Here, in the AAARGH community, we have been aware of Kevin McDonalds books since he published the first one, some years ago. We met him and had a long and interesting conversation with him. He has all the qualities -- and possibly the defects -- of an excellent American university scholar. Cultured, humanist, open-minded, he is a logical mind. We had to bridge a large rift between us: he is a Psychologist and we tend to believe that psychology is a vast intellectual fraud in itself, that it should not be considered as anything scientific, that it should be classified as a modern equivalent of shamanism, in the best of cases. This being said without the least element of hostility -- towards shamanism.
The subject of the books he writes happens to be "the Jews". This is a very interesting subject, although it is of only marginal interest to AAARGH.
His ideas have a definite link with what roused intense discussions and bouts of pure hostility in the 80s', sociobiology. Anyway, what he has to say about Jews as a historical and possibly biological community is interesting and may be discussed with rational arguments. We have remained largely unconvinced by the documents McDonald has used to base his views because they are produced, we believe, in a purely American context where segments of the so-called Jewish community are looking for biological and genetical links among themselves. In France, with the invasion of the old Ashkenazi population by North-African waves of Sephardic alleged refugees, the question itself would seem rather odd. They do not even mix together. Anyway, we have not ventured very far into this debate and we do not intend to do so because we think it is basically an-historical.
For years, K. McDonald could go about his business of writing about Jews in complete tranquility. Then something happened. He accepted to testify in Irving's trial against Lipstad.
This was a fatal move which is going to ruin his quiet Long Beach life. Soon enough, after the news of his involvement was broken on Irving's site, the thought police was alerted. Special investigators were found. Inquiries were made. Phone calls were distributed country-wide, pressure groupes were alerted, word was passed. The usual tactics of destruction were initiated. McDonald employers, students, colleagues, publishers, doorkeepers, plumbers, gardeners, were approached, warned, threatened.
In a way, it is too late. McDonald is testifying in court today, 31 January 2000. But his destruction is now planned. Remember what they did to Zundel, to Fred Leuchter, what they are doing to Irving: isolate, destroy business or professional status, ruin financially in order to make their oppoent a powerless destitute pariah. This happens to be the subject of McDonald's speech. So we know he is aware of all the consequences of his intervention. We salute him as a courageous man!
For details, resume, photograph, publications since 1980 and other items of interest, see his own Website at:
<http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/>
We have put together this file, but it should ne be expected from us to pursue the matter for a longer time. You will find here only the beginings of the threads.
First, this statement was posted on Irving's website (www.fpp.co.uk). Later, the awakening of the the self-apppointed vigilantes.
1. I, KEVIN MACDONALD,
Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901 USA, will say as follows:-
2. I have a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences from the University of Connecticut. I have published six books (including two edited books) and over 30 academic papers in the area of evolutionary approaches to human behavior, particularly in the field of evolutionary psychology and the application of evolutionary psychology to understanding ethnic conflict in history (e.g., Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis. New York: Plenum, 1988). I am editor of the journal Population and Environment, published by Human Sciences Press, a division of Kluwer Academic Publishers. This journal deals with issues related to the interface between environmental issues and human population, including issues of ethnic conflict. I am also Secretary/Archivist and member of the Executive Board of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the main academic organization dealing with the application of evolutionary biology to the study of human affairs.
3. Since 1991 I have been involved in extending the evolutionary paradigm to the study of Judaism. This project has resulted in three books:
A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CONNECTICUT: Praeger, 1994; 302 pp.) delineates key aspects of Judaism within an evolutionary theory of groups. The basic proposal is that Judaism can be interpreted as a set of ideological structures and behaviors that have resulted in the following features: (1) the segregation of the Jewish gene pool from surrounding gentile societies; (2) resource and reproductive competition with gentile host societies; (3) high levels of within-group cooperation and altruism among Jews; and (4) eugenic efforts directed at producing high intelligence, high investment parenting, and commitment to group, rather than individual, goals.
Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CONNECTICUT: Praeger, 1998; 325 pp.) develops an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism. The basic thesis is that Judaism must be conceptualized as a group strategy characterized by cultural and genetic segregation from gentile societies combined with resource competition and conflicts of interest with segments of gentile societies. This cultural and genetic separatism combined with resource competition and other conflicts of interest tend to result in division and hatred within the society. A major theme of this volume is that intellectual defenses of Judaism and of Jewish theories of anti-Semitism have throughout its history played a critical role in maintaining Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The book discusses tactics Jewish groups have used over the centuries to combat anti-Semitism. Particularly important are discussions of Jewish self-interest, deception, and self-deception in the areas of Jewish historiography, Jewish personal identity, and Jewish conceptualizations of their ingroup and its relations with outgroups.
The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CONNECTICUT: Praeger, 1998; 376 pp.) Ethnic conflict is a recurrent theme throughout the first two volumes, and that theme again takes center stage in this work. However, whereas in the previous works ethnic conflict consisted mainly of recounting the oftentimes bloody dynamics of Jewish-gentile conflict over the broad expanse of historical time, the focus here shifts to a single century and to several very influential intellectual and political movements that have been spearheaded by people who strongly identified as Jews and who viewed their involvement in these movements as serving Jewish interests. Individual chapters discuss the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner.
4. The main point of my testimony is that the attacks made on David Irving by Deborah Lipstadt and Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should be viewed in the long-term context of Jewish-gentile interactions. As indicated by the summaries of my books, my training as an evolutionist as well as the evidence compiled by historians leads me to conceptualize Judaism as self-interested groups whose interests often conflict with segments of the gentile community. Anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been a pervasive feature of the Jewish experience since the beginnings of the Diaspora well over 2000 years ago. While anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior have undoubtedly often been colored by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group competition exactly as expected by an evolutionist. Particularly important have been the themes of separatism-the fact that Jewish groups have typically existed as recognizably distinct groups and have been unwilling to assimilate either culturally or via marriage to the wider society, the theme of economic, political, and cultural domination, and the theme of disloyalty.
Because anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been such a common response to Jews as a Diaspora group, Jewish groups have developed a wide variety of strategies to cope with their enemies. Separation and Its Discontents discusses a great many of these strategies, including a very long history of apologia dating to the ancient world. In the last century there have been a great many intellectual activities, most notably many examples of Jewish historigraphy which present Jews and Judaism in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light, often with little regard for historical accuracy. Most importantly for the situation of David Irving, Jewish groups have engaged in a wide range of political activities to further their interests. In general, Jews have been active agents rather than passive martyrs; they have been highly flexible strategizers in the political arena. The effectiveness of Jewish strategizing has been facilitated by several key features of Judaism as group evolutionary strategy-particularly that the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean. In all historical eras, Jews as a group have been highly organized, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they have been able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their group goals.
For example, Jews engaged in a very wide range of activities to combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1914, including the formation of self-defense committees, lobbying the government, utilizing and influencing the legal system (e.g., taking advantage of libel and slander laws to force anti-Jewish organizations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans, and funding organizations opposed to anti-Semitism composed mainly of sympathetic gentiles. Jewish organizations commissioned writings in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as exemplified by academically respectable publications that portrayed Judaism in negative terms. Academic works were monitored for such material, and Jewish organizations sometimes succeeded in banning offending books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages. The result was to render such ideas academically and intellectually disreputable.
A theme of anti-Jewish writing in the contemporary U. S. has been that Jewish organizations have used their power to make the discussion of Jewish interests off limits. Individuals who have made remarks critical of Jews have been forced to make public apologies and suffered professional difficulties as a result. Quite often the opinions in question are quite reasonable-statements that are empirically verifiable and the sort of thing that might be said about other groups or members of other groups. For example, media critic William Cash (1994), writing for the British magazine The Spectator, described the Jewish media elite as "culturally nihilist," suggesting that he believed Jewish media influence reflects Jewish lack of concern for traditional cultural values. Kevin Myers, a columnist for the British Sunday Telegraph (January 5, 1997) wrote that "we should really be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group, without being called anti-Semitic. Frankness does not feed anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does. The silence of sympathetic discretion can easily be misunderstood as a conspiracy. It is time to be frank about Jews." Myers goes on to note that The Spectator was accused of anti-Semitism when it published the article by William Cash (1994) referred to above. Myers emphasized the point that Cash's offense was that he had written that the cultural leaders of the United States were Jews whose Jewishness remained beyond public discussion.
Cash stated that there is a double standard in which a Jewish writer like Neal Gabler is able to refer to a "Jewish cabal" while his own use of the phrase is described as anti-Semitic. He also noted that while movies regularly portray negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, Cash's description of Jews as "fiercely competitive" was regarded as anti-Semitic. As another example, Marlon Brando repeated statements originally made in 1979 on a nationally televised interview program to the effect that "Hollywood is run by Jews. It's owned by Jews." The focus of the complaint was that Hollywood regularly portrays negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups but not of Jews. Brando's remarks were viewed as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) and the Jewish Defense League (Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1996, F4).
