Renegades, Turncoats and Jews

Giles Milton

Excerpts from White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves

Captain Pellow’s ship the Francis was captured by Barbary corsairs in 1715. Captain John Pellow, six crew and his eleven-year-old nephew Thomas Pellow became slaves. Captain Pellow died under the abysmal conditions but Thomas Pellow survived to rise up the ranks of sultan Moulay Ismail’s slaves until escaping twenty-two years later. His and others’ accounts reveal the shocking scale and cruelty of white slavery at Moorish hands.

Renegades and turncoats

Thomas Pellow and the other European renegades in Morocco operated in a shadowy world of servitude and slavery. They were rarely subjected to chain gangs and hard labour, yet they were made to work for the regime they despised. The Frenchman, Pidou de St Olon, concluded that although the sultan’s renegades lived apart from the other captives, ‘they were no less his slaves.’ Escape was impossible and freedom remained a dream.

The exact number of renegades forced to serve under Moulay Ismail remains unknown. They rarely figure in the tallies of captives that were compiled by ambassadors and padres. Nor were they considered worthy of being included in negotiations conducted by their home governments. Despised for having forsaken their Christian faith, they were abandoned to their fate.

This was a foolish mistake on the part of Europe’s ministers, for the sultan’s renegades easily outnumbered the captives being held in the slave pens and played a crucial, if unwilling, role in keeping Moulay Ismail in power. Without the services of these apostates – many of whom were desperate to escape – the sultan would have been hard pressed to contain the country’s frequent rebellions. The French consul, Jean-Baptiste Estelle, noted some years earlier that Moulay Ismail’s armoury of 40,000 muskets was in large part cast by renegades, and he added that ‘soon he will more since, in Fez, Christian slaves are casting 400 cannon barrels a month, very fine and of good quality.’

One of the most celebrated of these renegade gun-founders was an Irishman by the name of Carr. A contemporary of Pellow, Carr had been captured as a young lad and voluntarily converted to Islam. ‘The temptation was very great,’ wrote the Englishman, John Braithwaite, who was to meet Carr in the late 1720s. ‘He was offered fine women, and all the riches and grandeur of this country, which if he had not accepted of, he foresaw nothing but slavery, misery and extreme want.’ Moulay Ismail showed unusual respect for Carr on account of his skill at casting weaponry. ‘[He] used to call him brother, and gave him clothes off his back and would hug and caress him very much, and offered him the greatest governments in the country.’ He even made him a kaid and for a short time promoted him to the rank of governor, with control over ‘the frontiers of Guinea.’

Carr was a duplicitous individual whose principal skill was self-preservation. ‘A very handsome man,’ wrote Braithwaite, ‘[and] very ingenious... to us he seemed much to lament his condition and declared himself as much a Christian as ever.’ Years of service in Morocco had left him broken and wretched, and he had frequent recourse to the bottle. ‘He drank with us very hard,’ added Braithwaite, ‘and declared to us if it was not that he locked himself up every now and then and took a hearty dose of wine, he could not have supported his spirits, when he came to think he was for ever lost to his country and friends.’ Carr typified so many of the sultan’s renegades: he was desperate to return home, but knew that the chance of this happening was extremely low.

Few other apostates won the trust of Moulay Ismail. Those who did rise to positions of prominence were quickly corrupted by their now-found power and authority. A Spanish surgeon called Laureano turned against his former comrades after being made the sultan’s personal attendant. He converted to Islam, changed his name to Sidi Achmet and became a most unsavoury individual. ‘His physiognomy is very bad, his heart deceitful, his behaviour brutal and impious, and he is a great enemy to Christians,’ wrote Father Busnot. The most hard-hearted renegades were put in charge of Christian slaves, whom they treated with great contempt. Guilt about their apostasy may have played a part in their brutal behaviour, but they may also have been affected by sights of extreme cruelty. According to one unnamed slave, the worst fate for any European captive was to be ‘belied, back-bitten and beaten by some of their own number who are called Christians.’ These ‘Christians’ – he means apostates – had gained their positions through flattery and deception, informing on former comrades who were slacking at work. They knew that they would only retain their posts ‘on proviso that they shall make the other slaves work so much the harder.’ To this end, they became savage and sadistic, and ‘surpass the very barbarians themselves in cruelty, beating their fellows unmercifully.’ (pp. 145-147)

Jews

Some of the bukhari became horsemen – ‘the highest esteem imaginable’ – and were appointed stewards to the country’s greatest kaids. They were also employed as emissaries, ‘to carry the emperor’s letter of thanks to any officer who served him well, or to call him cuckold, spit in his face, give him a box on the ear, strangle, or cut off his head.’

On occasions, select members of the black guard were called upon to carry out political assassinations. Moulay Ismail used one of his bodyguards to kill the richest Jew in Morocco, Joseph Maimaran, whose vast fortune had helped him secure the throne. Maimaran made the mistake of reminding Moulay Ismail of his debt, and the sultan responded by having him murdered. ‘The negro did as he was ordered,’ wrote Francis Brooks, who said that Maimaran was followed while he was out riding. ‘[The assassin] spied his opportunity very diligently, so spurred his horse over him, rode upon him, and trode out his brains.’

Moulay Ismail’s relations with Morocco’s large Jewish community was always ambivalent. The majority he treated with contempt, but a handful of the wealthiest – descendants of Jews expelled from Spain – were accorded senior positions at court. One of them, Moses ben Hattar, became treasurer of the court and played a prominent role in keeping Moulay Ismail in power. Another who found great favour with the sultan was Joseph Maimaran’s son, Abraham. He was appointed comptroller of the imperial household soon after his father’s murder. An ugly man, but a skilful survivor, he amassed a vast fortune and was only too willing to lend money to the sultan. Father Busnot thought he had ‘a very ill presence,’ but conceded that he had ‘a great deal of wit and a long experience.’

Neither of these two courtiers showed any interest in helping the Christian slaves. Father Busnot said that Maimaran was the one member of the imperial household ‘that might do most service to Christians, if his inclination was towards it.’ But Maimaran hated Christians with almost as much passion as the sultan himself and had no desire to improve the lot of the European slaves. Nor did any of Morocco’s other influential Jews. One used to boast that he had amassed as many Christian slaves as Moulay Ismail. When asked what he intended to do with them, he gave a wry grimace and said ‘that he would sacrifice one of them every Friday night until they were all consumed.’

Even the wealthy Jews were not immune to the sultan’s wrath. On one occasion, he summoned a group of them to his palace and began to harangue them in a most unpleasant fashion. ‘You dogs,’ he began, ‘I have called you all hither that you may take the red cap and embrace my law.’ He told them that ‘you have amuzed me above these thirty years with the coming of your messias ... [and] if you do not positively tell me the year and day when he will come, you shall no longer enjoy your goods or lives.’

Genuinely alarmed, the assembled Jews asked for eight days in which to consider their answer. Moulay Ismail granted them this request and sent them out of his presence. When they returned the following week, they coolly informed him that their messiah would appear in thirty years. Moulay Ismail scowled and said they had answered thus in the knowledge that he would be no longer alive. ‘I will deceive you in my turn,’ he said. ‘I will live longer than shall be the requisite to make out your imposture.’ He would probably have had the Jews executed for impertinence had they not had the foresight to present him with a huge sack of gold coins. (pp. 150-152)


White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2004.

Rashomon & Realism

 

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) is commonly found on lists of the world’s greatest movies, and deservedly so. Rashomon features avant-garde narrative techniques (flashbacks, multiple points of view), dynamic black-and-white cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, compelling Ravel-like music by Fumio Hayasaka, subtle and intensely dramatic performances, and a complex but tightly edited script, all combined into a fast-paced 88-minute masterpiece with an emotionally devastating climax. Rashomon is also distinguished by featuring one of the most loathsome and twisted female villains in all of cinema (“Let’s you and he fight, and I’ll go with the survivor”).

When Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival, it did more than lay the foundations for the enduring world-wide fame of Kurosawa and his star, Toshiro Mifune; it opened the eyes of the world toward Japanese cinema as a whole.

Rashomon is the story of a rape and murder committed in twelfth-century Japan. Or, rather, it is four radically divergent stories of the same rape and murder. Rashomon is constantly trotted out by coffee-house intellectuals as an illustration of the subjectivity of our perceptions and the relativity of truth. But this is a superficial misreading of the film.

The stories in Rashomon do not diverge because of the ineluctable subjectivity of all claims about the world. The witnesses are simply lying. Furthermore, if we pay attention to their testimony, the characters of the witnesses, and the enduring facts of human psychology, we can reconstruct what really happened. Finally, Rashomon does not just presuppose that reality is objective and knowable, but that there is a moral order that is objective and knowable as well, an objective ought as well as an objective is. In short, Rashomon is not a relativist film but a deeply realist one.

