evola never laid out a specific program for this, but makes allusions in his works to assessments in which a person's political and racial opinions would be taken into account. In his Elements of Racial Education, he asserts that "The one who says yes to racism is one in which race still lives," and that one who has race is intrinsically against democratic ideals. He also likens true racism to the "classical spirit," which is rooted in "exaltation of everything which has form, face, and individuation, as opposed to what is formless, vague, and undifferentiated."²⁹ Keep in mind that for Evola, "having race" is synonymous with having the "Olympian race" of the spirit. Upon discovering a mentality that fits the criteria for soul and spirit, a subsequent education of "appropriate disciplines" would be carried out to ensure that the racial spirit within this person is "maintained and developed." Through such trials, conducted on a wide scale, a nation can determine those people within it who embody the racial ideal and the capacity for leadership.

Protecting and developing the Nordic-Olympians was primary for Evola, but his racialism had other goals. He sought to produce the "unified type," or a person in whom the races of body, soul, and spirit matched one another and worked together harmoniously. For example: "A soul which experiences the world as something before which it takes a stand actively, which regards the world as an object of attack and conquest, should have a face which reflects by determined and daring features this inner experience, a slim, tall, nervous, straight body - an Aryan or Nordic-Aryan body."³⁰

This was because "it is not impossible that physical appearances peculiar to a given race may be accompanied by the psychic traits of a different race."³¹ To Evola, if people chose mates on the basis of physical features alone, there is a good chance that various mental and spiritual elements would become intermingled and generate a dangerous confusion; there would be Nordics with Semitic mental characteristics and Asiatic spiritual predispositions, Alpines with Nordic proclivities and fatalistic religious attitudes, and so on. Such a mixture was what Evola considered to be a mongrel type, in whom "cosmopolitan myths of equality" become manifested mentally, thus paving the way for the beasts of democracy and communism to permeate the nation and take hold.

Evola cared more about the aristocratic racial type, but he did not want the populace to become a bastardized mass: "We must commit ourselves to the task of applying to the nation as a whole the criteria of coherence and unity, of correspondence between outer and inner elements."³² If the aristocracy had as its subjects a blob of spiritless, internally broken people, the nation would have no hope. For the Fascist state, he promoted an educational campaign to ensure that the peoples of Italy selected their mates appropriately, looking for both appearances and behavior; non-Europeans would of course be excluded entirely. The school system would play its role, as would popular literature and films.³³

Another way to develop the "inner race" is through combat. Not combat in the modern sense of pressing a button and instantly obliterating a hundred people, but combat as it unfolds in the trenches and on the battlefield, when it is man against man, as well as man against his inner demons. Evola writes, "the experience of war, and the instincts and currents of deep forces which emerge through such an experience, give the racial sense a right, fecund direction."³⁴ Meanwhile, the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and its pacifist worldview lead to the crippling of the inner race, which will ultimately become extinguished if external damage is thenceforth inflicted (via intermixing with inferior elements).

Conclusion

American racialists have much to gain from an introduction to Evola's thoughts on race. In the American context, racialism is virtually devoid of any higher, spiritual element; many racialists even take pride in this. There are, without a doubt, many racialists who consider themselves devout Catholics or Protestants, and they may even be so. However, the reality of race as a spiritual phenomenon is given little attention, if any at all. For whatever reason, American racialists are convinced that the greatness of Western civilization, evinced by its literature, architecture, discoveries, inventions, conquests, empires, political treatises, economic achievements, and the like, like solely in the mental characteristics of its people. For instance, the Romans erected the coliseum, the English invented capitalism, and the Greeks developed the Pythagorean theorem simply because they all had high IQs. When one compares the achievements of different Western peoples, and those of the West to the East, however, this explanation appears inadequate.

Intelligence alone cannot explain the different styles that are conveyed through the culture forms of different peoples; the Greeks' Corinthian order on the one hand, and the Arabs' mosques and minarets on the other, are not results of mere intellect. Sociological explanations do not work either; the Egyptians and Mayans lived in vastly different environments, yet both evoked their style through pyramids and hieroglyphs. The only explanation of these phenomena is that there is something deeper within a folk, something deeper and more powerful than bodily structures and mental predispositions. As Evola elucidates through his multitude of works - themselves the result of intense study of ancient and modern texts from every discipline imaginable - race has a "super-biological" aspect: a spiritual force. Ancient peoples understood this reality and conveyed it through their myths: the Romans used the lares; the Mayans used totemic animal symbols; the Persians used the fravashi, which were synonymous with the Nordic valkyries;³⁵ the Egyptians used the ka; and the Hindus in the Bhagavad-Gita used Lord Krishna.

To better understand the spiritual side of race, the best place to look is Julius Evola. Through his works, which have greatly influenced the European New Right, Evola dissects and examines the concept of the Volksgeist, or racial spirit. It is the supernatural force that animates the bodies of a given race and stimulates the wiring in their brains. It is the substance from which cultures arise, and from which an aristocracy materializes to raise those cultures to higher civilizations. Without it, a race is simply a tribe of automatons that feed and copulate.

When the super biological element that is the center and the measure of true virility is lost, people can call themselves men, but in reality they are just eunuchs and their paternity simply reflects the quality of animals who, blinded by instinct, procreate randomly other animals, who in turn are mere vestiges of existence.³⁶

Nowhere would Evola's racial ideas be more valuable than in the United States, a land in which the idea of transcendent realities is mocked, if not violently attacked. Even American racialists, who nostalgically look back to "better" times when people were more "traditional," are completely unaware of how the Aryan Tradition, in its purest form, understand the concept of race. Many of these people claim to be "Aryan" while simultaneously calling themselves "atheist" or "agnostic," although in ancient societies, one needed to practice the necessary religious rites and undergo certain trials before having the right to style oneself an Aryan. Hence the need for these "atheist Aryans" to become more familiar with Julius Evola.

Michael Bell writes about race and popular culture from a Radical Traditionalist point of view.

________________________________

[1] William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899), 1.
[2] Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (North Stratford, NHL Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., 2000), xix.
[3] H.F.K. Gunther, The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G.C. Wheeler (Uckfield, Sussex, UK: Historical Review Press, 2007), 9.
[4] Philippe Rushton, “Statement on Race as a Biological Concept,” November 4, 1996, http://www.nationalistlibrary.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1354.
[5] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926 & 1928), vol. 1, chs. 6 and 9; cf. vol. 2, ch. 5, “Cities and Peoples. (B) Peoples, races, Tongues.”
[6] Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium (Newport Beach, Cal.: Noontide Press, 2000), 293.
[7] See the Introduction to Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins, trans. Guido Stucco, (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 2002).
[8] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 48.
[9] Julius Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, trans. Thompkins and Cariou (Thompkins & Cariou, 2005), 11.
[10] Evola, Elements of a Racial Education, 34-35.
[11] For more on the Levantine “race of the soul” see Elements of Racial Education, 35.
[12] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 35.
[13] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 259.
[14] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 262.
[15] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 260. Evola’s descriptions of Nordic and Mediterranean proclivities show the strong influence of Gunthers’s The Racial Elements of European History.
[16] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 29.
[17] Julius Evola, Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory, & Death in the World of Tradition, ed. John Morgan and Patrick Boch (Aarhus, Denmark: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2007), 63.
[18] Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995), 48.
[19] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 48.
[20] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 40.
[21] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 48.
[22] Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love, trans. anonymous (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1991, 9.
[23] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 195.
[24] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 197.
[25] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 58.
[26] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 170.
[27] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 30.
[28] Julius Evola, “Race as a Builder of Leaders,” trans. Thompkins and Cariou, http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id7.html.
[29] Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, 14, 15.
[30] Evola, The Elements of Racial Education, 31.
[31] Evola, “Race as a Builder of Leaders.”
[32] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 33.
[33] Evola, Elements of Racial Education, 25.
[34] Evola, Metaphysics of War, 69
[35] Evola, Metaphysics of War, 34.
[36] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 170.

Too Good to Be True

Erin V. Arvedlund

New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin, 2009

Betrayal

Andrew Kirtzman

New York, NY: Harper, 2009

No One Would Listen

Harry Markopolos

New York: Wiley, 2010

Madoff With The Money

Jerry Oppenheimer

New York: Wiley 2009

The Madoff Chronicles

Brian Ross

New York, NY: Hyperion, 2009

Catastrophe

Deborah and Gerald Strober

Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2009

Madoff’s Other Secret

Sheryl Weinstein

New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2009

Reviewed by John Graham and Kevin MacDonald

July 20, 2010

[Note: A print version of this article will appear in the Summer, 2010 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Click here for a pdf version of this article.]

Abstract: Initially Bernard Madoff’s record-breaking $65 billion Ponzi scheme was reported in terms of how much harm he had done fellow Jews. Subsequently discussion focused on the ineptitude of the Securities and Exchange Commission in not detecting and shutting down this fraud much earlier.

We contend here that the now extensive literature reveals that the Madoff phenomenon was in fact a massive shift of resources from non-Jews to Jews. Prime beneficiaries extended beyond the Madoff family to a number of other members of the Jewish elite. The scam utilized familiar Jewish social traits to reach the size it did. Far from being protected by SEC ineptitude, it was Madoff’s perceived position as part of the Jewish Establishment that put him beyond the law — by intimidating the SEC. This was accentuated by traditional Jewish inhibitions on reporting Jewish criminality. We suggest that Madoff’s self-destructive as well as socially damaging behavior stemmed ultimately from the conditionality inherent in the Jewish attitude to society at large — and is not unique to him.

* * *

In December 2008 the astonishing news broke of Bernard Madoff’s immense Ponzi scheme — the biggest in history, apparently, with a notional value approaching $65 Billion. This was very rapidly followed by loud complaints by prominent Jewish leaders such as the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxmanand the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris, to the effect that the media coverage of this scandal was facilitating anti-Semitism by repeatedly noting that Madoff is Jewish.

To the uninvolved observer, these claims appeared paranoid. The news channels were choked with pitiful and chilling stories of elderly Jews discovering they had been flung into destitution by Madoff, and of Jewish Charities reeling from the blows he had struck them. The well-known among the victims — such as Stephen Spielberg, Mort Zuckerman, and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg’s family — seemed invariably Jewish. Initially the presence of non-Jewish victims was not very apparent. The obvious question was: How could someone do this to his own people? That question could not be asked without acknowledging Madoff’s ethnicity.

For most, probably, the conclusion will have been that this event resembled the depressing procession of stories about clergymen of every creed being involved in pedophilia. Society generates these positions involving trust and power, and from time to time they get occupied by perverts who abuse them.

Subsequently, much fascinating detail has come to light, including the seven books cited above. We suggest here that the Madoff affair does in fact offer important lessons as to the nature of the Jewish community, its relationship with the non-Jewish community, and its influence on Public Policy.

The Madoff facts need to be established.

· Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities right out of Hofstra College (later University), in November 1960. He focused on dealing in the shares of small firms, not listed on any Exchange — “Over-the-Counter” or “Pink Sheet” stocks (the latter from the color of the daily publication which listed the broker-dealers willing to quote prices in particular equities over the phone). In 1971 a computerized communications network was established which made the quoted prices easily visible (NASDAQ). This evolved through several phases to the point at which it is now arguably as efficient a marketplace as any. Bernard Madoff was in the thick of this development, serving on many industry bodies including as Chairman of NASDAQ itself. In the late 70s Madoff began offering competitive markets in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (which he never joined). By 1989 Arvedlund (45) reports Madoff’s firm was handing 5% of the NYSE volume (others say it reached as high as 10% [Weinstein, 166]). In 2002 there was talk of it being worth $1 billion (Kirtzman, 131).

· This firm was a genuine business and a considerable technological achievement. There seems to be no evidence that the many non-family professionals employed there ever had any inkling that the investment side of the business was a fraud. It also provided perfect cover.

· As soon as he was able, Madoff began taking in “discretionary” accounts from the public. These are accounts where the broker is authorized to act without first consulting the client. Initially, funds were attracted by promising high returns, but in the later years the pitch was fairly modest returns with a very high degree of confidence (“low volatility” — the “Jewish T Bill”). From raising money among New York-area relatives and friends, he moved on to using agents to tap the wealthy across the country. Ultimately, over the last two decades, Madoff was able to use some of the professional fund-allocating operations which have developed with the hedge fund boom (“Funds of Funds”). Unlike the previous contributors, many of the owners of this money were not American and not Jewish.

· This operation may well have been a fraud right from the start. There is no evidence of trades for the investors for many years. The long number of years involved and the power of compounding means that many of the accounts were bloated with fictitious profits. Some suggest that something around $20 Billion may have been paid in over the years, of which a good deal was paid out, so that most of the $65 Billion investors thought they had at the end was fantasy.

· Madoff’s claimed returns were intrinsically implausible, and in later years numerous investment professionals believed that his activities were fraudulent. This point of view was repeatedly and forcefully brought to the attention of the SEC, in particular by a Boston-based analyst, Harry Markopolos. In a fascinating response, in 2006 the agency finally launched an investigation which scrupulously ignored the investment operation and in November 2007 “found no evidence of fraud” (Arvedlund, 217). Why this absurdity happened is the Public Policy question addressed in this essay.

Transferring Wealth from Non-Jews to Jews

From a sociobiological point of view, the first thing to grasp about the Madoff phenomenon is that it was a large scale transfer of wealth from non-Jews to Jews. This is because of the shift in the Ponzi scheme funding basis at the beginning of the 1990s. The big professional fund raisers (and consequently the biggest creditors) entered then or later: Fairfield-Greenwich ($7.9B), Banco Santander ($3B), Banco Medici ($2.1B), Access International ($1.4B), Tremont/Rye/Kingate ($5.8B) and others. Arvedlund (142) reports these outfits in aggregate were owed some $20 Billion; because of their comparatively late entry and accelerating contributions, a much higher proportion of this loss would represent real cash invested. In addition, the $659 million the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) has paid out to Madoff account owners should be included — the SIPC is funded by its member broker-dealers, and so ultimately by its customers.

Fairfield-Greenwich and Access International were focused on the ultra wealthy jet-set/titled European crowd, but most of the other European conduits accessed the general European public. Some Jewish money may have been added via Bank Medici, the Vienna-based vehicle established by one-time US resident and Orthodox Jewess Sonja Kohn, who is rumored to have brought in some Russian Oligarchs (as a result of which she is now in hiding). But even here, via complex arrangements with various banks, the main contributions came from the general public in Europe.

Markopolos asserts that the European losses were “substantially more than losses in the United States” (114). His book has among its illustrations a charming two-page map detailing the location of the 255 foreign funds of funds in over 40 countries who were Madoffed.

This has effectively put the early investors with Madoff in a strange position. Over the past 20 years, as Kirtzman (140) notes: “Hundreds of Bernie Madoff’s investors were retiring early, moving into bigger houses, on the money they made” Whatever else Madoff may have thought about his large entourage of elderly early small investors and their descendents, as Kirtzman says, he couldtake the view that “he was taking care of all of them in their old age” (251).

It is simply a fact that many people lived very well for many years from the proceeds of Madoff’s depredations.

This is not to suggest that they had the faintest idea their life styles were in any sense illegitimate and were rooted in fraud. Nor does it mitigate the appalling shock they went through in late 2008, discovering that their Guardian Angel had devoured them. And while the Trustee may have legal logic behind his stance that no recoveries can be obtained in the many cases (reported as over 83% of the direct Madoff Securities accounts) where cash withdrawals exceed the amount paid in, had their money been honestly invested, most could have expected substantial gains, given the securities markets of the last generation. So they have enormous opportunity losses and very real grievances.

But, nevertheless, they were beneficiaries too.

The Jewish Ethnic Nexus That Enabled Madoff’s Fraud

Several writers have discussed the arresting idea that the genetic mutations which supply Ashkenazi Jews with their high intelligence are also those which cause the ravaging of this group with cruel and lethal ailments such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s disease (see here, here, and here). Bernard Madoff was like a Tay-Sachs occurrence within the Jewish community: The characteristics which make them such formidable competitors for resources also rendered them pathetically vulnerable to a Madoff.

Most salient of these was the practice among this otherwise skeptical and independent community to coalesce around rabbinical/guru figures, who are treated virtually as gods, revered, unquestioned, and fiercely defended. Obvious examples are found to this day among the Hasidim. Kevin MacDonald has demonstrated in The Culture of Critique how this pattern imposed itself on Western intellectual life, as seen in the rise of Freudianism, Boasian Anthropology, and the Frankfort School, among others, all equipped with their prophet. “Flying wedge” tactics and conscious intra-group loyalty has made this characteristic exceptionally valuable in seizing control of professional entities such as university departments from the disorganized and atomistic non-Jews.

