I’m watching this “A Football Life” documentary on running back Marcus Allen and near the end, Marcus’s dad says: “I still can’t figure this out. For 11 years he played for the Raiders, I was the only father in that locker room.”
Hmm, I wonder what is going on? Perhaps it is part and parcel of the phenomenon that few men in prison celebrate Father’s Day.
The protagonist in this John Updike novel, Roger, a divinity professor, wants to bed Verna, the single-mother daughter of his half-sister. Roger convinces her to get an abortion.
Adam Begley writes in his biography of John Updike:
In the dingy anteroom, surveying the other “prospective mothers,” he spots a black girl with wet cheeks and an otherwise impassive face, “an African mask, her lips and jaw majestically protruding.” Later, seeing that her tears have dried, he marvels at this “princess of a race that travels from cradle to grave at the expense of the state, like the aristocrats of old.”
When I ask people who knew me as an infant what my personality was like, they mention how easily and loudly I would cry. I think that growing up in foster care, I had to wail sometimes to get attention and so I developed my histrionic attention-seeking personality as a reaction.
Dr. Daniel Siegel writes: Later, while at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, [Mary] Ainsworth tested her ideas about attachment patterns by putting in 47 hours of painstaking observation with each mother-child pair in her study. She found that when caregivers promptly and effectively responded to young infants’ cries, the babies cried less by the end of the first year. The securely attached children had learned that their caregivers were reliable and therefore subtler expressions of their distress and needs would generate responses-they didn’t need to be crybabies to get the attention they sought. Infants who develop confidence in their caregivers are securely attached because their caregivers have proven to be reliable.
…Bowlby’s theory suggested that not only would these relationships provide the foundation for personality development, but they’d do so by affecting the child’s capacity for emotional regulation and the formation of mental representations of self and others. For example, a child who’s been rejected is likely to
interpret the behavior of others as rejecting and behave in ways that lead to further rejection, continuing the pattern. However, the theory also states that such behaviors are subject to change, especially given fundamental changes in relationship support. If others are supportive, despite off-putting behavior, a child’s worldview and behavior may change. Further, early experience isn’t erased, but retains its potential to impact later developmental
stages.
LUKE: Boy, does this speak to me. Growing up in foster care, I knew frequent rejection and so by my earliest memories, I had adopted behavior that would lead others to reject me. I’ve been able to moderate that behavior when connected to supportive friends, but when I isolate, I become increasingly weird and off-putting.
The blogger Jayman wrote: “The transmission of misery or bliss in a family is entirely due to shared genes, just like most everything else.”
Rex responds: “But what about religion? Most people take their religion from their parents. Is it totally irrelevant whether a child is brought up Muslim, Scientologist, Jain or Jewish?”
Jayman responds:
To the incredulous commenters above, yes, I realize the idea that parenting has no lasting impact on children’s outcomes is a tough pill to swallow, one that you might say defies common sense and experience. But, as I said in one of my recent tweets, science does occasionally produce counter-intuitive results. Indeed, if it did not – if it always confirmed our naive intuitions – we wouldn’t have to do science.
The case for the non-existence of lasting parental effects is borne out of overwhelming evidence. I review a good bit of it in the following two posts:
The Son Becomes The Father | JayMan’s Blog
and
More Behavioral Genetic Facts | JayMan’s Blog
To be clear: I’m not talking just some broad nebulous personality traits, or even IQ. I mean all the stuff that “really matters” – all the stuff where you’d expect parental treatment, lessons, and examples to “make a difference” , including:
Political/societal views, attitudes, and values
Religiosity
Criminality
Psychopathology (mental problems, like anxiety disorders, depression, ADD, etc.)
Marital stability/divorce risk
Promiscuity
Substance abuse
Income
Mate choice
Adult life satisfaction (happiness)Each one of these is backed by gigantic studies as discussed in the above posts. These studies span the Western world, as well as East Asia. Parents have an important task in keep their kids healthy and safe. But most of the parental efforts, beyond that which is devoted to this end (which itself was NOT any small job in the past, let’s not forget) or to pass on knowledge merely serves the end of bringing joy to parents and children. In other words, the things parents do for children should be enjoyed for their own sake.
