Race does not exist?

The work done by John Goodrum, the Majority Rights team, and Steve Sailer to disprove this bizarre idea may appear to be wholly outside the mainstream of scientific thought - if you rely on the unfree press for your information. Nice to know then that the ‘World’s most trusted reference books’ (the Oxford University Press Reference collection) agrees with these guys.

Race: 1. (in biology) A category used in the classification of organisms that consists of a group of individuals within a species that are geographically, ecologically, physiologically, or chromosomally distinct from other members of the species. The term is frequently used in the same sense as subspecies. Physiological races, for example, are identical in appearance but differ in function. They include strains of fungi adapted to infect different varieties of the same crop species. 2. (in anthropology) A distinct human type possessing several characteristics that are genetically inherited. The major races are Mongoloid, Caucasian, Negroid, and Australoid.
"race" A Dictionary of Biology. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Subspecies: A group of individuals within a species that breed more freely among themselves than with other members of the species and resemble each other in more characteristics. Reproductive isolation of a subspecies may become so extreme that a new species is formed (see speciation). Subspecies are sometimes given a third Latin name, e.g. the mountain gorilla, Gorilla gorilla beringei (see also binomial nomenclature).
"subspecies" A Dictionary of Biology. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press

Variety: A category used in the classification of plants and animals below the species level. A variety consists of a group of individuals that differ distinctly from but can interbreed with other varieties of the same species. The characteristics of a variety are genetically inherited. Examples of varieties include breeds of domestic animals and human races. See also cultivar. Compare subspecies.
"variety" A Dictionary of Biology. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Race: An interbreeding group of individuals all of whom are genetically distinct from the members of other such groups of the same species. Usually these groups are geographically isolated from one another, so there are barriers to gene flow. Examples are island races of birds and mammals, such as the Skomer vole and the St Kilda wren. See SUBSPECIES.
"race" A Dictionary of Zoology. Ed. Michael Allaby. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Subspecies: Technically, a race of a species that is allocated a Latin name. The number of races recognized within a species and the allocation of names to them is somewhat arbitrary. Systematic and phenotypic variations do occur within species, but there are no clear rules for identifying them as races or subspecies except that they must be: (a) geographically distinct; (b) populations, not merely morphospecies; and (c) different to some degree from other geographic populations .
"subspecies" A Dictionary of Zoology. Ed. Michael Allaby. Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Race: a phenotypically and/or geographically distinctive subspecific group, composed of individuals inhabiting a defined geographical and/or ecological region, and possessing characteristic phenotypic and gene frequencies that distinguish it from other such groups. The number of racial groups that one wishes to recognize within a species is usually arbitrary but suitable for the purposes under investigation. See ecotype, subspecies.
"race" A Dictionary of Genetics. Robert C. King, William D. Stansfield and Pamela K. Mulligan. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Subspecies:1. a taxonomically recognized subdivision of a species.
2. geographically and/or ecologically defined subdivisions of a species with distinctive characteristics. See race.
"subspecies" A Dictionary of Genetics. Robert C. King, William D. Stansfield and Pamela K. Mulligan. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Variety n. The quality or condition of being diversified, or a collection of unlike things. In biology, a taxonomic group into which a species is divided, containing organisms that are genetically differentiable from other members of the same species by the relative frequencies of their polymorphic genes. Also called a microspecies, race, or subspecies. [From Latin varietas variety, from varius various]
"variety n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Subspecies n. In biology, a taxonomic group into which a species is divided, containing organisms that are genetically differentiable from other members of the same species by the relative frequencies of their polymorphic genes. Also called a microspecies, race, or variety.
"subspecies n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Microspecies n. A taxonomic category below the level of a species, hence a race, subspecies, or variety. [From Greek mikros small + Latin species appearance or kind, from specere to look]
"microspecies n." A Dictionary of Psychology. Andrew M. Colman. Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press

Daily Mirror nails it...

Louisa Pilbeam of the Daily Mirror has compiled a formidable critique of the BNP’s policy platform and the idea that underpins it, that Britain belongs to its native peoples. I am ashamed that I once found these arguments convincing and wish to thank Miss Pilbeam for her penetrating deconstruction of the ideological bases of ethnic nationalism.

So that other people who’ve been hoodwinked by the BNP might come to see how wrongheaded their policies are I reproduce the entire article here with the key points highlighted:

****

Euro elections: Dismay as BNP leader Nick Griffin wins seat

By Louisa Pilbeam 8/06/2009

Britain was plunged into despair last night as racist BNP leader Nick Griffin won his North West seat. He joins fellow fascist Andrew Brons as the two fascist members of the EU Parliament. They will now attempt to promote their agenda of division and hate on behalf of British voters in Brussels. After his shock win, Griffin claimed it was a “great moment for democracy”. He added: “This is the British people fighting back.”

But he had to be smuggled into the venue for an election count. At least 70 people surrounded his car when he arrived at Manchester Town Hall and stopped him getting out. The crowd waved “Don’t Vote BNP” banners and chanted that the party were Nazis. A similar protest at a second entrance meant Griffin had to be smuggled in hidden in a police van.

The BNP, which does not accept non-white members, won its first European seat – from Labour. GMB union general secretary Paul Kenny said: “On D-Day Britain sent an army to stop the Nazis. Now we send Nazis to Europe to represent us.” Retired teacher Brons, 61, was elected MEP for Yorkshire & Humber region on the back of 120,139 votes. He had been a National Front member. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone said: “The BNP are 21st century Nazis.” Tory Mark Francois called it “a disappointing night for politics”. Far right parties did well across Europe, especially in the Netherlands.

****

If only arguments like this had been made before the election by journalists and politicians from the mainstream parties …

Congratulations and thank you to two brave men...

Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons.

And to all their supporters and other candidates (next time...).

The B BC?

I rarely subject myself to the mainstream media’s ‘news’ programs (programming being exactly what they are), but even I can’t help noticing the blurring of the lines between national and international, especially American, coverage. It’s most obvious in the treatment of POTUS, who is usually just ‘the President’ and the story’s relevance to British interests, if any, is usually left unstated, but it’s quite pervasive.

I noticed a variation on this theme this morning. A BBC radio news bulletin reported the arrest of a retired U.S. State Department official and his wife on charges of spying on the U.S. for Cuba … without mentioning America once! We were told only that a ‘State Department’ official had been arrested for spying on behalf of Cuba. Is the State Department some outfit in Whitehall? Were the couple spying on Britain? You might be forgiven for thinking so.

I don’t believe the habit of never clearly distinguishing between British and American interests is accidental. It’s clear that most of our political and media elites are committed globalists and that the people’s stubborn scepticism about that project pisses them off.

It follows that we will be submitted to various subtle treatments designed ultimately to eliminate our identification with specifically British national interests, and to encourage identification with ‘global’ concerns, often to mean U.S. concerns as the U.S. is presently the most powerful instrument of the globalists.

David Lamb on Zimbabwe

Another short history of Rhodesia’s becoming Zimbabwe (read Roland Oliver's here). David Lamb wrote his brilliant African travelogue in the early nineteen eighties so we must forgive the naïveté. After all, no-one could have predicted that the Blacks would destroy what the White man had built. [sarc.]

