www.thornwalker.com/ditch/debruycker_lte.htm

 

Editor's note

This is a "free-standing" letter to the editor, unlinked to any one article at TLD. I asked all our writers to comment on it if they wished to; three of us did. Now I encourage interested readers to weigh in as well.

Nicholas Strakon
Editor-in-chief
November 28, 2003


 

To the editor ...

A frequently heard opinion is that large-scale immigration from non-Western nations would forever spoil a distinct American civilization and that America is rooted in a particular ethnic-racial identity; and more generally, that Western Civilization is a product of "our genetic endowments" (Samuel Francis). In the same vein, I read in a review of "Importing Revolution" that once our genes are lost through miscegenation, they can never be recovered! But how do these judgments accord with the following observations and facts, which I came across in various books?

• "The mixed race of Europe presents us with the highest type of man. We owe the Aryan race to the mingling of South & North, of fair & dark, of judgment & emotion." (Charles Morris, The Aryan Race)

• According to Gobineau, racial mixture is a factor in civilization; without the black there would be no art, he says! (For example, blues and jazz are the result of this mixture.)

• The "Mendelian laws" teach us that the original races never actually disappear; they are constantly reappearing in new subjects.

• In every race there are superior and inferior strains. Crossing of sound strains of different races is sound and is a factor in the production of talented man.

• The race of the Papuas is a "pure" race, but what is the level of their civilization?

• The Nordic Race in Northern Europe (where it was preserved from admixture) had to wait until it was stimulated by other races before it developed a culture of its own!

• The most prominent men in European history have been of mixed racial origin (e.g., Michelangelo, Goethe, and Beethoven).

• According to John O. McGinnis in Darwinism and the Right, evolutionary biology and anthropology do stress "the universal nature of man.... Thus a multiracial society can be sustained."

It would be a great pleasure for me to learn the opinion of TLD writers on the above points. (I also intended to ask the opinion of Michael Rienzi and Phillip Rushton, but I don't find their e-mail address.)

Gilbert De Bruycker
Belgium
October 31, 2003

 

Ronn Neff replies

I lack any qualifications whatever to discuss the biology or the history that underlies Mr. de Bruycker's comments.

I will therefore limit myself to a merely logical consideration.

Let us assume that everything Mr. de Bruycker has written is true. It would nevertheless be the case that the race of which modern whites are a part would have disappeared to become subsumed in a new race. It might be a superior race in many respects, but it still wouldn't be us. And in any case, we have no way of knowing what it would be.

Moreover, the culture that this new race would create would not be Western culture as we know it. Again, it might be a superior culture, lovelier and more productive, but again, it would not be our culture, and we have no way of knowing what it would be.

I would argue that it follows that there could be no basis on which to prefer either, but for the purposes of this reply, I shall settle for a weaker, more obvious claim, to wit: that there is in fact no basis on which to prefer either. Progress is no more likely than degradation.

Mr. de Bruycker might reply that there is likewise no basis for preferring races or cultures that now exist, but that reply would overlook that in the world of men, time, and events, transition periods are seldom smooth affairs — they are sometimes called dark ages — and that certainly neither those of us alive now nor our children are ever going to see the New Race or the culture that subsists in it.

And that is basis aplenty for preferring what we have, or rather for preferring what we have had and what little we would like to keep.

October 31, 2003

Ronn Neff is senior editor of TLD.

 

Stephen J. Sniegoski replies

Some believe that the overall level of intelligence among thinking entities will increase when the artificially intelligent robots take over and eliminate us humans. Is that something we should look forward to?

October 31, 2003

Stephen J. Sniegoski is a writer for TLD.

 

Nicholas Strakon replies

Nicholas Strakon is editor-in-chief of The Last Ditch though he is mostly non-Nordic.

I will confine myself to a few comments about Mr. de Bruycker's statement that "the most prominent men in European history have been of mixed racial origin (e.g., Michelangelo, Goethe, and Beethoven)" and his related reference to Gobineau: "Without the black there would be no art, he says!"

Gobineau first. To demonstrate what he apparently believes to be the truth of what Gobineau wrote, Mr. de Bruycker writes that "blues and jazz are the result of this mixture." To blazes with the mixture — I am willing to give blacks 100 percent of the credit for jazz and blues, as long as their breathtakingly minor role in producing the classics of high art is conceded. But that may not be in the cards, judging from Mr. de Bruycker's characterization of Michelangelo, Goethe, and Beethoven — or should that be "the totally wack jazz and blues composer Ludwig Ice Van"?