These claims regarding Hollywood are empirically verifiable claims, but the response of major Jewish organizations has been to label the claims "anti-Semitic" and attempt to ruin the careers of the people involved. Both Cash and Brando have apologized for their remarks and, as part of their apologies, visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (Forward, April 26, 1996). (Cash's apology occurred some two years after publication of his remarks.) The Forward article suggests that Cash has had trouble publishing his work in the wake of the incident. Moreover, the same issue of Forward reported that the publisher of Cash's comments, Dominic Lawson, editor of the London Spectator, was prevented from publishing an article on the birth of his Down Syndrome daughter in The New Republic when Martin Peretz, the owner, and Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, complained about Lawson's publishing Cash's article. There is abundant evidence that Peretz strongly identifies as a Jew and for his unabashed policy of slanting his journal toward positions favorable to Israel.
Similarly, Noam Chomsky, the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist, describes his experience with the ADL:
Consider also the comments of columnist Joseph Sobran, who was forced out of his position as columnist at National Review for remarks critical of Israel:
It is my view that the campaign to suppress the publication of David Irving's biography of Goebbels (Washington Post, April 4, 1996) is another example of these tactics. After an article by editorial columnist Frank Rich condemning the book appeared in the New York Times (April 3, 1996), the ADL successfully pressured St. Martin's Press to rescind publication despite the fact that this book, relying on previously unknown diaries of its subject, is a major scholarly achievement-an indispensable work for those writing on the history of the Third Reich. Deborah Lipstadt's work contributes to this atmosphere of suppression-particularly her statement that Irving is not a historian. Quite simply, it is widely acknowledged among professional historians such as Gordon Craig, A.J.P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper that David Irving is a brilliant researcher and a compelling writer. His work is required reading for serious students of the Third Reich and World War II.
I suppose that the motivation for this campaign of suppression is because of Irving's involvement in disputes about the nature and extent of the Holocaust-that in the absence of such activity, Irving's biography of Goebbels would have been published without incident. However, I submit that Irving's other activities should not result in the suppression of Irving's historical research and the general denigration of his work that is apparent in Lipstadt's work. To be sure, Irving, like many historians, may indeed see events through a filter of personal political and intellectual convictions. This is a commonly acknowledged difficulty that afflicts all of the social sciences, and Jewish social scientists have certainly not been immune from these tendencies. In my book Separation and Its Discontents, I devote much of a chapter to many examples of the historiography of Jewish history written by Jews-surely not exhaustive-in which there are clear apologetic tendencies-tendencies to view the Jewish ingroup in a favorable manner and to pathologize anti-Semitism as irrational and completely unrelated to the actual behavior of Jews. These works have been published by the most prestigious academic and commercial presses. Other commentators have noticed similar apologetic tendencies in Jewish historiography, including, most notably Albert Lindemann in his recent book Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Revealingly, Lindemann's examples of biased historical research include the work of Jewish Holocaust historians Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel J. Goldhagen-a clear indication that the area of Holocaust studies remains politically charged. Moreover, in The Culture of Critique I describe several highly influential intellectual movements (Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research) that presented themselves as science but were strongly influenced by the Jewish ethnic agendas of their founders, particularly combating anti-Semitism.
Intellectual blinders and political agendas are a fact of academic life. However, even were it to be proved that David Irving does indeed bring a certain set of biases to his work, even the most biased researchers may well contribute invaluable scholarship. Science emerges when the work of all investigators becomes part of the marketplace of ideas and when scholars are not vilified and their scholarship censored simply because their conclusions fly in the face of contemporary orthodoxy.
References
Cash, W. (1994). Kings of the deal. The Spectator (29 October): 14-16.
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Politics. Black Rose Books: Montreal-New York.
Sobran, J. (1996). The Buchanan frenzy. Sobran's (March): 3-4#
SIGNED: .....
KEVIN MACDONALD,
Professor of Psychology
California State University-Long Beach,
Long Beach,
CA 90840-0901 USA
NAME AND AFFILIATION: Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901 USA
ACADEMIC BACKGROUND: I have a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences from the University of Connecticut. I have published six books (including two edited books) and over 30 academic papers in the area of evolutionary approaches to human behavior, particularly in the field of evolutionary psychology and the application of evolutionary psychology to understanding ethnic conflict in history (e.g., Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis. New York: Plenum, 1988). I am editor of the journal Population and Environment, published by Human Sciences Press, a division of Kluwer Academic Publishers. This journal deals with issues related to the interface between environmental issues and human population, including issues of ethnic conflict. I am also Secretary/Archivist and member of the Executive Board of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the main academic organisation dealing with the application of evolutionary biology to the study of human affairs.
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS: Since the early 1980s I undertook to extend the evolutionary paradigm to the study of broad social phenomena such as group strategies in Ancient Greece and socially imposed monogamy in ancient Rome and in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages. This led to the study of the Catholic Church as a major institution of social control, and to the study of Judaism as a religious group strategy. The Judaism project has resulted in three books:
KEVIN MACDONALD: A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994; 302 pp.) delineates key aspects of Judaism within an evolutionary theory of groups. The basic proposal is that Judaism can be interpreted as a set of ideological structures and behaviours that have resulted in the following features: (1) the segregation of the Jewish gene pool from surrounding gentile societies; (2) resource and reproductive competition with gentile host societies; (3) high levels of within-group co-operation and altruism among Jews; and (4) eugenic efforts directed at producing high intelligence, high investment parenting, and commitment to group, rather than individual, goals.
KEVIN MACDONALD: Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 325 pp.) develops an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism. The basic thesis is that Judaism must be conceptualised as a group strategy characterised by cultural and genetic segregation from gentile societies combined with resource competition and conflicts of interest with segments of gentile societies. This cultural and genetic separatism combined with resource competition and other conflicts of interest tend to result in division and hatred within the society. A major theme of this volume is that intellectual defences of Judaism and of Jewish theories of anti-Semitism have throughout its history played a critical role in maintaining Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The book discusses tactics Jewish groups have used over the centuries to combat anti-Semitism. Particularly important are discussions of Jewish self-interest, deception, and self-deception in the areas of Jewish historiography, Jewish personal identity, and Jewish conceptualisations of their in-group and its relations with outgrips.
KEVIN MACDONALD: The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 376 pp.) Ethnic conflict is a recurrent theme throughout the first two volumes, and that theme again takes centre stage in this work. However, whereas in the previous works ethnic conflict consisted mainly of recounting the oftentimes bloody dynamics of Jewish-gentile conflict over the broad expanse of historical time, the focus here shifts to a single century and to several very influential intellectual and political movements that have been spearheaded by people who strongly identified as Jews and who viewed their involvement in these movements as serving Jewish interests. Individual chapters discuss the Basin school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a seem-cryptic manner.
I am not a historian. Although the history of Judaism is important to my work, I can offer no expert opinion on the work of David Irving except to the extent that I have noted that his work has been favourably reviewed by a considerable number of academic experts on World War II, including Gordon Craig, A.J.P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper
I believe that my background as an evolutionary psychologist and my research into Jewish-gentile relations equips me to describe to the court some competitive features of those relations. Anti-Jewish tactics are widely known, and it is widely accepted that active anti-Semites have and still do exist. But competitive behavior on the part of Jewish organisations is not as widely known. In my research I have reviewed the writings and activities of both Jews and their opponents, and I think I can help place the actions of Dr. Lipstadt and some Jewish organisations against Mr. Irving into a wider context.
The main point of my testimony is that the attacks made on David Irving by Deborah Lipstadt and Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) should be viewed in the long-term context of Jewish-gentile interactions. As indicated by the summaries of my books, my training as an evolutionist as well as the evidence compiled by historians leads me to conceptualise Judaism as self-interested groups whose interests often conflict with segments of the gentile community. Anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been a pervasive feature of the Jewish experience since the beginnings of the Diaspora well over 2000 years ago. While anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have undoubtedly often been coloured by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group competition as expected by an evolutionist. Particularly important have been the themes of separatism:
(1) Jewish groups have typically existed as recognisably distinct groups and have been unwilling to assimilate either culturally or via marriage;
(2) the theme of economic, political, and cultural domination;
(3) the theme of disloyalty.
Because anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been such a common response to Jews as a Diaspora group, Jewish groups have developed a wide variety of strategies to cope with their enemies. Separation and Its Discontents discusses a great many of these strategies, including a very long history of apologia dating to the ancient world. In the last century there have been a great many intellectual activities, most notably many examples of Jewish historiography which present Jews and Judaism in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light, often with little regard for historical accuracy. Most importantly for the situation of David Irving, Jewish groups have engaged in a wide range of political activities to further their interests. In general, Jews have been active agents rather than passive martyrs; they have been highly flexible strategizers in the political arena. The effectiveness of Jewish strategizing has been facilitated by several key features of Judaism as group evolutionary strategy-particularly that the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean. In all historical eras, Jews as a group have been highly organised, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they have been able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their group goals.
