The Culture of Critique reviewed by Stanley Hornbeck

http://www.heretical.com/miscellx/culturec.html

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.

Immigration

Prof. MacDonald argues that it is entirely natural for Jews to promote
open immigration. It brings about the "diversity" Jews find comforting
and it keeps America open to persecuted co-religionists throughout the
world. He says Jews are the only group that has always fought for mass
immigration; a few European ethnic organizations have made sporadic
efforts to make it easier for their own people to come, but only Jews
have consistently promoted open borders for all comers. Moreover,
whatever disagreements they may have had on other issues, Jews of
every political persuasion have favored high immigration.

This, too, goes back many years, and Prof. MacDonald traces in
considerable detail the sustained Jewish pro-immigration effort.
Israel Zangwill, author of the eponymous 1908 play The Melting Pot,
was of the view that "there is only one way to World Peace, and that
is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, custom
houses..." He was nevertheless an ardent Zionist and disapproved of
Jewish intermarriage.

Although the statue of liberty, properly known as Liberty Enlightening
the World, was a gift to the United States from France as a tribute to
American political traditions, the sonnet by the Jewish Emma Lazarus
helped change it into a symbol of immigration. Affixed to the base of
the statue several decades after its construction, the poem welcomes
to America "huddled masses yearning to breath free/The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore."

Prof. MacDonald has discovered that implausible arguments about
diversity being a quintessentially American strength have been made by
Jews for a long time. He reports that in 1948 the American Jewish
Committee was urging Congress to believe that "Americanism is the
spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to
people of all races, all religions, all nationalities." Of course,
there had never been such a tradition. In 1952, the American Jewish
Congress argued in hearings on immigration that "our national
experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in
the diversity of our peoples." This, too, was at a time when U.S.
immigration law was still explicitly designed to maintain a white
majority.

It is often said that when the old immigration policy was scrapped in
1965, scarcely anyone knew, and no one predicted, that the new law
would change the racial makeup of the country. Prof. MacDonald
disputes this, arguing that this had been the objective of Jewish
groups from the beginning.

Prof. MacDonald finds that Jews have been the foremost advocates of
immigration in England, France, and Canada, and that Jewish groups
were the most vocal opponents of independence for Quebec. Australian
Jews led the effort to dismantle the "white Australia" policy, one
reason for which was cited in an editorial in the Australian Jewish
Democrat: "The strengthening of multi-cultural or diverse Australia is
also our most effective insurance policy against anti-Semitism. The
day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel
more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian." Like
Earl Raab writing about the United States, this Australian Jew is
prepared to sacrifice the traditional culture, people, and identity of
Australia to specifically Jewish interests. It would not be surprising
if such an openly expressed objective did not have the opposite effect
from the intended, and increase anti-Jewish sentiment.

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 sexual restraint. At the same
time, within their own communities, and with regard to the state of
Israel, they have often supported the very institutions 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 assimilate fully, which accounts for their
survival as a people for thousands for years – even without a country
– has invariably attracted unpleasant and even murderous scrutiny in
nations with well -defined national identities. In Prof. MacDonald's
view it is therefore in the interest of Jews to dilute and weaken the
identity of any people among whom they live. Jewish identity can
flower in safety only when gentile identity is weak.

Prof. MacDonald quotes a remarkable passage 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 attitudes and behaviors, as well
as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for
example, not approval of homosexuality, 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 passage 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 passage, 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 identities: "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
Association 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 sexuality).
Central to this program was creating ethnographies of idyllic [Third-
World] cultures that were free of the negatively perceived traits that
were attributed to Western culture."

The role of the anthropologist became one of criticizing everything
about Western society while glorifying everything primitive. Prof.
MacDonald notes that Boasian portrayals of non-Western peoples
deliberately ignored barbarism and cruelty or simply attributed it to
contamination from the West. He sees this as a deliberate attempt to
undermine the confidence of Western societies and to make them
permeable to Third World influences and people. Today, this view is
enshrined in the dogma that America must remain open to immigration
because immigrants bring spirit and energy that natives somehow lack.