www.thornwalker.com/ditch/francis_debruycker.htm
 
Articles by Samuel Francis at TLD.


The letter
of November 28, 2003
 

Comments on the letter
from Mr. de Bruycker

By SAMUEL FRANCIS

 

For several weeks before Gilbert de Bruycker's letter appeared in The Last Ditch, he had been pestering me with his questions about race. I have tried to be polite, but quite frankly, from the kind of questions he was asking and the kind he asks in his letter, he impresses me as either disingenuous or reflective of a profound ignorance of the basic meaning of the concept of race. I cannot really blame him for the latter since it so common these days, but I have suggested to him that he do some serious reading and thinking about race in some of the more reliable recent scientific studies by scientists like Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Michael Levin, and others.

I have only two major remarks to make about his article and a series of responses to his questions.

First, his description of what I supposedly think, that (in his words) "Western Civilization is a product of our 'genetic endowments'," is not accurate. I suppose he has taken the quoted words from a passage in my speech at the 1994 American Renaissance conference or from Dinesh D'Souza's account of the speech in his The End of Racism. What I actually said (later published in American Renaissance and in the new anthology of articles from AR, A Race against Time, edited by George McDaniel, and as it was quoted in D'Souza's book) was that "the civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

This is not at all the same as saying that "Western civilization is a product of our genetic endowments." The latter statement implies that civilization is entirely a product of our genes, that race or our genes by themselves are sufficient to produce our civilization. What I actually said was that race or genes are merely necessary for our civilization but are not by themselves sufficient. If race were sufficient, there would be no problem — historical, geographical, and cultural variations in the behavior of a race would not even be possible. Mr. de Bruycker seems to have misunderstood and misrepresented, no doubt unintentionally, my meaning.

The larger problem with Mr. de Bruycker's questions seems to revolve around his misunderstanding of the concept of race, racial "purity," and racial mixture. He seems to assume that anyone who talks about the significance of race is deeply opposed to any racial mixture. This is not the case.

Racial mixture is harmful to a particular race when it and another race that is very different from it in such genetically influenced traits as intelligence and certain kinds of behavior interbreed. In that case, the race that is on average more intelligent, for example, will find that its descendants through the other race are on average less intelligent — an outcome most of the more intelligent race would not desire and would regard as harmful. But not all races are radically different in all respects, and the mixture of two races that are genetically similar would not usually be especially harmful to either of them (e.g., Nordics and Alpines, if we use the term "race" to cover these populations). Those who talk about the importance of race usually, on genetic grounds, oppose racial mixture between such significantly different races as blacks and whites but are largely indifferent to mixtures such as Nordic and Alpine.

Yet there may be other, non-genetic but just as important reasons as well — aesthetic, political, and other cultural reasons — for opposing even these mixtures. In general, whites should oppose mixture with other, non-white races because any such mixture, no matter how "superior" the other race might be, would mean the diminution of their own race and contribute to its eventual disappearance and extinction. Those to whom race is an important concept and a significant social as well as a natural reality will therefore oppose any racial mixture.

As for Mr. de Bruycker's several quotations from various writers, I'm afraid he either doesn't give us enough information about the context of these snippets or has misunderstood some of the terms and how they are used. Let us examine each of the examples he offers.

"The mixed race of Europe," for example, does not mean that Europeans are the products of unions between Caucasians, Negroes, or Mongolians (the major racial divisions of mankind) but that several different population groups that are sometimes called "races" or "subraces" (Nordics, Alpines, Mediterraneans, as well as various national and ethnic strains such as Celts, Germans, etc.) contributed to the modern white race of Europe. Charles Morris (in The Aryan Race) is presumably using the term "race" in a rather broader sense than it is generally used today.