To many, Madoff was such a deity. “He was like a God” Kirtzman quotes professional Holocaust victim Elie Wiesel saying of Madoff (96). (Wiesel lost most of his savings and his foundation’s endowment to Madoff.) “There was a myth that he created around him. That everything was so special, so unique”(Kirtzman, 96). Oppenheimer reports a member of an extended family long involved with and heavily damaged by Madoff saying that they “regarded Bernie like a messiah. He was spoken of as if godlike” (93). The accounts of the stir he created attending Jewish gatherings are almost comic: “He was received like visiting royalty, mysterious and unapproachable” (Kirtzman, 89).

The consequence was an extremely useful suspension of disbelief.

Infatuations of this type are rare among whites generally, and usually mild and fleeting. This makes them more difficult to organize — but less vulnerable to a Madoff.

A consequence of this ethnocentric infatuation was that would-be whistle-blowers were subject to savage attack, if they were not simply tuned out. Laura Goldman, an investment advisor now resident in Israel, had come to negative conclusions about Madoff and liquidated her own exposure to him. The Strobers relate how when in 2001 both Barrons and the trade publication MAR/Hedgepublished stories (here and here) insinuating Madoff’s returns were incredible, she mailed copies to contacts in Palm Beach (where the ultra-wealthy Jewish community had become a major funding source for Madoff): “They said that the publications were anti-Semitic — that Jews have more faith in Bernie Madoff than they do in God” (81).

In her own book, the author of the Barrons article (Arvedlund) reports that as a result of her efforts Goldman “was promptly accused of being anti-Semitic by Palm Beach residents… “And I live in Israel!” she noted” (252). This response is a factor to remember when we consider the behavior of the SEC. (The author of the MAR/Hedge article, Michael Ocrant, is Jewish.)

Until quite late in the history of his fraud, Madoff relied on drawing in funds from (wealthier and wealthier) individuals. Mechanically, this was a remarkable achievement. A value in the Madoff literature is the documentation it supplies on the characteristic group loyalty from which Madoff benefitted. Kirtzman notes:

He was a member of the tribe. Jews of his generation were brought up to think of other Jews as extended family members, with a shared responsibility to look out for one another. They felt more comfortable going to Jewish doctors, Jewish lawyers, Jewish accountants. Madoff became known as “the Jewish T-bill.” (73–74)

Kirtzman quotes from a contemporary from Laurelton, Madoff’s home district of Queens:

The Jewish world was very tight and highly networked. … Everything was done through “the phone call”. My brother wanted to go into retailing, so a call was made to Mr. Temona on the board of Lerners. I wanted to transfer to NYU and live in one dorm: a call was made to Professor Levine. (74)

Of course, from the point of view of a non-Jew, this kind of cohesive efficiency makes the Jews lethal competitors in the zero-sum struggle for resources. In the case of Madoff, however, the efficiency turned out to enable the fraud to spread more widely and to be more damaging to the Jewish community itself.

Other characteristics of his victims tended to amplify the Madoff damage. As a broker, rather than a hedge fund, he supplied his clients with pages and pages of transaction history — all fabricated — rather than an overview. Over the years, thousands of hours were evidently sunk by his clients into going through these statements looking for errors — Sheryl Weinstein, the CFO of Hadassah had an assistant committed to the task (Weinstein, 97). A good deal of fanatical seriousness about the investments was thus sublimated. The modest, low double-digit but extremely reliable returns offered in later years were accurately pitched to rational and careful investors. And, sadly, it has to be said that the attitude many brought to middle age from their upbringing increased their vulnerability. As Kirtzman’s Laurelton informant said of her and Madoff’s hometown, “The more money, the better your things…The more money, the more esteem. The more money, the more people looked up to you” (27) — a revealing comment on the importance of financial success within the Jewish community. Like Weinstein, many long-standing Madoff clients refinanced their homes in the easy credit conditions of recent years to maximize their Madoff investments. Many apparently had virtually all their liquidity with Madoff — hence the tales of desperate sales of jewelry in Palm Beach after the arrest.

This passionate intensity about money has worked well historically — but in the Madoff situation, it led to utter disaster.

So did lack of scruple. Kirtzman recounts how a Palm Beach Madoff client, dubious about Madoff’s success, asked his accountant in the early 90s to investigate. The accountant concluded that Madoff was most likely doing something fraudulent, probably front-running (trading ahead of client orders). The client’s response: “I don’t want to hear anything about it” (Kirtzman, 75–77). Clearly, many Madoff accounts thought they were safely benefitting from illegal activity — and did not care.

Jewish networking was also crucial, perhaps ironically, to the Madoff financial Black Hole spreading beyond the Jewish community. Fairfield-Greenwich Group, the biggest funds allocator caught by the implosion, is generally presented as haute WASP because of founder Walter Noel’s social image: but FGG was brought to Madoff by Noel’s partner Jeffrey Tucker, who is Jewish. Arvedlund suggests Tucker met Madoff via his in-laws the Schneiders of Allentown, Pennsylvania, wealthy garment manufacturers (114). Similarly, she says, access to the US annuity product and general hedge fund market came through Tremont Capital Management and its affiliate Rye Investment Management, run by Sandra Manzke and Bob Schulman (83–84). Manzke had other similar interests, one of which, Kingate Global, brought in wealthy Italian families. And also in Europe, besides Sonja Kohn of the imaginatively-named “Bank Medici” already mentioned (Arvedlund, 129–137), there was Union Bancaire Privee and the Safra Banking group run by Edgar de Picciotto and Edmond Safra. Arvedlund says:

De Picciotto and Safra shared similar backgrounds. They were both Sephardic Jews…and…more than just bankers — they were gatekeepers to billions…Once these men had signed off on someone, … the rest of the Swiss banking world would line up to invest, practically without question. (139–140)

What Kirtzman sneeringly describes as “the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses” (254) who invested with Madoff through FFG and Access International (the founder of which, Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, actually was a French nobleman) and the other members of the “Swiss banking world” who trusted Madoff’s prestigious endorsements were in fact following the old European tradition of the court Jew — “a general financial confidant of a territorial sovereign” (see here, p. 102; see also here). For centuries it was customary for aristocratic landowners, particularly in Eastern Europe, to delegate the task of managing the businesses operations on their estates to Jews, sometimes using the same families for generations. Similarly, throughout German-speaking areas, court Jews typically managed the financial affairs of the nobility, provisioned the military, arranged for loans through Jewish banking families and collected revenues in the form of taxes. Using a Madoff to manage their interests on America’s financial steppes and interface with the barbarous Americans was quite consistent with the long-standing behavior pattern of this social group.

Arvedlund notes that the European capital FGG attracted was of a type known in the hedge fund world as “dumb money” because of its herding habits (117). Of all the feeder fund leaders involved with Madoff, only Magnon de la Villehuchet has committed suicide. Bertrand de la Villehuchet commented, “Madoff wouldn’t understand the reaction of my brother. It was…honor, a word that’s not in his vocabulary” (Ross, 160–161).

Another pattern noted by MacDonald in his study of Jewish social organization is a structural tendency towards the enrichment of its elite. Wealth tended to flow upward within the Jewish community to the upper, scholarly, rabbinical class.While these groupings can be plausibly argued to promote the overall interests of the Jewish community as a whole, they also involve heavy transfers of resources within the community from the mass of Jews to a self-selected few — the Rabbinate, in the case of traditional society.

This was dramatically so in the case of the Madoff operation. Health Care entrepreneur Jeffrey Picower holds the prize: Arvedlund reports he and his family over many years withdrew “at least” $5.1 billion of phantom profits as part of a total of $6.7 billion of disbursements (237) (more recently the Madoff Trustee hasclaimed $7.2 billion). According to Oppenheimer, West Coast “money manager” Stanley Chais and his family are accused by the SEC of pulling out $500 million more than they ever put into Madoff themselves (77–78). (Chais did not tell his clients he was simply placing their money — some $1 billion — with Madoff.) Both Picower and Chais notionally had access to these funds partly because of extraordinarily high un-Madoff-like returns which conveniently appeared in their personal accounts. They also apparently were able to use their Madoff accounts to generate fake tax losses when needed.

The late Norman F. Levy, a New York real estate mogul who died in 1995, is a particularly colorful case. A long time intimate of Madoff’s, he was, according to Kirtzman for some prolonged time getting a daily visit from a Madoff driver carrying a check “usually for millions of dollars. Every now and then they’d be for tens of millions.” What kind of legitimate transaction necessitated this is hard to see. As Kirtzman says, “it’s…plausible that Bernie was using his friend’s bank account to park stolen money” (126–127). (In January, 2010 Levy’s daughtersagreed to pay $220 Million to the Madoff liquidator to settle his claims against “the family and its entities.”)

On October 25, 2009 Jeffrey Picower drowned in his Florida swimming pool after a heart attack. This is eerily similar to the 1991 drowning death of Robert Maxwell, the Ruthenian-born Jew and UK publishing entrepreneur, who was shortly afterwards discovered to have looted the pension funds of his public companies of hundreds of millions of pounds.² As the result of his death, the investigation into Picower’s activities is likely to be crippled. (Recent reports suggest the Picower estate is getting ready to pay the Madoff trustee $2 billion or more to settle.)

Whether Ezra Merkin, the long-time President of the socially elite Fifth Avenue Synagogue, was a member of this small circle of massive Madoff beneficiaries is no doubt a question of considerable interest to his fellow congregants. They are reported to have $2B of exposure to Madoff, much of it through Merkin’s hedge funds. Kirtzman reports that Merkin had $2.4B of his client’s money with Madoff — including that of 30 Jewish charities — but “Of the $470 million in fees he earned from Madoff, Merkin allegedly invested just $9 million back” (Kirtzman, 98).

If not an “insider,” Merkin would belong to a group that immediately came under fire in the aftermath of the collapse — the fundraisers. Besides the professional operations mentioned previously, these included a number of individuals like Robert Jaffe of Palm Beach and the late “Mike” Engler of Minneapolis-St Paul who in Kirtzman’s words

were usually prominent members of the Jewish community, working out of exclusive country clubs. While investors thought they were just friends…they were actually getting a percentage of the business. (89)

Because the apparent inside beneficiaries generally controlled substantial charities which reported large losses to Madoff, they initially escaped much of the opprobrium directed at the money raisers. Possibly the concept of a rogue being a large charitable donor is counterintuitive. But in principle there is no reason why a rogue would not fund charities. Being a philanthropist is in a sense a luxury good and a status symbol — a public marker of having arrived, particularly within the Jewish community.

Jewish Ethnic Networking Props Up Madoff’s Fraud

A remarkable fact that emerges from surveying the literature on Madoff was how widespread the belief was within the professional investment community that the Madoff operation was crooked. This opinion was spread far beyond the saga’s whistle-blowing hero, Harry Markopolos who noted, “The industry knew, there’s no question about that” (176) and his friends, about whom more later.

There were two Madoff theories. One was that intelligence derived from watching the firm’s order flow to its large trading operations gave the investment activity a crucial advantage (Graham remembers being told this — by an ultimate victim — more than 25 years ago.) If true, this would be front-running (taking advantage of a client’s business) and quite illegal. Concern about being exploited in this manner was doubtless why, according to Ross, such big brokerage firms as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would not do business with Madoff Securities (80).

As it happens, this theory was wrong. Since Madoff did not trade for his investment clients, he did not need this type of inside information. So the SEC was quite safe to focus on this question in its final investigation of 2006–7.

The other theory was that the Madoff Investment arm was crooked because it was to some degree at least a Ponzi scheme. Options specialists were led to this conclusion by realizing that Madoff’s alleged “Collar” or “Split strike” activities

• could not be replicated to produce the results he claimed.

• needed to be conducted on an impossibly large scale to accommodate the size of money Madoff was employing

• mysteriously left no trace at all in the close-knit world of options dealing.

This view was apparently widely held. The Strobers report the above-mentioned David Harris of the American Jewish Committee saying after the arrest

the Madoff name had come up here in the AJC’s investment committee some months ago when someone suggested we ought to explore investing … with Madoff. And the chairman of our investment committee actually said, “No, I think it’s a Ponzi scheme.” He actually used those words to the ten or fifteen people in the meeting. (42)

Arvedlund reports an account by Harry Markopolos of a meeting with Leon Gross, Citigroup’s global head of equity derivatives. Gross told him that “Bernie is a fraud and there’s no way his purported stock and options strategy can possibly beat Treasury bill returns. [Gross] also can’t believe the guy hasn’t been exposed yet” (218).

The famed Jewish co-founder of the Odyssey Partners hedge fund, the late Jack Nash, and his son, Joshua, seem to have had a hobby of denouncing Madoff. Jack Nash liquidated a less-than-two-year investment with Madoff in the early 90s after his son reviewed the Madoff statements and smelled a rat. Arvedlund reports they repeatedly told Ezra Merkin this over several years, to no avail (258–259).

Wall Street, of course, is an environment which encourages intense and exclusive concentration on one’s immediate financial activity. Furthermore, challenging Madoff was predictably dangerous. Arvedlund reports a meeting between the head of Lehman Brother’s alternative investment division and Merkin:

The Lehman guy fired first.

“C’mon, Ezra. You know what’s behind Madoff’s operation, don’t you? Don’t act like you don’t” he said.

Merkin and the man nearly got into a fistfight … and Merkin left Lehman Brothers in a huff. Not long after…the man at Lehman Brothers lost his job. (98)

Sheryl Weinstein, CFO of Hadassah (The Women’s Zionist Organization of Amerca) when it invested with Madoff, has a similarly informative story. In 1995, after several years of Madoff managing their money, new members of the investment committee became restless. “They were implying that maybe Bernie’s methods weren’t quite kosher” (166). A meeting was held in which Madoff succeeded in pacifying the all the board members except one, who apparently himself ran some Hadassah capital.

He later tested Bernie’s investment technique with some of Hadassah’s money. With results in hand, he told the board he could not replicate Bernie’s rate of returns.

The board’s response was to stop using him (Weinstein, 168–169) — not because his performance in his own style of investing was poor, but apparently for having the temerity to question this lion of the Jewish Establishment, Bernard Madoff.

(Hadassah’s case illustrates the arithmetic of long-time Madoff investors. The charity invested some $40 million in the late 80s and early 90s. It withdrew a total $130 million and thought it had $90 million when the end came.)

With so many prominent Jewish investment industry figures apparently aware that something was wrong with Madoff, the question arises: Why did they not turn him in? After all, a big scandal raising doubts about the integrity of independent investment advisors would be bad for everyone’s business, Jew or non-Jew (as it indeed proved to be). Because of Madoff’s high-level social-networking fund-raising techniques, many must have been aware that a great many fellow Jews were likely to be vulnerable (one third of the elite Jewish Palm Beach Country Club are reported to have been Madoff investors (Kirtzman, 245). Some might even have thought such a scandal would best be headed off by the Jews themselves for the sake of their community. (David Harris and the Investment Committee of the American Jewish Committee could also have taken this line — but they did not.) Furthermore, the standing of some of these men was such that action by them would have necessitated a serious response by the authorities.

MacDonald has demonstrated that group strategies forged in the stressful climate of Medieval Europe continue to be highly influential in determining modern Jewish social behavior. For centuries, it was absolutely forbidden to tell the Civil Authorities about law-breaking by a fellow Jew, an offence known asMesirah (informing). Some took the view that informing should be punishable by death. The concept of mesirah is alive and well amongst strongly traditional Jewish communities to this day — for example recently, in the community of Syrian Jews centered in Brooklyn where a prominent rabbi renounced his son after the son had informed on illegal financial activities within the community. A perusal of their web sites suggests that while there is some thought that, in the modern environment, informing about crimes of violence might be permissible, for other “lesser” offences (such as financial wrongdoing) it is still forbidden. There seems to be no concept that it might actually be a citizen’s duty to report criminal behavior.

Harry Markopolos Exposes Corruption in High Places

Deeply ingrained traditions fade slowly. The clear message of the facts of the Madoff scandal is that Americans generally cannot rely on American Jews to halt financial fraud by someone who is Jewish.

There was, however, a group who simply could not have tried harder to secure action by the authorities on Madoff. The fate of their efforts opens the most important public policy matter pertaining to the Madoff story.

Professional competiveness was what drove Harry Markopolos, a Boston-based options expert, to challenge Madoff. In 1999, he was asked by his employer, which managed options strategies similar to those claimed by Madoff, to figure out how Madoff was getting consistently superior returns. Within hours he decided that the Madoff claims were fraudulent.

Gathering around him an informal group of like-minded professionals, Markopolos spent most of the next decade trying to get the Securities and Exchange Commission to act. Numerous meetings with different officials as well as providing extensive documentation and apparently scores of phone calls and emails produced almost no response. Finally in November 2005 Markopolos submitted a report titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud” (on linehere [PDF]).

This 19-page document is a nuclear bomb. No one even slightly used to reviewing serious discussions of complex matters could fail to see that it is written by an expert, very carefully thought out, and devastatingly cogent. (Kirtzman — who appears to dislike Markopolos — is quite wrong to describe it as “a dense, rambling thicket … of mathematical formulas, and Wall Street jargon” [197].) One would have thought anyone in the line of responsibility for regulating Madoff would have been absolutely terrified.