Hmm. Over the past six months, I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying the work of UCLA psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel (who is best known for promoting mindfulness to achieve secure attachment). I’ve Googled him and read all the negative reviews of his books and I can’t find any significant debunking. Still, I want to be sure I am not studying nonsense.
I find this essay fascinating:
Five hundred people sat in a packed workshop at the Networker Symposium last March, listening to eminent developmental psychologist and researcher Jerome Kagan draw on more than four decades of research he’s conducted as he discussed the clinical relevance of inborn temperament. Midway through the session, responding to a question from the audience, he tried to clarify an earlier, seemingly disparaging, comment he’d made about attachment theory. But he soon removed any possible doubt about where he stood. “I’m glad that attachment theory is dead,” he said. “I never thought it would go anywhere.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by a low hum as people shifted in their seats and murmured to each other. Whatever their imperfect understanding of the voluminous research literature of attachment theory, for most therapists in the room, the idea that the early emotional attunement of a mother/caregiver (or lack of it) profoundly affects the child’s psychological development was as self-evident as the worthiness of therapy itself. Indeed, during the last 15 to 20 years, attachment theory has exerted more influence in the field of psychotherapy than just about any other model, approach, or movement. Though not a clinical methodology, it has justified a whole range of therapeutic perspectives and practices. Among them are a particular sensitivity to the role of traumatic or neglectful ties with early caregivers; the fundamental importance of affect regulation to successful therapy; the importance of establishing relationships with clients characterized by close, intense, emotional, and physical attunement; and the ultimate goal of recreating in therapy an attachment experience that makes up, at least to some degree, for what the client missed the first time around. That attachment theory itself has amassed a vast body of empirical evidence (see p.34) is often taken, by extension, to cast a glow of scientific credibility on attachment-based therapy. So when Kagan delivered his offhand rebuke, he was raising fundamental questions about the evidence supporting findings that most therapists there considered not just theory, but well-established fact.
Suddenly, in the wordless void that followed Kagan’s bombshell, psychiatrist, brain researcher, and staunch attachment theory proponent Daniel Siegel popped out of his seat, looked for a floor microphone to respond, and, finding none, strode up the center aisle and bounded onto the
stage. As a startled Kagan looked on and the entire ballroom audience sat dumbfounded, Siegel, the conference keynote speaker from that morning, asked for a microphone and announced: “I can’t let this audience listen to your argument without hearing the other side. Have you actually read the attachment research?” he demanded of his colleague.
There followed a heated, impromptu debate between the two men that later became the talk of the conference. Part of the buzz was because it was a disagreement between two stars—Jerome Kagan, arguably the most revered developmental psychologist in the world, and Daniel Siegel, one of the most influential thinkers and teachers in the field of psychotherapy today. Each brought to bear both an impressive resume and passionately held convictions on the age-old question about human development: which counts more—nature or nurture? Beyond its sheer drama, two things stood out about this spontaneous encounter—the surprise that a discussion of research findings could generate such intellectual fervor at a psychotherapy conference and, for the majority of the audience, the shock that there was any debate at all about the role of early experience in human development. It was as if a leading biologist had gotten up at a professional conference to denounce germ theory.
…psychologist and sex therapist David Schnarch suggests that it can keep adult couples stuck in the role of perpetually needy children. Author of the bestselling Passionate Marriage and several other books, and founder of a tough-minded, differentiation-based approach to couples’ counseling, Schnarch believes that relationship failure stems not from lack of emotional connection between partners—the focus of attachment-based therapy—but too much of the wrong kind. Partners become enmeshed, lose a sense of selfhood, and depend on positive reinforcement and reassurance from each other because they can’t soothe their own anxieties, and then have relationship difficulties when both demand validation from theother but neither will give it. Each partner needs, in effect, to grow up, learn to tolerate anxiety, and take charge of him- or herself before they can fully connect with the other.
Schnarch says that couples come to see him on the brink of divorce, whose own therapists told them not to see him, since they needed to attach before they could differentiate. This is exactly backward, he says. “Adults don’t need to go back and attach—that is not the right approach and just reinforces weakness, fragility, and dependency—characteristics of the emotional fusion, connection in the absence of differentiation, that is causing the problems in the first place. The solution is not to get them even closer together. Attachment-based therapy plugs together troubled couples only as long as they mutually validate and stroke each other, move in lock step, and keep on doing it. It encourages co-dependency.
