Race & War

Julius Evola

One of the most serious obstacles to a purely biological formulation of the doctrine of race is the fact that cross-breeding and contamination of the blood are not the only cause of the decline and decay of races. Races may equally degenerate and come to their end because of a process – so to speak – of inner extinction, without the participation of external factors. In purely biological terms this may correspond to those enigmatic ‘inner variations’ (idiovariations) which science has been forced to recognize are just as powerful as variations due to cross-breeding in bringing about mutations.

This will never be completely understood if the biological conception of race is not integrated with that ‘racism of the second and of the third degree’ of which we have repeatedly spoken here. It is only if race is considered as existing not only in the body, but also in the soul and in the spirit, as a deep, meta-biological force which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures in the organic totality of the human entity – it is only if this eminently traditional point of view is assumed – that the mystery of the decline of races can be fathomed in all its aspects. One can then realize that, in a way analogous to the individual abdication and inner breakdown of the individual, where the loss of all moral tension and the attitude of passive abandonment can gradually find expression in a true physical collapse, or can paralyze natural organic resources far more efficiently than any threat to the body – so developments of the same nature can occur on the plane of those greater entities which are human races, on the greater scale in space and in time of their aggregate life spans. And what we have just pointed out about organic resources neutralized, when the inner – moral and spiritual – tension of an individual is lacking, can even allow us to consider less simplistically and less materialistically the matter of racial alterations due to mixing and contamination, as well.

This is quite similar to what happens in infections. It is known, in fact, that bacteria and microbes are not always the sole effective and unilateral causes of illness: for a disease to be acquired by contagion a certain more or less strong predisposition is necessary. The state of integrity or tonicity of the organism, in turn, conditions this predisposition, and this is greatly affected by the spiritual factor, the presence of the whole being to himself, and his state of inner intrepidity or anguish. In accordance to this analogy, we may believe that, for cross-breeding to have a really, fatally, inexorably degenerative outcome for a race, it is necessary without exception that this race already be damaged inwardly to a certain extent, and that the tension of its original will be lax as a result.

When a race has been reduced to a mere ensemble of atavistic automatisms, which have become the sole surviving vestiges of what once it was, then a collision, a lesion, a simple action from outside, is enough to make it fall, to disfigure it and to denature it. In such a case, it does not behave like an elastic body, ready to react and to resume its original shape after the collision (provided, that is, that the latter does not exceed certain limits and does not produce permanent actual damage), but, rather, it behaves like a rigid, inelastic body, which passively endures the imprint of external action.

On the basis of these considerations two practical tasks of racism can be distinguished. The first task could be said to be one of passive defense. This means sheltering the race from all external actions (crossings, unsuitable forms of life and culture, etc.) which could present the danger to it of a crisis, a mutation or a denaturation. The second task by contrast is that of active resistance, and consists in reducing to a minimum the predisposition of the race to degeneration, that is to say, the ground on which it can be exposed passively to external action. This means, essentially, ‘to exalt’ its inner race; to see to it that its intimate tension is never lacking; that, as counterpart of its physical integrity, within it there is something like an uncontrollable and irreducible fire, always yearning for new material to feed its blaze, in the form of new obstacles, which defy it and force it to reassert itself.

This second task is obviously more arduous than the first, because it can demand solutions which vary from individual to individual, and because external, general and material measures are of little use for it. It is a matter of overcoming the inertia of spirit, that force of gravity which is in force in human interiority no less than in the outer, physical world, and here finds expression precisely in the inclination to abandonment, to ‘take it easy’, to always follow the path of least resistance. But, unfortunately, for the individual as well as for the race, to overcome this danger it is necessary to have a support – for the ability to act directly, to always remain at the crest of the wave, to maintain an inner initiative which is always renewed, without the need for renewed stimuli, can only occur as the result of an exceptional endowment, and cannot reasonably be demanded as a matter of course. As we have said, for tension which has become latent to reawaken, before it is too late and the processes of the automatization of race follow, an obstacle, a test, almost a challenge, is necessary. It is then that the crisis and the decision occur: by their way of reacting, the deeper, meta-biological powers of the race then show whether they have remained stronger than the contingencies and the destinies of the given period of history. In the case of a positive reaction, new potentialities come, from deep inside, to saturate again the racial circuit. A new ascending cycle begins for that race.

Julius Evola, 1898 - 1974

In some cases, it is even possible that precisely cross-breeding – naturally kept within very stringent limits – carries out a function of that kind. This is well-known in zootechnics. The ‘pure breed’ in some animal species is the result both of the preservation of heredity and of judicious cross-breeding. We do not share the opinion of Chamberlain,[1] who was inclined to apply this kind of thinking to the ‘superior races’ of humanity. However, it is a well proven fact that in some aristocratic families, which, with their centuries-old blood law, have been the only experimental field for racism in history hitherto, some cross-breedings have had precisely the merit of preventing extinction of the line through inner degeneration. Here – let us stress – the cross-breeding has the function of an ordeal, not a rule – an ordeal, moreover, which can also present a dangerous challenge for the blood. But danger reawakens the spirit. Before the heterogeneous element introduced by cross-breeding the homogenous nucleus is called to reaffirm itself, to assimilate to himself what is alien, to act towards it in the capacity of the ‘dominant’ towards the ‘recessive’, in terms of  the laws of Mendel.[2] If the reaction is positive, the result is an awakening. The stock which seemed spent and exhausted reawakens. But if it has already fallen too much, or if the heterogeneity is excessive, the ordeal is failed and the decline is quick and definitive.

But the highest instrument of inner awakening of race is combat, and war is its highest expression. That pacifism and humanitarianism are phenomena closely linked to internationalism, democracy, cosmopolitanism and liberalism is perfectly logical – the same anti-racial instinct present in some, is reflected and confirmed in the others. The will towards sub-racial leveling inborn in internationalism finds its ally in pacifist humanitarianism, which has the function of preventing the heroic test from disrupting the game by galvanizing the surviving forces of any still not completely deracinated peoples. It is odd, however, and illustrates the errors to which a unilaterally biological formulation of the racial problem can lead, that the racial theory of ‘mis-selections’, as expressed for example by Vacher de Lapouge, partakes, to a certain extent, of the same incomprehension of the positive meaning of war for race – but here, in the face of full knowledge of the facts – as is found in internationalist democratism. To be specific, they suppose that every war turns into a progressive elimination of the best, of the exponents of the still pure race of the various peoples, facilitating thus an involution.

This is a partial view, because it only considers what is lost through the disappearance of some individuals, not what is aroused to a much greater extent in others by the experience of war, which otherwise would never have been aroused. This becomes even more obvious if we do not consider ancient wars which were largely fought by elites while the lower strata were spared by them, but rather modern wars which engage entire armed nations and which, moreover, in their character of totality, involve not only physical but also moral and spiritual forces of combatants and non-combatants alike. The Jew Ludwig[3] expressed fury about an article published in a German military review, which brought out the possibilities of selection related even to air bombardments, in which the test of sang-froid, the immediate, lucid reaction of instinct of direction as against brutal or confused impulse, cannot but turn out in a decisive discrimination for those who have the greatest probability of escaping and surviving.

The indignation of the humanitarian Jew Ludwig, who has notwithstanding become the bellicose propagator of the ‘new Holy Alliance’ against Fascism, is powerless against what is correct in considerations of this sort. If the next world war is a ‘total war’ it will mean also a ‘total test’ of the surviving racial forces of the modern world. Without doubt, some will collapse, whereas others will awake and rise. Nameless catastrophes could even be the hard but necessary price of heroic peaks and new liberations of primordial forces dulled through grey centuries. But such is the fatal condition for the creation of any new world – and it is a new world that we seek for the future.

