Myth Of Gun Control In Germany, 1928-1945

SOLAR GENERAL — FEBRUARY 18, 2014

by William L. Pierce | A common belief among defenders of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is that the National Socialist government of Germany under Adolf Hitler did not permit the private ownership of firearms. Totalitarian governments, they have been taught in their high school civics classes, do not trust their citizens and do not dare permit them to keep firearms. Thus, one often hears the statement, “You know, the first thing the Nazis did when they came to power was outlaw firearms,” or, “The first thing Hitler did in Germany was round up all the guns.”

One can understand why many American gun owners want to believe this. They see in the current effort of their own government to take away their right to keep and bear arms a limitation of an essential element of their freedom and a move toward tyranny, and they want to characterize the gun-grabbers in the most negative way they can. Adolf Hitler has been vilified continuously for the past 60 years or so by the mass media in America, and certainly no politician or officeholder wants to be compared with him. If the gun-confiscation effort can be portrayed convincingly as something of which Hitler would have approved, it will have been effectively tarred.

This identification of the inclination to deny citizens the right to keep and bear arms with National Socialism and Adolf Hitler has been strengthened recently by clever magazine advertisements which show Hitler with his arm outstretched in a Roman salute under a heading: “All in favor of gun control raise your right hand.” A Jewish group, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), quite noisy for its size, has been especially zealous in promoting the idea that the current gun-control effort in America has its roots in Germany during the Hitler period. This group has gone so far as to claim in several articles published in popular magazines read by firearms enthusiasts that the current restrictive legislation being proposed by the U.S. government is modeled on a gun-control statute enacted by Germany’s National Socialist government: the German Weapons Law (Waffengesetz) of March 18, 1938.

Again, one can understand the motivation of the JPFO. Many non-Jewish firearms owners are well aware that the movement to restrict their rights is led and promoted primarily by Jews, and anti-Jewish feeling has been growing among them. They know that the controlled news media, which are almost unanimously in favor of abridging or abolishing the Second Amendment, are very much under the influence of Jews, and they know that the most vocal anti-gun legislators in the Congress also are Jews. It is natural for a group such as the JPFO to mount a damage- control effort and attempt to prevent anti-Jewish feeling from becoming even stronger among gun owners. Their strategy is to deflect the blame from their kinsmen in the media and the government and direct it onto their most hated enemies, the National Socialists — or at least to create enough smoke to obscure the facts and keep the gun-owning public confused.

Unfortunately for those who would like to link Hitler and the National Socialists with gun control, the entire premise for such an effort is false. German firearms legislation under Hitler, far from banning private ownership, actually facilitated the keeping and bearing of arms by German citizens by eliminating or ameliorating restrictive laws which had been enacted by the government preceding his: a left-center government which had contained a number of Jews.

It is not just that the National Socialist firearms legislation was the opposite of what it has been claimed to have been by persons who want to tar modern gun-grabbers with the “Nazi” brush: the whole spirit of Hitler’s government was starkly different from its portrayal by America’s mass media. The facts, in brief, are these:

1. The National Socialist government of Germany, unlike the government in Washington today, did not fear its citizens. Adolf Hitler was the most popular leader Germany has ever had. Unlike American presidents, he did not have to wear body armor and have shields of bulletproof glass in front of him whenever he spoke in public. At public celebrations he rode standing in an open car as it moved slowly through cheering crowds. Communists made several attempts to assassinate him, and his government stamped down hard on communism, virtually wiping it out in Germany. Between upright, law-abiding German citizens and Adolf Hitler, however, there was a real love affair, with mutual trust and respect.

2.The spirit of National Socialism was one of manliness, and individual self-defense and self- reliance were central to the National Socialist view of the way a citizen should behave. The notion of banning firearms ownership was utterly alien to National Socialism. In the German universities, where National Socialism gained its earliest footholds and which later became its strongest bastions, dueling was an accepted practice. Although the liberal-Jewish governments in Germany after the First World War attempted to ban dueling, it persisted illegally until it was again legalized by the National Socialists. Fencing, target shooting, and other martial arts were immensely popular in Germany, and the National Socialists encouraged young Germans to become proficient in these activities, believing that they were important for the development of a man’s character.

