An Introduction To The Reality Of Race

An Introduction To The Reality Of Race

By Aedon Cassiel

              

Now that we’ve gotten a few of the philosophical issues out of the way in the first entry of this series, it’s time to proceed to a discussion of the basic scientific concepts involved in human biodiversity. If you didn’t read that first entry, its central point could be summarized as follows:

A lot of people think that if you say people are the way they are more because of nature than nurture, then that entails believing that they deserve whatever they get even, if they are suffering because of their station in life. They think that someone who wants people to be made as equal as possible will for that reason have to believe that the differences between people are a result of their environments or upbringings rather than their genetics, and only someone who opposes the desire for equality could believe that human nature poses an obstacle to making people equal by making their environments equal. Therefore, if somebody believes that this statement is true, it can only be because they are a bad person with very poor values and morals.

However, all of this is false, because all of it is rooted in conflating facts with values. What we have, in reality, are claims about what is true on the one hand, and feelings about what we ought to do about it on the other. And what people want to do is going to be determined by what kind of people they are, not by what they happen to believe is true about the causes of peoples’ differences. You can think people are made the way they are by nurture rather than nature and still basically not give a damn about making them all equal, and you can think people are made the way they are by nature rather than nurture and still want to find ways to increase human equality however you still can (perhaps even by applying gene therapy directly). Both of these are perfectly logical possibilities, because facts and values are separate kinds of things. If someone cares about another person’s suffering from disease because they are the kind of person who cares, then it won’t matter to them whether that disease turns out to be genetic or viral. So you, the reader, had better be prepared not to let your feelings about what kind of society you want get in the way of what I’m about to explain to you about what is true, because it’s up to you decide what you want to do about it once I’ve shown you what the facts actually are. Even if I convince you that the argument that I’m going to make is true, and you come to agree with me, you won’t have to therefore sign on to the Alt Right’s overall political agenda; indeed, you can even continue being a Left-wing liberal, if it turns out that that is still what you want. The truth of what I aim to prove in this series stands completely irrespective of whether we in our ultimate political goals. As we move forward, I’ll be illustrating this with a variety of concrete examples.

To address a concern held by some of the constructive critics of that essay, it was a bit of a misnomer to title that first entry, “Human Biodiversity for Normies.” The aim of the series as a whole is to lay out the concepts and information that one would need in order to understand human biodiversity as a whole, while avoiding a number of common, predictable pitfalls and fallacies that tend to stand in the way of people doing so. Since the requisite concepts as well as these pitfalls and fallacies will all vary in complexity, I’m aiming for something that will ultimately work quite well both for “normies” and for relatively more intelligent liberals who have never been exposed to an intelligent argument from our side. That introduction was obviously necessary more for the sake of the potentially reasonable liberal than it is for the “normie.” But with this entry, we’re back into territory that should serve perfectly well as the beginning of an introduction for actual normies, even if they couldn’t follow the first entry, or found it too complicated or verbose. The downside of this approach is that any one person who tries to read the series from beginning to end will either find some pieces of it over their heads or else other parts too basic and oversimplified, but the upside is that mixing and matching pieces of interest should also make this a versatile series that can be adapted to many different needs.

This essay was originally going to offer a basic introduction to the meaning of “race,” and a range of concepts related to IQ such as the meaning of such basic fundamental concepts as “g” and “heredity.” However, the entry on “race” ended up being long enough to qualify as its own entry. In any case, this is a topic where even the most intelligent liberals are quite often stuck at a “normie” level of understanding regarding even the basics. I imagine that little of this will be new to my “choir” in the Alt Right, but I hope to at least be able to add at least a few fresh perspectives and insights in along the way – at least by introducing you to a few new rhetorical strategies – to keep you interested while I attempt to reach a new audience.

What is “race”?

Somehow, even this simple question has become a topic of controversy and confusion in the modern world. Some people will tell you that scientists have discovered that race is just a “social construct.” Now, when a Leftist or liberal says this, they clearly imply that if this were true, it would mean that race isn’t a real thing. But they obviously aren’t even thinking particularly hard about what a “social construct” is, because even if race is a social construct, that doesn’t inherently mean that it can’t also be a real thing.

I’ll illustrate an example of what a social construct is, and explain why being a social construct doesn’t always make something “unreal”: the color spectrum. In an important sense, the color spectrum is a social construct, because where we define the boundaries between “red,” “orange,” and “yellow” is up to us. In fact, even the fact that we define three major boundaries along this spectrum (from “red” to “orange” to “yellow”) instead of two (from “red” to “yellow,” cutting “orange” in half to divide between them) or two dozen (from “mahogany” all the way through “marigold,” with no groupings of these into “red” or “yellow” at all) is a matter of basically arbitrary social convention.

Similarly, advocates of the “race is a social construct” argument will point out that earlier in American history, anyone who had even “one drop” of black blood was classified as black. Is someone with ninety-nine drops of white blood and one drop of black blood black or white? Even if there is a “correct” answer, that answer is only “correct” because of conventions that we came up with – and could change if we wanted. Indeed, the historical American “one drop rule” is reversed in modern Brazil, where anyone who has even one drop of white blood is classified by society as “white.”

This is what people are referring to when they say that race is a “social construct”: that to some extent, people have defined it in different ways at different times. But they follow this point up with the bizarre interpretation that because people have defined the boundaries between the races in different ways over time, there is therefore no truth about what “race” to which a person belongs besides an arbitrary label.

This is like noticing that in English that a certain animal is called a duck, whereas in Spanish it is called patos, and then concluding that there’s no truth as to whether the thing being referred to by these different names is a duck or an airplane.

Even as the boundaries between “red,” “orange,” and “yellow” are defined by us and created by social convention, the colors labeled by those words are not. Whether we divide this piece of the color spectrum up into a spectrum from red to yellow, or from red to orange to yellow, or from crimson and mahogany to persimmon and orange peel to merigold and aureolin, the colors that are being named and divided up by these terms are still obviously real. Nothing about the fact that our color spectrum is a social construct entails that there is no difference between the colors which are being labeled by the terms red, orange, and yellow themselves. And the fact that racial categories are “socially constructed” (which they are) does not entail that human populations and the differences between them aren’t real, either (and they aren’t).

That’s why a somewhat more intelligent liberal won’t rely on just the “social construct” argument alone. They’ll use it, but they’ll add to it that the idea of race is meaningless because we now know there to be more variation between the people collected within racial groups than there is between people standing across racial divisions. In other words, according to some formulations of this argument, you are likely to have greater genetic similarity with a randomly chosen person from outside of your “race” than you are with a randomly chosen person within your “race.”

The old response to this was to name the fallacy contained within its reasoning: Lewontin’s Fallacy.

An example which illustrates this fallacy would go something like this: if we look at the range of how short or tall men can be, and then we look at the range of how short or tall women can be, those ranges are much larger than the difference between the shortest men and women, or the tallest men and women. Thus, it is also true that there is “more variation in height between the people within a given gender than there is between the genders.” However, this does not change the fact that men are significantly taller than women on average, or that it is useful to know this. Despite the fact that the “more variation in x feature within-group than between groups” applies here as well, it nonetheless does not change the observable fact that men are indeed taller than women, on average. Supposing we had a roller coaster ride with a height requirement of 6’2”, and we saw more men taking the ride than women, the fact that men are taller than women on average would most likely be a crucial part of the explanation why.

So even if the premise of that argument had been true, its conclusion that race is meaningless still wouldn’t have followed. Even if the absolute variation within your race was larger than the absolute variation between your race and another, there could still be significant differences on average between the average member of your race and the average member of the other which it would be useful to know if you were trying to figure out why some difference in net social outcome was occurring between them.

However, more recently we’ve also begun establishing conclusively that the premise was always false to begin with. It turns out that the genetic differences found between the races are, in fact, bigger than the differences found within them.

See here for a short discussion of that fact from an Asian physicist, and here for a few more charts from the same physicist illustrating the genetic clustering of Nigerians, Europeans, and Asians. These charts look at the sequence of genes in a person’s genome rather than just considering the genes in isolation. Guess what happens when they do that? They find literally no genetic overlap between the races at all. So why does Stephen Hsu’s analysis here seem to find a different result than others have?