Chaim Amalek: “Sell your sperm to dusky women who harbor the desire for whiter children. Charge $50 a pop. This would seemingly combine two of your favorite things: The goy’s desire to get off, and the Jew’s desire for gelt.”
As a smaller proportion of young Americans are white, there is proportionately less patriotism aka national loyalty. Members of tribes have a different relationship to the United States and to other nation states (unless the nation state is also their tribal state, such as Israel).
The New York Times reports: “Past generations have declined only marginally in their nationalism over time – they start out high and mainly remain so. But today’s youngest generation begins adulthood with much lower levels of fondness for the symbols of America, and if the past is a guide, there is no reason to expect increases as they age.”
There is a WASP core to the United States and the further you get from WASP, the less loyalty you find towards America. Whites, for instance, pay the most taxes and take out the least welfare while blacks, proportionately, pay the least taxes and take the most welfare.
May 17, 2012, Dennis Prager said on his radio show: “As it happens, proportionately speaking, more whites seem to have identified with the American value system (liberty, in God we trust, y pluribus unum) than non-whites. That’s why whites vote disproportionately conservative.”
When Osama Bin Laden was assassinated, who did you see celebrating in the streets? It wasn’t primarily blacks, Jews, latinos or Asians. It was whites.
Samuel Francis said in 1994: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
Do you think the millions of Mexicans who came to America and wave Mexican flags in America when they march and they boo the American soccer team and send billions of dollars home really love America or they want to transform it into an extension of Mexico? Do you think the tens of thousands of Chinese university students who come here for an education love America? I don’t.
Rabbi Mayer Schiller said in a 1990 interview: “The approach that we’ve seen throughout the Eastern European experience was largely one of isolation both imposed by the gentile society and also self‑imposed. That approach has been, by and large, continued in western societies by significant numbers of Orthodox Jews. They view gentile society simply as the arena in which they can pursue their own Jewish agenda, and they have very little interest in that society except insofar as it can help them pursue that agenda in indirect ways.”
That’s how tribes work, not just the Jewish tribe.
“I’m talking essentially about an approach that would have Jews weigh all societal questions on one scale of ‘How will this effect Jews?’ and should have very little, or a vastly secondary, concern for the wider society in and of itself. This parochial view is found in both religious and secular Jews, but it originally stems from the notion that the gentile is himself secondary in the eyes of the creator.”
“If Christianity is, as many maintain, Avodah Zorah, does this mean that the millions and millions of Catholics and Protestants who have lived for the past 2000 years have no share in haolam haba (the world to come)? Is that what we’re saying about these millions of sincere, pious people? In reality we often don’t assess the status of the gentile as if he himself had any intrinsic value. We always seem to be applying to him criteria that are relevant to us, but do not define either his objective or subjective status.”
“Can we live ethically in societies while not caring about them? What are the implications for anti‑semitism? If we hold to the notion that the gentile is secondary for God are we not in fact embracing a philosophy that is the fulfillment of every accusation that the anti‑semites have made about us?”
“Now, take the question of military service: should a Jew serve in the armies of the gentile nations he is living in? Should he try to get out of such service? try to get into it? If the answer is that he should try to get out of it or refuse to serve or lie his way out of it, then is the Jew a citizen? Should the gentile view him as a citizen. Should the Jew be granted equal rights if he is unwilling to make equal sacrifices? So I think you can’t escape the practical implications of these questions.”
“Kahane has asked a very simple question. He asks: if we believe in absolute truth how can we believe in majority rule? He’s also asked another question, and that is whether a society which has a vision for itself (and in this particular case a religious vision, but I think this also applies to ethnic and cultural visions as well) allow for what I call ‘1789’ or French revolutionary political rights? This is a very big problem and I don’t think that Jews have (confronted) or answered it honestly. On the one hand, for the past three or four hundred years of world history we have been in the forefront of those movements that have championed majority rule, pluralism, and ‘bill of rights’ type, 1789 rights. Yet when we get to Eretz Yisrael and we have our own country we’re all of a sudden saying ‘No, we don’t believe in simple majority rule. We believe that a nation has the right to preserve its own identity.’ Now, would we extend that right to Englishmen, to Frenchmen, to Germans, to Americans? I think Kahane is asking great questions. His answer is (and I’m just quoting him here from memory) that there are no nationalisms except Jewish nationalism. Now that might be an answer, and if you follow the really hard line traditionalist approach the answer would be that there really are no other nationalisms in God’s sight. All other nationalisms are a sham. So, when we’re Jews in Western Europe and America we try to be liberal, pluralist and tolerant in order to protect ourselves, but not because we think societies ought to be that way in order to be healthy societies. We think healthy societies are non‑pluralistic, but when you’re living amongst those ‘crazy goyim’ who can kill you at every turn you advocate political rights and pluralism.”
