Growing up in the 1990s, I found myself pondering all sorts of mysteries as a teenager: why did my black classmates consistently receive lower test scores; why were black students always in the lower track courses; why did people on television claim that blacks were as smart as Whites; why did blacks act in such a peculiar way; why were the smart White kids herded into the same schools with black thugs and drug dealers. I didn’t get it. Something didn’t feel right.

The inclusion of blacks at my school always bothered me. It struck me as an obstacle to my education. Blacks often assaulted the White kids in the school cafeteria. They sold drugs in school. They disrupted the classroom. They didn’t show any interest in their studies. Their sordid underclass culture rubbed off on the poorer Whites. My teachers were constantly forced to waste their time catering to the lowest common denominator. It was one long farce from kindergarten to graduation.

When I arrived at college, I was catapulted into a whole different world. Suddenly, there were lots of bright people around me with similar interests. A magic filter whisked away all the troublesome blacks who took up space in high school. In their place, I had an enormous college library to mine with thousands of books that interested me. I had a slew of courses that I could take to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. There was no comparison between my new segregated environment and my old integrated one.

I plunged in head first. When I emerged five years later, I was a different person. I had come to realize that my generation was the subject of a cruel liberal experiment in social engineering. In the name of “equality,” a small group of federal judges and ideologues had overthrown Alabama’s segregated school system and forced raw negroes into the White schools. This was done solely to uplift the negro, not to improve the White schools. Integration was based on the flawed premise that segregated schools were the cause of black academic underperformance.

Fifty years later, the segregationists have yet to be vindicated. The racial gap in average test scores failed to disappear in the integrated schools. It has stubbornly persisted into the Obama presidency. The traditional social problems of the black underclass (illegitimacy, vulgarity, drug abuse, violence, indolence, teen pregnancy) were imported into the White schools where they became a common problem. America’s public schools once inspired envy throughout the Western world. Thanks to our growing black and mestizo population, they now rank near the bottom.

The segregationists were right about other things. Theodore Bilbo had predicted that the end of segregation would unleash a tidal wave of black-on-white violent crime. Even Bilbo though couldn’t imagine that the day would come when negroes would rape over 35,000 white women per year in the United States. This was unknown in the Jim Crow South. Interracial crime is a one way street. Whites are overwhelmingly the victims of murders, thefts, rapes, and assaults by negroes, not the other way around. Even when blacks murder, rape, and steal from other blacks, White taxpayers incur the costs of their incarceration. This is another unsavory aspect of Martin Luther King’s so-called “dream” that is deliberately ignored in the mainstream.

Why do Whites accept inferior schools? Why do they endure unbearable levels of interracial violent crime? Why do they put up with racial discrimination in the form of affirmative action? Why do Whites accept an immigration policy which displaces them from their neighborhoods and reduces their political power? Why do Whites accept the redistribution of their wealth to non-Whites?

Let’s travel further in this vein: Why do Whites accept the degeneration of their culture? Why do Whites accept the spread of poverty, disease, filth, and ignorance in their midst? Why do Whites accept economic underdevelopment? Why do Whites accept the surrender of their culture and identity to placate hostile minorities? Why do Whites think their displacement in their native lands is a good thing? Why do Whites confuse decline with progress?

From a perspective of self interest, White racial suicide doesn’t make any sense. It becomes explicable though in the light of ideology and altruism. Our enemies have twisted Christianity and republicanism to justify our demise as a people. The intellectual fraud they have perpetrated doesn’t stand up to close historical scrutiny. The real impulse to annihilate Whites comes from outside both of these traditions.

Two centuries ago, Whites didn’t have these debates. Republicanism and Christianity flourished alongside a vigorous racial nationalism. Slavery was a contentious issue, but Whiteness itself wasn’t attacked by even the most radical egalitarians. No one believed that “liberty” and “equality” mandated or required the demographic submersion of America’s White majority. If a Christian minister or priest had invoked “love” to justify the racial displacement of his flock, they would have laughed him out of church. They probably would have tarred and feathered him to boot.

The attack on Whiteness began in the twentieth century. It came from three primary sources: Jewish academics, black intellectuals, and Marxists. More often that not, blacks and Jews mingled in the same radical fringe. It was an extremely secular milieu. Collectively, they dreamed of overthrowing the bourgeoisie republican order and replacing it with a classless Marxist utopia in which all racial and social distinctions would be abolished.

The Soviet Union was the first European nation to permanently incorporate this revolutionary ideal into law. In the 1920s, the USSR became a mecca for radical black intellectuals alienated from America. In the United States, the Communist Party USA was the only political party that fully championed the colorblind ideal that gradually triumphed after the Second World War. It was instructed to unfurl the banner of racial equality by the Comintern. Within the CPUSA, the Moscow party line was controversial, as it tended to alienate White working class voters.

This is a rich story that no one has completely told. The term “racism” made its debut on the Marxist fringe in the 1920s, entered American public discourse in the 1930s, and penetrated the mainstream in the 1940s. The Civil Rights Movement had close ties to communism in its earliest years. The U.S. dismantled Jim Crow largely because of the appeal of communism in the Third World. The ruling class neutralized the racial threat of Soviet communism (the possibility of a black fifth column) by mainstreaming the Soviet racial ideal here in America.

