TOQ Spring 2012

VOL. 12, NO. 1 SPRING 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS ______________________________________________________________

ARTICLES Megaton Genius Alex Kurtagic 3

The War on the English: Brenton Sanderson 11 A Case Study in the Culture of Critique Elite and Underclass: Review Essay F. Roger Devlin 31 on Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 Chapter 9 of Our Vision for Merlin Miller and Adrian Krieg 51 America: Common Sense Revisited—Social Issues The Balkanization of the System: Tomislav Sunic 57 Ernst Jünger and the End Times The Southern Point: The Bardic Sir Tristram 71 Dynamic, Part 1 The Fundamental Structure Richard Faussette 91 and Systematic Theology of the Torah

BOOK REVIEW

Squandering Our Inheritance: Review of F. Roger Devlin 105 Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations by Richard Lynn

The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 2012 2

MEGATON GENIUS1

ALEX KURTAGIC _________________________________

How can one change the status quo in a society, when one’s faction

is in the outer fringe? The question is especially apt for those of us who would like to see an end to the liberal system in the West, since that system controls millions of citizens and has vast resources with which to legitimate its ideas and perpetuate its rule.

On the surface, we have everything against us: the school textbooks are written by the enemy, the media is run by the enemy, the laws are written by the enemy. The enemy controls trillions of dollars in assets, even controls the machines that print the money. Through its control of the institutions, the enemy determines the way people see the world, the way they learn about the world, the way they think about the world, and even the way the enemy’s opponents think about themselves. What is more, the enemy controls its own opposition: if one is a dissident, one can rant about the gold standard, vegetable rights, Masonic Satanism, druids in the police—anything, in fact, so long as a one’s Whiteness is ignored, except to apologise for it, hand over one’s money, and celebrate one’s extinction. Those who step out of line lose their jobs, their money, their friends, their spouses, their freedom, and even their lives.

Such is the enemy’s domination of Western culture that it deter-mines how we describe ourselves. We are “anti-modern,” “anti-liberal,” “anti-urban,” “anti-feminist,” “anti-communist,” “anti-Black,” “anti-democratic,” and, worst of all, “anti-Semitic.” We are, in addition, against immigration, against diversity, against integration, against equality, against globalism, against secularism, against ration-alism, against materialism, against fiat money, against all the peoples of the Earth holding hands under the rainbow, singing Kumbayah.

Thus the enemy has manufactured for us a negative identity—an identity that is a negation of everything the enemy represents. In this narrative the enemy is always for something, whereas we are against

1 Adapted from a speech delivered at a meeting of the Charles Martel Society,

Nashville, TN, on October 29, 2011.


everything—against that brave new world that they created, based on universal freedom, equality, and brotherhood.

For the establishment this is very convenient, as is conservatism, because conservatism is the negation of the new; bereft of ideas of its own, it does not affirm anything. In fact, everything it stands for has been stolen from the corpses of those who came before. It is uncrea-tive, because it stands for what has already been created. It is sterile, museological, and necrophilic; it sees the West as a tomb in need of preservation.

Worse still, after two hundred and thirty-five years of liberalism, all that conservatism can conserve is an earlier form of liberalism. Con-servatives cheer the previous revolution. Accordingly, a debate be-tween liberals and conservatives is a debate between bold liberals ver-sus timid liberals—the daredevil versus the faint-hearted. Thus, when the radical Left calls conservatives fear-mongers, when they say that conservative politics is the politics of fear, they are one hundred per-cent correct: conservative politics is the politics of fear.

That is why conservatives are always losing, why they know only one gear: reverse. The world belongs to the brave, to those who take risks, who push the boundaries, who seek new forms. The world be-longs to the explorer, the inventor, the creator.

This is why we should not call ourselves conservatives. We should instead call ourselves traditionalists. Tradition is the affirmation of the archaic, endlessly renewing and regenerating. This makes tradition a creative process—one that builds upon what came before, honouring it, but also reinventing it and recreating it. And if it is not museologi-cal, like conservatism, neither is tradition like liberalism, which seeks to obliterate all that came before so that liberals can enjoy a clean slate upon which to impose their universal abstractions, without any kind of reference to or limitations from empirical reality.

THE WORLD BEFORE THE COLLAPSE

We talk about winning the collapse. This is a welcome constructive approach, for it becomes tiresome to hear people on the Right talking about the collapse as if it were the magical solution to all our prob-lems. It is also a necessary approach, because the collapse is desirable only as a gateway to a new beginning. What is more, it is not guaran-teed: if it ever happens, it may not happen when needed—it may take a long time to occur, or it may be a slow collapse. I speak from experi-ence: having lived in Venezuela during the late 1970s and early 1980s,

Kurtagic, “Megaton Genius” 5

I was witness to an economic collapse in that country, and it took fif-teen years before someone came along bringing radical change. His name? Hugo Chávez—not exactly Faustian man.

It is also worth noting that a collapse cleans the slate for everyone, creating opportunities for all, not just for our faction. This means that, if it happens, the collapse is just as likely to occur when our faction is not ready and someone else’s is. That someone else could well be more ruthless, better organised, have a ready-made alternative narra-tive, and, more importantly, possess the means to broadcast that nar-rative in a manner that is appealing and emotional, beyond all reason and compromise. Such a narrative would typically contain a message that is bigger than life and that makes the individual feel part of some-thing greater than himself. Never mind the sacrifice or the facts: the greater the sacrifice and the more outlandish the goals the better, for the rigor of discipline is infinitely more empowering than the message of limp-wristed, whiny White liberals.

MONEY IS NOT ENOUGH

Without question, a collapse offers opportunities. Those who know how to exploit it stand to profit greatly. However, money is not enough, the same way that more babies, or party politics, are not enough. Each of these is valuable, but they are each a piece of the puzzle.

If politics is the art of the possible, then in a culture where White-ness is a negative, White identity is not possible. It is at best marginal, and on its own it will never achieve fundamental change in our socie-ty. Neither will competitive breeding: a culture where Whiteness is a negative only supplies the enemy with more guilt-ridden taxpayers, donors, and sell-outs with whom to perpetuate its power—more guilt-ridden Whites with a negative identity, who give their enemy their money, rather than use it to help themselves or give it to those whose mission is to help their kin.

Fundamental change necessitates changing how that negative iden-tity is produced in the first place, creating a context conducive to a positive White racial identity—in other words, generating an overall culture that, while respectful of regional identities, is of the race, by the race, and for the race; a healthy, thriving, and vibrant culture in the West.

Needless to say, this is absent today, for, as we know, the culture of the West has been perverted by people who are not of the culture,


who have exploited some of its features for their own ends, who have reconfigured it to neutralise opposition and legitimise their hegemo-ny, and who rely on White complacency, selfishness, naïveté, and fear to perpetuate their domination. The culture of the West is not our cul-ture, but their culture.

To displace that culture we need another one to displace it with. And that other culture cannot be the necrophilic, museological culture longed for by conservatives, who would merely embalm the glories of the past. What is needed is a living culture that is energetic and active-ly engaged in self-creation; that honours tradition while also regener-ating it, reinventing it, and making it fresh and relevant to the man and woman of today; a culture that is cutting-edge, embracing the lat-est techniques and whose manifestations represent the state of the art; a culture that is forward-looking and futuristic while also never losing touch with its millenarian roots. What is needed is a culture that is the envy of the world, as ours once was and will be again.

Thus, we cannot be for Western culture without also being for those who create the culture—not just for those who defend it, but al-so for those who actively originate it, without whom there is no cul-ture. Who are they? They are the artists, the novelists, the composers, the philosophers, the filmmakers, and the mystics. The Brekers, the Evolas, the Fayes, the Lewises, the Nietzsches, the Schmitts, the Serra-nos, the Spenglers, the Wagners, the Yockeys, and the Riefenstahls. It is those with artistic and intellectual genius, those with spiritual in-sights that are beyond the common man. It is the Prometheans. It is the immortal ones who make a culture what it is, who define it, who give it its uniqueness, and who elevate us all above the state of ani-mality and towards the divine. It is the immortal ones who in turn make the race immortal.

That is why profiting from the collapse is not enough, essential as money may be. Money, after all, has to be for something. And it has to be for greatness, physically and metaphysically; for creating new im-mortal objects of art and beauty; for creating new intellectual para-digms that increase our knowledge and our wisdom; and for regener-ating our metaphysics—because art and beauty, even wisdom, need a spiritual dimension, a grand narrative that gives meaning to our lives, a cosmic purpose, not just as individuals, but as part of a nation and as part of a race.

And money has also to be for those who provide Prometheans with the means to do their work, who make it possible for the Promethean


gift to enrich members of the race and the race as a whole: the pub-lishers, the think tanks, the production companies, organisations in the creative industry—our creative industry—operating at the level of both High Culture and Popular Culture. Of the latter, both are need-ed, for they each provide something valuable, not just for different types of people, but for every taste and every occasion: culture is not just for eggheads any more than it is just about the Royal Philharmon-ic; it is, in fact, everywhere, all the time, seeping into every aspect of our lives, inner and outer. Culture is in the street, in our cars, in our homes, in our kitchens—even in our sleep; even beyond the grave.

This implies that those of us who wish actively to encourage fun-damental change in our society have to be everywhere, all the time, suffusing everything with our voice, style, and character, creating and sponsoring all forms of culture as well as the vehicles to transmit that culture—to record it, reproduce it, distribute it, promote it, recognise it, and reward it. That is what organising and wealth are for. In a cul-tural war, wealth is for weaponising genius: for turning genius into megaton genius.

OPPORTUNITY FOR CREATION

In terms of potential for culture creation, it is not as if we are lack-ing resources: there are millions of creative individuals out there. The problem is that most choose to sell out because the enemy grants them access to opportunity—opportunity to develop and realise their ideas. Many creative types choose to sell out because the enemy also grants them access to status.

Opportunity and status are strong motivators—much stronger than reason and facts. Facts are often inconvenient or problematic, realism is dreary and boring, truth causes trouble. By contrast, fantasies and daydreams are far more appealing; they are, after all, about making one feel good about oneself and the world we live in. It is unsurpris-ing, therefore, that most choose to ignore the facts or adopt the data set that flatters their vanity, that makes them feel ten feet tall in a world that is theirs for the taking? What better to become rich and re-spected doing something that we love and are good at? Is it any sur-prise that even those who agree with us will, when confronted with accusations of “racism,” brag about how their best friend is Jewish, Black, or both, as well as disabled, gay, transgender, and HIV posi-tive? Humans want to feel good; they want to be accepted and well-liked.


It follows, then, that providing access to opportunity and status for those who are creative is the dynamite stick that kills all the fish in the pond. Firstly, it attracts talent, because once economic dependency on the System is removed the motivation either to keep quiet or sell out disappears. Secondly, it deprives the enemy of talent, thus denying the enemy its sources of glamour and wealth. Thirdly, the culture is regenerated, not only keeping it alive and but also causing it to grow and flourish. Fourthly, the message goes out that our faction stands for something—for beauty, for tradition, for glory, for something that is unique, superlative, and inspiring; that our faction is current and relevant, rather than one of grave robbers or taxidermists.

That is why the struggle for the West should not be conceived in terms of defending Western culture. Yes, preserving our legacy is im-portant. It is our tradition. But preservation should not be our sole aim, because when one speaks of defending, the implication is that West is static, dead, without outward thrust, a museum or tomb in need of preservationists. Preservation implies that it is the enemy who is in motion, has the ideas, and the initiative. Preservation implies that the choice we have is between holding out or being flattened by the enemy charge. Conceiving the struggle in terms of preservation makes us reactive, not active. It sends out the message that we are past our peak, a preservation society, propping up a zombie civilisation. We are none of those.

AFTER THE LEFT

Our struggle is best conceived as an offensive operation. The best defence is a good offence. Going on the offensive, however, does not mean repelling an enemy that is already at the gates, because that is also a form of defence, whereby the enemy defines us in relation to their actions. Going on the offensive means aggressive exploration, creation, expansion, the conquest of new frontiers, whether they are artistic, intellectual, scientific, mental, or spiritual—with the micro-scope or with the spacecraft. It means not speaking about defending the West, but speaking about creating what comes after the Left. It means doing what we have always excelled at as a race, what made us kings of the world. And it means doing it without caring if someone is offended: the attitude has to be “we are here, we are going to do what we do, and if someone has a problem with that, they can like it or lump it.” One cannot make an omelette without breaking an egg.


That egg has to broken yesterday, for the alternative to the world af-ter the collapse needs to be created in the world before the collapse, so that if and when that collapse comes, there will be already in place a viable alternative to the freak shows and failures of the Left; so that if the collapse happens to be slow, we can speed it up and put the Left-ies out of their misery; so that if there are others battling for suprema-cy, we are the ones offering the most impressive option.

And the ability to impress is key. Humans cannot be reasoned into a change of allegiance. We are seduced with artistry, with music, with symbols, with slogans. They love a narrative that fires their imagina-tion, that satisfies their need for meaning and self-esteem, that tells them that greatness can be achieved. They look to winners—to indi-viduals who are attractive, confident, courageous, skilled, and who act without the need to explain, justify, or qualify, let alone apologise. Everyone wants to be like that, or with people who are like that. They are the role models, the heroes, the giants, the archetypes. Archetypes make people feel important, like they are part of something worth be-ing a part of.

THE MESSAGE IS THE MESSENGER

In a speech I delivered at a conference of the National Policy Insti-tute in Washington D.C. last September, I said that the message is the messenger. This same principle applies to culture in a culture war. The culture warrior does not tell; he does. He is the message. His ac-tions are the message. His achievements are the message. This is be-cause a culture war is won with a muscular culture, not with anemic discussions about culture; it is won with creation, not with criticism. Criticism only helps to clear the decks for a new order of creation.

THE WEAPONISED MIND

Lest it be seen as an insuperable task, it is important to remind our-selves that, powerful as it is, culture begins very simply: it begins with pen and paper, with a brush and canvas, with a man and his musical instrument. Plato and Aristotle are venerated today by virtue of their millenarian influence, but in a way they were also men like you and I. They did what came naturally to them, enjoyed doing it, and had no inkling in their day that two and a half thousand years hence millions of people would still be aware of them and study their work.

In a culture war, the creative genius is like an arms factory, and his output like a thermonuclear warhead. To have an effect, however, the


warhead needs to be weaponised: it needs a delivery system, well-chosen targets, and an industry to mass-produce it. Put another way: the mind is a weapon, and an organised army of minds is a weapon of mass construction.

The creative genius, therefore, exists in a symbiotic relationship with the men of finance, those who make the world go round. Noth-ing is possible without either. An atom whose energy cannot be re-leased is not a thermonuclear warhead—it is just an atom. Thus, to get rid of the eyesores and reconfigure the landscape, the men of finance must value creative genius. Only by actively seeking creative types, recognising their possibilities, and enabling them to release their en-ergy by creating opportunity will obscure fantasy be transformed into immortal glory.

THE WAR ON THE ENGLISH: A CASE STUDY IN

THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE

BRENTON SANDERSON __________________________________

In the last fifty years the culture of critique has reengineered public

discourse in the West so successfully that laudatory references to Eu-ropean ethnic groups, like the English, are today widely held to be morally repugnant. This reality is confirmed by the recent experience of Brian True-May, the co-creator of the internationally successful tel-evision series Midsomer Murders. One of most successful British cul-tural exports of the last decade, Midsomer Murders draws large audi-ences around the world—particularly in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The long-running series is known for its quaint English village setting which provides the backdrop for classic (if clichéd) murder mysteries.

The program made international headlines in March when True-May was suspended by ITV. Asked in an interview to account for the show’s international success, he said his winning formula was quite simple: keep it as English as possible. He pointed out that the series simply “wouldn’t work” if there was any racial diversity portrayed in the sleepy village set in the fictional county of Midsomer. “We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the Eng-lish village with them,” he told the Radio Times. “It just wouldn’t work. Suddenly we might be in Slough . . . We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way. Maybe I’m not politically correct. . . . I’m trying to make something that appeals to a certain au-dience, which seems to succeed. And I don’t want to change it.”

Predictably enough, an ITV spokesman immediately issued a statement:

We are shocked and appalled at these personal comments by Brian True-May which are absolutely not shared by anyone at ITV. We are in urgent discussions with All3Media, the producer of Midsomer Murders, who have informed us that they have launched an immediate investigation into the matter and have suspended Mr. True-May pending the outcome.


ITV was captured by the Judeo-Marxist establishment long ago, and Jewish editorial control at ITV has been ensured for the next gen-eration with the recent appointment of the 32-year-old Jonathan Levi as head of ITV’s arts and popular culture division. The situation at the BBC is little different.

Behind the suspension of True-May was a tacit threat: his program needs to modify a successful formula in the interests of promoting the multicultural ideal of Britain’s cultural-Marxist (and Jewish-dominated) intellectual establishment. This “last bastion of English-ness” must cease, even if this means undermining the very basis of the program’s success. The apparent concern is not that Midsomer Murders is inaccurate in its portrayal of typical rural English villages—which, to the dismay of many, are still overwhelming White, but rather that the program constitutes, in some sense, a “celebration” of this fact, and by extension, exploits a nostalgia and yearning for England as it was prior to mass Third World immigration and state-sponsored mul-ticulturalism. This is anathema to an elite that has contempt for the traditional people and culture of England, and an incomprehension of the web of traditions and prejudices once revered by the English.

Observing the contemporary assault on the English, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton notes that “every practice in which the spirit of England can still be discerned seems fated now to arouse con-tempt.”1 Unfortunately Scruton cannot see, or simply refuses to see, the Jewish elephant in the room as he attempts to account for this per-nicious trend:

The forbidding of England is a strange phenomenon and one that is hard to explain. The country was always victorious in war, and was not impoverished even by the loss of its empire. No outside force compelled it to relinquish its national pride and culture. The process came from within, and seemingly without resistance. George Orwell commented on the disloyalty, the anti-patriotism and “intellectual sabotage” that had helped to weak-en England during the 1930s. He attributed the phenomenon to the fact that the old imperial society excluded the intellectuals, and therefore drove them to take up a negative posture towards it.2

1 Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 247. 2 Ibid., 248–249.

Sanderson, “The War on the English” 13

Scruton apparently fails to notice the pursuit of Jewish group inter-ests manifest in the various intellectual movements that have formed the basis for what he terms the “culture of repudiation” that subjected the old virtues, customs and religion of England “to humiliating scorn by the makers of public opinion.”3 He is correct, however, in observ-ing that this “culture of repudiation” found particularly fertile soil in the cultural landscape of post-war England. The “English emerged from two world wars in a condition of moral fatigue. . . . An over-whelming sense of guilt seemed to paralyse the country—guilt at its own successes, and an awareness of their cost. . . . Rather than risk the accusation that they were so bellicose and xenophobic as actually to believe in themselves, the English preferred to apologise.” Therefore, one “of their most endearing traits became their nemesis. . . . The sneering and jeering at Old England was caused not by the country’s strength but by its manifest weakness, which means that it could be despised with impunity.”4 FROM A NATIVE CULTURE OF DISSENT TO THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE

The English were particularly susceptible to being enlisted as vec-tors of the culture of critique given their psychological predisposition to individualism and moral universalism (a characteristic of Northern Europeans generally).5 This tendency is a theme that finds repeated expression throughout English history. Scruton observes that “the pe-culiarities of the English” can be traced to what “is sometimes known as their ‘individualism’—that is, their disposition to affirm the right and responsibility of individual action in all spheres of social life.”6 Their individualism was manifest in their national character:

The English, it is generally agreed, were distant, cool, reserved. They had friends, but they did not make them easily. And when they made them, they held them at a distance, embarrassed at the natural flow of human affection, and taking steps to avoid it whenever it might erupt. This reserve was part of loyalty; their affections were cool but steady. They deplored the volatile hu-mours of Mediterranean people, and the fickle sentimentality, as

3 Ibid., 249–250. 4 Ibid., 249–255. 5 Kevin MacDonald, “What Makes Western Culture Unique?” (The Occidental

Quarterly, 2(2), Summer 2002, 9–38). 6 Scruton, England: An Elegy, 10.


they saw it, of the Irish. Because their attachments were slow to form they were also slow to dissolve: for one attachment must be driven out by another, and meanwhile takes up its place with the same discreet informality as a member takes his armchair in his club. This reserve was observed not only between friends, but al-so between lovers, spouses and members of a family, where it could coexist with the deepest love and a mutual identification of aims and interests. It amounted not to a lack of feeling, but ra-ther to a lack of self-regard—a refusal to display a feeling just because it happened to be yours.7

The inherent individualism of the English led to the evolution of a

nation of strangers. “Strangers do not live together by affection, by family sentiment, by swearing bonds of blood-brotherhood in the manner of the Arabian tribes. They live together by law, convention and a silent appeal to precedent. They settle disputes not by violent quarrels or vengeance, but by laying their grievance before an impar-tial judge, himself a stranger at one further remove.”8 The advent of the common law and devotion to the rule of law is regarded as the embodiment of the disposition of a people “who came to England from Jutland, Saxony and Scandinavia” who “were distinguished by their litigiousness.”9 For Scruton, England has always been a land of dissent where

Important sections of English society have scorned its traditions, its compromises and its aristocratic ways, seeing only the bare bones of power and oppression and the hypocrisy that has kept these things in place. Lollards, Luddites, Puritans, Dissenters and Roundheads stood always in the wings of English society, moving centre stage in times of crisis. Chartists, trade unionists and republicans have relayed their dissenting message to the modern world.10

7 Ibid., 48. 8 Ibid., 54–55. 9 Ibid., 9. 10 Ibid., 18.


That the modern culture of critique represents a profound disconti-nuity with this native tradition of dissent is revealed by the “undo-mesticated” nature of the new form of dissent. Scruton points out that

The English contained among their number a great many sneer-ers and scoffers: but they formed an accepted part of the organ-ism, a chafing away from inside which created the comfortable impression that England itself was impregnable, since its quar-rels were purely internal. . . . In their overseas adventures the English could be insolent and cruel. In Ireland, in North America and sometimes in India, Englishmen behaved like despicable criminals. Yet they were schooled in self-criticism, and unwilling to excuse a crime, merely because it was theirs. The narrative of their crimes was itself written by Englishmen and their excesses were no sooner committed than condemned.11 The moral universalism and naive idealism of native English intel-

lectuals, a legacy of their evolutionary development as Northern hunter-gatherers, was doubtless intensified by the nation’s fortunate geography. Centuries of safety behind the shields of sea and navy cre-ated the illusion that the world is a much kinder place than it really is, and thus allowed the arguments of idealists to flourish, arguments which would have disappeared in no time among the frequently con-quered peoples and shifting frontiers of the continent. Thus, Kipling chided the naive pacifists of his time for “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.”

This was an apt criticism of the anti-patriotic Edwardian Fabians who made up the Bloomsbury Group, who included the type of intel-lectuals that, George Orwell noted, “are ashamed of their own nation-ality” and who “felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institu-tion.” To a significant extent this was still true in 1965, but, with the intellectual force of the cultural of critique, this once atypical strand of thought and feeling broke out of its bookish little world to storm the cultural centers of the country, making, in the process, traditional English patriotism deeply unfashionable.

