Terrified of being labeled an anti-Semite

Tomislav Sunic is such an observer. As someone who has lived under communism and has seen firsthand the workings of state terror, he is in a unique position to describe the current slide of America into what he aptly terms “soft totalitarianism.” This regime is maintained less by brute force than by an unrelenting, enormously sophisticated, and massively effective campaign to contain political and cultural activity within very narrow boundaries. Dissenters are not trundled off to jail or beaten with truncheons, but are quietly ignored and marginalized. Or they are held up to public disgrace, and, wherever possible, removed from their livelihoods.

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Soft totalitarian regimes can only be maintained by a sense of moral and intellectual legitimacy - the willing assent of the vast majority of the people. Without this legitimacy, the entire apparatus of cultural control either disintegrates or transforms into hard totalitarianism - the truncheons and the gulags. But here there is a major difference between communism in Eastern Europe and the current cultural regime in the United States. As Sunic notes, “Behind the communist semantics in Eastern Europe there loomed a make-believe system in which nobody truly believed and where everybody, including former communist party dignitaries made fun of in private.” However, “in America, by contrast, many serious people, politicians, and scholars, let alone the masses, believe in…the message of the media.” The people who dissent from the American consensus have been successfully relegated to the fringes. The gods are still worshiped.

Sunic sees quite clearly that this moral and intellectual legitimacy is fundamentally the result of the triumph of the left in World War II. This transformation occurred first in Western Europe which has now mostly moved well beyond soft totalitarianism to the beginnings or a gulag system where there are formal legal sanctions for thought crimes. The thought crimes, enforced by liberal and conservative European governments alike, are designed to enforce the dogmas of leftist orthodoxy, most notably everything related to multiculturalism, race, immigration, and the Holocaust. Even in England, the font et origo of American democracy, academics are removed for stating their beliefs on scientific evidence on race differences in intelligence or criminality. (For example, in 2006 Frank Ellis of the University of Leeds was suspended for  statements supporting race differences in intelligence.)

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There is an old saying that “sticks and stones can break my  bones, but words can never hurt me.” However, the sad reality is that the vast majority of Americans in politics, the media, and the academic world are terrified of being labeled an anti-Semite or of having their work compared to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is at least ironic, because there is an image of academicians as fearless seekers of truth. Unlike politicians who must continue to curry favor with the public in order to be reelected and unlike media figures who have no job protection, academics with tenure have no excuse for not being willing to endure labels such as “anti-Semite” or “racist” in order to pursue the truth. Part of the job - and a large part of the rationale for tenure in the first place - is that they are supposed to be willing to take unpopular positions - to forge ahead using all that brain power and expertise to chart new territories that challenge the popular wisdom.

But that image of academia is simply not based in reality, as shown by an article appearing almost two months after the publication of Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay and appropriately titled “A hot paper muzzles academia.” “Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle —and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.” Professors refused to take a stand on the paper, either in favor or against. As one Ivy League professor noted, “A lot of [my colleagues] were more concerned about the academic politics of it, and where they should come down, in that sense.”

Bear in mind that the vast majority of the professors unwilling to take a stand on this issue have tenure and can’t literally be fired. They are afraid not of starvation but of having their career ruined by being associated with the wrong side in this debate. The downside is that they won’t be invited to deliver papers at other universities or important conferences. They  will not be able to publish their work at prestigious academic or commercial presses, or they may even have difficulty having their work published at all. They won’t be invited to the good parties, or get nice summer fellowships, or get asked to serve as dean, or in a future administration in Washington. Or maybe their sources of funding will dry up.

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I believe that in the United States we are presently heading down a volatile path - a path that leads to ethnic warfare and to the development of collectivist, authoritarian, and racialist enclaves. Although ethnocentric beliefs and behavior are viewed as morally and intellectually legitimate only among ethnic minorities in the United States … the development of greater ethnocentrism among European-derived peoples is a likely result of present trends….

Ethnocentrism on the part of the European-derived majority in the United States is a likely outcome of the increasingly group-structured contemporary social and political landscape - likely because evolved psychological mechanisms in humans appear to function by making ingroup and outgroup membership more salient in situations of group-based resource competition …. The effort to overcome these inclinations thus necessitates applying to Western societies a massive “therapeutic” intervention in which manifestations of majoritarian ethnocentrism are combated at several levels, but first and foremost by promoting the ideology that such manifestations are an indication of psychopathology and a cause for ostracism, shame, psychiatric intervention, and counseling. One may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism with sophisticated theories of the psychopathology of majority group ethnocentrism, as well as with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior.

At some point the negative consequences to the European population of the U.S. of multicultural ideology and massive influx of other peoples will become so obvious that current  levels of control will be ineffective. We will be like the Soviet Union when it became, in Sunic’s words, “a make-believe system in which nobody truly believed and where everybody, including former communist party dignitaries made fun of in private.”

And if at this point, Europeans stare into the abyss and voluntarily cede political and cultural power, they will have no one to blame but themselves. But they will be cursed by their descendants. Perhaps they will one day read Tomislav Sunic’s excellent book and think about what might have been.

Kevin MacDonald
Department of Psychology
California State University-Long Beach

from Foreword to Homo americanus:
Child of the Postmodern Age by Tomislav Sunic