All that follows is from David Lamb, The Africans: Encounters from the Sudan to the Cape (Methuen Books, London 1985) pp 332-336

I first arrived in Rhodesia (as it was then called) on Pioneers Day in 1978, a national holiday that celebrated the hoisting of the Union Jack over Salisbury eighty-eight years earlier. At that time the flag was raised by 180 pioneers who had traveled in ox carts from South Africa, moving through country unknown except to a handful of traders and missionaries. Most were “British” South Africans, not “Dutch” South Africans, and they came, like frontiersmen settling the Old West, in search of land and a better life. Their trek, led by Frederick Selous and organized by Cecil Rhodes, a Briton who had made a fortune in South African gold and diamonds, was made under the auspices of the British South Africa Company.

Now the whites, including six surviving daughters of the founding pioneers, gathered in Cecil Square on that September morning in 1978. The women wore broad-brimmed hats, spring dresses and white gloves. In the parks of Salisbury there was a profusion of purple jacaranda in bloom, and the broad boulevards - designed by Rhodes to be wide enough for an eight-team ox wagon to make a U-turn - ran along rows of low white shops with overhanging steel awnings that shaded the spotlessly clean sidewalks. Whereas Johannesburg is a real city, Salisbury (now called Harare in honor of a Shona Chief) is really a large country town. It feels very British, reminding me of what York would look like if it were stuck in the middle of the Montana plains. The soft spring sun beat down on the whites in Cecil Square and on a small group of blacks, watching impassively from across the street. There was a roll of drums and a bugle call as the great-grandson of a founding pioneer raised the Union Jack - a ceremony that would be repeated in 1979 but never again. White heads bowed. The words were brave, even defiant, but everyone knew the end was near. The whites had overcome great odds and built an amazing country. Now the lessons of Africa had caught up with them, and Rhodesia, racked by a liberation war that would claim 27,000 lives between 1972 and 1979, was in the throes of transition.

“Our hearts are heavy,” said the Reverend C. W. A. Blakeley, “for there is sadness and pain and fear and war in our land, and a terrible desire for destruction has been thrust upon us. God, give us all the courage to be part of the solution to our problems and not part of the problem itself.”

Prime Minister Ian Smith - accused by the liberal whites of attempting to maintain white supremacy and by the conservatives of trying to turn Rhodesia over to “Marxist thugs” - moved among the descendants of the pioneers. “How nice to have you here, to see you looking so well,” he said, and ninety-eight-year-old Maria Mooman smiled back and patted his hand. Then Smith, a farmer-turned-politician, walked to his limousine, one hand clutching his hat, the other on the shoulder of his wife, Janet, and sped away without looking back.

Rhodesia had done well under the early settler farmers; there was at the time only one country in sub-Sahara Africa more prosperous than Rhodesia - South Africa. In 1923, when the charter of the British South Africa Company was abrogated, the whites in Rhodesia were given the choice of being incorporated into the Union of South Africa or becoming a self-governing entity within the British Empire. They chose the latter. The whites never institutionalized racism the way the South Africans did, but the blacks in Rhodesia didn’t fare much better than their counterparts in the country next door. The best farmland was reserved for whites. All the top jobs and every seat in parliament were held by whites. The whites’ per capita income in 1975 was $7,800, the blacks’ was $716. The whites’ literacy rate was 100 percent, the blacks’ 30 percent.

“These Africans in Salisbury don’t have anything to do with the terrorists in the rest of the country,” a white housewife told me. “To my mind, they’re terribly lazy and inefficient - much too inefficient to be terrorists - and sometimes difficult to handle, but they’re good people. They’re part of our family, even when they’re working as servants. We tend to their aches and pains and we treat them like we do our own children.”

After World War II, thousands of immigrants from England moved to Rhodesia, attracted by one of the world’s most pleasant life styles, and in 1963 Rhodesia began negotiating with London for its independence. In 1964 the United Kingdom granted independence to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) but demanded that the whites in Southern Rhodesia first demonstrate their intention to move toward eventual majority rule. They refused, and on November 11, 1965, Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front Party unilaterally declared independence. In March 1970 Smith proclaimed a State of Rhodesia.

The world responded by isolating Rhodesia with political and trade boycotts. But Rhodesia, with the help of South Africa and some Western oil companies willing to ignore sanctions, continued to prosper. Its 6,000 white farmers - who produced 80 percent of the country's food - were as industrious and ingenious as any in America’s Corn Belt. They fed the California-sized country and had plenty of food left over to export. Agriculture became a $500 million industry as the farmers moved away from their one-crop economy (tobacco) and diversified. By the late 1970s Rhodesia ranked first in the world in per-hectare yield of groundnuts, second in maize and soybeans, and fourth in wheat. Denied legal trade with the developed world, Rhodesia started making its own wine (not bad) and whiskey (terrible, but the Rhodesians drank it with pride) and producing everything from air conditioners to radios. Despite the international sanctions, a young married couple setting up a home could meet 85 percent of its needs with Rhodesian-made products. (There was even a locally produced version of Monopoly, but since that name was patented, the Rhodesians called their game Around The Boardwalk.) The Rhodesian economy was further buoyed by important supplies of chrome, coal, copper and nickel.

Nevertheless, Rhodesia reverted to the status of a British colony in 1979 and became the independent, black-ruled nation of Zimbabwe in April 1980. What forced the whites to reluctantly surrender power was not sanctions but a guerrilla war that ended up costing the country thirty lives and $1.5 million - or 40 percent of the national budget - each day. The black nationalist forces of the Patriotic Front just wore the country down, economically and spiritually. One faction of the front was headquartered in Zambia, armed by the Soviet Union and led by Joshua Nkomo, a 300-pound former railway worker whose high living raised some eyebrows; the other was in Mozambique, equipped to a large extent by China and led by Robert Mugabe, a Marxist who once said, “Genuine independence can only come out of the barrel of a gun.”

Mugabe, a disciplined scholar and non-practicing Catholic, spent ten years in detention or under restriction until 1974 in Rhodesia, and the whites’ greatest fear was that he would persecute his former tormentors, turn Zimbabwe into a Communist state aligned with Moscow and preside over the disintegration of another African economy. None of those things have happened, and Mugabe has shown far more respect for the due process of law than Ian Smith ever did. As the elected prime minister, Mugabe deftly juggled black hopes and white fears, and in the process proved himself to be perhaps the most capable leader in black Africa. His brand of Marxism thus far has been no more radical than social democracy in Europe and appears no more revolutionary than the demand that the exploitation of blacks must end. He has taken a page from Jomo Kenyatta’s scenario in Kenya and attempted to accommodate the whites, knowing that their presence is essential if Zimbabwe is to prosper. He has remained aloof from the Soviet Union, not even allowing Moscow to set up an embassy in Salisbury until more than a year after independence. In short, this former teacher whom the West called a Marxist terrorist is no more than a socialist and nationalist trying to serve the entire country on a basis of equality.