“Take, for example, Jewish involvement in the civil rights movements. Ask a Jew why he was in favor of civil rights and very often he’ll come up with something like the following rationale: ‘We could be next!’ In fact recently there was a press report on Le Pen’s movement in France which reported that French Jews are opposing Le Pen because they are afraid that after the Arabs they’ll be next. Now this feeling is often subconscious and I’m not saying that there weren’t also many Jews who were idealistic about their politics, but the question is did the Jew really feel that a white Protestant southerner should have an integrated society? Or did the Jew really feel that for our own political agenda their ought to be an integrated society. Would the Jews have wanted integration with the blacks if the southern whites were Jewish Orthodox?”
“If the Jew understood this contradiction would he then have the chutzpah to continue to do what he does in Western society? Maybe it’s better that he doesn’t grasp it because than he would lose his easy assent to these things and feel less at home in gentile society. If the assumption is correct that these rights are what protect us from the wrath of the goyim then maybe it’s better that we continue to fool ourselves; for to be consciously manipulative (in backing liberal causes for selfish reasons) would be far harder than to be subconsciously manipulative (consciously thinking you are backing these causes from pure motives), which is the way the Jew operates now.”
“Eastern Europeans, and consequently chasidim in America, don’t have some of the restraints that Anglo‑Saxon and Northern European cultures have. They’re not as reserved. They don’t need as much physical space. They push easier.”
I’m disgusted at all the flopping about in the World Cup, not just among South Americans but also among Europeans such as the Dutch. The Americans and the British flop a lot less because they have these quaint Anglo-Saxon ideals of good sportsmanship.
As we let in more non-white immigrants such as Muslims, we get more horrors such as this, as reported by MLIVE.com:
LIVONIA, MI — The death of a Westland man who was assaulted during a Sunday soccer match has captured national attention, and the head of a referees’ group is speaking out on the matter — again.
Barry Mano, president of the Wisconsin-based National Association of Sports Officials has spoken at length on the violent death of a soccer referee once before, after Ricardo Portillo was punched by a teenage player and died a week later near Salt Lake City, Utah in 2013.
Mano was asked during an HBO interview last year whether he believed such an incident would ever happen again.
“My answer was ‘Yes.’ And, sadly, I have been proven right about something I wish with every bone in my body I would have been proven wrong,” Mano wrote in a column to be published in Referee magazine.
This time, the victim was John Bieniewicz, a 44-year-old dialysis technician at Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor.
Police believe Bassel Saad, 36, of Dearborn, punched Bieniewicz after growing angry when the referee signaled for his ejection during a soccer match at Mies Park on West Chicago Street in Livonia around noon Sunday.
Black educator Andre M. Perry writes in the Washington Post:
The achievement gap for black children is not a sufficient reason to push underperformers out. (It’s no better, and no less preposterous, than another path to close the gap: stop educating white people.) If schools don’t have everything they need to instill positive behaviors in their toughest kids, then let’s find the resources and staff for them to do it. Instead of lobbying for more disciplinary autonomy for schools, let’s petition for wrap-around services, restructured in-school suspensions, conflict mediation, restorative justice programs, parenting courses, out-of school behavioral services or a host of other interventions that address the problem. Just as long as we keep the kids in school.
The main problem in our schools is bad students, not bad teachers.
Rabbi Mayer Schiller wrote in 1995: If current trends continue, some time in the middle of the next century the majority of this nation’s inhabitants will be nonwhites. As has been shown repeatedly in the pages of American Renaissance, the presence of large numbers of nonwhites irrevocably changes the character of a school, neighborhood, city or state. Most whites find these changes so disagreeable that they simply move away. However, they can do this only because there are still many areas of the country that are overwhelmingly white. What will happen if whites become a minority?
