Essential Introduction to Kevin MacDonald

I want to introduce to you Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University.

He received a B. A. in Philosophy, a Masters degree in Evolutionary Biology and a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences.

Since assuming his position at California State University, his research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives on culture, developmental psychology and personality theory, the origins and maintenance of monogamous marriage in Western Europe, and ethnic relations (group evolutionary strategies). He is the author of more than 100 scholarly papers and reviews.

His most important book is considered The Culture of Critique (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , whose subtitle is "An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements".

In this book, and indeed in the trilogy of which it is part (The Culture of Critique series), he applies evolutionary theory to Judaism, arriving at the conclusion that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy, namely it helps the interests of the ingroup against the interests of rivals - the outgroups.

Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is the outgroups' response to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy that favours only Jewish interests at the expense of all others.

All three books are the fruit of extremely diligent and painstaking scholarly work.

Here's how MacDonald sums up The Culture of Critique (CofC) in the Preface to the First Paperback Edition of the book:

CofC describes how Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would neutralize or end anti-Semitism and enhance the prospects for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner. Several of these Jewish movements (e.g., the shift in immigration policy favoring non-European peoples) have attempted to weaken the power of their perceived competitors — the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia. At a theoretical level, these movements are viewed as the outcome of conflicts of interest between Jews and non-Jews in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues. Ultimately, these movements are viewed as the expression of a group evolutionary strategy by Jews in their competition for social, political and cultural dominance with non-Jews.

The "culture of critique" of the title can be described as the constant pattern of theoretical and intellectual attacks to which predominantly Jewish movements and elites have subjected the mainstream White, Gentile and Christian societies in which they've been living, attacks which have considerably weakened these societies' resistance to external and internal threats. Mass immigration, multiculturalism and Islamisation are contemporary examples of these threats, and they have been overwhelmingly not just supported but also promoted by Jewish communities in the West.

The Jewish movements analysed are

Freud, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasians, and the Frankfurt School, in which 'scientific' theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.

Boasians are the followers of Franz Boas, who established a highly influential school of thought in anthropology categorically denying the existence of human races and claiming that genetic differences between peoples are trivial and irrelevant.

It is thanks to this movement, that came to dominate the field of anthropology, that even believing in the existence of races and, more importantly, in differences among them is these days considered as racist.

I will return to MacDonald and his work in future articles but now I wish to introduce an autobiographical element.

During all the time I was in the counterjihad movement, I always felt that something wasn't quite right.

True, Islam is a serious problem, an inherently homicidal and supremacist doctrine disguised as a religion that threatens the whole world. I thought this then and I think this now.

But the question was: Islam is a foreign doctrine to the West, it's never been part of it and therefore it is - or at least it was - an external enemy to us.

The Western world is much stronger militarily, economically, politically, culturally than the Islamic world. How could the Occident be menaced by Islam, then?

If Muslim populations had been kept out of Western lands, they would have still represented a mortal threat to the unfortunate Christians living in Muslim-majority countries, but not to us. At one point someone opened the gates to Mohammedans, so that the invasion has not been by military conquest, as it happened sometimes in the past and was repelled by Christian armies, but by inordinate numbers of economic immigrants and true or false "refugees".

This is well-known recent history. But why not many people, even in the counterjihad, ask themselves and seek plausible answers to the question: who opened the gates and why?

The answers commonly given are not satisfactory: the Left, the politicians, and so on.

I was also giving myself these answers. Cultural Marxism was my best bet.

Now, I didn't then pause to reflect that Cultural Marxism is a typically Jewish movement.

Cultural Marxism's origins are traced back to Jewish intellectual György Lukács and Italian politician Antonio Gramsci, who married a Jewish woman, Julia Schucht; it was then developed by the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxists whose main inspirations and thinkers were overwhelmingly Jewish. Strange coincidences, when you think that Jews are a tiny fraction of the Western population.

Indeed, communism in its modern form is a Jewish creation. Its greatest, most influential authors are Marx for the theory, Lenin for the practice: both of Jewish background.

Bolshevism was disproportionately Jewish, and so has been radical Leftism in Western countries.

Not to mention another force that has been powerfully destructive of Western morality: psychoanalysis, another Jewish creation.

Add to that the strong anti-Christian feelings that Jews have always harboured, and you realise that there's far more than circumstantial evidence to establish a connection between the cultural destruction that has been practised for at least the last seven decades in the countries once collectively known as Christendom (a term Jews might have resented) and Jewish influence.

Let's hear some witnesses, then, only a few of the many from MacDonald's The Culture of Critique. These relate to both the questions of unrestricted immigration and secularisation in the USA:

The well-known author and prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel (1924, p. 215) writing partly as a negative reaction to the [restrictionist, EF] immigration law of 1924, wrote that 'If, then, the struggle between us [i.e., Jews and gentiles] is ever to be lifted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government with race, instead of with the political State.'

Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation and in the following quote he develops the view that the American state has no ethnic implications.

We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the peculiar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization - the identification of race with State.... America was therefore the New World in this vital respect - that the State was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal gentile spirit.... To-day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an 'inferior' people...

A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist and political activist Earl Raab, who remarks very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965. Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (1993a, p. 17), and he has also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that '(a)n increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop' (1995, p. 91). Or more colorfully:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.
We [i.e., Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible - and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, p. 23).

Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes that "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief - one firmly rooted in history - that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues."

Similarly, in listing the positive benefits of immigration, Diana Aviv, director of the Washington Action Office of the Council of Jewish Federations states that immigration 'is about diversity, cultural enrichment and economic opportunity for the immigrants' (quoted in Forward, March 8, 1996, p. 5). And in summarizing Jewish involvement in the 1996 legislative battles a newspaper account stated that 'Jewish groups failed to kill a number of provisions that reflect the kind of political expediency that they regard as a direct attack on American pluralism' (Detroit Jewish News; May 10, 1996).

It is noteworthy also that there has been a conflict between predominantly Jewish neo-Conservatives and predominantly gentile paleo-conservatives over the issue of Third World immigration into the United States. Many of these neo-conservative intellectuals had previously been radical leftists,4 and the split between the neo-conservatives and their previous allies resulted in an intense internecine feud (Gottfried 1993; Rothman & Lichter 1982, p. 105). Neo-conservatives Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus reacted very negatively to an article by a paleo-conservative concerned that such immigration would eventually lead to the United States being dominated by such immigrants (see Judis 1990, p. 33). Other examples are neo-Conservatives Julian Simon (1990) and Ben Wattenberg (1991), both of whom advocate very high levels of immigration from all parts of the world, so that the United States will become what Wattenberg describes as the world's first 'Universal Nation.' Based on recent data, Fetzer (1996) reports that Jews remain far more favorable to immigration to the United States than any other ethnic group or religion.

It should be noted as a general point that the effectiveness of Jewish organizations in influencing American immigration policy has been facilitated by certain characteristics of American Jewry. As Neuringer (1971, p. 87) notes, Jewish influence on immigration policy was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation in markers of economic success and political influence, Jewish organizations have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on United States immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they were able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their political aims...

In this regard, the Jewish success in influencing immigration policy is entirely analogous to their success in influencing the secularization of American culture. As in the case of immigration policy, the secularization of American culture is a Jewish interest because Jews have a perceived interest that America not be a homogeneous Christian culture. 'Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development of American church-state law and policy' (Ivers 1995, p. 2). Unlike the effort to influence immigration, the opposition to a homogeneous Christian culture was mainly carried out in the courts. The Jewish effort in this case was well funded and was the focus of well-organized, highly dedicated Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It involved keen legal expertise both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popular media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership, particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress:

No other lawyer exercised such complete intellectual dominance over a chosen area of law for so extensive a period - as an author, scholar, public citizen, and above all, legal advocate who harnessed his multiple and formidable talents into a single force capable of satisfying all that an institution needs for a successful constitutional reform movement.... That Pfeffer, through an enviable combination of skill, determination, and persistence, was able in such a short period of time to make church-state reform the foremost cause with which rival organizations associated the AJCongress illustrates well the impact that individual lawyers endowed with exceptional skills can have on the character and life of the organizations for which they work.... As if to confirm the extent to which Pfeffer is associated with post-Everson [i.e., post-1946] constitutional development, even the major critics of the Court's church-state jurisprudence during this period and the modern doctrine of separationism rarely fail to make reference to Pfeffer as the central force responsible for what they lament as the lost meaning of the establishment clause. (Ivers 1995, pp. 222-224)

Similarly, Hollinger (1996, p. 4) notes 'the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews' in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism (p. 11). The pace of this influence was very likely influenced by immigration battles of the 1920s. Hollinger notes that the 'the old Protestant establishment's influence persisted until the 1960s in large measure because of the Immigration Act of 1924: had the massive immigration of Catholics and Jews continued at pre-1924 levels, the course of American history would have been different in many ways, including, one may reasonably speculate, a more rapid diminution of Protestant cultural hegemony. Immigration restriction gave that hegemony a new lease of life' (p. 22). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the immigration battles from 1881 to 1965 have been of momentous historical importance in shaping the contours of American culture in the late twentieth century.

The ultimate success of Jewish attitudes on immigration was also influenced by intellectual movements that collectively resulted in a decline of evolutionary and biological thinking in the academic world. [All emphases mine]

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