One of his early moves, after relegating Nkomo to a minor cabinet post, was to convene a conference of thirty-six nations in Zimbabwe to raise money. The scene was similar to a TV telethon in the United States in which viewers make pledges to combat various diseases or to finance political parties. But this one was a bonanza and Mugabe netted $1.4 billion for Zimbabwe. The United States, recognizing that a successful multiracial Zimbabwe could influence the future of South Africa and diminish Soviet pressure in all of southern Africa, pledged $225 million over three years. Even the impoverished West African nation of Sierra Leone kicked in $90,000. No Communist countries were invited, although a Soviet delegation flew into Salisbury and cooled its heels for two days at a local hotel, waiting for an invitation that never came.

The creation of Zimbabwe was in itself a rare achievement and the government’s accomplishments have not been insignificant. It has paid fair-market prices to whites who sold their farms and left the country, unable to tolerate a place where black cabinet ministers called each other “comrade.” Majority rule has seen the school enrollment more than double, from 800,000 to 1,760,000, and the reopening of 2,000 schools closed by the war. The minimum wage has risen 50 percent, and health care is now free for anyone earning less than $235 a month, which covers the majority of the 6.8 million blacks. The government has subsidized food prices by $385 million to make staples cheaper for the poor. Black employment has increased by 100,000.

Under the constitution, whites are guaranteed twenty of the hundred seats in parliament until 1987. No other African colony has entered independence with similar assurances for the minority race. About half of the original 270,000 whites chose to stay in Zimbabwe, but by the summer of 1983 events had taken a decided turn for the worse in Africa’s youngest country, and Mugabe’s dream for a prosperous, multi-racial society had been derailed by tribalism and was in jeopardy.

Joshua Nkomo, the father of independence who had been cheered by thousands when he made a triumphal return to Rhodesia in January, 1980, had been thrown out of the cabinet and had slipped across the border to Botswana one night, making his way back to London - and another home in exile. What he left behind was an army from the Ndebele-speaking minority, which represents 17 percent of Zimbabwe’s people.

Nkomo had fallen from favor after arms caches were discovered in his tribal district of Matabeleland, where there had been much banditry and terrorism, including the killing of white farmers. Mugabe dispatched the government’s North-Korean-trained elite unit, known as the Fifth Brigade, there with vague instructions to restore order and apprehend deserters who had fought in Nkomo’s liberation army. The Fifth Brigade undertook its assignment with enthusiasm, killing several hundred unarmed civilians in a matter of weeks.

The fragile fiber of society seemed to be unraveling around Mugabe, a member of the Shona-speaking majority that comprises about 80 percent of all Zimbabweans. The economy had been scorched by drought and the world recession, and the departure of whites had reduced productivity. South Africa appeared intent on doing what it could to ensure that there would be no black success stories in next-door Zimbabwe. Mugabe, however, did not overreact as most African presidents do in time of crisis and personal challenge. He continued to preach that blacks and whites, if they worked together, could still create the Zimbabwe that was promised during the war of liberation.

Zimbabwe’s future is far from settled, but a nation of great economic potential has emerged from the ashes of war and racial inequality - a feat that seemed impossible just a few years ago. I would like to think that South Africans will learn from the lessons of what Mugabe has tried to do in Zimbabwe - and what other leaders have done in Kenya, the Ivory Coast and a handful of former colonies. The Afrikaner has only to look across his borders to see the advance of history’s tide.

Election day

“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer that in one word: victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival”.

Oops!

Instead of being arrested, as we stated, for kicking his wife down a flight of stairs and hurling a lighted kerosene lamp after her, the Revd. James P. Wellman died unmarried four years ago.

~ Correction in a US newspaper quoted by Edward Burne-Jones in a letter to Lady Horner

Kenya for the Kenyans!

In July 1923, the British government issued a White Paper stating that

Primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty’s Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if and when these interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail. As in the Uganda Protectorate, so in the Kenya Colony, the principle of Trusteeship for the Natives, no less than in the Mandated Territory of Tanganyika, is unassailable.

Indians in Kenya Memorandum (HMSO, London, 1923), p. 6.

Zimbabwe is 30 today! Why no fanfare in the press?

2nd June 1974
Rhodesia’s Black leaders rejected concessions which rebel Prime Minister Ian Smith had hoped might lead to Britain’s agreement to independence. Smith’s proposal was to increase from 16 to 22 the number of seats in parliament set aside for Blacks at the upcoming election. The offer was rebuffed by Bishop Muzorewa of the African National Council who complained that it would take decades at such a rate of increase to attain parity of racial representation in the House of Assembly.

In the election a few weeks later Smith’s Rhodesian Front won 75% of the White vote and all 50 White-reserved seats, the moderate Rhodesia party took 19% of the White vote, and a group of hard-line independents who claimed that Smith was selling out White interests took 6%. Bishop Muzorewa criticised the sweeping victory: “The White electorate is possessed of a demon of fear. They have voted for speeding up a confrontation of races. They have voted for more years of sanctions, isolation and pseudo-independence.”

2nd June 1979
Rhodesia formally declared an end to White rule and changed its name to Zimbabwe.

2nd June 2009
Robert Mugabe’s thugs chant: ‘We will eat your children’ (via Sarah, Maid of Albion)

Well, whaddayaknow, the race-realists excoriated by Bishop Muzorewa were proved right. I’m amazed.


From Africa scholar Ronald Oliver’s classic history ‘Africa Since 1800’:

From about 1974, guerrilla activities were conducted by armies which were distinct from the political parties which formally controlled them – ZAPU’s Zimbabwe Independence People’s Army (ZIPRA) and ZANU’s Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). In 1975, Robert Mugabe left Rhodesia for Mozambique, where he played an important part in directing the war, working closely with President Machel. By 1976, guerrilla activities had escalated into outright war fought on a number of fronts and, by 1979, the nationalist forces had succeeded in penetrating deep into Rhodesia, almost as far as Salisbury itself. South Africa became increasingly concerned by the scale of the conflict and changed its policy from one of support for the white government into one designed to promote the emergence of a ‘friendly’ black government installed in an independent Zimbabwe. As early as 1974, the South African prime minister, Vorster, tried without success to negotiate with the nationalist leaders, and the next year he even joined forces with President Kaunda of Zambia to put pressure on the Rhodesians. In 1976, Ian Smith made one attempt to achieve an ‘internal settlement’ by holding talks with Joshua Nkomo: when they failed, Nkomo left Rhodesia for Zambia. Later that year, the American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, visited southern Africa and, as part of a wider mission, met all the main actors in the Rhodesian drama. Astonishingly, he obtained Smith’s agreement in principle to settle for African majority rule within two years, but the only response of Nkomo and Mugabe was to escalate the fighting and to form a Patriotic Front to unite the efforts of ZAPU and ZANU. At length, in 1978, Smith concluded an internal settlement with the ‘moderate’ African element, led by Bishop Muzorewa, Sithole, and Chief Chirau, with whom he agreed to share power, pending one-man/one-vote elections in April 1979. By this time, the strains of the mounting struggle were clearly beginning to tell upon the European population. Whites were emigrating in significant numbers, even though compelled to leave most of their property behind them when they did so. Of those who remained, many were by now conscripted at least for part-time service in the defence forces. Despite strenuous attempts to Africanise the army, it became increasingly doubtful how wholeheartedly such forces would fight against their fellow countrymen in the guerrilla movements. And the Rhodesian economy showed signs of disintegrating under the burden of war.