The film opens in a downpour. Two men, a woodcutter and a priest, have taken refuge from the rain in the ruins of the Rashomon gate of Kyoto. It is a time of war, famine, natural disasters, and social breakdown. The woodcutter speaks the first words of the film: “I can’t understand it. I can’t understand it at all.” The two men look at each other and then turn to morosely watch the rain.

Soon they are joined by a third man, who turns out to be a cynic and a thief. Hearing the woodcutter repeating “I just can’t understand it,” the cynic asks what he is talking about. The woodcutter and the priest both state that they have heard troubling testimonies that day. The cynic asks to hear all about it. When the priest begins to sermonize, though, the cynic cuts him off. He only wants to hear the facts for his amusement. The priest can keep his moralizing to himself.

The Woodcutter’s First Story

According to the woodcutter, three days before, he went to the forest to gather wood. Walking along a forest path, he first encounters a woman’s hat with a veil hanging on a bush, then a samurai’s hat trampled in the leaves, then a length of rope, then an amulet case, then the dead body of a man. Horrified, he rushes off to tell the police. Next we see the woodcutter testifying in court. When asked by the judge if he saw a sword, he answers no.

The Priest’s Testimony

Next, we see the testimony of the priest, who passed the murdered man on the road on the afternoon of his death. The murdered man was a samurai, carrying a sword and a bow and arrows. His young wife was on horseback. The priest, who does love to sermonize, then begins to speak of the fragility and fleetingness of human life.

The Policeman’s Testimony

Next we see a policeman sitting next to the bound bandit, Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune). The policeman claims that he captured the bandit after he had been thrown from a horse, which turns out to be the horse of the samurai’s wife. The policeman also found the samurai’s bow and arrows.

Tajomaru’s Testimony

Tajomaru scoffs at the policeman’s claim that the great bandit Tajomaru had been thrown from a horse. Instead, he claims, he had been sick with dysentery from drinking polluted water. He then admits that he killed the samurai and tells how it happened.

It was a hot day, and Tajomaru was resting alongside the road. The samurai and his wife passed by, and a breeze momentarily lifted her veil. Struck by her beauty, the bandit decided that he would have her, even if he had to kill her husband. (This sort of contingency brings to mind Camus’ The Stranger, in which the protagonist Patrice Meursault ends up killing an Arab because it is an especially hot day on the beach.12)

Tajomaru quickly hatches a plan. He approaches the samurai and tells him that he found a treasure of swords and mirrors buried in the woods. He offers to sell them to him at a good price. The samurai follows the bandit down a forest path and into a grove, where the bandit springs on him and ties him up. The bandit returns to the wife and tells him her husband has taken sick. Her childlike concern made him feel jealous of her husband. He wanted to show her his disgrace and led her into the grove.

When she sees that her husband has been captured, her expression goes cold. Then she pulls out a dagger and attacks the bandit fiercely. He evades her blows, and as she tires, he seizes her. She breaks down in tears as he rapes her, dropping the knife as she gives in.

After the rape, the bandit prepares to leave and allow them to continue on their journey, but the wife stops him with a shocking proposal. She has been shamed. Two men cannot know of her shame. One of them must die. The two must fight, and she will go with the survivor. The bandit is horrified by this proposal. He cuts the husband’s bonds. The husband seizes his sword and attacks. There is an epic swordfight, and the samurai is killed. It is an honorable death, but it was not what the bandit intended.

When the fight was over, the bandit discovered that the woman had run off. So he took the husband’s sword and bow and arrows. Then he found the wife’s horse and left. He sold the samurai’s sword. But he forgot to collect the dagger, which he calls his “biggest mistake.”

Throughout his testimony, and in the flashbacks as well, Tajomaru’s testimony is filled with bravado, boasting, boyish hi-jinks, and loud, hollow laughter. At times, he seem maniacal. Even though he has been captured and will surely die, he pretends that he is in control, speaking haughtily to the policeman and judge. Genuine laughter is an expression of a sense of superiority. Nervous or forced laughter is an expression of feelings of inferiority trying to mask itself as superiority. The same is true of boasting. The bandit has been shamed, and he is trying save face. We must bear this motive in mind.

Japan, like other Far Eastern societies, is a shame culture, not a guilt culture. In shame cultures, one’s infractions of morals and manners cause intense shame if seen by others. In guilt cultures, one’s infractions of morals and manners cause pangs of conscience, even if nobody else knows about them. In shame cultures, one does not suffer pangs of conscience if one’s infractions go unnoticed or can be covered up with a face-saving lie. All the lies in Rashomon are motivated by the desire to hide shame and save face. If one bears this motive in mind, one can reconstruct what actually happened from the four widely diverging stories.

After Tajomaru’s story, the movie returns us to the Rasho-mon gate. Much to the cynic’s surprise, the wife was found alive, hiding in a temple, and was brought to the court to testify. The woodcutter then declares that both Tajomaru and the wife were lying. How does he know this? It turns out that he saw the whole thing and lied about it to the court.

The Wife’s Testimony

In the court, the wife is far from being the virago described by Tajomaru. Instead, she is tearful and submissive. According to the wife, after the bandit raped her, he told her his name and mocked her husband. The husband struggled in his bonds, and the wife ran to his side to help. The bandit laughed and ran away. The wife was frozen by her husband’s glance, which was aloof and filled with loathing. She screamed for him to kill her, but not to hold her in contempt. She fetched her dagger, freed her husband, and asked him to kill her. Then she grew hysterical and fainted. When she awoke, she found her husband dead, the dagger in his chest. It is never made clear whether he died at her hand or his. She said that she did not remember leaving the woods. She found herself by a pond and tried to drown herself, but failed. Then she took refuge in a temple. She ends her testimony by asking, “What could a poor, helpless woman like me do?” The whole thrust of her story is to establish her good intentions and to absolve her of all responsibility for what happened. She does not even have the agency to secure the honorable death that she claims she desired.

The movie then returns us to the three men conversing at the Rashomon gate. The cynic doubts the woman’s testimony, accusing women of fooling themselves and using tears to manipulate men. Then we learn that the dead samurai also testified in court, though a spirit medium. The woodcutter, however, declares that the dead man’s story is a lie as well. Again, he can say this because, as revealed later, he actually witnessed the whole crime.

The Husband’s Testimony

The medium’s testimony is one of the most imaginative sequences in the film. The medium is played by a woman, who engages is some sort of shamanic ritual, then speaks in a raspy, unearthly male voice.

According to the husband, after the rape, the bandit tried to console his wife and persuade her to run away with him. The wife agrees to go with the bandit, but then she implores him to kill her husband, again to hide her shame. The bandit is horrified by this and feels sympathy for the husband. He turns to the husband and says that he will kill her if he wishes it. The husband says that for these words, he almost forgave the bandit. The woman then fled, and the bandit chased her. Later, the bandit returns alone. The woman has escaped. The bandit frees the samurai and leaves. The samurai, sickened by his dishonor, takes up the wife’s dagger and stabs himself. As he dies, he feels someone approach and remove the dagger from his chest.

At this point, we return to the gate, and the woodcutter blurts out that the story is untrue, for the samurai was killed by a sword, not a dagger. At this point, the canny cynic realizes that the woodcutter had seen more than he let on and persuades him to tell the whole story.

The Woodcutter’s Second Story

As in his original story, the woodcutter first found the woman’s hat on a branch. But then he heard a woman weeping. He crept closer and found the samurai tied up and the bandit begging the woman to stop crying. The bandit has just raped her, but now he begs for her forgiveness. He offers to marry her. He even offers to work to support her. He then threatens to kill her if she refuses.

The wife gets to her feet and uses her dagger to free her husband. She does not wish to choose between the two of them. She wants the men to fight to the death, and she will go with the winner. The husband, however, holds her in complete contempt. He will not risk his life for a shameless whore and tells her to kill herself.

The bandit too is repulsed by her. He begins to leave but she begs him to stay. When her husband continues to insult her, however, the bandit stops and sticks up for her. Pressing her new opportunity, the wife manically shames both men, saying that if they were real men, they would fight each other. She says that women can only be won by strength, by the sword.

At this point, both men are still united by loathing for the woman, but they are also shamed by her into a half-hearted battle, a battle that they think will restore their honor but which simply deepens their own feelings of self-loathing. Instead of the epic show of swordsmanship in Tajomaru’s story, we witness an utterly degrading farce in which two men, sword hands trembling, advance hesitantly then quickly retreat, rolling in the leaves and dirt. Eventually, almost by accident, the husband—begging for his life—is killed by the bandit who throws his sword at him, almost to renounce responsibility for the killing in the very act. He is utterly sickened by his victory. (This long-drawn, sordid murder brings to mind the killing scene in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain some years later.) The woman then flees, dishonoring the bandit still further. The bandit picks up the samurai’s weapons, finds his horse, and flees, full of furtiveness and self-loathing.

