Kevin MacDonald
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998
$65 US
vii + 379pp.
Ever since the European Enlightenment and the subsequent political empowerment of the Jewish people, Jews have played an ever greater role in Western politics and culture. And, as the people of this unique nation have become ever more successful and powerful, European men have debated the significance of the “Jewish question.” Generally speaking, it has been those Europeans most intent on preserving and protecting their religions, cultures, and races that have viewed the Jews as a potential or actual social threat. In turn, Jewry has invariably advocated different forms of "pluralism" and sought to weaken, discredit, and destroy these European defenders and the institutions they defend. The "Jewish Question," then, is: Who are the Jews and what is and should be their role in societies in which they are a minority?
The conflict between Jews and their critics or enemies has colored many of the past century’s political struggles. Jewish ascendancy has meant the victory of cosmopolitanism and individualism with the accompanying breakdown and decline of the identities and traditions of the peoples who have hosted the Jews. This process, although at times halted by assorted counter-revolutionary movements, has been totally triumphant since the Second World War. The years prior to and during the war saw the success of many political movements committed to national, cultural, and racial loyalties. Nearly all of them sought to eliminate or at least limit Jewish influence and power.
Many writers have remarked that Jewish advocacy of mass immigration and other policies that undermine European identity is indicative of deceit. Jewry advocates pluralism and diversity and the end of distinct cultural and racial survival only for non-Jews, while jealously guarding their own survival, either as a self- conscious subgroup within gentile nations or in the manifestly Jewish homeland, Israel.
Indeed, recent decades have brought the power organizations of Jewry into conflict with other non-European peoples (Arabs, American blacks, and others) seeking to understand and express themselves as separate entities. It is no longer white nationalism alone that Jewry seeks to demonize but other group loyalties as well. Yet the degree of power that organizational and financial Jewry wield in America and in much of Europe makes the mere mention of these subjects taboo. Or, as Joe Sobran often puts it -- We are to believe that Jewish power doesn’t exist, and if you say it does, it’ll destroy you!
The literature on the Jewish question is as old as the original interaction between other peoples and the Jewish nation in antiquity. However, the problems unique to our era, rooted as they are in the post-Enlightenment extension of citizenship to Jews, form a distinct subcategory among the themes of the writings on the Jewish issue. The threat, such as it was, posed to Catholic, royalist, feudal Europe, for example, was far different and certainly far less mortal than that posed by Jews possessed today of equal rights and enormous wealth, power, and communications media influence.
Generally speaking, one must search in old libraries for works long out-of-print or in the book lists of marginalized organizations to find any attempt to discuss Jewish influence with honesty. Unfortunately, it is there that one often encounters a certain feverish rhetoric born of the extended suffering of a people enduring dispossession. Thus, for decades it has been almost impossible to find in book form a serious, scholarly, and dispassionate discussion of this vexing issue. This limiting circumstance has today been forever altered by the classic and now in some circles very well known trilogy of Professor Kevin MacDonald.
Published by Praeger of Westport, Connecticut, MacDonald’s books, A People that Shall Dwell Alone (1996), Separation and Its Discontents (1998) and The Culture of Critique (1998) bring a high degree of intellectual sophistication and scholarship to the Jewish question. The author launches no emotional jihads. In fact, until the end of the last volume there is little hint of where he feels the data he has amassed should lead the reader.
Essentially, MacDonald believes that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.” It has emphasized several qualities such as “separation, altruism and community control” that have enabled Jews to endure throughout the centuries when other ancient peoples have long since disappeared. In addition, MacDonald sees Jewry as having “emphasized eugenic practices and cultural practices that foster a specific set of phenotypic traits (especially intelligence, high– investment parenting and allegiance to the group) that are advantageous in stratified human societies. By specializing in these traits, Jews have been able to compete successfully with gentile members of many societies for positions in which literacy and intelligence are important.” As time has gone by “Jews have become specialized for occupational niches at the upper levels of the human energy pyramid.” They are the “consumers of energy produced by lower – status gentile members of society, laboring in the areas of primary production.”
However, MacDonald’s thesis goes much further. It is not simply a case of the Jews doing better than gentiles in certain basic skills and thereby enabling themselves to the fruits of their labor. The Jews also pursue a policy of criticizing gentile social assumptions and stability and seek to undermine the group homogeneity of gentile societies. “To a considerable extent,” MacDonald writes, “the fons et origo of the social policies and cultural shifts that have resulted in the dangerous situation now rapidly developing in the United States has been the Jewish dominated intellectual and political movements. . .” The Jewish strategy has gone so far that today it is “questionable” whether in the immediate future “Western individualist societies are able to defend the legitimate interests of the European-derived peoples.”