Thanks to research conducted at the University of Cambridge, we’ve recently learned that even when people have the same type of cancer, resulting from the same genetic mutations, the order in which they developed those mutations still changes the way the cancer behaves and how responsive the patient is to therapy which targets the mutated genes. And according to researchconducted by Joseph Nadeau at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, certain traits in mice appear to be influenced by genes that show up in their parents’ or grandparents’ chromosomes, but which do not show up in their own. After conducting a study in which two female mice had identical sets of genes, but who had a father whose Y chromosomes (which should not have been inherited by the females, and as far as they could tell, aren’t) came from a different strain of mice, they discovered that these offspring had behavioral patterns which more closely resembled that strain’s normal behavior, and they concluded that the “transgenerational genetic effects rival conventional genetics in frequency and strength.”

Elsewhere, Nadeau has studied gene-gene interaction directly.

To illustrate how complicated this idea is, Nadeau hops out of his chair and rushes over to the whiteboard in his office, where he quickly sketches out how these “completely crazy” context-dependent effects can act even within a single chromosome. The experiments focus on a genetic variant they have identified on chromosome 6 in the A/J mice that completely protects the animal against obesity. When they drop the chromosome into Black 6 mice, they too are protected against obesity. But it’s not that simple. When researchers stitch a bit of the DNA from the A/J strain into a large section of chromosome 6 in the Black 6 mice, the resulting mice are obese. When they trim away some of the Black 6 DNA and replace it with more A/J DNA, the resistance gene becomes active and the mice are lean. But when they add even more A/J DNA to this hybrid chromosome, the resistance gene turns off again. This on-off genetics continues even when the researchers add or subtract extremely small portions of chromosome 6. In fact, no matter how small the patch of DNA, nibbling away at it alternately confers or erases resistance to obesity. The reason is not known, but the larger message is that the effect of any variant seems to depend on its genetic surroundings. “We see that effect all the time,” Nadeau says. “All the time! Everywhere, in every trait we look at.”

Greater estimates of the degree to which different human populations are genetically similar look only at the genes in isolation. But this is like saying that the Bible and Atlas Shrugged must be basically the same book since they contain all of the same letters. In both cases, the sequences those segments are arranged in matters a whole lot more than anything else. The different genomes of the human race may contain most of the same letters, but it turns out that the sequences they’re arranged in are different enough to transmit quite different biological messages – just like with words and letters in novels. We’ll discuss more about what those differences are, and how confident we can be that they do in fact partially result from genetic differences, later; for now, the only point that we need to establish is that such differences do exist. In order to understand the magnitude of differences and where they lie, we will obviously have to go deeper than we are here.

Back to Basics

Before I had attained any proper understanding of this subject which went beyond the standard liberal platitudes, a writer by the name of Steve Sailer served as my own “normie introduction” to sane thinking about race. The way Sailer explained race very quickly made me feel like an idiot for ever having bought into these platitudes at all. The way Steve Sailer explains it in his Race FAQ, race is just literally a very extended family. How extended? Going back to our arguments concerning “social constructs,” wouldn’t the degree to which we decided to stretch the extended family before marking a limit and calling what we’ve circled a “racial” group arbitrary? Actually, no. The relevant point at which a “racial” group emerges is the point at which the extended group you’re looking at is large enough to be considered somewhat “inbred” compared to the rest of the human population, yet small enough that there is still a “rest of the human population” left. The definition of “race” is therefore relative, but not arbitrary.

Yet even without the added nuance involved in explaining where to cut off the “extendedness” of the extended family, the simple point that race is an “extended family” was all that it took to cut through a great deal of the pedantic bullshit I had been conditioned to think and say about race. It was more than obvious to me even then, no matter how deeply I had been indoctrinated with Leftist ideas, that it wasn’t a “social construct” to say that I belonged to an extended family. On the level of common sense alone, it was also pretty obvious that all the members of my extended family were more like each other in many ways on average than they were like people who weren’t related to us at all. If someone were actually neurotic enough to pose the argument to me that there is more variation within my extended family than there is between my family and others, it wouldn’t take much study for me to suspect that this was probably some kind of bullshit right off the bat.

Of course, the argument is even weaker for a racial group than it would be for a smaller extended family, because in normal circumstances where literal inbreeding is not prevalent, the members of smaller “extended families” are not shuffling genes more frequently among themselves (at least, not more than once) than they are with the outside: by definition, every new mating partner in a small “extended family” comes from “outside” the extended family. But if you keep expanding the tree of that extended family far enough into the past, you would reach a point where this is no longer true – where on average, the members of that tree are mating among themselves more often than they are with “the outside.” And this would be the point at which you had identified a “racial group.” The technical term for this is “pedigree collapse,” but I’ll leave further discussion of that term to Sailer himself. If you want to find deeper explanations regarding where the cutoff points between “racial” groupings are, and why they are not arbitrary, this is the term you’re looking for, and Sailer’s discussion of it should be illuminating.

This answers questions about how large or small a group has to be before qualifying as a “racial group” – questions about how closely we can zoom in on the fine differences between individuals while still calling those individual differences “racial” – perfectly. Every time you can extend a family tree back far enough to have identified a group which is relatively more “inbred” than it is with people from outside that tree, you have identified a group which is shuffling genes among itself which will therefore end up being more common inside of that group than they are outside of it. If Montana were cut off from the rest of the United States due to exposed fault lines for several generations, and the population of Montana thus bred within itself exclusively during that period, you would have a population whose members would become increasingly more genetically similar to each other and increasingly more dissimilar to the outside – even if the people you started with had, at that time, belonged to different racial categories. After a while, you would be able to recognize Montanans by distinct similarities in their appearances, and these similarities would begin to correlate with things like adaptation to high elevations above sea level. Eventually, the differences would become great enough that, in fact, a new Montanan “race” would have been created.

In retrospect, this should always have been obvious. There’s no other way for a different racial group to evolve in the first place other than through something that looks much like this process.

In his Race FAQ, Sailer dispatches pseudo-questions such as, “If races exist, how can somebody belong to more than one race?” with incredible common-sense efficiency: “If extended families exist, how can you belong to your mother’s extended family and to your father’s extended family?” I think everyone reading this understands the reproductive process well enough to realize that someone can only be mixed-race by having parents who are of mixed races. So in the case of the children of mixed–race parents, the pseudo-question and Sailer’s retort literally collapse into being exactly the same question. “If races exist, how can somebody belong to more than one race?” Well, if families exist, how can a mixed-race child have a white family and a black family? The punchline effect of his response reminds me of an old joke about a motorist who was stopped after speeding as part of a group of several speeding cars, and who is offended that the officer stopped him while letting all the other speeding motorists get away. The officer asks him, “Have you ever gone fishing?” The motorist responds, “Yes,” and the officer replies, “Did you ever catch all of the fish?”

With common-sense quips this direct, you don’t have to have the implication spelled out for you in order to see the point for yourself – unless you really are an idiot. That’s the level of obviousness and simplicity to which Sailer has distilled the concept of race. And that was the small beginning of significant shifts in how I came to understand the world as a whole.

Actually, the influence of race was obvious enough on the most visceral level even within my own extended family. When one of my cousins gave birth to a white child while another gave birth to a mixed-race, part-black child at the same time, the part-black child was walking around and trying to play-fight with the white child even while the white child was hardly beginning to crawl. During a series of family gatherings, the difference couldn’t have been more obvious. And the explanation clearly could not have been that they were receiving different nutrition, or that they were living in different socioeconomic strata. For that to even make sense as a postulate, the theory would have to be that receiving worse nutrition and living in poorer conditions accelerated black infants’ motor development. But in this case, I knew from observation that they were not being raised in environments that differed in any meaningful way. They were both spending the greater bulk of their time together, at the home where we had these family gatherings. They were even being fed the same brand of formula. In every way, their upbringings were effectively identical – and yet this extremely obvious difference had emerged nonetheless.

