When the Soviet Union disintegrated, most Americans likely had never heard of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan.

Yet the ethnonationalism of these Asian peoples, boiling to the surface after centuries of tsarist and communist repression, helped tear apart one of the great empires of history.

There swiftly followed the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Yet, if one knew nothing of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires or the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, one would likely have been surprised by the sudden emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo on the map of Europe.

What the splintering of the Soviet Union and of a Yugoslavia whose baptismal certificate dated to the Paris peace conference of 1919 revealed was the accuracy of Arthur Schlesinger’s insight in his 1991 Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society:

“Nationalism remains after two centuries the most vital political emotion in the world — far more vital than social ideologies such a communism or fascism or even democracy. … Within nation-states, nationalism takes the form of ethnicity or tribalism.”

Ethnic ties, Schlesinger wrote, might prove more powerful and historically important than the forces of globalism and democratism, which then seemed ascendant. He only neglected to mention religious faith as often a “far more vital” emotion than ideology.

. . .

Globalization is no longer on the march, but on the defensive. Economic nationalism is rising. Across the Third World, we see an upsurge of ethnonationalism and fundamentalism, especially among the Islamic peoples. From Nigeria to Sudan to Mindanao, Muslims battle Christians, as Christians are persecuted in Egypt, Iraq and Pakistan.

In India and Thailand, Muslims battle Hindu and Buddhists. In the Northern Caucasus, they fight Russians.

Ethnonationalism, that relentless drive of peoples to secede and dwell apart, to establish their own nation-state, where their faith is predominant, their language spoken, their heroes and history revered, and they rule to the exclusion of all others, is rampant.

In China, Tibetans fight assimilation and the mass migration of Han Chinese into what was their country, as do the Uighurs in the west who dream of an East Turkestan breaking away and taking its place among the nations of the world.

In speaking of the rising tribalism abroad, Schlesinger added, “The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever.”

Indeed, separatism and secessionism seem to be in the air.

Read the whole article.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

It’s always seemed to me that if human beings were naturally more inclined to buy into a blood based nationalism than some kind of universalistic ideology than this would be strong evidence that racial loyalty had a genetic basis. According to B. R. Myers in The Cleanest Race the secret to the behavior and survival of the North Korean regime can be found in its ideology, one which not only ignores Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy but directly contradicts it.

Both Koreas teach that the peninsula was taken over by the Japanese in 1905 and stayed under the imperialist power’s thumb until the end of World War II. While most historians take the view that the colonized were heavily oppressed, Myers disagrees at least as far as the elites are concerned. He sees the Korean intelligentsia as having been co-opted by the conquerors. The Japanese come across as relatively benign in this book, encouraging the use of the Korean language and even regional peculiarities. To Japanese researcher Yuko Mastumura, on the other hand, the occupation was a classic case of cultural genocide.

For our purposes anyway, what’s important is that the Japanese saw the Koreans as racially similar to them and thus worthy of respect. The residents of the peninsula were encouraged to hold two identities. After the Empire of Japan surrendered, North Korea became occupied by the Soviets and South Korea by the US. In the communist area those that had supported the Japanese were forgiven and became part of the new elite. The Korean war began when the North invaded the South in 1950 and ended with a stalemate in 1953. That’s where we remain until today.

According to the author, the new North Korea intelligentsia knew nothing about Marxism. They were given a crash course in its concepts by the Soviets. Kim Il Sung, a man who according to one diplomat appeared to have never read a serious book, was appointed leader of the country. He had been a resistance fighter against the Japanese.

The author pieced together his picture of North Korean ideology from domestic art and propaganda accessible at the Unification Ministry’s North Korea Resource Center in Seoul. Myers claims that the DPRK tries to hide the racialist aspects of what they believe and that Marxism is a facade. He found that the English language Korean Central News Agency tended to talk about peace, imperialism, and couch its reports in the terms of universal human rights. But the more one gets into what’s meant for domestic consumption the more racialist the material becomes. The author studied North Korean film, news releases, novels, short stories, poetry, newspapers, etc and refers to it all collectively as the Text. He speculates there’s harder stuff that was never made available to researchers.

The Koreans seem to have kicked the Japanese out of their race and held on to their view of themselves as a unique people. They don’t necessarily see themselves as more intelligent or athletic than anybody else, but beings of superior virtue, too innocent to survive in this world without a strong leader. But Kim Sung Il is more of a maternal than a paternal figure. He is always portrayed as caring and showing good cheer, never imparting wisdom, as being too erudite it seen as anti-Korean. Race includes paintings of children gathering around this jolly fat man, holding on to his leg or playing with his shoes. The arts have never attempted to hide the belly of either Kim and even occasionally show one of them smoking a cigarette. After all, a good Korean is spontaneous and in touch with his pure instincts. There is some tension between portraying Sung as a masterful tactician who single-handedly repelled the Japanese and a jolly mother that loves her children. The latter is always emphasized and reinforced while the former image is simply processed at a cerebral level. There’s a picture in the book of a young Sung receiving a gun from his mother. The viewer is supposed to take away the blank expression on his face; he’s an innocent child rather than a soldier deeply pondering the gravity of the situation.

The first leader of the country is said to have invented the ideology of juche, which means something like self-reliance. Myers considers it a tool to justify the continuation of the regime to the outside world. He finds the juche text so convoluted and meaningless that there must be nothing there. Its ideas are never presented in domestic art or the media. As a matter of fact, the nation is far from self-reliant, living off of imports and foreign aid. The leadership doesn’t seem to want to change that. Interestingly there has never been a magnum opus or central text of the philosophy that one can go to to to find what it’s about. The author believes that this is by design. Other Western scholars have taken what the North Koreans have said about themselves at face value.

When Sung died in 1994 his son Kim Jong Il took over. While the father was said to be an expert in all things, the son is presented as a military commander forced to focus all his energy on foreign relations. There is a genre of fiction made up of tales of the Kims that are understood not to be based on real events but reflect the spirit of the men. In a 1999 short story called “Transitions” Kim Jong Il blames hard times on a failure to implement his father’s teachings.

“Long ago the Leader [i.e. Kim Il Sung] was already calling agriculture the foundation of the universe. . . But we have not farmed well in recent years, and we have failed to implement his teachings properly. To make matters worse, we have suffered damages from floods and drought, so that now the people are enduring difficulty because of the food problem. But still no one complains. Even while eating gruel they are steadfastly surmounting difficulties. They’re worried they might otherwise cause me pain, you see. When I think of how much the Leader wanted to give our people white rice and meat soup, I find it hard to bear . . .”

“We have not properly taken on the work you gave us to do, General,” Kyong’u said as he hung his head.

Notice how both North Koreans and their leaders are presented as morally pure. Since the DPRK is no longer a Marxist-Leninist state there isn’t much pressure to increase the living standard of the population. As seen in the story above, economic problems are freely admitted to. All references to communism were taken out of the country’s constitution in 2009 and a military-first policy was enshrined. While in the 70s and 80s the regime could lie and say that the South lived in abject poverty the facade became impossible to maintain in the 90s when North Koreans near the border started watching Republic of Korea television and DVDs were smuggled in from outside the country. The story now fed to the population is that the ROK may be wealthy on the outside but is really crippled by shame on the inside. Some leftists in the capitalist nation even agree with this and see the Spartan existence of their poorer brethren as admirable. Since there are two Koreas, the less wealthy one with a smaller population needs a justification for its existence, which it finds in deriding the ROK as a Yankee colony. In the North Korean novel Encounter, a girl from the South says

(Korea) is making its world debut as the flashiest of American colonies, so much so that the Americans tout it as a model. But look under the silk encasing, and you see the body of what has degenerated to a foul whore of America. Here and there covered in bruises from where it has been kicked black and blue by the American soldiers’ boots, or decaying from where sewage has seeped in. And out of all of that has come a rotten “president,” a rotten “government,” rotten media. . . . (It) turns the stomach just to imagine it.

The DPRK isn’t just worried about political or cultural corruption, but biological. In May 2006 the two Koreas met to discuss the maritime border between the states. Someone from the ROK mentioned that farmers in his country were taking foreign brides. A general from the North replied “Our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance. I’m concerned that our singularity will disappear.” His counterpart answered that the unions were nothing more than a “drop of ink in the Han river.” The DPRK representative disagreed, saying that “Since ancient times our land has been one of abundant natural beauty. Not one drop of ink must be allowed.” Lest the reader think this was an isolated incident, weeks earlier the party daily had taken the South to task for the welcome they gave to a half-Korean American soccer player.

Mono-ethnicity is something that our nation and no other on earth can pride itself on. . . . There is no suppressing the nation’s shame and anger at the talk of a “multi-ethnic, multi-racial” society . . . which would dilute even the bloodline of our people.

Women coming back from China are given forced abortions and the state encourages large families in order to eventually be able to match the population of the ROK.

Before reading Race I had high hopes that the racism of the Koreans had a more scientific basis. Maybe locked away and only for domestic reading there are translated works of Rushton and Lynn that North Korean leaders study. More likely this nationalism is the kind of “We are the best!” ethnocentrism found at all times and everywhere before the present era.

The popular 1951 anti-American novella Jackals describes the revolting physical features of Caucasians. The following is a description of an American family.

The old jackal’s spade-shaped eagle’s nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen’s teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf-cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake that has just swallowed its skin.

Homosexuality is presented as an American perversion. In 1968 the North Koreans captured the USS Pueblo off their coast. A picture of the American shipmen being taken now graces postage stamps. The 2000 short story Snowstorm in Pyongyang tells of captured soldiers begging the North Koreans to let them engage in sodomy.

“Captain, sir, homosexuality is how I fulfill myself as a person. Since it does no harm to your esteemed government or esteemed nation, it is unfair for Jonathan and me to be prevented from doing something that is part of our private life.”

[The North Korean soldier responds,] “This is the territory of our republic, where people enjoy lives befitting human beings. On this soil none of that sort of activity will be tolerated.”

The survivability of the DPRK seems to stem from the genuine popularity that the regime enjoys. While it’s well known that many citizens flee to China what’s less often reported that 50 percent of them come back. This racialist state has survived while the dictatorships based on communism all collapsed. Unsurprisingly, people like being told they’re virtuous and better than others. They like having a God, or a perfect human being, to look up to. (While it’s been reported in the Western press that North Koreans consider the two Kims magical, in the Text it’s always a foreigner who is so impressed that he attributes supernatural powers to the father or son.) Myers relies on Freudian quackery to explain all this (I felt annoyed until I read the author studied in Germany and felt pity for him) but genetic similarity theory works better. Nothing North Koreans believe comes close to matching the absurdity of Christianity, Marxism, Freudism, Diversityism, feminism or racial egalitarianism. Even refugees who don’t like the North Korean regime express great admiration for the nation’s leaders and tear up when talking about them. As even the author acknowledges, the DPRK has never proposed invading an inch of territory outside the peninsula. But he still takes even the South Koreans to task for their chauvinistic attitudes. Are mentally healthy human beings anywhere too much for the liberal mind to bear?

In the end, the author is a typical member of the globalist elite: horrified that a non-Jewish state could be based on blood or a romantic nationalism that connects the people to the land. He seems to credit North Korea with a degree of cunning that strains credibility: understanding that a racialist state won’t fly in today’s world and inventing an alternative reality to present to other nations. If that’s the plan then there is no way that there will ever be peace between the US and the DPRK. Kim needs a threat to justify his rule and putting the military above all, and the US has a pathological need to bring political correctness to the entire globe. A free and racially pure united Korea will have to wait until the American empire collapses. Best of luck to them. While the DPRK may be an evil regime what they do is none of the business of the United States. How much of the starvation in the DPRK can be blamed on that country’s government and how much on ours? I don’t know, but what I’m sure of is that the future of the Korean peninsula would best be worked out by the people who live there. And if when they are united they choose to reject all aspects of multiculturalism I will be the first ones to cheer them on.

HBD Books, January 29, 2010

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
Read Part 4 here.

13. How do you explain the fact that a major football rivalry for Tunisians seems to be with other North Africans, Moroccans, rather than with people more distantly related?

Because Morocco is there. Close by. That’s one answer. But this is a frequent phenomenon in sport and is essentially the same issue as in sibling rivalry. You, a Québécoise girl, compete for mummy’s attention with your sibling because she is there. Some girl in China is not there, so why would you worry at all about her? Suppose, however, that both you and your sister are gymnasts and compete with each other initially, but your sister goes on to the Olympics and beats out a Chinese gymnast. Would you be happy for her? Or would you rather the Chinese won? Well, maybe if the sibling rivalry had been especially severe… But you get the point.

14. What is wrong with interracial marriage?

From your point of view, maybe nothing—provided you can accept the consequences. These can vary enormously depending on circumstances and personalities. But be prepared:

On the plus side, the girl/guy from the other race you are staring at may be incredibly attractive. Think of the sometime attractiveness of black men and white women for each other; or of white men and oriental women.