The spearhead of anti-racism hasn’t changed in our own times. It is still composed of Jewish academics, black intellectuals, and Marxists. The common thread uniting them is communism, atheism, and hatred of Whites. They have since moved on to creating a new radical discourse about “white privilege” and new forms of subversion like “critical race theory.” These ideals are then smuggled into the mainstream through left-wing front groups as the newest form of Christianity and republicanism.

This is where Comrade Jeffrey enters the picture. His apparent role is to put words into the mouth of Jesus Christ or Thomas Jefferson that were never spoken. The true progenitors of his ideal can trace their footsteps back to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. He doesn’t want you to find that out though.

Occidental Dissent, February 3, 2010

Before I begin what many may consider a tirade, allow me to first be more specific about what “educators” denotes. I am referring here to administrators, i.e. principals and department heads, as well as teachers. Both types of educators are crucial to this missive, but the issues to be taken with each are different.

In my college years, education was put on a pedestal to be something righteous and noble. Characters would be formed, future leaders spawned, ideas contemplated to the delight of all parties, inner potentials fully realized, lives changed, lives saved, and new paths explored in the church-like classroom of an all-knowing, intellectual, benevolent, priestly lover of words, art, problem-solving, and knowledge. The bored child would become an enthusiastic student; the downtrodden child would lose himself in philosophy or history, discovering new lessons on life from the tribulations of our ancestors; the pragmatist would become a god of math and science; ignorant minds would be imbued with culture—with soul. Under the tutelage of a teacher—a Socratic or Platonic figure with illuminating presence—anything would be possible for a student.

The truth, however, is that our secondary education system is far from noble, righteous, or fulfilling. The basely-bred youths who walk into sixth grade at age eleven walk out of high school at age 17/18 with virtually nothing new implanted into their minds, and no enrichment added to their souls. If anything, they walk away thinking that the culture-bearing subjects (history, literature, English, etc.) are the most dull and worthless experiences of their lives. They scorn higher learning, loathe complex ideas, and laugh at big words; math and science are absorbed to an extent, but the understanding of American youths is outlandishly inferior to that of the Chinese, Indians, and many European nations (while they still maintain their Europeanness and have not fully succumbed to the cancer that is Americanization.)

There is no doubt that the prevailing Zeitgeist, comprised of restlessness, technological escapism, and anti-intellectualism, is largely to blame for the inability of education to really penetrate our youths’ minds. The last line of defense against this tide of ignorance-worship would be teachers—passionate, inspiring teachers—but these are in the microscopic minority.

The Facilitators of Education

When I was a sophomore in high school, I found the majority of my classes drab and sleep-inducing. Most of my teachers had the students take notes for two-thirds of the class, which took so long only because my peers were largely mental dullards who could not maintain the slightest attention span. In addition, however, the teachers themselves suffered a complete lack of personality. Their manner of speech was monotone, their demeanor unenthusiastic, and I found out at times that their breadth of real knowledge was basic. Without the teacher’s edition textbooks they would have been as lost wanderers in a desert.

I am not saying that some teachers were not excellent at their craft; if I did not know any truly great teachers, I would have insufficient fuel for my current argument. Out of every ten teachers, I would say that two or three actually made you want to attend their classes. There were some whose company I enjoyed so much that I attended school on the various “cutting” days (district-recognized days when students are allowed to cut school, believe it or not) just to hang out with them. There was one in particular, an English teacher, whom I can say was a crucial influence on the course my life took and the view I began to develop of myself.

Mr. X, as we shall call him, was a throwback to the hippie days; his style of dress and his passionate, outspoken admiration for Bob Dylan gave this away immediately. He once even confessed to my class that he used to live on a commune. Despite the reprehensible image of some poorly-bathed, drug-addicted anarchist that this description may invoke, he was a well-groomed man of superior knowledge to his fellow teachers. He knew the canonical works of drama and literature; he studied all of the major religions of the world; he read philosophy and history in his spare time. When he taught, his passions poured out and filled the room, drowning all in a temporary lust for knowledge that they would have otherwise never experienced. Even the dumbest of my classmates picked their heads up to view his cultured orations coupled with emphatic gesticulations.

Though he was clearly of the same liberal sentiments that afflict most baby-boomers, an odd and somewhat contradictory synthesis of beliefs also made him into something of a neo-Platonist. He got a paternalistic joy out of being a mentor and friend to all students, especially the “low-end” kids, as he called them, but at the same time was willing to acknowledge that humanity is comprised of “five percent who are thinkers, and the rest: breeders.” During several private conversations with him, he would tell me that I was more analytical and intelligent than my peers, and that it would be a gross injustice for someone like me not to go onto college. Of course, on other occasions he expressed the fear he felt about me leaning toward the far right in my sensibilities, a fear that he “would sometimes go to bed thinking about”—a con that I think is far outweighed by his pros.

Aside from the personal details of his character, Mr. X. was a lover of knowledge who instilled the same sentiments in his students. He made his class an open forum for ideas to be discussed, for complaints to be vented, for mutual understandings to be reached. His lectures, conducted in a style befitting an emotional stage performer, made students pay close attention. His projects were extremely fun and allowed students to imbue them with a little piece of their personalities.  He was a giver of information who buttressed intellectual development.

I offer the above anecdote to demonstrate how a great teacher should ideally behave. One who is able to foster a love of learning among all of his students without watering down content is what we need in American classrooms. Unfortunately for our youths, however, Mr. X. is vastly outnumbered by his exact opposites.