What we have said here must be considered as a mere introduction to the  question  of the significance which war has, in general, for  race. Three fundamental points should be considered, in conclusion. First, since we proceed on the assumption of the fundamental difference of human races – a difference which, according to the doctrine of the three degrees of racism, is not restricted to corporeality but concerns also soul and spirit – it should be expected that the spiritual and physical behavior towards the experience or test of war varies as between the various races; it will therefore be both necessary and interesting to define the sense according to which, for each specific race, the aforementioned reaction will occur.

Second, it is necessary to consider the relationship of interdependence between what a well understood racial policy can do to promote the aims of war, and, conversely, what war, in the presupposition of a right spiritual attitude, can do to promote the aims of race. We can speak, in this respect, of a sort of germ, or primary nucleus, created initially or reawakened by racial policy, which brings out racial values in the consciousness of a people; a germ or nucleus which will bear fruit by giving the war a value, while conversely the experience of war, and the instincts and currents of deep forces which emerge through such an experience, give the racial sense a right, fecund direction.

And this leads us to the third and last point. People are accustomed to speaking too generally, and too romantically, about ‘heroism’, ‘heroic experience’ and the like. When they are done with such romantic assumptions, in modern times, there seem to remain only material ones, such that men who rise up and fight are considered simply as ‘human material’, and the heroism of the combatants is related to victory as mere means to an end, the end itself being nothing but the incrementation of the material and economic power and territory of a given State.

   

In view of the considerations which have been pointed out here, it is necessary to change these attitudes. From the ‘ordeal by fire’ of the primordial forces of race heroic experience, above all other experience, has been a means to an essentially spiritual and interior end. But there is more: heroic experience differentiates itself in its results not only according to the various races, but also according to the extent to which, within each race, a super-race has formed itself and come to power. The various degrees of this creative differentiation correspond to so many ways of being a hero and to so many forms of awakening through heroic experience. On the lowest plane hybrid, essentially vital, instinctive and collective forces emerge – this is somewhat similar to the awakening on a large scale of the ‘primordial horde’ with the solidarity, the unity of destiny and of holocaust which is peculiar to it. Gradually, this mostly naturalistic experience is purified, dignified, becomes luminous, until it reaches its highest form, which corresponds to the Aryan conception of war as ‘holy war’, and of victory and triumph as an apex, since its value is identical to those of holiness and initiation, and, finally, of death on the battlefield as mors triumphalis, as not rhetorical but effective overcoming of death.

Having indicated all these points in a basic but, we trust, sufficiently intelligible manner, we propose to tackle them one by one in writings which will follow the present one, which will specifically consider the varieties of heroic experience according to race and then the vision of war peculiar to the Nordic-Aryan and Ario-Roman tradition in particular.

Notes

[1] Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) was one of the most influential racial theorists of his era. His most important work was The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (New York: John Lane, 1910).

[2] Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) was a Czech-German scientist, and is often called “the father of modern genetics.”  Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance, based on his study of plants across several generations, attempted to define how specific characteristics are transmitted from parents to their offspring.

[3] Emil Ludwig (1881-1948) was primarily known at the time as the author of a number of popular biographies of historical figures, including Goethe, Bismarck, and Mussolini.

From Julius Evola, The Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory, and Death in the World of Tradition (Aarhus, Denmark: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2007), now published by Arktos Media.

Nations Don't Go Extinct Due To Loss Of Material Comforts: A Response To Bain Dewitt

By Riki Rei

Jared Kushner donned his smartest business casual attire for his visit to American troops in Iraq, while Ivanka wrote his name across the front of his bulletproof vest so that everyone in the changing room would know it was his.

The article “Russians Are Not #Ourguys” by Mr. Dewitt has generated a whirlwind of heated response from Counter-Currents readers. In my humble and candid opinion, the article reeks of being a piece of neocon shilling (dotted by some ostensibly decent and rational remarks, admittedly) which reads like it’s straight from the National Review or even The Weekly Standard.

The article does make some valid and reasonable points, albeit of a highly dubious nature. It seems to argue from the viewpoint of advancing and defending the geopolitical interests and economic benefits of the Western nations at large, and the US and UK in particular, in the Middle East, which is a common line of argument of the neocon ideologues over the past twenty years, and the recurring usage of the term “(American) hegemony” deepens that impression. But honestly, can White Nationalism afford that luxury, with our homelands increasingly flooded and swamped by hostile aliens as a result of the same neocon forces at the helm, preaching their tiresome and nation-wrecking agenda of “invade the world, invite the world”? Hasn’t that same clichéd and trite policy been enshrined in and guided American foreign policy, only to repeatedly fail catastrophically, with astronomical costs for America, Britain, and other nations?

The author seems totally blind to those glaring and indisputable facts, ignoring all the dangerous and deleterious ramifications of his propositions while insisting on bolstering and consolidating the Western geostrategic presence in the Middle East as part of its rivalry with Russia, blah, blah, blah. Simply put, he is awfully confused and utterly at a loss about the concepts of “priority” and “proportion” with his flawed and misguided focus on the alleged material interests to be obtained from the Middle East and his adamant critique of the Alt Right. He seems to be cardinally concerned with the oil and gas resources of the Middle East and securing arms sales through “coalition” maintenance under the shining, self-congratulating veneer of “Western hegemony,” believing that economic interests are everything while consigning vital and fundamental racial, cultural, social, and demographic factors to the backburner. In light of this, he is either insincere or incredibly naïve and blinkered (a term he likes to apply to the Alt Right), and his specious and condescending viewpoints are mostly misleading. A few typical examples coupled by my own comments are as follows.

In the fourth paragraph, the author simplistically dismisses the stance of Alt Right supporters of President Trump during his election campaign as an “isolationist agenda,” and that they thought Trump “has betrayed his loyal fans and acquiesced to Israeli influence. I don’t believe he has done any such thing, and now that the last debris of the last Hebrew Hammers has been swept away, I think it is clear that the Alt Right’s hysterics have been totally premature and unjustified . . .” This is a willful disregard of innumerable facts regarding the Jewish forces surrounding Trump, starting from his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have been exerting considerable influence on his decision-making as amply demonstrated by a series of incidents, ranging from his backtracking on his former “America First” platform to his unwillingness or inability to defend the more nationalist members of his cabinet, such as Steve Bannon. And the so-called sweeping away of the last “Hebrew Hammers” is certainly inconsistent with the facts.

In the fifth paragraph, the author insists on maintaining the façade of the corrupt, old-world system epitomized by today’s US and the West at large – namely, the petrodollar, NATO, arms sales, military adventurism, and so on – by fervently arguing that these are all good things keeping America from collapsing and should be preserved, going so far as to blatantly announce “we are all Anglo-Zionists,” as if it were a badge of honor. Even taking into consideration all the realpolitik and geopolitical factors, such audacious and misguiding arguments for the “status quo” are hardly convincing. My question to the author is, aren’t your propositions what the US political establishment and its allies have been following for decades? Did their actions make the white people of the West in any way better? Has the collective prospect of survival for whites in America or elsewhere in the western world improved? Fear of change (or, in the author’s word, “revolution”) and “conservatives” using pretenses like economic prosperity and securing resources is precisely what has corrupted and atrophied America and led whites to their current state of misery and crisis.

In the sixth and seventh paragraphs, the author mainly employs the economic interests and energy needs of the UK to justify his anti-Russian and pro-Gulf theocracies proposal. While some of his arguments sound reasonable or realistic, they are still inadvisable in a deeper context. First, the so-called coalition partners of the US in the Middle East (i.e., the corrupt, terrorism-exporting, and extortionist Sunni theocracies from Saudi to Qatar) aren’t the only source of energy for the West. There are alternatives, such as American shelf oil in Alaska. And let’s not forget about Iran, which is yearning to improve ties with America and Europe, and which hasn’t been involved in any terrorist attack on the West in decades, but nevertheless remains the most vilified nation on the hit list of the Jew-pandering neocon political establishment and its court media.