Gobineau is simply not taken very seriously today. He was an intrepid thinker, but he wrote prior to Mendelian genetics and even Darwinian biology, so his researches can have little scientific value today. Nevertheless, of course it is true that "racial mixture is a factor in civilization." By itself, this sentence means little — what is it a factor for? The historian Tenney Frank argued (in the American Historical Review in 1916) that racial mixture in the Roman Empire was a major cause of the decline of Rome — he certainly would not have denied that "racial mixture is a factor in civilization." It is absurd to say there would be no art without blacks, even if we consider jazz and the blues to be art. There was art in Paleolithic Europe, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, etc.

Yes, modern genetics tells us that genes never disappear, but their effect can be neutralized by other genes.

The terms "superior" and "inferior" have no scientific meaning. I don't know what a "sound strain" of a race is. I also don't know on what authority Mr. de Bruycker asserts that crossing of "sound strains" is "sound" (whatever that means) or is "a factor in the production of talented man," whatever that means.

The Papuans may indeed be a "pure" race, but so are most sub-Saharan Africans and probably most Swedes. No one claims that "purity" by itself contributes to the level of civilization. What contributes to civilization is the kind of genes a population carries. If the Papuans mixed with Swedes, for example, the descendants would probably be capable of a higher level of civilization (at least by the standards of the Swedes) than the original pure Papuans.

The Nordic "race" is generally considered to be a subrace of Indo-Europeans or Aryans, who are themselves a subrace of Caucasians. How did Nordics have "to wait" for stimulation by other races? Nordics often migrated or invaded into southern Europe, and they helped produce the civilizations of Greece and Rome, not to mention probably Indo-European conquests in the Near East in prehistoric times. What other races does Mr. de Bruycker think stimulated the Nordic "race" to develop "a culture of its own"?

As Nicholas Strakon points out, there is no evidence that any of the "most prominent men in European history" are of "mixed racial origin." Some have been the offspring of mixed ethnic or national stocks. So what?

Yes, I believe human beings have a "universal nature," that blacks and Asians and Australian aborigines are as much human beings as whites. I also believe, and there is no contradiction, that different races have different hereditary characteristics, and that these characteristics are often significantly different enough to make living together in the same society as more or less equals difficult or impossible. To say that all men share certain common characteristics as human beings and that therefore there are no significant differences between them is absurd. It's a bit like saying that all birds share a common nature (they wouldn't be birds if they didn't), and therefore hawks can live in the same nest as pigeons.

Some races are too different to live together easily; some are not. In fact, the United States has had a "multiracial" society from its beginnings — one in which whites dominated Indians, blacks, non-white Hispanics, and Asians. Thus, obviously, "a multiracial society can be sustained," if only through the domination of some races by others. The question is, how is it sustained? Through authoritarian states and empires, like all the multiracial states I know of from ancient Persia to modern Russia (and including America and South Africa with respect to race relations)? My own view is that such racial domination, in those empires and in American history and other societies, is generally not a good thing for either race — for those dominated, because of the injustice that usually results, and for those dominating, because of the corruption that unchecked power usually induces and the social deformations that often result from it. I will guardedly defend such systems of white domination, however, as alternatives to non-white domination, which is what whites in their own countries are beginning to face today and will face in the future. The denial of race and the willful refusal to accept its reality and importance are major factors in creating a future in which non-white races, infused with racial consciousness and solidarity, are able to dominate whites, who are denied any racial identity.

December 3, 2003

© 2003 Samuel Francis.
 

Mr. de Bruycker's letter and others' responses.

 

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist. His Website is at www.samfrancis.net. At his site, readers can subscribe to Dr. Francis's columns directly by e-mail for $20/year.


If you found this article to be interesting, please donate something to our cause. You should make your check or m.o. payable in U.S. dollars to WTM Enterprises and send it to:

WTM Enterprises
P.O. Box 224
Roanoke, IN 46783

Thanks for helping to assure a future for TLD!


Notice to visitors who came straight to this document from off site: You are deep in The Last Ditch. You should check out our home page and table of contents.