It is no more news to me that Sam G. Dickson is not a fan of the Jews (or of me), than that Kevin MacDonald is not about to convert.
However, this speech was recently send to me by the legendary scholar Joel LeFevre, following a long telephone conversation we had. I always try to post anything Joel sends me. He sent me some more important work that night, an extensive report on the communism of Ralph Bunche, however, that 52-page report is in a pdf that I could not post. Thus, my posting of this speech is really a matter of buying time and good will from Joel, until I can either transcribe or otherwise publish the Bunche report.
Dickson writes,
“The thesis promoted by the literature of philo-Semitica—and this thesis is the reigning orthodoxy of the establishment in our country and every other European country—is quite simple. That thesis is that blame for the bitter history of the relationship of Jews and Europeans lies 100% on the side of the non-Jews, that Jews are an utterly blameless people (‘the most innocent people in history’ according to Eli Wiesel), that non-Jews hate and persecute Jews for absolutely no reason whatsoever except the intrinsic wickedness and evil of Gentiles, that no action or behavior on the part of the Jews has ever contributed in the slightest way to the unhappy relationship so often found between Jews and Gentiles.Dickson’s mockery notwithstanding, the explanation for the history of gentile anti-Semitism is very simple: The Jews long ago lost their ancestral homeland to the Romans, who sent them hurtling among gentile peoples who greatly outnumbered them.
“This is their explanation of why for a period of twenty-five centuries or more Jews have often been the targets of hatred, anger, pogroms and expulsions at the hands of every people amongst whom Jews have lived…”
When one must live among strangers who greatly outnumber one, unless one has powerful allies, the strangers will make one suffer greatly.
Such is the history of genocide, which is hardly limited to the Jews.
The short version runs three words: Because they could.
“Intellectually intrepid? Surely few scholars have demonstrated this quality as strongly as Dr. MacDonald…”
Everyone with half an education—black supremacists, racial socialists, Nazis, my friends, et al., says his friends are “intellectually intrepid,” “courageous,” whatever.
As for Kevin MacDonald, I dealt with him years ago, in “Kevin MacDonald: The Jews are Our Misfortune!”
See also: “Seiyo Scores First Round KO over MacDonald”; and
Kevin MacDonald: “Comments on Takuan Seiyo’s Screed.”
Introduction of Professor Kevin MacDonald
By Sam G. Dickson
October 31, 2004
[On the occasion of Prof. MacDonald’s acceptance of the 2004 Jack London Literary Prize]
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We are gathered tonight to honor Dr. Kevin MacDonald. It is an honor for me and I am sure you “second that emotion” to honor him and to be here in his company.
On the way to this dinner I tried to elicit some personal and professional information from Dr. MacDonald. Alas, he is by nature private and excessively modest, an occupational hazard among our people, who have not learned the wisdom of the old proverb, “Brass will drive out gold.”
Here are some of the dry facts I managed to wring from this overly modest man: Dr. Kevin MacDonald earned his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of three books on childhood development.
He has published over 100 papers in scholarly journals. He currently teaches in the Psychology Department of the University of California at Long Beach. Those are the dry facts which, while impressive, tell us nothing of why we are here to honor him.
If ever there existed a writer and scholar who not only merited the Jack London Literary Prize, but personifies the criteria for this award, it is our honoree tonight.
Here are some of the criteria: intellectually intrepid, reflecting the timeless values of our western civilization and so on.
Intellectually intrepid? Surely few scholars have demonstrated this quality as strongly as Dr. MacDonald in the three-volume set of his works on what has to be the most controversial, most delicate and most timely topic in our society today.
Timeless western values? One of those values, a characteristic which has from earliest times set our people apart from the other races on the planet, is objectivity—the ability to observe nature, things and events dispassionately and clearly; a regard for truth as an ultimate reality.
This trait is evident as early as Plato and extends from the antiquity of Greece down into the science laboratories of our own times. Sometimes our objectivity has been counterproductive and has hobbled us in the struggle for survival and turf on this globe. Nevertheless, this quality has enabled us to make scientific advances, which are the wonder of history and the envy of other races. And the objectivity, the clarity, the restraint which permeate Dr. MacDonald’s trilogy may enable large numbers of people to think sensibly and fairly for the first time about the topic. And a large readership among thoughtful people may help hugely to further the survival of our people and its civilization.