The SEC did act. As noted above, in 2006 an investigation was launched. Markopolos was not consulted in any way and Arvedlund quotes a former SEC staff member:

When you look at the closing documents, it seems clear that the Markopolos allegations of Madoff being a Ponzi scheme were never even investigated. (216–217)

In the end the SEC paid itself a kind of fee by demanding that Madoff register as an investment advisor, and in November 2007 terminated the probe — barely a year before the collapse.

What happened?

It has to be said that the SEC compliance operation has evolved into a classicalrent-seeking bureaucratic monster, happily and expensively papering files in cooperation with a symbiotic tribe of functionaries inside investment operations and their law firms. A parasite, it is not designed to actually do anything substantive.

Furthermore, dark suspicions are increasingly common that large targets are exempt. Arvedlund quotes Markopolos recounting the remarks of a former SEC official: “The SEC is bureaucratic and political and turns down slam-dunk cases all too often” (199).

But the Madoff case was obviously enormous and the SEC had been presented with a very concrete and serious accusation — which was not difficult to test. And this was only the last and most elaborate of a series of investigations which inexplicably stopped (Ross, 34).

Now it is true that Madoff had ingratiated himself deeply with the SEC. And he was prominent: already he had served 2 terms as NASDAQ chairman. Quite possibly this explains the very odd lack of interest the SEC showed in the Madoff investment management activity after having shut down, in 1992, the unregistered fund-raising operation — exclusively for Madoff — run by the accounting firm of Avellino & Bienes. Over the previous 30 years, this outfit had developed into being Madoff’s main funding source. Ross says:

According to a person involved with the firm at the time, SEC investigators were looking into allegations that Avellino & Bienes were involved in a Ponzi scheme. The investigators discovered that Madoff was handling the investments … but they did not or would not connect the dots that would have exposed Madoff’s role as the true master of the scheme. (134)

Instead, the SEC allowed A&B investors to switch their funds to Madoff Securities directly — rendering nugatory the settlement which required the pool to be returned to the investors.

In the 80s and early 90s, Bernard Madoff was popular with the SEC because of the central role his firm was playing in automating stock trading and competing with the New York Stock Exchange. But by the late 2000s, that was ancient history. Furthermore, the SEC had almost ten years of presentations from Harry Markopolos to consider — and, Markopolos reveals, tips from others too. The scale of the matter was of the first magnitude. Why was there no effective action?

We submit that the answer to this question is the same as to why America is engaged in an unpopular war with the Muslim world with no Congressional dissidence, and why nation-breaking immigration continues — in the midst of recession — with only a little more dissent — and that after the topic had been virtually driven out of public debate for several years. The Bernard Madoff matter was one about which a significant segment of Jewish America cared very much — some for financial reasons, others, perhaps, because of community pride and loyalty. Challenging this group was well known to be extremely dangerous. As in other matters, they awarded themselves a veto, and they used it — as it happened in this case, to their cost. All in all, the Madoff affair and the cover-up is another indication of Jewish power in America.

An insight into this process arose during the 2006–7 SEC investigation. Harry Markopolos, accurately sensing a cover-up, contacted John Wilke, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter with an exceptionally fine record. Kirtzman reports:

With characteristic overkill, Markopolos bombarded the reporter with documents, contacts, questions for him to ask ….

But the Journal never did investigate Madoff. Markopolos believed it was the fault of “senior editors” at the Journal who “respected and feared” Madoff. (208)

Sadly, Wilke died on May 1^st 2009 at 54, of pancreatic cancer. Oppenheimer reports the then WSJ Managing Editor, Paul Steiger, flatly denying having heard of the approach (157). Steiger now heads the heavily Jewish Propublica Foundation, set up by Herb and Marion Sandler who sold their Golden West mortgage operation to Wachovia Bank with ruinous consequences for the latter. Ironically, Propublica, established to promote investigative journalism, has done some valuable work on the Madoff story, particularly the Picower angle(although nothing recently).

In his book, Markopolos reveals that he actually met with and had extensive discussions with Wilke, who seemed very responsive. Throughout 2006, Wilke gave him to believe he was about to start on the story. As late as November Markopolos wrote his “team” that “John told me that his editor has read my Madoff analysis and is very, very excited to start their investigation in January” (166).

But early in 2007 Wilke abruptly cooled off, never actually refusing the story but now raising quibbles. Markopolos (who continued to have a working relationship with Wilke on other stories) says

In my mind, at least, I was convinced that someone high up at theJournal had decided it was too dangerous to go after Bernie Madoff. … I was finally beginning to consider the possibility that Bernie Madoff was untouchable — that he was simply too powerful to be brought down.” (Markopolos, 166–167)

This analysis — as a practical matter effectively true in our opinion — is very different than the cover story generally presented that Madoff survived because of SEC incompetence. And it is not plausible that the Wall Street Journal’s management did not know what was absorbing so much one of their best reporter’s time.

A remarkable insight into how this power works appears in Markopolos’ No One Would Listen. When, in the aftermath, Markopolos was interviewed by David Kotz, the new Inspector general of the SEC, he was surprised to be told that the meeting was part of a criminal investigation and told to take an oath. He was then asked what he knew about Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) calling the SEC about their Madoff investigation (243).

Markopolos knew nothing, but as he points out “for a middle level SEC employee with ambitions, any case in which an important politician is involved is a case he or she wants to stay far away from” (141).

Bernie Madoff and his sons Andrew and Mark generally maxed out contributing to Schumer’s campaigns. In more recent years Bernard had also contributed significantly to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and some other Democratic candidates, mainly, like Schumer, Jewish.

But it gets stranger — and more ominous. In September, 2009, Markopolos appeared before the Senate Banking Committee, scheduled to follow H. David Kotz, SEC Inspector General, who was there to discuss his recently-publishedinvestigation (PDF) of the SEC’s Madoff failure. There was a recess between the two testimonies and then:

Only Senators Chuck Schumer, who had made a phone call to the SEC, and Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Washington, returned. Schumer took over the questioning …. The entire room was filled with SEC staffers …. The victims had been shunted to a hearing room … to watch the proceedings on closed circuit television. We couldn’t have picked a more adverse audience. (Markopolos, 261)

Schumer (who apparently felt no need to recuse himself or even disclose that he had intervened on Madoff’s behalf) then ran the session so that Markopolos would be able to speak as little as possible. This became so extreme that the lawyer Markopolos had brought “started handing me cards urging me, ‘Jump in whenever you can’” (Markopolos, 262).

There is nothing to suggest Schumer was actually involved with or even knew Madoff: yet No One Would Listen makes it clear he treated Markopolos with rudely dismissive curtness. Why deprive this genuine public hero of his moment in the sun?

Similarly strange things had happened when Markopolos went (voluntarily) in March 2009 to brief the newly appointed chief of the SEC, Mary Schapiro. David Becker, the career Wall Street lawyer imported the previous month as SEC General Counsel, picked a quarrel over extraneous trivia and threw a tantrum so violent that Markopolos’ lawyer “thought that he was about to come right over that table and go for my throat” (Markopolos, 249). Consequently, the meeting was terminated.

In 1977 the actor Cliff Robertson, seeking to correct an erroneous report to the IRS of income from Columbia Pictures, inadvertently triggered the discovery that the (inevitably Jewish) head of the studio, David Begelman, was a large scale embezzler. As a result, Robertson, then at the height of his career, wasblacklisted and got no major movie roles for several years. Evaluating Andrew Kirtzman’s Madoff book Betrayal purely subjectively, one would think Harry Markopolos was the villain. The Schumer and Becker performances are in the same tradition: unrestrained rage against someone deemed to have caused damage to a community member — quite regardless of the ethical facts.

Written after the Kotz report on the SEC/Madoff fiasco was published, Markopolos’ No One Would Listen conveniently adds to the evidence presented in the report, thereby destroying the idea that only ineptitude and dislike of Harry Markopolos protected Madoff. In fact, the SEC had had quite independent and very plausible inputs suggesting Madoff was fraudulent:

• “In 2003 … an unidentified fund of hedge funds manager alerted the SEC … explaining during a conference call he … ‘couldn’t figure out how he was earning his returns’ …. This was lost in the bureaucracy.” (our emphasis)

• An intelligent SEC examiner in 2004 looking (as was his right) at internal correspondence at the fearsomely quantitative Renaissance Technologies Hedge Fund pool headed by James Harris Simons found a discussion concluding Madoff’s activities were “inexplicable.” Evidently he forwarded this to his superiors with no result. (Renaissance Technologies itself did nothing either.)

• In 2005 an anonymous tipster claiming to have withdrawn $5 million said he was “deeply concerned that Madoff is running a very sophisticated fraudulent pyramid scheme.” They even got an anonymous letter in 2008 alleging Madoff was keeping two sets of books! (Markopolos, 257–258)

Quite apart from all this, the SEC 2006–7 investigation itself did produce the information that Madoff had lied about the number of clients he was handling — an issue which drastically alters regulatory requirements. Markopolos says:

“What really bugs me is that the SEC caught Madoff lying to its investigators repeatedly and making false statements to a federal official. This is supposed to carry a five year … maximum sentence; yet they never referred him to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution.” (161)

Nothing was done.

We submit that the SEC failed to stop Madoff not because it was incompetent, but because it was afraid — of the Jewish Establishment.

Looking Like a Goy: Growing Up in the Jewish Community

While we are focused on the way the Madoff case illuminates and reflects the relationships between Jews and non-Jews, there is also the question of how Madoff the man related to the Jewish people.

Looking back, his childhood contemporaries have realized Madoff could well have come to resent his own people — that he had, in the words of an Oppenheimer informant, an “inner need to screw the system” (87).

In the competitive, upwardly mobile Jewish society of Laurelton, Queens in the 1950s, the Madoff family did not command much respect. They were not prosperous, nor were they involved in a prestigious profession. Bernard himself won no academic laurels — Kirtzman quotes a middle school girlfriend recalling a poignant occasion with him sitting silently through a school lunch at which his circle were comparing and boasting about their report cards (21). He had nothing to boast about. Shortly afterwards she broke up with him: “I didn’t think he was smart enough” (23).

In fact, Madoff had a concrete reason to feel alienated — what Weinstein describes as his “beautiful blue eyes” (25). These are not necessarily appreciated in Jewish circles — Graham recalls being curtly told they represented a fault in the bloodline when once asking a Jewish friend about her eye color. Weinstein reports Madoff’s grandmother disliked his High School girlfriend and future wife: “She thought she was a “shiksa”…because Ruth was blond and had blue eyes” (61).

There was no doubt about Ruth Alpern’s Jewishness — the two families were in the same town, virtually neighbors — but Oppenheimer reports a school friend remembering of Ruth that a candy store proprietor was ““shocked — shocked —to learn she wasn’t a gentile because of her goyish look.” Ruth Alpern “looked like a shiksa. She did, absolutely…extremely shiksa looking” (34).

Madoff’s choice of such a partner may have said more about his attitude to his own community than his circle realized. Weinstein reports the Madoffs were not at all observant, and in fact frequently used Yom Kippur as a day to fly to their villa in France (47).

When the British tried to figure out what caused the socially elite and privilegedBurgess/Maclean/Philby circle to damage their country so much by spying for the Soviet Union, they found that anguish about minor status blemishes could be argued to have triggered this murderous resentment. Being on the margin of a highly judgmental group can apparently cause extremely anti-social behavior.

Postscript: Where’s the Rest of the Money?

What will be the aftermath? Ross reports that “Investigators believe there could be a billion dollars or more that Madoff had stashed in foreign bank accounts” (207). He also quotes an investigator who noted that

someone who plans ahead so well that he pre-positions his clothes around the world, don’t you think he has some hidden bank accounts around the world too? (89–90)

(Besides wardrobes at his four homes, Ross notes, Madoff maintained steamer trunks of clothes at six hotels around the world.) A recent story in the New York Post quotes a former fellow prisoner alleging Madoff claims to have $9 billion squirreled away.

Beyond the question of the Madoff loot, there is the — if anything even more interesting — question of the apparent enrichment of the non-family insiders, Picower, Chais, Levy — and perhaps others. (The Wall Street Journal has reported a total of “at least eight.”) What was going on here? How did these men come to cooperate? What was Madoff’s motive for cutting them in?

Our prediction is that nothing significant will ever emerge on these questions. Observation of a long list of scandals, from 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty to the dropping of the espionage prosecutions against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last year, leads inevitably to this conclusion. Thoroughly investigated, the Madoff scandal has the potential to illuminate the economic and political prerogatives usurped in late 20^th-century America by what can only be described as the new ruling class. That will not be allowed to happen.

Indeed, an article that appeared too late to include in the print version questioned “whether anyone will be charged with being an accomplice to the fraud….Given the slow pace of the investigation, it is questionable whether the government will ever be able to show that there was anything more than a few willing enablers.” This is despite the fact that in at least some of these cases the defendants knowingly committed fraud. For example, in one case, “each woman ‘knowingly perpetuated the fraud,’ but there is no claim that they helped to perpetrate it. This means that once again the government accuses defendants of enabling Mr. Madoff’s fraud but not with having any responsibility for it. It is a bit puzzling why this is only a civil case, and not a criminal indictment.”

If Bernard Madoff has a redeeming quality, it must be the unflinching courage he has shown in refusing to implicate his family in any way. Sheryl Weinstein, his mistress for some years, knew the score: “From our very first lunch, I understood that Bernie was very wrapped up in his family” (57).

So the question is, how could he do this to them?

Absent the almost unprecedented financial crisis of late 2008, Madoff’s fraud might never have been revealed, as Arvedlund reports (265). Markopolos told the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets that Madoff could have gone to $100 Billion (Markopolos, 228). It would probably have outlived him. With the remarkable renaissance in confidence in Hedge Funds in 2009, he very likely would indeed have gone on to new heights. But, eventually, the piper would have had to be paid — especially, as seems plausible on the basis of the literature, if the sons did not know exactly what their father was doing.

Was Madoff so extremely present-oriented that some years in a very warm sun were worth decades of obloquy for his descendents?

Perspective is supplied by the case of one of the most outspoken skeptics about Madoff in Florida, named by Arvedlund as Salomon Konig, a “Fund of Funds” manager who “also hails from the Florida Jewish community.” Konig’s penetrating critique of Madoff was well informed for good reason, as Arvedlund discovered: he left Venezuela in 1993 and is under indictment there for running a Ponzi scheme. Yet he has been able to establish himself in his new country in the financial business (239–240).

Perhaps in the back of Madoff’s mind was the idea — possibly the instinct — that after a few years, perhaps in a different country, maybe speaking a different language, his family would live on, possibly with a new name (surname changes are under way among the Madoff kin) and perhaps with some portion of the loot.

Americans need to ask themselves if parties with this larcenous and nomadic tradition are appropriate stewards of our national institutions.

John Graham (email him) is employed in the financial sector.

Kevin MacDonald (email him) is professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach and editor of the Occidental Quarterly andthe Occidental Observer.

Good marriages and business opportunities flowed to individuals with scholarly ability. However, wealthy individuals were also expected to contribute to communal charity for the less able, although indolence was not tolerated. Return.

“Robert Maxwell.” Ketupa.net: A Media Industry Resource. The report begins, “Robert Maxwell, aka the Bouncing Czech, demonstrated that you can have a lot of fun in publishing … especially if you are using other people’s money and are not inhibited by ethics or concern about legality.” Return.

A culture is the achievement of a particular blood line.

As such, “culture wars” may be seen as ultimately blood wars between competing conceptions of race and identity.

The culture war in the university between those advocating a “culturally diverse” curriculum and those advocating a curriculum based on the “Great Books” is, for example, essentially a debate about the future of American nationhood – will it be “Western” (i.e., white) or will it be “culturally” (racially) inclusive.

In the West, these sorts of wars have raged for nearly two centuries now. Many still fought in the United States are, in fact, but continuations of ones begun long ago in the old country.

This seems especially the case with the culture wars of Victorian England – in which the “progressive” or “liberal” forces, allied with “low-church” Protestants, challenged the traditional authority of the Church of England.

Since its establishment in the sixteenth century, the Church of England had rested on the social prominence of the landed aristocracy and gentry, and, more generally, on the organization of rural society, all of which began to decay with the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. As the numbers and prominence of the Protestant dissenters (responsible for much of the invention and entrepreneurialism that made Britain the world’s dominant economic power) grew in the course of the nineteenth century, especially after the Second Reform Bill of 1867 made them a majority of the expanded electorate, they more and more challenged the religious and cultural hegemony of the landed interests – the “Old Corruption,” so-called.

The dissenters’ demands for religious disestablishment were frequently raised in reference to the United States, cited as a vibrant, successful nation without a state church,

It was in the context of this cultural war between the landed interests and “the rising bourgeoisie” that the poet and critic Matthew Arnold intervened to rebuff the anti-traditionalists.

He argued that “All America Hebraises” and that England risked becoming Hebraic if it should follow the dissenters council, separate church from state, and let themselves fall into the “anarchy” that would come with disestablishment.

