the White network - Age of Treason Radio Archive

Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 3

Published on February 19, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

More on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind:

After World War I the Germans and the Czechs along the border between the two countries intermarried so often that the Germans of this section got to look like Czechs and the Czechs began to speak German. But this did not make the two countries love each other.

People of every European nation have racial brothers in other countries, often ones with which they are at war. If at any one moment you could sort into one camp all the people in the world who were most Mediterranean, no mystic sense of brotherhood would unite them. Neither camp would have language or nationality or mode of life to unite them.

The same applies to mankind as a whole – yet anti-“racists” argue in favor of a mystic sense of brotherhood uniting all of mankind.

Pretending race doesn’t exist doesn’t make race go away.

The movements of peoples over the face of the earth inevitably produce race mixture and have produced it since before history began. No one has been able to show that this is necessarily bad.

They know race mixing is not inevitable, which is why they take the trouble to argue and propagandize in favor of it. They wish to thwart the natural human tendency to discriminate and separate.

But, as far as we know, there are no immutable laws of nature that make racial intermixture harmful.

Harmful for who?

No immutable laws of nature make extinction harmful. Group identity, self-awareness, morality – group judgment of good and bad – is what gives words like “harmful” meaning.

The thesis of Arthur Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races is that each society throughout history has been an expression of a racial/national core, and that their success leads to conquest, then mixing, then collapse.

Racial Superiorities and Inferiorities

to prove superiority … you have to test abilities

Science therefore treats human racial differences as facts to be studied and mapped. It treats racial superiorities as a separate field of investigation; it looks for evidence. When a Nazi says “I am a blue-eyed Aryan and you are non-Aryan,” he means “I am superior and you are infenor.” The scientist says: “Of course. You are a fair-haired, long-headed, tall North European (the Anthropological term is Nordics, not Aryans), and I am a dark-haired, round-headed, less tall South European. But on what evidence do you base your claim to be superior? That is quite different.”

Race prejudice turns on this point of inferiority and superiority. The man with race prejudice says of a man of another race, “No matter who he is, I don’t have to compare myself with him. I’m superior anyway. I was born that way.”

Anti-“racism” turns on this point of inferiority and superiority, playing on insecurity, fear of exclusion. A “racist” who says “born different” is saying superior/inferior is beside the point, though having a sense of pride in one’s own group is perfectly normal and natural.

Pages 16 and 17 of the pamplet are missing. This portion of the pamphlet discusses IQ. The tail end of it is on page 18 (italics in original):

The white race did badly where economic conditions were bad and schooling was not provided, and Negroes living under better conditions surpassed them. The differences did not arise because people were from the North or the South, or because they were white or black, but because of differences in income, education, cultural -advantages, and other opportunities.

From the page on Gene Weltfish at Wikipedia:

The most controversial statement was the mention of a set of IQ tests administered to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War I, in which “Southern Whites” scored below “Northern Negroes”. Weltfish and Benedict argued that “The difference….[arose] because of differences of income, education, cultural advantages, and other opportunities,” since southern schools spent only a fraction of the amount spent on education in the North. This was the statement that led to a general outcry in the military. The bulk of the pamphlet was dedicated to explaining that perceived differences in group mental abilities vary in accordance with social and cultural factors, not biological ones.

The heritability of IQ and racial differences in IQ are well established. The controversy over this comes entirely from anti-“racists” who simply want to deny and suppress these facts. See, for example, The Bell Curve and the “debate” it spawned.

A large portion of the anti-“racist” fraud, from 1943 through to this day, having to do with IQ and other racial differences, is conflating overlap with equality. It is a kind of hand-waving – a deliberate attempt to induce confusion and minimize differences in norms and averages by pointing to overall variance. A specific example has come to be known as the Lewontin fallacy, which I’ll discuss in more detail in a future installment.

Character Not Inborn

The second superiority which a man claims when he says, “I was born a member of a superior race/’ is that his race has better character. The Nazis boasted of their racial soul. But when they wanted to make a whole new generation into Nazis they didn’t trust to “racial soul”; they made certain kinds of teaching compulsory in the schools, they broke up homes where the parents were anti-Nazi, they required boys to join certain Nazi youth organizations. By these means they got the kind of national character they wanted. But it was a planned and deliberately trained character, not an inborn “racial soul.”

Race prejudice is, after all, a determination to keep a people down, and it misuses the label ‘”inferior” to justify unfairness and injustice. Race prejudice makes people ruthless; it invites violence. It is the opposite of “good character” as it is defined in the Christian religion— or in the Confucian religion, or in the Buddhist religion, or the Hindu religion, for that matter.

Civilization Not Caused by Race

History proves that progress in civilization is not the monopoly of one race or subrace. When our white forebears in Europe were rude stone-age primitives, the civilizations of the Babylonians and the Egyptians had already flourished and been eclipsed. There were great Negro states in Africa when Europe was a sparsely settled forest. Negroes made iron tools and wove fine cloth for their clothing when fair-skinned Europeans wore skins and knew nothing of iron.

When Europe was just emerging from the Middle Ages, Marco Polo visited China and found there a great civilization, the like of which he had never imagined. Europe was a frontier country in those days compared with China.

The United States is the greatest crossroads of the world in all history. People have come here from every race and nation, and almost every race in the world is represented among our citizens. They have brought with them their own ways of cooking food, so ihat our “American” diet is iudebted to a dozen peoples. Our turkey, com, and cranberries come from the Indians. Our salads we borrowed from the French and Italians. Increasingly in recent years we have enriched our tables with soups from Russia, vegetables from Italy, appetizers from the Scandinavian countries, seafoods from the Mediterranean lands, chile and tortillas from Mexico, and so on almost endlessly.

THE FUTURE OF RACE PREJUDICE

NEVERTHELESS there is race prejudice in America and in the world. Race prejudice isn’t an old universal “instinct.” It is hardly a hundred years old. Before that, people persecuted Jews because of their religion-not their ”blood”; they enslaved Negroes because they were pagans-not for being black.

Looking back now, modems are horrified at all the blood that was shed for centuries in religious conflicts. It is not our custom any more to torture and kill a man because he has a different religion. The twenty-first century may well look back on our generation and be just as horrified. If that century builds its way of life on the Atlantic Charter-for the whole worid-our era will seem a nightmare from which they have awakened. They will think we were crazy. “Why should race prejudice have swept the western worid,” they will say, “where no nation was anything but a mixture of all kinds of racial groups? Why did nations just at that moment begin talking about ‘the racial purity’ of their blood? Why did they talk of their wars as racial wars? Why did they make people suffer, not because they were criminals or double-crossers, but because they were Jews or Negroes or non-Nordic?”

We who are living in these troubled times can tell them why. Today weak nations are afraid of the strong nations; the poor are afraid of the rich; the rich are afraid they will lose their riches. People are afraid of one another’s poHtical or economic power, they are afraid of revenge for past injuries, they are afraid of social rejection. Conflict grows fat on fear. And the slogans against “inferior races” lead us to pick on them as scapegoats. We pin on them the reason for all our fears.

Race Prejudice Not Inevitable

Freedom from fear is the way to cure race prejudice.

Hello from the 21st century. There are still weak and strong, rich and poor. Today the anti-“racists” are in charge and they scapegoat “racists”.

Atlantic Charter, Wikipedia:

The Atlantic Charter was a pivotal policy statement first issued in August 1941 that early in World War II defined the Allied goals for the post-war world. It was drafted by Britain and the United States, and later agreed to by all the Allies. The Charter stated the ideal goals of the war: no territorial aggrandizement; no territorial changes made against the wishes of the people; restoration of self-government to those deprived of it; free access to raw materials; reduction of trade restrictions; global cooperation to secure better economic and social conditions for all; freedom from fear and want; freedom of the seas; and abandonment of the use of force, as well as disarmament of aggressor nations.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

2 Comments

Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 2

Published on February 12, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

More on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind:

BLOOD THE SAME

For ages men have spoken of ‘blood relations” as if different peoples had different blood. Some people have shouted that if we got into our veins the blood of someone with a different head shape, eye color, hair texture, or skin color, we should get some of that person’s physical and mental characteristics.

Modern science has revealed this to be pure superstition. All human blood is the same, whether it is the blood of an Eskimo or a Frenchman, of the “purest” German “Aryan” or an African pygmy— except for one medically important difference. This medical difference was discovered when doctors first began to use blood transfusion in order to save life. In early attempts at transfusion it was discovered that “agglutination” or clumping together of the red cells sometimes occurred and caused death. Gradually investigators learned that there are four types of blood, called O, A, B, and AB, and that although blood typed O can be mixed successfully with the other three, none of these can be mixed with one another without clumping.

These four types of blood are inherited by each child from its forebears. But whites, Negroes, Mongols, and all races of man have all these blood types. The color of their skin does not tell at all which blood type they have. You and an Australian bush-man may have the same blood type.

For ages the use of blood as a metaphor for inheritance was a reasonable, intuitive understanding of the mechanics.

Rather than mocking this as “pure superstition”, and falsely insisting that “all human blood is the same”, someone interested in making an honest argument concerning blood and heritability based on science could have cited August Weismann’s germ plasm theory (“inheritance only takes place by means of the egg and sperm cells”) and the Weismann barrier (“other cells of the body—somatic cells—do not function as agents of heredity”), which had been known since c1900.

Ongoing scientific inquiry, known as genetics, had by 1943 further refined the understanding of the mechanism of heritability. Among the more prominent geneticists were the “purest” German “Aryans”, scientists like Alfred Ploetz and Fritz Lenz.

The blood intuition was valid in the sense that head shape and other heritable traits are encoded within our bodies. If the “blood” (which we now understand is DNA) could be changed then the expression of those traits would change. A more realistic example is what happens when one person “mixes their blood” with another to produce children.