For example, Jews engaged in a very wide range of activities to combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1914, including the formation of self-defence committees, lobbying the government, utilising and influencing the legal system (e.g., taking advantage of libel and slander laws to force anti-Jewish organisations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans, and funding organisations opposed to anti-Semitism composed mainly of sympathetic gentiles. Jewish organisations commissioned writings in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as exemplified by academically respectable publications that portrayed Judaism in negative terms. Academic works were monitored for such material, and Jewish organisations sometimes succeeded in banning offending books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages. The result was to render such ideas academically and intellectually disreputable (Levy, 1975; Raging, 1980).
Jewish organisations have used their power to make the discussion of Jewish interests off limits. Individuals who have made remarks critical of Jews have been forced to make public apologies and suffered professional difficulties as a result. Quite often the opinions in question are quite reasonable-statements that are empirically verifiable and the sort of thing that might be said about other groups or members of other groups.
The main point of my testimony is to discuss Mr. Irving's difficulties which he argues have been brought about by Jewish organisations and with the defendant, Deborah Lipstadt who has contributed to the effort to ban Mr. Irving from publishing his work with reputable publishers. This is a major part of Irving's complaint. As evidence I call your attention to Lipstadt's comments in The Washington Post of April 3, 1996 in which she is quoted as stating that "In the Passover Hagadah, it says in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us. David Irving is not physically destroying us, but is trying to destroy the memory of those who have already perished at the hands of tyrants." "They say they don't publish reputations, they publish books... But would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy relationships? Of course the reputation of the author counts. And no legitimate historian takes David Irving's work seriously."
These comments were made in reaction to the St. Martin's Press rescinding publication of Irving's book, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, and were clearly intended to support that decision. The decision to sue Lipstadt came only after St. Martin's Press had rescinded publication of the book, and only after Lipstadt's public support for that decision (see Guttenplan (Atlantic Monthly, Jan 2000, 53).
Moreover, as the plaintiff has noted in his statement, the intense pressure brought to bear by certain Jewish groups on Mr. Irving goes far beyond preventing publishers from publishing his work. Mr. Irving has been prevented from travelling to certain countries, his speaking engagements have been disrupted and cancelled, his contracts with other publishers have been voided, and he has been subjected to physical intimidation.
While David Irving has to my knowledge been a target of these organisations far more than any other author, Jewish organisations in the U. S., and particularly the ADL have also attempted to censor books critical of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. These books include Paul Findley's They Dare to Speak Out (Wilcox, 1996, 82) dealing with the activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the U. S., Victor Ostrovsky's By Way of Deception which deals with Israeli intelligence operations, including recruitment of Jews in foreign lands to act as spies for Israel, and Assault on the Liberty by James Ennes on the role of Israel in the attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war (recounted in They Dare to Speak Out by Paul Findley). For example, an ADL official claimed that Findley's book "is a work of Holocaust revisionism seeking to spread the claim that the Nazi slaughter of Jews was a hoax" although it made no such claim (Wilcox, 1996, 82). The ADL is also actively engaged in attempting to censor the Internet (Boston Globe, 3/25/99). Moreover, the ADL has flouted the law by engaging in "espionage, disinformation and destabilisation operations, not only against neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen, but against leftist and progressive groups as well" (Laird Wilcox; Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America, 1996, 7). These activities include illegal penetration of confidential police files in San Francisco and elsewhere. This story broke in early 1993.
Another example of behavior by Jewish organisations that tends to chill free expression involved the Canadian teacher Luba Fedorkiw. Running for the Canadian Parliament in 1984, she "discovered to her utter amazement that B'nai B'rith Canada ... had circulated an internal memo which accused her of 'Jew-baiting!' " (Wilcox, 1996, 81-82). The allegation was repeated in the Winnipeg Sun along with the assertion that she was being investigated by B'nai B'rith on suspicion of anti-Semitism. The resulting defamation cost her the election to David Orlikow and subjected her to malicious harassment. According to Ms. Fedorkiw, when the investigation was publicised, she received obscene and harassing telephone calls, a swastika was spray-painted on her campaign office and a number of her political supporters withdrew their support. She sued for libel and won a $400,000 judgement on the basis that it was false that she had said that her opponent was "controlled by the Jews."
In my book, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Analysis of Anti-Semitism I discuss several other examples of Jewish activism aimed at suppressing criticism of Jews, Judaism, or Israel. Media critic William Cash (1994), writing for the British magazine The Spectator, described the Jewish media elite as "culturally nihilist," suggesting that he believed Jewish media influence reflects Jewish lack of concern for traditional cultural values. Kevin Myers, a columnist for the British Sunday Telegraph (January 5, 1997) wrote that "we should really be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group, without being called anti-Semitic. Frankness does not feed anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does. The silence of sympathetic discretion can easily be misunderstood as a conspiracy. It is time to be frank about Jews." MYERS goes on to note that The Spectator was accused of anti-Semitism when it published the article by William Cash (1994) referred to above. MYERS emphasised the point that Cash's offence was that he had written that the cultural leaders of the United States were Jews whose Jewishness remained beyond public discussion.
Cash stated that there is a double standard in which a Jewish writer like Neal Gabler is able to refer to a "Jewish cabal" while his own use of the phrase is described as anti-Semitic. He also noted that while movies regularly portray negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, Cash's description of Jews as "fiercely competitive" was regarded as anti-Semitic. As another example, actor Marlon Brando repeated statements originally made in 1979 on a nationally televised interview program to the effect that "Hollywood is run by Jews. It's owned by Jews." The focus of the complaint was that Hollywood regularly portrays negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups but not of Jews. Brando's remarks were viewed as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) and the Jewish Defence League (Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1996, F4).
These claims regarding Hollywood are empirically verifiable claims, but the response of major Jewish organisations has been to label the claims "anti-Semitic" and attempt to ruin the careers of the people involved. Both Cash and Brando have apologized for their remarks and, as part of their apologies, visited the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles (Forward, April 26, 1996). (Cash's apology occurred some two years after publication of his remarks.) The Forward article suggests that Cash has had trouble publishing his work in the wake of the incident. Moreover, the same issue of Forward reported that the publisher of Cash's comments, Dominic Lawson, editor of the London Spectator, was prevented from publishing an article on the birth of his Down Syndrome daughter in The New Republic when Martin Peretz, the owner, and Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, complained about Lawson's publishing Cash's article. There is abundant evidence that Peretz strongly identifies as a Jew that he has an unabashed policy of slanting his journal toward positions favorable to Israel.
Similarly, Noam Chomsky, the famous MIT linguist, describes his experience with the ADL:
In the United States a rather effective system of intimidation has been developed to silence critique... Take the Anti-Defamation League... It's actually an organisation devoted to trying to defame and intimidate and silence people who criticise current Israeli policies, whatever they may be. For example, I myself, through a leak in the new England office of the Anti-Defamation League, was able to obtain a copy of my file there. It's 150 pages, just like an FBI file, [consisting of] interoffice memos warning that I'm going to show up here and there, surveillance of talks that I give, comments and alleged transcripts of talks ... [T]his material has been circulated [and] ... would be sent to some local group which would use it to extract defamatory material which would then be circulated, usually in unsigned pamphlets outside the place where I'd be speaking... If there's any comment in the press which they regard as insufficiently subservient to the party line, there'll be a flood of letters, delegations, protests, threats to withdraw advertising, etc. The politicians of course are directly subjected to this, and they are also subjected to substantial financial penalties if they don't go along... This totally one-sided pressure and this, by now, very effective system of vilification, lying, defamation, and judicious use of funds in the political system ... has created a highly biased approach to the whole matter. (Chomsky 1988, 642-3)
Consider also the comments of columnist Joseph Sobran, who was forced out of his position as columnist at National Review for remarks critical of Israel:
The full story of [Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it's taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls. Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it's highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralysing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you. It's a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. (Sobran 1996, 3).
I regard Deborah Lipstadt more as an ethnic activist than a scholar. It is highly significant that Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust was written with extensive aid from various Jewish activist organisations, including the ADL. Lipstadt's book was commissioned and published by The Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her acknowledgements, she credits the research department of the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for Jewish Affairs (London), the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee-all activist organisations.
Lipstadt is the Chair of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. Historian Jacob Katz finds that academic departments of Jewish studies are often linked to Jewish nationalism: "The inhibitions of traditionalism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward apologetics, on the other, can function as deterrents to scholarly objectivity" (p. 84). The work of Jewish historians exhibits "a defensiveness that continues to haunt so much of contemporary Jewish activity" (1986, 85). Similarly the pre-eminent scholar of the Jewish religion, Jacob Neusner, notes that "scholars drawn to the subject by ethnic affiliation-Jews studying and teaching Jewish things to Jews- turn themselves into ethnic cheer-leaders. The Jewish Studies classroom is a place where Jews tell Jews why they should be Jewish (stressing "the Holocaust" as a powerful reason) or rehearse the self-evident virtue of being Jewish." (Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 1999).
