The story is simple: a twenty-something suburban couple, Micah and Katie, he a day trader, she a university student, both White, middle class, and American, encounter evidence of nocturnal paranormal activity in their house, which Micah sets out to document; the situation grows progressively worse and eventually climaxes at the end of the film.

The latter employs a number of familiar tactics.

Firstly, it has extraordinary events befall perfectly ordinary folk, and seeks, therefore, to augment its affrighting potential by making it easy for the audience to identify with the characters.

Secondly, it has the male protagonist not take the paranormal threat very seriously, while the female protagonist descends into hysterics.

And thirdly, it has the activity escalate in an algorithmic crescendo, slowly at first, rapidly at the end: said activity is not only minor and relatively harmless during most of the film, but it is never witnessed directly by the protagonists until the final chapters; for the most part, the activity takes place while the characters sleep, with its discovery posthumous and mediated by a digital recording.

What interested me about the film, however, was not so much the technique but how it related to the characters, particularly where whiteness and gender roles and representation intersect in modern American cinema.

Evidently, if we are watching a horror film and if the protagonists are meant to be young and nothing special, we would be wrong to expect them to display great wisdom or superior intelligence. Yet, precisely because they are meant to be nothing special, it is shocking to deduce what their characterisation says about the Ronald Reagan generation.

The viewer will notice, for example, that, although the couple lives together, they are neither engaged nor have plans to marry. Having been together for three years, one would imagine that they know each other well enough by now to be able to ascertain whether their relationship is going anywhere; but, instead, it seems they are content with the status quo, neither party willing to commit to anything, leaving their options open, and, by implication, merely staving off loneliness until they get bored or someone better comes along.

This is the normal state of affairs these days, and, I will concede, one not without advantages: after all, the good old days whose passing so many nostalgic Right wingers like to lament had its fair crop of unhappy marriages and life partnership is a serious commitment where mistakes can be enormously costly in more than one sense.

All the same, open-ended arrangements like that of Micah and Katie bear the seeds of dysfunction and are symptomatic of the disintegration of the Western family structure. An ex-girlfriend of mine from my university days found herself in an analogous relationship, only to discover, after nine long years, that the gentleman in question was unwilling to marry her. By this time she was well into her thirties, not an easy age for anybody to find fresh new partners or start a new relationship from scratch. She was eventually successful, however, and recently married, but she is now over 40 and a healthy conception, if at all possible, will be considerably more difficult – women over 40 are more likely to conceive a child with genetic defects, such as Down syndrome.

The speculation one can make from watching the film is that, perhaps, culpability for the absence of a marriage proposal lies with Micah. This gentleman is good at making money from buying and selling shares on his computer, but he persistently exhibits an irritating lack of maturity and an inability to assume responsibility and keep promises.

Early in the film the couple is advised by an expert in the paranormal not to get a Ouija board or attempt communication with, let alone bait or antagonize, the demon. He, in fact, recommends referring the matter to a demonologist. What does Micah do? Too wrapped up amusing himself recording ‘cool’ paranormal events to think of consequences, gets the Ouija board, attempts to communicate, bait, and antagonize the demon, and scorns the suggestion to call the demonologist, despite mounting evidence to its advisability. When confronted about the Ouija board, which his girlfriend had made him promise not to buy, Micah’s smirking response is exactly what we would expect from his type: “I didn’t buy it. I borrowed it!”

Micah’s puerility is compounded by a weak and half-developed sense of masculinity; his reactions are consistently adolescent, he allows himself to be shaped by events, and he even permits Katie to treat him like a child. That he does is nor surprising, given his lack of seriousness, bemused flaccidity, and fainéant laggadliness, which inspire nothing but contempt.

When, by dint of sniping sarcasm and scornful skepticism, he is finally embarrassed into adopting a more assertive approach, his performance is juvenile and pathetic: “Nobody comes into my house . . . fucks with my girlfriend . . . and gets away with it,” “I am taking care of this . . . this is my house, you’re my girlfriend . . . I’m gonna fucking solve the problem. OK?” Yea, right. Whatever.

Whatever Micah’s shortcomings as a White, heterosexual male, the fact is that he deserves his girlfriend. She is bossy and, as is routine in modern American film and television, incapable of having an argument with her partner without gratuitous sarcasm and derogatory shots at his masculinity. She also shouts, bellows, and dresses in a most unfeminine manner, favoring informal, thick, cotton wear that often conceals rather than emphasizes her feminine curves. This latter point might be unfair, as the filming takes place during evenings and mornings and it is common for people, even sartorially relaxed university students, to change into comfortable clothes while at home. All the same, it is easy to imagine Katie either tarted up for a boozy evening at the nightclub or in sneakers, t-shirts, and jeans or jogging suits, with little variety in between; while at university in the late 1980s and early 1990s I came across hundreds of Katies, so her character conforms to a common American type.

As to the house inhabited by this irksome couple, it is well worth noticing, as it tells us as much about them as it does about contemporary American culture. Firstly, the viewer will observe that there is not a single book in the whole house – not one, except for a copy of one of Wiley’s For Dummies manuals and a handful of college textbooks hidden away on a low-lying shelf. As an English Literature major, it is clear that Katie scrapes by with the textbooks alone: no genuine lover of literature here. And when Micah decides to do some research to better understand the haunting, we find him leafing lazily through a copy of Ernst and Johanna Lehner’s Devils, Demons, and Witchcraft, which is little more than a picture book. At the same time, the viewer will also observe that the shelves in the lounge hold hundreds DVDs: this is, then, the sole source of culture for this college-educated couple.

Indeed, their lounge is dominated by – oh, yes – a monstrous television set several parsecs across and massive enough to form a steep gravitational well. One wonders why the sofas are not in orbit around this monstrosity. Television is so important to this couple that they are not above sacrificing natural daylight in order for the television set to constitute the epicenter of stimuli in the area: the black jumbo set blocks the front window almost entirely, and (presumably to avoid tempting burglars) the blinds to this window are kept permanently shut.

Is it any surprise, then, that their dialogue is so exasperatingly brainless? Admittedly, they are not as dumb and inarticulate as the characters in The Blair Witch Project, who could barely string a sentence together, and who lacked words to name even basic objects or concepts; but, even so, Micah and Katie are somniferously superficial and have nothing interesting to say. I imagine one’s frontal lobes would rapidly necrotize and liquefy after a few weeks in their company.

On the second floor we encounter another anomalous feature. The three-bedroom house has… three double bedrooms. One is theirs; the other two are unused guestrooms. Now, for a house inhabited by a lonely couple with no plans to marry and, as far as one can see, no plans to reproduce anytime soon, this creates the impression of their having more space than their impoverished imaginations allow them to fill. Could it be that they have an active social life and frequently entertain visitor friends? There is little indication that this is the case: the film records their activities over a period of several weeks and, during this time, we find Micah never talks to anyone but his girlfriend, while Katie is visited by only one friend, a patronizing tubular female with no conversation.

When we consider that Paranormal Activity was written and directed by one Oren Peli, a 39-year-old Israeli-born film director and screenwriter, his instincts with regards to what constitutes an ordinary White American couple is revealing because they are those of an outsider: the White Americans in this film are uncultured philistines, infantile, spoilt, obdurate, bickering morons incapable of learning from experience, let alone anything profound or useful; they are, put a different way, like oversized children, with too much time, too big an allowance, and really nothing to do. They are parochial, ovine consumers, serving time with no sense of purpose or direction, completely oblivious of the world outside the confines of their feckless existence, and for whom life is simply a succession of unconnected moments, wiled away meaninglessly in search for endless entertainment and fun.

Peli is not alone pumping out similarly negative portrayals of White American youth; I am reminded of the vile Eli Roth and the latter’s Cabin Fever, another horror film featuring cognitively deficient all-White university students.

The sad aspect of these films is that, because viewers consume them passively as entertainment, the sheer persistence of the attitudes and interpersonal dynamics therein presented act eventually to normalize them. I have seen enough of them reproduced in real life to wonder about the degree to what ordinary people take their cues from modern American cinema when faced with unstructured social situations. Even though most realise that the scenarios presented are fictional, fantastical, stupid, or impossible, American cinema’s influence as a model of social interaction ought not to be underestimated.

To better suspend disbelief, fiction imitates life. But in postmodernity, in the age of ubiquitous information and mass communications, life is known to imitate fiction, with the result that fiction imitates life that imitates fiction that imitates life imitating fiction. Distortions – because the imitations are two dimensional – are introduced into every revolution. Round and round they go, the distortion growing ever larger until they acquire a life of their own. The medium is the message, as the saying goes.

Without cinema able effectively and entertainingly to challenge Peli’s and Roth’s and their ilk’s message, without a different voice providing an alternative narrative, theirs becomes the cultural default, the dominant paradigm and archetype. The main premise of Paranormal Activity is entertaining enough, even for a complete skeptic, but it needs to be told by a less contemptuous narrator.

What is “sexual liberation”? It is usually spoken of by way of contrast with the constraints of marriage and family life. It would seem to be a condition under which people have more choice than under the traditional system of monogamy. Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” seemed to offer men more choices than just sleeping with the same woman every night for fifty years. Feminism promised women it would liberate them from “domestic drudgery” and turn marriage and motherhood into just one among many lifestyle choices.

On the other hand, there was always an element of free choice even regarding marriage: one may choose whether, and to a certain extent whom, one will marry. Indeed, marriage is perhaps the most important example of a momentous life choice. But on the traditional view you cannot make your choice and still have it. Once one takes the vow and enters into the covenant, ipso facto one no longer has a choice. In other words, marriage is a one-way nonrefundable ticket. Your wife is your choice even if she eventually displeases you in certain ways, as all mortal wives necessarily must. Keeping your choice of mate open forever is called “celibacy.”

Ultimately, the ideal of sexual liberation rests upon a philosophical confusion which I call the absolutizing of choice. The illusion is that society could somehow be ordered to allow us to choose without thereby diminishing our future options. Birth control, abortion, the destigmatizing of fornication and homosexuality, arbitrary and unilateral divorce—all these have been pitched to us as ways of expanding our choices.

Now, I am in favor of giving people all the choice they can stand. But I would like to be careful about what this means: analysis will reveal that the term “choice” has distinct and partly contradictory senses which may not be equally applicable in all contexts. In other words, choice is not a single thing which can be expanded indefinitely at no cost; the appearance of greater choice in one area can be shown to entail reducing one’s possibilities in another.

One perfectly legitimate sense of choosing is doing as one desires. When we are asked to choose a flavor of ice cream, e.g., all that is meant is deciding which flavor would be the most pleasing to us at the moment. That is because the alternative of chocolate or strawberry involves no deep, long-term consequences. But not all choices can be like this.

Consider, for example, a young man’s choice of vocation. One of the charms of youth is that it is a time when possibility overshadows actuality. One might become a brain surgeon, or a mountain climber, or a poet, or a statesman, or a monk. It is natural and good for boys to dream about all the various things they might become, but such daydreams can breed a dangerous illusion: that, where anything is still possible, everything will be possible. This is only true in the case of trivial and inconsequential matters. It is possible to sample all of Baskin-Robbins’ thirty-one flavors on thirty-one successive days. But it is not possible to become a brain-surgeon and a mountain climber and a poet and a statesman and a monk. A man who tries to do so will only fail in all his endeavors.

The reason for this, of course, is that important enterprises demand large amounts of time and dedication, but the men who undertake them are mortal. For every possibility we realize, there will be a hundred we must leave forever unrealized; for every path we choose to take, there will be a hundred we must forever renounce. The need for choice in this sense is what gives human life much of its seriousness. Those who drift from one thing to another, unable to make up their minds or finish anything they have begun, reveal thereby that they do not grasp an essential truth about the human condition. They are like children who do not wish to grow up.

Now, sexual choices, especially for women, are analogous to a man’s in regard to his calling. Inherently, they cannot be made as easy and reversible as choosing flavors of ice cream. But this is what sexual liberation attempts to do. The underlying motive seems to be precisely a fear of difficult choices and a desire to eliminate the need for them. For example, a woman does not have to think about a man’s qualifications to be a father to her children if a pill or a routine medical procedure can remove that possibility. There is no reason to consider carefully the alternative between career and marriage if motherhood can be safely postponed until the age of forty (as large numbers of women now apparently believe). What we have here is not a clear gain in the amount of choice, but a shift from one sense of the word to another—from serious, reflective commitment to merely doing as one desires at any given time. Like the dilettante who dabbles in five professions without finally pursuing any, the liberated woman and the playboy want to keep all their options open forever: they want eternal youth.

The attempt to realize a utopia of limitless choice in the real world has certain predictable consequences: notably, it makes the experience of love one of repeated failure. Those who reject both committed marriage and committed celibacy drift into and out of a series of what are called “relationships,” either abandoning or being abandoned. The lesson inevitably taught by such experiences is that love does not last, that people are not reliable, that in the end one has only oneself to fall back on, that prudence dictates always looking out for number one. And this in turn destroys the generosity, loyalty, and trust which are indispensable for family life and the perpetuation of our kind.

Most of those who have obeyed the new commandment to follow all of their hearts’ desire do not appear to me to be reveling in a garden of earthly delights. Instead I am reminded of the sad characters from the pages of Chekhov: sleepwalking through life, forever hoping that tomorrow things will somehow be changed for the better as they blindly allow opportunities for lasting happiness to slip through their fingers. But this is merely the natural outcome of conceiving of a human life as a series of revocable and inconsequential choices. We are, indeed, protected from certain risks, but have correspondingly little to gain; we have fewer worries but no great aspirations. The price we pay for eliminating the dangers of intimacy is the elimination of its seriousness.

In place of family formation, we find a “dating scene” without any clear goal, in which men and women are both consumed with the effort to get the other party to close options while keeping their own open. There is a hectic and never-ending jockeying for position: fighting off the competition while keeping an eye out for a better deal elsewhere. The latest “singles” fad, I am told, is something called speed dating, where men and women interact for three minutes, then go on to someone else at the sound of a bell.

Sex belongs to early adulthood: one transient phase of human life. It is futile to attempt to abstract it from its natural and limited place in the life-cycle and make it an end in itself. Sustainable civilization requires that more important long term desires like procreation be given preference over short term wishes which conflict with them, such as the impulse to fornicate.

The purpose of marriage is not to place shackles upon people or reduce their options, but to enable them to achieve something which most are simply too weak to achieve without the aid of a social institution. Certain valuable things require time to ripen, and you cannot discover them unless you are faithful to your task and patient. Marriage is what tells people to stick to it long enough to find out what happens. Struggling with such difficulties—and even periods of outright discouragement—is part of what allows the desires of men and women to mature and come into focus. Older couples who have successfully raised children together, and are rewarded by seeing them marry and produce children of their own, are unlikely to view their honeymoon as the most important event of their marriage.

People cannot know what they want when they are young. A young man may imagine happiness to consist in living on Calypso’s Island, giving himself over to sexual pleasure without ever incurring family obligations; but all serious men eventually find such a life unsatisfying. The term “playboy” was originally derogatory, implying that the male who makes pursuing women his highest end is not to be taken seriously. The type of man who thinks he’s hot stuff because he’s able to have one night stands will never raise sons capable of carrying on the fight for our embattled civilization.

