A review of The Culture of Critique from September 2011.

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Posted in response to a request from Mark from Melbourne.  This review of the third of Kevin MacDonald's trilogy disappeared when Amazon stopped carrying all three books sometime back.

Other Gentile authors such as Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn have also been disappeared. His 200 Years Together is readily available in Russian and French, but Columbus Falco's English translation entitled The Crucifixion of Russia remained available from Amazon for only a couple of years.

On the other hand, Jewish authors such as Norman Finkelstein, Yuri Slezkine and Robert Wistrich, to name three off the top of my head, remain available despite offering more pointed criticisms than McDonald's. Go figure

The thrill of the forbidden, like reading Henry Miller in the 1950s

McDonald's work is important if only because so many people vehemently tell you that you should not read it. Anything that instills that much fear among the intelligentsia, who generally seem quite capable of taking care of themselves, deserves your attention.

McDonald calls himself an evolutionary psychologist. I had never heard of one before, and I think he may have invented the field. His basic thesis seems unassailable. Just as species compete with each other within ecological niches, cultures compete with one another within geographies occupied by humans. An obvious example would be the Roma in Europe.  Sarkozy recently kicked him out of France for the same reason they get kicked out periodically from almost every other country. They are regarded as a nuisance; they do not produce anything except perhaps entertainment, and they parasitically cheat and steal and siphon welfare from the state. The dominant society tolerates them until they become too numerous, and then reacts by ejecting them.

McDonald examines the relationship between the Jews and their host societies, especially in this book 20th-century America. Individuals in America compete for scarce resources now just as since the dawn of civilization. We compete for money, power, beach frontage in the Hamptons and placement at Harvard.

Moreover, just as our forefathers did, we compete on a tribal basis. Each tribe has its own mechanisms for furthering its own interests. Here is where McDonald has an interesting theory as to the difference between Jews and white Gentiles in the United States. His thesis is that Gentiles evolved highly altruistic societies, which favored their expansion in northern Europe where intertribal conflicts were less of a threat to survival than harsh nature. We developed altruistic genes. For a more thorough analysis, read Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Mothers and Others,” which I also review. He theorizes that the Gentiles developed a generalized altruism.

McDonald theorizes that the Jewish people evolved in an environment in which intertribal conflicts were a greater existential threat, first in the Levantine deserts and then as a minority people in the diaspora. Their altruism is confined to members of their own tribe, the interests of which they resolutely promote. He proposes that consciously or not, the Jews have promoted social agendas in the 20th century which were inimical to the interests of the previously dominant white gentile population. Specifically, they have weakened and ridiculed the Christian religion in every public domain, advanced feminism and homosexuality, which interfere with the white Christian population’s ability to reproduce itself, and championed immigration, both legal and illegal, whereby the voting power of the white Christian population is diluted. He notes that the Jews have been extraordinarily active in supporting black interests, through which they diminish the relative power of white Christians.

This is his third book on Jewish themes, and he responds to some of the intense criticism he has taken from the American intelligentsia. He points out how hypocritical it is for the Jews to mount such an intensive attack on Christian dominance in the United States when they unashamedly promote a similar Jewish dominance over Arabs in Israel. He points out that there were no Jews in Israel as recently as a century and a half ago, and that the native Palestinians disappeared through a process of ethnic cleansing.

These arguments are certainly worthy of discussion in any free intellectual climate. One senses, even from reading other reviews of this book, that the calumny confronting McDonald consists largely of extravagant emotional smokescreens put up in lieu of solid arguments. In other words, the frantic nature and the weakness of the opposition arguments would lead you to believe that he is onto something. 

I will close in noting something that McDonald fails to consider. Whether or not driven by cultural competition, the modern notions which is so crippled the white Christian majority's ability to reproduce itself, including feminism, promotion of homosexuality, dilution via immigration, and reducing the ability to raise children by taxing responsible parents to the point that they feel they cannot afford children, affect Jews as much as Christians. Whereas the WASP minority is not producing children that the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, Jews in America are doing even worse. Jews are conspicuously at the forefront of feminism and gay organizations, and they are simply not having children. Those whom they do raise are extraordinarily frequently adoptees, and those children simply do not for the most part grow up to be good Jews. It is not in their genes.  One would at least conclude that the Jews are not acting out of informed self-interest.