When the woodcutter finishes his story, the cynic questions the truth of the tale, and the woodcutter bristles and says that he is telling the truth. A bit later, the cynic asks him why he omitted any mention of the dagger, and the woodcutter admits that he stole it and sold it.

What Really Happened?

We can determine what really happened in Rashomon if we understand that all the lies and omissions in the various tales—save one, which is crucial to the movie’s end—spring from the same motive: the desire to conceal shame and save face. I think it is most plausible to work backwards from the woodcutter’s second tale. The woodcutter’s account is most likely to be accurate because he was merely a witness, not a participant in the events. But even he conceals something out of shame, namely his theft of the dagger. But that was after the rape and murder took place.

If we take the woodcutter’s account as basically accurate, then remove everything from it that the bandit, the wife, and the samurai would find shameful, we will arrive at the tales they tell.

The woodcutter did not see how the samurai and his wife ended up in the grove, or how the rape took place, so we simply must take the bandit’s account of those events at face value.

The humiliating events that the bandit omits from the woodcutter’s tale are begging the woman to marry him, the woman’s verbal abuse and shaming, and the disgraceful duel at the end. Instead, as the bandit told it, he was prepared to leave and let the samurai and his wife to continue their journey, but she begged him to kill her husband. He was horrified by this proposal and released the husband. The husband then attacked. A gallant duel followed, ending with the samurai’s honorable death.

The woman’s tale omits everything after the rape that casts her in a shameful light. Gone is her proposal to have the two men fight to the death, which is present in all the other accounts. Gone is the bandit’s horror at this proposal, which is also present in the other three accounts. As the wife tells it, the bandit simply leaves, the husband treats her contemptuously, she begs him to kill her, then faints. When she comes to, she finds her husband dead with her dagger in his chest—perhaps at his own hand, perhaps at hers. Her story does not account for what happened to the dagger, which was not found at the scene of the crime.

The tale told by the samurai’s ghost also omits everything personally shameful to him: his wife goading the men to fight and his death at the end of their degrading duel. Instead, he claims that he committed suicide, but, unlike the wife, he had the presence of mind to explain why he was not found with a knife in his chest.

What remains to be explained is the discrepancy between the woodcutter’s first and second accounts. Why did he completely omit the events after the rape leading up to the murder? To answer this question, we need to examine the final scene of the movie.

The Foundling

After the woodcutter finishes his second story, the priest bemoans the fact that human lies and selfishness create hell on earth, and they are living through it.

The ruined Rashomon gate is not just a place where people take refuge from the rain. It is also a spot where unclaimed corpses and unwanted babies are abandoned. After the priest finishes his lament, they hear the cries of a baby.

The woodcutter and the priest are horrified to find the cynic stealing the baby’s clothes and an amulet left for its protection. The cynic defends himself by claiming that if he did not do it, someone else would. The woodcutter accuses him of being evil and selfish. The cynic deflects that by claiming that the parents of the foundling are evil and selfish for abandoning it.

The woodcutter disagrees. The amulet was left for the baby’s protection. It must have been hard for the parents to abandon their child. The cynic mocks the woodcutter’s compassion for the parents and leaves. The woodcutter then tells the priest that he will adopt the baby. He has six children already. One more won’t matter. The priest then tells the woodcutter that he has restored his faith in humanity. The rain stops, sun breaks through the clouds, and the woodcutter departs with the foundling. The End.

How has the great Rashomon gate of Kyoto become a ruin where rotting corpses and unwanted babies are abandoned? How did life on earth become hell?

Rashomon’s answer is: because of Japanese honor culture, because of the selfish desire to save face, to construct and propagate an image of oneself, which requires lies, manipulation, and the domination of others. How does one get beyond selfishness, lies, and violence to heal the world? The woodcutter shows us the way: through compassion. I read Rashomon as a critique of Japanese honor culture, including the code of the samurai, from the point of view of a Buddhist ethics of compassion.

The woodcutter’s compassion even explains why he omitted so much when testifying in court. Granted, he had selfish reasons not to mention the theft of the dagger. But then again, he had six children to feed. However, he did not omit the story of the murder to hide his own shame, but because he felt compassion for the shame of the bandit, the samurai, and his wife. It was painful for him to watch. It is painful for us to watch. We want to look away, and we can understand why the woodcutter did not want to compound their shame by revealing it to the world.If Rashomon is a deeply realist work, presupposing that both facts and morality are objective and knowable, why has it become the favorite film of relativists? Why has such a superficial reading become the dominant one? What sort of bovine mind could view four completely contradictory accounts of what the rest of us naïvely call “the same events” and conclude that there’s nothing more to the film than that? How can one watch Rashomon all the way to the end and never advance beyond the opening words, “I can’t understand it. I can’t understand it at all”? What sort of mind would wish to repeat and recommend such an experience? And what do such viewers make of the ending of the film, which I interpret as a repudiation of everything that the relativists praise?

I believe that the relativist reading of Rashomon is popular because we today are living in the same kind of world depicted by the film: a Dark Age of selfishness and lies. Relativism is just a philosophical rationalization of the egocentrism and dishonesty that turned the world of Rashomon into a hell. Which means that today we face the same problem explored in the film itself: how can we awaken the forces of compassion and solidarity, forces that can free us from the deep solitude of spirit to which this Dark Age confines us, allowing us to redeem this hellish fallen world and make it a place we can all call home?

Trevor Lynch

Counter-Currents, October 16, 2017

Mr Hypergamy Returns

What happens when divorce does not simply end a marriage, but continues to interfere in a father's relationship with his children, his career, his finances, and deepest corners of his private — all with no end?

In this episode of The Mansplainers, we speak with Daniel, a father who shares his personal experience with divorce, family court, protective orders, separation from his children, and the lasting consequences that followed.

Daniel recounts being separated from his children for approximately ten months, the effect the ordeal had on his employment and future opportunities, and why he believes the consequences of divorce can extend far beyond the courtroom.

The discussion also turns to the Lindsey Clancy case and the experience of her husband, Patrick Clancy, as Daniel considers whether such a crime is made possible by similar procedures involving marriage, divorce, fatherhood, and the institutions surrounding the family.

Rather than discussing the divorce regime only in the abstract, this episode examines it through the experience of one man and his family.

Featuring a single case is risky, because every case is unique, and there is always the danger of getting lost in the procedures and minutiae. But our guest Daniel has a keen eye for what is significant, and importantly, he has used his experience to educate himself on the background of what family court did to im and his family and why.

So it is definitely worth hearing his experience and what he and we have to say about it.

***

The Mansplainers is a podcast series where we discuss issues involving men and women, family, sex (“gender” if I must), plus the legal-political context in which we must now understand them — all in ways that will push you to think outside the box and sometimes outside your comfort zone. Our videos consist of discussions, debates, essays, and interviews with some of the best minds confronting these questions today.

These issues are now exploding everywhere, and our aim is to separate the chaff from the wheat, the noise from the essence, the complaining from the constructive, and give you what you need to know.

We make no apology for the name. We are men, talking (mostly) with men and for men, and we will do our best to explain matters that sometimes seem to defy explanation and even belief. We are also not afraid to listen to men explain to us, when they know more than we do. Questions involving romance, sexuality, family deterioration, family politics, and connected matters are not always easy to understand. We and our guests have spent years and even decades of study, for some of us professional and academic study (involving, yes, many man-hours), and writing and publishing books and comparable projects. And yet every day we discover new truths – or new ways to approach old truths – that previously escaped our notice. This is because we want to learn and help others learn, even if they do not have the time to devote to it that we have.

So if you are looking for someone to tell you what you already know, confirm you in your existing opinions, listen to you whinge and whine about all the unfairness you face, or indulge in he-said/she-said gossip – all in angry, combative tones – well, just remember that venting your feelings of distress, while doing nothing to correct the matter, is a feminine trait. You may find little to interest you here, and you are not the type of man that we hope to reach.

At some point, we plan to have a site with all the interviews listed and indexed, but in the meantime, here is a list of shows so far, with links to our YouTube playlist (most recent first). (Titles may differ slightly.)

#29: “The Divorce Industry Destroys: Daniel’s Story”


#26: “Mr Hypergamy Returns”, featuring F. Roger Devlin


The man who pioneered many themes now current in the more thoughtful sectors of the “Manosphere” returns to “The Mansplainers” for a discussion of hypergamy, monogamy, marriage, fatherhood, the sexual revolution, the “gentlemanosphere”, and the overall free-fall of relationships between men and women. (His first appearance can be seen here.) We also discussed his new book, Not Hooking Up: How the Sexual Revolution Led to Broken Families, Collapsing Birthrates, Widespread Celibacy, and an Epidemic of Loneliness (Cross-Currents),consisting of essays recently published in important journals.