If Gobineau really wrote what Mr. de Bruycker says he wrote, cannot reasonable people simply consign him to the Nut File and get on with life? Do we really have to debate such an assertion at length? Well, I for one don't.

***

Moving on, I wonder whether Mr. de Bruycker came by that business about "the most prominent men in European history" by Googling (as I did) into an article on the Web by a Dr. A. James Gregor titled "National Socialism and Race." Among the works Gregor assesses is Human Heredity by three co-authors named Fischer, Baur, and Lenz (Gregor does not provide their Christian names). Gregor describes them as "enthusiastic adherents of Nordicism," but then quotes something they wrote that is very odd in light of that description:

Many of the men who are universally regarded as the greatest in history (for instance, Socrates, Michelangelo, Luther, Goethe, and Beethoven) were obviously of mixed race. Speaking generally, it is exceptional to find that distinguished men exhibit a pure racial type.

The mention of Nordicism probably told me all I needed to know, but I decided to devote a few minutes, at least, to researching the suddenly problematic racial origins of Michelangelo, Goethe, and Beethoven. Sure enough, it turns out that Michelangelo was of "mixed race," and so, for good measure, was Christopher Columbus — but only if one considers Italians with Lombard blood to be racial hybrids!

As for Beethoven, he was a hybrid, too, if similar criteria are employed: according to the Encyclopædia Britannica his father was of Flemish origin. Imagine — a part-Flamand loose in Germany and Austria! There is also a legend cultivated by some blacks, and their white entourage, that Beethoven was Negroid; but those same folks also promote the story that the "100 million" (or whatever it was) corpses thrown into the ocean during the "400 years" of the Atlantic slave trade raised the level of the ocean by several feet.

I was unable to find so much as a parallel fantasy about Goethe, though admittedly I refrained from devoting hours to the task. The Britannica says that Goethe's father was north German, while his mother was from Frankfurt. Now, there's a mulatto if ever I saw one.

I am astonished that Mr. de Bruycker didn't mention Pushkin, who — let's all chant it together — had an Ethiopian great-grandfather. What, is Pushkin chopped liver? On the other hand, if one more racial-egalitarian hat is hung on that poor lonely tree, it may topple over.

***

Nordicism, which glowers suspiciously even at the "Dinaric" Swiss, is irrelevant to the concerns of white European and white American racial realists who worry about drowning in a rising tide of radically alien and stunningly fecund people from Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

November 28, 2003

 
Ronn Neff objects

What about Alexander Dumas pere, whose grandfather was, I believe, full Negro. Huh? What does Mr. Smarty Pants Strakon say about that, huh?

And another French writer — Alexander Dumas fils. I think he was part Negro, too. I read that somewhere.

November 28, 2003

 
Strakon abases himself

I deserve a life sentence in the Chateau d'If!

November 28, 2003
 

Comments by Samuel Francis.
December 3, 2003


Mr. de Bruycker seems a very improbable blend to me. He combines apparently limitless ignorance about the topics he purports to address with awareness of at least the names of prominent writers on those subjects (Francis, Rienzi, and Rushton). A child, a drug addict, or some type of Internet prankster? I admit that I struggle to take him with the slightest seriousness, for had he read the works or authors he pretends to cite (as opposed, perhaps, to skimming Google-derived fragments linked to their names), he would have awakened to the internal contradictions contained within most of his bullet points sufficiently to withdraw them, if only for fear of mockery. Having said that, I'll offer a few further comments in response.

The word race itself, as anyone who has even glanced at the titles of older works in physical anthropology could have told Mr. de Bruycker, has evolved in meaning over the past century. While there was once much careless popular talk about the "English race" or the "German race," even physical anthropologists used to speak of the three "races" of Europe (the Alpine, Nordic, and Mediterranean), by which they meant, of course, the three sub-races of the broader White, or European, race. To the extent that any of the drivel Mr. de Bruycker felt compelled to repeat about "mixed race(s)" or men of "mixed racial origin" in Europe had its source in anything beyond error or his doubtlessly feverish imagination, it would have to be understood within that context. The older physical anthropologists would have described (without necessarily casting aspersions) the product of a little brunet Welshwoman and a tall blond Swede as "mixed race." (In fact, Stoddard, in The Races of Europe, uses exactly those terms in his characterization of the Hellenic Greeks as a blend of Nordic Acheans with indigenous Mediterranean Pelasgians.) It is unfortunate that our language damns us in its mutability and imprecision to these endless disputes. So much playing with words ...

