Reflections On Carl Schmitt’s The Concept Of The Political

                 

Carl Schmitt, 1888–1985

By Greg Johnson  

Translations: Estonian, French, Polish

“Why can’t we all get along?”–Rodney King

Carl Schmitt’s short book The Concept of the Political(1932) is one of the most important works of 20th century political philosophy.

The aim of The Concept of the Political is the defense of politics from utopian aspirations to abolish politics. Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished.

In ordinary speech, of course, liberalism, international socialism, etc. are political movements, not anti-political ones. So it is clear that Schmitt is using “political” in a particular way. For Schmitt, the political is founded on the distinction between friend and enemy. Utopianism is anti-political insofar as it attempts to abolish that distinction, to root out all enmity and conflict in the world.

Schmitt’s defense of the political is not a defense of enmity and conflict as good things. Schmitt fully recognizes their destructiveness and the necessity of managing and mitigating them. But Schmitt believes that enmity is best controlled by adopting a realistic understanding of its nature. So Schmitt does not defend conflict, but realism about conflict. Indeed, Schmitt believes that the best way to contain conflict is first to abandon all unrealistic notions that one can do away with it entirely.

Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace.

Us and Them

What does the distinction between friend and enemy mean?

First, for Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy is collective. He is talking about “us versus them” not “one individual versus another.”

Schmitt introduces the Latin distinction between hostis (a collective or public enemy, the root of “hostile”) and inimicus (an individual and private adversary, the root of “inimical”). The political is founded on the distinction between friend (those on one’s side) and hostis (those on the other side). Private adversaries are not public enemies.

Second, the distinction between friend and enemy is polemical. The friend/enemy distinction is always connected with the abiding potential for violence. One does not need to actually fight one’s enemy, but the potential must always be there. The sole purpose of politics is not group conflict; the sole content of politics is not group conflict; but the abiding possibility of group conflict is what creates the political dimension of human social existence.

Third, the distinction between friend and enemy is existentially serious. Violent conflict is more serious than other forms of conflict, because when things get violent people die.

Fourth, the distinction between friend and enemy is not reducible to any other distinction. For instance, it is not reducible to the distinction between good and evil. The “good guys” are just as much enemies to the “bad guys” as the “bad guys” are enemies to the “good guys.” Enmity is relative, but morality—we hope—is not.

Fifth, although the friend/enemy distinction is not reducible to other distinctions and differences—religious, economic, philosophical, etc.—all differences can become political if they generate the friend/enemy opposition.

In sum, the ultimate root of the political is the capacity of human groups to take their differences so seriously that they will kill or die for them.

It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense. Schmitt’s notion of politics applies primarily to foreign relations — the relations between sovereign states and peoples — rather than domestic relations within a society. The only time when domestic relations become political in Schmitt’s sense is during a revolution or a civil war.

Sovereignty

If the political arises from the abiding possibility of collective life or death conflict, the political rules over all other areas of social life because of its existential seriousness, the fact that it has recourse to the ultimate sanction.

For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision.

If a sovereign declares an enemy, and individuals or groups within his society reject that declaration, the society is in a state of undeclared civil war or revolution. To refuse the sovereign’s choice of enemy is one step away from the sovereign act of choosing one’s own enemies. Thus Schmitt’s analysis supports the saying that, “War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”

Philosophical Parallels

The root of the political as Schmitt understands it is what Plato and Aristotle call “thumos,” the middle part of the soul that is neither theoretical reason nor physical desire, but is rather the capacity for passionate attachment. Thumos is the root of the political because it is the source of attachments to (a) groups, and politics is collective, and (b) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups.

     

The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity. He is what Nietzsche called “the last man,” the man for whom there is nothing higher than himself, nothing that might require that he risk the continuation of his physical existence. The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped up, dumbed down, self-absorbed producer-consumers.

Schmitt’s notion of the political is consistent with Hegel’s notion of history. For Hegel, history is a record of individual and collective struggles to the death over images or interpretations of who we are. These interpretations consist of the whole realm of culture: worldviews and the ways of life that are their concrete manifestations.

There are, of course, many interpretations of who we are. But there is only one truth, and according to Hegel the truth is that man is free. Just as philosophical dialectic works through a plurality of conflicting viewpoints to get to the one truth, so the dialectic of history is a war of conflicting worldviews and ways of life that will come to an end when the correct worldview and way of life are established. The concept of human freedom must become concretely realized in a way of life that recognizes freedom. Then history as Hegel understands it—and politics as Schmitt understands it—will come to an end.

Hegel’s notion of the ideal post-historical state is pretty much everything a 20th (or 21st) century fascist could desire. But later interpreters of Hegel like Alexandre Kojèveand his follower Francis Fukuyama, interpret the end of history as a “universal homogeneous state” that sounds a lot like the globalist utopianism that Schmitt wished to combat.

Why the Political Cannot be Abolished

If the political is rooted in human nature, then it cannot be abolished. Even if the entire planet could be turned into a boneless chicken ranch, all it would take is two serious men to start politics—and history—all over again.

But the utopians will never even get that far. Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us.

Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics. But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison.

Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration. And since it is a mere conflict of interest—in which both sides, really, are right—rather than a moral or religious crusade between good and evil, light and darkness, ultimately both sides can strike a deal with each other to cease hostilities.

But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”—it becomes universal in scope and endless in duration. It is universal, because it proposes to represent all of humanity. It is endless, of course, because it is a war with human nature itself.

Furthermore, when war is declared in the name of “humanity,” its prosecution becomes maximally inhuman, since anything is fair against the enemies of humanity, who deserve nothing short of unconditional surrender or annihilation, since one cannot strike a bargain with evil incarnate. The road to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki was paved with love: universalistic, utopian, humanistic, liberal love.

Liberalism

Liberalism seeks to reduce the friend/enemy distinction to differences of opinion or economic interests. The liberal utopia is one in which all disputes can be resolved bloodlessly by reasoning or bargaining. But the opposition between liberalism and anti-liberalism cannot be resolved by liberal means. It is perforce political. Liberal anti-politics cannot triumph, therefore, without the political elimination of anti-liberalism.

The abolition of the political requires the abolition of all differences, so there is nothing to fight over, or the abolition of all seriousness, so that differences make no difference. The abolition of difference is accomplished by violence and cultural assimilation. The abolition of seriousness is accomplished by the promotion of spiritual apathy through consumerism and indoctrination in relativism, individualism, tolerance, and diversity worship—the multicult.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists, they are just less capable of honesty.

Liberalism, however, generally prefers to kill us softly. The old-fashioned version of liberalism prefers the soft dissolution of differences through cultural assimilation, but that preference was reversed when the unassimilable Jewish minority rose to power in the United States, at which time multiculturalism and diversity became the watchwords, and the potential conflicts between different groups were to be managed through spiritual corruption. Today’s liberals make a fetish of the preservation of pluralism and diversity, as long as none of it is taken seriously.

Multicultural utopianism is doomed, because multiculturalism is very successful at increasing diversity, but, in the long run, it cannot manage the conflicts that come with it.

The drug of consumerism cannot be relied upon because economic crises cannot be eliminated. Furthermore, there are absolute ecological limits to the globalization of consumerism.

As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult: only whites are susceptible to their effects, and since these ideas systematically disadvantage whites in ethnic competition, ultimately those whites who accept them will be destroyed (which is the point, really) and those whites who survive will reject them. Then whites will start taking our own side, ethnic competition will get political, and, one way or another, racially and ethnically homogeneous states will emerge.

Lessons for White Nationalists

To become a White Nationalist is to choose one’s friends and one’s enemies for oneself. To choose new friends means to choose a new nation. Our nation is our race. Our enemies are the enemies of our race, of whatever race they may be. By choosing our friends and enemies for ourselves, White Nationalists have constituted ourselves as a sovereign people—a sovereign people that does not have a sovereign homeland, yet—and rejected the sovereignty of those who rule us. This puts us in an implicitly revolutionary position vis-à-vis all existing regimes.

The conservatives among us do not see it yet. They still wish to cling to America’s corpse and suckle from her poisoned tit. But the enemy understands us better than some of us understand ourselves. We may not wish to choose an enemy, but sometimes the enemy chooses us. Thus “mainstreamers” will be denied entry and forced to choose either to abandon White Nationalism or to explicitly embrace its revolutionary destiny.

It may be too late for mainstream politics, but it is still too early for White Nationalist politics. We simply do not have the power to win a political struggle. We lack manpower, money, and leadership. But the present system, like all things old and dissolute, will pass. And our community, like all things young and healthy, will grow in size and strength. Thus today our task is metapolitical: to raise consciousness and cultivate the community from which our kingdom—or republic—will come.

When that day comes, Carl Schmitt will be numbered among our spiritual Founding Fathers.