3. Gun registration and licensing (for long guns as well as for handguns) were legislated by an anti-National Socialist government in Germany in 1928, five years before the National Socialists gained power. Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Five years later his government got around to rewriting the gun law enacted a decade earlier by his predecessors, substantially ameliorating it in the process (for example, long guns were exempted from the requirement for a purchase permit; the legal age for gun ownership was lowered from 20 to 18 years; the period of validity of a permit to carry weapons was extended from one to three years; and provisions restricting the amount of ammunition or the number of firearms an individual could own were dropped). Hitler’s government may be criticized for leaving certain restrictions and licensing requirements in the law, but the National Socialists had no intention of preventing law-abiding Germans from keeping or bearing arms. Again, the firearms law enacted by Hitler’s government enhanced the rights of Germans to keep and bear arms; no new restrictions were added, and many pre-existing restrictions were relaxed or eliminated.

4. At the end of the Second World War, American GIs in the occupying force were astounded to discover how many German civilians owned private firearms. Tens of thousands of pistols looted from German homes by GIs were brought back to the United States after the war. In 1945 General Eisenhower ordered all privately owned firearms in the American occupation zone of Germany confiscated, and Germans were required to hand in their shotguns and rifles as well as any handguns which had not already been stolen. In the Soviet occupation zone German civilians were summarily shot if they were found in possession of even a single cartridge.

Jews, it should be noted, were not Germans, even if they had been born in Germany. The National Socialists defined citizenship in ethnic terms, and under Hitler Jews were not accorded full rights of citizenship. National Socialist legislation progressively excluded Jews from key professions: teaching, the media, the practice of law, etc. The aim was not only to free German life from an oppressive and degenerative Jewish influence, but to persuade Jews to emigrate. The German Weapons Law of March 18, 1938, specifically excluded Jews from manufacturing or dealing in firearms or ammunitions, but it did not exclude them from owning or bearing personal firearms. The exclusion of Jews from the firearms business rankled them as much as any other exclusion, and in their typically ethnocentric fashion they have misrepresented the law involved as an anti-gun law in an effort to cast their enemies in a bad light. It should be noted in passing that the restrictions placed on Jews by the National Socialists had the intended effect: between 1933 and 1939 two-thirds of the Jews residing in Germany emigrated, reducing the Jewish population of the country from 600,000 when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 to 200,000 at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Jews in the United States, looking at this period from their own narrowly focused viewpoint, have described these peacetime years of the National Socialist government as a time of darkness, terror, and regression, whereas for the German people it was a time of hope, joy, and spiritual and material renewal.

Much the same type of distortion is seen in the portrayal of the United States in the early 1950s: the so-called “McCarthy Era.” Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican, Wisconsin) used his position as chairman of the Senate’s Government Operations Committee to expose the widespread communist infiltration of the U.S. government and other U.S. institutions which had taken place during the Second World War. A substantial majority of the communists who were dragged reluctantly out into the light of day by his efforts were Jews. As a result, the controlled media always have portrayed the period as one of terror and repression, when everyone was frightened of Senator McCarthy’s “witch-hunt.” Of course, it was nothing of the sort to non-Jewish Americans, who were not intimidated in the least. History viewed through a Jewish lens — i.e., through media controlled by Jews — always is distorted in a way corresponding to Jewish interests and concerns.

Both the German Weapons Law of March 18, 1938, enacted by the National Socialists, and the Law on Firearms and Ammunition of April 12, 1928, which was enacted by an anti-National Socialist government, are given below in full, first in facsimile and then in English translation. A little background information first, however, may help the reader to understand their significance. After Germany’s defeat in the First World War (a defeat in which Germany’s Jews played no small part, demoralizing the home front with demonstrations and other subversive activity much as they did in America during the Vietnam war), the Kaiser abdicated, and liberals and leftists seized control of the government in 1918. Hitler, recovering in a military hospital from a British poison-gas attack which had blinded him temporarily, made the decision to go into politics and fight against the traitors he felt were responsible for Germany’s distress.

