American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 21, No. 8	August 2010

CONTENTS

Are You Surprised or Angry?
Kicking the Dead
The Galton Report: The Mysterious Flynn Effect
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters

COVER STORY

Are You Surprised or Angry?

Different races appear to read faces differently.

by Robert Henderson

The liberal internationalist dream of one big happy human family divided only by cultural differences recently took a knock. Research published in the September 29, 2009, issue of Current Biology by a team at Glasgow University in Scotland suggests that whites and East Asians interpret facial expressions in significantly different ways. The findings have sobering implications for inter-racial understanding because they raise the possibility that different races interpret the most important non-verbal human signals — facial expressions — either differently or with different degrees of accuracy.

The research samples were small — just 13 Europeans and 13 East Asians, of which 12 were Chinese and one was Japanese. The subjects were shown photographs of both white and Asian faces expressing emotions that were classified as Happiness, Surprise, Fear, Disgust, Anger, Sadness, and Neutral. The emotions were categorized according to the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), that is, according to the facial muscles that are used.

The research found that the whites and Asians differed significantly both in the way they scrutinized faces and in how well they identified the emotions. Whites correctly interpreted all the expressions all the time, but one third of the time Asians confused fear with surprise, and disgust with anger. Interestingly, they were less likely to make mistakes when they were shown photographs of Asians rather than whites. There was no difference in the way whites and Asians interpreted faces expressing sadness, happiness, and neutral feelings.

Fear and surprise, and disgust and anger are related pairs. Indeed, they may be experienced at the same time or in rapid succession. Probably because they are emotional cousins, they result in similar and perhaps confusing facial expressions. Happiness and sadness, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed, and are presumably more easily recognized.

The Glasgow University team tracked the subjects’ eye movements, and found that the two groups looked at faces differently. Asians concentrated mainly on the eyes while whites concentrated equally on the eyes and mouth. Asians therefore have difficulty distinguishing expressions in which the eyes take on similar appearances. Whites, who use two reference areas, are better at interpreting such expressions.

The difference in the way the two groups scan faces may explain why whites and Asians use different emoticons (typed characters that represent emotions). Whites use parentheses to represent the mouth: Happy is “:)” and “:(” means sad. Asians represent the eyes, with “^.^” meaning happy and “;_;” meaning sad.

The Glasgow researchers concluded that culture accounts for how Asians and whites scan faces. Perhaps. Some group differences in behavior are clearly cultural and not inherent: For example, for Chinese and Japanese, the color of death is white but for Europeans it is black. However, the way we interpret emotions from facial expressions is unlikely to be culturally determined. We do not have to be taught to recognize expressions; we understand them without thinking about them. It may be that as a child develops, he associates certain expressions with certain types of behavior, but this would not explain the different ways in which Europeans and Asians scan faces. It is hard to think of a cultural practice that would lead Asians to concentrate on the eyes, and a different cultural practice that would encourage whites to concentrate on both eyes and mouth. It is not clear how such a cultural difference would operate because scanning faces is so natural even very young babies do it.

But if there is a genetic racial difference in the way people scan faces, how did it arise? Perhaps Asian languages cause speakers to move the mouth less energetically than do European languages. Perhaps the range of physical expression in Asian faces is less around the mouth than it is in whites. If that were so, the most efficient thing for Asians to do would be to concentrate on the eyes.

If this is true — and, indeed, this is highly speculative — it may explain the age-old Western complaint that Asians are “inscrutable.” If they are actually less expressive than whites in the region of the mouth, it would mean that whites, who scan the mouth as carefully as the eyes, are searching in vain for emotional cues that are not there.

On the other hand, it may also be that Asians have other ways to detect emotion and have less need to read faces. As any dog or cat owner knows, animals can be very sensitive to non-verbal signals that indicate human emotional states. The ancestors of homo sapiens must have interpreted emotions the same way. Their language was primitive, and interpreting non-verbal signals of all kinds, including facial expressions, would have been more important than such abilities are to modern men living in sophisticated societies.

People read emotions through body language, and the nuances of speech. They may also use less obvious clues, such as pheromones. The Glasgow research measured only one way of interpreting emotions. It seems to have uncovered a racial difference that is significant as far as it goes, but it did not go into the whole range of verbal and non-verbal clues people can use. It may be that Asians, while less accomplished than whites at pure facial recognition, are just as good or even better than whites at identifying emotions in real-life situations in which the full range of emotional clues is available.

Or it could be that Asians are consistently less able than whites to read emotional clues correctly, whether they be facial expressions, body language, or tone of voice. It is not out of the question that detecting emotions was simply less important in the social environment Asians built for themselves.

Patterns of misidentification

There is a suggestion of this possibility in another important finding by the Glasgow researchers: that there was a pattern to the way Asians misidentified the expressions. They showed a bias towards the softer, less threatening emotions. Given a choice between fear and surprise they chose surprise, and between disgust and anger, they chose disgust.

The researchers again concluded that this tendency was culturally determined, but this is not necessarily so. Studies of twins and other siblings have repeatedly shown that personality is subject to genetic influences. Personality is therefore subject to natural selection, and different races differ in what could be called “average personality” as much as they do in average intelligence.

Asians could be genetically slanted towards interpreting facial expressions in less threatening ways, and these differences seem to be consistent with what appear to be innate racial differences in behavior. A quarter of a century ago, in his seminal book Sociobiology (abridged edition, p. 274.), Edward Wilson reported on infants:

[Studies have]demonstrated marked racial differences in locomotion, posture, muscular tone and emotional response of newborn infants that cannot reasonably be explained as the result of training or even conditioning within the womb. Chinese-American newborns, for example, tend to be less changeable, less easily perturbed by noise and movement, better able to adjust to new stimuli and discomfort, and quicker to calm themselves than Caucasian-American infants.

More recently, Professor Phil Rushton has written:

Temperamental differences, measured objectively by activity recorders attached to arms and legs, show up in babies. African babies are more active sooner and develop earlier than white babies who, in turn, are more active than East Asian babies. Motor behavior is a highly stable individual difference variable. Even among whites, activity level measured during free play shows highly significant negative correlations with IQ: more restrained children average higher intellects. (“Solving the IQ Conundrum,” Vdare.com, Aug. 12, 2004)

In my American Renaissance article of October 2009 (“Why Have Asians Not Dominated?”) I wrote:

Despite their higher average IQ, Asians have failed to become the culturally dominant race, probably because innate personality traits work against them. Compared to Europeans, they are passive, unquestioning, and lacking in initiative.

If a society favors the quiescent personality — one that interprets facial expressions as softer and less threatening than they really are — those with genes that tend towards such personalities will be favored, but that raises the question of why a society would favor particular personalities. This could conceivably be a blind throw of the genetic dice, but personality is such a central part of human society that it is difficult to see how natural selection would have produced such a trait accidentally, or as a consequence of some other evolutionary advantage that was even more important than personality. The answer probably lies in the implications of being a social animal.

People have many opportunities to remodel behavior, and recent findings suggest that evolution has been very rapid during the last few thousand years. Those who become powerful can destroy their enemies and promote their friends, and do it on a scale — including genocide — not possible for any other social animal. For several thousand years, East Asians have lived in circumstances in which a ruler or small group could assert power over large populations. Any encouragement of specific character traits by the dominant members of society would help spread the genes for those traits within the population.

At the same time, certain evolved Asian character traits may have directly influenced the kind of societies Asians built. From the beginning of historical times there appears to have been a clear difference in mentality between Europeans and East Asians.