Confusion about one’s desires is probably greater in young women, however. For this reason, it is misleading to speak of women “wanting marriage.” A young woman leafing through the pages of Modern Bride does not yet know what marriage is; all she wants is to have her wedding day and live happily ever after. She may well not have the slightest notion of the duties she will be taking on.

Parenthood is what really forces young men and women to grow up. Young men whose idea of the good life was getting drunk, getting laid, and passing out suddenly start focusing on career planning and building capital. They find it bracing to have a genuinely important task to perform, and are perhaps surprised to find themselves equal to it.

But without the understanding that marriage is an inherently irreversible covenant, both men and women succumb to the illusion that divorce will solve the “problem” of dissatisfaction in marriage. They behave like the farmer who clears, plows, and plants a field only to throw up his hands on the first really hot and sweaty day of work, exclaiming: “Farming is no fun! I’m going to do something else!” And like that farmer, they have no one to blame but themselves when they fail to harvest any crops.

Understanding the marriage bond as an irreversible covenant similarly influences the way economic activity and property are understood. Rather than being a series of short-term responses to circumstance, labor and investment become an aspect of family life transcending the natural life span of any individual. From a mere means to consumption, wealth becomes a family inheritance. In Burke’s fine words: “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself.” By contrast, the characteristically modern view of property finds its clearest expression in the title of a bestselling 1998 financial planning guide: Die Broke. This amounts to a scorched earth policy for our own civilization. Perhaps someday the author will favor us with a sequel entitled Die Alone or Die Childless.

But not everyone is equally receptive to this kind of message. Women in parts of West Africa are averaging over eight children apiece. The revolt against marriage and childrearing is an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. It is primarily in white countries that the birthrate has fallen below replacement level. It would behoove racially conscious whites, therefore, not to ignore the sexual side of the revolt against our civilization, nor shortsightedly to limit our attention to the single issue of miscegenation. The homosexual bathhouse view of sex as merely a means to personal pleasure attacks our race from within and at its source. As much as with inimical races and racial ideologies, our survival will depend upon our ability to organize effective resistance.

When we look around at all the forces arrayed against our race, it can be daunting. How can we fight them all? Are circumstances right? Would we be ready even if they were? And what to do in the meantime? The situation becomes a lot less daunting when we realize that the first battle, and the first victory, must take place within ourselves.

Masculinity has always changed. Men have been writing and speaking and arguing about what makes a man throughout history. As the particulars of a society change, the prevailing model of masculinity becomes more nuanced or more brutal according to need.

When men helmed Western civilization, they maintained a smooth continuity through changing times because they knew themselves. They knew what men were, they knew what men could — and could not — become. They knew what stirred their own souls, they knew how to speak to each other and reach common ground. They knew the kinds of ideas that would take their own hearts and move them into battle with swords or muskets, in animal skins or sharp uniforms. They knew that in peacetime men could not be ruled by fear alone, that masculine ideals and codes of honor would reveal both the stronger and the nobler aspects of a man even when he was not being watched. Men were able to carve a hard jaw, a stern brow and a proud, noble chin for mankind because they knew themselves. They knew how to shape a head that fit the body of a Man. Embodied Man had a rich and sustaining bloodline; he lived and thrived in the context of history and Tradition.

“Modern,” headless man has no life-sustaining bloodline. Women and men with counter-masculine, alien, anti-Western agendas have successfully severed him from his history of heroes, ideals, and the world of masculine Tradition. Traditional Man is their fearsome enemy, the agent of their supposed oppression and the Man to blame for all violence and what they call injustice. Their project is one of ressentiment –to cast the heroic Traditional man as the ultimate villain, and to ennoble their own set of “virtues” as the ideal.

(T)he problem with the other origin of the “good,” of the good man, as the person of ressentiment has thought it out for himself, demands some conclusion. It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,–should he not be good?” then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal’s establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, “We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

The wealth and luxury of the modern world have made possible an age of the lamb, and oh how the eagle is cursed!

Women, the weakest men, men with an exploited sense of chivalry. and misguided advocates for men are struggling to fashion a sheep’s head for the eagle. But that project, too, is an unnatural, bloodless monstrosity. Frankenstein’s work. The head doesn’t fit. The body of Man rejects it, shrugs it off and remains headless. The enemies of Men toil under the assumption that the age of the sheep will last forever, and that the eagle must don a sheep’s head if he is to survive at all.

Forever is a very long time.

The project for Traditional Man is first an archeological one. He venture out onto the lake of ice and recovers the frozen remains of Man’s severed head. What follows is an anthropological project. He must study paleo-masculinity; he must reverse engineer the head and understand the mechanics of masculinity as it functioned before Man’s beheading. He must understand what came before, and repair his connection with his bloodline.

The sheep are crafting a world and a “modern” masculinity meant only for sheep. Eagles have no place in it.

But the age of sheep can’t last forever. It is artificially ordered, unbalanced, unsustainable. The meek have inherited the earth, but by the very nature of their meekness they will be unable to keep it.

Traditional Man must find and keep his head, his manhood’s redoubt. It is difficult to find and walk a path of honor in a world that is hateful to honor. It’s a lonely path. But ultimately, every man is alone with his Honor.

Ennio Morricone is playing.

Eventually, an Interphase will come.

And another Age of Eagles.

Alternative Right, March 21, 2010

Judaism is not merely a “religion,” as many Jews are overt atheists or agnostics, and they do not consider themselves less Jewish for all that. Jewry is also not a race even if it is true that a “trained eye,” most of the time, can recognize a Jewish appearance, that is to say, a characteristic pattern which is the result of their strict observance of endogamy for centuries. Jews see themselves as the “chosen ones” of God, and marriage outside the community is strictly frowned upon. However, mixed marriages do exist and have also helped to renew the blood of Israel during all the centuries spent in the various ghettos where the Jews preferred to live, separately and apart from the rest of the population. The essential condition for such mixed marriages is that the mother be Jewish, since Orthodox Rabbis recognize as Jewish only the child born of a Jewish mother. However, having just a Jewish father or grandparent can suffice for a person to identify completely with Judaism. Jewishness is therefore a “mental race” that has been shaped over the centuries by the Hebrew religion and the universalist project of Judaism.

Judaism is a Political Project

Judaism is essentially a political project. It is important for Jews to work toward the emergence of a world at “peace,” a peace meant to be universal and permanent. It is therefore not a coincidence that this word “peace” (shalom in Hebrew) is found frequently in Jewish discourse worldwide. In the perfect world that they are building, all conflicts will disappear between the nations. This is why Jews have been militating tirelessly for many years for the abolition of all borders, the dissolution of national identities and the establishment of a global empire of “peace.” The very existence of separate nations is considered to be responsible for the triggering of wars and turmoil. so they must be weakened and eventually replaced by a world government, a “one world government,” a “New World Order,” one single world-ruling authority that will permit happiness and prosperity to reign, Jewish-style, on earth.

We find this idea more or less developed both in the writings of certain intellectual Marxists such as Karl Marx himself and the Jewish-French philosopher Jacques Derrida and also in the discourse of liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper, Milton Friedman and France’s Alain Minc. The idea is to unify the world by all means necessary and to generate cultural conflicts that will weaken nation-states. It is for this One World that intellectuals Jews labor tirelessly all over the world. Whether they call themselves left- or right-wing, liberal or Marxist, believers or atheists, they are the most ardent propagandists of the pluralistic society and of universal miscegenation, that is of racial mixture.

Thus, all their strength the Jews – basically, ALL the vocal Jews in the world – encourage non-white immigration into every country in which they are located, not only because the multicultural society is their fundamental political aim, but also because the disintegration of national identity in each nation and the massive presence of anti-white immigrants is designed to prevent the original white population from succeeding in any nationalistic outbursts against the Jewish sway over finance, politics, and the media. All Jewish intellectuals, without any exception, are focused on this question of building the “pluralistic society” and for this they practice constant “vigilance against racism.” In France, influential writers and journalists such as Bernard-Henri Levy, Jacques Attali, Jean Daniel, Guy Sorman, and Guy Konopniki agree on pluralism and anti-racism despite their political divergences in other areas. This obsession, which is very characteristic of Judaism, is also manifested in movies, where many producers and directors are influential Jews. As soon as a film starts defending and promoting interbreeding, “tolerance” and pluralism, we can be sure that the producer of it is Jewish.

Now we can understand better why the former communists and leftists of the 1970s did not have to make such a big leap to become today’s “neoconservatives.” They have merely switched to a different strategy to achieve the same goal: the rule by racially pure Jews over a racially mixed society.

The fact is that after the Palestinian intifada began in October 2000, the Jews in France and the rest of the Western world have realized that nowadays the danger to their interests and their project comes primarily from Islam and from young African immigrants, both Arabic and black. Their aim is to strengthen the modern race-mixing and race-blending society, which they have contributed so much to establish in our country of France. But this mosaic now threatens to break up into separate communities, and this the Jews do not want. They want no separate identities or separateness at all, except a separate Jewish identity and Jewish separateness. Former Marxists in France such as Alexandre Adler, André Glucksmann, and Pascal Bruckner thus support nowadays, along with Alain Finkielkraut, the right-wing, pro-Washington, pro-Zionist party of Nicolas Sarkozy. And yet they have not become French patriots. They react only for the exclusive benefit of Jewry, asking, as American Jews proverbially do on every issue: “Is it good for the Jews ?”

“Tolerance” as a Weapon

The members of the Jewish sect are the most proselytizing people on earth, but unlike Christians or Muslims, who dream of converting all peoples of all races to their faith, the Jews have no plan to convert the world to their own faith, Judaism, but simply to encourage other nationalities to give up their national and religious identities – and live only for the goal of “tolerance.” The unceasing campaigns to blame all Whites for slavery, colonialism, the plundering of the Third World or for Auschwitz have no other purpose than putting the opponent on the defensive, and getting him on his knees not by violence but via guilt. When the Jews are the only people left on earth who are keeping their faith and their traditions, they will finally be recognized by everyone as God’s “chosen people.”

Their “mission” (and Jews frequently use this term “mission”) is to disarm the other peoples, to dissolve anything which is not Jewish or Jewish-controlled, to grind the people down to a powder for making a new identity-free work force, and thus to favor a universal “peace” among the peoples who have no more “divisive” identities.

As their prophet Isaiah said: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the tiger will rest with the kid, the lion and the ram shall live together, and a young child will lead them” (Isaiah 11: 6-9). The Messiah, coming from Israel, and awaited for three thousands years, will establish anew the kingdom of David and will give the Jews an empire over all the earth. And certain Jewish texts explicitly call for this.

Jews are therefore continuously encouraged to campaign, in whatever society they inhabit, in order to promote the unification of the world – and thus to also hasten the arrival of their promised and cherished Messiah. Propaganda is a Jewish specialty, and it is no coincidence that Jews become so influential in all the media. In their hands, the concepts of “tolerance” and “human rights” have become incredibly efficient weapons of white guilt and accusation against the majority culture. In fact, it is not through Jewish-sounding names or a Jewish physical appearance that we can best recognize Jews, but rather from what they write and say wherever they are on earth.

Selective Amnesia and Fabulation

Many Jews, as we know, played an absolutely huge role in the Soviet tragedy 1917-1991 and the thirty million deaths that marked this era. Let us remember that Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family and that Lenin himself had a Jewish maternal grandfather, that Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik founder and head of the Red Army, was born a Bronstein, while Kamenev (real name: Rosenfeld) and Zinoviev (real name: Apfelbaum) were running the two Bolshevik-conquered capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But the list of Jews who stood out in the mega-crimes of Communism is endless. It must be said and it must be repeated: Jewish officials and Jewish torturers bore a very heavy responsibility in this tragedy. The “perfect” world they concocted and which was supposedly “historically inevitable” turned out from the very beginning to be a nightmare for the Russian population. It was not until 1948 when the Jewish intellectual elite Jewish began distancing itself from the Stalinist government, and this was only because Stalin had launched his “anti-Zionist” campaign, meant to purge pro-Israel Jews from senior leadership positions.

This indisputable Jewish guilt for the gigantic crimes of Bolshevism is now systematically being shoved down the Memory Hole (the phrase from George Orwell’s 1984). In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 2002 book Two Centuries Together, the Nobel Laureate and 11-year veteran of the Bolshevik gulag expresses outrage that Jewish intellectuals were still refusing to recognize their ethnic responsibility in the slaughter of millions of Christians. Solzhenitsyn also denounces modern Jews who pose as victims of an “antisemitic” Bolshevik government when that government was in fact heavily Jewish and Jews were among the worst perpetrators.

This selective amnesia is necessary for a people who ceaselessly proclaim their “innocence” of any provocative acts, as we regularly note in their writings, for example in an editorial in Israel magazine of April 2003, “the first Israeli monthly magazine in the French language” written under the name of a certain André Darmon.

He wrote: “To kill a Jew or a child makes God cry, for we are exterminating [in the Jew] the bearer of universal ethics and innocence.”

No less!

With this mindset of absolute innocence Jews cannot conceive bearing any responsibility for their atrocities. Jews are only victims, only “scapegoats” in an evil and hostile world. But very soon the Messiah will punish the “wicked” and will restore the victimized sons of Israel to their full rights.

Nevertheless, in this same Israel magazine editorial, a certain Frederick Stroussi asserted that the Nazi government was worse than the Stalin regime. He quoted the cruelties he claimed were perpetrated by certain SS men. For example, we learn from Stroussi that the Latvian SS man Cukur’s hobby was to toss Jewish babies in the air to shoot them in their head as in skeet shooting. He also writes of other episodes, such as the rape of children by the SS before they killed them. The Second World War has certainly stimulated the fertile imagination of the children of Israel.

Or perhaps this imagination is once again a case of the Jews’ own “projection” syndrome, that is, accusing others systematically of one’s very own crimes as a matter of consistent PR policy: always attack. We know in fact – even if the media never speak about it – that many Jews and their rabbis are involved in the felony crime of pedophilia (see Psychanalyse du Judaisme, 2007).

And murdering a child would seem to be more a Jewish specialty than a characteristic of the SS mind. The revelations of tenured professor Ariel Toaff of Bar Eilan University in Israel – the son of the former Grand Rabbi of Rome – and buttressed in February 2007 by his 147-page, heavily footnoted, scholarly work Pasqua di Sangue [ Blood Passover] – reveals proof of ritual murder among some Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Eastern European origin).

Emotional Fragility

We outsiders are thus supposed to understand that the sufferings of Jews cannot be compared to those of any others. As a consequence, we are supposed to get as indignant as they do when a serious historian such as Stephane Courtois states (in the preface of his famous Black Book of Communism): “The death of a Ukrainian child of Kulak origin [ from the independent farmer class] who is deliberately forced to starve to death by the Stalinist government is as significant as the death of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto.” These simple words were enough to provoke the ire of Frederic Stroussi who declares he was “stunned” by such an affront. Such a remark, according to him, was “despicable” and represented a vulgar attack against Israel: “What does this comparison have to do here?” he writes. “Why do we have to use the slaughter of a Jewish child to transmit this underlying, false and hateful rumor that the Jews overshadow all other victims of totalitarianism and monopolize all the attention on themselves?”