Most of our teachers today are simple people. They are not necessarily bad people, nor even are they unintelligent, but they are certainly simple. Rather than explore ideas and stimulate an incorrigible lust for education, they regurgitate excerpts from the drab textbooks mandated by watered-down, dry, mediocre curricula. They appear more like computers that display information for the class to record rather than human agents with communicative abilities. Their demeanor is unenthusiastic and without passion, which instills the same among their students. In many ways, they are virtually indistinguishable from the common 9-to-5, 5-day-a-week workers who love the sound of their cards punching out more than their actual jobs.

If a teacher is supposed to be like a master of his subject unto his apprentices, the students, then most of our teachers today fail to make the grade. Few have a truly expansive breadth of knowledge, especially in the realms of history and literature. The bulk of these teachers’ knowledge comes from the textbooks they use and the few facts they have retained from college. I have encountered many English teachers who hate to read and never do it in their spare time and some who do not understand basic principles of English grammar. I recall a history teacher who tried to assert that Adolf Hitler sought to kill anyone who did not have blonde hair and blue eyes—a statement one often hears from the uneducated rabble who know nothing of Third Reich history other than what they get from hearsay. He even pointed to a tan-skinned Indian girl who happened to have light eyes and said “Women like her would be the only ones Hitler allowed to live in his world.” Blatant stupidity.

H. L. Mencken summed up the situation excellently in his The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:

. . . school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers. Imitativeness being the dominant impulse in youth, their pupils acquire some measure of their stupidity, and the result is that the influence of the whole teaching tribe is against everything included in genuine education and culture.

Some things I have observed in teacher lounges betray other undesirable traits among these mental workers. They make fun of their students by name, often calling them obscenities and sharing their personal lives with colleagues, not in an effort to collaboratively help the kids, but for a laugh. “So, I heard so-and-so’s mother is a crack-addict that beats him,” or “Yea, her father was the one who was arrested for such-and-such” are the kinds of things heard. Make no mistake here—many of today’s students are complete degenerates of base origin that will go nowhere fantastic in life. However, a professional educator of these kids should not be using their personal dilemmas and foibles as a source of entertaining gossip. Such a thing reeks of childishness and a lack of professionalism.

Allow me to conclude with some other details. Many teachers today give students “A” grades simply to avoid having to call their parents and set up meetings, so a student gets passed through the system with no increase in skill or knowledge; they give assignments they ultimately do not grade simply to pass the time; they curse at students; they curve grades to the point where nobody can fail, simply because they don’t want to deal with the inquiries of department heads and parents; they count as “test grades” things of the most minute importance, i.e. getting a progress report signed by parents, to increase their students’ grades and thus not have to deal with parents and administrators; they have no real interest in the content they teach; they hang out in bars until the late hours of the night when they could be grading; they smoke pot; they have sex with students, which has become prevalent as of late.

The list can go on, but the above picture serves well to illustrate what I mean when I say that most teachers are “simple people.” This especially refers to the younger teachers just getting into the workforce; among the older generation these foibles are much less frequent.

Their Bosses

If teachers today are substandard in quality, it’s only because the selection process is carried out by people of the same cut—nay, they are worse. Today’s principals, superintendents, and other administrators are some of the most corrupt, nepotistic, lazy, backbiting, dishonest liberal scoundrels ever to afflict education in American history. They are like average politicians, but their power extends locally rather than statewide or nationally. The policies they enact are destroying the minds of our nation, and the people they hire are chosen because they are not idealistic or aware enough to question or even notice said policies. To quote Mencken again:

For one thing, a teacher, before he may begin work, must sacrifice whatever independence may survive within him upon the altar of authority. He becomes a cog in the school wheel and must teach only the things countenanced and approved by the powers above him, whether those powers be visible in the minister of education . . . the traditions of the school . . . or in the private convictions of the millionaire who provides the cash . . .

Before I elaborate on the personality issues shared by administrators, a word on the “things countenanced and approved by the powers” is due. In the realm of education today, both on the secondary and college levels, there is a battle being waged over what is effective pedagogy. On the one side of the battlefield are those who support the traditional, lecture-based, master-apprentice style of instruction that has worked since the dawn of Western civilization; on the other lie the supporters of a revolutionary style—a style that seeks a virtual inversion of roles—referred to as “student-centered instruction” (SCI). The latter have been winning the battle as of late, which can only be expected in the Kali Yuga in which we live. One thing must be made clear: this new pedagogy, if it can even be called such, will sound the death knell of all intellectuality in this nation.

So what do these educational Bolsheviks believe? In essence, they seek a total leveling of the hierarchy between teachers and students. A suitable definition is offered by the Teaching and Learning Forum of 2000:

Gibbs (1992) offered a useful definition of student centred learning. He stated that student centred learning, “gives students greater autonomy and control over choice of subject matter, learning methods and pace of study” (p. 23). This view highlighted three core characteristics of student centred learning by promoting the idea that students should have more input into:

• what is learned,
• how it is learned, and
• when it is learned.

An important implication of this definition is the need for students to assume a high level of responsibility in the learning situation and be actively choosing their goals and managing their learning. They can no longer rely on the lecturer to tell them what, how, where and when to think. They must start to do this (Sparrow, L. et. al. (2000). Student centred learning: Is it possible? In A. Herrmann and M.M. Kulski (Eds), Flexible Futures in Tertiary Teaching. Proceedings of the 9th Annual Teaching Learning Forum, 2-4 February 2000. Perth: Curtin University of Technology. http://lsn.curtin.edu.au/tlf/tlf2000/sparrow.html.)