In Europe there were always strong tendencies to resist absolutism and centralization of power, a fact even the most powerful rulers had to take into account if they were to survive. Twenty-five centuries ago, the Greeks demonstrated over and over their refusal to accept autocracy. Even at their most despotic, Roman emperors found it politic to keep at least the forms of the power-sharing structures of the Roman Republic and to appease the masses with bread and circuses.

The post-Roman European world was not a world of dictators, but of monarchs precariously sitting on their thrones. Mediaeval Europe saw the widespread rise of representative assemblies, and even the powerful, so-called absolute monarchies that crushed or emasculated their assemblies between the late 16th and late 18th centuries were unable to change the general mentality of their people. They fell in the 19th century to democratic impulses and national self-determination. Nor were attempts to impose the divine right of kings ever successful.

Chinese history tells a different story. It is a catalogue not just of autocracy but autocracy on a grand scale, a constant search for a central authority with unqualified power. That does not mean China was always a single, centralized state.

The first unification of China is usually dated from the short-lived Chin dynasty (221-207 BC) and for approximately half the period since then the country has been divided. Nonetheless there have been many successful attempts to establish autocratic, unified control, the last of which is the present Communist regime. Before the Communists, the last successful traditional autocracy was that of the Manchu, who established the Ching dynasty in 1644 and who might still be ruling had Europe and the USA not intruded into Chinese politics during the 19th century.

In their long history as an independent people, the Chinese never developed a political system that went beyond that of the God-appointed/God-related ruler — the Chinese emperor’s Mandate of Heaven. There were frequent rebellions, but even if they were not simply uprisings by local warlords or disloyal imperial servants, they did not seek a form of government that spread power to more people but the replacement of a bad ruler with one considered just in the Confucian sense, a ruler who would behave temperately and for the good of those he ruled, but who would still be an absolute monarch. Confucianism is an expression of submission, because it defines right conduct as submission: child to father, wife to husband, subject to those higher in the hierarchy.

The experience of China in modern times reinforces the idea that Asians are more prone to accepted social circumstances that require submission. In 70 years, the country has moved from the fractured quasi-colonial situation prior to 1949, through the madness of the Mao dictatorship, to the present curious hybrid of capitalism and Communist political and social control. What is striking is not that through this period the governing ideology has changed radically, but that the Chinese have not seriously challenged the idea of a central ruling power. The post-war Japanese experience is somewhat different, but it is a democracy with a distinctly Asian flavor of conformity, and before conquest and occupation by Americans, Japan was a highly structured and authoritarian society that never developed beyond the God-emperor stage.

Crosscultural communication

The Asian personality may be well adapted to Asian societies but, assuming it reflects racial differences that cannot be easily effaced by cultural influences, what does it mean for the current vogue of integration and multi-culturalism? The Glasgow University researchers were brave enough to note that “our results question the universality of human facial expressions of emotion, highlighting their true complexity, with critical consequences for crosscultural communication and globalization.”

Just so. If human beings do not have a common understanding on something as basic as recognizing emotions, there is much scope for friction. It is also significant that Asians were better able to interpret emotions in the faces of fellow Asians. Misunderstandings are more likely in multi-racial settings, and in racially mixed societies people tend to associate with people of their own race. The Glasgow findings suggest what one of the reasons for that may be.

It will be interesting to see if these results are replicated with larger samples and with different groups. A comparison of Japanese natives with Japanese Americans, for example, would suggest the extent to which the racial differences the Glasgow team found can be changed by environment. Comparisons of black Americans, white Americans, and Africans might also yield interesting results. Science continues to raise uncomfortable obstacles to the mixed-race, egalitarian world our rulers are planning for us.

Mr. Henderson is a history and politics graduate whose career was divided between the public and private sectors.

BOOK REVIEW

Kicking the Dead

A dishonest smear of a man who cannot hit back.

William H. Tucker, The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science and Ideology, University of Illinois Press, 2010, 254 pp., $50.00

Reviewed by Jared Taylor

Although he was not well known to the public, Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) was one of the most influential research psychologists of the 20th century. He wrote 56 books and more than 500 journal articles in the fields of personality, intelligence, and multivariate analysis. He designed 30 standardized tests for measuring intelligence and personality, some of which are still in use.

During the course of this remarkably productive career, Cattell received many honors and awards, and in 1997, the American Psychological Association (APA) announced it would present him with the association’s Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement. The 92-year-old Cattell traveled to Chicago from Hawaii, where he lived in retirement, to receive the honor, but two days before the ceremony the APA announced that the award was to be “postponed.”

The reason? Two professional “racism”-hunters — Barry Mehler of Ferris State University and Abraham Foxman of the ADL — had written the association complaining about Cattell’s political views. The APA announced it would withhold the award until a Blue Ribbon Panel had looked into “the relationship between Dr. Cattell’s scientific work and his views on racial segregation.” This caused a furor, in the midst of which Cattell withdrew his name from consideration. The panel disbanded and issued no report; a few months later, Cattell died.

The Cattell Controversy is a book-length account of Cattell’s career, with special emphasis on his little-known political writings that so exercised the anti-“racists.” The author, William Tucker of Rutgers University-Camden, is himself a professional anti-“racist,” who supported the witch hunt, and who assures us that Cattell’s views were so appalling that the APA would have disgraced itself by giving him its top honor. Instead, it is University of Illinois Press that has disgraced itself by publishing a volume of transparent dishonesty.

A remarkable scientist

Despite his obvious hatred for Cattell, Prof. Tucker admits that “almost everyone who had worked with him, even for a short time, regarded Cattell with a mixture of awe and gratitude for his brilliance, his prodigious work ethic, and his ability to inspire others.” Prof. Tucker also concedes that Cattell was admired for “his good manners, sense of humor, and ability to treat everyone with respect, no matter their status or background,” but warns us that even Nazi exterminators could be loving husbands and fathers, and that “it is hardly unusual to find considerable personal charm and kindness coupled with monstrous beliefs.”

Prof. Tucker also recognizes that Cattell was brilliant. He graduated at age 19 from London University with top honors in chemistry and physics. His interests changed, however, after attending a lecture by Cyril Burt on Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics. As a boy, Cattell had been deeply moved by the colossal massacre of the First World War and the poverty of London slums, and came to the early belief that such horrors could be alleviated by eugenics. He came of age at a time of great enthusiasm for the view that by understanding and controlling evolution mankind could enter a golden age. Cattell therefore abandoned the physical sciences for the social sciences which, he believed, would be at the forefront in guiding evolution in fruitful directions.

Cattell threw himself into the study of personality because he understood that evolution works on all aspects of personality, not just intelligence, and that any scientific eugenics program would have to make careful choices about which traits to encourage and which to discourage. His Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire was first published in 1950 and quickly became a standard instrument for assessing personality. What are now known as “the big five” personality traits — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism — though not developed specifically by him, are derived from his work.

Cattell also made important contributions in the study of intelligence. He recognized the need to measure innate ability independent of cultural influence, and his Culture Fair Intelligence Scales are still used today.

Cattell believed that if the traits and abilities of people could be measured at an early age, each citizen could be given the place in society in which he would be happiest and most productive, and that this would put an end to unearned privilege and class conflict. As the great British psychologist Charles Spearman put it, “perfect justice is about to combine with maximum efficiency.”