Stephen Baskerville

Kevin Barrett & Kevin MacDonald on “Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews (Re: Gaza)

 

[In this video Kevin Barrett talks with Dr Kevin MacDonald, and says:

“Evolutionary psychology scholar Kevin MacDonald discusses his new article ‘The Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitudes Toward the Gaza War’ In it, he writes:

‘At least until the Gaza war, Jews have successfully depicted themselves as moral paragons and as champions of the downtrodden in the contemporary West…

This Jewish pose of moral superiority is a dangerous delusion, and we must be realistic what the future holds as Whites continue to lose political power in all Western countries. When the gloves come off, there is no limit to what Jews in power may do if their present power throughout the West continues to increase.

The ubiquitous multicultural propaganda of ethnic groups living in harmony throughout the West will quickly be transformed into a war of revenge for putative historical grievances that Jews harbor against the West, from the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans to the events of World War II.
This same revenge was fatal to many millions of Russians and Ukrainians. It’s the fate of the Palestinians that we are seeing unfold before our eyes.”

– KATANA]

TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 6,713 – 45:51 mins)

Kevin Barrett: Welcome Droopsy Hot Radio, broadcasting live from the [word unclear], the rooftop studio here in beautiful Stadia, Morocco. I’m Kevin Barrett, bringing on the most controversial, interesting, thoughtful, and often well informed guests that you’ll ever see in audio and video. And we are, of course, broadcasting live in video now here on Revolution Radio. Where you can find the ultimate in the free speech experience. No de-platforming, no censorship, nothing like that here at Revolution Radio.

Please support Revolution Radio however you can go to that website and figure out how. You can support me Kevin Barrett, at Kevin Barrett dot Substack.com. You can also check out my column over at the Unz’s Review at unzreview.com dot, and you can go to truthjihad.com to find even more rubrics. And I do still edit over at Veterans Today.

All right, let’s see what we can get going with here we have an interesting lineup today as usual. In the second hour, Fadi Lama comes on with an incredible new book which I finally got a chance to read. It’s called Why the West Can’t Win. And it’s a very good read. It goes into all of the reasons for the rise of the money power bankster dictatorship in the Western world, and the reasons that that dictatorship or that attempt to create a one world order based on the power of usury is, in fact, doomed! He provides strong empirical evidence for that.

Doctor Fadi Lama is a PhD in engineering, mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and he is also at, what does he have, other engineering degrees from other institutions! He’ll come on in the second hour.

The first hour, Doctor Kevin MacDonald just put out a great new piece called The Extreme Hyper Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitude Towards the Gaza War. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the first hour, if we can find Kevin MacDonald. There we go.

Hello, Kevin. I can hear you now.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I don’t know what happened. Turned all the way up. It never had not worked before. I don’t understand it. I don’t get it.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s always conceivable that some of the usual suspects are sabotaging us, but it’s also quite possible that something else is going on. But I don’t know what it would be.

So let’s talk about your new article. I was just introducing it on the Extreme Hyper Ethnocentrism of jews on Display in Israeli Attitude Towards the Gaza War. And the striking things about your article, I guess, are the pretty serious warning about the fate of Gaza could be the fate of other countries and of the West. A lot of people, of course, would think that’s exaggerated. I’m not so sure.

So maybe you can elaborate on that. Why is the genocidal mania that’s overtaken Israel is related to jewish ethnocentrism and how that’s actually a threat to the West as well?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, well, I think every time jews have had, you know, absolute power, as they did in the Soviet Union for 20, 30 years there, and they have exercised it brutally against their enemies. And I’m concerned that we’ll see that again.

Now, you see, and you see it, you know, look at the Old Testament. I mean, all the injunctions for all the desires for genocide of these people who are their enemies. And all the jewish religious writing saying basically that gentiles are another species, they’re below us, they’re basically animals and that sort of thing.

And then you see that rhetoric regarding the Palestinians, and you will see that regarding Europeans. Because if and when we lose power, we haven’t lost power yet, obviously.

But I’m just concerned about the future because clearly the jewish establishment is desiring more and more immigration. So all the Western European countries, United States, Canada, Australia, they will all be minority White countries at some point. White people may not have enough power, political power, to really resist what is going on. And I just fear that jewish ethics is entirely self centered! For the interests of the group, nothing more! And completely the opposite of western ethics, which is universalist. You know, Kant’s categorical imperative.

Basically, you do what anybody else could do in that situation, you’d be okay with it.

So it’s like that sort of western universalism, which is unique in the world, really. Other cultures tend to be very ethocentric and they privileged their own group. But the West has this long liberal tradition really stemming from the Enlightenment, but in a way going earlier than that. And I trace it back to evolutionary roots in my book on Western Individualism. But that’s the basic idea that the West is tied to universalism. And there’s this sense that we should be universalist. It’s the moral thing to do, that we should basically take care of other people and see their point of view and all that.

Jewish ethics isn’t completely foreign! You know, it’s like you don’t care about what they think. The more Orthodox you get, and the Orthodox have taken over Israel. And I like today I get this email from Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, and he’s been in Israel. He comes back to this message and basically he says:

“What happened on October 7 was anti-semitism.”
 
And you always see this by the jewish apologists that there is no context to what happened on October 7. There’s nothing about the blockade that’s been going on since 2003, nothing about all the oppressive policies that Israel’s engaged in over the years.

And what Israel’s doing is absolutely destroying Gaza! It’ll never really come back for years and years, if ever.

Kevin Barrett: Let me just question the idea that the West is so much more universalist and completely non-ethnocentric.
I mean, I think there’s some truths you’re talking about.

Kevin MacDonald: I don’t say it’s completely non-ethnocentric. Okay. But there certainly can be ethnocentric, but it’s relatively less than other cultures. And again, if you look at Joseph Heinrich’s book as well on Individuals in the West. He talks about how unique Western culture is. He talks about western universalism. And that’s exactly the big point of my book.

We are different. And it’s a problem now because western universalism, it’s hard to oppose these movements, these jewish intellectual movements and political movements, because they’re always phrased in universal terms. They’re always phrased in moral terms. And Westerners are suckers for that!

I mean, they want to be good people. Westerners don’t rely on kinship. They rely on being a good person in the group, having a good reputation.

And right now, Western culture is completely determined by these often jewish elites in the media and the academic world and so on.

So what needs to be a good person is to be totally accepting of immigration and your culture is nothing special, and let them come in and don’t worry about anything in the future.

But in-group out, group conflict, based on ethnicity has been going on forever, and it’s not going to stop now!

So I’m pessimistic about the future because I don’t see any big force in the West trying to turn back this tide. It’s just not going to happen.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I actually, over time, I’ve become more sympathetic to your viewpoint. You know, when we first started having these discussions on my radio show, I don’t know, ten years ago or something, I was still, you know, kind of holding you at arm’s length and saying, but this and that.

Over time, I’ve realized that there’s a lot more truth to what you’re saying and a lot more of a good scholarly basis to your work than maybe I had realized, probably, than a lot of other people realized, too.

Let me say, however, I still think that when we talk about Western universalism, the way it manifests itself and often has in going back a ways in the history, is actually not much better, maybe even worse, than the kind of traditional tribalism of a lot of other traditional people.

That is, if you look at the way Americans behaved in Vietnam, with Korea, with Vietnam, with Indonesia in 1965, and all of these other “Holocaust”, quote, unquote, “the American Holocaust” that Chomsky and Wolczak wrote about in their book on Western terrorism, where they came up with about 60 million people murdered by US military and CIA interventions since World War Two.

The ugly American who goes to these places and murders millions of people to try to impose the American way and American hegemony on these cultures. He thinks he’s universalist, and he uses universalist propaganda in his media back home to get the people to imagine that they’re doing something universalist and non-ethnocentric. But there’s nobody more ethnocentric than an arrogant universalist who thinks that his way is the universal way!

And so I kind of question whether this so-called universalism has made Westerners so kind and nice and gentle. You know, when you take those 60 million people that the US murdered since World War Two, then you add another 30 million or so with a post 9/11 era, it seems to me that these kind general universalists are actually a lot more murderous than the tribalists.
Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, the Western culture has always been very militarized and very expansive and also been very inventive and prone to adventurism.

I mean, the Indo-European legacy in Western culture is basically that. And the West has been extremely successful, unlike other cultures when they had been able, … You look at around the world, cultures that have been successful have expanded. They have dominated other peoples and all that.

But the West, you know, there’s these two traditions in the West. One is that Indo-European militarized version, and that is still there to some extent. But you also have now, especially since 1965. I mean, before that, it was anti-communism, and they were very concerned, correctly so.