Is there any other issue so urgent, so difficult as this issue? Alexander Solzhenitsyn recently published a book on the history of the relationship between Russians and Jews entitled Two Centuries Together. To say the least Two Centuries Together did not meet with the approval of America’s philo-Semites. It also did not suit the anti-Semites. Solzhenitsyn for obvious reasons of his own nationality and the necessity of limiting the scope of his book to a manageable size focused on the history of the dealings between Russians and Jews over the last two centuries.
But the unhappinesses, strains, stresses and difficulties we find detailed in Two Centuries Together are not restricted in space or time. Indeed, we might entitle Dr. MacDonald’s trilogy on the Jewish people as Two and Half Millennia Together.
The topic is one with a sizeable literature.
We have a reasonably large trove of literature dealing with the Jewish-Gentile divide from the Gentile/Christian side of the aisle. Most of this would be characterized by the mores and tastes of our society as “anti-Semitica.” The size and extent of the literature of those hostile to the Jews is rather large, even if—in our “free” society—such literature is “not available in stores” and can be found only in the samisdat press. (Samisdat is Russian for “self-published” and was the term used for underground, anti-party literature in the late and unlamented Soviet Union.)
Unfortunately, setting aside the matter of the general unavailability of anti-Semitica, most of such books are characterized by a tone so hateful and polemical as to impair their usefulness.
There are exceptions now and then such as the book by the Roman Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, entitled simply The Jews, and Anti-Semitism by Bernard Lazare, himself a Jew. But such thoughtful and restrained books are rare to the point of being almost non-existent. In contrast to “anti-Semitica” the literature on the issue from the Jewish perspective is overwhelming in size and in distribution. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of books; a veritable unending river of articles in newspapers, magazines and journals as well as incessant Hollywood movies have been produced setting forth the Jewish or philo-Semitic explanations of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews.
Furthermore, not only are such works generally available in our society, they are virtually forced upon us.
One thinks of the books which appear at regular periods funded by groups like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith which achieve massive distribution by being first offered for sale and widely promoted, then remaindered and finally inserted by gift into practically every library in America including every high school, college and municipal library.
Examples of such books spring readily to mind: Undercover and The Plotters by Roy Carlson, The Troublemakers, Danger on the Right, The Paranoid Style and so on.
The thesis promoted by the literature of philo-Semitica—and this thesis is the reigning orthodoxy of the establishment in our country and every other European country—is quite simple. That thesis is that blame for the bitter history of the relationship of Jews and Europeans lies 100% on the side of the non-Jews, that Jews are an utterly blameless people (“the most innocent people in history” according to Eli Wiesel), that non-Jews hate and persecute Jews for absolutely no reason whatsoever except the intrinsic wickedness and evil of Gentiles, that no action or behavior on the part of the Jews has ever contributed in the slightest way to the unhappy relationship so often found between Jews and Gentiles.
This is their explanation of why for a period of twenty-five centuries or more Jews have often been the targets of hatred, anger, pogroms and expulsions at the hands of every people amongst whom Jews have lived from the Greeks and Romans of the pre-Christian era of antiquity through all subsequent time throughout all of Europe including virtually every nation of Christian Europe such as the England of Edward II, the Spain of 1492, Poland, the Germany of relatively modern times and Russia.
Everybody but the Jew is out of step.
Such an “explanation” can only be characterized as a libel on humanity. This silly, one-sided, biased and intrinsically impossible thesis is promoted by authority in our society, accepted by the vast majority of people, and those who dissent from it are frequently the targets of official and semi-official harassment and persecution. Indeed, as Joe Sobran once trenchantly observed, we don’t even have a vocabulary with which to deal with this subject—and other such subjects. We have the word “anti-Semitism” to describe the hatred of the Gentile for the Jew but no word exists in our language for the hatred of the Jew for the Christian.
