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Old March 3rd, 2008 #1
Mike Parker
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Default John Derbyshire

The Conservatism of Fools: A Response to John Derbyshire1

By Kevin MacDonald2

This is a response to a review by John Derbyshire of my book, The Culture of Critique, that appeared in The American Conservative. In an earlier article, Derbyshire described himself as philo-Semite who traces his attitudes on Jews to his pleasant childhood memories of a local Jewish family and "the numberless kindnesses that I have received at the hands of Jews, friendships I treasure and lessons I have learnt. I cherish those recollections."3

I find myself now, in middle age, with complicated and sometimes self-contradictory feelings about the Jews. Those early impressions -- culture, wit, intelligence, kindness, and hospitality -- are still dominant, and I have read enough to know what a stupendous debt our civilization owes to the Jews. At the same time, there are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted in the most fundamental premises of Judaism, has, it seems to me, done great harm in the modern age.... I also find the theories of Kevin Macdonald (The Culture of Critique) about the partly malign influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive -- though this is not an endorsement of Macdonald's theory of "group evolutionary strategies" which I do not understand. And like (I suppose) every other Gentile, I have often been irritated by Jewish sensibilities, and occasionally angered by them.4
These earlier comments on The Culture of Critique appeared in April, 2001. Derbyshire's evaluation of the book (and its author) has changed a bit, perhaps because the edition reviewed in The American Conservative contains a new preface that tilts the balance in my writing even more on the side of the negative.

For Derbyshire, evaluating Jews is like a business ledger: There are positives and negatives, and for him, the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. However, providing a balance ledger of credits and debits is not a purpose of The Culture of Critique. My purpose is to document Jewish intellectual and political movements -- movements led by Jews and motivated by perceptions that these movements would advance Jewish interests. I have tried to document all such movements that I am aware of, but this is not the same as documenting Jewish contributions to civilization or culture. As I note in the Preface, Albert Einstein's work -- obviously an important contribution to physics -- does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement because it was not motivated by advancing Jewish interests (even though Einstein was a strongly identified Jew). Similarly, my book has no interest in recording fond memories of individual Jews that seem to have formed Derbyshire's intellectual outlook.

As a result of his generally positive attitude about Jews and Judaism, Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. We non-Jews should understand such Jewish behavior because these outcomes are good for Jews. But, somehow he fails to follow through with this logic, imputing malice to people like me who are concerned about the future of their own people in societies where they are becoming minorities surrounded by groups that, like Jews, harbor deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. It is quite an extraordinary omission and lapse in consistency by Derbyshire. In the end, the logic is as follows: Jews have made wonderful contributions to civilization. Therefore, non-Jews should welcome Jewish efforts to advance their interests even when they conflict with their own. As Derbyshire himself says in another context, the only thing to say of those who voice such sentiments is what Shakespeare's Bianca would have said: "The more fool they."

Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn't require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses. My view is that modern evolutionary theory gives us a powerful way of understanding why this must be so. Anti-Semites have often portrayed Jews as the embodiment of evil. Consistent with evolutionary theory, however, I have documented that Jews tend to be highly intelligent, good parents, and patriots fighting to preserve their people and extend their people's power and influence -- sometimes at the expense of the interests of other peoples. Many organized groups of Jews have pursued such conservative goals by resisting other groups and behaving aggressively against them. By the same logic, it is legitimate for non-Jews to defend their own ethnic interests. Is this a formula for perpetual conflict? Hopefully not, but the only hope for a just resolution is to recognize the nature of the situation and agree on terms, not to deny the importance of one's own interests.

Derbyshire's review begins with a chilling account of how critics of Jews simply disappear from sight -- their professional horizons diminished if not entirely ended. One thinks of people like Joe Sobran, William Cash,5 and a host of politicians who have had the temerity to criticize Israel or American support for Israel, or who have called attention to Jewish power and influence in particular areas. Jewish groups have made any critical discussion of Jewish issues off limits, and that's vitally important because, yes, Jews are a very powerful group. What Derbyshire refers to as Jewish "world-perfecting idealism" is very much with us and is still wreaking havoc in the modern world, everywhere from the erection of a multi-cultural police state in the United States -- the origins of which are the general topic of The Culture of Critique -- to the current war for the "liberation" and "democratization" of Iraq, a war that is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.6 As with other examples of Jewish idealism, the destruction of Iraq is shrouded in a lofty moral idealism aimed ultimately at securing a rather obvious Jewish ethnic goal -- Israeli hegemony throughout the Middle East. That these latest examples of Jewish "world perfecting idealism" also happen to conform rather obviously to Jewish ethnic interests should be of concern to all non-Jews.

Derbyshire dismisses evolutionary psychology as a passing fad, and asks, sarcastically, if in criticizing evolutionary psychology, he is pursuing his own evolutionary goals. Well, maybe. Most of what we humans do is connected only distantly to evolutionary goals. For example, quite a few evolutionary psychologists propose an evolved goal of social status based on commonly accepted standards of scientific evidence,7 but we are very flexible in how we achieve such goals. And it does occur to me that writing critiques of evolutionary psychology and dismissing those who criticize Jews might be one way to attain social status among the predominantly Jewish neo-conservative elite that dominates so much of the conservative media.