The tendency of Germany’s new rulers after the First World War was much the same as it is for the liberals in America today: they promoted cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and egalitarianism. By 1923 economic conditions in Germany had become catastrophic, and there was much public unrest. The communists had made major inroads into the labor movement and were a growing threat to the country.

Hitler had indeed gone into politics, and his National Socialists battled the communists in the streets of Germany’s cities and gradually came to be seen by many patriotic Germans in the working class and the middle class as the only force which could save Germany from a communist takeover and total ruin. Hitler’s National Socialists continued to win recruits and gain strength during the 1920s. The communists, with aid from the Soviet Union, also continued to grow. The political situation became increasingly unstable as the government lost popular support.

The government’s response was to substantially tighten up restrictions on the rights of German citizens to keep and bear arms. The Law on Firearms and Ammunition of April 12, 1928, was the most substantial effort in this regard. This law was enacted by a left-center government hostile to the National Socialists (the government was headed by Chancellor Wilhelm Marx and consisted of a coalition of Socialists, including many Jews, and Catholic Centrists).

Five years later, in 1933, the National Socialists were in power, Hitler headed the government, and the communist threat was crushed decisively. The National Socialists began undoing the social and economic damage done by their predecessors. Germany was restored to full employment, degeneracy and corruption were rooted out, Jews and their collaborators were removed from one facet of national life after another, and the German people entered a new era of national freedom, health, and prosperity.

Finally, in 1938, the National Socialist government got around to enacting a new firearms law to replace the one enacted by their opponents ten years earlier. The highlights of the 1938 law, especially as it applied to ordinary citizens rather than manufacturers or dealers, follow:

1. Handguns may be purchased only on submission of a Weapons Acquisition Permit (Waffenerwerbschein), which must be used within one year from the date of issue. Muzzle- loading handguns are exempted from the permit requirement. [The 1928 law had required a permit for the purchase of long guns as well, but the National Socialists dropped this requirement.]

2. Holders of a permit to carry weapons (Waffenschein) or of a hunting license do not need a Weapons Acquisition Permit in order to acquire a handgun.

3. A hunting license authorizes its bearer to carry hunting weapons and handguns.

4. Firearms and ammunition, as well as swords and knives, may not be sold to minors under the age of 18 years. [The age limit had been 20 years in the 1928 law.]

5. Whoever carries a firearm outside of his dwelling, his place of employment, his place of business, or his fenced property must have on his person a Weapons Permit (Waffenschein). A permit is not required, however, for carrying a firearm for use at a police-approved shooting range.

6. A permit to acquire a handgun or to carry firearms may only be issued to persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a permit. In particular, a permit may not be issued to:

1. persons under the age of 18 years;

2. legally incompetent or mentally retarded persons;

3. Gypsies or vagabonds;

4. persons under mandatory police supervision [i.e., on parole] or otherwise temporarily without civil rights;

5. persons convicted of treason or high treason or known to be engaged in activities hostile to the state;

6. persons who for assault, trespass, a breach of the peace, resistance to authority, a criminal offense or misdemeanor, or a hunting or fishing violation were legally sentenced to a term of imprisonment of more than two weeks, if three years have not passed since the term of imprisonment.

The manufacture, sale, carrying, possession, and import of the following are prohibited:

1. “trick” firearms, designed so as to conceal their function (e.g., cane guns and belt-buckle pistols);

2. any firearm equipped with a silencer and any rifle equipped with a spotlight;

3. cartridges with .22 caliber, hollow-point bullets.