Personality assessment had other uses. Cattell believed it could chart the progress of mental therapy, with patients taking periodic tests to see if they were becoming more normal. He also thought that if someone showed the qualities of a great research scientist, for example, he should be given considerable laboratory resources even before he had produced anything important. He believed it was possible to measure groups on such scales as Good Internal Morality versus Poor Cultural Integration and Morale. He believed it would be instructive to evaluate a society every 100 years or so to see if it were moving in promising directions.

Cattell believed that the goal of life was “to strive upward,” and that moral behavior was that which contributed to the betterment of the species. Like Galton, he did not think traditional religions were reliable guides in this respect. He recognized the importance of giving meaning to life and of grounding men in larger values, but he rejected universalist ethics that treated all men equally, despite vast differences in ability and contribution. He was convinced that science, rather than revealed truths, was the proper basis for morality and, again like Galton, thought that man’s religious impulses should be directed towards the eugenic goal of improving mankind.

Cattell shared his generation’s concern with dysgenic fertility, or the tendency of the incompetent to outbreed the competent. He calculated that if Europeans reproduced indiscriminately, average IQ would decline about one point per decade and that “in three hundred years half the population would be mentally defective.”

Having children was therefore “far from being a personal matter but must admit of fine regulation by the state on behalf of the happiness of all.” “The first step of the nation” therefore, was “to control the number and quality of its citizens,” and Cattell’s personality assessment tools would make it possible to measure quality. Every citizen could then be assigned a fertility quota that reflected his abilities, and Cattell believed that with the right education, most people would understand the profound social implications of procreation, and would stay within their quotas. He suggested that the legislature should have a “house of scientists” that would operate more or less like the House of Lords, and help make evolutionary choices for society.

Cattell believed that it was best for a nation to have high averages of intelligence and ability but without a great deal of variation. This would eliminate large class differences and would make real self-government possible. He did not think democracy worked well in societies with large variations in abilities, and thought no one with an IQ of less than 90 should be allowed to vote. Cattell also opposed excessive individualism, and wanted evolution nudged in the direction of the man who was “capable of achieving his fullest expression only in groups.” He thought societies that promoted “sympathy, unselfishness, self-sacrifice, and the capacity for enthusiastic cooperation” were most likely to succeed.

Cattell assumed that different societies would establish different evolutionary goals. Some might prefer a wide range of abilities, with the recognition that this would result in castes and aristocracies that were not suited to democracy. He also believed that sexual attraction was “a backward eddy in the stream of natural selection,” because it put a premium on certain physical configurations that had no real value. He even hoped for an anti-aphrodisiac that would curb sexual urges, so couples would be attracted to each other because of “congenial temperaments and common purposes” rather than lust.

The importance of race

If Cattell had gone no further than this, he probably would have got the gold medal. His views were certainly open to criticism, especially on libertarian grounds, but compulsion is a specialty of the left, and the idea of the authorities running our lives for us is congenial to anti-“racists” — assuming they are the authorities.

Cattell’s unforgivable sin was to see evolution working not just on individuals but on races. In his view, racial differences were a great natural experiment in evolution. Nature had given rise to groups with distinct temperaments and abilities, and it would spoil the experiment to mix the races. Cattell also noted the practical problems of diversity:

Whenever a nation has been forcibly put together from differing races, we find a social life unnecessarily disjointed, weak, and feverish. There are thousands of misunderstandings, produced by individuals working for different goals in different ways and at different speeds.

Cattell thought racial consciousness was a natural part of human nature, and that the campaigns waged against it, generation after generation, were proof that it could not be eradicated. Societies should therefore adjust to it rather than battle it uselessly, and the most obvious adjustment was to avoid unnecessary contact between races.

Homogeneous societies were also more conducive to the best kind of group identification. Cattell thought that an intelligent Scot, for example, would probably be more comfortable with the less intelligent members of his own race than with an equally intelligent Chinese, because temperament and fundamental outlook differed between races. Cattell wanted citizens to feel they were part of an important group enterprise, a “super-individual consciousness” that was striving for biological improvement, and doubted that this feeling of solidarity could extend across racial lines. It could probably extend across national lines so long as the nations were of the same race.

Ultimately, this sense of participation in the evolutionary improvement of one’s people was to play the role of religion in rationally organized societies. Cattell coined the term “Beyondism” for this new, science-based religion, which would direct man’s “upward striving” and give meaning to life.

What most enrages Prof. Tucker is that Cattell expected different racial and national groups to evolve separately and competitively. Each group should prosper or stagnate in accordance with its own powers rather than exploit vulnerable groups or ask to be carried on the backs of those that were more successful. To Cattell it was clear that cultures could not be imposed, willy nilly, on groups that were biologically unsuited to them, but he went even further: scientific discoveries should not be shared indiscriminately, because this would falsify the results in the great experiment in which races rose and fell in accordance with their gifts.

Here, therefore, was another objection to indiscriminate altruism. Just as it was wrong, within a single society, to tax the productive to subsidize the procreation of the unproductive, it was “biologically perverse” to extend altruism across national lines. If Somalis or Congolese, for example, could not build societies that prevented starvation, it violated the norms of evolution — and therefore of scientifically established morality — for the French or the Japanese to feed them.

Beyondism

Cattell summarized his political/religious thinking — as opposed to the personality assessment work for which he is famous — in two volumes: A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, published in 1972, and Beyondism: Religion from Science, published in 1987. Prof. Tucker calls these “the most comprehensive statement of his [Cattell’s] sociomoral beliefs,” but he quotes from them briefly and selectively, with the clear intention of discrediting them.

The Beyondism books are hard to find, but a spot check of Prof. Tucker’s citations is disconcerting. He writes of Cattell:

[O]ther humanistic principles “such . . . as ‘social justice and equality,’ ‘basic freedom’ and ‘human dignity,’” he dismissed as ‘whore phrases.’

Prof. Tucker clearly wants us to think that Cattell had nothing but contempt for “human dignity,” for example. However, in this passage, Cattell was criticizing a governing ethos not based on scientific principles and that has:

only a political, Humanistic rhetoric in which such whore phrases as ‘social justice and equality,’ ‘basic freedom’ and ‘human dignity’ continue to prostitute their beauty to every imposter. (New Morality, p. 411.)

In other words, these beautiful concepts become whore phrases in the mouths of imposters who ignore science — something completely different from what Prof. Tucker wants us to think.

Prof Tucker continues: “The notion of ‘human rights’ was nothing more than ‘an instance of rigid, childish, subjective thinking.’” Again, we are to believe Cattell dismissed anything that could be described as human rights. This is what Cattell actually wrote: “The notion that ‘human rights,’ or any other ethical standards, are independent of the circumstances of the group is an instance of rigid, childish, subjective thinking . . .” (Beyondism, p. 88) Cattell is not denying human rights at all; he is pointing out that they depend on circumstances. Rights that are appropriate in peacetime, for example, may not be possible during war. By chopping up Cattell’s sentences, Prof. Tucker utterly distorts their meaning. If someone had the time — and the stomach — to check all his citations there is no telling what he might find.

What most stimulates Prof. Tucker to distortion, however, was what Cattell considered the logical consequence of competition between groups: that there would be losers as well as winners. What happens when nature’s great experiment produces a failure? Cattell did not believe that more successful groups should keep less successful groups alive through foreign aid, and that under certain circumstances some groups or races might go extinct if left unaided. What should the more successful groups do about this?