Having a not insignificant impact on subsequent American developments (especially in the university),¹ Arnold’s argument speaks to us still in addressing the origins of our own culturally troubled age, particularly as it relates to our people’s cultural identity.

The Blood of the Isles

Arnold was steeped in the racial thought of his era, though his racialism tended toward the unsystematic and unorthodox. He had little patience with “rabbis,” men of a school or system who singlemindedly applied their fixed “truths” as if they were Holy Scripture.²

In his writings, particularly Culture and Anarchy (1869) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) Arnold often framed his arguments about cultural developments in ethnological and racial terms.

All races, he believed, “have some one peculiar characteristic by which they are known.”

Race in this view denotes not just inherited physiological or genotypical differences but spiritual, psychological, and cultural ones that constitute “the soul of a race” and shape its history and civilization. A race’s soul or character is, then, just as fixed as its anatomic properties. Indeed, race so defined would serve in this period as a rough synonym for what we today call “culture.”

Arnold’s method, accordingly, was to ascertain the pre-eminent or representative characteristic of a race (or nation) and then seek evidence for it in fields where the race (or nation) exerted itself.

One representative example of his method is evident in his use of these lines from an old Irish verse.

For acuteness and valor, the Greeks;
For excessive pride, the Romans;
For dullness, the creeping Saxons;
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaels.

Despite the Irish boast is this, Arnold thought it captured a certain truth about his people’s character.

A morally earnest race, the English, he believed, lacked the lively, creative spirit of the Celts. This didn’t make them inferior, for dull as they allegedly were, the English were nevertheless the world’s foremost people: earnest, energetic, morally serious, and world-creating. Everything else, he held, rested on these “sterling” qualities.

But Arnold also believed the moral earnestness of the “Saxons,” especially in orienting them to money-making and individual salvation, had a tendency to make them one-dimensional – dull – and that this dullness was starting to take a toll on English national life.

Such reflections on national character were not atypical of his age. The third quarter of the nineteenth century (Arnold was 37 in 1859 when Darwin published his own On the Origin of Species) was a flourishing era of racial thought, particularly in its “Teutomania” (which, inspired by Tacitus’ flattering description of the early Germans, held that the most vital and regenerative elements in the West were Germanic in origin). Englishmen, Germans, Americans, and other North European peoples were all touched by it. (Manifest Destiny, Anglo-Saxonism, and Turner’s powerful frontier thesis were some of its more notable expressions in the US.)

Among Victorian England’s leading lights, it was everywhere assumed that the English were the purest of the Teutonic peoples, having been fathered by the Angle, Saxon, Jute, and Frisian invaders of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries and later by the Vikings and their descendants in French Normandy, while the Germans (the people who bore the name) were a Mischvolk, a product of different European stocks, and thus less “Germanic” than the English.

The Celts, the Irish especially, were, by contrast, seen as the near antithesis of the Teutons, foreign “in blood, belief, and religion.” Arnold’s own father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, claimed the distance between the English and the Irish was greater than that between “any other race in the world.”³ The good doctor, like his (born of a Cornish mother), had, revealingly, a good deal of Irish blood in his veins. More typically, Benjamin Disraeli described the history of “this wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race” as “an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”⁴ Such sentiments would lead Ralph Waldo Emerson to argue in English Traits that “race avails much” and “all Celts were Catholic and believers in authoritarian government, while all Saxons were Protestants and believers in the representative principle.⁵

Arnold’s methodology was analogous in describing peoples or nations as collective personalities defined by their dominant traits. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was critical of the reigning Teutomania and lacked the religious biases of his day (whose anti-Celticism was usually a surrogate anti-Catholicism).

He was also informed by the latest racial research and saw how culturally distorting these biases were.

This was particularly evident, he thought, in the disproportionate way the English treated Irishmen and Jews. The latter, he pointed out, especially after Puritanism, “seemed a thousand times nearer than the Celt to us.” As a result, “a steady, middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Enud’s cousin than Ossian’s.”⁶ The English, in other words, were more inclined to identify with alien Semites than with their closest blood cousins, the Irish.

What especially set Arnold apart from the classically trained Englishmen of his day was his familiarity with French and German thought, especially the pioneering Indo-European and Celtic studies that Ernst Renan and Amedee Thierry were carrying out in France.

From their studies, Arnold had learned that Saxons and Celts were closely related Indo-European peoples and that much of the existing archaeological and historical evidence contradicted the prevailing belief that the earlier Germanic invaders had other exterminated the indigenous Celtic Britons or else driven them to the island’s mountainous extremities in the west and north. He thus suspected that: “The Englishman who thinks himself sprung from the Saxons or the Normans is often in reality the descendant of the Britons” (i.e., the Celts).⁷

Indeed, Arnold believed it was the Celts’ gift for style – and “their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact” – that had saved England from “the Philistine vulgarity” he found offensive in North Germany.⁸

He thus celebrated the kinship of blood and spirit that had never before imagined to exist between Celt and Saxon, courageously doing so in a period when Fenian political violence had aroused a good deal of anti-Irish sentiment in Britain.⁹

“Hebraism” Versus Hellenism

In this context, Arnold coined the term “Hebraism” to characterize the moralizing tendency of various “Teutonic” peoples influenced by Calvinism’s strict biblical standards.

Following Renan, who was instrumental in presenting Judaism as the counter-phenomenon of “Aryanism,” Arnold believed Indo-European peoples had been responsible for the world’s great intellectual, political, and cultural movements, while the Semitic race was responsible for the great religious movements of monotheism.

Yet, if the Hebrews glory was their elevated morality, outside religion, their achievement, it seemed, was largely negative.

Englishmen Hebraised in an evangelical Protestantism may therefore have been morally resistant to the reputed “lubricity” of Continentals, something every earnest Victorian prized, but they were olso, Arnold saw, “narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive.” In his view, the prevailing coarseness and vulgarity of the evangelicals reflected, moreover, a deeper ailment associated with Jewish self-righteousness: “Der Englander,” as Goethe put it, “ist eigentlich ohne Intelligenz.”¹⁰

“Unintelligence” here denotes not “stupidity,” but rather the inability to grasp a thing’s relation to its larger context or value because a cramped conviction closed off a broader, more accurate view. As a result, Arnold argued that the Jews’ biblical “unintelligence” tended to make nonconformists Philistine, “vulgar on the side of beauty and grace, coarse on the side of mind, spirit, and intelligence.”¹¹

As such, the nonconformists (”Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Baptists”) treated biblical moral standards as if they were the unum necessarium (the one thing needful) and, worse, were satisfied with a “very crude conception” of what these moral standards implied.

Given that non unum necessarium frees human beings from the obligation of thinking what to do in life’s multiple realms, this “one thing needful” was wont to justify the “vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence” of its deformed spirit.¹² To see things as they are, on the other hand, requires a larger conception of human nature – a conception of which those of the unum necessarium felt little need.

For Arnold, then, “to Hebraise” meant to sacrifice “all sides of our being to the religious side” – at the expense not only of a fuller understanding, but of a more balanced or complete life.¹³

As embodied in the Puritan middle class, the morally earnest Hebrew was responsible for what Arnold called the increasingly “humdrum, plain, ugly, and ignoble” character of English national life.¹⁴

The growing influence of this “stiff-necked and perverse” stratum, Arnold feared, meant that industrializing England risked a terrible deculturation, if the materialism and individualism of this class should become hegemonic and if the old traditions and established creeds, with their emphasis on beauty, harmony, and balance, were forced to retreat before a market-based culture in which all that mattered was commerce and industry.

Like the Continental bourgeoisie, the English middle class had tended to stand apart from the main currents of European society, for both Ancient and Medieval civilizations held the merchant in low repute. When this class assumed greater social weight in the industrial nineteenth century, it quite naturally retained something of its hostility to the traditional order, rebuking not just its political tenets, but its larger heritage. In practical terms, Arnold feared this was leading to the loss of English unity, of community, of a common system of value and belief, and, ultimately, of a shared sense of meaning and beauty.

Arnold was no enemy of the nonconformists and always stressed that they had contributed much of what was “strongest and most serious” in the English nation. He may have been unusually evenhanded as a Victorian in dealing with Catholicism, but he was decisively on the Protestant side, for the latter’s individual conscience allegedly made Protestants more religiously serious than Catholics and thus less prone to the “dissolute” life.¹⁵ For all his love of the Hellenic cultural tradition, Arnold still felt, as one critic put it, “the powerful appeal of the Old Testament conception of righteousness.¹⁶

He nevertheless criticized nonconformists for having “not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have … [for developing] one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and [for becoming] incomplete and mutilated men in consequence.” ¹⁷

The victory of “bourgeois civilization” in England and the development of a market society based on Hebraic principles may have made England a rich, powerful country, but, Arnold warned, it also threatened the older traditions of beauty, knowledge, and purpose, without which a people lacks a sense of direction or meaning.¹⁸

Given its narrow horizons and “mechanical” mental habits, the dissenting middle class seemed, then, to be divesting itself of the heritage native Indo-European peoples, cutting itself off from “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

More immediately, this Hebraic tendency to dismiss every criterion but economic and individualistic ones, the nationalist-minded Arnold feared, meant that Continental peoples, with less energy than the English, but greater intelligence, would soon encroach on their supremacy – a rather bold and prescient idea in this age of British world supremacy.

Worse still, he feared that low-church Philistinism would make the English complacent about the factories and slums, the iconoclastic chapels and gin palaces, which were changing the nation’s character.

Against the Philistines and the spiritual impoverishment they served, Arnold took up the cause of “culture” and what he called “Hellenism.” For if the Puritan Reformation had, in Christopher Dawson’s phrase, “rebuilt the Jewish temple,” recasting Englishmen in a Hebraic mold, the Renaissance, against which the Reformation revolted, had “replanted the groves of Academus.”¹⁹

The Renaissance awakening of the larger Greco-European heritage that Arnold called “Hellenism” had the potential, he thought, to return “humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are,” unsmudged by the soot and smoke of a petty Hebraic conscience.²⁰ (In this spirit, the Renaissance Pope, Leo X, had professed a greater love of Plato than of Christ.)

As the antithesis of Hebraism, Hellenism meant comprehending “things in their essence and beauty.” Arnold thought that Hellenism might even further the moral designs of Hebraism, for its Puritan distillation had made a great caricature of grace, faith, election, and righteousness. “No man, who knows nothing else,” Arnold professed, “knows even his Bible.”²¹

In awakening the creative impulse of its repressed Celtic heritage and imbuing its middle class with the “sweetness and light” of Europe’s Hellenic tradition, Arnold hoped to turn “the practical, utilitarian mentality” of the middle class toward higher, more noble aspirations.

Arnold’s Concept of Culture

When members of our racially conscious community hear the word “culture,” many react in the way Hermann Goering allegedly did – by reaching for their holster.²²

No concept, in fact, has so often been used in the twentieth century to deny racial differences and relativize the white man’s values as the anthropological notion of culture – a notion, I nevertheless hold, that is of foremost relevance to the white-nationalist project.

When Arnold took up the cause of “culture” as a remedy to the threat of “anarchy,” the term did not quite mean what it currently does. In Keywords, Raymond Williams points out that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, with a long, complex etymology.²³ It was originally used to define that which undergoes a process of tending or cultivation – like a crop of domesticated herds – and was thus initially associated with agriculture. During the eighteenth century, the French began to use the term as a synonym for “civilization,” but the early Romantic reaction to the Revolution of 1789 (particularly in German-speaking lands) associated Kultur with the spiritual heritage of a material civilization – and thus with the process of becoming civilized, specifically as it relates to human development (i.e., as Bildung or éducation).

In the late 1860s, when Arnold took up the cause of “culture,” it lacked the anthropological definition it would acquire in the twentieth century. Nor was the term widely used in English. Among those Englishmen conversant with it, the term was associated with the “frivolous and unedifying curiosity” of self-occupied Frenchmen and Germans and thus used disapprovingly.²⁴

Only with the publication of E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871 was the way opened for the word’s subsequent evolution into an anthropological term to denote “socially patterned human thought and behavior” – though it ought to be added that Tylor, like Arnold and like the viewpoint expressed herein, associated culture with race.²⁵

For Arnold culture is:

the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.²⁶

Culture in this is self-culture: that is, the self-cultivation of man’s being through a formation in the finest achievements of his civilization. Hence, the definition found in older editions of the OED: “The training, development, refinement of mind, tastes, and manners.”

For Arnold the striving to improve and enhance oneself (”perfection”) was the ideal state of the mind, just as health was the ideal state of the body.

Culture here is more a state of mind than a body of knowledge. For the mind’s love of perfection implies a process of becoming rather than of obtaining, designating an inward condition higher or greater than outward materialism. In submitting to “the sweetness and light” (the beauty and intelligence) of the great poetry and literature of the Western heritage, the individual imbues his mind with a balance, clarity, and fullness of thought, which Hebraisim – in its stern reaction to the moral indifference of Renaissance Hellenism – closes off.

As such, culture preserves an openness as it strives for the best, fostering in the process “human wholeness” and “social health.”

“Culture,” then, is essentially two things for Arnold: primarily, it’s a general process of “intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development” in the individual, and, secondly, it’s a body of works and practices representing the best in European artistic and intellectual achievement.

This notion of culture as the harmonious development of human nature through the individual’s cultivation of his mind has been subject to numerous criticisms. For example, it has been criticized for being too individualist and too bookish, for favoring “high” culture over folk culture, for being too abstract and having no reality in contemporary society, and nowadays for being exclusive and exclusionary, etc.

Whatever the justice of these criticisms, Arnold’s notion of culture (which is, admittedly, dated) must ultimately be valued not as an unconcealing truth, but as a valiant rearguard defense of the Western tradition – waged in an age when the West had begun to war on its own culture. (The white man, to be sure, didn’t have to await the Jews’ “culture of critique” to start assailing his heritage. It had already started in Arnold’s day, having grown out of the liberal modernist impulses of industrial society.)²⁷

Arnold’s conception of “culture” may no longer be defensible, but his concern for the larger heritage and his notion of culture’s intimate relationship to national behavior, I think, retain a certain relevance.

The Rise of “Culturalism”

The Arnoldian concept of culture is held by few today. By the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties, the anthropological nation of culture that began supplanting the Arnoldian notion in the late nineteenth century had almost everywhere became dominant.

As early as 1949, T.S. Eliot, who succeeded Arnold as the foremost Anglophone defender of the European tradition, had accepted the anthropological concept that defines “culture” as a particular people’s way of life, encompassing all the genres and modes of a people’s experience. In a famous sentence, Eliot stressed the wide compass culture embraces:

It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelve of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wenley-dale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.²⁸

All these things added up not to culture, however, only its multiple elements.

“Just as man is more than the sum of his body parts, culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs. All these parts act on one another and to fully understood one you have to understand them all.”²⁹

Culture for Eliot is evidently not the cultivation of the individual mind, or even the canon of its great achievements, as Arnold held, but a common way of life embodied in social institutions, involving moral standards and practices with a tradition behind them.

His notion of culture is nevertheless something more than the anthropologist’s “way of life” – because it’s something entirely its own, something which Eliot associated with the religious incarnation of a people’s particular spirit.³⁰

The strictly anthropological concept, by contrast, sever all ties between human biology and culture, seeing the latter as an artificial creation of generalized men in generalized circumstances, as if men were “blank tablets on which the environment inscribes culture.”

Beginning in the late 1880s, when Franz Boas “embarked on his life-long assault on the idea that race was the primary source of the differences in mental or societal capacities of different human groups,” he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and races are mentally equal.³¹ He extended, in effect, the democratic principle from politics to culture and then from culture to race.

From this allegedly impartial perspective, different peoples, different societies, different forms of social organization, belief, and value are seen as the product of different histories, different experiences, different circumstances, different stages of development, but not the achievement of specific blood lines and races. In a word, group differences were reconceived as cultural rather than biological.

In Max Weber’s eloquent formulation, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance [i.e., culture] which he himself has spun.³² This makes culture sui generis – explainable solely in terms of itself.

Hence, Boas’ contention that cultural and social factors alone, rather than biological or innate ones, explain differences in human behavior. Hence also the anarchistic tendency inherent in the ensuing relativism, where no standard is allowed to judge human behavior except cultural ones, which are self-referential and thus self-legitimating. Hence, finally, the tendency to consider all cultures as inherently equal, as if the “culture” of New Guinea headhunters is comparable to that of the higher civilized cultures, which are products of history and the complex intertwined social worlds they create. Perversely, not a few twentieth-century anthropologists (Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict preeminently) have used their select knowledge of primitive peoples to highlight the failures of modern society and to challenge conservative moral standards – not for the sake of their own culture, but for that of liberal reform and the nonwhites of whom they are so enamored.