Thus, when Bishop Muzorewa emerged victorious from the election of April 1979, it was apparent that, even though Rhodesia had taken the momentous step to a mainly black government, there would be no lasting peace and no international recognition until the nationalists in exile had been accommodated. Lord Carrington, who became British foreign secretary in May 1979, at once addressed himself to this problem. Essentially, it was a matter of persuading Muzorewa and his colleagues to submit themselves to a fresh election, to be held after a brief period of resumed British rule, during which the exiles would be permitted to return to the country and join fully in the election campaign. Equally, it was necessary to persuade the exiles to drop their military activities in favour of political action and to trust in the fair conduct of the election. Carrington’s initiative received much support at the routine meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers at Lusaka in August. Leaders of the front-line states joined in putting pressure on the various parties to attend a constitutional conference in London, which in the event dragged on from September until December. Just before Christmas, it was judged that sufficient mutual trust had been achieved for Lord Soames to be sent as governor, with wide powers but no force other than a contingent of military ‘monitors’ 1,400 strong, to supervise the reabsorption of some 25,000 guerrilla fighters and the conduct of the election which followed only two months later.

The result of the election of February 1980 was probably a surprise to all who took part in it. Of 100 seats in the new parliament, Muzorewa’s party won three and Sithole’s party none. Of the exiles, Joshua Nkomo’s party, which had enjoyed the hospitality of Zambia and the material support of the Soviet Union, won twenty seats, all in Matabeleland. The overwhelming victory, with fifty-seven seats, went to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU/PF, the party with a reputation for uncompromising Marxism, which had been hosted in exile by Machel of Mozambique. The remaining twenty seats were reserved for whites, and all went to the Rhodesian Front. If there was momentary dismay felt in western countries, this was certainly reciprocated in those of the Soviet bloc, whose satellites were not even invited to the independence celebrations which followed on 18 April. Meanwhile, Mugabe’s early speeches and public statements had been reminiscent of those of Jomo Kenyatta when he assumed power in the Kenya of 1963. Reconciliation was the keynote. Pragmatism rather than dogma was to be the guiding light. Black and white would walk into the future arm-in-arm and with full confidence.

Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Africa Since 1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp 280-282.

Liberal tolerance

The banners in these photographs - taken in Berlin in 1989 - are the product of the same ‘tolerance’ which makes ‘liberal democracies’ so prone to waging war on other types of regime and to race-replacing their own populations. If diversity is a value-in-itself, as we’re often told, then anti-diversity is valuable in itself. Why then is it to be eliminated? Note the skeleton and the terminology of the ethnic cleanser.

University - Rage against the Nazi Brood!

Expel the Nazis! Foreigners stay!

Get rid of the Brown (Nazi) Filth!

I found the photos in a book called ‘Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.’ I suppose a critical anthropology of ‘anti-racism’ might be titled ‘Annihilating Difference through Anti-racism: The Anthropology of Ethnocide.’

BBC: The Incredible Human Journey

I didn’t see the first two episodes, Out of Africa and Asia, but tuned in to see the one about the journey to us, Europe.

Two points.

I couldn’t help being amused by Alice Roberts’s struggle to find the right words to describe the reconstructed face of the ‘first European’. In the context of the ‘Human Journey’ she was forced to acknowledge the obvious: we Europeans clearly don’t look like that nowadays. But if modern Europeans can so easily be distinguished from the reconstructed model, can’t we just as easily be distinguished from present-day people who look quite like the model, or otherwise look quite unlike Europeans? Of course we can, but this simple fact sits uneasily with the BBC’s usual racedoesnotexist line. How would the lovely doctor avoid seeming to take sides in the conflict between fact and politicised pseudoscience - essential if she hopes to keep on fronting BBC documentaries?

She came up with a clever dodge: “this face doesn’t look like we may think of modern Europeans as looking.”

A tortuous verbal formula that seemed to acknowledge the obvious but forbidden truth, so could move the narrative along its inevitable course, but that didn’t directly confront establishment lies. “We may think -- but maybe our eyes are lying.’’ Sure. A free person would simply have said “we don’t like that today,” what a shame Alice Roberts didn’t feel free to say that.

***

Second point, illustrating again the tension between honest science and prevailing dogmas. The theory is proposed that a ‘shared identity’ and ‘distinct culture’ was our ancestors’ decisive advantage over the relatively individualistic Neanderthals. In other words, one human group displaced another - to the point of its extinction - mainly by virtue of the incoming group’s higher levels of solidarity and co-operation.

The parallels between 40,000 B.C. and today, between the long-settled European populations and funny looking Afro-Asian colonists of both periods, must have occurred to many viewers even though Roberts never made the connection explicitly; the phrases ‘distinct culture’ and ‘shared identity’ are familiar from discussions about mass immigration and multiculturalism.

But could the same dynamic arise between rival sapiens sapiens groups - and with a similar outcome? Well, in Darwin’s famous words:

“A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit
of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to
aid each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be
victorious over most other tribes.”

Common sense, really, but the establishment persists in telling us the only thing to fear is our own ‘racism’ - by which they mean our will to survive. We should welcome immigrants; respect but not emulate their high degree of group cohesion and mobilisation; we should not be alarmed at the rapid demographic changes we see; and we certainly shouldn’t vote BNP who advocate the kind of policies that appeal only to "Neanderthals"! History and science, though, tell us the opposite.

Home Schooling for Nationalists

Preliminary research.

Current rules on Home-schooling in England are mercifully lenient. Any parent at any time and for any reason may decide to home-school his child. In the government publication Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities it is stated:

The responsibility for a child’s education rests with their parents. In England,
education is compulsory, but school is not.

Parents may choose home education for a variety of reasons. The local authority’s primary interest should lie in the suitability of parents’ education provision and not their reason for doing so. The following reasons for home educating are common, but by no means exhaustive:

• distance or access to a local school
• religious or cultural beliefs
• philosophical or ideological views
• dissatisfaction with the system

So, even if a parent’s decision to home-school his child relates to politically incorrect views, the state is not likely to interfere unless gifted the excuse of curriculum-based concerns. Such hazard is easily avoided, instilling pride in our children for their heritage does not require us to use ideas that are easily characterised as “hate-speech” by the real haters, for example.

The booklet continues:

Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 provides that:

“The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive
efficient full-time education suitable –

(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.”

An “efficient” and “suitable” education is not defined in the Education Act 1996 but “efficient” has been broadly described in case law [1] as an education that “achieves that which it sets out to achieve”, and a “suitable” education is one that “primarily
equips a child for life within the community of which he is a member, rather than the way of life in the country as a whole, as long as it does not foreclose the child’s options in later years to adopt some other form of life if he wishes to do so”.

1 Mr Justice Woolf in the case of R v Secretary of State for Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust (12 April 1985)

Multiculturalism to the rescue! Although principally a tool for destroying the old social order, it does at least formally provide for every group – even the majority – the ‘right’ to maintain its distinctiveness. And the qualification would not be a problem for most nationalist-minded parents. It is the state’s desire to engender self-hatred in the English which needs be coercive, not our hope to pass on to our children a healthy and natural self-respect.