As I studied the science of race, I discovered that it had actually been a very well-supported piece of knowledge for a very long time that black infants do, in fact, develop motor skills faster, especially during their first year of life. Even though they’re born faster and require shorter gestation times in their mothers’ wombs, studies still consistently find that they are able to raise and hold their heads up sooner, sit steadily without help sooner, learn to walk sooner, and so on down the list of just about every benchmark of motor development that can be studied scientifically. These differences show up not only from birth, but in fact, even beforehand; while only a third of white children are born by thirty-nine weeks, fully half of black children are. And once half of white children have been born in week forty, a whopping seventy percent of black children have. And yet, despite how much faster they leave the womb, and thus how much less time they have to develop prior to infancy, they still pass every benchmark of motor skill development in infancy more quickly as well. This is a remarkable, large, and biologically-influenced “racial” difference that shows up worldwide in populations from different racial groups, no matter what country they’re found in, from the very moment of birth – nay, before it.

In retrospect, it seems absolutely remarkable now that it took so much science for me to finally just admit what I had been seeing with my own eyes. Why had I ever been afraid of admitting it, when it had been so obvious? The only reason I could give is that admitting that people innately differ – for any reason at all, whether race was one of the variables in the explanation or not – felt vaguely threatening to the generally liberal worldview I held at the time. Back then, I couldn’t even have articulated why, because there wasn’t really any coherent thought behind it. I guess I just knew that I enjoyed carrying the instinct to see differences in people as an excuse to look for some big, bad villain to direct righteous anger towards – and the thought that people might innately differ from each other in any way threw a fly into that cocktail of intoxicating righteousness, so it simply wasn’t something that I wanted to devote any of my time or energy toward thinking about one way or another.

I don’t think the story of my evolution is uncommon. I think the trends that caused me to think and feel in the way that I did are exerting the same influence upon others’ minds, too. I think the same facts that changed my mind will be more than sufficient to change those of others, also. And I think I can demonstrate that whether you regard yourself as someone who supports the Alt Right’s political programs in part, in whole, or not at all, there really is nothing to be afraid – even if you do want to demonize the Alt Right’s politics, it is illegitimate and unfair to demonize the concept of human biodiversity itself. Suppose we lived in a world where white activists were in a panic over the fact that white infants are developing motor skills more slowly compared to black ones, and thus demanded the establishment of a welfare institution to provide white infants assistance in order to grow faster.

And now suppose that we discovered something which we already know is true today: that this difference results primarily from innate biological differences between white and black infants that appear everywhere, no matter what environment they grow up in, throughout the world. Would white children be harmed if people came to acknowledge this? Obviously not. If we cared about the development of white children, we would simply stop wasting our time on what had objectively been a dead end, and find some other means of helping white children that would actually have a realistic chance of helping them. Whether we cared about white children or not, then – indeed, no matter what it is that we care about – understanding the true nature of the facts can only provide us with more efficient means for achieving more of our own goals, and wasting less of our time. Whatever those goals may be.

On Libertarian Universalism

   

The libertarian worldview is based on the idea that every individual has a set of rights, which no one can take from him/her. This means that the state’s restrictions on individual freedom in most cases are seen as illegitimate. There are several forms of libertarianism; anarcho-capitalism, objectivism, minarchism, individualist anarchism and others, and they stem from different philosophical traditions but reach more or less the same conclusions.

I see these libertarian currents as incarnations of the Indo-Aryan longing for freedom and Norse “individualism”. My Norwegian ancestors were proud, strong and independent, and almost 70 years of social democracy has not been able to change this completely. But just like other incarnations of old ideals, such as nationalism and socialism, libertarianism lacks something from a traditional perspective.

Apoliteia

First we must establish that there are two kinds of traditionalists, two different attitudes towards the modern world. Both assume that the modern world is fundamentally bad, that we are living in the darkest phase of the Kali Yuga. There are however two ways of reacting to this, and Julius Evola expressed both in different stages of his life (James Mason expressed it in the most simple way: “Total Dropout or Total Revolution”). The first reaction is the ksatriya-reaction, full-scale revolt against the modern world, even political. Through his involvement in Italian Fascism and WWII, Evola demonstrated this reaction. The second reaction is more resigned, and was given the name apoliteia by Evola. Here, he contends that the Kali Yuga still has many years left in it, and that it’s unrealistic to try to fight it. The only thing one can try to do is to live a traditional life in the midst of it, and since there are no political movements worthy of support, one should distance oneself from politics (apoliteia).

       

I don’t agree with Evola’s later, more resigned analysis. There are many signs that the current world order has developed inner contradictions that will lead to its collapse in relatively short time, demonstrated especially by Marxists such as Immanuel Wallerstein (Third World immigration with its resulting ethnic conflicts, the lack of a hegemony to replace the United States, etc.). Thus, fighting the current system is not only a necessity in order to call oneself an ariya, it is also completely realistic.

Anyway, an interesting question that arises from the apoliteia perspective is which society is the best one to live in. Social democracy, totalitarianism, theocracy? This is where libertarianism becomes interesting, as a libertarian society offers a traditionalist the freedom to be himself and search for enlightenment/initiation in his own way. No thought police will come knocking on the door of the traditionalist when he has dared to express his thoughts on race or gender roles. No thought police will fire the traditionalist as soon as the media has “exposed” him as an anti-democrat (as the libertarian ideology itself is anti-democratic, i.e. opposed to the right of the majority to take away the rights of the individual). No benevolent nannies/politicians will imprison the traditionalist as soon as he, as part of his search for enlightenment, has tried the effects of marijuana.

From this fact, there are strictly practical affinities between a libertarian worldview and a traditional one. In many cases traditionalists will have great use of strong libertarian lobby groups, and in fact the libertarians have use of a number of traditionalists spreading their ideals about mature, honorable, and independent people as well (for freedom to work, the human material must have some degree of quality). As a traditionalist, one can also feel respect for the libertarians when they stand up to the state and the nanny mentality, and say: “I am a grown up, honorable person. I am fully capable of taking care of myself and answer to the consequences of my own actions. I don’t need a nanny state to take care of me”, as this is closer to the attitudes and human ideals of our ancestors.

  

Moreover, a libertarian society offers a framework which also traditionalism can function within. But it is just a framework, which can be filled with anything, and there is a great risk that many people will use it to defend their “choices” of purely animalistic lifestyles (“eat, shit, fuck, die”).

Ethnicity and progressive collectivism

But my objection to a libertarian worldview is its anti- or a-nationalism. It sees ethnicity as a non-issue, or a strictly private issue, something which can and should be kept separate from politics (for example, many libertarians defend an open border policy, something which from a traditional perspective would lead to the doom of the people and is thus a very strange, self-destructive and anti-popular position). To protect your kin and people is an important part of tradition, and to silently watch your people march towards certain doom is simply not honorable.

Empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that keeping ethnicity and politics separate is impossible, neither is it possible to, from a “selfish gene”-perspective, “distance yourself” from your group. Geneaologists, who have mapped the movements and fates of different genes throughout history, have found that in-group competition is not the most crucial factor in regards to what genes have survived and spread, it is the competition between groups. Genocide, displacement and silent extinction, this is what history has looked like. Those who want to protect the future of their own genes and their own bloodlines, are forced to protect that of their own people as well. And the research on “ethnic nepotism” also shows that this is exactly what human beings do. We have developed instincts and cultures (“group evolutionary strategies”, for those that have read the works of professor Kevin MacDonald) that makes us feel kinship with those who look like us, as they are also highly likely to share our genes to a greater extent. And those that we feel kinship with, we favor, in order to favor the survival of our own genes (note that phenomena like suicide bombings can also be explained from this perspective. Even if a childless person blows himself up, the genes of his relatives, which he shares, will live on).

   

The conclusion is, of course, that he who thinks he can “distance himself” from his group is in fact sadly mistaken, and has a lesser connection with reality than the “bigots” that he often implicitly wants to distinguish himself from. What consequences does this have for libertarian a-nationalism, when we have established that ethnic nepotism is inborn? Well, first we realize that we can’t be so certain that every group in a libertarian society will “follow the rules.” Groups that are numerous but not as economically well off, will take advantage of their strength in numbers to force advantages for themselves, and then the political arena will be reborn, maybe even the state (and maybe even an ethnic state). This is a very clear tendency throughout history, we can see it in Uganda where native Africans banished Asians which they saw as having become too rich. We can see it in Germany where the Germans turned against the Jews which they saw as “unfairly” successful, or in the US and the entire Western world where “minorities” force changes to their own advantage through politics and/or rioting. Such is the reality of ethnic relations, such is human nature. When people don’t see the rules as being to their advantage, and if they are numerous enough, they change them. Even if I saw ethnicity as a non-issue, there are many people that would disagree with me, and on the contrary see me as an “unfairly privileged Western man”. The circle closes, and those that tried to distance themselves mentally become the socio-economic losers when other, more self-conscious groups take away their privileges.

