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Race and Fraud: Franz Boas

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.

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Race and Anthropology – Part 5

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)

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Race and Anthropology – Part 4

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.

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