Derbyshire complains about my statement that, "The human mind was not designed to seek truth but rather to attain evolutionary goals." I was merely expressing a principle of evolutionary biology that has been of fundamental importance since the revolution inaugurated by G. C. Williams and culminating in E. O. Wilson's synthesis: Organisms are not designed to communicate truthfully with others but to persuade them -- to manipulate them to serve their interests. We should expect deception and self-deception to be at the very heart of interactions among organisms. This is the subtext of The Culture of Critique: The beguilingly irresistible theories masking an ethnic agenda. I too was once enthralled by psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Derbyshire supposes that the idea of a group evolutionary strategy may be "complete nonsense." Freed of technical jargon, a group evolutionary strategy refers to the ways people structure groups in order to get on in the world -- to attain group goals such regulating their own members (e.g., preventing them from defecting, promoting cooperation with ingroup members, promoting eugenic marriages) and dealing with outsiders (e.g., having different ethical standards for ingroup versus outgroup). I discuss how Jews accomplished these tasks in traditional societies in my book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, and I recently applied this sort of analysis to several other groups, including the Overseas Chinese, in the paperback version of that book.8 There are several other good sources, including David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral,9 where, among other examples, the early Christian Church is described as a non-ethnic form of Judaism that was adaptive at the level of the group in navigating the uncertainties of the ancient world.

My analysis describes the powerful social and psychological forces that have maintained Jewish group loyalty. Derbyshire asks, "From an evolutionary point of view, would not the optimum strategy for almost any European Jew at almost any point from AD 79 to AD 1800 or so have been conversion to Christianity?" But the question is not whether an omniscient Jew in the Middle Ages would choose to remain a Jew, but what forces have kept Jewish groups together over the centuries while other groups have been assimilated or otherwise disappeared. Even if individual Jews would have been better off defecting (some did!), the vast majority did not because of sanctions against relatives who remained Jews, because of powerful, psychologically salient ethnic and kinship ties to other Jews, because of the high level of social and material support available in Jewish communities, because of hostility toward Jews emanating from the wider society, and probably because, despite periodic troubles, Jews were remarkably successful in many times and places, including the medieval period.

Despite Derbyshire's claim, it is simply not the case that Jews have only been successful since "emancipation." Jews have very frequently achieved powerful positions: ancient Alexandria and the late Roman Empire; parts of Western Europe during the Middle Ages prior to the expulsions of Jews from most of Western Europe; the Turkish Empire after the fall of the Byzantine Christians and many other places where Jews served alien ruling elites, especially in the Muslim world (e.g., Spain after the Muslim conquest); Christian Spain beginning at least by the late 14th century and extending well into the period of the Inquisition; Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe beginning in the early modern period and extending into the 20th century.10 Perhaps most notably, the elite status of Jews in the Soviet Union had little or nothing to do with the opportunities made available by the Enlightenment, since the Enlightenment had little impact on the Russian Empire.

Group strategies don't need outgroups. The main thing is that there is group-level organization that regulates individual behavior to conform to group goals. Derbyshire mentions Chinese eugenics, but as important as eugenics may be for understanding the Chinese, it does not necessarily imply a group evolutionary strategy. The most obvious explanation is that the emperor wanted the more intelligent people to run the civil service, and, given the Chinese practice of polygyny and the benefits of high social status, this had a eugenic effect. But this can be easily explained by self-interest on the part of everyone involved; no need to invoke the effects of group structure on individual behavior. On the other hand, in the recent paperback edition of A People that Shall Dwell Alone, I argue that the Overseas Chinese qualify as a group strategy because they live as an organized group among outgroups; they have a consciousness of themselves as being of a different ethnic group than their hosts, they are internally organized (but not nearly so tightly as traditional Jewish communities), and they cooperate in economic enterprises.

Derbyshire rejects my argument that without Jewish involvement, the Bolshevik Revolution and its horrific aftermath would not have happened. The percentage of Jews in early Bolshevik Party congresses is irrelevant to this issue. The questions I ask are: Would the Revolution have occurred without the key involvement of a relatively small number of very talented Jews like Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Uritsky who played such prominent roles in the Bolshevik Revolution and the early Soviet government? (In the same way, one can reasonably ask whether the neo-conservative revolution in U.S. foreign policy would have happened without the critical contributions of Richard Perle, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and David Wurmser, to name only some of the most prominent Jews involved. Small numbers of highly talented, closely cooperating people can have enormous influence.) Would the Revolution have been sustainable in its early stages without the involvement of large sections of the Jewish community who came to staff the Soviet bureaucracy, most notably the Secret Police? Were the most powerful non-Jews accurately described as philo-Semites'"Jewified non-Jews," to use Albert S. Lindemann's term?11 Were Jews an elite group in the Soviet Union at least until anti-Jewish attitudes began to be government policy after World War II? Did Jewish Communists and other leftists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere identify as Jews? I see no reason to change my views on these issues as a result of Derbyshire's comments.

Similarly, Derbyshire states that Jews "were not the sole, nor even the prime, movers in [the] downfall" of European dominance in the U.S. without providing a concrete alternative. I have never stated that Jewish intellectual movements and interest groups were the sole force, but I do indeed maintain that they were by far the most important. On the critical topic of immigration, there simply was no other force that energetically pursued the goal of multi-ethnic immigration in the period prior to 1965 apart from Jewish organizations or organizations composed partly of non-Jews that were funded, organized and staffed by Jews.12 And beyond the transformations being wrought by the sea change in immigration policy, I think it inconceivable that the current regime of what Derbyshire terms "racial guilt, shame, apology, and recompense, accompanied by heroic efforts at social engineering ('affirmative action')" could have been built without the influence of the intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique. As Derbyshire notes, this regime is inherently far less stable than what went before, and one can only shudder at what the future holds throughout the Western world.