  

On Gavin McInnes & The Alt Light

On Gavin McInnes & The Alt Light

By Spencer Quinn

       

Recently, Gavin McInnes, our friend over at Taki’s Magazine, helpfully released a video entitled “What is the Alt Right?” In it, he does a pretty good job of describing who (or what) most of us are, dividing us into the “Alt Light,” the “Alt Right,” and everyone else. The video is not for the Alt Right in a broader sense, of course. There really isn’t anything new in it. It’s just an introduction to the outer reaches of the Right for normies and an assurance that we’re not as bad as we are made out to be. Again, helpful, but not perfect. At one point, McInnes proclaims that Jared Taylor wishes to discriminate against Jews, which we all know isn’t true. McInnes also neglects to mention anyone, other than Richard Spencer, who is to the right of Jared Taylor – that is, the “everyone else” category above – and more or less questions the influence and sanity of those of us who are in that category.

McInnes’ overall point, as expected, is to make the Alt Light look good compared to the Alt Right. One of the ways in which he does this is by expressing a key difference between the two: the Alt Right consists of racial (namely, white) chauvinists, whereas the Alt Light consists of cultural (namely, Western) chauvinists. This we all know, and it is therefore uninteresting, but McInnes’ justification for preferring the latter over the former is. He just doesn’t have the heart to draw a color line when dealing with non-whites who conform to acceptable standards of Western chauvinism. He even states that the Alt Light should almost be more welcoming to blacks and other non-whites considering how hard it is for some of these people to gravitate to the Right in the first place. In his typical expressive, onomatopoetic manner, he imagines himself rejecting a Right-minded black as if he were a game show host getting buzzer-happy booting a losing contestant off a show. He then indicated without saying it that he could never do something so cruel and absurd.

As someone who, for the most part, belongs in the “everyone else” category of the Alt Right, I can say without the slightest hint of sarcasm that I like Gavin McInnes, and his reasoning behind promoting the Alt Light is one reason why. Despite his sneering, pugnacious persona (and his dismissive attitude towards people like me), he seems like a genuinely nice and funny guy whose heart and mind are in the right place in the grand scheme of things. I’ve said this before: the world is a better place with race realist writers like Gavin McInnes than without them, regardless of any disagreements I, or we, may have with them.

Furthermore, I like what he and the Alt Light have to say. Shouldn’t we all judge people for what’s on the inside rather than the outside? In my personal and professional life, I try to adhere to this dictum as much as possible, regardless of a person’s race. Isn’t that fair and just? When wouldn’t one want to be fair and just with people? A worldview like McInnes’, which accepts racial and sexual differences yet still promotes an ecumenical, equal-opportunity approach to in-group status is . . . attractive. Almost seductively so.

For example, if God were to come down and say to me, “Hey, Spence, you schlemiel! Gavin’s right. You’re wrong. Get on board with the Alt Light tout suite! Capiche?” I wouldn’t do so grudgingly. I would do so gladly, being all too eager to unburden myself of my cynical understanding of human nature and start singing “Kumbaya” with my moral betters.

I’m sure it would be nice, but once I awaken from such an idyllic reverie, I’m forced to realize that my sticking point with the Alt Light can be found in this cynical (yet accurate) understanding of human nature. There is more to race realism than accepting that blacks do poorly on their SATs, East Asians are really good at math, and white people have a thing for the Gap. Race realism also means that people are fundamentally racial; before all else they will express loyalty towards their own kind, especially when the red, white, and blue chips are down.

This alone is enough to obviate the Alt Light. Once enough people of various races enter and become a part of the West, what good would Western chauvinism be when these races use all the great aspects of the West to pursue their own interests at the expense of those of other races? Isn’t the point of Western chauvinism to suck in the rarefied oxygen above all that racial stuff? Were we big Western chauvinists when the Japanese made use of Western weapons and technology against us at Pearl Harbor? Are we Western chauvinists today as the North Koreans aim their very Western nukes at us? As Samuel Huntington pointed out concerning Arab Muslims (but it could apply to any non-white racial group), they wish to modernize, not Westernize.

Gavin McInnes fails to see that most non-whites will be Western chauvinists only insofar as it coincides with their racial chauvinism. And if these chauvinisms ultimately conflict with each other, the latter will subsume the former, always.

McInnes should also remember that one of the great flaws of the human mind is to assume that all other minds are (or potentially are) like the one doing the assuming. This is not an obvious mistake; in fact it is quite natural, so I am not blaming him for it. I’m reminded of the wonderful biopic of Temple Grandin, the autistic celebrity and scientist who, according to the movie, has the freakish ability to visualize complex mathematical equations in her mind. When a college instructor asks in disbelief if she really has such an ability, she looks puzzled and responds, “Doesn’t everybody?”

It seems that only white people in large numbers can overcome race to the point where they believe it doesn’t matter. I don’t know why – it could spring from genetics, or from two thousand years of Christian indoctrination, or from many hundreds of years of practice being a host population to other races. In any case, many whites, including those on the Alt Light (who, frankly, should know better), are more than happy to abjure race entirely and judge individuals strictly on a case-by-case basis.

I think this is noble, yet foolhardy.

When I look at the vast majority of non-whites (with the exception of some East Asians settled in the West), I see racial-minded people behaving racially, as well they should. Israel doesn’t just refuse entry to white Goyim and Syrian refugees from next door. They also give the pointy boot to black Jews from Africa. Furthermore, what nations besides white nations are making real efforts to take in other races in large numbers? Only white nations do this. And hundreds of years of exposure to Western Civ isn’t going to make non-whites do the same – if so, they would have done it by now. They are who they are, and all the West will ever do for them is modernize them, not Westernize them. Therefore, I don’t understand McInnes’ optimism about non-whites. The safer, more sensible path, in my opinion, can be found in the Alt Right, which states that the races for the most part would do best to be separate.

Such a conclusion is less attractive, but certainly more realistic than the ones reached by the Alt Light. Furthermore, the Alt Right can afford to be wrong. The Alt Light can’t. After enough race-mixing and miscegenation, as is promoted by the Alt Light, if it is eventually proven that race really is as important as the Alt Right says it is, then we’re courting disaster. And there’s no going back. You can’t unmix the races any more than you can turn back time.

With the Alt Right, we hedge our bets and play smart, putting white interests first. There’s also the point that Vox Day makes, which I agree with: whites should be shrewd about their racial interests, since what’s good for whites is ultimately good for everyone else. Whites are the architects of the modern world, after all. They have done more great things than all the other races combined. Why wouldn’t we want them to maintain their racial identity?

Another mistake McInnes makes is to assume it’s all about him. Remember his game show host imitation? What he is doing there is putting himself, Gavin McInnes, in the fictional role of an all-powerful guardian of a white ethnostate. He personally does not have the heart to reject people who have all their ducks are in a row just because the ducks are the wrong color. This speaks to the titanic sense of morality I find in many adherents of the Alt Light. As I said before, I genuinely like these guys. But just because they are going to go to Heaven when they die does not mean that they’re right, and does not mean that what they propose is best for white people (and by extension, for everyone else).

Again, I’m reminded of a movie, this time Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. In one scene, Howard Hughes, as a young parvenu, is having dinner with Katharine Hepburn and her very wealthy family. When Katharine’s mother informs Howard that they don’t care about money in their household, Howard snaps back, “That’s because you have it.”

To make this analogy about race, Gavin McInnes is willing to disregard race because he, by virtue of being white, has it. He grew up in a world that was mostly white. For many years, only white people mattered in the development of the modern world. Whites were on top and experienced little, if any, oppression in their home territories from non-whites. I am quite certain that as things continue to change and as anti-white sentiment in the West turns more and more into anti-white violence and oppression (like it already has in South Africa and Zimbabwe), whites like McInnes will become less and less generous with this racial business. They will start drawing that racial line in their minds – the lines they are loath to draw today. And they will not care so much about going to Heaven.