Lovecraft’s Bible: Robert M. Price & The [Un]-Making Of The New Testament

Lovecraft’s Bible:  Robert M. Price & The [Un]-Making Of The New Testament     

By James J. O'Meara  

The Human Bible New Testament

Translated and introduced by Robert M. Price
Cranford, N.J.: American Atheist Press, 2015

     

“It is certain that the New Testament was not written by Christ himself, nor by his apostles, but a long while after them, by . . . I know not what sort of half Jews, not even agreeing with themselves, who made up their tale out of reports and opinions merely, and yet, fathering the whole upon the names of the apostles of the Lord or on those who were supposed to follow the apostles, they maliciously pretended that they had written their lies and conceits according to them.” — St. Faustus, Fifth Century French Bishop

The last time I was rapping at ya’ll, the topic was the resurgence of the idea of the Mythic Christ, particularly the efforts of Kenneth Humphreys in his Jesus Never Existed: An Introduction to the Ultimate Heresy,[1] which accounts for the rise of Christianity by looking not for a divine founder but at the social process of religious syncretism.

Now, if there is no need, as Humphreys insists, for a man or god-man to account for Christianity, they perhaps there is also no need to rely on a man, or men, or even God, to explain the origin of the New Testament itself.

While logically distinct, there is a pleasing symmetry to the idea. Although, as we saw, just about everybody takes for granted the idea of some kind of real Jesus, the most fervent of them also seem to be wedded to the idea of a New Testament written by certain definite men, under some kind of “divine inspiration.” While only the duller ones think the author is King James, or even “Saint James,” owing to the famous “version” erroneously attributed to him as an author, the rest are sure they are reading actual letters of Paul and the other apostles, along with “eye-witness” accounts of Jesus.

The reality, as our author says in his Introduction, is that

The understanding of Jesus . . . gelled . . . from a volatile mixture of Hellenistic syncretism.[2]

Well, we can’t push the analogy too far here. Somebody did intentionally construct it out of that mixture — unlike the tornado in a junkyard that the New Atheists think can account for the origin of life — but the point is it was assembled, like an artefact, and the letters aren’t letters, the “eye-witness” accounts aren’t, and none of it was written by the apostles (who were, after all, illiterate fishermen).

And no, it wasn’t Lovecraft either, of course – now there would be a weird tale! – nor do I mean by my title something like “Jefferson’s Bible,” although the book under review is also a kind of a reshuffling of the received text. I just find it interesting, in another case of taking an analogy too far, that the author, Robert M. Price, is a prominent Lovecraft scholar, and writer of weird fiction, as well as being, in his real life, a prominent New Testament scholar and, like Lovecraft, a religious skeptic.[3]

As Price himself says on his website:

Lovecraft was a scholarly soul, and part of the effect of his stories, with their gradual build-up from the mundane to the spectacular, is their scholarly, treatise-like tone. The reader gets the feeling he is reading a deposition, a reluctant account, the report of a case.[4] Such narration comes naturally to me, too, because of my prior experience in scholarly writing. It is perhaps something of a limitation, but then if one’s goal is to imitate a limited writer, maybe it is an asset, too!

Indeed, what better preparation for dealing with what more than one writer – Nietzsche, for one – has compared to the records of a madhouse?[5] Not only was Lovecraft skilled in creating verisimilitude through the skillful manipulating of texts, he also found himself creating an actual religious or at least magical text, the Necronomicon, which people to this day believe is a real book he discovered, or even wrote himself.[6]

Hence, we have here the idea of the human Bible – not a book written by some guy, but a library of texts, by various authors, and subject to various levels of rewriting by various editors with various agendas, and needing to be read as such – with caution.[7]

Living in an evangelical environment, most Americans simply take for granted the idea that the apostles had some scriptures, if not a book, which they waved around, sermonized from, and gave people to read and be converted by. A moment’s thought shows this is quite unlikely, and some investigation will prove it to be entirely false.

A related notion, is that based on these scriptures, there was some kind of original orthodox belief and believers, which was occasionally threatened by heretics like “the Gnostics” and charlatans like Simon Magus. Again, untrue.

Rather than the myth of one group of faithful disciples, spreading one consistent “gospel” and repelling the encroachment of various bands of “heretic” with their “false” gospels, the texts in the New Testament are the patchwork results of a couple of centuries of warring factions seeking to overcome each other by various forgeries.

Much of the work of so-called Form Critics since the 19th century has consisted in identifying these layers, whilst the public, and the preachers, continue to try and impose a consistent interpretation of a supposedly unified text — the “Word of God.”

Guénon and the other “orthodox” Traditionalists deplored such “modernism,” but I think wrongly. Apart from making themselves look like fuddy-duddies, the Christian scriptures are quite unlike the holy books of the East, which are organic products of each pagan ethnos, and at least purport to be produced by sages returning from altered states and verifiable by anyone who chooses to follow the directions supplied.

The Bible, on the other hand, is obviously a rag-bag of fake histories and forged correspondence,[8] claiming to be as real as the morning papers (the “Good News” indeed), and on that basis impudently imposing itself in the place of our native traditions as being “the Truth,” yet deigning only to acknowledge allegiance through blind faith; if you weren’t told it was scripture (by a Church, or the word “Holy” on the cover) you’d see it for what it is: a massive work of Judaic chutzpah.[9]

As fellow Christ Myther Acharya S – who has reached the same conclusions, through almost entirely different sources — says, reviewing an earlier book of Price:

When these facts are clearly understood, it becomes abundantly evident that, rather than representing a free-flowing transmission of mystical and divine origin, the New Testament is a highly contrived text worked over numerous times for the specific purpose of establishing iron-clad dogma and doctrine.[10]

Since both related ideas – the Original Book and Original Sect — are false, it should be no surprise – though it usually is – that the truth is also two related ideas, but reversed. The first canon of official scriptures was cobbled together by a man later deemed an arch-heretic, but at the time as orthodox as anyone else in that “volatile mixture”: Marcion. And the faith Marcion was attempting to establish he traced back not to Jesus but Paul, a gnostic,[11] and, Price argues, the false face given to the historical “father of all heresies,” . Simon Magus.

Now, Marcion is somewhat familiar to some alt-Right types, since he has been a great favorite of those trying to set up their own, modern, alternate canon of Christian scriptures, so as to create or “rediscover” an Aryan form of Christianity. Marcion makes for an obvious role model here.[12]

Despite such a modern fan club, Marcion, as Price presents him, was not anti-Judaic as such.[13] Sure, the God of the Jews was a violent, dangerous nutjob, but he was their god, and they were welcome to him. It was a perfectly valid religion, for them; but Paul had brought the Good News of a new god, who gave the gentiles, and any Jews who wanted out, an escape from the world ruled by the vengeful sky-god JHVH-1.[14]

The real problem came from those calling themselves “Catholic,” meaning “universal.” To Marcion, this was a “syncretistic mess” created by the disciples who, as is clear from the Gospels themselves, were too stupid to understand the message of Jesus. Thus, Paul had been sent to straighten things out; hence all the stories of the controversies between Paul and the other “apostles” and “brothers of Jesus.” And Marcion was going to finish the job.[15]

Marcion’s story was that “the risen Jesus had to go outside” the circle of the apostles, “to find someone else, a man with no proper credentials, to get his message across.”

We should stop and note here, are Price himself does, that the situation facing Paul and Marcion is the same as that presents itself to the individual, scholar or not, vis-à-vis the “scholarly consensus” that, of course, Jesus existed,[16] or of course, you’re just throwing your vote away on a third party (Price’s example), or (not mentioned by Price) of course exactly six million Jews were deliberately murdered in WWII,[17] or of course, the planet is getting hotter because of my (but not Al Gore’s) “carbon footprint,” and of course, IQ is a myth (and liberals are smarter than us for believing this), and there are no “races” anyway (but the white race needs to be abolished).

Price rightly dismisses this kind of maneuver as nothing but the logical fallacy of Appeal to Authority, and a self-fulfilling prophecy, to boot; and elsewhere even cites my own scientific role model, Paul Feyerabend:

Consensus is no criterion. The truth may not rest in the middle. The truth may not rest with the majority. Every theory must be evaluated on its own.[18] If we appeal to “received opinion” or “the consensus of scholars,” we are merely abdicating our own responsibility. . . . I accept the dictum of Paul Feyerabend at this point. The only axiom that does not inhibit research is “Anything Goes.” Let’s just see how far. It matters neither whether a particular hypothesis comports easily with the majority paradigm nor with owns own other hypotheses. Since all must be but tentatively and provisionally held anyway, we must follow the evidence wherever it seems to be taking us.[19]

Ironically, the New Testament was itself put together to challenge the “existing consensus.” Here’s how it was done, more or less.

Paul (actually, Price believes, Simon Magus) “appears out of nowhere with a different doctrine and a massive constituency that the Jerusalem establishment simply could not dismiss with indifference. . . . This is what lies behind the stories of his separate calling as an apostle and his subsequent uneasy alliance with the Christianity of the twelve.”

At this time there are no gospels, and no epistles; so Marcion began to write them.

Tertullian notes that Marcion “discovered” the Epistle to the Galatians, and on analogy with Deuteronomy and the Book of Mormon, this would seem to mean that he had written it himself.

