Jonathan Cook Tells The Truth About Jews And
Evil
Jonathan Cook lives in Nazareth.
Jonathan Cook knows what is happening in
Occupied Palestine
aka Israel.
Jonathan Cook [ lately
of The Guardian ] tells it like it is.
As a local Zionist sport is attacking both Stephen Walt and Kevin MacDonald, I invite any of the sportsmen to critically evaluate this article in which both are on display. MacDonald is both bold and supremely iconoclastic. What he says is disturbing, at least initially. The image of Walt is far more relaxed. The question is, what if any rules of the road does either of them violate? Without committing to either view, I say "none". Have at it. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen Walt on Anders Brevick, Immigration, and Western Culture
Kevin MacDonald on August 5, 2011 — 77 Comments
If there’s one characteristic that defines the European nationalist
parties, it is that they have eschewed racialist rhetoric in favor of
cultural arguments. Geert Wilders,
Marine le Pen, et al. have claimed
that Islam is incompatible with Western culture—that Muslims refuse to
assimilate and have values that are incompatible with Western
modernity, particularly on women and sexuality.
Without doubt this tactic has made nationalist parties more acceptable
to mainstream voters and more difficult to attack by the left. It is
not possible to tar these parties with the ultimate post-WWII
pejorative—”Nazi—which is sure to come up if one breathes a word about
ethnic interests of Whites.
Now Stephen Walt, of Israel Lobby fame, attempts to undercut cultural
conservative arguments that he associates with Breivik—“the idea that
he is defending some fixed and sacred notion of the ‘Christian West,’
which is supposedly under siege by an aggressive alien
culture” (“Breivik’s Warped Worldview“). (He’d doubtless disapprove
even more of Breivik’s Nordicist proclivities.)
In my review of The Israel Lobby, I made the following point about
Western elites:
Confronted with the moral critique of America emanating from elite
universities and the media, the old Protestant intellectual
establishment quickly yielded the high ground. Many of them became
avid cheerleaders of the new multicultural zeitgeist that rejected the
America and even the Americanism of their ancestors, to the point that
the new zeitgeist has become a consensus among elites of all stripes.
They accepted their own demographic decline, and they gave up their
pretensions as cultural leaders and trend setters. And they implicitly
paved the way for their eventual loss of political power to other
groups, some of which have historically conditioned grudges against
them—a dangerous situation to say the least. In doing so, they became
the pallbearers for their own people.
Sadly, this applies to Stephen Walt. In the current main TOO article,
Charles Dodgson does an excellent job of refuting Walt’s moral
indictments of the West. Right now I am reviewing Ricardo Duchesne’s
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization—a book that I strongly
recommend for intellectuals like Walt. Duchesne, a sociologist at the
University of New Brunswick, is fond of showing how the critics of the
West typically presuppose ideas whose origins are uniquely Western.
For example, in discussing the anti-Western attitudes of Franz Boas
(one of my least favorite intellectuals), Duchesne notes,
there is … an unavoidable paradox contained in the very historical
origins of cultural relativism, for its roots lie in the uniquely
Western idea that there is a universal humanity. Starting with the
Stoic cosmopolitan idea that each person is a member of a common
cosmos, through to the Christian idea that all humans irrespective of
local, ethnic or cultural origin were created by the same God, to the
16th-century idea that humans have a ‘natural’ rights-bearing
disposition to life, liberty, and dignity, the West has long
cultivated the notion of a universal humanity. (p. 31)
Even more pointedly, in his discussion of the fad among historians for
a “blinkered, anti-Western” world history, Duchesne notes that
the trend toward a more even-handed evaluation of non-European
peoples, initiated by Western scholars in the first half of the 20th
century deserves to be acknowledged. It is, after all, a trend in
character with the ideals of human rights and dignity advanced by
European civilization. (p. 53; emphasis in text)
There is nothing in Breivik’s writings to suggest that he thinks that
Western culture is “fixed.” Even a cursory glance at Western history
indicates an extraordinary internal dynamism. Western culture has
indeed been open to outside influences, but Duchesne notes that
the rise of this culture cannot be abstracted from the special
developmental history of the Greek and Roman assemblies of citizens;
the parliaments, municipal communes, universities, and estates of the
medieval era; the reading societies, salons, journals and newspapers
of the Enlightenment; the political parties, trade unions, and
nationalist groups of the 19th century. … At the heart of Western
modernity … is the ideal of freedom, and the ideal of a critical, self-
reflexive public culture. (pp. 237–238)
Moreover, just because Western culture is not fixed and is open to
outside influences does not mean that factors internal to Western
civilization are not critical. In searching for the dynamism of the
West, ultimately a great weight must be given to internal factors.