The Jewish intellectual class, and their non-Jewish dupes like prom-inent Labour politician Roy Jenkins, who became the public face of

11 Ibid., 19, 47.


British multiculturalism, were thus able to draw upon a native tradi-tion of dissent, and exploit it to unleash an orgy of altruistic punish-ment among the English. With the destruction and disruption of World War II, the austerity and chaos after that war and the manic suburbanisation of the country that came with the prosperity of the fifties and sixties, it was easier than ever for the English to be per-suaded that significant parts of national existence should be altered forever. In an incredibly short time they turned England into a nation without heroes and without pride in its past. “All those features of the English character which had been praised in wartime books and films—gentleness, firmness, honesty, tolerance, ‘grit,’ the stiff upper lip and the spirit of fair play—were either denied or derided. England was not the free, harmonious, law-abiding community celebrated in boys’ magazines, but a place of class divisions, jingoism and racial in-tolerance.”12

While ostensibly unable to detect the etiology of his “culture of re-pudiation” Scruton aptly defines its conceptual outlines:

While exhorting us to be as ‘inclusive’ as we can, to discriminate neither in thought, word, nor deed against ethnic, sexual or be-havioural minorities, political correctness encourages the deni-gration of what is felt to be especially ours. . . . The gentle advo-cacy of inclusion masks the far-from-gentle desire to exclude the old excluder: in other words to repudiate the cultural inheritance that defines us as something distinct from the rest. The ‘down with us’ mentality is devoted to rooting out old and unsustaina-ble loyalties. And when the old loyalties die, so does the old form of membership. . . . We who live in the amorphous and multicultural environment of the postmodern city must open our hearts and minds to all cultures, and be wedded to none.13 Into the vacuum left by the collapse of English self-confidence, a

new ideological conformity has emerged. The new empire of ideas reaches into the most intimate areas of life, and those who do not ac-cept it are held to be personally at fault, not just politically or philo-sophically wrong. It is the most fanatical system of thought to domi-

12 Ibid., 21. 13 Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Lon-

don: Continuum, 2002), 72–73.


nate the British Isles since the Reformation. Indeed, failure to conform to the new orthodoxy is held to be a moral failing and evidence of psychopathology. The effects of the culture of critique on English so-ciety have been so devastating that it is entirely fair to make an analo-gy with Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. It has devalued objective knowledge and attempted to make many thoughts unthink-able. It has sundered many of the invisible bonds that once held Eng-lish society together. The lore of the English tribe and the stories of their ancestors have largely ceased to be.

Meanwhile, under the banner of “social justice” the “oppressed” Brown and Black immigrant communities are given complete license (and White taxpayer-funded assistance) to affirm their cultures and aggressively pursue their group interests. The crucial goal, with re-gard to the native English, is to “sever young people from historical loyalties” and instill “a ‘non-judgmental’ attitude towards other cul-tures that goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might had been one’s own.”14 Young English people gain nothing from this culture save bewilderment and the loss of any sense of racial and cultural identity. THE WAR ON THE ENGLISH FAMILY

Under the new cultural orthodoxy the traditional English virtues are rapidly disappearing. The effect of the culture of critique on a so-ciety whose values were all open to question and whose morals were dissolving was explosive and continues to be so. Scruton observes that

having been famous for their stoicism, their decorum, their hon-esty, their gentleness, and their sexual puritanism, the English now subsist in a society in which those qualities are no longer honoured—a society of people who regard long-term loyalties with cynicism, and whose response to misfortune is to look round for someone to sue. England is no longer a gentle country, and the old courtesies and decencies are disappearing. . . . Sex, freed from taboos, has become the ruling obsession: the English have the highest rate of divorce in Europe, regard marriage as a bore, are blatantly promiscuous and litter the country with their illegitimate, uncared for and state-subsidised offspring.

14 Ibid., 81.


Of course, this is merely part of a larger problem in that “The loss of traditional virtue and local identity has occurred throughout Eu-rope and its diaspora.”15

The intellectual war against the traditional White family, a product of the culture of critique, is one which has had disastrous consequenc-es for White group interests. Scruton notes that the assault on the fam-ily was part of a great cultural shift from the affirmation to the repu-diation of inherited values: “Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, Aaron Ester-son, and radical psychotherapists of their persuasion see the family as a burden imposed by the past: a way in which parents encumber their offspring with an inheritance of defunct authority. Schizophrenia, in Laing’s view, arises because the Self is made Other by the parental imposition of dysfunctional norms.”16

Inevitably, these dysfunctional norms were the traditional family structure and regulative ideas of English society. Following the path laid out by these radical intellectuals, and post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, “radical feminism has set out to deconstruct the fam-ily entirely, exposing at as an instrument of male domination, and ad-vocating new kinds of ‘negotiated’ union in its place.” As Kevin Mac-Donald notes, this radical deconstruction of the traditional Western family structure was never accompanied by an analogous deconstruc-tion and critique of the traditional Jewish family structure and its reg-ulative ideas—particularly its inculcation of ethnocentrism and a bun-ker mentality of “us against them,” as well its extreme emphasis on economic success and upward mobility.17

While, in the face of this ongoing assault on the traditional Europe-an family, there remains a section of society committed to “family values” and to the division of roles that makes families durable, this section of society does not have any real voice in the shaping of public opinion. The cultural Marxist elite have a virtual monopoly on speak-ing positions, and, as Scruton points out,

the message of the media, the academy, and the opinion forming elite is feminist, anti-patriarchal, and opposed to traditional sex-ual prohibitions such as those governing abortion, homosexuali-

15 Scruton, England: An Elegy, 245–246. 16 Ibid., 70–71. 17 Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse,

2002; originally publication: Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), Chapters 4, 5.


ty, and sex outside marriage. More importantly, the culture of the elite has undergone a kind of ‘moral inversion’ to use Mi-chael Polanyi’s idiom. Permission turns to prohibition, as the advocacy of alternatives gives way to a war against the former orthodox. The family, far from enjoying the status of a legitimate alternative to the various ‘transgressive’ postures lauded by the elite, is dismissed out of hand as a form of oppression. . . . Like Marxism, feminism purports to show us the world without ideo-logical masks or camouflage. Its repudiating zeal is not, as a rule, directed against Islam or the cultures of the East. It is directed against the West, and its message is ‘down with us.’18

The generations that came after the triumph of the culture of cri-

tique have often come from families that have disintegrated or are weak, whose schools do not uphold tradition or racial pride, and whose religious experience and understanding are non-existent. They have instead grown up with immensely strong outside influences—almost all of them radical enemies of White people and their culture. Anyone who controls a major television network or movie studio (as our hostile Judeo-Marxist elite does) can use it to pour out propagan-da which most young Whites find impossible to resist, provided it us-es the right sort of codes, language and symbols. This media control has done infinitely more damage to the long-term group interests of the English people than anything the Luftwaffe managed to do to them during World War II.

FROM VICTORIANISM TO THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE

Jewish historian Norman Cantor observed that the Jewish intellec-tual movements, which he equated with “modernism,” represented the negation of “Victorianism.” He notes that

something more profound and structural was involved in the Jewish role in the modernist revolution than this sociological phenomenon of the supersession of marginality. There was an ideological drive at work. . . . Victorianism liked to build on the heritage of the past. Modernism, assuming this heritage, want-ed to put it aside and concentrate on what could be discovered anew in the laboratory, in the research library, in the psychiat-

18 Scruton, England: An Elegy, 71–72.


ric patient’s free association and sexual memory, in the applica-tion of colour to canvas, in words and sentences, in quantifiable social trends, in the anthropological fieldwork experience. Their response was a fundamental re-examination of the postu-lates of European thought as it had existed in the nineteenth century. As new men, as recent outsiders, they had no personal stake or family participation in Victorianism or professional re-sponsibility to it. They were not restrained by prior commit-ments from undertaking the zero-base reconsideration of phys-ics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and the arts.19

A central concern, in this endeavour, was to deconstruct the theo-retical and cultural basis of English racial pride and ethnocentrism. To expunge a view that during the Victorian era was held by the English as natural and self-evident: that “When considering the human mate-rial from which English civilisation was made,” it was natural to “re-fer to the English race, this ‘happy breed of men,’ whose offshore is-land was the guarantee of their racial purity and apartness.” Scruton invites us to ponder what happens when a people live together on an island unconquered, as the English were unconquered during the cen-turies that made them:

There occurs a gradual homogenisation in appearance, in de-portment and in temperament. A bodily rhythm is acquired and passed on. This rhythm becomes established as an almost physi-ological trait, recognisable at a glance to the foreigner in Eng-land, and to the Englishman abroad. In such a case it is not sur-prising to find our Victorian ancestors referring to the English race, to ‘kith and kin’, to the ‘island stock’, and so invoking, though idioms that are now widely disapproved, a perfectly normal and natural human fact. England was associated, in the minds of those who claimed it as their homeland, with a recog-nisable physical type, with its own varieties of male and female beauty. Paintings, photographs, poems, novels and descriptions

19 Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York:

HarperCollins, 1994), 303.


show that this type existed in large numbers, before immigration and emigration began to alter it.20

To fatally weaken the instinct for racial preservation of the “island

stock” the culture of critique had to overcome a revulsion against mis-cegenation which was a longstanding feature of English life—a fea-ture that reached its apogee in the late Victorian period, and which was a major source of their imperial strength. Scruton notes that

this fear of contamination is, paradoxically, what made the Eng-lish into such intrepid adventurers and explorers. They could go anywhere, encounter anyone, suffer anything and emerge un-polluted. . . . The people among whom they wandered were es-sentially other, and interesting for that very reason. But since they were other, they did not belong with us. . . . The English made themselves especially offensive to the Indians by treating all of them, even the Brahmins, as though they were of a lower caste than themselves, and by allowing them to share their do-mestic lives only as servants and never as equals. The intricate connection between this attitude and the fear of sexual contami-nation is well brought out by Paul Scott, in his anti-English nov-els of the Raj. . . . Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, and the English knew this.21 This cultural feature found its leading expression in the Scottish

surgeon, anatomist and anthropologist, Robert Knox, best known now as the chief client of the Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare. His published works included The Races of Men (1850, revised 1862), in which he described “as simply a fact” that “race in human affairs is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilisation, depend on it.”22 The highest races were the Germans, the Saxons, and the Celts; the lowest were the dark races of the Earth. He described the Jewish race as “sterile parasites.” Though Knox’s work is now almost com-pletely forgotten, it was widely admired at the time, by Charles Dar-

20 Scruton, England: An Elegy, 76. 21 Ibid., 50–51. 22 Robert Knox, The Races of Men (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publish-

ing, 1850), xi.


win among others, and exerted significant popular influence. Knox was pessimistic regarding British imperialism, partly because he held it to be a fruitless task (given that he believed the dark races were in-capable of being civilised), but mainly because it could eventually lead to the degeneration of a superior race as a function of miscegena-tion.

Knox’s views were later given scientific foundation by the mathe-matician Francis Galton who, in his book Hereditary Genius (1869), pi-oneered the ideas that a “man’s natural abilities are derived by inher-itance”; that “out of two varieties of any race of animal who are equal-ly endowed in other respects, the most intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle for life”; and that on a sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, a Negro is two grades below an Englishman. A more sys-tematic development was undertaken by Karl Pearson, another Cam-bridge-trained mathematician, who in 1911 became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London. Pearson became persuaded that his statistical techniques (which he called “biometry”) could be used to demonstrate the dangers posed to the Empire by ra-cial degeneration.23

Meanwhile, as psychological research based on social identity theo-ry would predict, the English racial type was idealised. Typical was the statement of Joseph Chamberlain who maintained: “I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen; in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, so tenacious, self-confident and deter-mined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilisation.”24 A similar view was also expressed by one of the characters in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847) who tells us that the historical success of England is an “affair of race. A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century. And when a superior race, with a superior idea of Work and Order, advances, its state will be progres-sive.”25

23 Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin,

2003), 264. 24 John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 2004), 237. 25 Benjamin Disraeli, quoted in Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation,

237.


At the beginning of the 20th century, the English racial ideal was embodied in characters like Lord John Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, with his “strange, twinkling, reckless eyes—eyes of a cold light blue, the colour of a glacier lake.”

He was the essence of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert, open-air lover of dogs and of horses. His skin was of a rich flower-pot red from sun and wind. His eyebrows were tufted and overhanging, which gave those naturally cold eyes an al-most ferocious aspect, an impression which was increased by his strong and furrowed brow. In figure he was spare, but very strongly built—indeed, he had often proved that there were very few men in England capable of such sustained exertions.26 The English were recognised not only by themselves but by visitors

and travelers as a distinct human type. Indeed, some of the best de-scriptions were written by foreigners, as they endeavoured to under-stand the phenomenon of the Englishman. The Czech novelist Karel Capek wrote in 1925 that

if you get to know them closer, they are very kind and gentle; they never speak much because they never speak about them-selves. They enjoy themselves like children, but with the most solemn, leathery expression; they have lots of ingrained eti-quette, but at the same time they are free-and-easy as young whelps. They are as hard as flint, incapable of adapting them-selves, conservative, loyal, rather shallow and always uncom-municative; they cannot get out of their skin, but it is a solid, and in every respect excellent skin. You cannot speak to them with-out being invited to lunch or dinner; they are as hospitable as St. Julian, but they can never overstep the distance between man and man. Sometimes you have a sense of uneasiness at feeling so solitary in the midst of these kind and courteous people; but if you were a little boy, you would know that you could trust them more than yourself, and you would be free and respected here more than anywhere else in the world; the policeman who would puff out his cheeks to make you laugh, an old gentleman would play at ball with you, a white-haired lady would lay aside

26 Arthur Conan Doyle, in Ferguson, Empire, 265.


her four-hundred page novel to gaze at you winsomely with her grey and still winsome eyes.27

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously

enumerated the qualities of the English as he perceived them in 1922, noting that

instinctively the Englishmen is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet out-wardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, be-cause he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the days of Greece has the world has such a sweet, just, boyish mas-ter. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics manage to sup-plant him.28 For the English sons of British Empire there was certainly deep ra-

cial pride, though it was restrained by benevolence and a fair amount of modesty. Thus, Thomas Pickles, writing in 1932, could point out: “The almost worldwide domination of the White man does not mean that our way of life is the only right way, or that peoples of other races are necessarily inferior; indeed the study of geography shows us that ‘coloured’ peoples have a great deal to contribute to the well-being of the world.”29 THE NEW ORTHODOXY

The post-cultural-revolution environment is, of course, very differ-ent. As the Jewish historian Norman Cantor pointed out: “since 1945

27 Karel Capek, Letters from England, trans. by Paul Selver (London: Allen & Un-win, 1941), 174–175.

28 George Santayana, “The British Character,” in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 32.

29 Thomas Pickles, Europe (London: J.M. Dent, 1932), 89.


and more intensively since the 1960s all forms of racialist thinking are excluded from rational and enlightened discourse, especially in the United States, where the liberal civil libertarians have made racial doctrine intrinsically wrong, evil, and undiscussable. Modern anthro-pology, as defined the German-Jewish expatriate Franz Boas, for three decades head of the anthropology department at Columbia Universi-ty, declared nineteenth-century race theory without foundation.”

Unlike many of his co-ethnics, Cantor is willing to admit that “this behavioural egalitarianism and universality was itself an ideology,” and that “Whether mankind can be divided into biologically designat-ed racial groups had been neither proven nor disproven, merely ex-cluded from civil discourse as a result of what the Nazis and other such hate-mongering groups did with it.” Even more remarkably, Cantor had the intellectual honesty to admit that

racism is itself a central doctrine in traditional Judaism and Jew-ish cultural history. The Hebrew Bible is blatantly racist, with all the talk about the seed of Abraham, the chosen people, and Isra-el as a light to the other nations. Orthodox Jews in their morning prayers still thank God daily that he did not make Jews ‘like the other peoples of the earth.’ If this isn’t racism, what is? That highly regarded medieval book, Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, is bla-tantly racist. Halevi will not even allow that a convert to Judaism is the equal of a natural-born Jew. Martin Buber, the much-praised theologian and mystic, was still talking in the early 1920s about the distinctiveness of Jewish ‘blood’. Early Zionism was greatly affected by a positive view of racism. Herzl was inclined that way, and his close associate Max Nordau, for two decades a prominent Zionist leader in Europe, was the author of a classic of racist theory, Degeneration. From about 1830 to 1900 Jews in Western Europe, especially in Britain, benefited rather than suffered from racist attitudes. Jews of Sephardi origin, if they were affluent, were regarded in aristo-cratic circles as esoteric creatures possessing superior bloodlines, and intermarriage with a converted Jew was entirely permissible in the best social and political circles. The behaviour of the Brit-ish Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is an example of this atti-tude. Far from trying to play down his Jewish ethnicity, Disraeli, the shrewdest of politicians, emphasized it by turning up in Par-


liament in a hairdo and clothes that fit the racial stereotype of a Mediterranean Jew.30

Racial theory only became unpopular among Jews when their

group interests were threatened by the emergence of a variant “of hi-erarchic Social Darwinism, which had wide acceptance as a legitimate sociology between 1880 and 1920. Darwin’s population biology was regarded in the late nineteenth century as scientifically verifiable. . . . It was popular in Britain as sustaining the myth of the White man’s burdensome privilege of ruling over the coloured races.”31 However, the key rationale for the emergence of Boasian anthropology as a Jew-ish intellectual movement was the fact that: “In the 1890s Social Dar-winists, including some in universities, began to turn out hierarchic tables in which Jews were placed near the bottom of the list of races, just above blacks. If universalist multiculturalist equality rather than Social Darwinism had been fashionable, this particular pseudo-scientific polemic against the Jews would not have been possible, of course.”32

It is hardly surprising in such an intellectual environment that Jews would resort to embracing “a cultural pluralism that removed the claim for the superiority of one culture over another” and which es-sentially “protected the Jews from Christian and anti-Semitic claims that Judaism was an inferior religion.” Support among Jewish intellec-tuals for Boasian anthropology really gained momentum as the ex-panding and prosperous Jewish communities in the West “suffered a severe check in the 1920s and 1930s from anti-Semitic discrimination and the closing of opportunity, particularly with regard to open access to the learned professions.”33

From this point it became abundantly clear that White ethnocen-trism and group cohesion was antithetical to Jewish group interests. This applied with particular strength to the English, who despite their common law tradition and strong inherited tendency to individual-ism, “retained a firm dedication to groupthink, sensitivity to collective social action, and identification of Jews as a distinct minority even if they had been emancipated to receive individually civil and political

30 Cantor, The Sacred Chain, 336. 31 Ibid., 337. 32 Ibid., 337. 33 Ibid., 308.


rights. Some English Gentiles were anti-Semitic,” writes Cantor, “but even those who were not were highly conscious of Jews as a distinct group with identifiable behavioural characteristics.”34

Moreover, pre-war England is held in the historical memory of Jews to be a society riven with anti-Semitism. For instance, Cantor writes that “the thick anti-Semitism of the time, spreading slowly up-wards from the Gentile lower classes, who competed with immigrant Jews, to the ruling classes, was pervasive and bitter. There were se-vere limitations on the entry of Jews to the better private schools, to Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and to the learned professions. The Jews were made to feel alien and unwanted.”35 He also claims that the British government “was deeply concerned that Christian young men conscripted to fight in the war were not perceived as being sacrificed for the Jews. In addition to this general caution, high officials in the foreign and defence ministries were personally and openly anti-Semitic.”36

As for Winston Churchill, he “was a highly intelligent man and something of a personal philo-Semite,” but in the end he did “not raise a finger for the Holocaust-threatened Jews” because “he was hy-persensitive to the depth of anti-Semitism in his society and haunted by a fear that special efforts to save the Jews would raise cries of ‘it is a Jew’s war’ and ‘British Christian boys are dying to save the rotten Jews.’ He backed off completely.”37 Meanwhile, the Jewish communi-ty in Britain “that could have intervened to help Eastern European Jewry were inhibited and distracted by the wall of hate in their own ambience.”38 England itself was a land of painful memories for British Jewry with Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland pointing out that “even the map of his own country was pockmarked with the sites of medieval Jewish torment: Lincoln, Norwich, York.”39

The fact that the English sacrificed a generation of its young men to fight Hitler means little to the Jewish intellectual class and its non-Jewish puppets. Western civilisation then, like now, was regarded by activist Jews as an undifferentiated and pathological whole ripe for

34 Ibid., 316. 35 Ibid., 360. 36 Ibid., 361. 37 Ibid., 361–362. 38 Ibid., 349. 39 Jonathan Freedland, Journey into the Heart of Belonging (London: Hamish Hamil-

ton, 2005), 9.


radical deconstruction. Today, all Europeans are held by the Jewish elite to be proto-Nazis and guilty of the Holocaust, with any hint of White ethnocentrism and group cohesion regarded as a recrudescence of National Socialism, and therefore a deadly threat to the prospect for Jewish group continuity. For an important subset of ethnocentric Jew-ish intellectuals, Auschwitz is the culmination of Western culture, and the English are as culpable as any for spreading this immoral culture to large parts of the world. In this lies the underlying rationale for the post-war assault on the English.

Unsurprisingly, for the Jewish historian Simon Schama, what this “post-imperial Britain has going for it is precisely its resistance to the chilly White purism of Euro-nationalism.” Schama, who might be termed the favorite historian of the hostile elite, glories in the revolu-tion in values wrought by the culture of critique, a revolution that has made “something positive, a fresh Britain, out of its memories . . . ,” and where “instead of listening to the paranoid rant of an Enoch Pow-ell prophesying that a multi-racial Britain would end like Rome with the ‘River Tiber foaming with blood,’ a multi-racial Britain actually took pride in what Colin MacInnes, the ‘rebel’ writer of the 1950s, called even then its ‘mongrel glory’?”40 Nobody will be surprised to hear that Schama has never expressed a similar hope for a racially-mixed Israel.

Instead he gleefully recounts statistics that confirmed that, even a decade ago, the English people were well on track to doing away with themselves as a biological entity. “More important for a multi-coloured British future,” he notes, “a 1997 opinion poll found that 50 percent of British-born Caribbean men and 20 per cent of British-born Asian men had, or once had, White partners. In 2000 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown found that, when polled, 88 percent of White Britons between the ages of 18 and 30 had no objection to inter-racial marriage; 84 per-cent of West Indians and East Asians and 50 percent of those from In-dian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi background felt the same way.”41

Last year we learnt that, based on current demographic trends, Britain is destined for a White minority by 2066—the one thousandth anniversary of the Norman Conquest. The trend has been greatly ac-celerated in the past decade under a Labour government where the

40 Simon Schama, A History of Britain, 1776–2000: The Fate of Empire (London: BBC

Worldwide, 2001), 550. 41 Ibid., 551.


huge increase in migrants was the result of an attempt by certain La-bour ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” The revelation that former Home Secretary Jack Straw (a leading member of Britain’s hostile Jewish elite) was the ideological driving force behind a strategy to flood Britain with mass Third World immigration was hardly surprising given his professed enmity for the English people, whom he once declared had a “propen-sity for aggression and violence” which they used to subjugate others. Of course the reality in England today is quite the reverse—that, as a result of the massive influx of low-IQ Third World immigrants, Whites are increasingly the targets for non-White aggression and vio-lence.

The intellectual, political and social assault on the English people is paradigmatic of the damage that has been wrought on White people generally by the socially transformative effects of the culture of cri-tique. The English have largely abandoned the regulative ideas of their traditional society, and have been encouraged, pressured, and legally obligated to embrace a set of ideas contrary to their group evo-lutionary interests. It is only in exposing the self-interested ethnic agenda running through this war on the English, and on the White race generally, that we can hope to liberate White people from the psychological grip of the “new orthodoxy,” and allow them to once again unashamedly pursue their group interests as they did during the Victorian era.