It is always difficult to imagine that 3% of the population could have such enormous influence on culture and public policy, but successful lobbying efforts by small, committed special interests are commonplace in American politics, not only among ethnic lobbies but among business interests, farming groups, unions, professional organizations, and even gun enthusiasts. An obvious example is U.S. policy in the Middle East. Here we have a record of an incredibly effective, well-funded, intensive lobbying effort carried out over several decades. The historical evidence reviewed in Chapter 7 of The Culture of Critique shows that Jewish organizations carried out a similar campaign in an effort to alter U.S. immigration laws and that they were by far the most important force in changing these laws, often taking pride in the part they played.

Derbyshire does not think it hypocritical for Jews to promote multiculturalism in the U.S. while wishing to maintain Jewish ethnic dominance in Israel. The hypocrisy comes from the fact that, as I note in Chapter 8 of The Culture of Critique, the Jewish advocacy of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate coincided with a major effort by Jewish organizations and Jewish-dominated intellectual and political movements to supplant the prevailing view of the United States as a European Christian civilization with a European ethnic base. Especially hypocritical is that the disestablishment of the European basis of American identity was performed with appeal to universalist Enlightenment ideals of justice and individual rights, while it pathologized the ethnocultural basis of American civilization that had become an important foundation of American identity by the early decades of the 20th century. Although it is common for defenders of Israel to describe Israel as a democracy based on Western political ideals, I have yet to see any important Jewish organization or intellectual movement pathologize the ethnic basis of Israeli society or challenge the many ways in which Jewish ethnic interests are officially recognized in Israeli law and custom (e.g., the Law of Return). Indeed, the American Jewish community has been complicit in the ongoing ethnic warfare in the Middle East that has resulted in the dispossession, degradation, and large-scale murder of the Palestinians.

Derbyshire accuses me of being one of those who would prefer "a return to the older dispensation" -- the older cultural and ethnic mix characteristic of the United States until the changes inaugurated in the last 35 years. I plead guilty to this charge. That regime was stable and it was good for people like me (and Derbyshire), and even for the American Jewish community who saw the modest, low-profile, non-violent character of anti-Jewish attitudes that were fairly common prior to World War II dwindle to irrelevance in the postwar period. Nothing wrong with that.

The dispossession of Europeans is the ultimate defeat -- an evolutionary event of catastrophic proportions for people of European descent. Whatever the contributions of Jewish "entrepreneurs, jurists, philanthropists, entertainers, publishers, and legions upon legions of scholars," they could never make up for this cataclysmic loss and for the political instability and chronic ethnic tensions that have been unleashed by the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in The Culture of Critique. Further, as The Culture of Critique attempts to document, a very high percentage of the Jewish contribution to culture has been used to advance Jewish ethnic interests. The only exceptions are advances in technology and basic science, but does anyone seriously suppose that technological advances like the atomic bomb mentioned by Derbyshire would never have been discovered without Jews? (Germany, certainly, was very close.) It may be that these advances would have taken longer, but there is no question that they would have happened without Jews. After all, with a mean IQ of 100 and far larger numbers, European populations undoubtedly have far more individuals of the requisite IQ to make the stupendous contributions to culture that have occurred in recent centuries.

Western cultures have produced a long list of ethnically European geniuses in every field of science and art, from Plato and Aristotle down to the present. Pity the poor English who expelled the Jews in the Middle Ages and were thus restricted to the meager cultural contributions of Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Newton, and Darwin even as they vastly expanded their numbers and the territory controlled by their people. Can anyone seriously suppose that the West would be unable to produce a brilliant high culture without Jews or that the Jewish contribution is of irreplaceable value? And recall that my argument in The Culture of Critique is that many of the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters. In other words, their accomplishments are due in large part to the fundamental cultural forms of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, not to any inherent worth in what was produced. The sorry records of psychoanalysis, Boasian anthropology, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School are far more a testimony to Jewish identity and group cohesion than they are to anything resembling science.

Derbyshire acknowledges that the Jewish contributions to culture discussed in The Culture of Critique have been made with an eye to advancing Jewish ethnic interests. This is certainly a very sizeable portion of the entire Jewish contribution to culture during the period I discuss, but advancing Jewish interests by contributing to culture goes far beyond these movements. As I attempt to show in the preface to the recent paperback edition of The Culture of Critique, Jewish contributions to entertainment and the media have often had the function of promoting positive images of Judaism and multi-culturalism and negative images of Christianity and European ethnic interests and identification. Derbyshire describes his love of songs like White Christmas that have come to define how Christmas is experienced. However, such songs are also part of the Kulturkampf in which Christmas has been converted into a secular and commercialized event; as such it represents a kind of cultural subversion. As Philip Roth noted, "God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave Irving Berlin Easter Parade and White Christmas, the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ ... and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow."13 In recent decades, a major thrust of Jewish influence on culture has been the promotion of the Holocaust as the fundamental moral touchstone and intellectual paradigm of the contemporary Western world. (I recently came across a reference stating that there have been over 170 Holocaust films since 1989.14)

Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists may have indeed contributed to economic growth, but they have also lavishly funded Jewish causes -- causes that typically oppose the ethnic interests of European Americans. Jews constitute more than a quarter of the people on the Forbes Magazine list of the richest four hundred Americans, 45% of the top 40 richest Americans, and one-third of all American multimillionaires.15The beneficiaries of this wealth include 4000 foundations controlled by Jews and 300 national Jewish organizations, the latter with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion -- a sum greater than the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations. Jewish entrepreneurs and philanthropists like hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt, Charles and Edgar Bronfman (co-chairs of the Seagram Company), bingo parlor magnate Irving Moskowitz (who funds the settler movement in Israel), the notorious Marc Rich (who funds Birthright Israel, a program aimed at raising Jewish consciousness), George Soros (who funds pro-immigration organizations in the United States and in a variety of European countries), film maker Steven Spielberg (head of the Shoah and Righteous Persons foundations), Leslie Wexner (owner of the Limited and Victoria's Secret), Laurence Tisch (chairman of the Loews Corporation), Charles Schusterman (owner of an oil-and-gas business in Tulsa), and Mort Mandel of Cleveland (former distributor of electronics parts) have used their money to advance Jewish causes such as Israel and increasing Jewish consciousness and commitment among Jews.16 Wealthy Jews are by far the largest contributors to the Democratic Party and are very significant contributors to the Republican party,17 ensuring that Jewish interests will be heeded throughout the U.S. political spectrum. Whether Jewish success in business has had a measurable effect on economic growth is difficult to know. What we do know is that it has come with an enormous cost to the ethnic interests of European Americans.

In concluding, I call attention to the challenge for evolutionary psychology in trying to understand the complete lack of ethnic identification of so many elite Europeans such as John Derbyshire. He is only the tip of a massive iceberg. I have sketched a theory of why this might be in the Preface to the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique: a relatively weak sense of ethnocentrism resulting from our European evolutionary past combined with the influence of the Jewish intellectual and political movements I describe and its amplification in the media; the powerful opprobrium and, increasingly, police state controls that have become attached to criticism of Jews and Israel; and the heady inducements to conform to the interests and views of a powerful minority. Having read Derbyshire's account of his childhood, one might add to the model two more variables: socialization in a very benign Jewish milieu and deep reverence for the cultural accomplishments of Jews. In the end, Derbyshire is the epitome of that sad and paradoxical figure, the Judaized intellectual discussed in The Culture of Critique for whom Jewish attitudes and interests, Jewish likes and dislikes, now constitute the culture of the West, internalized by Jews and non-Jews alike. It is a mindset that is leading Europeans directly to the fate of the Israelites who stray from God's way as described in Deuteronomy (28:62): "And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars of heaven for multitude."

http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-derbyshire.html

Last edited by Mike Parker; March 3rd, 2008 at 07:36 AM.
 
Old March 3rd, 2008 #2
Mike Parker
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February 26, 2008

DNA, Schmee-NA! The Genetic History Of The Jews

By John Derbyshire

The Jews are an ideal subject for studies in population genetics, forming as they do an unusually well-defined "genetic island": small founder group, little exogamy, long history. It is therefore odd that Jewish scholars have been especially prominent in the resistance to population-genetics research. The paradigm that dominated the human sciences through the later decades of the 20th century, of an infinitely plastic human nature imbedded in a uniform, static biological substratum—the "blank slate"—was essentially the creation of anthropologist Franz Boas and his student Ashley Montagu, both of whom were Jewish. The paradigm was upheld, and ferociously policed, by Jewish scholars of the following generation: Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Rose.

Things look even odder when you factor in the strenuous efforts undertaken by religious Jews to combat exogamy. Thus the January 21 issue of Newsweek magazine contains a short news item headed "Sex and the Synagogue":

“The rise of interfaith marriage is a sensitive issue among American Jews, and now two powerful forces in the religion are teaming up to do something about it: rabbis and JDate, the top matchmaking Website for Jewish single … the site is offering a bulk rate to rabbis who want to buy membership accounts for their congregants …”

"All is race, there is no other truth," wrote Benjamin Disraeli. Michelle Obama might agree, but most Jews of our time would swoon in horror to hear such a thing said. Jon Entine told me that when he showed the cover of his new book Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People to a rabbi of his acquaintance, directing the rabbi's attention to the subtitle, the gentleman shook his head vigorously, saying: "No DNA! No DNA!" In the book itself, Entine writes of a California businessman named John Haedrick, who was raised as a Christian but who discovered, after taking a DNA test, that his ancestry included "a rather populous pedigree of Ashkenazi Polish Jews." Mr. Haedrick set about getting himself accepted as a Jew, only to be rebuffed by his own local rabbi with: "DNA, schmee-NA."

DNA is real stuff, though. And with the discoveries in population genetics that have been coming thick and fast this past few years, it is getting more and more difficult to find any serious researchers, Jewish or otherwise, who still cling to the Boasian "blank slate" paradigm.

You don't have to go all the way to Disraeli's position to be convinced, by the sheer and fast-accumulating weight of evidence, that the common processes of population-genetic change did not come to a sudden dead stop when homo sap. emerged from the African homeland 60,000 years ago.

Those changes continued through the Paleolithic, the isolated endogamous populations of that long era slowly diverging from each other according to well-understood biological laws. The big modern continental races were probably formed in very much their present states when the Neolithic arrived 10,000 years ago. Yet still the genetics of inbreeding populations continued their slow mutations, down into recorded history and through to the present day.

This is not speculation but observed fact. We can tick off the changes, and even date them reasonably well, right there on the human genome.