As I said before, there is virtually a void of sensible, restrained literature on the subject.
And into that void has stridden our intrepid and clear-reasoned honoree, Dr. Kevin MacDonald.
And at the most appropriate and suitable time of our post-September 11 world.
Indeed, one may wonder if it were not said correctly that “the hour and the man have met”—or should we say “the hour and the scholar”? For three generations our country’s infatuation with the State of Israel and its role as the enabler of Zionist brutality against the Arab world provoked hatred and rage.
Over and over again we have witnessed the spectacle of the votes in the United Nations condemning some latest Israeli outrage—votes in which the entire world, even including Britain and the Western European countries, has voted to condemn. And only two—the United States and Israel—have voted to condone such atrocities.
Was it a surprise when after almost 60 years of such events the United States became the target of Arab terrorists, as we were warned by so many people including among them the late Alfred Lillienthal, himself a Jew? But immediately the “leaders” of the American people assured us that despite the clear statements of the terrorists themselves, we were attacked because “they hate our freedom.”
No, we all know better.
The 3,000 or so Americans who died in the twin towers in New York died precisely because of our support of Israel, no matter how atrocious its behavior.
Despite the damage control efforts on this subject, the terrorist attack and the present situation will eventually force some degree of consideration of this issue from a vantage point other than the silly, preposterous “everyone is to blame but the Jews” theory.
And that is why the appearance of Dr. MacDonald’s trilogy could not be more timely, allowing its readers to look at the history of our Two Thousand Five Hundred Years Together objectively.
The core of those three volumes can be concisely stated by the observation that the key to Jewish survival throughout the long history of their diaspora is that they are—and must remain—adversarial to any society in which they live.
Jews are not the only minority ever to be distributed broadly through the world.
The French Huguenots were spread throughout Holland, Britain, Germany and America—most notably in South Carolina where my own ancestors came. In South Carolina they arrived speaking an alien language, following a Protestant religion with significant differences from the prevailing Anglican Church and as members of a nation which had been the historic enemy of the English for centuries.
Within three generations the French Huguenots were extinct, totally absorbed and assimilated, their existence lingering on only in an occasional peculiar French name like my father’s name “Bonneau.”
Why is this so?
For the obvious reason that the French Huguenots were in a fundamental way not adversarial to the society in which they lived. If the Jews ever ceased being adversarial, they would cease to exist. And as Dr. MacDonald’s works show, is it unnatural that the non-Jews in the community who as individuals or whose values, churches and institutions are the subjects of that adversarial attitude (the “culture of critique”) resent and are provoked by such an attitude and what comes with it? This fresh and fair approach allows all involved—Jew as well as Gentile—to view the relationship of Jew and Gentile in a new light, and a light which may promise some way of answering these problems sensibly and humanely.
This introduction has gone on long enough.
Let it be said that my remarks are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our honoree Dr. Kevin MacDonald, nor of the organizers of this event and The Occidental Quarterly. Ladies and gentlemen, we have gathered as adult people, as fair and just people, as people not motivated by hatred or the desire to hurt others, to deal with a topic which needs adult attention. All over the Washington area here are stores offering “adult” literature, literature which was once regarded as controversial but which now enjoys widespread acceptance in our society. Well, we are honoring here tonight real adult literature, works which are helpful to adult people, meeting together as adults, seeking adult solutions to matters of concern to adults.
Alas, most of our society seems more interested in childish treatments of this explosive subject.
Leave them to their “Dick-and-Jane” theories they read in The New York Times and elsewhere.
We will deal with this issue as grown-ups.
As Saint Paul said the time has come to put aside childish things and to think like men.
And let us now show our appreciation to someone who thinks like a man and has a man’s guts to stand behind the truth even at great cost: the distinguished and worthy recipient of the Jack London Literary Prize, Dr. Kevin MacDonald.
# # #
Mr. Dickson’s remarks were preceded by an introduction by Dr. Virginia Abernethy. [N.S.: Unfortunately, Virginia Abernethy’s Web site is no longer working.]
Prof. MacDonald delivered his acceptance speech on Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?
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