ELITE AND UNDERCLASS

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles Murray New York: Crown Forum, 2012, 416 pages Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin

Coming Apart is Charles Murray’s most substantial offering since

his Human Accomplishment of 2003. It continues a theme familiar to readers of The Bell Curve: increasing American social stratification. Murray focuses on Whites because otherwise the social trends he de-scribes might lazily be explained away as effects of demographic change; he demonstrates that the trends are almost wholly unaffected by race or immigration. As he notes, a constant focus on how racial minorities “lag” Whites serves to distract attention from important changes in the benchmark population itself.

The author begins with a description of American life on the eve of the Kennedy assassination, highlighting everything which would shock the younger generation: just three TV channels; no Thai restau-rants; ‘coffee’ meant Maxwell House. If you missed a movie when it was in the theaters, you would not get to see it at all.

The products of the entertainment industry still usually validated American norms. Subjects such as abortion and homosexuality were never touched upon in television shows, only rarely and disapprov-ingly in movies. Most liberals were willing to say that extramarital sex was wrong. Only three and one-half percent of American families were headed by a divorced parent. In many neighborhoods, houses were left unlocked and children could go about unsupervised.

But American women had “much to be outraged about,” the author tells us, such as being expected to marry and have children! If Murray gets portrayed as a “hard-rightist,” it is only because presenting data honestly is now all such a designation requires or implies.

Such class differentiation as existed in 1963 was only reluctantly acknowledged: ninety-five percent of Americans described them-selves as either working class or middle class. Poor people refused to think of themselves as lower class, and rich people were almost as re-luctant to be considered upper class. A typical house in exclusive


Chevy Chase, Maryland, cost only twice as much as the nationwide average. People who could afford luxury cars often refrained from such purchases out of a fear of seeming “ostentatious”—an old Protestant pejorative which has now mostly disappeared from Ameri-can English.

This was still recognizably the American society observed by Tocqueville 130 years before: “In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the con-trary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

The people who had risen to the top in 1963 had little in common except their success. Most had grown up in middle-class or working-class families, and they retained the preferences and tastes of those milieus. Their status was precarious, and often not successfully transmitted across even a single generation. In other words, America was ruled by a rapidly circulating elite, not by an upper class. (The “old money” families of Philadelphia, New York and Boston were an exception, but their numbers were tiny and as a class they had no in-fluence on the nation’s destiny.)

Coming Apart tells the story of how this equilibrium was upset in the years that followed. Murray first discusses the rise of a new upper class; then, turning to the opposite end of the social scale, he shows how the White working class has deteriorated into a proletariat.

The new upper class is a product of our higher-tech economy, which relies heavily on people with exceptional cognitive abilities. A young person with outstanding mathematical ability might formerly have aspired to become a college professor; today he can make a kill-ing writing code or managing a quant fund. Business decision-making has also become more complex and the stakes are higher. “Today, if a first-rate attorney can add ten percent to the probability of getting a favorable decision on a regulatory ruling worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he is worth his many-hundreds-of-dollars-per-hour rate.”

The more efficient exploitation of cognitive ability has created enormous new wealth, but the benefits have been concentrated heavi-ly at the very top of the income distribution. For over half of America, income has remained flat in real terms since around 1970 (see Figure 1).

Devlin, “Elite and Underclass” 33

Figure 1: American family income distribution, 1959–2009; from Mur-

ray, Coming Apart. Economic change alone cannot explain how this new elite has be-

come a self-perpetuating class. For this we must look at postwar de-velopments in higher education.

At one time, geography largely determined where most people went to college; even the Ivy League catered to the northeastern social elite rather than the cognitive elite of the entire nation. Since the 1960s, however, our higher education system has come to function as a sort-ing mechanism for grouping youngsters according to intellectual abil-ity. An American’s cognitive ability can, with ever-increasing exact-ness, be inferred from the college he attended.

Murray defines the cognitive elite as the top five centiles (i.e., 5%) of cognitive ability. By 2000, just forty-one schools took in half these students. Today, “the typical classroom in an elite school has no one outside the top decile of cognitive ability, and many who are in the top hundredth or thousandth.”

As the author notes, most Americans’ notion of meritocracy is that all the brainy kids scattered across the fruited plains should be offered the same chance to develop their talents. The social class of one’s par-ents is not supposed to matter. This is not how things worked out, for two reasons: 1) cognitive ability is significantly heritable, and 2) it is now the major determinant of social status.

College education occupies young people during their prime mate-seeking years. Combine this fact with the cognitive sorting now per-formed by the college admissions process and you get intellectual ho-mogamy: people marrying those with similar cognitive ability. This

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level of ability tends rather strongly to get passed on to their off-spring. Most children within the cognitive elite have parents with an average IQ of 117 or more. Only about 14 percent of them are pro-duced by parents from the bottom half of the distribution.

So while the brilliant son of a plumber from Podunk will still occa-sionally break into the Ivy League, there will never be enough others like him to determine the character of those schools. Most of his classmates will come from affluent families, and a disproportionate number from the new upper class itself. American meritocracy has ended up producing something like a hereditary upper class.

As Murray acknowledges, this new class has its virtues: they are well-mannered, make good neighbors, seldom get divorced, are de-voted parents, careful about their health, and make sincere efforts to be socially responsible. At times, such virtues are driven to comic ex-cess. The obsessive parenting of the new upper class has earned them the nickname “helicopter parents” from harried college administra-tors. Certain members insist upon drinking their fair-trade organical-ly-grown coffee only from recycled mugs. Others not only jog and take the latest vitamin supplement daily, but react with moral abhor-rence to second-hand smoke and saturated fats. The author recom-mends David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise as a witty anthropological de-scription of this new “bourgeois bohemian” class.

“The culture of the new upper class carries with it an unmistakable whiff of ‘we’re better than the rabble,’” observes Murray. So, as a technical term to designate that class’s members, he suggests “Over-educated Elitist Snobs.” (The small-town Iowa boy still shows through Murray’s Harvard varnish.) He even includes a quiz by which the reader can gauge his own level of elitist snobbery. If you don’t know who Jimmie Johnson is, you may be in trouble.

Like everyone else, Overeducated Elitist Snobs prefer to live near others who share their background, tastes and concerns. Once they concentrate in significant numbers in any neighborhood, they inevita-bly begin to reshape it in their own image.

When Murray was at Harvard between 1961 and 1965, he reports, the students and professors did not command the necessary critical mass in the town of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The town had some funky bookshops and folk-music joints, but the local eateries still ca-tered to the working class majority. Harvard kids still rubbed shoul-ders with ordinary Americans.

Over the following generation, the working class was driven out by


high-tech professionals and research organizations. Greasy-spoon diners gave way to gourmet espresso bars. A geographical and mental bubble grew up around the inhabitants of Cambridge.

The same process has been occurring in other college towns, the Philadelphia suburbs, Austin, TX, Seattle and elsewhere. These places have become the “Bourgeois Bohemian Paradises” where you can find asiago-encrusted focaccia served with tarragon-infused olive oil after midnight.

To define such neighborhoods objectively, Murray created a scor-ing system that combined average income with percentage of college graduates. Then he ranked zip code areas nationwide. Those with scores in the top five centiles he designated “SuperZips.” There are 882 of them in America.

As of 2000, the SuperZips were still eighty-two percent White (in-cluding Jewish), while the percentage of Whites in the rest of the country had sunk to just sixty-eight. Asians were eight percent in SuperZips, three in the rest of the country. Blacks and Latinos were three percent each in SuperZips, but twelve and six, respectively, elsewhere. A second edition of Coming Apart will update these figures from 2010 census data.

SuperZips tend to cluster together. The four largest clusters sur-round New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which together account for thirty-nine percent of America’s SuperZip inhab-itants. Smaller clusters are associated with Boston, Chicago, Philadel-phia, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Large swaths of America contain no such zip codes.

Why is the clustering of SuperZips important? “A class that makes decisions affecting the lives of everyone else, but doesn’t know much about how everybody else lives, is vulnerable to making mistakes.” They think having cheap Central American gardeners and nannies is terrific. It doesn’t occur to them that the policies which provide their servants also result in Blacks shot dead in the streets of South Central Los Angeles or less affluent White families forced to flee to Colorado. (My example, not Murray’s.)

It will come as no surprise that a class so alienated from the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans tends to be liberal. This tendency is especially strong in the four largest SuperZip clusters around New York, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Conservative SuperZips of a sort can be found elsewhere, but the inhabitants are reading The Wall Street Journal, not The Occidental Quarterly. Murray


emphasizes that the shared culture of the new upper class is remarka-bly constant across the political spectrum.

After a hundred-odd pages on Overeducated Elitist Snobs, Coming Apart shifts its focus to the bottom end of the social spectrum: the new lower class. In the older America, “lower-class” referred only to blacks, “the broken down denizens of the Bowery and Skid Row, or the people known as white trash.” Apart from Blacks, such people were numerically insignificant. The working class was something al-together different. Indeed,

for most of its history, working-class America was America. In 1900, 90 percent of American workers were employed in low-level White-collar or technical jobs, manual and service jobs, or worked on farms. Even in 1960, 81 percent of workers were still employed in those jobs.

Most of America’s “poor” were simply working-class people who didn’t make a lot of money.

Since the 1960s, White working-class America has suffered a cata-strophic decline in virtue. Referring explicitly to Aristotle, Murray de-fines virtue as the habits required to live satisfying lives and which communities require to function as communities. A well-policed au-thoritarian state may be able to carry on after a fashion, if not prosper, in the absence of virtue. America, however, has traditionally allowed its citizens a large measure of personal freedom:

Americans were subject to criminal law, which forbade the usual crimes against person and property, and to tort law, which regu-lated civil disputes. But otherwise, Americans faced few legal re-strictions on their freedom of action and no legal obligations to their neighbors except to refrain from harming them. The guides to their behavior at any more subtle level had to come from within. Such internal principles are precisely what the now-unfashionable

term “virtue” signifies. Murray distinguishes four virtues which have been especially important in the history of America: industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity.

Industriousness refers to “the bone-deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work, making a better


life for oneself and one’s children.” Henry Adams pointed out that the spirit of industriousness affected those on the bottom of American so-ciety more powerfully than those on the top:

Reversing the old-world system, the American stimulant in-creased in energy as it reached the lowest and most ignorant class, whirling them upward as in the blast of a furnace. The penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was caught and consumed by it; for every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children.

America was understood by both natives and immigrants as a land of opportunity, and the most characteristically American of virtues was the industriousness which permitted Americans to take advantage of their opportunities.

Honesty is a necessary precondition for a republican constitution and a free market. One Scottish visitor remarked upon the tedious regularity with which Americans would ask him whether he did not admire “the extraordinary respect which the people pay to the law.” Our limited data indicate a very low crime rate in early America: one study of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, found an average rate of prosecution for theft of 2.7 per 10,000 population between 1760 and 1810. Tocqueville remarked upon how few public officers were charged with apprehending crime. Sympathy for criminals was nearly non-existent.

Marriage is properly an institution rather than a virtue, of course, but it involves the exercise of certain virtues: loyalty and sexual tem-perance at a minimum, usually patience as well. There is little explicit evidence for the importance of marriage in early American society be-cause the matter was regarded as self-evident; indeed, our current confusion about the nature and purpose of marriage has no precedent in history.

Some observers, however, did remark on the seriousness with which Americans took their marital vows. Tocqueville wrote that Americans “consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill.” And the Austrian-born immigrant Francis Grund said: “I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principle source of all their other qualities.”

When Murray named religiosity as his fourth American virtue, I


suspected it might be simply an unforthright way of referring to Christianity. Yet it is not specifically Christian doctrine he has in mind. In part, religiosity consists in the ethical monotheism be-queathed to Christendom by the Old Testament. John Adams, who was fully cognizant of America’s debt to Greece and Rome, wrote:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation [by propagating] to all mankind the doc-trine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization. Religion is also a crucial source of what sociologists call “social cap-

ital.” Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) has noted that “nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal phi-lanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.” But this is not all: religious persons also ac-count for a disproportionate share of social capital which is not explic-itly religious:

People who say religion is very important to them are much more likely than other persons to visit friends, to entertain at home, to attend club meetings, and to belong to sports groups; professional and academic societies; youth groups; service clubs; hobby or garden clubs; literary, art, discussion and study groups; fraternities and sororities; farm organizations; political clubs; nationality groups; and other miscellaneous groups.

And Putnam is referring to religion’s role in society today! The decline in the four American virtues was preceded, as the au-

thor points out, by a subtle change in American thinking: The belief that being a good American involved behaving in cer-tain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade [by 1950] and has not revived. It came to be tacitly assumed that the American system itself would work under any circumstances as long as we got the laws right. Murray then documents that decline, restricting his study to White


Americans between the ages of 30 and 49 (“prime age adults”), who have normally completed their educations and are engaged in careers or raising families. Within this set, he defines the working class as those with no more than a high school diploma, who work in blue collar, service, or low-level White collar jobs, or are not working. In 1960, this class included sixty-four percent of prime age Whites; by 2010, it had shrunk to thirty. The author’s principle finding is that the decline in the four American virtues has been steepest among this class.

According to a widespread perception, more prosperous Ameri-cans have become highly secular, while those in modest circumstances have tended to remain religious. Murray’s data do not bear this out. According to the annual General Social Survey (GSS), unbelievers ac-count for twenty-one percent of the working class, slightly higher than the figure for the upper middle class.

But besides outright unbelievers, there is a larger set of people who may feel they “ought” to be more religious, and who state a religious preference, but also acknowledge they do not attend worship services more than once a year. Murray denominates this group the “de facto seculars.” It is here that the decline in working class religiosity be-comes especially apparent. Adding the two classes together, we find the total level of secularization approaching sixty percent. For the up-per middle class, the figure is still around forty, though also growing.

Of working class Whites who remain religious, an increasing share has turned to fundamentalist denominations. Such groups are more inclined to wear their religious commitments on their sleeves. Murray believes the increase in these high-profile believers explains the mis-perception that the working class as a whole has remained religious.

Criminal statistics show a large rise in crime affecting the White working class. Murray computes the proportion of prisoners in the adult working class population and finds that between 1974 and 2004 it grew by a factor of five. The corresponding statistics for the upper middle class are extremely low and remained largely unchanged dur-ing the same period.

There has been a well-publicized forty percent drop in crime since 1991, but this does not necessarily reflect a decline in criminality. The American prison population has exploded during the same period. We may just be getting better at locking criminals up.

Criminal statistics clearly do not tell the whole story of the decline in honesty. As Murray observes: “It would be nice to know if there have been trends in the consistency with which people keep their


word, insist on taking personal responsibility for their mistakes, and tell the cashier when they have been given too much change.” But it is not easy to find data of this type. He does mention that the “a quad-rupling of personal bankruptcies over a period [1986–2005] that in-cluded one of the most prosperous decades in American history looks suspiciously like a decline in personal integrity.” He was unable to disaggregate this data by social class.

Murray illustrates his statistics with anecdotes concerning a largely White working class neighborhood in Philadelphia called Fishtown. Back in the early 1970s, the place was the despair of social workers, who could not understand why residents would be disinclined to re-ceive governmental “help”; one concluded they were “psychologically unable to face up to their social, cultural and economic deprivation.” Unfortunately, Fishtown has made a lot of progress since then.

In earlier days, the neighborhood was strongly Catholic. Most chil-dren attended parochial school, and “the church’s teachings—among others, that the home is a domestic church—gave validation to the core values of Fishtown.” By the late 1990s, one sociologist described religious observance thus:

Typical attire for most men at mass [includes] blue jeans, sneak-ers, and “Eagles” jackets with hoods. Older people and some younger parents in their 20s and 30s genuflected before entering the pews. I did not see any children performing this ritual, or saying any prayers for that matter. Most were standing around with their coats on throughout the service; they looked rather blank.

One Fishtown parochial school closed due to low enrollment in 2006; a second followed in 2011.

Crime was not much of a problem in earlier days, when residents sometimes administered rough justice without resorting to the police. If you found your car broken into, “you went to where the [glue sniff-ers] hung out, bashed some heads and found out who did it easy enough.” Even the local gangs “were kind of like vigilantes—beat the crap out of thieves, dopeheads, etc.”

When intact families were the rule in Fishtown, there was a great deal of solidarity among them:

If a neighbor saw a child misbehaving, it was considered appro-


priate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grate-ful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence. The increasingly common unmarried and divorced Fishtowners are

less likely to behave this way today, and many parents try to curry favor with their children through lax discipline. One Fishtown wom-an’s apathy at the deteriorating situation has become so conspicuous that it has earned her the nickname “Not-my-kid Sue.”

Perhaps the biggest change to come over White working-class neighborhoods like Fishtown in recent decades has been the decline in marriage. In 1960, over eighty percent of prime age working class Whites were married; the figure has since plummeted to around fifty. Meanwhile, the number who have never married has risen from under ten percent to about twenty-five. He claims the increase “was driven mostly by the retreat of men from the marriage market.”

The decline in marriage has impaired the happiness of adults, but it has been catastrophic for the rising generation. Whether one considers delinquency, criminality, school problems, physical or emotional health or early mortality, children do best when raised by biological parents who remain married and worst when raised by a single moth-er (results for children of divorced parents fall in the middle).

The number of children born to White, unwed mothers has sky-rocketed from three percent in 1960 to nearly thirty percent today. For mothers without a high school diploma, the figure is now around six-ty percent. Many of these mothers are teenagers, and their children often end up being raised by the grandparents. Yet among mothers with a college degree, the proportion of unmarried births has yet to rise above three percent.

As marriage has declined, so has male industriousness. White men with only a high school education began dropping out of the labor force in the 1970s; the figure stood at twelve percent on the eve of the current recession. Since the 1980s, working class men have also be-come more likely than the American population as a whole to be un-employed (but seeking work), and twenty percent of them with em-ployment of some kind are working fewer than forty hours per week. Murray sees no explanation for this, merely noting that it mainly af-fects the working class. I shall offer some thoughts of my own below.

One small but telling statistic concerns working class men who claim to be unable to work due to a physical disability. As the author


notes, this figure must have gone down since 1960, given medical ad-vances and the proliferation of labor saving devices. Yet it has risen from two percent to an utterly incredible ten percent. Disability has become a racket.

A time-use study cited by Murray reveals that “between 1985 and 2005, men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours a week.” The greatest share of this increase was devoted to television viewing, followed by sleeping.

Murray recognizes the strong correlation between the decline in marriage and the decline in male industriousness. Unmarried men are over three and a half times more likely to be out of the labor force than married men, between two and three more times likely to be unem-ployed but looking, and at least half again as likely to be working fewer than forty hours a week. Some of this difference is due to the preference of women for hardworking men, but more is probably due to the effect on men of marriage itself.

These patterns are also apparent in the history of Fishtown. One lo-cal mother reported that her sixteen-year-old daughter had been to six baby showers in four months—just a modest fraction of her fifty-two pregnant classmates. The mother estimated the comparable number from her own youth at around four per year.

A nun teaching at this same Catholic school remarks that some women in the neighborhood are married to men who seem less like husbands than extra sons: “There are women with two bags of grocer-ies in their hands, children hanging on to both sides of their coats, and the husband with his computer game walking behind her down the street. There’s something wrong here!”

One group of Fishtown men calls itself the Sunshine Club. They work summers on the Jersey Shore, then get “some stupid job for a couple of months just to get time in to collect unemployment for the rest of the year until summer rolled around again.”

Another set of men prefer to live off their girlfriends’ welfare checks; they are known as “runners,” because they must constantly move to keep one step ahead of child support collectors, the police, their girlfriends or their children.

Murray writes that “being a single mother is tough, and it is ap-propriate to sympathize with women who are in that situation.” He does not say it is appropriate to be sympathetic to the manchildren of Fishtown, and most readers will be left with the impression that what they need is a good kick in the pants. Yet I wonder whether the same


factors did not produce the undesirable behavior of both men and women that he notes today.

In the America of 1963, a high school graduate might expect to find a job which would allow him to marry and permit his wife the leisure to stay home raising a few children. He could buy a freestanding house and a car, and still afford to take the family on a two-week va-cation every summer. The wife would have been reared with a view to preparing her for the duties of marriage and motherhood; she may even have taken “Home Ec” in school.

Then gradually, beginning in the 1960s, women became convinced marriage was an imposition to be “outraged” about. Helen Gurley Brown began whispering in their ears that an independent career path could be filled with exciting romances involving attractive men, free of the “drudgery” to which marriage consigned their mothers. The family income was abolished in favor of “equal pay for equal work.” The law was changed to permit women to divorce their husbands uni-laterally and without grounds. (Wives are responsible for around ninety percent of divorces.)

None of this much affects the men at the top of the income and sta-tus hierarchy. They make enough money that even women with per-sonal incomes perceive them as supporters and are willing to marry them. If a wife leaves after the baby is born, child support payments are manageable and a replacement wife is easily found.

The Fishtown girls who might have married working men in 1960 may well be earning more than such men today just by sitting at desks entering data. They can obtain higher quality sperm from more desir-able men without submitting to the constraints of lifelong monogamy; the “ex” or the taxpayer is made to provide for any resulting children. They even enjoy the sympathy of male commentators for the terrible hardship all this supposedly represents. Is it any wonder such women are reluctant to devote their lives to raising the children of ill-paid construction workers?

The contemporary Fishtown man, his wages reduced by competi-tion from females and immigrants, and the ever-decreasing market value of upper-body strength, has correspondingly slim chances of earning enough to make himself an acceptable suitor to any woman with an income of her own. These men are not “retreating from the marriage market,” as Murray phrases it; they are being driven from it as a matter of deliberate policy.

Even if a particular working class man beats the odds and finds a


girl to marry, he cannot expect the satisfaction of supporting her; she may well end up supporting him. And what self-respecting man wants to end up like that poor sap uselessly tagging along behind his wife who just bought all the groceries?

But this is still not the worst. Prospective husbands stand a good chance of losing everything in the divorce settlement within a few years of the wedding. Child support is not so easy when it must be paid through low-skilled labor. Even if you avoid being jailed as a “deadbeat dad,” you will certainly not have enough left over to con-template a second marriage.

In short, the American dream of a home and family through honest labor is now far out of reach for an increasing number of low-status men. Under these circumstances, what is such a man to do with his life? I’d say an unconstrained bachelor existence with plenty of time for amusements looks very much like a rational choice. The male commentariat may make you out to be a bum, but that sure beats years of performing all the hard work traditionally required to sup-port a family and then not getting the family.

Aristotle understood that certain virtues have social presupposi-tions: liberality, for example, can hardly be expected from persons liv-ing hand-to-mouth. Male industriousness, I would suggest, also pre-supposes certain social arrangements. Monogamy and the family wage system resulted in the Irish immigrant who strives to make gen-tlemen of his children with every blow of his axe; liberated women earning equal pay for their equal work bring forth the men of the Sun-shine Club.

So single motherhood and the decline in male industriousness our author describes cannot be spirited away simply by getting men and women to the altar. “Outrageous” though it may seem to a generation steeped in feminist propaganda, the natural economic basis of mar-riage must also be restored. White men are programmed by evolution to be providers. If you deliberately rearrange society to render this function superfluous, do you have any right to complain when men stop knocking themselves out to perform it?

* * * Murray goes on to describe “the selective collapse of American

community”—selective because, so far, it has largely spared the upper middle class.