A modest degree of out-breeding could also be good for one’s kids. Here’s the story, according to standard biology texts: All your genes come in pairs, one allele of each pair from each parent. If a pair contains an allele that is bad for you but also “dominant,” meaning dominant over the other member of the pair, it will cause the person carrying it to die, be sick, or be otherwise unattractive as a mate. So we tend not to worry too much about dominant bad genes in our planning, since they tend quickly to self-destruct. But recessive genes don’t get “expressed” unless matched up with exactly the same allele. Outbreeding reduces the chance of a recessive bad gene you are carrying being matched up with its like, and thus being expressed. On the other hand, you don’t need to go very far afield to be sufficiently “outbred,” and certainly not as far as what we think of as another race or species (the defining feature of species is the inability to successfully interbreed with other species). In outbreeding to another race, your offspring may be picking up some surprises, either unpleasant (e.g., genes that encourage diabetes or sickle cell anemia) or pleasant (e.g., genes for high IQ or some more specialized talent). Ethnic and racial groups undoubtedly vary in “genetic load,” the number of bad recessive genes in their gene pool, although geneticists don’t seem to have a completely clear picture of all that. In any case, in picking a spouse it’s hard to know what you are getting into without at the very least a thorough genetic background check; the more ethnically/racially different a person is, the harder in general it is to vet that person for quality in any trait. There is one speculative aspect you might want to entertain. Racial differences are thought to have originally arisen through natural selection favoring those traits that made a person better adapted to a particular climate and ecology. Black skin was protective in tropical climates, while white skin encouraged penetration of rays from the sun when northern climates made them beneficial. These climatic selection pressures may not be all that strong today where modern technologies can mitigate them (Vit D supplements are extra important for Blacks living far from the equator). But the benefits of such natural selection may one day again be appreciated if the earth undergoes unexpected climate change. Intermarriage would reduce the traits that had once been useful in particular climates.

Here’s an ethical consideration: We are importuned daily to regard other ethnies/races with tolerance and respect. Well, if we really do value another group’s cultural and physical traits, why would we want to do anything that would contribute to the destruction of those traits? If you dislike your own race so much that you want to marry into another, aren’t you implying that other races are justified in negatively “profiling,” or looking down upon, yours? In any case, the destruction of one’s people would happen only one intermarriage at a time, but it would happen. One intermarriage might seem like a drop in the bucket for one’s whole ethny, but overwhelming for one’s immediate family.

The major threats to the success of interracial marriages would have to be (a) the strong chances of cultural incompatibility and (b) the lack of the social cohesion that is normally achieved with the relatively close kinship of a within-ethny marriage. The former is a problem on its own merits but it also can act as a marker for degree of biological relatedness which affects cohesion. Cultural incompatibility doesn’t necessarily show up right away. People’s lives go through stages, each with its own set of customs and expectations that might not be apparent until one reached a particular stage. For instance, whether, where, how, and with whom will we be buried after death? And what sort of lives will the children of such a marriage have to look forward to? There are some horror stories, e.g., the isolation of offspring of Americans (especially blacks) and Vietnamese women as a result of the Vietnam War. (Yes, it does depend on what the kids look like.) And where are children of a Jewish-Arab marriage to live? Palestine? If they can form a larger community of people like themselves, they could mitigate the effects of social exclusion, as did the “mulattoes” of Haiti following the war of independence from France. If not, they remain isolates, neither fish nor fowl, possibly handicapped in finding a mate or a welcoming community and a good job. Wishing it otherwise is no help.

15. How do you decide how much immigration to have?

Easy. “Enough immigration” is when you feel in your heart that there has been enough. The problem is that different people will come up with different estimates. For anyone desperate for more labor, cheap or expensive, there is never enough immigration. For people wanting to live among people like themselves and to maintain their culturally specific ways and political systems, nearly any immigration by other ethnies constitutes a potential threat. “None is too many,” a high-level Canadian government official is reputed to have said when asked how many Jews should be accepted during the 1930s. Canadian Jews are still a tiny minority but they certainly did come to exert considerable political and cultural influence through their lobbying efforts (e.g., the strongly pro-Israel Conservative government of Harper of 2010) and via the media (a major newspaper publishing and broadcasting empire, CanWest, built by Izzy Asper and his sons, stridently and successfully promoted a pro-Israel foreign policy). Members of immigrant groups see the sky as the limit. They argue that they constitute no threat whatsoever to the indigenous ethnies/cultures, so not to worry. They naturally ignore the fact that any human being, once he feels at home, will want to adjust his surroundings to his own taste, which means “taking over,” to whatever degree becomes possible. If your city eventually becomes majority Chinese, expect the cultural norms to become Chinese as well…sooner or later.

So there is no sacred answer. The best that can be done in a democratic society is to put it to a vote. When was the last time anyone voted on whether to increase or decrease the level of immigration? Can’t remember, can you? Anyway, each person’s favored immigration rate will reflect some trade-off between a concern for one’s own culture and people going down the tube and some mix of attractions perceived in out-group immigration, including the above economic factors.

16. How can a small territory, enclave, ghetto, neighborhood) control immigration?

It’s not easy, today, what with laws established, in the interest of minorities, to outlaw “discrimination” in residential housing. Notice that no one is outlawed from discriminating when it comes to marriage (cf. personal ads in newspapers asking to meet, say, a “white heterosexual Catholic female” for friendship and possible marriage, etc.). And few object to exceptionally religious people establishing certain types of social enclave for their own group (a Yeshiva University for Jews or a Bob Jones University for white Christian fundamentalists), since who else would want to go to them? The strongest objectors to the state of Israel discriminating in favor of Jews and against gentiles in immigration are those gentiles whose land was taken to make way for Israel, plus a few sympathizers. So the seeming illegitimacy of discrimination depends entirely on its context, on those doing the discriminating, and whether it involves theft or violence, not on the act of discrimination itself. Today in N. America, discrimination is nearly impossible except against whites.

When multicultural ideologies become fashionable, about the only sure way to favor one’s own (or a culturally compatible) ethny in an enclave would be to form a sovereign state. Meanwhile, one might avoid making public any announcement of housing for sale or rent and, instead, advertise by word of mouth or with the help of a sympathetic real estate agent. Perhaps one could set up a housing association with various covenants, conditions, and restrictions that discourage, if not prevent outright, people coming into a community who would be culturally incompatible.⁴² Then we have “ethnic cleansing”, à la Palestine and the late Yugoslavia , or repatriation – which Abraham Lincoln and many other great Americans favored for American Blacks.

17. What do you mean by group structure?

Humans are not bees. Bees have highly preprogrammed (by genes) brain mechanisms that cause them to work for the whole hive, their “group.” Humans may be a little bit “groupy,” instinctively, but a variety of cultural strategies have had to be devised over millennia for accentuating the willingness of group members to act as cohesive, cooperative group members. Some strategies work better than others; some are more enjoyable to live with. There are rules, such as for distinctive clothing – e.g., the Amish, or Hasidic Jews. But if Hasidic men’s garments are unbearably hot in summer, inspiring major investment in air conditioners, they also serve as a test of group loyalty: Anyone willing to put up with the hot clothing must surely be willing to adhere to the less visible and hopefully internalized rules of the group, and hence must be trustworthy within the group. If the garments were simply functional and comfortable, they wouldn’t constitute a good test of trustworthiness. The same goes for a woman’s more or less uncomfortable hijab in the Middle East. If it’s hot enough, women stay indoors and out of trouble (from their husband’s point of view); but if they do venture out, wearing their hijab suggests trustworthiness. Their husbands can then get on with their work without worrying so much about what their wives are up to.

Rules for helping each other within the group can vary, some seemingly more shortsighted than others. The “bucket of crabs” analogy is cited by North American aboriginals for the case, say, of a person who is awarded a fellowship for educational purposes but who ends up giving away so much of the money, in his in-group’s spirit of sharing, that he never does get the degree which would presumably enable him later to help others get ahead. Put crabs in a bucket and as each one tries to climb out of the bucket, the others in trying to climb out themselves, latch onto him and pull him back down. The relevant rule was adaptive for one set of conditions (hunter-gatherer) but is less so for the modern world. So groups vary in willingness to help their talented maximize the use of their talents (e.g., via scholarships paid for by other members); and those who take advantage of the help vary in their willingness to contribute to the group later on.

There has never been a guarantee that devising rules for one’s own group would lead to an optimal set. (Try inventing a set, yourself, to see how hard it is.) Much mental energy must have been expended by humans in such trial and error. The Biblical “Ten Commandments” are just one such set, created for use within Jewish communities (but, interestingly, not for relations with “gentiles”), and Jewish scholarship has devoted thousands of years to elaborating upon these rules (the Talmud). The longevity of Jewish groups, in the face of massive pressures to assimilate, is testimony to the effectiveness of their group rules and structure.

A challenge for any modern nationalist is to come up with a set of rules for the group that are both effective, attractive, legal, and do not become unbearable to live with. A major dilemma involves finding a balance between sacrifice for the group vs. working for oneself.

18. Should everyone be a nationalist?

Nationalists would love to have all fellow coethnics be nationalistic, but any person’s answer depends on his point of view, and, as we have seen, people often have different psychological interests. However, anyone who criticizes others for their nationalism, rather than simply being uninterested, is likely being either hypocritical or envious.

11. Doesn’t the success of multiculturalism show that having the same ancestry is not necessary for a harmonious society as long as people do speak a common language?

It depends on how much “harmony” you would settle for. To achieve the harmony of an ethnically homogeneous nation, you would need more than just a common language. Immigrants would also have to love, accept, and thoroughly learn the host culture, and then intermarry over and over so that any distinctive physical features receded or blended. And they would probably have to forget their ancestral history, so that they wouldn’t end up with dual loyalties.

It is very true that in economically well-off countries such as Canada, in contexts that force many different peoples to brush up against each other daily in factories, universities, schools, etc., there are innumerable instances of harmonious interethnic relations. Things are so harmonious, in fact, that these countries are still merrily promoting multiculturalism year after year, and show no sign of desisting in their invitations to people around the world to “come on over.” Increasingly, however, there are voices to the contrary. The evidence points to a loss of community and mutual trust among citizens as the ethnic homogeneity of a territory is lost. Special interests in control of immigration policy have, in effect, given away the farm.

There are important things to note about multiculturalism. Particularly fascinating is the fact that Jews have arguably been the most vociferous of its advocates in the West, but are ferociously against it when it comes to their own state of Israel. Wonder why? Guess.

Second, multiculturalism has never been the subject of a referendum wherein a majority of the citizens of a country could declare themselves in favor of it—with or without their consent being fully informed as to the possible or likely consequences. Africans were brought to the United States by a small minority of people—e.g., plantation owners—who wanted cheap labor. The result may be good American jazz, but it has also been a long history of miserable racial tension and conflict.

Employers looking for cheap labor are still encouraging more illegal migrants from Mexico. Now “La Raza,” as many Mexican Latinos call themselves, is planning a takeover of the American Southwest. At the present rate of demographic change, they are likely to be a majority in California and several other states before long. They will then have avenged the earlier American takeover of what was once Mexican territory. And their ethny will be dominant. In anticipation of this, many whites are now moving out of California. Regardless of the legal justification for any of these political moves, it should be evident that not all the human beings involved have the same attitude toward these events; that is because they have different psychological “interests.” People the world over can have an interest in moving to economically prosperous lands, and they often succeed, because the majority populations in those lands are not organized effectively to control immigration. Some countries of the West have now probably reached the point of no return, of never being able to stop immigration, and thus prevent another “tragedy of the commons”: alien ethnies will now want to promote further immigration of their own people, so that there will be even less chance of avoiding the overexploitation of a territory’s resources.

Meanwhile, in, e.g., Toronto, various immigrant groups vie with the Hell’s Angels for the highest homicide rate. Jamaican blacks argue that they aren’t the only murderers, that homicide certainly is not in their genes, and that they shouldn’t be racially profiled; their detractors don’t really care whether it’s poverty, genes, or culture: They just wish the Jamaicans would go back to Jamaica. They don’t say that publicly, because such political incorrectness can be prosecuted as a “hate crime.” Then there are the twenty-plus years and 130 million dollars it took Canada to try to prosecute the allegedly Sikh perpetrators of the 1985 Air India crash (only one was finally convicted), thanks in part to ethnic barriers to collecting evidence. Recently Muslim immigrants have demanded the introduction of elements of “sharia” (Muslim law) into the Canadian legal system, while other immigrants screamed that they had just fled sharia. Other Canadians have preferred a more traditional separation of church and state…or full public financing of private Jewish schools…or a Christian imposition of the “right to life” against abortions.