I mean, the Soviet Union was a dangerous foe, and they were opposing communism, I get it. But especially since 9/11 we’ve had these wars basically for Israel, and we have a new elite in the country. It’s a very aggressive leap. They want to maintain western hegemony desperately. That’s why we’re fighting in Ukraine, and we’re upping the ante now. They’re allowing Ukraine to target Russia. And so, yeah, that’s a part of our reality.

But you think about say, slavery. You know, we, Western conquest in America, then they brought in slaves from Africa and all that.

But, yeah, it was also, Western culture is the only culture that ended it for moral reasons. And this northern European culture of radical individualism. And they condemn slavery in the 19th century, especially the British started there, and they ended slavery in 1831. They abolished the slave trade in 1808 or something like that. And, it’s no other culture. I mean, you look around the world, slavery was endemic to just about every culture in the world.

So Western culture is now being singled out for things that other cultures have done throughout history.

But, yeah, there’s some ethnocentrism there, and it’s just relatively submerged. It’s easily overcome. I mean, you can make, they did this experiment where they had college students come in and they gave them a bunch of questions or pictures, photos, and they said:

“Well, your responses were racist, anti-semitic”
 
Or something like that. Boy, when they showed them, when they went through it again, the people responded much more slowly. They don’t want to feel they’re a bad person! And we see that over and over again, especially among women. Women want to fit into the group. They want to be nice people! And now the culture is totally anti-Western, anti-White, anti-European.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, the culture has certainly gone to extremes lately. Speaking of the tribalism and stuff, I have a good anecdote for you. I’m living in Morocco now, and I’ve had some, let’s say, difficulties working with the local zoning authorities and construction guys, putting up a little room on the top of the house to house a library.

So it’s been quite frustrating. And I talked to a couple of in-laws, a couple of friends, and they talked. They said:

“You know, if you want to get any construction done or any repairs done in Morocco, it’s hopeless! It’s crazy! These people, they’ll eat your lunch, they’ll steal you blind and stuff, and they’ll do a terrible job.”

And so I said:

“Well, so how did you guys get your excellent houses built?”
 
And they both said:

“Well, my cousin!”

Kevin MacDonald: Exactly!

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Each of them had hired a cousin one of them had, had to fire the first guy he hired who wasn’t a cousin and bring in his cousin who just happened to show up at the right point.

And you know, that’s, I think, a kind of a common thing around the world. Doesn’t mean that there’s no use of universal dimension to the culture here or in other places where they still have these kinship ties. But it is different from the United States and also Europe today. And these cultural differences are real and you should be allowed to talk about them.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, that’s the problem with the third world, is in kinship. If you a job or something like that, you’re expected to., … Well, you expect kin to help you out, you know, as long as you’re related. It’s all about kinship. African cultures are like that. Extremely so!

It happens in Europe, but much less. That’s the thing about Europe. You have these high trust cultures where your reputation group is not dependent on being a relative. It’s dependent on, are you trustworthy, can I do business with you? That sort of thing.

And so you don’t have to rely on your cousin to build your house. And you don’t expect the person to cheat you, that sort of thing. That’s why Western culture has been so successful.

But that’s the problem. It hasn’t stopped in other parts of the world. It’s absolutely hardwired in those cultures. The Middle East, but also Africa. You know, China has always been that way, actually tribal and all that, collectivists. But they seem to be able to square the circle. But there’s a lot of corruption, but they clamp down on it, and the central government, to some extent at least, really does not want that. And they get it about trust.
Kevin Barrett: There are these ideologies, whether universalist or nationalist, that seem to play a role in kind of overcoming the tribalism.

And in fact, in Islamic history, the success of the religion of Islam and the legal system and the weights and measures and the injunctions to fair trade with everybody, not just your relatives, that played a big role in the bringing together of tribal peoples into a super tribe, or a huge world straddling kind of empire where people could trust each other. You could travel from one end of the earth to the other and not be robbed.

So, and I think with China, the ideologies of communism and now kind of Confucian nationalism play that kind of a role.

And then that leaves the question of could the West be saved by some sort of return to the religious roots that actually produced the great works of the West and produced this universalism that seems to have fallen upon hard times now as the West enters its decadent phase.

I just attended a conference in Croatia with Doctor E. Michael Jones and a bunch of Catholics. I was one of the two token Muslims there. And those folks are hoping for a revival of Catholicism to revive the West. I’m a bit skeptical, but I do think that these kinds of religions or greater religious like ideologies are really the only thing that can get people to sacrifice for something bigger than themselves and overcome these pitfalls of tribalism and human nature. But I know you’re not an advocate of that, so why not?

Kevin MacDonald: Well, I’m not religious myself. I just can’t see any evidence for it, you know, sort of scientific. And my basic paradigm is evolution and evolutionary biology, and I just don’t see room for that.

But I can see, I do think that religion is good. I mean you think about the Reconquista in Spain. They were very religious, and they treated the Muslims and threw them out. And European Christianity served Europe well for a very long time. Once you got to the 19th century and science and then, you know, militant Marxism and everything, you know, some of it is jewish, but I think a lot of it isn’t. It’s just the changes in intellectual, the scientific perspective sort of militates against that. And I don’t know!

But I do think if you look at America, religious Conservatives are, you know, mainstay in the Republican Party. You know, I don’t agree with all their substantive things.

I mean, they seem obsessed with abortion. But they’re good on average.

But then you look at the mainstream religions and they’re all into this stuff, and it’s pretty much universal, the Southern Baptist. I mean, the officialdom there. For example, James Edwards is a good guy who’s in Tennessee, political, successful guy. He’s been basically shunned by these people.

And I grew up Catholic and Catholic Church, as far as I can see, the pope is a communist. I mean, he’s way on the Left.

Kevin Barrett: Well, he did just say something about how there’s too much faggotry these day!

Kevin MacDonald: Too much what?

Kevin Barrett: He used to use the slur, the anti-homosexual slur. He said there was too much faggotry in the Church. [chuckling]

Kevin MacDonald: And then he profusely apologized.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah.

Kevin MacDonald: I mean, it is true. But he’s been all in favor of immigration and all that.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, yeah. That’s why this made such a big splash was its the first thing this pope has ever done that wasn’t politically correct and woke!

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, exactly!

Kevin Barrett: But, Kevin, don’t you think, though, that the issue here is really that these, you know what’s left of Christianity in the West is mostly just sort of fronting for the real religion of the West, which is secular, progressive, materialist humanisms and that that real religion which has underline all of these kinds of liberal tendencies that you and I both are skeptical about, that actual religion, which involves something overcoming the normal human condition in a kind of pretty extreme submission to something greater than the self and to transcendent values, which is very foreign, of course, to the secular outlook, but also to the kind of these namby pamby liberal religions that we’re talking about today as not being solutions. I agree they’re not. But I think I’ve heard arguments, including from some recent radio show guests, that real religion actually might be the solution.

But the only way it’s ever going to come back is when the civilization collapses and people are fighting for survival in red and tooth and claw.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, this, you know, Western culture has been expansive that we’ve said, and it’s also with capitalism, it’s greedy, materialism, and we want things, and as all humans do. Everybody would be rich than poor, I guess.

Kevin Barrett: Kevin, if you could hold your phone a little stiller, that would be better because we’re getting a lot of, …

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, it’s what the Western culture is now ugly! You know, I’m rooting for Russia in the Ukraine war because to me, Western culture is completely bankrupt! You know, it’s gone, completely woke.

And if Ukraine would win, you’d have more mass immigration, there would be, religion would take a dive ultimately, and Ukraine would just become another vassal of the West, where traditional Ukrainian culture would be condemned, as there already. There’s a long, fraught history with jews and Ukrainians.

But anyway, you know, that’s the problem. The West is completely corrupt as far as I can see, and it’s not getting any better. In a sense, it is, as you say, I mean, secular humanism, greed, wanting material things and that sort of thing. That’s what we want.

Kevin Barrett: And how about what’s the role of this jewish ethnocentrism that you just wrote about in this new article in The Decline of the West and even a threat of some kind of global tyranny. We know that the mythology of jewish religion involves, as you wrote in the article, kind of these messianic millenarian expectations that the jews will one day triumph over the goyim or all the non-jewish peoples and basically enslave them and rule the earth.

And we do see that jews have become the most powerful ethnic group in the world probably, by taking over the US Empire. And now they’re completely out of control in their own ethno-state over an occupied Palestine and ready to tear down the Islamic world’s oldest and greatest architectural monument, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and put up a blood sacrifice temple and start sacrificing pink heifers to symbolize this new era in which jews rule the world. And their mythology tells them that every jew will have, I forget how many thousands of goyim slaves.
Now, of course, that all sounds pretty exaggerated and it sounds like a pipe dream, but the role that jews are playing in this process does seem outsized and rather dangerous and destructive, does it not?