Journal Article: The Oligarchic-corporate state

In an article in ‘The Journal of Anthropological Theory,’ Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer proposes a new approach for understanding elite power structures and processes, and their relationship to the globalisation and the state. Extensive selections from the article below.

New formations of power, the oligarchic-corporate state, and anthropological ideological discourse

by Bruce Kapferer

University of Bergen, Norway, and Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA

Abstract

The article presents a broad claim that the political environment of the nation-state is complicated by the emergence to dominance of state and state-like oligarchic-corporate state formations. These are considered as a relatively new kind of political departure that constitutes a reconfiguration of the relation of controlling interests to social realities. The argument develops the suggestion that some recent anthropological orientations to the state are relatively unreflective as to their own ideological positioning.

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Current configurations of global, imperial and state power relate to formations of oligarchic control. A major feature of this is the command of political organizations and institutions by close-knit social groups (families or familial dynasties, groups of kin, closed associations or tightly controlled interlinked networks of persons) for the purpose of the relatively exclusive control of economic resources and their distribution, these resources being vital to the existence of larger populations. For many theorists the state, throughout history and in its numerous manifestations, was born in such processes and continues to be so. Moreover, the oppressive power of state systems (e.g. the denial or constraining of human freedoms, the production of poverty and class inequalities) and the expansion of these in imperial form is a consequence of oligarchic forces. A diversity of political theorists of different persuasions (from anarchists and Marxists to liberals) have developed such themes. This article continues their argument but is concerned to show that the oligarchic formation of political processes and, indeed, the character of the state, is undergoing significant transformation(s) or transmutation(s) in the current historical moment. The state takes multiple forms and defies most attempts to arrive at an adequate definition of long-standing worth. The once broadly accepted Weberian definition of the state as that authority with the legitimate monopoly of violence over defined territory seems to be undergoing challenge in many global regions. Difficult to define, it is nonetheless a hard, if often different, shifting and uncertain, imagined and felt reality in the experience of most. Rather than define the state in some absolutist sense, what I intend to do is to explore its formation as a commanding and differential organizational complex of power in relation to oligarchic processes.

What is broadly referred to as globalization (a catch-all term and conceptually problematic despite its trendy appeal) is widely conceived of as subversive of the state, particularly in its modern territorially defined nation-state form. But the concept of globalization disguises the emergence to unchallenged (if momentary) global imperial dominance of the USA, whose own claim to international sovereignty reduces the sovereignty of many nation-states. Globalization, in other words, is both the cause and the effect of the emergence to political and economic dominance of a relatively new political formation (with many historical antecedents) that I will refer to as the oligarchic-corporate state formation.

[…]

A broad argument that I develop is that contemporary globalization, and what are deemed to be its effects (the failure of the regulative function of postcolonial states, porosity of borders, the privatization of erstwhile state-controlled institutions of redistribution), is a feature of oligarchic processes coming into new internal and external relations with the political-bureaucratic machinery of nation-states (orders, I add, that are still highly relevant). More importantly, I explore the engagement of these processes in the generation of critical shifts in the orders of state power and the formation of new kinds of state structure.

[…]

OLIGARCHIC FORMATIONS

Oligarchic formations are present throughout recorded history and themselves took a state form apparent in ancient systems (e.g. Mesopotamia, Athens, Carthage and so on), in feudal Europe, and especially evidenced in Italian city states – Venice and Florence being both outstanding examples. Political strife in ancient systems has repeatedly been expressed in rivalries between and within oligarchies which also embroiled loose and shifting alliances of dependents or ordinary citizenry within the wider population (e.g. the conflicts between factions relating to populist reforms involving the Gracchi in Imperial Rome, or the much later struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines through Europe.)

However, I suggest that in the modern period (with the formation of centralized territorially bounded nation-states in Europe and later in North America) oligarchic forces defined their economic interests and power through varying kinds of alliances with mass populist movements and sentiment through which they gained control of the machinery of state, developing it away from absolutist monarchical domination. Indeed, revolutionary movements (increasingly of left/right designation) over the last couple of centuries centred their struggles in relation both to entrenched oligarchic interests and newly forming oligarchies developing from the expansion of trading ventures (as a result of old and new world exploration, colonial settlement). This gathered pace from the Protestant Reformation on, coming to a head in the 17^th century through to recent times. The kind of state that came into being was, of course, highly various, dependent often on the degree of popular involvement in its formation or the degree to which already entrenched political and economic interests took a part or controlling direction in the creation of their state-political circumstances of existence e.g. the Cromwellian vis-a-vis the French Revolution. Broadly, the modern nation-state in its variety of forms – nationalist elite, egalitarian democracies, fascist, socialist, or class (oligarchic) dictatorships, frequently military – took shape each with its particular compact with previous or newly created oligarchic interests. These interests were, by and large, pursued through the order of the state (or subordinated to state concerns), its machinery either being captured by oligarchic groups or else such groups themselves being captured by populist forces in control of state apparatuses that were external to the social orders of local oligarchies.

[…]

But mass populism was a critical element in the formation of most modern nation-states (both dictatorships and democracies). It was also a vital factor in the creation of state-regulated systems for the distribution of wealth. Oligarchic interests were constrained within national orders even as they were oriented to the control of the political machinery of these states (and by a diversity of means from dictatorial coups to democratic election). The regulation of oligarchic practice (with or without the approval of oligarchs) operated in the interests of oligarchic/industrial and other economic ventures both in controlling competition (e.g. through anti-monopoly legislation) and in maintaining, as Marx argued in Capital, a reserve army of labour. (The close connection between advertising, consumerism and nationalism has been widely noted and is a factor in the influence of oligarchic interests in nation-state control.) The nation-state system permitted the expansion and further development of capital and simultaneously operated to order the mass of nationally-defined populations in expansive capitalist interest (see Arrighi, 1994; Harvey, 2003).

However, the current moment indicates both continuities with the relatively recent past and also new developments. One major shift is the breaking of oligarchic power away from the containing and regulative political order of the state. The development of the modern corporation has been of importance in this, further facilitated by the development of new technologies, especially relating to cyber-space, and new kinds of productive labour use. As summarized by Hardt and Negri (2000), production is now decentred and widely distributed (across different productive systems, tribal, peasant and so on) in a postmodern ‘putting out’ system articulated via computer technology – what Hardt and Negri label as post-Taylorist Toyotaism. The state has become in many instances a hindrance to oligarchic/corporate expansion, and the rhizomic mushrooming of corporations, interlocking directorships, shadow companies and other organizations, has reflected state constraints but also creative ways of escaping them and the revenues which states had been able to command. Organized extra- and trans-state oligarchic and corporate orders gathered an increasing political significance (as a function of their economic power and other influence), their organizations operating as independent political structures without a dependent population (apart from shareholders whose interests are thoroughly in accord with oligarchic and corporate self-interest). This key difference from state polities (which must enter into some kind of social contract with their populations, a key aspect of state promulgated nationalist ideologies), as these have hitherto developed, results in a relative lack of concern for populations except as consumers. Corporations are more or less immune from populist social demands and likely to be little interested in long-term programmes of social development that do not serve oligarchic and corporate self-interest. Rather, their approach is more in the direction of charitable assistance. The USA is an example. In many ways, it can be described as an oligarchic state par excellence whose charitable foundations are the key institutions of public support but intensely tuned to oligarchic/corporate interest. The privatization of public–state programmes in the contemporary era of corporate dominance over the state or release from state constraint is not merely a means for opening avenues of capital expansion but constitutes a way of increasing the indebtedness of populations (which, of course, is a major form of political and social control). In addition, it removes the capacity of populations to politically challenge corporations (especially in contexts where there are either no or weak unions), indeed the democratic possibility of the mass (or multitude as Hardt and Negri, 2004, following Marx would say) is dramatically reduced. While oligarchies and corporations may have some interest in controlling populations, their capacity to move outside the state (and effect shifts in state orders – to corporatize them) paradoxically can – at least in the short-term – be an effective means of subordinating the mass to oligarchic and corporate control.