MacDonald ably demonstrates the prominent role that Jews have played in those intellectual movements of the twentieth century that have effectively destroyed Western gentile cultures' self perception. This critique has been launched on two fronts. Through Freudianism, Marxism, and the Old and New Lefts it has made war against the religious, moral, aesthetic, and behavioral norms of gentile groups. Second, in their role as originators and popularizers of the Boasian view of anthropology and the Frankfort School of Social Research, Jews have sought to discredit all gentile group allegiances as either illusory (Franz Boas) or mentally deranged (Frankfort School). To a large extent many of the conclusions of all the above critiques form the ruling ideology of contemporary America and Europe.
Yet in the end, MacDonald is cautiously optimistic. He feels that the surrender of the white world is an “unprecedented unilateral abdication” and that “an evolutionist would expect no such abdication without at least a phase of resistance by a significant segment of the population.” This resistance will “emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving, collective ideologies and social organizations.” This “strategic mimicry” will, ironically, amount to a “ ‘Judaization’ of western societies.”
Thus whether the white world goes under as a result of Jewish influences or saves itself by imitating Jewish strategy the “profound impact of Judaism” is unavoidable.
Or, as Revilo Oliver described matters in 1981,
[T]he Jews, whose racial cohesion has made them a super-organism, are undoubtedly a superior species.... That you may disapprove of their methods or their character is irrelevant. They have given proof of biological superiority.
Yet, Oliver parts company from MacDonald’s guarded optimism as to the future.
So far as one can extrapolate from the present, disregarding our pathetic hopes for a psychological and biological miracle, there is one race, which by its own fatuity and degeneracy, seems likely to become extinct less than a century after it was master of the world.
In MacDonald’s description of Judaic influences the picture is of conflict between Jews and non-Jews. Missing is the simple fact that for many gentiles there is no such conflict and has not been one for centuries. As just quoted, Oliver maintained that the decline of the white world is to be found in “its own fatuity and degeneracy.”
This was also the position of another famous student of the Jewish question, Ivor Benson. He wrote in 1986,
The entire burden of the responsibility for what Spengler called the ‘decline of the west’ must rest squarely on the shoulders of the peoples of the west, and not on the Jews, for the peoples of the west have themselves created the morally unhygienic social and political conditions that render them susceptible to debilitating influences which hitherto they were able to resist quite easily. In other words, modern Jewish predominance is not the cause of Western decadence but only one of its more conspicuous symptoms.
Granting MacDonald’s notion of the negative effects of a Jewry struggling throughout the centuries for resources, survival and finally power with their varied gentile adversaries, the larger question is: Are we witnessing an ultimate cause of European decline or simply one of its more viral symptoms?
For example, in the field of non–white immigration to America and other western lands, MacDonald assembles the data to prove that organizational Jewry has always supported this massive invasion. What he ignores is that it has also been supported by gentile capitalism desiring cheap labor and gentile liberals desiring self destruction. Without these two sources of support, the 1965 Immigration Act could never have been passed. Indeed, it has ever been so. The needs of large property owners in ante-bellum Dixie led to the creation of America’s black problem. American colonization and continued meddling in the affairs of Puerto Rico led to that post war mass immigration.
MacDonald fails to diagnose the change in white mentality over the years and primarily after the second World War. It was this failure of will, desire for profit or simple self-hate which allowed Jewish propaganda to fall on fertile ground.
A correct answer to the source of gentile weakness is not merely academic. If, in the words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” then unless the white man first recovers some semblance of positive racial identity he will be incapable of understanding, let alone confronting massed forces of unbridled capitalism, liberal self-hate, and Jewish subversion.
To this reviewer it seems absurd that less than 2 per cent of the population could effectively dictate to the remaining 98 per cent how to live their lives without significant assent on the part of the overwhelming majority. It is here that we come upon a question that critics of the Jews have yet to confront openly. At present, given the reality that most middle and upper class whites are still able to avoid living in multiracial areas, they care little about white identity. Most whites find the empty consumerism, so passionately denounced in conservative and racialist literature, pleasant enough. They no longer respond to appeals to group loyalty and survival.