One of the best known passages in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America discusses how “Americans are forever forming associations,” and a look at almost any American locality one hundred years ago re-veals a complex interweaving of fraternal, charitable, educational, civ-ic and religious associations busily engaged in all sorts of activities. Biographies of eminent Americans of years gone by are apt to include so bewildering a variety of memberships that the modern reader is left wondering how anyone could have found time for all of them.

Another defining quality of American society was the extent of its neighborliness, i.e., voluntary assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside one another. This made the community in which one grew up an important aspect of an American’s identity. One reason the Fishtown of years gone by was so dear to the people who lived there was that neighbors helped one another, looking out for one another’s children and informally exchanging services.

By the 2000s, seventy-five percent of Fishtown residents were so-cially disengaged, meaning that they no longer belonged to any “sports clubs, hobby clubs, fraternal organizations, nationality organi-zations (e.g., Sons of Italy) or veterans groups.” Eighty-two percent were civically disengaged, meaning they belonged to no “service groups, youth groups (e.g., being a Scoutmaster), school service groups or local political organizations.”

Much of this decline is due to the erosion of social trust: the expec-tation that the people around you will do the right thing. Whites’ es-timation of the trustworthiness, fairness and helpfulness of others has declined across the board, but that of working class neighborhoods has declined more steeply and from an already lower base.

Robert Putnam’s research has demonstrated that social trust erodes as ethnic diversity increases. This erosion occurs even within each par-ticular ethnic group in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. (Putnam sup-pressed these results for several years, embarrassed that they contra-dicted liberal happy-talk.)

The author expresses the hope that the distrust which has accom-panied ethnic diversification will diminish over time, but acknowl-edges that this is only a hope. Of course, we never had to take the gamble: it was decided upon for us by treasonous elites who have bought their own way out of all the negative consequences.

Murray moves on to a fine discussion of happiness in the spirit of Aristotle. He identifies four principle factors that go to make up a suc-cessful human life: family, vocation, community and faith. It is not dif-


ficult to see how each of these components of the good life is related, respectively, to the virtues of marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity. Easy as it is to ridicule the old Stoic doctrine that virtue equals happiness, it is also easy to demonstrate a high correlation be-tween the two, especially on the level of society as a whole. A hard-working nation of harmonious families actively involved with one another and living according to the tenets of a generally accepted reli-gious teaching—this is about the closest approach to blessedness compatible with the human condition.

Crunching the data on reported happiness, Murray finds that mar-riage and vocation are the two most important factors. There is also a strong synergy between them: the benefit from a satisfying vocation (often but not always one’s paid employment) combined with a happy family life is greater than the sum of each considered separately.

It seems reasonably clear that religion plays a significant role in human flourishing, but the precise nature of its role remains elusive. In Murray’s data set, only twenty-three percent of those who never attend religious services describe themselves as “very happy.” This figure gradually rises in tandem with frequency of attendance, reach-ing forty-nine percent among those who attend more than weekly. Mere belief does not seem to do anything for people apart from partic-ipation in worship services and the life of a congregation; on the other hand, Murray’s data do not support Pascal’s famous recommendation that merely going through the motions will cure unbelief.

I can think of one significant fact which seems to fly in the face of the religiosity-happiness correlation: Denmark, with the highest self-reported happiness in the world, is also the most secular nation in Eu-rope. I have no explanation for this.

High levels of community involvement also correlate positively with reported happiness. Volunteering and charitable giving make the biggest difference, but group membership and activities, informal so-cial interaction and even electoral politics also produce benefits.

Income, once it rises above subsistence level, does not correlate well with reported happiness: “there is no inherent barrier to happiness for a person with a low level of education holding a low-skill job.” But all the virtues that do promote happiness are presently deteriorating among lower-income Americans.

Toward the end of the book, Murray integrates non-Whites into his data. “It was a surprise to me and perhaps it will be a surprise to you: Expanding the data to include all Americans makes hardly any differ-


ence at all.” From this he infers: We are one nation, indivisible, in terms of whites and people of color. Differences in the fortunes of different ethnic groups persist, but white America is not headed in one direction and nonwhite America in another.

I don’t believe this optimistic conclusion is warranted, for two rea-

sons. Firstly, it is contradicted by Robert Putnam’s evidence that racial diversity adversely affects social trust. Murray’s warning—”don’t kid yourselves that we are looking at stresses that could be remedied by restricting immigration”—is unconvincing in this context. Stopping and reversing ethnic diversification might not restore the American sense of community all by itself, but there is every reason to expect it would do a great deal of good.

Secondly, racial conflict tends to express itself politically, and hence tends not to show up in the sorts of social surveys from which the au-thor derived his data set; in Murray’s terminology, it is an artifact of the study. For example, several commentators have noted that Ameri-can politics is increasingly divided along racial lines, with increasing percentages of European-descended Whites voting Republican (over 60 percent in the 2010 Congressional elections), and the Republican Party getting over 90 percent of its votes from Whites, while the Dem-ocratic Party attracts 80 percent of the non-White vote.1

It is true Whites have begun suffering from a number of problems formerly associated with the Black underclass, but this newfound community in vice and social pathology no more makes Whites and Blacks indivisible than our pre-existing solidarity in wearing shoes or watching television. If anything, a mutual decline in virtue is likely to intensify political conflict over government benefits.

America in the early twenty-first century is still a powerful and prosperous country but, as the author observes, it is rapidly losing the special qualities which made it a distinctive nation. He compares the process to the transition from republic to empire in ancient Rome:

In terms of wealth, military might, and territorial reach, Rome

1 Ronald Brownstein, “White like me” (National Journal, March 17, 2012). http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/political-connections/white-like-

me-20120315


was at its peak under the emperors. But Rome’s initial down-ward step, five centuries before the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire, was the loss of the republic. Was that loss im-portant? Not in material terms, but for Romans who treasured the republic, it was a tragedy that no amount of imperial splen-dor could redeem. By analogy, the soul of America was the unprecedented freedom it

granted private citizens to shape their lives as they wished, leaving them to face the consequences of their own behavior. The very fabric of American society grew out of such freedom, as Murray explains:

Marriage is a strong and vital institution because the family has the responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are strong and vital because the community has the responsibility for doing im-portant things that won’t get done unless the community does them. [From such responsibility,] an elaborate web of expecta-tions, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that leads to norms of good behavior that support families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, the web frays [and behavior deterio-rates].

In essence, this is what is happening to America, and the poorest, least educated class has been first to feel the effects. The disease is progres-sive, however, since the welfare state inevitably tries to palliate the unfortunate results it produces by assuming still greater responsibili-ties. But this process cannot go on forever, and eventually civilization becomes unsustainable.

Can America expect five hundred years of imperial grandeur be-fore the final curtain? Apparently, Murray thinks so. Nothing in Com-ing Apart surprised me as much as the following passage which occurs early on:

The economic dynamics that have produced the class society I deplore have fostered the blossoming of America’s human capi-tal. These dynamics will increase, not diminish, our competi-


tiveness on the world stage in the years ahead. Nor do I forecast decline in America’s military and diplomatic supremacy. I take this to mean that the new economy’s success in turning high

intelligence to account more than makes up for decline of the White working class, the inefficiencies of the welfare state and military ad-venturism.

Many White advocates treat it as axiomatic that the Washington re-gime’s ability to squander its subjects’ wealth, courage and ingenuity will eventually overcome any possible economic arrangement. If Mur-ray is correct, however, the post-collapse strategy recommended by luminaries such as Guillaume Faye and Yggdrasil could prove dan-gerously mistaken.

Murray has his own version of the “worse is better” strategy, how-ever, involving the increasingly obvious unsustainability of the wel-fare state. When the large nations of Northern Europe begin falling into chaos of the sort Greece has recently experienced, it is just possi-ble that Americans will reconsider their options and change direction in time. Alternatively, the irrationality of our own welfare system may soon become apparent to even the dimmest social democrat. Whatev-er the merits of the welfare state’s core goal—providing a basic in-come for all American adults—it could now be achieved simply by cashing out all current income transfer programs. (See Murray’s 2006 volume, In Our Hands, for an argument that this could be done while leaving Americans responsible for their own lives.)

Murray’s final hope is for what economist Robert Fogel has called a “Fourth Great Awakening.” Historians commonly speak of three “Great Awakenings” in American history: in the 1730s, the early dec-ades of the 1800s, and the period 1880–1910. Each was characterized by charismatic revivalism and brought otherwise unforeseeable politi-cal change with it. The last Great Awakening ushered in the Progres-sive Era, whose message of uplift for the poor is repeated by liberals to this day. But, as Fogel says, such slogans have little resonance for an age when “even the poor are materially rich by the standards pre-vailing a century ago and where many of those who are materially rich are spiritually deprived.”

Amen to that. Murray remarks upon how many persons of our day seem to live according to the principle that “the purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possi-ble, and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to


do so.” Many are happy to pay the taxes on which the underclass sub-sists as long as it frees them from any personal involvement with such people.

The author does not try to predict the specific form a new Great Revival would take, but he expects a return to civic engagement may form a part of it: “age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us.”

As Murray acknowledges, many among our elites behave reasona-bly responsibly on a personal level, including staying married and in-vesting in their offspring. But a healthy and self-confident elite would do more: they would “preach what they practice” and set a better tone for the rest of society. They would demand more of themselves than a life of eating health food and being “tolerant.”

If the present elite experiences no Great Awakening soon, perhaps some other class of men will. They might even end up providing America with its next ruling elite.

CHAPTER 9 OF OUR VISION FOR AMERICA: COMMON SENSE REVISITED—

SOCIAL ISSUES1

MERLIN MILLER AND ADRIAN KRIEG ___________________________________

“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better man.” Benjamin Franklin

In evaluating social issues and the funding of programs, we should

always keep in mind the Constitutional limitations of government and the freedom to choose by individuals. It is easy to fall prey to socialist concepts, but as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” WELFARE NETWORK

Today there are 47 million Americans getting food stamps and 14 million getting unemployment benefits, which the government has now extended to three years. We have millions on welfare, in some cases third-generational welfare. And to top it off we have over 24 million illegal immigrants seeking assistance. This drain is wrong and unhealthy. We are denying our people real productive opportunities through poor policy, actually forcing them into poverty and govern-ment dependency. The answer does not lie in government, but in free-ing the private sector to produce again.

Washington’s falsely named “wars” (war on drugs, war on terror, etc.) actually serve to grow those problems. The “war on poverty” has created a large and entrenched dependency class of citizens, and wastes trillions of dollars. Compassion should be based on common sense, and charity should be the individual’s domain, not government

1 Our Vision for America: Common Sense Revisited is a book-length position state-

ment by Merlin Miller, presidential candidate for the American Third Position Party; Adrian Krieg, Board Member of the American Third Position, is co-author. The American Third Position may be contacted at 9811 W. Charleston Blvd., Suite 2-441; Las Vegas, NV 89117; phone: 561-351-4424. Chapter 9, “Social Issues,” is reprinted here by permission.

http://american3rdposition.com/


reallocations of resources—by taking from some to give to others. We at A3P would eliminate the “war on poverty” over a period of several years by educating and removing those on welfare into a trade of their choosing with guidance. Thereafter, the entire program should be canceled, and welfare needs left to the charity of individuals, church-es, and other organizations.

The federal government should have absolutely nothing to do with housing, including mortgage guaranteeing and incentive programs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should be eliminated. HUD has developed and expanded one slum after an-other in virtually every inner city and has created a dependency class which is kept in poverty and ignorance. Their major utility is at elec-tion time—to be used as voting fodder for welfare state advocates, who seldom leave office for the real working world.

SOCIAL SECURITY

The greatest Ponzi scheme in the world is run by the federal gov-ernment and is called Social Security. Americans who have been forced by the government to pay into this scheme have been cheated beyond most peoples’ understanding. Additionally, various Social Se-curity employees and government bureaucrats defend this system with a continuous stream of never-ending lies. When you ask Social Security to send you a statement of contributions, they list the money you paid in but omit your employer’s equal contribution on your be-half. So, before we even start they cheated you out of 50% of the mon-ey collected on your behalf. And nowhere in any document, which the government sends you, is there one penny of interest attributable to the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars that they collected on your behalf.

A3P asked an actuary (statistician) from a prominent insurance company to figure out what the carrier would pay out to an individu-al who had for his entire working life paid all Social Security taxes to the carrier and had his employer’s contribution likewise paid to the carrier. Then making the assumption that the individual would retire at age 65, having worked 37 years (average retiree), how much would be paid out per month? The answer is $2,976 per month, and if he died before age 85, $86,400 would go his heirs. The average Social Se-curity payment in America is now $1,200 per month and the death benefit is $340.00, not enough to be buried.

Miller and Krieg, “Chapter 9 of Our Vision of America” 53

Placing Social Security into proper perspective: After 40 years of contributions to the system you will have amassed an average of $870,920. Conversely Congress gets almost free healthcare, absolutely outrageous retirement benefits, 67 paid holidays and several weeks of vacation, unlimited sick days, free haircuts, free gym privileges, a spe-cial reserved dining room, $178,000 annual pay—and they then have the nerve to call what we as citizens paid for a “benefit.”

Congress has removed the “safe,” pilfered the contents and trans-ferred them to the general fund—and then replaced the funds with dubious IOUs. If the system were run honestly from its inception there would be a surplus of funds in the trillions of dollars. But that’s spilt milk, and we must now look to the future and end this uncon-scionable and unsustainable thievery.

Fraud in Social Security-administered disability is so huge that an estimated 45% of people on disability have no recurring illness requir-ing payments. Once on the system the recipient is a life member. This must be stopped. Also, many unauthorized recipients, including ille-gal aliens, should immediately be purged from the system.

A3P has studied the problem and analyzed how other nations have successfully solved it. We propose:

• All Americans who have paid into the system for more than 10 years can opt to stay in the system and receive such payouts as presently available. • Beginning in 2014 the minimum age for Social Security will be 65, by 2018, 67, by 2022, 70. Same for Medicare. • All others should consider purchasing pension annuities from private carriers, if not otherwise properly covered through employment retirement plans. • Social Security, as it now exists, should be phased out as re-maining authorized recipients expire.

MEDICARE The existing Medicare system is financially unsustainable. This is

primarily due to the fact that medical costs have increased about 14% above the growth rate of the economy. A primary cause is FDA (Food and Drug Administration) mismanagement.

Regulations are not drawn up by Congress or a third party, but by agency insiders who increase their staffing and regulatory powers with each expansion of products regulated. They have constructed a


draconian system for drug and instrument approval. For example, the FDA will not accept any foreign produced-medication or instrument sale in America without their direct approval and American domestic testing. The average drug test for approval by the FDA costs the pro-ducer $14 million.

If a drug has been safely used in Switzerland, France, or England for over ten years, the FDA will not accept those nations’ tests and approval even though, in many cases, it is more stringent. This is a turf war in which American “beneficiaries” suffer. For example, the average variance of medication costs between America and Canada shows that the same drug, made by the same producer, in the same factory, is 30% cheaper in Canada and 45% cheaper in Europe.

Pharmaceutical campaign contributions to incumbent legislators are among the three greatest by classification and affect FDA actions.

• The FDA must be reined in and forced to accept rationally proven foreign tests used as approval for American sales and distribution. • The FDA’s plans to regulate homeopathic medicines and vitamin supplements must be legislatively prevented. • FDA labeling laws must be made to comply with common sense, not bureaucratic force, and drug testing procedures should be streamlined to reduce costs to producers. • FDA staffing must be reduced and their budgets cut. Medicare costs, greatly inflated by fraud according to the agency,

should be dramatically reduced through enforcement of Medicare regulations—with severe penalties for fraud perpetrated by doctors, hospitals, and patients. HEALTHCARE INSURANCE

The Obama administration, with Democrat control of both houses, approved a 2,300-page takeover of the nation’s healthcare industry—14.7% of the entire economy. They did this in the face of socialized medicine’s failure in England, Russia and Germany, as well as most of Europe. Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, but have been unable to make any effective changes. Senator Harry Reid still sits on thirty bills, which he refuses to let the Senate vote on.

Our present healthcare system is not efficient, but the proposed Obamacare is financially impossible to sustain, as well as being un-

Miller and Krieg, “Chapter 9 of Our Vision of America” 55

constitutional. There are various possibilities for providing health in-surance; we prefer free market alternatives to forced and unworkable government solutions. Keep in mind that as more citizens return to productive jobs, the need for taxpayer assistance for health care will be reduced.

We propose the immediate cancellation of Obamacare. A3P’s solu-tion to the present health insurance debate may be summarized as fol-lows:

First, we must all recognize that no society has ever found it possi-ble to insure every citizen’s health insurance cost. The Soviet com-munists tried it, Britain’s Labor Party tried it, and Canada’s system is, by necessity, being modified. What we want to do is to allow every citizen the possibility of purchasing health insurance that is affordable to them and to America.

In order to do this, health care insurance should be portable across state lines with carriers allowed to sell in all states. The maximum le-gal limits for pain and suffering should be reduced with liability laws streamlined, such that reasonable standards can be set to help curtail outrageous legal fees and judgments. Litigation and the resultant es-calating insurance costs have altered the scene radically. Co-pay for-mulas should be developed for individuals who cannot afford inde-pendent care, or through employer plans—with sensible restrictions to minimize any taxpayer obligations.

Insurance carriers should be allowed to index insurance costs for lifestyle of the insured with self-induced maladies excluded from normal coverage (drug addiction, alcoholism, smoking, etc.), allowing carriers to increase charges for insuring anyone having such condi-tions. All non-citizens should be excluded from coverage.

The key to affordable health care resides with a free market that al-lows for a sufficient number of medical practitioners, and removes the cost-escalating practices of insurance companies, the legal industry, doctors, hospitals, equipment manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies. It should discourage the current medical practices of con-ducting unnecessary testing and procedures, and allow for alternative means of health care, including natural remedies. Decisions should be the domain of individuals and their doctors, not government or the medical and pharmaceutical industries.


FAMILY Unfortunately, many American men and women have misplaced

their priorities: Individualism and hyper-materialism have become more important than family and community. Millions of our youth have been coerced into a destructive Marxist, “politically correct” phi-losophy through television, radio and print media. The exclusive groups that dominate these mass media outlets have methodically imposed a degenerate influence on our people.

We must encourage a return to a strengthened family unit as the norm for society. We reject “alternative lifestyles” being promoted by the ruling elite and the mass media.

CRIME—TAKING BACK OUR COMMUNITIES

America has become unrecognizably dangerous. The slow decline in the welfare of our people and nation has been marked by the ruling political establishment’s acceptance of rampant crime as a way of life, as if we were actually incapable of curbing it. Our people have had to alter their everyday behaviors to simply keep from being victimized by predators roaming the streets. While the ruling elites drone on end-lessly about the rights of criminals, the happiness and welfare of our people has been sacrificed at the altar of so-called “political correct-ness.”

The American people have a right to both a sense and enjoyment of safety. We should not have to relocate from one town to another to escape criminal gangs who roam freely as the hands of the police and the criminal justice system are bound from above. We should not have to worry about the legality of defending ourselves, our families and our homes as we are attacked by criminals. These predators should not have any rights at the expense of the safety and welfare of up-standing, law-abiding people.

We will put these common sense principles into practice without delay: Enable police to concentrate on real criminals and serve the public welfare, not the political goals of the ruling elite. Permit victims of crime greater freedom to defend themselves and their property. In-troduce automatic sentences for repeat offenders who prey on our communities. Support states’ rights to enforce capital punishment for those convicted of capital crimes. Make prisoners understand that they are being punished, and not rewarded with a state-subsidized vacation for their crimes, in part through large-scale obligatory public works projects.

THE BALKANIZATION OF THE SYSTEM: ERNST JÜNGER AND THE END TIMES

TOMISLAV SUNIC

___________________________ It seems that the prognoses about the imminent death of the West

were not just a favorite topic of the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, the author of the much acclaimed Decline of the West. In times of great geopolitical unrest and social polarization, such as those sweeping now over Europe and the USA, predictions about an impending catastrophe seem to be a cherished subject among countless intellectuals, especially those who portray themselves as traditionalists or nationalists—or even worse, those who are por-trayed by their detractors as “White racists” or “radical right-wingers.” Amidst the flurry of philosophical prose dealing with the purported balkanization of the West and announcing the apocalyptic end times, one could single out the name of Ernst Jünger, the late German essayist and novelist, whose name was once associated with the so-called “Conservative Revolution” in Weimar Germany, and who is today eulogized by all sorts of White nationalists and tradi-tionalists as a leading figure in understanding the end times of the West.1

A subject that also needs some clarification is the word ‘balkaniza-tion’, a word that has come to be associated not just with state frag-mentation, but also with ethnic and racial turmoil. How could Ernst Jünger and some of his types of “dissenting sovereign individuals” be relevant in understanding and combating the unparalleled racial changes that have occurred in Europe and America over the last three decades? As a man of considerable foresight as well as insight, Jünger contemplated different types of nonconformist individuals, whom one may clumsily call, different types of dissenters facing up to the Sys-tem, within different historical timeframes and different political envi-ronments. However, nowhere in his voluminous work did Jünger en-vision the impending racial turmoil which is soon likely to bring Eu-rope and America into a real cycle of chaos.

1 Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972).


Hopefully, some of Jünger’s works and some of his archetypes, or Gestalts of “sovereign individuals” can be useful in understanding postmodern times and what role the individual should play in the System. The ongoing multiracial balkanization of the liberal experi-ment in Western Europe and America may soon yield far more cata-strophic results than the former communist end times in Eastern Eu-rope in the aftermath of World War II.

The notion of end times is not new. It is reminiscent of the biblical predictions of the linear times, which are eventually bound to con-verge into the Apocalypse and then the descent of the new Heaven upon Earth. Thus, in the Book of Revelation one can spot warnings but also upbeat signs:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.2 In its secular version however, this biblical notion of end times can

be observed among many modern intellectuals who display a strong monotheist and Judeo-Christian mindset. Such a do-good divinatory and eschatological mindset surfaces quite often among secular scribes of the modern System, particularly in their advocacy of Communism, Liberalism, multiculturalism, and the latest avatar, the ideology of so-called human rights. Such optimistic systems of beliefs offer, as a rule, formulas for the glorious unfolding of the future.

However, in the process of the voyage to the final destination of multiracial embrace, real—but more often surreal—evil creatures need to be doctored up and make their entrance onto the world scene, if for no other reason than to give further legitimacy to the prevailing founding myths of the System. Accordingly, the System must squash those wicked figures, usually viewed as symbols of absolute evil. Thus, on the one hand, System world-improvers must ceaselessly dis-pense flowery formulas about the birth of paradise on earth; yet, on the other, they must never tire of raising the specter of the absolute evil lurking in the guise of a “neo-Nazi,” a looming “Islamo-fascist,” an “anti-Semite,” a “religious fundamentalist,” a “Holocaust denier,”

2 Revelation 21:1–4.

Sunic, “The Balkanization of the System” 59

a “right-wing extremist,” or a “White supremacist”—all of whom dwell on the invisible horizon, and all of whom are geared up to bring about the Undemocratic Judgment Day. Should a freedom loving free spirit—a nonconformist individual—ever empirically try to question such interim scenarios of the System, he is condemned to silence. Or worse, he will be tracked down by the System’s Thought Police.