I predict that as the proportion of non-whites in the West reaches a tipping point, and as they bring the average IQ of the Western nations further and further down as predicted by Byron Roth in his excellent work The Perils of Diversity, white countries will become what I call “prison nations.” In prisons, races congregate into gangs out of necessity. These gangs are tribal, first and foremost, and they quite fiercely look after their own.

As David Skarbek pointed out in his excellent book The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System:

The Mexican Mafia and the Nuestra Familia were the first two prison gangs to form in California, and they were not the last. As they rose to power, inmates of other races and ethnicities formed gangs as well. Morrill explains that, in the following years, inmates “who formed these other gangs felt they had to in order to protect themselves.” In the late 1950s and early 1960s, white inmates formed the Blue Bird Gang. Little is known about this organization, but by the late 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that it had become “apparent to other white inmates that a more powerful gang was necessary to protect white inmates from the Black and Mexican prison spawned gangs that were in power in the California Department of Corrections prison system.” The Aryan Brotherhood prison gang formed in 1967 with the explicit purpose of protecting white inmates from black and Hispanic gangs.

This is our future, folks. We will need to stick together in order to survive, just like humans have always done. The Alt Right recognizes this. The Alt Light, as of now, does not. But they will. And when they do, and when they come over to our side of the political spectrum and admit their mistakes, we should accept them and hold no grudges. At that point, there will only be one Alt Right in a world more dangerous for white people than the one we’re in now. And that will make me happy and sad at the same time.

Remembering Adolf Hitler

Remembering Adolf Hitler:
April 20, 1889–April 30, 1945

By Greg Johnson

           

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. In commemoration of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following pieces on this website.

Hitler’s Significance for Our Struggle

Greg Johnson, “The Burden of Hitler” (Translations: French, Polish, Russian, Spanish)

Greg Johnson, “Our Struggle Too: Propaganda and Organization”

William Pierce, “The Measure of Greatness” (French translation here)

Irmin Vinson, “Some Thoughts on Hitler” (Translations: French, Norwegian)

For audio versions of all three, see “Three Texts on Hitler.”

Historical and Philosophical Accounts of Hitler and the Third Reich

Kerry Bolton, “Breaking the Bondage of Interest: A Right Answer to Usury,” Part 4

Jonathan Bowden, “Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: Leni Riefenstahl’s Heir? ”

Amanda Bradley, “Nazi Fashion Wars,” Part 1 and Part 2 (French translation here)

Emil Cioran, “Hitler in the German Consciousness”

Veronica Kuzniar Clarke, “Demystification of the Birth & Funding of the NSDAP,” Part 1 and Part 2

Léon Degrelle, “The Enigma of Hitler”

Léon Degrelle, “Hitler’s Social Revolution,” Part 1 and Part 2

F. Roger Devlin, “National Socialism as Anti-Modernism: Julius Evola’s Notes on the Third Reich”

Guillaume Durocher, “Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Guillaume Durocher, “Collaboration and Adaptation in Axis Europe,” Part 1, Part 2

Guillaume Durocher, “Gandhi and Hitler: The Story of a Friendship,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Guillaume Durocher, “Hitler and Clausewitz: The Philosopher as War Cry,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Guillaume Durocher, “Hitler as YouTube Star”

Guillaume Durocher, “Hitler vs. the Untermenschen: Myth and Reality”

Guillaume Durocher, “Hitler’s Reading Habits”

Guillaume Durocher, “Plato, Hitler, and Totalitarianism”

Guillaume Durocher, “Schopenhauer and Hitler,” Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Guillaume Durocher, “Some Recent Genetic Studies . . . and Hitler”

Guillaume Durocher, “Tocqueville and/or Hitler”

Guillaume Durocher, “Understanding Hitler and the Third Reich”

J. F. C. Fuller, “Why Hitler Lost”

Andrew Hamilton, “Hitler as Orator”

Andrew Hamilton, “Hitler’s Speeches”

Andrew Hamilton, “When Mussolini Scorned Hitler”

Andrew Hamilton, “What is the Best Hitler Biography?”

Andrew Hamilton, “What if Germany had Won?: Hitler’s Britain”

Andrew Hamilton, “Pan-Nationalism”

Andrew Hamilton, “On Oratory”

Andrew Hamilton, “A Table Talk Puzzle”

James Holbeyfield, “A Dog’s Best Friend”

Greg Johnson, Review of Nasser Ghaemi’s A First-Rate Madness

Greg Johnson, Review of R. H. S. Stolfi’s Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, Part 1, Part 2

Greg Johnson, Review of David Irving’s The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor (Spanish translation here)

Anthony M. Ludovici, “Hitler and the Third Reich”

Anthony M. Ludovici, “Hitler and Nietzsche”

Anthony M. Ludovici, “My Education,” Part III

Daniel W. Michaels, “Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe” (French translation here)

James J. O’Meara, Review of Joseph Howard Tyson’s Hitler’s Mentor: Dietrich Eckart, His Life, Times, & Milieu

Riki Rei, “Confessions of an East Asian National Socialist”

Brenton Sanderson, “Evil Genius: Constructing Wagner as Moral Pariah,” Part 4

Savitri Devi, “History, Action, and the Timeless”

Savitri Devi, “Hitlerian Esotericism and the Tradition”

Savitri Devi, “Hitlerism and Hindudom” (Greek translation here)

Miguel Serrano, “Hitler and the Last Avatar: The 114th Anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s Birth” (Czech translation here)

Dominique Venner, “Hitler’s Failure”

Mark Weber, “The Enduring Allure of Hitlerism: Hitler as Enlightenment Intellectual”

Significant Admirers of Hitler

Kerry Bolton, “Henry Williamson”

Kerry Bolton, “Knut Hamsun”

Collin Cleary, “Heidegger: An Introduction for Anti-Modernists” (French translation of part 4 here)

Mark Deavin, “Henry Williamson: Nature’s Visionary”

Mark Deavin, “Knut Hamsun and the Cause of Europe”

Andrew Hamilton, “Alfred Rosenberg in Translation”

Martin Heidegger, “Heidegger on World Jewry in the Black Notebooks”

Greg Johnson, “Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Diary of a Dissident National Socialist”

Greg Johnson, “Remembering Martin Heidegger: September 26, 1889–May 26, 1976” (Ukrainian translation here)

Greg Johnson, “Unity Valkyrie Mitford: August 8, 1914–May 28, 1948”

Michael O’Meara, “Heidegger ‘The Nazi’”

Miguel Serrano, “Hitler and Jung”

Film and the Third Reich

Jonathan Bowden, “Hans-Jürgen Syberberg—Leni Riefenstahl’s Heir”

Lyle Burkhead, “Ministry of Illusion: Film in the Third Reich”

Jef Costello, “Disingenuous Genius: A Tribute to Leni Riefenstahl”

Andrew Hamilton, “Battle for Norway — 1940 Campaign (Geman — 1940)”

Andrew Hamilton, “Leni Riefenstahl’s Lost Film Victory of Faith (1933)”

Derek Hawthorne, “Der Herrscher (1937)”

Derek Hawthorne, “Opfergang: Masterpiece of National Socialist Cinema”

Derek Hawthorne, “S.O.S. Iceberg”

Derek Hawthorne, “Storm Over Mount Blanc”

Derek Hawthorne, “The White Hell of Pitz Palü”

Derek Hawthorne, “The Holy Mountain”

Derek Hawthorne, “North Face: The Return of the German Mountain Film”

Greg Johnson, “Remembering Leni Riefenstahl: August 22, 1902–September 8, 2003” (French translation here)

Martin Lichtmesz, “Heimkehr Revisited”

Martin Lichtmesz, “Kolberg Revisited”

The Legacy of Hitler and National Socialism:

R. G. Fowler, “Woman Against Time: Remembering Savitri Devi’s 100th Birthday” (translations: German, French, Norwegian, Czech)

Greg Johnson, Review of Farnham O’Reilly’s Hyperborean Home (French translation here)

Alex Kurtagić, Review of Miguel Serrano’s The Golden Thread

William Pierce, “Rockwell: A National Socialist Life”

Saint-Loup, “Quotations from Saint-Loup”

Savitri Devi, “The Religion of the Strong”

Savitri Devi, “Incurable Decadence”

Savitri Devi, “Race, Economics, and Kindness: The Ideal World”

Humor

Jim Goad, “Adolf Hitler: History’s Angriest Jew?”

