Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique
Reviewed by Stanley Hornbeck
In The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald advances a carefully researched but extremely controversial thesis: that certain 20th century intellectual movements -- largely established and led by Jews -- have changed European societies in fundamental ways and destroyed the confidence of Western man. He claims that these movements were designed, consciously or unconsciously, to advance Jewish interests even though they were presented to non-Jews as universalistic and even utopian. He concludes that the increasing dominance of these ideas has had profound political and social consequences that benefited Jews but caused great harm to gentile societies. This analysis, which he makes with considerable force, is an unusual indictment of a people generally thought to be more sinned against than sinning.
The Culture of Critique is the final breastle in Prof. MacDonald's mbuttive, three-volume study of Jews and their role in history. The two previous volumes are A People That Shall Dwell Alone and Separation and its Discontents, published by Praeger in 1994 and 1998. The series is written from a sociobiological perspective that views Judaism as a unique survival strategy that helps Jews compete with other ethnic groups. Prof. MacDonald, who is a psychologist at the University of California at Long Beach, explains this perspective in the first volume, which describes Jews as having a very powerful sense of uniqueness that has kept them socially and genetically separate from other peoples. The second volume traces the history of Jewish-gentile relations, and finds the causes of anti-Semitism primarily in the almost invariable commercial and intellectual dominance of gentile societies by Jews and in their refusal to buttimilate. The Culture of Critique brings his analysis into the present century, with an account of the Jewish role in the radical critique of traditional culture.
The intellectual movements Prof. MacDonald discusses in this volume are Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school of sociology, and Boasian anthropology. Perhaps most relevant from a racial perspective, he also traces the role of Jews in promoting multi-culturalism and Third World immigration. Throughout his analysis Prof. MacDonald reiterates his view that Jews have promoted these movements as Jews and in the interests of Jews, though they have often tried to give the impression that they had no distinctive interests of their own. Therefore Prof. MacDonald's most profound charge against Jews is not ethnocentrism but dishonesty -- that while claiming to be working for the good of mankind they have often worked for their own good and to the detriment of others. While attempting to promote the brotherhood of man by dissolving the ethnic identification of gentiles, Jews have maintained precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others.
Celebrating Diversity Prof. MacDonald claims that one of the most consistent ways in which Jews have advanced their interests has been to promote pluralism and diversity -- but only for others. Ever since the 19th century, they have led movements that tried to discredit the traditional foundations of gentile society: patriotism, racial loyalty, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and loveual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, and with regard to the state of Israel, they have often supported the very insbreastutions they attack in gentile society.
Why is this in the interests of Jews? Because the parochial group loyalty characteristic of Jews attracts far less attention in a society that does not have a cohesive racial and cultural core. The Jewish determination not to buttimilate fully, which accounts for their survival as a people for thousands for years -- even without a country -- has invariably attracted unpleasant and even liquidateous scrutiny in nations with well -defined national idenbreasties. In Prof. MacDonald's view it is therefore in the interest of Jews to dilute and weaken the idenbreasty of any people among whom they live. Jewish idenbreasty can flower in safety only when gentile idenbreasty is weak.
Prof. MacDonald quotes a remarkable pbuttage from Charles Silberman: "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief -- one firmly rooted in history -- that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of atbreastudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homoloveuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of American Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues."
He is saying, in effect, that when Jews make the diversity-is-our-strength argument it is in support of their real goal of diluting a society's homogeneity so that Jews will feel safe. They are couching a Jewish agenda in terms they think gentiles will accept. Likewise, as the second part of the Silberman quotation suggests, Jews may support deviant movements, not because they think it is good for the country but because it is good for the Jews.
Prof. Silberman also provides an illuminating quote from a Jewish economist who thought that republicans had more sensible economic policies but who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate anyway. His reason? "I'd rather live in a country governed by the faces I saw at the Democratic convention than those I saw at the Republican convention." This man apparently distrusts white gentiles and voted for a racially mixed party even if its economic policies were wrong. What is good for Jews appears to come before what is good for the country.
Earl Raab, former president of heavily Jewish Brandeis University makes the diversity argument in a slightly different way. Expressing his satisfaction with the prediction that by the middle of the next century whites will become a minority, he writes, "We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country." He is apparently prepared to displace the people and culture of the founding stock in order to prevent the theoretical rise of an anti-Jewish regime. Prof. Raab appears to see whites mainly as potential Nazis, and is willing to sacrifice their culture and national continuity in order to defuse an imagined threat to Jews. This pbuttage takes for granted the continued future existence of Jews as a distinct community even as gentile whites decline in numbers and influence.
In the same pbuttage, Prof. Raab continues by noting that, "we Jews have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible..." -- just as it tends to make the ultimate displacement of European culture also irreversible.
Prof. MacDonald traces the development of this diversity strategy to several sources. It is widely recognized that the German-Jewish immigrant Franz Boas (1858-1942) almost single-handedly established the current contours of anthropology, ridding it of all biological explanations for differences in human culture or behavior. Prof. MacDonald reports that he and his followers -- with the notable exceptions of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict -- were all Jews with strong Jewish idenbreasties: "Jewish identification 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."
By 1915, Boas and his students controlled the American Anthropological buttociation and by 1926 they headed every major American university anthropology department. From this position of dominance they promoted the idea that race and biology are trivial matters, and that environment counts for everything. They completely recast anthropology so as to provide intellectual support for open immigration, integration, and miscegenation. They also laid the foundation for the idea that because all races have the same potential, the failures of non-whites must be blamed exclusively on white oppression. The ultimate conclusion of Boasian anthropology was that since environment accounts for all human differences, every inequality in achievement can be eliminated by changing the environment. This has been the justification for enormous and wasteful government intervention programs.
The entire "civil rights" movement can be seen as a natural consequence of the triumph of Boasian thinking. Since all races were equivalent, separation was immoral. The color line also sharpened white self-consciousness in ways that might make whites more aware of Jewish parochialism. Thus it was, according to Prof. MacDonald, that Jews almost single-handedly launched the desegregation movement. Without the leadership of Jews, the NAACP might never have been established, and until 1975 every one of its presidents was a Jew. Prof. MacDonald reports that in 1917, when the black separatist Marcus Garvey visited NAACP headquarters, he saw so many white faces that he stormed out, complaining that it was a white organization.
Prof. MacDonald concludes that the efforts of Jews were crucial to the "civil rights" transformation of America. He quotes a lawyer for the American Jewish Congress who claims that "many of these civil rights laws were actually written in the offices of Jewish agencies by Jewish staff people, introduced by Jewish legislators and pressured into being by Jewish voters."
While the Boas school was promoting integration and racial equivalence, it was also critical of, in Prof. MacDonald's words, "American culture as overly homogeneous, hypocritical, emotionally and aesthetically repressive (especially with regard to loveuality). Central to this program ...
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