Second, as for Russia, it certainly has its own interests, as does any country, but it certainly is not unreasonable or unwilling to negotiate. The author is kindly reminded of the fact that the West has chosen to continuously and obstinately antagonize, exclude, and threaten Russia ever since the rise of Putin with acts of political isolation, economic sanctions, propaganda demonization, and strategic encirclement. If the West changes its attitude and were to sincerely engage with Russia and Iran, it will not only help the Middle East by checking the radical and smug Sunni states, and thus contributing to the overall security and stability of the region, as well as improving Russia’s means of supplying Western Europe with gas on friendlier and stable terms, but it would also help to drive a wedge between Russia and China – the latter being a great adversary of the white race.

It has long been a well-known fact that there is an ingrained historical and geopolitical rivalry and mutual mistrust between Russia and China, as observed by astute scholars such as Dr. Kerry Bolton and this humble writer. Russia, for its part, harbors deep-seated wariness and misgivings toward China, especially the latter’s rapid demographic expansion into Russia’s Far East. It is only the arrogant exclusionism of the West toward Russia that has driven the cash-strapped and resource-rich country into China’s bosom, who is eager to use its bulging wallet to buy advanced military hardware and other technologies from them. In a word, the current alliance between Russia (and, to a lesser extent, Iran) with China is but a temporary and expedient one, and could be made to unravel if the West were to develop the will and wisdom to do so.

In the tenth paragraph, the author almost appears to sympathize with ISIS and castigates Obama for being “played” by Assad. This passage – “thus illustrating that he cared little for the blood and treasure that had been spent in Iraq to secure US-UK stability in years to come” – not only serves to rationalize and whitewash the monstrously wrongheaded Iraq War, but confuses the picture by fabricating a so-called US-UK stability in Iraq which never existed in the first place.

The thirteenth paragraph is a non-starter: “Having shown that the US lacked the will to fight, applying pressure on China to cooperate on trade would be a non-starter. The Chinese Premier was present for the strikes for the specific reason of showing that Trump would no longer allow Russian expansionism and creating a stranglehold on the European gas market.” First, Trump reneged on his campaign promise and refused to apply pressure on China over trade not because America lacked the will to fight in the Middle East, but precisely because it lacks the will to fight China (not in terms of actual warfighting, of course, but to impose essential restrictive measures on it to gradually choke off its predatory trade exports to the US) as a result of the intense pressure from international Jewry and traitorous American corporations hand-in-glove with the Chinese regime, which has been going on for the last thirty years. It is the status quo and the system the author vigorously defends that actually enabled the rise of China in the first place and which continues to fuel that rise, even though the author rightfully decries that rise (notice his confused and contradictory thinking?).

The author’s nonsense then escalates. In the fourteenth paragraph, he went so far to argue that “[a] Syria led by Assad that has defeated ISIS and settled into peace is no friend to the West” simply due to its being a close ally of Russia’s. An image of the Cold War mindset, rising like an ugly phoenix from the ashes, unfolds before my eyes. He then states that millions of Syrians and other refugees who have fled to Europe will not be welcomed back by a victorious Assad, and uses this in opposition to the legitimate Assad government with a straight face. This is highly questionable. First, you can’t know for certain that Assad will refuse to take refugees back incrementally provided that the West is willing to discard its antagonism toward him. Second, if the Syrian chaos persists, whatever else happens it will definitely result in even more uprooted refugees flooding towards Europe – a predictable outcome the author refuses to see. Talk about selective logic!

In the fifteenth paragraph, the author again enlists superficial economic benefits to justify the West’s support for unreasonable and vehemently anti-Western states such as Turkey, whose policies regarding Turks living in other countries resembles that of Israel in the sense it claims a vigorous attachment to and the right of governance over Turks living in Europe, and uses its demographic weapon to persistently intimidate and blackmail European countries. The author’s claim that “the Turks don’t supply the Taliban with IEDs to blow up British soldiers. Russia does,” is such a slanted reproof that it is truly flabbergasting. Even if what the author accused Russia of doing were factually accurate, he failed to explain why the British and American soldiers were there in the first place. To spread democracy and liberty across the globe? To secure the oil interests of the West? To help shore up the position of our dear and irreplaceable ally, Israel? An endless supply of blood and wealth must therefore be squandered there, right? It must be right according to the author.

In the sixteenth paragraph, the author bares his teeth at the American Alt Right with ridicule and name-calling. He defines it as a “malaise” and calls their “America First” ideal an ”unrealistic, principle-first isolationism policy.” The author seems utterly contemptuous of the Alt Right“ and its intellectual leaders as a redneck, lowbrow class of peasantry while regarding himself, and for that matter, the button-pushing Trump, as masterminds of real-world pragmatism and statecraft on a par with (((Henry Kissinger))) and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Bravo!

In the last seven paragraphs, the author’s searing attack on the Alt Right reaches its climax, and unsurprisingly is filled with bogus and spurious and accusations. In the seventeenth paragraph, he explains that he wants peace but detests peacenik, and exhorts us to remember that life is a struggle. However, wanting America to become less involved in the Middle East mess, refrain from fighting wars on behalf of Israel, and showing more flexibility toward a non-confrontational and non-threatening Syria and Iran is not a peacenik response, and “life is a struggle” rhetoric still requires us to choose the struggle rightly and wisely, not foolishly and futilely. Then comes his most classically neocon point: “Without Middle Eastern wars on the neocon hitlist, American hegemony is threatened, and our “way of life” – read: First World luxury – is directly threatened.” Whoa, just whoa. “Neocon hitlist,” “American hegemony,” and “First World luxury” – what invaluable and indispensable goals! But isn’t all that materialism and hegemony stuff what has been undermining the health and integrity of the white race and America for the last half a century, at least? Besides which no perceptive minds in the Alt Right camp have solely blamed Jews for the military adventurism which the author advocates. The myopic, venal, and corrupt white elites certainly did as they were bid and contributed to this gigantic folly. Likewise, hardly anyone on the Alt Right actually shed tears for the loss of Syrian lives as a result of the strike. Rather, we only lamented Trump’s spinelessness and lack of foresight, which played right into the hand of the Jews and neocon interventionists, further exacerbating the situation and demonstrating his vulnerability and obsequiousness before bullying Jewry and the military-industrial complex of America.

In the eighteenth paragraph, the author sings the praises of Trump’s decision to teach a lesson to the Russians by attacking Syria and highlights that the cost of the missile strikes is nothing compared to the cost saved by securing a profitable arms deal. Again, one cannot help but ask, is it impossible to check Russia’s aggression by other means? If America moves to alter its antagonistic behavior toward Assad and Iran, can’t America and Britain, with their infinitely more advanced technologies and richer resources, fare better in competition with Russia? It is only when one insists on the current course of antagonizing Syria and Iran in the first place that one is forced to resort to interventionism.

Next, the author’s sudden pounce on North Korea (another member of the shopworn Axis of Evil) likewise smacks of neocon subversion – yet another attempt to topple the government of a sovereign nation to bring it into the globalist new world order, just like what happened to Iraq and Libya previously. He never bothers to mention the fact that the Norks have never attacked America, and have no real intention to attack the US (for all their pugnaciously provocative and incendiary anti-American rhetoric) as long as they are left alone. They will never attack America or South Korea given that they are fully aware that any such aggression means their own instant demise. While fanning alarmism, the author seems insouciant about China, which is the genuine mammoth geostrategic adversary, not merely to America but to white people everywhere in the years to come, given that it stands in lockstep with the largely Jewish political and economic establishment to consistently fatten and empower the latter at the expense of the interests of America and the white middle and working classes in particular.