One encounters the notion of the end times in the old European sa-gas and myths too, although ancient Europeans had a cyclical notion of the flow of time. After each storm, clear weather must show up on the horizon. Ernst Jünger must be credited for making a sharp distinc-tion between the traditional European times of destiny—the cyclical times, and the modern liberal, linear and measurable times of today’s System. “Destiny can be anticipated, it may be felt, it can be dreaded, but it must never be known. Should that occur man would live a life of a prisoner who knows the hour of his execution.”3 One may tenta-tively surmise that in order to set up a rock-solid future, the System must demand that its constituents behave like docile inmates on death row.

In its desire to arrest the flow of time and bestow upon the man-kind ready-made salvation formulas, the System cannot allow any criticism of its founding myths. The scenario of a possible undemo-cratic end times makes the System nervous and therefore irrational; it prompts its servants to be constantly on the alert and to consider it their sacred duty to resort to the criminalization of those viewed as icons of absolute evil. Thus, a nonconformist is designated as evil; he is no longer considered a human, but a dangerous animal. Hence, in the capacity of a dangerous animal he cannot enjoy the judiciary cover of modern human right canons. He must be killed and removed for good. THE NONCONFORMIST IN THE BALKANIZED END TIMES

Once upon a time, communism was the symbol of the end times for many people in Europe, especially those in Eastern Europe. The course of the communist era following the end of World War II seemed to have been arrested for good. Indeed, after the disaster of 1945, there were many intelligent Europeans who seriously thought that with the arrival of communism, not only had the end of a world crept in, but the end of the world altogether. Today, for postmodern

3 Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1959), 25.


White Europeans and Americans, the same question is resurfacing. Is the balkanized West, or whatever the word ‘West’ may mean today, moving to even more dreadful end times, or are the current times of the System only a passing cosmic yawn that will soon go away? Per-haps, future historians will give the appropriate name for the current times of the System only when White Europeans and Americans legal-ly, or better yet physically, disappear from the map.

The problem for many White Europeans and Americans is how to come to terms with the time flow of the System. Can the current times they now live in be any worse than they already are? Where is the end of the end times? In a larger historical framework the time flow of the System represents just a fraction of a second and should, therefore, be of little concern for the survival of the White man. However, for the single lifetime of a racially and culturally conscious White dissenter, the current flow of time of the System must seem to be lasting an aw-fully long time.

The awareness of the cyclical time flow, especially in the case of war and social chaos, has historically been well apprehended by all White peoples. Today the notion of the recurrence of upheavals is much weaker, which is largely due to the forceful imposition of the multiracial and ecumenical mindset, promising that each tomorrow will be better than today, no matter how unlikely this is. However, with the significant shifts in the racial profile in Europe and America, followed by scary global financial turmoil, the possibility of the end times of the West is much more than simply a working hypothesis.

The concept of balkanization does not only imply geopolitical dis-locations and ethnic and racial disruptions—a process traditionally and often pejoratively ascribed to the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. Balkanization also means a poor sense of self-worth, a sensation of fleeting or passing identities that are continually replaced by new con-tradictory identities. This is today visible in the ongoing changes in the racial profile of the multiracial System whereby a host of divergent racial identities collide with each other, each trying to portray itself as the victim of other identities.

Today, however, the increasingly balkanized Europe and America may require from Whites a different choice of self-perception, one that has less to do with their own ethnic identity and more to do their ad-herence to the common European gene pool. And of course, it also re-quires new types of dissent and new forms of nonconformist action. Arguably, Jünger could be of help in furnishing some didactic tools


for the right choice of nonconformism, or provide some archetypes of free spirits, which he so well describes in his novels and essays: the rebel, the partisan, the soldier, and the Anarch. Despite the fact that White Europeans and Americans still continue to be immersed in their outdated tribal animosities and infightings, they cannot deny the fact that they are witnessing a unique low-intensity conflict with non-Europeans, this time not on foreign turf, but on their own—in the heart of Europe and America. In light of mass migrations from Third World countries, even Europeans and Americans with scant explicit racial or cultural awareness, are forced to choose sides. The forthcom-ing conflict will not necessarily pit Whites against non-Whites; nor does it need to be a military battle for historical territory. The conflict may only require choosing the right type of dissent for confronting the process of multiracial balkanization, such as different forms of “cogni-tive wars” via different types of electronic devices. For instance, a nonconformist who decides to live in the woods amidst wild animals, like Jünger’s forest dweller the Waldgänger, has to behave, of course like a wild animal himself.4 Conversely, the individual who decides to live among bandits can hardly have success in preaching the Gospel.

Even guerilla warfare, were it to occur, will radically change its na-ture. During his military campaign in Spain Napoleon was reported to have said that fighting irregular troops or partisans, required that the regulars become partisans or guerilleros themselves. The same goes for the modern figure of the sovereign nonconformist who will need to assess the situation first and then act accordingly. Never before has any political system declared itself criminal; it is always the opponent who makes this accusation. As Carl Schmitt noted, “the modern parti-san expects neither justice nor mercy from his enemy. He has turned away from the conventional enmity of the contained war and given himself up to another—the real—enmity that rises through terror and counter-terror, up to annihilation.”5

This is sometimes unfortunately the case with many self-proclaimed White racialists who think they can fight the System by violent means. Jünger’s sovereign type of a nonconformist wisely watches from his watchtower and waits for the right moment before

4 Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951). 5 Carl Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan; A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of

the Political, trans. by A. C. Goodson (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 4.


he strikes. Perhaps one could learn some lessons from the rebels in the Vendée province during the French Revolution or from Balkan out-laws during the Turkish occupation stretching from the 16th to the 19th century. Those rebellious “sovereign individuals” lived as peas-ants one day, but were ready, the day after, to take up arms. In a simi-lar vein, one hundred years ago, the Italian anti-liberal sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, obliquely suggested how to confront the feelings of uprootedness in the liberal System: “Whoever becomes a lamb, will find a wolf to eat him.”6 Naturally, that does not presuppose that a nonconformist must live the life of the wolf all the time in order to beat the System. Only the time flow will tell which figure of dissent best fits a particular historical moment. Sheep’s clothing can some-times come in handy.

With the approaching end times many Europeans and Americans will be compelled to practice the talent of survival regardless of their wolfish or unwolfish nature. For some this may mean borrowing Jünger’s sovereign individual living in the forest, or somewhere on the marble cliffs in Dover or in Colorado, and contemplate passively the horror of the end times. For some, that would entail the detach-ment from all political or tribal ties, yet remaining constantly on the alert against the intruders. Jünger remained his entire life a very cir-cumspect man, a natural loner, always on his solitary watchtower, al-ways observing the approaching end times in the capacity of a seis-mographer, yet never actively participating in violent activities and never attempting to arrest or roll back the end times.

Of course this may pose a moral problem for would-be young White nonconformist individuals who can hardly tolerate the men-dacity of the System. One can take again the example of Jünger and examine his role during the National Socialist period in Germany. Very obliquely he explains his rejection of National Socialism in his allegorical and autobiographical novel On the Marble Cliffs.7 Later on, Jünger tacitly supported his colleagues at the High German command of wartime France as they plotted the assassination of Hitler. A time-less question now arises. Must one peacefully abide by the law of the System, even if the System is violent and abhorrent, or should one try

6 Vilfredo Pareto, “Dangers of Socialism,” in The Other Pareto (New York: St. Mar-

tin’s, 1980), 125. 7 Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs, trans. by Stuart Hood (London: Penguin

Modern Classics, 1984).


to violently remove the very nature of the violent System? Or to put it differently, if Jünger had such a fine foreboding of the allegedly ty-rannical times ahead, why did he not try to kill Hitler himself? After all, Hitler had a high opinion of his earlier works, and Jünger could have, had he wished, acted accordingly. If the summer of 1944 in Paris was too risky for him, the late 1920s offered him a golden opportunity to stage his own violent coup against what came to be described after World War II as “National Socialist tyranny.” After all, Jünger’s earli-er martial essays had enjoyed huge popularity among incipient Na-tional Socialist leaders and intellectuals in the Weimar Republic and enabled Jünger to cross paths with many future National Socialist bigwigs. Was Jünger a small coward or a big opportunist?

One might reframe the same question, albeit in a different timeframe regarding the timeless subject of whether one should try to remove the purported evil system by force, or whether one should abide by the rule of the law in a purportedly evil system. Who showed more integrity and civic courage—or evil? A handful of French Waffen SS volunteers who defended to the last man the Wilhelmstras-se in Berlin against the invading Soviet troops on May 1, 1945—knowing fully well that the end times had arrived and that the game had already been over? Or Jünger and his likes who planned the as-sassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944—when half of Germany already lay in ruins? In a similar way why does Jünger’s alter ago, the noncon-formist character Anarch, from the city-state of Eumeswil socialize and toast with Condor the Tyrant, whom he hates so much, instead of making an extra step to take the Tyrant out?

One can tackle the same dilemma regarding ethical obligations vs. lawful behavior and civic respectability, or to put it poetically, of “self-distancing” or “esthetic aloofness,” when observing the behavior of many White American and European covert nationalist intellectu-als, who, anonymous behind their computer screens, burst with self-proclaimed civic courage, but who diligently backpedal when they need to confront the System in public. The fear of the loss of tenure or the anxiety over cuts to one’s pension plan may have a far more grip-ping effect than the fear of facing the gallows.

THE END TIMES OF SMALL TIME NATIONALISM

The beauty of Jünger’s prose is his rejection of small time White na-tionalism. Historically, European types of sovereign individuals, each sporting his own brand of nationalism, had never had a unifying ef-


fect on European peoples. In general, they have been mutually exclu-sive and harmful to all Europeans. In the balkanized multiracial Eu-rope of today small time nationalisms have no future. Figures of na-tionalist dissent, under the guise of the terrorist, the soldier, or the an-archist, including all types of nationalist fervor, such as the adherence to one’s tribe, or the craving for an independent statehood at the ex-pense of a neighboring European state or tribe, as observed historical-ly with Poles vs. Germans, Serbs vs. Croats, Irish vs. English, etc., have proved to be suicidal for Europe. Such sectarian figures of rebel-lion or figures of nationalist dissent are dated. Acts of self-proclaimed patriotic anarchism or terrorism only legitimize the ongoing experi-ment of the System with stateless multiracialism.

Nobody has a good grasp of what will be the form of the new bal-kanization in Europe and America and which type of dissent a White individual will need to borrow from Jünger’s arsenal. One should again recall a polymorphous type of the Anarch from Jünger’s autobi-ographical novel Eumeswil.8 The protagonist, Martin Venator, alias the Anarch, alias Ernst Jünger, lives his double life of academic Gelassen-heit, i.e., “aboveness” and of “self-distance” in the vicinity of the mul-ticultural kasbah. The Anarch is neither a rebel, nor a partisan, nor an anarchist. However, at a given moment, he could assume all these three types of conduct. For the time being Jünger’s Anarch is just a re-spectable person who blends well with the System he despises.

Jünger’s novel can be regarded as the Bildungsroman for today’s postmodern White Europeans and Americans living in a multiracial and balkanized world, with one serious exception: in today’s balkan-ized end times the enemy has acquired different features, which re-quires learning entirely different codes of nonconformist conduct and waging an entirely different type of war. THE ANARCH VS. MULTIRACIAL MASS MURDER

The consequences of balkanized Europe and America may be dreadful indeed. Time does not come to an end, as Jünger notes. One must keep crossing the Wall of Time both forwards and backwards in order to project oneself beyond the time flow and possibly foresee when open rebellion needs to commence. This may help avoid further cataclysms. In this respect one could draw a parallel between the cur-rent times of multiracial mass murder by the liberal System and the

8 Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (Sämtliche Werke) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977).


serial killings by the communist system in the aftermath of World War II. In retrospect, the former has been more effective than the latter, simply because it prevents the observer from making a clear-cut dis-tinction between friend and foe.

One must bear in mind that communist genocides in the aftermath of World War II had a serious impact on the decline of the cultural and genetic heritage of White Europeans and Americans. For exam-ple, in what became communist Yugoslavia, the Croatian and the eth-nic German middle class, including a large number of academics, were simply wiped out by the new communist regime in the summer of 1945.9 Thus they could not pass on their heritage, their intelligence and their creativity via their offspring. Today, however, in view of the System-induced “soft” mass murder of Whites, communist mass kill-ings seem trivial. What the late communist commissars had failed to achieve with physical terror, the present-day liberal “super class” of the System is achieving with its own substitute ideology of “multicul-turalism.” The constant influx of non-Europeans has already caused the impoverishment of the European gene pool. This influx may be understood as a soft (because it is imperceptibly gradual rather than the result of violence), self-induced genocide of White peoples.

One can see time and again the stark impact of the ideology of egal-itarianism, albeit this time in a different modality. The modern System uses different weapons of mass destruction, such as by importing non-Europeans, and thus achieving more elegantly the same goals that communism failed to achieve.

It must be borne in mind that the terror unleashed by the com-munists after World War II was not solely based on ideological rea-sons under the guise of the purported “class struggle.” Communist serial killings were fueled by envy as well as the awareness among their perpetrators of their own physical and spiritual inferiority. Simi-lar attitudes of envy and racial resentment can be observed today among non-European immigrants, although at this time they must hide them for obvious reasons. For the time being, Third World immi-grants are neither physically nor logistically in a position to convert their resentments against Whites into a large scale conflict.

For that matter even the word ‘multiculturalism’ can work miracles as it happens to be an apt euphemism used by the System; it is a

9 Florian Thomas Rulitz, Die Tragödie von Bleiburg und Viktring (Klagenfurt: Ver-

lag Hermagoras Mohorjeva, 2011).


handy code word for the discredited ideology of communism. Both systems are popular among immigrants from the Third World, for the simple reason that both Systems offer them a lifestyle that is not con-ceivable, let alone acceptable in their home countries. In addition, multiracial balkanization flatters the ego of leftist intellectuals, who are aware that the denomination ‘communism’, after having been se-verely discredited, must now be replaced by the code words of ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘multiculturalism’. Communism fell apart in the East be-cause it had fully achieved its goals in the West.

THE RACIAL SOVEREIGN AND THE SYSTEM

Capitalists bear a heavy blame for the balkanization of Europe and America. It is in their interest to import cheap reserve labor army into Europe and America. Subsequently, they show no compunction in cutting down the wages of their own domestic White workers and in outsourcing national wealth at will. Moreover, imported immigrant workers, typically having lower IQs and little social or class con-sciousness, are more easily manipulated than White workers by the new masters. They can better serve the interests of the capitalist super class and of leftist opinion makers who posture as their moral protec-tors. A German stockbroker or an East European ex-communist, who recently recycled himself into a bank speculator, could care less where his home is—as long as he makes money.

Should one be surprised? The founding father of capitalism, the in-famous, yet highly praised Adam Smith wrote a long time ago: “The merchant is not necessarily the citizen of any country.”10 Therefore Jünger’s alter ego, the Anarch, should not be surprised at the sight of a new Holy Alliance between the Merchant and the Commissar, be-tween Big Business and the Left. The Left favors mass immigration because immigrants, in its eyes, represent the substitute symbol of the new proletariat. For the capitalist it is also advantageous to bring peo-ple from the Third World countries into Europe and America, because they serve better the interest of capital. “Thus, big business has reached its hand to the far Left, the former aiming at dismantling of the welfare state, considered to be too costly, the latter killing off the

10 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2

vols. (Edinburgh: Printed at the University Press for T. Nelson, 1827), 172.


nation-state considered to be too archaic.”11 For this reason alone, nei-ther the Middle Easterners nor the Africans are to be blamed for the balkanization of Europe and America; rather the System and its politi-cians, the so-called capitalist “super-class” must be held accountable for the process of balkanization and the coming end times of the West.

Big business, run by a predominantly White oligarchy in Europe and America, seconded by the guilt-ridden post-Christians, and en-dorsed by a Left eager for racial promiscuity, bestows legitimacy on the arrivals of millions upon millions of non-European new immi-grants.

If White Europeans and Americans ever wish to reestablish their own racial sovereignty, they must demystify the first foe: capitalism. Foreign immigration will stop as soon as immigrants find out that the System’s economy has run out of fuel. The entire legitimacy of the System has rested on the dogma of permanent economic progress.

The only functional type of dissent against the System is the sover-eign racial individual, or the nonconformist with strong racial and cul-tural awareness, regardless whether he resides in California, Croatia, Chile, or Bavaria. Given the massive flood of non-European immi-grants, only groups with a long racial and cultural memory have a chance for long term survival. The danger of total biocultural es-trangement is offering now a chance to all Europeans and European Americans to see the bigger picture and shake off their local tribal and territorial imperatives. Indeed, what does it mean today to be Ger-man, French, American, or English, in view of the fact that more than 10 percent of Germans and more than 30 percent of Americans are of non-European origin? All verbiage by the System about freedom, jus-tice and tolerance, has by now obtained an opposite significance:

Are we allowed to conclude with a statement that the meaning of all these upheavals is that the world of freedom has disap-peared? Certainly this is not the case. Freedom is eternal in the world, although it will be always newly conceived. Beyond the line, beyond the Wall of Time freedom can be felt as something which is today felt as coercion and vice versa. There are also places and surfaces where awareness of new freedom will arise,

11 Alain de Benoist, “L’immigration, armée de réserve du capital,” Eléments, no.

138 (April–June 2011).


and these surfaces must be also taken into consideration, just as those where fear declines and as the surfaces expand. . . . We must bear in mind that spiritual sovereignty has been at all times a precious exception. Irrespective of the political and social fluxes, of the truisms of their slogans, of their revolutions and of their reactions, of their independence from gods and priest-hoods, of their independence from ethics and science of a given age—it has always been rare, and today perhaps more than ever before.12

A new identity of the sovereign racial individual or the noncon-

formist, or a new type of dissident, must be embedded in racial and cultural awareness. The idea of race cannot be denied, even if this word is criminalized by the System’s media and its ruling class on all wavelengths. The nonconformist who challenges the System can change his religion, his habits, his political views, his territory, his na-tionality, and even his passport, but he cannot escape his heredity. Undoubtedly, the study of race and heredity is met by the media to-day with ridicule and with the threat of the penal code, although when end times are near every human being, regardless of his race, regardless of his beliefs, wisely runs for cover to his tribe first. Should he forget or dismiss his racial type or his racial “Gestalt,” he will be quickly reminded of it by another hostile racial outgroup. The recent war in the balkanized ex-Yugoslavia was a case study of reactive na-tionalism and reactive racialism. Citizens of former Yugoslavia, with little or no national consciousness, discovered their racial and national “new identity” only when the end times had begun, prompting many to mutate into grotesque hyper-nationalist Serbs or Croats respective-ly.13

However, race-consciousness alone is not sufficient for the putative nonconformist or would-be White dissenter. Race has a larger mean-ing, and must be internalized in a spiritual way. Race is not just a bio-logical given—race is also a spiritual obligation. There are many, many Whites in Europe and America who are mental misfits—despite their “White” body. A well-proportioned body is by no means a guar-antee for a good racial character as observed by a late German racialist

12 Jünger, An der Zeitmauer, 171. 13 Tomislav Sunic, La Croatie: un pays par défaut? (Paris: Avatar, 2010).


scholar, Ludwig Clauss: “To investigate into the psychology of races means first and foremost to discern the meaning of its bodily form (Gestalt). This meaning, however, can only be understood from its psychological form.”14

Non-European immigrants know well that they can thrive only in the guilt-ridden, post-Christian System that is steeped in self-hate and beliefs about the benefits of multiracial diversity. Ironically, feelings of self-hate are unknown among non-European immigrants, just as they are totally dismissed, if not ridiculed, by the rulers of the countries where immigrants come from. White Europeans who have lived in Third World countries know the severity of racial exclusion and dis-crimination against Third World citizens by their own ruling-class. A Mexican cholo from East Los Angeles or a Turk with Asiatic features living in the Berlin Kreuzberg knows well which racial and cultural subgroup he belongs to in his native country. He can never be on an equal footing with a “White Turk” from the upper class, or with a White Mexican of Spanish ancestry respectively. Incidentally, the rul-ing class in Turkey likes to brag about its Albanian or Bosnian pheno-type, proudly advertising its “White” roots in public all over the Western capitals. But they are not Europeans, nor will they ever be part of Western culture.

Must it get worse before it gets better? The question that needs to be raised by dissenting Whites such as the Jünger’s postmodern An-arch in the balkanized West, is the following: what to do with immi-grants? Integrate them? Assimilate them? Expel them? Is it ethical to deport them in the coming end times? If the System’s scribes and its elites do not wish to talk officially about this subject, that doesn’t mean that the subject will go away. History is replete with mayhem and violence. In 1945 more than 12 million German civilians were sub-ject to “ethnic cleansing” in Eastern Europe—not within a period of years, but within a period of weeks and months. Nobody had ever thought that such mass human expulsion could happen on such a gi-gantic scale, let alone that it could be foreseeable. But it did happen, just as it was predictably followed by the proverbial shrug of history

14 Ludwig Clauss, Rasse und Charakter (Frankfurt: Verlag Moritz Diesterweg,

1942), 43.


and by the silence of court historians.15 Similar expulsions of millions of people from Europe and America will likely happen tomorrow, al-beit carried out by different political actors and under the sign of an-other political system of beliefs. The question that needs to be asked by the nonconformist or any other new White Anarch, or any other White sovereign individual, is: who will be the architect of this new “ethnic cleansing” and who will be its victim?

Seen from an historical perspective the System is dead. Its experi-ment with the abstract dogmas of multiculturalism and economic progress and ethnically and racially undefined White populations has failed. The balkanized Europe and America show us daily that the his-tory of the System is history. There is sufficient empirical evidence at-testing to that. A typical feature of a moribund political class is to start lecturing in solemn terms about its “infallibility,” its “eternity” and about the “veracity” of its System—at the very moment when the Sys-tem is falling apart.

Such wishful thinking has been common to all political elites throughout history. Even the palaver of today’s System ruling super class about the “end of history” is similar to the rhetoric of the former political class in ex-communist Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, short-ly before they collapsed. In the summer of 1989, military parades in East Germany were held, at which local communist politicians bragged about the “indestructibility” of the communist System. A few months later the Berlin Wall came down—and with it came the death of their System.

Today’s ruling class in the System, be it in the EU, be it the USA, does not know where it is headed and what to do next. And for this reason alone it has to resort to ever more world-improving verbiage. The System is much weaker than it wishes to show, and one must nei-ther overestimate its self-declared strength, nor forget its inborn fra-gility. The nonconformist Anarch lives again in the dangerous void of time and it depends on his accurate observation and his willpower which action he will take during the fast approaching end times. The plough and the pen may need to become the sword.

15 Tomislav Sunic, “In Fluß der verlorenen Zeiten; Das Schicksaal des Deutsch-

tum im Donauraum,” in Kein Dogma, Kein Verbot, Kein Tabu! (ed. Alfred Schickel. Festschrift für Prof. F. W. Seidler, Pour le Merite, 2008), 213–219. See also Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Ger-mans, 1944–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

THE SOUTHERN POINT: BARDIC DYNAMIC, PART 1

SIR TRISTRAM

____________________________ After many and long attempts to analyze complex problems by the aid of the method of analogies, you feel the uselessness of all your efforts; you feel that you are walking alongside a wall. And then you begin to experience simply a hatred and aversion for analogies, and you find it necessary to search in the direct way which leads you where you need to go. P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum1 White Americans generally do not utilize the innate legendary po-

tential of their historical experience to its fullest. They should. The ep-ic material is available in spades. And they love heroes and have many great examples of their own which might inspire them to dare the extraordinary, despite any odds. In fact, all that is left for this gen-eration and the next is the conscious assumption of the mantle and the active realization of the native mythos . . . or not. Failure to do so is optional and will eventually result in racial dissolution and the dis-placement of a truly original civilization. No more bad men behind blue eyes.