You would think that all this would be of absorbing interest to Jews, who are so keenly interested in their own group identity, so fearful—like the rabbis in that Newsweek item up above—of that group identity becoming diluted, and so proud of their long history and ancestry. Think of all those "begats" in the Old Testament.

But there is, of course, much more to Jewish identity than that. Jon Entine documents it all here: the history, the migrations and scatterings, the genetics (including that grimmest of all genetic terms of art, the "population bottleneck"), the paradoxes. So many paradoxes! For example: The first rule of Jewish identity—the one currently used by the government of Israel—is that you are Jewish if your mother is a Jew, or if you have been formally and correctly converted. The identity is therefore basically matrilineal. And yet, as Entine explains, "most Ashkenazi Jewish women descended from Gentiles"! (A long time ago). Again, in defiance of those rabbis fretting about exogamy, it is often the case, as Entine says, that "nothing can be more Jewish than not wanting to be."

The author himself is of East-European Jewish ancestry, and was raised as a Reform Jew. He seems now to be an agnostic or atheist; but of course that gets you a mere few inches away from your Jewish identity. ("I'm an atheist," pleads the Ulsterman under questioning by a terrorist gun squad. "All right," snarl the gunmen, "but are ye a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?")

Entine is the author of the 2000 book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It. As can be seen from that title, our author is not shy about discussing group differences. He certainly pulls no punches here, speaking straightforwardly about those differences as they relate to Jewish populations.

Note that last plural: the processes of group-genetic change have caused divergence among Jews themselves. The sensational average IQ scores of Ashkenazi Jews, for example, are not found in populations of Sephardim and Oriental Jews.

The variety of sub-populations within world Jewry is, in fact, another of those paradoxes that give Jewish identity its weird optical-illusion character. Abraham's Children tells the full astonishing story of the Lemba, a black South African tribe who carry the ancient Cohen Modal Haplotype at high frequency, and whose menfolk are therefore in direct line of patrilineal descent from Aaron. There is another sub-populations scattered among Hispanics in the American Southwest, who have a tendency to discover, to their surprise, that they descend from Jewish conversos in late-medieval Spain. (Entine missed one of my own favorites: the non-Sephardic Romaniotes of Greece, who have a fine old synagogue in New York's Broome Street, right opposite the first lodgings I ever had in the U.S.A. I used to sit at my window on idle Saturday mornings watching the minyan assemble.)

Some other lineages claimed as Jewish are shown by genetics to be not part of the common ancestry: the Falashas of Ethiopia, for instance, and the Bene-Menashe of far northeastern India. Myths are exploded, too. The Khazars of early-medieval central Asia did not supply the founding stock of East European Jewry, as claimed in Arthur Koestler's 1976 book The Thirteenth Tribe.

“The studies of the Y chromosome and mtDNA do not support the once-popular notion that Jews are descended in any great numbers from the Khazars or some Slavic group, although it's evident some Jews do have Khazarian blood. … Perhaps not every Jew is descended solely from the ancient populations in Judea and Samaria … but most Jews do share a common ancient ancestry. Most Jewish males appear to have originated in the eastern Mediterranean, with at most 20 percent showing a central Asian origin similar to that of most Europeans. After being expelled from the Middle East, and after diaspora stops along separate routes in Italy and Asia, Jews trickled into Europe. They brought with them some wives, but more often than not, they coupled with local women.”

Note, however, that:

“[University of Arizona geneticist] Michael Hammer has calculated that after the initial trysts and founding of various Jewish villages, less than 0.5 percent of each succeeding generation of Ashkenazi women had children with non-Jewish Europeans.”

In the matter of myths, genetic studies have also exploded the story told in the Book of Mormon that American aborigines are descended from the ten Lost Tribes. Nor is there any substance to claims by the British Israel movement that the Island Race is an offshoot of the Chosen People. Those ten tribes seem, in fact, to be well and truly lost—absorbed, probably, into Middle Eastern and West Asian populations.

Abraham's Children is a fascinating book, packed with well-researched information on every conceivable aspect of Jewish history and identity, as illuminated by our marvelous new understandings of the human genome. The basic framework of the book is historical—it contains within itself, in fact, a good outline history of the Jews. All the interesting byways are thoroughly explored, though. There is, for instance, a very good account of characteristically Jewish diseases, with a full list of them in an appendix.

Entine visited key people and places when making the book, and includes appropriate interviews and travelogue. One of the interviews is with Kevin MacDonald, whose name will be known to VDARE.com readers. MacDonald has taken exception to the interview's published version. However, Entine's account seems fair to me. [Astounding conclusion from someone who wasn't present. Always takes the side of the Jew.](I have read MacDonald's trilogy on the Jews' "group evolutionary strategy," and reviewed the third volume for The American Conservative.)

Entine has done a splendid job here, writing in a clear and unpretentious style, uncovering many curious facts, and putting everything together in a good connected narrative.

How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews


murmured W. N. Ewer. Possibly so: but if He had not chosen them, the world would have been a much less interesting place.The population geneticists of today would have much less good material to work with; and we curious laypersons would have been deprived of at least two very fine recent books: Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century and Jon Entine'sAbraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People.

John Derbyshire [email him]writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. His most recent book is Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra. (see!)

http://www.vdare.com/derbyshire/080226_dna.htm

Last edited by Mike Parker; March 3rd, 2008 at 07:47 AM.
 
Old June 10th, 2008 #3
Mike Parker
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Derbyshire on MacDonald

Edmund Connelly

March 8, 2008

British immigrant commentator John Derbyshire is at it again, firing a tiny salvo in the direction of evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. Since discovering MacDonald’s corpus of writing on Jews, Derbyshire has had a like-dislike relationship with the author’s work.