The nineteenth paragraph is another confusing and untendable passage. While the author has to admit that “[t]he same news agencies that were breathlessly reporting on a Tomahawk strike against a Russian ally a few weeks ago are now trying to revive their Russian Connection narrative,” he then inexplicably remarks that “they are floundering and on the back foot.” The reality of the situation seems not so positive, though, with the liberal political establishment plotting to mount a new round of attacks to compromise, if not derail, the Trump Presidency. The author goes on to praise Trump’s firing of Comey, which of course was the right move, and predicts that those in Camp Clinton are now worrying about their own uncertain fate. Then he suddenly reverts back to claim that the stage was set with the Syria strike, which was a “firm statement,” and that Trump acted “in America’s best interest, not Russia’s.” The last argument is not only unfounded, it’s also a deviation from his preceding statement, as one is left agape as to what is actually his main theme.

In the twenty-second paragraph, the author again denounced and sneered at the leaders of the Alt Right movement, accusing them of “sacrificing America’s interests for ones’ own sensibilities.” Apparently, America’s national interests in the author’s mind do not go deeper or higher than ingratiating with Middle Eastern customers who “buy American products,” attaching huge importance to “deliver[ing] trade deals” with such countries, “winning” (of wasteful and fruitless interventionist wars in the Middle East while doing the bidding of Israel, Turkey, Saudi, and Qatar, and propping up ISIS), and the “great quality of life” for decadent and pampered American consumers.

The last paragraph reads almost like a hagiography written by a starry-eyed Trump devotee. We see the author’s implicit summary of what constitutes “vital national security interest” (which seems to be tantamount to bullying Assad, jettisoning the America First “isolationism,” and adopting Clintonian international meddling). We see the author’s strong and sweeping claim that “the Tomahawk strike flattened the opposition – domestically and internationally,” and his breathlessly exultant conclusion that “Trump has set policy, set leadership, and established dominance with effectively zero cost. The Syria strike was a win, and America is winning again.” Considering the dreadful and dismal reality of America as a whole and the imperative of securing the future existence of white people amidst great difficulties, the last sentence reads almost like sarcasm, though we do know the author is earnest.

I have never truly been a Russophile, and I am ambivalent towards the Russian nation. I admire some of their qualities, such as their perseverance and tenacity, while I detest some traits of theirs, such as habitual bullying, vengefulness, brazenness, and unabashed self-justification. I can’t forgive their shameless unilateral violation of the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty near the end of the Second World War, invading Manchuria from North, brutally slaughtering and pillaging Japanese civilians and occupying a few small – yet indisputably and inherently Japanese – islands north of Hokkaido to this day, an egregious and despicable act of “looting a burning house” that has been conducted without a trace of moral compunction. But in spite of the title of the article and the author’s call to resist Russia’s advances in the Middle East, the focus of this article really is not on Russia or how to counter it but rather on the American establishment and its existing Middle East policy, which serves the agenda of corporate America and Britain. It’s about more status, more empire-building, more closed-door power games, more arms and pipeline deals, more corporate profits, more globalist mercantilism, more foreign wars, more depraved material prosperity, more dodging of the ingrained structural problems of the Western countries that were created and are maintained by the ruling plutocracy through the banks and other anti-white institutions, more shilling for Israel and the Sunni Arab states, and more senseless antagonism of Syria, Iran, and Russia. At bottom, no White Nationalist ideal or interest can be identified in the author’s propositions or his glorification of Trump’s “leadership,” “dominance,” and “winning.”

The type of hegemony the author lavishly plays up may sound good on the surface, but in fact it is nothing more than an illusion that is unsustainable for today’s whites, not to mention being morally questionable. It is at best a wistful anachronism and, at worst, a detriment and anathema to White Nationalism. Let me conclude this humble critique by revisiting the principle that underlies White Nationalism in relation to mainstream politics and politicians who are ostensibly, and rudimentarily, sympathetic to our ideas: we should serve as a supervisory force to prod, remind, and alert them, constantly exhorting and admonishing them, but never buying into them with blind loyalty. If we prod them by a foot, they may move an inch in our direction. Although if we uncritically fall for them, they will unfailingly betray us quickly, and by doing so, we also forfeit our own political and social foundations, as well as the core of our vitality as a significant force for change.

H.P. Lovecraft: Aryan Mystic

H. P. Lovecraft: Aryan Mystic

By Jonathan Bowden

              

Czech translation here.

Published in honor of H. P. Lovecraft’s 120th birthday, August 20, 2010.

“Homo Homini Lupus; Man is a wolf to his kindred.”
–Plautus

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence on Rhode Island in 1890. His father died in 1898 in Butler hospital, Providence, allegedly from nervous exhaustion due to over-work, but, in actuality, it was occasioned by general paresis or insanity brought on by tertiary syphilis.

Lovecraft was then raised by his mother and two aunts, Lilian and Annie Emeline Phillips. A cosseted and molly-coddled youth, he developed psychosomatic illnesses of varied kinds – most of which disappeared the further he traveled from his aunts. Did his mother go insane from what might be described as a syphilitic complication, the latter aided and abetted by arsenic tincture as a ‘preventative’? She also died in Butler hospital on May the 21st , 1921.

Lovecraft’s stories are divided by some into three categories: namely, the macabre, the dreamy and the mythological. His tales all incarnate the premise of some genetic inheritance or other — usually in a morbid manner. They often illustrate notions of a guilty precognition – the former nearly always of a morphic or physiological kind. Other leitmotifs – which are almost Wagnerian in import – prove to be non-human influences, usually of a cosmic indent, that impact on mankind in a detrimental way.

Indeed, Lovecraft’s view of a mechanistic and amoral universe goes well beyond Augustinian pessimism – the usual basis for Christian conservatism. It essentially looks to a benumbing terror at civilization’s heart; and it also speaks of Pascal’s nausea at those cold, interstellar depths. Fate plays a large role here as well, and under such a dispensation progressive notions of free will or evolution fall sheer.

Lovecraft felt that Western society was laboring under an implicit or immediate threat. This took – somewhat inevitably – a racial form. A convinced Anglophile, Lovecraft saw miscegenation and ethnic kaos everywhere in contemporary America – not least in New York city during his brief marriage. His discourse tends to intuit hierarchy, to wish to manage or reify it, and then to string it uppermost like a mobile by Angus Calder. He attempts here – morphically – to create hierarchies of an exclusive or traditional kind, so as to provide Nietzsche’s pathos of difference.

All of this is undertaken – without any notion of paradox – in order to make life more three-dimensional or tragic. Truly, a pessimist and an ultra-conservative who’s on a par with Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Lovecraft even sees science as grist to his mill. Usually positive enquiry – or evidentialism – is thought of as liberalism’s hand-maiden, but, in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, it can serve as a basis for overthrowing ‘Enlightenment’ nostrums.

               

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, 1890-1937

Let us take, by way of illustration, the relatively lengthy tale which is known as “The Dunwich Horror.” It first appeared in the fantasy magazine Weird Tales in 1929. This story involves the idea of transformation or radical change – i.e., of a man into a beast and a beast-man into nothingness. At one remove from the present, a decayed family of backwoodsmen merges in with entities from the beyond. They do so on Sabbat eve up on those stones in dense undergrowth and pursuant to bringing down what exists without.

Two spawn are bequeathed to their witch-mother, Lavinia, one of whom is visible – the other less so. Initially, her father extends the homestead in order to accommodate new borders. An extension is added so as to conceal beneath its wood the threat of what grows within it. A sharp hammering was heard at night, as Old Man Whateley sought to extend his Imperium.

Gradually the more presentable of the two sons, Wilbur, begins to seek out forbidden knowledge and secrets. These tomes happen to be stored at Miskatonic university – a creation of Lovecraft’s. Wilbur’s deformed torso and trunk – not to mention his devil’s foot – as well as his searching out of unhallowed lore, leads to suspicion.