But why go there when we don’t have to? The Irresistible Forces cannot continue their onslaught if they encounter an Immovable Body.2 The buck stops first within the individual consciousness de-termined to take a stand.

1 P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World (Rochester:

Manas Press, 1920), 68. 2 Donald Davidson recurrently develops the conflict between the Irresistible

Forces and the Immovable Bodies. I find it to be an extremely useful construction covering a variety of areas. The first place that Davidson uses it, to my knowledge, is in his comparison of American historians Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard in The Attack on Leviathan: “Turner stands for a flexible, decentralized society, allowing the maximum of tolerance, within the national government, for divergen-cies of interest; Beard stands for extreme centralization, for conformity to one type of economic interest, and hence for the minimum of tolerance for any sort of divergen-cies. Turner speaks for the oldest and sturdiest American aspirations: the idea of freedom, because of which Americans turned their backs on Europe and, even at


Before we can amplify the immutable point, however, some cleav-age is necessary. There are two essential versions of the American sto-ry which, while on the surface may seem similar, in fact they do not quite line up with the vanilla platforms of the primary political parties and the color-coded delineation of Red State/Blue State America, alt-hough these divisions are useful for general purposes, at a certain dis-tance. Of course, these are broad strokes which are underscored by perennial injections of a youthful revolutionary zeal that tends to defy all attempts at categorization as well as a recognized trait in the White American character towards a radical maverick individualism, which challenges any comfortable establishment or bullying mentality, and always loves an underdog. Beyond this, the importance of a discrimi-natory sift, therefore, is in the assertion that it does mean something to be an American. An American cannot be all things to all people. The All-American actually used to convey a distinctive type. Like Mom and apple pie, the idea projected a popularly accepted archetypal im-age. But we live in confused times.

There is, then, on the one hand, the so-called liberal, progressive, multicultural, egalitarian, deracinated, industrial, secular, technocrat-ic, globalist, cosmopolitan, politically correct, modern power state version which sports, as its defining feature, the collusion between big business, mass media, applied science, intrusive government, milita-ristic adventurism abroad, and the consolidation of domestic minority voting blocs, foreign-sourced cheap labor and manufacture—all in the name of human rights, world democracy, and a cosmic melting pot. Equality of both opportunity and outcome via forced encouragement is the flavor of the rhetoric animating this group, although this creed is largely ignored in a hypocritical manner by its elites.

cost to their economic welfare, insisted upon their separateness from Europe. Beard speaks for the late European idea of security at whatever cost; he reunites America and Europe, and prepares the way, under the name of democracy, for new forms of the tyrannies which Americans once sought the new world to escape. Turner is Jef-fersonian; his is the voice of the inland and Pacific America of the South and West, and his following is to be found among the historians and men of letters from those sections. Beard is Hamiltonian; and his voice is the voice of the great cities of the Northeast, whose backs are toward inland America, and whose faces are toward the Atlantic and the manifold sorrows of Europe. Turner represents the Immovable Bodies of the great American problem; Beard, the Irresistible Forces.” Donald Da-vidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (Transaction Publishers, 1991), 38.

Sir Tristram, “The Southern Point: Bardic Dynamic, Part 1” 73

This version has deftly grafted itself onto some of the Enlighten-ment rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and to the Northern victory in the Civil War with the subsequent de jure transformation of the Constitution, paving the way for the civil rights movement, immi-gration reform, and centralization of power that we saw in the 20th century. The fact that the 14th Amendment is used to bolster minori-ties and corporations gives the lie. The vision of the American hero from this side is summed up in the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., although many “respectable” types would secretly, perhaps, prefer Abraham Lincoln. Barack Obama represents King’s latter day incarna-tion and fully symbolizes the manifestation of the “bottom rung on top” subversive mentality of the Modern world triumphant.

This is Neo-Marxist America which has as its zenith (despite what any “liberal” theorists, including Mr. Obama, might argue with such professorial refinement) the elevation of the state of Israel and the concomitant fusion of Communism and corporate Capitalism, active in a network of cosmopolitan satellites. This side currently rules in Washington D.C. Its cultural capital is New York City. The symbol of its financial strength is the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. It has an unmistakably Jewish spirit, though there are many non-Jews who willingly embrace and endorse it. Commonly referred to through the years as the “Eastern Establishment,” it is operative and predominant to a large degree in both political parties as well as in the hearts and minds of many who consider themselves Conservative. We might also call this conglomeration, the Neoconservative regime. The apparent conflict between the Democrats and Republicans is largely a good cop/bad cop play put on for the entertainment of the rubes. In reality, there is an underlying unity to the tyranny, like a coin that has two faces.

A fairly large-sized portion of the congregation that supports the current establishment from the Left honestly believes that it has en-dorsed a badly needed revolution against an age-old “racist White supremacy,” whose remaining vestige can be perceived in the fear-mongering of the Republican Party and its successful “Southern strat-egy,” flanked by the fundamentalism of the Christian Right and the “ignorance” of the White working classes. This portion of the Left is deceived. The edifice of the Neoconservative Eastern Establishment is based upon many lies. But it has Power, for now.

I could leave it there and just say that it is this Eastern Establishment versus the Rest of the West and I wouldn’t be too far off the mark. And


it might be wise to be somewhat vague because, within the Rest of the West, there are many elements which, on the surface, apparently con-tradict one another. In fact, the innate nature of the Rest of the West is much more pluralistic and freedom-loving than its nemesis and is thus more wary of “one size fits all” proclamations from a central command unit. This is its strength and its weakness for if we look too deeply into the crystal we might come up with some discrepancies that may cause further division when the necessity for unity of action is at hand. Arguably, this was the reason for the downfall of the Southern Confederacy, whose legacy nevertheless remains valuable as it was the initial reaction against the Modern world on the North American continent. However, a genuine discussion might also bring about a basis for a higher synthesis.

The formula for working out any conflict between potential allies is the reminder that cultural consciousness has a vertical axis but a hori-zontal playing field. While on one level, things may seem to be im-proving, a deeper level might reveal a stronger undercurrent in the opposite direction. People of differing intelligence or experience may identify themselves with the level they more readily perceive and thus not be aware that they are moving in a suicidal direction. The key is finding common denominators and properly arranging priorities so that those with the deepest level of consciousness can still connect with those closer to the surface. So, let’s continue the categorization.

On the other side then, there is the more common-sense driven, conservative, traditional, decentralized, multifaceted, populist, rough-around-the-edges, regional, patriarchal, agrarian, religious, tribal, or-ganically land-attached, genuinely patriotic folk intelligence which traces the westward settlement of the American frontier as the identi-fying locus of its expansion and model for its characteristic ingredi-ents and which can be summed up in the rugged individualism and independence of the White pioneer and his pietas for God, family, community and country. Perhaps we should also add to the equation, his traditional wariness of being governed from afar.

This side more or less recognizes the de facto reality of racial differ-ences based on experiential observation (rather than preconceived ideological assumption), though it also understands that, currently, to be cast as a racist not infrequently spells the end of a professional ca-reer. This realistic (though underground) racial consensus was origi-nally symbolized by the “gentleman’s agreement of 1876” between Northern and Southern Whites, marking the real conclusion of the


Civil War and the bankruptcy of the utopian visions of the radical Northern abolitionists, whom the Neoconservatives have resurrected and continue to champion.

The American hero from this rightward angle is the frontier aristo-crat soldier and first president of our country, George Washington. As Robert E. Lee’s father and Washington’s close friend, Lighthorse Har-ry, famously said, Washington was “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” I see no need for a reformulation. While the Rest of the West has powerful European antecedents, it also represents something distinctive and new on the world stage: a hither-to unparalleled fusion and energizing of all of the principal European nationalities against the backdrop of a primitive wilderness. This new element was first expertly demonstrated in Washington’s outstanding adaptive leadership abilities.

The Rest of the West is comfortable in the company of the Founders. Liberty understood within the confines of a generally accepted and binding social contract (the Constitution) facilitating a real meritocra-cy, is the flavor of the rhetoric animating this group. Its current strate-gy for getting around the embarrassing fact of unbridgeable racial dif-ferences in a pluralistic society, after such a costly internal war osten-sibly dedicated to the liberation of the slave class, seems to be to em-phasize the negative edge of the meritocracy: that if certain groups don’t show merit than they will be allowed to fall. The Rest of the West can be counted on to make all out war on the welfare state, and, as a last resort, to keep a closet full of arms should Big Brother come seek-ing reparations for slavery or some other fabricated “humanitarian” demand to transfer income from those who work to those who don’t.

This side arguably encompasses the broadest cross-section of the heritage of the 223.6 million White Americans which, as of the 2010 census reports, make up 72% of the American population,3 although a considerable portion of this percentage gives its support to the ideo-logical Left. Currently, the Rest of the West is forced to do the bidding of the other side due to its lack of control of the money supply and the military, though it persistently bucks at the direction in which the rul-ing regime is taking the country.

A significant part of this group believes that it is beleaguered do-mestically by Multiculturalism on all sides and that its sole foreign al-

3 2010 Census Shows America’s Diversity http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb11-cn125.html


ly in the world is Israel (despite its distrust of those “New York mon-ey people”), whose dispute with the Palestinians and the other large Muslim blocs in the Middle East, it views analogically and sympathet-ically through the biased filter of the mainstream media, operated predominantly by Jewish apologists. This portion of the Right is de-ceived and would do well to distance itself from both the Jews and Muslims at the group level. This side is not in Power. But it has the Truth in its favor as well as a sheer mass which, if ever properly di-rected and coordinated, could easily smash the usurpers.

For the most part, this heartland alliance can trace a certain biologi-cal galvanization of its lineage on this continent back into at least the 19th century. Some allowance can be given to all of those latter day immigrants (individual Jews included) who assimilated and readily identified with the more native White group’s metaphysical dream of itself which can be summed up in the twin concepts of “self-reliance” and “the best shall rule.” For all purposes, I would assert that this is the real America, whether it admits to it or not. And it had come into its own before certain immigration strategies were adopted for rea-sons other than enhancing the virility of the host body politic. Again, the real America is predominantly a White America (the group that conquered the continent) that has as yet still been unable to conscious-ly recognize itself as such (in part because of its youth), at least on a viable political front outside of the Old South.

Consistently, certain other ethnicities enlisted by the ideological Left get involved in defining themselves in opposition to and agitating against Whites on the basis of real or imagined previous grievances. They are encouraged and financed by various sectors to act as belea-guered minorities with distinctive identities worth preserving at the cost of dethroning Whites from center stage. For this reason, there is little hope for their peaceful assimilation or co-habitation. They un-consciously promote a hostile zero-sum game because they are en-couraged not to accept simultaneous reactive White efforts to defend White interests or celebrate distinctively White achievements, even in a peaceful manner. They perceive the entire attempt of self-identification on the part of Whites as illegitimate. There are a number of “watchdog” organizations like the ADL and the SPLC that go so far as to pathologize any expression of White identity as dangerous and extremist behavior.

The American type that these minorities represent is a self-acknowledged outsider, a hopelessly divided mulatto mess of contra-


dictions when operating at a political level, speaking a language not its own and enjoying implements, tools, weapons and gadgets also largely invented by the White group that it resents so much. The pres-ence on the Left of this degenerative element has destroyed its future legitimacy for genuine reform in any conceivably positive way in the United States. Period. Whites should flee the Democratic Party en masse.

The healthy continuation of a viable legacy on the continent, there-fore, depends upon a pronounced identification with a genetically clear vision of the type emerging from a more or less ideologically Right and biologically White side, and then on whether or not this type will decide to fight the conglomerated Frankenstein in its path, taking the country back “by hook or crook,” or concede more ground as it has been doing for the past half-century, consigning itself to certain oblivion.

I should say that this may be a temporary, corrective focus because there is a place for a forward looking progressivism within the White community, especially as we consider the example of Southern popu-lism. However, as our lexicon is currently constituted, we associate the Left side of things with measures aimed at diluting or attacking the White race and generally speaking, going soft in a number of areas (immigration, defense, abortion, gay activism) that, if left unchecked, would seem to promote our own suicide as a culture and a superpow-er. The thrust from the Left seems always towards unlimited amal-gamation, biologically and culturally, with absolutely no principled eugenic angle or discriminating factor. It is based on the lie that the races are completely interchangeable and that we owe no allegiance to the original intent and intelligence which formed our body politic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So, Conservatism understood as a countering rightward motion becomes directly related to realistic biological considerations of self-preservation and, therefore, trumps all other considerations. But it will be a Conservatism that actively overturns the status quo. This is what M. E. Bradford intimated with his formula, the Reactionary Imperative.4

4 M. E. Bradford, The Reactionary Imperative (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), from the

preface: “‘Reaction’ is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous.”


The task ahead, as I see it, ultimately lies in reconnecting an authentic White American intelligentsia to its folk. Some of this may seem obvious, but for many it is not and deserves repeated emphasis. This reconnec-tion is a big project and has many different angles. Science has already verified the hunch of common sense regarding the reality of racial dif-ferences, but its ability to persuade at emotive levels has always been decidedly poor. The key for our leaders is to find the currently dry an-cestral channels stretching into the deepest recesses of the collective imagination and to “release the flow.” There must be a reaching back into the record of our traditions to a point where we can speak with more clarity and authority and then a reflecting forward of inspira-tional imagery facilitating action without coercion. But how is this to be done?

One answer lies in the postmodern process of cultural excavation, the reexamination of older texts, the creation of new aesthetic artifacts, and more generally, through accessing a different type of knowledge than that which the scientific method affords, a type of knowledge that catalyzes direct communication with the White Folk so that we can build a popular movement, peacefully. Barring this, we would still need this access point so that the more audacious amongst us can steel themselves in order to provide a sacrificial example for future genera-tions.

Properly regarded, science delivers us from illusions. It gives us “facts” which are based on “truths,” which ultimately ought to deliver us from certain primitive superstitions, thereby enhancing our knowledge of the material world. The inner world, however, involves a different dynamic. Let’s call it the Bardic Dynamic. This paper will assert that such a dynamic, properly apprehended and understood, is necessary to create a holistic binocular effect within the American consciousness, by adding the wisdom and depth of our native histori-cal and literary experience to a defense of scientific Truth. SCIENCE AND POETRY

In Understanding Poetry,5 which, from its initial publication date in 1938 through the end of the 1960s was a standard text in English de-partments of liberal arts colleges and state universities across the country (Ivy League included), eminent Southern scholars Robert

5 On the impact of Understanding Poetry in American universities, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Poetry.


Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks defended the art of poetry by assert-ing that it answered needs that science could not:

The advantages of a scientific statement are not to be had with-out the limitations of a scientific statement also. The primary ad-vantage of the scientific statement is that of absolute precision. But we must remember that such precision is possible only in re-lation to certain materials and can be gained only by using terms in special and previously defined senses. The scientist carefully cuts away from his technical terms all associations, emotional colorings, and implications of attitude and judgment. Science tends, indeed, toward the condition of mathematics, and the re-ally exact scientific statements can be expressed in mathematical formulae. The language of science represents an extreme degree of special-ization of language in the direction of a certain kind of precision [i.e. water = H2O]. It is unnecessary, of course, to point out that in this specialization tremendous advantages inhere, and that the man of the twentieth century is rightly proud of this achievement. But it is more often necessary to point out that sci-entific precision can be brought to bear only on certain kinds of materials. Literature in general—poetry in particular—also represents a specialization of language for the purpose of precision; but it aims at treating kinds of materials different from those of science . . . [i.e. water = the liquid from which the goddess Aphrodite rose].6

While science is interested in charting quantifiable phenomena, po-

etry (as well as a host of other related artistic disciplines) is concerned with qualitative human values, the creative faculty, the ingredients of character, dramatic motion, and with the scientist himself, as an exis-tential creature striving through an ever-deepening contingent mys-tery that he is unable to fully fathom. It is concerned with the style of personality, and when regarded as such, can be seen as a rich reservoir containing superior reference points leading to the resuscitation of powerful older types.

6 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York:

Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), 4–5.


Science ostensibly focuses on the rational function to investigate the world, determine causes and effects, and to the application of the hu-man will to solve problems. Poetry seeks to understand the human condition in its totality and to effect the full integration and animation of the person. Both disciplines are aimed at arriving at certain irreduc-ible, unanswerable statements but they involve different categories that must not be confused. Again, each one represents a type of mo-nocular vision, which, when combined create binocular sight. This binocular sight is an indispensable component of all high civilizations. Science convinces with logical demonstration, poetry does so through the presentation of an aesthetically magnetic cinematic moment. Warren and Brooks suggest that science, as Bertrand Russell asserted, is “power knowledge.” The Bardic Dynamic, on the contrary, is perhaps best summed up by AE’s comment that “All that is substance in us aspires to the ancestral beauty.”7

There is a realm in which certain fictional amplifications elevate human sentiments and capacities for achieving incredible feats and deepening consciousness. This is the sphere in which Romance and Tragedy in the highest sense, properly belong. This type of “positive illusion” knowledge concerns the soul and the personality at both the individual and group level and is embodied in the artistic imagination and religious impulse, both of which revolve around the memory function and in the manifestation of a “light body.” History and its mythic/literary recombination serve as powerful reinforcements of this body and as pointers to the mysterious and uncharted territory of the human psyche and its yearn towards an unlimited potential as well as an honest approximation of its creaturely limitations and fi-niteness. Poetry, indeed, also deals intensively with the sardonic and comedic.

Dreams are the commodities of the Information Age. The contem-porary frontier is not wholly physical. It also now involves an interior space where the self is reflected in an invisible wilderness against a double generated by mass media projectors and an academic intelli-gentsia guarding the gate against the onslaught of younger genera-tions who have not yet been programmed. War is no longer on an ac-

7 See Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the

United States (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1962), 366. Davidson is comparing H. G. Wells’ vision of the future in War of the Worlds to that of George Russell (AE) in his The Interpreters. He prefers Russell.


tual battlefield. Violent conflict is secondary. The real fight is in the mind. It is perceptual. But it is no less significant. And decentralizing phenomena like the internet, cable, and general access to plural un-regulated information sources, are beginning to even up the score through a massive distribution of audiovisual artillery, facilitating the revelation of Truth against Power, which will continue to be the battle cry of the Rest of the West as it overcomes everything in its path. Hop on now, while you still can. EZRA POUND: FAILED KEEPER OF MEMORIES

The study of literature is hero-worship. It is a refinement, or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.

Ezra Pound8 The Bardic Dynamic focuses on the magnetic relationship between a

speaker and an audience and the communication of a fundamental series of ideas. Traditional examples of this can be found in the great epic poems of Western Civilization. Ezra Pound believed that before about 1750 or so, the quintessence of Western man could be found in his poetry.9 The context of these older texts is often an address made by one who remembers to those who may have forgotten. The bard or poet was the “keeper of memories.” This is a very different conception than that which has developed in contemporary times with the hip-hop rapper and his thousand-miles-a-minute ebonicspeak, backed with heavy bass beats or the coffee-house Ginsberg wannabe railing against, well, against G.I. Joe Whitey, of course. Who else?

Bradford’s formulations, as a literary critic rather than political strategist, are apt in this arena, too. Instead of viewing the poet as one who longs solely to liberate himself from the “tyranny of culture,” he would ideally be the “craftsman and vessel of prescription . . . who in the operations of his imagination assumes the fundamental legitimacy of his society.”10

The fashion in which memories were cataloged provides a glimpse of an oral tradition that outlined communal identity and put forth the

8 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance: An Attempt to Define Somewhat the Charm of the

Pre-Renaissance Literature of Latin Europe (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910). http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924027097330/cu31924027097330_djvu.txt 9 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber,

1954), 31. 10 M. E. Bradford, “Artists at Home: Frost and Faulkner,” 2. http://www.mmisi.org/ma/30_3_4/bradford.pdf


ideal of the hero. This “live” speaking has been fundamental to group development in all periods. Attention to the epic form also involves the recognition of a generally accepted scale of values or a web of meanings based upon the recollected experiences of a specific kinfolk. This web of meanings was communicated through a form of charis-matic leadership, resting upon the power of a singular, ubiquitous voice that could speak well. The subject matter often involved little more than recounting the key scenes (cinematic moments) from the day’s battles in a compelling manner, in order to facilitate a return in-to the field the following morning. As time went on, these meditations became more internal and psychological up until the absolute subjec-tivity of modern poetry and the complete derailment from the connec-tion with the community. This is the error we would try to mend to-day, thereby reestablishing a more effective continuity between the past and the present as well as between the individual and the group.

Certain extraordinary heroic cycles and turns of phrases gained in popularity through their repetitive retelling, until they reached a grandiose magnitude and became literally, the songs of a people. The-se songs became reference points and buoys during times of hardship. They represented bulwarks for the spirit as well as catalysts for future heroic action, measuring sticks for those who wanted to test them-selves against the greatest examples available. The important thing is that these stories, tales, and songs, always came out of the concrete historical experience of a group and was combined with its most in-tense longings and dreams for the future. The Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Bible, Beowulf, The Eddas, The Icelandic Sagas, The Divine Comedy, El Cid, The Song of Roland, and Le Morte d’Arthur are all exam-ples in the Western tradition of the relationship between a persuasive speaker and a people at various key watershed turning points in our civilization’s history.

The survival of these vivid heroic testaments is proof of the evolu-tionary value of the Bardic Dynamic. Science has not made these “trains of thought” irrelevant. It unraveled some important mysteries, no doubt. But it also endorsed an unfortunate spiritual shriveling that has inhibited the development of the older and more robust personali-ties that our forebears displayed so boldly. Fortunately, the seed form of these personalities has partially been preserved in our poetry and literature in exactly the same way that amber perfectly fossilizes an-cient life forms.


Although the United States is still young in the grand scheme of human events and fast heading off a cliff, several American poets have periodically attempted to enunciate an American epic that put forth a heroic vision of our historical experience. These efforts provide us with a starting point of a stand, if nothing else. Realistic beginnings have been made against a backdrop of frontier development and sub-sequent worldly engagement during the 20th century. According to Jeffrey Walker in his book Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson:

The poets had taken up the Whitmanesque project for a “great psalm of the republic” that would cultivate a national ethos—or the vital will of what they imagined to be a latent aristocracy, a “true America,” the necessary catalyst for creating a splendid, even world-redeeming national civilization. The ethical cultiva-tion of this vital, aristocratic will required, the modernists be-lieved, the communication of historical intelligence, the moral gist arising from a mythic history that “told the tale” of struggle between the agents of creative will and the anti-vital, torpid, and degenerative counterforces in the common mind. But the bardic poem would not tell that tale, at least not directly. Instead, it would enact the discovery of a sublime historical intelligence and would seek through the dramatic presentation of a bardic voice to involve the reader in that process.11 In 1909, when Pound was discovering his Whitmanesque identi-ty, he was also carrying on a correspondence with his mother about . . . the nature of epic and the role of the American poet. Pound’s examples, in that exchange, were Dante and Whitman, and his definition of epic was “the speech of a nation through the mouth of one man.” Obviously, the definition is debatable, as far as a theory of epic goes, but it is highly revealing as a descrip-tion of the American bardic voice. Like Whitman, then, Pound would constitute himself as the elect of the elect, the voodoo aristocrat or shaman-king, and would align himself with ancient powers and ancestral spirits. Their

11 Jeffrey Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem: Whitman, Pound, Crane,

Williams, Olson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 81.


voices, as a nation or a tribe, would emerge from his own mouth. Through the abysmic bard, Whitman said, many long-dumb voices speak. And, like Whitman, the bardic Pound would speak in the interest of cultural, political, and economic revolution as the decayed aristocracies of the past gave way to the new/old order. The American bard would speak once more with a terri-ble negative voice, denouncing infidelism where he found it and announcing or promoting a countervision of right conduct and right society. He would promote the ethical will of an ebullient, freely creative “eugenic paganism”—the modern version of Whitman’s “savage virtue.” He would promote also a revitalized society providing that will with scope for its fullest expression.12

Pound sought to resurrect an American artifex, a term that connotes

something akin to the “Renaissance Man” of modern parlance, a sin-cere and versatile genius capable of harnessing the diverse compo-nents of a civilization together. Odysseus was a classic example of this type from ancient times, with his crafty and brilliant leadership skills. Pound believed that a man like Thomas Jefferson was the epitome of the artifex in North America. Jefferson had an inventive and creative mind. He was more than just an administrator. He was polumetis (many-minded), a multifaceted statesman who was also an architect and an artist. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini,13 Pound suggests that Jeffer-son was the de facto ruler of the United States during the entire genera-tion following Washington’s initial leadership.