In a column on VDARE last week, Derbyshire said he was satisfied with the account of an interview with MacDonald as told by Jon Entine, author of Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. Entine surprisingly quotes MacDonald as saying “I’m a scientific racist” and likens MacDonald’s work to (you guessed it) The Protocols of Zion. Entine then summed up MacDonald’s work as making the argument that “Jews have an almost diabolical, biologically programmed plan of dominance.”

Diabolical? As in the devil? Can any fair reader of MacDonald’s social science prose make such a claim? For his part, MacDonald vehemently disagreed with Entine’s version. “I never wrote anything like ‘the devious nature of Jews.’ Such a statement would be an outrageous overgeneralization. Rather, I simply stated that Jewish identification and interests among the Boasians were unstated in their public writings and that the movement was couched in the language of science and universalism.” What, then, could Derbyshire mean when he claims “Entine’s account seems fair to me”?

Derbyshire’s first major piece on MacDonald appeared in the March 10, 2003 issue of The American Conservative under the title “The Marx of the Anti-Semites.” There his take on the book was mixed, beginning with “The Culture of Critique includes many good things. . . . Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field.” Derbyshire even validates an important point of MacDonald’s work: “These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with—Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on—were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were.”

But Derbyshire then concludes that “This is, after all, in the dictionary definition of the term, an anti-Semitic book.” Perhaps, however, MacDonald can be forgiven, since, as Derbyshire muses, MacDonald suffers the defects of being “prickly and unworldly.” Yet the mildly generous Derbyshire nonetheless leaves the reader with the ominous conclusion: “I am not sure I could persuade less charitable souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and that there is not malice lurking behind MacDonald’s elaborate sociological jargon.” (See MacDonald's reply.)

To be fair, Derbyshire is the proverbial writer caught between a rock and a hard place. While he aims to write honestly — wherever the chips may fall, as he implies — he’s also exquisitely aware of the risks a non-Jew takes when writing in a forthright manner about things Jewish. Worse, as a self-described minor name in American journalism, he fears that any criticism of Jews may well spell career destruction.

Derbyshire made an excellent case for this risk in a remarkable exchange with Joey Kurtzman, a Jewish editor of the website Jewcy.com, asserting:

So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.

Despite this conscious awareness of why he won’t give MacDonald’s work the praise it deserves, Derbyshire continues with his mixed feelings: “I found his first two books tough-going, jargony, and not very well written.” Later, he complains about MacDonald’s “rather unscholarly language in speaking about the ‘manipulation’ of Gentile culture by Jewish intellectuals, and so on.”

Elsewhere, however, Derbyshire felt otherwise (and to his credit, he is a smart enough writer to admit to contradicting himself at times): “Kevin has interesting things to say . . . He ought to be heard.” “The Culture of Critique is an interesting book. (It is also, by the way, better-written than most books by academics.)”

He even admits that he finds the parts about the “partly malign influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive.” And then it’s back to snark, referring to MacDonald’s work as “some rather abstruse socio-historical theories cooked up by a cranky small-college faculty member.” This last crack, of course, recalls Judith Shulevitz’s nasty comment in her 2000 Slate article: “A man in his 50s, MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate school, California State University in Long Beach.” (She was wrong; MacDonald was and is a full professor.)

Worse, in his VDARE column last week, after agreeing with Entine’s smear of MacDonald, Derbyshire repeats his praises for Yuri Slezkine’s exposé, The Jewish Century. (See MacDonald's review of Slezkine.) Derbyshire writes that he finally understands the importance of the assertions about the Jewish role in the Bolshevik revolution. As Slezkine tells us, “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” Estimates are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during this “rise of the Jews,” prompting Slezkine to call such Jews “Stalin’s willing executioners.”

One might question the orientation of Derbyshire’s moral compass when he can reconcile the above with his claim that Jews add far more to a nation than they take away. Spain, he believes, suffered greatly for expelling its Jews, and America without its great wave of Jewish immigrants indisputably “would have been worse off.” Indeed, he believes “American conservatism is proud of its Jews, and glad to have them on board.” Needless to say, critics of Jewish neoconservatives, among others, would likely disagree. For one thing, the attachment of Jewish neoconservatives to an open borders immigration policy will in short order, if it hasn’t already, leave precious little to be conservative about.

Derbyshire’s own opinion of MacDonald is that “he is a plain reactionary, at least so far as the Jews in America are concerned. . . . I think MacDonald is in love with 1950—with the old Gentile supremacy.” But for members of MacDonald’s group of European Americans—the overwhelming majority then—1950 was on average probably far better for them than today’s America.

And what’s wrong with a group trying to retain supremacy? As historian Jerry Z. Miller’s recent Foreign Affairs essay reminds us, ethnonationalism is the rule around the world (most notably, for purposes of this essay, in Israel). Viewed in cross-cultural perspective, the immigration policies throughout the West that will inevitably lead to the displacement of white populations are provincial indeed.

Oddly, it is Derbyshire who seems to be caught back in 1950, when Jews were, in his view, responsible for “the wonderful vitality of American popular culture.” But should we today classify South Park’s scatological holiday special “Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo” or the equally vulgar performances of Sarah Silverman as part of this “wonderful vitality”? More than a few observers have concluded—to borrow a phrase—that American popular culture has gone to hell in a handbasket. And it’s been progressively more Jewish the whole way, as argued in the preface the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique that you reviewed.