To these Marcion added a single gospel, a sort of Ur-Luke. And that’s it: the Evangelion and the Apostolicon, the Gospel and the Apostle.[20]

Whence come the 27 books of the “canonical” New Testament?

Someone, most likely Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, a noted opponent of Marcion, decided to try to co-opt Marcionism by embracing their idea of a uniquely Christian scripture, adding a New Testament to the Old, retaining both. The “Pauline” Epistles, hitherto shunned as heresy, could be adapted to Catholic usage by judicious redaction.

Then, to paper over the disputes between Paul and the Twelve, Polycarp (or whoever) doctored up Mark, padded out Marcion’s Luke, heavily edited the Gnostic Gospel of John, translated an Aramaic history of the Apostles into Greek, and added his own material, creating Acts, which pumps up the role of Peter as an equal to Paul, then adds in the Catholicizing “Pastoral Epistles”[21] and a few random texts attributed to some apostles to beef up their roles.

Voila! Bow down before the Word of God!

Perhaps exhausted by all this forgery, Polycarp finished up by grabbing an entirely non-Christian text, from the Essenes at Quorum, added a hasty “say hi! to Timothy” at the end, and produced The Epistle to the Hebrews.[22]

The big surprise here is Revelation, which, from its position — at the end — and subject matter – end times – most people assume was written last. Though controversy about including it also lasted right up to the end of the canonization process, it is, in fact, the earliest text here, and was the subject of that quote from Price I used at the beginning; its surrealistically shifting visions of various Jesi – sometimes the angel Gabriel, sometimes Zeus, sometimes the planet Venus — come from a period of the “volatile mixture of Hellenism” when the image of Jesus had not yet “gelled.” The orthodox simply added the equivalent of “cover letters” to various churches, and created yet another “holy book.”

Price now undertakes to reverse the process and present the reader with each of the canonical books in order of composition, preceded by introductions – short, but packed with information and insights – and freshly translated, with various typographical conventions to help sort out the editorial work that was done to make them “canonical.”

One advantage of Price’s unfamiliar – shall we say, unorthodox? – arrangement is that it gives his translation a chance to start off with a bang, rendering the rather dull opening of Hebrews, as in the New Revised Standard Version:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various way by the prophets . . .

as

By dribs and drabs, in various ways, God has anciently spoken to the fathers by the prophets . . .

It is, as Vince says in Pulp Fiction, the little things, and throughout Price does things like that, using his literary talents to give us a translated text that is based on sound scholarship but rendered in a way that is faithful to, or at least suggests from time to time, the rather racy original (written, as it is, in a kind of Ebonic Greek).

Another nice touch is Price’s insistence on rendering the word doulos correctly as “slave.” This is not just a common noun in the New Testament but a title wore with pride by the apostles and others, as in “a slave of Christ” etc. Most translations try to smooth this out by rendering it as “servant,” as if we are to imagine someone like Jeeves or Alfred the Butler. Perversely, modern PC types try to eliminate it altogether, as something distasteful to modern sensibilities. It is repugnant, at least to Aryan people, of course, but that’s why Price is right to render it as “slave,” and if modern Christians cringe at being reminded of their belonging to a slave religion, then hooray!

Now, Here’s an example of a rendering that though racy shows accuracy has some limits:

“Oh no! Lord, I am not worthy to have you actually set foot under my roof! Just use some incantation, and my servant boy will be cured. I know how it works, since I myself am a man under authority, and I have soldiers under my command. And I order this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and I order my slave, ‘Do this’ and he does.” – Matthew 8:8-9

Note “slave” but also note “servant boy.” The latter is pais, ‘boy.’ Why does Price render pais as ‘servant boy’ just as the New Revised Version does? Now both doulos and pais were also terms for what we might call a “boy toy” or “love slave” (in the parallel story in Luke, it’s doulos again), and as James Neill among others has pointed out, it’s hard to believe a Roman centurion, proud of his race and rank as we see, would be distraught enough to seek out a Hebrew magician (“use some incantation” not the liturgical “say but the word”) to heal a mere “servant.”[23] Both Price and the New Standard Version are trying to work around the oddity that the only time Jesus meets up with a pagan “homosexual” he neither condemns him, nor says, as he does to the adulterous woman, “go and sin no more,” but instead praises the “gay” goy for greater faith than found in Israel.[24]

Now and again, of course, I find something, amateur that I am, a bit frustrating; take the Gospel of John, for example. The text itself is, as Price says, “a bit of a mess” (there’s that Hellenistic syncretism again) from which no consistent Christological doctrine can be derived, but he also seems less concerned with explaining his translational decisions. Thus, in the famous opening, Price renders καὶ θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος as “and the Word was a God,” thus blithely siding with the Gnostics and Jehovah’s Witnesses in a typically long and bitter dispute over the Incarnation and Trinity.[25] While it’s always good to see the outsiders win one, I’d like to see his reasons.

Similarly, in John 6:58, we find “Amen, amen: I say to you, I existed before Abraham did!” rather than the traditional, and much used, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” Here, Price gives us a footnote, and a reference to a book which “thoroughly debunks the popular mistranslation of Jesus’ declaration as ‘before Abraham was, I am.’” I’ll bet he’s right, and that it does, but it sure would be nice to have at least a hint as to why ego eimi doesn’t mean “I am” here.[26]

The kindle version is a mixed bag itself. Footnotes have been renumbered to consecutively run throughout the text, and hyperlinked to the endnotes; this is good. What’s odd is that despite all this attention to detail, the text continues to be broken up by periodic chunks of blank space, with the recurring line “Human Bible New Testament .indb” followed by the page number of the printed text; I assume this is some production tag. It’s not really a drawback, but just, as I say, odd that no one noticed or cared, and judging from reviews on Amazon many if not all of American Atheists Press kindles have the same appearance. It’s just odd.

So there we have it: the Human Bible. It is human, because it was written by humans, not some divine being; and because it is addressed to humans. If we in turn are to approach it as a human, rather than a Christian “slave” or a humble servant of some bogus “scholarly consensus,” then we must read and evaluate it ourselves, for ourselves.[27] That task has been considerably facilitated by Dr. Price’s Bible, which I hope all readers here at Counter-Currents will, as the child said to Augustine, take and read.[28]

Notes

[1] “Tales of the Christos Mythos,” here.

[2] “It’s a volatile mixture of cool jazz and hot munitions.” MST33k, Episode 612, The Starfighters.

[3] Price seems to keep his two careers quite separate — like many on the alt-Right do — and the only hint I find here of the weird is when he glosses Docetism as “Had [Jesus] actually been, in the phrase of Robert W. Chambers, the Phantom of Truth?” The Phantom appears in The King In Yellow, one of Lovecraft’s favorite weird books; see commentary here.

[4] “No weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” – Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930. We’ve discussed the factual approach of Lovecraft as essential to his method to produce horror in the essays collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012)

[5] Who was it said that “the history of Europe was determined by the absence of madhouses in 1st century Palestine”? It was the late Alisdair Clarke who suggested that the Middle East was a “Lovecraftian pit of evil” needing either a cordon sanitaire or nuclear eradication for Europe to find peace. See “Pit of Evil in the Middle East,” Aryan Futurism, March 28, 2006, online here.

[6] Interestingly, Lovecraft himself had no interest in Biblical criticism, since he assumed that no sane person could truly believe the Bible to be dictated by Jehovah anyway. See S. T. Joshi’s “Lovecraft on Religion,” reprinted in his Lovecraft and a World in Transition by S. T. Joshi – Collected Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014).

[7] Nietzsche, his philologist’s nose disturbed, suggested wearing gloves.

[8] See Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why The Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011); Ehrman, who believes in a vanishingly small “real Jesus,” concludes that forgery is the one distinctive talent of the Christian. Nietzsche knew this back in The Antichrist: discussing St. Paul, he sneers “Well lied, lion!”

[9] Relating back to the related issue of the Christ Myth, Coomaraswamy wrote to a Harvard professor in a letter dated July 10, 1942: “I am not convinced of the historicity of either Christ or Buddha,” which seems fairly clear, but here again we see correspondence given the sanction of scripture and given an “orthodox” interpretation — son Rama insists that “My father was much too intelligent not to believe in the historical Jesus,” availing himself of the same cheap sophism we’ve already examined. See “Coomaraswamy – The Man, Myth and History” by Whitall N. Perry; Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1977). P. 4; online here.

[10] The Pre-Nicene New Testament, reviewed here. The reviewer notes that this with this 1,200 page work, “Price has produced a book that could literally serve as a weapon in the pummeling of logic into the human mind.” More pacific than that, The Human Bible is an attempt to produce a smaller work – still over 500 pages – by restricting itself to the works that actually made it into the canon.

[11] See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975).

[12] See “The Marcionite Heresy” in The Gnostic Origins of Alfred Rosenberg’s Thought by James B. Whisker, here.

[13] Nor even really much of a Gnostic. Price notes that the unknown author of so-called “1 Timothy” “confuses Marcionism with Gnosticism, but this is not uncommon even today.”