So in a student centered classroom the following situation will likely arise. Fourteen year-old ninth-graders enter a history course with no prior knowledge about the events and ideas they will be studying. Alexander the Great, the Investiture Conflict, and the Renaissance are terms with which they have no familiarity. They are expected, now, to assist the teacher in determining what topics should be studied? The ignorant one is supposed to inform the knowledgeable one whose degree signifies that he has mastered the content? And what of students having “input” into “how” and “when” material is covered? Students have no understanding of pedagogy, child psychology, or how to keep a group of their peers entertained and attentive. They have no understanding of what time sequence should be followed for historical study—ancient China and pre-modern Europe are equally foreign to them. From the very beginning, this philosophy is sheer madness. It’s one of those Leftist ideas that cry “I am utterly ridiculous” right away, like the idea of paying students to go to school (which has been debated, believe it or not.)

An immature adolescent has no ability to discern what should and should not be learned, how it should be taught, or when it should be taught. A teacher is only a teacher because he has fulfilled his collegiate obligations and demonstrated mastery over his subject matter, as well as his ability to impart knowledge onto others. Student centered instruction would essentially render all this training obsolete.

How is this pedagogy practiced specifically? To enumerate every possibility goes beyond the scope of this article, but one example is due. One type of exercise is the project-based learning activity, wherein students work in groups, both large and small, to solve problems and answer questions. The purpose is not for students to reach a goal set by the teacher, but rather, to come up with their own conclusions—to “construct their own knowledge” as the theorists call it. Whatever answers they concoct are to be discussed Socratically by the class, with the teacher acting as “facilitator” of the discussion rather than an arbitrator who says “correct” or “incorrect.” In the end, no real objective knowledge is obtained, but the students have worked together and developed a collective mentality.

A good teacher friend of mine told me about the response his department head gave him when he complained about the academic worthlessness of the above pedagogy. “Bah, the kids can learn names and dates on the Internet, man!” was the response. “Those details aren’t important for the curriculum.” In other words, the content means nothing as long as the students work together to come up with an answer, even if it is incorrect.

For a deeper explanation of what today’s curricula are degenerating into, I suggest reading the deliberate dumbing down of america (yes, all lower case) by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The central thesis is that educational methods are being geared toward making young people collective, workforce-trained thinkers rather than individualist, intellectual thinkers—a prerequisite for the globalist aims of the powers that be. This is what today’s teachers must sacrifice their individuality for in the Menckenian sense.

So, many of our administrators are looking for teachers who are willing to be mediators rather than actual teachers. When they conduct interviews with job candidates, they carefully screen whether said applicant is an ardent supporter of SCI, or perhaps someone who is apolitical and will just go along with it. Candidates who betray support for the traditional methods, or any kind of intellectual loftiness (which could develop into opposition to SCI), are generally dismissed. Not every school subscribes to this pedagogy, but the numbers are gradually increasing.

Even if you removed SCI, administrators are still largely unlikeable people. Most of the time they hire personal friends or associates when positions open, but give mock interviews to other candidates in order to fulfill legal obligations mandated by the state. In other words, they will go through well over twenty interviews knowing in advance of this process who they want for the job. Much of the time this person is an unlicensed, barely experienced youth who’s fresh out of college. The grouchy, haggard secretaries assist them in this process by throwing the resumes of strangers into a pool but keeping those of known associates close at hand; the pool, I might add, is disposed of within a month.

I met an elderly teacher once who shared with me his trials in finding a job. He taught in one district for a few decades, and then retired to pursue a small business. Upon leaving, his principal said “You will be welcomed back here any time, if you so desire.” During his absence he traveled the world and gained experience that one could not gain elsewhere.

After ten or so years his family business went under. He decided thus to get back into teaching, but was not immediately welcomed back. Instead, he had to wait several years for twenty positions to be filled in the district before the principals would consider him; many of the new administrators were former coaches who had former students that they wanted to hire. The man had countless years of teaching experience under his belt along with years of traveling the globe, but as an aspiring social studies teacher, the employers still used the front that his “experience and abilities are not what we need at this time.”

What do we get as a result of this clannishness? Teachers hired not for their excellence in academia or their documented teaching capabilities, but for whose barbecues they go to or whose cousins they’re dating. Teachers like Mr. X are gradually being pushed out so that semi-intelligent, unlicensed, frat-boyish kids with no recorded ability can be used to dumb down our youth and turn them into globalist workers for the future world village.

If you want your kids to get a somewhat decent education, the best bet is to enroll them into a private school. Some of the above problems prevail, but their standards of teacher excellence are still a bit higher. If you have the time and money then it would be an unforgiveable injustice not to try home schooling.

Let us first take a closer look at the curricula. Students today sit through classes that offer nothing in the way of academic rigor when compared to the classes of fifty years ago. Back then, secondary school kids studied all the major liberal arts, including Latin. English classes demanded that students read major works of literature from Tolstoy and Shakespeare, not the dull novels of John Steinbeck or Harper Lee. Math and science classes were certainly more difficult than they are now, as evidenced by the report A Nation at Risk. All of these highly cerebral subjects fostered mentally and culturally enriched students: Latin gave them a better understanding of English and enhanced their communication skills; math and science made them more rational problem-solvers; literature offered the same benefits as Latin, plus the added knowledge about history and life in general that came from studying the experiences of different characters from other times.