Isn’t multiculturalism wonderful? Well, it is, if you are one of the immigrants who successfully made it to Canada or the U.S. (either recently or in an earlier era), especially if you fled conflicts in the old homeland. Immigrants are mainly looking for improved living conditions, and are not too concerned with their acceptability to host ethnies beyond avoiding serious hostility. Upon arrival, most seem to coalesce around preceding members of their own ethny. Even the aboriginals, who came in several waves, probably did not ask permission from previous waves—any more than did the much later Europeans. The point, for the moment, is not which ethny was right or wrong, but what happens when they all find themselves under the same roof. Multiculturalism, beyond a modest cultural variety in restaurants and the like, is not attractive to those who fear that their political and other cultural ways will be challenged or, sooner or later, overwhelmed and displaced by incompatible mores.

12. Why isn’t everyone nationalistic?

a. Individualism

b. No nation

c. Attachment to one’s ethny is overridden

d. Fear of offending others

e. Deception

Clarifications:

a) Individualism

The self-sufficient individualist feels that he can achieve happiness on his own; any form of nationalism may seem like a giant, oppressive handicap, given all the anticipated time and effort expended in in-group activities. People vary for constitutional reasons on nearly every imaginable biological trait, including personality and motivational factors. Thus attachment to a group can be expected to vary as well. Demanding role requirements can make it difficult to herd many people into a cohesive ethnic grouping; not all roles are equally attractive to or suitable for every person. Good leadership is rare. Most humans are easily frightened sheep. So if there is a military or paramilitary role to be played, only a few reasonably macho males are likely to volunteer to take the necessary risks. The fighters in the IRA and UDA in Ireland are hardly random samples of their populations. Ironically, such “hard men” are sometimes not even supported by many members of their people who later benefit from their sacrifice, e.g., pacifists terrified of violence, true Christians who invariably favor turning the other cheek, devotees of Gandhi, or people who object (on principle or out of fear of retaliation) to their own nationalists’ theft of land and resources from other groups, and so on.

b) No nation

It might not be clear who one’s people are because of mixed ancestry, so that one is an isolate among other ethnies; or one’s “people” consist of a mix of equally salient and historically conflicting groups, such as half-Jewish and half-Arab, or half-African and half-British, that lends itself to identity conflicts or ambiguities. The more mixed our perceived ancestry, the more diffuse should be our conception of our people, unless people with the same mixed ancestry can get together to form a new ethny, e.g., the “Métis” of western Canada (a mix of aboriginal and French ancestry), or the growing coalition of half-Jews. At one extreme, there are people whose ancestry is so incredibly complex that apart from humanity as a whole, they don’t feel especially close to any single present-day ethny. Ethnicity for such “isolates” ought to be pretty much meaningless—unless, of course, they are somehow discriminated against by people who do belong to a specific ethny and regard them as outsiders. But apart from their immediate family, it ought to be hard for them to form strong bonds to any particular large grouping—compared to, say, the average Croat, whose ancestry is more homogeneous. There are naive idealists, often (erstwhile) communists, who recommend as much mixture of ancestry as possible. They urge this, first, because they see ancestry as unimportant: marry whomever you like. But often they see vast amounts of intermarriage as an antidote to war or other vicissitudes of ethnic competition, an inadvertent recognition that ethnic homogeneity is indeed meaningful. What would be the result? While one batch of multiculturalists is joyfully mixing their children’s ancestry, other batches will be sticking to the path of homogeneous ethnicity, with all the competitive advantages that accrue to especially cohesive groups. The isolated idealists will gradually be squeezed to the margins, perhaps under some form of exploitation or even “slavery” (just think of the millions of unprotected Russian and Eastern European women who are currently being forced into prostitution [“white slavery”]), if not eventually lost to the forces of natural selection. Inter-group relations may not be inevitably competitive, at least to the point of unpleasantness, but they sometimes are—in which case, who is likely to win, or at least to successfully defend themselves?

c) Attachment to one’s ethny overridden

It can be overridden by a lack of pride in one’s people, or by a dislike or hatred resulting from a harrowing family or group life. Nearly any motive can be overridden by other more urgent needs and motives. Not everyone is hungry at suppertime. Hunger is obviously a “biological need,” but can easily be overridden by an exciting television program.

People also vary in how hunger driven they are, some becoming obese, others anorexic. It’s the same for ethnic cohesion. Individualism, the desire to go it alone, love of solitude—all these tendencies may be somewhat heritable (so that if one identical twin were like that, it’s a good bet that the other twin of the pair is similar). Ask them to behave like a hive of Hutterites or Hasidic Jews and they will instantly feel suffocated and run for the door.

Unfortunate family experiences, or the feeling that one’s own people are a bad lot, can prompt a search for another ethny/culture with which to gradually acculturate and eventually assimilate through intermarriage (e.g., Princess Diana’s attraction to the warmth of Egyptian culture).

Serendipitous, wonderful experiences with an out-group can, especially if following upon earlier misery, inspire hope for a new and better life, a feeling of paradise found. This is what many emigrants hope for and, if found, can lead to a desire to change their ethny and assimilate, or else to frustration if the host ethny is not as welcoming as had been hoped.

Family ties can be overridden by romantic/sexual attractions. But imagine the bind if the respective ethnies are at loggerheads, e.g., a mixed Serbian and Muslim couple in Bosnia during their internecine strife. Imagine their offspring torn in two by pressures from both sides. Such unfortunates must surely feel impelled to just clear out of that part of the world to find solace elsewhere. Hence the effort seen in so many ethnies to prevent their offspring coming in too close contact with out-groups during life stages important for mate choice. Again, think of “honor killings” in which a woman is killed by her father or brother for having contravened the marital choice rules designed to maintain family cohesion where such cohesion is felt to be absolutely crucial for success in life. Such people know instinctively that it’s not just a matter of maintaining cultural compatibility but, in addition, has to do with the degree of trust that comes from optimal kinship and from obeying a family’s chief decision maker. “Optimal” here refers, also, to the fact that one shouldn’t marry someone too closely related, either, since too much inbreeding (as in incest, or the equivalent with small endogamous tribes) courts the hazard of genetic defects. See FAQ #14 re interracial marriages.

d) Fear of offending others

A person with friends in out-groups might sense that professing a nationalism of his own would conflict with such affections. But need that be the case? After all, a powerful love for one’s own parents needn’t prevent anyone from having friends and lovers outside one’s own family. A reunion that is fundamentally one of family ties on Thanksgiving or Christmas has never prevented families from inviting all manner of friends and acquaintances home for at least some of its celebrations. Having one’s own family as a first priority does not preclude positive relations with any other person, or even other species of animal and plant.

Still don’t think such prioritizing is necessary? Well, again, think about whom you would turn to when in severe difficulty? Do you have the backup of people you can trust? Who will take responsibility for you during severe illness and old age? Or are you all alone to fend off whatever sort of gang you are up against? Whom would you try to save from falling off a cliff when the choice is among individuals varying in kinship to you? Please try your best when doing this mental exercise to equate these individuals on variables other than kinship, such as how nice they are as persons, how healthy they are, their age. Try out different combinations. Your sister vs. your cat; your sister vs. a chimpanzee; your sister vs. your cousin; your father vs. your uncle, a fellow Icelander vs. a Swede; a fellow Icelander vs. a Vietnamese; etc. Which choices are easiest to make? Why?

e) Deception

The most vehement criticism of nationalism often comes from members of a minority ethny who are cleverly attempting to reduce the competitive power of other, larger ethnies by reducing their cohesion. Make nepotism, nationalism, or any kind of in-group appreciation “politically incorrect” enough and an ethny’s nationalism is sabotaged. To override kinship is nothing new. In the past, children have been induced to denounce their parents for not being communist enough or religious enough. It’s all very ironic if the people doing the criticizing, e.g., Jews, are themselves highly and cohesively nationalistic. But it’s a neat trick if they can pull it off.

Religious doctrine can override kinship by, in effect, deceiving a person into treating out-group members as if they were kin: “We are all brothers under the skin,” they might say, when of course literally this is patently untrue. Christianity may have succeeded so well in such sleights of hand in part by creating a confusion between an altruistic spirit of reciprocity vs. altruistic sacrifice in which one’s own people are, in effect, handicapped.

To be concluded . . .

6. How do we reach reciprocity from “might-makes-right”?

The same way it was done in the Wild West. Try to introduce the “rule of law” (a form of reciprocity insofar as it results from social contract, not imposition) and hire good sheriffs who shoot straight—something never appreciated by the outlaws or by governments of powerful countries that don’t think they will ever have to reciprocate. (“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”) World War I and then World War II were supposed to mark the end of ethnic holocausts. But these have persisted, albeit on a smaller scale. So the rule of law is certainly very hard to establish. Ever since the League of Nations was proposed as a way of substituting self-determination and peaceful arbitration for interethnic warfare, humans still haven’t gotten their act fully together. Hypocrisy seems to be built into nearly everyone (“let he who hath not sinned…”). In which case, while we’re waiting, nationalism is still a rational and absolutely necessary strategy for self-defense. Use it or lose it.

7. Doesn’t nationalism inspire a feeling of superiority that is used to justify dominating other ethnies?

Obviously a nationalist will feel that his own culture is best for himself and not want it to be displaced by another. However, it is common, especially for successful nations, to feel superior to and to want to impose their rule or culture on others (as the U.S. government and Israel are attempting to do in the Middle East, early twenty-first century), but that is not a logically or empirically necessary adjunct to ethnic, in-group favoritism. The Swiss cantons, ethnically and linguistically different, have lived for many happy generations with no serious inclination to take over their neighboring cantons, although recently there was a brief cantonal readjustment to better achieve cantonal homogeneity.

8. What is the relationship between reciprocity and kinship?

They aren’t 100 percent mutually exclusive. There is no reason why we can’t have reciprocal dealings with kin. It’s just that it’s not quite such a disaster if they don’t reciprocate—after all, they are carrying some of our genes. On the other hand, there is often an understanding in families that if the family is to be “always there” for its members, the members ought to always be there for the family. So that if a member is not willing to contribute to the family’s vitality, he shouldn’t expect the family to be forever there to help him out. The so-called honor killings of some societies follow that logic and go a step further in not only withdrawing their help but in actually killing the individualist who has, say, married someone not acceptable to the family. The loss of “honor” comes from that person ruining the family’s reputation for trustworthiness in defense of group interests. Who in that culture would want to marry into that family if it is perceived as careless in making marital alliances? Also, having already invested a great deal in that person, the family would resent seeing all their investment wasted—as they perceive it. Obviously people will disagree about how much they are contributing to or detracting from the common good. But in reciprocal relations there is no getting away from such calculations. The value of cleverness in the context of exchange may have been a major selection pressure behind the evolution of the large human brain.

One can have kinship-like dealings with non-kin insofar as non-kin are able to simulate kin. But by and large, kin relationships end up being restricted to kin—with due allowance for the flexibility of who are considered “kin.” We are often extremely fond of other animals, not to mention members of completely different ethnies or races. Yet these affections, however powerful, are arguably not quite the same as close family ties, even though people may try to treat them as such. Example: the adopted child who, even though very fond of her foster parents, eventually has an urge to find her birth parents and (re-)establish a real kin relationship. Another example: Compare marriages between cousins with marriages between spouses who are much less closely related. The great worldwide popularity of the former may relate to the fact that cousins have both kinship ties as well as attraction based on reciprocity, while a marriage of non-kin is dependent entirely on reciprocity.

Members of a human group based on kinship can afford to help each other without too much regard for being “paid back,” since as long as their genes are being reproduced by at least someone in the group, who cares very much whose survival and reproductive success are being most advantaged? In a group of unrelated people (e.g., a labor union), however, members have to continually evaluate whether they are receiving their money’s worth from their common endeavors. Hence the extra effectiveness of nationalist groups in struggling for goals which will benefit their members. The efficacy is so great that there may well have been a natural selection for instinctive mechanisms for group loyalty, willingness to sacrifice oneself for the group (e.g., suicide bombers), patriotism, etc. Some animals have such instincts, as when a mother doesn’t simply flee from the nest at the sight of a predator but rather acts, at some risk to herself, as a decoy to distract the predator from her young. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find humans preprogrammed to take risks for kin. Humans are also at times willing to risk their lives for non-kin, it is true. But the willingness tends to be less than for kin and to take place in contexts where a certain amount of reciprocity can be expected—e.g., only in small communities where everyone knows each other and reputations for risk-taking on behalf of others can be acquired. So we might expect some sacrificial risk-taking in small communities of unrelated humans (e.g., an army unit), but expect even more in ethnically homogeneous communities.

If someone doesn’t reciprocate, words such as “cheating” or “parasitism” come to a biologist’s mind. Social dilemmas can turn on what should, in fact, have been expected. Usury, the charging of interest for a loan, was historically considered illegitimate for Christians and Muslims (for Jews, too, but not when dealing with non-Jews). Perhaps the value of the interest paid by a borrower was perceived as being more than the cost of the loan to the lender and so represented a form of unequal exchange—or cheating. Or, in a small homogeneous community, loans might have been something everyone could be expected to need sooner or later, and thus be reciprocated in kind. Close kin, as in members of a tribe, might not anticipate “interest” on a loan that benefited common genetic interests.