Benedict and Weltfish minimize blood differences, ignoring what was understood about the relation to race even in 1943: that the distribution of blood types among races is distinctive.

As the American Red Cross puts it, even in today’s extreme anti-“racist” zeitgeist:

Different ethnic and racial groups … have different frequency of the main blood types in their populations.

There are other significant facts about blood type and race, some understood in 1943 and others which have come to light since. RH- is entirely a White trait, highest in the Basque at 20-35%, 15% among Europeans in general, near 0% in everyone else. Amerindians and Australoids are nearly 100% O+. In addition to A, B, AB, and O, there are many less common, lesser known blood subtypes which are unique to certain ethnic groups.

If you’re European there’s a good chance you have some combination of A, B, or RH- blood, and in this case the blood of an Australian bushman is almost certainly incompatible.

The best donor for blood or organs are those most biochemically compatibile with the recipient. This is more likely to be a close relative. The more different genetically, the less likely they are compatible.

Having more people like yourself around you increases the likelyhood of blood/organ compatibility. Diversity and race mixing reduces that likelyhood. When it comes to blood, diversity is plainly not a strength.

Returning to The Races of Mankind:

COLOR

Finally, let us take skin color, the most noticeable of the differences between peoples. Few traits have been used as widely to classify people. We all talk about black, white, and yellow races of man.

Recently scientists found that skin color is determined by two special chemicals. One of these, carotene, gives a yellow tinge; the other, melanin, contributes the brown.

People of browner complexions simply have more melanin in their skin, people of yellowish color more carotene. It is not an all-or-nothing difference; it is a difference in proportion. Your skin color is due to the amount of these chemicals present in the skin.

So the visible difference in skin color is caused by an underlying chemical difference, which ultimately reflects a biological, genetic heritable difference. The key, here again, is that races exhibit different distributions, different proportions.

In other words it is evidence in favor of the reality and significance of race, not against it.

HOW ARE RACES CLASSIFIED?

THE three primary races of the world have their strongest developments in areas A, B, and C on the map on page 9. In these parts of the world most of the inhabitants not only have the same skin color but the same hair texture and noses. A is the area of the Caucasian Race, B of the Mongoloid Race, C of the Negroid Race.

The Caucasian Race inhabits Europe and a great part of the Near East and India. It is subdivided in broad bands that run east and west: Nordics (fair-skinned, blue-eyed, tall, and long- headed) are most common in the north; Alpines (in-between skin color, often stocky, broad-headed) in the middle; Mediterraneans (slenderer, often darker than Alpines, long-headed) in the south. The distribution of racial subtypes is just about the same in Germany and in France; both are mostly Alpine and both have Nordics in their northern districts. Racially, France and Germany are made up of the same stocks in just about equal proportions.

American Indians are Mongoloid, though they differ physically both among themselves and from the Mongols of China.

The natives of Australia are sometimes called a fourth primary race.

In the map A is centered on Sweden, B on China, and C on Congo. Benedict and Weltfish continue to minimize the differences, both by literally minimizing their geographic extent, and by glossing over the many different shades, eg. the very black skin in India and Australia.

It is a willful blindness, interesting in contrast to illustrator Ad Reinhardt’s later Black paintings, the “art” of which was in the appreciation of the significance of subtle, near imperceptible shades of black.

This portion of the pamphlet presents a general understanding of race that could just as well have been written by any contemporary proponent of race, eugenics or racial hygiene. Benedict and Weltfish acknowledge the existence of “racial subtypes” (Nordic, Alpine, Med) amongst Europeans, and the difference of opinion over the number of major races – without using these points as arguments against race. Instead they cite it to steal for themselves a measure of sciency credibility in support their ulterior anti-“racist” agenda, specifically to prepare the ground for the next issue, which is at the very heart of that agenda:

THERE IS NO JEWISH “RACE”.

Aryans, Jews, Italians are not races. Aryans are people who speak Indo-European, “Aryan” languages. Hitler used the term in many ways— sometimes for blond Europeans, including the Scandinavian; sometimes for Germans, whether blond or brunet; sometimes for all who agreed with him politically, including the Japanese. As Hitler used it, the term “Aryan” had no meaning, racial, linguistic, or otherwise.

Jews are people who acknowledge the Jewish religion. They are of all races, even Negro and Mongolian, European Jews are of many different biological types; physically they resemble the populations among whom they live. The so-called “Jewish type” is a Mediterranean type, and no more “Jewish” than the South Italian. Wherever Jews are persecuted or discriminated against they cling to their old ways and keep apart from the rest of the population and develop so-called “Jewish” traits. But these are not racial or “Jewish”; they disappear under conditions where assimilation is easy.

I don’t know about Hitler’s use of the term Aryan. Perhaps someone who does can leave a comment about it. The arguments this pamphlet makes where Hitler is concerned are a kind of fallacy, increasingly common since WWII, known as Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Beyond Hitler, they’re deliberately obfuscating reality which is not difficult to explain. Aryan is not simply linguistic, no more than jew is simply a religion. Aryans were a people who left traces of their language, artifacts, and genetics among those they conquered. Jewish traits are racial in the sense that they are heritable, genetically based.

Benedict and Weltfish misrepresent the cause and effect of jewish distinctiveness and “persecution”, which is more objectively (scientifically) understood in terms of mutual alienation, not the one-sided narrative favorable to jews that they present.

Jewish genetic differences arose and were maintained by jews discriminating and separating themselves from their host populations, on the whole refusing to intermarry. Jews don’t assimilate, otherwise they would long ago have ceased to exist. The core of jewry is utterly hostile to assimilation of jews to their hosts. Instead they organize and demand and generally get special rights and privileges for themselves, causing the host to assimilate to their desires and way of seeing things. Even supposedly assimilated jews lend their hands to this effort.

Religion is one component, but the key component of jewish identity is biological, not ideological. It is an identity passed from parents to children, whether their children want it or not.

Harlan Schulke and Carolyn Yeager had an insightful discussion of jewish identity in the first half of How the translator affects meanings in the Protocols of Zion.

Benedict and Weltfish continue:

Italians are a nationality, Italians are of many different racial strains; the “typical” South Italian is a Mediterranean, more like the Spaniard or the Greek or the Levantine Jew than the blond North Italian. The Germans, the Russians, and all other nations of Europe are nations, not races.

This is argument by conflation and confusion. The classic meaning of “nation” is roughly equivalent to “racial strain”. The use of “nation” as a synonym for country or state causes misunderstanding. The existence of several “racial strains” within the borders of a single country doesn’t mean that “racial strain” isn’t racial in nature.

This disingenous argument leads directly into the next:

Racial Mixture

As far back in time as the scientist can go he finds proof that animals and men moved about in the world. There were different kinds of animals, and many of them went great distances. But wherever they went, the different kinds could not breed together. A tiger cannot mate with an elephant. Even a fox and a woif cannot mate with each other. But whenever groups of people have traveled from one place to another and met other people, some of them have married and had children.

Lions and tigers are capable of breeding. Likewise wolves and dogs. Left to themselves, in nature, they generally don’t. Primates and even humans, left to ourselves, demonstrate a similar, general aversion to mixing. The Aryan conquerers in India codified the aversion as caste. In the US there were laws against miscegenation. An objective scientist, who could set his “race”/anti-“racist” agenda aside, would recognize both the capability of mixing and tendency to discriminate and compete as a perfectly natural step toward speciation.

Racial strains which set their “race” agenda aside will be outcompeted by those who don’t. The key understanding here is that among man, argument and communication are part of the fitness equation of the competition. Lying and fraud and propaganda and psychological warfare are all part of the fitness equation.

We are used to thinking of Americans as mixed. All of us have ancestors who came from regions far apart. But we think that the English are English and the French are French. This is true for their nationality, just as we are all Americans. But it is not true for their race. The Germans have claimed to be a pure German race, but no European is a pure anything. A country has a population. It does not have a race. If you go far enough back In the populations of Europe you are apt to find all kinds of ancestors: Cro-Magnons, Slavs, Mongols, Africans, Celts, Saxons, and Teutons.

Yes, Whites are diverse in the true sense of the word.

The crime commited by the Germans, from a jewish point of view, was to recognize jews as aliens, not Germans.

There is nothing inherently wrong with purity as an ideal, nor with the notion that a dilution of purity is something to be avoided. These are normal, traditional values. Anti-“racists” succeeded in flipping these values and today promote degenerate, destructive mixing as the ideal, while pathologizing purity.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

9 Comments

Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 1

Published on February 5, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Picking up from the last installment, more on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s anti-“racist” pamphlet The Races of Mankind.

The Editor’s introduction from Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, by Philip Nel, Google Books:

In 1948, Weltfish and Violet Edwards, under the supervision of Benedict, adapted Brotherhood of Man for In Henry’s Backyard: The Races of Mankind, illustrating it with images from the cartoon.

The New York Times Book Review . . . disagreed with the book’s central claim of racial equality . . . also discredits the authors on the grounds that both work in anthropology, “not a true science at all, but . . . a kind of specialized reportage.”

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the FBI believed opponents of racism were also Communists. As David H. Price points out, what “were scientists like Gene Weltfish to do” when America’s main political parties condoned Jim Crow racism and “the Communist Party’s position on racial equality was in total alignment with the scientific findings of biological and anthropological research”?

the activism of Benedict and Weltfish was rooted in the empirical methods of scientific inquiry, not in the procrustean confines of ideological doctrine.

Only a few small portions of the book itself can be made out. Here’s one:

sensible people learn to live in peace and friendship. They know that the differences in the way people behave are not inherited from their ancestors. They come from something called cultural experience or environment.