One eminent professor, Doctor Armitage, becomes disturbed by Whateley’s desire to access arcane texts. Many of these are in Latin and feature the scribblings of the Elisabethan astrologer, John Dee. Bemused by Dr. Armitage’s refusal, Wilbur determines to break into the library at a later date. In a Hammer horror denouement, young Whateley dies trying to extract unhallowed arcana from this ‘Bodelian’.

Doctor Armitage – concerned at the presence of satyrs in New England – decides to investigate up country. He gathers a posse around him. Meanwhile, Wilbur’s brother has burst out of the house – after the deaths of his mother and grandfather. He (Doctor Armitage) then proceeds to investigate this decayed hermitage. In a dramatic crescendo – punctuated by Lovecraft’s love of Yankee patois – a final blaze takes place.

It involves the other Whateley who’s observed by some New England peasants floating into the ether. (In this scene, the man’s senses are blasted out of all expectation!) The first thing to note is the beast’s categorisation: this involves anthropomorphism. For it consists of a writhing and insensate ‘mass’ of snakes, pipes, vessels or tubular instruments. (These can’t help resembling a cancer). It also floats abroad without any discernible support – and yet above its tendrils, suckers and mouths (or living stoves) we see a remarkable sight. It happens to be a face – or, more accurately, a half-face which hovers above Whateley’s jelly. It looks like a revolving disc. You see, this creation of inbreeding, miscegenation, Galton’s dysgenics and lower occultism is leaving the planet. He/‘it’ proves to be searching out the Old Ones beyond the stars – he’s going back.

For Lovecraft’s tale seems to be a rite of passage; in that it’s a cautionary wedding of an albino’s litter with the occult’s left-hand. Could it be thought of as a celebration (albeit in reverse) of a Comus rout? It ticks off the absolute in order to cry out against the cosmos, somewhat pessimistically. Does it resurrect Evola’s example here? Certainly, all of this causes the pot to boil over. After all, it’s a medley of the albino, racial kaos, a search for ‘elementals’, satanism, unsacrosanct lore and nineteenth century degeneration theory a la Nordau. . . .

An effluvium which contrives to alter our perspective of a New England dreamer; a man who once produced a journal called The Conservative. A ‘zine which was mimeographed in form and truly reactionary in spirit. . . .

At this distance we can see Howard Phillips Lovecraft more clearly: and he floats, free of clutter, like a mystic, a visionary or a mystagogue. His imagination is on fire and he exists amid a transport of energy. Truly, he has seen the Black Sun – to use imagery from the New Zealand writer, Kerry Bolton. This former resident of Rhode Island can now be considered as an Aryan fakir – or a mage who dreams of purple in obsidian (implacably so). These nightmares exist amidst blocks of granite – whether tinted red or green – and in subdued light. He (Lovecraft) preaches the end of the discernible; even the beginning of a cosmic kaos – sometimes called cosmicism.

           

Moreover, these processes portend a notion of order; i.e., they move towards it before doubling-back or switch-blading. Most definitely, Lovecraft has drawn the Tarot card known as the Tower in either Waite’s or Crowley’s deck. He succeeds in preaching Apollyon (thereby). Indeed, no other fantasist reckons on such Revelations as these – in the manner of the Apocalypse or the New Testament’s last reading. (A discourse which never repudiates the scientific enquiry that this astronomer believed in).

Hail to thee, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and your dark visions of yore. They are bound to end up in either autophagy or a triptych by Memling. Isn’t it an example of a Western gothic or baroque sensibility? Or might it be seen in terms of George Steiner’s shoah drama, The Portage to San Christobal of A.H.? In this respect, could his lexicon haunt mass consciousness as Grendel’s latest trip?

http://www.jonathanbowden.co.uk/articles.html#lovecraft

Martin Heidegger

The Great Philosophers 10: Martin Heidegger

The field is not without other distinguished contestants, but in the competitive history of incomprehensible German philosophers, Martin Heidegger must, by any reckoning, emerge as the overall victor. Nothing quite rivals the prose of his masterpiece Being and Time (1927) in terms of contortions and the sheer number of complex compound German words which the author coined, among them ‘Seinsvergessenheit’ (Forgetfulness of Being), ‘Bodenständigkeit’ (Rootedness-in-soil) and ‘Wesensverfassung’ (Essential Constitution).

At first, it is likely to be puzzling and perhaps irritating, but gradually, one may warm to the style and understand that beneath its vaporous surface, Heidegger is telling us some simple, even at times homespun truths about the meaning of our lives, the sicknesses of our time and the routes to freedom. We should bother.

He was born, and in many ways remained, a rural provincial German, who loved picking mushrooms, walking in the countryside and going to bed early. He hated television, aeroplanes, pop music and processed food. Born in 1889 to a poor Catholic family, he became an academic star after the publication of Being and Time – but made the fatal misstep of taking Hitler at his word in the mid 1930s (he wasn’t alone). He hoped that the Nazis would restore order and dignity to Germany and, to fit in with the mood of the times, he made a few fiery speeches and tried to ban Jewish academics from Freiburg University, where he was rector. One can almost forgive him this period of lunacy, for which he paid dearly and repented for over decades – in his own way. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, he was hauled in front of a Denazification Commission and was forbidden to teach until the end of the decade. Amazingly (it was a testimony to the appeal of his ideas), his career gradually revived, though he spent more and more time in a hut he owned in the woods, away from modern civilisation, until his death in 1976.

Throughout his career, he sought to help us live more wisely. He wanted us to be braver about facing up to certain truths, and to lead richer, more thoughtful, happier lives. Philosophy was no academic exercise. It was – as it had been for the Ancient Greeks – a spiritual vocation and a form of therapy. He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of new diseases of the soul:

One: We have forgotten to notice we’re alive

We know it in theory, of course, but we aren’t day-to-day properly in touch with the sheer mystery of existence, the mystery of what Heidegger called ‘das Sein’ or ‘Being’. Much of his philosophy is devoted to trying to wake us up to the strangeness of existing on a planet spinning in an otherwise seemingly silent, alien and uninhabited universe.

It’s only at a few odd moments, perhaps late at night, or when we’re ill and have been alone all day, or are on a walk through the countryside, that we come up against the uncanny strangeness of everything: why things exist as they do, why we are here rather than there, why the world is like this, why that tree or this house are the way they are. To capture these rare moments when the normal state of things wobbles a little, Heidegger talks, with capital letters, of the Mystery of Being. His entire philosophy is devoted to getting us to appreciate, and respond appropriately to, this rather abstract but crucial concept.

For Heidegger, the modern world is an infernal machine dedicated to distracting us from the basic wondrous nature of Being. It constantly pulls towards practical tasks, it overwhelms us with information, it kills silence, it doesn’t want to leave us alone – partly because realising the mystery of Being has its frightening dimensions. Doing so, we may be seized by fear (‘Angst’) as we become conscious that everything that had seemed rooted, necessary and oh-so-important may be contingent, senseless and without true purpose. We may ask why we have this job rather than that one, are in a relationship with one person rather than another, are alive when we might so easily be dead… Much of daily life is designed to keep these odd, unnerving but crucial questions at bay.

What we’re really running away from is a confrontation with – and even non-German speakers might respond to the sonorous depth of this key Heideggerian term – ‘das Nichts’ (The Nothing), which lies on the other side of Being.

The Nothing is everywhere, it stalks us, it will swallow us up eventually, but – Heidegger insists – a life is only well lived when one has taken Nothingness and the brief nature of Being on board – as we might do when, for example, a gentle evening light gives way to darkness at the end of a warm summer’s day in the foothills of the Bavarian alps.

Two: We have forgotten that all Being is connected

We look at the world through the prism of our own narrow interests. Our professional needs colour what we pay attention to and bother with. We treat others and nature as means and not as ends.