Kevin MacDonald: It is very destructive and dangerous. And we see that Israel is continuing this offensive in the south of Gaza now, despite the fact that all these nations, I mean, it’s hard to, I can’t think of any country that’s gung-ho in favor of what Israel’s doing, but they’re just thumbing their nose at it. They don’t care! Your international criminal court, what was the arrest, Netanyahu and all that, it doesn’t matter. They are in the driver’s seat and they know they have America completely in their hands! And that’s the reality. And they will use America as long as they can.

And, yeah, they are in the driver’s seat right now, but we’re not at the end game yet. But, yeah, jewish power is really on display here! I mean, you think of all the European countries, America, the Biden administration even, is condemning what they’re doing. Then they say they’re going to withhold weapons and they don’t really do that.

But anyway, it’s amazing what the power that they have.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And it’s kind of just over the top sadistic cruelty in their approach to people of Gaza.

Kevin MacDonald: Oh, yeah!

Kevin Barrett: It’s making ethnocentrism look bad. People like you, Kevin, you’re kind of a White, pro-ethnocentric guy. People like Louis Farrakhan a black, pro-ethnocentric guy. And there are various people who are defending various kinds of ethnocentrism. But what Israel is doing right now is really an embarrassment to ethnocentrism, wouldn’t you say?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, this is extreme ethnocentrism! And it’s what I call hyper-ethnocentrism. And what I would advocate is universal nationalism, that everybody be in their own country and stay there. And that you’d have a sort of ethnic nationalism as a basis of a country.

But, you know, that’s a long way off now, given what’s happened in the West. We used to be, you look at movies here, culture from the 1950s, and it’s a White country and proudly. So the same way with the Western European countries. But now it’s just not there. I don’t see how to get it back without a cataclysm.

And I think the Left wants a cataclysm because they have purged the military and all that, and they are in charge of legal system, as you can see in the Trump verdict, and we’ll see.

But I think we’re headed for a cataclysm or else the West just goes down with a whimper.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, my second hour guest today on this radio show is Fadi Lama, who wrote Why the West Can’t Win. And his analysis is that Western central bankers have presided over this expanding Western empire, of course, expanded during the colonial period, and now he thinks they’re going all out for a kind of a global takeover. And he thinks it’s going to fail. And that this nationalist alliance of multipolar nationalist forces led by Iran, Russia and China is likely to prevail over the Western banksters.

So if that’s the case, then the world that you want to see, which would be a world of multipolar sovereign nation states where each people is relatively unto itself and free to be itself, and then to deal with other peoples, hopefully in a reasonable manner, unlike what the Israelis are doing right now, that world is coming. But at what cost to the Euro-American countries that are losing the struggle, is the question.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, absolutely! I’m happy to see this other bloc forming. And Western globalism really means Western hegemony and control over the rest of the world via the economics, the banks and all that.

So, yeah, that’s why I favor Russia in the war. And I look favorably on Russia’s ties with Iran and China. And if you’re a country like Iran or Russia or China, you have to know what’s going on in the West. You know that you have this Western elite that really wants to control everything. And this globalist phenomenon is backed by a US military, and it’s not going away.
And that’s why Ukraine is seen as an existential issue for both sides. Russia and United States and Western Europe, I think. They see that if the West does not prevail in Ukraine, that Russia will really take off.

And I noticed in Georgia, the country of Georgia, they had this law, they just enacted the law, I guess, that prevents these foreign NGO’s from, … They have to register and say how much of the money is coming from the West. And they have to disclose all their sources. Well, this is a big source of the Western power. That’s why Putin clamped down on that. The West is where the money is.

So all these NGO’s, they go in there and they propagandise for pro-Western stuff and immigration and all this Leftist stuff and color revolution.

Kevin Barrett: Don’t forget that. What they want to LGBTQ, all that kind of thing.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, exactly! It’s going to happen in Ukraine, if Ukraine wins and Russia loses. This is existential! But that’s the danger here, that both sides here see it as existential. Well, then you’re heading for a World War, nuclear war, a disaster for humanity!

I mean, I don’t see how this ends now. Biden just allowing Ukraine to strike targets in Russia with American missiles? I mean, this is really serious!

Kevin Barrett: That was supposed to be a red line, wasn’t it?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, that was a red line and not anymore.

And so they keep erasing these lines:

“Oh, we won’t give them this, won’t give them that!”
 
And they give it to them eventually. And because they do not want to lose this! They realize that sanctions have not worked because of the alliances, really, Iran and China and other countries. India is favorable to them to some extent anyway. And Brazil, other countries like that they just look at where the power is and where it’s going to go.

But yeah, they understand that the West is [word unclear] about destroying all their cultures and really all their peoples. And one hodge-podge of humanity. And I just think that would be a disaster!

Kevin Barrett: What do you think is the reason that the Western elites are choosing such a seemingly wrong headed strategy from their own point of view? In terms of both, they’re watering down their own cultures and harming their own cultures and their own military capacity through all sorts of policies. The various woke policies and so on.

And then rather than a sort of a sensible policy of trying to sort of contain, say, China and then make nice with Russia and Iran while you try to contain China, and then if you ever have to shift a little bit and contain Russia, then you make nice with China a little bit. That kind of sensible strategic policy which characterized the US during the Cold War, to a certain extent, they’ve thrown that away and now they’re trying to go to war against Russia, China and Iran all at once driving them into each other’s arms, even as they tear apart their own societies.

It’s almost as if they have some kind of death wish and they want to go down in flames. How do you explain that?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I’m wondering, … But part of it is, I think, jewish hatred towards the West. You know, they think in terms of what happened in the Middle Ages, they think in terms of the destruction of the temple by the Romans. The pogroms in Russia in the 19th century, as they see them, and of course, in the Holocaust.

And it’s like Western culture is to them is absolutely the real [word unclear]. And these people, it’s always the extremists that end up dominating what direction the jewish community goes in.

And right now, the extreme ethocentrism is on display! And to some extent, most of it went to Israel. But they’re an awful lot in the United States. And jewish power in the United States, you see now, like, for example, pro-Palestinian protests on universities, they’re getting arrested and all that they would never do that for Black Lives Matter in the same way.
And so they’re really clamping down. And anyone who supports the Palestinians, they’re going to have a hard time getting a job on Wall Street or in the media and all that.

So, yeah, they have the power right now, and they are using it.

Kevin Barrett: And that will provoke a reaction. And we’ve seen throughout history that when jewish communities went too far in their sharp practices towards the majority societies, they suddenly faced a big backlash.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah.

Kevin Barrett: And I’m wondering if some of these students are going to suddenly go from being Left-wing, woke pro-Palestine multiculturalists to saying:

“You know, I think Kevin MacDonald actually might have a point about the jews.”
 
Kevin MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah, I think that jews have always felt that they can manage, you know, Muslim immigration, Palestinian immigration, all that they had enough power to manage it.

And right now they do. I mean, they’re clamping down these protests. But they do see there’s some in Congress now who are pro-Palestinian. And so this policy of letting Muslims come into Europe, say, has backfired for the jews to some extent, a great extent. And you see all these articles about how jews are saying:

“Muslims are our allies!”

And the [chuckling] question is what are their allies against?

And of course, they’re allies against the White majority.

But now that’s breaking down. And so many of the immigrants into Europe are Muslim and they really don’t like to choose and they don’t, …

Kevin Barrett: Quick question. Yeah. I think you’re right that a lot of the Muslim immigrants in Europe are the ones who are supporting the pro-Palestine protests and things like that. But do you think there’s any kind of qualitative difference or meaningful difference between so-called Muslim immigrants in Europe and, let’s say, sub-Saharan Africans from non-Muslim backgrounds, whether Christian, animist or secular, what have you.

That is, I found this whole emphasis on the Muslim identity and the Islamic religion to be very deceptive, given that the kinds of problems that immigrants have created in these societies are actually problems that you’re going to see more from the less religious, the more secular elements, whether they’re sub-Saharan African from Christian backgrounds, or whether they’re northern African from Muslim backgrounds. It’s not the religious people that you have to worry about. It’s the non-religious ones

Kevin MacDonald: Well, I don’t know. I think Muslim religion certainly is a big unifying, motivating factor for Muslims.

But you talk about sub-Saharan Africa, you know, they’re really talking about a low IQ, criminality prone population that will never really contribute anything to any functioning society.

Kevin Barrett: Wait a minute! I played basketball with a bunch of guys from both northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa when I went to the University of Paris. And there were some very sharp college students from sub-Saharan Africa were playing on that basketball team, actually. So I don’t over generalize to that extent.

Kevin MacDonald: Well, there may be some, and there are, but you look at overall the average, and that’s critical, actually! And we see black culture has basically failed in this country despite the fact that there are some intelligent ones. Just look at it and it’s an academic disaster! And I just don’t see it.