Sensible people stop kicking each other around and apply their boots to the seats of…

…the ugly Green Devils of prejudice, stupidity, hate

The artist in the original pamphlet was Ad Reinhardt, Wikipedia:

Adolph Frederick Reinhardt (“Ad” Reinhardt) (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism.

Reinhardt is best known for his so-called “black” paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades.

Boasian anthropology is a series of just-so stories. Just-so story, Wikipedia:

In science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative[1] nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the hearer of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore and mythology

Benedict was a folklorist.

The Races of Mankind, Internet Archive:

Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 85

by Professor Ruth Benedict and Dr. Gene Weltfish

Department of Anthropology

Columbia University

Copyright 1946

The World is Shrinking

The war, for the first time, brought home to Americans the fact that the whole world has been made one neighborhood. All races of man were shoulder to shoulder. Our armed forces were in North Africa with its Negro, Berber, and Near-East peoples. They were in India. They were in China, They were in the Solomons with its dark-skinned, “strong”-haired Melanesians. Peoples of all the races of the earth became our neighbors.

Americans know better than most how much hard feeling there can be when people of different races and nationalities have to live together and be part of one community. They know that there is often conflict. When what we all wanted more than anything else was to win- this war, most Americans were confident that, whatever our origins, we would be able to pull together to a final victory.

Science and the Race Front

In any great issue that concerned the war we turned to science. When we needed new fuels, substitutes for rubber, lighter metals, or new plastics, we asked scientists to tell us what was possible and what was impossible. The chemists told us how to make the plastics we needed, and the physicists told us how to detect and locate an approaching airplane, and the engineers told us how to build a better fighting plane. When we were faced with war shortages, they told us what essential materials we had been throwing out on the dump heap.

We needed the scientist just as much on the race front. Scientists have studied race. Historians have studied the history of all nations and peoples. Sociologists have studied the way in which peoples band together. Biologists have studied how man’s physical traits are passed down from one generation to the next. Anthropologists have studied man’s bodily measurements and his cultural achievements. Psychologists have studied intelligence among different races. All that the scientists had learned became important to us at this crucial moment of history. They told us: “this is so,” “this is not so,” “this occurs under certain conditions,” or “this occurs under opposite conditions.”

This booklet cannot tell you all that science has learned about the races of mankind, but it states facts that have been learned and verified. We need them.

One Human Race

The Bible story of Adam and Eve, father and mother of the whole human race, told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today: that all the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.

No difference among human races has affected limbs and teeth and relative strength so that one race is biologically outfitted like a lion and another biologically outfitted like a lamb. All races of men can either plow or fight, and all the racial differences among them are in nonessentials such as texture of head hair, amount of body hair, shape of the nose or head, or color of the eyes and the skin.

After the discovery of America by Columbus, Europeans began traveling to every quarter of the globe, and all the new peoples they met were complete strangers to them. For one thing, the Europeans couldn’t understand their languages. They looked and acted strange. Europeans thought they were different creatures and named a lot of different “races.” Gradually the Europeans described each one as having a skin color, kind of hair, kind of lips, height, and head shape that was peculiar to that “race.” Nowadays we know that this was a false impression.

Or let us take the brain itself. Because the brain is the thinking organ, some scientists have tried to find differences in the size and structure of the brain among different groups of people. In spite of these efforts, using the finest microscopes, the best scientists cannot tell ftom examining a brain to what group of people its owner belonged. The average size of the brain is different in different groups, but it has been proved over and over again that the size of the brain has nothing to do with intelligence.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

1 Comment

Race and Fraud: Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish

Published on January 29, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish

In this installment we examine two specific characters and one significant contribution they made to the larger anti-“racist” fraud. These two women were students of Franz Boas and their efforts represent only part of the long-term team effort to carry on the crusade Boas began: to derail race science and replace it with cultural narrative, to decouple academic investigation and understanding of human beings and human relations from biology and change the focus instead to sentimentalism and moralizing. To replace clarity with obfuscation. That project, reduced to a word, is anthropology.

Kevin MacDonald’s The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences, on the anti-science of anthropology:

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution, such as those implying developmental sequences, by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half century of its dominance of the profession (Stocking 1968, 210). Because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology may thus be characterized more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture (White 1966, 15).

“It’s all so confusing!!!”, is the suggestion, and that’s exactly what is produced – confusion, doubt and demoralization. Hand-waving and smoke-blowing are other terms for such tactics.

Ruth Benedict, Wikipedia:

Ruth Benedict (born Ruth Fulton, June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist.

She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College and was graduated in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her Ph.D and joining the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she may have shared a romantic relationship,[2] and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.

Benedict’s father died when she was 2 or 3.

She developed a close friendship with Boas, who took on a role as a kind of father figure in her life – Benedict lovingly referred to him as “Papa Franz”

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict are considered to be the two most influential and famous women anthropologists of their time.

Benedict died of a heart attack in 1948

Her major work:

Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was published in many editions as standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years.

The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, “her view of human cultures as ‘personality writ large.'”

In other words, culture is a collective expression, reflecting the tastes and personality traits of the people creating it. Culture is an expression of race but anti-“racists” simply deny it.

Benedict, in Patterns of Culture, expresses her belief in cultural relativism. She desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole. It was wrong, she felt, to disparage the customs or values of a culture different from one’s own. Those customs had a meaning to the people who lived them which should not be dismissed or trivialized. We should not try to evaluate people by our standards alone. Morality, she argued, was relative to the values of the culture in which one operates.

Indeed, as noted previously, morality is relative to the group it concerns, who/whom, who is concerned about whom.

Boasian anti-“racism” is a disparaging, dismissmive, and trivializing criticism of Western culture – openly and approvingly acknowledged by anti-“racists” as a radical challenge to long-standing Western cultural norms. When it comes to the West, the anti-“racist” criticism is not constrained to our culture either, but is aimed also at the supposed moral and mental flaws of White people.

The root of this hypocrisy, which is especially visible in jew-dominated Boasian anthropology, is the jewish “culture of critique”. Jews are the most acid critics of everyone else, who cry foul when anyone criticizes them, and by extension oppose any White criticism of non-Whites.

The anti-“racist” critique is based on fraud – lies and hypocrisy, universalist and scientific sounding language disguising a pursuit of narrower loyalties and motives (both ethnic and ideological).

When Boas retired in 1937, most of his students considered Ruth Benedict to be the obvious choice for the head of the anthropology department. However, the administration of Columbia was not as progressive in its attitude towards female professionals as Boas had been, and the university President Nicholas Murray Butler was eager to curb the influence of the Boasians whom he considered to be political radicals. Instead, Ralph Linton, one of Boas’ former students, a WWI veteran, and a fierce critic of Benedict’s “Culture and Personality” approach was named head of the department.[14] Benedict was understandably insulted by Linton’s appointment and the Columbia department was divided between the two rival figures of Linton and Benedict, both accomplished anthropologists with influential publications, neither of whom ever mentioned the work of the other.[15]

More on Benedict’s motives for taking up Boas’ crusade:

Ruth Benedict, columbia.edu:

In 1921, Dr. Franz Boas waived the admission requirements and admitted Dr. Ruth Benedict as a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University anthropology program. Dr. Boas was extremely important to Dr. Benedict, who wrote to him in 1940, “I can’t tell you what a place you fill in my life.”

She did field reserach with American southwestern tribes, with the Serrono of California and the Blackfoot of Canada.

Wikipedia’s description of The Races of Mankind:

One of Benedict’s lesser known works was a pamphlet “The Races of Mankind” which she wrote with her colleague at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, Gene Weltfish. This pamphlet was intended for American troops and set forth, in simple language with cartoon illustrations, the scientific case against racist beliefs.

the writers explicate, in section after section, the best evidence they knew for human equality. They want to encourage all these types of people to join together and not fight amongst themselves.

Gene Weltfish, Wikipedia:

Gene Weltfish (Born Regina Weltfish) (August 7, 1902 – August 2, 1980) was an American anthropologist and historian working at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. She studied with Franz Boas and was a specialist in the culture and history of the Pawnee people. Her 1965 ethnography The Lost Universe is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.

She is also known for the 1943 pamphlet for the U.S. Army called The Races of Mankind, which she co-wrote with Ruth Benedict, meant to teach military personnel about the cultural differences between the peoples of the world. In the text they argued that perceived differences between the races are cultural rather than biological. Among the data used in the text was an IQ study that had found higher scores among some northern Blacks than among some southern Whites. The pamphlet was not widely circulated within the army, and eventually it was banned as subversive. Weltfish was engaged in social activism and attracted the attention of the FBI which suspected her to be a communist.

One of two daughters born into a German Jewish family in New York’s Lower East Side, Gene Weltfish grew up speaking German as her first language, taught by a German governess hired by her grandfather. Her father, to whom she was very close, died when she was 13.

