Author, Bruce Lerro, Co-Founder and Co-Manager of Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
Orientation
Is there a place for race and ethnicity in helping us to understand Europe’s decline?
Both liberals and Marxists agree that ethnicity is something prevalent in pre-modern times but as a result of both capitalism and communism it is thankfully dying out. The outlook on race is even worse. Social scientists inform us that the existence of races is a social and ideological process, not anything biological or evolutionary. Discussing races at all is a sign someone is racist and proclaiming openly or smuggling in white racist superiority. This article defends both the reality of races and ethnicity and helps to explain why in the last two centuries migrant populations are a big problem for Europeans and Yankees. Compared to the rest of the world ethnicity has been relatively unimportant in the West. But how did the Western reluctance to identify with its kin groups come back to haunt it? As we shall see, its universalistic moral values undermined its ability to compete with more ethnocentric groups. This is the subject of this article.
Contrary to what social science claims, ethnic loyalty is neither something to be overcome because it is irreverent to modern life not because it was a sign our thinking is ignorant or even racist. According to evolutionary psychologists, ethnicity is part of our genetic heritage just as are families’ and kin groups’ loyalty. Ethnicity (or attempts to deny it) helps to explain why the West evolved differently from the East. I begin by relying on the work of Frank Salter (Genetic Interests) who claims ethnicity is an adaptive model for human groups isolated geographically from other human groups thousands of years earlier. Secondly, I shall discuss cold winters’ theory to help explain why Ice Age hunter gatherers were different from hunter-gatherers in other parts of the world. I’ll discuss the genetic benefits and liabilities of light skin and explore the unique social habits that followed these Ice Age hunters including exogamy, monogamy and trust of strangers by building a reputation. I then turn to a description of agricultural collectivism and contrast it to ice age hunters across 24 categories.
Next I turn to the when, where and why of the life of Indo-European pastoralists. I identity how reciprocity with strangers broke down kin relations and ethnicity. I discuss their technological advances and military culture along with the places where the Indo-Europeans succeeded and failed. In the next section I show that even within Europe there were degrees of individualism and collectivism in Western, Central and Eastern Europe going back as far as 8,000 BCE. In Europe they are characterized as:
- egalitarian individualism of northern ice age hunters;
- aristocratic individualism of pastoralists of Central Europe and the Pontic Steppe
- collectivism of Eastern European farmers
These three roads of Europe are compared across 20 categories.
I then follow the work of Kevin MacDonald through Western history and show how the ethnic characteristics of the Ice Age hunters and Indo-European pastoralists were continued on in the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans and in the Dark Ages of the German “barbarians”. The Catholic Church was also vital in carrying on Western values as were the Swedes, the Puritans and the Anglo-Saxons. I close this article by comparing the work of Kevin MacDonald in his Individualism and the Rise of Liberalism to Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World.
Where are we going?
In this article I draw out the evolutionary and social psychological consequences of Europe having an abstract morality which reaches beyond kin and ethnic groups. Social identity theory helps us understand why some ethnic groups are more loyal to each other than others. In the last 200 years Europe has been paying for its refusal to take its own ethnicity seriously. There was a counterrevolution against aristocratic individualism of the Indo-Europeans which was begun in earnest by the Anglo-Saxons in the late 19th century. Rather than defend its evolutionary ethnic interests the Anglo-Saxons, led by religious visionaries and later capitalists to disidentify with its ethnicity and instead adopt a universalistic identity that crossed ethnic lines while allowing for migration of immigrants and refugees from other countries. Along with this the rise of a substantially Jewish elite which:
- attacked European ethnicity
- defended immigrants and refugees from other countries from Europe
- defended its own ethnicity.
According to Kevin MacDonald in his book the Culture of Critique, the ethnic strategy of Judaists was to turn Europeans against each other by exploiting the moral universalism of Europeans. They encouraged Europeans to renounce their own ethnic self-interests. This obviously failed in World War II. However, after World War II Zionists have been attacking Europeans since the end of World War II. The Zionists have controlled Europe for 80 years. This elite became entrenched in the media and educational system of Mordor and Western Europe. MacDonald’s points to the likely consequences of the European populations if present trends continue.