One other quick point: Gobineau's primary work, On the Origins of the Inequality of the Races, was published in the mid 1850s, and Gobineau himself died in 1882. It seems rather fanciful to ascribe to him not only the sentiment that "art" would have been forever denied Western man absent the Negro, but the choice of "blues and jazz" as that sentiment's illustration! Jazz didn't begin to take meaningfully coherent form until the early 1900s, long after the Count's demise, and even "blues," to the extent this "art form" existed (for it never developed at all) in the 19th century, would certainly have been unknown to him beyond possible contact with a few drunken, moaning Negroes in some squalid European port. I doubt such an experience would have led him to the stated conclusion.

Erik Meyer
December 1, 2003;
posted December 16


As a first-time visitor to The Last Ditch I accept Editor Strakon's invitation to "weigh in" on the issue of intellect and race, as follows.

The claim to be able to measure human intelligence was for a very long time (and maybe still is) a pseudo-science lorded over by people who scored well on tests prepared by their cohorts. While growing up on a small farm in Ireland I read books written by English "scientists" and phrenologists celebrating their own English intellects, which they always contrasted with the low intellect of the Irish whose features were depicted in their books as negroid — and the likes of which I'd never once observed anywhere in Ireland. Since I left school a few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, any IQ test I'd have taken would have confirmed their thesis of "the genetic inferiority of the Irish." However, after a few years building houses in Chicago followed by a few more studying civil engineering I was drafted into the Army. Owing to those few years of study I scored out on the lip of the bell curve of the Army's battery of tests — among the top 2 percent of Mensa members.

Within the next few years under less urgent intellectual pressure I know that my score dropped significantly, to nearer the norm.

The point made above, which I offer to this debate, is that the intellectual capacity of humans, even that of a "scientifically proven" genetically defective Irishman, is much more of a "sometime thing" than many IQ test-winners would like to believe. I suppose what was used for so long to "justify" the oppression of Ireland's people and looting of their labor and resources is used today for similar reasons against others.

Chris Fogarty
Chicago, Illinois
December 8, 2003

 
Dr. Francis replies

Of course the British oppression and exploitation of the Irish goes back centuries, far longer than intelligence tests have been around. In any case, IQ tests do nothing to justify domination of one group over another at all. What they may do is help explain why some groups (with higher IQs) do dominate others with lower IQs.

 

Nicholas Strakon attempts to be helpful

Mr. Fogarty apparently has not yet discovered my own extended treatment of the issues, posted right here at TLD. I refer him (and also our next correspondent, for that matter) to my article "Sweeping Rand's barnyard: Racism and individualism." I don't expect either letter-writer to agree with all that I have to say, but I hope they come to understand the necessity of some heavy-duty grappling with the subject and with the evidence, much of it massively inconvenient in terms of the current political climate, that scholars have amassed around it.


It seems to me, gentlemen, that every one of you has missed the boat on this one. Are there "races," composed of humans who generally present distinctively different physical appearances compared to members of other "races"? Certainly. Do each of these "races" have different "cultures"? Sure. But race is not culture, no more than George Washington Carver was a Hottentot or the Queen of England a Midwestern soybean farmer. There are far more "cultures" than "races," and while I will always be the offspring of a penniless Cherokee who found Ohio a destination that was preferable to a reservation in the future Oklahoma, Scots who skipped the Highlands for the New World long before 1776, and an over-achieving pack of 19th-century German immigrant farmers, I can darned well choose my culture — and so can anyone else, no matter what their "race."

While it is a simple matter to point at "those different-looking/acting people over there," and blame them for most of the troubles in the world, it is also inaccurate (and you may take that as a paraphrase of Mr. Mencken). The willfully ignorant and shortsighted, the fools with a lust for power and no wisdom, would-be Emperors, Prætorian Guards-presumptive, and the seething masses selling their votes and cheers for cheap food and cheaper amusement are the problem; and while any of them may, from time to time, be primarily composed of one or another race or religion, color and creed are mere descriptors: what they share is a culture of indolence and power-worship, of hatred of achievement.

Western Culture has been fortunate; like most "luck," the West's has been brought about by hard work and a culture that rewards excellence, and does not bar admission to any who will work to achieve it. Trade that last away for any illusory "racial purity," and you will have thrown it all away. (Our present politics bids fair to destroy another element, the reward of excellence, in socialist-egalitarian equalization of outcome; and the ultimate end of that course is the same.)

One of the things that doomed Rome was a lack of availability of upward mobility on the individual level. Given no other outlet, the talented among the underclass turn to crime, corruption, depravity, and revolt.

But of course, the tall, blonde, blue-eyed woman who writes these things to you is herself a product of the (so-called) Shameless Mixing of Races; so don't pay the least attention. It must be just an ignorant heathen notion.