They’ve tried to improve black academic achievement for decades now, since the sixties, with no success, really. And it’s getting worse. I think there’s actually selection now for that the people having children, … You know, these black women who are going to college and assuming all these high level positions, they’re not having children, very many children at least. Whereas the ghetto moms are having a lot of kids, relatively.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Well, hasn’t the breakdown of the black family is the biggest reason for all of this.

Kevin MacDonald: It’s a huge factor. Yeah, that was an effect of the 1960s. You look at the charts, because I used to teach child psychology every semester I look at these charts in my textbook, and they would be in the 1950s, very strong family structure.

And then all of a sudden in the sixties, everybody went south! But blacks much more than anybody else. They were sort of unleashed, you might say, from the social control. We couldn’t just get on welfare so easily. And those single mothers were not really supported that much. You had to have a man around. But not anymore. It hasn’t been that way for a long time! And it’s not changing.

Kevin Barrett: Religion, again, getting back to that topic, plays a role in this, in that the religious cultures typically put a strong emphasis on these kinds of family values and taboos on sexuality outside of reproductive marriage.

And so when that breaks down, then you get a breakdown of the culture and you have a lot of unwed mothers, etcetera. Once again, my argument is that religion is an indispensable part of civilized humanity, that giving it up for transcendent value is really necessary overall. There might be a few people who can do okay without that. But for the culture as a whole, it needs that. It needs to be infused with a traditional way of doing that.

Kevin MacDonald: You’re probably right. I think that’s a reasonable thing to say. I think most people seem to need religion for social support and moral compass and sort of meaning to their lives and all that. I agree.

Kevin Barrett: Wow! Just like I won an argument with Doctor E. Michael Jones last week. Actually, won an argument with Kevin MacDonald! Again, not too many people can say that. [chuckling]

All right, we only have a couple, couple of minutes left here. Well, you know, Kevin, we’re with two minutes left.

What can be done to stop this butchery in Gaza?

Kevin MacDonald: I just don’t know. Because the Israelis have free reign and they don’t care what anybody else thinks. And the Right militants, settlers, aggressive ones, they’re in charge. And they don’t care what anybody else thinks.

And I think they do think that over time it’ll blow over. They’ll do something for the Palestinians, or they’ll let them emigrate or something. The West will give in. Jordan, these other countries will give in, and they’ll let them come in. And they’ll just get rid of them!

And then Israeli settlers will set their sights on Jordan, and then they’ll set their sight., … You know, I believe they’re an expansive culture. And Gaza is just part of it. They want that land, and I think there will be jewish settlements back in the Gaza. You know, there were until 2000, was it three or something? When the Israeli army withdrew and all that, to great controversy, at which point they became an open air prison.

But yeah, it’s a very expansive, aggressive group, always has been. And we’ll see where it ends. And I think that maybe the rest of the world may start stand up to them at some point.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, I think it’s definitely at or even past the point that that needs to start happening.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I’d say so!

Kevin Barrett: If they really think that we’re going to just roll over and forget all this. Come on, guys. You know, the Nakba* of 1947, 1948 has not been forgotten!

[* The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة an-Nakba, lit. ’the catastrophe’) is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Source: Wikipedia]

And today’s people are telling stories about what happened to their grandparents and great grandparents and they’re keeping that memory alive. And so what’s happening in Gaza now, that memory is going to be kept alive forever and it’s going to come back to bite the perpetrators.

Well, thank you so much, Kevin MacDonald. It’s always great to talk with you. A true original thinker and a fearless thinker! Keep up the good work.

Take care.

Kevin MacDonald: Thank you. Bye.

Kevin Barrett: That’s Kevin MacDonald, a fellow academic heretic from the University of Wisconsin. That’s where he went as well as where I got chased out of for talking about 9/11 in the way that certain folks didn’t like.

All right, we’ll be back in the next hour, God willing, with Fati Lama talking about why the West can’t win!

https://katana17.com/

Catch-23

Science journals regularly publish articles attacking intelligent design, but they routinely reject articles defending intelligent design. For example, Darwinists have criticized Michael Behe’s arguments for ID (Chapter Ten) in many peer-reviewed science journals, including Nature, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and the Quarterly Review of Biology. But those journals routinely refuse to publish Behe’s responses. One journal editor to whom Behe submitted a response cited a reviewer who wrote: “In this referee’s judgment, the manuscript of Michael Behe does not contribute anything useful to evolutionary science.” The editor of another journal wrote to Behe: “As you no doubt know, our journal has supported and demonstrated a strong evolutionary position from the very beginning, and believes that evolutionary explanations of all structures and phenomena of life are possible and inevitable. Hence a position such as yours . . . cannot be appropriate for our pages.”16

In Joseph Heller’s classic novel about World War II, Catch-22, an aviator could be excused from combat duty for being crazy. But a rule specified that he first had to request an excuse, and anyone who requested an excuse from combat duty was obviously not crazy, so such requests were invariably denied. The rule that made it impossible to be excused from combat duty was called “Catch-22.”

Darwinists use a similar rule—I call it “Catch-23”—to exclude intelligent design from science: intelligent design is not scientific, so it can’t be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. How do we know it’s not scientific? Because it isn’t published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 17 Catch-23!

The 2004 publication of Meyer’s article shattered the rule. It also alarmed Darwinists at the Smithsonian Institution (SI), with which the Biological Society of Washington (BSW) is loosely affiliated. Smithsonian Darwinists teamed up with the militantly pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to control the damage to their cause. NCSE staffers sent long, detailed e-mails attacking Meyer’s article to high officials at the Smithsonian. The NCSE then worked closely with Smithsonian employees to develop a strategy of character assassination to punish Sternberg for publishing the article. To protect himself, Sternberg lodged a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), established by Congress to investigate such cases.18

Frankenstein’s castle?

To Dr. Richard Sternberg, concerning his treatment by the Smithsonian Institution (SI) after publishing a peer-reviewed article by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer on intelligent design: “Our preliminary investigation indicates that retaliation came in many forms. It came in the form of attempts to change your working conditions. . . . During the process you were personally investigated and your professional competence was attacked. Misinformation was disseminated throughout the SI and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false. It is also clear that a hostile work environment was created with the ultimate goal of forcing you out of the SI.”

—U.S. Office of Special Counsel, 2005

In August 2005, the OSC sent Sternberg a letter notifying him that a recent administrative decision had removed his case from their jurisdiction, but confirming that “members of NCSE worked closely with SI and NMNH members in outlining a strategy to have you investigated and discredited,” noting that “OSC questions the use of appropriated funds to work with an outside advocacy group for this purpose.” The OSC letter also confirmed that the management of the Smithsonian had falsely accused Sternberg of mishandling specimens in his research and of violating Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington policies in the publication of Meyer’s article. These accusations “were published to several outside organizations,” severely damaging Sternberg’s reputation. The managers later admitted that the accusations were false, but the OSC saw no evidence that “any effort was made to recall or correct these comments once the truth was known.” There were other abuses, too, but since the OSC lost jurisdiction over the Sternberg case “the SI is now refusing to cooperate with our investigation.” Nevertheless, the OSC concluded that the management of the publicly funded Smithsonian Institution had deliberately “created a hostile working environment” for Sternberg, hoping that he would “leave or resign.”19

To investigate the Darwinists’ accusation that Sternberg had circumvented the normal peer-review process, the president of the Council of the BSW reviewed the file, and he found that the peer review had been properly conducted. Nevertheless, the council subsequently issued a statement declaring that “the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.”20 Although the BSW stopped short of formally retracting the article, the Darwinists did not end their ruthless campaign of character assassination against Sternberg.

Catch-23 is still enforced by most science journals, but it is now supplemented with an additional rule: if intelligent design theorists do manage to publish in a peer-reviewed science journal, Darwinists will make sure the editor suffers grievously for it.

16 Michael J. Behe, “Correspondence with Science Journals: Response to Critics Concerning Peer-Review,” Discovery Institute (August 2, 2000). Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=450.

17 Jonathan Wells, “Catch-23,” Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology, July/August 2002. Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1212.

18 Jim Giles, “Peer-reviewed paper defends theory of intelligent design,” Nature 431 (2004): 114. Trevor Stokes, “Intelligent design study appears,” The Scientist 5 (September 3, 2004): 4. Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20040903/04/ See the home page of Richard M. v. Sternberg, available online (April 2006) at: http://www.rsternberg.net/. The NCSE’s and SI’s misbehavior were documented by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The OSC’s August 2005 report is available online (April 2006) at: http://www.rsternberg.net/OSC_ltr.htm.