The author of the article, as we can notice, reacts in a outraged and totally disproportionate way to the modest and certainly justified intentions of the level-headed historian Stephane Courtois. Stroussi demonstrates here the “great intolerance to the frustration” which are so characteristic of the Jewish intellectual. Such reactions are clearly not “normal.”

We note that Israel magazine is a monthly magazine designed for the Jewish community and that, consequently, one can hardly accuse Frederick Sroussi of lying to goyish readers, or hiding from the goyim the true nature of Bolshevism and the supposedly malefic cruelty of the SS. His discourse here does not correspond to any false dialectic, as anti-Semites claim, but here, in this magazine by and for Jews, he is reflecting, as a Jew among Jews, writing to Jews, the very essence of their soul: 1) We are always innocent – and 2) Jewish lives are more valuable than those of others.

There is an “attack anti-Semitism” that stems from a failure to understand the Jewish identity and only sees deliberate perfidy where there is in reality a genuine existential anxiety, one generated by a deep psychological dysfunction.

Hysterical People

The Jews have never dared to collectively approach the mirror on their inner lives represented by Freudian psychoanalysis, a prism through which the Jews claim to see all humanity, but which, on closer analysis, sheds far more light on the specific neuroses of Judaism. Psychoanalysis, like Marxism, is a “Jewish science” and a product of the Jewish mind. It was therefore logical to wonder how this Freudian “discovery” corresponds to Jewish specificities.

The answer was not initially obvious to the author, and it took the reading and analysis of hundreds of books of all kinds, mostly written by Jews themselves, for him to realize that the searing question of incest stands at the throbbing heart of the Jewish question, and not theoretically either.

Jewish mothers do love their sons, as is well known, but outright incest is at the origin of a well-known mental illness – one that especially afflicts Jews – called “hysteria.” Incest attracted early the attentions of Freud while he was developing his theories. The parallels between Judaism and hysterical pathology are quite natural.

Jewry is well-known for these syndromes: Hysteria, depression, introspection, amnesia, manipulation, pathological lying, ambivalent identity, prophetic deception, sexual ambiguity, and so on. Every Jewish symptom is found in hysteria.

Freud, as a loyal Jew, merely projected the traits of a specific community onto the rest of humanity. In reality, there is no “Oedipus complex” but rather an Israel complex (all Jews together technically being Israel, not just the Near Eastern state). In fact, Jews do not seem to really wish to discuss the topic of incest within their families. On the other hand, all the psychiatrists mention: “The hysterical woman so much wants a child from her father or her doctor that she can persuade herself that she is pregnant by one of them and thus develops a ‘nervous pregnancy.’”

It is interesting that all Jewish writers use the same term to refer to the coming of their Messiah, namely, the “delivery” of the Messiah. The whole Jewish community, we must understand, is “the wife of God” (the Shekhinah of the Kabbalist) who is some day supposed to give birth to the Messiah, and thus the whole of Jewry is indeed suffering from a “nervous pregnancy” not unlike that found in nervous, hysterical women.

Karl Kraus, the Austrian Jewish journalist who did not agree with Freud, wrote sarcastically: “Psychoanalysis is the mental illness of which it claims to be the cure.” But the right and the best formula can be stated in ten words: “Judaism is the disease that psychoanalysis is meant to cure.”

The Sexual Revolution

After Freud, other Jewish thinkers came along who produced a symbiosis between Freudian doctrine and Marxism. Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse preached sexual revolution in order to break down the patriarchal family and unleash “free sex.” Their theories largely inspired the student riots of May ’68. The 1970s saw a new wave of Freudo-Marxism and Jewish women were in the forefront (such as Gisele Halimi and Elisabeth Badinter in France and Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the USA). As time passed, a series of Jewish-inspired laws appeared, one after the other, designed to dissolve the family. In France, a Neuwirth-promoted law legalized the contraceptive pill (1967), then came the challenge to the authority of the father as head of the household (1970), then divorce by mutual consent (1974) and the “right” to abortion promoted by “Holocaust survivor” Simone Veil (1975). A great wave of movie porn accompanied this “liberation” from traditional family values. Here we are compelled to note that Jewish producers and film directors play a very important role in the sex film industry. (See my La Mafia Juive [The Jewish Mafia], 400 pages, 2008). Parallel to this, the Freudian concept of bisexuality favored the acceptance of overt “gay pride” and homosexuality.

A War Machine against Humanity

In fact, the only tangible results of this moral “liberation” was the systematic demoralization and criminalization of the white man, who is denounced tirelessly in movies, literature and history as the cause of all the planet’s ills and of the collapse of the West. The appeal of egalitarianism – as intended by Jewry – tends to level all ethnic differences and identities and brings about their slow destruction.

Yitzhak Attia, director of French-language seminars at the Yad Vashem Holocaust institute in Tel Aviv wrote this himself in the same issue of Israel magazine:

Even if reason tells us, even shouts with all its force the very absurdity of this confrontation between the small and insignificant people of Israel [i.e, all Jewry worldwide, not just “the State of Israel”] and the rest of humanity… as absurd, as incoherent and as monstrous as it may seem, we are engaged in close combat between Israel and the Nations – and it can only be genocidal and total because it is about our and their identities.

You read it right : Between the Jewish people and the rest of humanity the struggle can only be “genocidal and total.” The “peace” which Israel intends to confer is no more and no less than “genocide,” the warrant for the execution of all humanity – except for those allowed to live as cultureless slaves.

The Neutralization of the Devil

The question is whether the aggressiveness of Judaism can be neutralized in order to save humanity from its evils, evils that could prove even more serious than Marxism such as psychoanalysis and the ideology of globalism. First of all, we must face the facts: After all these centuries of mutual misunderstanding, the antisemitic Christians, the Muslims, and Hitler have all failed to resolve the Jewish question. The fact is that the Jews feed on and grow off the hatred they have engendered among all the peoples of this world. This hatred, it must be said, is vital for their survival and for their spiritual genetics. It has allowed them for many centuries now to close ranks within their community against an external enemy, while other civilizations have disappeared.

For their part, the rabbis spare no efforts to keep their gene pool Jewish. And so even a renegade Jew remains a Jew, and therefore it is perfectly useless to attempt to leave the Jewish prison community. Judaism is indeed a prison. Claiming that a Jew cannot ever stop being Jewish works in favor of Jewry’s survival.

Our mission must be to accommodate these sick among us, because the Jews are not “perfidious” people as much as they are sick people to be cured.

Jews are to be loved individually and sincerely in order to free them from the prison in which they are locked. Only then will they become free from the cult’s grip – and from the threat they pose to themselves and to all humanity.

Only then we will become free from this grip, and at the same time, they will free themselves from the evil inside them that threatens all mankind.

Autumn 2007
Source: http://storage.canalblog.com/88/46/516490/47626479.pdf

The birth rate of whites—native Europeans—in Europe is well below replacement level. As many writers including Pat Buchanan and Mark Steyn have noted, the aging, bloated European welfare states will increasingly be sustained by immigrants who are openly hostile to European culture. In America, our immigrants are much less likely to blow themselves to smithereens. But Hispanics are having 59% larger families than whites on average. Whites have long been headed for minority status, and Latinos are already flexing their demographic muscle in government and entertainment. The new majorities have their own cultures, and they will have their own interests to promote. The stewardship of Western Civilization isn’t their responsibility or their problem.

Somewhere in the litany of “hate facts” about the decline of white birth rates is a lesson about what happens to people-any group of humans, really-when they abandon family life and choose instead to promote consumerism, self-indulgence, non-reproductive sexuality and female careerism.

Occidental birth rates were already dropping before the deep recession. An article in a recent issue of The Atlantic ominously suggested that disproportionately increased male unemployment—the “mancession”—could have a dramatic effect on the stability of existing families, and make starting new families even less attractive to the young.

To pull Western Civilization out of its death spiral, Western men and women would have to conduct some sort of “War on Oblivion.” Westerners would have to re-assert the primacy of the reproductive family and stabilize their birth rates, or risk seeing their culture and heritage become dead history.

However, we seem to be doing just the opposite. Lawmakers and enforcers have colluded with feminists, progressives, and neocons alike to make dating women, getting married and fathering a big family seem like just about the dumbest thing a young man could do right now.

The Spearhead is a new online men’s magazine that focuses on men’s issues from, in many cases, a virulently anti-feminist perspective. It’s putting a younger, harder game face on the “Men’s Movement,” and its readership has been exploding. Some of its writers and readers identify as “MRA’s” (Men’s Rights Advocates), some go by the acronym MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), others consider themselves part of the “game” community. As a sometime writer for The Spearhead, I’ve learned much from these men about new legal and social hazards of sex, dating, marriage, and child-rearing. Some of these guys have really been burned, and they’re madder than Hell. The man behind the scenes at The Spearhead writes as “Welmer,” and as a divorced father of two, he feels their pain.

To begin with, why would men even want to be fathers today? Depictions of fatherhood in pop culture suggest that in a couple of generations we’ve gone from “Father Knows Best” to “Father is a Completely Inept But Loveably Quirky ATM Machine.”

Women say men should simply share the duties of parenting equally, but the media still giggles at stay-at-home dads, referring to them as “Mr. Moms.” Motherhood is sacralized, but any suggestion that fathers play a uniquely important, non-disposable role in child rearing is met with outrage and indignation from the growing hoards of single mothers.

What’s in it for men? Is it worth the sacrifice? Or should men who want to pass on their genes just make a deposit at the local sperm bank and save themselves the aggravation?

Fatherhood is and always has been a sacrifice. There is no guarantee of any temporal reward, or even gratitude in the long run. Passing on one’s genes may give a man some sense of satisfaction, but this is mere conceit, and, let’s face it: you’re just a disposable vessel as far as your genes are concerned anyway.

I think for men, the true reward may be in the sacrifice itself. There is something about men that compels them to live for something higher than themselves, whether it be God, tribe, or family. Sacrificing oneself for these ideals fulfills a spiritual need that men have, and in so doing they can provide great benefits to whatever institution harnesses their effort. Even in this era of destruction of families and suppression of the paternal role, a man can still be an immensely important part of his children’s lives. Culturally, men are starting to recognize this, and the criminal excesses of the family law system do not have quite the same crushing, isolating effect they used to.

So even though a wife can, with a lawyer, the police, an army of social workers, and a judge at her disposal, dismember a man’s life, she can’t fully destroy the connection between a father and his children. She may be able to do a tremendous amount of damage, but provided he literally survives a divorce (suicide rates and deaths from disease spike for men following divorce), a man can still find a fulfilling role as a father if he truly desires it.

Certainly all is not lost, at least not yet.

I have two sisters myself, and they are both happily married and raising kids with their husbands in fairly traditional households. It still happens. And plenty of divorced dads find a way to make it work against the odds. But the West has to start setting families—and fathers—up to succeed again.

You mentioned the “criminal excesses of the family law system.” The media is focused on single mothers and doesn’t seem to care much about what happens to men or their relationships with their kids after a divorce. And men don’t want to whine, they don’t want to be the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. I don’t think people are really aware of what men are up against and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview. There’s a lot of ground to cover, let’s start with divorces.

Has America incentivized divorce for women?

For some women it is definitely incentivized. Those who are stay at home mothers with high-earning husbands can make out like bandits, and often do. Perhaps the biggest incentive is the virtual presumption of maternal custody. Although some courts have tried to present a front of even-handedness, a man is highly unlikely to gain custody of the children unless (a) the mother is a basketcase, or (b) the mother doesn’t want custody. The reason more men are gaining custody is a result of the latter trend, which is increasing as women come to dominate the workforce. Women are also less likely to be jailed for child support obligations, and less likely to pay at all, so more and more women are choosing to leave their children with ex-husbands, who are often all too happy to raise their children with or without support from the mother.

However, the most important reason divorce is so common is not that it is incentivized, per se, but that there are no penalties for breaking the contract. On the balance, a woman is not likely to have a better, richer life after leaving her husband. In most cases she takes a financial hit, but this isn’t what she’s thinking about. Many, if not most, people tend to have a gambling mentality. This is how a lot of women approach divorce. They roll the dice hoping for the big time. Most of them come up short, but there’s always the dream of the big bucks, or, in this case, Mr. Big. I mean, who wants to stay chained to some lame husband schlepping away at some low-status job that doesn’t even support the entire family when popular culture and TV tell you what a princess you are. Of course, as a modern American woman, you deserve better than this loser.

So she puts her foot out in the water to see how warm it is, and then she jumps in. She isn’t going to get a windfall right away, and in many cases she never will, but she knows — probably from conversations with girlfriends or her mother — that society and the law will do everything possible to mitigate the consequences. If she has kids and needs to stay in the house, she can get a temporary custody order and she will get to stay in the house. If she needs the car for the kids, she keeps the car. The husband will be ordered out and ordered to keep making payments, etc. If he objects to this or attempts to stay, she can have him thrown out by the police, and they will do so-violently if he makes a fuss. In short, she is virtually guaranteed to face the minimum consequences possible for breaking her marital vows for any reason whatsoever.

Of course, the husband will face some pretty serious consequences, especially if children are involved. This is why men don’t often file for divorce, and when they do, it’s generally because they have no choice (child abduction, abandonment, theft, etc.). Many, many men will try to work things out even if they know their wives are cheating, breaking the bank — even pregnant by another man! They know that the only way to keep some semblance of a life is to swallow their pride and soldier on. In most cases this isn’t enough, and the divorce will happen anyway. This is why I would advise guys to simply bite the bullet and make a clean break.

If you care to consider something really disturbing concerning incentives, ask yourself what kind of male sexual relationship actually is incentivized. Marriage, with its 50% failure rate and extreme cost of failure, obviously is not. Casual sex with single women, with the possibility of being hit up with a paternity suit (or, in the worst case scenario, a false rape allegation), is not incentivized either. Of course, extramarital sex, with the high likelihood your wife will find out and divorce you, is very risky. So what’s left? Sex with married women, if you’re single (or childless).

Men who have sexual relationships with other men’s wives actually stand to gain on the balance in our current system of family law. Women are very good at hiding their affairs, so even if the woman gets pregnant, the cuckolded husband is likely to be established as the legal father, which means that the bio father will never have to pay a dime of child support. In most states, men only have a couple months to a couple years to contest paternity. That isn’t all that long if you didn’t know your wife was fooling around — not even long enough to know whether the kid actually looks like you in many cases. In some states, merely signing the birth certificate is enough to establish permanent legal paternity. Of course, most cheating women take some precautions to avoid pregnancy, so most affairs do not end up producing offspring.

Say the affair results in a divorce. The wife gets the house and car if she has kids, and now the boyfriend can move right in. He’s got zero responsibility, and the ex-husband is paying the bills. He’s got a free ride, all for breaking up a marriage. This is actually pretty common. The New York Times recently highlighted the cases of some guys whose wives left them for their lovers, and even when it was legally determined that the lover was the bio dad of the child, the husband was still ordered to pay child support while the child was living with its real father!

So if you want an example of criminal excess, there you go.

You mentioned some of the broader legal issues that men face in their relationships-are there any specific laws that are really doing more harm than good when it comes to keeping families together?