Even before whites are reduced to a minority, the shift towards a largely nonwhite population will be felt in all areas of life. Taxes, crime, and disease will rise. “Reverse discrimination” will become the norm. Ever larger parts of the country will be essentially off limits to whites, even as government resorts to ever more draconian measures to enforce integration. Legislatures and schools dominated by nonwhites will rewrite our history, belittle our heritage, overturn our monuments, and abandon the cultural norms of our civilization. This is the great crisis of our times.1
As the demographic tide shifts, it will be futile to defend “the canon” of Western literature or, in the South, to try to keep the Confederate flag flying over state houses. A faculty that is largely black and Hispanic will not teach Melville; nor will nonwhite legislators assemble beneath a banner they see as a symbol of white consciousness…
It is important to note that there are black and Hispanic conservatives who are struggling to persuade their people to behave responsibly. They deserve the support of all fair-minded people. Their writings and movements should interest AR readers because they raise the question that all who believe in racial differences — be they genetic or deeply cultural — must answer honestly: How are we to approach those minorities who live and advocate lives of civility, who even acknowledge the European nature of our nation and live in deference to it?
We should support minority efforts at self-help. We should welcome black and Hispanic spokesmen who advocate self-reliance, religion, and the virtues of our civilization. Much could be accomplished if theirs were the dominant minority voices.
But even in the unlikely event of a triumph by minority conservatives, our attitude towards them should be no different from that toward Asian immigrants (who often show lower levels of crime and poverty than whites). We can welcome a small number of people of different races into this nation if they embrace our civilization, but we cannot allow the nation to lose its European identity. No people is obligated to abandon its national identity — in which race plays a significant part.
Any large group of nonwhites, no matter how well-intentioned, will eventually change our society in permanent ways. A nation dominated by blacks, Asians, or Hispanics, or one that is a majority-less farrago of races cannot help but be different from one that is dominated by whites. We have every right to prefer to live in a society of our own making, and we should not be compelled to open our nation and culture to the changes that large-scale racial incursion inevitably bring. For this reason, long-run demographic change demands a solution beyond anything that can be offered by minority conservatives.
What, then, are whites to do?
One undesirable possibility would be to abandon an increasingly third-world United States and return, en masse to Europe. This would assume that Europe had solved its own racial problems by strictly limiting nonwhite immigration. But would Europe want another 100 million citizens? In the waning days of white rule, the governments of Rhodesia and South Africa tried to prevent mass exodus by making it illegal to take assets out of the country. A black-Hispanic American government would probably do the same thing, turning most whites into penniless refugees.
Another possibility, which is nothing more than an extension of what most whites do now, is enclave existence. Today, whites pay a substantial premium to live in their own neighborhoods, free of blacks and Hispanics. They are also willing to pay for private schools for their children, in addition to the taxes they pay for public schools. For most whites, this is an acceptable exchange.
However, as the population shifts, as crime increases, and the government resorts to ever more ingenious methods of forced integration, enclaves will become precarious refuges. In South Africa, ever since the breakdown of apartheid, white neighborhoods have started hiring private security patrols. This is already happening in some American suburbs, and may become the norm in the future. Whites will develop various ways to barricade their neighborhoods against the “rising tide of color,” but will a nonwhite government allow whites to live separately and to protect themselves by private means? It is more likely that government will force “low-income housing” into all white areas; even if it does not, whites in their enclaves will still face oppressive taxation and systematic “affirmative” persecution.
What then remains? Separation. Whites should enter into serious dialogue with black and Hispanic nationalists who seek to establish racially based nations within the territory of the United States.
Opposition to this idea is most likely to come from whites. Many blacks and Hispanics already have a firmly developed racial consciousness, whether instinctual or sophisticated. Many have no interest in the study or practice of European culture, and this is neither wrong nor surprising. What remains to be achieved is a large-scale awakening of racial consciousness among whites, without which no serious dialogue can begin about the mechanics of separation.