One of Weltfish’s minor works, cowritten with Ruth Benedict, had a surprisingly great effect. Published in 1943, The Races of Mankind was a pamphlet intended for American troops. It set forth, in simple language with cartoon illustrations, the scientific case against racist beliefs.[7] The publication of this pamphlet and the subsequent political furor that it caused, when it was decried as a piece of socialist propaganda, attracted the attention of anti-Communist authorities.[8]

The pamphlet represented the Boasian way of thinking about race which later became the standard view in anthropology and was endorsed with a 1948 UNESCO declaration, but at the time this was politically controversial, especially in the American South, where Jim Crow was still in rigor.[9] Weltfish herself described her motivations for writing the pamphlet:

“During the first four years of my graduate training at Columbia, Hitler rose to power in Germany, bolstering his heinous operations with racist theories developed from distorted anthropology. The books of Franz Boas were burned in Germany. In 1942, after [Boas’] death, Ruth Benedict, my senior colleague in the Anthropology Department, and I felt that we should carry the banner on the race question. In 1943, Ruth Benedict and I collaborated on a pamphlet, “The Races of Mankind,” published by the Public Affairs Committee. The pamphlet was originally written at the request of the U.S.O. for distribution to the men in the armed forces who had to fight side by side with allies such as the Huks in the Philippines and the Solomon Islanders. “The Races of Mankind” was used, not only for orientation by the army, but in the de-Nazification program in Germany after the war.”
—(Memo by Weltfish, October 24, 1967, quoted in Pathe 1989:375)

Far-right political groups in the US and elsewhere still consider Weltfish’s work to be part of a conspiracy by Boas and his students to eliminate the study of race in psychology and anthropology in “preparation for the defeat of ‘White Civilization’ by the Jews”.[10]

Basic facts about Benedict and Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind:

“intended for American troops” (both wikis)
first published in 1943 (both wikis)
“had a surprisingly great effect” (Weltfish wiki)
made “the scientific case against racist beliefs” (Weltfish wiki)
“The pamphlet was not widely circulated within the army, and eventually it was banned as subversive.” (Weltfish wiki)
“used, not only for orientation by the army, but in the de-Nazification program in Germany after the war” (according to Weltfish)

More biographical information on Gene Weltfish at webster.edu:

Despite its widespread use until then, “The Races of Mankind” was banned from armed forces libraries in 1944. It continued to be translated and read around the world. There was a dispute over whether or not the pamphlet showed northern blacks as smarter than southern whites.

The original pamphlet price was 10 cents. A used copy on Amazon is priced at $20.

A variant of the original work is In Henry’s Backyard: The Races of Mankind, also at Amazon, published in 1948:

A cheerfully illustrated little story about fighting the “green devils” of prejudice and recognizing all races are equally human.

Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, at Google Books, includes a copy of In Henry’s Backyard, and in the Editor’s introduction includes more information about the original pamphlet:

debunked racial myths spread by fascists abroad and racists at home

Benedict was the author of Race: Science and Politics (1940) and coauthor of Race and Cultural Relations: America’s Answer to the Myth of a Master Race (1942)

Using science to prove that we are all “one human race” and that culture (not nature) accounts for differences among peoples was controversial in the 1940s.

to be distributed through the USO. But Kentucky congressman Andrew May objected

May persuaded the army to stop distributing the pamphlet, his act inspired public protests, garnered media coverage, and boosted sales. The Races of Mankind sold nearly a million copies in its first ten years, and was translated into French, German, and Japanese.

In 1945, United Productions of America (UPA) made the book into an animated cartoon, Brotherhood of Man.

UPA was an innovative animation studio founded by Dave Hilberman, Zack Schwartz, Steve Bosustow, and John Hubley, all former Disney employees – and ex-Communists – who took part in the 1941 strike. (Disney’s reponse to the strikers was to fire them.) Hubley and Phil Eastman – another ex-Disney-striker and ex-Communist – animated the cartoon, and future Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner, Jr., cowrote the script. (The UPA studio would go on to produce the Academy Award-winning cartoon Gerald McBoing Boing and the Mr. Magoo cartoons.)

More on this topic in the next installment.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

1 Comment

Race and Fraud: Franz Boas

Published on January 22, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

This installment focuses on jewish efforts in the social sciences, specifically in anthropology, and specifically concerning Boasian fraud. The fraud was not only in announcing an incorrect view of skull plasticity, but in the widespread efforts to maintain that incorrect view, and its use as one part of an ongoing and disingenuous argument against any racial understanding. It represents a group-scale fraud – the deceptive efforts one group, jews, has used to gain advantage over another, Whites.

Though jewish participation has been largely disguised, jews have dominated anthropology all along.

Jinfo.org on Jews in Anthropology:

Jews played a significant role in the founding and subsequent development of modern anthropology. Two of its four principal founders, according to Jerry Moore, in his study Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists, were Émile Durkheim and Franz Boas. Of the twenty-one major theorists profiled by Moore, six were Jews. Similarly, Jews are the subjects of about thirty percent of the forty-two biographical entries contained in The Dictionary of Anthropology. Two of the five major biographical articles in the Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology deal with the work of Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Listed below are the names of prominent Jewish anthropologists and of other Jewish scholars who have contributed to the development of anthropology.

Returning again to excerpts from Kevin MacDonald’s The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences:

By 1915 the Boasians controlled the American Anthropological Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board (Stocking 1968, 285). In 1919 Boas could state that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia (in Stocking 1968, 296). By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish.

This point from the last installment is worth reiterating:

As Frank (1997, 731) points out, “The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Jewish identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate.

The invisible subject is the jewish domination of anthropology and social sciences in general.

Recalling Lenz (as per Robert Proctor):

Many jews, Lenz reports, in the process of adapting to essentially alien surroundings, have tried to imitate the customs and appearances of their hosts in order to blend in and appear less conspicuous. He considers this a typical case of “animal mimicry,” commonly observed “wherever a living creature gains advantages in the struggle for existence by acquiring a resemblance to some other organism.” It is for this reason, he argues, that jews are not just shrewd and alert, not just diligent and persevering, but possess as well an unusual sense of empathy – an ability to put themselves in the place of others and to induce others to accept their guidance.

Boasian anthropology, and the broader phenomenon of jews posing as objective (mainly social) scientists, is an example of jews inducing others to accept their guidance, for their own advantage in the struggle for existence. Race science was exposing jews as genetically distinct. Under jewish mis-guidance, race and White race-related thinking and research have been illegitimized.

The liars (“we’re objective scientists”), have been telling lies (“no such thing as race”), to cover their lies (“we’re all the same, especially the jews”).

Wolf (1990, 168) describes the attack of the Boasians as calling into question “the moral and political monopoly of a [gentile] elite which had justified its rule with the claim that their superior virtue was the outcome of the evolutionary process.”

Jews have the “moral and political monopoly” now. They justify it by denying it exists, disguising it through denial and punishment for dissent.

If the Nordicist/Anglo-Saxon elite monopoly had been so complete, or they had been as sensitive to competition and ruthless about defending their interests as the jews, they would not have lost their monopoly. They lost as soon as they gave up the premise that their society, with them in charge, was superior to any other society with them not in charge.

Jews think this way about themselves and their position, and they didn’t even create this society, they usurped it. Which is why they cannot acknowledge it openly.

Calling into question Whites dominating and seeing our societies as superior to others is an attack on Whites. Only you can be you. You’re the best, the superior person for that job. The belief that this is true can be rationalized in many ways. Nothing more is required than the understanding that as soon as you stop believing it, you’re done for.

Boas, Bones, and Race, by Charles Fergus, May 2003:

In the 19th century, anthropologists argued that skull capacity equated directly with intelligence. Caucasians, so the theory went, had larger brains — and thus were smarter — than American Indians and people of African descent. It was a convenient, if false, viewpoint in a white-dominated society.

The latest science confirms that there is a correlation between brain size and a variety of measures of intelligence.

There is nothing wrong with Whites dominating a White society created by Whites.

The Grantians identified one metric of skull shape, the cephalic index, as one indicator of racial distinctions among Europeans. Other indicators include hair color, eye color, stature. Boas’ fraud called into question issue was the stability of this indicator, not it’s existence.

In 1912, Franz Boas stunned the world of anthropology by reporting striking differences in cranial form between American-born children of immigrants and their European-born parents. After collecting and analyzing measurements from over 13,000 subjects, Boas proclaimed that environment, not heredity, determined skull shape. The skull was plastic: You couldn’t use it to reliably distinguish ethnicity or race, let alone intellect.

David Hurst Thomas, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, summarizes Boas’s revelation in his book Skull Wars, published in 2000: “Boas found that nobody knew what a ‘race’ really was.” Instead, human form and behavior stemmed from environment: the foods a person ate, the kind of home he or she grew up in, the society to which the individual belonged. Over time, Boas’s outlook became widespread — became in its own way as dogmatic, some anthropologists now say, as the earlier racist outlook.

Recently, two physical anthropologists reanalyzed Boas’s head-form data. They report that Boas — now considered the founding father of modern American anthropology — was wrong.

The use of the term race was ambiguous. There was and still is disagreement about how many races there are, where the boundaries are, not the empirical existence of more or less homogenous groups and differences between those groups.

Corey Sparks, a doctoral candidate at Penn State, and Richard Jantz, a professor at the University of Tennessee, published their findings in the October 7, 2002, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“In evaluating skull shape,” Sparks notes, “Boas looked at three variables. These days a physical anthropologist” — whether doing forensic work or studying bones from an archaeological dig — “will typically make around 80 measurements. Boas focused on cranial index: the ratio of head width to head length. In many cases, he compared pre-adult children with their parents. That approach downplays the fact that the cranium changes as an individual grows and matures. Boas concluded that, in only one generation, dramatic changes in head form had taken place.”

Boas did not offer any theory why such change had occurred, only that his result “disproved” the stability of cephalic index. As it turns out, his disproof was invalid. His data, when finally double-checked in 2002, indicated the cephalic index was a stable hereditable physical trait.

Sparks explains what they did, Janz explains why:

Says Sparks, “Working from Boas’s data, we found that some change had indeed taken place, but not much. After you factor out age, the amount of change is not statistically significant.” The reanalysis actually suggests an overall stability of the cranial index, even in a changing environment where people may abandon old cultural traditions, enjoy better nutrition, contract new diseases, or experience a lower infant mortality rate. As Sparks and Jantz state in their PNAS article, skull differences between same-age related individuals born in Europe and America are “negligible in comparison to the differentiation between ethnic groups.” Says Sparks, “We found that the dominant force for all traits was genetic.”