What are some precise, immediate steps that federal or state governments could take to “get out of the way” of thriving families or encourage more men to make the basic sacrifices that fatherhood requires?

I’ve grown to be very suspicious whenever politicians start talking about “taking steps.” It’s all the steps they’ve taken that have gotten us into this mess in the first place. In fact, they’ve stepped right into our families and our homes, and it hasn’t been helpful, to say the least.

The best thing government could do in regards to the family is step out of it. The attempt to enforce strict gender equality even in the home has been a disaster. Generous welfare for single mothers combined with coercive measures against single fathers has already wrecked black American families, and I think it would be rather arrogant and short-sighted to think it won’t do the same to the majority. Actually, it has already started to do so. White illegitimacy is at an all-time high and rising.

But it goes beyond interference with the family. Affirmative action in the workplace, schools and federal government has more than “leveled the playing field,” especially for the under-40 cohort. Younger men are already in trouble in all areas. A large proportion of them aren’t even equipped for marriage because their prospects are so dim. There has been a sustained, political effort to give girls incentives while penalizing boys. We are starting to see the effects of that. I don’t think this will end well—our tax base will be gutted.

Government obviously can’t solve everything. Culture is key. What kind of cultural changes do you think would be necessary to bring about a renewed interest in fatherhood and family life?

From a historical perspective, cultures adapt fairly quickly. Unfortunately, a generation doesn’t seem all that fast when you’re living history. If the government were to remove the problem institutions and laws, we’d be back on track within a generation. However, that won’t happen. Government does not shrink by nature. Laws tend to multiply. Look at the response every time some rare crime or tragedy occurs. Immediately, there are calls for new legislation. Sometimes laws are needed, but sometimes a one in a million occurrence is just that. Additionally, there is an entire industry built around getting new laws passed, and this includes congress.

The United States will legislate itself right into collapse, and that’s when culture will begin to change. When the government can no longer afford to pay checks to its employees, can’t afford to imprison people, and can’t even afford to enforce many of these laws, then this unnatural situation — this hothouse flower — will start to wilt. But I really have no idea when that will occur. The Fifth Horseman thinks it will take about ten years, and he’s taking an economic approach. Whether it’s tomorrow or decades from now, it will happen eventually. Until then, I guess we should just muddle through.

As for interest in fatherhood and family, it’s already here. The problem is simply that the means have been removed. I don’t think it will take any pressure or convincing to get men to have children, and to love their children and wives. In fact, pressuring them will inevitably backfire, because our culture apparently has a sadistic tendency to apply only coercive, punitive measures when it comes to men. This only creates more female entitlement, which, as previously mentioned, is one of the biggest problems we have today. Hatred of its men is probably the most critical flaw in Anglo civilization, and if that can’t be changed will probably be its downfall.

Absolutely. That’s the raison d’être for this very section of Alternative Right—”Virtus.” An appreciation for the importance of Western men and Western manhood is absolutely critical to the survival of Western Civilization.

To wrap up, where do you look for inspiration as a father?

Are there any role models, historical or mythological — or perhaps even some books — that present and future fathers in the West should look to for guidance to help them better envision their role in rearing their children?

It’s probably my Catholic background, but I can’t think of a more inspiring figure for fathers — especially wronged ones — today than Christ. Condemned by crooked lawyers and judges, thrown to the wolves by self-interested politicians, and ultimately martyred for those He loved — there are just so many parallels with today’s abandoned, persecuted fathers. Many men who go through the family law system must gain a renewed, and deeper, appreciation for the meaning of the Crucifixion. That so many churches have abandoned and vilified these men speaks volumes about the state of contemporary Christianity.

As for historical figures, that is a lot more difficult. Men’s love for their families is usually a deeply private matter. It must be, because that is usually where they are at their most vulnerable. Because of this, they don’t tend to publicly air the details of their family lives. When they do, it is often to confess some regret, which can be very touching.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, if my memory serves me here, listed his failure to inoculate a baby son against smallpox, which later claimed his life, as his greatest regret. Such inevitable personal failures of parenthood, in their tragedy, reveal the love and humanity inherent in men. Emperor Augustus was more troubled by his daughter’s misbehavior than anything else in his life, and Emperor Kang Xi of Qing Dynasty China was also deeply concerned by the misdeeds of an errant son.

So although these men’s concerns and weaknesses don’t make them role models in the conventional sense, I think it would be of great comfort for many men to know that their innermost fears, their self-doubt and the vulnerabilities that surround family life have been shared by many of the most accomplished, powerful men in history.

Sometimes, the most noble things about us are those that make us most personally vulnerable. Fatherhood is chief among these, so for inspiration we should look to men who, through the sacrifice and travails of fatherhood, have brought their measure of humanity to the world. Fortunately, we don’t have to look far: they are the men we see around us every day.

From Alternative Right, February 27, 2010

I also like Tim Burton. He has been accused of “doing the same thing over and over again.” But Burton unique aesthetic always works well with his limited subjects and actors.

Sadly, my optimism about this one was misplaced. Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was a visually stunning shell with mere remnants of the myth at its core. Of course, Walt Disney Pictures has been doing this sort of thing for years. Their mermaid, for instance, has none of the original’s tragedy, while classic Disney films like Bambi are rarely shown, because they do.

Wonderland is a sequel: now 19, this young lady is brought to her surprise engagement party. Confused and unhappy with her suitor, she runs off into the garden to think things over, falls down a rabbit hole, experiences many adventures in Underland, and returns to the party to set things straight.

Visually, Burton maintains all the dark aspects of his other films, whether it comes to the heads floating in the moat around a castle or Jabberwocky’s cut-off tongue. And, there are many references to the mishmash of Wonderland and Looking Glass. The fabulous Queen of Hearts yells, “Off with their heads!” repeatedly and plays croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs. Johnny Depp — the Mad Hatter — is quite good when it comes to Carroll’s tongue-twisting linguistic games. The psychedelic feeling of the books is very believable in the case of the hookah-smoking caterpillar and magic forest mushrooms alike, enhanced by 3D.

And, most important, the Cheshire cat is simply GLORIOUS.

The film does presuppose a prior knowledge of the original texts, which, much like one of the White Queen’s magic potions, is wishful thinking. However, all similarities are, by and large, superficial.

As far as essential content is concerned, the filmmakers use the fact that the original Alice was a brave child and warp it into a Hollywood version of feminism. Many characters in Underland do not recognize Alice, not only because she grew up, but also because she lost her “muchness.” Thus, they insist that she assert her independence, make her own choices, and stop pleasing others, on and on and on. As a result, Lewis Carroll’s stories lose their muchness. (Luckily, Good and Evil are clearly defined in Underland, and Alice’s decisions do end up helping the former side.)

In this attempt to display commercial “girl power,” this project ends up contradicting itself. In the beginning, the filmmakers go out of their way to show the supposed decadence of Victorian society underneath the prim and proper veneer. Young Alice does not want to wear constricting stockings or corsets, let alone be married to a stuck-up nerd, whom she does not like one bit. She is turned off by the idea of marriage further by the fact that she catches her own sister’s husband cheating. And, she is threatened with becoming just like her half-crazed old-maid aunt, lest she accept. Yet in the end, her deceased father’s business partner (and the father of the man whom she just rejected!) invites her to become an apprentice in a sweeping anachronistic move. Emmeline Pankhurst would be jealous. Thus, 19-year-old Alice sails off into another cinematic Happy Ending in order to work on a business venture she herself pioneers — an expansion from Hong Kong into the rest of China.

Seriously?

Disney’s Affirmative Action for girls is not surprising: the film’s audience is predominantly female. This was certainly true of the screening I attended. And, Alice is quite the cash cow: there already exists a proven market for Alice-themed consumption. In Tokyo, one of the most popular attractions for us, North American tourists, is the Alice-meets-Gothic-Lolita cafe. This weekend, tearooms all over town are booked back-to-back. (We called!) Recently, Swarovski unveiled the Alice in Wonderland jewelry collection..

Girls love jewelry. But as a friend of mine aptly noted, she would have preferred to see this movie starting and ending with the rabbit hole, with none of this social commentary.

Alternative Right, March 6, 2010

Simon Downer is a thug. He plunged a knife into the stomach of a girlfriend and got six years in prison. Whilst there he met another woman, Tracey, a single mother in her late 30s.

Tracey fell head over heels in love, married the violent criminal on his release and brought him home to live with her 8-year-old daughter. The married couple were very happy together.

Until they had an argument one night, just three months after their marriage. Simon Downer shoved aside his stepdaughter, stabbed his new wife fatally in the heart telling her “that’s what happens if you push it with me.”

Most women would not have married the thug. Even so, there has been a spate of reports in recent times of women, sometimes quite respectable professional women, choosing to have relationships with violent criminals.

One thing this tells us is that the ruling idea of human nature in Western societies is mistaken. John Kekes describes this ruling idea as follows:

The view of human nature at the core of the liberal faith is thus that human beings are by their nature free, equal, rational, and morally good.

If you accept this view of human nature as adequate, then you will think it not only possible but desirable to leave each individual to arrive at their own moral view. The ideal will be a society of free, equal and morally elevated individuals, untouched by any external restraints on their choices.

But the liberal view of human nature hasn’t brought us closer to a society of independent, high-minded gentlemen and women who freely, and therefore most virtuously, choose to discipline their lives to some morally elevated purpose.

Look what happens, for instance, when the “no rules” principle is applied to women like Tracey Downer. Her sexuality is liberated from the influence of traditional morals, which then unleashes a destructive attraction to violent, dangerous men. The result is disastrous.

The problem is that we are not equal in our natures. Not everyone has the same level of moral conscience, prudence and self-discipline. Nor are we entirely rational in our natures. We are moved too by passions and loves, which for both better and worse define the human experience in important ways.

Liberals worry that if a society sets a moral standard, or if we are influenced by the culture we live in to be good, that we are acting like automatons, and losing the virtue of freely choosing the good. A liberal wants to feel morally elevated because of his own autonomous character.

I think this fear is mistaken. There will always be the possibility of acting badly, no matter how great the influence of society. Our moral free will to choose for the better or the worse will always be there. All that a society can do is to bolster the voice of moral conscience and encourage prudence.

Second, it can be argued that it’s the liberal view which undercuts the need for character and moral will. After all, if people are naturally and equally good, then doing the good will come easily. It’s only if you think that human nature is fallen, with each individual struggling to follow the better part of his nature, that our acts of goodness become achievements of character.

From Oz Conservative, February 24, 2010

Original news article.

To listen and/or download the show for free, see the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Topics for discussion will include:

1. How Alexander Kojeve laid bare the most fundamental political differences between the Left and the Right. Dr. Devlin explains how Kojeve’s philosophy uses Hegelianism to understand the modern world making his ideas the “logical culmination of modern thought.”

2. How the Left uses tropes like History is Over and The End of History as a means of imposing its “universal homogeneous state” on the world’s wide-ranging populations.

3. Traditional gender roles as fundamental obstacles to the Leftist Universal State. Dr. Devlin explains how feminism has devalued women into nothing more than political subjects. How feminism has transformed the high-status the European world has traditionally given to women into social misery.

4. Tom and Roger discuss Solzhenitsyn’s last and most powerful book, Two Hundred Years Together. Devlin provides brilliant insight into the Jewish involvement within Russia’s frequent revolutionary movements.

About F. Roger Devlin:

To learn more about F. Roger Devlin and his unique perspective read his insightful essays at The Occidental Quarterly, TOQ Online, American Renaissance, and VDARE. His important book Alexandre Kojeve and the Outcome of Modern Thought is available on Amazon.com.

Listening and download instructions:

The interview will air on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network. To tune in to the live feed for this and all VoR programming, click here to use Windows Media Player or here for Winamp. For iTunes: open iTunes, press Ctrl+U on your keyboard, copy/paste http://208.110.82.50/vor_high.pls into the Open Audio Stream dialog box, then click OK (you will now be able to listen to VoR live on iTunes any time by clicking on ‘Voice of Reason Broadcast Network’ in your music list). If you cannot catch it as it airs on Tuesday, the interview will be archived in mp3 format for download on Tom’s page at the VoR site soon after the show ends (archived shows are listed on the right side of page).

To the modernist, this trend must appear very strange. American women are liberated from their homes, unburdened by the biological curse of motherhood, and treated by society like tiny castrated men. They’ve achieved the feminist dream! For some reason, a growing number of White American women aren’t even grateful for the cubicle that they’ve worked so hard for the opportunity to dwell in. They spend their lunches in the corporate break room, eating corporate food, in their corporate pantsuits, reading fantasy novels about being barefoot and pregnant in a country kitchen.

Early last year, I was reading National Geographic’s excellent article on the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church and it suddenly clicked for me. I was peering into America’s future . . . at a future stage of the same historical process. Every White Advocate ought to take the time to read this article and envision a restoration of Tradition here in America. Picture the return of righteous indigenous authority. How can we spearhead or even trigger it? How can we lead by example?

Every few months, somebody in the White Advocacy movement writes an article lamenting the fact that our movement ought to have more ladies. Our atheists and materialists will keep writing these because they’re fundamentally incapable of offering what women want: Tradition. When I go to church, I’m surrounded by beautiful young women, women who outnumber the men. In fact, women even outnumber men at our monthly White Advocacy meetings. I believe that it’s due to our chapter’s unique emphasis on fostering a family-friendly environment, embracing tradition, and focusing on local community concerns.

People who see things through modern eyes often mistakenly perceive tradition as being oppressive toward women when it’s anything but. For example, the institution of marriage has always been an imposition on men on behalf of women, with traditional women as union members and libertine women serving as “scabs” undermining the collective bargaining power. Ironically, the true enemies of female empowerment are the sluts. At least prostitutes are compensated for their treason!

Tradition is the weapon of choice of the tiny elderly women — the matriarchs:

I recognize her kind from my years in the Soviet Union. There were always women like her in the few churches that were open in those days, women who scrubbed the floors, tended the candlestands, and stood through all the services when Soviet disapproval had frightened off everyone else. In a sense, they nursed the church through its long incarceration. They were the custodians of propriety and custom: Stand like this! Face the altar! Cover your head! Cross yourself! They were insufferable, but the church owes them a great debt. So I do what other Russians do when confronted by these vigilantes: I meekly bow and put away my camera.

One message this excellent article drives home is how some people under even the most hostile and oppressive alien regimes are quietly keeping the flames of religion, tradition, nationalism, and family alive.

This is a tremendous inspiration for me.

Travel back in time and tell a Russian dissident in the eighties that his omnipotent oppressors would disappear altogether within a few years; that the Russian national spirit would rise like a phoenix from the ruins of the once-invincible Jewish oligarchy. Would he believe you? Would you believe me if I told you that there are millions of potential matriarchs hiding in plain sight in corporate break rooms across America, patiently awaiting the opportunity to restore our White American nation and its communities to their former glory?

Occidental Dissent, February 12, 2010

If validation of this theory were needed one would only need to attend, say, a meeting of International Socialists, and then visit a meeting of anti-immigration enthusiasts and compare the results. At the Nuremberg-like, mother of all get-togethers of over-enthusiastic anti-immigration enthusiasts at a certain beach-side locality several years ago, only a sprinkling of pink petals bobbed in a swirling sea of testosterone.