Obviously, that is debatable, but the illustration is useful because it suggests that the magnetic power of charismatic leadership might ex-tend beyond the parameters of authorized governing powers (e.g., the four-year presidential term). Influence is ultimately related not to po-sitions held but rather to the power of presence. Pound tried to establish a vivid similarity between the type of leadership that he perceived in Benito Mussolini and his conception of Jefferson’s example. Sidestep-ping the obvious dissimilarities, he encouraged his audience to view the two as talented political artists and men who were in touch with the “root-and-branch” elements of their respective folk communities.

12 Ibid., 84–85. 13 Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley Nott, 1935). http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/pound_ezra/jeffmuss.html


The artist has been at peace with his oppressors long enough. He has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly. We turn back, we artists, to the powers of the air, to the djinns who were our allies aforetime, to the spirits of our ancestors . . . The aristocracy of entail and of title is decayed, the aristocracy of commerce is decaying, the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service . . . and we who are the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo, we artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control. (Ezra Pound, 1914)14

Yet Pound ultimately failed in this project. This was partly because

he could not connect his “terrible negative voice” to a national audi-ence. If anything, his more polished poetry is aimed at a small circle of fellow poets, revolutionaries, and sacerdotal literati (priestly men of let-ters outside of the Church). In my opinion, his masterwork, The Can-tos, is impossibly obscure, fragmented, and esoteric. Although that doesn’t necessarily nullify its value, he himself was divided over its ultimate utility for posterity. For those with a deep multilingual knowledge of various cultural literary episodes arranged in a bizarre labyrinth of cinematic moments, it may provide considerable insight. It is still highly regarded in some circles. He even won a Bollingen Prize for it, while he was languishing in a mental institution because of his sympathies in World War II.

Pound spent a large amount of his professional life as an expatriate in Europe, extrapolated from that “common mind” in the heartland of America which desperately needed leadership, especially from some-one attempting to create a “great psalm of the republic.” While there is something to be said for distancing art from the bourgeois mentali-ty, it is also possible to become too estranged from one’s people to maintain any sort of decipherable communication. And despite his genuine attempts at preventing American intervention in Europe dur-ing World War II, he engaged in the dubious strategy of aligning him-self with the Italian Fascist regime after the US had decided to go to war and was ultimately labeled a traitor and insane. This has effec-tively cut him off from younger generations who have not been able to resonate with his political choices.

Nevertheless, it is still important to note that Pound is considered to be the preeminent poet of the Modernist movement in the 20th cen-

14 Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem, 84.


tury. His definition of Modernism is summed up in his encourage-ment to all artists to “Make it new!” His threefold formula for con-temporary poetry from his essay “The Art of Poetry” still holds water:

Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome15

This “newness” was not aimed at forgetting or destroying the past

but rather towards bringing it into the present more effectively. In a review of The H.D. Book,16 by Robert Duncan, Greer Mansfield sug-gested that

even though Pound, H.D., and their fellow Modernists were re-volting against rhetorically cluttered and metrically anemic “late Romantic” verse, restoring meaning and vigor to poetry by cut-ting words and drawing with clear and precise lines, they were also conscious inheritors (and refiners) of pre-Raphaelite and Romantic poetry. Pound and H.D. both wrote poems filled with romantic pre-Raphaelite imagery of flowers and trees, longhaired maidens and chivalrous knights. It was imbued with what Pound called “the spirit of romance.” T. S. Eliot17 dedicated The Wasteland to him, as Pound had been Eli-

ot’s chief editor. He was a close friend of W. B. Yeats. Pound encoun-tered almost every luminous aesthete of his day on the Right and the Left, and virtually all of them were impressed by his erudition and fluidic intelligence. He advanced many of their careers. He also made many important social comments outside of his poetry, especially re-garding usury, that serve to verify contemporary reactions against the materialism which has fully succeeded in infiltrating and corrupting our intelligentsia today.

15 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 3. 16 Greer Mansfield, review of The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 2011). http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2011_08_017955.php 17 An online documentary about T. S. Eliot and Modernism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnD75tk6uO4&NR=1


Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, a town in the Idaho frontier territo-ry, in 1885. His fiery radio rants in Italy during the War had a folksy, populist tone. Even from the pinnacle of the avant-garde of Modern-ism, he was unable to fully shed his uncouth and raw American roots which couldn’t help but to “tell it l’ak it is.”18 Pound explained his understanding of the Fascist movement as a struggle to embrace qual-ity over quantity.

The fascist revolution was FOR the preservation of certain liber-ties and FOR the maintenance of a certain level of culture, certain standards of living, it was NOT a refusal to come down to a level of riches or poverty, but a refusal to surrender certain immaterial prerogatives, a refusal to surrender a great slice of the cultural heritage.19

Unsurprisingly, establishment critic Jeffrey Walker is convinced

neither by Pound’s example nor his “take” on Fascism. He suggests that Pound’s voice is irrelevant because he said unattractive things and he failed to convince a larger group that he was right. His failure, according to Walker, is connected to a charismatic and moral short-coming. Like many others, he takes Pound to task for his anti-Semitism and instead offers up (in a strange detour if one does not al-ready know how the cultural terrain is mapped) the good Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (!) as an alternatively successful sacerdotal liter-atus, who succeeded in altering the national will, where Pound and his fellow elites had failed.20

However, Walker winds up with this interesting speculation: Let us suppose, for a moment, that the poets are right. Their ar-gument is not, after all, wholly without sources of appeal. The mythic history with which they work, not to mention the ele-mental antithesis of Jefferson and Hamilton (or a sort of populist republicanism versus Federalism, big government, and the banks) is a version of a mainstream political mythology that is still viable today.

18 Ezra Pound’s Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. by Leonard W. Doob. http://www.whale.to/b/pound.html 19 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Chapter XXXII. 20 Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem, 238.


The poets also have available to them a potent, commonplace notion of personal liberty, as well as a belief in the moral respon-sibilities of legislators and men of affairs. It is conceivable then, that the literatus could use his mythic his-tory to convince us that the rights of man—conceived in terms of personal liberty within a stable and beautiful social order—could best be served by an enlightened authoritarianism, or by a privi-leged aristocratic intelligentsia that looks to the artist for its ethi-cal guidance and promotes the enterprise of factive, inventive individuals. It may be possible to demonstrate that the demo-liberal, egalitar-ian ideals of “anonymous government” or “mobocracy” really are absurdities (as William James suggested) and inconsistent with the lessons of history. It may be true, in short, that the poets preferred authoritarian polity is really most consistent with the high national ambition to create a splendid, world-redeeming civilization equal to, or better than, the greatest civilizations of the past. If the poets could really convince us of the justice and responsibility of their preference, we would unquestionably be driven to a hard choice, one involving a profound redefinition of the national ethos.21 Rather than redefining the national ethos, I would assert that the

process would be closer to a reminding of something that is already there, namely, the historical and literary experience of the Rest of the West.

Despite his genuflection before the gods of political correctness, I do like that Walker entertained the idea that public speakers and statesmen could attain to the sacerdotal literatus status. It offers a novel perspective on energetic populism as a precursor to the higher con-cept of a leader as prophetic seer and of a bard as a lot more than a court jester or rhymester.

The Bardic Dynamic, therefore, is still an unfinished and open-ended project in the United States. I believe that its further evolution will involve the development and emergence of distinctive new voices

21 Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem, 239.


from a populist soil which will then “blow the top off” through some form of comprehensive nullification at a local yet global level. It will probably look, on the surface, very much like the populism of earlier generations with one primary qualification: conscious White advoca-cy. If we speak for White people, then we must speak as White people.

We’ve never had to qualify it like that before (except, of course, in the South) because we assumed either that racial consciousness was a given or that we had to be vague in order to sidestep modern politi-cally correct sensibilities. No longer. Now, it must be taken and se-cured with a well-tempered righteousness that then assumes a mantle and populist rhetoric that is already in place.

Other people do not do things like we do. We cannot speak for them. Nor should we try. In order to be useful, therefore, this histori-cal intelligence must fundamentally reassert the moral claim of the traditional White people and culture of the United States. The White folk built this country. It is ours, if we act. As Joel Chandler Harris once mused, “I think . . . that no novel or story can be genuinely American, unless it deals with the common people, that is, the country people.”22 That goes for the epic, too.

The Bardic Dynamic could be focused on facilitating charismatic leadership by promoting confidence in the traditional people and cul-ture of the West as a substitute for the guilt and groveling that is cur-rently poured out by the mainstream media. It may also be useful in reestablishing the conduit between a leader and a people. It looks to the communicative popular arts and is trained on heroic endeavor and example as recorded by our writers, storytellers, artists and pub-lic speakers, rather than on scholarly abstractions that flee to the cita-del of a scholastic environment, a Parisian salon, or a downtown high rise. It seeks a soapbox and a town square, or a good bonfire. Most of all, it seeks fellows of a like mind.

You ask me what my program is. Here it is, you hicks. And don’t you forget it. Crucify ’em! Crucify Joe Harrison. Crucify any-body who stands in your way. Crucify MacMurfee if he don’t deliver. Crucify anybody who stands in your way. You hand me the hammer and the ten-penny and I’ll do it with my own hand. Crucify ’em on the barn door! And don’t fan away the blue-

22 Julia Collier, ed., Joel Chandler Harris, Editor and Essayist (Chapel Hill: Universi-

ty of North Carolina Press, 1931), 182.


bottles with any turkey wing! (Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men23)

Charismatic leadership depends on resonance. Resonance in the US

depends on understanding the predominant features of the common American White character and in relaying that understanding effec-tively. For examples on the political front, we would do well to reex-amine American populists, including 19th-century figures like An-drew Jackson and David Crockett, and especially 20th-century figures like Huey Long and George Wallace, who, for a time, harnessed the “voice of a people” in response to the Eastern Establishment’s destruc-tive incursions into their communities. They were extraordinarily tal-ented, spontaneous public speakers. Popular prejudice short circuits consideration of these southerners. Perhaps it is time for a reassess-ment. We desperately need leaders with their powers of persuasion now.

Over the past 250 years Americans started something original and ultimately conquered the best part of an entire continent, despite the enormous setback of the Civil War. At the close of frontier settlement in 1891, the American citizen, excluding considerations of the newly freed Blacks, native Indians and Hispanics, represented the most thorough revitalization of European blood in the history of Western civilization. This was the melting pot in the best sense of the term. No other process could possibly have erased the territorial boundaries of old Europe and enabled powerful new genetic strains to appear in such a short time. Thus, the point at which this new character begins to enter into the creative and literary imagination deserves special consideration because it is relatively free of alien antagonism and some of the strange doctrines that would come to infect our intelli-gentsia in the latter half of the 20th century. This is the moment when the authentic American “light body” is born. That point begins pre-cisely when and where the physical frontier was no more.

23 Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 134.

THE FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURE AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF THE TORAH

RICHARD FAUSSETTE

__________________________ You can spend many years looking at something without knowing

what you are looking at. You can examine every detail of something and not really know what it is. One day you cross a threshold, connect that significant piece of the puzzle and the picture emerges. You have not yet connected all the puzzle pieces but you know what the puzzle portrays, and that is how I came to recognize the fundamental struc-ture and systematic theology of the Torah.

I grew up in New York City. The classrooms of Yeshiva University were across the air shaft from my bedroom window. I rarely paid at-tention to the students as they sat in their classrooms, but, from time to time, they assembled in the bowels of the school building and I could heard their communal singing reverberate up and down the tenement block through the air shafts. At those times they sounded entirely different from the way they looked and I would stop what I was doing and listen to what I imagined to be a cohesive cohort of warriors engaged in vibrant song.

Over the years I learned to recognize Jewish names. My mother paid the rent to two brothers who had a Jewish name. The big stores on 181st Street had Jewish names. My doctors and dentist were Jew-ish. Even the man who owned the busy corner candy store was Jew-ish, so Jewish intelligence and business success were all around me growing up. When Charles Darwin and evolution came along in my teens I incorporated the Darwinian paradigm and eventually won-dered . . .

If this anomaly in intelligence and aptitude had something to do with Darwinian selection, where was it hidden in the Bible? The Bible was the one thing these successful people had in common, but only the first five books of the Bible; the Torah, were considered to be the “cornerstone of Jewish law and the foundation of Jewish culture.”1 In my mid-twenties I realized that at some point in my life I would have

1 A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People: From the Time of the Patriarchs to the Present,

ed. Eli Barnavi (London: Kuperard, 1998), 158.


to do a close reading of the entire Torah from a Darwinian perspec-tive. I was not interested in the seven days of creation, the Torah’s chronology or its genealogies. I was interested in people. It only took an undergraduate degree with a double major in psychology and an-thropology to see that I was already beyond the ideologically skewed social science curriculums. I acquired one of the neglected family Bi-bles and kept it near me all the time. I read books about niche theory, population regulation, the major religions, the evolution of the human brain, Stone Age culture, religious mysticism and the meaning of anx-iety, among many others, to get the necessary foundation to do the close reading I was contemplating. I hoped to learn the fundamental things men do to endure and excel in spite of the human condition. These “chosen” people were prolific and successful people and they had endured for thousands of years despite the seemingly over-whelming odds against them.

However, even after years of slow but steady preparation, reveal-ing the secrets of the Torah seemed a presumptuous undertaking and I began the close reading and abandoned it many times, procrastinat-ing for years, until I read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It was then that I came across Darwin’s thrilling reference to Genesis. In chapter one, titled “Variation under Domestication” under the head-ing “Principles of Selection Anciently Followed and Their Effects,” Darwin makes the following remark:

From passages in Genesis, it is clear that the colour of domestic animals was at that early period attended to.2

I looked up from the book in my lap and stared off into space for a

few moments enjoying the physical thrill of discovery. Then I laid my hands on the Bible next to me and paged through Genesis until I found the relevant passage in chapter thirty in the story of Jacob and Esau. The secret was in Genesis! Charles Darwin himself was pointing it out to me. Motivated by this remarkable turn of events I began to read Genesis slowly and painstakingly, poring carefully over every utterance and every behavior.

The Darwinian reading of the allegory of Jacob and Esau is straightforward. We are told outright that Jacob deliberately weakens

2 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: New American Library,

1958), 50.

Faussette, “Structure and Theology of the Torah” 93

Laban’s flocks. He breeds only the less vigorous animals in Laban’s flocks while breeding the most vigorous animals in his own. This is precisely what Laban has done to Jacob. Jacob had bargained with La-ban for Rachel’s hand, not “dull-eyed” Leah’s, but at the last minute Laban insists that, according to tradition, the elder daughter must be married before the younger and Jacob is forced to marry Leah and work seven more years for Rachel. By forcing Jacob to marry a dull-eyed wife first, Laban has potentially weakened Jacob’s human flock. The son of a dull-eyed woman will procure the birthright and title of patriarch and will rule over Jacob’s next generation. Jacob retaliates in kind by weakening Laban’s flocks in righteous indignation. God, how-ever, despite Laban’s substitution of Leah for Rachel, does not allow the son of a dull-eyed woman to rule over Jacob’s next generation. Ra-chel’s son Joseph, who is not entitled to the birthright as his cunning father Jacob was not entitled to it before him, will rise from the bottom of a well to become counselor to the Pharaoh while all of dull-eyed Leah’s sons make consistently wrong choices (Jacob catalogs their mistakes in chapter forty-nine). Over three generations, intelligence trumps birthright, as the elder duller brother serves the younger smarter brother.

Jacob’s embrace of what might be called a high-K reproductive style—meaning, in the case of humans, high intelligence and self-control—is the optimum behavioral response to the “Fall” of Adam and Eve.3 Once Adam and Eve could choose between good and evil, they had to learn the difference between them. Intelligent parents give birth to intelligent children who learn more and learn faster. The puz-zle pieces integral to the emerging structure were falling into place. This was not myth or fiction or history. This was social science couched in religious allegory.

When my close reading of Genesis was over, I was so struck by its succession of allegories that instead of continuing the close reading of

3 In population biology, the r/K continuum of reproductive strategies varies

from high r (relatively high fertility, low investment in offspring; e.g., rodents such as rats which can breed very rapidly and require little time and energy to become adults) to a high-K strategy (relatively low fertility, long lifespan, high investment in offspring). Humans are at the K-end of this continuum, but there is variation among humans in fertility and investment in children. The r/K continuum is basic to J. Philippe Rushton’s life history theory of race differences in behavior. See J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 3rd ed. (London, On-tario: The Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000).


the entire Torah I had planned, I quickly compiled an essay “The Book of Genesis from a Darwinian Perspective” and was fortunate to have it published almost immediately.4 At the end of the essay, I quoted Adolphe Franck’s The Kabbalah: The Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews to indicate what I had found:

At issue is an interpretation, or rather a doctrine which, although known, was taught under the seal of mystery; of a science no less fixed in form than in principles. . . . If we are to believe Maimon-ides—who, although a stranger to the Kabbalah, could not deny its existence—the first half, entitled “The Story of Genesis,” taught the science of nature.5 It was upon finishing the essay on Genesis and then simply consid-

ering the analysis of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, that the Torah’s fundamental structure and systematic theology ap-peared to me. I had not yet connected all the puzzle pieces but I now knew what the puzzle portrayed. I was able to recognize the funda-mental structure of the Torah because I had seen it before in an abbre-viated form in an earlier religious work, the Purusha Sukta (the Hymn to Man), an essential hymn of the Rig Veda. Like Genesis, the Purusha Sukta is a creation account of primeval man. As I considered a closer reading of Moses’ establishment of a nation out of an undifferentiated population of former slaves, I recalled what Moses had actually ac-complished and saw an analog for his accomplishments in the Vedic hymn. Here are the lines I recalled from the Purusha Sukta as I con-sidered Moses appointing Aaron priest and Joshua warrior:

When they dismembered Man, Into how many parts did they separate him? What was his mouth, what his arms, What did they call his thighs and feet? The Brahmin was his mouth; The Rajanya (Princes) became his arms.6

4 Richard Faussette, “The Book of Genesis from a Darwinian Perspective,” The

Occidental Quarterly 7(2) (Summer 2007), 37. 5 Adolphe Franck, The Kabbalah: The Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews (New

York: Bell Publishing, 1940), 16. 6 Antonio T. de Nicolas, Meditations through the Rig Veda, Four Dimensional Man

(Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1976), 226.


The dismemberment of Man in the Vedic hymn describes the most basic functional classes into which nations are organized and the changes that occur as a community moves from a non-sedentary to a sedentary life style.

So does the Torah: In Genesis, the patriarchs are nonsedentary shepherds who establish a diaspora in Egypt. Abraham is an armed shepherd who speaks directly to God. He tithes to Melchizedek, the pastoral archetype, whose name is warrior/priest; a man literally “re-membered.” In Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Man is then dismembered as he is in the Vedic hymn. Moses appoints a priestly (Brahmin) class and a warrior (Rajanya) class before the con-quest of Canaan begins and he offers his community a law written on stone tablets.

I could recall the description of Man’s dismemberment in the Vedic hymn, but perhaps because the novelty of a dismemberment is so striking, it was all I could recall from the hymn. I would have to go back to the hymn and verify the lines immediately before Man’s dis-memberment to see if they referred to a pastoral archetype—Man “re-membered.” I went to the shelf and found a translation.

Here are the lines preceding Man’s dismemberment in the Purusha Sukta:

From that [Man’s original cosmic sacrifice] horses were given birth, And cattle with two rows of teeth. Cows were born from that, And from that were born goats and sheep.7 The book of Genesis is a narrative. The Purusha Sukta is a hymn. Its

ideas are expressed in verse, its archaic language difficult for transla-tors, but it is evident that all of the animals named in these few lines preceding the description of Man’s dismemberment are domesticated animals; animals “given birth” by nonsedentary pastoralists; men re-membered. The Torah structure set against the relevant lines of the Purusha Sukta may be seen in Table 1 below.

The above comparison indicates that the process of Man’s “dis-memberment” into functional classes that occurs when human groups transition from a nonsedentary to a sedentary lifestyle were known to Vedic priests from five hundred to a thousand years before they ap-

7 Ibid., 225.


pear in the Torah structure. The Vedic hymns are a part of the Indo-Iranian religious traditions of the Persian Empire. According to the book of Ezra, a Persian emperor authorized the Torah. ______________________________________________________________

The Torah Parusha Sukta Genesis “From that Establishing a diaspora [i.e., Man’s original cosmic sacrifice] Pastoralism Horses were given birth Man Re-membered And cattle with two rows of teeth Cows were born from that

And from that were born goats and sheep

_____________________________________________________ Exodus When they dismembered Man, Leviticus Into how many parts did Numbers they separate him? Deuteronomy What was his mouth, what his arms Establishing a nation What did they call his thighs and Nationalism feet? Man Dismembered The Brahmin was his mouth

The Rajanya (Princes) became his arms.”

Table 1: Comparison of the Torah and the Parusha Sukta.

______________________________________________________________

Given that a route of transmission from the Asian steppe to Jerusalem exists, it is not entirely unexpected to have found this anciently un-derstood religious and political process encoded in the Torah struc-ture itself.

The fundamental Torah structure is a loop, with nonsedentary di-aspora life established by entering Egypt from Canaan and sedentary national life established by entering Canaan from Egypt.

PRIEST’S MODE OF CONQUEST, WARRIOR’S MODE OF CONQUEST

The priestly mode of conquest is hidden in pastoral Genesis. The following sequence of passages show how the priestly mode of con-quest functions.