Roberta J. Barmore
November 30, 2003;
posted December 15



Mr. de Bruycker replies

I would like to reply to Mr. Erik Meyer's objections.

1. Mr. Francis claims:

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.

Actually, the passage I have quoted is from Goldberg in National Review 2-25-02.

2. Mr. Meyer says that "the word race itself, as anyone who has even glanced at the titles of older works in physical anthropology could have told Mr. de Bruycker, has evolved in meaning over the past century." I don't deny this and can sustain this by a man no less than Francis Parker Yockey (who considers himself as a follower of Oswald Spengler) in his book Imperium:

Race is not a matter of stock, color, anatomy, skeletal structure, or anything else objective.... The mistake of Gobineau, Chamberlain, Grant consists in regarding racial realities as rigid, existing rather than becomming.... Safeguarding the purity of the race in a purely biological sense is sheer materialism.... They were ignoring the connections of race and history, race and spirit.

And:

The quality of having race has no connection with which race one feels community.... There are numerous intellectuals in the West who feel community with the idea of Asiatic Nihilism.

And:

All strong minorities have welcomed into their company the outsider regardless of his racial provenance.... A race imbued with a historical idea has the power to take up alien human material into it.

3. One finds similar ideas expressed by for example Frank H. Hankins in his The Racial Basis of Civilzation: "Well-endowed Italians, Negroes ... are better material out of which to forge a nation than average and below-average Nordics." And also by Karl Jahn: "A nation can be mutiracial (temporarily, at least: nationalists welcome race-mixing)."

4. For Gobineau. I give you the following quotations. From Gerald M. Spring, The Vitalism of the Count de Gobineau: "Even the Aryan race can benefit from racial mixture; it is undoubtly a factor in civilization." "Art is possible only by the marriage of 'black and white' ... the Black strain furnishes the requisite passionate emotion." From Michael D. Biddiss, Gobineau, Father of Racist Ideology: "Tribes that are incapable of overcoming their repugnance to blood mixture remain stagnant." "Blood mixture is necessary for the development of society and for the very creation of civilization."

And why not quote Gobineau himself? — "Artistic genius arose after the intermarriage of White and Black."

5. To conclude, here is a general question for Mr. Meyer: How came it to be that in its Nordic homeland the Nordic race was unable to bring forth any culture worth mentioning? We must go to Greece and Rome to find a Sophocles, a Pericles ... How came it to be that Nordic man in his very Nordic lands never set up a great kingdom like that of Alexander? I am looking forward to an answer.

Gilbert de Bruycker
Flanders, Belgium
December 24, 2004;
   posted February 6, 2004


Mr. Meyer replies

I'd like to clear up a few misunderstandings on Mr. de Bruycker's part that seem to have crept into our conversation.

I am not Dr. Francis. Since Mr. de Bruycker chose to preface his reply to me with a reply to him, though, I will say in Dr. Francis's place that Mr. de Bruycker appears to have missed his point, which was not that Mr. de Bruycker's source for this misrepresentation was Dinesh D'Sousa but rather that Mr. de Bruycker's letter misrepresented Dr. Francis's position on the relationship between genes and civilization. (As a fun aside, I will observe that Jonah Goldberg, my correspondent's stated reference, probably did get the quote in question from D'Sousa's book. The boys at National Review these days are too busy eating Cheetos and watching cartoon re-runs on television to look anything up. I doubt they know the extent to which D'Sousa's monument of scholarship, The End of Racism, has been discredited or that they would care if they did.)

I'm glad that Mr. de Bruycker and I are in agreement that the word "race" has been used in varied and conflicting ways over the years, but I brought all that up only because Mr. de Bruycker seemed confused about what the word meant when employed by the various authorities he saw fit to quote on topics such as "race-mixing" and "mixed-race" individuals. I repeat, those writers were not talking about the mixture of "races" as we use the term "race" today (Whites [Europids], Blacks [Negrids], Australian Aborigines [Australids], etc.). They were talking about the mixture of "races" of Whites as understood by physical anthropologists (Alpinids, Nordids, Mediterranids, etc.). I'm afraid Francis Parker Yockey's views on the meaning of race, while of possible interest to the student of neo-Fascism, could scarcely be less relevant to the point I was making.

It simply won't do for my correspondent to keep dredging up random quotes and using them as a substitute for reasoned analysis. It really doesn't matter what Yockey thought or claimed to have thought about the reality of race; what matters is whether race has reality. John R. Baker's Race or Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior, both of them exhaustive works drawing on centuries of study of human biology, are authorities on that topic. Yockey's Imperium is not.