Those who are daunted by the prospect of separation should once again consider the alternatives. Current trends will ineluctably reduce whites to minority status, and there is every sign that hostility to whites and to their culture only grows as nonwhites gain numbers and influence. Aside from emigration, the probable outcomes are some kind of violent resolution of racial conflicts or the reduction of whites to a persecuted minority in an increasingly lawless, third-world society. The former would be horrible for all people and the latter would be intolerable for the people whose ancestors built this nation.
At present, the idea of dividing the nation into racial zones seems impossible. (For fairness sake, in the interests of those who wish to continue the grand experiment, there could be a multiracial area. It would be interesting to see how many white liberals would want to live there.) However, there are still large parts of the country that are predominantly white. They could secede. This seems a wild prospect today, but as we move into the next century the burden of racial redistribution of wealth will become increasingly unbearable, and the spectacle of city after city following the path of Detroit and Washington will continue. Who is to say what the citizens of Montana or North Dakota may decide to do?
Indeed, it need not be whole states that secede. Groups of counties could declare independence from Washington. If these efforts were coordinated to occur at the same time their effect could be very powerful. How would the central government react? Given the size of the country and the notorious mismanagement of third world governments, it may not matter how it reacts.
Of course, none of this can happen without profound change in the hearts of whites and this does not now seem likely. Nevertheless, there is simmering unrest in the land. Given clear thinking and courageous leaders we may be able to move beyond the clichés that now govern us.
HERE IS ANOTHER ARTICLE BY RABBI SCHILLER:
To hate a human being because of his race, religion or nationality is a horrible thing. The history of all mankind is marred by the outbreak of unspeakable violence against people perpetrated, not because of anything they did, but merely because of who they were. Bigotry is a vile thing, its prejudgment of a man in direct violation of Judeo-Christian morality as well as the norms of Western Civilization.
Yet, it is also clear that so much of what makes life worth living is to be found in group identity. We are who we are not only as individuals, but also as members of larger entities, i.e. families, neighborhoods, towns, nations, races, religions and civilizations. No man is born into a total vacuum of identity. We are the products of genetic, familial and cultural forces. In the end meaning is provided solely by these extra forces which provide our perceptions and action with conceptual or at least visceral coherence.
Whether these extra personal loyalties be of a metaphysical nature deriving their essence from an essentially spiritual (God centered universe) or be they merely an inherent part of the rational world is a question beyond the confines of this brief essay. What is relevant for our purpose is that man needs identity, meaning and purpose and becomes confused and demoralized without them.
Accordingly it is one of the moral imperatives of our era to articulate a philosophy and seek to implement a policy which will allow men to realize themselves in a group without falling prey to hating or harming other groups. This is far from an easy task. Indeed, there are those who would maintain that the enmity which often goes hand-in-hand with group identification is inevitable and it is best to pursue policies which will inexorably weaken those loyalties. It is an alluring position and one to which the “respectable” media and politicians of our era are all pledged.
It is, an illusory, immoral and unnatural agenda, however. Illusory, for history’s testimony is that widely diverse people cannot and will not live peacefully together. Immoral, because its ultimate results will be the end of the truths and virtues of the world’s various faiths, races and nations. Unnatural, because group identity is a fundamental need of all men.
The way out of our current impasse on matters of race, ethnicity, etc. would seem not to lie in the direction of totalitarian coercive mixing, but towards voluntary disentanglement by men of good intentions.
All any man really desires is a sense of physical security, some orientation towards a life of meaning, a community whose ways are familiar and pleasant to him and a place to call his (and his peoples’) own.
Sadly, today all the above is granted certain groupings but not others. Europeans, White people and those attached to traditional faiths and lifestyles of the West are told by the powers-that-be that they alone among mankind’s tribes are forbidden to have or even articulate a collective identity.
Perhaps this is due to their having overstepped the proper boundaries in the past, or alternatively to their own current weakness and gullibility. Whatever the reason none can deny the current threat to Western Man. Other peoples define themselves as groups, only European Man is forbidden to do this.
A solution to our crisis will be found to the degree that all of the world’s assorted tribes can say to each other: “You have your way of life and your place to live. We wish you well. Now let each of us live among our own. We bear you no ill will.”