My Experience Teaching a Course on Ethnic and Race Relations
Twenty years ago I taught a class at Golden Gate University in the San Francisco Bay Area on Race and Ethnic Relations. I taught this class once a year for about six years. Because this was night school most of the students were in their 30s or 40s. At the beginning of the class I went around the room and asked people what their ethnic background was. There were ten people in the class on average, and roughly 80% had European backgrounds. The other 20% were from other parts of the world, usually from India or China. When I asked these Europeans their background many of them didn’t know. They dismissed the question as almost irrelevant and said they were “mutts”, a mixture of German, Scottish or English. Then I gave them an assignment to ask their parents or some of their relatives who might know their family history. They seemed almost annoyed. On the other hand, those from China and India knew exactly what their ethnicity was and were sensitive to the different subdivisions within China and Indian ethnicities. I was puzzled by why most of the class had no sense of their ethnicity and others did. At the time I chalked it up the cross-cultural distinction between individualism and collectivism. As I have now learned the reasons were more biological and climatic. I also noticed that when my Chinese or Indian students spoke about their experience the Europeans were very interested, more interested than in the experience of fellow Europeans. What’s up with that?
Four Types of Attachment to Ethnicity
About half way through this first 4-hour class I gave them a writing exercise in which they were to rate the degree of ethnic attachment they had. The four kinds of attachment were nuclear, modal, marginal and dormant. The four kinds of attachment were measured across eleven categories:
- physical characteristics
- time of arrival (in the country)
- occupation
- neighborhood – ethnic enclaves
- marriage choices of ethnicity
- familiarity with native language
- first and last name changes
- changes in religion
- food preferences
- clothing
- knowledge of ethnic history
The most intensively ethnic were “nuclear” and “modal” and the least ethnic were “marginal” or “dormant”. Please review Table 1
Table 1 Depth of Attachment to Ethnicity
| Category of Comparison | Nuclear
Identity is completed absorbed in group | Modal
Identity is mostly absorbed but not completely | Marginal
Only weakly attached to ethnicity | Dormant
Completely detached from ethnicity |
| 1) Physical characteristics | Pronounced so that what your ethnicity could be is easy to guess | Moderately pronounced What your ethnicity might be is wider | Subtle could be most ethnicities | Invisible
You could appear to be any ethnicity |
| 2) Time of arrival | Families lived in a country for one generation or less | Families lived in same country for one generation | Family lived in the same country for two generation | Family here for many generations |
3) Occupation
the work associated with your ethnicity.
cabinet maker; middle man minority – small businesses | You do the same work your parents did | You do different work from your parents but are of the same social class | You do different work from your parents but are of the same social class | You do different work from your parents and you occupy a different social class |
4) Neighborhood
ethnic enclaves | Live with your ethnic group in the same neighborhood
“Chinatown” | Live in mixed neighborhood, but within 10 miles of your relatives | Live in a mixed neighborhood in a different city from your relatives | Live in a mixed neighborhood in a different state or even different country |
5) Marriage
choices | You marry someone of the same ethnicity
and same race | You marry someone of a different ethnicity but same race | You marry someone of a different ethnicity from a different continent | You marry someone of a different ethnicity and different race |
6) Familiarity
with native language | Speak the language of your ethnicity and either do not speak the new language or speak it very badly | Bi-lingual Can speak both languages fluently | Can only speak a little of your ethnic language and fluent in new language | Cannot speak your ethnic language at all but can speak the new language easily |
| 7) Your first and last name changes | Keep your first and last name exactly as the one you were born with | Shorten your first name and keep your last name | Shorten your first and your last names | Change your first and last names completely |
| 8) Changes in religion | Practice the same ethnic religion as your family and relatives | Do not practice the ethnic religion much | Do not practice the ethnic religion at all. Or changed religions but within the West or the East | Changed religion, especially from Eastern to Western or Western to Eastern |
| 9) Cooking ethnic dishes | Eat your ethnic food 2-3 times a day and know most of the recipes | Eat ethnic food once a day or less
Know some recipes | Eat ethnic food occasionally Don’t know any of those recipes | Don’t eat your ethnic food at all and don’t know any recipes |
| 10) Wearing traditional clothing | Will wear ethnic clothes some of the time | Wear ethnic clothes occasionally | Do not wear ethnic clothes at all | Do not wear ethnic clothes at all |
| 11) Knowledge of ethnic history | You know your ethnic history deeply Know very little about the new country | Are somewhat familiar with it but know the new culture’s history also | Know more about new cultures’ history than about your own | Don’t know anything about your culture’s history or the host culture’s history |
Probably about 60% of my students identified as dormant. I gave them about 30 to 45 minutes to fill this table out, with perhaps a three-sentence explanation or example for each of the choices made. The ones who categorized themselves as dormant were finished in about 10 minutes and were annoyed when I insisted, they give it more thought. Even the Chinese and Indian students were not nuclear or modal because they were middle class or upper middle class. Middle or upper middle class tends to make a person more individualist. Also, they were dormant simply by the fact they were living in the United States and taking the class. Part of my article is designed to explain the deep two hundred year history of why my European students had a dormant ethnic identity.