So I am arguing that the growing independence of oligarchies and corporations from state control is producing a change in the state form. I am also suggesting that the nature of oligarchic and corporate orders is also changing. They are assuming increasingly state-like potencies but without the obligations of states. They are the global state form – states without borders and in many ways not reducible to notions of the state born in a history of nation-state formation.

CORPORATE AND OLIGARCHIC STATE EFFECTS: THE PRESENT IN THE PAST AND CONTEMPORARY MUTATIONS

The modern transnational corporation and aspects of a global oligarchic power were prefigured in the trading companies of the largely northern European colonial and imperial expansions from the 16th century onward. They acted like predatory states with virtually no moral obligations except to make money. In this they were much like modern corporations (see Bakan, 2004). But brought within state regulative control they assumed a clear state, often bureaucratic, form, effectively parallel states.⁴ This is evident in the British East India Company, the British West Africa Company and, of course, the British South Africa Company that in southern Africa was virtually the state (or a state within a state) right through to the end of colonial rule and after. The mining companies of southern Africa operated in a socially constitutive way, creating a society within the society of the encompassing colonial state.⁵

Contemporary corporate/oligarchic activity continues patterns that were evident in the colonial era (as Ho, 2004, stresses in the context of the World Trade Center attacks). They are involved in the creation of mobile global elites and simultaneously what could

be called a global working class. Perhaps Marx is more relevant today than ever before as far as the creation of class relations is concerned – a point that Hardt and Negri (2004) optimistically elaborate upon and indicate in their development of the concept of the multitude. My own view is that this multitude is much weaker than in earlier eras. It is highly fragmented and much more vulnerable (see Kapferer, 2002). It is relatively powerless before the coherent organized and often socially cocooned elites sponsored by company oligarchies.

A major distinction from the past in the present is that corporations and trading oligarchies were largely based in the nation-state, empowered by it as they were ultimately regulated by it. Fundamentally, they were formations of the state or nation-state (the freebooting extension of the state that acted as if it were independent) that operated a state-like bureaucratic system which continued through into postcolonial state orders. Acting apparently independently of the state, they were not bound by state legitimating moralities or inter-state diplomatic arrangements but were the under cover of the state, acting in its interests.

In the current context the situation is almost reversed. Nation-states are becoming the instrumentality of oligarchic empires and corporations. (The influence of News Corp and Fox is one example but there are many other less publicly visible examples.) These, as I have said, are not only independent of states (are deterritorialized states) but have a state form all their own, managerial rather than bureaucratic, with a tension to person-centred autocracy stressing flexibility rather than rule-driven impersonality (Sennett, 2000). Moreover, the modern state (the nation-state) is transforming in the corporate direction rather than the other way around, as in the past.

Corporate forms and practice are being fused with state processes so that the state itself is taking a corporate shape as well as a more overt oligarchic political form. The Hobbesian idea of the state (as mediating between rival groups and in a contractual relation to society) is in retreat. The Singapore model is becoming more evident in the sense that state forms and practice are becoming modelled after corporate organizational/ management ideals.⁶ This was the potential in the very beginnings of the USA and integral to its already established distinction from the monarchical bureaucratic centralized states of Europe. The individualist and oligarchic tendencies were explored early by De Tocqueville and provoked the excitement of the anarchist Kropotkin (1993 [1898]), who appreciated the individualist and oligarchic autonomy (and what he recognized as their innovative and creative flexibility) and the effectively anti-nation-state direction of America. The USA might be considered the modern and postmodern exemplar of the oligarchic state, though territorialized. Another example of contemporary oligarchic state formation is the European Community. It is a transitional form sharing some of the territorializing dimensions of the nation-state with the deterritorializing encompassing shape of the corporate state form. Its much commented upon bureaucracy, I suggest, is a hybrid elaborating around new managerial practices (Shore, 2000). Overall the newly emergent corporate state recognizes far more thoroughly than in the past the economic as the political. The market is its transcendent ideal and gives it ontological direction. This direction has minimal interest in either control over persons (except through the dictates of the market) or control over territory (other than that ‘territory’ defined by consumption).

I should add that the imperialism that is generated from Hobbesian state processes is distinct from what could be described as the imperialism of the corporate state. The imperialism of the former involves an expansion of the boundaries of sovereign territory (Queen Victoria becomes the Empress of India). The imperialism of the corporate state respects no boundaries, is trans-territorial and denies sovereignty of any territorial kind, operating primarily a logic of control (of the market) rather than a logic of rule (of power over persons and populations).

[…]

THE NATIONALISM OF THE OLIGARCHIC/ CORPORATE STATE

Oligarchies (contemporary ones that create the social on the basis of economic organization in relation to the market) have an associated mythos that is increasingly delocalized. They might be described as alienated dislocated forms. Superficially they bear some similarity to nation-state ideologies, with the critical difference that they are not territorialized. They have kinship, religious and communitarian aspects but are generalized in an open space without borders. Their character is akin to product loyalty, the territory that they define marks out a space of consumption as a way of existence or life that can be shared across great differences in actual social and cultural practice. Religion, the community, the family become products for consumption (e.g. evangelist preaching, new pentecostalist movements such as Hillsong in Australia and in Europe)⁷ and exist chiefly as a product, virtually a fantasy, that can only be truly lived in the space of the product.

The USA as the wellspring of oligarchic nationalism provides numerous examples. The well-known discussions on Disneyfication or McDonaldization provide some illustration. The ideological development of the family in the USA was a conscious state-supported effort to forge a national unity among an extraordinarily diverse immigrant population. Corporations were at the forefront, advertising agencies being strongly influenced by Freudian subliminal theories (see BBC Documentary, Centuries of the Self ). The national ideology of the family (iconic with one definitional aspect of oligarchic power) is an alienated virtual fantasy space lived perhaps most concretely in the roadside diner or the larger company chains (McDonalds, Cracker Barrel and so on). Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show gives a marvellous sense of a global all-encompassing family-centred oligarchic-controlled cosmic possibility. Whereas state-nationalism centred and opposed populations on the basis of a territorialized national cultural difference, oligarchic nationalism decentres, deterritorializes yet unifies populations in relation to corporate generated totalities and values. In the latter, culture is created through consumption, labile and moveable, whereas in the former culture is embedded, essential, and grounded.