Notes Jantz, “Boas’s head-form studies have been cited by many people critical of what morphometricians are doing.” Morphometricians are physical anthropologists who analyze bones, focusing mainly on skull shape. By thoroughly measuring a skull, some morphometricians believe they can correctly identify its owner’s continent of ancestral origin with up to 90 percent accuracy: They can state that a skull comes from a person whose forebears originated in Africa, Europe, or Asia.

[Boas] once wrote, referring to racist anthropology, that “far-reaching theories have been built on weak foundations.”

Anti-“racism” is a theory that race doesn’t exist, built on no foundation whatsoever except the ruthless effort to suppress any racial understanding of human nature. Jews do so primarily because they believe it’s good for jews. Whites do so primarily because they believe it’s good for everyone. None of this is good for Whites.

Boas led anthropology toward the study of human biology, language, and culture and away from what he called the “comparative method,” which ranked different cultural groups along a single axis of progress. His students included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, and Ashley Montagu, all famous anthropologists in their own right, and all proponents of Boas’s anti-racist viewpoint. Penn State historian of science Robert Proctor says, “Boasians turned away from bones altogether.” Or, as Skull Wars author Thomas states in an October 8, 2002, New York Times article reporting on the Sparks-Jantz paper: “Once we anthropologists said race doesn’t exist, we have ignored it since then.”

Sparks and Jantz do not know why Boas concluded that the human skull was so fluid in response to environmental change. “Boas had a strong statistical background,” Sparks says. “For his era, he was one of the most numerically intensive anthropologists around. He pretty much did the type of analyses that people did back then. It was paper-and-pencil work — no computers. After new statistical methods were developed in the twenties and thirties, Boas did not go back and recheck his head-form data.

“Boas’s correspondence with friends, rivals, and even enemies reveals his distaste for the scientific racism of his era. As a Jew, he no doubt understood firsthand the effects of racism on minority groups. We make no claims that his calculations were purposely skewed. But it does seem possible that he chose to ignore variation in skull shape between populations because he believed it might contribute to racist anthropology.”

Coincidentally, as of this writing, another paper, by anthropologists at the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, and Northwestern University, is scheduled for publication in American Anthropologist; it concludes that Boas correctly interpreted his head-form data. According to Jantz, these present-day anthropologists fail to acknowledge Boas’s error in comparing children with adults. Nor, points out Sparks, do they consider cranial differences between ethnic groups.

Sparks and Janz’s 2002 paper, A reassessment of human cranial plasticity: Boas revisited:

Abstract

In 1912, Franz Boas published a study demonstrating the plastic nature of the human body in response to changes in the environment. The results of this study have been cited for the past 90 years as evidence of cranial plasticity.

Results indicate the relatively high genetic component of the head and face diameters despite the environmental differences during development. Results point to very small and insignificant differences between European- and American-born offspring, and no effect of exposure to the American environment on the cranial index in children. These results contradict Boas’ original findings and demonstrate that they may no longer be used to support arguments of plasticity in cranial morphology.

In the struggle for group survival, politics is war by other means. Likewise history and science (and especially anthropology and the social sciences) are battlegrounds too. Academics in general is war by other means.

Anti-“racism” is anti-Whitism – it is more or less covert aggression aimed almost exclusively at Whites. Anti-“racism” has been a team effort, and extends far beyond its Boas figurehead. Others, many of them jews, have been hard at work in other places, using other approaches. We’ll shift forward in time and continue analyzing this struggle in upcoming installments.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

3 Comments

Race and Anthropology – Part 5

Published on January 15, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Franz Boas

More on how Franz Boas and other jews flocked to anthropology specifically to oppose a racial understanding of human nature.

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. – Ruth Benedict

Anthropology has from the beginning been dominated by jews. The purpose of jewish anthropology is to make the world safe for jews. One of the main tactics jews use is to disguise what they’re doing as a high-minded pursuit of more general interests.

A good example is found in Herbert S. Lewis’ The Passion of Franz Boas (PDF), published in “American Anthropologist” journal Volume 103, Issue 2, pages 447–467, June 2001.

Lewis defends Boas from criticism made by the children of the anti-“racist” revolt he led. The core of this defense is a recounting of Boas’ life-long efforts to thwart an understanding of reality which assigns significance to race. Some children of the revolution see Boas himself as a “racist” because he did not deny the existence of race. Others complained that he was only promoting jewish (or “white”) interests.

By the 1960s the many facets of the thoroughly though cryptically judaized culture of critique had pathologized and demonized and prevailed (at least in intellectual/academic circles) not only over “racist” Nordic champions such as Madison Grant, but Whites generally. As jewish involvement increased they shifted the understanding of race from real, to insignificant, to imaginary, to the self-contradictory anti-White/anti-“racism” of today – where “race” is supposedly a construct of the evil White race, who used (and still uses!) it to exploit and oppress all the other, innocent “people of color” (i.e. everyone who isn’t White).

Lewis’ defense amounts to the argument that Boas did great service at the start of this progression. His hand-waving and smoke-blowing was, as usual for jews, used to obscure the Who/Whom – who was served by whom and at whose expense – behind a pretense that everyone benefited.

Lewis concludes by quoting Michel de Montaigne:

I see most of the wits of my time using their ingenuity to obscure the glory of the beautiful and noble actions of antiquity, giving them some vile interpretation and conjuring up vain occasions and causes for them. What great subtlety! Give me the most excellent and purest action, and I will plausibly supply fifty vicious motives for it. God knows what a variety of interpretations may be placed on our inward will, for anyone who wants to elaborate them.

This criticism applies all the more to contemporary anti-“racist” interpretations of the White men who were beginning to understand the significance of race. Boas and his tribe have prevailed, for a while at least, by pathologizing and demonizing their enemies while disguising their own motives, thus obscuring the racial nature of the conflict.

One substantial criticism of Boas and the broader jewish influence in anthropology and social science was ignored by Lewis.

Kevin MacDonald’s The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences, is Chapter 2 in “Culture of Critique”, subtitled “An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements”, first published in 1998:

Several writers have commented on the “radical changes” that occurred in the goals and methods of the social sciences consequent to the entry of Jews to these fields (Liebman 1973, 213; see also Degler 1991; Hollinger 1996; Horowitz 1993, 75; Rothman & Lichter 1982). Degler (1991, 188ff) notes that the shift away from Darwinism as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences resulted from an ideological shift rather than from the emergence of any new empirical data. He also notes that Jewish intellectuals have been instrumental in the decline of Darwinism and other biological perspectives in American social science since the 1930s (p. 200). The opposition of Jewish intellectuals to Darwinism has long been noticed (Lenz 1931, 674; see also comments of John Maynard Smith in Lewin [1992, 43]). 1 In sociology, the advent of Jewish intellectuals in the pre–World War II period resulted in “a level of politicization unknown to sociology’s founding fathers. It is not only that the names of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim replaced those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but also that the sense of America as a consensual experience gave way to a sense of America as a series of conflicting definitions” (Horowitz 1993, 75). In the post–World War II period, sociology “became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes abounded

It was jews who were joking.

An endnote refers to Lenz’s observation concerning the “jewish fondness for Lamarkism”:

The jewish inclination toward Lamarckism is obviously an expression of the wish that there should be no unbridgeable racial distinctions.

MacDonald adds:

The obvious interpretation of such sentiments is that Jewish intellectuals opposed natural selection because of possible negative political implications. The suggestion is that these intellectuals were well aware of ethnic differences between Jews and Germans but wished to deny their importance for political reasons—an example of deception as an aspect of Judaism as an evolutionary strategy (SAID, Chs. 6–8).

Lenz states that the Jewish opposition to discussion of race “inevitably arouses the impression that they must have some reason for fighting shy of any exposition of racial questions.”

Back to MacDonald’s main text:

This chapter will emphasize the ethnopolitical agenda of Franz Boas, but it is worth mentioning the work of Franco-Jewish structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss because he appears to be similarly motivated

Lévi-Strauss interacted extensively with Boas and acknowledged his influence (Dosse 1997 I, 15, 16). In turn, Lévi-Strauss was very influential in France

Levi-Strauss’s most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. . . . [H]is elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be Europeans. . . . [H]e evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. . . . [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left . . . that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference. (Lilla 1998, 37)

Degler (1991, 61) emphasizes the role of Franz Boas in the anti-Darwinian transformation of American social science: “Boas’ influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” Boas engaged in a “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture” (p. 61). “Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science” (p. 71).

Boas did not arrive at the position from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial question. . . . There is no doubt that he had a deep interest in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological outlook—racism—which he considered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society. . . . there is a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public. (Degler 1991, 82–83)

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

4 Comments

Race and Anthropology – Part 4

Published on January 8, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Franz Boas

In Race and Anthropology – Part 1 I mentioned Franz Boas in passing, giving a preview of where the discusion was going. Here we’ll finally review in detail who Franz Boas was and what he did.

Franz Boas, from Wikipedia:

Franz Boas (/ˈfrɑːnz ˈboʊ.æz/; July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942)[2] was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the “Father of American Anthropology”[3][4] and “the Father of Modern Anthropology”.[5] Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. He applied the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies; previously this discipline was based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge.

Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society.

Boas vocally opposed anti-Semitism and refused to convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew;[8] indeed, according to his biographer, “He was an ‘ethnic’ German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America.”

Boas was appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896, and promoted to professor of anthropology in 1899. However, the various anthropologists teaching at Columbia had been assigned to different departments. When Boas left the Museum of Natural History, he negotiated with Columbia University to consolidate the various professors into one department, of which Boas would take charge. Boas’ program at Columbia became the first Ph.D. program in anthropology in America.

In his 1907 essay, “Anthropology”, Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: “Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?”