That is the essence. Numerous other provisions of the law relate to firearms manufacturers, importers, and dealers; to acquisition and carrying of firearms by police, military, and other official personnel; to the maximum fees which can be charged for permits (3 Reichsmark); to tourists bringing firearms into Germany; and to the fines and other penalties to be levied for violations.

The requirements of “trustworthiness” and of proof of need when obtaining a permit are troubling, but it should be noted that they were simply carried over from the 1928 law: they were not formulated by the National Socialists. Under the National Socialists these requirements were interpreted liberally: a person who did not fall into one of the prohibited categories listed above was considered trustworthy, and a statement such as, “I often carry sums of money,” was accepted as proof of need.

The prohibitions of spotlight-equipped rifles and hollow-point .22 caliber ammunition were based on considerations that the former were unsporting when used for hunting, and the latter were inhumane.

Now read the German firearms laws for yourself, either in the original German exactly as they were published by the German government in the Reichsgesetzblatt or in the complete English translations which are provided here. If you want to skip over most of the legal gobbledygook and go directly to the most pertinent part of the National Socialist Firearms Law — the part pertaining to the purchase, ownership, and carrying of firearms by private citizens — turn to page 35 (Part IV of the Law). Note, as already mentioned above, that two separate and distinct types of permits are referred to: a Weapons Acquisition Permit (Waffenerwerbschein), required only for purchasing a handgun; and a Weapons Permit (Waffenschein), required for carrying any firearm in public. Interestingly enough, as also mentioned above, a hunting license could take the place of both these permits.

When you have read the two laws mentioned here, you will understand that it was Hitler’s enemies, not Hitler, who should be compared with the gun-control advocates in America today. Then as now it was the Jews, not the National Socialists, who wanted the people’s right of self- defense restricted. You will understand that those who continue to make the claim that Hitler was a gun-grabber are either ignorant or dishonest. And you will understand that it was not until 1945, when the communist and democratic victors of the Second World War had installed occupation governments to rule over the conquered Germans that German citizens were finally and completely denied the right to armed self-defense.

The Money (((Masters)))

   

The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America

This documentary is outstanding, overall. I only wish that more would have been said in the WWII segment concerning the successful economic reforms which took place under Adolf Hitler. I am naturally aware that this is an unpopular subject in the mainstream and in the minds of normies who have been lobotomize all their lives. 

But by failing to adequately explore the issue of National Socialist Germany’s debt-free national revival, as well as the foundation of its stable currency against the gold standard, the primary causes of WWII are sure to remain misunderstood. 

Until Hitler’s economic revolution is understood, the establishment’s artificial excuses for that terrible war will continue to be used against us. I trust critical thinkers to review the information available here and elsewhere and make up their own minds. 

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THE MONEY MASTERS is a 3 1/2 hour non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumulate wealth. 

With the formation of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to a privately-owned “central” bank was first forced upon the backs of an entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the three centuries to our day. Nation after nation has fallen prey to this cabal of international central bankers.

The success of the central banking scheme developed into a far-reaching plan described by President Clinton’s mentor, Georgetown Professor Carroll Quigley: 

"to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. 

The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the levels of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”

Several short-lived attempts to impose the central banking scheme on the United States were defeated by the patriotic efforts of Presidents Madison, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren and Lincoln. But with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, America was firmly lashed to the same yoke, so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses a yoke little better than slavery itself. 

That yoke inevitably grows heavier with ever-compounding interest, and totals over $20 trillion of debt owed by the American people today ($80,000 per American) ultimately to these bankers. This vast accumulation of wealth concentrates immense power and despotic economic domination in the hands of the few central bankers:

"who are able to govern credit and its allotment, for this reason supplying, so to speak, the life-blood to the entire economic body, and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of the economy so that no one dare breathe against their will.”

Segments: 

•The Problem

•The Money Changers

•Roman Empire

•The Goldsmiths of Medieval England

•Tally Sticks 

•The Bank of England

•The Rise of the Rothschilds

•The American Revolution

•The Bank of North America 

•The Constitutional Convention 

•First Bank of the U.S.

