Review of A People That Shall Dwell Alone, by Kevin MacDonald.

This review of the first of Kevin MacDonald's trilogy was written in October 2011. It obviously disappeared when Amazon chose to stop selling all three books.  It is supremely ironic that the tribe that initiated anthropology as an academic discipline is so hostile when they themselves are the subject of analysis. I am posting this in response to requests by Mark from Melbourne.

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, remained available despite offering more pointed criticisms than McDonald's. Go figure

Great scholarship on a sensitive subject from an unexpected quarter – a “good old boy”

MacDonald opens his second edition with a description of several other Diaspora peoples: the Gypsies or Roma, the overseas Chinese, Calvinists and Puritans, Anabaptists, Amish and Hutterites. He describes the mechanisms by which they maintain or maintained a unique identity within a larger society, the social niches that each of them fill, the in group – outgroup mentality that each of the maintain, and the mutual support mechanisms they have evolved whereby the members of the in group take care of one another and often exploit or parasitize the outgroup. This is a valuable background for an analysis of the Jews. It establishes some commonalities among human evolutionary groups, and also leads to some conclusions about the uniqueness of the Jews.

The Gypsies have a reproductive strategy that includes large families and low investment in education. They prize the highly extroverted, aggressive temperament which is useful in gulling the gadje, the host society. They actively discourage intermarriage and even socialization with the gadje.

The Puritans and Calvinists no longer exist as evolutionary units. They thrived for a while couple of centuries ago, but their distinct identity dissolved as their religious convictions became diluted and they intermarried with the surrounding society. Today, Presbyterians and Methodists are no different than anybody else in society.

The Amish and Hutterites maintain their own identities in their own communities. Physical separation and endogamy have maintained them as separate evolutionary entities. They have benign relations with their host societies. They want to be left alone. To that end they go out of their way to be good neighbors to those of the host society who live close to them, but they generally minimize trade and other connections and avoid going into commerce. Their strategy is self-sufficiency.

The overseas Chinese marry among themselves when they can, but have not been reluctant to intermarry with local peoples. Unlike the Jews, they have generally kept a very low profile in host nation politics. Again unlike the Jews, they have been quite ready to abandon Chinese language publications and names in their attempt to blend in with their host societies. Their situation has been different than that of the Jews in that China as an ancestral motherland has existed throughout the duration of their Diaspora.

McDonald says that Jews are unique in that they have been a separate evolutionary group for perhaps three millennia, since their sojourn in Egypt, far longer than any of the above-mentioned. MacDonald's thesis is that the Jews’ evolutionary strategy involves eugenic considerations – arranged marriages that enhance the likelihood of highly intelligent offspring, and a society which shuns members who do not enthusiastically support the collective mission. They invest highly in their children's education.

A hard question which has confronted society throughout history is whether Jews are a tribe or race, or merely a religion. Mac Donald quite conclusively demonstrates that they are a genetic entity, an evolutionary unit. Throughout their history they have practiced endogamous and even consanguineous marriages. That is to say that the Rothschilds, the Goldmans and the Sachs married each other's nieces and cousins at an astoundingly high rate. Moreover, the Jews are keenly attuned to ancestry and have very often refused consideration of marriage partners who don't have a totally Jewish pedigree. Also, Jews almost never proselytize. They make it difficult to join the religion and converts to Judaism, as well as many generations of their descendents, have often been kept on its periphery.  The result is that Jewish DNA is demonstrably different from that of all of the host peoples among whom they dwell, and in general Jews from any part of the world are more closely related to one another than they are to their gentile neighbors.

McDonald's thesis flies in the face of a standard part of the groupthink on a modern college campus, the Standard Social Science Model. It is the theory first articulated by doctors Skinner and Watson at Harvard in the 1930s that all humans are born with the same potential; only our environment and upbringing differentiates us from one another. The corollaries of this hypothesis are that there are no group differences in ability or temperament.

Jewish scholars have been at the forefront of advocating such theory. Franz Boaz and the American anthropological Association state as much on their website. MacDonald documents the ways in which this stand, although it is incompatible with almost all scientific research, serves the interests of the Jews. It deflects attention away from the Jews’ uniqueness as a people, and the intelligence and tribal loyalties which make them such formidable competitors against their gentile hosts. It provides the intellectual foundation for the Jews’ championing the rights of other minorities, such as blacks and Hispanics, at the expense of the white Gentile majority. If one assumes that there are no genetic differences among populations, then prejudice and discrimination offers the only explanation for blacks’ and Hispanics’ failure to achieve rates of success equivalent to those of the white majority. McDonald observes that Jews have been at the forefront of movements making this claim. The effect has been to dilute white power and to make it impossible for the gentile population to use commonsense defenses to justify disproportionate representation in organizations such as teaching staffs and fire departments.

The "old boys network" is one of the canards often thrown at white people, frequently in the same breath as the "oh poor us, victims of anti-Semitism"complaint.  MacDonald's career is a perfect illustration of the power of the old boy network. None whatsoever!  He came up from a working-class neighborhood in the Midwest and attended state universities in the Midwest. He published rather extensively at second tier universities such as the University of Connecticut and Urbana-Champaign, after which he moved to California State University at Long Beach where he became a full professor after 10 years. In short, he came up by his bootstraps. Meanwhile, others who benefited by tribal affiliation quickly rose to the heights in Ivy League institutions, from which they now scornfully pour down contempt and abuse.

To put it briefly, the supposed old boy network did him no good whatsoever. His professional associations with that lonely band who attempt to perform scholarly work in forbidden fields (read about his associations on Wikipedia) lead to contempt and derision from organizations such as the Southern poverty Law Center which hold themselves out as being far holier than a guy like MacDonald but which in fact are highly biased and politicized.  He is not alone; any white gentile who questions why our group is singled out to bear the blame for all of humanity’s incivility likewise comes under withering scorn.

Congratulations to Mister MacDonald for having the courage to pursue such an unpopular course of study. I am sure that further research will refine his opinions, and may well reverse some of them. The important thing is the validity of the inquiry itself. He has established the legitimacy of asking questions about what makes Jews unique.