How Do We Define Race and Ethnicity
These days in politically correct Yankeedom you are not allowed to even use the term race with being suspected of being a racist. The politically correct terminology was to substitute ethnicity for race. We are told that race is an outmoded term and the social sciences have claimed to have shown that race is not a scientific concept. But the fields outside of social science, say in ethnology or population genetics, point out that races exist in animals (which we call breeds) and these scientists are not so willing to accept that the races of humanity have no scientific value. In his book Race Differences in Ethnocentrism Edward Dutton defines a race in the following way:
- race is a breeding population separate from another of the same species long enough to be noticeably evolved in a different environment
- yet they can still breed with other groups despite genetic differences as a result of
- showing a pattern of genotypical frequency for a number of interrelated characteristics
Different kinds of races, according to Cavalli-Sforza include:
- Europeans (Caucasoids)
- North-East Asians
- South Asian and North Africans
- Native Americans
- Africans of sub-Sahara
- Bushman and pygmies
- Pacific Islanders
- Australian Aboriginals and Aboriginal New Guineans
- Arctic people
The categories for determining the differences in races include the structure of the body, blood type and genetic makeup. Ethnic groups are subdivisions within races. So for Europeans, ethnic groups include the Lapps, Finns, Germans, English, and Italians. For South-East Asians included are the Southern Chinese, Thais, Filipinos and Indonesians. The susceptibility of races to difference diseases include the following: cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria, hypertension, stroke, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer, obesity, myopia and schizophrenia. None of this is controversial. Where theories of racial differences get into trouble is when they imagine that intelligence can be tracked using IQ tests. As a communist I think that intelligence is foundationally social and much deeper and more complex than the results of IQ tests.
Ethnic Decline of Aristocratic Individualism
As I wrote at the beginning of this article, liberals and Marxists agree that ethnicity is relatively unimportant. But what does this imply about the territories or nation-states they inhabit? Is the ideal of liberals and Marxists that all ethnicities or races can live in any nation-state in the world? Are there any limits, and if so, what are they? At the other extreme right-wingers may insist that all ethnicities and races ought to live in their original homelands. Aside from the difficulty of carrying this out, it is important to state these extremes in order to make the political-geographical implications explicit. The reason this is important is because for the last two centuries capitalist elites have pressured Europeans to accept migrant workers increasingly without any limit because these workers cost less and are more easily exploitable. This has gradually eroded European ethnicity which is rooted in a particular nation-state or territory. Do Europeans have a right to claim the land of their ancestors. What goes with this is the pressure by capitalists for a universal morality that goes beyond ethnic beliefs that get in the way of capitalist trade. But capitalists are not alone.
Beginning in the 17th century the values of Indo-Europeans began to lose ground to a moral universalism which first affected the Puritans, then in the creation of a secular humanism including socialism and finally the Anglo-Saxons. These flames were fanned not only by globalist capitalist but also by Judaic elites, both of whom had their own reasons for attacking European ethnicity.
Puritanism as Competitive Ethnic Strategy
Puritanism attacks its own ethnic group
According to Kevin MacDonald, the English Civil War of the mid-17th century established the influence of Puritan culture in both Britain and the U.S. At the same time this should been seen as a turning point in the history of the West, a crossroads that eventually ended the domination of the fundamentally Indo-European derived social structures. There is a triple movement by Europeans away from kinship morality. In kinship morality you defend all members of a kin group and externalize moral problems as the fault of other cultures. European and later Yankee societies moved away from this. Instead, they:
- criticized members of their kin group undermining their ethnicity
- defended strangers
- developed a universal morality that included strangers
Puritanism originated in East Anglia which was settled mainly by Angles during the early Medieval period. They produced a civic culture of high literacy and town hall meetings in which they argued with each other. There was punishment for religious heresy and public regulation of personal behavior via social controls including sexual violations, lack of religious piety, and public drunkenness. In addition they had a tendency towards insurrections against arbitrary power of their ruling classes with the rebellions of 1381 led by Jack Straw, Wat Tyler and John Ball as examples. The intensity of public violence directed at its own members was used against Puritans by other ethnic groups.