What have our youth now? Well, the math and science are still there, but the fact that most European and Asian students are better mathematicians suggests that our courses are not very rigorous. English classes are a complete joke. Most of the young people I meet nowadays have a horrible command of English (even American-born ones), and few have read anything other than Of Mice and Men and The Great Gatsby. Even many of my fellow college students from a year ago had substandard ability in writing; there was one event that I will never forget when a professor for one of my classes went off on a tirade about how she knows 8th graders that write better than my colleagues (not to brag, but she specifically excluded me from her insults). The possibility for any cultural enrichment has been removed due to the over emphasis on “multicultural education.” Instead of focusing for several weeks at a time on Greek, Latin, English, French, or Italian literature, as it used to be done, students are being bombarded with single works from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the US, within a few weeks. From this they learn virtually nothing about the host of cultures they are examining, only a confused mess of different narratives. History education barely even exists anymore, and it won’t be long before such classes are cut completely so that we can increase the math and science in an effort to keep up with China (which will not happen anyway). Believe it or not, I’ve actually met students from schools where history was only taught during detention, as a form of punishment.

Now let’s look at the students I keep mentioning.

Never before have I met a more undisciplined, unintelligent, ignorant, restless, uncontrollable — and in many cases, flat out uneducable — rabble. The majority have no desire to learn, which they make clear by their constant interruptions, side conversations (about the most irrelevant topics), requests to use the bathroom, and complaints about work. Those who actually leave the class to go to the bathroom walk as slowly as possible, stop into other classrooms to say hello to their friends, take forever once they get to the bathroom, and walk even slower on their return to class. My time in various attendance offices has informed me that at least a hundred students simply don’t show up to school or come in late each day, the majority of these being black and Hispanic. Many times it’s impossible to even confirm absences with parents, as they cannot speak English.

While sitting in the teacher’s lounge, I’ve overheard countless conversations in which teachers complain that their students don’t even know their times tables. Let me repeat that: high school students don’t know their TIMES TABLES! I was forced to memorize these when I was nine years old! That some still have not done so says that (A) they are of below average IQ, and (B) their elementary and middle school teachers were lazy scoundrels who simply passed them through the system. “Someone else’s problem,” they likely said to themselves. Of course, nowadays it’s virtually impossible to hold students back for poor performance. The same parents who were never there to check homework or help study suddenly appear to bitch and moan to the education board that their kids are geniuses and shouldn’t be held back.

Borderline public indecency is also rampant throughout public secondary schools. Young girls wear the most form-fitting and scanty garments available, and it’s not uncommon to see exposed lingerie. Slack-jawed degenerate boys still sag their pants for the world to see their boxer shorts. Lesbian couples make out in the hallways between classes, and whorish little white girls hang onto the arms of ape-faced, prognathic Negroes with lazy grins and charcoal-dark skin. The parents obviously could not care less, are trying to be fashionable, or are simply incapable of maintaining any control. Regardless of which is the case, it’s apparent that they should never have become parents.

The above problems are of course systemic. For one, it’s impossible to maintain a properly functioning education system when droves upon droves of subhuman mongrels flood society from Africa, Asia, and South America, all with their unique yet irreconcilable modalities. The classes need to be continuously debased for the sake of “cultural responsiveness.”

Another problem lies with American culture (if you can call it a culture) at large. Technology has completely consumed the youth generation via text messages, Ipods, video games, instant messaging, fantasy football, and of course, wit-dimming television shows. The idols provided to the youth from movies, shows, and music spew the same message of “rebellion” against all forms of authority, be it parents, teachers, counselors, etc., and parents seek to be fashionable by allowing the goalless rebellion to continue unhindered. Self-expression for the sake of “originality” and “being different,” no matter how ridiculous the results, is continuously drilled into the youth’s heads through the aforementioned sources.

The Frankfurt School has won the culture battle.

We are now left with a hopeless generation with only a small minority that is capable of really learning and synthesizing anything.

The future looks awesome.

Jared Taylor

From Taki’s Magazine, October 12, 2009

The media love disaster. One can hardly sit through a half hour of cable news without hearing dire prophecies of “climate change” and other ecotastrophes. And over the past year, television pundits have warned incessantly that without massive Wall Street bailouts and compulsory Swine Flu vaccinations, the sky just might fall. This all comes on the heels of years of talk of terrorist attacks and the potential for the African AIDs epidemic to infect the middle class.

Not all of this is hysteria, of course, and without question the United States faces real economic and security challenges. But the most obvious, perilous, and, most importantly, preventable catastrophe looming on America’s horizon is one that the media and political class refuse to talk about.

In his famous speech of April 20, 1968, the British statesman Enoch Powell said, “The discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.”

One great, avoidable evil we face is the declining quality of the American work force.

The Census Bureau tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of nearly two million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population in just 14 years—in 2023—and will become a minority of the working population just 16 years later. The greatest increase will be in Hispanics, who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin. . . . Read the whole article.

I came late to the issues characteristically discussed in The Occidental Quarterly.

I had no interest in politics during my early adult years, a circumstance for which I am now grateful. Like most Americans, I assumed that “politics” meant electoral contests between hardly-distinguishable parties.

In early adulthood I encountered The Gulag Archipelago and gained a proper appreciation of just how high the stakes of politics could be. Initially, I gravitated toward that combination of anti-Communism and status quo Social Democracy known as neo-conservatism. In the academic bubble I then inhabited, such a stance was viewed as radical.