Boas also presented himself as a role model for the citizen-scientist, who understand that even were the truth pursued as its own end, all knowledge has moral consequences. The Mind of Primitive Man ends with an appeal to humanism:

I hope the discussions outlined in these pages have shown that the data of anthropology teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity.

Where Boas was at odds with Madison Grant, eugenics and race science:

His most important research in this field was his study of changes in body form among children of immigrants in New York. Other researchers had already noted differences in height, cranial measurements, and other physical features between Americans and people from different parts of Europe. Many used these differences to argue that there is an innate biological difference between races. Boas’ primary interest—in symbolic and material culture and in language—was the study of processes of change; he therefore set out to determine whether bodily forms are also subject to processes of change. Boas studied 17,821 people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. Boas found that average measures of cranial size of immigrants were significantly different from members of these groups who were born in the United States. Moreover, he discovered that average measures of cranial size of children born within ten years of their mothers’ arrival were significantly different from those of children born more than ten years after their mothers’ arrival. Boas did not deny that physical features such as height or cranial size were inherited; he did, however, argue that the environment has an influence on these features, which is expressed through change over time. This work was central to his influential argument that differences between races were not immutable.

Madison Grant mocked Boas’ result in The Passing of the Great Race, but the case that it was an outright fraud has only been made recently. In 2002 the raw data was reexamined and the results were not as Boas claimed. Wiki mentions the controversy but misrepresents the claims on each side. More on this later.

Boas did not try to claim that race and racial differences do not exist. He argued instead that race is plastic – that the observable differences are not immutable. This is the thin edge of the, “Race may exist, but it isn’t really important.” line of argument.

As the Wiki article notes, this is considered Boas’ “most important research”. This sentiment is echoed elsewhere by those who agree with him.

Wiki relates an anecdote concerning Boas’ strong identification with jews. Boas delivered a speech at a black university in Atlanta in 1906 in which he described several historic situations that had “brought different peoples into an unequal relation”:

the best example, for Boas, of this phenomenon is that of the Jews in Europe:

Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had not been able to efface, and which is strong enough to find — not only here and there — expression as antipathy to the Jewish type. In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.

Boas’ closing advice is that Negroes should not look to Whites for approval or encouragement, because people in power usually take a very long time to learn to sympathize with people out of power.

French nationalists rightly recognize that the jews who happen to live in France consider themselves a separate people who care first and foremost for themselves as jews and jews in general. Just as Boas did. Europeans have long criticized jews for constituting a “nation within a nation.” European nationalists are today routinely pathologized and demonized for doing so.

Contemporary headlines reflect the fact that jews are the people in power today. Hollande vows to wipe out anti-Semitism, 2 Nov 2012:

“France will hunt down terrorism … by all possible means,” Hollande said during an emotional service on Thursday at the Ohr Torah school in Toulouse, where the four were shot dead by Al-Qaeda-inspired killer Mohamed Merah on March 19.

“My country will not be weak in fighting terrorism,” he said.

Pledging to “eradicate” anti-Semitism, Hollande promised all-out measures to ensure the security of Jews.

“Safeguarding their safety, their integrity and their dignity is a national cause…. It is not only the affair of Jews but of all French people.”

“Let us learn the lessons of this ordeal for humanity, for mankind,” he said, adding: “We shall never forget.”

In the US in the early 20th century, Boas sympathized with blacks, specifically as a jew, and collaborated with them against Whites.

One early reaction to the news of Boas’ cephalic index data fraud came from Sam Francis in 2002. Franz Boas – Liberal Icon, Scientific Fraud:

In political terms, if human beings have few or no “fixed characters” and are shaped by the social environment, then what we know as modern liberalism is in business. So is communism, which also assumes that human beings can be transformed by manipulating the social environment.

Francis’ conclusion:

Not only has a giant of modern social science—and a pillar of modern liberalism—tumbled from his pedestal, but the dogma that man is merely a blank slate, on which state bureaucrats and social engineers may scribble whatever ideologies they please, has toppled with him.

If that dogma really can be killed, then much of the tyranny and chaos it has helped create will die with it.

Ten years on I think it’s safe to say this was overly optimistic.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

3 Comments

Race and Anthropology – Part 3

Published on January 1, 2013 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Reading and commentary on Madison Grant’s views on eugenics (the Anglosphere equivalent of German Rassenhygiene, racial hygiene, previously discussed here and here) as well as his view of race as contrasted with nationality.

Excerpts from The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History:

The value and efficiency of a population are not numbered by what the newspapers call souls, but by the proportion of men of physical and intellectual vigor. The small Colonial population of America was, on an average and man for man, far superior to the present inhabitants, although the latter are twenty-five times more numerous. The ideal in eugenics toward which statesmanship should be directed is, of course, improvement in quality rather than quantity.

Efforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes of the community, while most desirable, encounter great difficulties. In such efforts we encounter social conditions over which we have as yet no control. It was tried two thousand years ago by Augustus and his efforts to avert race suicide and the extinction of the old Roman stock were singularly prophetic of what some far seeing men are attempting in order to preserve the race of native Americans of Colonial descent.

Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement. He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization. The first method was adopted by the Spartans, who had for their national ideals military efficiency and the virtues of self-control, and along these lines the results were completely successful. Under modern social conditions it would be extremely difficult in the first instance to determine which were the most desirable types, except in the most general way and even if a satisfactory selection were finally made, it would be in a democracy a virtual impossibility to limit by law the right to breed to a privileged and chosen few.

Addressing historic dysgenics and making the case for a deliberate negative eugenic effort:

Experiments in limiting reproduction to the undesirable classes were unconsciously made in mediaeval Europe under the guidance of the church. After the fall of Rome social conditions were such that all those who loved a studious and quiet life were compelled to seek refuge from the violence of the times in monastic institutions and upon such the church imposed the obligation of celibacy and thus deprived the world of offspring from these desirable classes.

In the Middle Ages, through persecution resulting in actual death, life imprisonment and banishment, the free thinking, progressive and intellectual elements were persistently eliminated over large areas, leaving the perpetuation of the race to be carried on by the brutal, the servile and the stupid. It is now impossible to say to what extent the Roman Church by these methods has impaired the brain capacity of Europe, but in Spain alone, for a period of over three centuries from the years 1471 to 1781, the Inquisition condemned to the stake or imprisonment an average of 1,000 persons annually. During these three centuries no less than 32,000 were burned alive and 291,000 were condemned to various terms of imprisonment and other penalties and 17,000 persons were burned in effigy, representing men who had died in prison or had fled the country.

No better method of eliminating the genius producing strains of a nation could be devised and if such were its purpose the result was eminently satisfactory, as is demonstrated by the superstitious and unintelligent Spaniard of to-day. A similar elimination of brains and ability took place in northern Italy, in France and in the Low Countries, where hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were murdered or driven into exile.

Under existing conditions the most practical and hopeful method of race improvement is through the elimination of the least desirable elements in the nation by depriving them of the power to contribute to future generations. It is well known to stock breeders that the color of a herd of cattle can be modified by continuous destruction of worthless shades and of course this is true of other characters. Black sheep, for instance, have been practically obliterated by cutting out generation after generation all animals that show this color phase, until in carefully maintained flocks a black individual only appears as a rare sport.

In mankind it would not be a matter of great difficulty to secure a general consensus of public opinion as to the least desirable, let us say, ten percent of the community. When this unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated together with the great mass of crime, poverty, alcoholism and feeblemindedness associated therewith it would be easy to consider the advisability of further restricting the perpetuation of the then remaining least valuable types. By this method mankind might ultimately become sufficiently intelligent to choose deliberately the most vital and intellectual strains to carry on the race.

Grant’s was a pragmatic vision of societal-scale improvement, with an explicit preference for quality over quantity, and the imagined improvements accomplished by curtailing the reproduction of problematic heritable human traits. Grant assumed popular support for this plan could be argued and won via appeal to a collective, democratic process.

As with the other accomplished racial thinkers previously discussed, the scandalized, negative image of Grant and his milieu visible through today’s judaized lens is distorted and false. Grant spelled out quite clearly who and what he favored, and why – and that opinion was favorably received. The next installment will explain how this was largely undone by jewish deception and fraud.

Grant’s vision was predicated on discrimination and exclusion, which any group requires to exist. This and the contemporary fearful response to it are discussed here.

Moving on to Grant’s distinction between race and nationality:

Nationality is an artificial political grouping of population usually centring around a single language as an expression of traditions and aspirations. Nationality can, however, exist independently of language but states thus formed, such as Belgium or Austria, are far less stable than those where a uniform language is prevalent, as, for example, France or England.

States without a single national language are constantly exposed to disintegration, especially where a substantial minority of the inhabitants speak a tongue which is predominant in an adjoining state and, as a consequence, tend to gravitate toward such state.

The history of the last century in Europe has been the record of a long series of struggles to unite in one political unit all those speaking the same or closely allied dialects. With the exception of internal and social revolutions, every European war since the Napoleonic period has been caused by the effort to bring about the unification either of Italy or of Germany or by the desperate attempts of the Balkan States to struggle out of Turkish chaos into modern European nations on a basis of community of language. The unification of both Italy and Germany is as yet incomplete according to the views held by their more advanced patriots and the solution of the Balkan question is still in the future.

Men are keenly aware of their nationality and are very sensitive about their language, but only in a few cases, notably in Sweden and Germany, does any large section of the population possess anything analogous to true race consciousness, although the term “race” is everywhere misused to designate linguistic or political groups.

It sometimes happens that a section of the population of a large nation gathers around language, reinforced by religion, as an expression of individuality. The struggle between the French-speaking Alpine Walloons and the Nordic Flemings of Low Dutch tongue in Belgium is an example of two competing languages in an artificial nation which was formed originally around religion.