But occasionally (and again walks in the country are particularly conducive to this realisation), we may be able to step outside our narrow orbit and take a more generous view of our connection with the rest of existence. We may sense what Heidegger termed the Unity of Being, noticing – in a way we hadn’t previously – that we, and that ladybird on the bark, and that rock, and that cloud are all in existence right now and are fundamentally united by the basic fact of Being.

Heidegger values these moments – and wants us to use them as the springboard to a deeper form of generosity, an overcoming of alienation and egoism and a more profound appreciation of the brief time that remains to us before ‘das Nichts’ claims us in turn.

Three: We forget to be free and to live for ourselves

Much about us isn’t of course very free. We are – in Heidegger’s unusual formulation – ‘thrown into the world’ at the start of our lives: thrown into a particular and narrow social milieu, surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices and practical necessities not of our own making.

The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this ‘Thrownness’ (this ‘Geworfenheit’) by understanding its multiple features. We should aim to grasp our psychological, social and professional provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal perspective.

In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from ‘Uneigentlichkeit’ to ‘Eigentlichkeit’ (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start to live for ourselves.

And yet most of the time, for Heidegger, we fail dismally at this task. We merely surrender to a socialised, superficial mode of being he called ‘they-self’ (as opposed to ‘our-selves’). We follow The Chatter (‘das Gerede’), which we hear about in the newspapers, on TV and in the large cities Heidegger hated to spend time in.

What will help us to pull away from the ‘they-self’ is an appropriately intense focus on our own upcoming death. It’s only when we realise that other people cannot save us from ‘das Nichts’ that we’re likely to stop living for them; to stop worrying so much about what others think, and to cease giving up the lion’s share of our lives and energies to impress people who never really liked us in the first place. ‘Angst’ about ‘The Nothing’, though uncomfortable, can save us: awareness of our ‘Sein-zum-Tode’ (our ‘Being-toward-death’) is the road to life. When in a lecture, in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we might recover authenticity, he replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time ‘in graveyards’.

Four: We treat others as objects

Most of the time, without quite meaning to, we treat people as what Heidegger terms ‘Equipment’: ‘das Zeug’ – as if they were tools, rather than Beings in Themselves.

The cure for this selfishness lies in exposure to great art. It is works of art that will help us to step back from ourselves and appreciate the independent existence of other people and things.

Heidegger elaborated this idea in the course of a discussion of a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes. Normally, we don’t pay much attention to shoes, they are merely another bit of ‘equipment’ that we need to get by. But when they are presented to us on a canvas, we’re liable to notice them – as if for the first time – for their own sakes.

The same might happen to us when confronted by other bits of the natural and the man-made world represented by great artists. Thanks to art, we’ll feel a new kind of ‘Care’ (‘Sorge’) for Being that lies beyond our selves.

Conclusion

It would be lying to say that Heidegger’s meaning and moral is ever very clear. Nevertheless, what he tells us is intermittently fascinating, wise and surprisingly useful. Despite the extraordinary words and language, in a sense, we know a lot of it already. We merely need reminding and emboldening to take it seriously, which the odd prose style helps us to do. We know in our hearts that it is time to overcome our ‘Geworfenheit’, that we should become more conscious of ‘das Nichts’ day-to-day, and that we owe it to ourselves to escape the clutches of ‘das Gerede’ for the sake of ‘Eigentlichkeit’ – with a little help from the graveyard.

  

Dark Star

Dark Star Offers A Melancholy, Intimate Portrait Of Artist H.R. Giger

By Cheryl Eddy

There’s a sadness running through Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World — a portrait of the Swiss artist whose most famous creation was the title character in Alien. It comes from knowing that its subject died last year. But the mood suits this appreciative study of a man who counted fear and death among his muses.

Most of Belinda Sallin’s documentary, which opens May 15 (look for VOD August 18), takes place within and around Giger’s ramshackle Zurich home, a wondrous maze filled with his surreal drawings, paintings, sculptures, and other talismans: a skull collection, random things floating in jars, endless stacks of books, his always-underfoot pet cat, and, oh yeah, his Oscar. “The house is almost like a living being,” observes one close associate interviewed here, among several who offer articulate insight, including: his wife, Carmen; the poster seller who gave him his first break, Hans H. Junz; and one of his assistants, Thomas Gabriel Fisher, also known as Tom G. Warrior, frontman of death metal pioneers Celtic Frost.

As the film unfolds, a main topic of conversation is what Giger’s art — dark, disturbing, erotic, lushly sinister, filled with images of his signature “biomechanical” beings — represents (“certain dark areas that we all have related to the trauma of birth,” a psychiatrist friend speculates), and where it all came from. He was the product of parents who were well-off enough to own a retreat in the Swiss Alps (Giger later gave it to his first wife, with whom he remained friendly), but also apparently understanding enough to encourage their son’s unusual talent. When he was a child, his sister took him to a local museum to see an Egyptian mummy — which is indeed eerie, evidenced by its on-camera appearance — an encounter that scared him so much that he returned several weekends in a row, determined to overcome his fear. The mummy and its representation of death became key influences on his art, wife Carmen points out, also noting that “you have to come face to face with your dark side before you can see the light.” 

This theme crops up again when the film turns to the suicide of Giger’s first longtime partner and frequent model, Li Tobler. Though he’s reticent throughout the rest of the film, Giger speaks openly about the pain of that loss. He turned to his art as a coping mechanism, and a few years later, Ridley Scott came calling. Alas, Scott is only seen here in archival on-set footage, but it’s great stuff, depicting a gleeful Giger’s claim that the studio told him his first design for the alien eggs “looked too much like a vagina.” (Also missing: Alejandro Jodorowsky or any mention of Giger’s work on the never-made Dune. For that, you’ll need to watch the Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary instead.)

Dark Star also addresses Giger’s odd position in the art world. It was only near the end of his life that the “serious” art scene welcomed him with museum exhibitions and the like; we see him traveling, in a worrisomely frail state, to a retrospective in Linz, Austria. Thanks to his Hollywood fame and his catalog of album-cover art, his art-world cred had become supplanted by his status as a pop-culture icon, inspiring musicians like Celtic Frost’s Fisher, as well as untold thousands of tattoos. The opening of the gorgeous H.R. Giger Museum, overseen by wife Carmen, brings out devoted fans who weep in his presence.

Mostly, though, Dark Star concentrates on delivering what its subtitle promises. There’s a certain amount of biography, but this is chiefly a doc about what it means to be a massively popular artist at the end of one’s life, too infirm to make art anymore— a process as important to existing as breathing. At this point, he’d rather stay home, puttering around his dark rooms and begrudgingly allowing his employees and family members to make some order out of the chaos of his belongings. In one spontaneous moment, an assistant reaches into a teetering pile and extracts a drawing dated 1960, an item of obviously great value. “There’s so much hidden away in this house that no one’s ever seen,” the young man says in amazement. We also see that same man stacking book after book in front of Giger as he autographs each one, a reminder that part of being a famous artist is embracing (or at least tolerating) its more businesslike aspects.

Unfortunately, what’s lacking in Dark Star is much input from the man himself — at heart, “just a normal guy,” according to his mother-in-law. Either because he physically can’t or would prefer not to speak much, Giger is the most-seen and the least heard figure in the film. Instead, his art does most of his talking. (It’s certainly evocative enough.) Giger’s death, which occurred just after the documentary wrapped, is handled sensitively, and suggests that he knew didn’t have much time left. His apparent contentment with that fact, and his satisfaction about the life he was lucky enough to live, offers unexpected uplift to the film’s final moments.

Images courtesy of Icarus Films.

The Hellstrom Chronicle

The Hellstrom Chronicle

Remarkable footage of insect predation and survival tactics. 