The larger point here is that the anthropological concept of culture, as the historian Carl Degler puts it, “made the idea of a hierarchy of human societies based on innate differences . . . no longer tenable; human nature was now a unity, however diverse its expressions.”³³

Boas’s concept, which soon spread to other social science disciplines, was, of course, arrived at not through a disinterested, scientific inquiry, but through a belief in liberalism’s blank-slate ideology (which emphasizes the primacy of learning and environment).

It would be naive, though, to assume that this Jewish anthropologist (however dishonest and conniving) somehow single-handedly undermined the racial foundations of American life. Boas’s culturalist assault on the then existing racial hierarchy was waged in the spirit of liberal modernity and of the American political tradition. Boas’s efforts were indeed linked with the “new social sciences,” the Social Gospel, and Progressivism. For integral to the country’s pragmatic spirit (especially after the War of Secession) was a will to reform society, expand opportunity, and create a more rational social order based on individual achievement rather than on natural ascriptions.³⁴ This was inherent in the liberal creedal principles of individualism and equality undergirding Lincoln’s new constitutional order – an order which Jews and other new immigrants were especially active in combating the country’s equally powerful national heritage.

Despite the previous existence of slavery and the persistence of rigid racial hierarchy, biological or Darwinian determinism jeopardized the environmental principles of America’s postbellum liberal enterprise. For if pathological behavior, poverty, and ignorance were due solely to racial or hereditarian factors, then there could be no hope for reform and progress: you simply could not change the unchangeable.

But if it’s culture and heredity – nurture and nature – that is the source of human difference, then race is incidental to existing social inequities.³⁵ Reform and change are thus possible, which makes modification of educational and environmental factors the key to social development.

Culturalism, as such, rejects race theory on the basis of an unproven assumption: that mental processes are roughly equal in all people and therefore that the body is not a factor affected the mind. But if culturalism assumes that there is no relationship between mind and body, its materialistic mirror image, racial/biological determinism, assumes that the mind is simply another facet of the body, with the body determining the mind (not just in shaping its capacity but also its substance).

Philosophical Anthropology

Though there is more evidence for racial/biological determinism, it is no less disputable, especially in that man in that man is a composite not merely of biological matter, but also of those nebulously named non-bodily substances like intellect, reason, mind, and soul.³⁶

A plant or animal may thus be understood simply in terms of animated matter and instinct (i.e., biologically), but in human beings matter is linked with sentiment and intelligence, and, though in ways not often clear, it is the latter more than the body that plays the leading role – at least to the degree that the body possesses a vitality whose spirit achieves a certain sovereignty.³⁷ The biological or “scientific” idea of race, by reducing man’s spirit to his animal nature (in the sense of making culture not merely dependent on, but synonymous with the disposition for intelligence and creativity bequeathed by genetics),³⁸ is arguably objectionable in the same way that Marxism’s reduction of society and religion to the “superstructure” of the economic “base” is objectionable.³⁹

Biological determinists and cultural anthropologists are quite alike, then, in being equally unqualified to speak on the relationship between culture and race, or on what might be called a variant of the historic mind-body question.

But through natural science in inadequate to the study of this relationship, it doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent. The thinkers most qualified to examine this relationship, which has occupied Western philosophical thought in one form or another since Aristotle, are those belonging to that rarefied, mainly German, discipline known as “philosophical anthropology” – a discipline which aims at bridging the different realms of physical, cultural, and theoretical anthropology in order to develop “a coherent idea of human being.”⁴⁰

From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, it is scientifically legitimate to classify man into “anatomical characteristics regularly and constantly produced by hereditary” (i.e., racial genotypes), but it itself this discloses nothing (or nothing substantial) about the mind’s relationship to its animal body.

The greatest of the philosophical anthropologist to speak to this relationship, Arnold Gehlen, spent much of his career investigating culture’s complex physiological sources and the way the body is linked to the cultural expressions of the mind. This is not the place to repeat what I have said of Gehlen’s work elsewhere.⁴¹ Suffice to mention that Gehlen did not reduce mind to body, but instead saw culture (mind’s spiritual compendium) as a means of compensating for man’s “instinctual deficiency.”

Animals, Gehlen argued, have no need to think of plan how to build a nest, fly south for the winter, or ruffle their feathers to woo a mate. The “not yet determined animal” man, on the other hand, lacks such instincts and head, under the unsheltered sky 40,000 years ago, to rely on his culture – on the learned responses and principles that came from his past, that were continually modified in his encounter with world, and that ultimately took institutional form and became “quasi-automatic habits of thought, feeling, judgment and action” – to cope with the stimulations, impressions, and challenges coming from his environment.⁴²

Culture arose and developed in Gehlen’s view as man’s “second nature” – as something to compensate for his instinctual deficiency and his lack of “environmental specialization.” And somewhat like his genetic heritage, culture, as a “shaping template” of behavior, is transmittable to the next generation, so that the achievements of one era can be passed on to the next. This makes culture a community of thought and achievement, a community of history and tradition, and a community of blood and kin. All these “communities” go into the formulation of a culture, and to stress just one, say body or thought, is reductionist.

Culture, in this view, is bound up with man’s physical nature, but is nevertheless “world open,” able to evolve and adapt and become self-conscious. It is this second nature that enables man “to anticipate himself, fall back upon himself, adjust and reverse his movements, plan – all in order to enhance his survivability.”⁴³ As such, man’s being is caught in an endless exchange between interior forces (intelligence, will, imagination, etc.) and exterior ones (the environment), as the exterior is assimilated into the interior and the interior is manifested in the exterior. Mind – and the culture its creates – are not, then, mere reflections of the body, though they are inseparable from it.

It is thus through mind (and culture) that a specific genotype responds to and influences its larger environment.

Race, in this way, gives rise to a culture that can be seen, to use a term that Gehlen didn’t, as “an extended phenotype.” For if a spider’s web is the extended phenotype of the spider’s genotype, culture in a similar way can be seen as the extended phenotype of a specific human life form. In Louis R. Browning’s formulation: “The ability of persons to deal with, and manipulate, their environments, their interactions with other people, their schooling, their career: all such capabilities that can influence the fitness of a person can be considered part of the individual’s [extended] phenotype.”⁴⁴

Racial behavior in this perspective needs to be seen in terms of tendencies that enhance “fitness,” not fixed inevitabilities, like instincts, for the different cultures that different races create do not actually dictate behavior per se, so much as they provide an orientation that shapes its contours and does so across history’s longue duree, as the generations of the dead impose their hard-won truths on the living. Ultimately, this works to enhance a people’s survivability, as well as its vitality.

In this vein, one of our great anti-liberal historians defines a healthy culture as one which recovers the sources of life. “Why,” he asks,” is a stockbroker less beautiful than a Homeric warrior . . .? Because he is less incorporated with life, he is not inevitable, but accidental, almost parasitic. When a culture has proved its real needs, and organized its vital functions, every office becomes beautiful.”⁴⁵

What then is the relationship between race and culture? Arnold’s notion that every people or race has a distinct personality that can be grasped through a few designated characteristics is probably too simplistic to be of more than literary value. Indeed, every great people (from a historicist rather than a relativist perspective) is probably best viewed in terms of its own standards rather than those of another. Arnold, however, got the most important thing right: that people and culture, blood and heritage, are ultimately one. He thus posited a distinct relationship between race and culture, just as he suspected that the impairment of one would have a negative impact on the other.

This, I think, is key to understanding the relationship between race and culture. But it’s not until we get to Gehlen that we see how culture entails not just all those things that are tied up in a way of life, but also in life itself – in the form of man’s animal body. This relationship is not the simple one-way process that nineteenth-century racialists or contemporary sociobiologists assume – but it nevertheless accepts that a specific genotype (race) gives rise to a corresponding extended phenotype (culture).

Because culture is the second – the spiritual – nature of man, it no more determines the behavior of man’s animal body than the body controls a people’s culture. Rather than “determine,” the word should probably be “express” – for man’s second nature is unlike instinct in being “world open.”

Think of the cultural diversity among peoples of the same stock. Though there are profound similarities between, say, Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Presbyterians (such as their profoundly conservative morality, the “epigrammatic concision” of their speech, or the intransigence of their nationalism), the sharp differences dividing these long-warring communities, despite their virtually identical DNA, demonstrate that culture is not a mere organic offshoot of the body. History, circumstance, and experience are evidently crucial factors in its production.

Culture and biology, though, are irreparably linked, as Gehlen indicates, and linked in ways that almost alway sustain one another. A white man born into Chinese culture may conceivably become Chinese in language, behavior, even spirit – which means he ceases to be a white man in any way except genotypically – but at the same time he can never become Chinese in blood, which is not the case of Irish Catholics and Presbyterians vis-a-vis each other’s cultures.⁴⁶ The spirit of a Chinese-enculturated white man would consequently always he at odds with the body, and this would inevitably distort his place in the world. Said differently, his genotype acquires an “unfit” or incongruent extended phenotype.

Behavior, if follows, cannot replace biology; culture cannot be separated from its racial source; one cannot become what one is not.

The link between race and culture may therefore be a supple one, but in the last instance it cannot be eliminated without risking a mongrelizing adulteration – based on a callous disregard of man’s specific nature. For though blood inheritance is a paramount importance in determining man’s nature, the spirit that guides his nature, even with the help of contemporary behavioral genetics, cannot be understood outside the culture that situates it.⁴⁷

The body that forms a community or a nation is not, then, the body of biology, the animal body, but rather the mind-perfected body of closely related cultural beings.

When a community or nation defines itself in bodily or racial terms, even its idea of the body is shaped by the mind and its specific culture. For if an individual or a community is essentially grounded in a body, this body-idea shares in the given social or political reality (as the idea of dynasty, blood lineage, enthnonation, or race) and, as such, is always the product of a particular cultural heritage rather than an unmediated reflection of the body. (At the same time, the opposite also holds, for man is never a completely self-enclosed, autonomous individual, either physically or culturally: hereditary capabilities develop only in certain environments, just as their development depends on a genetic predisposition.) Man, in other words, is neither totally a product of race nor of culture, but a biocultural organism whose blood and spirit are inextricably bound.

It seems no accident that the starting point of most systems of human racial classification begin not with the “natural” or “pure” races found in primitive societies, but with “historical races” – entities pertaining as much to mind (history) as to nature. Instead, then, of being understood as distinct groupings based exclusively on physical traits, human races must also be seen, given that man is a composite, in terms of his unity of being – in terms, that is, of the inner principle that pervades his component parts.⁴⁸

From this perspective it can be claimed that races come into existence and develop not according to strict biological laws, but under the influence of the mind.⁴⁹ This is not to say that mind determines genotype, but rather that the mind’s social-cultural exteriorization affects a people’s racial istory and identity – and thus determines if a particular genotype will arise or not. There is, as a result, no distinct racial or national type without a correspondingly distinct cultural type.

I am not proposing a “culturalist” notion of race. The race I defend is the European race based on a specific gene pool, genetic cluster, breeding population, stock, or whatever term you want to use to speak of race in the zoological sense. Our genetic heritage is primary and cannot be compromised. But race as a biological category applied to human beings refers only to man’s animal nature, not his whole being. His animal nature may provide the disposition or capacity for specific European life forms and therefore cannot be dispensed with, but the European’s distinct heritage is only a facet of life, inseparable from everything else that contributes to it. Thus, however much race in the biological sense is requisite to everything else, in itself it has little explanatory power – because man’s being, even in the physical sense, is above all affected by the mind.

To take one’s stand simply in the animal sphere, then, not only confuses the part with the whole, it leaves us defenseless in all those higher realms where our life is manifested and sustained. A purely “scientific” (better said, “scientistic”) notion of race cannot, as a result, but leave all the other ramparts supporting our specific expression of human life undefended – and it is at these other ramparts (call them culture, society, religion, etc.) where the enemy has been most successful in destroying the basis of white life. For once the white man’s culture is destroyed, then the significance and purpose of white life is also destroyed – first ontologically, then physically. It’s imperative for this reason to take our stand not in natural science alone, but in all the multiple realms of human being.

There are several roots to the idea I’m suggesting here. The deepest, perhaps, is Friedrich von Schelling’s idea that a people emerges from its myths insofar as the “community of consciousness” forged by a shared myth is what grounds and unites a people as a people.⁵⁰ Every understanding of the ethnogenetic process that creates races and nations starts from this idea.

Race, Culture, and America

The American case is the preeminent example of this conception of the connection between race and culture. When transplanted Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia began identifying themselves as “white,” in opposition to their black slaves – who were seen as more beast than man – they made “white skin” the basis of what later became the core of the American’s national identity. “White” here wasn’t just a biological marker that put whites at the high end of the human chain of being. It also implied all those things associated with their racial kinsmen in Europe (such as their cultural heritage, religious beliefs, standards of beauty, etc.) Other European whites (Scots-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, French, etc.) would consequently be accepted as Americans on the basis of their cultural and biological kinship with the larger European family of nations. Entry into American society was based thus largely on ethnic invisibility and racial origin – which made white skin color “the most important single determinant in their human relations.”

With the arrival of the Irish in the 1830s and ’40s, the religious (Protestant) and social (bourgeois) components of America’s white identity were culturally challenged by the Catholic, tribal character “the mud-splattered, shillelagh-wielding salpeen” with the imputed simian features.”⁵¹ In time, though, as the Irish were acculturated and Americans became more religiously indifferent, they were gradually accepted as Americans on the basis of their racial kinship wit the native Anglo-Protestants. But it should be added that Irish-Americans, however loyal to their new homeland, “had no intention of abandoning their religion, disguising their ancestry, or detaching themselves from the struggles of their native land.”⁵² Indeed, it was from their fierce devotion to Mother Eire that came their equally unyielding devotion to America. The Irish, as such, were acculturated into American culture, which they also helped to shape – they were not “melted” into a mongrel mass.

The “assimilation” of Irish and other Europeans ethnics, however, could never happen with blacks, for implicit in the American way of life was the understanding that race – not just white skin, but all that was associated with their Old World origins – was primary. Their European origins, in fact, were requisite to everything that made the American an American. The assumption here was not just that black skin belonged to another physical type of man than those with white skin, but that the black spirit – culture, soul, essence – was a different order of spirit than the white man’s. These differences were not accomodatable because they were fundamentally alien to one another, as alien as the drum-beating percussions of the African jungle were to the counterpoint of Bach’s Kunst der Fuge. An Irishman could change his religion, lose his brogue, or embrace American norms, but nothing could turn black into white.

Then as now, blue-nose reformers would insist that race was no more an obstacle to assimilation than religion, social rank, or national origin. But no matter how deficient Americans may have been in their high cultural accomplishment, they nevertheless retained their identity as Europeans – as whites – whose singularity was defined in opposition to non-Europeans. Cultural assimilation, in a word, was based on and conditioned by racial criteria.⁵³

Only after 1945, under assault from the new National Security State and a largely Jewish-controlled “culture industry,” would the racial basis of American identity (and hence culture) be subverted and refounded on the basis of purely creedal/ideological criteria. Accordingly, the new nonracial identity of the postwar era led directly to a multiracial atomization destructive of the American’s former racial identity – as his expanded phenotype more and more diverged from his genotype, to the point where the former is now, arguably, no longer an extension but adulteration of the latter.

A backhanded affirmation of the inherent link between race and culture is particularly evident today in the ideology of multiculturalism. At the root of this liberal pluralistic dogma is the “anti-racist” contention that the biological entities once commonly referred to as “races” do not exist – but are rather mere “social constructs.” This makes “race” a totally subjective category based on an allegedly flawed, bigoted, or self-interested perception. But if race as a biological fact is a matter of perception, and if perception of biological (racial) differences is an expression of racism, as multiculturalists hold, this doesn’t mean that the socially constructed fact of race is to be ignored, for it has supposedly become pivotal to the dominant system of social control. Thus, no sooner do anti-racists deny race as a biological essence than they turn around and call for measures favoring the so-called nonwhite “social construct” – and, just as contradictory, they advocate not assimilation into the larger (white) American culture but a recognition and validation of their nonwhite cultures.

As one egalitarian critic of multiculturalism explains: “Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake.⁵⁴

Culture in this multiculturalist optic becomes a surrogate for the biological notion of race, and the celebration of cultural differences (”diversity”) becomes a celebration of racial differences. Multiculturalism serves in this way as the proxy of multiculturalism. This doesn’t mean, of course, that race and culture are equivalent terms – only that among anti-racists there is a certain assumption about the inherent relationship between race and culture.

And on this one point I think these enemies of our people get it right.

Culture and Post-American Anarchy

In Arnold’s most famous poem, “Dover Beach” (1867), he depicted England’s troubled culture in all its deep-seated spiritual anarchy:

… for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams …
[Is but] a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This is the England of Culture and Anarchy, whose disordering chaos lay not just in increased incidents of social violence and political agitation, but in the country’s

hideous sprawling industrial cities, its loud-voice assertion of personal liberty, its dismal, stuffy, and cantankerous forms of Christianity, its worship of size and numbers and wealth and machinery generally, its state-blindness, and its belief in collision (collision of parties, of sects, of firms) as the only way to salvation.⁵⁵

Arnold thought the root of this growing anarchy was cultural. As a child of the Reformation, England had been home to that “Dissidence of Dissent and [that] Protestantism of the Protestant religion” called Puritanism.⁵⁶ Puritanism, Arnold granted, may have been necessary to develop “the moral fiber of the English race . . . to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men’s minds, and to prepare the way for freedom of thought.”⁵⁷ But its notion of moral perfection had nothing to do with spiritual perfection, and its narrow, individualistic spirit was a threat to the nation’s unity.