As a college instructor, I was baffled to receive student essays vehemently maintaining the “equality” of black and white, or singing the heroism of Rosa Parks. My classes were in philosophy and I never mentioned race at all. Clearly, this was the stuff students had been taught to write for their professors before they got to me.

The stridency of their language suggested they were defending an idea under heavy attack. But where was the attack? All I had ever heard anyone say about races is that they were “equal.” If this is all the students wanted to say, what were they getting so worked up about? They wrote as if they were trying to scratch an itch.

I wished to devote my life to learning and scholarship, with no thought of practical application beyond eventually sharing my knowledge with the generation that came after me. Of course, I quickly learned that few of my colleagues shared this elevated, quasi-monastic notion of the scholar’s calling. Some turned out to hold beliefs weirdly similar to the jailors described by Solzhenitsyn; many more did not, but were untroubled by — or afraid of — those who did.

Accordingly, my first practical cause belonged to the realm of academic politics: defending the life of the mind from ideological corruption. I was also fascinated by the sheer power which ideology exercised over many men’s minds, and by how a band of resentful mediocrities armed with little else had infiltrated and virtually subjugated an institution made up of highly intelligent people.

The ideologues talked a great deal about race, of course; but this did not lead me to take any interest in the subject myself. I vaguely hoped that once the imposters had been purged from the academy we could forget about race and get back to learning and teaching.

I devoted several years to investigating the first principles of modern “progressive” thought, publishing a little philosophical primer on the subject (Alexandre Kojève and the Outcome of Modern Thought). But this still did not lead me to the issue of racial differences, which are an empirical rather than philosophical matter. The entire drama of ideological politics can be played out within a homogeneous society, as students of the French Revolution know.

Nevertheless, I have come to the point where I prefer to publish even purely sociological analysis (e.g., “From Salon to Guillotine,” Summer 2008) in an explicitly racial-realist venue such as The Occidental Quarterly.

Here is why. Those traditional conservatives who continue to admonish us against the dangers of “biological determinism” are increasingly condemning themselves to irrelevance. The plea that “race isn’t everything” is valid per se, but not especially germane to the situation in which we find ourselves. For we are not the aggressors in the battle now being fought. And in any battle, it is the aggressors’ prerogative to choose the point of attack: if they come at you by land, you do not have the option of fighting them at sea.

Race is everything to our enemies, and it is the angle from which they have chosen to attack our entire civilization. It is also where they have achieved their greatest victories: you can see this from the way “conservative” groups feel they must parrot the language of the egalitarians just to get a hearing (see: www.edmundburkeinstitute.org/programs.htm). Such well-meaning but naive friends of our civilization are in effect consenting to occupy the status of a “kept” opposition.

The more we try to avoid confronting race directly, the more our enemies will press their advantage at precisely this point. Tactically, they are correct to do so. And they will continue until we abandon our defensive posture and turn to attack them on their own chosen ground.

The Occidental Quarterly is blessed with contributors who have made racial differences and ethnic conflict their lives’ study, and I cannot match them in their own fields. But I prefer to throw in my lot with them because they are unambiguously not part of any “kept” opposition. Being a pariah at least keeps one honest.

A turning point for me was reading Glayde Whitney’s “The Biological Reality of Race” in American Renaissance (October 1999). Like everyone else in America, I had been subjected to years of race-talk, but the aim had always been to lead me to “feel” in a predetermined way. Even my students’ papers had been apprentice work in this genre. Whitney, by contrast, was simply setting forth information. Reading him was like being addressed as an adult after years of being talked down to. This by itself was enough to get me to sit up and take notice of what he was saying.

Moreover, he contradicted everything I had ever been told. And he did so while showing that race could be as interesting as any other scientific topic. I had never seen anyone actually diagram the human family tree, showing which groups were most closely related and which most distantly separated. I was particularly struck by the revelation that the deepest evolutionary cleft within the human race was that between black Africans and everyone else.

But even a complete racial science based upon exhaustive knowledge of the human genome would never make a dent in anti-white ideology. This is because ideologies are not scientific theories: they are systems of ideas mobilized by groups of men in their struggle to acquire or maintain power over other men. They are a misuse — a prostitution — of the faculty of human reason, whose proper end is the discovery of the true. Ideological doctrines are true, in the best of cases, only per accidens; more often they are falsehoods publicly maintained through violence and intimidation.

Not being based upon knowledge, the content of ideologies change with the elites and counter-elites which champion them. Past ideological regimes have been governed by Marxists who spoke of class rather than race. Still earlier regimes (and revolutionaries) invoked religious concepts. And, yes, racial science itself has been prostituted in the service of what was essentially a political ideology.

The masters of the West long ago ceased performing even the minimum function required of any governing elite: seeing to the physical survival of the people it rules. Instead, it maintains its power by setting its clients (“designated victims”) against the rest of us. “Antiracism” is the ideology, but what is really going on underneath is the mobilization of envy, covetousness, and the libido dominandi.

Much of the elite itself is white, of course. But this is really no more paradoxical than a company getting rich by staging a “going out of business sale” that never ends. Except, of course, that the “white antiracism” game will have to end soon.

The regime’s greatest crime, however, lies not in setting its clients against us; it is what it has done to our own young people. Those indoctrinated students whose essays so perplexed me had been formed into instruments of an alien will: pawns in a struggle inimical to their own interests, and whose real nature they could not grasp. They were no less victims for being willing.