Decline of Puritan group boundaries
After the Restoration of 1660 and the decline of Puritan political power in England, the ability of the Puritans to retain control over their territory began to decline. The main source of Puritan decline was that the British government denied them the right to police their borders and expel heretics. It also ended the colonies’ right to select their own governor and its practice of limiting voting to church members. Their colony was then opened up to immigration and soon became inundated by waves of people who were not committed to a Puritan way of life. This forced the Puritans to develop a wider morality to include these immigrants. The ethnic evolutionary strategy of Puritanism had ended within 70 years of its beginning.
The rise of Anglo-American universalism
The radicalism of the Puritan revolution was that it eventually destroyed the old tripartite Indo-European order based on a dominant of a military elite. Yet it was the rise of England into a dominant world power in the 18th century that was a fundamental break in the history of the West. However, the corporations established by the heirs of Puritanism were world imperialist, referred to as WASPS who required a universalistic morality for dealing with its colony that was beyond the Puritans. Eventually it turned into monster, incapable of preserving the ethnic character of the Anglo-Saxon nation as a whole
19th Century Secular Versions of Morality Beyond Ethnic Self-Interest
In the United States in 17th century Massachusetts’ moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line just as in Europe. However, in the 19th century it was secularized and universalized and directed at the entire country, correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery. The Yankee moral condemnation of slavery resulted in the loss of many other Anglo-Saxons of the South during the Civil War.
How Indo-European Fairness Undermines Western Ethnic Loyalties
David Hackett Fischer’s book on fairness shaped the way that Kevin MacDonald saw U.S. history. In his book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, his four groups were
- Puritans—East Anglia – egalitarianism
- distressed Cavaliers – Southeast England – aristocratic individualism
- Quakers
- Scots-Irish
They all differed in their struggle for a place in America. The first two go back to English prehistory. Fischer claims that until the mid-20th century there are no words for fairness in languages other than in English, Danish and Norwegian. Fairness has no Greek or Latin roots but can be traced to Indo-European origin. His book Fairness and Freedom provides an entirely cultural explanation for the development of a universal sense of ethics of fairness in the West.
The earliest ethical usage of fairness tended to operate within tribes of Britons and Scandinavia. These ideas flourished on the far fringes of northwestern Europe among groups of people who were proud, strong, violent and predatory and who lived in harsh environments. Ideas of fairness developed as a way of keeping some of these habitual troublemakers from slaughtering each other. In the second stage the folk cultures of Britain and Scandinavia began to grow as they embraced others beyond the tribe. The concept of fairness expanded again when it met the humanist ideas of the Renaissance. It continued in the spirit of the Enlightenment. In England the usage of fairness has been increasing steadily since 1800 while the use of aristocratic liberty has been in steady decline from the peak around 1780.
The Rise and Fall of American Anglo-Saxonism
Even in the 19th century the aristocratic individualism of the Indo-European liberal theorists hung on. They saw a future America composed of people who looked and thought like themselves. They thought even people from different races would ultimately become Anglo-Saxons and Protestant no matter what their racial background. In his Rise and Fall of Anglo-America Eric Kaufmann shows that in the 18th and 19th centuries Anglo-Americans had a strong sense that they were the biological descendent of freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon tribes. The New England town hall meeting was likened to the Anglo-Saxon tribal council. The yeoman farmer was considered to be the ethnic prototype.These proud Anglo-Saxons thought all races would be absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon race. This was the period when Samuel George Morton published his data on the cranial capacity of different races, showing Europeans had larger cranial capacity than other racial groups. Immigrants were to be made into American WASPS by absorbing American English, liberty, American Protestantism and ultimately intermarrying with Americans. It was quite common for Anglo-Saxons to think of individualism as resulting from their ethnic heritage.