[14] On the other hand: “I did find myself perplexed at Price’s definitive statements as to what Marcion thought, felt and believed as he created and circulated the first New Testament, particularly since we do not possess any original writings of the man in which he thus expressed himself. In my own studies, I did not gather several of the impressions Price did regarding Marcion, particularly since the pertinent data are not composed of Marcion’s own writing and words but constitute reportage from his detractors and enemies. Hence, we are on shaky ground as to what Marcion truly thought, felt and believed.” Acharya S., op. cit.

[15] Price adduces the example of the prophet Amos, a rural outsider who, therefore, was the only one who could challenge the “professional” prophets of Jerusalem, who had become a self-perpetuating, self-selecting caste of yes-men.

[16] See, “Tales of the Christos Mythos,” op. cit.

[17] See, “Dachau Blues: Applying History to Science and Science to History,” here.

[18] The sage advice given to his lazy colleagues by A. E. Housman; see his “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in A. E. Housman: Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge, 1961). Online here, and listed as one of the Top Ten Essential Works in New Testament Textual Criticism here, despite making no mention of the Bible at all. I consider it the one essay you need to read in order to be able to think at all; afterwards, you can skip college altogether.

[19] The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems (Cranford, N.J.: American Atheist Press, 2011), “Methodological Presuppositions,” his italics.

[20] What, no Necronomicon? That had to wait for the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, of course.

[21] Timothy and Titus, the worst of the lot, containing all those pesky Flanderisms that make people hate Protestants. Women be talking too much! Oddly, these “Catholic” epistles are the absolute favorites of radio preachers, by my informal survey; stripped of Titus, Timothy, and perhaps Peter, they’d be almost silent. How typical, that Christianity in practice is mostly derived from the worst texts available?

[22] Price notes that later scribes noticed that “Paul” had forgotten to mention Jesus anywhere, so they added “Jesus” or “Christ” in various places, sort of the ancient equivalent of cut and paste.

[23] See James Neill, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies (McFarland, 2009), kindle loc. 4394-4407.

[24] Neill goes on to note that the aforementioned King James I, sponsor of the English Bible, used Jesus as a defense of his own conduct towards George Villiers: “Jesus had his John, and I have my George.” As always, everyone has their favorite Beatle.

[25] For the other side, see here, for example, and generally here.

[26] Not that it matters, but Neville, the midcentury Alan Watts of the New Thought Movement, laid great store by all those “I am” passages (or “I AM” as he would render it). See, among hundreds of examples, Your Faith is Your Fortune, chapter 2, “Before Abraham Was.” You can find it in the recent anthology The Power of Imagination The Neville Goddard Treasury (New York: Penguin/Tarcher, 2015), where the Introduction: “Neville: A Portrait by Israel Regardie” (1947) discusses the importance of the phrase “I AM” in Neville’s books and lectures. Interestingly, as Regardie notes, Neville regarded the whole Bible as mythological – or rather, psychological – and not historical, thus putting him on the side of Kenneth Humphreys and the other Christ Mythers, including Price himself.

[27] As Nikolas Harnoncourt has said, the “historically authentic performance” movement is intended not to gain for us some – impossible – “original” experience of music, but precisely to enable us to gain our own relation to the music, free of 19th-century Romantic “traditions.”

[28] “I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when, lo, I heard the voice as of a boy or girl, I know not which, coming from a neighbouring house, chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read; take up and read.’ Immediately my countenance was changed, and I began most earnestly to consider whether it was usual for children in any kind of game to sing such words; nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So, restraining the torrent of my tears, I rose up, interpreting it no other way than as a command to me from Heaven to open the book, and to read the first chapter I should light upon.” The Confessions of St. Augustine (Book 8, Chapter 12) translated from the Latin by J. G. Pilkington, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church edited by Philip Schaff, Series I, Vol. I (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1882).

Tales Of The Christos Mythos

Tales Of The Christos Mythos

By James J. O'Meara  

Kenneth Humphreys
Jesus Never Existed: An Introduction to the Ultimate Heresy 
With an interview by Chip Smith
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2014

Bert Cooper: “Even if this were true, who cares? This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you’ve imagined here.”[1] 

“One of the most remarkable features of public discussion of Jesus of Nazareth in the twenty-first century has been a massive upsurge in the view that this important historical figure did not even exist.” — Maurice Casey

               

Not content with filling the world with essays on anti-natalism and novels of Nowickian despair, Nine-Banded Books has now decided to tackle “the ultimate heresy.”

No, it’s not pedophilia, or cannibalism, or wearing white after Labor Day. It’s the idea that Jesus Christ never existed.

Not much of a heresy? Think about it. Jews, whether secularist or worshipers of the sky-god JHVH-1, don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah, but they do believe that there was a Jesus. According to the Talmud, he still lives, confined to a boiling pot of semen in Hades.

Agnostics and atheists, like those Four Horsemen of the New Atheism we hear far too much about, don’t believe Jesus was God, or the Son of God, or the right-hand man of God, but they do believe that he . . . was. Some praise him as a wise man about whom absurd legends were woven, some mock him as a deluded prophet of doom, but they all accord him the dignity of existence.

Kenneth Humphreys – along with, we shall see, increasing numbers of other skeptics[2] — takes the last step, looks at the (lack) of evidence, makes up his own mind, and winds up endorsing the ultimate heresy: Jesus never existed.

Do you really think it all began with a sanctimonious Jewish wonder-worker, strolling about 1st century Palestine? Prepare to be enlightened.[3]

To call this a heresy, of course, does not mean it hasn’t been argued before. In fact, it’s been around for some 200 years, from Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) onward.[4] You can read Humphreys’ chronology of scholars and laymen online here.[5]

Even the Popes weighed in:

Boniface VIII (1294–1303) at a General Council at the University of Paris and, in front of King Philip of France, five archbishops, and twenty-two bishops, said; “There was no Jesus Christ and the Eucharist is just flour and water. Mary was no more a virgin than my own mother, and there is no more harm in adultery than in rubbing your hands together.”

Pope Paul III (1534–1549) said that “there is no valid document to demonstrate the existence of Jesus Christ’, adding ‘that Jesus Christ had never existed.”

Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503) openly revealed his thoughts about the fabricated nature of the Christian religion, saying; “Almighty God! How long will this superstitious sect of Christians, and this upstart invention, endure?”[6]

At the turn of the last century, the Christ Myth seemed to be all the rage among academics, but for some reason – possibly connected with the rise of Fundamentalism,[7] but certainly not connected with the discovery of any new evidence — the “scholarly consensus,” to use that much abused phrase, has swung to the aforementioned Big Bang Theory: “there must have been somebody, no matter how much of a schnook or schlemiel, to start the whole thing off.”

Even scholars like Bart Ehrman, for example; despite being an agnostic, and the author of a whole treatise on the early Christians as fanatical liars and forgers,[8] Ehrman insists that there had to be some kind of real guy, and anyone who disagrees is just a kook.[9]

There’s a problem with that, however; an instability within the Big Bang: if Jesus wasn’t, as academics admit, a miraculous wonder-worker, and no secular historian or contemporary document or carving deigns to mention this ordinary guy, then why postulate him at all? As Humphreys says on his website:

The New Apologetics is at its weakness at precisely those points where the old apologetics offers miracle and marvel to resolve difficulties. Why was Jesus notable if he did not draw multitudes from across the region? Why was he remembered decades later if he did not perform spectacular healings and miracles? Why did his followers “just start believing” that he had been resurrected if the laws of the universe had not been suspended?

A Jesus who did nothing of consequence and said nothing of consequence would not have been the catalyst for a religious revolution.

A nonentity of a Jesus, even a gifted carpenter, simply could not have inspired an overturning of established belief systems that had held sway for centuries, if not millennia. A minimalist Jesus (and in fact there were hundreds of men of that name!)[10] obliges us to look elsewhere to explain the religious sea change.

Humphreys, like many — not all[11] — of the Mythicists, suggests the well-known (in other religions) phenomenon of syncretism:

The truth is that Christianity grew from neither a god nor a man but out of what had gone before; a human Jesus was no more necessary than was a human Horus, Dionysos, Mithras, Attis, etc. Can we explain the emergence of Christianity without its humanoid superstar? Of course we can. Christianity, like all religious movements, was born from myth-making and many currents fed the myth, including astrological speculation, pagan salvation cults, Hellenistic hero worship, and the imperial cult itself, manufactured at precisely the “time of Jesus,” with its own sacrificed saviour (Divus Iulius), its own gospel of a son of god (Res Gestae Divi Augusti), its own priests and temples, established in the very same urban centres which later witnessed the emergence of early Christianity. In its various rival incarnations the Christian movement languished for two centuries. Thanks to civil war it got its big chance and finally triumphed in an omnibus edition of all that had gone before, the ultimate product of ancient religious syncretism.

Now, readers familiar with Traditionalists like René Guénon will recognize that “syncretism” is a Bad Thing which he is always insistent on distinguishing from his own notion of a “transcendent unity of religion” (in Schuon’s phrase) or “the traditional method” (Evola’s phrase). In the latter, distinct traditions are “unified” by tracing them to common principles of which they are local variants (Coomaraswamy’s “paths that lead to the same summit”); in syncretism, these traditions receive a premature, superficial, ultimately false unity on the basis of purely accidental local similarities. It is typical of the 19th-century pseudo-traditions that Guénon called “spiritism” or what today we would call ‘New Age cults.”