Perhaps the best indication of Lipstadt's Jewish activism is that she has served as Senior Editorial Contributor at the Jewish Spectator, a Jewish publication for conservative, religiously observant Jews. Her column, Tomer Devorah (Hebrew: Under Deborah's Palm Tree), appears in every issue and touches on a wide range of Jewish issues, including anti-Semitism, relations among Jews, and interpreting religious holidays. In her column she has advocated greater understanding and usage of Hebrew to promote Jewish identification, and, like many Jewish ethnic activists, she is strongly opposed to intermarriage. "We must say to young people 'intermarriage is something that poses a dire threat to the future of the Jewish community.'" Lipstadt writes that Conservative Rabbi Jack Moline was "very brave" for saying that number one on a list of ten things Jewish parents should say to their children is "I expect you to marry a Jew." She suggests a number of strategies to prevent intermarriage, including trips to Israel for teenagers and subsidising tuition at Jewish day schools (Jewish Spectator, [Fall, 1991], 63).
In his recent book, The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick clearly thinks of Lipstadt as an activist, although not as extreme as some. He repeatedly cites her as an example of a Holocaust propagandiser. He notes that in her book Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945, Lipstadt says Allied Policy "bordered on complicity" motivated by "deep antipathy" toward "contemptible Jews." Novick says that while there is no scholarly consensus on the subject, "most professional historians agree that "the comfortable morality tale... is simply bad history: estimates of the number of those who might have been saved have been greatly inflated, and the moralistic version ignores real constraints at the time" (Novick, 1999, 48). Novick characterises Lipstadt as attributing the failure of the press to emphasise Jewish suffering as motivated by "wilful blindness, the result of inexcusable ignorance-or malice" (p. 65) despite the fact that the concentration camp survivors encountered by Western journalists (Dachau, Buchenwald) were 80% non-Jewish. Lipstadt is described as an implacable pursuer of Nazi war criminals, stating that she would "prosecute them if they had to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher" (p. 229). In a discussion of the well-recognized unreliability of eye-witness testimony, Novick writes: "When evidence emerged that one Holocaust memoir, highly praised for its authenticity, might have been completely invented, Deborah Lipstadt, who used the memoir in her teaching of the Holocaust, acknowledged that if this turned out to be the case, it 'might complicate matters somewhat,' but insisted that it would still be 'powerful as a novel.' " Truth is less important than the effectiveness of the message.
The intrusion of ethnocentrism into historical scholarship is a well-recognized problem in Jewish historiography, discussed at length in Separation and Its Discontents. Historians such as Jacob Katz (1986) and Albert Lindemann (1997) have noted that this type of behavior is commonplace in Jewish historiography. A central theme of Katz's analysis - massively corroborated by Albert Lindemann's recent work, Esau's Tears-is that historians of Judaism have often falsely portrayed the beliefs of gentiles as irrational fantasies while portraying the behavior of Jews as irrelevant to anti-Semitism. To quote the well-known political scientist, Michael Walzer: "Living so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture" (Walzer 1994, 6).
The salient point for me is that Jewish historians who have been reasonably accused of bringing an ethnocentric bias to their writing nevertheless are able to publish their work with prestigious mainstream academic and commercial publishers, and they often obtain jobs at prestigious academic institutions. A good example is Daniel Goldhagen. In his written submission to the court on behalf of Deborah Lipstadt, historian Richard Evans, describes Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, as a book which argues "in a crude and dogmatic fashion that virtually all Germans had been murderous anti-Semites since the Middle Ages, had been longing to exterminate the Jews for decades before Hitler came to power, and actively enjoyed participating in the extermination when it began. The book has since been exposed as a tissue of misrepresentation and misinterpretation, written in shocking ignorance of the huge historical literature on the topic and making numerous elementary mistakes in its interpretation of the documents."
These are exactly the types of accusations levelled by Lipstadt at Irving. Yet Goldhagen maintains a position at Harvard university; he is lionised in many quarters and his work has been massively promoted in the media while his critics have come under pressure from Jewish activist organisations (Guttenplan, 2000). Regarding the latter, in an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel, historian Ruth Bettina Birn comments on the "unexampled campaign since 1995 to promote the Goldhagen book. A literary first effort becomes a world sensation, and immediately the newspapers start hinting that there's a Harvard professorship waiting for the views his book propagates." She also comments on "the attempts to stifle the criticism voiced by me and [her co-author, Norman] Finkelstein," including efforts to pressure her publisher to rescind publication of a book critical of Goldhagen. The contrast between the treatment of Goldhagen and the persecution of David Irving speaks volumes.
Because I am not a historian, I am reluctant to pass judgement on the competence and integrity of Mr. Irving as a historian. However, as indicated by my written statement to the court, I have taken notice of the fact that some well-known historians have praised his work and have been dismayed at the efforts to censor him-that it is simply false that, as Lipstadt claims, "no legitimate historian takes David Irving's work seriously." Indeed, based on my own reading of Irving, I would venture the opinion that whatever the faults of books like Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich or Hitler's War in dealing with certain issues, such as the role of Hitler in the Holocaust, there is no question in my mind that any student of World War II would benefit from reading it-that, quite simply, it is an indispensable resource for scholars.
What I find deeply distressing as a scholar is that the pressure on St. Martin's Press exerted by Lipstadt and Jewish organisations like the ADL occurred independently of the content of the volume. The same Washington Post article referred to earlier in quoting Lipstadt's support for the actions of St. Martin's Press noted that several other companies had rejected the manuscript without having read it. The effort to pressure St. Martin's press was spearheaded by Jewish ethnic activist organisations and by newspaper columnists, such as Frank Rich of the New York Times, who are not professional historians, and by people like Deborah Lipstadt who do not have the expertise to evaluate a manuscript on Goebbels. In other words, the effort occurred independently of the analytic content of the manuscript and was therefore an illegitimate intrusion on free speech. Therefore, even if the court comes to believe that the scholarly objections raised, for example, in Richard Evans's report are valid, the fact remains that this book was rescinded because of who Irving is-because his ideology conflicts with that of some Jewish activist organisations, not because of its scholarship. I find that utterly appalling.
Besides promoting Goldhagen and attempting to censor his opponents, the ADL has also condemned responsible scholarship that deviates from its version of the Holocaust. The ADL condemned Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as an "evil book", presumably because, as Peter Novick (1999, 137) notes, her depiction of Eichmann "could be read as trivialising the Israeli accomplishment and undermining the claim that he was an appropriate symbol of eternal anti-Semitism." Similarly, the ADL included Arno Mayor, author of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken as a "Hitler apologist" because of his view that Hitler was motivated more by anti-Bolshevism than anti-Semitism. The ADL claimed that Mayor's was an example of "legitimate scholarship which relativises the genocide of the Jews." Clearly Holocaust scholarship has been politicised to the point that there are received dogmas whose truth is jealously defended by Jewish activist organisations.
One such politicised dogma is that the Holocaust is unique:
Civil Judaism's belief in the Holocaust's uniqueness as being ultimately significant per se... thus epitomises the type of belief for which religious faith is both famous and infamous-a dogma. And like all such dogmatic beliefs, the more it is challenged, the fiercer the faithful become in its defence. For them, the first of the Ten Commandments has been revised: "The Holocaust is a jealous God; thou shalt draw no parallels to it" (Goldberg 1995, 48; inner quote from Lopate [1989, 56 ]).
The most commonly expressed grievance was the use of the words "Holocaust" and "genocide" to describe other catastrophes. This sense of grievance was rooted in the conviction, axiomatic in at least "official" Jewish discourse, that the Holocaust was unique. Since Jews recognized the Holocaust's uniqueness-that it was "incomparable," beyond any analogy-they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable. (Novick 1999, 195)
As Novick notes (1999, 196), one can always find ways in which any historical event is unique. However, in Lipstadt's eyes, any comparison of the Holocaust with other genocidal actions is not only factually wrong but also morally impermissible and therefore the appropriate target of censorship. Lipstadt clearly places herself among those who would not merely criticise but censor scholarship that places the Holocaust in a comparative framework-i.e., scholarship that questions the uniqueness of the Holocaust (Novick, 1999, 259). Novick (1999, 330n.107) quotes Lipstadt as follows: Denial of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is "far more insidious than outright denial. It nurtures and is nurtured by Holocaust-denial." In Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt castigates Ernst Nolte and other historians who have "compared the Holocaust to a variety of other twentieth-century outrages, including the Armenian massacres that began in 1915, Stalin's gulags, U.S. policies in Vietnam, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Pol Pot atrocities in the former Kampuchea" (Lipstadt, 1993, p. 211). Lipstadt calls these "attempts to create such immoral equivalencies." In the section on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, she cites approvingly the claim that "the Nazis' annihilation of the Jews... was 'a gratuitous [i.e., without cause or justification] act carried out by a prosperous, advanced industrial nation at the height of its power'" (p. 212). The inner quote is from Richard Evans' In Hitler's Shadow (p. 87). (Evans is an expert witness for the defence in this case.) While there are different meanings one might attribute to this, I take it as an attempt to make the actions of the Nazis completely independent of the behavior of Jews. In my view, such a position is untenable and is part of a common tendency among Jewish historians of Judaism to ignore, minimise, or rationalise the role of Jewish behavior in producing anti-Semitism. This is a major theme of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism.