Consider Christian (or other) ideologies that encourage people to give, charitably, to non-kin without any expectation of getting something in return. Are the people doing the giving being cheated? If it happened enough, they might be severely handicapped relative to competitors. At another level, it might not be cheating if the charity were seen as promoting human biodiversity via a form of reciprocal altruism (insurance), provided it does not come at too great a cost to one’s own people.

9. Why would anyone doubt the relationship of family or extended family to ethnicity and nation?

First, unconscious psychological processes cannot easily be brought to conscious awareness, where they can be evaluated or seen for what they are. Westerners brought up without material suffering, never having lived through a war or other serious crisis, may simply have no idea how they would behave in severe ethnic conflict. Normally they are ever so tolerant and outgoing to people of other ethnies and races, never imagining that they would ever behave otherwise. But if suddenly terrorized by a gang from one of those out-groups, they might well find themselves searching desperately for a familiar face, i.e., someone as much like themselves, ethnically/racially, as possible. This will be done instantly and instinctively, without thought for what is politically correct or egalitarian or nice or prejudiced. Notice how quickly “racial profiling” became de rigueur for security agencies following the demolition of the World Trade Center by Arabs and subsequent terrorist acts.

Second, nationalism is not an inevitable or automatic phenomenon, however likely it may be by virtue of belonging, objectively, to an ethny. (Why? See the next FAQ, #10.)

A major reason for confusion over the connection of family to ethnicity is that there have been mischievous ideologies that have propagandized over the years against the positive aspects of biological relatedness, or anything biological at all. One has only to think of all the extreme environmentalists (in the nature-nurture debates) and egalitarians who promote not just equal rights but also the idea that humans have equal abilities across groups, if not as individuals, as if biological variation has ceased to apply to humans. Bring up anything biological and they go through the roof. Won’t discuss it. Hysteria reigns.

Finally, there is the ready observation that all is not sweetness and light in nearly any family, sibling rivalry being only one example. The Ottoman sultans routinely killed their own brothers. However, this issue seems to have been pretty well laid to rest by those who noticed that if you can hold all other factors constant except for varying degree of kinship, it turns out that one is still clearly better off and safer by being surrounded by kin than by non-kin. Other factors are not normally constant, though, so when there is not enough of a resource to go around, or there is a vast amount up for grabs, there is good reason for a bias in favor of all one’s own genes at the expense of even an only slightly smaller set of them present in close relatives, never mind people of a very different ethny or race. So expect competition for resources to take place throughout the relatedness hierarchy whenever competition at a higher level doesn’t take precedence. E.g., expect Jews in Occupied Palestine to argue and fight even more with each other than they do now if the Arab-Israeli conflict is ever resolved. That will be “subsidiarity” at work. However, a healthy family or nation finds ways of balancing the virtues of kin solidarity with rivalries.

Objectively, parents’ biological “interests” are maximally fulfilled if their parental investment is distributed to those offspring with the greatest chance of survival, success, and further reproduction. And so parents sometimes discriminate, whereas no child wants to be discriminated against. Parents can try to treat children equally, especially if their prospects seem comparable, but also in order to minimize counterproductive rivalry and promote cooperation among them. Family unity in Iran is promoted by outlawing unequal inheritance among sons. (To get around this, when one’s heirs seem to have very different potentials, would require performing a triage while still alive.)

Similar logic pertains to the larger ethnic group. Helping one’s kin does not necessarily mean helping all of them equally, since some are more valuable to the group than others. There is no point in expecting otherwise. To ask of someone what he cannot give is simply to guarantee disappointment and resentment toward a person who cannot rise to the occasion as one might have liked.

Thus the most “worthy” of the group’s aid are those who appear to carry the best genes and have the best character and talents relevant to the group’s success—much as scholarships are normally given to the best students. It doesn’t mean that others have to be thrown to the dogs. The least talented did not wish their bad luck. And a nation benefits if all members are encouraged to contribute to their full potential, however meager, and are appreciated for whatever role they can play. Nationalists living together will want a good safety net for their ethny and are typically willing to pay taxes to a communal pot for both common services and communal insurance systems. But in multicultural societies “…it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state…” The perceived risks of parasitism become too high and sympathy for other ethnies too low – as in the reticence of many Americans to support Obama’s Health Care proposals.

A successful nation must appreciate and honor differences in talent in many areas—in political leadership, capacity to recognize danger, expertise in technology or agriculture, courage in warfare, charisma, good health (including good genes), promotion of psychological and social health, noblesse oblige, leadership in community rituals and celebrations.

There will always be some individuals that deliberately, if not out of weakness, sabotage or otherwise work against the interests of the group. These individuals must somehow be neutralized: either placed in a position where their weakness cannot fail the group, or, in extremis, ejected from the group.

10. Why aren’t cultural differences the reason for nationalism?

Well, they are—in a sense. It’s just that they aren’t the fundamental basis of it. Nevertheless, today many think that cultural differences are what cause nationalism. Even people who ought to know better, such as the majority ethny of Québec, the French-speaking Québécois. These days they focus chiefly on protecting the French language, one of the more salient of cultural traits (meaning traits that people learn rather than exhibit instinctively). The result has been that they think that all they have to do to protect their nation is to make sure everyone speaks French, regardless of their ancestry. You can be from China or Haiti, but as long as you speak French, Québec nationalists don’t seem to worry much about your effect on the future of Québec. On the other hand, they have the expression, “Québécois de souche,” which certainly does mean Québécois by virtue of common ancestry—all the way back to the early French immigrants out of St. Mâlo—and which betrays an instinctive understanding of the importance of that ancestry. But they return uneasily to language in an effort to appease various other ethnies now living in Québec who would be affronted to think that they weren’t considered full-fledged “Quebecers”. They are confusing citizenship with ethnicity.

The sociologist Pierre van den Berghe pointed out that cultural differences are very often the best clue people have to their genetic differences, that is, differences in ancestry. Historically, most competition or warfare has been between groups of people who looked much the same physically. Thus differences in clothing, vocabulary, accent, behavior, tattoos, customs, or personal acquaintance were what they had to go on in deciding whose extended family or tribe they belonged to. Genetically transmitted physical features (the basis of “racial differences”), when they are more common in one group than another, can be especially good “markers” for ancestry. Returning to the question at hand, think of a hen: FAQ#10 is like asking whether the reason the hen sits on her eggs is that they carry her genes or, alternatively, because of the environmental aspects of the eggs’ appearance and location in the nest. The question makes little sense, since she must use any available and appropriate markers, such as appearance or location, in order to ensure that the eggs’ role in reproducing genes is carried out.

But nothing is perfect: To the extent that one can fake markers for an ancestry, one will be treated as though one had that ancestry. Teaching a recent immigrant to speak French like a Québécois de souche would be like placing duck eggs in a hen’s nest: Are the markers similar enough? In fact, some hens will still sit on them as though they were their own eggs. Yes, the eggs hatch and the little ducks then imprint on the mother hen and follow her around and she just goes about her own business oblivious to the “error” she has made. Apparently natural selection has not prepared that species of hen for such trickery. Similarly, speaking Quebec style French will clearly help the immigrant to Quebec become accepted, as well. But will it be sufficient? See below.

To be continued . . .

3. Why aren’t the nearly 100 percent of our genes that everyone shares more important than those few that vary?

Indeed, around 99.9 percent of all the genes that a human being carries can be found in all other humans, and 98 percent in chimpanzees. Similar percentages of shared genes are found in most other animal species. So obviously it’s the tiny handful of remaining genes (perhaps 30 or so out of 30,000), each of which can have different versions (alleles), that cause people, primates, and other animals to differ from each other. It is those genes that can and do differ which are the basis for an increase in altruism as biological relatedness increases. Perhaps this is the basis for the oft-repeated phrase from Freud, the “narcissism of small differences.”

Suppose that a mutation (a new allele) happens to be useful. It makes sense (from the point of view of the whole package of genes within which the mutation is immersed) that there be some way to keep it from being lost to posterity. How? Well, surely not by worrying solely or mostly about the 99.9 percent of genes all humans share. No, you have to give proper attention to that new allele. The person carrying it has to reproduce it by making babies with his or her spouse. And while some animals can just walk away at this point, leaving offspring to their own devices, humans take care of their kids, e.g., that child now carrying the good mutation. That mutation might be one that encourages a parent to take better care of her child—who may, in turn, be carrying the same good mutation. That’s the feedback loop enabling altruism in the first place.

All this requires being able to recognize one’s kids. How? There are many possible ways: Look at whose body they came out of and who had sex with the mother, or physical resemblance, or what people say about the child’s ancestry, etc. Some of these clues are more reliable than others hence the attention to “small differences.” Then the parents have to be motivated to take care of their child—who is carrying half of each parent’s genes (since mammals undergo sexual and not asexual reproduction, or cloning). For all of this to happen reliably, via accurate detection of whose child is whose, plus a desire to take care of one’s own child (rather than any child or any object in the neighborhood), there have to be genes which program us to do the right thing. Notice that if one had a desire to take care of someone else’s child rather than one’s own, that would be the end of one’s own genes—including that lovely mutation. One doesn’t have to know about genes, but one has to have the right genes in order to do the right thing for this object (child) that came out of the mother’s body and the father’s sperm. Other objects come out of our body that we certainly do not take care of (no offense intended). So what’s the difference? Genes. Genes that program the “instincts” which enable us to identify and take care of our children properly (along with what we’ve learned from our parents). And since our children have inherited those genes, 50 percent of them in each child, the genes will be self-perpetuating. Get rid of those genes for “caring-for-own-kids” and the self-perpetuation evaporates.

Now then, if that logic works so well for one’s own children, couldn’t it work, in principle at least, in regard to individuals who didn’t come out of our own bodies but who nevertheless are carrying many of our genes because we have ancestors in common that came out of the same bodies? Providing, that is, that we can identify them and then want to promote their survival and reproductive careers. Apparently we have such propensities. And that must be the basis for whatever extra cohesion we find among extended relatives compared to nonrelatives. How do you feel about your own brothers and sisters? Your nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, cousins? Some people find themselves alienated from even their closest relatives, but that is usually because of something extremely unpleasant that happened (e.g., excessive sibling rivalry). Were it not for that unfortunate matter, surely they would not be so seemingly indifferent to them. Notice what transpires when long lost relatives suddenly find each other after decades of separation due to war, adoption, or exile. Very touching, no? All because they share genes. What alternative is there? Remember, if genes were not running the show, you wouldn’t likely have the same show repeated across every other culture. Rather, just by chance you would expect a few different shows: such as cultures in which people routinely prefer non-kin and foreigners to their own kin, where they routinely prefer to raise other ethnies’ children and give their own away to foreigners (if they have them at all). But think natural selection: Whose kids, on average, are most likely to be best off and most likely to reproduce?

Frank Salter, whose book on nationalism is strongly recommended here, uses the phrase “genetic interests” in conceptualizing the relationship between genes and their reproduction. He doesn’t mean that genes or most animals carrying genes are capable of imagining their genes’ interests, even if they act as if they could. Genes just program their carriers to act that way. Such interests are more analogous to financial interests a person might have without being aware of them, an educational fund, say, that one day a child will inherit. A rock doesn’t have an interest one way or another in remaining intact or in becoming crushed rock. But that’s because it lacks any semblance of a process dedicated to even self-interest, never mind reproduction.

It’s an empirical question how and if a human being will go about promoting his genetic interests. Just because an Icelander’s genes are heavily represented in other Icelanders and, metaphorically, have an interest in being reproduced, does not mean that they, their carrier, or anyone else will have the necessary psychological motive for, or psychological interest in, reproducing them. He might or he might not. Is there any point in saying to a reluctant Icelander, “Hey, your genes have an interest in getting reproduced, so get busy and do the right thing”? It might be worth bringing up the subject in case he had the right motives but had merely been distracted, or didn’t realize he had so many virtual brothers on the island. (Incidentally, Salter, citing recent DNA data, is confident that Europeans in general are much more closely related to each other than heretofore imagined, thanks to the small size of their early prehistoric breeding pool following initial migrations to Europe. Imagine the thousands of present-day Icelanders growing to a hundred million or so. If additional immigration were restrained, they would find themselves with millions of virtual siblings.) However, if our Icelander friend is not at all interested in those previously unimagined relatives, there may not be any point in haranguing him. If he were nationalistic, though, the fact that his genes are scattered among other Icelanders would make it all understandable; that is i.e., it would make sense that he had an evolved mechanism for acting as if he knew that they, too, were carriers of his own genes—just as a mother bird acts as if she knew that her eggs carried her genes. Look at a bird for the first time, and for all you know she may be a one-off creature that just came into the world and is unique. But if she has eggs and takes care of them and if you know all about DNA and genes, you say to yourself, Aha! She very likely has some sort of built-in, preprogrammed brain mechanisms for getting her to do all that—sitting on eggs, feeding chicks after they hatch, etc. So now when we see Icelanders or the Irish acting nationalistically, we know about the genes they share, and so it makes sense to us that they should be nationalistic—rather than, say, run off en masse to volunteer to be slaves for Africans. A few Irish are not at all nationalistic, but there are probably a few birds now and then that don’t sit on their eggs properly. No machinery is totally impervious to malfunction. And the many interesting things to do in life and the many wonderful people in other cultures can easily distract humans. One could distract a bird from sitting on her eggs.