Now there are two interesting things to note here. First, Humphreys gives a pedigree for his notion of syncretism by adducing the examples of Alexander, who not only spread Hellenism but also encouraged his generals to dress as Persians[12] and take Persian wives “in order to create a hybrid race” in other words, mongrelization — and the Romans, ‘who went even further,” creating a cacophony of races and religions in which Christianity became almost the natural alpha dog.[13] This fits nicely with Guénon’s notorious anti-Classicism, noting a fundamental metaphysical defect in the “Greco-Latin” world that makes it the natural vehicle of cyclical degeneration, always disguised as the “new” or the “reborn.”[14]

The other, however, presents a challenge to Guénon, who always thought of Christianity as an authentic tradition, and as the savior of the degenerate Greco-Roman world.[15] But what if, in fact, Christianity is just another lousy syncretism, which has come to dominate the West not because it’s “true” but simply and precisely because it is the biggest, and most mundanely bureaucratized, syncretism of them all?

Finally, Christianity cut down to size; just another synthetic neo-pagan cult, no worse – or better – than any other.[16]

About ten years ago, Kenneth Humphreys produced another book called Jesus Never Existed — subtitled The Tragic Fabrication of a Savior of the World and currently available from Nine-Banded as well — but given its size (533 pages) and controversial publisher (Historical Review Press), someone wisely decided that, in terms of getting the message out (a topic to which we shall return), a much shorter book was needed. Humphreys manages to boil down his argument to a spare 75 pages, and adds to that an intelligent and revealing interview with Nine-Banded’s own Chip Smith that takes up another 50 or so pages.

Though academically trained, Humphreys is not a “practicing” academic, and thus manifests both an independence of thought and clear, attractive prose style not generally associated with professional scholars (Schopenhauer’s “philosophers of the history of philosophy”).

I’m no professional scholar myself, to say nothing of being a trained Biblical scholar, but I’ve been aware of the Christ Mythers for a while now, having first been exposed to them through Michael Hoffman’s online research into the origins of religion in ancient drug cults,[17] and Humphreys has some stuff here that was news to me.

I was particularly impressed by a chapter that demonstrates how the Passion Narrative shows clear signs of originating in a dramatic spectacle, a not infrequent part of ancient religious life;[18] in another chapter, he reviews the imaginary and re-shuffled geography of the Gospels, showing how it serves to create an artificial but recognizable landscape for Jesus to circulate around during his supposed lifetime (sort of like our “ripped from the headlines” TV shows).

All this was “a necessary visual propaganda for an illiterate population.” Like the later cathedrals, the New Testament “books” were manufactured, brick by brick.

I’ll leave it to the reader to buy this slim, relatively inexpensive book and evaluate the arguments and evidence for themselves. And that’s the real point:

To consider and ultimately embrace the idea that Jesus never existed, the reader must, first of all, be a person who questions authority and does their own thinking.

Academic credentials are very important, almost as important as having an inquiring and logical mind and the courage to challenge received wisdom,

It has always been mavericks who have advanced knowledge rather than the time-servers of consensus. Thinking differently isn’t an eccentricity, it’s vital.

This, in fact, is the real heresy.

Now, you may think this is just a storm in a teacup, but the Christ Myth controversy has important lessons for, and should be inspiring to, the White Nationalist or pro-Western Civ or anti-globalist, and especially those who are following the path of metapolitics to change the culture. Are we not challenging the “consensus” of the “experts,” are we not pointing out the embarrassingly obvious, are we not putting forward our own, new, paradigm?

And do they not hate us with a similar passion?

“The endorsement of amateurs by amateurs is becoming a rampant, annoying and distressing problem for biblical scholarship . . . The disease these buggers spread is ignorance disguised as common sense . . . the popularity of the non-historicity thesis . . . now threatens to distract biblical studies from the serious business of illuminating the causes, context and development of early Christianity.” – R. Joseph Hoffmann[19]

Caught between, on the one hand, a self-selected, self-sustaining academic establishment that cloaks itself in learned mumbo-jumbo, and on the other, a dumbed-down and uninterested general public that just wants to be left alone,[20] the independent thinker — Christ Myther or White Nationalist — finds himself in a familiar positon.

Take economics, where the witch doctors of what Charles Hugh Smith has memorably called the “Keynesian Cargo Cult” are dancing around, either honestly trying to conjure up a recovery by the only method they know, or else hypnotize us into not noticing that things are worse than ever, and continue to pay their salaries.[21] As Smith notes,

The cruel stupidity and immorality of the Keynesian Cargo Cult knows no bounds because they refuse to accept the reality that diminishing returns cannot be fixed by more debt and more squandering of good money after bad.

One is tempted to say, ‘twas ever thus, but it does seem as if the combined forces of tenure (supposed to ensure academic freedom, but actually doing the reverse, since getting it requires years of conformity that are hard to reverse) and money (student loans, and federal research funding, again all depending on conformity and subservience) have, as Evola would say, “hatched a real conspiracy” among so-called “scientists.”[22]

If the people have no money, they may buy no goods, even essentials, without falling ever more deeply into debt. That is not so difficult to understand. Unless your paycheck demands that you not only cannot understand it, but not even see it, or talk publicly about it.

The harlots of finance and economics will say, ‘You laymen simply do not understand the mysteries of our science. Wages always lag in a recovery.’ Seven years is some lag.

Unfortunately economics these days has less in common with a natural science than it has with marketing. And at its worst, it has become a carney sideshow.[23]

From New Testament studies to economics to climate “science” to Holocaustianity,[24] the truth is, as Smith says, that “the failed cartel[s] . . . [have] to be leapfrogged and left in the dustbin of history.”

An intellectual cartel indeed. Humphreys writes:

There is a poverty, emptiness, and a certain hard-headed obstinacy, about a view that resolves those sort of difficulties with a shrug yet is quite insistent that “of course Jesus existed” and mercilessly vilifies those who say otherwise.

And another point of similarity and inspiration for us is the role of the internet in breaking the cartel. As Humphreys writes on his website:

Increasing numbers of web-savvy enquirers are asking, “What real evidence is there for a historical Jesus?” and are not convinced by the replies. The result is that a paradigm shift is in progress. The mythic Jesus, an idea largely ignored in the 20th century by the vested interests of religion and conservative scholarship, has argued its way back onto the agenda, if only to compel the mandarins to issue contemptuous rebuttals.[25]

Yet whisper-thin defences of a historical Jesus do not cut it in the internet-enabled world – and established academics don’t like that one little bit. The on-line arena can be rude and crude but, as with the printing press six hundred years ago, the power of a cartel has been broken. For some tastes, the wrong kind of people have gained an audience.

White Nationalists, racialists, neo-pagans, and other Counter-Currents types — “the wrong kind of people,” if not necessarily “diseased buggers” — will find this book a pleasant-to-read introduction to a subject that should interest them both in itself, and as an inspiring example of how to stand up to the academic cartels.

Notes

1. Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 12: “Nixon Vs. Kennedy”

2. See Jesus Mythicism: An Introduction, ed. Minas Papageorgiou (iWrite.gr Publications, 2015), which includes interviews with 12 prominent Mythicists, including Kenneth Humphreys.

3. See more here.

4. See Greg Johnson’s “Lessing’s Ideal Conservative Freemasonry,” here.

5. Papageorgiou provides a fuller survey in his Jesus Mythicism: An Introduction., note 2 above.

6. Quoted with citations at “The Fake Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” here.

7. Not confined to the Bible Belt; in 1999, the Confederation of Protestant Churches of Lower Saxony demanded the removal of theologian Gerd Luedemann, who, though not a Mythicist, had dared to suggest that only about 5% of the words attributed to this Jesus chap were authentic. See Geogeiou, “Interview with Gerd Ludemann,” op. cit.

8. See his Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why The Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011). For Humphrey’s account of the Christian “Fabrication Factory,” see here. A handy list of known Christian forgeries is here.

9. The resulting book, Did Jesus Exist?, is possibly the worst “scholarly” book I’ve ever (started to) read, and might be sufficient to make the layman go over to the other side, as Cioran once suggested about the Christian anti-Gnostic polemics. See the kooks strike back here: Bart Ehrman and the Quest of the Historical Jesus of Nazareth: An Evaluation of Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist? Ed. Frank R. Zindler and Robert M. Price (American Atheist Press 2013); Humphrey’s own review is here.

10. Mark Twain once satirized the parallel search for the historical Homer by claiming the scholars had discovered that Homer’s works had not been written by Homer, but by another Greek, of the same name.

11. See Papageorgiou, op. cit,, loc. 302-313, on “The Trends” within Mythicism.

12. As in the Wall St. adage, “Dress British, think Yiddish!”

13. The idea that Christianity was simply the best organized of the available cults, and could therefore best provide a new structure for the crumbling Empire, has also been argued by Colin Liddell in “Apollonius of Tyana and the Alternative Empire” (Aristokratia III, 2015; reviewed here) but adds that it failed to save the Empire anyway.

