Kevin MacDonald, Ph.D.

CSULB, Department of Psychology

DEFENDING A HOLOCAUST DENIER

Kudos to reporter Tony Ortega for his well-researched, insightful, and revealing article concerning the theories developed by Kevin MacDonald, professor of psychology at Cal State Long Beach. ("Witness for the Persecution," cover story, by Tony Ortega, April 20-26.) As a member of the history department at the university, I was more than dismayed in January to hear on National Public Radio that a Long Beach professor had testified on behalf of Holocaust denier David Irving in London. But that was apparently only the tip of the iceberg.

Ortega flushes out MacDonald's anti-Semitism, hidden beneath the veneer of scholarship. MacDonald's allegation that Jews are responsible for what has befallen them is just another example of blaming the victim. Not content with inferring that Jews must share responsibility for the worst crime of the 20th century, MacDonald warns of a Jewish-inspired race war that will backfire against Jews. This prophecy echoes Hitler's Reichstag speech on January 30, 1939, that "if the international Jewish financiers...should again succeed in plunging nations into another war, then the result will be...the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

Nazi Germany owed much to the eugenic movement pioneered in the United States early in the 20th century, theories that have long been discredited. Undoubtedly, Holocaust deniers, skinheads, and neo-Nazis are emboldened by MacDonald's work, but hopefully, his efforts will prove to be as futile and worthless as his defense of David Irving.

Dr. Donald Schwartz
via the Internet

KM: Dr. Schwartz has been involved in a debate conducted on the faculty email list for the College of Liberal Arts at California State University-Long Beach over my ideas and my testifying in the Irving/Lipstadt trial. Here are four fairly long replies, the first two of which focus on comments by Schwartz.

Thank you very much for publishing the informative and well-written article on MacDonald. I was, of course, appalled to learn that this obscene fucker is on the faculty of the university at which I also teach. I hope Ortega's article generates enough fallout to cause MacDonald to lose tenure and be thrown into the street. It would also be good if everyone on campus pissed on him as he walked by, but that's probably too much to hope for.

Stanton J. Price
via the Internet

KM: Unfortunately, Dr. Price has not participated in the email debate at CSU-Long Beach.

I stumbled on MacDonald's books about a year and a half ago. I think Ortega's take on his work was pretty fair. I came away from MacDonald's work thinking, "Why isn't this guy on Nightline one night and Charlie Rose the next?" I think he has a handle on something that has plagued Jews and Gentiles for thousands of years.

People need to take a look at his books with an open mind, free from the fear of being labeled an anti-Semite or hatemonger. I'm glad Ortega didn't try to vilify (although his opinion of MacDonald's work was rather clear) a guy for trying to explain (perhaps in an unpleasant, brutally painful way) the "longest hatred."

Lee Johnson
via the Internet

Journalistic accounts of academic writings are almost inevitably problematic because they tend to slide over the subtle nuances of academic presentations in favor of material that will grab a reader's interest and make a good headline. I have prepared a detailed reply to Ortega's article that can be seen at my Web site (this Website also has a detailed account of why I testified for David Irving). The following is a brief summary of the points made in my reply:

1. It is false that evolutionary approaches to human affairs are untested or untestable, as a glance at academic journals such as Evolution and Human Behavior or Human Nature will show. And it is false that evolutionists believe that women are inferior, although they do tend to think that men and women are importantly different.

2. I do not think that the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves. I claim only to have a theory of anti-Semitism, not a theory of the Nazi Holocaust. My position is that anti-Semitism is typically not completely irrational. Rather, we should suppose that in general there are indeed real conflicts of interest between groups and that outbreaks of hostility are a complex interplay of fantasy and reality. Other scholars have also argued that Jewish behavior -- very often Jewish success -- is an important factor in anti-Semitism; see, e.g., Albert Lindemann's Esau's Tears (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

3. I do not blame Jews for a "coming race war in America," although I do suggest that the increasing ethnic division in the U.S. and other European-derived societies resulting from high levels of immigration and the rise of multiculturalism will lead to increased ethnocentrism on all sides and a decline in the Enlightenment values of de-ethnicized individualism.

4. I reply to critics quoted in the article. I do not propose that Jews are genetically homogeneous, but I do argue that the Jewish gene pool has been significantly segregated from the gene pools of the populations that Jews have lived among for centuries, while at the same time there is significant genetic commonality between Jewish groups that have been separated for centuries. There is no historical or genetic evidence that Gentiles have married into the Jewish gene pool until very recently. Nor do I view Judaism as monolithic; there are a great many Jewish strategies engaged in by subgroups of Jews. Nor do I propose that all Jewish social scientists see their work as advancing Jewish political interests, although there is a great deal of evidence that some of them do. I reiterate the basis for my argument that eugenic processes have been important in producing the very high average IQ among Ashkenazi Jews. Ortega performs the usual guilt-by-association analysis of IQ findings that has became a hallmark of the intellectual left ever since it lost the battle over empirical evidence. Finally, I discuss hatred directed at other diaspora groups, like the overseas Chinese and Indians, who have occupied similar economic niches as Jews have.