Richard Hoste, “All-Time Leading Hitlers”

Lawrence Murray, “Tay Did Nothing Wrong”

F. C. Stoughton, “Home Remedies for Hitler Hysteria Prescribed by the New Right Avant-Garde”

Hitler in Fiction

Greg Johnson, “Make Rome Great Again: Rienzi in Berlin”

James J. O’Meara, Review of Troy Southgate’s Hitler: The Adjournment

James J. O’Meara, Review of Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back

Poems

Savitri Devi, Forever and Ever: Devotional Poems

Savitri Devi, “In Memory of May 1st, 1945”

Robinson Jeffers, “Tragedy has Obligations” (French translation here)

Michael Walker, “Triumph des Willens”

Leo Yankevich, “The Adolf Hitler Canal”

Is It Okay To Punch A Communist?

Is It Okay To Punch A Communist?

By Aedon Cassiel

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

Welcome to yet another installment in the literary genre called, “But wait . . . if you take the word ‘white’ out of that sentence and replace it with the word ‘black,’ wouldn’t it be . . . racist, according to you?”

When Richard Spencer was infamously sucker-punched on the street on the way home from attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Internet was soon awash with articles gleefully asking, “Is it okay to punch a Nazi?” Richard Spencer did not attend this event after tweeting messages to his followers about how he planned to go in and come back carrying a hundred severed liberal heads. He wasn’t even there to promote his own ideas or activities – he was simply attending the inauguration when someone recognized him by his distinctive haircut. Celebratory memes cropped up which replayed the attack on an endless loop. Visit an institution of degenerate millennial culture (but I repeat myself . . .) like OKCupid, and in the “What do you do on a Friday night?” category you’ll find answers suggesting that what many liberals spend their entire week looking forward to is getting off on Friday so they can spend hours watching those videos without distraction.

So the meme asks, “Is it okay to punch a Nazi?”

Of course, Richard Spencer is not literally a Nazi; this didn’t happen in Germany, Hitler is long dead, and it’s been a long time since 1945. In fact, in the moments leading up to the punch, Richard Spencer was on camera for an impromptu interview explaining both that he did not identify as a neo-Nazi, and that the people who do identify as neo-Nazis hate him.

So what does it mean to ask if it’s okay to punch “a Nazi,” when the term has obviously outlived its literal meaning?

First and foremost, Richard Spencer is considered to be “a Nazi” because he subscribes to hereditarianism. Wikipedia defines hereditarianism as “the doctrine or school of thought that heredity plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, such as intelligence and personality. Hereditarians believe in the power of genetics to explain human character traits and solve human social and political problems.” Never mind that according to this definition, mainstream science is unanimous that its claims are true! This is the definition of “Nazi” that shortly thereafter allowed the very same people to describe a homosexual Jew who claims to exclusively date black guys as “a Nazi.” And it was then just moments later that the same group of people forced out a college speaker – Charles Murray – who is a serious academic and who has devoted his career to proving that heredity plays a significant role in determining human nature and character traits, and discussing its implications.

The idea is supposed to go something like this: first, the Nazis were evil. They committed horrible atrocities, and left a dark stain on human history.

Second, the Nazis were hereditarians.

From these two points alone, sheer guilt by association is supposed to render all further discussion of the truth or falsity of hereditarianism impossible. By this outlook, the cancer that is the hereditarian conviction must be treated aggressively, lest the Nazi atrocities be inevitably repeated. There are those who dispute that the atrocities the Nazis actually committed were as horrible as is often claimed. These people are usually called Holocaust “deniers,” but a proper reading of their works will reveal that even the most extreme among them still grant that at least some Jews and others were treated quite brutally.

So where does this argument go wrong?

First of all, to argue that eugenics or hereditarianism were the source of the brutalities committed by the Nazis ignores the fact that hereditarianism has been the norm throughout most of human history. All the way back in 378 BC, Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon in The Republic goes as follows:

Socrates: I see that you have hunting dogs and quite a flock of noble fighting birds at home. Have you noticed anything about their mating and breeding?

Glaucon: Like what?

Socrates: In the first place, although they’re all noble, aren’t there some that are the best and prove themselves to be so?

Glaucon: There are.

Socrates: Do you breed them all alike, or do you try to breed from the best as much as possible?

Glaucon: I try to breed from the best. . . .

Socrates: And do you think that if they weren’t bred in this way, your stock of birds and dogs would get much worse?

Glaucon: I do.

Socrates: What about the horses and other animals? Are things any different with them?

Glaucon: It would be strange if they were.

And then Socrates says:

Dear me! If this also holds true of human beings, our need for excellent rulers is indeed extreme. . . . It follows from our previous agreements, first, that the best men must have sex with the best women as frequently as possible, while the opposite is true of the most inferior men and women, and second, that if our herd is to be of the highest possible quality, the former’s offspring must be reared but not the latter’s. And this must all be brought about without being noticed by anyone except the rulers, so that our herd of guardians remains as free from dissension as possible. . . . And among other prizes and rewards, the young men who are good in war or other things must be given permission to have sex with the women more often, since this will also be a good pretext for having them father as many of the children as possible.

To modern ears, this may sound like hardcore fascist eugenicism. In fact, this is one of the most celebrated and influential thinkers of the entire Western philosophical tradition, more than 2,300 years before the rise of Nazi Germany.

Furthermore, even eugenics policies had been in place around the world – including in the United States – for years, before Nazism arose in one of them. There is an essay titled “Eugenics and the Third Reich” which explains that Hitler opposed the Jews “because he held them responsible for World War I,” which “had nothing to do with eugenics”; that the German euthanasia program was instituted for economic and practical reasons “which bore no relation to eugenics”; and that the German sterilization program “could in no sense be characterized as perverse, savage, or (most importantly for my argument) unusual for its time.”

So while Nazi Germany did have some eugenics policies, and while the Nazis were hereditarians, neither of these things can be, in any sense, what made the Nazis unique.

So what about Communists?

The reasoning of those who claim that the Nazis were hereditarians goes as follows: hereditarianism is Nazism, and Nazism was brutal, therefore “Nazis” should be preemptively punched in the streets even before they’ve actually contemplated so much as forcefully touching another human being.

If we apply this same logic to Communism, we would say this: the Communists were blank-slate environmentalists about human nature. Therefore, blank-slate environmentalism is Communism, and we should call anyone who leans too close to a blank-slate environmentalist understanding of human nature a Communist, whether they identify as one or not – even if they actively disavow the label.

And Communism was brutal.

Professor Rudy Rummel was the author of twenty-four scholarly books on collective violence, war, and other deaths inflicted by governments which earned him numerous awards and accolades. According to his estimates, the total number of people killed worldwide by governments throughout history is around two hundred twelve million. Of these, Communist regimes murdered around one hundred forty-eight million. That’s almost seventy-percent of the worldwide historical total of all known deaths ever caused by governments.

The total number of deaths estimated to have been caused by Hitler is just under twenty-one million. In contrast, the total number of deaths estimated to have been caused by Mao in China alone stands at nearly seventy-seven million. That is already well over three times as many. It’s more than fifty-five million additional deaths. And that’s before adding in any other Communist dictatorships. Stalin alone murdered almost twice as many as Hitler: around forty-three million.

Clearly, if it is justified to peg hereditarianism as the cause of Nazism and treat all hereditarians as if they would cause or deserve blame for the atrocities of Nazi Germany, then that goes several times over for blank-slate environmentalists, considering that Communism involved such assumptions about human nature in the same way that Nazism involved hereditarian assumptions. And collectively, it was Communists – not hereditarians of any form – who were responsible for the vast majority of worldwide deaths by government atrocity in human history.

So why doesn’t society treat college kids wearing Che Guevara T-shirts the same way it treats one wearing a swastika shirt? Why doesn’t it treat college professors who downplay the atrocities committed by Marxist regimes the same way it treats “Holocaust deniers”? Why is it willing to grant the assumption that even if those college kids, or professors, are deeply misguided, they are still at heart good, decent people – even if they are promoting a misguided ideal? Why is everyone so aware that the mainstream estimate is that up to six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust that articles about the Holocaust are literally among the top results when typing the generic phrase “six million” into a search – and no one even has any idea what the estimates of those killed by any Communist leader or regime are? And now that it’s a member of the antifa who is at the center of a famous “punching” incident – someone who showed up claiming to want to come back with “one hundred scalps,” someone who is part of a group that sells posters advocating violence against government agencies – why aren’t we having the same conversation about punching “Communists” that we recently had about punching “Nazis”?