This uniqueness comes down to the Western proclivity to individualism
and its correlatives: the simple household, monogamy, exogamy,
relative lack of ethnocentrism, relatively high position of women,
moral universalism, science, and individual rights against the state—
in my view a legacy of our history as northern hunter-gatherers. But
of course, any appeal to evolved ethnic tendencies is anathema to
contemporary academic elites in the West—a phenomenon that is,
ironically perhaps, itself the result of ethnic conflict initiated and
maintained by hostile and aggrieved ethnic outsiders.
And given the ethnic origins of the West, ethnic aliens are indeed a
threat. Walt writes as if Breivik has no rational reason to be worried
that 4% of the people living in Norway are Muslims. But all the
projections indicate Muslims will be a majority in many European
countries later this century. To suppose that European civilization
can survive such a transformation is folly indeed. There is no culture
where Islam dominates that has any of the characteristics of Western
modernism mentioned above. As I am sure Walt would acknowledge,
Western nation-building in the Middle East has been an abject failure;
the West has had absolutely no success in implanting liberal culture
in any part of the Muslim world. The Arab Spring is rapidly devolving
into an Islamic nightmare.
The same may be said for African cultures where, for example, South
Africa is steadily descending into barbarism, invidious nepotism,
political authoritarianism, poverty, slavery, and lawlessness that
characterize the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
I completely understand why European nationalist parties and Breivik
wish to frame the struggle in terms of cultural conflict given the
post-WWII intellectual climate of hostility toward evolutionary and
biological thinking. Nor do I expect intellectuals like Stephen Walt
to be sensitive to arguments that massive non-White immigration
inevitably lowers the Darwinian fitness of the traditional peoples of
Western immigrant-receiving countries.
In addition to declines in IQ, there is clearly natural selection
against the Danish gene pool in general [resulting from non-Danish
immigration]. That is, at the same time that Darwinian natural
selection has been relaxed for IQ, immigration (especially non-Western
immigration) has resulted in intense natural selection against Danes
as an ethnic group, with the result that in the long run they will be
displaced entirely. That is, if we continue these population
projections well beyond 2072 when ethnic Danish births are projected
to be 33% of the total births in Denmark, the births to ethnic Danes
will become a vanishingly small percentage of the total births and
there will be selection against genetic combinations unique to
Northern Europe. For example, the genes underlying Nordic appearance …
would become less and less common. This is Darwinian selection with a
vengeance. (See here)
Clearly it is in the ethnic interests of Europeans to prevent their
biological displacement.
However, even if one takes a completely cultural viewpoint, there is
no reason for optimism. Walt writes that compared to people like
Breivik, he has “greater confidence in the inherent strengths of a
liberal society.”
I don’t. Any Whites who think that the liberal culture of the West
with its roots in the European Enlightenment will persist when Whites
become a minority are dreaming (see above_.
One might frame it in terms of a variation on Pascal’s Wager: A
rational person should behave as though biological tendencies are
critical for the construction of European culture(s) and therefore act
to prevent large-scale immigration that could tip the demographic
balance against Europeans. This is because Europeans have everything
to lose if there is any possibility that allowing the traditional
peoples of the West to become minorities in the societies they founded
will result in disaster for Europeans at the hands of peoples with
historical grudges against them or will result in the demise of
liberal European political institutions—particularly personal freedoms
which are completely absent in the Muslim world and foreign to Africa.
If we are indeed witnessing the demise of the West, as there is every
reason to believe, elite intellectuals like Walt will bear a very
large portion of the blame.