Here, Prof. Tucker concentrates on essays Cattell wrote in the 1930s when he was in his early 20s, and which are nearly impossible to find. Prof. Tucker writes this:

Cattell named ‘the negro’ as one of those races that, despite their ‘endearing qualities,’ were appropriate candidates for a process of humane elimination, in which ‘by gradual restriction of births, and by life in adapted reserves and asylums, must the races which have served their turn be brought to euthanasia.’

Why is this quotation chopped up? Is it a fair summary or a distortion? Prof. Tucker’s record (see more below) offers grounds for suspicion. He also cites the following sentence fragment from a 1933 publication: “[T]he leading nations may attempt to reduce the numbers of the backward people by birth-control regulation, segregation, or human sterilization.”

Again, there is no way to know in what context Cattell said this or how he might have qualified it. Prof. Tucker cannot find similarly menacing material in Cattell’s later, mature work, but he has an explanation: “[I]t was unlikely that Cattell’s views had changed, but in a more politically correct era, apparently he felt compelled to make a modest accommodation to the changed zeitgeist.” It would be the rare man whose views did not change from his 20s into his 50s or 60s, but Prof. Tucker apparently thinks he can read Cattell’s mind from beyond the grave.

It is important to know what Cattell really thought — in the 1930s as well as in the 1980s — because Prof. Tucker, now in his own words, writes of his subject’s views of blacks:

At the very least it would have been morally proper in Cattell’s analysis to confiscate their land and property and move them onto ‘reservations’ — that is, into concentration camps — where they would be prevented from reproducing as part of a systematic attempt to eliminate the black population.

Prof. Tucker even goes on to say that Cattell would have countenanced “violent elimination” of blacks. These are very serious accusations, and should be based on careful, extensive citation, not on out-of-context, unverifiable fragments from the 1930s. Prof. Tucker concedes that even in the 1930s, Cattell insisted that any steps taken by one group with regard to another must be taken with “kindness and consideration,” not exactly the language of mass murder.

How did Cattell treat this controversial question in his mature, verifiable works? Prof. Tucker expects the reader to be horrified by the term “genthanasia,” which Cattell coined to describe the process whereby, in words quoted by Prof. Tucker, “a moribund culture is ended, by educational and birth control measures, without a single member dying before his time.”

Prof. Tucker refrains from quoting a passage that continues onto the very same page:

As regards animal species, we are today inclined, for aesthetic and scientific purposes, to make sanctuaries and reservations for species obviously heading for extinction, and still more extreme and scrupulous consideration is indicated before allowing a breed of humans — however maladapted — to become extinct. But it is realistically questionable in both cases how much space the more vital species will continue to allow for museum “storage.” The maintenance of the status quo cannot extend to making ninety-nine hundredths of the earth a living museum. (New Morality, pp. 220f.)

These are the “reserves” that Prof. Tucker tells us are really “concentration camps,” but there is no hint of violence, of taking anyone’s property, or running people off their own land. Cattell says it would be impractical to set aside 99 percent of the world’s surface for failing groups, but clearly huge expanses could be devoted to this purpose.

Prof. Tucker quotes further, expecting the reader to be horrified:

Failing groups should either be allowed to go to the wall, or be radically re-constituted, possibly by outside intervention. By contrast, successful groups, by simple expansion or budding, should increase their power, influence, and size of population.

Prof. Tucker fails to quote Cattell’s following paragraphs:

This is the logic of the situation, but it leads to conclusions that run counter to the habits of thought of the majority of people today. The result will be that for them emotion will add its lurid touches, and convert what has just been said into an alleged advocacy of a nightmare of ambitious group self-seeking. Finally it will be dramatized that all this must end in a nuclear holocaust. Actually this conclusion is logically, politically and emotionally false.

It was logically false because most of relative success in survival had to do with “competition against nature” rather than against other groups. It was politically false because a sane society avoids the lopsided requirements of arms expenditures that should be put to productive uses.

Cattell continues:

It is emotionally false because the concept of cooperative competition implies a brotherhood in a common religion of progress, in which real competition and objective comparison are an indispensable reality, but no cause for rancor. . . . [C]ooperative competition . . . is emotionally a very complicated balance, involving mutual assistance and shared hopes and strivings, along with inexorable regard for realities. It calls for pressures toward re-direction not unlike those in a parent bringing up a child, or in true friendship. (New Morality, pp. 95f.)

Prof. Tucker — a textbook case of the hysteria Cattell so accurately predicted — refuses to recognize that Cattell did not want any group to go to the wall. He did not want to see failing groups kept alive indefinitely by artificial means, but the “pressures toward re-direction” in the previous passage meant evolutionary and eugenic advice that successful groups should give to the less successful. Cattell even wanted a “world federal government” that would be a clearing house for promising evolutionary information to be made available to all. This government would also provide protection to any subnational group that wanted to seek its own evolutionary destiny but was so small it might require defenses against larger neighbors. Furthermore, it is clear from these passages that expansion into the territory of others would take place only after a failing group had depopulated it.

Cattell believed that with enough careful study and the proper assessment instruments, it would be possible to devise a “probable survival index” for measuring the health of different societies. Here is what Prof. Tucker says about the index:

A low value on this index would not only eliminate “the need to wait on complete collapse” but, by providing the opportunity to study ‘a misconceived racio-cultural experiment as it demonstrates its failure,’ could lead to greater understanding of the laws and principles of evolutionary advancement. (The two quoted passages are inexplicably stitched together from pp. 91 and 100 of Beyondism.)

The image is clear — ghoulish white scientists taking careful notes as dark-skinned natives go through their death agonies — but Prof. Tucker has it wrong. Cattell is talking about how evolutionary criteria could be established. One way to learn what to avoid is to study societies that have gone extinct and figure out why. Another is to study current societies and rank them according to a “probable survival index.” Cattell writes: “Discovering such an index — thus eliminating the need to wait on complete collapse as the ‘criterion’ [for policies to avoid] — will appeal to humanitarian motives.” It will appeal to humanitarian motives precisely because complete collapse might be avoided if a failing society accepted timely eugenic advice.

“Genthanasia” was a last resort for groups that refused eugenic advice and could not carry on. It was to ease the end of what Cattell called a “tragic” process and was, in this sense, the equivalent of euthanasia. To accuse Cattell — certainly the Cattell of Beyondism — of countenancing mass murder is a vicious distortion, especially since Cattell repeatedly stressed that one of the purposes of science-based morality was to rise above the chance and cruelty that had governed evolution in the past.

Like all diligent anti-“racists,” Prof. Tucker cannot resist evoking the Nazis. He tells us that Cattell praised the eugenic policies of the Third Reich in the 1930s — at a time when Winston Churchill himself expressed admiration for Hitler’s leadership. After the war, however, Cattell wrote of “Hitler’s lunacy,” and compared his regime to a roving band of killers. He lamented that his personality assessment tools had not been perfected and applied to politicians because, if so, “Hitler would never have got past the clinical psychologist.” This does not stop Prof. Tucker from writing that “Cattell’s ideological thought . . . was essentially an intellectual justification for the form of fascism adopted by Nazi Germany.” By “fascism,” Prof. Tucker does not mean industrial or labor policy; he means extermination.