14. See, for example, The Crisis of the Modern World. The Japanese seem to have a natural talent for assimilating other cultures without entirely giving up their own nature, as in the development of Zen; while post-war Japan delights in the most absurd kinds of syncretism (celebrating Christmas with crucified Santas in shop windows), the idea of “solving” its economic problems with immigration and interbreeding is never even considered.

15. See, again, Crisis, pp. 14-15. For Guénon, the Middle Ages were the high point of this reclamation effort; the much-vaunted “renaissance” was a zombified corpse, reanimated for anti-Traditional action. Evola, by contrast, never regarded Christianity as anything more than a pseudo-tradition, and gave credit for the Middle Ages to the “Roman” part of the “Roman church.”

16. “Two or three years ago it was just another snake cult, now . . . they’re everywhere.” Conan the Barbarian (1982); not to be confused with Just Another Snake Cult. Minas Papageorgiou (note 2 above) makes this point and emphasizes the special case of Greece where, ironically enough, paganism has labored under official censorship. On what basis can the Christos Mythos be given special consideration by the state?

17. Not to be confused with Michael A. Hoffman II, the revisionist researcher, although the coincidence continues to amuse me. See the research collected at egodeath.com. Humphreys briefly mentions John Allegro’s mushroom cult hypothesis, and avers there’s something to be said for it, although he eschews all such searches for “the” cause as prone to conspiracy thinking, rather than his more open-source syncretism thesis.

18. This could explain its unique attraction, from mediaeval plays to Bach’s passions, to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. The latter is especially interesting as a kind of Mythicist work, malgre lui; Gibson’s Catholic fundamentalist reading ironically horrified nominal believers who had never actually reflected on how bizarre the text really is; on the other hand, Gibson, one is tempted to say “in typically Christian fashion,” engaged in his own cut and paste work by silently incorporating passages from the mystical vision of Catherine of Emmerich, exactly the way the texts were originally concocted (“Hmm, this looks good, let’s toss it in.”).

19. For what it’s worth, Hoffmann replies to Humphreys thus: “I apologize for my error: I should have known better—and I do. Buggers do not spread disease. Probably an autocorrect for ideas.” Well, alrighty then.

20. “We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD!” — “Howard Beale,” Network (Sidney Lumet, 1980).

21. “The Keynesian Cargo Cult: Dancing Around the Fire Waving Dead Chickens” by Charles Hugh Smith, here. The truth is the failed cartel of higher education has to be leapfrogged and left in the dustbin of history.”

22. “Those who are called “scientists” today have hatched a real conspiracy; they have made science their monopoly, and absolutely do not want anyone to know more than they do or in a different manner than they do” — Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2001), p. 4. For an example of the academic conspiracy against Evola himself, see Eliade’s contemptuous dismissal of Evola’s work as too non-academic to be worth considering, as analyzed in “Mircea Eliade’s Traditionalism: Appearance and Reality” in Aristokratia III and my review, op. cit.

23. “The reason there has been no recovery, in one chart,” here.

24. See my review of Nicholas Kollerstrom’s Breaking the Spell: “Dachau Blues: Applying History to Science and Science to History,” here.

25. Such as “diseased buggers.”

Could Mexico Become Somalia?

Could Mexico Become Somalia?

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, October 9, 2015

Organized crime threatens chaos in Mexico.

Cameron Holmes, Organized Crime in Mexico: Assessing the Threat to North American Economies, Potomac Books, 2014, 200 pp., $24.95.

“When the history is written of the decade from 2006 to 2016 it will be recognized as the period during which the United States condemned its northern Mexican neighbors to a failed state and the Mexican economy to ruin.” So concludes Cameron Holmes, author of Organized Crime in Mexico. He believes that the Mexican drug combines have become so powerful they could push northern Mexico into complete lawlessness and destroy its economy. Holmes points out that Mexico is our third largest trade partner after Canada and China, and that if Mexico slides into chaos it will “threaten the economic well-being of North America.”

Cameron Holmes, who died in 2013, knew what he was talking about. He first worked as a ghetto policeman, then went to law school and spent the rest of his career as a prosecutor in Phoenix, Arizona’s, organized crime unit. After years of fighting Mexican crime syndicates, he came to believe that they are such a threat to our southern neighbor that, if only out of self-interest, we must do everything we can to shore up the Mexican authorities against destruction.

Not cartels

Holmes punctures several myths about Mexican crime networks. First, they are not “drug cartels.” A cartel is a group of producers who collude to set prices, whereas the Mexican syndicates are in brutally murderous competition. Holmes calls them CEs–“criminal enterprises”–which is the term used in American RICO statutes. Nor do they depend on drug income. Indeed, they threaten the state because their nature has changed:

Their power has increased for a number of reasons, including vertical integration of distribution networks in the United States, diversification into multi-crime enterprises, militarization of tactics and operations, the availability of mercenary gunmen, the availability of high-powered weapons, and international expansion. Corruption, the CEs’ diverse sources of criminal income, their intimidation through violence, and their active intelligence gathering have symbiotic effects. Together they create and maintain a web of power that is difficult to control, because each aspect makes addressing each of the others more difficult.

Holmes argues that it was diversification out of drug- and people-smuggling that made the CEs a direct threat to the state. When the only business was smuggling, criminals had a simple agreement with the authorities: We bribe you to look the other way. Mexicans thought getting drugs and people into the United States was a victimless crime. They like getting the remittances illegal immigrants send home, and they don’t care if Americans poison themselves taking Mexican drugs.

What finally drove the Mexican government to send the army against the CEs were crimes against Mexicans: kidnapping, mass extortion, truck hijacking, and even diversion of petroleum shipments–all combined with massive corruption of police and the judicial system. These are intolerable threats to any government. But once the authorities began to take action, the CEs made it clear they were beyond the reach of government.

That is the purpose of the horrible brutality we hear about so often: beheadings, video-taped chain-saw killings, bodies hung from bridges, heads pitched into night clubs like bowling balls. In 2011, one gang dumped 35 mutilated bodies, including 12 women, at a major underpass in the city of Veracruz–in rush hour, in broad daylight. Holmes says this sort of thing sends two messages: “[We] will show horrible cruelty to any who stand in their way,” and “government is powerless to do anything about it.”

Holmes adds that the most obvious and direct threat to the state is the increasingly common practice of “choosing local candidates by assassination.” This, along with the murder of police chiefs, creates zones of virtual impunity for CE operation, and killing journalists ensures a blackout on their activities. In 2010, for example, the daily in Juarez formally announced that it would no longer run any stories the CEs didn’t like.

The result is gang rule. CEs shake down civilians and legitimate businesses for regular protection payments known as “street taxes.” No one is spared. In Juarez, criminals burned down a kindergarten because the teachers weren’t paying enough protection money. “Street taxes” squeeze people to the point they can no longer pay legitimate taxes, which means government has less money for fighting crime.

Naturally, crime flourishes. There are an estimated 40,000 kidnappings and tens of thousands of truck hijackings in Mexico every year. Armed men also drive huge trucks up to grain elevators and spend the day stealing everything. They can take their time because they know the police won’t stop them. The police themselves practice their own extortion rackets, so people no longer even report crime.

Eventually, it becomes rational for citizens to turn to the CEs rather than to the authorities for “justice.” Holmes quotes a study according to which an astonishing 23 percent of middle-class Mexicans asked CEs to help them sort out disagreements; in regions where the CEs were most powerful, the figure was 40 percent. Crime syndicates become de facto governments.

Violence

The willingness to use mass violence against the state–and against each other–is the hallmark of the modern Mexican CE. Violence is cheap because thousands of young Mexicans are eager to work as full-time kidnappers, extortionists, and assassins. Many are cocaine users who think they are invincible and who need money to support their habit. At $500 to $650 a month, their pay is much better than that of a soldier or policeman, so any corrupt policeman who is fired or let out of jail has an obvious second career. Holmes writes that a glut of gunmen has brought the price of a contract killing down from several thousand dollars to under a hundred. He points out that Mexico now has a generation of totally brutalized young men who can probably never be properly socialized.

Private armies mean new options for CEs:

With so many inexpensive young strangers available as gunmen, CE leaders are not as constrained as they had been about violent confrontations with rival gangs or with government authorities. When conflict meant that a king-pin’s own brothers, uncles, sons, nephews, cousins, and in-laws might die or be injured, naked aggression was not as attractive as a negotiated resolution or some other alternative.

The result: “Attacks that did not make strategic sense five years ago are much more attractive.” Also, high murder rates make it easy to camouflage an ordinary killing. If you want someone’s girlfriend you can get rid of him by chopping him in pieces and leaving him by the roadside. Everyone will think it was a drug-war killing.

In Mexico it is legal for private citizens to own guns, but ownership is carefully regulated. Illegal ownership is increasingly common. One survey found that in high-violence areas half of poor Mexicans owned a firearm.