Three Conflicted Political-Religious Tendencies From Indo-Europeanism to
Cosmopolitanism
Libertarian anarchism
The first type included a few libertarian anarchists like Benjamin Tucker. This radical, political tradition of anarchist individualism included figures like Thomas Jefferson, Horace Greeley, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. However, this anarchist tradition did not wipe clear all traces of Anglo-Saxon Protestant attachment. A large part of the vision of what Kaufmann called the “expressive pathfinders” in the early 20th century was a rebellion against small town Protestant America. Into the 20th century these libertarian anarchists included The New Bohemians in Greenwich Village between 1910-1917 who were led by Max Eastman. Another important figure in this mold was H.L. Mencken who opposed Puritanism as moralistic, aesthetically barren and an impediment to American intellectual development. Now the older America of British stock still are prevailingly over the artists and thinkers of the land but they each work for themselves without an Anglo-Saxon common vision. They have no ethnos any more.
Liberal Protestantism
Kauffmann points out several strains of liberal Protestantism in the 19th century. There was the Free Religious Association which was a liberal offshoot of the Unitarians. But even they thought of their liberal attitudes as still stemming from ethnic heritage. The president of Rutgers waxed, “We liberals are committed by all the logic of two thousand years of Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon history and made a stand against the legions of Rome”.
Frederick Jackson Turner
Fredrick Jackson Turner thought America was a melting pot in which a frontier environment fused immigrants into an American race. The new race would not be Anglo-Saxon or English but distinctly American. However, Turner was not sympathetic to the new immigrants. He merely emphasized:
- one part of his inherited American ethnic mythology – frontier, liberty, agrarianism
- without jettisoning the other symbols – Protestant, Nordic, whiteness
The Universalistic Morality in the British Anti-Slavery Movement
This section discusses what has been termed the “Affective Revolution” which occurred in England in the 18th century. This “emotional” revolution of sympathy was labelled by Hannah More the “Age of Benevolence”. It was the consequence of the egalitarian tendencies of the Puritans and their program of establishing moral communities as the basis of social cohesion devoid of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. This movement occurred at a time when slavery was the norm in Africa, the Arab world, India, the Ottoman Empire and in effect, China. In Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), written 17 years before The Wealth of Nations, Smith emphasized moral emotions rather than abstract rules of justice based on reason.
The abolitionists placed their hope not on sacred texts, but on human empathy. As a result of these efforts, abolition of the slave trade was popular with the public long before it became a law in 1807. Slave traders in Britain encountered public disapproval early in the 18th century. Quakers of Philadelphia early developed an antipathy towards slavery and came out against it in 1754 which helped to expel the slaveholders in the 1760s and 1770s. All this culminated in the emotional sympathy Anglo Saxons had for the slaves and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833. This expanded the movement from a boldly proud Indo-European Anglo-Saxonism to hollow ghostlike universalism (like the image at the beginning of this article).
Judaic Ethnics Have Their Cake and Eat It Too
Beginning in the late 19th century WASP intellectuals began interacting and making alliances with first and second immigrant Jewish intellectuals who were committed to the lack of ethnic identity they found in their WASP cohorts. Kaufmann credits two Jews, Felix Adler and Israel Zangwill with promoting 19th century American universalist tendencies to the point of completely rejecting ethnicity altogether. Under Adler’s influence Anglo Protestant thinkers would call for Anglo Protestants’ termination.
Jewish ethnics promote universalistic morality for Anglo-Saxons while at the same time maintaining that Israel should remain separate. Zangwill was well aware that Anglo-Saxon ideals of individualism and universalism could be used in the battle against immigration restriction. In the 1924 debate on the immigration restriction, the House Majority Report emphasized the Jewish role in defining the intellectual battle as “Nordic superiority vs American ideals”. The Protestant establishment would be implored to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a culture of cosmopolitan humanism. Horace Kallen, the premier theorist of multicultural America, was an ardent Zionist. The dominant Anglo-Saxon group was losing its case for its preservation. Instead, it needed to devote itself to bringing about the new cosmopolitan humanity. All other ethnic groups would be allowed to retain their identity and cohesion. Only the Anglo-Saxon is implored to be cosmopolitan.
The Turn to Lamarck in Anthropology
In the 20th century the cultural relativism of anthropologist Franz Boas promoted the demise of Darwinism in the social sciences, and the fall of Darwinism was a critical linchpin underlying any visible intellectual basis for Anglo-Saxon or any other ethnic defense. This was an intellectual establishment that would view the eclipse of Anglo-America as a moral imperative.