“Why is it so?” as an eccentric, televised scientist used to ask as the experiment gave the repeatable result yet again. A quick search of the internet reveals a depressing lack of research into this phenomenon. This perhaps could be ground-breaking investigation.

A premise this exploration will assume, much to the chagrin of feminists who constitute many of pink sprinkles on the left (so it doesn’t matter) is that there are fundamental differences between the sexes apart from the obvious physical ones. The physical differences being so pronounced, it should not surprise that men and women also inhabit different mental worlds. Biology is destiny (this is fingernails scraping on a blackboard to Feminists).

Why would it be that the Left is attractive to females?

For starters, that is where Feminism is situated on the political spectrum. It should be borne in mind that we are discussing here the New Left — not the musty old Left that died with history’s failure to conform to the prediction of capitalism’s collapse, not to mention the collapse of its home in the Soviet Union. What we are indeed concerned with here is the New Left.

Along with Feminism as its star recruit, the New Left is concerned with every shade and hue of “social justice,” with perhaps the sole exception of the injustices still suffered by white, working class men. They evidently ended up in the dust and rubble with the Old Left. High ranking union officials like to pretend that that isn’t the case, but to paraphrase the once lovely Mandy Rice Davies, they would, wouldn’t they — given their pampered, jet-setting life styles.

Within the Left there is a curious twist. Notwithstanding its thorny, knotty nature, it was resolved with silk-like smoothness. How it was done must remain one of nature’s impenetrable secrets. The conundrum was the towering contradiction posed by Feminism’s strident defence of “women’s rights” confronted by the Left’s general championing of multiculturalism which, by definition, had to include the brutal trampling of women’s rights that is the hallmark of our growing Islamic sub-culture.

Without discussion, without riotous, blood-spilling committee meetings, this issue seemed to be resolved the way a flock of birds suddenly, without communication, decides to change direction. This pocket of resistance was quietly surrendered to the enemy. Multiculturalism trumped Feminism. Like the pedophile uncle, this matter is never discussed.

With its perennial and “selfless” concern for society’s victims, it is perhaps only natural for the Left to be a lure to women who after all are the carers and nurturers of the race. This should not be a controversial statement but in a world sadly turned upside down, it is. How though could they not be carers and nurturers by nature given the role they play in the incubation and care of the race’s new arrivals?

Unfortunately this natural bent has been exploited many times over for commercial and political gain. The historically low wages and poor conditions of nurses is an obvious example. Using women to inspire men go to war is another. If woman, who is a gentle pacifist by nature, is urging men to go to war, that war must be an entirely just and unavoidable enterprise.

There are of course exceptions to the rule. Our self-styled antipodean Joan of Arc, Pauline Hanson, personified that exception. It could possibly be argued though that it was precisely because of her rarity as a woman on the wrong side of the political tracks that she became such star — a created star at that — created by the media which once they had discovered that the creation was a monster, did their level best to kill it.

While Pauline’s trajectory was arcing through the firmament, a parallel career was almost flat-lining below it. This was the challenge extended to the political establishment by Graham Campbell, a rogue Labor Party politician and former minister who continued to hold the federal seat of Kalgoorlie as an Independent. Campbell was immensely experienced and was loaded with the concomitant political savvy. He was saying most of the same things as Hanson, only much more intelligently, but because of his being ignored by the media and “starved of oxygen,” be died a slow, political death.

Scientific fact: whereas men think predominantly with the brain’s left hemisphere — the home of cold hard logic — a woman’s thinking is shared evenly between the left and the right hemisphere which is where we are thinking when we are said to be thinking with the heart.

To present a hypothesis, which admittedly would be extremely difficult to test, we need a lifeboat packed with passengers who’ve just escaped a sinking ship. In the water surrounding the boat other survivors are struggling, screaming for help and trying to get into the boat.

If those already in the boat were all female, the struggling unfortunates would be helped into the boat. If those in the boat were all male, it would be quickly realised that if any more were allowed to board the boat it would sink and no-one would have any chance of survival. Accordingly, steps would be taken to prevent that eventuality even if it meant smashing heads with oars. The left side of the brain would be whirring with rationalisations about the greater good. The monster of a moral dilemma is neatly resolved. The ladies’ boat is headed for the bottom.

In modern times though, it must be admitted, women have toughened up, but largely in the wrong direction through having been led up the garden path by Feminism. Most women, at least to some degree, have been affected by what has been called “an ideology of pure selfishness.” While initially addressing long standing injustices, once the injustices had been for all intents and purposes remedied, feminism veered off to where all causes based on victim-hood end up: in a perpetual war against a largely non-existent enemy.The non-existent enemy in this case was of course men — all men.

The energy this struggle sapped from women left little to be used in the fight against real enemies. The all-pervading “awareness” of “patriarchy” and men in general as the oppressors left little room on the mental screen for projecting the image of a tyrannical, global elite hell-bent on usurping the natural rights of men and women everywhere, and busting nations in an insane pursuit of transforming the world into one great serfdom.

To be sure, that this could be happening, at first sight, seems so breathtakingly incredible that it is not difficult to see why it is dismissed by so many as paranoid delusion. That this perception could be easily swept aside by means of even the most rudimentary research — needing of course motivation in the first place — goes without saying. But perhaps a more important aid in lifting the curtain on what is coming is a capacity for abstract thinking — the ability to see what isn’t.

Judging by the huge male preponderance in the fields of philosophy and invention, it may not be too outrageous to claim that men may be just a little more gifted than women in this department. (Before the high-heeled shoes begin being thrown, the much fabled women’s intuition is duly noted.) To be able to see what isn’t, one needs to be able to extrapolate from what is, as well as current trends (especially when those trends show no sign of ever stopping or changing course) to see what will be.

Agreeing in advance to the obvious poor value of anecdotal evidence, strong motivation urges the inclusion of just one small sliver. When a young, intelligent woman was told that Australia’s current immigration policies would eventually lead to Australians becoming a minority in their own country, she was scornful. “Do you really think that could ever possibly happen?” she wanted to know.

Because Australia since its settlement has been an essentially white country, she was assuming, notwithstanding rolling breakers of third world immigration, that it would always be so. To someone extrapolating from current trends it was obvious that it wouldn’t.

The same woman apologizes profusely whenever expressing anything that could even remotely be construed as a “racist” sentiment. Whenever this happens, one cannot escape the feeling that this reaction is identical to that of a religious person on letting slip a heresy.

This leads to another possible reason why women are essentially uninterested in nationalism. To anyone with experience of raising or teaching girls it would be readily apparent that they are different to boys — in terms of their being better behaved — girls good, boys bad. When girls turn into women they retain their predilection for being good and being perceived as good. It’s not for nothing that they have been termed “God’s police.”

When, for example, Western society was still strongly influenced by moral values, the demarcation line between “good” girls and “bad” girls was as clearly defined as the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsular. Many’s the man who married the girl of his dreams simply because it was the only way to fulfill that dream in the carnal sense.

Times sure have changed, but not women’s persistent desire to be good in whatever way society deems “good.” With media, the education system, the churches, governments and bureaucracies lecturing us to the point of hypnotism on the evils of nationalism, and even worse, being concerned about your race, is it any wonder women may be tempted to avoid this yawning den of iniquity? To some women, being seen leaving one of these nests of nationalist malcontents would probably be worse than being seen leaving a house of ill repute.

On the other hand, there is evidently a sizable proportion of the male population who don’t mind being seen as “bad boys,” in fact even reveling in it. This is perhaps where most of society’s rebels have come from. This might be where we should be looking for nationalists — provided they have the additional attributes of a capacity for independent thinking and a store of moral courage.

So now at least we might have some idea of why the girls are missing from the party. However, as Mr Marx (not Groucho) so succinctly put it: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however, is to change it.” How do we get the girls to the party?

Angelic, gentle, pure, and sweet is how man has seen woman since even when she was covered in primeval mud. But she also has another side, hidden most of the time but nevertheless only quietly dozing. It is terrible and frightening. But how to awaken it? What does she care about more than anything else in the world — even the one who thinks he is number one? It is of course her children.

It is for these she will fight like a tigress, and if necessary, gladly die. It must somehow be communicated to the women of this country that the future is extremely uncertain at best, and as perilous as a battlefield at worse. A dark future, perhaps difficult to see now, is nevertheless heading toward us with gathering speed.

As individuals more concerned with shopping, celebrity antics and soap operas than with the survival of our race we are lost. Atomised, the way those who think they own us want us, as we are invaded by those who think and act as collectively as bees in a hive, we have no chance. Our children have no chance. As they come to adulthood in a country that should have been theirs but find instead the ruins of a collapsed tower of Babel where they are the objects of scorn of a hundred different tribes they will scream their rage and pain into the wind: “Why were we betrayed so? Why such a miserable inheritance?”

By a strange twist of synchronicity, as this essay was nearing completion, the perfect ending was stumbled upon. Provided by F. Roger Devlin in “The ‘Reafricanization’ of the West,” American Renaissance, June 2008, it cannot be improved upon.

Many racially conscious whites worry about the absence of women in our ranks, but I believe they have it backwards. We do not need women on our side to succeed politically; we need to succeed politically to have women on our side. As soon as we start winning, the ladies will find our arguments plausible, our faces handsome, and our jokes witty. Direct political action by women is not part of the European tradition; respect for the vital female role in the family is. When we have done our work, they will gladly do theirs: bear our race’s children. (http://www.amren.com/ar/2008/06/index.html)

White Australia, January 25, 2010

Infidel: My Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Silenus, c. 1618 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

As a tentative evolutionist, I must acknowledge limitations for human progress due to certain unchanging characteristics of men. Contrary to the blank-slate theoreticians of the post-Enlightenment, man is not a fundamentally rational or good creature.

Evolutionists of the racialist stripe, however, sometimes indulge in their own wishful thinking, grasping at Nietzschean straws about “supermen” seeking their own evolutionary destiny. This is but the Enlightenment error with a naturalistic veneer. No creature, including man, is truly naturally rational in the sense of pursuing fitness directly, but rather relies on a set of signals that merely represent fitness. While these signals may have been more-or-less reliable in the original environment for which they were designed, they have become increasingly dysgenic in the contemporary world.

As a Christian and a Calvinist, I see man as a fallen creature who, short of the supernatural, will degrade himself progressively with animalistic urges even unto death. Without the threat of supernatural accountability, men will, given the opportunity, seek to gratify their appetites for these false signals even if they are rationally aware that these are paths to destruction, not fitness. Even with a belief in supernatural accountability, men will still struggle their entire lives to combat false signals from their lower brains with explicit pursuit of fitness from their neocortex.

In this series I will explore three of these false signals: fast food (or more generally, the obesity epidemic), pornography, and video games. The evolutionary cul-de-sac before us is represented by a 20 to 40-something male in our society who consumes Taco Bell for nutrition, Internet porn for sex, and seeks fulfillment through the simulated accomplishments of video games.

Fair disclosure: I am agnostic about claims of human origins, finding both theistic evolution and intelligent design to be compelling but mutually contradictory arguments. Thus, like many evolutionists, I will use terms like “designed” and “evolved” interchangeably but any particular use of these words should not be an interpretation of my yet still unformed opinion on these matters. I will also note that either of these beliefs is compatible with race realism. Race realism is such a blindingly obvious fact (for those sufficiently rational to overcome the peer pressure against it) that it is akin to acknowledging that birds have feathers, which they obviously do whether evolved or designed.

Fast Food and Obesity

Man finds foods attractive on a sliding scale more-or-less correlating with calorie density. The reason for this is not hard to grasp: in times of scarcity, a healthy appetite for calorie-dense foods, when they were available, would result in an individual more likely to build up fat deposits in the good times in preparation for the bad. For primal man the name of the game was caloric intake for survival.

Thanks to Western science, food is now plentiful beyond the wildest hopes of our ancestors. Our most serious nutritional problem is now obesity, as the Darwinian free market provides a cornucopia of choices perfectly matched to our primal instincts. Outlets such as Burger King and Taco Bell offer plentiful meat, cheese, starches and sauces to satisfy our desires for high-density, high-variety food. These companies spend millions on research and development to determine which combinations of flavors will most stimulate our senses of smell and taste.

Yet there is a twist in our design. Implanted deep inside each of us is an innate idea of the ideal of the human form. This ideal, for some reason, is not that of the obese which is of necessity the consequence of human desire matched with unlimited food. However, this does not seem to make much sense. If these desires evolved in a time of scarcity, why wouldn’t more of a good thing (fat deposits) be itself a good and attractive thing to our sexual natures? I am happy to accept it as it is, but I’m sure evolutionists have a clever explanation.

My guess: the opportunities in our primal world for obesity would be non-existent, even if theoretically such a state might offer additional marginal fitness, though at some extreme the acute effect on health and mobility would quickly supersede any benefit from increased stored calories. However, if human microevolution has indeed accelerated over the last 10,000 years (as theorized in the groundbreaking new book The 10,000 Year Revolution), one would expect obesity in early civilization to be associated with status, and status to be associated with sexual attraction.

Since older, fatter men would tend to have higher status in early civilizations, you might expect women to have developed some tolerance for such a male phenotype. Indeed, this is what we see in human nature, where women are generally less concerned with the physical attractiveness of a male IF the male is high status.

Men, on the other hand, tend to care only about physical attractiveness (and to some extent, personality, another ornamental feature of a well-developed mind and good genetics) and not so much about the status of a woman. This is probably because for most of our recent evolutionary history women have had comparably little opportunity nor any natural proclivity to acquire status through property and wealth, rather relying on their charms, both physical and otherwise, as their primary marketable characteristics in the sexual marketplace.

Another obvious biological problem with modern obesity and attractiveness is that our lower brains, at some level, must be coded with some template of what is and is not “human” in body shape. The extremes of modern obesity may prevent individuals from finding each other attractive because of this circuitry.

Feminists have their own sexist beef with this idea of an embedded ideal body form for attractiveness hard-coded into human DNA; in short, our women’s studies’ professors want to eat Twinkies and emasculate men, but resent the idea that men might find them less attractive for doing so.

The essence of feminism, of course, is that men are responsible for women’s happiness, whatever that might entail at a given moment. So we get demands for equal pay, but also demands for paid maternity leave. They want the freedom to behave immorally sexually, but also dislike the idea of pornography (i.e., imposing a standard of morality on men but not themselves).

The journalist Steve Sailer has coined his own “Law of Female Journalism,” which too is eerily predictive: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

So it is with feminists who dominate the “fat acceptance” movement who explicitly challenge the idea of men being naturally attracted to a certain body shape. Like other tabula rasa adherents, they blame “culture” for propagandizing men to prefer highly fertile 19-year-olds over hirsute, obese 40-something female sociology professors. Among their claims is that in ancient civilizations men preferred larger women.

Certain Roman ruins to call into question this assumption, but there may be a nugget of truth to it, to a certain well-defined limit. Some have identified a trend in the popular culture towards promoting thinner and thinner ideals of female beauty. Marilyn Monroe, for example, wore a size 8 dress for most of her career. In today’s Hollywood she would be considered a bit on the heavy side. Another study by Wired Magazine documented the decreasing Body Mass Index of Playboy centerfolds over the last 40+ years.