Guilt by collaboration

Prof. Tucker concedes that some have argued that Cattell’s admittedly extraordinary scientific contributions should be assessed without regard to his political views, but says this would be wrong, first, because his views were repulsive and, second, because he cooperated actively with wretches even more repulsive than he. There follows a long section of guilt by association, in which the reader is treated to amateurish smears of such people as Roger Pearson and William Shockley, and to such howlers as the following:

Alain de Benoit’s magazine Nouvelle Ecole is “a French version of the Mankind Quarterly,” and his organization, GRECE, “placed particular emphasis on pre-Christian societies in which Aryan aristocrats ruled over inferior races.” Revilo Oliver’s America’s Decline is “a neo-Mein Kampf,” and Wilmot Robertson’s magazine, Instauration was “a slick periodical” (it always looked as though it had been mimeographed). He tells us Carlton Putnam’s two books on race “described how Jewish scientists had duped the nation into extending political equality to blacks” (Race and Reason hardly mentions Jews, and Race and Reality contains just a few references, most of them complimentary).

However, among all the scoundrels with whom Cattell allegedly cooperated, it was his association with the editor of American Renaissance — the writer of this review — that most clearly demonstrated Cattell’s unfitness for high honors:

Cattell would never have engaged in American Renaissance’s blatant racism yet did not hesitate to lend his prestige to a publication founded on the belief that blacks should be deprived of their constitutional rights.

Here is Prof. Tucker’s example of AR’s “blatant racism:”

Until recently, the editor pointed out, there had been widespread agreement that blacks were ‘a perfectly stupid race,’ and although they could ‘neither be killed nor driven away,’ no one expected ‘civilized white men’ to work alongside them.

The quotation marks are clearly meant to suggest that these are the editors own words and sentiments. In fact, they are quotations from prominent Americans, cited in an article about racial views from the past, (“The Racial Revolution,” AR, May 1999) and are not even from the same person; the first two are from Theodore Roosevelt and the last is from Charles Eliot (1836 – 1926), president of Harvard.

Prof. Tucker warns that according to a 1997 survey of AR readers, Adolf Hitler got the top score for Foreigners Who Have Advanced White Interests. He conveniently fails to report that half again as many AR readers said Hitler was the foreigner who had most damaged white interests.

And what about AR’s alleged denial of blacks’ constitutional rights? Prof. Tucker refers to an article by the late Sam Francis:

[A]ccording to the magazine, blacks were entitled only to personal liberty and the right to hold property, not to any of those “phony” rights to participate in the polity and economy that had been “fabricated” for them in the 1960s.

Unfortunately for Prof. Tucker, Francis wrote that equality before the law does not mean:

the ‘right’ to attend the same schools, to serve on juries, to marry across racial lines, to serve in the armed forces, to eat at lunch counters, to ride on buses, to buy a house or rent a room or hold a job, to receive welfare, to be admitted to colleges and universities, to take academic degrees or to be promoted.

All these are phony ‘rights’ that have been fabricated through the corruption of our constitutional law and our understanding of it, and no citizen of any race is entitled to them. (emphasis added)

Isn’t it curious how the words “fabricated” and “phony” seem to have caught Prof. Tucker’s eye?

And how did Cattell “lend his prestige” to the filth you are holding in your hands? In 1995, when he was 90 years old and in retirement, he gave an interview to the editor of AR that resulted in a one-page article. Nothing more. “This,” thunders Prof. Tucker, “is not guilt by association but rather guilt by collaboration.” It is the concluding, definitive example from Prof. Tucker’s list of the ways in which Cattell actively tried to bring about the “common vision of an ethnically cleansed future” that he reportedly shared with AR and all the other felons with whom he allegedly cooperated and whom Prof. Tucker caricatures.

What may yet be the pinnacle of Prof. Tucker’s mendacity, however, is his claim to have described Cattell’s thinking “as fairly and accurately as my admittedly imperfect ability will allow.” This ingratiating false modesty makes the swindle all the more odious.

Prof. Tucker’s performance is sadly typical of his kind, but why are anti-“racists” incapable of taking their opponents as they are? Perhaps they are so blinded by hate that they truly cannot understand the words they are reading. More likely, they just can’t resist the thrill of a distortion that turns an opponent into Hitler and eugenics into genocide. This shoddy behavior dirties the name of a respectable academic press.

One can perhaps understand the temptation to misquote (if, in fact, Prof. Tucker has done so) obscure publications from the 1930s that no one can check, but the back issues of American Renaissance are a few mouse-clicks away on the Internet. Why risk exposure? Is it because Prof. Tucker believes his colleagues are no more scrupulous about the truth than he, when it comes to fighting “racism”?

All things considered, however, it is good that this book was written. It reveals — as if any additional proof were needed — the low character of our opponents. More significantly, if it stimulates even a little interest in the work of a man who had the vision to care about the destiny of fellow men who would live 1,000 years in the future, it will have rendered good service — a service far different from that intended by its contemptible author.

ARTICLE

The Galton Report

The Mysterious Flynn Effect

by Hippocrates

The Flynn Effect (FE) has become the accepted term for the increase in IQs that has been reported in many developed countries during the 20th century. The FE has also recently been reported in two developing countries, Dominica and Sudan.

In fact, the term Flynn Effect is a misnomer, because the rise of IQs was first shown in the United States in 1948 by Read Tuddenham, in a comparison of the IQs of the military drafts in 1917 and in World War II. In 1949 a similar rise of IQ, from 1932 to 1947 was reported in Scotland. These increases were subsequently found in a number of other countries before Professor James Flynn, emeritus professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, rediscovered them in 1984. An IQ increase was reported for Japan in 1982 by Professor Richard Lynn and the rise has sometimes been called the Lynn-Flynn Effect. Use of the term “the Flynn Effect” violates the convention that scientific discoveries be named after those who discovered them, such as Boyle’s law and Mendelian genetics. The increase in IQs should properly be called the Tuddenham Effect.

Let us consider the main facts about the FE and then the theories that have been proposed to explain it. The main facts are, first, that IQ scores increased in many countries by about 3 IQ points every decade from 1917 up to around the year 1990. During the last 20 years or so these increases have stopped in Denmark and gone into reverse in the United States, Britain, and Norway. Second, the FE has taken place mainly for reasoning ability and very little for verbal comprehension or mathematical-spatial ability. Third, the FE has occurred principally among the less intelligent, which is to say that averages have risen mainly because of the gains among people of lower rather than higher IQ. Fourth, in the United States, the FE has taken place at the same rate for blacks and whites.

There have been three principal theories to explain the FE. Professor Flynn initially took the view that “real intelligence” has not increased at all, because obviously young people today are not much more intelligent than their grandparents. What had increased must have been the ability to do better on intelligence tests. However, in his 2007 book What is Intelligence? he changed his mind. He now believes that there have been improvements in education that have led to more scientific and logical thinking (“science has engendered a sea change . . . formal education played a proximate role”) and this has caused a real increase in reasoning ability.

Prof. Flynn also believes that the ability to think more scientifically and logically is transmitted by association: “[T]he IQ of our social environment is a potent influence on our own IQ.” This leads him to predict that people who live in a university town will have higher IQs than those who do not, because the high IQs of professors will raise the IQs of the population. This is extremely unlikely because it has been found that the IQs of adoptive parents have no long-term effect on the IQs of their adopted children (see “Genes or Environment,” AR, June 2010). If growing up with smart parents doesn’t raise your IQ, living in the same town with smart people is hardly going to make a difference.

The principal alternative theory of the FE is that the main cause of the IQ increase has been improvements in nutrition. This would have resulted in increases in height as well, and would have produced better neurological development of the brain and larger brain size. In developed countries, increases in height ceased about 1990, at about the same time as the increases in IQs ceased. In further support of this theory, it has been shown that the FE can be found in two-year-olds, which rules out the theory that it has been caused by improvements in education.