Given that the chief bearer of Puritan dissent was the English middle class and that this class was dominant not only in the economy, but increasingly in society, Arnold feared its Hebraising effects would rend the nation’s communal fabric. For the Puritan’s highly developed individual conscience posited that every man was on his own in matters of religion, as well as in matters of business and personal conduct. The norms embodied in the established church were thus ignored, as was the cultural heritage that once animated the English people. Like Jacobinism, utilitarianism, and liberalism, Puritanism had no patience with the legacy of the past and was disposed to radical schemes subversive of established hierarchies. In its opposition to the Church of England, it proposed, for example, “placing all good men alike in a condition of religious equality.” Arnold called this the solution of the “tailless foxes,” who advocated that all foxed cut off their tails.⁵⁸ The endless cycles of sectarian strife that isolated their mitotic churches in “holes and corners,” further fragmenting the nation. By rejecting any corporate or collective authority that might compromise their conscience and insisting that every Englishman had the right to do whatever he pleased, the dissenters’ individualism, Arnold feared, was leading, quite literally, to anarchy.

This is why he championed the cause of culture, which he called “the most resolute enemy of anarchy.”⁵⁹ If the whole nation would learn self-discipline through a unified culture of “right reason, ideas, and light,” it might be possible “to cure the narrowness of Puritanism” and bring it “into the main current of national life.” A man reared in the “totality” of the established church had no need, he claimed, to struggle to find a private form of self-expression: imbued with “a sense of the historical life of the human spirit, outside and beyond [his[ own fancies laving himself free to develop his other sides. A national culture centered in an established church thus offered innumerably more avenues for self-development and realization, suggesting "new sides and sympathies for our own forms of religion, gives us the leisure and calm to steady out our view of religion itself."⁶⁰

"In a serious people, where everyone has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his [whole] mind.”⁶¹ Relatedly, all the great works of art, literature, and science “came not from nonconformists, but from men of the Establishment – or at least men trained by the Establishment.” The greatest Puritans – Milton, Baxter, Wesley – had, accordingly, been formed within the Establishment’s pale. “A generation or two outside the Establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more.”⁶² Against the Puritans’ deforming morality, Arnold defended the sweetness and light that came from the Anglo-European heritage.

Arnold’s cultural antidote to the centrifugal forces of modern liberal society pertained, though, not just to Victorian England, but to the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States.

The America Arnold knew was very different from the America that began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, just as the latter qualitatively would differ from the America of the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, much of what he said about this new country retains its significance in illuminating the country’s subsequent cultural trajectory. Basic to his view is the contention that America was essentially “a province of England,” with roughly the same admixture of Saxons and Celts. Yet unlike England, America had a small reading class, few men of letters, no intellectual center, and a people oriented more to material than cultural matters. Also, unlike England, America lacked both an aristocracy and a peasantry, which meant it was almost entirely a middle-class country, affected by the same Philistine and Hebraising tendencies he criticized in the English middle class.⁶³

Influenced by the sectarianism of its evangelical Protestantism (”without great men and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity”),⁶⁴ American energy was funneled into money-making or, when it took spiritual form, into doctrines of moral uplift, such as those promoted by the reforming mania of the Social Gospel.

In Arnold’s view, the “unintelligence” of English nonconformists almost totally dominated the United States. He rhetorically asked in one of his articles:

Do not tell me only … of the magnitude of your industry and commerce; of the beneficence of your institutions, your freedom, your equality … tell me also if your civilization – which is the grand name you give to all this development – tell me if your civilization is interesting.⁶⁵

And he answered himself in the negative, for America in his eyes lacked distinction, having, despite its vast economic achievement, failed to develop “the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners, as well as the great power of conduct and religion.”⁶⁶

Like many European critics of America’s plebian civilization, Arnold was overly quick in applying his European standards to American life, failing to grasp many of its defining features (such as the cult of republicanism and producerism inscribed in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist tradition, which in some ways served as a national “church,” or the personal trust and mutual interest that bound these ostensibly atomized individuals to one another.) The result is a picture not quite as balanced as it should have been. Arnold also didn’t fully understand that a totally middle-class country, based on an idea of “personal aggrandizement” and having no Church, nobility, or army to anchor its established values, was a country dominated not just by individualist market principles, but by state and social structures indifferent, if not hostile to nation and culture.

Nevertheless, his basic point – that America’s Philistine, middle-class culture, with its materialist and individualist slant, was corrosive of community and thus a force of anarchy – retains, I think, a certain pertinence, even if he failed to see what it implied in terms of larger structural or institutional developments.

More generally, the postbellum America Arnold knew was in the process of succumbing to forces that exacerbated the atomistic tendencies of its middle-class culture, as the country fell into the hands of a rapacious plutocracy indifferent to its diverse population and incapable of developing a national culture around which to assimilate its different European stocks.

The divisive, potentially anarchistic tendencies that have since colonized its culture with the prerogatives of the market have not merely continued into the present, but have been accelerated by other, more centrifugal forces.

In the late nineteenth century the country’s massive industrialization began to overwhelm the small-town, rural character of American life, replacing it with sprawling, smoke-stacked metropolises that radically transformed the social-scape, as the earlier agrarian America gave way to a new business civilization dominated by giant corporate entities.⁶⁷ The peasant masses from Eastern and Southern Europe who came to fill the new factories helped undermine the largely British/North-European character of the population. Linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities became more complex and conflicted, just as local and regional cultures surrendered its urbanizing, commercial, and technological forces.

America’s increasingly deracinated masses were drawn into a “culture industry” based on newspapers, vaudeville, touring theater companies, and then, in the twentieth century, on automobiles, urban night life, professional sports, movies, radio, TV, and other mass entertainments lacking the “sweetness and light” characteristic of traditional European culture. Worse, this consumer-driven, commercial culture, instead of rejecting the outward materialism, fully succumbed to it. Not the best that had been thought and said, this mass culture appealed to what Henry James called “the new, the simple, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly.”⁶⁸

The late twentieth century then introduced forces that were qualitatively more anarchistic. The most radical of these, of course, was Third World immigration, which is changing not just the ethnic but the racial character of the population, breaking down the country’s last remaining European remnant.

It seems hardly fortuitous that America’s present Affenkultur is tied to the racially alien forces of hip-hop and Hollywood – and to a spirit, institutionalized in Marxisant cultural studies departments, which treats all forms of discrimination, taste, and value judgment as illegitimate.

This cultural process of ethnoracial dissolution has been compounded by a communication and digital revolution, whose programmed images create a “virtual reality” unmoored from the realities it represents and whose representations are both medium and message;⁶⁹ by a globalization of economic exchanges in which national imperatives give way to world market interests and those of the global “superclass”;⁷⁰ by a “new class” elite increasingly nonwhite, “counter-cultural,” and indifferent to all former standards of social distinction and taste;⁷¹ by “entertainment values” and visual media that corrupt the way we think;⁷² and by an educational system, which has produced what is arguably the dumbest and most infantile generation of students in American history.⁷³

Behind these developments that have become integral parts of America’s consumer society that seek to turn Americans into a faceless mass of coffee-colored consumers lies the destruction of all that connects genotype and extended phenotype, as the organic ties linking America’s European race and its nativist variant of the larger European culture are severed.

As long, then, as white American identity is not defined by the symbols, beliefs, and destiny dictated by our past and by our regulative tradition, but by the programmed contrivances of an alien culture industry, we cease to exist as a people. For without the memories and myths that make a people a people, white Americans are only “so many politically bound” people.⁷⁴

Conclusion

To the extent that the white-nationalist project endeavors to raise the consciousness of the country’s European-descended population, it is largely a cultural project to heighten white identity by anchoring it in a body of beliefs and practices – a culture – whose consciousness defies the racial anarchy presently threatening whites. It thus consciously or unconsciously accepts that culture is neither the democratic smorgasbord for all tastes that multiculturalists claim nor is it something fixed in an academic canon for all time, as our Jewish-trained conservatives would have it. Rather, as suggested above, it is the spirit engendered by the blood that created the European life world and the people who inhabit it – it is the extended phenotype of the white genotype.

Culture as such is an organic growth, inseparable from the people who live it and make it grow. At the highest level it is indistinguishable from race and nation, being the spiritual manifestation of a people’s distinct life form. To separate race and culture – not just through the introduction of Hebraising practices, but through a concerted assault on the institutional relationship between whites and their heritage – is to destroy, then, both race and culture, for one cannot exist without the other.

Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books, 2004).

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¹ “No other foreign critics, and perhaps few native ones, have acquired such a reputation and exercised such palpable influence on American culture.” John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 1.
² Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J.D. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 1960), 68
³ O.D. Edwards, “Matthew Arnold’s Fight for Ireland,” in R. Giddings, ed., Matthew Arnold: Between Two Worlds (London: Vision Press, 1986)
⁴ Quoated in Robert A. Hutterback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies 1830-1910 (Illinois: Cornell University Press, 1976), 17.
⁵ Frederic E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1951), 18. (This is the key work on Arnold’s “racialism,” and my essay is much indebted to it.) The Celts, like the Teutons, were a “North European” people. To see either as a distinct race is misleading, as they are perhaps best viewed as different cultural-linguistic offshoots of the same racial stock. E. Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland: Habit, Heritage and History (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992), 43-45
⁶ Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (Sioux Falls, S.D.: NuVision Publications, 2008), 22.
⁷ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 53. On English superstitions about the Celt, see G.B. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904) (various editions). Although the English saw themselves as descendants of the Angle and Saxon invaders, they are actually, in the vast majority – as a long tradition from Thomas Huxley to Sir Arthur Keith to Brian Sykes has scientifically demonstrated – descended from the old Britons – Celts! English Cymric (or Cumbri) Celts had their language and institutions Germanized by the Anglo-Saxon and later Norman invaders, while Ireland’s Gaelic Celts managed to naturalize the Germanizing influences of its Viking, Norman, and Anglo-Irish invaders. Despite the successive waves of invaders, there has, in fact, been no significant genetic variation in the population of the British Isles over the last several thousand years. See Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York: Norton, 2006); more generally, John Morris, The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
⁸ Edwards, “Matthew Arnold’s Fight for Ireland.”
⁹ This is the subject of George Meredith’s 1910 novel, Celt and Saxon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922)
¹⁰ Matthew Arnold, “Ecce, Convertium ad Gentes,” in Irish Essays and Other Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1970). Ernst Renan made a similar observation about the lack of “general intelligence” in the US, which he referred to as la dure inintelligence des Américains du Nord. Intelligence, however, is different from character, and the latter is arguably the greater force for change and action.
¹¹ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 11.
¹² Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 150.
¹³ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 14.
¹⁴ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 53.
¹⁵ The oppression, dispossession, and garrison state that were the basis of English rule in Ireland didn’t exactly convince the Irish of English morality. The notion of “perfidious Albion” is similarly embedded in Continental culture. This suggests not only how subjective Arnold’s method was, but how subjective all such ethnoracial characterizations are. Gustav Le Bon’s Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Paris, 1894) [English trans., The Psychology of Peoples], which represents one of the best treatments of what might be called the characterological analysis of race, drew – revealingly – the exact opposition conclusion, with Le Bon seeing the English and Americans as sturdy, self-reliant, enterprising peoples and the “Latin” races, despite their greater intellectual and artistic gifts, as being inherently “subservient” – i.e., dependent more on the central state than themselves.
¹⁶ A. O. T. Cockshut, “Matthew Arnold, Conservative Revolutionary,” in D.J. Laura, ed., Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973).
¹⁷ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 11.
¹⁸ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 102.
¹⁹ Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1960, 106.
²⁰ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 141.
²¹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 154.
²² It was actually the German playwright Hanns Johst who said: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.”
²³ Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76-82.
²⁴ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 43.
²⁵ The emergence of the modern notion of culture in this period was both representative of the great changes then transforming Europe and of the changing consciousness of European peoples. In the following potent sentence, Martin Heidegger captures something of the essence of this new consciousness: “The connection of the concept of culture with the idea of historicality – the formation of culture as a historical process – makes intelligible the conceptual domination of the concept of culture at the end of the nineteenth century, [for] only where historical consciousness is awake can the idea of culture as a process of formation and formative aim of human creative life penetrate into reflective consciousness.” Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2008), 101.
²⁶ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 6.
²⁷ Kevin MacDonald, “American Transcedentalism: An Indigenous Culture of Critique,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol.8, no.1 (Spring 2008).
²⁸ T.S. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 104.
²⁹ Eliot, “The Unity of European Culture,” in Christianity and Culture.
³⁰ Eliot, Notes toward the Definition of Culture,” 100.
³¹ Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6.
³² Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
³³ Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 104.
³⁴ According to Julius Evola, the vision of man that stands behinds the American concept of individualism is one in which “everyone can become whatever he wants to, within the limits of the technological means at his disposal . . . if he knows how to train himself.” “American Civilization” (1945), http://feastofhateandfear.com/archives/jevola3.html.
³⁵ A variation of the anthropological concept of culture is the economic concept of “human capital,” seen in terms of the requirements for economic life – e.g., specific skills, work habits, attitudes to education, enterprise, etc. See Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
³⁶ In saying this, let it be clear that the supposition here is that man’s blood inheritance is of paramount importance and that man’s mental and social achievements are premised on what his specific genotype bequeaths.
³⁷ Michael O’Meara, “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 6, no.3 (Fall 2006).
³⁸ For example, Mark Graubard, “The Biological Foundation of Culture,” in Alan McGregor, ed., Race, Evolution, Creative Intelligence, and Inter-Group Competition (Washington D.C.: Mankind Quarterly Monograph, n.d.).
³⁹ The conceptually lax Arnold sometimes saw racial traits as constant and sometimes as alterable by culture. The point here is that man is both mind and body. A strictly idealist, like a strictly materialist, understanding confuses a fact of man’s being with his entirety.
⁴⁰ Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. H. Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
⁴¹ Michael O’Meara, “World Openness and Will to Power,” http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/20070/07/16/world-openness-and-and-will-to-power.html.
⁴² Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 70-73.
⁴³ Gehlen, Man, 55.
⁴⁴ The notion of culture as a phenotype is developed in Louis R. Browning, “Bioculture: A New Paradigm for the Evolution of Western Populations,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol.4, no.1 (Spring 2004). The strictly biological notion of the “extended phenotype” comes from Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
⁴⁵ Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History, ed. J.J. Mulloy (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2002), 69.
⁴⁶ Donald A. Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988).
⁴⁷ Argued in different terms, this is the point Sam Francis makes in “Why Race Matters” (1994), Essential Writings on Race, Jared Taylor, ed. (Oakton Va: New Century Foundation, 2007).
⁴⁸ Even Darwin held that “race was outside [biological] evolution.” Nancy Stephen, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 54-55.
⁴⁹ Sir Arthur Keith: “No matter what racial mixtures have entered into the composition of a people, that mixture is welded into a new race under the working of a common national spirit.” Ethnos (London: Keagan Paul, 1931), 37. Though Keith (probably the most nationalist/racialist of modern evolutionary anthropologists) saw national formation as part of a group evolutionary process and treated mind and spirit as instruments of nature’s evolutionary impetus, it was, however, man’s mind that either abetted or hindered nature and determined the way men organize themselves in the world. He thus argued, especially in reference to the Jews, that “the primary marks of race are psychological” – an argument premised on purely Darwinian postulates that led to conclusions not unlike Arnold’s “characterological” notion of race. Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Evolution (1947) (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1968), 377.
⁵⁰ Friedrich von Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth (1842), trans. M. Richey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
⁵¹ Elite aversion to Irish Catholics (especially before the “Hungry Forties”) wasn’t much different from its aversion to Scots-Irish Protestants. Catholic or Protestant, both were called simply “Irish”; Andrew Jackson was thus “the Irish President.” More than the usual ethnocentrism, this aversion stemmed from long-standing class antagonisms, with the dispossessed “Irish” occupying the radical wing of popular democracy. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitutions to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), 335.
⁵² Peter Quinn Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2007), 226.
⁵³ It’s the denial of this concept that animates the various imperialist ventures of America’s transnational ruling class, for it assumes that the particularlistic distillation of America’s market culture can be universally imposed on the rest of the world.
⁵⁴ Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 39.
⁵⁵ J.D. Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
⁵⁶ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 57-58.
⁵⁷ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 61.
⁵⁸ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 32.
⁵⁹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 204.
⁶⁰ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 20-21.
⁶¹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 20-21.
⁶² Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 13.
⁶³ Mathew Arnold, “A Word About America” (1882), in R.H. Super, ed., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), vol. X.
⁶⁴ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 22.
⁶⁵ Quoted in L. Mazzeno and A. Lefcowitz, “Arnold and Bryce: The Problem of American Democracy and Culture,” in Machann and Burts, eds., Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours.
⁶⁶ Arnold, “A Word About America.”
⁶⁷ Richard Weaver, “Orbis Americarum” (1948), In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1965, ed. Ted J. Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).
⁶⁸ Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 173.
⁶⁹ Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss et. al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 2000).
⁷⁰ David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).
⁷¹ Avrom Fleishman, New Class Culture: How an Emergent Class in Transforming American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).
⁷² Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985.)
⁷³ Mark Baurelein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher, 2008); Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
⁷⁴ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 2.