This, of course, presents a problem for MacDonald’s theory of predetermined, endless group struggle. It leads him to posit some form of inevitable white resistance in the future. Perhaps, though, the MacDonald model does not take into account the simple historical given of civilizational death. Whole peoples seem, at some point in their history, to run out of gas. They slip into a selfish individualism that values personal and perhaps familial comfort and fulfillment over a larger loyalty to groups. This seems to be the state of the white race worldwide today.
Indeed, this self-absorption affects even Jewry. Large numbers of Jews now simply marry outside their group and are lost to it. Current estimates run as high as 50 percent. Nevertheless, enough Jews remain loyal (to their nation, not to their faith; very few observe its precepts or regularly attend synagogue). This loyalty, often fierce, is most manifest today in three areas: support for Israel, remembrance of the Holocaust, and the destruction through all means available (law, social ostracism, financial ruin, and physical intimidation) of all gentile identity-based nationalisms, which are invariably denounced as "anti-Semitism" of one kind or another. In the end, the gentile infected by an extraordinary communal apathy is no match for Jewish power.
One of the strengths of the MacDonald trilogy is that it avoids the hysteria that has typified most rightist studies of this issue in the past. The reader will search in vain for talk of Learned Elders meeting in cemeteries or secret cabals stretching back to the satanic Illuminati and currently directed by “Insiders” from their secret headquarters in Manhattan. This “Spy vs. Spy” picture of reality may satisfy the Maxwell Smart inside us all but does little to help grasp the real nature of the Jewish assault.
Organizational Jewry is neither secretive as to its goals nor taking orders from a mysterious Mr. Big somewhere. It says quite openly that it is working for a society devoid of any identity base. On a host of internal Jewish issues Jews evidence great diversity. In fact, the animosity that different segments of Jewry feel for each other is clearly real. There is no monolith. What gentile society encounters is something perhaps even more troubling, an almost subconscious yet instinctive loyalty to Jewish self-interest utterly oblivious to the similar needs of others.
Let us assume for a moment that the real enemy is, indeed, “us.” Accordingly, the problem posed by the impact of Jewish power must be postponed till whites reacquire a sense of their own group identity and a desire to survive. Yet, at that point, if and when the white counter-revolution sweeps into power, what should be its approach towards the Jewish question?
Here we doubtless encounter a wide diversity of opinion among those gentiles who understand the nature of the Jewish assault. There are those who remain forever committed to libertarian and constitutional ideals who feel that a return to the traditional freedoms of the Anglo-Saxon heritage will do away with the prominent dangers of the rising tide of color and the Jewish problem. If we only allow individuals and states to follow their own desires and ideas, then the Jewish power wielded via the federal government and controlled media will become irrelevant.
This view would assert that a truly free press and media would allow for an open and honest debate on the role of Jewish power and its intentions in general society. By allowing for free debate on the subject, Jews will no longer be able to demonize, persecute, and ostracize those who oppose them. Yet it is unclear how the current crop of media and government “leaders,” almost uniformly subservient to Jewish power, are to be replaced. And, if they are not to be replaced, how is the public to be exposed to a free exchange of ideas?
For those who have abandoned or who never harbored sympathies for constitutional republicanism, it would seem that in addition to exposing the duplicity of Jewish political advocacy, there remains a need to place some limits on Jewish social and cultural involvement. Perhaps, a demonstration of long-term loyalty on the part of families or individuals would be the basis for participation in the nation’s governance.
Alternatively, there was the policy, advanced by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the early part of the 20th century, to grant the Jews autonomy within gentile states but withhold from them national citizenship. This policy may be well in keeping with what some have seen as the necessary division of America into autonomous zones or lands, each populated by a different race or ethnicity.
It remains possible that, when our civilization reaches the pivotal battles with liberalism and the rising colored populations, many Jews will finally see the error of their ways and the self-destructive consequences of the policies and values they have promoted. There are some indications of this already among some Jews who, to one degree or another, have begun to abandon or at least mute the liberalism and radicalism that have been characteristic of Jewish politics.
At present all thoughts concerning the nature of gentile opposition to Jewish power are purely speculative, however. Despite the thorough job MacDonald has done in documenting the Jewish role in white and particularly American decline, unless whites disclose an interest in something besides their own individual well-being, our author’s efforts will be no more than the work of a latter day Gibbon.
Long-time observers note that the numbers and levels of interest of people now involved in white survival movements is today perhaps higher than it has been since the smothering of Southern resistance to racial desegregation four decades ago. Whether this growing and devoted band will ever be capable of convincing the majority of opting for survival is, at this stage, very far from clear.