               

Here http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=Bratgoul#g/u 

More Info From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hellstrom_Chronicle 

The Hellstrom Chronicle is an American film released in 1971 which combines elements of documentary and science fiction to present a gripping depiction of the Darwinian struggle for survival between humans and insects. It was conceived and produced by David L. Wolper, directed by Walon Green and written by David Seltzer, who earned a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for his screenplay.

Several cinematographers photographed this film using stop-motion photography with microscopic and telescopic lenses. The trailer resembled an announcement for a science fiction movie. The film provided the inspiration for Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Hellstrom's Hive.

A fictitious scientist called Dr. Nils Hellstrom (played by Lawrence Pressman) guides viewers throughout the film. He claims, on the basis of scientific-sounding theories, that insects will ultimately win the fight for survival on planet Earth because of their adaptability and ability to reproduce rapidly, and that the human race will lose this fight largely because of excessive individualism. The film combines short clips from horror and science fiction movies with extraordinary camera sequences of butterflies, locusts, wasps, termites, ants, mayflies, other insects rarely seen before on film and insectivorous plants/insects.

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067197

Intelligence & Inheritance

Intelligence & Inheritance

By Aedon Cassiel

       

Audio Version: To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click hereand choose “save target or link as.”

Now that I’ve given a cursory definition and defense of “race,” it’s time to move on to IQ. This essay will address IQ separately, before synthesizing the two subjects in a subsequent follow-up. While I will explain the core foundational concepts in IQ science, I’ll also demonstrate why this is important in race-neutral terms by showing how the issues apply to education – and impact how we ought to think about, and practice, educational policy.

If minds are essentially blank slates which are carved into what they become by their environment, then the only thing limiting our ability as a society to turn anyone into anything at all is the skill of our teachers. Teachers, who influence most of the mind-shaping period of childhood, are the ones who deserve the most praise when people succeed and who deserve the most scorn when people fail.

There’s a saying one often sees on motivational posters for educators: “Teachers plant the seeds of knowledge that last a lifetime.”

But what if people themselves are already more like seeds than soil?

Soil is an empty receptacle that will generally grow whatever you can plant in it. If a gardener chooses to plant oak seeds instead of apricot seeds, then by virtue of that action, he is responsible for the fact that his garden grew oak trees instead of apricots.

On the other hand, the seed depends on certain elements in its environment in order to grow properly, but it already comes with its own built-in “blueprint” for what it is going to become, even when it is still indistinguishable from any other seed. The gardener deserves credit for watering his plants and ensuring the health of his soil, but he is not responsible for the fact that an oak seed becomes an oak tree. Its environment can stunt its capacity to grow, but its nature comes from within.

Are children like soil, passively waiting to grow whatever type of seed the gardeners of education choose to plant in them – or are they more like seeds, unfolding into what they will become according to their own internal blueprints, requiring only that their environment contains the preconditions to allow this process to take place?

If we assume that people are like soil, then we will take the fact that one group excels over another in a given subject as evidence that the first group is getting too much, and the second group is getting too little of our resources and attention. We’ll want to increase our focus on the second group until it achieves comparable outcomes. If people are blank slates, then their unequal outcomes must axiomatically be the result of the fact that we have treated them unequally — and therefore treated them unfairly.

But if children are more like seeds, then this will all be wasted effort. Pouring more water on a crape myrtle, or planting it in better soil, will never make it grow as tall as a redwood. And if you try to make that happen, you’ll waste incredible amounts of time and resources that could have achieved something far more productive if used in another way.

When it comes down to it, you simply have to accept crape myrtle seeds and redwood seeds for what they are. You’ll never grow the world’s tallest tree by planting crape myrtles, but you wouldn’t want to plant redwoods in your front yard. The key is to first accept them for what they are so that you can find places where their inherent traits fit in appropriately.

There is another important upshot of this distinction between seeds and soil. Suppose we had a variety of seeds, and we didn’t know what they were, and we needed to create the tallest row of trees possible. They’ve all been placed in equally bad soil so far, so they’re all withered, and it’s impossible to tell if some would naturally grow to be taller than the others if placed in better soil. In this scenario, what should you do?

As we discovered which seeds responded to being watered and placed in good soil by growing taller than the others, we would want to devote even more of our time and resources to those trees, and even less to those that still seemed to come up short once placed in better soil. We have limited time and resources on hand to produce the outcomes we need to achieve, and we will get far better dividends by investing in the better seeds than to expend them on those that lag behind.

The application to people is obvious: if people are more like seeds than soil, then failing to devote more resources to the most gifted is a far greater sin than failing to do so for those who lag behind. The most gifted are like redwoods: in a proper environment, they’ll grow to become the tallest trees on Earth. By impoverishing their environment, you can stunt their development and make it seem as though the difference between redwoods and crape myrtles isn’t as great as it really is. But the redwood doesn’t owe the fact that it is a redwood to its environment: a crape myrtle planted in the same soil will never grow as tall. If we neglect the most intelligent children in a vain attempt to let slower children catch up, we aren’t just wasting time, we’re stunting the growth of those redwoods while trying in vain to make the crabapples grow equally tall.

In fact, some educational systems do this.

Germany, for example, tracks children into different types of schools based on teachers’ and parents’ assessment of their potential, beginning as early as fifth grade.

So, what has this produced?

An unemployment rate that is half that of the United States, and a world-renowned reputation for high-quality products like the BMW. Students of low-to-average intellectual ability are directed towards apprenticeships rather than universities.

Rather than attempting to turn crabapples into redwoods, the German system aims to plant crabapples in their most appropriate place and tries to make them into the best crabapples they can be. In the end, this serves the best interests of everyone, from the workers themselves to the national economy of Germany as a whole.

Yet, Left-wing critics, including Vernor Muñoz, whose report to the UN on the “right to education” gave Germany low marks, describe the German system as an “anachronism” and as a “refuge for the privileged” which “emphasizes social inequality.”

Sure. Clearly, Germany should become more like the United States, where spending on K-12 education, even once adjusted for inflation, has roughly tripled over the last four decades, and yet scores on reading, math, and science have remained perfectly flat.

While most Americans polled in 2007 expressed the belief that the biggest problem with public schooling is insufficient funding, the last four decades have in fact been a national experiment in rampantly increased educational spending – and the results of that experiment have been clear: as a society, no one, including our children, has benefited from this massive influx of resources into education.

The proponent of the people-as-seeds perspective can easily explain this discrepancy: placing crabapples in better soil won’t turn them into redwoods. But the proponent of the people-as-soil perspective has a serious problem: how could we add this much additional fertilizer into the soil and see literally no increase in our trees’ height? That just doesn’t make sense.

Thankfully, science has reached the stage where it can answer this question once and for all. And the evidence is clear: people are not soil as much as they are seeds. To explain what the science says about this, we’ll have to perform a rundown of a few basic concepts.

First: heritability.

This is the concept that all of the studies we usually perform to try to estimate “how genetic” a behavior is are going to be measuring. Strictly speaking, how heritable something is and “how genetic” it is are not the same thing. The distinction is that heritability measurements do not measure the total influence that an individual’s genes have on that individual’s behavior. As we’ll see in a moment, heritability estimates can both overestimate or underestimate “how genetic” something is in this sense.

What these studies do is take for granted the amount of currently seen variation in behavior and personality between individuals in a given population, and then estimate how much of that variation is the result of differences between those individuals’ genes or environments. Thus, without any change in “how genetic” a behavior or personality trait is, the heritability of that trait can change! So heritability is a relative, and not an absolute, value.

I’ll proceed with examples.