Kevin MacDonald
Department of Psychology
California State University Long Beach

Once, when I was a preschooler, a much older boy wandered into our backyard, where I was playing in my sandbox, and called me a "little kike." I thought he said "kite." But even not knowing the word I knew the intent.

Deep down I don't really understand anti-Semitism the 2,000 years of it plus the centuries (Middle East version) before that. The best I can think is that it still seems to be about religion. I think bigotry is mostly projection. If it weren't for that factor this meaningless dialogue would have ceased long ago.

MacDonald's genetic arguments are totally off. Yes, there are Jewish genetic components or there wouldn't be Jews. (Or any other ethnic group.) But there's obviously genetic diversity. None of this is a big deal unless you've got an ax to grind. It seems to me that nations i.e., peoples with a history of centuries in one geographical area are at least as apt to inbreed as those who have been geographically dispersed. So why not just as easily say nationalism promotes inbreeding?

I once heard Louis Farrakhan scream (on a live radio broadcast) in the middle of a harangue against Jews, "They killed our Lord." This was Farrakhan the Christian speaking.

It seems to me that truth is the best evolutionary strategy. Because the only other alternative is deception. And sooner or later you'll get found out. The idea of survival without considering the complex meaning of "the fittest" is so cynical, naˆØve, and narrow as to reduce the formula to a tautology (which is about what all formulas are anyway). There's too little appreciation of the humanist factor in survival. Yet it's this energy that we generate between each other empathy regarding basic needs that helps sustain us and give us culture. It seems to me this is more important than the ill-formed dialectics we pose against one another.

Back in the '70s I went to the Central Library a lot. On one occasion I read an anti-Semitic poem by e.e. cummings, and on another occasion one by Le Roi Jones. Another time I ran across John Donne's "Spit on Me Ye Jews" while reading his sonnets at the library in Beverly Hills. It was then that I first began to think about just how many of the writers and artists I most admired expressed anti-Semitic sentiments to one degree or another. Which kind of shattered any preconception I might have had that artists and poets (at least the ones I liked) were on a higher plane than the rest. I could read a laundry list of names. But it's interesting that it hasn't stopped me from appreciating their work, because art transcends.

Jerry Katz
Santa Monica

You have shown a marked reluctance to publish letters or articles by people who have sound and objective knowledge of the German Holocaust debacle. I wonder why.

Myself and many others, who survived World War II and worked for organizations belonging to NATO or to the British in Germany, have done extensive research into the how and the why of the Jewish programs. Yet the U.S. media does not want to hear from us.

I assume it is because we researchers have found enormous gaps in facts disseminated by the World Jewish Congress and by Jewish "historians," such as the inaccurate tally of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. This figure can easily be refuted by adding up all the Jews domiciled in every European country (except Britain) and the displaced persons, then subtracting those the WJC stated were killed in concentration camps. The numbers do not add up, nor can they.

If, as most objective European historians have stated, that around 5 million Jews died in the Holocaust a terrible number one asks, why did the WJC not revise its tally down when all the thousands of displaced men and women flocking all over Europe in the period after the war surfaced? One probability is that the hated Soviet Union also claimed that 6 million of its citizens died in German-, Romanian-, Hungarian-, and Polish-based concentration camps. Americans have no knowledge whatsoever of war or its aftermath. All U.S. authors are "readers" who obtain their data from others via books. What if those sources are incorrect? They merely perpetuate the falsities.

When you and other media choose to not publish facts, such as the documented one of Jewish groups installing a gas chamber in Dachau when there had not been one, and tales of gas chambers in Belsen, when there had been none (I spent three months at the Bergen Hohne Camp site), you compound the problem by giving credence to the Holocaust deniers.

In the 1960s, I discussed the '30s with many Germans, and all said the same thing. Prior to the Third Reich there was enormous poverty in Germany, with people starving and begging in the streets. The Versailles Treaty stripped Germany completely. The banks and financial institutions were mainly Jewish-owned, along with the shops and stores, and Jews aided other Jews and no one else.

The initial violence against Jews did not start the way the U.S. media portrays it. The S.A., or Brownshirts, who were led by homosexual sadists and thugs, started attacking Jewish shops and businesses in the early '30s.

The public, starved and jobless, supported the S.A. and the attacks against whom they saw as the "fat cats" of society, the unfortunate Jewish owners. Nothing starts without cause. Yet none of the thousand or so movies, TV programs, docudramas, or media articles tell these factual events. The truth about this and the incorrect Holocaust numbers should have been told from the very beginning, in 1946. That would have been morally ethical.

Why are Americans so afraid of telling the factual truth?

B. Rosalyn Moran
Torrance

I discovered an important historical artifact through the solid research and righteously broad scope of the article. The godfather of MacDonald's eugenic tommyrot turned up in my own backyard. I discovered the German "eugenics-anthropologist" Hans Gunther's book, Racial Elements in the History of Europe (1927), in its English translation in our library at Cal State L.A.