It might be added here that in the emergence of corporate state forms, what was once public space held in the larger public interest is made into corporate space. Paradoxically that which was common (the Commons) is transmuted into corporate territory and given back to the public as part of corporate largesse. The nation-state – even if only ideologically – protected the public interest, the commons as public right. The corporations capture or create ‘public space’ (often making it internal to the corporation, a right of the corporation) and link it with what I have already referred to as the charitable practice of binding populations in the moral economy of the gift.

The ideologies and practice of oligarchic state forces not only contribute to what some might identify as a growing tide of popular conservatism (intensifying processes of alienation) but also constitute a new structuring of power bolstering the capacity of corporations to define the society of populations and to simultaneously politically tighten their grip over them. Outside the USA, the corporate and oligarchic invasion of the once public sphere is everywhere in evidence from attacks on institutions concerned with the redistribution of social justice (education, health, social security) to the privatization of a vast array of public services.

The oligarchic state as an alternative to the nation-state (and certainly subversive of it) was implicitly expressed in an interview on Fox News with Shimon Peres concerning the transfer of Gaza to Palestinian control. Shimon Peres (interview, Fox News, 10 April 2005) recommended (echoing US policy in Iraq) that corporations should take over the task of development and socio-economic reconstruction. In other words, the Palestinian state should not be a nation-state but an oligarchic state in which corporations should take the key roles. The idea is undoubtedly encouraged in the vision of Palestinians as fragmented by kinship and lineage (a factor that often seems to be the understanding behind the failure to achieve unity, ignoring the fragmenting, overweening power of the Israeli state) and thus suited to oligarchic/corporate political forms. These, as I have said, are by and large antithetical to the nation-state as an institution of regulation and distribution (factors that might provide for the social-political unity of the state against Israel).

A NEW STATE FORM

The emergence of what I have described as the oligarchic corporate state is a relatively new form, as too are corporate orders powerful enough to work independently of state regulation and controls. The nation-state may be in decline but it is giving way to a relatively original state order or political/economic formation with multiple state-like effects that is able to act in ways systemic with deterritorializing global processes. What I have labelled the corporate state and the emergence of corporations with state-like effects was developed in the context of nation-states, but through breaking free of state constraints or coming into control of state apparatuses new exploitative possibilities are opened. The corporate apotheosis is already indicating effects reflected in growing poverty, failures in public facilities, and an increased sense of insecurity – dimensions of Beck’s (1992) ‘risk society’. The issue of public order, the Hobbesian legitimation behind the nation-state, has been transformed into the problem of security. This is increasingly a private matter and has been corporatized. Security and surveillance have become a major concern for the corporate state, in many ways a means for protecting ruling interests against the public.

If the nation-state frequently abused the rights of its citizens, this is now a strong potential of the corporate state, which both privatizes the means for violence and turns the greater violent power of economically dominant groups against the general citizenry.

State violence takes a new oligarchic and corporate form. The nation-state is ceding the monopoly of violence as embodied in the military increasingly to private corporations, as Singer (2003) demonstrates. Corporations guard or secure themselves against the public, which suggests a vision of the mass that accords with the most abject visions of the essential baseness of humankind (sometimes attributed to Hobbes but vital in the most dismal economistic thinking). If we are in a risk society it is now also a society of intense suspicion. I suggest that this is not so much a consequence of the so-called War on Terror but generated in the very dynamic of the growth of the corporate state whose logic is founded in a dialectic of competition, control and self-protection.

Corporatization and, of course, the capitalist ethos which it further impels and transmutes, is founded in a discourse of desire and envy. The current stress in some scholarly areas on the larger political relevance of a psychoanalysis of desire, insightful as it undoubtedly is, is also organic to a contemporary rise of oligarchic and corporate power. The War on Terror is to a great extent fuelled in the formation of the corporate state whose participants both present themselves as objects of desire and of envy and who must be protected – such protection, of course, becoming itself a product for consumption and profit.

The nation-state was incorporative (often oppressively so), creating public order in a society of the state. The corporate state is oriented differently. It is not concerned to totalize society or to provide uniform regimes of order. The problem of order is resolved not by ordering the mass into a relatively static whole but rather by retreating from it, enclaving and guarding against the dangers of the mass at large. The corporate state is oriented to the creation of micro social orders of total control highly adapted to a social world premised on movement and displacement in which the social is always in the process of being reconstituted, often as a direct result of oligarchic and corporate action. If the nation-state gave rise to the impossible paradox of society against the state, the corporate state escapes such a paradox by sealing off spaces where persons must submit to control as a condition of access and participation in them from other spaces in which control is more open.

Human beings are made to choose continually between relatively open and closed social, political and economic worlds. As in nation-states, but motivated in different ideological commitments (which often accentuate individual freedom and which are antagonistic to government or ‘big government’), populations are being made complicit in their own domination, engaged in the acts of making choices between personal freedom and control – choices that they have little opportunity to avoid and which are oriented in the direction of willing submission.

A somewhat stark example is Iraq. This is becoming a corporate state par excellence, certainly distinct from the totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein. More a system of distributed totalitarian enclaves in which the citizenry is routinely given the choice – a choice that is more or less impossible to refuse – to forego personal freedoms in order to gain access to the means of survival. Moreover, the public is engaged in its own control and surveillance (the BBC reports that Iraqis engaged in security work, now the main employment, outnumber the occupying troops). This self-policing is a feature that scholars following Foucault describe as governmentality. Developed as part of nation-state systems, it is at least as crucial to what I am calling the corporate state and its rather distinct processes of ordering.

[…]

NOTES

4) They were, in effect, incorporated within the state. Their often dramatic fiscal failures enabled states to take them over. Of course, the agents of the trading companies had heavily engaged the political interests of the state in their operations and the takeovers were largely a formalization of the state-political controls that were already integral in operations that had the open appearance of being independent.

5) In South Africa and in Zambia the domains controlled by the mining companies were extremely tightly controlled, more regulated and far more autocratic than even the colonial orders within which they were embedded and upon which they were dependent.

6) The managerialization of state bureaucracies subverts conventional bureaucratic hierarchies’ command and promotional structures. On the surface this may increase participation, for example, in decision-making (this and flexibility being its ideological justification). However, the effect is to circumvent the power of bureaucrats (which is a dimension of their alleged inefficiency and slowness) as it may concentrate power in particular individuals which, nonetheless, is always limited or subject to results as these are defined in terms of the overall objectives of the corporate or corporatized organization. The limitation of the power of state-institutional/corporatized functionaries (expressed in higher rates of turnover in key managerial positions) reduces their capacity to impede the power of those oligarchic interests or groups who exercise control through access to and command over state Instrumentalities. I am suggesting that the state in its corporatization is not only changing but increasing its power ultimately in oligarchic interest.

7) Recent fieldwork by Judith Kapferer and myself among new Pentecostal churches in Australia indicates their powerful corporative and secretive/surveillance nature. Their growing alliance with the corporatizing state of the current Prime Minister John Howard is noteworthy. What is often described as the growing Christian religious fundamentalism in the USA and in Australia has a powerful corporate dimension to it. There is a degree of identity between the corporate structure of some of the relatively new evangelizing church congregations and the corporate/managerial style of government.