Now, I happen to have read (most of) Imperium. I've also read Spengler's Decline of the West in its entirety. Reading the latter work is a bit like reading Remembrance of Things Past or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Clearly its style and contents are burned irrevocably into Mr. de Bruycker's mind. But I assure him that Imperium should have been subtitled: There Is No God but World-Historical Morphology, and Oswald Spengler Is Its Prophet. Yockey didn't just claim to be a follower of Spengler; he wrote like Spengler's ape, and the section of Imperium Mr. de Bruycker quoted was lifted, almost word for word, from The Decline of the West.

Spengler himself displayed no sign whatsoever of either having studied human biology or having acquired even an interest in the topic (though he developed an aversion to certain duskier-hued types late in life). He wrote essentially as a post-Hegelian mystic convinced (like Yockey) that he had stumbled across the Fundamental Truth that human societies function as collective organisms defined by their organization around world-historical concepts; and that they are doomed, like their physical analogues, to pass invariably through phases of development and ultimately either stagnate or expire. While Spengler could have theoretically linked these core concepts (the Classical "point," the Magian "World Cave," the Faustian "infinite") to the genetically defined way of being-in-the-world (or extended phenotype) of their originating races, he didn't — and, in fact, he would have had to modify his definition of the "Magian" considerably if he had. Yockey just mouthed his master's words, adding nothing.

While I'm not acquainted with either Hankins or Jahn, the comments Mr. de Bruycker repeats are simply unsubstantiated assertions that Mr. de Bruycker may as well have made himself. The words quoted do not become binding precedent because somebody said them before Mr. de Bruycker did. I hope my correspondent will ponder that point. His quotes tell me that Hankins likes "well-endowed Italians and Negroes" and that Jahn believes in the possibility of multiracial "nations." Absent further context or argumentation those assertions are of interest only to the two writers' biographers.

Likewise for Mr. de Bruycker's obsession with Gobineau.

I must confess some astonishment at Mr. de Bruycker's last line of inquiry, as I don't recall having said anything good or bad about the achievements of Nordic (or more precisely, Nordid) men during this debate. I suppose in light of the name Meyer it was safe to assume that I was Nordid and proceed to attack my people as a way of attacking me personally (as a Fleming, Mr. de Bruycker is presumably attacking his own people too, but in these decadent times self-hatred is worn as a badge of honor). Well then: Mr. de Bruycker is right enough, my ancestry is Scots-English-German, and while that background is not inconsistent with the possibility of Alpinid or Mediterranid admixture, I am dolichocephalic, long-limbed, fair (blond, red-bearded, blue-eyed), and Nordid in every other relevant characteristic but that of extreme height.

Having said that, I find Mr. de Bruycker's attack laughable if only in the examples he cites: the civilization of Greek classical antiquity was created largely, though not entirely, by a Nordid ruling class that swept down from the North and East in waves (Acheans, Dorians, etc.) and conquered the indigenous Mediterranid Pelasgian stock (the people who had arguably created the Minoan civilization that predated Hellas). Read Homer. Have a look at Greek sculpture. Alexander and his Macedonians, and the Latins who founded the original Roman Republic were of similar origins.

Nordids were fairly clearly, if not indisputably, the people responsible, too, for the Vedic civilization in India as well as the early Persian (Iranian) empire.

In fact the Greek/Indian-model Nordid warrior-aristocracies, ruling over a substratrum of conquered peoples (in this case Alpinids and Mediterranids), largely defined the history of Europe all the way into the modern era; and in that sense, while I would never claim that Western Civilization sprang solely from the Nordid brow, it is indisputable that the Nordids were critical to its development.

Even if Mr. de Bruycker would like, wrongly, to restrict the Nordid "homeland" to the frigid wastes of Scandinavia, Scandinavian accomplishments in literature, navigation, shipbuilding, and all manner of technical arts were substantial. Expanding our scope to include England and Scotland, as well as Northern Germany (populated largely, if not entirely, by those of Nordid stock), we find that Nordids were responsible for most of the abstract and applied ideas upon which the modern world has been built.

Erik Meyer
Virginia, North America
December 29, 2004
   posted February 6, 2004


Editor's note

I apologize to the correspondents for the delay in posting their latest exchange.

Unless Dr. Francis wishes to offer a final observation, I now declare this correspondence closed.

Nicholas Strakon
Editor-in-chief, TLD
February 6, 2004

 
To the
LTE contents page.

Back to Mr. de Bruycker's letter of October 31, 2003 (top of page).

Home.