Suddenly, the mainstream media has a moral compass which says that regardless of a person’s ideology, punching them when they haven’t yet initiated physical violence against anyone else is unfair. And suddenly, even trying to have any of these broader discussions about history and ideology are merely seen as a distraction from that basic injustice. Isn’t the mainstream media’s ethical stance admirable?

Defending the Holocaust: A Free-Speech Assignment?

Defending the Holocaust: A Free-Speech Assignment?

By Roberto Hernández

Published: 2017-04-07

From the very first words of the report at Syracuse.com about the “odd”  assignment high-school students from Oswego County high schools were given, which was to defend the so-called “ Final Solution ” in the Nazi Era, it was to be expected that there would be complaints. I also might add that this is not precisely the type of assignment that promotes of free speech at all.

In the New York Times, you can read that students were told, “Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationales from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!” ¨.

It is obvious that this assignment has to do more with “debate and rhetoric” than with really inquiring into a topic that is taboo at any school in America. It does not get the student closer to the real problem of taboo. All to the contrary, it is such a radical assignment that it enhances the taboo that makes the Holocaust impossible to deal with routinely in class in an open manner.

Revisionism is not about defending the Nazi regime and its crimes during WWII, and it is not about excusing anti-Semitism which is what this high-school assignment at Oswego County is promoting, more or less.

Maybe this assignment was not intentionally harmful (to revisionism) and it does seem to have had the aim of really having a discussion on a taboo issue that needs to be addressed in school where uncomfortable and unpopular views must not stop students and professors to seek the truth and to generate a truly free exchange of ideas.

What we want to happen in schools is that students can freely inquire about this history period without the fear that they are stepping into a forbidden zone. There should also be material that argues against the orthodox view in order for students to truly have an alternative view.

History must be studied at school as rigorously as Physics or Biology. Sentimentality cannot be a wall that forbids free inquiry, and open debate regarding  the Holocaust question .

But it is evident here, through this assignment, that teachers themselves are ignorant about Holocaust revisionism. It is possible that many of them do not consider revisionism as a serious discipline which tries to shed light into the intricacies of the complexity of this historical event we call Holocaust. It is also possible that many professors have never been in touch with Holocaust revisionist texts and ideas.

So, assignments such the one that was given at Oswego County high schools, create much more confusion in the student´s mind who might really want to know if there is another side to the historical truth they been told over and over.

Needless to say, this assignment has been canceled and will never, according to the New York State Education Department Commissioner, Mary Ellen Elia, be assigned again.

And of course, the ADL saved the world once more… ¨Evan Bernstein, the Anti-Defamation League’s New York regional director, praised the district and Elia after saying in a statement that “There is no assignment that could ever be given to students that even hints at a balanced perspective to the horrors of Nazi actions during the Holocaust …”

Everything is back to normal in the American public schools and no uncomfortable questions, no ¨odd¨ assignments may be given in classrooms. No way. For the sake of our vulnerable students, who must be guided through this topic with all the care in the world

Plato, Hitler, & Totalitarianism

                    By Guillaume Durocher

        

Today, Western liberals are ambivalent about Plato. On the one hand, liberals claim they are the heirs of Greco-Roman civilization and philosophy, and as Alfred North Whitehead famously said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

On the other hand, Plato is denounced by some – notably the Jewish thinker Karl Popper – as the ancient originator of “totalitarianism” and the archetypal enemy of the “open society.” Fascists in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany eagerly claimed the pedigree of Plato. The philosopher, like the fascists, was obviously a communitarian elitist and not an individualist democrat. The French historian Johann Chapoutot goes so far as to write, “The official philosopher of the Third Reich, the man who could simultaneously offer substance and political prophecy was not Nietzsche, but Plato.”[2] 

Indeed, National Socialist intellectuals such as Hans Günther, Werner Jaeger, Fritz Lenz, Adolf Rusch, and Richard Darré cited Plato. Some wrote entire books on the subject, such as Joachim Banns’ Hitlers Kampf und Platons Staat and Kurt Hildebrand’s Platon, Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht. Hitler’s press officer, Otto Dietrich, would plead in his repentant post-war memoirs that he had seen in National Socialism “the mirage of a classless Leader State such as Plato had celebrated in his Laws.”[3]

The liberals often agreed that there was considerable overlap between Platonism and Nationalism Socialism, and so condemned Plato like Popper did. The liberals’ incomprehension of and hostility to Plato goes at least as far back as the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson was disgusted by Plato’s Republic, writing to John Adams, “While wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?” 

Jefferson blamed Plato’s prestige on his popularity among the obscurantist Christian priesthood. If one considers that Jefferson was one of the most influential liberal statesmen of all time, perhaps this is an appropriate response. (In contrast,  Adams wrote that the American Revolution was based on “the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sidney, Harrington, and Locke; the principles of nature and eternal reason.”)

A few liberal classicists tried to salvage Plato, however, such as Glenn R. Morrow, who emphasized the importance of the rule of law in Plato’s otherwise firmly authoritarian final work, the Laws.[4] The Communists, in contrast with the liberals, competed with the fascists in claiming the Platonic heritage. I do not find this very defensible: Plato is an emphatic inegalitarian. The communism of property and wives described in The Republic is an aristocratic one, reserved for the ruling elite, a proposal he in any case does not repeat in his more practical work, the Laws.

There is no question that the regimes described in The Republic and even in the more moderate Laws have strictly nothing to do with what we mean today by “liberal democracy.” There is precious little in Plato’s thought that I can see which is compatible with such as ideas as “human rights,” “all men are created equal,” or “individual liberty.” Plato is clear: the better should lead the worse, individual interests must cede to those of the community, and the enlightened should establish laws aiming at systematic cultural improvement through education and training, and biological improvement through eugenic population policies. 

Scholars endlessly debate about the extent to which Plato’s Republic was meant as a practical proposal. What is less often pointed out is that Plato’s more practical Laws are almost as authoritarian and communitarian in approach, the regime being admittedly moderated into a “mixed constitution” with democratic and aristocratic elements, somewhat akin to Sparta. In the Laws, Plato explicitly praised Sparta as the happy medium between Athenian egalitarianism and Persian despotism.

So far, so “totalitarian."

All this needs to be qualified, however, with a very important caveat. Plato did not come up with most of this stuff as part of some crazed, megalomaniacal dream of his. As is clear from Aristotle’s Politics, it is not merely Plato who is “totalitarian” in comparison with modern liberalism, but indeed all politics in the Greek city-state. The Greeks in general believed that there was no separation of private and public life, and just about everything about individuals’ lives could be regulated if it was deemed to be for the good of the community. 

In particular, ensuring the reproduction of the population in appropriate numbers (neither too high, nor too low) and in high quality (eugenics) was recognized as one of the most important duties of the state, which was notably responsible for the institution of marriage. In Sparta, this went so far as the lawgiver mandating rewards for citizens who had many sons and requiring the killing of all deformed newborns. In democratic Athens, the law could also be very intrusive, such as Solon’s banning women from weeping loudly at funerals. 

The philosophers considered the state’s highest role to be the education and training of the citizens in virtue. In general, “citizenship” for the Greeks did not mean a set of “rights” to do as one pleased or to be treated the same as everyone else, but rather it consisted of the elaboration and enforcement of the rules of the polis, to whose disciplines all were subject. Citizenship for the Greeks meant not individual liberty and equality, but in Aristotle’s worlds, “to rule and be ruled in turn” (Politics, 1317b). Arguably, Plato is often merely systematizing the practice of politics which the Greeks took for granted.

Needless to say, fascists could easily find rationales for many of their actions in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The Hitler Youth, positive and negative eugenics, expulsion or enslavement of aliens, the Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment: all this could be justified by referring to Greek philosophy, if they indeed improved the cultural and biological character of the people.

I am not saying that classical philosophy necessarily leads to fascism. What I am saying is that there is substantial overlap, and from a certain chauvinistic late-liberal point of view, just about everything but liberalism itself is “totalitarian.” The stringent disciplines of the Greek polis and even of Plato’s city-states are normal for traditional societies, in which individual behavior for most was constrained by family, religion, and rank. 