Hypotheses for this trend are widely varied, including A) men really do naturally prefer thinner women (thinness being a proxy for youth) and this trend reflects businesses serving their market, B) homosexual designers in the fashion industry prefer thinner women to better showcase their clothing, and this combined with the cultural phenomenon of the supermodel, served to distort ideals of beauty, which are somewhat socially influenced and flexible or C) the increasing obesity of the American population makes thinness even more relatively attractive as it becomes a highly desired, hard-to-attain and largely fake-resistant public indication of fitness.

Nevertheless, Homo sapiens finds himself in an interesting position in the early 21st century. His acquired habits make it extremely hard for him to resist plentiful, tasty food to excess while the demands of his sedentary lifestyle make it more likely he will permanently retain these fat reserves. These excess fat reserves, society-wide, not only result in increased mortality but also make him both less attractive to and less attracted to the opposite sex.

On top of this, the mass media constantly push impossible images of beauty, showcasing the idealized, airbrushed forms of the top 1% of the population. Every now and then the supermarket tabloids will feature candid beach or vacation photos of these airbrushed celebrities, and the difference between their projected, airbrushed media image and their appearance in real life is striking. Not even the “beautiful people” meet the standard of beauty in the age of Photoshop.

How might man escape this sexual dystopia? We will explore the escape of pornography in the next installment of this series.

Read Part 2 here.

First, the book of New Moon is terrible: nearly 600 pages of pedestrian prose, glacially paced, padded to excruciating lengths not with fluff, but with damp, insipid, indigestible literary sawdust. (Don’t any of the big publishers employ decent editors? I am not asking for Victor Hugo every time I pick up a work of popular fiction, but could we at least have Stephen King?) Worst of all, the most compelling character, Edward Cullen was absent throughout much of the book. The only thing that got me to pick the book back up after flinging it down several times in dismay was the hope that finally the romance of Bella Swan and her vampire lover Edward Cullen would resume.

Second, Catherine Hardwicke, the superb director of the first Twilight movie, was replaced by Chris Weitz, and the previews of the movie were not promising. Frankly they are as flat and dull as the novel.

But I have to hand it to Weitz and scriptwriter Melissa Rosenberg: they managed to extract a compelling two hour movie from the sprawling mess of the novel. New Moon is not as good as Twilight, but it is a worthy successor and a bridge to the final two novels/films, which promise much more. The momentum has not been lost.

Part of what makes New Moon work is simply the lingering magic of the first film. We were all glad to see the familiar characters and settings again.

Beyond that, Weitz manages to condense vast boring tracts of the novel into tightly paced, compelling scenes, many of them wordless. The literary sawdust has been replaced with visual poetry—and light comedy.

Taylor Lautner

But the best thing about New Moon is the performance of Taylor Lautner as Jacob Black. Although in the book, Jacob seems merely a distraction and digression from the main plot, Taylor Lautner’s performance made this movie his own. Amazingly, when he was on the screen, we did not miss Edward Cullen. Lautner is a fine, sensitive actor, with a magnificent physique, imposing stage presence, and genuine animal magnetism (which comes in handy for playing a werewolf).

(Guys: I saw this movie with an audience that was 90 percent white, 80 percent under 30, and 80 percent female, and I can tell you if you don’t already know: women go for muscles. They might say something different, but their gasps, sighs, and flutters told a whole different story.)

My two main criticisms of this movie are that the computer animated werewolves look fake, and the Cullens mostly look terrible. In the first film, they are lighted and made up to seem pale but beautiful and strong, like marble statues. In New Moon, they look like corpses who have just awakened from a decades-long nap, with the bad hair one would expect.

Now, as a white racialist, what is my take on this movie? In my review of Twilight, I emphasized that I liked three aspects of that movie.

First, even though the movie added in a number of non-white bit characters, it largely follows the book in underscoring the beauty of white people. New Moon undermines this, by making the Cullens look unappealing and by placing the spotlight on Jacob Black and his fellow young American Indians, who are portrayed by exceptionally handsome, muscular, and fit actors. By the way, judging from the biographies of the actors as well as their looks, all of them seem to have some white ancestry, despite their coppery complexions, which gives them longer, handsomer faces rather than typically round, ugly Amerindian faces.

Although there is a deep friendship—and the seeds of romance—between Jacob and Bella, in the end she returns to Edward. However, the movie can only promote miscegenation through its portrayal of an unusually handsome and gallant non-white male. White girls considering such dalliances in the real world need to realize that race-mixing destroys all races that take part in it. They also need to look at statistics on non-white tendencies towards infecting white women with STDs; raping them; and abandoning, abusing, and murdering them and their children.

Second, I liked how Twilight portrayed Bella Swan and Edward Cullen as exceptionally mature, cultured, and well-mannered young people—without implying that these qualities in any way detract from them being fun-loving and sexy. New Moon does nothing to undermine this, but it does nothing to add to it either.

Third, Twilight emphasizes traditional sex roles. Edward Cullen and Jacob Black are not today’s silly, weak, effeminate, non-threatening males. They are strong, masculine, gallant, heroic, and a little dangerous. Bella Swan is no ass-kicking, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is physically weaker than Edward and Jacob and attracted to their strength—including the dangers that come with it—and grateful for their protection. (Bella requires a lot of rescuing.) New Moon reinforces this aspect of the story, with Jacob and his wolf pack taking on the role of rescuers.

Yet Bella is in full possession of her real strength as a woman, which makes both men willing to sacrifice themselves to protect her. They do not want to live without her, but they both break off their relationships with her, because they fear that their supernatural strength threatens her well-being. Both come to learn, however, that Bella is safer with them than without them.

When Edward thinks that Bella is dead and seeks to end his life, Bella takes on the role of the rescuer, appearing in the nick of time to save his life, not through strength, but simply because she is the one who makes his life complete.

Echoing my review of Twilight: in spite of their supernatural powers, Edward Cullen and Jacob Black are what in decades past were known simply as red-blooded males. Because of the sickness of our society, such men today can appear on the screen only in the guise of monsters. But because of the strength of nature, women find the monsters irresistible nonetheless.

White people should see New Moon, but the parents of young girls need to warn them about the consequences of miscegenation in the real world.

This past weekend, a friend of mine recounted a visit he paid to his wife’s family in Arkansas around the time McCain had scheduled his much-awaited announcement of who his running-mate would be. Watching the coverage on TV, my friend was struck by just how quickly his Southern in-laws empathized with the then-unknown governor of Alaska. She was their gal, even though they weren’t yet sure how to pronounce her last name.

Sarah Palin is, put simply, the goddess of implicit whiteness. She represents the “Real America” as it’s understood, most often tacitly, by the founding stock of the country from Juno, Alaska, to Jasper, Texas. This is, of course, a dangerous thing in many ways, for so far her powers have been used to mobilize white Christian support for John McCain. But even the man who think he’s Palin’s handler and eminence grise must realize that the woman represents a force he cannot totally control, and that someday she might really “go rogue,” as it were.

Or maybe not. No one as of yet has been able to capture her inner personality. And I certainly haven’t learned anything watching her recent television interviews, in which Oprah and Barbara have been fishing for headline quotes about how mad she was at McCain for not letting her make a concession speech yadayadayada… My guess is that Sarah is probably a profound narcissist, most beauty pageant contestants are, but then she also has a flexibility and openness of mind that allows her to embrace, at one time or another, Buchananism, Zionism, Kenyan anti-witchcraft, and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle.

I should read her book and write something about it. At the very least, one can make do with its many tales from the campaign trail, like this one about GOP operative Nicolle Wallace‘s ingenious idea of booking Sarah for an interview with Katie Couric, Wallace’s one-time colleague at CBS News.

From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn’t have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.

Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”

Don’t you love how Palinese translates to the page! What I also find interesting is that while the media would depict the McCain camp as a mean old gathering of cantankerous blackshirts, in reality it was staffed by third-wave feminists who made Oprah-style evocations of female solidarity and you-go-girl spirit. According to Wallace, it was a good idea to be interviewed by Katie because “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom”; “She just has such low self-esteem”; “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.” All that was lacking was my favorite therapy cliché, “Katie’s in a bad place right now.”

As we know, the interview turned into a catastrophe, with Katie questioning Sarah in a cold, contemptuous, almost sarcastic manner that made the governor produce responses that were even more convoluted than usual. Working-mom solidarity was easily trumped by Katie’s snootiness towards a non-east coast, pro-life Christian. In many ways, Wallace reminds me a lot of Marcia Clark, the prosecuting attorney in the OJ Simpson trial who worked hard to select a mostly female jury, hoping that women would empathize with Nicole Brown Simpson and lock up the abusive OJ. The sly Jonny Cochran went along with the scheme, but made sure that they were all black women. The final composition was 10 women, 2 men; 9 blacks, 1 Hispanic, and 2 whites. As it turns out, the battle between “sisterhood” and black racial ideology is no contest.

And as Katie’s interview with Sarah shows, women are meaner, pettier, more jealous and unfair around other women than they are around men.

But then, this isn’t exactly a shocking revelation for anyone who’s ever attended high school.

The messages in these films are so clear and so overpowering that it is a wonder none of the volunteer reviewers on Amazon see them.

But they don’t, and I suppose it is just as well.

Five are White Nationalist Classics. These are Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. Several others make the list but fall short of the WNC class.

None of these feature-length animated films deals with race or race conflict, so then why do any of them merit the WNC classification? The answer is that they encourage the other side of the WN coin, the code of amity, or broadly speaking, the behaviors and attitudes necessary to keep the group’s cradle full.

The importance of these films is best illustrated by the very first Disney feature length animated movie — Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs — produced in 1937.

The story line is taken from one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Snow White is a princess who, at the end of the story, marries her handsome prince. However, “Snow White” is not really a romance. She interacts with the Prince for only about two minutes, once at the very beginning of the movie and a minute or so at the end. Love and life-long commitment are automatic in this movie. The fact of romance needs no development whatever and gets none. It is instinctive and instantaneous.

Thus, in order to find out what this movie is really about we must observe Show White’s actual conduct — what does she spend her time doing in this film? And once we focus on exactly what Snow White spends her time doing, we see that if Snow White were a real princess, then she would be a most unusual one indeed.

When we first see her she is dressed in a plain torn skirt humming contentedly as she scrubs the steps of the Castle. Once in the forest, she finds the house of the Seven Dwarfs and notices that it is a filthy mess. She sets about merrily and lovingly washing dishes and cleaning the house with the help of her animated animal friends. Once the dwarfs discover her in their house, she cooks their dinner and affectionately asks them to bathe first — something the dwarfs apparently have not done in months, if ever.

Thus, Snow White brings to these seven diminutive miners the bare minimum of sanitation and civilization — regular baths, a clean house and clean dishes, and regular meals. And she does it cheerfully with her own labor.

She cooks their breakfast and kisses each one tenderly on the forehead as they go off to work. When they come home, she greets them affectionately at the door and has dinner ready.

Snow White is a selfless, sweet, maternal homemaker. She displays all of the peasant virtues. The message of Grimm’s fairy tale as well as Walt Disney’s movie is that the cheerful labor that goes into making a home and raising babies is the true royal quality, and it is that quality which ultimately merits the love of a handsome prince.

Of course, it has been at least 800 years since a European royal has actually swept a floor or washed a dish. But what Grimm and the European parents who bought his books recognized is that certain attitudes toward work and sacrifice were necessary in order for our race to survive and increase over generations.

In this modern age, our daughters have become so skilled at manipulating mom and dad into maid and butler service that they never wash dishes or do the laundry. The cohesion of the family dinner has given way to our fractured schedules and the isolation of the microwaved TV dinner. Parents leave the piles of dirty clothing which we find strewn all over our daughters’ bedroom floors in hopes that they might someday clean up their own mess, but they never do. For some strange reason, the boys seem to do a slightly better job of picking up after themselves.

When they finally do move out of the house, their apartments are such a dreadful mess — and the sink and dishwasher are so jammed with months-old dirty dishes — that they never entertain friends at home, but feel compelled to frequent bars and restaurants for social interaction, falling head over heels into credit card debt, and losing a significant advantage which territorial boundaries can provide in maintaining standards in the mate selection process.

The basic building blocks of civilization celebrated in Snow White are melting away before our eyes.

Under the current cultural regime, only those with the most powerful instincts will be able to make the sacrifices necessary to form stable relationships and to raise children. As the gentle restraints and pressures of civilized norms crumble, huge numbers will succumb to their own self absorption, their lack of behavioral restraint, and their disdain for labor. They will leave no traces of their presence on this earth in the next generation.

Snow White lives to make life bright, cheerful and clean for all those around her, no matter what circumstances she may be placed in by others. She is the model of the female role you will see in re-runs of the 1950s family television series like The Donna Reed Show, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. It is the behavior which so infuriated the inner party critics of our culture, most famously Susan Sontag who railed against the suburbs in the early 1960s as “Christian breeding grounds.”

The modern hatred of all that Snow White represents shows up clearly in the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives. And it is this hatred which commands our unwavering allegiance to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the uniqueness and importance of Snow White is to contrast that movie with a more recent Disney effort at exploiting the apparently instinctive desire of little girls to find their “handsome prince.”

The 1990 animated piece entitled The Little Mermaid follows the same broad outline.

However, when we examine the behavior of the Little Mermaid, we see a young girl who is completely self-absorbed. She routinely disobeys her father and the rules of her society. She is willful and headstrong. She fails to show up at music rehearsals and performances, inconveniencing others. She manipulates those around her to get her way, and she is vain about her appearance. Finally, she abandons her family, her friends and her race — all those who should be most dear to her — never to see them again, so that she can become a human and marry her prince. She would never dream of cleaning the house or washing dishes.

I should note in passing that the typical Christian viewing The Little Mermaid would look for an abstract conceptual formula — marriage with no pre-marital sex — and conclude that The Little Mermaid is a “Christian friendly movie.” However, the little mermaid’s actual behavior is pure poison and profoundly anti-Christian. The little mermaid displays none of the behaviors which indicate a capacity for making the kinds of sacrifices necessary to stay married or to undertake the drudgery involved in caring for and cleaning up after children — or even to show up at feeding times. In fact, the movie glorifies the opposite behaviors.

The Little Mermaid is particularly seductive because it gets the aesthetic exactly right — the prince in that movie is a robust, aggressive, attractive, and unambiguously white male — exactly the kind you would want your daughter to marry. And aside from her fish tail, the Little Mermaid is a very attractive and unambiguously white girl — one who wins the ultimate prize despite her behavior.

The message to Christians is clear. Focus on the behaviors which are being encouraged and celebrated in a film — and do not apply formulas based on conceptual abstractions or theological formulas. Hollywood can easily cripple your children by producing movies that conform to your conceptual abstractions, while encouraging behaviors and conduct which are wildly destructive of your child’s ability to form a stable family.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs also established the pattern of demonstrating a single female’s maternal qualities through her interactions with animated animals. Snow White’s animated animal friends all serve as child substitutes — allowing her to display all of those qualities which add up to fitness for motherhood. Disney repeats these kinds of interactions to the same effect in Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

Snow White had a profound influence on other movies.