It is sobering to read the foul racism dressed up with "statistics" and interspersed with slanderous remarks about the genetically transmitted "cunning" of the Jews. This book got people killed. More chilling is the fact that MacDonald lifted his idiocies directly from the proto-Nazi. Ortega's article did a great service to cultural studies, in which I am engaged, as well as public safety. My professor could hardly believe he held such a book in his hands, and requested that I copy a dozen pages for his personal files. I am placing the book in our library's Special Collection, where its pages may be studied by the serious scholar. Leaving this item in our open stacks even today may still get someone killed or a house of worship bombed.

Stuart M. Chandler
Culver City

Thanks to Ortega for the well-informed and thoughtful article. I'm only sorry that he doesn't mention that within weeks of having (partially) absolved David Irving of anti-Semitism while under oath, MacDonald publicly conceded that his courtroom testimony was inconsistent with the definition of anti-Semitism he develops in his volume Separation and Its Discontents.

In a message to the discussion list H-Antisemitism posted on February 28, MacDonald posited two senses in which Irving could (should?) be classified as an anti-Semite according to MacDonald's schema, observing that given such considerations "I guess I should amend my testimony." MacDonald also implies that this conclusion represents something of an evolution in his thinking since the publication of Separation and Its Discontents, but nothing about the rather half-baked distinction he draws between types of anti-Semitism significantly advances the arguments of Separation, and nothing about this new formulation mitigates the fact that the definition of anti-Semitism MacDonald appeared to accept in the courtroom was utterly at odds with the one he elaborates in his published work. The implication is clear: In the service of a higher goal (i.e., thwarting the Jewish evolutionary strategy as personified at the moment by Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who challenged Irving in court ), MacDonald was prepared to misrepresent his own convictions under oath.

For his part, Irving appears to have been as unaware of MacDonald's public about-face as he was of the content of MacDonald's books. Had he actually read MacDonald's work, it seems unlikely that he would have asked MacDonald whether he (MacDonald) considered him (Irving) to be an anti-Semite, since the answer MacDonald should have been expected to give would have been something like, "Why, yes, your are an anti-Semite, and bully for you, you have every reason to be one," which would hardly have advanced Irving's cause.

On March 15, two weeks after MacDonald's public declaration that Irving may well be an anti-Semite after all, Irving described MacDonald in his closing argument as "the world's leading expert on these things," meaning, of course, the widespread Jewish conspiracies to spread malicious lies about the likes of David Irving, such as the accusation that he is (gasp!) an anti-Semite. Given MacDonald's retraction, it seems pretty clear that the only person left in the world who doesn't believe David Irving is an anti-Semite is, well, David Irving. The question remains, however, as to whether, even according to the strange standards set by his own theory, there is any way one could argue that Kevin MacDonald is not an anti-Semite.

David Lieberman
Boston, MA

KM: David Lieberman is an old adversary from the H-ANTISEMITISM email discussion list, a professionally moderated discussion list made up mainly of historians of Judaism and anti-Semitism. This is a reply I made to Lieberman on these issues that I posted on H-ANTISEMITISM.

Your description of the Pioneer Fund is a misleading partial truth.

For the information of your readers, the Pioneer Fund's sole activity is the making of grants to research organizations, primarily universities, for research in projects suggested by those organizations. We publish no materials and make no statements, leaving those to the grantees. We have made such grants to 60 organizations in eight countries.

In considering grant proposals, the Fund has always sought excellence in the researchers. Two grantees are among the five living psychologists most cited by other scientists. Grantees have been elected as the presidents of the American Psychological Association, the British Psychological Association, the Behavior Genetics Association, the Psychonomic Society, and the Society for Psychophysiological Research. One grantee won a Nobel prize, two were Guggenheim Fellows (one for doing Pioneer-funded work), and two more were selected by the Galton Society of the United Kingdom to give the 1983 and 1995 annual Galton Lectures (also on the basis of Pioneer-funded work). Three are among the 11 living biographees in the Encyclopedia of Human Intelligence, and 10 of the articles in that two-volume work were written by grantees.

Grantees currently serve on the editorial boards of major academic journals, including three on the board of Personality and Individual Differences and three more on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence, and many have published in both journals. One was selected by the latter journal to plan, select authors for, and supervise a special 1996 full issue on "Intelligence and Social Policy."

Most of the Pioneer grantees hold fellow status in one or more of their respective scientific organizations, and many have won academic honors for their research or other distinguished contributions from, among others, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Educational Research Association, Mensa, and the American Psychological Association. In some cases, Pioneer had funded the very research for which the academic honors were awarded. Thirty Pioneer grantees of recent times, in psychology and other fields, have together published close to 200 scholarly books and 2,000 scientific articles, most in the leading journals.

Harry F. Weyher
via the Internet