The authoritarianism of the Greek polis is merely the extension of familial discipline and solidarity to the entire city through the laws established by the family fathers in concert. The authoritarianism of Plato’s Republic, I believe, is similarly an extension of the pious self-discipline of the Socratic philosopher and the monastic order to the entire city. 

What, the extremely regulated and self-disciplined life of a monk is freedom, you say? I understand this will be incomprehensible to those who believe that “freedom” means, for instance, having the opportunity to get drunk on a whim. We can also safely say that Hannah Arendt’s claim that “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek, or Roman,”[5] is patently false.

Classical political philosophy and modern fascism thus share an adherence to an authoritarian and hierarchical communitarianism. However, I would also emphasize the obvious differences between National Socialism and Platonism.

Firstly, the one-party state with a powerful, charismatic dictator as proposed by fascism is not really compatible with the ideal citizenship of the Greek polis or of Plato’s Laws. Under fascism, there is citizenship, but this is reduced to one’s role in the bureaucratic hierarchies in the Party and the State, ideally the best being systematically promoted to leadership. 

It has no equivalent to the Greek assembly, where all qualified citizens are present and vote in elections. Both Hitler and Aristotle, the latter no doubt speaking for many educated Greeks, believed that power and rights should be commensurate with one’s contribution to the community. But fascism and the Greek-state have very different ways of putting this citizenship into practice.

The fascist party-state is much closer to the ideal regime in The Republic, Callipolis. The regime of the Guardians can be considered analogous with the Party (the enlightened leadership) and the SS (the enforcers). However, I would argue that Hitler’s regime significantly differs from Plato’s simply because it is not a philosophical one, but a passionate one. Hitler’s Party was a populist mass organization which achieved power and sustained itself through appeals to emotion, above all through the Führer’s own inspiring oratory. In contrast, Plato’s Callipolis is ruled by dispassionate and almost ethereal philosophers.[6]

Plato’s notorious attacks on the poets and Homer in particular could also be justifiably aimed at Hitler: the poet’s masterful manipulation of the public’s emotions overpowers their reason and blinds them to reality. Hitler himself was well-read and something of an intellectual, but he was obviously not of a philosophical temperament, but rather of an artistic one. No one would deny that he had an incredible ability to intoxicate himself and his followers through the power of the spoken word, inspiring all who would listen to join together and sacrifice in an epic struggle for greatness.

Secondly and more briefly, Hitler’s highest end in politics was evidently the maximization of his racial state’s power, notably military power. Plato and Aristotle considered martial states to be superior to those dedicated to commerce or pleasure, but still second to the best state: that dedicated to philosophy.

A third difference: Plato and Aristotle put a high value on the rule of law. By this, they did not just mean the modern attachment to rules and procedure, but rather a basic law which stipulates and trains the citizens for a specific way of life. Hitler was quite contemptuous of law. (I would also note that Hitler did agree with the philosophers in believing that there was a law of nature, a law with which politics should be in harmony.)

All in all, I would not saddle Plato with Hitler. Though I do believe – in my mystical moments, listening to Dan Houser or watching Aguirre, the Wrath of God – that, through the dark mists that necessarily shroud human existence, Plato and Hitler saw the sublime rays of the same glorious Sun.

If one must look for ancient antecedent to Hitler, it was not Plato, but Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver. In both Sparta and the Third Reich, one has militarism, natalism, eugenics, and unabashed rule over racial inferiors. Hitler himself wrote in his unpublished Second Book, “Sparta must be regarded as the first ethnostate.” Observers such as Ezra Pound also noted the similarity between the two states.

Of course, in one sense, to compare philosophers and statesmen is inappropriate. Plato was drafting paper-polities, Hitler was building a great state and empire. Plato and Aristotle achieved almost nothing in the field of practical politics to actually realize their ideals, whereas Hitler knew astonishing, if brief, success, founding a worldview which continues to haunt the Western mind to this day. 

Hitler’s passion and poetry were necessary to this, the same passion and poetry which undid him, when he made enemies of too many great nations and treated the Slavs like Lycurgus’ helots rather than as cousins and allies against liberalism, Communism, and Semitism.

The philosophers were quite conscious that to actualize their theoretical ideals was no easy thing and was something beholden to the vagaries of fortune. Hitler was no scribbler but a spiritual lawgiver and political leader, on par with Muhammad or Lenin, doing in the sphere of policy and ideology what Lycurgus had done in that of basic law. 

Both Plato and Aristotle had written that the exceptional lawgiver will, in establishing or transforming a regime, be a temporary sovereign dictator. Both Plato and Aristotle argue that a supremely good man of almost impossible perfection but, if only by chance (he must occur eventually on a long enough time scale), should rule supremely as a lawgiver (see Laws 681d, 710a-712a). 

Aristotle writes of the supremely good man, “There can be no law governing people of this kind. They are a law in themselves” (Politics, 1284a3). And: “It is surely clear that [the one best man] must be a lawgiver” (Politics, 1286a21). Hitler was obviously not such a man, however. Though he’d made an effort while Hindenburg was alive, in the depths of the war he even lacked the self-control to go to bed on time, reading books and watching films until four or five in the morning and getting up around noon. This was a nightmare for his aides.

However, Plato does say of Lycurgus that he “combined human nature with some of the powers of a god” (Laws, 691e). And while poetry is inferior to philosophy in the pursuit of truth, nonetheless, “poets as a class are divinely gifted and are inspired when they sing, so that with the help of Graces and Muses they frequently hit on how things really happen” (Laws, 682a).

In conclusion, perhaps it is also worth noting the disagreements between late-liberalism and classical philosophy. The Greeks were certainly tempted by egalitarianism, with recurring claims that all had an equal claim to rule. This view is explicitly rejected by their philosophers, however. Plato and Aristotle’s denunciations of egalitarianism and individualism are among their most damning and eloquent. 

The Greeks have much to say on the evils of belly-chasing, comfort-clinging, effeminacy, decadence, luxury, and those eternal crabs who are driven to drag down the best of humanity into a collective slop bucket out of spite and envy. 

I cannot read Plato and Aristotle’s warnings without thinking of the downward slide of Western culture since the 1960s, if not earlier. Much of the truth is necessarily unpopular, and what was unpopular then must necessarily become much more so today, given how childish the average Westerner’s character has become.
Personally, I think this whole affair is more embarrassing for modern liberals than it is for Plato.

Notes

2. Johann Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), p. 195.

3. Otto Dietrich, The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich’s Press Chief (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010), p. 91.

4. Glenn R. Morrow, “Plato and the Rule of Law,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 14 (1940), pp. 105-126. Morrow lists a few of the National Socialist books dedicated to Plato. Clyde Murley, another classicist of that era, in an article attacking the National Socialists and Communists, went so far as to argue that Plato was really a democratic individualist. I find this extremely forced and unconvincing. Murley overlooks Plato’s explicit negative eugenics and makes light of Plato’s muscular advocacy of censorship (notably against what we would today call pop culture):

"There is some censorship and some propaganda in the Republic. We may not like that. But it is benevolent in intent, and people are to be told as close an approximation to truth as they can understand and will act on. If there are tactful subterfuges, they are merely a device, like the physician’s device in Lucretius – of coating the edge of the cup containing bitter medicine . . ."

Clyde Murley, “Plato’s Republic, Totalitarian or Democratic?,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 7 (April 1941), pp. 413-420.

5. Hannah Arendt, “Approaches to the ‘German Problem’,” in Essays in Understanding (New York: Schocken, 2005), p. 108.

6. I leave aside the speculative question of whether the Third Reich could have evolved in a less populist and more philosophical direction. We see a clear elitist tendency over time: Power is seized by inspiring a critical mass of the German people and a historic compromise with the traditional conservative/military elites. Power shifts to a new elite, selected for their patriotism, willingness to sacrifice, and ideological soundness.

This shift was embodied by the fall of the SA and the rise of the SS. The SS’s power and the constant wars in the East were meant to prevent the inevitable slouching into bourgeois materialism and individualism. SS-Reichsführer Himmler was a quite schoolmasterly type, very interested in history and spirituality, and he planned special meditative retreats for his men. There were also a good many genuine intellectuals among the SS, such as Werner Best.