Elite Protestants As Ethnic Traitors
Kauffmann points out a general tendency in which elite Protestants made alliances with immigrant groups. These elites were in opposition to the middle and working-class Anglo Protestants of both parties. The period from 1900-1910 saw the beginnings of a liberal Protestant elite, willing to sacrifice the dream of conversion to Anglo-Saxonism for universalist humanitarian ethics. The idea that the Anglo-Saxons would convert the world to Protestant Christianity – common in the late 19th century – faded after 1919. Further, these elites were more open to religious relativism.
From 1918 to 1955 the concept of national identity held by Anglo-Protestant university administrators, intellectuals, federal bureaucrats and the federal executive underwent a shift from a WASP conception to a pluralist orientation. They embraced pluralism over assimilation. But this brand of Christian liberal progressivism was not characteristic of the great mass of American Europeans. During the 1920s there was a rise of fundamentalist, non-elite Protestantism as a reaction. MacDonald says it is remarkable that the word Nordic disappeared by the 1930s in the same decade as Hitler used “Nordic superiority” to rise to power.
Last Stand of The WASPS and Right-Wingers – 1889-1965
Among elite liberal intellectuals of the 19th century, America was a product of Anglo Saxon ethnicity which coincided with optimistic ideas about an Anglo-Saxon future. However, at the end of the 19th century American intellectuals were coming to grips with large scale immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and optimistic views of Anglo-Saxon’s future were more and more difficult to defend. The decades leading up to the passage of the 1924 immigration law were a period of ethnic defense. Among many pro-restriction intellectuals, Darwinism displaced Lamarckism. The result was an alliance between elite intellectuals of Ivy League, educated Puritans with rural whites in the South and West to prevent America from being overwhelmed by immigration. In the United States those who continued to defend ethnicity were political right-wingers.
William Graham Sumner was a Darwinian anthropologist typical of an intellectual elite of the late 19th in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination. The prominence of Social Darwinist theories of ethnicity were racial and they was not confined to the United States. In Europe Arthur Gobnineau, Houston Chamberlain, Gustave Le Bon, Herbert Spenser all worried that migration meant race-mixing and that would end the reign of European civilization. As we saw, along with them a large number of Jewish racialist theories appeared which were mostly related to Zionism. The early part of the 20th century was the high-water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. Military officers were schooled in the theories of Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard and Gustav Le Bon. They held it in the highest importance to retain control over the lands they had inherited as a result of the exploits of their ancestors. Their books included:
- Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race
- Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against World White Supremacy
- Lothrop Stoddard The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man
The racists views that were common in the 1920s persisted among the US military officers well into the 1930s.The restriction on immigration came out of a realization that the new immigrants would not convert to Protestantism.
After World War II, accelerating greatly in the 1960s and thereafter these moral communities have been defined by the intellectual life which is bent on dispossessing European-derived people from territories they have dominated for hundreds, or in the case of Europe, many thousands of years. This alliance of right-wingers lasted until the passage of the 1965 immigration law which opened up immigration to all peoples. In 1965 immigration removed national origin and racial ancestry from their policy and opened up immigration to all human groups. It became intellectually acceptable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. In the coming decades this cultural shift resulted in the ever-decreasing power and influence of the European-derived peoples and cultures of America.
Mistaken Identities: Post World War II Yankees Dissolve Ethnicity into Race
In the United States especially after World War II, ethnic Europeans became less caring for their own ethnicity while at the same time reducing all social relations to race. For example, black people from Jamaica, Venezuela or Ethiopia are three ethnicities but for European Americans these ethnic differences are overridden. These people are simply black. Their own ethnicity is a ghost of its former identity. Today European ethnics identify more as white people than their ethnic origins and they are justifiably up against the wall thanks to the machinations of capitalists, religious liberals and Zionists. It is politically incorrect for European ethnics who identify more as being white than being Italian, Irish or Greek to associate in public without being attacked as racist. Further, they are attacked by liberal elites for any cultural gatherings without it being labelled as a psychopathology. This is a legacy of Boas, the Frankfurt school and their offshoots. The academic world has become a liberal, totalistic church forbidding debates about ethnicity, let alone about race. Sadly, European-Americans gather in settings where “white” people come to associate with other whites without any explicit acknowledgement that race plays a role in these gatherings. MacDonald names the following:
- a Republican political affiliation
- a NASCAR racing enthusiast
- an Evangelical Christian
- a country-music fan
- an ice hockey fan
- being from the Southern part of the United States and supporting the Confederate flag
Sadly, none of these affiliations have anything to do with being Italian, Irish or Greek. They have much more to do with being a right-wing working class American trapped into identifying themselves as white.