Again, when you write that “it’s a scandal that Kevin’s books are not more widely reviewed and read” and that shutting them out from the public forum is “absurd and unfair,” I applaud you. In the end, however, your Jewish sparring partner Joey Kurtzman comes across as the greater booster of MacDonald’s work. Recall that Kurtzman wrote:

MacDonald has presented us with a fascinating and genuinely novel examination of the history and internal workings of the Jewish world. His trilogy is a hell of a read. To any Jewcy readers tired of pious, ‘hooray-for-us!’ Jewish historiography, or just interested in seeing traditional Jewish history through a kaleidoscope, I happily recommend it.

Let me propose a deal: we readers will try to be more sympathetic if you will try to more forcefully challenge the (largely Jewish) forces which now compose what Buckley once called “the prevailing structure of taboos.” You know it won’t be easy; after all, one of your exchanges was titled, with reference to Jewish power, “Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You: Criticizing Jews is professional suicide.” But your own vow to write honestly demands that you try harder.

Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com...elly-Derb.html
 
Old July 18th, 2009 #4
Mike Parker
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Twelve questions for John Derbyshire

JOHN DERBYSHIRE writes on a wide range of political, scientific and cultural topics for National Review and the New English Review. He is often controversial and always interesting. His novel, "Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream", was a New York Times "notable Book" in 2006. He has also authored or co-authored four non-fiction works, the latest of which is "We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism", which is due out in September. This week we asked Mr Derbyshire why he thinks we are doomed, and talked to him about immigration, religion, China and Bruce Lee.

DIA: Your publisher says your forthcoming book aims "to pour cold water on all 'schemes for political improvement'" because "civilization is in its twilight". Do you really believe that? Are we really doomed?

Mr Derbyshire: I am not responsible for what my publisher says. My book argues that American conservatives are doomed, through having embraced too many optimistic schemes of human and social improvement. It's not really about the fate of civilisation at large, though I wouldn't rule out the possibility of tackling that in a later book. Without some political outlet for the conservative temperament, though, I doubt that American civilisation, or the US, can survive beyond (to take the date I actually use in my text) 2022. So I haven't been very seriously misrepresented.

DIA: Why 2022? What's going to cause this rather rapid downfall?

Mr Derbyshire: In my book I mention Andrei Amalrik's 1969 essay (later a book) "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" He was looking forward 15 years. This inspired me to write a column in 2007: "Will the United States Survive Until 2022?" also looking forward 15 years. That's all. I mention this in my book and follow up with some remarks.

DIA: You say that conservatives ought to be pessimistic and take a more realistic view of human nature. When did conservatism start to become too optimistic for you?

Mr Derbyshire: March 4th 1929.

DIA: Hoover's inauguration. Have there been any bright spots for conservative pessimism since then?

Mr Derbyshire: Oh sure—the fall of the U.S.S.R., for example, and the associated events. (Among the latter, my favourite was the summary execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his loathsome wife, which brightened up my Christmas twenty years ago.) But in US politics, not really. You can make a case for Reagan, and I do my best in the book. He had a good deep streak of pessimism underneath all the sunny talk. However, Reagan's other great political passion—other than fighting communism—was reducing the size of government. In that, as David Frum pointed out in his book "Dead Right", Reagan was a failure.

DIA: What finally prompted you to put pen to paper?

Mr Derbyshire: An offer from a publisher.

DIA: Give me some examples of how conservative pessimism might translate into policy.

Mr Derbyshire: Abandonment of "nation-building" exercises. Abolition of the federal Department of Education. A 1924-style immigration freeze. Repeal of No Child Left Behind. End of all federal subsidies to "community groups". End of all federal subsidies to arts and culture. End of all foreign-aid programmes that are not plainly and obviously bribes for pro-American behaviour. Restart construction of neutron bombs. Full-bore federal-subsidised research on missile defense. Withdrawal from the UN, followed by razing of all UN structures on American soil and sowing the ground with salt. How many d'you want?

DIA: The candidate button on the cover of your book doesn't exactly look like a political winner. Do you think conservative pessimism can be sold to American voters? Do you see any candidates out there who might take up the cause?

Mr Derbyshire: No. No.

DIA: You have been a strong supporter of both democracy and restrictions on immigration. If it came down to it, which of these two values would you think more important for the United States? If, in a multistate referendum, the voters of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona decisively rejected building a wall between Mexico and their borders, and a group of aggrieved citizens decided to do so anyway--or decided, let's say, to patrol the border on their own, with firearms that they used often--would you support the renegades or the majority's decision?

Mr Derbyshire: It's the NATION's border, not just Texas's, New Mexico's and Arizona's. Of course I would support citizen action. Heck, I'd be down their with them.

DIA: You're an immigrant (and former illegal immigrant) yourself. Why are you so passionately anti-immigration?

Mr Derbyshire: Say WHAT? What on earth does "anti-immigrant" mean? I am opposed to myself? Opposed to my wife and most of my friends? I don't understand this question.

DIA: I'm referring to your proposed immigration freeze, which would severely restrict immigrants from a number of countries if you're basing it on the 1924 law. Your wife is from China, right? If so, there's a good chance she wouldn't have been allowed to immigrate to America under 1924 law.

Mr Derbyshire: So what? A nation has every right to restrict immigration in any way it likes. If the United States had not permitted my wife to immigrate in 1986, we should have gone to live in some other country. Perhaps I would have gone to live in China. The United States is under no obligation to respect my marriage preferences.