For example, you can see Snow White’s behavior toward animals exhibited by Ava Gardner in the John Ford masterpiece, Mogambo (1953) — a romance set in Africa also starring Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. The good-hearted prostitute — one suited for marriage — is one of Hollywood’s favorite themes. In Stagecoach (1939) John Ford has John Wayne’s love interest display her maternal qualities with an actual baby born to another passenger. In Mogambo, John Ford has Ava Gardner’s character demonstrate maternal qualities by mothering a baby elephant — a rough one who knows what he likes and grabs it (and Ava Gardner had lots to grab) and tosses her in the mud several times. Through it all Gardner remains true to Snow White’s tender behavior, imitating her gestures and mannerisms as well as the inflection and tone of her voice. The similarity to the animated classic is uncanny. In these scenes, Gardner’s character demonstrates that she is just an ordinary farm girl who has temporarily gone astray, with all the maternal peasant virtues of Show White.

Contrast the development of the “good-hearted prostitute theme” in John Ford’s classics with a more recent effort — Pretty Woman — in which we see no maternal qualities at all. Rather, we see behaviors which bespeak fitness for shopping, and fitness for tasteful selection of fashions appropriate to the role of high class, childless, and relatively monogamous courtesan — a conception of the role of wife that is quite popular in Hollywood these days. The behaviors we see in Pretty Woman are those which display fitness for passing the time pleasantly as our race drifts toward extinction.

Conceptual abstractions and theological formulas are unreliable guides for judging whether a movie is good for your children. Movies, like church going, teach us very specific behaviors. Thus it is the behavior being promoted that counts. Little else matters.

You are what you watch.

Contemporary popular culture is as jejune as contemporary politics: strangled by political correctness and by contempt for form and etiquette, it eats away like acid at what remains of courtesy and memory.  But the past of popular culture – in literature and the movies – has much nourishment to offer.  One of the most popular authors of the Twentieth Century, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 – 1950), had a keen intuition about the health of the body politic and the positive relation of a vital culture to its founding traditions.  The Author of Tarzan (1912) and its many sequels, the inventor of the extraterrestrial sword-and-sandals romance, ex-cavalryman, admirer of the Apache and the Sioux, anti-Communist, anti-Nazi, self-publishing millionaire entrepreneur, religious skeptic, “Big-Stick” patriot, Southern California real estate baron, sixty-year-old Pacific-Theater war correspondent, Burroughs has, with a few ups and downs, maintained an audience both from his authorial debut in 1912 to the present day, nearly sixty years after his death.  Burroughs has a place in the culture wars, standing as he does for the opposite of almost everything advocated by the elites of the new liberal-totalitarian order.  I offer, in what follows, a modest assessment of Burroughs’ work.

I recommend Burroughs, whose books saw translation in every European language, to parents of conservative temperament on the lookout for adolescent-appropriate reading matter to offer to their children, whether male or female it hardly matters.  If you are Latvian or Bulgarian, you may read Tarzan in your native tongue.  Please do…

I. A longtime teacher of Western Literature, Classics-in-Translation, and American Novel courses at the university level (in California, Michigan, and Upstate New York) and a professing paleoconservative, I am fiercely dedicated to high culture and the Great Books.  I confess, however, to a sneaking fondness for some of the outstanding – even some of the less-than-outstanding – popular literature of the first half of the Twentieth Century. . . . Read the whole article

Taking Sex Differences Seriously

John Adams once famously wrote to his wife that he studied politics and war so his children could study mathematics and philosophy and his grandchildren poetry and music.  Only a man of the Enlightenment could be so naive.  More than two hundred years later some students do study mathematics and music.  But it would’ve probably never crossed Adams’ mind in a thousand years that yet others would be studying “gender.”

Political scientist Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously is one of those books that is as interesting as its necessity is depressing.  Nothing that is written here — men are more interested in sports than women, women prefer status in men, females are better suited to care for children, etc. — would have been controversial in Adams’ day or amongst any band of hunter-gatherers.  But here we are in 2009, explaining that girls are not boys.  The Enlightenment philosophers’ mistake was projecting their belief in reason onto the rest of humanity.

From the First Day

One-day-old female infants have a stronger response to hearing a human in distress than their male counterparts.  Three days after birth, the stronger female interest in people is present.  Girls will maintain eye contact with a silent adult twice as long as boys do.  If the adult talks, girls but not boys will look longer.  Week-old baby girls but not boys can distinguish between an infant’s cry and other noises.  Only females are able to separate photographs of people they know from those they don’t by the age of four months.  Infants separate by sex very early.  One-year-olds prefer to play with their own kind and when watching a movie of babies will look at the members of their own sex more than the other.

If the above paragraph alone isn’t enough to kill the socialization hypothesis, we can look at real life examples of attempts to thwart Mother Nature.  In 1966, a circumcision gone wrong left one male identical twin without a penis.  Psychologist Dr. John Money of John Hopkins University persuaded the parents to raise the child as a female.  Surgeons completely castrated him and built what looked like a female vagina.  “Brenda” was from that point on treated like a girl.  She was given female steroids that would “facilitate and mimic female pubertal growth and feminization.”  When Brenda was 12, he/she was reported to be doing fine.  Time magazine ran a long piece on the story and the 1979 Textbook of Sexual Medicine claimed that Brenda’s “remarkably feminine” development proved the “plasticity of human gender identity.”  What’s missed here is that even if Brenda’s story was true, a lot more than socialization was going on.  Female hormones were injected and removal of the testicles ensured that some male hormones wouldn’t be produced.

But chemical tinkering and socialization together weren’t enough to make a boy into a girl.  Researchers eventually showed that Dr. Money was a fraud (whether he was embarrassed over the pain he caused or simply a maniac who liked seeing children mutilated and tortured we don’t know).  By the 1990s, Brenda had become David and was working in a slaughterhouse.  At the age of 14 he decided to start living as a male and a year later his parents told him the truth.  David was given male hormones, his breasts were removed, and he had a constructed penis installed.

After the real story came out, researchers at John Hopkins decided to find out what had happened to other boys that they decided would live as females.  They located twenty-five of them.  Each enjoyed rough-and-tumble play.  Fourteen had declared themselves boys, with one doing so as early as at five-years-old.

Simone de Beauvoir

The Ugly Implications of Feminism

If males and females should put the same amount of time and effort towards work, than the principle of equality demands that men do just as much work raising children.  As feminist Susan Okin has written about her just world:

In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.  No assumptions would be made about “male” and “female” roles; childbearing would be so conceptually separate from child rearing and other family responsibilities that it would be a cause for surprise, and no little concern, if men and women were not equally responsible for domestic life or if children were to spend much more time with one parent than the other.

Presumably, since we don’t want a world where people do more of what they don’t like or aren’t good at, we can socially construct one where men and women will like or dislike child rearing equally.  According to Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, “Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be.”

Getting in the way of these egalitarian fantasies are the wishes of actual women.  In surveys, women are more likely than men to say that they enjoy spending time with infants.  Sweden, always on the cutting edge, decided in the 1970s to allow parental leave for a family only if the father took it.  The government undertook a propaganda campaign to get men to take care of their children.  To this day, Swedish mothers take parental leave twice as often as fathers do and for six times as long.  Similar evidence comes from the Israeli kibbutzim.  These small communities aimed specifically at doing away with traditional sex roles.  At the beginning, children were raised away from their parents.  After lobbying by young mothers, the family is once again the center of society.

No wonder that in 1975 feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.  It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.

This authoritarian streak is part of mainstream feminism.  Women’s advocates will support day care subsidies but not tax breaks for dependents, because the former is only financially beneficial if women work.

Perhaps it is the childlessness of feminists that makes them unable to understand their fellow women.  The peptide oxytocin is the most important nurturing hormone.  It promotes bonding and a relaxed emotional state.  It’s released in males during orgasm and in females while they are pregnant or breastfeeding.  Females have more receptors for the hormone and the number increases when a woman is pregnant.  Rhoads explains:

Oxytocin and prolactin, another hormone that surges during pregnancy and breastfeeding, change women’s personalities in ways that make them better mothers.  These hormones seem to make routine more tolerable.  Compared with other women their age, pregnant and breastfeeding women have been found to be more tolerant of monotony.  They are also more prone to please and obey-a trait that some researchers think is nature’s way of making them more ready “to ‘take orders’ from their babies.”  Even the act of stroking her baby releases oxytocin in the mother, causing her to feel a “beatific calm” and somewhat sedated.

. . . Many women feel euphoric or exhilarated while nursing.  A few even have orgasms.

When asked to rate how important on a 10 point scale different parts of their lives are to their happiness, 86 percent of mothers say that their children are a 10 while only 30 percent of working women give their careers a rating that high.  Many women who buy into the worldview of the nihilists end up regretting it.  Sylvia Hewlett set out to write a book on women who had achieved great things.  After interviewing the first ten, she was struck by the fact that each one was childless.  Not a single woman was so by choice.  Hewlett then went out and commissioned a survey of women who were making more than $60,000 a year in midcareer.  When they graduated from college, 14 percent knew they didn’t want children but 33 percent ended up childless.  Hewlett wrote that she was “continually surprised — and humbled — by how raw and near to the surface the emotions” were.  A women said to Hewlett that is was “frightening, this yearning for a child — it’s hard to fathom the desperate urgency.”  There is no equivalent feeling in childless successful men.  Quite a few of the older women had unrealistic expectations of being able to get pregnant in their 40s.  They were like Hillary Clinton, who said at the age of 49 that she might like to have another child.

Not even ideological feminists are immune.  A childless newswoman from Australia said that she was “Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel.  Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfillment came with a leather briefcase.”  A female journalist with a Yale degree said that when she realized that she wanted to mother her baby, “a huge and terrifying abyss” opened up beneath her.

A primate female is built for birthing and raising children.  Her psychological makeup and hormonal balance evolved for it.  Some skills are remarkably specialized.  When a baby cries in pain, mothers and fathers react the same way.  But when the cry is “I want” (food, comfort) the female is quicker to respond.  When childless women watch a video of a baby crying their heart rates accelerate.  Those of childless men decelerate.

As much as women need children, children need their mothers.  Infants prefer their moms to their dads.  One researcher explains the subtle dance that goes on when a child is nursing:

During a feeding, dozens of events occur.  The baby sucks, winces, squirms, relaxes, lets go of the nipple, burps, falls asleep, hiccups, smiles, roots, cries, opens his eyes, tenses his face or softens his expression.  His mother rocks, sits still, hums, is silent, adjusts her position, tenses, relaxes, gazes, smiles, talks, pats, strokes, lifts the baby, puts him down.  Each event is a remark.

It’s unclear whether fathers have interactions of comparable complexity with their infants because it’s difficult to find men who are with their babies long enough to be researched.  One study found that men on average talked to their infants 38 seconds per day.

While in the womb, a baby can recognize a mother’s heartbeat and voice.  After birth, he is calmed by both.  In one experiment researchers took monkey babies away from their mothers and noted the “grief, listlessness, the obvious and heart-rendering despair.”  One person involved declared, “Thank God, we only have to do it once to prove the point.”  If only our culture showed such consideration for human children.

The Chivalrous Conservative

Men are given much less attention than women in this book.  While the tragedy of Title IX and the havoc its wrecked on male sports is given its own chapter, besides that things are supposedly going pretty well for men.  According to Rhoads, “The sexual revolution gave men, not women, what they wanted.”  Perhaps a very small minority of men.  Rhoads writes that on college campuses today women sleep around, and in general it’s men who decide if the relationship continues.  That wasn’t the experience of most college students I knew.

I’m guessing that the sample that the author worked with was biased.  Men who aren’t doing well with women generally don’t like to talk about their nonexistent sex lives, and many aren’t above lying when they do.  The female sample is also unlikely to be representative.  The author tells us about pretty girls who gain weight so men will leave them alone, but the views of females too fat to even attract ugly men aren’t given much consideration.  Although the latter is most certainly more common, girls whose attractiveness and not obesity is the source of their pain are much more likely to talk about it.

There is a tendency noted by Roger Devlin for anti-feminist conservatives to cast themselves as the true defenders of women’s rights. Attention is given to the fact that women aren’t attracted to men who are beneath them in status (making it extremely difficult for high-achieving women to find husbands) but not much to the men who lose status and mating opportunities because their jobs go to women.  Affirmative action is not mentioned.  While it would be pointless to get into a discussion about who — men, women or children — have been most victimized by feminism, ignoring the plight of males is itself a product of this evil ideology.

The Need for Righteous Anger

At the beginning of his chapter on the psychoanalytic movement in the The Culture of Critique Kevin MacDonald quotes Paul Churchland who said: “How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted — on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments . . . is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”  The same thing has to be asked about feminism.  How did a movement so destructive to both utilitarian and biological interests gain such widespread acceptance?

It’s really may not that much of a mystery at all.  We’ve got these giant brains, and sometimes they lead us astray.  Religious groups that don’t believe in procreation have popped up and gone extinct.  The Western world has become such a death cult.  The nihilists will leave this planet and the patriarchal shall inherit the earth.

Rhoads notes that his classes on sex differences are overwhelmingly female.  The young co-eds are on the edge of their seats while the few men look bored.  The author writes fondly about the young “radical feminists” he’s had in his classes.  He’s too kind.  My reaction to leftists has been closer to that of Paul Gottfried, who said in his Encounters that over the years he “developed a Nietzschean reaction to the girly men and virago women that populate university settings.”  Feminists and multiculturalists changed society while motivated with a burning hatred for those they considered the epitome of evil, not by making friends with those they considered simply misguided. It’s a lesson we ought to learn.

The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters

It’s no secret that Asian women and white men seem to have a good deal of mutual attraction. Richard Bernstein, a Jew married to an Asian woman, tries to put this into a historical context. Reading his book gives an idea of how unique Western ideas of sex and marriage truly have been.

Sexual Chinese Nationalism

The East opens with the story of a young, possibly British man teaching English in China. He ran a blog where he called himself ChinaBounder and on which he bragged about his exploits with Chinese women, usually fellow students. From one entry: “I was with Star on Saturday. I was with Yingying on Sunday. In between, I contacted Cherry via MSN. I telephoned Rina, and I used SMS to flirt with Tulip. I sent Susan an e-mail to flirt with her, and I professed my love to Wendy on her blog.”

A psychology professor named Zhang Jiehai came across the website. He posted a long article, “Internet Hunt for an Immoral Foreigner,” urging Chinese men to find the English teacher and kick him out of the country. After presenting quotes making fun of Chinese males’ lack of sexual prowess, Zhang concluded by calling on the males of China to rise up.

Please think about how this foreign piece of trash has dallied with your sisters and made fun of your impotence. Do you want to say that this is no big deal? Do you still want to treat the foreigners as important? Do you still quiver when you see foreigners? Please straighten your backbones.

The psychology professor went on to provide clues that could help identify the scoundrel. His name may have been Brian and he had revealed what hotels he’d stayed at. ”Let our compatriots act together on this Internet hunt to find this foreign trash until we kick him out of China,” Zhang wrote.

