Dissecting A Racial Mystique
No one must lightly dismiss the question of race. It is the key to world history and it is precisely for this reason that written history so often lacks clarity-it is written by people who do not understand the race question and what belongs to it. Language and religion do not make a race, only blood does that, Benjamin Disraeli
A subject which has been made topical in a number of learned journals in the United States, following the publication of Professor Ernest van den Haag’s The Jewish Mystique, is the claimed superiority of the Jewish “intellectual apparatus” as a possible explanation of the truly astonishing predominance in wealth, power and influence of a tiny Jewish minority in the Western world.
We may be sure there is some truth in the claim put forward by Dr. Nathaniel Weyl (some of whose work has been discussed in Chapter 11) and others that centuries of “selection for intelligence" has played an important part in the evolution of a Jewish race and nation with an exceptionally high average standard of intelligence and a remarkable dearth of fools and misfits. We also know that the same “intellectual apparatus* works differently in different circumstances and in response to different stimuli, and we know, or ought to know, that the peculiar circumstances of the Jewish people, always a tiny minority in a human environment which they feel to be potentially hostile, must have the effect of prodding their minds into alertness and activity.
What we really want to find out is whether the present extraordinary disparity is the product only of a superior “intellectual apparatus” or whether there are other important factors involved.
How, for example, are we to reconcile the present apparent disparity in performance with the indisputable fact that the whole might of the West, the civilization which has today spread its influence all over the globe, is essentially a product of the energy and creative genius of Western Christian European people, and that in 3000 years the Jews have been unable to produce anything even remotely comparable?
One of the distinguishing features of the European people, as a race, is that they are to a most unusual degree “culture builders,” with countless individuals, often at some sacrifice of their private interests, contributing to a vast shared cultural treasury. By comparison, as Spengler and Toynbee have pointed out, the Jews are basically a nomadic “fellah" people who accommodate themselves readily to a culture created by others.
How do we reconcile the present competitive inadequacy of the Western European with a recognition of the mighty powers of mind and spirit whose achievements in every field of human endeavor, especially in architecture, art, music and literature, represent to this day, after centuries of competitive striving, the high-water mark of human achievement?
We cannot hope to be able to understand the world in which we live and our own situation in that world if we are unable or afraid to try to find the answers to questions like these.
We do know also that there have been lengthy periods in history when the inferior status of the Jewish people has contrasted markedly with the power, confidence and brilliant achievement of the people among whom they dwell; and we are not aware that such inferior status was ever attributed to any inferiority of the Jewish “intellectual apparatus."
One part of the explanation of the apparent contradiction can be traced to the well-established fact that the human mind can function in radically different ways. It can function solely at the service of the individual, when it fully deserves the description of an "apparatus." Or it can function almost entirely at the service of the community, when it is not so much an apparatus as a superpersonal phenomenon, a sort of cyclonic funnel drawing to its center and expressing in works the entire cultural resources of the race.
Western European achievement has never depended on a high average of intellectual activity but more often on the exceptional performance of a few gifted individuals. Those who form the bulk of the population are then naturally inclined to coast along as comfortably as possible, sharing and enjoying the benefits provided by the activated few, propping up and carrying along with them many who might otherwise fail to keep up, and carrying along with them also a genetic inheritance capable of throwing up more exceptional individuals when these are required.
This phenomenon of the exceptional individual is better known as genius, where the great tidal flow of race energy and will force itself impetuously and turbulently through the narrow strait of the individual mind, too often at terrible cost to the individual concerned.
What it all comes to is that prevailing historic circumstances, including the almost complete domination of the economic motive in modern life, are as advantageous to the Jewish people as they are disadvantageous to the Western European people, confining them almost exclusively to science and technology and other pursuits which have to do with the manufacture and distribution of goods; and the disparity continues to widen as private-ownership capitalism degenerates at an accelerating pace into anonymous finance capitalism.'
The "degeneration" refers, of course, to the fact that the displacement of private-ownership capitalism is one of the evil results of the betrayal by governments of one of their most important social responsibilities-that of preventing the emergence of concentrations of economic power large enough and strong enough to control government itself, all this being part of the process whereby the Western European, whether in Europe or elsewhere, has been largely dispossessed of the control of his own destiny.
For this state of affairs the Western European has no one to blame except himself, because in making money and material possession the only measure of value, he has created an environment and a complex of human relationships more advantageous to the energetic and self-reliant Jewish minority than to people of his own kind.
The result we see all around us. The essential Western European, whether he be an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an American or South African, is afflicted with a form of soul- sickness which undermines his morale, stifles imagination and enterprise and inhibits mental activity in all its forms, and illness which naturally varies in intensity according to personal circumstances. Unable to be true to himself, the Western European has become the victim of cultural and political distortion, the main symptoms as experienced by the individual being the lack of a sense of direction and purpose; in other words, a haunting sense of the futility of existence, converting masses of the educated, especially the young, into ductile revolutionary material capable of being used by the prevailing powers for almost any purpose.
It is not enough, however, to say that the Western European is today afflicted with soul-sickness and to make an inventory of the symptoms and consequences of that sickness.