There is no right to go and settle in someone else's country. When you ask to do so, you are asking a favour, which might legitimately be refused. If it is refused, you have no right to complain.

DIA: Secular writers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris report that people tell them on book tours they thought they were the only atheists in town, before "coming out" and finding so many others who share their doubts. Are you finding anything similar since you started the Secular Right blog?

Mr Derbyshire: No. Most commentators seem to be God-worshippers trying to bring us to the light. There are a lot of people—I get email from them, and meet them at events—who hate the ever-growing federal power and the sight of our liberties withering away, yet who just can't swallow the ghosts'n'angels stuff. They are secular conservatives. Like the Son of Man, though, they have no place to rest their heads, and we don't seem to have attracted them with Secular Right. Perhaps we're not very good bloggers. In my case, too damn lazy.

DIA: You recently called Augusto Pinochet "a patriot who saved his country". When I think of Pinochet I think of two things: largely successful free-market economic reforms and tremendous human-rights violations. China is another economically successful regime that is known for human-rights violations. But you're not so forgiving in that case. Why is that?

Mr Derbyshire: Difference of scale. Pinochet's horrors, while certainly real, were very small potatoes set against the CCP's. And he had no sustaining ideology. That's why he stepped down when his public turned against him. The ChiComs would destroy their country—and the world, too—in a sea of flame before they gave up their power. That's what ideology'll do for ya.

DIA: Finally, is it true that you were in a Bruce Lee movie?

Mr Derbyshire: See here.

DIA: Nice shirt, but ouch!.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ..._john_derb.cfm
 
Old April 9th, 2012 #5
Mike Parker
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National Review fires writer John Derbyshire for saying blacks are dangerous, unintelligent

04/08/2012
By Gregg Re - The Daily Caller


John Derbyshire, who wrote for the National Review, penned a column that criticized blacks and accused them of being dangerous generally. It also advised readers to stay away from blacks.

National Review editor Rich Lowry said on Saturday that the magazine had fired columnist John Derbyshire for writing an allegedly racist article, which appeared on the libertarian site Taki’s Magazine.

Derbyshire’s post, first published on Thursday, is entitled “The Talk: Nonblack Version.” In it, Derbyshire tells readers that blacks are generally dangerous, relatively unintelligent and untrustworthy. He also suggests that non-blacks avoid helping blacks in need.

The post begins with Derbyshire referring to numerous Internet articles about “the talk” that black parents have had with their children in the wake of the shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin. Many black adults, Derbyshire implies, have used the shooting as a way to educate their children about racism.

For example, one post linked by Derbyshire, authored by KJ Dell’Antonia and posted on the New York Times, referred extensively to the Martin shooting and stated that “overt and subconscious racism affects us all.”

“You know that “talk” — the one that has nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with what it means to be a black teenager in a country with a history of regarding young black men as a threat,” Dell’Antonia wrote. “The talk about standing up straight, dressing the part, keeping your hands in sight at all times and never, ever letting your anger get the best of you.”

Derbyshire— who self-identified as a “tolerant” racist in a 2003 interview — then offers a similar “talk” directed at non-blacks, in an apparent attempt to argue that there was justification for certain racist beliefs that writers like Dell’Antonia had ignored.

“A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us,” Derbyshire writes in the article. “Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.”

The article goes on to tell readers to “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods,” and advises non-blacks to never act as a “Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway. … If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.”

Additionally, the article states that the average intelligence of blacks is lower than that of whites, and laments the effects of affirmative action.

“Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians,” Derbyshire warns in the post.

Derbyshire notes in the article that, while he had not given the “talk” to his two teenage children, they “have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen.”

Reaction on the Internet was swift, and fellow National Review contributors wondered aloud why Derbyshire had not been fired immediately. Many critics accused Derbyshire of racism.

Josh Barro, a writer for the National Review, posted on Forbes that Derbyshire’s piece was “unbelievably racist” and demanded that the National Journal terminate Derbyshire.

On Saturday, the National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, announced that he had done just that.

“Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer,” Lowry said on the National Review Online. “I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative,” Lowry wrote.

“[Derbyshire's] latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible,” Lowry continued. “We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.”

Derbyshire remains a contributor at Taki’s Magazine, the webzine that describes itself as “smart, cheeky, and culturally relevant.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/08/na...#ixzz1rXo8btCh
 
Old April 9th, 2012 #6
Alex Linder
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Everyone to my right is an evil nazi and should be shunned! But I's a good little communist, honest boss.
 
Old June 13th, 2013 #7
George Dumas
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John Derbyshire was nice to the Jews but that didn't save him from being dismissed from National Review for writing the article: The Talk: Nonblack Version.
Just like I said, it doesn't mater how nice you are to the Jews they will crucify you for the first mistake of not dancing to their music.
His and Jared Taylor's case should serve an example for those who wants to play it friendly with them.
 
Old June 14th, 2013 #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by George Dumas View Post
John Derbyshire was nice to the Jews but that didn't save him from being dismissed from National Review for writing the article: The Talk: Nonblack Version.
Just like I said, it doesn't mater how nice you are to the Jews they will crucify you for the first mistake of not dancing to their music.
His and Jared Taylor's case should serve an example for those who wants to play it friendly with them.
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Old June 14th, 2013 #9
George Dumas
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I don't get it. :-)
What does this music has to do with what I said?
 
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