From my perspective as an evolutionist, bloody and violent ethnic conflict has been a recurrent theme throughout history. The attempt to say it is unique is an attempt to remove the Holocaust from the sphere of scholarly research, interpretation and debate and move into the realm of religious dogma, much as the resurrection of Jesus is an article of faith for much or Christianity. By accepting the type of censorship promoted by Lipstadt's writings we are literally entering a new period of the Inquisition wherein religious dogma rather than open scientific debate is the criterion of truth.
Peter Novick has a great deal of interesting material on the political campaign for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In the same discussion where he comments on Lipstadt's statements on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, he notes Elie Wiesel's idea of Holocaust "as a sacred mystery, whose secrets were confined to a priesthood of survivors. In a diffuse way, however, the assertion that the Holocaust was a holy event that resisted profane representation, that it was uniquely inaccessible to explanation or understanding, that survivors had privileged interpretive authority-all these themes continued to resonate." (i.e., in recent years) (Novick, 1999, 211-212).
Novick also describes a massive campaign to make the Holocaust a specifically Jewish event and to downplay the victim status of other groups. Speaking of 11 million victims was clearly unacceptable to [Elie] Wiesel and others for whom the "big truth" about the Holocaust was its Jewish specificity. They responded to the expansion of the victims of the Holocaust to eleven million the way devout Christians would respond to the expansion of the victims of the Crucifixion to three-the Son of God and two thieves. Wiesel's forces mobilised, both inside and outside the Holocaust Council, to ensure that, despite the executive order, their definition would prevail. Though Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had no role in the initiative that created the museum, they came, under the leadership of Wiesel, to dominate the council-morally, if not numerically. When one survivor, Sigmund Strochlitz, was sworn in as a council member, he announced that it was "unreasonable and inappropriate to ask survivors to share the term Holocaust ... to equate our suffering ... with others." At one council meeting, another survivor, Kalman Sultanik, was asked whether Daniel Trocme, murdered at Maidanek for rescuing Jews and honoured at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, could be remembered in the museum's Hall of Remembrance. "No," said Sultanik, because "he didn't die as a Jew... The six million Jews ... died differently." (Novick 1999, 219)
Activists insisted on the "incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the Holocaust" (Novick 1999, 178). "Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically-subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they're unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the 'inexplicable mystery' of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious" (p. 200). Elie Wiesel "sees the Holocaust as 'equal to the revelation at Sinai' in its religious significance; attempts to 'desanctify' or 'demystify' the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism" (Novick 1999, 201). A 1998 survey found that "remembrance of the Holocaust" was listed as "extremely important" or "very important" to Jewish identity-far more often than anything else, such as synagogue attendance, travel to Israel, etc.
Reflecting this insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Jewish organisations and Israeli diplomats co-operated to block the U.S. Congress from commemorating Armenian genocide. "Since Jews recognized the Holocaust's uniqueness-that it was 'incomparable,' beyond any analogy-they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable" (p. 195). Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, stated the Holocaust is "not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God's chosen children and, thus, on God himself" (p. 199).
Novick has also shown how the Holocaust successfully serves Jewish political interests. The Holocaust was originally promoted to rally support for Israel following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars; "Jewish organisations ... [portrayed] Israel's difficulties as stemming from the world's having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate ground for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex" (p. 155). As the threat to Israel subsided, the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. During this period, the Holocaust was also promoted among gentiles as an antidote to anti-Semitism. In recent years this has involved a large scale educational effort (including mandated courses in the public schools of several states) spearheaded by Jewish organisations and manned by thousands of Holocaust professionals aimed at conveying the lesson that "tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad, the overall rubric [is] 'man's inhumanity to man'" (pp. 258-259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups-prototypically the Jews.
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Retrieved from David Irving's website, www.fpp.co.uk.
Posted Monday, Jan. 24, 2000, at 7:35 a.m.
What scares people about the trial going on in London over whether Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled Holocaust denier David Irving by calling him a liar is that British law requires Lipstadt to show that her statement was true. If she can't prove beyond a doubt that the Holocaust took place, Irving might win. That would be a devastating blow to historical accuracy if it happens, but Culturebox thinks it won't. There's a lot of truth on Lipstadt's side, and very little on Irving's. Plus Lipstadt has one of the best lawyers in London and is planning to call several heavyweight scholars to testify. Irving, on the other hand, is acting as his own lawyer and so far has named very few witnesses and experts, none of whom anyone has ever heard of.
If Irving doesn't appear to be taking the necessary steps to win, why else might he have brought the lawsuit? For publicity, is the obvious answer--to air his own views, as well as those of his witnesses. And that's what scares Culturebox. Irving's claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz is bad enough, but since it bears directly on the question of his truthfulness, it will be refuted on the spot. Irving's experts, on the other hand, are being called to testify on issues tangential to the case, and their twisted theories could well go unanswered. One expert, John Fox, the former editor of a British Holocaust journal, will probably argue that Lipstadt and the Jews are trying to shut down free discussion of the Holocaust. Irving's other expert is an American professor named Kevin MacDonald, whose ideas about Jews have almost no relevance to the case but represent the broadest, ugliest, and most vicious anti-Semitism passing for scholarship in this country today.
We know more or less what McDonald will say on the stand, because he recently put a copy of his written statement to the British court on the Internet. (Click here to go to the discussion group where he posted it. At the drop-down dialogue box, select postings for January 2000, then click on a posting titled "MacDonald's statement in the Irving/Lipstadt trial," dated Jan. 18.) The bulk of MacDonald's testimony will be a summary of his three books about Jews: A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Praeger, 1994); Separation and Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Praeger, 1998); and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger, 1998). Here is what he says in them--in Culturebox's words, not his. (If you want to read MacDonald's own summary, clink on the link above. To read a fuller account of his books, go to his Web page.) <http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/>
MacDonald's central thesis is that Judaism is best understood not as a religion but as a blueprint for an experiment in eugenics--a "group evolutionary strategy," he calls it--designed to maximize a single trait: intelligence. For thousands of years, he says, Jews have separated themselves from their neighbors, choosing to confine themselves to a closed society with strict rules against marrying outside the group. They have lived by policies of extreme group loyalty and obedience to rabbinical authority, which served to maintain their racial purity; and they practiced low-birth-rate, high-investment parenting, which is the royal road to a high group I.Q. They conferred social status (which brings along with it the most desirable women) on men according to their brilliance--indeed, says MacDonald, study of the Talmud was nothing more than a casuistic exercise meant to weed out the dim. Eventually, their highly developed genes for mental and verbal acuity, as well as their social aggression (also carefully bred-in), gave the Jews powerful tools that enable them to dominate neighboring ethnic groups in the endless war of all against all for food and resources.
In his second book, MacDonald explains why Jews have encountered so much anti-Semitism for so many years: It was justified. Gentiles reacted to Jews the way any group of animals on the veldt would when confronted with a group of superior animals likely to challenge them successfully for control of the available resources--they tried to destroy the Jews before the Jews destroyed them. Even the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism, such as Nazism, can be seen not as aberrations but as "a mirror image" of Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a master race. (MacDonald does not deny that the Holocaust occurred, but he appears to think it was rooted in an immutable biological chain reaction that the Jews set off.) Faced with the hatred of gentiles, Jews have often resorted to a "strategy of crypsis"--that is, they have pretended not to be Jews. Do the Jews themselves realize what they're up to? MacDonald goes back and forth on this point; one moment he'll chastise Jews for believing their own religious rationalizations, the next he'll explain that they can't help it--they're genetically "prone to self-deception."
In his third book, MacDonald takes on what he calls the "Jewish" intellectual movements of the 20th century, from psychoanalysis to Marxism to "Boasian anthropology" and "the Frankfurt School of social research." His argument is that the ideas of secular Jewish intellectuals are merely a device to promote tolerance of the Jewish presence by gentiles--so that the Jews can more efficiently pursue their nefarious agenda of systematic breeding and control of resources. A good example of this is cultural anthropology: Its Jewish founder, Franz Boas, shifted the focus of anthropology away from Darwinism and eugenicism and toward the study of culture in order to bring an end to the criticism of Jews as a race. Even if an intellectual movement (such as liberalism) was founded by non-Jews, the minute Jews join it, they'll take it over, because their ancestral history predisposes them to form "highly cohesive groups": "Intellectual activity is like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist strategies." Ideas that MacDonald identifies as Jewish, he invariably finds to be not only subtly self-interested but also repellent by any ordinary (which is to say gentile) moral or intellectual standard. Freud "conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture." When Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed doubts about sociobiology back in the 1970s, their approach exemplified the kind of "skeptical thrust of Jewish intellectual activity" that results in Jewish "nihilistic anti-science."