•Napoleon’s Rise to Power

•Death of the First Bank of the U.S. / War of 1812

•Waterloo

•Second Bank of the U.S.

•Andrew Jackson

•Abe Lincoln and the Civil War

•The Return of the Gold Standard

•Free Silver

•J.P. Morgan / 1907 Crash; Jekyll Island

•Fed Act of 1913

•J.P. Morgan / WWI 

•Roaring 20s / Great Depression

•FDR / WWII / Fort Knox

•World Central Bank

Conclusions:

“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” - Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild.

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, 1815

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered… The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Re-charter of the Bank Bill (1809)

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.” – Thomas Jefferson

“…The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.” - Thomas Jefferson

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.” - James Madison

“The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” - The Rothschild brothers of London writing to associates in New York, 1863.

“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity.” - Abraham Lincoln

“The death of Lincoln was a disaster… There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilization.” - Otto von Bismark (1815-1898), German Chancellor, after the Lincoln assassination

“Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to…provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Despite these warnings, Woodrow Wilson signed the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. A few years later he wrote:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” - Woodrow Wilson

“I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people.” - Reginald McKenna, as Chairman of the Midland Bank, addressing stockholders in 1924.

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” - Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company.

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.” - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908- ), former professor of economics at Harvard, writing in ‘Money: Whence it came, where it went’ (1975).

In Defense Of "Losers"

By Aedon Cassiel

Originally, I had planned for this essay to be a response to Jack Donovan’s still relatively recent essay, “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist.” However, I’ve decided that this essay would work better if thought of as an extended discussion of a couple of the topics raised by Donovan’s essay, rather than as another open letter response aimed at Donovan himself. In part, this means it will only address a fraction of the things Donovan actually said.

Beyond the Buddy System

For the most part, the subtext of these arguments was not really “why I disagree with the premises of ethnonationalism” so much as it was “why I don’t personally want to buddy up with everyone who identifies as a White Nationalist.” Since Donovan’s entire political philosophy now appears to be “cracking open a cold one with the boys in the woods,” it makes sense why he would implicitly muddle the distinction in this way between what one’s political philosophy is and who one would like to buddy up with.

I don’t have to be ‘buddied up’ with everyone I want to form political alliances with. Indeed, the inability to form and negotiate political alliances with people who aren’t pals and bros is a kind of weakness. And it is a kind of weakness that will be bred out of the world by evolution, because groups that are capable of this will inevitably dominate groups that can’t. If the United States government were to turn against the Wolves of Vinland and try to wipe it out of existence, how long do you think the Wolves would survive? I think it would be reasonable to bet they wouldn’t last a week. And why is that?

It’s because the United States government is a larger entity than the Wolves. And the United States government is a larger entity than the Wolves because membership in it is based on shared dedication to common principles and goals as well as consent to the hierarchy of an overarching command structure—not whether or not everyone who joins the U.S. government wants to buddy up with each other. The U.S. government’s capacity for domination of fringe groups like the Wolves is, in and of itself, proof that political alliances built out of principle and extended hierarchy rather than “buddying up” will trump isolated, small–tribe “groups of buddies” every time.

In light of this, Donovan should ask himself why he’s in favor of forming groups of “buddy-based” tribes in the first place. Whatever answers he gives for why individuals should network together to form tribal groups will probably end up being the same exact reasons why those very tribal groups should network together to form larger political blocs.

I say this truly—I really do respect the inner core of the anarcho-primitivist instinct. If I had the choice to live in a thoroughly anarcho-primitivist world, I would be tempted to take it.

But in reality, the inevitable course of events is that tribes will either network into political blocs that grow to the scale of governments, or else they will be dominated by whatever other network of tribes manages to do so first. For a historical analysis of this aspect of the relationship between tribal warfare and the formation of ordered civilizations throughout history, Ian Morris’ War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots gets my highest possible recommendation. In short, this is the scenario that repeats on an endless cycle all over the world: individuals form into tribes, and these tribes either grow to the scale of governments that eventually rule over the other tribes—or else they end up dominated themselves because some other tribe built itself up to that level first. Like it or not, one’s tribe either “dominates” or grows to become “dominated.”

