((Quote: "1950 was on average probably far better for them than
today's America."-Bret.))
Derby****re on MacDonald
Edmund Connelly
March 8, 2008
>>"British immigrant commentator John Derby****re is at it again, firing a
ti=
ny salvo in the direction of evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald.
Sinc=
e discovering MacDonald's corpus of writing on Jews, Derby****re has had a
li=
ke-dislike relation****p with the author's work.
In a column on VDARE last week, Derby****re said he was satisfied with
the account of an interview with MacDonald as told by Jon Entine,
author of Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the
Chosen People. Entine surprisingly quotes MacDonald as saying "I'm a
scientific racist" and likens MacDonald's work to (you guessed it) The
Protocols of Zion. Entine then summed up MacDonald's work as making
the argument that "Jews have an almost diabolical, biologically
programmed plan of dominance."
Diabolical? As in the devil? Can any fair reader of MacDonald's social
science prose make such a claim? For his part, MacDonald vehemently
disagreed with Entine's version. "I never wrote anything like 'the
devious nature of Jews.' Such a statement would be an outrageous
overgeneralization. Rather, I simply stated that Jewish identification
and interests among the Boasians were unstated in their public
writings and that the movement was couched in the language of science
and universalism." What, then, could Derby****re mean when he claims
"Entine's account seems fair to me"?
Derby****re's first major piece on MacDonald appeared in the March 10,
2003 issue of The American Conservative under the title "The Marx of
the Anti-Semites." There his take on the book was mixed, beginning
with "The Culture of Critique includes many good things. . . . Kevin
MacDonald is working in an im****tant field." Derby****re even validates
an im****tant point of MacDonald's work: "These Jewish-inspired
pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned
with--Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and
so on--were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with
MacDonald, they were."
But Derby****re then concludes that "This is, after all, in the
dictionary definition of the term, an anti-Semitic book." Perhaps,
however, MacDonald can be forgiven, since, as Derby****re muses,
MacDonald suffers the defects of being "prickly and unworldly." Yet
the mildly generous Derby****re nonetheless leaves the reader with the
ominous conclusion: "I am not sure I could persuade less charitable
souls that my interpretation is the correct one, and that there is not
malice lurking behind MacDonald's elaborate sociological jargon." (See
MacDonald's reply.)
To be fair, Derby****re is the proverbial writer caught between a rock
and a hard place. While he aims to write honestly -- wherever the chips
may fall, as he implies -- he's also exquisitely aware of the risks a
non-Jew takes when writing in a forthright manner about things Jewish.
Worse, as a self-described minor name in American journalism, he fears
that any criticism of Jews may well spell career destruction.
Derby****re made an excellent case for this risk in a remarkable
exchange with Joey Kurtzman, a Jewish editor of the website Jewcy.com,
asserting:
So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: First, I
was making particular reference to respectable rightwing journalism,
most especially in the U.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone
who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT -- not
ever again -- be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages,
The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York
Post, or The Wa****ngton Times. I know the actual people, the editors,
involved here, and I can assert this confidently.
Despite this conscious awareness of why he won't give MacDonald's work
the praise it deserves, Derby****re continues with his mixed feelings:
"I found his first two books tough-going, jargony, and not very well
written." Later, he complains about MacDonald's "rather unscholarly
language in speaking about the 'manipulation' of Gentile culture by
Jewish intellectuals, and so on."
Elsewhere, however, Derby****re felt otherwise (and to his credit, he
is a smart enough writer to admit to contradicting himself at times):
"Kevin has interesting things to say . . . He ought to be heard." "The
Culture of Critique is an interesting book. (It is also, by the way,
better-written than most books by academics.)"
He even admits that he finds the parts about the "partly malign
influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive." And
then it's back to snark, referring to MacDonald's work as "some rather
abstruse socio-historical theories cooked up by a cranky small-college
faculty member." This last crack, of course, recalls Judith
Shulevitz's nasty comment in her 2000 Slate article: "A man in his
50s, MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a
third-rate school, California State University in Long Beach." (She
was wrong; MacDonald was and is a full professor.)
Worse, in his VDARE column last week, after agreeing with Entine's
smear of MacDonald, Derby****re repeats his praises for Yuri Slezkine's
expos=E9, The Jewish Century. (See MacDonald's review of Slezkine.)
Derby****re writes that he finally understands the im****tance of the
assertions about the Jewish role in the Bolshevik revolution. As
Slezkine tells us, "anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the
hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself
confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator." Estimates
are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during this "rise of the
Jews," prompting Slezkine to call such Jews "Stalin's willing
executioners."
One might question the orientation of Derby****re's moral compass when
he can reconcile the above with his claim that Jews add far more to a
nation than they take away. Spain, he believes, suffered greatly for
expelling its Jews, and America without its great wave of Jewish
immigrants indisputably "would have been worse off." Indeed, he
believes "American conservatism is proud of its Jews, and glad to have
them on board." Needless to say, critics of Jewish neoconservatives,
among others, would likely disagree. For one thing, the attachment of
Jewish neoconservatives to an open borders immigration policy will in
short order, if it hasn't already, leave precious little to be
conservative about.
Derby****re's own opinion of MacDonald is that "he is a plain
reactionary, at least so far as the Jews in America are
concerned. . . . I think MacDonald is in love with 1950--with the old
Gentile supremacy." But for members of MacDonald's group of European
Americans--the overwhelming majority then--1950 was on average probably
far better for them than today's America.
And what's wrong with a group trying to retain supremacy? As historian
Jerry Z. Miller's recent Foreign Affairs essay reminds us,
ethnonationalism is the rule around the world (most notably, for
purposes of this essay, in Israel). Viewed in cross-cultural
perspective, the immigration policies throughout the West that will
inevitably lead to the displacement of white populations are
provincial indeed.
Oddly, it is Derby****re who seems to be caught back in 1950, when Jews
were, in his view, responsible for "the wonderful vitality of American
popular culture." But should we today classify South Park's
scatological holiday special "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo" or the
equally vulgar performances of Sarah Silverman as part of this
"wonderful vitality"? More than a few observers have concluded--to
borrow a phrase--that American popular culture has gone to hell in a
handbasket. And it's been progressively more Jewish the whole way, as
argued in the preface the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique
that you reviewed.
Again, when you write that "it's a scandal that Kevin's books are not
more widely reviewed and read" and that shutting them out from the
public forum is "absurd and unfair," I applaud you. In the end,
however, your Jewish sparring partner Joey Kurtzman comes across as
the greater booster of MacDonald's work. Recall that Kurtzman wrote:
MacDonald has presented us with a fascinating and genuinely novel
examination of the history and internal workings of the Jewish world.
His trilogy is a hell of a read. To any Jewcy readers tired of pious,
'hooray-for-us!' Jewish historiography, or just interested in seeing
traditional Jewish history through a kaleidoscope, I happily recommend
it.
Let me propose a deal: we readers will try to be more sympathetic if
you will try to more forcefully challenge the (largely Jewish) forces
which now compose what Buckley once called "the prevailing structure
of taboos." You know it won't be easy; after all, one of your
exchanges was titled, with reference to Jewish power, "Be Nice, or
We'll Crush You: Criticizing Jews is professional suicide." But your
own vow to write honestly demands that you try harder."<<
Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the
cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com/authors/Connelly-Derb.html
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