Toward the end of the third book, MacDonald lays out his solution for restoring what he calls "parity" between the Jews and other ethnic groups: systematic discrimination against Jews in college admission and employment and heavy taxation of Jews "to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth."
It is not a coincidence that MacDonald spends much of his time in his third book attacking the enemies of Darwinism and sociobiology--or evolutionary psychology, as it is usually called today. MacDonald identifies himself as an evolutionary psychologist, and indeed, most prominent figures in the field would at least know his name. But, remarkably, to Culturebox's knowledge, no American evolutionary psychologist has publicly objected to his work. This is not to say that it has been celebrated. A man in his 50s, MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate school, California State University in Long Beach. [Note from Culturebox two days later: She was wrong about this. He is in fact a full professor. My apologies for the error.] But much more important to an academic than his title is his standing among his peers, and there MacDonald is on firmer ground: He's the secretary, archivist, newsletter editor, and executive board member of the professional organization the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), to which the majority of America's leading evolutionary psychologists belong. He edits a small journal called Population and Environment. And the three books summarized above appeared in a series edited by Seymour Iztkoff, a well-known if extremely conservative scholar of the genetics of intelligence at Smith College.
Are MacDonald's peers aware of what he's writing in the name of a field long accused of fostering--unfairly, many of them would say; by Jews, MacDonald would say--sexist and racist stereotypes? Do other evolutionary psychologists have an opinion on MacDonald? Culturebox called several well-known members of HBES, specifying in her voice messages that she was writing an article about MacDonald. Few returned her phone calls, but those who did said they'd never read his Jewish trilogy. Two leading scholars said they had read papers of his on other subjects and found them "muddled"; one academic said she had been forced to reject a paper by MacDonald on child development for an anthology she was editing. When Culturebox described the contents of MacDonald's books to them, they expressed extreme shock and said he contradicted the basic principles of contemporary evolutionary psychology. "The notion that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn't make it on the basis of modern population genetics," said John Tooby, the president of HBES and a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Also, he said, "group-selection theory"--the idea that natural selection can occur at the level of a group (such as a bunch of Jews) as opposed to individuals--was debunked in the 1960s, and though some scholars are working to bring group-selection theory back, it remains a minority view.
Not everyone in the field is as critical as Tooby, however. A review praising MacDonald's first book appeared in the journal Ethology and Sociobiology four years ago (the publication was in the process of being taken over by HBES at the time); the author, John Hartung, a professor at the State University of New York and a former secretary of HBES, concluded that the Holocaust, "the most enormous act of reactive racism ever perpetrated," had been misrepresented as an unjustified evil so as to cow non-Jews into looking the other way while Jews "purloin" land in Israel. According to Lingua Franca, which covered the incident, the only public reaction to Hartung's review was a "tepid" letter by the journal's editor saying he didn't realize that it could be offensive, and an outright defense of Hartung by HBES's then-president, Dick Alexander. As for MacDonald, the author of the book that inspired these remarks, there was little visible effort at the time to refute him or to challenge the appropriateness of having him serve in so many key positions.
On the contrary. MacDonald thanks several prominent evolutionary psychologists in the acknowledgments to his trilogy. Among them is David Sloane Wilson, the leading advocate of group-selection theory. What exactly these scholars did for MacDonald is unclear. (Wilson did not return Culturebox's phone calls.) But MacDonald appears to have given them an opportunity to have their names suppressed, because there are other scholars he says he could have identified but didn't: "Regrettably," he writes, they "have asked that their names not appear here."
Can we blame the field of evolutionary psychology for Kevin MacDonald? Intellectually speaking, no. Evolutionary psychology is a fairly new endeavor trying to overcome an extremely disturbing past, and you can't make serious scholars accountable for all the discredited notions their peers cling to. But we can hold specific academics responsible--Itzkoff comes to mind--and we can ask what on earth the officers of HBES were thinking when they allowed MacDonald to become such an active member of their organization. If the response to Hartung's review is any indication, they would probably say that they don't believe in censoring their members. But it is the job of a scholarly association not just to foster discussion but also to police the boundaries of its discipline. When this evolutionary psychologist and HBES officer testifies in the Irving trial, he is bound to get his counterparts in a lot of trouble. In many ways, they deserve it.
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Posted on the Website Slate, retrieved from
<http://slate.msn.com/Code/Culturebox/Culturebox.asp?Show=1/24/00&idMessage=4446>
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Judith Shulevitz's article, "Evolutionary Psychology's Anti-Semite," is so outrageous a piece of yellow journalism that I am surprised that a prominent magazine like Slate would run it. It bears about as much resemblance to what I've written as a creationist tract attacking evolution bears to Darwin's Origin of Species. It is so outrageous one almost yearns for British laws on libel so that I could force her to provide evidence for her false claims that I am "evolutionary psychology's anti-Semite" and that my ideas about Jews "represent the broadest, ugliest, and most vicious anti-Semitism passing for scholarship in this country today." Some of her statements are simply overly general, others simply false, while others are incomplete or take my thoughts entirely out of context. In general Shulevitz fails to even once indicate that I have adduced a great deal of evidence for my claims and that I have developed a fairly elaborate theory based on evolutionary biology and evolutionary social psychology. In the following I will intersperse my responses--[sometimes in brackets]-- with her mischaracterizations.
Shulevitz: "MacDonald's central thesis is that Judaism is best understood not as a religion but as a blueprint for an experiment in eugenics--a 'group evolutionary strategy,' he calls it--designed to maximize a single trait: intelligence."
Based on a great deal of evidence, I argue that Judaism developed a conscious program of eugenics to improve scholarly ability (but not only scholarly ability), with the result that Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is at least one standard deviation above the white mean. This was not the only trait that was selected for.
Jewish eugenics was conscious in the sense that they believed that people should be very careful about the characteristics of one's mate because they would affect one's children. They were especially keen on the importance of marrying men who were scholars. The following is from the Talmud: "a man should sell all he possesses in order to marry the daughter of a scholar, or marry his daughter to a scholar or other man of character, because he may then rest assured that his children will be scholars; but marriage to an ignoramus will result in ignorant children" (b. Pesachim, 49a).
This is a paragraph from A PEOPLE THAT SHALL DWELL ALONE: "JUDAISM AS A GROUP STRATEGY: the authors of the Talmud, like the other ancients, believed that heredity made an important contribution to individual differences in a wide variety of traits, including physical traits (e.g., height), personality (but not moral character), and, as indicated by the above quotations from the Talmud, scholarly ability. 'Every care was taken to prevent the birth of undesirables by a process of selective mating' (p. 32). Individuals contemplating marriage are enjoined to attend to the family history of the future spouse: 'a girl with a good pedigree, even if she be poor and an orphan, is worthy to become wife of a king' (Midrash num. R.i, 5). A prospective wife should be scrutinized for the presence in her family of diseases believed to be inherited (e.g., epilepsy), and also the character of her brothers should be examined, suggesting an awareness of the importance of sex-linked factors. Physical appearance was not to be a critical resource for a woman: 'for "false is grace and beauty is vain." Pay regard to good breeding, for the object of marriage is to have children' (Taanith 26b and 31a). There is every evidence that in fact the Jews followed these rules quite closely, particularly the practice of wealthy men finding scholars as husbands for their daughters."
Shulevitz: "For thousands of years, he says [actually, since the beginning of the Diaspora -- about 2000 years], Jews have separated themselves from their neighbors, choosing to confine themselves to a closed society with strict rules against marrying outside the group. They have lived by policies of extreme group loyalty and obedience to rabbinical authority, which served to maintain their racial purity; and they practiced low-birth-rate [oftentimes Jewish birth rate has been quite high), high-investment parenting, which is the royal road to a high group I.Q. They conferred social status (which brings along with it the most desirable women) on men according to their brilliance--indeed, says MacDonald, study of the Talmud was nothing more than a casuistic exercise meant to weed out the dim. [Nonsense; that was one effect, but the Talmud also served as a legal code and much more. The less intelligent were not literally weeded out, but the intelligent were able to enter into better marriages and have more children; over time, this raised the mean Jewish IQ.] Eventually, their highly developed genes for mental and verbal acuity, as well as their social aggression (also carefully bred-in) [I never make such a claim], gave the Jews powerful tools that enable them to dominate neighboring ethnic groups in the endless war of all against all for food and resources. [At certain times and places they have dominated, but surely not always; I never talk about food.]
In his second book, MacDonald explains why Jews have encountered so much anti-Semitism for so many years: It was justified. [Such a statement has moral connotations that are completely inappropriate to my analysis.] Gentiles reacted to Jews the way any group of animals on the veldt would when confronted with a group of superior animals likely to challenge them successfully for control of the available resources--they tried to destroy the Jews before the Jews destroyed them. [This is an extremely crude rendering. My thesis is based on the mainstream view that part of our evolved psychology involves mechanisms designed to deal with between-group competition. However, I take pains to emphasize that human intelligence and our ability to monitor the behavior of other group members make us quite unlike other animals in several important ways. See Chapter 1 of A PEOPLE THAT SHALL DWELL ALONE.] Even the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism, such as Nazism, can be seen not as aberrations but as 'a mirror image' of Judaism, with its emphasis on creating a master race [I describe several ways in which Nazism was a mirror image of Judaism, including a powerful concern with socializing group members into accepting group goals and with the importance of within-group cooperation in attaining these goals. However, I also describe some differences.]