One of the puzzles of the FE is that it suggests American blacks today are smarter than whites were in the 1920s. As IQs increased by about 3 IQ points a decade during the 70 years from 1917 up to around the year 1990, the IQs of both blacks and whites increased by 19 IQ points, so if the IQs of blacks and whites are set at 85 and 100 (respectively) in 1917, the average IQ of blacks in 1990 was 104 and that of whites was 119. This raises the problem of why blacks, with their increased IQs, have not produced the geniuses that whites with the same IQ produced in the 1920s. There are about 32 million blacks in the United States, accounting for about 12 percent of the population. The United States has won 46 Nobel Prizes in the sciences from 2000 to the present, but none by blacks.

There are three possible answers to this problem. First, blacks still score 15 IQ points lower than whites, so there are many fewer black geniuses. Second, the range of IQ is lower among blacks, so there are fewer blacks with very high IQs. Third, blacks may lack the persistence required for the sustained effort necessary to do the work necessary to win a Nobel Prize. Professor Michael Levin hints at this in his book Why Race Matters, in which he suggests that blacks have what economists call a “high time preference,” i.e. they prefer present pleasures over deferred rewards: “The central motivational difference between blacks and whites may be said to be higher black time preference” (p.78).

This is closely related to the fact that blacks appear to be different from whites not just in average intelligence but in what could be called “average personality,” and this also could contribute to racial differences in achievement. In July 2002, AR published an article called “Race and Psychopathic Personality,” which explored this question in detail. Even when whites and blacks are matched for IQ, blacks still commit crime at 2.5 times the white rate, suggesting that something other than intelligence explains group differences.

Research on personality consistently shows that blacks have higher levels of psychopathy, originally identified in 1837 as “moral imbecility” by the English physician J.C. Pritchard, and recently replaced with the softer term, “anti-social personality disorder.” An early definition of psychopathic personality described it as general poverty of emotional feelings, lack of remorse or shame, superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, a lack of insight, absence of nervousness, an inability to love, impulsive antisocial acts, failure to learn from experience, reckless behavior under the influence of alcohol, and a lack of long-term goals. There is a normal distribution of psychopathic tendencies in all populations, and blacks seem to have markedly higher average levels than whites — who, in turn, have higher levels than East Asians. These tendencies do not lead to success in many fields other than crime and politics.

As noted above, during the last 20 years or so, IQs have declined in the United States, Britain, and Norway. The most likely explanation for this is that nutrition reached its optimum around 1990, so the IQ increases ceased. In the last two decades, IQs have declined because the more intelligent have been having fewer children than the less intelligent. This is known as dysgenic fertility, and has been a characteristic of economically developed nations since the closing decades of the 19th century. Because intelligence is transmitted from parents to children, the effect of this is that the intelligence of each generation of children falls, once the advantages of improved nutrition have been exhausted. This fall is now taking place and can be expected to continue.

Flynn, J.R. What is Intelligence? Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Levin, M. Why Race Matters. Praeger, 1997.

Lynn, R. What has caused the Flynn effect? Secular increases in the development quotients of infants. Intelligence, 2009. 37, 16-24.

Pritchard, J.C. A Treatise on Insanity. Harwell, Barrington & Harwell, 1835.

Tuddenham, R. D. Soldier intelligence in World Wars I and II. American Psychologist, 1948, 3, 54-56.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

When Dreams Go Bad

From the end of the Second World War until just about the end of the last century, California was the American dream for many whites. Whites moved there for aerospace or defense jobs, to pursue their dreams of movie-stardom, or for a refuge from dreary East Coast weather. They made California not only the most populous American state, but also created an ideal of what America was to become. Not any more. The whites who created California are now fleeing in the face of Hispanics and other non-white immigrants. Between 2000 and 2008, while the overall population grew by four million to 38.1 million, the white population decreased by 500,000. Whites made up nearly 80 percent of the population in 1970, and 57 percent as recently as 1990. That number fell to 47 percent by 2000, and in 2008, whites were down to just 40 percent. They are not only leaving; the ones who stay behind are not replacing themselves.

Hispanics continue to pour in. In 1940, there were only 415,000 Hispanics in the entire state; in 2008, there were more than 14 million, or 37 percent of the population. Hispanics are on track to surpass whites as the state’s largest racial group in 2016, and will become an absolute majority in California by 2042 at the latest. [Justin Berton, Whites in State ‘Below the Replacement’ Level, San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 2010.]

In 1970, California ranked seventh in the nation in the educational level of its workers. Now it ranks last, according to a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies. One in six workers is a high-school dropout. Thanks to mass immigration, each year adds another 91,000 unskilled workers to the state’s ranks, and the income divide is becoming that of a Third-World country. [Steven Camarota, California Now the Least Educated State, Center for Immigration Studies, June 10, 2010.]

The Great White Way

Times are tough on Broadway, with ticket sales declining every year. Producers hoping to reverse their fortunes are focusing on a group not known for theater attendance: blacks. Four current Broadway productions feature blacks as central characters, and producers hope to put on three more this fall, including a two-man play about Martin Luther King called “The Mountaintop.”

One current production is a musical called “Memphis,” which tells the story of a black woman R&B singer in segregated 1950s Memphis, Tennessee, and her “turbulent romance” with a white disk jockey. Advertisements originally featured the tagline, “The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” but when that didn’t bring in enough blacks, the advertising was changed to “His Vision, Her Voice. The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and posters now prominently feature the black singer. “Memphis” producers also began marketing the show to black ministers, choir directors, and black women. They spent $75,000 to promote it in black schools, sending cast members to discuss it in classrooms and bringing students — more than 1,000 so far — to see the show for free.

“Memphis” won a Tony award as Broadway’s top musical, but many critics aren’t impressed, dismissing it as “conventional” and deriding its message of “racial reconciliation” as “simplistic.” Lead producer Sue Frost says that doesn’t matter because the show is having a big impact “on a wide cross section of people who feel that Broadway isn’t usually for them.” She is proud to note that Michelle Obama and her two daughters saw the show.

Despite the Tony and unprecedented efforts to get blacks to shell out $94 a ticket, “Memphis” continues to struggle at the box office and is a long way from turning a profit. [Patrick Healy, Broadway Sees Benefits of Building Black Audience, New York Times, June 27, 2010.]

Africans in Minnesota

Africans, most from Somalia, Kenya, and Liberia, now account for half of the immigrants to Minnesota. They say they are attracted to Minnesota for the usual reasons — quality of life, good schools — but also because Minnesota has a growing reputation in parts of Africa as receptive to immigrants. “Minnesota holds a very prominent place in the minds of Liberians,” says Ahmed Sirleaf of something called Advocates for Human Rights. “I’ve heard people there say that Minnesota is one of the very few states where an immigrant with an accent can be hired to work in his chosen profession. In other places, most people have to stay in odd jobs.”

Barbara Ronningen, an analyst for the Minnesota State Demographic Center, agrees: “Once you have a certain number here, they just keep coming.” Like the Somalis in Lewiston, Maine, an African refugee living in St. Paul sends out word that Minnesota is a nice place and soon the rush is on. “No one is sitting in Africa suddenly thinking, ‘I’m going to Minnesota,’” says James Sanigular, a Liberian immigrant who arrived as a child. “It happens through personal connections.” As in Lewiston, no one knows just how many live in Minnesota. State officials put the number of Somalis at a few thousand, for example, but Somali community leaders claim more than 50,000. What is known is that of the 18,020 legal immigrants to Minnesota last year, 9,579 were African.