Writing for The Occidental Quarterly is essentially a continuation of the work I had always intended to do, adapted to a hostile political situation I have come to understand better. In the most general terms, this work remains: the pursuit of knowledge, teaching, and the fight against the same ideological enemies I encountered in the academy. For a professor-manqué, writing for an independent journal is the equivalent of what home-schooling is for a parent: a quiet revolt against institutions which have lost all claim to allegiance.

As a hereditarian, I believe that my political beliefs are to a large extent genetically determined. Liberals, who think that everything is shaped by the environment, probably have much better stories about how they came to believe the things that they do. I can’t do that. I never was robbed or beaten up by a black person, nor has a Mexican ever taken one of my jobs. If there were a movie made about my life, some bad experiences with NAMs [non-Asian minorities] would have to be put in there, because a story about a guy coming to his life philosophy through reading books and thinking wouldn’t make for interesting viewing.

What is worth writing about is how my personality has interacted with the world around me. Before ever thinking about politics or race, I spent my early teens wondering about religion. A cousin and some of his friends once tried to convert me to their hellfire and brimstone version of Christianity. They told me that the vast majority of the world is damned and only those “saved” would avoid eternal torture. I found this horrifying, but the biblical arguments made sense. The God I found in the Bible wasn’t the friendly man upstairs we know in popular culture. As a matter of fact, he was quite horrifying. But if the Word was the Truth, I would have to learn to love Big Brother. Luckily, I eventually ran across a book called Atheist Universe and have since been free of the cosmic dictator that only existed in my head.

While becoming an atheist gave me peace of mind, it also permanently separated me from the rest of humanity. Ninety percent or so of Americans believe in God, and many of the rest believe in a “higher power.” For better or worse, I simply lack something that the rest of humanity has.

I’m reminded of this at strange moments. One of the biggest stories of the past few weeks has been that of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard, found safe after being snatched almost twenty years ago. Of course I feel for what the family must have gone through, but much of that sympathy went away when I later read that the girl’s mom had consulted a psychic to try to find her daughter. Anyone who could’ve done such a thing is someone with whom I have trouble feeling a human connection.

I should be humble about my atheism. The smartest man in the world believes in God, and I’m not going to argue with anybody who has an IQ several standard deviations higher than mine. But we can say for certain that all religions and claims of humans having supernatural powers are false.

I didn’t think much about politics. I had the vague notion that I was smart, and since all smart people were liberal that’s what I should be. My only philosophical idea was atheism, and it didn’t escape my notice that those who most strongly believed in God tended to be on the right. (Atheist Universe itself is sprinkled with a couple shots at conservatives and just assumes that anyone smart enough to pick up a book is going to be of the left) I was isolated from the masses, but at least there was a minority of college professors, journalists, and intellectuals who were rational and believed in socialism, racial egalitarianism, feminism, and all the other smart people stuff.

I got my first experience with liberals in the flesh when I went off to college. I took a few years of Arabic. It seemed as if everybody in the classes were either those hoping for careers in the Army or CIA or Islamophiles, including white girls who had converted to Islam and were wearing the hijab. I must’ve met more white converts to Islam in my college days than I did believing Christians.

Interestingly, I saw the same professors and students who foamed at the mouth at the “Christian Fundies” treating these confused coeds like they had made a wise and sober decision. (My Arabic professor, a secular Moroccan, was just as disgusted and baffled with the girls as I was.)

I searched for logical consistencies. What led people to at the same time celebrate homosexuality and a culture that stoned homosexuals to death, all while rallying against “homophobia” in America? Nothing but hatred of whites and Western civilization. Behind all the intellectualization, the millions of words in academic journals, the conferences, the class room
discussions, the thousand page dissertations and media coverage that’s all there was.

It’s really not something that takes a lot of brain power to figure out. Just find a liberal (almost anybody who went to college). Ask him if the Tibetans should be allowed to preserve their culture. Then ask him whether whites should be allowed to. Contrast the reactions. Or tell him a story about Christians opposing birth control. Then a little while later bring up a story about Muslims stoning somebody to death. You can also see it in how liberals downplay black crime while their hearts bleed about separate water fountains fifty years ago.

My disgust with liberals grew and grew at the same time I was discovering sociobiology (no thanks to the four year brainwashing camp that I attended!), and my basic world view was formed. Whatever personality trait I had that caused me to reject religion and isolated me from the masses led me to reject egalitarianism and be disgusted with the elite. I eventually made my peace with the religious believers after I saw what those who didn’t believe in God believed in.

I write because I value the search for truth, classical music, freedom of speech, capitalism, beauty, science, and technological innovation. However simple the common folk are, I understand that these things almost exclusively were either created by or exist within the white race.

I go mad when I see those who’ve contributed nothing to human knowledge or advancement demand their “fair share” of what modern civilization produces. And my conscience is clear if I can do whatever little I can to combat the inverted morality of our present civilization.

A movement needs activists and money more than it needs intellectuals. The science on racial differences is conclusive and the moral case for white nationalism can be made in one paragraph. It wouldn’t be worth writing if I didn’t think that my work provided something valuable not found elsewhere.

Whether I’m changing the world on any large scale is doubtful. I’m inclined towards pessimism when it comes to the human condition, but who knows. If the white race ever feels like asserting its right to exist again, I can at least say that I played a small part.