The prevailing lack of true race consciousness is probably due to the fact that every important nation in Europe as at present organized, with the sole exception of the Iberian and Scandinavian states, possesses in large proportions representatives of at least two of the fundamental European subspecies of man and of all manner of crosses between them. In France to-day, as in Caesar’s Gaul, the three races divide the nation in unequal proportions.

In the future, however, with an increased knowledge of the correct definition of true human races and types and with a recognition of the immutability of fundamental racial characters and of the results of mixed breeding, far more value will be attached to racial in contrast to national or linguistic affinities. In marital relations the consciousness of race will also play a much larger part than at present, although in the social sphere we shall have to contend with a certain strange attraction for contrasted types. When it becomes thoroughly understood that the children of mixed marriages between contrasted races belong to the lower type, the importance of transmitting in unimpaired purity the blood inheritance of ages will be appreciated at its full value and to bring half-breeds into the world will be regarded as a social and racial crime of the first magnitude. The laws against miscegenation must be greatly extended if the higher races are to be maintained.

The coasts of the North Sea extending from Schleswig and Holstein into Holland are inhabited by a very pure Nordic type known as the Frisians. They are the handsomest and in many respects the finest of the continental Nordics and are closely related to the English, as many of the Post-Roman invaders of England either came from Frisia or from adjoining districts.

All the states involved in the present world war have sent to the front their fighting Nordic element and the loss of life now going on in Europe will fall much more heavily on the blond giant than on the little brunet.

As in all wars since Roman times from a breeding point of view the little dark man is the final winner. No one who saw one of our regiments march on its way to the Spanish War could fail to be impressed with the size and blondness of the men in the ranks as contrasted with the complacent citizen, who from his safe stand on the gutter curb gave his applause to the fighting man and then stayed behind to perpetuate his own brunet type. In the present war one has merely to study the type of officer and of the man in the ranks to realize that, in spite of the draft net, the Nordic race is contributing an enormous majority of the fighting men, out of all proportion to their relative numbers in the nation at large.

Grant distinguished distinct strains – Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean – within what others identify as a larger White/European/Caucasian continental-scale race. He observed that national boundaries tended to be shaped by common language and religion, and cut across race. He laments that the Nordic race suffers, mainly in war, under this arrangement.

Grant’s analysis of the nature of even greater racial distinctions in close proximity is grim:

Where two distinct species are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists but nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.

Grant’s vision for the future was never fully realized, and his estimation of his sentimentalist contemporaries was too charitable. In the vacuum created by pathologizing and demonizing and thus eliminating Nordic champions like Grant, a wholly opposite “well meaning” kind has inherited the role of leadership. Today they demonstrate a vision based on a distinct preference for anything and everything not only non-Nordic, but more broadly non-White.

Image source.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Comments Off

Race and Anthropology – Part 2

Published on December 25, 2012 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Reading from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History:

xxviii INTRODUCTION TO FOURTH EDITION

“The Passing of the Great Race,” in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow-Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the “Melting Pot” theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of the doctrines enunciated in this volume and in the discussions that followed its publication was the decision of the Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples.

Another of the results has been the publication in America and Europe of a series of books and articles more or less anthropological in character which have sustained or controverted its main theme. The new definition of race and the controlling role played by race in all the manifestations of what we call civilization are now generally accepted even by those whose political position depends upon popular favor.

There exists to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in the past and if allowed to go uncontradicted, may do even more serious damage in the future. Thus the view that the Negro slave was an unfortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period and it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man. Nor was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in the amphitheatre. Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.

Recent attempts have been made in the interest of inferior races among our immigrants to show that the shape of the skull does change, not merely in a century, but in a single generation. In 1910, the report of the anthropological expert of the Congressional Immigration Commission gravely declared that a round skull Jew on his way across the Atlantic might and did have a round skull child; but a few years later, in response to the subtle elixir of American institutions as exemplified in an East Side tenement, might and did have a child whose skull was appreciably longer; and that a long skull south Italian, breeding freely, would have precisely the same experience in the reverse direction. In other words the Melting Pot was acting instantly under the influence of a changed environment.

What the Melting Pot actually does in practice can be seen in Mexico, where the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian population has produced the racial mixture which we call Mexican and which is now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government. The world has seen many such mixtures and the character of a mongrel race is only just beginning to be understood at its true value.

It must be borne in mind that the specializations which characterize the higher races are of relatively recent development, are highly unstable and when mixed with generalized or primitive characters tend to disappear. Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

In the crossing of the blond and brunet elements of a population, the more deeply rooted and ancient dark traits are prepotent or dominant. This is matter of every-day observation and the working of this law of nature is not influenced or affected by democratic institutions or by religious beliefs. Nature cares not for the individual nor how he may be modified by environment. She is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type and heredity alone is the medium through which she acts.

Israel Zangwill popularized the Melting Pot meme:

Zangwill was born in London on January 21, 1864 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Czarist Russia, to Moses Zangwill from what is now Latvia and Ellen Hannah Marks Zangwill from what is now Poland. He dedicated his life to championing the cause of the oppressed. Jewish emancipation, women’s suffrage, assimilationism, territorialism and Zionism were all fertile fields for his pen.

Zangwill married Edith Ayrton, a gentile feminist and author

The use of the metaphorical phrase melting pot to describe American absorption of immigrants was popularised by Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot,[3] a hit in the United States in 1909-10.

“Melting Pot celebrated America’s capacity to absorb and grow from the contributions of its immigrants.”[5] Zangwill, who had already left Zionism, was writing as “a Jew who no longer wanted to be a Jew. His real hope was for a world in which the entire lexicon of racial and religious difference is thrown away.”

After having for a time supported Theodor Herzl and the main Palestine-oriented Zionist movement, Zangwill broke away from the established movement and founded his own organization, called the Jewish Territorialist Organization in 1905. Its aim was to create a Jewish homeland in whatever possible territory in the world could be found (and not necessarily in what today is the state of Israel). Zangwill died in 1926 in Midhurst, West Sussex after trying to create the Jewish state in such diverse places as Canada, Australia, Mesopotamia, Uganda and Cyrenaica [[the eastern half of what’s called Libya today]].

Back to Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race:

In dealing with European populations the best method of determining race has been found to lie in a comparison of proportions of the skull, the so-called cephalic index. This is the ratio of maximum width, taken at the widest part of the skull above the ears, to maximum length. Skulls with an index of 75 or less, that is, those with a width that is three-fourths of the length or less, are considered dolichocephalic or long skulls. Skulls of an index of 80 or over are round or brachycephalic skulls. Intermediate indices, between 75 and 80, are considered mesaticephalic. These are cranial indices. To allow for the flesh on living specimens about two per cent is to be added to this index and the result is the cephalic index. In the following pages only long and round skulls are considered and the intermediate forms are assigned to the dolichocephalic group.

This cephalic index, though an extremely important if not the controlling character, is, nevertheless, but a single character and must be checked up with other somatological traits. Normally, a long skull is associated with a long face and a round skull with a round face

The use of this test, the cephalic index, enables us to divide the great bulk of the European populations into three distinct subspecies of man, one northern and one southern, both dolichocephalic or characterized by a long skull and a central subspecies which is brachycephalic or characterized by a round skull.

The first is the Nordic or Baltic subspecies. This race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture.

The second is the dark Mediterranean or Iberian subspecies, occupying the shores of the inland sea and extending along the Atlantic coast until it reaches the Nordic species. It also spreads far east into southern Asia. It is long skulled like the Nordic race but the absolute size of the skull is less. The eyes and hair are very dark or black and the skin more or less swarthy. The stature is distinctly less than that of the Nordic race and the musculature and bony framework weak.

The third is the Alpine subspecies occupying all central and eastern Europe and extending through Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs. The Armenoids constitute an Alpine subdivision and may possibly represent the ancestral type of this race which remained in the mouutains and high plateaux of Anatolia and western Asia.

The Alpines are round skulled, of medium height and sturdy build both as to skeleton and muscles. The coloration of both hair and eyes was originally very dark and still tends strongly in that direction but many light colored eyes, especially gray, are now common among the Alpine populations of western Europe.

While the inhabitants of Europe betray as a whole their mixed origin, nevertheless, individuals’ of each of the three main subspecies are found in large numbers and in great purity, as well as sparse remnants of still more ancient races represented by small groups or by individuals and even by single characters.

These three main groups have bodily characters which constitute them distinct subspecies. Each group is a large one and includes several well-marked varieties, which differ even more widely in cultural development than in physical divergence so that when the Mediterranean of England is compared with the Hindu, or the Alpine Savoyard with the Rumanian or Turcoman, a wide gulf is found.

In zoology, related species when grouped together constitute subgenera and genera and the term species implies the existence of a certain definite amount of divergence from the most closely related type but race does not require a similar amount of difference. In man, where all groups are more or less fertile when crossed, so many intermediate or mixed types occur that the word species has at the present day too extended a meaning.

Eye color is of very great importance in race determination because all blue, gray or green eyes in the world to-day came originally from the same source, namely, the Nordic race of northern Europe. This light colored eye has appeared nowhere else on earth, is a specialization of this subspecies of man only and consequently is of extreme value in the classification of European races. Dark colored eyes are all but universal among wild mammals and entirely so among the primates, man’s nearest relatives. It may be taken as an absolute certainty that all the original races of man had dark eyes.

One subspecies of man and one alone specialized in light colored eyes.

Blond hair also comes everywhere from the Nordic subspecies and from nowhere else. Whenever we find blondness among the darker races of the earth we may be sure some Nordic wanderer has passed that way.

It must be clearly understood that blondness of hair and of eye is not a final test of Nordic race. The Nordics include all the blonds, and also those of darker hair or eye when possessed of a preponderance of other Nordic characters. In this sense the word “blond” means those lighter shades of hair or eye color in contrast to the very dark or black shades which are termed brunet.