Many Minnesotans hope the influx will reverse the depopulation trend in 25 of the state’s 87 counties. Minnesota schools, for example, enroll 70,000 fewer students from native, English-speaking homes than they did ten years ago. Many people leave Minnesota because of the harsh winters. “No one comes here to bask in the snow,” says demographics consultant Hazel Reinhardt. “We either must attract whites the way we did in the ’70s and ’80s — or attract a large number of minorities.” [David Peterson, African Influx Reshapes Immigration to Minnesota, Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 15, 2010.]

AZ Democrats Squirm

Polls continue to show overwhelming national support for Arizona’s SB 1070, which allows state and local policeman to enforce federal immigration laws, and several states are considering passing similar laws. The Obama administration is still dithering over whether to sue Arizona, although all indications are that it will — much to the dismay of the state’s three Democratic congressmen, all of whom are facing tough reelection fights. “I believe your administration’s time, efforts and resources would be much better spent securing the border and fixing our broken immigration system,” Rep. Harry Mitchell wrote to President Obama in June.

“Congresswoman [Gabrielle] Giffords wants more federal agents on the Arizona border, not federal lawyers in court arguing with state lawyers,” says a spokesman. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick agrees: “I am calling on the president and the attorney general to abandon preparations for a lawsuit against Arizona, and to recommit to finding a national solution to fixing this national problem,” she says. [Sean J. Miller, Arizona Democrats Urge Obama Not to Sue Over Controversial Immigration Law, The Hill (Washington, DC), June 23, 2010.]

Meanwhile, the lawmakers responsible for SB 1070 aren’t resting on their laurels. This fall, Republicans plan to introduce a bill to deny US citizenship to children of illegals born in the state. Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, the driving force behind SB 1070, says illegal immigrants have “hijacked” the 14th Amendment, which was written to grant citizenship to former slaves. Sen. Pearce is undeterred by arguments that any attempt to undo birthright citizenship would be unconstitutional, saying, “We will write it right.” He says the idea is to make the citizenship process so onerous that illegal immigrants will give up and go home. A recent poll found that 58 percent of Americans are opposed to birthright citizenship.

Some Arizonans, however, want to undo Mr. Pearce’s good work. Susan Vie, a naturalized citizen from Argentina, leads a group that is hoping to collect enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot that would repeal SB 1070 and put a three-year moratorium on all state laws on immigration. She wants to give the Obama administration enough time to get amnesty for illegals. [Adam Klawonn, Arizona’s Next Immigration Target: Children of Illegals, Time, June 11, 2010.]

Loving Day

On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court — in a unanimous decision — struck down Virginia’s 305-year-old law banning miscegenation. The case was Loving v. Virginia, and for several years now, mixed-race couples and families have been quietly celebrating June 12 as “Loving Day.” Time magazine considers the day the perfect occasion to throw “an awesome, inclusive party.”

Loving Day was started by Ken Tanabe, a half-white, half-Asian graphic design student who made it part of his senior thesis. Mr. Tanabe had never heard of the Lovings — the couple who brought the case — when he was growing up, so he started a website to teach the history of mixed-race marriage in America and to encourage miscegenation. In 2004, there were two large “Loving Day” celebrations, one in New York City and one in Seattle. The idea caught on and now Loving Day is supposedly “the biggest multiracial celebration” in the US, with public events in most large cities. Since 2007, Washington, DC sponsors Loving Day celebrations but it is not a holiday.

In 1958, Richard Loving, who was white, made Mildred Jeter, who was black and Indian, pregnant. Since it was illegal for the couple to marry in Virginia — and in 21 other states — they got married in Washington, DC. A few weeks later, back in Virginia, they were arrested for “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” A judge sentenced them each to one year in prison, but told them they could avoid prison if they moved to Washington and did not return for 25 years. The couple became homesick after a few years and brought the case that ultimately overturned all state laws banning interracial marriages. In 1975, the Lovings were in a car crash that killed Richard Loving and left his wife severely injured. She never completely recovered, and died in poverty in 2008, despite earning some money from a 1996 cable television movie about her marriage. [Christopher Shay, Loving Day, Time, June 11, 2010. Neely Tucker, Mildred Loving Followed Her Heart and Made History, Washington Post, May 6, 2008.]

In 1961, the year Barack Obama’s parents married in Hawaii, 96 percent of Americans opposed interracial marriage. By 1987, most Americans still opposed it, but just four years later, opposition had slipped into the minority. More recent polls have found that large majorities accept intermarriage — or at least tell pollsters they do. The numbers are skewed by age. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent or more of people in their 20s approve of miscegenation, but only about one-third of those 65 or older do. [Meredith Moss, Younger People Least Likely to Object to Interracial Marriage, Dayton Daily News, June 12, 2010.]

Road to Recovery?

The US Census Bureau estimates 230,000 Haitians died in the earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince in January, but the bureau expects Haiti to surpass its pre-quake population of 9.5 million in 2012. By 2050, it projects a population of 13.4 million. Haiti is already overcrowded; one of the reasons the January earthquake killed so many people is that there is so little space for building that Haitians stack ramshackle concrete homes on top of each other. During the quake these homes collapsed, crushing the occupants.

While there will be more Haitians in the world in the year 2050, there will be fewer Swedes and Belarusians. Both countries currently have about the same number of people as Haiti, but the population of Sweden is expected to fall slightly by mid-century, while that of Belarus will plunge by nearly 2 million, or 20 percent. Many white countries will see their populations fall, most notably Russia, which will go from 139,390,000 to 109,187,000. In contrast, while the US population will increase from 310 million to 439 million, virtually all of the growth will come from non-white births and immigration. Non-whites are a third of the population, and are expected to be the majority in just over thirty years. [US Census: Haiti Population Booming After Quake, AP, June 28, 2010. US Census Bureau, International Data Base.]

No Truth, Please

Last year, Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of Germany’s central bank, gave an interview with a German financial newsletter in which he described Muslims as an “underclass” not fit for much more than “fruit and vegetable selling.” “I don’t have to accept someone who lives off a state they reject, doesn’t properly take care of the education of their children — and keeps producing more little girls in head scarves,” he added. “That goes for 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arabic population of Berlin.” Although he is a Socialist, the German left denounced him as a “right-winger” and a “Nazi,” and the Berlin public prosecutor considered charging him with Volksverhetzung or “racial hatred.”

Amazingly, Mr. Sarrazin managed to hang onto his job with the Bundesbank. He may not be so lucky this time. In June, the 65-year-old banker expressed dismay at the dysgenic effect of immigration on Germany.

“There’s a difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence,” he said, singling out immigrants from “Turkey, the Middle East and Africa.” Unlike Germans, who have the lowest birth rate in Europe, these immigrants have many children, which causes “a different propagation of population groups with different intelligence because parents pass their intelligence on to their children.” Germans are therefore “becoming dumber.”

Critics are, of course, demanding Mr. Sarrazin’s head. A spokesman for a Berlin Muslim group calls him “a tired old white Christian male full of prejudice and few ideas.” So far, he is refusing to apologize and many Germans agree with him. [Allan Hall, Migrants ‘Make Germany Dumb’ Says Central Banker in Astonishing Outburst, Daily Mail, June 12, 2010.]