In Europe or America, a college professor taking it upon himself to defend that nation’s women against the advances of foreigners would be unheard of. Chinese men expressed their disgust for this “white ape” and the “bitches” who slept with him on different Internet forums. ChinaBounder called Zhang a “lunatic” in response. This became a big enough deal for China’s censors to block ChinaBounder’s blog. He soon began writing from Thailand.

The blog’s existence in the first place illustrates the luck many white men have had with Asian women. Older men can use their money to attract women a third their age. The appeal of younger men is probably based more on their relative masculinity. The Chinese are particularly touchy on this last point. Before the ChinaBounder saga, there was a novel by Chinese author Zhou Weihui called Shanghai Baby about a Chinese woman whose boyfriend was impotent but whose Western lover was anything but. Like the ChinaBounder blog, it was banned.

Bernstein attributes these feelings of Chinese inferiority to the country’s long history of weakness in relations with the outside world. While much of that is true, it’s doubtful that some of the fears of relative Caucasian virility aren’t based on reality.

Prostitution was a regular part of life for the American men serving in Vietnam. Sex would be available for less than $5. The Vietcong pointed this out in propaganda. Some whites who served in Indochina never left. The US Clarke Army base in Angeles City (the Philippines) closed in 1991 but many of the businesses that catered to US soldiers are still operating. Bernstein tells the story of an American bar owner in Thailand who employs prostitutes to service his friends. The VFW in that country had 961 members as of 2007. Not a few Western men have decided that they’d rather spend their last days with young Asians than their saggy, no longer attractive wives. The author found a community of such men in Bangkok.

Most of the men around the table at the Federal Hotel were married to Thai women, and some of them were on their second or third wives, the first of them Americans whom they’d married decades ago. And what they said is that for men like them, what is easy in Thailand-finding willing, much-younger women-would be impossible back home. I met one former GI of substantial girth in Pattaya…

“I hit the L.A. airport,” the man said of a trip to the United States he made some years ago. “I was going to see my kids. I ended up in a bar at the airport. There were these guys talking about lawn mowers, a new garage. Lawn mowers! ‘Okay’ I said, ‘get me the fuck out of here.’”

Bernstein writes that “It’s not hard to find Western men in Thailand who describe European women as emasculating, egotistic, mannish, and afflicted with what they regard as the ideological rot of feminism.” Unfortunately for the men, things don’t always end well. Since foreigners aren’t allowed to own property in Thailand, many have had to put houses in their brides’ names. There are stories of these women kicking the white geezers out and replacing them with their younger boyfriends.

The Culture of the Harem

“East” in this book mostly means East Asia but occasionally India or the Islamic world. Although obviously quite different from one another, all Eastern cultures have historically had a series of characteristics dealing with sex that they shared with one another but not Europe. One is what the author calls “the culture of the harem.” Easterners recognized that men had sexual needs outside of monogamous relationships and accepted as a fact of life that there would be a class of women who existed to satisfy those desires. The prostitutes and concubines served to protect the honor of “good” girls from “good” families who were expected to remain pure.

This world where sex is divorced from love has enchanted European soldiers, businessmen, and travelers. In the days of colonialism, some British administrators in India began their own mini-harems. This outraged Victorian England. A writer in an 1887 newspaper decried British men falling to the level of the “heathen.” The conservative philosopher Edmund Burke fretted over the sexual implications of the whole colonial project.

No place, save some Islamic lands, did Westerners colonize a people politically without also doing so sexually. It usually wasn’t by design (although some British troops were encouraged to have children with native women in India to form a class of reliable soldiers) but simply a product of human nature. The fact that this continues today is based partly on the income discrepancies between East and West. There are undoubtedly sociobiological factors too; we don’t see wealthy Japanese men finding poor Ukrainian brides. The vast majority of people still marry and mate within their own culture but we may see sexual globalization leading to more people seeking love elsewhere. Those who care about preserving historic nations and cultures will need to fight it.

Not much attention is given to black Africa. Harems in Tanzania are mentioned, but the simple fact seems to be (the author doesn’t admit this) that white men have not been attracted to black women. If the reader doesn’t believe me, he can google “African brides” and compare the number of sites that come up to the hits for “Russian brides.” British explorer, diplomat and linguist Richard Burton did report, however, that black women lasted longer in bed. Among dozens of other works, he was the first to translate the Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights into English. In the latter book, when the king finds his queen embracing a “blackamoor” a footnote reads that “Debauched women prefer negroes on the account of the size of their parts.”

Feminism’s Legacy

It has to be more than a coincidence that Western culture was both unique in mating practices and in technological development. What we are moving towards today is not Eastern practices, but something entirely new. While Asians, both South Asians and Mongoloids, have always accepted the existence of prostitutes and political/economic power leading to sexual success, the majority of the population cared enough about traditional morality to at least espouse it. The family was seen as a social good and debauchery to be, although inevitable, an evil if it ruined “good” girls or destroyed necessary institutions.

Western men today seem to have the worst of all possible worlds. Hard work and worldly success don’t translate into landing even one attractive woman (see the wives of Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, or George W. Bush). The rich and poor alike have no guarantee of fidelity. Men’s natural desires are condemned while even the arbitrary prerogatives of women are treated as sublime and somehow more legitimate. In traditional societies, girls often married in their teens. But today, finding a young bride who is still somewhat in tune with her nature and not yet programmed to hate men is blocked by an array of social pressures, including laws that can land a man in jail for decades. There are none of the benefits of the Eastern system (the “boys will be boys” attitude, the compliant wives, ability to sexually succeed through socially beneficial channels) or the Western one (guaranteed monogamy, lack of polygamy meaning women are available to virtually all). It’s no wonder men go to Asia. I’d bless this for the young ones if I didn’t worry about the world’s dwindling number of whites.

The politically correct thing to do would be to condemn 70 year-old men who find 20 year-old women that they only have thanks to their money. Thankfully, Bernstein doesn’t do that. He does take the seemingly common sense view, however, that these girls don’t have genuine affection for their partners. That’s to take a very Western-centric and male-centric view (thanks to feminism, even Western females have moved towards male-centric desires) of what attracts people to one another. I don’t doubt that the subconscious of women from conservative cultures may place more weight on status and wealth. Some are certainly cynical manipulators, but not all are. Despite the small oversight there, The East is generally non-judgmental, and the author’s sympathy for the human condition rubs off on the reader.

From HBD Books, August 21, 2009

Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China

Francis Galton said that the first country to undertake a dedicated program of eugenics would conquer the world.  It shouldn’t be surprising that a country ruled by the most intelligent race in the world would realize that he was right.  Researcher Frank DiKötter relies on the orignal sources to tell us about the history of eugenics in China and the cultural influences of its ideas in Imperfect Conceptions.

Early Chinese Attitudes Toward Childbirth, Sexuality

The first three fourths of the book deals with attitudes in China in the centuries before the communist takeover.  Much of it is speculation.  Only a minority of a minority (the coastal elites) ever wrote anything and left a record of their thoughts.  The most interesting thing about some of the Chinese attitudes is how similar many of them are to European ideas.

They believed that too much masturbation or sex “wastes” semen and produces deformed offspring.  Europeans for centuries didn’t like masturbation either.  Is there an evolutionary reason for this?  Perhaps it serves as a substitute for sex and is bad for the gene pool.  Or maybe making the masses prudish is an evolutionary strategy of the elites.  We also have to be open to the possibility that there is no Darwinian reason at all; when we see sperm shooting out of a penis it’s natural to think that the supply is getting depleted.

Sex was never treated as a source of pleasure.  When writing on it appeared it was always to tell a morality tale or give advice on producing healthy children.  Writers warned that if a man was drunk during conception the children would be dim-witted.  A story is told about a young man who had homosexual relations with a neighbor, turned into a woman and ended up pregnant.  In the 16th century, pediatrician Wan Quan claimed:

In ancient times, women lived in separate quarters and did not have sexual intercourse with their husbands after they became pregnant, hence they had no difficulty during delivery.  Many of their children were born virtuous and suffered from few disorders.  Today, people show no restrictions and indulge in their desires to their hearts’ content . . . there are children born with numerous disorders, some entirely covered with small pox pustules: all are the result of excessive sexual congress.

DiKötter points to a fascinating difference between Western and Eastern approaches to knowledge.  While Western scientists aimed to stand out and gain recognition for their discoveries, Chinese intellectuals were more interested in allying with a school of thought and paying homage to their intellectual forefathers.  This is consistent with a whole host of East/West differences that I’ve

By the time of the Republican era (1911 – 1949), Chinese intellectuals, like their Western counterparts, believed in eugenics and were enamored with the idea of “science” being mankind’s savior.  In the 1930s Shaanxi province’s governor endorsed a paper titled “Draft for the Implementation of Shaanxi’s Race Reform.”  It called for government regulation of marriage and the state ensuring “superior births.” Some upheld Nazi practices as worthy of emulation.  It was only the Japanese invasion and then the Chinese civil war that stopped a full blown eugenics program by mid-century.

Eugenics as State Policy

Not many rational policies were implemented during the Mao era.  He may have led the most impractical instance of putting egalitarian ideals into practice in all of human history.  By the 1970s, nurses were promoted to doctors, and doctors were being relegated to cleaning windows.  Thankfully, the much more sane Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978.  The author writes:

Although the one-child family programme, by which the government only in exceptional circumstances allows parents to have more than one or occasionally two children, is relatively well known, an important component of these policies has been the improvement of the quality of new-born babies.  The control of the ‘quality’ of births has been regarded in China as being no less important than the control of ‘quantity’: both have regularly been heralded as the twin goals in the control of reproduction since 1978.

The first conference of the China Genetics Institute was held that year.  Government officials and medical professionals supported making eugenic research a top priority.  All policies dealing with reproductive health now exist within a eugenics framework.  A couple isolated voices protest, but according to the author suggesting that there’s much diversity of opinion on this issue would be misleading.  Scientific journals, like those in the West, publish articles on the importance of heredity in determining intelligence.  Studies are done showing that retardation also depends on genes.  A detailed report in Fujian province showed that fertility trends were dysgenic.  There’s no New Left lobby to block this research.

The government has waged a war on inbreeding, popular in rural areas and amongst some minorities.  The author makes the compelling argument that even if much of this battle may be based on solid science, the crusade serves a symbolic purpose.  Cosmopolitan elites across the world tend to see those practicing congenital relations as holdouts against modernity.

Legitimizing the reach of the government into families and lineages, (the battle against cousin marriage) endows society with unprecedented powers of intervention and regulation into the personal lives of individuals in the name of public health.

In 1995, the famous Eugenics Law was passed, making prenatal screening mandatory and “encouraging” the unfit not to reproduce nationwide.  Many provinces have their own, much stricter laws.  Support for these programs reaches into the highest levels of government.  Party officials who are eugenicists have centered around former Premier Li Peng (quoted as saying “Idiots breed idiots”), an outspoken advocate of good breeding.  He has close ties to former Minister of Public Health Chen Minzhang, the man who introduced the Eugenics Law.  In 1996 the government is alleged to have moved towards a policy of encouraging the more fit to breed.  Officials are aware that this is unpopular with the “international community” (i.e., white elitist do-gooders) and not many details are available.  Numbers on how many people have been sterilized are hard to come by.

Especially encouraging is the overwhelming support that these policies have among the mid-level elites.  The journal Population and Eugenics ran an article called “The Population Policy in Singapore” that advocated that the Chinese follow Singapore in encouraging the higher classes to have more children.  A different eugenics journal warned about the “bitter wine fermented by opposing eugenics” by showing two deformed lovers and their even more hideous offspring.

Improving the gene pool isn’t all that the Chinese government is doing to ensure more healthy births.  Steps are taken to make sure that pregnant women have their medical needs met.  At the level of consumer culture, claims are made that reading to a child in the womb or having the fetus listen to classical music can improve its intelligence.  Similar ideas also exists in the West.  People can’t do anything about their genes, so it makes sense that a market exists to improve the quality of children by environmental interventions.  Like in pre-modern times, women’s thoughts and emotions are thought to determine the health of the child.  Pregnant women are encouraged to read intellectually stimulating books and listen to classical music while avoiding romance novels and pop songs.

The concept of race doesn’t get much attention in China, but one author does claim that the twentieth century will see a competition between “whites” and “yellows” for world domination, with the winner being partly determined by who masters genetic engineering technology (Richard Lynn’s theory).

The idea that the collective is more important than the individual extends to other related areas of health.  Mercy killing for sick newborns are “rarely seen to pose any particular ethical problem.”  A biologist belonging to the Chinese Academy of Social Science points to the cost of caring for severely handicapped infants and the pain that they cause their families.

While there’s no equivalent to the Western idea of life being sacred from the moment of conception, extreme medical experiments are frowned upon.  For example, it is claimed that during the Cultural Revolution a chimp was impregnated with human sperm in an attempt to create a new race for military use.  The ape died three months after the start of her pregnancy.  No mention is made of whether research was done on the fetus.  There’s a story of the Soviets having conducted similar experiments without success.

At the end of the book the DiKötter deals with the ethical issues of eugenics and gives his own opinion on the feasibility of such programs.  I wish he would’ve left this out.  Up until this point he came across as a neutral researcher.  Then, he starts to claim that eugenics may not work because traits like intelligence and most diseases are polygenic (determined by more than one gene).  Of course that’s true, but if no traits determined by more than one gene could be selected for, then animal domestication couldn’t work.  Nobody claims that intelligence in dogs is determined by a single gene, but different breeds differ and can be made smarter or stupider.  He also worries about eugenics colluding with patriarchy.  Hearing a man come from the race that is going extinct due to women’s liberation worrying about male dominance is laughable.  “Better extinct than politically incorrect” is the rallying cry of the modern liberal.

A World Without Liberalism

A high IQ population, in which the best minds aren’t systematically destroyed by egalitarian evil, does exist out there.  That should give us hope.  And if there’s a silver lining to the decline of the West, it’s that our governments won’t be able to feminize the one billion Chinese the way they did the Germans and Japanese (putting them on the road to oblivion) and are seeking to do to the Muslims and Russians.

For more information on Chinese eugenics, see my review of Richard Lynn’s Eugenics.  For more on Darwinist thought in China see here. For an analysis of the famous Chinese Eugenics law see here.

From HBD Books, July 24, 2009

Norman Rockwell: Freedom from Want, 1943

Another family gathering has reminded me of the always-depressing shape of too many White family trees — a family of five children that begets two grandchildren, a family of three children that begets none, and so on.  We are a race that has been sapped of our very will to exist — concerned with the continuation of every living thing on earth but its own people.  Could the irony of this ever be pointed out to a childless, 40-something White couple who work for an environmental advocacy group?

1.  Careerism. These are the young Whites — smart, attractive and often accomplished — who have decided that the law firm, the non-profit organization or the university will command their lives.  Social messages have likely played a big part here.  The coolest life trajectories on television are career-based.  The absurd ones are family-based.  I fear women are particularly victimized by this one.  They are told that children are messy and uncool, but that making partner at the law firm is a true woman’s calling.  But I can pretty much guarantee you that these woman aren’t happy — childless and sucking down their Diet Cokes at 47.