If we study the heritability of height by looking at the United States in 2017, we’re going to find a very high value for that heritability. It is mostly genes that determine who is taller in the United States in 2017. But this is because very few people are being exposed to the environmental influences that can influence how tall people grow to be as adults. For instance, very few people in the United States in 2017 experience the kind of severe caloric deprivation it takes to stunt their physical growth. If half of the United States were to experience an economic crash in 2018, and this kind of severe caloric deprivation appeared again, what would happen when we remeasured the heritability of height in the United States in 2018? The heritability would fall significantly, because an environmental factor would then explain a much larger proportion of the differences in height found between the United States’ two halves – the one where severe caloric deprivation is prevalent and the one where it is not.

But heritability estimates can also underestimate the total degree to which a trait “is genetic” as well. We know, for example, that there is a small minority of people who can spend years smoking cigarettes and still have perfectly healthy lungs. We know that this is due to the protective effect of a few unique genes which studies have now precisely identified.

If we studied the heritability of lung cancer today, smoking would be the most significant predictor of someone developing it, and we would find an extremely low value for heritability. But what if this situation were to change? What if these “good genes” that protect against the damage from smoking were to spread throughout most of the population, and smoking as a habit became more prevalent?

Well, suddenly the heritability of lung cancer in America would become extremely high, because now that almost everyone is exposed to cigarette smoke, it is a less effective way of predicting who will develop lung cancer than looking at who has the protective genes. With almost everyone being exposed to cigarette smoke, knowing someone had been exposed wouldn’t give you very solid grounds for predicting how things will turn out in the future.

In short, heritability is as close as we can get to trying to estimate “how genetic” a trait or behavior is. While it doesn’t tell us how responsible an individual’s genes are for that individual’s traits or behaviors, it can tell us how responsible genes are for the differences found within groups of people in a large population.

How do heritability studies accomplish that?

Traditional heritability studies primarily focus on two techniques. The first technique is to control the environment in order to see how much variation between individuals remains (since what remains is the amount of variation that is due to genetics). The second technique is to control for genes in order to see how much variation remains (since what remains is the amount of variation that is the result of the environment). You can achieve the former by comparing adopted and biological children raised in the same home from young ages. You can achieve the latter by looking at identical twins raised separately. Of course, this is not exhaustive; there are many other techniques you can employ, such as measuring the similarity found between identical and non-identical twins, and comparing this with the proportion of genes shared by them, but for the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the more straightforward methods.

Without exception, the results of all of these studies show that personality and intellectual ability are very heritable: in other words, when people in the modern world differ in IQ, that difference is owed to genes more than it is to environmental factors. What this means in concrete terms is that adopted children grow up to be more like their biological parents than they are like the siblings they grew up with, or their adoptive parents. Yet at the same time, identical twins grow up to be significantly more like each other than non-twin siblings do. And this happens even if their childhoods never intersect because they grew up in different homes.

Now let’s discuss the heritability of IQ.

By the lowest estimates made by nearly anyone, anywhere, in any respectable academic position, the heritability of IQ is at least around fifty percent. Scientific debate is no longer over whether IQ is heritable. There is literally no respectable scientific theory which supposes that IQ is determined primarily by the environment. The debate is between “environmentalists” and “hereditarians,” but even those “environmentalists” take the position that IQ is somewhere around fifty percent heritable. The “hereditarians” who take a stronger stance simply raise that estimate to around eighty percent.

To get a more tangible idea of what these values mean, let’s plug some overly simplified numbers into a hypothetical scenario.

Suppose that in the population we’re studying, the range in IQ stretches from scores of exactly eighty at the low end to exactly one hundred twenty at the top. If IQ were fifty percent heritable in this population, then people would be born with genes that set their IQ somewhere between ninety and one hundred ten – then the very best or worst environments that any part of this population is ever exposed to would be capable of adding or taking away another ten points to determine a person’s IQ. The total range of IQ in this population is forty points, and genes would be responsible for half of that, which means genes would be responsible for twenty total IQ points. Thus, if we start in the middle at one hundred, genes would first add or take away up to ten total points in either direction, and then the environment would add or take away up to ten more points.

Thus, someone born with the worst genes for IQ seen in this population would start at ninety. They could reach an IQ as high as one hundred with the help of the most beneficial environmental boost possible, and being placed in the most corrosive environment seen anywhere in this population could cause their IQ to fall to as low as eighty. Meanwhile, someone born with the best genes for IQ seen in this population could only reach an IQ of one hundred by being exposed to the worst environment ever seen in this population.

But he will never, under any circumstances, perform worse on IQ tests than the individual with the worst genes for IQ in this population; it would take exposure to the worst environment possible just to make him do equally as poorly as the individual with the worst genes for IQ can do only with the help of the best environment possible.

If you can, try to let it sink in that this is what the “environmentalists” in the modern scientific debate believe to be true regarding the hereditability of IQ. Even in this scenario, as you can see, genes are still extremely significant for explaining the differences between individuals.

On the other hand, if the hereditarians were correct about this population and its IQ were found to be eighty percent heritable, then a person would be born with genes that would place their IQ somewhere between eighty-four and one hundred sixteen. Then the best and worst environments could add or take away at most only four points to produce that individual’s IQ.

The total range in variation between an IQ of eighty and an IQ of one hundred twenty is still forty points. If genes are responsible for eighty percent of that variation, then they are responsible for thirty-two total points. Thus, starting in the middle at one hundred, a person’s genes start them off with up to an extra sixteen points for or against them, and then the environment fills in the remaining twenty percent of variation by adding or taking away up to four points. This might not be “genetic determinism,” but damn if it isn’t close.

Children and Adults

One important point that gets missed in many entry-level discussions of this topic is that the heritability of IQ changes across different age groups. In children, the heritability of IQ is relatively low. In one’s late teens and in both younger and older adults, the heritability of IQ rises substantially. Environmentalist arguments have often tried to draw power from studies that solely looked at the heritability of IQ in children. In one study we’ll look at in the next entry in this series, the environmental influence over the IQ of children adopted into the homes of parents of a different race was large – and the heritability was low.

“Case closed!” the environmentalists wanted to shout – except that when a follow-up was performed ten years later, that environmental influence had almost totally washed out. The IQ of those children’s biological parents was, once again, the most significant predictor of their current IQ – not the IQs of the adoptive parents who had raised them or the siblings they grew up with.

The best way to think about this discrepancy is to imagine that children come with blueprints given to them by their parents which lay out the plan for what their adult IQ is going to be. However, the speed at which those children are exposed to different environmental stimuli will have a significant impact on how fast they put that blueprint together.

Can we infer from the heritability of individual IQ that there is a heritability of IQ between races?

Technically, no. That is, again, because heritability is a relative value. We have to establish that the environment that two individuals are exposed to is the same before we can estimate the amount of variation left over that must be due to genetics. Since the Left-wing argument is that members of different racial groups are exposed to systematically different environments because of their race, it would beg the question of whether or not what is true of the heritability of IQ between two white individuals must also be true for the heritability of IQ between a white individual and a black one. That is why an important part of this debate will always belong to sociology – a topic I’ve taken a reasonable start on addressing in many of my previous articles (“Is the War on Drugs Racist?”, “An Open Letter to Jesse Williams,” and “Employers Hate Blacks, but They Love ‘Ebony’?”).

Obviously, we wouldn’t be able to learn anything interesting by comparing poor black individuals to wealthy white individuals. If all blacks were poor, and all whites were from wealthy homes, then using the methods of heritability studies would be absolutely incapable of giving us any meaningful information about the causes of the differences between black and white IQs. Fortunately, I think most people are aware by now that not all blacks are poor and not all whites come from wealthy homes. But it does take extra work to figure out the cause of the differences between two different groups, even once you know the causes of the differences between the various individuals within those different groups. We’ll take a look in the next article at how far the science is capable of taking us on that question.

Further reading: Steve Sailer, ”The College Paradox: Not Everyone Gains by Higher Education,” VDARE.