But as far as Jack Donovan personally goes, there isn’t much left for argument on this point to prove. Either a time will come within Donovan’s lifetime when his tribe needs a more extended network in order to protect itself against outside assaults from activist enemies ethnonationalists share in common—or there won’t. Either ethnonationalists will be organized enough to be able to usefully offer this kind of protection at that time—or they won’t. Either Donovan’s disavowal of the most crude “skinhead” types in the movement will help shift the Leftist bullseye off of his back, even if it doesn’t remove it completely—or it won’t.

Either way you go, these are all inconclusive predictions of the future; this is not a case where we can pontificate and produce “proof.” In the meantime, all any of us are doing is building our own personal projects while discussing them with our often separate, sometimes overlapping followings . . . and all of us, in our own ways, are ultimately trying to prepare for civilization to collapse. Should the collapse set in within our lifetimes, we’ll just have to see who makes it out given however the general situation will have changed by that time.

And on that point, there really isn’t anything left to be said. So this concludes the first point raised by Donovan’s essay that I thought there might be some value in discussing.

What if We Really are “Losers”?

The second point I thought there might be some value in discussing is Donovan’s suggestion that White Nationalism will fail because of White Nationalists. Throughout the essay, Donovan continually refers back to the most tired Left-liberal characterizations of what kinds of people “White Nationalists” supposedly are: men with “‘white pride’ tattooed on [their] chest[s]” who “theatrically claim to be proud of being white because it is usually the only thing they have going for them.” To be fair, this may very well describe Donovan’s personal encounters with self-professed “White Nationalists.” But to speak for myself, I’ve been involved with Counter-Currents for long enough to have accumulated a rather large pool of people I would call “White Nationalists,” and I’m quite certain I have literally never met a single one who had “white pride” tattooed either on their chests or otherwise.

In fact, most “White Nationalists” I know would look down on anyone who has any tattoos at all—Richard Spencer thinks tattoos are degenerate, for example. For this new generation, “white pride” isn’t something “white supremacists” boast about, it’s just what regular old milquetoast conservatives who read outlets like Breitbart or The Blaze try to ironically (and ineffectually) throw back in the face of liberals when the topic of black or Mexican pride comes up. The average “White Nationalists” of the younger generations today are likely educated enough to be familiar with findings from the field of biosocial criminology showing that genes do indeed have an influence on the propensity to criminal behavior, probably turned in the direction that led them towards ethnonationalism after liberal researcher Robert Putnam finally published his results showing the negative impacts of diversity brought by immigration on community trust, hate drugs and porn and promiscuity, desperately want to build wholesome families, and are genuinely afraid to reveal their views to their peers.

The nature of the “movement” (such as it is) is changing rapidly, and part of the issue here may simply be that Jack Donovan has relatively more contact with the older breed of “White Nationalists” that most people in the new generation only know from cheesy stereotypes.
Either way, this finally brings me to the second point I want to discuss.

If White Nationalists were losers, just what would that prove?

Let’s grant it just for the sake of the argument: let’s assume 100% of people who identify as “White Nationalists” are “losers” in a broad sense.

Well, one could make a similar argument about welfare. According to your definition, you could say that most or all people who rely on welfare to survive are “losers,” in the sense that they would literally “lose” without welfare because they can’t stand on their own feet (or else they wouldn’t be on it in the first place). But what would liberals think about an argument that said that welfarism is dumb because people on welfare are “losers”? Certainly they would recognize it as a non sequitur: so maybe they are “losers”—does that mean we should let them starve in the streets? “Not so fast,” they’d respond.

Let’s step back for a moment.

Within any given race, all traits are distributed along bell curves.