4. Why is kinship “relative”?

If the above account of kinship is true, it means that who we consider to be “our people” will normally depend on whom we actually are most closely related to and on our ability to reliably detect who those relatives are. But “most closely” is a relative concept. How close is “close” depends on whom we are comparing, which often means whom we are competing with. Compared to chimpanzees, Africans are “closer” to Icelanders. Compared to Africans, Swedes are closer to Icelanders. Compared to Swedes, other Icelanders are closer. Our identical twin is closer than our ordinary sibling. So there are no absolutes here. But the logic implies obvious priorities. Whom we consider “our people” and ally ourselves with in a crunch will follow that logic, other things being equal. It will depend on context and on whom, if anyone, we find ourselves competing against. Confusion here is the reason for arguments over whether one should identify oneself as a “white” or as a “Englishman” or “Spaniard”.

As a practical matter, the idea of ethnic relativity may have something to do with the notion of “subsidiarity” discussed frequently by Europeans (especially the British, and especially the British magazine The Economist) in connection with the European Union. This is the idea that all problems in life should be dealt with initially at the lowest possible political level (family, or neighborhood, or municipality, etc.), and that only if insoluble at that level should they be moved to the next higher level, and finally even to Brussels and the European Union—or to the United Nations. Subsidiarity would seem to follow a general logic of human concern. The first interest of any human is normally his own welfare and future, followed by his family and up through his extended family and ethny, extending eventually to all human beings and finally to the continued existence of life in general on the planet. At the higher levels of subsidiarity, we find a universal nationalist’s respect for ethnic and cultural diversity—in contrast to homogenizing globalization.

5. Doesn’t nationalism promote wars between ethnies?

Of course. Not a problem if you love the excitement and fulfillment of warfare, and the booty. Indeed, the genetics of kinship do partly account for the wars that occur between different peoples. Race wars (big genetic differences) may come to mind as especially horrible. However, frequency of warfare has recently been reported to be positively [sic] related to genetic similarity, even after controlling for geographic proximity. Reason suggested: genetic similar means similar economic and other interests that can more easily conflict. E.g, Palestinian Jews and Arabs (genetically similar) both feel entitlement to the same land. Nevertheless, expect even closer kinship within than between such groups if they are endogamous.

But suppose you aren’t a war lover? Then go for the “reciprocity” mentioned earlier. And yes, there is a biological underpinning to it all. If that draws a blank, here’s a brief intro.

Genes can be promoted not only by squashing your competitors but also by mutual aid arrangements—between individuals who don’t necessarily share any genes at all. Think of bees pollinating flowers and getting nectar in return; or the tiny fish that nourish themselves by helpfully cleaning the teeth and gills of very large fish in coastal waters. The only way these mutually beneficial arrangements can work, long term, is by ensuring that it’s a two-way street. It can work between nearly any organisms if their mutual benefit is simultaneous, so that if either one ceases to benefit, the other automatically gets cut off, too, and so neither can exploit the other. But humans are capable of reciprocity over time. You help me today and I will, in return, help you tomorrow, thanks to our big brains that can minimize exploitation. It’s division of labor, the economists’ “law of comparative advantage,” It may account for an enormous amount of human sociality, including warm friendships across ethnic and racial lines as well as more prosaic sorts of trade and commerce. Some people’s careers make them exceptionally prone to this type of interethnic relation, e.g., academics, political and professional elites; those involved in trade and the transport of goods and people between countries, etc.

Much of our emotional make-up (genetically evolved machinery in the brain) is thought to be devoted to monitoring and regulating these reciprocities. Feelings of friendship, attachment, obligation, or guilt toward nonrelatives exist because the capacity to feel these emotional incentives promotes beneficial reciprocity. The outrage felt when we are cheated motivates us to stop giving anything to those who don’t reciprocate. Vengeful feelings motivate us to punish those who cheat on us or betray us. Specialized cognitive systems serve us in detecting cheaters. Since all humans seem to be prone to self-interested bias, cheating requires constant management. Reciprocity may have originated in relations with relatively close kin, gradually becoming extended to genetically more and more distant humans as natural selection rewarded such commerce.

Read Part 3 here.

Editor’s Note: The following essay is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in print in The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 2005). For ease of online reading, it is presented here without notes, which can be found in the archived version of the print edition. I should, however, mention that Dr. Hilton’s argument is heavily indebted to Frank Salter’s theory of Ethnic Genetic Interests presented in his On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration. This is the first of five parts.

Explanation

These thoughts on “nationalism” were put on paper for the benefit of several young relatives who have misunderstood or been puzzled by my position on certain family and political issues.* Arguing about individual bits of a puzzle without an overall framework has been a waste of time and emotion. So I’ve tried to give, first, a brief overview or “manifesto,” followed by several specific explanations. Perhaps these considerations will help others faced with critics unfamiliar with the biology of human nature.

Here’s a thought: You either like your own people or you don’t. If you don’t, well, too bad, and we’ll get back to you in a minute. But if you do like your own people—that is, your own children, family, extended family, clan, tribe, or ethnic group, hereinafter called your “ethny” or nation (and we’ll get back to these words, in a minute, too)—this memorandum offers some considerations concerning life on this planet that today, oddly, many people and conventional wisdom seem to ignore. You may also appreciate the fact that our planet contains many other cultures and ethnies/nations, whose continued existence you might also be in favor of in accordance with today’s quasi-ideology of “bio-diversity.” That is, if you claim to love and respect other cultures, races, or ethnies as well as your own, you would do nothing to destroy or unduly change them. You would then be a “universal nationalist.”

Most people ought to be able to answer quite easily, when asked, “Yes, I would like to see my own people and culture continue to exist, not disappear,” or else, “No, my people and culture are not worth saving—I couldn’t care less if they vanished from the face of the earth.” To favor the continuation (the non-disappearance) of one’s people does not mean that one wouldn’t like to see improvements in flawed individuals (and who doesn’t have a few flaws?) or find some way of keeping flawed individuals from sabotaging the cause. One might like to see improvements in certain cultural details or personality traits common in one’s group, and the eugenic elimination of nasty genes wherever feasible. But such improvements would not be intended to remove either the major cultural traits or the vast majority of the characteristic genes that one’s people carry around and reproduce each generation.

Now then, if (and only if) you do not want your people to disappear, wouldn’t you necessarily have to favor the following policies?

First, you would favor a protective/defensive “nationalism” in regard to your own extended family and ethny. This need not be to the exclusion of commerce and other valuable reciprocal relationships with other families, other peoples, other ethnies. There is no good reason why your nationalism can’t be thoroughly compatible with other nationalisms and even synergistic with them—at least, or especially, if there is provision for some sort of regulatory-adjudicative body and police force to prevent any one ethny from being unduly predatory and pounding the stuffing out of its neighbors. Predation was not always irrational, as long as the odds were good that your side would win out and claim all the booty. But predators have to worry about their victims taking revenge (as in “terrorism”). No one likes to be the loser in a war, and in today’s wars often everyone is the loser, not least because wars pollute and interfere with depolluting the planet. Genocide, the slaughter of an ethny in its entirety, or its complete assimilation into another ethny, is analogous to the extinction of any species of plant or animal.⁵ Just as “biodiversity” is regarded as potentially beneficial across the animal and plant kingdoms, so, arguably, is human diversity in particular. One never knows when or how another culture or ethny may turn out to benefit one’s own, but if they go extinct, they are lost forever. Maybe there are some cultures that you detest, but maybe you should hold your nose and hope that they survive, too—someplace.

Second, you would want at least one territory, including a homeland, for your own people and culture as the easiest, most practical way to protect your ethny from being swamped by other ethnies. With a territory for every ethny, each is then responsible for not overloading its carrying capacity. The territory need not be large, e.g., a Swiss canton. Most of today’s cities contain micro ethnic enclaves (however vulnerable to invasion) along with areas that are heterogeneous.

Third, you would want at most a very modest amount of immigration into your territory, along with tourism, to provide exposure to alternative and possibly better cultural ways, without being forced to adopt them. Guest workers can provide extra labor when needed. Notice that most people can’t get past an all-or-nothing statement of the issue: You either allow immigration or you don’t; they can’t think in terms of “a little, but not a lot.”

Fourth, at most a very modest amount of intermarriage with other ethnies to counter the genetic effects of too much inbreeding, or to achieve other eugenic goals, e.g., to have smarter kids.

Fifth, you would need some sort of group structure or community (with rules, customs, laws, etc.) designed to help achieve the above goals.

Sixth, group structure and community would, for many people, be handicapped without a full embrace of the spiritual world, which, in essence, seems to be a conscious and unconscious acceptance of and celebration of the “sacred,” i.e., of the extreme importance of certain aspects of our lives, both social and physical, and a devotion to the quest for paradise in this best of all possible worlds. Nowadays, of course, any spiritual or religious dogma that is contrary to the findings of modern science, typified by the antipathy of some Christian and Muslim doctrines to the idea of biological (Darwinian) evolution, will likely alienate the most talented of one’s people. This antipathy has obscured what is surely the most sacred priority imaginable, the survival on this planet of one’s people, however defined: one’s “sacred nation.” What is sacred is essentially what is vitally important. Rituals that are sacred are those that surround important milestones in life (birth, marriage, death, etc.) and that promote successful negotiation through these stages of life.

There are people who are nationalistic without calling themselves “religious,” but to exclude the spiritual is to ignore the enormous fulfillment which a focus on the spiritual can provide for many people in matters of success, love, tragedy, and death, and in encouraging a healthy and cohesive community. A major problem historically has been that so much that characterizes well-known religions seems contrary to common sense, irrational or silly (some concepts of the hereafter), maladaptive (the “promiscuous” altruism of some Christians), hypocritical (“Onward Christian Soldiers”), unnecessarily hazardous to outsiders (Zionists, Crusaders, Taliban), and therefore unnecessarily alienating. For many of us, they also originated in foreign lands, in people and cultures that lived in different times, ecologies, and circumstances. Surely all this can be improved upon.

An incidental note: To say that you favor the above policies doesn’t necessarily imply anything about what you are personally prepared to do about them, only that you would necessarily favor them if you want your people to be protected. E.g., you might be too busy, distracted, discouraged, or lazy to do much about them. Maybe you’re so far along in your life that you can only hope others will do the job. Encourage them.

So, in brief, that’s about it. However, thanks to a half century or so of massive ideological campaigns against the relevance of biology for human social relations, any defender or critic of nationalism should become familiar with a few essential understandings. Perhaps the following will help.

_____________________

FAQs

In which we address a number of misunderstandings or frequently asked questions.

1) What is meant by “our own people”?

2) What is biological kinship all about? Why is it such a strong glue?

3) Why aren’t the nearly 100 percent of our genes that everyone shares more important than those few that vary?

4) Why is kinship “relative”?

5) Doesn’t nationalism promote wars between ethnies?

6) How do we reach reciprocity from “might-makes-right”?

7) Doesn’t nationalism inspire a feeling of superiority that is used to justify dominating other ethnies?

8 ) What is the relationship between reciprocity and kinship?

9) Why would anyone doubt the relationship of family or extended family to ethnicity and nation?

10) Why aren’t cultural differences the reason for nationalism?

11) Doesn’t the success of multiculturalism show that having the same ancestry is not necessary for a harmonious society as long as people speak a common language?

12) Why isn’t everyone nationalistic?

13) How do you explain the fact that a major football rivalry for Tunisia seems to be with another North African country, Morocco, rather than with countries that are much more distantly related?

14) What’s wrong with interracial marriage?

15) How do you decide how much immigration to have?

16) How can a small territory (enclave, ghetto, neighborhood) control immigration?

17) What do you mean by group structure?

18) Should everyone be a nationalialist?

___________________________

1. What is meant by “our own people”?

This can vary all over the lot. Situations differ in how salient they make certain degrees of closeness among kin. A holiday may focus our minds on immediate family, while a family reunion could bring together a large collection of people with the same last name. A war can make us concerned for our whole ethny or nation (e.g., Irish Catholics or Serbs or Jews) as it is aligned against an enemy nation. Note that we often belong to associations such as a flying club, or a labor union, or to a management team. But we’re mostly concerned here with groupings that are based on some degree of biological kinship, which seems to be an especially powerful glue for group formation, rather than common economic or other interests. American workers tend to resent their jobs being outsourced to “fellow” workers in Southeast Asia or to illegal immigrants: Where is the worker solidarity there?