There are several ways to examine the claim that race is a social construct. A method popular in our community is to prove by genetics or biology that racial differences are real or immutable; this research has been carried out by numerous scholars whose work is well-known and whose names need not be repeated here. They oppose the theories of Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, and other inheritors of Franz Boas’s legacy. Yet there is another strain of social construction theory that has not been so thoroughly addressed by those in our community. The academic left, much of it whose power resides not in the sciences but in the humanities, propagates a parallel “race is a social construct” thesis from departments of English, philosophy, history, communication, and allied fields. These arguments, which stand largely unopposed, have less to do with human evolution than with language, stereotypes, and social interaction.

Regardless of what evidence exists for race’s biological reality, “race,” because it is a linguistic phenomenon – a word, an utterance – becomes a social construct when it enters the world of discourse, which it must do, of course, in order for us to communicate about it. I hope to show that understanding how language functions socially is vital when developing a robust, meaningful, and comprehensive argument for the reality and importance of race.

To illustrate, I would like to analyze two texts that defend this strange position. Ian F. Haney Lopez, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, has written extensively on racism and racial constructs in the American legal system. His classic essay, “The Social Construction of Race,” argues that race “must be viewed as a social construction. Human interaction rather than natural differentiation must be seen as the source and the continued basis for racial categorization.” ¹ In other words, to that author race is a social construction because we, as social beings, interact about it and therefore constantly construct its abstract significance. To Haney Lopez, because race’s definition has varied widely over time, and because it continues to evolve today at both the individual and societal levels, one should not consider “race” to be a meaningful category by which to classify people.²

Haney Lopez proceeds anecdotally, recounting his experience growing up biracial, the son of an Irish father and a Salvadoran mother. (Though, as one might expect, he explicitly writes this chapter “as a Latino.”³) While Haney Lopez’s brother identified more closely with his father’s white family, leading him to understand and present himself as “unraced,” Haney Lopez himself identified more closely with his mother’s family and considered himself a Latino. From this, he concludes that, “in my experience race reveals itself as plastic, inconstant, and to some extent volitional.”⁴ Haney Lopez, of course, proves very little with his quaint tale, but Critical Race Studies has never required much in the way of academic rigor: its democratic orientation lends itself to evidence based upon feelings and personal convictions. Nevertheless, Haney Lopez’s point is well taken: though he and his brother were born of the same parents and can claim the same genetic heritage, they have constructed their racial identities differently. Hence he concludes that race is not biological; it is a set of behavioral expectations chosen and performed by its bearer. It is a social construction.

Obviously, Haney Lopez’s biological biraciality, though it is of primary importance to his own refutation of race, is of no consequence to us: the existence of the Labradoodle does not refute the existence of the Labrador. But perhaps this issue of biracial identity does complicate our discussion of race. Haney Lopez’s story introduces the important point that a person can “choose” – or construct – his racial identity not only on a census form, but also, more notably, in the wardrobe, in the classroom, and on the streets of American cities. And, as we all known, biracial individuals are not the only ones who must construct their race in this way: a black man must perform whiteness when interviewing for a corporate job, for example, just a white kid in an urban public school must perform blackness when changing in the locker room for gym class.

I think the issue of performable racial identity is vital to explore, for it establishes that there are two forms of useful racial classifications: one that is biological and one that is social – one we are born with and one that is “volitional” (inasmuch as social behaviors can be described as volitional). This second category, the one that is socially dependent, is, according to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential Racial Formation in the United States, “a matter of both social structure and cultural representation.” They protest that

Too often, the attempt is made to understand race simply or primarily in terms of only one of these two analytic dimensions. For example, efforts to explain racial inequality as a purely social phenomenon are unable to account for the origins, patterning, and transformation of racial difference. Conversely, many examinations of racial difference – understood as a matter of cultural attributes, a la ethnicity theory, or a society-wide signification system, a la some post structuralist accounts – cannot comprehend such structural phenomenon as racial stratification in the labor market or patterns of racial segregation.

⁵

Here the authors identify and hope to synthesize two distinct, popular understandings of race based upon social constructionism: one that centers upon the oppression of biased social systems, and another which maintains and marginalizes various race-specific behavior patterns through institutionalized discourse structures. My intent is, like that of Omi and Winant, to synthesize disparate concepts within race theory in order to suggest a more suitable and realistic concept of race – one that seeks to make use of both biological and social race, which, together, comprise our identity as a people.

Hilton and MacDonald’s Social Constructionism

In this regard, there is much to say about Anthony Hilton and Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Observer article “Race as a Social Construct? No – and Yes!” The authors admit to “a modest role for social constructs” in the race debate. However this concession is less generous than it might at first seem, because it allows for only a very limited and weak social constructionism – one in which our unconscious minds are influenced by “images of black criminality and poor academic performance,” while our conscious minds are molded by what “the mainstream media like the New York Times tell us we should believe.” Seemingly inherent in this proposed duality is an omnipresent empirical reality, one in which we all directly observe and “unconsciously” internalize images of black criminality and substandard performance. In addition to this “implicit” comprehension of race and racial differences there exists and “explicit” conditioning by the mainstream media that persuades us to consciously accept the socially constructed party line. Then not only do we accept the product of our explicit conditioning, but many of us also participate, sometimes enthusiastically, in its maintenance at the societal level.⁶

First, I submit that very few whites actually internalize, consciously or unconsciously, unmediated black criminality. For the most part, we might see blacks “act black” and perform poorly in school, and we might even occasionally see blacks commit various petty crimes, but very rarely do we personally experience the widespread lack of civilization which characterizes our individual understandings of black performance in Western societies. In lieu of personal observation, which we must have in order to directly internalize images of black criminality, this understanding comes to us through published statistics, interpersonal communications, and various media (including motion pictures, newscasts, novels, the New York Times, and articles written by writers like Professor Hilton and MacDonald). These media, of course, contribute to a socially constructed notion of how race functions in our culture. The simple fact that most of us derive our racial biases, prejudices, and stereotypes largely, though not exclusively, via mediation, rather than via isolated personal experience (which, I argue, would still leave significant room for social construction), indicates that our individual conception of race are, at their root, socially constructed.

I want to commend Hilton and MacDonald for addressing the relationship between race and social construction within our discourse community for it is a topic we should seriously explore. Yet I would like to go a step further than Hilton and MacDonald and argue that race is a social construct in vastly more ways than they recognize in their article. In order to make my argument, I want to briefly explore the roots of social constructionism and suggest a few ways in which its application might be of use to us as race theorists.

Social Constructionism As Theory

Of course, social construction theory did not begin with Haney Lopez or Omi and Winant; they are only a few of the most widely cited scholars who have related that theory to race. The notion of a socially negotiated reality, as constructed through discourse, dates back to classical antiquity. Cratylus, Socrates, and Hermogenes debate the matter in Plato’s Cratyles. Socrates concludes the dialogue by stating

Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that this is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the chance occurs there will be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality.

⁷

The participants in this dialogue attempt to find a correlation between words and the concepts they signify; Hermogenes finds the relationship to be essentially arbitrary, while Cratylus maintains that words and names naturally reflect the essence of that for which they stand.⁸ As can be seen above, Socrates concludes the matter ambiguously; the matters of transitory knowledge and arbitrary signifiers are a bit of a mystery even to him. But his verdict is clear: one who relies upon a thing’s name (i.e., one who relies upon something as socially contingent as a mere word) to establish transcendent meaning or stable essence might find himself in an “unhealthy state of reality.”

Countless philosophers, linguists, and language theorists have continued this debate since the stalemate between Socrates, Cratylus, and Hermogenes in the fifth century B.C. Yet because of nineteenth- and twentieth-century breakthroughs in structuralist and poststructuralist linguistics, the “conventionalists” – those who find the relationship between signifier and signified to be conventional and arbitrary – seem to have taken the prize. So for our purposes, the implications of their position are worth revisiting: if a word (or other signifier) does not flawlessly and directly communicate the concept it signifies – in other words, if there is not an inherent relationship between signifiers and their referents – at least a certain degree of social construction of meaning must take place between a communicator and his audience. Naturally, this is true even when the conversation is about race or other matters that have a certain empirical basis.

Some modern theorists of social constructionism have latched upon the ambiguous relationship between words and concepts and have then attempted to induce from it a vision of the world in which reality exists only via mediation and construction. This “strong” social constructionism, which gained popularity after the Second World War and which was particularly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, can be exemplified by Richard Vatz, who claims that

Fortunately or unfortunately meaning is not intrinsic in events, facts, people, or “situations,” nor are facts “publicly observable.” Except for those situations which directly confront our own empirical reality, we learn of facts and events through someone’s communicating them to us. This involves a two-part process. First, there is a choice of events to communicate . . . The second step in communicating “situations” is the translation of the chosen information into meaning.

⁹

Readers of The Occidental Quarterly can likely appreciate Vatz’s recognition that reality is frequently crafted for individuals by mediating forces; in fact, this journal exists only as a response to popularly propagated myths which obfuscate or invent (socially construct) “truths” about race and other related issues. If these myths were not “the truth” to the masses of the American public, we in the TOQ community would have little to discuss. Yet Vatz goes further in his theory of social construction, deferentially quoting American political scientist Murray Edelman: “language does not mirror an objective ‘reality’ but rather creates it by organizing meaningful perceptions abstracted from a complex, bewildering world.”¹⁰ This dismissal of any “objective reality” is the core of strong social construction theory.

In quoting, Edelman, Vatz aligns himself with an entire tradition of postmodern thinkers from this era – Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty are among the most notable – who endorse a position of more or less total social construction: they posit a view of the world – or, more accurately, a view of six and a half billion worlds – that exist only in the minds of their beholders. According to them, a person’s linguistic experience constructs for him an unstable and indescribable reality that will inevitably differ from that of all other individuals, each of whom possess his own little symbolic reality. According to this postmodernists, we are therefore only able to use language as a system of symbols that problematically communicate the concepts between our quite incompatible individuals worlds. So to them and their twenty-first century acolytes, race, as an utterance, is meaningless, insomuch as “meaning” implies a social negotiation of fluid, faultless understanding. This extreme brand of social constructionism departs notably from the one suggested by Hermogenes in the Cratylus, and it is one which, in my opinion, fails to realistically address the complex relationship between material reality and social interaction.

Today many others also find this “strong” social constructionism untenable. In the introduction to his The Construction of Social Reality, philosopher John Searle addresses the theories of the “strong” constructionists: “We live in exactly one world, not two or three or seventeen … But the existence of phenomena which are not in any obvious way physical or chemical gives rise to puzzlement.”¹¹ To Searle, language does prevent people from living on the same planet. There is room within social construction theory for a realist vision of a shared world, and though language complicates the matter, it does not totally imprison us isolated within its grasp.

Searle distinguishes between things that can be considered socially constructed and those that cannot. He explains that there is a difference between those two types of reality: first, there is the reality in which the value of a $5 bill is socially constructed, and second and there is the reality that hydrogen atoms have one electron.¹² Our society has constructed a system of exchange in which $5 bills, despite their intrinsic worthlessness, are accepted as legal tender and are differentiated from lesser and greater bills only by the ink patterns printed upon them (to Searle, an “institutional” or “social” fact¹³). On the other hand, that hydrogen atoms have one electron is an empirical fact (or a “brute” fact) that would still exist without human observation or agreement.¹⁴

After exploring the significance of these differences, Searle commends many twentieth-century sociologists for attempting to solve the problems of social construction, but suggests that their research perspective was restricted; as scientists, they were unequipped to tackle the problems posed by language and negotiated, contextually constructed meaning. Their tradition of inquiry, while certainly intertwined with that of the humanities, was not accustomed to exploring the relationship between words, signification, and producers of discourse. While they could theorize about the nature of truth and the effects of individual constructs, their disciplinary research narratives did not include Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and the other western philosophers who have contributed over the centuries to our understanding of reality. And if we, as modern day race theorists, are truly interested in understanding the social construction of race, we would be remiss to ignore such a rich tradition.

To constructionists of the above “soft” variety, truth is largely social: often it can only be discovered through discourse, through interaction with other people. For example: we learned that Barack Obama was elected president not by counting votes ourselves, but by watching post-election television coverage. We “know” we has elected only in a very indirect and trusting way; i.e., we “know” it because other people told us so. It is the exact same process by which our peers come to “know” that Nobel Laurete Menachim Begin was a man of peace and that, without George Washington Carver, we certainly wouldn’t have peanut butter today. These “truths” are socially derived, and, according to social constructionists, this process by which we negotiate truth can be applied not only to mass mediated reality, but also to local and more individualized realms of discourse: when we talk with friends, listen to lectures, and read novels, articles, and poetry. They argue that in every social situation there is, to a certain degree, an amount of social construction and negotiation of meaning and reality.

Conclusion

So how does all of this help us, as theorists of race? We can agree, I argue, that to a certain degree race is a social construct. If we accept Searle’s distinction, we can consider race both a brute and a social fact. On at least one level, it is a set of social conventions, including fashion, art, dialects, mannerisms, and even occupations and pastimes. It can be performed in certain cases, such as the one cited by Haney Lopez. (And I have to point out that we’ve all bemoaned the sight of those sixteen-year-old white kids at the mall who “talk,” “dress,” or “act black,” not to mention the respectable blacks among us who, as we insist, “act white.”) In addition, I posit it will benefit us to develop a more critical understanding of how society does in fact construct race in cultural artifacts, political discourse, and news reporting, for our people are frequently the victims of a vicious perpetuation of negative stereotypes – what some might call the social construction of the white race.

Moreover, we must recognize that, even among ourselves – even as a community with common goals and values – we will disagree about the boundaries of race and the definition of whiteness. We as individuals do not scientifically test people we meet in order to judge whether or not they are white. We make that decision based upon how we individually define whiteness, and that definition doesn’t come from some universally understood essence or an acknowledged set of criteria. It comes from our social interactions with other humans, from our contrastive experiences with whites and non-whites, which have led us to our own subjective and socially constructed definitions of whiteness.

Let us remember that, when Searle and other modern proponents of social construction developed their theories, they were standing on the shoulders of giants – the giants, in fact, of the entire western tradition. So regardless of what I might think of the excesses of strong social constructionism and its lingering, though dissipating, impact upon humanistic thought today, I believe it will be beneficial for our community to consider the traditions from which these theories evolved. I believe it will be beneficial for us to adopt a rational and well-defined theory of socially constructed race, alongside our traditional theories of biological race, in order to come to a comprehensive definition of who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to preserve.

The appropriate way to rebut Haney Lopez and his humanist colleagues is not to compare skull sizes, establish ancestral migration patterns, or cite criminal statistics (regardless of whatever undeniable merit these projects do possess). Instead, we should consider (1) how certain institutions have manipulated negative social constructs in their attempts to marginalize entire classes of academic research and pathologize certain behaviors and concepts among our people; (2) how revisiting our people’s traditional mores, ideals, and worldviews can help us reconstruct an ideal of who we are and what we want as a people; and, perhaps most importantly, (3) how our circles’ traditional aversion to modern theories of social construction impedes our ability to participate in these reasonable discussions of the issue which we, as readers of and contributors to The Occidental Quarterly, find most essential: race.

John Howard is the pen name of an American author and critic.

_______________________

¹ Ian F. Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Del Gado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000(, 163-75.
² To put it crassly: the use of the word “race” has different connotations in the bleachers at the Daytona 500 than it does in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), though most TOQ readers will likely find both uses to be of equal intellectual consequence. Simply put, the term “race” derives its significance from the context in which it is written, spoken, read, or heard, and from its relationship to the chain of signifiers that precede and follow it. See Kenneth Burke’s discussion of “contextual definition” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 24-26.
³ Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” 165.
⁴ Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” 166
⁵ Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56.
⁶ Anthony Hilton and Kevin MacDonald, Race as a social construct – No – and Yes!” The Occidental Observer, December, 9, 2008.
⁷ Plato, “Cratylus,” The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 474.
^8
9 Richard E. Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 156-57.
¹⁰ Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action (Chicago: Markham, 1971), 33-34.
¹¹ John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), xi.
¹² Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 2.
¹³ John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 50-53.
¹⁴ Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 190-94.