MacDonald closes his book by pointing out that:“Huge swaths of humanity—Arabs, Han Chinese, Bantu have been able to ethnically monopolize vast areas as the result of the conquests of their ancestors, yet we never hear them expressing their guilt for their conquest or the treatment of conquered people.”It is only guilt-ridden Europeans who feel they need to renounce their ancestry.
Objections and Rebuttals
Why are you defending the Indo-Europeans? They were a hierarchical society with military values and they conquered many cultures, as feminists point out.
I agree. However, hierarchical societies have existed for 5,000 years and by Marxian accounts, the production of material wealth and hierarchies are a precondition for a communist society. Furthermore, the values of Indo-Europeans and their quest for honor is qualitatively better than the values of capitalist traders than was their successor. There are two recent books which defend Indo-Europeans and their legacy, both by Ricardo Duchesne. The first is The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. The second is Faustian Man in A Multicultural Age.
Why are you defending competition between ethnic groups? Won’t this just lead to endless economic competition and a new kind of imperialism which will be the result of some ethnic victories over others?
I begin with what is real, not what is ideal to liberals and Marxists. Competition between ethnic groups goes all the way back to the beginning of humanity and it is grounded in the evolutionary psychology of ethnic relations. That does not make ethnic competition inevitable and cannot be changed by social policy. Its bio-evolutionary origins just means it won’t be easy. The last chapter of Frank Salter’s book On Genetic Interests has a more visionary way of thinking about ethnic relations. See Salter’s concept of “utilitarian adaptation”. Ethnic competition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for our future.
Your claim for the existence of races implies some are better than others and historically has been used to claim some races are less intelligent.
The existence of racism and the reality of the existence of races are two different things. As I said in the article, while the ideology and practice of racism is true historically from the 1840s in the United States, I am not claiming this is a good thing in the past or in the future. What I am claiming is that races of humans that were formed in the last 100,000 years have genetic predispositions which are still operating and which show up in health and disease studies. This “racial realism” is recognized among European and US scientists involved in the biological sciences such as population studies and behavioral genetics. I make no claim that races have differences in intelligence or that IQ tests are a good measure of intelligence.
Why are you defending racist books written of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries? These people were racists who claimed s were superior to other cultures.
I use these authors not because I agree with them politically, but because their work points to something real in the Yankee population that was a fear that Europeans might die out. What was the basis of this? There was the reality of the loss of the European population in the Civil War, followed by freed slaves afterwards and the loss of European soldiers in World War I. There was a fear of ethnic replacement. I don’t support Europeans wishing to enslave racial minorities but we do think that European working-class fear of losing their historical ancestry in their own homelands is real and there is nothing pathological in this fear.
You are making universal morality as a way of overcoming ethnic competition a bad thing. Isn’t universal morality something we need to promote to counter ethnic fighting that currently is going on?
The universal morality of liberals supports global capitalism and its efforts to pulverize kinship and ethnic relations in the service of reducing human societies to nothing but Adam Smith’s truck and barter system. Twenty-first century socialism will not ignore and deny the reality of ethnic genetic interests. It will conserve what is valuable about them, it will criticize their shortcomings and will propose a synthesis, something like Salter’s utilitarian adaptation. Salter also promotes what he calls ethnic states which preserves the legacy of those who have first settled the land.
Conclusion
Why were my European students so out of touch with their ethnicity? Because they were well aware that when they did claim their ethnicity it was important as members of the race that they were indirectly responsible for the existence of slavery. Not knowing your own ethnic history is a way to distance from the pain of that collusion. Secondly, my students were products of the trend to renounce their Indo-European heritage and identify with a universalist morality which we discussed earlier in this article that was two centuries in the making. This is a case of European hollow ethnicity coming back to haunt my students.
The purpose of this article and the last is to defend the New European Right’s claim that:
- Europe is fundamentally different from the rest of the world
- Europe has an ethnic heritage that is worth defending
- there is a scientific basis for defending the preservation of ethnic differences based on the evolutionary psychology of ethnic self-preservation
Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University, and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his four books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website. 