On the one hand, this means it will always be true that keeping groups with different bell curves separate will lead to more social cohesion than mixing them willy nilly—as is validated by the literature on diversity and social cohesion that began with the previously mentioned research from liberal Robert Putnam.

On the other hand, it also entails that there will always be a minority of outliers in any given group who actually are more similar to the average member of a different group than they are to the average member of their own.

These minorities will always exist. But because of—you know—the very meaning of the word “average,” it follows that they will also always be in the minority. So even if not all admixture leads directly to reduced social cohesion, a totally segregated society would still always be more cohesive than a totally integrated society.

Now, suppose you live in an area like Palo Alto, California. The average rent in Palo Alto is almost $2,800 for a single bedroom apartment, and these expenses keep out anyone who can’t afford to pay. As it turns out, one’s IQ predicts one’s future wealth better than one’s wealth predicts one’s future IQ scores. This means if there are some groups with low average IQs and low wealth, then someone who lives in Palo Alto will have experiences almost exclusively with the outliers from that group—the few that are unlike most of the rest of them. A similar point would go for a black man whose only experiences with white men are in underground rap battle scenes: such an environment would inherently select for white men who are more extroverted, aggressive, and impulsive than the white male average; and this particular black man could end up as a result with an inaccurate idea of what most white men are really like as a result.

In other words, smart and successful whites who dismiss the “racism” of lower IQ whites who decry the negative effects of diversity because those whites aren’t as smart or successful as others might be rather like the tallest man in the room mocking everyone around him for drowning while the room they’re in begins to flood, dismissing them because he thinks they’re too short to have a valid opinion. It turns out that actually experiencing diversity also predicts one’s holding a negative view of it. Evidence like this suggests that it is much more often those who haven’t experienced as much diversity who imagine that its effects on a community are better than they really are, than it is those who haven’t lived around large members of other races who expect they would find the experience to be less enjoyable than they really would.

And IQ helps predict one’s experiences with diversity. When more successful whites enter diverse areas, they inevitably end up “gentrifying” them. And guess what happens when middle and upper class regions full of successful whites grow increasingly diverse? “White flight”. This deserves repetition for emphasis: do more successful, higher IQ whites stay or go when regions grow more diverse? As a matter of fact, they go. As regions grow more diverse, very large numbers of those whites who can leave in fact do. Thus, more successful whites never have to think about the idea of ethnonationalism, for exactly the same reason they never have to think about food stamps and other forms of welfare.

While it is absurd that this simultaneous condemnation of “gentrification” and “white flight” leaves successful whites damned if they do and damned if they don’t, whether they stay or they go (in other words, if they do just about anything other than give all their money away to blacks as one Baltimore professor insists or else just plain drop dead), there is truth to the fact that both these phenomena imply forms of “privilege”: successful whites rarely, if ever, have to experience any form of “diversity” that doesn’t entail skimming the cream of the crop off of outside groups while staying safely sequestered away from the rest. Less successful whites aren’t so lucky—as successful whites move away, they get left behind. Thus, it is actually less successful whites who end up acquainted with what multiculturalism actually is like, in the real world, for most people, most of the time. Should they be forced to live in increasingly stratified communities because someone thinks they aren’t intelligent enough to be worth caring about?

Are they really just too dumb to deserve cohesive communities to live in?

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

By Riki Rei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Heidegger

The Great Philosophers 10: Martin Heidegger

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

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

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

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

One: We have forgotten to notice we’re alive

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

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

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

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

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

Two: We have forgotten that all Being is connected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four: We treat others as objects

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

  

The Hellstrom Chronicle

The Hellstrom Chronicle

Remarkable footage of insect predation and survival tactics. 

               

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence & Inheritance

Intelligence & Inheritance

By Aedon Cassiel

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, some educational systems do this.

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

So, what has this produced?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First: heritability.

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

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

I’ll proceed with examples.

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

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

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

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

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

How do heritability studies accomplish that?

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

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

Now let’s discuss the heritability of IQ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children and Adults

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

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

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

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

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

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

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