2. What is biological kinship all about? Why is it such a strong glue?

Most people around the world understand something about the importance of “blood,” or family, as a primary source of help, backup, love, and social cohesion, a fundamental basis for sociality. Several sharp minds managed to convince many gullible minds to the contrary, during the twentieth century, but fortunately their forces seem now to be in retreat.

Common sense tells us that a first and very natural impulse for most of us (with due allowance for abnormal individuals or situations) is the promotion of our own lives and self-defense. Thanks however to important insights by biologists (see, e.g., Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, for an introduction), it is now clear that we share many of our distinctive genes (the all-important DNA strands that are blueprints for proteins out of which human beings are constructed) with kin. (Note: We are talking about only those distinctive genes [“alleles”] that can vary across humans, not the vast number—well over 90 percent of our genes—that all of us have in common.) If the recent insights are correct, the ultimate meaning of life, and the raison d’être for any altruism and social cohesion at all, is the promotion of our distinctive genes along with the others. The way DNA gets perpetuated is by building a body that looks and acts in ways that lead to reproduction of those same strands of DNA molecules. No reproduction, no more DNA. Thus, one way of promoting this reproduction is by helping our kin as well as ourselves. One sees this dramatically in the ultra-cooperation between identical twins—who share all their genes with each other. It can also be seen in the considerable social cohesion exhibited by small, ethnically homogeneous societies such as exist in Iceland. Given their degree of within-island, yet non-incestuous, marriage, the average Icelander has the equivalent of over a thousand siblings in the community, if one considers that she will likely share at least a few of the Icelandically distinctive genes with each of the several hundred thousand people in Iceland. Add them all up—that is, across all the individuals with whom she shares at least one—and it makes perfect sense that Icelanders should be cohesive: helping other Icelanders would be like helping all those virtual siblings. Genetic commonality means a certain amount of commonality of interest. Common interest is a basis for trust, since insofar as people want the same thing for each other, they are unlikely to betray each other.

Read Part 2 here.

Cola di Rienzi, c. 1313 - 1354

Ronald F. Musto
Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003

A young Italian nationalist leads his followers on a march through Rome, seizing power from corrupt elites to establish a palingenetic regime. Declaring himself Tribune, his ultimate aim is to recreate the power and glory of Ancient Rome. However, a conspiracy of his enemies topples him from power, and he is imprisoned.  Eventually, the most powerful man in the West frees him and restores him to power — albeit as leader of a puppet regime. His second attempt at Italian rebirth is cut short; he is captured, killed, and his body desecrated by the howling mob. A man who had attempted to drive his degenerate countrymen to fulfill a higher destiny is cut down by the unthinking masses — a cowardly herd who lacked the ability to comprehend, much less work towards, this leader’s dreams of glory.

Is this the life of Benito Mussolini, Duce of Fascist Italy? Well, perhaps — but even more accurately it is a description of Il Duce’s predecessor, the Roman notary Cola di Rienzi. In the mid-fourteenth century, 900 years after the Fall of Rome, di Rienzi engaged in a romantic and ill-fated attempt to restore the Roman Republic and, perhaps, the Empire itself.  Musto’s book tells us what happened. To those familiar with the life of Mussolini, di Rienzi’s tale is shocking in its similarities — shocking and depressing.

The life of Cola di Rienzi — referred to by Musto as Cola di Rienzo — is well known to historians of the Middle Ages, and was, at one time, well known to Italians in general. But in the twentieth century he was eclipsed by Mussolini, who still symbolizes Roman and Italian renewal in many minds. The self-hating Italian Luigi Barzini did di Rienzi no favors in his book The Italians. Thus, Musto’s sympathetic and well-written biography of di Rienzi is long overdo, and is an excellent addition to the library of any individual interested in European history. Of interest for this essay is the relationship of di Rienzi to fascism and the role played by the church and selfish elites in the downfall of di Rienzi and in the humiliating history of modern Italy.

Roger Griffin (Fascism, Oxford University Press, 1995) famously described fascism as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” — making the elements of renewal, rebirth, and regeneration central to all permutations of this ideology. That Cola di Rienzi was a proto-fascist is quite clear. He was a populist leader, appealing to the middle class against established elites, intent on the regeneration and rebirth of Rome, Italy, and, by example, the world.

William Holman Hunt, Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother, slain in a skirmish between the Colonna and the Orsini factions, 1848 - 1849

That he couched this agenda in highly religious Christian terms is to be expected for the time and place — in fourteenth century Italy he could not do otherwise — and in no way detracts from the fascistic palingenetic tone of his rhetoric and actions. After all, perhaps the “most fascist” of all the twentieth-century fascisms — Romania’s Legionary movement — was devoutly Christian and made spiritual/moral regeneration the palingenetic focus of their ideology. Thus, there is no obvious reason not to see “Rienzism” as a sort of fourteenth century fascism.

Indeed, as Musto describes di Rienzi’s march through Rome (sound familiar?) to establish his buono stato (good state), we read the following : “. . . the people of Rome restored to their proper place, mingling among friends, neighbors, and strangers, all sharing the same sense of rebirth and renewal” (emphasis added). That sounds reasonably palingenetic to me; Cola di Rienzi as Tribune of Rome or Benito Mussolini as Duce of Italy — the similarities outweigh the differences.

That Cola di Rienzi is viewed by many as a generally positive figure who — for all his flaws — sincerely wanted the best for the people suggests that perhaps proto-fascism (or fascism, for that matter) is not the unalloyed evil that some make it out to be.

Musto states that di Rienzi was more of an artist than a politician in his actions and propaganda, which is completely consistent with the aesthetic nature of fascist movements (uniforms, ceremonies, rituals, art, etc.) of the twentieth century. Cola di Rienzi’s friend and admirer was the famed Petrarch, who recognized in the young Tribune the hope of Italy and the possibility of a new age, an age of rebirth and promise. Thus, a primary icon of fourteenth century Western culture was attracted to the sociopolitical and aesthetic characteristics of the Rienzian phenomenon.

Musto notes that di Rienzi spoke not only for the people of Rome but for all the people of “sacred Italy” to whom he wished to extend Roman citizenship. Musto describes in detail how, after spending time with Pope Clement VI — his eventual bitter enemy — di Rienzi returned to Rome to overthrow the feudal rule of the baronial families. These barons had turned the eternal city into a depopulated, anarchical, bloody, and violent mess, with the Roman people groaning under the self-interested misrule of the baronial elite.

Cola spent many months laying the groundwork for his revolution, engaging in various form of propaganda, including art as well as speech, until the day came when he and followers marched to seize power. Cola declared himself Tribune, ousted the barons, and began the formation of the so-called buono stato — a name which implies as much moral/spiritual renewal as much as it does plain good governance.

Statue of Cola di Rienzi by Girolamo Masini, erected in 1877 near the Campidoglio, where he was killed

And di Rienzi did bring good governance; to use twentieth-century language he made the “trains run on time.”  Establishing ties with other Italian cities, reaching out to the West as a whole, and supported by Petrarch, di Rienzi captured the attention not only of Europe but also instilled fear into the Islamic world, which saw the possibility of a resurgent Rome as the center of Western resistance to Asiatic expansion.

However, the Pope was not at all pleased with the rise of a secular power base in Rome to challenge the Church. As long as he perceived that di Rienzi would act as an effective mouthpiece to enforce Papal prerogatives against the barons, Clement supported the Tribune. But as soon as it became apparent that di Rienzi was his own man, with his own agenda, and that this agenda included a destiny for Rome and Italy that went beyond slavish subservience to the church, Clement decided that di Rienzi had to go.

Therefore, after months of intriguing against di Rienzi — even to the point of attempting to orchestrate food shortages to turn the Roman people against the Tribune — the Pope (the papacy at this time being self-exiled in France to protect themselves from their secular enemies) dropped the bombshell: on Dec. 3, 1347, Cola di Rienzi was condemned and excommunicated, and all who would support the Tribune were threatened with the same fate.

Indeed, if Rome still rallied behind di Rienzi, the entire city would have been under the Papal interdict; the entire city would have become a pariah in the Western, Christian world. In the fourteenth century, particularly fourteenth century Italy, excommunication was the worst sociopolitical fate for any leader, far worse than merely being labeled a “traitor” (which they called di Rienzi as well).

A whole list of crimes were put forth against the Tribune (including, absurdly, necromancy), and the Pope began to actively collaborate with the barons for the “final act” against the Rienzian regime. By this time, di Rienzi and the Roman people had decisively defeated the barons in the battle of Porta San Lorenzo. But it did not matter. In the year 1347, the Church, and the spiritual power of the Pope, was far more powerful than any army, any military victory. So, with the aid of the Pope, the barons rebelled and deposed di Rienzi, who was forced into exile.

Even then the Pope was not satisfied, remaining “fixated” on di Rienzi, scheming to have him captured and “annihilated.” Such was the hatred of this “Christian man of God” for the Tribune who wished to create regeneration for Romans and Italians. Could di Rienzi, in the fourteenth century, have said “Basta!” and defied the Church? Consider that Mussolini in the twentieth century could not do so, to his detriment. The secular power and ambitions of the Church was and remains a shackle on the aspirations of the Italian people.

The banishment of Rienzi, as depicted in Wagner's opera "Rienzi"

Cola di Rienzi attempted to find sanctuary in Prague with the emperor Charles IV who eventually bowed to the overwhelming power of the papacy and turned di Rienzi over to the Inquisition for trial for “heresy.” Part of di Rienzi’s defense was his assertion — somewhat “outrageous” for the fourteenth century — that the church should have no secular power, since the founding basis for Christianity was “poverty and humility.” One can only imagine Pope Clements’s reaction to that.

Eventually brought before Pope Clement, di Rienzi was a shell of his former self, and the symbolism of this meeting cannot be dismissed. The populist and secular (yet devoutly religious) hope of Italy was brought as a humiliated prisoner before the man representing the memetic virus that has infected the West and enslaved the Italian people for centuries.

The worm turned after the death of Clement VI and the ascension of Pope Innocent VI, a less “worldly and extravagant” man than his predecessor. Innocent had, not surprisingly, secular aspirations in Rome and was therefore distressed by the violence and anarchy prevailing after the fall of di Rienzi and the rise, once again, of the baronial families. Therefore, Cola was “rehabilitated” and sent to Rome as a Papal puppet to restore his “good state” — but this time, as Innocent writes, without the “fantastic innovations” of the first Rienzian regime.

Of course, those “fantastic innovations” were merely the assertion of the Roman peoples’ right to rule themselves in a secular state independent of papal micromanagement, and that Rome and Italy were in dire need of regeneration and renewal. This was not exactly what the church wanted, or wants today. And so, a chastened Cola di Rienzi was put forward as Pope Innocent’s tool with the hope that the repeat of the Rienzian regime would not degenerate into farce. Rome not being what she once was, that hope was misplaced.

The ex-tribune (now “senator” and Papal rector) was painfully aware that the real leader of Rome was the Pope, not the Emperor, not any self-proclaimed Tribune. This is something that he had dedicated years to opposing. From the beginning of his second tenure of power — power only at the sufferance of the Pope — the established elites, particularly the barons, opposed and plotted against di Rienzi. The plots became complicated and di Rienzi, after years of imprisonment and hardship, and possibly suffering from epilepsy, was not the same man. Errors of judgment, executions of venerable Roman citizens, and the imposition of required taxes began to fray the support of the fickle Roman masses.

When the end came, at the instigation of the barons and their supporters, it came fast. The howling mob stormed di Rienzi’s residence and drowned out his attempts to reason with them. Cola di Rienzi was caught trying to flee the mob in disguise (like Mussolini); he was stabbed to death (like Caesar); his body was desecrated (like Mussolini again) then burnt to ashes (like Hitler). The ashes were thrown into the Tiber; all physical traces of the Tribune were gone.

From a production of Wagner's "Rienzi" in Nancy, France, July 2003

The eerily similar lives and political careers of di Rienzi and Mussolini should give one pause. Both men were Italians living in a time of crisis for their people. Both men rose up to lead populist revolts against the established order. Both men established regimes which were initially successful and lauded by many, but then these regimes went sour and were overthrown by the forces of reaction. Both men were imprisoned thereafter. Both men then returned to power through the help of another, more powerful person — in the case of di Rienzi it was the Pope, in the case of Mussolini, Hitler. Both men then attempted to reestablish their regime, eventually failed, were killed by their enemies, and their bodies were desecrated by the mob. Both men attempted to lift the Italian people to greatness, but the special interests were too powerful and the lure of insipid, hedonistic stagnation too great.

The similarities are too many to be a coincidence. This then seems to be a distinctly Italian phenomenon. Who was at fault? Was it the fault of the two leaders themselves? Were they fatally flawed men? No doubt both men, particularly di Rienzi, had their flaws, and these flaws contributed to their failure and demise. But all great men have flaws. This easy explanation does not suffice.