There are quite a few reasons for the precarious state of our civilization and our people. But one of the main ones is that we have lost the intellectual and moral high ground to a cultural elite that is hostile to our people and our culture. The domination of the mass media and the academic world by elites that are hostile to White identity and interests is a major barrier for educated Whites to act on behalf of their interests. White people cower in fear of being called a racist for believing and acting in ways that are absolutely normal and natural for all the other peoples of the world. While other peoples defend themselves, their culture and their borders, societies in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand that have been controlled by Whites for hundreds of years are the only ones to accept their demise as a moral imperative. We view this outcome as the result of competition over the construction of culture in which the legitimate interests of Whites have been compromised.

A main purpose of TOQ is to change the attitudes of White people so that they will feel confident identifying as White and explicitly asserting their interests as Whites. Politically aware Whites must understand that the elites that dominate culture and the political process in the West are intellectually and morally bankrupt.

All of the scientific data are on our side. Increased ethnic diversity is associated with a host of societal ills, including decreased support for social welfare programs and lack of public trust. Those who argue that Western societies have a unique moral obligation to cede cultural and political control to non-Whites completely ignore the legitimate interests of Whites in maintaining their cultural and political control. No one argues that countries like Korea or Uganda have a moral obligation to allow other peoples to swamp the native population.

As editor, my first priority is to increase the number of subscribers. Subscriptions are only $40 for four issues — a very minimal amount – certainly not a financial burden to the vast majority of our target audience. Here is the link to our subscription page.

Having a large subscriber base will make it possible to for TOQ to be self-sustaining. We have established a policy whereby writers will be paid at rates that are competitive with other well-known journals of political opinion and scholarship. The amount of the stipend is not large. The writers who are putting in all the time and energy producing this material will still be working mainly to make a contribution to the ideas and ideals espoused by the journal. But it is important to get White advocacy beyond the volunteer level and to eventually support a large number of professional White advocates able to effectively compete with the legions of professionals who are able to find employment with our opponents.

The first issue under my editorship will soon be sent to the printer. I am sure that our readers will find it an exciting and informative reading experience. The issue will have four articles:

Patrick Cleburne and Kevin MacDonald: “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?” This article discusses several books on the Madoff affair and relates the findings to other research on Jews.

Raymond Wolters: “The Latest Trend in School Reform.” This article recounts the history of failed attempts to raise the academic performance of African-American children. It focuses particularly on recently legitimated concerns about the culture of the Black family as the latest hope among the liberals for raising academic performance.

Kevin MacDonald: “Why are Academics Liberals?” This article discusses a recent important academic theory about why the academic world became a bastion of the left and shows that the findings are compatible with the conclusions of The Culture of Critique.

Roger Devlin: “Louis DeBonald: Neglected Anti-Modern.” Devlin reviews the writing of an early 19th-century French thinker who opposed many of the currents of modernity. His reasoned opposition to divorce is particularly interesting.

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200 Years Together has been a rallying cry in racially aware circles for as long as I can remember. The book is notorious for its failure to find an English publisher. The American Jewish community has invested many hours in preventing 200 Years Together from finding a wider audience. That is a positive indicator that it is worth reading.

Check it out.

Racism, Schmacism

From the day we first went on-air people have been asking when I might write my first book.  Well, after nearly six years of broadcasting, that day is finally upon us.  The result is Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals use the R-Word to Push the Obama Agenda, a professionally produced and published title that I’m very proud to bring to your attention!

If you’re like me, you’ve had it up to here watching the conservative movement spin its wheels, making lots of noise but never going anywhere. You’re fed up with with attending Tea Parties and other protest rallies, hoping to make a powerful statement about big government, only to spend most of your time listening to a bunch of wimps insisting they aren’t racists.

Once you’ve read Racism, Schmacism you’ll understand why this is so, and exactly how to solve the problem.

I want you to discover why every conservative in America must read this explosive new book! I lay the truth right out there. Unlike so many conservative commentators and authors, I’m not afraid to call a spade a spade.

In this brilliant (and often hilarious) new book, I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that in today’s politically correct climate, “racist” simply means “white person” or “conservative white person.” And “racism” is simply anything a white person does that minorities and leftists don’t approve of.

Once you’ve finished it you will never look at politics the same way. You’ll certainly never be a sucker for underhanded liberal smear tactics.

Reading Racism, Schmacism will become one of those “aha moments” you’ll remember the rest of your life, because your world will never be the same again. There is simply no other book on the market like this one.

You’ll be urging your friends and family to get a copy for themselves, because you will see that it is no exaggeration to say that until the vast majority of conservatives grasp the message of Racism, Schmacism, the conservative movement will go nowhere!

Order your copy today, and let’s start building a conservative movement that can win!

http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.com/book

Most Sincerely,

James Edwards
Host, The Political Cesspool Radio Program

P.S. – Here are just a couple examples of the things you will discover when reading my book that the liberal media doesn’t want you to know:

- The shocking facts you haven’t heard about Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Hate, and how they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that “racist” simply means “white person” in today’s America.

- Now that the Confederate flag has been all but outlawed as a symbol of “racist hate,” guess what the next step is? Yes, going after the Stars & Stripes—an apartment complex in Oregon actually sent a letter to residents saying that anyone who displayed an American flag sticker on their vehicle would have to remove it, or face eviction, because a lot of non-whites live in the complex. Then there is the white woman in Texas (with a daughter serving in Iraq) who had to remove the American flag in her office because an African immigrant found it offensive.

- Just as shocking, you’ll read the sickening story of how an elected mayor in an American city wrote to a black woman and promised her that never again would white cops be allowed to eat bananas on duty – because she said white men eating bananas is racist.

There’s much, much more in Racism, Schmacism, and once you start reading it you won’t be able to put it down.

Above and beyond all else, this book will equip you with the intellectual ammunition needed to fight back. You’ll be able to disarm their socio-political “nuclear bomb” once and for all!

Seriously, if you buy just one book this year, this needs to be it!

http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.com/book

Get Whitey

No One (White) Is Responsible for Anything.

That’s the screaming headline of the Rev. David L. Ostendorf’s lead article at Imagine 2050, the web publishing arm of the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based “civil rights organization.” Mr. Ostendorf is upset that White America is not being browbeaten into collective racial guilt over the Gulf Oil Spill.

Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, is White. The BP Board of Directors is another inexcusable collection of pale faces. BP has failed to contain the Gulf Oil Spill. Thus, White America is responsible for this ecological disaster, as White Americans and their European cousins belong to the same race.

Among our other racial sins, White America is to blame for slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the failure of “comprehensive immigration reform,” the plight of blacks, the failures of American energy policy, and the 2008 recession and financial crisis on Wall Street. Whenever Whites are involved, Ostendorf doesn’t hesitate to wag his sanctimonious finger and make group judgments.

These are the same people who demonize us as “racists” and “anti-Semites”  for pointing out that blacks commit a disproportionate number of rapes, robberies, and murders in America or that Jews are overrepresented in corrupt Wall Street investment banks like Goldman Sachs. They also like to pull out and wave the magic wand of individualism whenever these legitimate grievances are raised.

There is a clear anti-White double standard: when White individuals engage in bad behavior, Whites as a race are to blame; when Jews and non-Whites engage in bad behavior (or fail in their responsibilities), either the non-White individual or Whites are blamed.

In David L. Ostendorf’s twisted imagination, Whites are never held accountable for their actions. What planet does this guy live on?

George W. Bush was blamed and held accountable for Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the Wall Street financial crisis. The GOP was held accountable for outrageous levels of government spending, pushing amnesty in the teeth of overwhelming grassroots opposition, and two endless wars in Eurasia. Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 and the Presidency in 2008.

I can think of several other recent examples: in spite of his seniority, Arlen Specter lost the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania; Bob Bennett lost the Republican primary in Utah; Larry Craig was shamed out of the Senate in Idaho; Reverend Ted Haggard was exposed to public ridicule and lost his former lucrative position in the National Association of Evangelicals; George Allen lost his Senate seat in Virginia after his “macaca” moment. White politicians and public figures are held accountable for their actions all the time.

It is blacks who are never held accountable for their actions. Jesse Jackson cheated on his wife and fathered a child out of wedlock. Yet he remained a credible public figure. Al Sharpton was not discredited by the Tawana Brawley fiasco or the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a plagiarist and serial adulterer, but now looms larger than George Washington in the American pantheon of heroes. In the current environment of political correctness, comedians are terrified to crack jokes about Barack Obama lest they be accused of “racism.”

Blacks have destroyed almost every country in post-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. They have laid waste to Detroit and numerous other American inner cities. It is more dangerous to spend a night on the streets of Chicago than to patrol the front lines of the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Blacks have never been held accountable for decades of consistent underperformance relative to Whites on standardized tests.

Every excuse in the world is made for blacks. Their plight is laid at the feet of nebulous unquantifiable abstractions (which, unlike IQ, leftists are sure exist) like “the legacy of slavery” or “the white racial frame” or “structural racism.”  Amazingly, blacks can succeed at basketball, but not in physics. The “structural racism” of academia (which includes millions of dollars alloted for multicultural centers and diversity hires) must be holding them back in a way that professional sports is not.

If the President of the United States was White and the CEO of BP was black, Rev. David Ostendorf would be defending BP and attacking the White House right now. The Left savaged the Bush administration for its “slow response” to the devastation of New Orleans. They would undoubtedly be pushing the same narrative today if the roles were reversed.

Barack Obama’s race has determined their response. Far from being irrelevant, race is the best predictor of their attitude on any given subject. Obama is forgiven for his neglect of Louisiana; Bush is excoriated. Arizona is compared to Nazi Germany for protecting its border; excuses are made for Mexico. Whites are blamed for “hate crimes”; blacks cannot be blamed for violent crimes.

There is at least one element of consistency in all this: in every case, Imagine 2050 tows the most anti-White line possible. Where they stand has never been clearer than in this article.

The term “racism” is a rhetorical ploy to dupe Whites into surrendering their racial interests. As we see here, racism against Whites is perfectly acceptable in self-described “anti-racist” circles.

White Nationalists learned this lesson long ago. Those new to our circles would be well advised not to take the rhetoric of our opposition at face value.

Some see the Republican Party as an implicitly White party that could be accessed and guided toward positions explicitly favoring European Americans. Persons holding this position point to David Duke who ran and won as a Republican in Louisiana, and Derek Black who was recently elected to a party post in Florida.

Others see the Republican Party as hopelessly corrupted by neo-conservatism that toxic mix of globalism and Judeo-Christianity. Any partisan political activity is best directed toward building a third party. They point to the American Third Position, a new party that has enlisted support from several men known for their intelligence and integrity, as a likely vehicle.

Finally, many White advocates believe that at present partisan politics is a waste of limited time and resources. There is not yet the critical mass of support, especially publicly committed support, to make running for office practical. Some who hold this position are so alienated that they refuse to spend even a few minutes biennially to vote for the lesser of evils claiming that not voting is a form of protest.

There is evidence and arguments to support all three of the above positions. To further a discussion on this topic I will recount my recent experiences with the North Dakota Republican Party (GOP).

My first direct contact with the ND Republican Party came in February, 2008. Every four years our state holds party caucuses to select convention delegates pledged to presidential candidates. While I am neither a libertarian nor an enthusiastic supporter of Ron Paul I thought he was the best of a disappointing lot of presidential hopefuls. So I braved below-zero temperatures and icy roads to meet with other Republicans, listen to speeches, and cast a vote for a presidential contender. Rep. Paul did relatively well. He cane in third, and actually won some delegates. Sen. McCain came in fourth in our state caucuses.

To vote in a caucus one needed to supply complete contact information. As a result for the next two years I received a light but steady stream of emails from the state GOP announcing upcoming events and soliciting contributions. Only once did I respond to these missives, that a pithy reply to a particularly muddled editorial in support of neo-conservatism written by the party chairman.

Despite my somewhat frosty feedback to the party in early March I received a notice that my district still had openings for delegates to the state convention. I thought it might be interesting to meet the candidates and see how a political organization operates on the state level. So I applied and was accepted as a delegate.

My agenda for the convention was to speak with the five principle candidates (two for US Senate and three for US House), ascertain their positions on three important issues (immigration, Middle East, and fiscal/monetary policy), and inform them of my own views on these subjects. I managed to speak to four of the five candidates at some length on the above issues.

All the candidates were pleasant, even friendly, but often vague on policy specifics, just what you might expect from politicians looking for delegate votes. If one was seeking a spirited policy discussion he would not get one from these candidates. In fact debate or even discussion of policy issues was a rare occurrence during the convention. One might think that with 1200 political activists in one venue there would be plenty of such conversations. On the other hand if you think back to Poli. Sci. 101 you might remember that American politics is often more about personality than policy and more about image than ideas.

The impressions I did receive on policy positions from the candidates and other delegates were not reassuring. It appeared that at the time (late March 2010) that the GOP was on board with amnesty for illegal aliens. Since then neo-con leaders such as Senators McCain and Graham have found it prudent to put so called comprehensive immigration reform on the back burner. In the future, however, these dogs will not hesitant to betray their European American constituents for political expedience.

Prospects appear even less favorable for a more evenhanded GOP policy towards the Middle East. I found little support for Ron Paul’s less interventionist foreign policy. In fact I heard criticism of the Obama administration for not being sufficiently pro-Israeli (Vice President Biden had recently returned from a rocky road in the Levant). It seemed that the more “Christian” a candidate or delegate was the more likely they were to be a Judeo-Christian Zionist. Honesty, with their talk of a wider war in the Middle East I find these Christian Zionists to be the scariest people on the political spectrum.

As for a sounder fiscal and monetary policy, another issue raised by Rep. Paul during the 2008 campaign, the GOP leadership is quick to give lip service to cutting spending but very hesitant to advocate more fundamental reforms such as regular auditing of the Federal Reserve. I asked Rick Berg, the Republican candidate for our at-large US House seat, specifically about Rep. Paul. I noted the enthusiastic support Dr. Paul has received especially from younger Republicans (Paul had recently won the presidential straw poll at the CPAC conference in Washington). Berg conceded that Ron Paul energizes a core Republican constituency and is an impressive fund raiser, but I could sense the profound reluctance of the GOP establishment candidate to go off script and think outside the box. Whatever his strengthens and weaknesses, and he has both, Rep. Paul is a true maverick. Sen. McCain, the self proclaimed maverick, is more the grumpy opportunist.

During the past year I attended a couple of local Tea Party (TP) events, and I recognized several persons from those events at the convention. I asked them about the Tea Party’s relationship to the GOP. While this is obviously a small sampling it appears the TP is now firmly wedded to the Republican Party. Back in 2009 it seemed possible that the TP would be a radical movement independent of the Republicans, but this has not happened, at least not yet. Although they are having a significant influence on the GOP I predict many Tea Partiers are going to be disappointed with the results of their efforts. It is just too easy for the Republican leadership to give their issues only token support. The elite consensus, supported by both parties, is based on international casino capitalism, big government, and military interventionism all of which preclude serious fiscal and monetary reform. The system will have to go bankrupt before it will change.

So getting back to my original topic: What have I glean from my admittedly brief experience with the GOP? First the Republican organization is permeable, though there are, of course, limits to its inclusion. An activist who chooses the GOP as his medium would need to be politic and use some finesse while still being uncompromising on key issues such as immigration and an America-first foreign policy.

As always the unaffiliated individual is relatively powerless. The best way to get your issues heard is to run your own candidates at conventions and in primaries. This requires one individual to be the point man, a lighting rod. If no individual is available an alternative strategy is to form a group of party activists who would vote as a block at conventions and/or primaries. It would be best to link positions to Republican figures past or present. Such an intra party organization might be called the Buchanan Brigade, Paleo-conservative Caucus, or the Republican Rough Riders.

Up till now I have not mentioned money. It has been pointed out many times that money is the mothers’ milk of politics, the fuel that runs political activism. One needs to open his wallet a bit just to get a seat at the table. That said; remember our cause is starved for funds. I hope no European American would lessen his financial support of an explicitly White organization to support the GOP.

The strategy of infiltrating the Republican Party is not a magic formula for success. As Derek Black is finding out the dominate forces within the party will strongly resist any move toward an explicit White agenda. It will take a stout and sustained effort to have the desired influence on policy. Is the effort worth it? Would resources be better used pursuing another course? The US has had a two-party system almost from the beginning. The last major new party is over 150 years old. These facts show continuity. Yet the parties themselves have changed tremendously over time. One hundred years ago the Democrats’ core constituencies were Southern segregationists and Northern White working men. Many will argue that European Americans will never be able to vote themselves out of the present mess. I agree, but it is difficult to image a realistic scenario for our instauration in which partisan politics does not play at least some role.

Our “movement” is criticized for being long on complains and preaching to the choir, and short on activism. In many regions of this huge country comrades are few and far between. In areas where the Republican Party is the only organization on the right it could be a vehicle for raising issues and networking. This strategy would be a good fit for persons who have excellent interpersonal skills, need to remain within the mainstream, and live in conservative states or districts without other avenues for activism. And remember, this approach does not exclude pursuing other tactics as well.