In Genesis we are presented with Abraham’s future reproductive success. God promises Abraham that his descendants will be greatly multiplied until they are “as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore,” and God tells Abraham they “shall possess the cities of their enemies.”8

The Genesis promise is not left to chance. In Leviticus we have spe-cific laws conducive to the high fertility (within a high-investment, K-style reproductive regime) promised by God in Genesis.9

You shall not approach a woman to have intercourse with her during her period of menstruation. You shall not have sexual in-tercourse with the wife of your fellow countryman and so make yourself unclean with her. You shall not surrender any of your children to Moloch and thus profane the name of your God. . . . You shall not lie with a man as with a woman: that is an abomi-nation. You shall not have sexual intercourse with any beast to make yourself unclean with it, nor shall a woman submit herself to intercourse with a beast: that is a violation of nature.10 One of these forbidden practices (having sex with a fellow Israelite)

jeopardizes family and group stability, another forbids consigning newborn children to the sacrificial flames. The rest do not result in pregnancy. God explains what happens when you ignore the prohibi-tions:

8 Genesis 22:17. 9 For a discussion of the ideology of high reproductive success and the im-

portance of genetic segregation, see also Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2002; originally published by Praeger, 1994), Chapter 3, 52:

The religion of the Tanakh was greatly concerned with reproductive success, endogamy, and cultural separation from surrounding peoples within a dias-pora context. It was a religion with powerful sanctions on individuals who worship other gods or stray from group goals, and one in which lowered re-productive success is the result of deviation from life within the confines of the kinship group, while those who continued in the kinship group would be rewarded with great reproductive success and eventual revenge and domina-tion. 10 Leviticus 18:19–24.


You shall not make yourselves unclean in any of these ways, for in these ways the heathen, whom I am driving out before you, made themselves unclean. This is how the land became unclean, and I punished it for its iniquity so that it spewed out its inhabit-ants. You, unlike them, shall keep my laws and my rules: none of you, whether natives or aliens settled among you, shall do any of these abominable things. The people who were there before you did these abominable things and the land became unclean. So the land will not spew you out for making it unclean as it spewed them out; for anyone who does any of these abominable things shall be cut off from his people. Observe my charge there-fore, and follow none of the abominable institutions customary before your time; do not make yourselves unclean with them. I am the Lord your God.11 The message is consistent from Genesis to Leviticus. Genesis makes

the promise of high reproductive success and Leviticus provides the practical behavioral framework for achieving it. The combined effects of the high quantity birthing prescribed by Abraham and the high quality birthing prescribed by Jacob result in the potential for their tribal communities to displace native populations, but they are en-joined to also remain endogamous and segregated from those native populations among whom they disperse. Upon the return of the Baby-lonian exiles to Jerusalem under Ezra, Israelite leaders reported that many of the people, including priests and Levites, had married with foreign wives and adopted the abominable practices of the Canaan-ites. Ezra is shocked and humiliated before God and reminds them of their potential as an endogamous community.

The land which you are entering and will possess is a polluted land, polluted by the foreign population with their abominable practices, which have made it unclean from end to end. There-fore do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons, and do not marry your sons to their daughters, and never seek their welfare or prosperity. Thus you will be strong and enjoy the good things of the land, and pass it on to your children as an ev-erlasting possession.12

11 Leviticus 18:24–30. 12 Ezra 9:11–13.


Many scholars believe Ezra to be the Torah’s chief author/redactor. Ezra certainly knows that generations of high quality, high quantity birthing will give the Israelites enormous potential to out-compete na-tive populations. Native populations will decline in numbers and in strength in the face of the Israelites’ rapid demographic and socioeco-nomic ascent. In addition, the Israelites religiously maintain the seg-regation of Goshen and the sexual prohibitions of Leviticus.

By the end of Genesis, Joseph, the intelligent son of intelligent par-ents, has remarkably risen from the bottom of a well to become coun-selor to the Pharaoh. He has established a diaspora for his family by having choice land set aside for them in Goshen where they can live as a segregated endogamous (high-K) community within Egypt. He has also set his men as herdsmen over the Pharaoh’s cattle and cen-tralized agriculture by dispossessing the formerly free and land-owning Egyptian farmers who become slaves in Egyptian cities.

Contrast the gradual population displacement of Genesis with the physical and immediate warrior’s conquest of Deuteronomy.

When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to occupy and drives out many nations before you—Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations more powerful and numerous than you—when the Lord your God delivers them into your power, and you defeat them, you must put them to death. You must not make a treaty with them or spare them.13 In the priestly mode of conquest, the native population is subjugat-

ed and “spewed out of the land” over generations. In the warrior’s mode of conquest, the native population is conquered and slaugh-tered.

MAN RE-MEMBERED: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A DIASPORA MAN DISMEMBERED: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATION

The national structure of “Man dismembered” portrayed in the Purusha Sukta and in the Torah arises from the pastoral structure of “Man re-membered” whose egalitarian society is dismembered into functional classes of priests and warriors when they settle down and become agriculturalists. For the primeval pastoralist there were no

13 Deuteronomy 7:1–2.


separate priest and warrior classes. The flat hierarchies of the earliest pastoralists are simpler than the functionally differentiated classes of sedentary agriculturalists. Man’s two major political roles; maintain-ing a community’s oral traditions and militarily advancing a commu-nity’s interests are responsibilities ideally assumed by all men in these smaller mobile populations.

In the process of pastoral Man’s dismemberment into national Man, a nonsedentary community settles down, adopts and intensifies agri-culture and eventually amasses an agricultural surplus. As agriculture becomes more efficient many more people are born but fewer of them are engaged in food production. The growing society stratifies. Priest and warrior classes necessarily emerge because large diverse popula-tions have to be taught the shared traditions and norms ordained by their elites, and stored agricultural surplus and sedentary communi-ties have to be guarded.

The priest and warrior classes into which Man is dismembered in the Vedic Purusha Sukta and in the saga of Moses in Exodus, Leviti-cus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are typical of sedentary agricultural societies; nations with borders, a priestly class, a warrior class and written laws.

Men re-membered do not know borders and have no priestly class, warrior class or written laws. Men re-membered memorize their oral traditions. They are disciplined to make the self-sacrifice. Men re-membered are nonsedentary priest/kings with the laws of God “writ-ten on their hearts.”

THE RETURN FROM THE FALL: RE-MEMBERING MAN

The story of the Fall of Adam and Eve contains a very simple for-mula; the central hub around which the fundamental structure and systematic theology of the Torah revolves. It is the formula for “writ-ing the law on your heart.”

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil the “eyes of both of them were opened and they dis-covered that they were naked; so they stitched fig-leaves together and made loincloths . . . and hid from the Lord God.”14

Allegorically, those lines describe two minds moving from one state of being to another. Actually, those lines are about Man himself loosening the bonds of instinct and embracing learned behavior. The

14 Genesis 3:6–7.


Biblical author does not know anything about evolution’s transitional forms or Mendelian genetics but he can see the differences between the men and animals in front of him. He knows that animals behave instinctively because he can easily lead a lamb to slaughter. The lamb does not have an awareness of what is about to happen and cannot anticipate its own demise. The lamb does not pause to consider its choices. The lamb does not “sin.” Only men anticipate their own de-mise and bear the guilt of their sins for it is only after eating the for-bidden fruit that Adam and Eve acquire the knowledge of good and evil and can freely choose between them. Before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve had lived instinctively, like the animals. Before the Fall, there was only one choice to make. Do they eat from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” or not? Will they maintain the in-stinctive behavior they were endowed with at their creation and con-tinue to live according to God’s will and in God’s presence or do they venture out beyond what God has allotted them into a world of good and evil?

Adam and Eve choose to venture out, as they must, because their fallen condition is our human condition, and it is our fallen human condition that the Biblical author is describing. Adam and Eve’s sud-den realization after eating the forbidden fruit is of a shift in their state of being. At the Torah’s allegorical level, it happens in an instant of Biblical time; but the transition actually occurred over millions of years of biological time as the human brain increased in size and complexity and man developed his unique intelligence and an acute sense of self-consciousness. The fundamental nature of the shift is de-scribed very specifically in the Biblical text. Adam and Eve open their eyes, cover their nakedness, and hide from God.

Adam and Eve open their eyes to self-consciousness in a Biblical in-stant, compressing millions of years of evolutionary time. Their ex-panded consciousness of the self generates ontological anxiety—the fear of sin and death. Paul Tillich, the philosopher and theologian lec-turing at Yale University declared, “Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being.”15 The discipline of self-sacrifice returns a man from the Fall by eliminating the fear generated by the threat of non-being—the self-conscious awareness of the inevitability of death. By eliminating concern for the self, the individual’s sense of ego is diffused, and anxiety over the threat of non-being subsides.

15 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 155.


As Tillich writes, “Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being.” The self-sacrifice eliminates the threat of non-being through disciplines that affirm the essential self (the Spirit) by surrendering the threatened self (the body).

To return from the Fall, a man learns God’s will and writes it on his heart. Having made learned behavior intuitive, a man becomes a liv-ing sacrifice. He does not need a priest, a temple or a written law. He is both priest and warrior; a man re-membered in the succession of Melchizedek16 the priest/king, to whose order Jesus Christ belongs. He lives fearlessly and proudly in God’s presence. He is “perfect.”17 “Scripture and theology tell us that the blessed see God face to face.”18

CONCLUSION: THE FUNDAMENTALS OF STEPPE PASTORALISM

There was a time when there were only animals on the vast central Asian steppe. Men followed the animals and gradually came to occu-py the steppe by subjugating the animals. Men followed their animals across the steppe and through the seasons from pasture to pasture. The nonsedentary men of the steppe multiplied and began to en-croach upon one another and compete, ever more intensely, over the wildly fluctuating resources of the now fully occupied vast open steppe.

If I am a man with my family on the wide open steppe where there are no natural defenses, what do I have to defend myself from the other nonsedentary communities on the steppe? Perhaps I have my father, my brothers, my sons, my uncles, my nephews, my cousins. I am always striving to have as many fighting men as I can and the best weapons I can obtain because there is nowhere for us to run and hide on the steppe, so when the only resources I have to ensure my surviv-al are my brains, my courage and my brothers, I want more of them; more brains (high-K reproduction), more courage (self-sacrifice) and more brothers (high fertility).19

16 Hebrews 5:6. 17 Genesis 17:2: “Live always in my presence and be perfect.” 18 The Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.catholicity.com/encyclopedia/h/heaven.html 19 Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and

Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 200. The fundamentals of steppe pastoralism from a geneticist’s point of view: “The potential for rapid population growth following the increase of herds, the advantage of life in the open with frequent change of environment . . . the ability to move rapidly and


The allegories in Genesis illustrate fundamental truths of steppe pastoralism; the need to have as many courageous defenders as you can muster (a necessity on the vast central Asian steppe where there are no natural defenses), coupled with the additional need for each of those defenders to be as intelligent and as technologically equipped for war as he can be.

The high-fertility reproduction of Abraham (have as many children as you can), the high-K reproductive style advocated by Jacob (marry well among your own) and the discipline of self-sacrifice are essential elements of the Torah structure. These strategies address the ecologi-cal stresses on steppe pastoralists in an environment with no natural defenses at or near carrying capacity over thousands of years.

Abraham the shepherd is forbidden by God to practice infanticide (which promotes fertility) and Jacob the shepherd breeds Laban’s flocks weaker while breeding his own flocks stronger.

The Torah is not to be regarded as mere myth, fiction or history. The Torah’s two fundamental literary, religious and political struc-tures: the worldwide Jewish diaspora established by Joseph in Gene-sis, and the nation of Israel established by Moses in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, stand established in strength in the 21st century.

form large bands of well-trained warriors . . . the development of very effective weapons and tactics . . . All these preadaptations have made it likely that strong groups of pastoral nomads could move to invade and control rich agricultural re-gions even though they were, in terms of relative numbers, small minorities.”

SQUANDERING OUR INHERITANCE

Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations by Richard Lynn Ulster Institute for Social Research, Revised 2nd Ed., 2011 Reviewed by F. Roger Devlin

Two years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, a now-forgotten French physician named Bénédict Morel published his Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Race. He attributed the degeneration he hypothesized to the compara-tively high fertility of prostitutes, paupers and criminals, as well as to contemporary improvements in public health which allowed sickly and weak persons to live long enough to pass on their deficiencies to their offspring.

Morel’s work found no echo in his own time and country, but Darwin’s theories soon led to the independent discovery of the same set of problems in Britain. Darwin himself believed that humanitarian intervention to help the weak would prove injurious to the human race as a whole, and in The Descent of Man he wrote: “Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree infirm in body or in mind.”

One early student of Darwin was his distant cousin Francis Galton. In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton took the logical step of proposing to counteract human degeneration by promoting high fertility among the gifted: “As it is easy to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several con-secutive generations.” In 1883 he coined the term eugenics—Greek for “good breeding”—as a name for his proposal. (‘Dysgenics’ only made its appearance in 1915 as a term to denote the problem which eugenics was intended to solve.)

During the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics be-came a successful movement, “popular to the point of faddishness,” as one author observed. Most scientists supported it, as did public figures of every background and belief. And, contrary to a common misconception, the movement was not brought to a halt by World


War II; it continued largely unabated into the 1960s. The book under review highlights one London conference of 1963: “Three of the most distinguished biologists of the time, Hermann Muller, Joshua Leder-berg and Francis Crick, all of whom had won the Nobel Prize for their work on genetics, recognized the seriousness of the problem of genetic deterioration and proposed methods for counteracting it.”

From about that time on, however, interest in eugenic issues de-clined quickly and drastically. More than one shallow author has in-terpreted this decline as the equivalent of a refutation: human knowledge always progresses, doesn’t it?

Indeed it does not, and mankind has often forgotten what it once knew. No anti-eugenic zealot has ever pointed out exactly which sci-entific discovery or which rational argument rendered eugenic con-cerns obsolete in the 1960s. It fell victim to a shift in the Zeitgeist and nothing more.

The man most responsible for reviving discussion of the issues is Richard Lynn. In Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, he pursues the following objectives: “to show that the eugenicists were right in their belief that natural selection has broken down and that, as a consequence, genetic deterioration is occurring in modern populations; to present the evidence for this; and to assess the magni-tude of the problem.”

Praeger Publishers under the editorship of Seymour Itzkoff brought out the first edition of the work in 1996. Unfortunately, be-cause of the controversial nature of the books published under his edi-torship (including Kevin MacDonald’s trilogy on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy), Itzkoff was later replaced by a more conven-tional editor. As a result, this book, along with several others on polit-ically incorrect themes, was permitted to go out of print. Several months ago, this reviewer wished to consult Dysgenics and was able to locate just one used copy for sale over the internet—priced at one thousand dollars!

It was extremely gratifying, therefore, to learn of the appearance of this second edition. Lynn has updated the data and the bibliography, and added two new chapters.

Females of all primate species mate preferentially with males to-ward the top of the status hierarchy. This serves to spread genes which enable males to out-compete rivals, such as those which favor health, strength, intelligence and ambition. In all pre-industrial hu-man societies, males lacking these qualities tended either to die young

Devlin, “Squandering Our Inheritance” 107

(natural selection) or not to get chosen for mating by fertile females (sexual selection). The process was cruel, but it helped to maintain and improve the genetic quality of the human species as a whole.

During the nineteenth century, selection against the genes of the poor within Western nations faltered due to improvements in nutri-tion and sanitation, as well as immunization and other checks on the spread of infectious diseases.

This might have led to a population explosion, but the increase was moderated by a rapidly ensuing parallel decline in fertility, which Lynn attributes primarily to increased use of contraception. This hap-pened in France as early as 1800; in the rest of Europe, the decline set in around 1900.

This two-part process has come to be known as the demographic transition: a shift from maintaining population through high fertility and high mortality to achieving the same end with low mortality and low fertility. Both trends have continued and intensified over the twentieth century, as governmental “welfare” schemes began subsi-dizing the offspring of the least capable members of society while the fertility of the most capable fell far below replacement level.

While these two counteracting causes serve to keep population size fairly stable, it greatly damages genetic quality by effectively re-versing the process of natural selection; for diminishing fertility main-ly results in selection against the genes of successful people, while the genes of less successful people are differentially successful because their bearers are more fertile. This dysgenic pattern is evident in three areas: health, intelligence and moral character.

Another problem is that genetic mutations may be getting more common as a result of rising exposure to radiation and industrial and agricultural chemicals. Deleterious genes are certainly surviving and being propagated more often, thanks to antibiotics, surgical proce-dures and other treatments for genetic disorders. One study indicates that, under present conditions and over a thirty-year period, the inci-dence of hemophilia can be expected to increase by 26 percent, cystic fibrosis by 120 percent, and phenylketonuria by 300 percent. Although research in this area is still sketchy, and takes up only a single chapter of the present book, we can be confident that gene-related health problems will increase in the decades to come.

Lynn concentrates more heavily on dysgenic fertility for intelli-gence. Early studies involved measuring the correlation between a child’s intelligence and his or her average number of siblings. They


found that smart children tended to have few or no siblings, while the duller children tended to come from larger families. On this basis, re-searchers at the time estimated that British average IQ was declining at a rate of about 2 points per generation. Richard Lynn revived the method in 1993, and found this decline continuing at the slower pace of 0.8 points per generation.

On the other hand, intelligence is not exclusively determined by genes; it is affected by nutrition, developmental trauma, and so forth. Lynn estimates that 71 percent of measured (“phenotypic”) intelli-gence is due to genetic influence. Using this estimate for the heritabil-ity of intelligence, Lynn arrives at a genotypic decline in British intelli-gence of around 1.42 IQ points in the early twentieth century, slowing to 0.57 points later in the century. This decline can be directly ascribed to dysgenic fertility.

Sibling studies have the disadvantage of leaving childless couples out of consideration. Since separate studies have indicated above av-erage intelligence for childless couples, their inclusion would have yielded a higher total rate of decline.

American researchers pioneered the direct correlation of parent-child IQs. The best and most recent of these studies indicate a decline of genotypic intelligence among White Americans of 0.75 points per generation. As in Britain, there is evidence that the decline was steep-er earlier in the century. Lynn estimates a total average genotypic de-cline in the intelligence of White Americans for the period 1885–2010 (about five generations) at around 5 IQ points, or one point per gener-ation. The effect has been greater for women than for men, and greater for Blacks than for Whites.

Few intergenerational studies of IQ have been conducted in Eu-rope. The best was a 1969 Scottish study indicating a dysgenic effect of 0.58 points per generation. A Greek study conducted in the early 1950s indicated that men in professional or managerial jobs (average IQ: 117.2) had an average of 1.78 children. Fertility rose steadily as one moved down the social scale to 5.56 children for unskilled workers (average IQ: 82.2). This indicates strongly dysgenic fertility in mid-20th-century Greece.

Besides health and intelligence, Francis Galton was interested in the genetic fate of a third human trait which he called “character.” Lynn explains this as a “syndrome of socially desirable qualities com-prising honor, integrity, prudence, self-discipline, the control of anti-social behavior, including crime; a sense of social obligation; and the


motivation to work for long term goals.” Modern researchers refer to this same set of qualities as “conscientiousness.”

No one has ever developed an entirely satisfactory method for quantifying conscientiousness. If it is indeed a syndrome of related traits rather than a single trait, it may not even admit of any unequiv-ocal measurement. For relevant evidence, the author looked to sur-veys regarding moral values, indicators of “work ethic,” smoking, al-coholism, sexual restraint and crime; each of these reflects some part of what is meant by “conscientiousness.”

One survey questioned people on the priority they assigned to eighteen values, including pleasure, a sense of accomplishment, a comfortable life and mature love. The study found that the (usually more fertile) people low on the socioeconomic ladder placed a higher value on pleasure and comfort, while the (less fertile) people higher up were more likely to stress accomplishment and love.

The concept of a “work ethic” goes back, of course, to Max Weber, who defined it in the best Prussian style as the tendency to work out of a sense of personal or social duty rather than solely in order to ob-tain money. Alternatively, one might consider it the disposition to find work intrinsically satisfying. Various studies have shown a work ethic to be more characteristic of those higher on the social scale.

Recklessness in the matter of smoking, alcohol consumption and sexual behavior all indicate low conscientiousness, and all are found especially among the lower orders. But the very best indicator of low conscientiousness is crime. Contrary to what one might infer from watching television, most crime is not committed by well-groomed White businessmen; it is disproportionately the doing of unskilled workers and the underclass. Lynn personally investigated the fertility of British criminals in 1995, and found them 77 percent more fertile than the British average.

In chapter 15, Lynn expands the scope of his investigation to the non-Western world. He believes that fertility in Africa may not yet be dysgenic, since it is hardly controlled at all by any segment of the population. Differential fertility, however, is only half the story of dysgenics; the other half is the increased survival rate, due to modern medicine, of those with weak genes. The current African population explosion would seem to indicate that this is taking place in Africa, but Lynn does not discuss it.

Four Asian nations—Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Fiji—seem to be successfully moderating human fertility rather evenly


across the social classes, and thus to be avoiding dysgenic conse-quences. Lynn has no explanation for this anomaly, and it will be in-teresting to see whether it continues in the future.

For the rest of the world, there is evidence of dysgenic fertility of the same nature as in the West. In most of these countries the demo-graphic transition is still in its early stages, however, so the dysgenic pattern is not as strong as it has now become in the West.

New to this second edition of Dysgenics is a chapter on the genetic effects of migrations. One widespread phenomenon is the internal migration of intelligent persons from the countryside to seek their for-tunes in cities. In France, Britain and Portugal, residents of the capitals have higher IQs than their provincial countrymen; in central Lisbon the difference surpasses 17 points.

Foreign emigration is likely to be dysgenic more often than not since, as Lynn notes, “a reasonably high IQ is needed to envisage the advantages and find the resources to migrate.” Massive nineteenth-century emigration probably explains why Ireland today has the low-est national IQ in Northern Europe, at 92.

The more serious problem for the West today, of course, is dysgen-ic immigration. Lynn attributes the problem to four major causes: lib-eral asylum laws, labor shortages in the aftermath of World War II, allowance of immigration from former colonies and—in the US, Can-ada and Australia—a desire to increase the population.

The America of 1960 was 88 percent White and had an average IQ of 98.2. By 2000, Whites had sunk to 71 percent of the population and the national IQ had dipped to 96.8. By 2050, Whites are predicted to constitute just 45 percent of the population, and the average American IQ will fall to 92.4.

In Britain the same process is occurring at a slightly slower pace. Whites are currently predicted to fall below 50 percent of the popula-tion around 2066. White fertility in Britain now stands at 1.6 children per woman. Among immigrants from Pakistan (IQ: 92), Bangladesh (IQ: 92) and Somalia (IQ: 86), the figure is 5.0 children per woman.

Similar processes are occurring in continental Europe but, for vari-ous reasons, they are more difficult to measure: some countries, such as Norway, count the descendants of immigrants as natives starting with the third generation; France refuses to count by national origin at all; and the many illegal immigrants all over Europe do not show up in official censuses. But it is clear both that on average immigrants have lower average IQs than indigenous Europeans and that their fer-


tility is significantly higher. Dysgenic fertility for conscientiousness is especially to be feared in

countries with large Black African populations. Black crime rates are everywhere higher than those of Whites, although incarceration ratios vary significantly: 2.4 times the White rate in Sweden, 5.9 in Britain, 8.26 in the USA.

Another chapter new to the second edition concerns the future of intelligence in the world as a whole. Lynn calculates average world IQ as 92.75 in 1950 and 90.31 in 2000. This measured decline of 2.44 IQ points corresponds to a 1.73-point genotypic decline, or 0.87 points per twenty-five year generation. Because of the extremely low fertility in high-IQ countries, Lynn predicts that this figure will rise to 1.29 points per generation over the first half of the twenty-first century, although this will probably be masked somewhat by phenotypic in-creases due to improved nutrition in parts of the developing world.

My early printing of this second edition of Lynn’s Dysgenics is, un-fortunately, marred by frequent typographical errors. I hope this needless shortcoming can be eliminated from later printings of what is surely the most authoritative work on its subject matter in the world today.

TOQ Spring 2012

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Transcript of TOQ Spring 2012