No, the Italian people also have to share the blame, and I say this as a pan-European racial nationalist who is very supportive of the Italian people. Nevertheless, twice in Italy’s modern history dynamic leaders came to the fore to lead Italians to greatness, and twice did the Italian people turn on them. (In defense of the Italians, one has to ask if any other European societies have done better. One might say that it is better to have tried and failed a Rienzi or a Mussolini than never to have tried at all, which is the case of most European societies.)

I cannot forget reading Leon DeGrelle’s book on his experiences on the eastern front (translated as Campaign in Russia), fighting for Europe as part of the Wallonian division of the Waffen SS. The Italian soldiers he met were uninterested in fighting. They had no sense of the seriousness of the crusade against Bolshevism and for Europe. Instead, they cared only about “wine, women, and fun in the sun.” Nietzsche’s “last men” to be sure! (The rest of Europe has surely caught up with the Italians since then.) No wonder Italian military performance in WW II was a farce. No wonder that Italians have so long been the anvil of history, not the hammer, a fact lamented by great Italians from the middle ages to Machiavelli to Julius Evola to the present day.

Benito Mussolini, 1883 - 1945

But we cannot solely blame the Italians or focus on the personal flaws of di Rienzi and Mussolini. No, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the Vatican.

An analysis of the career of di Rienzi clearly shows the pernicious influence of Pope Clement VI. Musto’s book makes it clear that Clement VI was little more than a self-interested feudal lord, more concerned with maintaining petty Papal power and privilege than in the national regeneration promised by di Rienzi. For example, on page 190 we read of the Pope’s real attitude toward di Rienzi’s new regime: “. . . the pope began carefully, delicately plotting Cola’s downfall and seeking his personal humiliation, as well as his public infamita as a traitor and a heretic.” In short, the church plotted to crush the political aspirations of the Italian people to keep them in secular servitude to the Vatican.

There is a long history of such behavior. Cola di Rienzi was not the first man to attempt Italian/Roman regeneration only to fall victim to the Vatican. As Musto tells us, in 1143, the people of Rome rose up against Pope Innocent II, drove the papacy into exile, re-established the Roman Senate, and even started minting coins in the name of “SPQR” — “The Senate and the People of Rome.” Arnold of Brescia, a monk and political philosopher, rose to lead the new republic and offered an intellectual rationale for the church’s renunciation of secular power. But in 1155, at the instigation of the papacy, the German Emperor Frederick I led an army against Rome to crush the republic and reinstall the pope. Arnold of Brescia was burned at the stake as a heretic and his ashes dumped into the Tiber. Yes, to preserve its power, the church turned to foreigners to suppress the political aspirations of the Romans.

The secular power of the church caused a “dual loyalty” problem that remains to this day. Is an Italian’s highest loyalty to Italy or to the Vatican? To di Rienzi and Mussolini or to the Pope? (Or, in Il Duce’s Italy, to the Pope as well as the secular figurehead, the King?) It is interested to contemplate how history might have been changed if the papacy had remained in Avignon, if the church had been disestablished and the papacy denied sovereign status once and for all after the reunification of Italy, or if Mussolini had not signed the Lateran Treaty of 1929, rescuing papal sovereignty from the legal limbo in which it had languished since 1861.

The other major party opposed to Cola di Rienzi were the barons of medieval Rome. As a self-interested elite, enriching themselves at the cost of the people’s well being, they are perfectly analogous to the white globalist elites of today, who routinely betray their race’s interests in their hedonistic pursuit of money, power, and pleasure.

The barons of di Rienzi’s time are also analogous to the established elites (King, nobility, military, and business) of Mussolini’s Italy. These elites opposed a full and radical fascistization of the Italian people and instead valued the well-being of their own caste over that of society as a whole. European-derived peoples, with their greater individualism, tend to produce elites willing to betray their race (and their own ethnic genetic interests) for selfish class/caste/individual interests.

April 28, 1945: The bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci hang upside-down in Milan's Piazza Loreto for the delight of the mob

What are the lessons of the story of Cola di Rienzi?

Culturally and politically, the Italians are one of the healthiest people in Europe today. Their tradition of palingenetic populist nationalism has deep roots, nourished and hallowed by the blood of martyrs like Arnold of Brescia, Cola di Rienzi, and Benito Mussolini. They failed because they could not overcome the resistance of the “barons” and the church — those whose petty secular interests are threatened by genuine national renewal. The next time — if there is a next time — things need to be done right.

For the West as a whole, the story of di Rienzi demonstrates that self-interested established elites always oppose palingenesis. It is time for a new elite, one that understands that their own interests and those of their people are one and the same, and who will work first towards  survival, and second towards fulfilling a higher destiny, the Destiny of the West.

Will “the people” be up to the challenge? We shall see. One thing is for sure — we cannot afford to waste the likes of a di Rienzi or a Mussolini. Such leaders need to be treasured, not to have their torn bodies hanged upside down for the amusement of the small-brained, milling mob.

It is time for a clean sweep. Reform is the enemy. Only complete rebirth can save us now.

Komarom, Hungary — The right-wing demonstrators have gathered here on the fringe of a long-lost empire, near the border with Slovakia, the banks of the Danube, along rusting train tracks that stretch northwest to Vienna.

They wear wraparound sunglasses, leather vests and combat boots; and they knot around their necks the red and white striped flags reminiscent of Hungary’s pro-Nazi party of the 1930s and ’40s.

“Take your guns in your hands,” rasps a singer. “This is the last fight we’re going to win. Endurance.”

And then: “I may have big boots. You may throw a stone at me. But this is still my country, this is where my cradle lay.”

The crowd has gathered in the September sunshine for the main attraction, Gabor Vona, a charismatic young nationalist who heads Hungary’s newest, fastest growing and most controversial political party — and founded its affiliated militia.

Gabor Vona

Vona steps out of a minivan, a slight young man with a few shoots of gray in a crop of dark hair. A passing driver leans furiously on his car horn, and the young woman in the passenger seat shows Vona her middle finger as they careen past. Vona blinks and turns away with indifference. He’s ready to face his fans.

“You should know that Hungarian policy may change in the very near future,” he tells them. “Everyone knows that for the past 20 years we kept silent and bowed down, but this will change.”

Vona is riding high these days. His radically nationalistic party, Jobbik, picked up nearly 15% of the Hungarian vote in June elections for the European Union parliament. The Hungarian Guard, the paramilitary organization founded by Vona and his party and distinguished by its Nazi-like iconography and menacing marches through Roma, or Gypsy, areas, is locked in conflict with police and courts. . . . Read the whole article.

Jerry Z. Muller a professor at Catholic University, (“Us and Them,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008, and “Replies,” July/August 2008) argued that the power of ethnic nationalism “will drive global politics for generations to come” because it “corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit,” which often manifests in the “need for each people to have its own state.” His essay provided a valuable corrective to the position that ethnic identity is a mere social construction that globalization will steadily eradicate.

But Muller’s argument would have been strengthened by understanding why people prefer genetic similarity in others.

Ever since the 1994 publication of The History and Geography of Human Genes by Stanford University geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, it has been possible to measure genetic distances between population groups in terms of family equivalents. Anthropologist Henry Harpending showed that against the background of worldwide genetic variance, the average similarity between people within a single population is the same as that between half-siblings. Political scientist Frank Salter calculated that compared to the Danes, any two random English people have a kinship of 1/32 of a cousin. Two English people become the equivalent of 3/8 of a cousin by comparison with people from the Near East, 1/2 cousin by comparison with people from India, half-siblings by comparison with people from China, and like full-siblings compared with people from sub-Saharan Africa.

Thus, the aggregate of genes people share with co-ethnics dwarfs those shared with extended families. Rather than being a poor relation of family nepotism, ethnic nepotism is virtually a proxy for it.

The pull of genetic similarity explains why members of ethnic groups move into the same neighborhoods, join together in clubs and societies, and are prone to develop ethnocentric attitudes toward those who differ in dress, dialect, and other appearance. In The Ethnic Phenomenon (1981), by Pierre van den Berghe, a sociology and anthropology at the University Of Washington, found that even relatively open and assimilative groups “police” their boundaries against invasion by strangers using cultural “badges” to mark group membership, such as scarification, linguistic accent, and clothing style. Another study calculated coefficients of consanguinity within and between Eskimo tribes in the Hudson’s Bay region of Canada and found prosocial behavior such as wife exchange, and anti-social behavior such as genocidal killing during warfare, followed lines of genetic distance, albeit mediated by ethnic badging such as dialect and appearance. [A study in the evolution of ethnocentrism, by C.  J. Irwin, in The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism, 1987]

From an evolutionary perspective, the reason why people construct ethnic identities and engage in ethnic nepotism is that by doing so they increase the survival of their genes. Central to discussion is the concept of inclusive fitness.

As Richard Dawkins explicated in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, it is genes that survive and are passed on across generations. Some of the individual’s most distinctive genes will be found in fellow ethnics as well as in offspring, siblings, nephews, cousins, and grand-children. By benefiting extended kin, people benefit copies of their genes.

Of course, altruism has always posed a conundrum for Darwinism. How could altruism evolve through “survival of the fittest” if altruism means self-sacrifice? If the most altruistic members of a group sacrifice themselves for others, they will leave fewer offspring to pass on the genes that made them altruistic. At first glance, it would seem that altruism could not evolve, while selfishness would.

Yet altruism is common in all animals, even to the point of self-sacrifice. When bees defend their hive and sting intruders, the entire stinger is torn from the bee’s body. Stinging an intruder is an act of altruistic self-sacrifice. In ants, if nest walls are broken open, soldiers pour out to combat foragers from other nests; at the same time, worker ants repair the broken walls, in the process leaving the soldiers outside to die.

Evolutionary psychology answers the Darwinian conundrum. From an evolutionary point of view, an individual organism is only a vehicle, part of an elaborate device, which ensures the survival and reproduction of genes with the least possible biochemical alteration. So even when an altruist sacrifices its life for its kin, it ensures the survival of common genes. In this case, the vehicle has been sacrificed to preserve copies of its precious cargo. . . . Read the rest of the article.

Filippo Marinetti, 1876 - 1944

Filippo Marinetti is unlike most of the post-nineteenth Century cultural avant-garde who were rebelling against the spirit of several centuries of liberalism, rationalism, the rise of the democratic mass, industrialism, and the rule of the moneyed elite. His revolt against the leveling impact of the democratic era was not to hark back to certain perceived ‘golden ages’ such as the medieval eras upheld by Yeats and Evola, or to reject technology in favor of a return to rural life, as advocated by Henry Williamson and Knut Hamsun. To the contrary, Marinetti embraced the new facts of technology, the machine, speed, and dynamic energy, in a movement called Futurism.

The futurist response to the facts of the new age is therefore a quite unique reaction from the anti-liberal literati and artists and one that continues to influence certain aspects of industrial and post-industrial sub cultures. An example of a contemporary cultural movement paralleling Futurists is New Slovenian Art, which like futurism embodies music, graphic arts, architecture, and drama. It is a movement whose influence is felt beyond the borders of Slovenia. The best-known manifestation of this art form is the industrial music group Laibach.

Marinetti is also the inventor of free verse in poetry, and Futurist adherents have had a lasting impact on architecture, motion pictures and the theatre. The Futurists were the pioneers of street theatre. They inspired both the Constructivist movement in the USSR and the English Vorticists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

Marinetti was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1876. He graduated in law in Genoa in 1899. Although the political and philosophical aspects of the course held his interest, he traveled frequently between France and Italy and interested himself in the avant-garde arts of the later nineteenth Century promoting young poets in both countries. He was already a strong critic of the conservative and traditional approaches of Italian poets. He was at this time an enthusiast for the modern, revolutionary music of Wagner, seeing it as assailing “equilibrium and sobriety . . . meditation and silence . . . ”

By 1904, Futurist elements had manifested in his writing, particularly in his poem Destruction that he called “an erotic and anarchist poem,” a eulogy to the “avenging sea” as a symbol of revolution. After an apocalyptic destruction, the process of rebuilding begins on the ruins of the “Old World.” Here already is the praise of death as a dynamic and transformative.

With the death of Marinetti’s father in 1907, his wealth allowed him to travel widely and he became a well-known cultural figure throughout Europe. Nietzsche was at this time one of the most well-known intellectuals who desired liberation from the old order. Nietzsche was widely read among the literati of Italy, and D’Annunzio was the most prominent in promoting Nietzsche. Among the other philosophers of particular importance whom Marinetti studied was the French syndicalist theorist Georges Sorel, who inclined towards the anarchism of Proudhon. This rejected Marxism in favor of a society comprised of small productive, cooperative units or syndicates; and founded a new myth of heroic action and struggle. Rejecting much of the pacifism of the left. Sorel viewed war as a dynamic of human action. Sorel in turn was himself influenced by Nietzsche, and applying the Nietzschean Overman to socialism, states that the working class revolution requires heroic leaders. Sorel became influential not only among Left wing syndicalists but also among certain radical nationalists in both France and Italy.