"(MacDonald does not deny that the Holocaust occurred, but he appears to think it was rooted in an immutable biological chain reaction that the Jews set off. [My theory emphasizes indeterminism and chance events that have major effects on history. I do not claim to have a theory of the Holocaust, only a theory of the general outlines of group competition with specific reference to anti-Semitism. A theory of the Holocaust would require a detailed understanding of the psychology of the major players (Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels) and their underlings who carried out their orders, their opportunities and constraints. I certainly do not have such a theory.) Faced with the hatred of gentiles, Jews have often resorted to a 'strategy of crypsis'--that is, they have pretended not to be Jews. [Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Jewish history would have to agree that Jewish crypsis is well attested in several times and places. This practice is very understandable given the prevalence of anti-Semitism. I describe a great many examples of crypsis and other strategies by which Jews have attempted to combat anti-Semitism in Chapter 6 of SEPARATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.] Do the Jews themselves realize what they're up to? MacDonald goes back and forth on this point; one moment he'll chastise Jews for believing their own religious rationalizations, the next he'll explain that they can't help it--they're genetically 'prone to self-deception.' [The importance of self-deception is well established among evolutionists. However, distinguishing between deception and self-deception is extremely difficult. My discussion is based on a lot of examples, and I think some at least are plausibly examples of self-deception while some may indeed simply involve deception. I provide examples of deception and self-deception among both Jews and anti-Semitic gentiles.]
"In his third book, MacDonald takes on what he calls the 'Jewish' intellectual movements of the 20th century, from psychoanalysis to Marxism to 'Boasian anthropology' and 'the Frankfurt School of social research.' His argument is that the ideas of secular Jewish intellectuals are merely a device to promote tolerance of the Jewish presence by gentiles--so that the Jews can more efficiently pursue their nefarious agenda of systematic breeding and control of resources [I would never use a word like 'nefarious' in this context. This is moralizing by Shulevitz]. A good example of this is cultural anthropology: Its Jewish founder, Franz Boas, shifted the focus of anthropology away from Darwinism and eugenicism and toward the study of culture in order to bring an end to the criticism of Jews as a race. [The Boasians were much more concerned to discredit the racialist ideas of Madison Grant and others which accorded the Nordic race a superior place in the evolutionary scheme. I argue that the Boasians were influenced by their ethnic identities as were Grant and his supporters. It is a commonplace that social science had WASPish overtones early in the century. Why should one be surprised that Jewish contributions reflected their ethic identity? In my view, individuals with strong group identities see the world through a prism colored by their perception of group interests.] Even if an intellectual movement (such as liberalism) was founded by non-Jews, the minute Jews join it, they'll take it over, because their ancestral history predisposes them to form 'highly cohesive groups': 'Intellectual activity is like any other human endeavor: Cohesive groups outcompete individualist strategies.' [Again, one must deal with the evidence that I have put together that in fact several important 20th-century intellectual movements were developed by people with strong Jewish identities pursuing perceived Jewish interests.] Ideas that MacDonald identifies as Jewish, he invariably finds to be not only subtly self-interested but also repellent by any ordinary (which is to say gentile) moral or intellectual standard. [Not true. Many gentiles -- including me -- became involved in these movements; we obviously found the ideas attractive.] Freud 'conceptualized himself as a leader in a war on gentile culture.' [There is a great deal of evidence for this. Shulevitz writes as if I am just pulling this out of a hat.] When Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed doubts about sociobiology back in the 1970s, their approach exemplified the kind of 'skeptical thrust of Jewish intellectual activity' that results in Jewish 'nihilistic anti-science.'
"Toward the end of the third book, MacDonald lays out his solution for restoring what he calls 'parity' between the Jews and other ethnic groups: systematic discrimination against Jews in college admission and employment and heavy taxation of Jews 'to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth.' [This is complete nonsense. I never advocate discrimination of any kind. The context was my discussion of Horace Kallen's idea of cultural pluralism (where every group maintains its ethnic identity, but, in Rodney King's words, we somehow "all just get along") versus the melting pot idea that most of us learned in high school (where each group sort of melted in, while still retaining some ties to the old ways in diet, religion, etc.). I argue that: (1) The data show groups differ in all sorts of performance (for whatever reason or mix of reasons); (2) like it or not, evolutionary theory says groups will attach particular significance to where they stand relative to other groups (hence the call for affirmative action programs, etc.). Then given (1) and (2), I predict (not advocate) that sooner or later the high levels of Jewish performance in certain areas will come to attention and there will be calls for the type of things Shulevitz insinuates I am advocating. I discuss the many Jewish notables (like Sydney Hook) who moved from the left to the libertarian right (i.e., neo-cons) because of their concern that affirmative action for minorities would eventually compromise Jewish interests. Jewish organizations have clearly seen that affirmative action is a slippery slope towards the old numerus clausus that kept qualified Jews out of the Ivy League, etc. That's why these organizations have opposed affirmative action.]
"It is not a coincidence that MacDonald spends much of his time in his third book attacking the enemies of Darwinism and sociobiology--or evolutionary psychology, as it is usually called today. MacDonald identifies himself as an evolutionary psychologist, and indeed, most prominent figures in the field would at least know his name. But, remarkably, to Culturebox's knowledge, no American evolutionary psychologist has publicly objected to his work. This is not to say that it has been celebrated. A man in his 50s, MacDonald is still an associate professor of psychology at a third-rate school, California State University in Long Beach. [Actually I have been a full professor for about five years now. (I got a late start because of my involvement in '60s radicalism.) I like to think of Cal. State Long Beach as a second rate institution. It's not quite UC-Berkeley, but it's pretty good. Whatever Shulevitz may think, there are many fine professors and students here. Many of the latter, including some of my master's degree students, have gone on to excellent Ph. D. Programs.] But much more important to an academic than his title is his standing among his peers, and there MacDonald is on firmer ground: He's the secretary, archivist, newsletter editor, and executive board member of the professional organization the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), to which the majority of America's leading evolutionary psychologists belong. He edits a small journal called 'Population and Environment.' And the three books summarized above appeared in a series edited by Seymour Iztkoff, a well-known if extremely conservative scholar of the genetics of intelligence at Smith College.
"Are MacDonald's peers aware of what he's writing in the name of a field long accused of fostering--unfairly, many of them would say; by Jews, MacDonald would say--sexist and racist stereotypes? Do other evolutionary psychologists have an opinion on MacDonald? Culturebox called several well-known members of HBES, specifying in her voice messages that she was writing an article about MacDonald. Few returned her phone calls, but those who did said they'd never read his Jewish trilogy. Two leading scholars said they had read papers of his on other subjects and found them 'muddled'; one academic said she had been forced to reject a paper by MacDonald on child development for an anthology she was editing. [The only thing muddled is Shulevitz's knowledge of the data and theory of evolutionary psychology and behavior genetics. Unlike many evolutionary psychologists, I believe not only in the importance of domain-specific mechanisms that evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. I am far from being alone in arguing that we have to go beyond an exclusive concern with domain-specificity to study the evolutionary importance of domain-general mechanisms like IQ. My colleagues with a background in both behavior genetics and evolutionary psychology (e.g., David Geary, David Rowe, Nancy Segal) agree with me on this. (I took my Ph. D. Under Benson Ginsburg, a prominent behavior geneticist, and did my Ph. D. dissertation on personality differences among wolves.) IQ is a central component of my analysis of Judaism, though many evolutionary psychologists avoid the topic. Nonetheless, I have published my views in highly reputable refereed journals in psychology.] When Culturebox described the contents of MacDonald's books to them, they expressed extreme shock and said he contradicted the basic principles of contemporary evolutionary psychology. 'The notion that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn't make it on the basis of modern population genetics,' said John Tooby, the president of HBES and a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. [Tooby perhaps has not read the relevant sections of my books. I summarize a great many population genetic studies showing that in fact there are genetic frequency differences between Jews and gentiles and that these differences have been maintained by Jewish marriage practices. I argue that Judaism represents a group strategy which is fairly (but not completely) closed to penetration from gentile gene pools. The data indicate that Jews have remained genetically distinct from the groups they have lived among despite having lived among them for centuries. In addition, Jewish populations in very diverse areas have significantly more genetic commonality than is the case between Jews and the gentile populations they have lived among for centuries. One of the most amazing recent studies shows that the Kohanim have preserved among themselves essentially the same Y-chromosome. I also show that Jews have placed a high premium on marrying within the group and have placed formidable barriers to prevent significant penetration of gentiles into their gene pool. I can't imagine why an evolutionist would be surprised by this.] Also, he said, "group-selection theory"--the idea that natural selection can occur at the level of a group (such as a bunch of Jews) as opposed to individuals--was debunked in the 1960s, and though some scholars are working to bring group-selection theory back, it remains a minority view. [Again, I doubt that Tooby has read my books. I clearly emphasize *cultural* group selection which has none of the theoretical difficulties associated with the form of group selection that was "debunked in the 1960s." My work is highly compatible with the work of theorists like David Sloan Wilson, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson. This perspective emphasizes the ability of human groups to monitor group members, prevent cheating, and enforce group goals -- in short to create a group evolutionary strategy.]"