The organization of crime

Mexican CEs all operate on the same general pattern. At the center is a leader who has established himself because of several qualities: a reputation for violence, a knack for criminal organizing, and a broad set of corruptible contacts in government and business. He must have a small group of insiders who are completely loyal to him, and he ensures loyalty two ways: By making sure they make a lot of money, and by torturing and mutilating waverers. The network is full of psychopaths who must be exterminated at the first sign of insubordination.

Anyone who knows enough about the inner workings of the CE to be useful is bound to the CE for life. His knowledge must stay within the syndicate. If he tries to leave, he will be killed and his family will be killed.

The different crime operations of the CE are grouped into “cells” that are isolated from each other as much as possible. The people running prostitutes don’t even know the kidnappers or hijackers.

Holmes notes that the large population of Mexican immigrants makes it easy for CEs to operate in the US. One of the most profitable changes that resulted from extending operations across the border has been vertical integration of drug distribution. Most of the profits in drug dealing are made close to street level. Holmes calculates the profits in the Colombian cocaine trade as follows: Andean growers: 1.5 percent; Colombian and Mexican transporters: 13 percent; Mexican and American wholesalers: 15 percent; Mexican and mid-level to final retailers: 70 percent. The CEs have gained billions in extra profits by controlling the trade right down to the barrio.

At the same time, Mexican-American street criminals are a useful minor league for CE recruitment. Many are American citizens, which makes it easy for them to cross the border or infiltrate American customs and police.

CEs use the Internet to sell genuine but bootlegged opioid pain killers to Americans. Once users are hooked they switch to CE-provided heroine, which is cheaper than legal drugs. The CEs are also expanding their drug trade around the world: Central and South America, China and Australia, and Europe.

Since the United States is the biggest drug market in the world, the CEs have had to figure out how to get their profits back to Mexico. Suitcases full of dollars are still smuggled across the border, but they are subject to confiscation at customs, and the smuggler might decide to disappear, along with the suitcase.

Not easily transported: $22 million in cash found during a cartel raid in Mexico.

The latest trick, according to Holmes, is called “trade-based money laundering,” and it involves actual trade in Chinese goods. The US-based trader for the CE sends $400,000 in drug profits to China as a down payment on goods that wholesale for $500,000. The Chinese ship the goods to Mexico, and invoice the CE’s Mexican front company for the remaining $100,000. This means the CE now owns $500,000 worth of goods, for which the Mexican branch paid only $100,000. This means $400,000 has been cleverly laundered into Mexico from the United States via China.

The most common–and profitable–Chinese products used for money laundering are counterfeit software, drugs, videos, Gucci handbags, etc. The Chinese make 80 percent of the world’s fake goods and don’t care who their customers are. The stuff sells for a very high markup, which adds to CE profits and cuts into legitimate businesses. Holmes reports that the Zetas and La Familia have gone into the fake-goods business in such a big way that they put their own logos on products, and do not permit the sale of competing goods.

Another way to send drug profits back to Mexico is to over-invoice products exported to the United States. A $200,000 shipment of electronics from a Mexican assembly plant to the US is invoiced at $500,000. The extra $300,000 is repatriated drug profits.

Obviously, this kind of fiddle requires connections with semi-legitimate and even legitimate manufacturers, freight forwarders, insurers, etc. It may also require paying customs agents not to examine shipments with suspiciously high or low invoices. Mr. Holmes notes that as the CEs get acquainted with executives in legitimate companies, they learn whose families can pay the highest ransoms, and pass this information along to the kidnapping unit.

All aspects of CE power reinforce each other. Wealth from drugs and hijacking brings in enough money to corrupt the police. When the police look the other way, CEs can run city-side extortion rackets, and kill politicians and journalists who do not toe the line. Unchecked power–except when CEs compete for the same business–means yet more diversification into yet more criminal enterprises.

The result, as Holmes explains, is that honest citizens “are surrounded and immobilized by the illicit power web.” Instead of being suspicious when neighbors have unexplained wealth and reporting them to the police, Mexicans see such people as powerful potential allies. Ambitious parents want their daughters to marry crime bosses.

Once local governments are discredited they may never regain authority. Holmes believes that, at least in the northern states of Mexico, CEs could “strangle legitimate US-Mexico commerce” and establish vast areas of warlord rule, from which they could extend their influence ever deeper into the United States. He writes that American political leaders are “studiously ignoring the coming crisis in Mexico” for fear of offending Mexicans on both sides of the border.

Fighting back

Some outsiders think the CEs realize they could eventually destroy the Mexican economy and will be careful not to kill the host. Holmes says no. A CE always wants more revenue. The boss can satisfy the inner circle only by making more money for them, and they might strike out on their own or even depose him if he turned his back on potential profits. In any case, if one CE shows restraint, another will simply move in and scoop up the profits. If a CE could divert all of Mexico’s oil revenue it would–even though oil pays for 40 percent of the national budget and stealing it would wreck the economy.

CEs and corruption have scared away tourists–and revenue–from even the most famous resorts. The Wikitravel tourism site that is supposed to promote travel warns:

[D]rug-related violence has been increasing in Acapulco. Although this violence is not targeted at foreign residents or tourists, U.S. citizens in these areas should be vigilant in their personal safety. For the average tourist, the most frequent danger comes from local police. Bribery and extortion is at every corner.

Many people think that a quick way to defeat the CEs is to legalize drugs. Again, Holmes says no. Imagine an American company trying to get into the newly legalized cocaine market. It would have to buy its coca leaves from Andean producers, all of whom are controlled by CEs. It would have to use FDA-inspected plants, pay its workers health benefits, insure against overdose-related lawsuits, advertise, and pay excise taxes. It would be impossible for a legal provider to compete with CEs that don’t have to worry about any of that.

“No legal product can come within a multiple of ten of matching the real-world price of smuggled hard drugs,” Holmes writes. Even if a legal supplier miraculously managed to be competitive, addicts would rob and steal to support a legal habit just as they do to support an illegal one. Legalization would probably increase the numbers of users, so there would be even more street crime.

Some drugs, Holmes writes, are too horrible to legalize: “The doctrinaire position on universal legalization will always be confronted with sales of substances that are so horrible that no civil society could stand by while its members make money by selling these substances to other human beings.” He says methamphetamines cause such terrible damage to the body that they will never be legalized, thus leaving the field to the CEs.

Marijuana is a somewhat different story: It can be grown anywhere, is less destructive, and is so cheap you don’t have to be a criminal to support a habit. But here, too, the regulatory and other costs of legal production combined with high excise taxes would probably price legal suppliers out of the market. Even if they managed to get a piece of the high-end trade, legalization would probably expand the market so much that CE profits would grow.

Some users would grow their own, but Holmes points out that even though it’s easy and legal to grow your own tomatoes, hardly anyone does. Instead, they buy inexpensive, mass produced tomatoes that are available year ’round. Finally, underage users would probably be barred from buying legal marijuana, so the CEs would have that important market to themselves. In any case, marijuana accounts for only about 16 percent of the American illegal-drug market, so even if CEs were completely shut out of it, it would only dent their income.

Holmes writes that if it were possible actually to seal the border, that would cut CE profits significantly but not eliminate them. Mexicans grow a lot of marijuana in American national parks, and could move meth production north. There was a time when snuffing out US-bound smuggling might have throttled the CEs, but that wouldn’t work today. They have diversified into Mexico-based crime, and sell drugs all over the world. Whatever one thinks of legalization, Holmes reminds us that the Mafia had no trouble surviving the end of Prohibition.

So, how to fight the CEs? Holmes first points out that this is not a “war on drugs” that can be won by seizing more contraband. He sees it as a multi-faceted, international effort to keep a major economy from falling into the hands of pirates. Mexico needs better laws against organized crime, modeled on American RICO, wiretapping, and asset-forfeiture laws. It needs a better judicial system with better judges, but in the meantime it should simply send more criminals to the US for prosecution and prison. (Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s escape from a high-security Mexican prison in July underscores the weakness of the entire system. The Americans had offered to jail him, but the Mexicans insisted they could handle him.)

But Mexico doesn’t have the capacity to act alone. Holmes urges a “close partnership with the Mexican government,” though the UN might supervise joint US-Mexican raids so as to ease Mexican sensitivities about US “intervention.” He wants clear goals and a commitment of billions of dollars to achieve them.

Holmes points out that in any network, if you immobilize one essential part, the rest will stop functioning. Arresting street dealers is a never ending struggle because they are easily replaced. But if it were possible, for example, to keep the precursor chemicals for meth out of CE hands, the illicit trade would stop, even if manufacturing, smuggling, distribution, and money laundering were all running perfectly.

Holmes, who was an expert on financial crime, writes that the CEs’ weakest point is money transfer. He says the authorities catch an estimated 20 to 40 percent of the illegal drugs that cross borders but stop only about 0.2 percent of the payments. Mexico does not have good laws against illicit money transfer, and does not realize this could be a choke point.