19 David Klinghoffer, “The Branding of a Heretic,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.opinion-journal.com/taste/?id=110006220. Joyce Howard Price, “Researcher Claims Bias by Smithsonian,” Washington Times, February 13, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050213-121441-8610r.htm. Letter from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to Dr. Richard Sternberg, August 5, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.rsternberg.net/Documents/OSC-Sternbergpreclosure-ltr2.pdf. Barbara Bradley Haggerty, “Profile: Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom,” transcript of “All Things Considered” (NPR), November 10, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=CSC%20-%20Views%20and%20News&id=3083.

20 Richard Monastersky, “Biology Journal Says It Mistakenly Published paper That Attacks Darwinian Evolution,” Chronicle of Higher Education Daily News, September 10, 2004. “Statement from the Council of the Biological Society of Washington,” October 4, 2004. Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.biolsocwash.org/id_statement.html.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design 

Jonathan Wells 

Letter From a Madman - Guy de Maupassant

 LETTER FROM A MADMAN FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE FEBRUARY 17, 1885 ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE GIL BLAS, UNDER THE PEN NAME “MAUFRIGNEUSE”

  My dear Doctor, I place myself in your hands. Do with me what you like.

I am going to tell you my state of mind very frankly, and you will judge whether it isn’t better to have me taken care of for a little while in a sanatorium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that are plaguing me.

Here’s the story, lengthy and precise, of the singular illness of my soul.

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

It was a phrase from Montesquieu that suddenly illumined my thinking. Here it is:

“One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”

 I reflected on that for months on end, and, little by little, a strange clarity came to me, and this clarity let there be night.

In fact, our organs are the only intermediaries between the exterior world and ourselves. That is to say, the inner being, which constitutes the ego, is in contact, by means of a few nerve endings, with the exterior being, which constitutes the world.

Beyond the fact that this exterior being escapes us by its size, its lengthy existence, its countless and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its aims, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs provide us only with information as uncertain as it is paltry about the portion of it that we can know.

Uncertain, because it is nothing but the properties of our organs that determine for us the apparent properties of matter.

Paltry, because since our senses number only five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are both quite limited.

I will explain. The eye transmits dimensions, shapes, and colors to us. It deceives us on these three points.

It can reveal to us only objects and beings of an average dimension in relation to human size, which has led us to apply the word “large” to certain things and the word “small” to certain other things, only because the eye’s weakness does not allow it to be aware of what is too immense or too tiny for it. Hence, it knows  and sees almost nothing, and almost the entire universe remains hidden from it, the star that inhabits space as well as the microbe that inhabits a drop of water.

Even if our eye had even a hundred million times more than its normal strength, if it perceived in the air that we breathe all the races of invisible beings, and all the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist an infinite number of races of animals so small, and worlds so distant, that the eye could not see them.

All our ideas about size, then, are false, since there is no limit possible to largeness or to smallness.

Our awareness of dimensions and shapes has no absolute value, since it is determined solely by the power of the organ and in constant comparison with ourselves.

Let us add that the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. A flawless glass tricks it. It confuses it with the air, which it does not see either. Let us move on to color.

Color exists because our eye is constituted in such a way that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways that bodies absorb and break down, in accordance with their chemical composition, the light rays that strike them.

The various proportions of this absorption and breaking down make up the shades of color.

Thus this organ imposes on the mind its way of seeing, or rather its arbitrary way of noting dimensions and perceiving the relationships of light with matter.

 Let us examine the sense of hearing.

Even more than with the eye, we are the playthings and dupes of this fanciful organ.

Two bodies colliding produce a certain shock in the atmosphere. This movement makes a certain tiny piece of skin vibrate in our ear, which changes immediately into a sound something that is in fact nothing but a vibration.

Nature is silent. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us all the quiverings of invisible waves in space in the form of meaning, meaning that changes depending on the number of vibrations.

This metamorphosis, which is performed by the auditory nerve over the short trajectory from the ear to the brain, has allowed us to create a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

What shall we say of the senses of taste and smell? Would we recognize smells and the quality of various foods without the peculiar properties of the nose and the palate?

Humanity, however, could exist without the ear, without taste and smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or smell.

Thus, if we had a few organs less, we would be unaware of admirable and unusual things, but if we had a few organs more, we would discover around us an infinity of other things we would never have suspected while we lacked the means to observe them.

 So we deceive ourselves when we pass judgments on the Known. We are surrounded by an unexplored unknown.

Everything is uncertain, and can be perceived in different ways.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

Let us formulate this certainty by using the old dictum: “Truth this side of the Pyrénées, error beyond.”

And let us say: Truth inside the sense organ, error outside.

Two and two no longer have to make four outside of our atmosphere.

Truth on Earth, error further away. So I conclude that the mysteries we have glimpsed—like electricity, hypnotic sleep, transmission of will, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena—remain hidden from us, because nature has not provided us with the organ, or organs, necessary to understand them.

After I had convinced myself that everything my senses reveal to me exists only for me as I perceive it, and would be completely different for someone else differently organized, after having concluded that a differently made humanity would have about the world, about life, about everything, ideas that are absolutely opposite to our own, since the consensus of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and differences of opinion come only from slight differences in the functioning of our nerve endings, I made an effort  at superhuman thought in order to get some inkling of the impenetrable universe that surrounds me.

Have I gone mad?

I told myself: “I am surrounded by unknown things.” I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me—afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

And this confused terror of the supernatural, which has haunted mankind since the birth of the world, is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing other than what remains veiled to us!

Then I understood terror. It seemed to me that I kept brushing against the discovery of a secret of the universe.

I tried to sharpen my organs, to excite them, to make them perceive glimpses of the invisible.

I told myself, “Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?”

 How many men feel them, tremble at their approach, shudder at their imperceptible contact. We feel them around us, but we cannot discern them, for we do not have the eyes to see them, or specifically the unknown organ that could discover them.

Then, more than anyone else, I felt them myself, these supernatural passersby. Beings or mysteries? How can I know? I can’t say what they are, but I can always indicate their presence. And I have seen—I have seen an invisible being—as much as one can see them, these beings.

I remained motionless for entire nights, seated in front of my table, my head in my hands, thinking of that, thinking of them. Often I thought an intangible hand, or rather an ungraspable body, was lightly grazing my hair. He didn’t touch me, since it wasn’t a carnal essence, but an imponderable, unknowable essence.

One evening, I heard the floor creak behind me. It creaked in a strange way. I trembled. I turned around. I saw nothing. And I thought no more of it.

But the next day, at the same time, the same sound occurred. I was so afraid that I got up, certain, certain, certain that I was not alone in my bedroom. I could see nothing. The air was clear, transparent everywhere. My two lamps lit up all corners of the room.

The sound was not repeated, and little by little I calmed down; I remained uneasy, though, and often looked around.

 The next day I shut myself in early, looking for a way I could contrive to see the invisible being that was visiting me.

And I saw him. I almost died from the terror of it.

I had lighted all the candles on my mantelpiece and chandelier. The room was illumined as if for a celebration. Both my lamps were burning on my table.

Opposite me, my bed, an old oaken four-poster. To my right, my fireplace. To my left, the door, which I had locked shut. Behind me, a very large wardrobe with a mirror. I looked at myself in it. My eyes looked strange, and my pupils quite dilated.

Then I sat down, as I did every day.

The sound had occurred, the night before and the night before that, at 9:22. I waited. When the precise moment arrived, I perceived an indescribable sensation, as if a fluid, an irresistible fluid, had penetrated me through all the pores of my skin, drowning my soul in an atrocious, true terror. And the creaking sounded, right next to me.

I got up, turning around so quickly that I almost fell down. You could see everything there as if in full daylight, but I couldn’t see myself in the mirror! It was empty, clear, full of light. I was not inside it, and yet I was facing it. I looked at it with panic-stricken eyes. I dared not go towards it, since I knew he was between us, he, the invisible one, and he was concealing me.

I was terrified. And then I began to see myself in a mist far back in the mirror, in a mist as if through  water; and it seemed to me that this water shimmered left to right, slowly, making me more precise from second to second. It was like the end of an eclipse.

What was hiding me had no outlines, but a kind of opaque transparency that little by little became clearer.

And finally I could see myself clearly, just as I do every day when I look at myself.

I had seen it!

And I did not see it again.

But I wait for it ceaselessly, and I feel that my mind is wandering in this waiting.

I remain for hours, nights, days, weeks, in front of my mirror, waiting for him! He does not come anymore.

He has understood that I’ve seen him. But I feel that I will wait for him always, until death, that I will wait for him without rest, in front of this mirror, like a hunter lying in wait.

And, in this mirror, I am beginning to see crazy images, monsters, hideous corpses, all kinds of terrifying beasts, atrocious beings, all the unlikely visions that must haunt the minds of madmen.

That is my confession, my dear Doctor. Tell me, what should I do?

—February 17, 1885