Futurist Manifesto

Marinetti’s artistic ideas crystallized in the Futurist movement that originated from a meeting of artists and musicians in Milan in 1909 to draft a Futurist Manifesto. With Marinetti were Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. The manifesto was first published in the Parisian paper Le Figaro, and exhorted youth to, “Sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.”

The Futurists were contemptuous of all tradition, of all that is past:
“We want to exult aggressive motion . . . we affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

The machine was poetically eulogized. The racing car became the icon of the new epoch, “which seems to run as a machine gun.” The Futurist aesthetic was to be joy in violence and war, as “the sole hygiene of the world.” Motion, dynamic energy, action, and heroism were the foundations of “the culture of the Futurist future. The fisticuffs, the sprint and the kick were expressions of culture. The Futurist Manifesto is as much a challenge to the political and social order as it is to the status quo in the arts.

It declared:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of an explosive breath–a roaring car that seems to ride on grape shot is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

7. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries. Why should we look back when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible? Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

8. We will glorify war–the world’s only hygiene–militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, the beautiful ideas that kill, and scorn for women.

9. We will destroy the museums libraries academies of every kind, will fight moralism feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

10. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot. We will sing of the multi-colored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modem capitals, we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric motors, greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents, factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon: deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing: and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries! . . .  Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day, that we grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that . . .  but I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot? And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely? Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you then wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth we tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner . . .  But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are! . . .  Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums! . . .  Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . .  Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

The oldest of us is thirty so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts–we want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing dog-like at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

But we won’t be there . . .  At last they’ll find us–one winter’s night–in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us. Driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes. Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw will-power, have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly, breathless, and unresting . . . Look at us We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed . . .  Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again, we hurl our defiance at the stars.

You have objections?–Enough! Enough! We know them . . .  We’ve understood! . . .  Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors–Perhaps! . . .  If only it were so!–But who cares? We don’t want to understand! . . . Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again! Lift up your heads. Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance after stars!”

A plethora of manifestos by Marinetti and his colleagues followed, futurist cinema, painting, music (“noise”), prose, plus the political and sociological implications.

War, the World’s Only Hygiene

Portrait of Marinetti by Prampolini

Marinetti’s manifesto on war shows the central place violence and conflict have in the Futurist doctrine.

We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy, while the foul tribe of pacifists huddles dying in the deep cellars of the ridiculous palace at The Hague. We have recently had the pleasure of fighting in the streets with the most fervent adversaries of the war and shouting in their faces our firm beliefs:

1. All liberties should be given to the individual and the collectivity, save that of being cowardly.

2. Let it be proclaimed that the word Italy should prevail over the word Freedom.

3. Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be canceled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater.

For us today, Italy has the shape and power of a fine Dreadnought battleship with its squadron of torpedo-boat islands. Proud to feel that the martial fervor throughout the nation is equal to ours, we urge the Italian government, Futurist at last, to magnify all the national ambitions, disdaining the stupid accusations of piracy, and proclaim the birth of Pan-Italianism.

Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapulas, and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun! There is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnel and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.

Artistic Storm Trooper

Marinetti brought his dynamic character into an aggressive campaign to promote Futurism. The Futurists aimed to aggravate society out of bourgeoisie complacency and the safe existence through innovative street theater, abrasive art, speeches, and manifestos. The speaking style of Marinetti was itself bombastic and thunderous. The art was aggravating to conventional society and the art establishment. If a painting was that of a man with a moustache, the whiskers would be depicted with the bristles of a shaving brush pasted onto the canvas. A train would be depicted with the words “puff, puff.”

Both the words and deeds of the Futurists matched the nature of the art in expressing contempt for the status quo with its preoccupation with “pastism” or the “passe.” Marinetti for example, described Venice as “a city of dead fish and decaying houses, inhabited by a race of waiters and touts.”

To the Futurist Boccioni, Dante, Beethoven and Michelangelo were “sickening” Whilst Carra set about painting sounds, noises and even smells. Marinetti traversed Europe giving interviews, arranging exhibitions, meetings and dinners. Vermilion posters with huge block letters spelling ‘futurism’ were plastered throughout Italy on factories, in dance halls, cafes and town squares. Futurist performances were organized to provoke riot. Glue was put onto seats. Two tickets for the same seat would be sold to provoke a fight. “Noise music” would blare while poetry or manifestos were recited and paintings shown. Fruit and rotten spaghetti would be thrown from the audience, and the performances would usually end in brawls.

Marinetti replied to jeers with humor. He ate the fruit thrown at him. He welcomed the hostility as proving that Futurism was not appealing to the mediocre.

Politics

Portrait of Marinetti by Carlo Carra

The first political contacts of Marinetti and the Futurists were from the Left rather than the Right, despite Marinetti’s extreme nationalism and call for war as the “hygiene of mankind.” There were syndicalists and even some anarchists who shared Marinetti’s views on the energizing and revolutionary nature of war and gave him a reception.

In 1909, Marinetti entered the general elections and issued a “First Political Manifesto” which is anti-clerical and states that the only Futurist political program is “national pride,” calling for the elimination of pacifism and the representatives of the old order. During that year, Marinetti was heavily involved in agitating for Italian sovereignty over Austrian-ruled Trieste. The political alliance with the extreme Left began with the anarcho-syndicalist Ottavio Dinale, whose paper reprinted the Futurist manifesto. The paper, La demolizione was not especially anarcho-syndicalist, but of a general combative nature, aiming to unite into one “fascio” all those of revolutionary tendencies, to “oppose with full energy the inertia and indolence that threatens to suffocate all life.” The phrase is distinctly Futurist.

Marinetti announced that he intended to campaign politically as both a syndicalist and a nationalist, a synthesis that would eventually arise in Fascism. In 1910, he forged links with the Italian Nationalist Association, which from its birth also had a pro-labor, syndicalist aspect. In 1913 a Futurist political manifesto was issued which called for enlargement of the military, an “aggressive foreign policy,” colonial expansionism, and “pan-Italianism”; a “cult” of progress, speed, and heroism; opposition to the nostalgia for monuments, ruins, and museums; economic protectionism, anti-socialism, anti-clericalism. The movement gained wide enthusiasm among university students.

Interventionism

The chance for Italy’s “place in the sun” came with World War I. Not only the nationalists were demanding Italy’s entry into the war, but so too were certain revolutionary syndicalists and a faction of socialists led by Mussolini. From the literati came D’Annunzio and Marinetti.

In a manifesto addressed to students in 1914 Marinetti states the purpose of Futurism and calls for intervention in the war. Futurism was the “doctor” to cure Italy of “pastism,” a remedy “valid for every country.” The “ancestor cult far from cementing the race” was making Italians “anaemic and putrid.” Futurism was now “being fully realised in the great world war.”

The present war is the most beautiful Futurist poem which has so far been seen. Futurism was the militarization of innovating artists.

The war would sweep away all the proponents of the old and senile, diplomats, professors, philosophers, archaeologists, libraries, and museums.

The war will promote gymnastics, sport, practical schools of agriculture, business and industrialists. The war will rejuvenate Italy: will enrich her with men of action, will force her to live no longer off the past, off ruins and the mild climate, but off her own national forces.

The Futurists were the first to organize pro-war protests. Mussolini and Marinetti held their first joint meeting in Milan on March 31st 1915. In April, both were arrested in Rome for organizing a demonstration.

Futurists were no mere windbags. Nearly all distinguished themselves in the war, as did Mussolini and D’Annunzio. The Futurist architect Sant Elia was killed. Marinetti enlisted with the Alpini regiment and was wounded and decorated for valor.

Futurist Party

Ritratto di Marinetti by Thayat

In 1918, Marinetti began directing his attention to a new postwar Italy. He published a manifesto announcing the Futurist Political Party, which called for “Revolutionary nationalism” for both imperialism and social revolution. “We must carry our war to total victory.”

Demands of the manifesto included the eight hour day and equal pay for women, the nationalization and redistribution of land to veterans; heavy taxes on acquired and inherited wealth and the gradual abolition of marriage through easy divorce; a strong Italy freed, from nostalgia, tourists, and priests; industrialization and modernization of “moribund cities” that live as tourist centers. A Corporatist policy called for the abolition of parliament and its replacement with a technical government of 30 or 40 young directors elected form the trade associations.

The Futurist party concentrated its propaganda on the soldiers, and recruited many war veterans of the elite Arditi (daredevils), who had been the black-shirted shock troops of the army who would charge into battle stripped to the waist, a grenade in each hand and a dagger between their teeth.

In December 1919, the Futurists revived the “Fasci” or “groups.” which had been organised in 1914 and 1915 to campaign for war intervention, and from which was to emerge the Fascists.

Futurists and Fascists

The first joint post-war action between Mussolini and Marinetti took place in 1919 when a Socialist Party rally was disrupted in Milan.

That year Mussolini founded his own Fasci di Combattimento in Milan with the support of Marinetti and the poet Ungasetti. The futurists and the Arditi comprised the core of the Fascist leadership. The first Fascist manifesto was based on that of Marinetti’s Futurist party.

In April, against the wishes of Mussolini who thought the action premature, Marinetti led Fascists and Futurists and Arditi against a mass Socialist Party demonstration. Marinetti waded in with fists, but intervened to save a socialist from being severely beaten by Arditi. (To place the post-war situation in perspective, the Socialists had regularly beaten, abused, and even killed returning war veterans). The Fascists and futurists then proceeded to the offices of the Socialist Party paper Avanti, which they sacked and burned.

Marinetti stood as a Fascist candidate in the 1919 elections and persuaded Toscanini to do so. Whilst the Fascists held back, the Futurists threw their support behind the poet-soldier D’Annunzio’s takeover of Fiume. Marinetti arrived and was warmly welcomed by D’Annunzio.

When the Fascist Congress of 1920 refused to support the Futurist demand to exile the King and the Pope, Marinetti and other Futurists resigned from the Fascist party. Marinetti considered that the Fascist party was compromising with conservatism and the bourgeoisie. He was also critical of the Fascist concentration on anti-socialist agitation and on opposition to strikes. Certain futurist factions realigned themselves specifically with the extreme Left. In 1922, there were several Futurist exhibitions and performances organized by the Communist cultural association, Pro-letkul, which also arranged a lecture by Marinetti to explain the doctrine of Futurism.

Futurism and the Fascist Regime

A futurist Mussolini

When the Fascists assumed power in 1922 Marinetti, like D’Annunzio, was critically supportive of the regime. Marinetti considered: “The coming to power of the Fascists constitutes the realization of the minimum futurist program.”

Of Mussolini the statesman, Marinetti wrote: “Prophets and forerunners of the great Italy of today, we Futurists are happy to salute in our not yet 40-year-old Prime Minister of marvelous futurist temperament.”

In 1923, Marinetti began a rapprochement with the Fascists and presented to Mussolini his manifesto “The Artistic Rights Promoted by Italian Futurists.” Here he rejected the Bolshevik alignment of Futurists in the USSR. He pointed to the Futurist sentiments that had been expressed by Mussolini in speeches, alluding to Fascism being a “government of speed, curtailing everything that represents stagnation in the national life.” Under Mussolini’s leadership, writes Marinetti:

Fascism has rejuvenated Italy. It is now his duty to help us overhaul the artistic establishment . . . . The political revolution must sustain the artistic revolutions Marinetti was among the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals who in 1923 approved the measures taken by the regime to restore order by curtailing certain constitutional liberties amidst increasing chaos caused by both out-of-control radical Fascist squadisti and anti-Fascists.

At the 1924 Futurist Congress, the delegates upheld Marinetti’s declaration:

The Italian Futurists, more than ever devoted to ideas and art, far removed from politics, say to their old comrade Benito Mussolini, free yourself from parliament with one necessary and violent stroke. Restore to Fascism and Italy the marvelous, disinterested, bold, anti-socialist, anti-clerical, anti-monarchical spirit . . .  Refuse to let monarchy suffocate the greatest, most brilliant and just Italy of tomorrow . . .  Quell the clerical opposition . . . . With a steely and dynamic aristocracy of thought.

In 1929, Marinetti accepted election to the Italian Academy, considering it important that “Futurism be represented” He was also elected secretary of the Fascist Writer’s Union and as such was the official representative for fascist culture. Futurism became a part of fascist cultural exhibitions and was utilized in the propaganda art of the regime. During the 1930s, in particular the Fascist cultural expression was undergoing a drift away from tradition and towards futurism, with the fascist emphasis on technology and modernization. Mussolini had already in 1926 defined the creation of a “fascist art” that would be based on a synthesis culturally as it was politically: “traditionalistic and at the same time modern.”

In 1943, with the Allies invading Italy, the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and surrendered to the occupation forces. The fascist faithful established a last stand, in the north, named the Italian Social Republic.

With a new idealism, even former Communist and liberal leaders were drawn to the Republic. The Manifesto of Verona was drafted, restoring various liberties, and championing labour against plutocracy within the vision of a united Europe. Marinetti continued to be honoured by the Social Republic. He died in 1944.