Shulevitz concludes her review by stating that "it is the job of a scholarly association not just to foster discussion but also to police the boundaries of its discipline. When this evolutionary psychologist and HBES officer testifies in the Irving trial, he is bound to get his counterparts in a lot of trouble. In many ways, they deserve it."
Whatever Shulevitz may think of my work, I hope all HBES members and academics in general will agree that we are better sticking with peer review than being *policed* by Shulevitz or anyone else. My conscience is clear that I am in no way an anti-Semite and that in the long run my analysis of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy will be proved right in its essentials. SLATE, police thyself!
Second installment
Posted Thursday, Jan. 27, 2000, at 7:42 a.m.
Is Kevin MacDonald an anti-Semite with nauseating ideas or just a misunderstood evolutionary psychologist? If he's an anti-Semite, should the editor who published his scholarly work and the colleagues who welcomed him into their professional association be held partly responsible for his ideas?
MacDonald, a professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach, is about to testify in London on behalf of David Irving, a historian of World War II who is suing another historian over her charge that he is a Holocaust revisionist. In "Evolutionary Psychology's Anti-Semite," Culturebox gives a foretaste of MacDonald's testimony, drawing from books in which he argues 1) that Judaism is a conscious strategy of eugenicism designed to maximize Jewish intelligence, and 2) that anti-Semitism is therefore justified. In "On Fighting Bad Ideas," Culturebox argues that the association of evolutionary psychologists, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), of which MacDonald is the secretary, archivist, newsletter editor, and executive board member, should never have let him get as far as he has without refuting him.
MacDonald disagrees strongly with Culturebox, as do several evolutionary psychologists who feel it is unfair of Culturebox to call them to account for someone else's ideas. Click here to read MacDonald's letter to Culturebox in The Fray. Click here to read Culturebox's reply. Other notable contributors to The Fray include MacDonald reviewer John Hartung, group selection theorist David Sloan Wilson, John Horgan (author of The Undiscovered Mind), and Steven Pinker (author of How the Mind Works and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language).
Tune in next week for the continuation of the debate in a Slate Dialogue between Culturebox and HBES president John Tooby.
===================
See: <http://slate.msn.com/Code/Culturebox/>
Third Installment:
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2000, at 4:38
p.m.
Was Culturebox calling for censorship yesterday when she said she blamed the professional organization where Kevin MacDonald holds several executive positions, as well as the series editor who oversaw publication of his books, for his anti-Semitic ideas? How could Culturebox hold the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) in particular and evolutionary psychologists in general responsible for the theories of a single man? Isn't she just being a wooly-headed liberal, scrounging around for ways to condemn a discipline prone to express politically incorrect ideas?
One at a time, ladies and gentlemen.
Several posters in The Fray as well as the editor in question, Seymour Itzkoff, believed that Culturebox stopped just short of calling for a gag order. "I'm not the series approver or disapprover of the particular ideas of the writers," Itzkoff told her. "I make a decision about whether the person's work is qualified for publication." Indeed, says Itzkoff, the nonsense quotient in the books could have been higher. "I was instrumental in having him rewrite a number of passages, because I said to the people at Greenwood [Publishing Group] that these would destroy his book--they were so beyond the pale in terms of factuality. But I couldn't censor or ask that he rewrite everything."
Not wanting to be seen as a censor is the defense of nearly everyone who has helped MacDonald make his upward climb toward respectability. As it happens, censorship wasn't an issue with the first volume of MacDonald's trilogy, because Itzkoff thought highly of it (that's the book in which MacDonald calls Judaism a "group evolutionary strategy" masquerading as a religion in order to hide its true purpose--to maximize intelligence and give Jews an advantage in the competition for resources). But even if he'd hated the book, says Itzkoff, it wasn't his job to pass judgment on its contents--merely on whether it merited publication. Iztkoff didn't think nearly as well of MacDonald's work in Volumes 2 and 3 (in which he argues that anti-Semitism is justified and exposes what he feels to be the Jewish agenda behind 20th-century intellectual movements), but by then Itzkoff felt that MacDonald had "the right to publish it."
Culturebox isn't buying it. Itzkoff is not the editor of a scholarly journal. He has not been asked (as such editors are) to toss as many explosive subjects as possible into the public domain, as long as they meet some minimum standard. Nor can he offer a letters page for debate. He is not the editor of Oxford or Cambridge University Press, both of whom publish vast quantities of books, making the task somewhat similar to that of a journal editor, although without the forum for debate. Itzkoff is the named editor of a small series of scholarly books. His name is cited on the title page specifically to guarantee the quality of the work. Under those circumstances, his judgment as to whether the work is "qualified for publication" is tantamount to saying that he endorses its conclusions.
Moreover, the only institution that owes MacDonald "the right to publish" is the government, under the First Amendment. Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, etc.
As for blaming HBES in particular and evolutionary psychologists in general: Culturebox was mistaken to rap the officers' knuckles for letting MacDonald hold executive positions--he was elected to them, not appointed. That may reflect poorly on the membership, but it can't be pinned on the officers. And perhaps she should have given HBES a chance to explain that it has long embraced an ethos of open expression--until recently, all papers submitted to the annual HBES conference were accepted without peer review. (According to founding member Leda Cosmides, back when the group was formed in 1989, this seemed the best way to combat the censorious hostility directed at most people working in evolutionary psychology at the time.) But Culturebox doesn't think being inclusive gets HBES off the hook. On the contrary--accepting papers without peer review is an abdication of scholarly responsibility under the best of circumstances and a poor idea for an association of evolutionary psychologists, whose discipline is notorious for attracting cranks.
HBES president John Tooby tells Culturebox that he and other HBES members did not fail to be alarmed by MacDonald's ideas. When a positive review of MacDonald's work appeared in a journal about to be acquired by HBES, Tooby and others thought about sitting down and writing a letter objecting to both the work and the review. In the end, however, they decided not to. They didn't want to give MacDonald and his reviewer any more attention than they had received already.
Culturebox would reply that if you're going to take the unusual step of welcoming all ideas, you can't proceed to ignore the bad ones. You have to be prepared to do battle against them. That is (or ought to be) the duty of anyone who has staked his or her professional reputation on one particular scientific approach or methodology. And giving publicity to bad ideas isn't itself necessarily a bad idea. After all, if you draw attention a bad idea by refuting it, you also put your refutation on record.
Here's what Culturebox has to say to all the evolutionary psychologists who feel that Culturebox has smeared them by association with a man she considers an anti-Semite: If he's going to lay claim to your methodology and benefit from your systems of legitimation, it's up to you to distinguish yourself from him. The MacDonalds of the world won't go away just because you think they're not worth responding to. Where they'll go is wherever as many people as possible will hear them. And there they will brag--as MacDonald has done in a response to Culturebox coming soon to The Fray, and as he probably will in a British court some time in the next few months--"I have published my views in highly reputable refereed journals in psychology."
Note for all of you who have stuck with this endless New York Review of Books-style refutation and have yet to flee screaming: Culturebox will be responding to MacDonald's post in The Fray--in The Fray. She hereby promises to keep Culturebox itself MacDonald-free--at least for the time being.
++++++++++++++++++
The Start of Pack Hunting
In the past few days, on a variety of lists devoted to issues in evolutionary psychology and human biocultural diversity, several prominent scholars have gone on record as being "revolted" by MacD's (mis)use of evolutionary theory. Beyond this, one of the current officers of the Human Behavior & Evolution Society has written stressing that MacD's views in no way reflect the views of the vast majority of the Society and explained that allowing MacD to use the Society's meetings as a platform to profess his views is just part of the ugliness one has to put up with if one wants to allow a free discussion of ideas. Moreover, the Editor of the series in which MacD's books were published ("Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence") has written that he had to strongly suggest the correction of some factual errors while editing the first book and that he disagrees with the last two books, but published them so as to provide food for thought.
In short, there has been a sudden and dramatic shift from scientists generally ignoring MacD's work, rife as it is with factual misrepresentations and a thinly veiled political agenda, as not being worth the time & effort to critique to a position where many now feel it's time to actively distance themselves from his position. Whether this will make any difference at all is open to question. I have engaged in on-list debate with MacD both here and elsewhere, the ultimate resolution (in his mind) is that "of course, you cannot understand the argument because you're Jewish and inherently deluded." So I wouldn't get my hopes up.
-Ken Jacobs UdeMontreal
List: [email protected]
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 08:43:43 -0600
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