What we need, if we are to do ourselves any good, is to gain an insight into the etiology of it, tracing with precision the nature of the distortion and the causes which lie immediately behind the symptoms.
The entire known history of the human race will confirm that man is essentially a social animal and that he needs, as one of the first requirements of his moral health, the security provided by a sense of community or sense of belonging, which is something he has never been able to find hitherto except in some circumscribed group or community made up of individuals much the same as himself.
Inseparable from such a pattern of existence which has persisted through millennia and is shared by the greater part of the animal kingdom, is a dual code of attitude and conduct clearly designed by nature to preserve that pattern-inside the group, amity and cooperation and mutual sympathy (even if spiced with a little competition between the individuals composing it); towards all those outside the group, an attitude of indifference which can harden into hostility and conflict, as circumstances demand.
The individual living in such an environment is never morally confused. "These people," he says to himself, in effect, “are my people. These I can trust and they can trust me. I help them and they help me." He draws a deep-rooted sense of security from the knowledge that there are people joined to him by a shared set of interests and obligations. Operating from such a firm base of security, he is prepared to risk his life, nay, even willingly sacrifice it, giving his all to the group form which he derives all.
What the individual, then, calls his "conscience” is part of the psychological machinery required to ensure that he always maintains towards other individuals in the group, or towards th< group as a whole, a code of attitude and conduct calculated to servi the best interests of the group and of all the individuals composing that group.
The moral and political distortion which afflicts the people o Western European origin can thus be ascribed to the obliteration o the ancient boundaries separating groups of self-conscious!; similar people and their enforced inclusion in some large heterogeneous political unit.
The individual saddled with a psychology which is this evolutionary product of millennia of experience, now finds himsel on the horns of a dilemma, Drawn or forced into a heterogeneous human environment, he brings with him, and cannot be parted fron a deep-rooted need for a homogeneous human environment.
But how, in a heterogeneous society with its strange new marts of relationships dictated by an economic ordering of society, does the individual distinguish between “us" and "them,” between those who belong with him and those who do not? Even more painful is his dilemma when he finds himself in a greatly expanded political unit which includes people widely different in race and life-style, it some cases not even sharing with him the same language.
The result for the Western European individual is inner conflict and confusion; his responses, instead of being simple and clear-cut as they would be in the simpler form of society whence he emerged, are mixed up in such a way as to produce psychological disturbances, including guilt feelings and a weakened morale. The individual is divided within himself and his creative and intellectual potential greatly reduced, likewise his capacity for effective combination with other individuals of his own kind.
The trouble does not end there-far from it! Society itself shows signs of deep inner division as the many soul-sick individuals tenc to cluster together according to the way in which they seat individually to resolve their dilemma of a dual code which has ceased to work, giving rise eventually to two major groupings which we can identify with the terms right and left.
On the right are those who hope to find salvation in the reestablishment of smaller, more homogeneous units of humanity ir which the psychology of the dual code can once again be made tc work freely; or, at any rate, resist all those influences tending toward the creation of still larger, more heterogeneous political units, culminating even in the possibility of a one*world state.
Conspicuous among those on the are individuals in whom intellect has been developed at the expense of instinct, and who now seek salvation in an imagined world in which all people will be equal and undifferentiated and in which mankind's primordial heritage of a dual code can be replaced with a single code of universal amity and "brotherhood."
Thus a conflict which originates inside the individual is transferred to society itself, even dividing families, and creating a situation which any alien minority can exploit to its own advantage.
We cannot know how all this is going to work out in the years ahead, but we do know for sure that the psychological disturbances which arise out of efforts to apply a single code of universal amity and equality in a dual-code world which no one can change, constitutes a form of soul-sickness which has everywhere reduced the moral and political potential of the Western European peoples, and has created conditions highly advantageous to a small Jewish minority which united in dispersion jealously preserves its dual code morality.
The key to this unique minority advantage is a system of institutionalized learning, hitherto reinforced by religion, which makes it possible for the Jewish people to preserve an intensely self-conscious racial and national unity in dispersion, whereas for others, national and racial unity has always depended on geographical boundaries. Instead, Jewish race-consciousness and nationalism have become all the more intense for having been confined entirely to the mind.
The science of anthropology has had to be falsified and smothered to a truly astonishing degree to prevent information of this kind being universally known and understood. Many of those sciences whose purpose it is to help man understand himself-anthropology, psychology, genetics, etc.-are in the same state of eclipse today as were astronomy and other sciences in the Middle Ages and for the same reason: that their findings threaten the foundations of existing power structures, whether these be religious or political or financial.
Political commentators and analysts who decline for one reason or another to probe below the surface for causes of what is happening in the world today, so far from making any contribution to public enlightenment, are only helping to thicken the fog of confusion in which millions of the soul-sick flounder.
A strong sense of group identity, pride of race, nationalism-call it what you will-gives people a strong sense of purpose and direction which renders them almost totally immune to the culturally and morally subversive influences which are rampant in the Western world, all utterly destructive of the health and happiness of mankind.
From which it follows that when a civilization is in decline and the process of culture-building has virtually ceased, the Jewish people with their strong sense of race identity and their readiness to associate closely for practical ends, enjoy an enormous competitive advantage,