It is in the spirit of separation founded on mutual respect that I have attempted on a personal level over the past decade to communicate with nationalists (White and Black), to patriots of many nations and to committed members of many faiths. My goal has been to strip group identity of hatred and the responses I have received have been almost uniformly encouraging. I have found that when you face a man and say; “Your people are a people with a unique identity. They have a right (perhaps an obligation) to survive as a people. Yet you must realize there are other peoples in the world who have similar yearnings. How can we work this out?” – that most men are willing to act in a positive fashion.
To sum up, groups should speak to each other as groups (away from media terror and self-seeking politicians). Far more important than speaking, though, is listening. To hear the other as we remain ourselves is our contemporary task.
HERE IS A 1990 INTERVIEW WITH RABBI SCHILLER:
Jewish Review: Could you comment on the contradiction which Rabbi Kahane has drawn between the Israeli state and democracy, or between the philosophy of Judaism and majority rule?
Rabbi Schiller: Kahane has asked a very simple question. He asks: if we believe in absolute truth how can we believe in majority rule? He’s also asked another question, and that is whether a society which has a vision for itself (and in this particular case a religious vision, but I think this also applies to ethnic and cultural visions as well) allow for what I call ?1789? or French revolutionary political rights? This is a very big problem and I don’t think that Jews have (confronted) or answered it honestly. On the one hand, for the past three or four hundred years of world history we have been in the forefront of those movements that have championed majority rule, pluralism, and ?bill of rights? type, 1789 rights. Yet when we get to Eretz Yisrael and we have our own country we’re all of a sudden saying ?No, we don’t believe in simple majority rule. We believe that a nation has the right to preserve its own identity.? Now, would we extend that right to Englishmen, to Frenchmen, to Germans, to Americans? I think Kahane is asking great questions. His answer is (and I’m just quoting him here from memory) that there are no nationalisms except Jewish nationalism.? Now that might be an answer, and if you follow the really hard line traditionalist approach the answer would be that there really are no other nationalisms in God’s sight. All other nationalisms are a sham. So, when we’re Jews in Western Europe and America we try to be liberal, pluralist and tolerant in order to protect ourselves, but not because we think societies ought to be that way in order to be healthy societies. We think healthy societies are non‑pluralistic, but when you’re living amongst those ?crazy goyim? who can kill you at every turn you advocate political rights and pluralism.
Jewish Review: Kahane’s view might be that since the gentiles have no legitimate nationalism their society should be democratic and pluralistic?
Rabbi Schiller: That’s probably his position. But I don’t think Kahane thinks about it very much. He’s like everybody else in that he’s not really seriously asking, for example, what a Catholic in Spain should want from his realm.? We don’t spend very much time as Jews thinking what a goy should be doing as a goy.
Jewish Review: Kahane would probably say ?let the goyim worry about it?. He creates his rationale in order to get to a certain endpoint and whatever gets him there is what’s important.
Rabbi Schiller: That’s right. He’s more of a practical political thinker than a philosopher. That’s not a condemnation, just a fact.
Jewish Review: But you hold that even for those who don’t hold his general political position the questions he raises are very important?
Rabbi Schiller: Sure he’s hit us right in the teeth, he really has.
Jewish Review: You’ve said that for the religious right, and I suppose you are also speaking, for example, about the Gush Emunim in Israel, that gentiles are seen as largely a means whereby God punishes, tests or protects the Jews. The gentile’s personal destiny is not only secondary to ours, but in some sense, part of our own destiny. Is this a philosophy that is clearly articulated?
NPR’s Education Team tweets: “I reach out to diverse sources on deadline. Only the white guys get back to me :(”
In my experience, whites are the most timely and responsive of any racial groups I know. They are more likely to want to talk to the media than Asians. Whites tend to have more altruism than any other group.
There is a common thread to the modern characteristics of European man, and he carries these characteristics wherever he migrates. This common thread is an abiding sense of reciprocity, a conviction that others have rights that must be respected. This conviction, which can be described as a kind of public morality, is at the heart of the institutions that are common to most white societies and absent from virtually every non-white one: democracy, free speech, and the rule of law. These appeared over time and took root more firmly in some white nations than in others.
In like manner, European societies have given rise to a broad range of non-political traditions also based on concern for others. These have established the unique texture of life among whites, but now virtually all of these traditions have changed in ways that make them threats to our survival.