The Devil Knows Latin:
Why America Needs the Classical Tradition

E. Christian Kopff, classicist at the University of Colorado and occasional contributor to The Occidental Quarterly, has the knack of writing about difficult issues with an easy grace. The book under review is first of all a defense for our time of the value of classical learning. On the way, he includes much sound advice for actual or prospective parents, a few biographical sketches, and comments on the contemporary humanities and the American cinema.

In the curricular wars of the 1980s and 1990s, most self-described conservatives saw themselves as combating “the legacy of the sixties.” But from long before the sixties there radiates still the baleful influence of John Dewey. And before him stands President Charles Eliot of Harvard with his elective system to replace the traditional program of studies in Latin and Greek. In reality, as Kopff explains, the problems with our educational establishments go all the way back to the Enlightenment.

The central fallacy of the Enlightenment was that tradition constituted a burden upon the present generation, limiting its possibilities. The “enlightened” philosopher sought to make a new beginning, as when Descartes declared he would write “as if no one had written on these matters before;” or as when Rousseau began an argument with: “let us put the facts aside; they have nothing to do with the case.” The underlying notion is similar to one I have heard from young would-be writers and artists: they must avoid studying past works in their genres because that would limit their “originality.” Of course, if we carry this thought to its logical conclusion, we arrive at a cult of ignorance as the path to discovery and achievement.

Kopff believes that “creativity is possible only as the final stage in a long, rigorous absorption of the teachings and discoveries of the past.” (p. 9) For example, the solving of a scientific puzzle demands a thorough grasp of the relevant facts and theories as discovered or worked out by previous generations of scientists. “Science is not spun out of the minds of individual scientists; it is the achievement of a tradition of research fostered carefully and slowly over millennia.” (p. 108) Hippocrates of Cos, Kopff points out, got it right in the fifth century BC in a lecture entitled “On Tradition in Medicine.”

And the appropriation of a heritage is itself a demanding task: it cannot be passively received like a gift. “Acquire what you have obtained from your fathers if you would possess it!” said Goethe.

The view of education Kopff champions is that of Albert Jay Nock as expounded in his 1931 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia (published as Theory of Education in the United States). Nock’s educational thought rests upon a fundamental distinction between education and training. Training means the learning of information relevant to the accomplishment of specific goals. Education in the proper sense refers to the study and mastery of a body of knowledge formative in character: formative, that is, of the learner himself. Genuine education aims at producing thoughtful men who have at their disposal a wealth of general knowledge, and who, in the light of this knowledge, can judge matters of significance in a disinterested manner.

Classical literature is employed as the best means to this end. The goal is not to produce professional classicists—scholarly specialists in antiquity, trained in collating manuscripts or interpreting inscriptions. Rather, the claim of Greek and Latin literature to pride of place in the general curriculum, says Nock, are that they

comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity. The mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective. [These studies] are maturing, because they inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. (pp. 103-104)

Beginning in the 1890s, says Kopff, the ideal of those in charge of instructing the young shifted from education to training. First on the reformers’ list of useless courses were Latin and Greek. But, as classicist Paul Shorey recognized in 1917, the “dead” languages were from the start mere pretexts; the reformers had no more use for Shakespeare or Milton than for Homer or Virgil. There is a straight line from the introduction of the elective system, made possible by the banishment of Greek and Latin, to the current multicultural ideal of sampling Lady Murasaki one day and the Mahabharata the next.

Dr. Kopff is skeptical even of “Great Books” curricula, which he calls the “dime-store approach to education” or “civilization on the cheap.” (p. 13) There is no substitute for mastery of the languages in which the books are written. Such a requirement will undoubtedly make it more difficult to find qualified teachers, but the teacher who sets out to fulfill it “will experience an increase in his self-respect as well as his humility—things in short supply in today’s teachers of the humanities.” (p. 18) I suspect the abolition of rigorous Greek and Latin requirements has contributed to “science envy,” the source of much non-functional technicality and obfuscation in recent literary studies.

Not knowing the history of the civilization of which they are a part, today’s students are like amnesiacs, cut off from the past that makes them who they are. Or again, they have become like the anti-heroes of absurdist fiction (Kafka, Céline): trapped in a world they cannot understand, bit players in a drama whose basic themes remain a mystery to them. “The only reason we are still alive,” said German philosopher Gerhard Krüger with only slight exaggeration, “is our inconsistency in not having actually silenced all tradition.”

Indeed, as late as the 1960s, there were more than 700,000 Latin students in American high schools. But the torch was definitely dropped at that time.

A modest revival is now underway, spearheaded by homeschoolers and organizations such as the Association of Classical and Christian Schools (see www.accsedu.org). Kopff recommends a primary curriculum focused on Latin and mathematics:

contemporary research confirms that the best time to begin the study of languages and math is before puberty. What the pupil learns of these subjects early will provide a firm foundation for any future course of study. English, for example, consists by more than 50 percent of words of Latin origin; and most of the sciences, however much their content may change over time, will always presuppose a good grounding in mathematics.

As the educational mainstream continues its downward slide, the students quietly being given a classical education today (at home or in modest church schools) will one day be poised to form an intellectual elite within our nation. As Professor Kopff puts it:

The materials are out there, lying in the warehouses of the Cambridge and Oxford University Presses. We have in our hands the making of a reactionary revolution of excellence. Do we have the will to give our children their heritage? (p. 111)

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