While the three main European races are the subject of this book and while it is not the intention of the author to deal with the other human types, it is desirable in connection with the discussion of this character, hair, to state that the three European subspecies are subdivisions of one of the primary groups or species of the genus Homo which, taken together, we may call the Caucasian for lack of a better name.

The existing classification of man must be radically revised, as the differences between the most divergent human types are far greater than are usually deemed sufficient to constitute separate species and even subgenera in the animal kingdom at large. Outside of the three European subspecies the greater portion of the genus Homo can be roughly divided into the Negroes and Negroids, and the Mongols and Mongoloids.

The environment of the Alpine race seems to have always been the mountainous country of central and eastern Europe, as well as western Asia, but they are now spreading into the plains, notably in Poland and Russia. This type has never flourished in the deserts of Arabia or the Sahara, nor has it succeeded well in maintaining its early colonies in the northwest of Europe within the domain of the Nordic long heads. It is, however, a sturdy and persistent stock and, while much of it may not be overrefined or cultured, undoubtedly possesses great potentialities for future development.

The Alpines in the west of Europe, especially in Switzerland and the districts immediately surrounding, have been so thoroughly Nordicized and so saturated with the culture of the adjoining nations that they stand in sharp contrast to backward Alpines of Slavic speech in the Balkans and east of Europe.

The Mediterranean race, on the other hand, is clearly a southern type with eastern affinities. It is a type that did not endure in the north of Europe under former agricultural conditions nor is it suitable to the farming districts and frontiers of America and Canada. It is adjusted to subtropical and tropical countries better than any other European type and will flourish in our Southern States and around the coasts of the Spanish Main. In France it is well known that members of the Mediterranean race are better adapted for colonization in Algeria than are French Alpines or Nordics. This subspecies of man is notoriously intolerant of extreme cold, owing to its susceptibility to diseases of the lungs and it shrinks from the blasts of the northern winter in which the Nordics revel.

The brunet Mediterranean element in the native American seems to be increasing at the expense of the blond Nordic element generally throughout the Southern States and probably also in the large cities. This type of man, however, is scarce on our frontiers. In the Northwest and in Alaska in the days of the gold rush it was in the mining camps a matter of comment if a man turned up with dark eyes, so universal were blue and gray eyes among the American pioneers.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Comments Off

Race and Anthropology – Part 1

Published on December 18, 2012 by Tanstaafl in Age of Treason Radio

Madison Grant

A review of the roots of anthropology, the science of humanity, in the early 20th century.

The two main branches of anthropology – physical/biological/racial anthropology and cultural/social anthropology or ethnology – represent an outgrowth of two more general complementary poles of academic thought. As the Wikipedia page for Franz Boas describes, the:

distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th century German academe, which distinguished between Naturwissenschaften (the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities)

Generally, [[the sciences]] refer to the study of phenomena that are governed by objective natural laws, while [[the humanities]] refer to those phenomena that have meaning only in terms of human perception or experience

This dichotomy in anthropology was then and remains today a divide between objective and subjective points of view. Right from the start anthropology became a battleground, with White/Aryan/Nordic racialists gravitating to the one side, and jewish anti-“racists” advocating the other.

Metapedia’s article on physical/biological/racial anthropology notes the jewish origins of the term “racism”:

The term racists was first coined in print by Leon Trotsky, a communist Jew and mass murderer, in a 1930 piece called the History of the Russian Revolution (translated into English in 1932).[2] He coined the term in a paragraph where he is mocking what he called “Slavophilism”, which Trotsky claims is the “messianism of backwardness”.[3] In the same breath, the paragraph on the so-called racists also speaks of “Teutonic jackasses”,[3] thus from the very beginning the term came from the mouth of a communist Jew in a thoroughly Europhobic context. He continues on in a 1933 piece about German socialism, speaking of racism.[4] The -ism itself was popularised largely due to Magnus Hirschfeld, a co-racialist of Trotsky and Sexual Bolshevist agitator in Berlin, in the 1934 work Racism.[5]

The champion of the Nordic side was Madison Grant:

Madison Grant (November 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist. As a eugenicist, Grant was responsible for one of the most famous works of racial anthropology, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation polices in the United States. As a conservationist, Grant was credited with the saving of many different species of animals, founding many different environmental and philanthropic organizations, and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.

Grant was born in New York City, New York, to Gabriel Grant, a well-known physician and American Civil War surgeon, and Caroline Manice. Grant was a lifelong resident of New York City. As a child he attended private schools and traveled Europe and the Middle East with his father. He attended Yale University, graduating early and with honors in 1887. He received a law degree from Columbia Law School, and practiced law after graduation; however, his interests were primarily those of a naturalist. He never married and he had no children.

Grant was a close friend of U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. Among other things he founded the Save-the-Redwoods League, helped found the Bronx Zoo, build the Bronx River Parkway, save the American bison, and create Glacier National Park and Denali National Park.

Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the “racial history” of Europe. The book had eight printings within twenty years and is considered one of the most influential and vociferous works of scientific racism and eugenics to come out of the United States. Coming out of Grant’s concerns with the changing “stock” of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a “racial” interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, revolving around the idea of “race” as the basic motor of civilization. He specifically promoted the idea of the “Nordic race” — a loosely-defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia — as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history.

Grant and his opinions on race were, in their own time, popular and celebrated. The sneer quotes in the text immediately above reflect the poisonous contemporary anti-“racist”/jewish influence over it’s original source, Wikipedia.

I think the most effective antidote to this poison is to read Grant’s own thoughts:

The Nordics are, all over the world, a race of soldiers, sailors, adventurers, and explorers, but above all, of rulers, organizers, and aristocrats in sharp contrast to the essentially peasant character of the Alpines. Chivalry and knighthood, and their still surviving but greatly impaired counterparts, are peculiarly Nordic traits, and feudalism, class distinctions, and race pride among Europeans are traceable for the most part to the north.

As Metapedia notes:

One of his long-time opponents was the Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas and Grant were involved in a bitter struggle for control over the discipline of anthropology in the United States while they both served (along with others) on the National Research Council Committee on Anthropology after the First World War. Grant represented the “hereditarian” branch of physical anthropology at the time, and was staunchly opposed to and by Boas himself (and the latter’s students), who advocated cultural anthropology. Boas and his students eventually wrested control of the American Anthropological Association from Grant and his supporters and used as a flagship organization for his brand of anthropology. In response Grant founded the Galton Society with American eugenicist and biologist Charles B. Davenport in 1918 as an alternative to Boas.

Excerpts from The Passing of the Great Race, Or, The Racial Basis of European History:

PREFACE

European history has been written in terms of nationality and of language, but never before in terms of race; yet race has played a far larger part than either language or nationality in moulding the destinies of men; race implies heredity and heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government.

Quite independently and unconsciously the author, never before a historian, has turned this historical sketch into the current of a great bio- logical movement, which may be traced back to the teachings of Galton and Weismann, beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century. This movement has compelled us to recognize the superior force and stability of heredity, as being more enduring and potent than environment. This movement is also a reaction from the teachings of Hippolyte Taine among historians and of Herbert Spencer among biologists, because it proves that environment and in the case of man education have an immediate, apparent and temporary influence, while heredity has a deep, subtle and permanent influence on the actions of men.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xiii

War is in the highest sense dysgenic rather than eugenic. It is destructive of the best strains, spiritually, morally and physically. For the world’s future the destruction of wealth is a small matter compared with the destruction of the best human strains, for wealth can be renewed while these strains of the real human aristocracy once lost are lost forever. In the new world that we are working and fighting for, the world of liberty, of justice and of humanity, we shall save democracy only when democracy discovers its own aristocracy as in the days when our Republic was founded.

Henry Fairfield Osborn.

December, 1917.

It will be necessary for the reader to divest his mind of all preconceptions as to race, since modern anthropology, when applied to history, involves an entire change of definition. We must, first of all, realize that race pure and simple, the physical and psychical structure of man, is something entirely distinct from either nationality or language. Furthermore, race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons of the past and the laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in the phenomena of inanimate nature.

The antiquity of existing European populations, viewed in the light thrown upon their origins by the discoveries of the last few decades, enables us to carry back history and prehistory into periods so remote that the classic world is but of yesterday. The living peoples of Europe consist of layer upon layer of diverse racial elements in varying proportions and historians and anthropologists, while studying these populations, have been concerned chiefly with the recent strata and have neglected the more ancient and submerged types.

Aboriginal populations from time immemorial have been again and again swamped under floods of newcomers and have disappeared for a time from historic view. In the course of centuries, however, these primitive elements have slowly reasserted their physical type and have gradually bred out their conquerors, so that the racial history of Europe has been in the past, and is to-day, a story of the repression and resurgence of ancient races.

The author also wishes to acknowledge his obligation to Prof. William Z. Ripley’s “The Races of Europe,” which contains a large array of anthropological measurements, maps and type portraits, providing valuable data for the present distribution of the three primary races of Europe.

The image above is purported to be of Grant at Yale in 1887. The source is Classify Madison Grant, where some commenters mock Grant for not looking Nordic enough.

The podcast will be broadcast and available for download on Tuesday at 9PM ET.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

3 Comments

Page 7 of 10« First ‹ Previous 3 4 5 678 9 10 Next ›

Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 3

Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 2

Race and Fraud: The Races of Mankind – Part 1

Race and Fraud: Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish

Race and Fraud: Franz Boas

Race and Anthropology – Part 5

Race and Anthropology – Part 4

Race and Anthropology – Part 3

Race and Anthropology – Part 2

Race and Anthropology – Part 1

Listen

Programs

Recent Broadcasts/Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Policy