Rent-a-White

Indian companies that want to project an image of success have taken to hiring Europeans to pose as employees or foreign partners. Having white people around is supposed to make Indian businesses look “international” and impress clients. A Polish woman, for example, picks up money on the side, working as window dressing for an advertising company. She accompanies the manager to meetings as his “Polish business partner” and shakes hands with potential customers. The company gives her fake business cards and tells her to keep the chit chat to a minimum, lest she be exposed.

Indians like their white women blonde and attractive. Angie Silva, an olive-skinned Australian of Portuguese descent, got an actual job working for a real estate company. It didn’t last long. “I felt like the other employees and my boss were a bit disappointed with the look of me, saying that I looked Indian,” she says. “My boss actually told me he would pay me to dye my hair blonde.” He told her that a pale, blonde Czech had been a better investment. [Pallavi Polanki, Whites Only Please, Open Magazine (New Delhi), May 29, 2010.]

In China, they call the practice of hiring whites to pose as company employees “white guy window dressing,” “a white guy in a tie,” or just “a face job.” It’s been going on for years, and Chinese companies do it for the same reasons as the Indians: It makes the firm look international. Jonathan Zatkin is an American actor who lives in Peking and occasionally works as a “rental foreigner.” Last year he posed as the vice president of an Italian jewelry company that had supposedly been in business with a Chinese jewelry firm for a decade. The company paid him $300 to attend the grand opening of one of its stores. “I was up on stage with the mayor of the town, and I made a speech about how wonderful it was to work with the company for 10 years and how we were so proud of all of the work they had done for us in China,” he says.

There are simple rules for a rent-a-white: 1. Be white. 2. Do not speak any Chinese, or preferably, don’t speak at all, unless asked. 3. Pretend you just got off of an airplane yesterday. [Lara Farrar, Chinese Companies ‘Rent’ White Foreigners, CNN, June 29, 2010.]

Black and Bleu

When the French national soccer team, known as “Les Bleus” because of its blue uniforms, won the World Cup in 1998, it was heralded as a shining example of “diversity” because many of its star players were non-whites. National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen earned the ire of French lefties for complaining that the team was “insufficiently French.” The 2010 team is even less French — 13 of the 22 players on the squad are non-white, including eight of the 11 starters — but it is still a model of diversity. Only now it is showcasing diversity’s disadvantages.

French fans had high hopes for this year’s World Cup. Instead, the team exited the tournament without winning a single game. After a lackluster performance in their opening game with Uruguay, players began grumbling about the way coach Raymond Domenech was running the team. Things came to a head after an embarrassing loss to Mexico, when star player Nicolas Anelka cursed the coach, who then cut him from the squad and sent him back to France. The rest of the players went on strike, refusing to train for a day, and there were rumors some members would refuse to play. Les Bleus lost their next game to South Africa and were eliminated.

France was horrified. The media highlighted the “selfishness, indifference, and indiscipline” of the players, and accused them of humiliating the nation. Because the coach is white, and the most troublesome players are black, the criticism soon turned racial. Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut compared the players to Parisian ghetto rioters, telling a radio interviewer, “We now have proof that the French team is not a team at all, but a gang of hooligans that knows only the morals of the mafia.” Politicians called the players “scum,” “little troublemakers” and “guys with chickpeas in their heads instead of a brain.” Marine Le Pen, vice president of the National Front and daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, speculated that many of the players failed to play hard for France because “they are a part of another nation or have another nationality in their heart.”

Fadela Amara, a daughter of Algerian immigrants and a junior minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, worries that all the “racially-charged” criticism is “building a highway for the National Front.” [Steven Erlanger, Racial Tinge Stains World Cup Exit in France, New York Times, June 23, 2010.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — If Americans paid more attention to history, the fate of the Comanche would serve as a stark reminder of why allowing an alien people into one’s territory is a bad idea. When two species compete for the same resources, one of them eventually — and inevitably — is displaced. This is known as the Competitive Exclusion Principle, or Gause’s Law, and we white Californians are living it every day.

Art Hansen, Chatsworth, Calif.

Sir — I was pleased to see a mention in your July cover story of one of my favorite characters from American history: Quanah Parker (1852–1911). His mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was captured at age nine by Comanches with whom she lived for 24 years. She married a Comanche brave, and Quanah (meaning “fragrance”) was the first-born of her three children. Texas Rangers later “rescued” her and a daughter and forced them to live with her white family, but she always wanted to return to the Comanche. She starved herself to death shortly after her daughter died of disease.

Quanah became a chief and was the leader of the last Comanche band to surrender to the US Army and go on the reservation. He was named chief of the reservation and was a capable leader, respected by both whites and Indians. He was a successful rancher, invested wisely, and may have been the richest American Indian of his time. He went hunting several times with Theodore Roosevelt. He had at least five wives and was one of the founders of the Native American Church, which uses peyote in its services. His many descendants hold an annual family reunion and powwow in his honor.

Parker is an example of contact between whites and natives that turned out reasonably well. Most of the time, contact meant tragedy.

Sarah Wentworth, Richmond, Va.

Sir — The June issue featuring the cover story on “Black Metal Ethnonationalism” is my favorite so far — and I’ve read nearly every one. I’ve been a devoted follower of Black Metal (BM) since 1985. I’ve been “in the scene” continuously, and have conducted many interviews with BM musicians. I can attest to the fact that most BM musicians and fans are, either overtly or covertly, 100 percent racially aware. While some musicians express white racial consciousness in their lyrics, others do so privately. I’ve had many off-the-record conversations with BM musicians that make it clear where they stand.

Many of these bands put principle above financial success. I know of two Virginia bands — Arghoslent and Grand Belial’s Key — that are so good they have received glowing reviews in “mainstream” metal publications. For example, Metal Maniacs magazine (now defunct), which had a circulation of 30,000 and could be picked up at every 7-11 and supermarket, said of both that if they would just abandon their racialism they could achieve stardom in the “normal” metal world. They refused.

Eric Schroeder, Lawrenceville, Va.

Sir — Your review of Nell Painter’s execrable new book exposes the fraud of what passes for “scholarship” in so-called “white studies” programs. Isn’t it interesting that whereas black studies, Chicano studies, women’s studies and all other manner of “studies” of and for the aggrieved seek to build their self-esteem by blaming all of their problems on the white man, the purpose of “white studies” is to lower the self-esteem of impressionable young whites. Mr. Sims must have a thick hide to have slogged through that intellectual fever swamp.

Carter Phillips, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir — I spent an hour today discussing politics with a man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who said some interesting things. Not surprisingly, he started in about how racist white people were, and that we were to blame for the sorry state of Africa today. I replied that Europeans brought schools, a written language, and the rule of law to Africa. He said Africans didn’t need any of those things — I agreed with that. He told me he was getting a PhD here in the United States and was going back to Africa afterwards because someone had to help Africa.

He said he didn’t want to stay in the US because he could see that American society was failing. You know things are bad when someone from such a wretched place as the Congo says that. He told me whites were quickly becoming a minority and he thought that once the “Latinos” and blacks took over there was going to be a dictatorship because whites at least try to be fair.

He added that whites are in trouble and will not be able to hold on to power because we aren’t reproducing. I agreed with that, and we talked about feminism, which I believe is one of the principal causes. He said that when whites lose power it will be time for everyone to do to the whites what whites have been doing to everyone else. He said he was sure that there was going to be a race war eventually. He asked me why liberal whites are always in Africa telling Africans how to behave when whites aren’t even intelligent enough to keep their own race from dying out. I told him I didn’t know. I suspect his views are not that different from those of other educated Africans.

Name Withheld, Southern Methodist University

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