He also notes that the people who handle such things as trade-based money laundering–shippers, insurers, brokers–are good targets for police action. First, they have special skills and cannot be easily replaced if they are jailed. Second, they are white-collar people with families. This means that if they are arrested, they are desperate to cooperate with the police if that means a shorter sentence. Third, they make credible witnesses at trial, unlike snarling, brutish people who sell drugs and kill people.

Holmes argues that a coordinated attack on money transfers would strangle the CEs. He writes that many have few cash reserves, and that if armies of killers suddenly stopped getting paid, they could turn on their bosses. A campaign like this would have to target all the CEs at the same time; otherwise, the strong would simply wipe out the weak.

It is hard for a non-expert to know if CEs could be put down that way, but another of Holmes’s ideas probably would not work. He thinks people could be made to understand that “Americans who choose involvement with Mexico-sourced illegal drugs are, quite simply, choosing to contribute to economic devastation for North America.” And he thinks drug users could be persuaded to care.

Holmes thinks Americans of drug-taking age are greenies who worry about carbon footprint, genetically modified crops, and “blood diamonds.” He thinks a graphically illustrated campaign with the slogan, “You get high, people die,” would shock users into at least switching to home-grown marijuana. A campaign like that would not work on blacks, or on degenerate white meth users, but college students might pay attention.

What future for Mexico?

Holmes’s predictions are sobering–but are they accurate? Could we really end up with a Mestizo Somalia? Holmes says Mexican politicians won’t admit the truth because it only underscores their incompetence, and American politicians are terrified of offending Mexicans. If Mexico blew up, Central America and Colombia would follow.

Even if there is a good chance of collapse, Congress won’t send billions of dollars south of the border. Americans already think Mexico is a huge financial drain, and most would probably want to build a nice wall and shut the place out. That would have consequences. Two-way trade with Mexico runs to about $500 billion a year, and American companies have further billions in Mexican assets. For strictly defensive reasons, if Mexico really is on the verge of collapse, and an expensive campaign against the CEs would prevent that, it’s probably a sensible economic bargain. If Mexico did become Somalia, boatloads of Mexicans would come swarming ashore just as Africans are in Europe.

Whatever happens, it is clear that Mexico has huge problems, and that immigrants–legal and illegal–bring Mexico’s problems here. The more Mexicans we send home and the fewer we let in the better.

Shackled To An [Ungrateful] Corpse

Shackled To An [Ungrateful] Corpse

Part 2: Importing Mexico`s Worsening Racial Inequality

Part 3: America`s Imported Caste System

Part 1 of a Series on the Mexican racial hierarchy and its implications for America

The U.S. government has chosen to increasingly intertwine America`s fate with that of Mexico – and thus with Mexico`s corrupt white power elite. The U.S. Treasury bails them out whenever their economic bubbles burst (1982, 1994). By providing a safety valve that drains off Mexico`s most desperate young brown men, our lax borders allow Mexico`s most avaricious old white men to loot their nation with impunity.

In the U.S., this mestizo influx generates ever greater quotas and set-asides designed to propel their climb in American society. In contrast, in Mexico all the best jobs in government, industry, and academia are becoming ever more segregated. (See Mexican political scientist Jorge G. Castaneda`s February, 1997 Atlantic article, “Ferocious Differences”)

Today, Mexico`s economy is finally climbing off the canvas, where it landed with a thud when Mexico unexpectedly devalued the peso on December 20, 1994. America`s high-tech boom is pulling in Mexican imports. Their economy is also bolstered by high oil prices. In the words of Pat Buchanan`s latest speech on immigration and U.S.-Mexican relations, “Mexico has colluded with OPEC to keep oil off the world market to gouge the Americans who bailed out Mexico five years ago. So much for gratitude.”

Thus, the ancient hope is starting to spread again: this time Mexico has truly turned the corner into modernity. Syndicated columnist Raoul Lowery Contreras writes, based on a pollyannaish article by Joel Millman in the 4/14/2000 Wall Street Journal, that in another decade or so the American economy will face “shortages” of illegal immigrants from Mexico. [What if `they` stop coming, 4/29/00] Then we`ll presumably endure the horrible fate of needing to pay California stoop laborers enough so that they can stop living in caves. One can always hope …

Of course, this isn`t the first time the Mexican economy boomed in one of their Presidential election years. Their last three economic expansions also culminated during the campaigns of 1976, 1982, and 1994, only to be followed immediately by shocking collapses. In this series of columns, I`ll attempt to explain why sophisticated American institutions like the Wall Street Journal are forever having their fond hopes dashed by Mexico. We gringos constantly misunderstand Mexico, in large part because we are clueless about Mexico`s subtle but oppressive racial hierarchy of whites on top, mixed-race mestizos in the middle, and pure Indians way, way down at the bottom. Mexico has no overt color line, and the government promotes a mestizo identity for all Mexicans, yet the elites have been getting whiter.

Mexico`s last election year, 1994, was particularly memorable. No one doubts that the previous Presidential election, in 1988, had actually been won by the leftist candidate Cuauthemoc Cardenas, son of the mestizo President who seized the oil industry from foreign owners in 1938. However, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico since 1929, stole enough ballots to put Harvard-educated Carlos Salinas in power. Despite this embarrassing entry into power, Salinas, who enjoyed a close relationship with the Bush family, quickly became the darling of the Wall Street Journal for his “free market reforms.”

To demonstrate its newfound commitment to democracy, the PRI announced that in 1994 it would no longer pay for its political campaigns out of the government treasury. So Salinas simply invited to dinner the thirty moguls to whom he had sold off government-run monopolies. He extracted from these close personal friends pledges to pitch in to the PRI`s kitty 25,000,000 American dollars … apiece. At this single “Billionaire`s Banquet,”  the PRI netted promises totaling three quarters of a billion U.S. dollars. (Eat your heart out, Bill Clinton.)

After President Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress in 1993, Washington and Wall Street assumed that the trade pact`s first day of operation, January 1, 1994, would mark the beginning of the end for Mexico`s poverty, feudalism, and violence. Instead, early that morning, a revolution broke out. Impoverished Mayan Indians, driven to despair by cuts in price supports for their corn crops – which the U.S. demanded so that Midwestern agribusinesses could price the peasants out of the corn market – seized control of much of the deep southern state of Chiapas. Of course, as everywhere else in Mexico, the Indians` Marxist leaders were white. Today, Subcommandante Marcos still clings to power in the jungles.

Later that eventful year, Luis Donald Colosio, the presidential candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — the equivalent of Al Gore — was gunned down during a campaign rally in Tijuana. Salinas` government responded by advancing numerous conflicting theories about who dun it, leaving the citizenry too confused and cynical to focus their outrage on any particular caudillo. Colosio`s killing remains unsolved.

That fall, another hired gunman assassinated the chairman of the PRI. Now, the next few paragraphs might seem confusing if you don`t recall the case. This is because your mind will refuse to believe that what you`re reading is something that could happen outside of, say, Shakespeare at his most Titus Andronicus-style lurid. But the following is all true, so far as we can know anything for sure about what really happens within Mexico`s incestuous elite.

The dead PRI chairman, Pepe Ruiz Massieu, had married President Salinas` sister. But the marriage ended, it is said, when that lady discovered her husband in bed with a man.

After his murder, President Salinas appointed as special prosecutor the victim`s own brother Mario Ruiz Massieu. This investigator soon went on TV to dramatically accuse old-guard PRI politicians opposed to Salinas` “modernizing” of the murder.

Meanwhile, having secured the election of the PRI`s replacement presidential candidate Ernesto Zedillo, ex-President Salinas was looking forward to an active retirement as the human emblem of the New World Order. Clinton was backing Salinas for the presidency of the World Trade Organization. Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, elected him to its Board of Directors.

Then, as so often happens to Mexico`s ex-presidents as soon as power slips from their fingers, the ex-President`s shiny reputation collapsed. Three weeks after Salinas left power, his economic house of cards fell and Mexico plunged into a depression.

Special prosecutor Mario Ruiz Massieu fled to New Jersey. Seven millions dollars were found in Mario`s Texas bank account. The Zedillo administration announced that Mario had been covering up the true murderer of his own brother.

So who was this real culprit? According to President Zedillo, the mastermind behind the murder was former President Salinas` own brother Raul. Whether or not the former First Brother acted without the ex-President`s consent, he took the fall. After a four year long trial, Raul was sentenced to 27 years in prison. Meanwhile, Raul`s wife was arrested in Geneva for attempting to remove from their Swiss safety deposit box about $100,000,000, which Raul probably obtained from drug smugglers.

Carlos Salinas, fearing that if he appeared on the street in Mexico his former subjects might lynch him, fled to Ireland. He lives there in exile today. Oh, by the way, Dow Jones didn`t renominate Salinas for their board of directors.

(Readers can find additional garish details about Mexico`s ruling class in “Mexico on the Brink” by Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald reporter Andres Oppenheimer. The website of a PBS Frontline documentary on the Salinas brothers is also quite juicy.)

What kind of social system produces such people, and what does it portend for the U.S. as our culture becomes more influenced by Mexican norms? In subsequent columns, I`ll explore the insidious effects of Mexico`s little discussed racial system.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie criticfor The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]