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Fjordman on Tibet and Europe’s indigenous peoples

At the Brussels Journal blog, Creating a European Indigenous People's Movement:

The next time EU leaders complain about China's treatment of minorities, I suggest the Chinese answer the following: "Yes, we represent an anti-democratic organization dedicated to subduing the indigenous people of Tibet, but you represent an anti-democratic organization dedicated to displacing the indigenous peoples of an entire continent."

[...]

I have earlier toyed with the idea of giving native Norwegians the legal status as indigenous people in Norway. A large proportion of my ancestors have lived here since the end of the last Ice Age, for as long as this country has been habitable for humans.

[...]

Genetically speaking, native Europeans have thus lived longer on the same continent than have Native Americans. Many Southeast Asians are descendants of southern Chinese settlers who displaced or eradicated the original, dark-skinned inhabitants of the region in early historical times, just as many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa are Bantu invaders who displaced or eradicated the indigenous Khoi-San peoples throughout much of Africa. Modern-day Japanese have lived in Japan for a shorter period of time than Europeans have lived in Europe. Yet a Scottish councillor, Sandy Aitchison, was chastised for using the term "indigenous" about native Brits. Why is it considered ridiculous or evil if Europeans assert our rights? Is it because we are white? Everybody's supposed to keep their culture, except people of European origins? Is that it? Why is colonialism bad, except when my country, which has no colonial history, gets colonized by Third World peoples?

***

Excellent article. Do read the rest.

Yesterday I visited the campus of a local university and happened to meet some students, campaigning under a ‘Free Tibet’ banner, for the creation of a state devoted to the interests of the Tibetan people.

For ten minutes or so we had a pleasant chat about Tibet’s history, imperialism and colonialism, and Buddhism. The students’ friendliness gave way to wariness, however, when I pointed out that the Chinese government programs the campaigners found most objectionable were identical to those of most European governments: deliberate demographic transformation contrary to the native peoples’ wishes, suppression of indigenous protest movements, educational programs designed to alienate the native people from their heritage and deracinate them, and the governments’ blanket denial of the native peoples’ ownership of their homelands.

This observation made the students deeply uncomfortable, as it once made me. I remembered my own struggle, thanks to a lifetime’s conditioning, simply to admit that my people have rights too - even that I *had a people*. I decided not to push the kids too hard, so signed their petition, wished them well, and left.

It’s discouraging, naturally, to see English students demanding rights for other peoples they are reluctant to grant their own people. But I console myself with the knowledge that polls show most of our people believe that what these students demand for the Tibetans is owed to us, too. Even these students, I believe, will one day come around to thinking of their own people with same concern they now have for the Tibetans. An organisation and campaign along the lines Fjordman recommends would help return these kids - and our nations - to health all the sooner.

Genius of Friendship - Williamson on T.E. Lawrence / Shaw (Lawrence of Arabia)

I have uploaded a PDF file of Henry Williamson's Genius of Friendship, a memoir of his relationship with T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) / T.E. Shaw, to archive.org and mihd.net.

As far as I can tell this is the only copy available online. If the link breaks I can email a copy to anyone who requests it, but for now this is good:

http://www.archive.org/details/GeniusOfFriendship

Ronald Niezen on Ethnocide

A Brit, fed-up with race replacement immigration, claims, with justification, that the principles outlined in the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have been violated in Britain. In the comments thread to an article about the BNP’s chances of gaining a seat on the London Assembly, James Burrows quotes the Declaration adopted by the General Assembly on 13th September 2007 :

Article 7.2 “Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct peoples”

Article 8.1 “Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.”

Article 8.2 “States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;
(e) Any form of propaganda directed against them

Quite right Mr. Burrows, and your timing couldn’t be better. Western politicians, spooked by the violent protests of these last few weeks, are finally discussing the decades long program of ethnocide in Tibet. But in sympathising with the Tibetans, and in giving the Dalai Lama a respectful hearing - his solution to the conflict is essentially ethnic-nationalist - these politicians cannot help but compromise their own opposition to Europe’s nationalist movements and spokesmen.

Anyway, a good excuse to post these quotations from Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 2003):

“Ethnocide, ” sometimes also called “cultural genocide, ” occurs more often where the state has a firm grip over a subject people but is still striving to secure its national identity. It is usually manifested in policies or programs of “assimilation” aimed at eliminating stark cultural differences and rival claims to sovereignty that arise from first occupation of a territory. Its goal is the elimination of knowledge of, and attachments to, distinct and inconvenient ways of life. In the nation building of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, assimilation policies made use of what was referred to as the “tools of civilization”— the schools of the state, the churches of the Christian faith, and the households of “national families”—to eliminate the attachments of children to the “backward” and “uncivilized” ways of their families and ancestors. [p.55]

***

That remains true for the New World, and is the case in Europe too. But today the principal targets of the states’ efforts are the White majorities.

Niezen goes on to explain that the ethnocidal regime will also employ mass-murder (genocide) to achieve their ends:

Ethnic cleansing becomes an actuality or latent possibility when a minority people people [more accurately, a subject people ~ fellist] are seen to be significantly obstructing the unity and prosperity of the dominant society: claiming title to land that could be better used; practicing faiths laden with error and malignant powers; insisting upon maintaining traditions that contrast with those of the standard bearers of nationhood; and, by virtue of these differences, competing for political representation and power as a distinct society—such perceived faults lead to a general view of minority people as an obstacle to unity and collective self-actualization by those with power over them. More significantly, the minority is seen as somehow beyond the possibility of reform, unchangeable, stubborn, or, even when “properly” educated, subject to cultural recidivism.

With such perceptions as a starting point, dominant peoples, especially in frontier societies where there is competition over resources, sometimes assert their identities and interests by eliminating, one way or another, the weaker people who stand in their way. Such “cleansing” has taken a variety of forms, including forced expulsion, imposed hunger, and mass killing. The goal of total removal is inseparable from the idea, itself a companion of collective hate, that a subject population cannot be separated from its attachments to cultural differences and assertions of sovereignty. Ethnocide, by contrast, stems from the prevailing notion that cultures are malleable, that entire peoples are capable of guided transformation and therefore that inconvenient or threatening attachments to differences can be peacefully disposed of through strategies of cultural reform.

These basic approaches to eliminating cultural differences are not mutually exclusive. Ethnic cleansing and ethnocide can in fact be seen as complementary, since their main difference is that one has the goal of eliminating a people whereas the other has the goal of removing those features that make them distinct. But it is important also to keep in mind that colonial powers or dominant ethnic groups are not always politically homogeneous or coordinated in their actions, interests, and objectives. State governments can be perfectly willing to negotiate treaties with their indigenous inhabitants—or, more correctly, “neighbors”—while settlers are bent upon their extinction. It is thus conceivable, and realized on a number of occasions, that the sovereignty of indigenous societies can be affirmed through a treaty-making process at the same time that policies are put into effect to remove their cultural differences, all the while that they are being forced onto reservations or starved into submission or that frontiersmen are waging open warfare against them with impunity. [Ibid., p.92]

UNESCO at 60 by Claude Lévi-Strauss

A rather surprising endorsement of the basic claims of race-realists and nationalists:

From UNESCO at 60 by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Diogenes Vol. 54, No. 3, 5-10 (2007)

Quoting:

In the wake of the Second World War, what with the horror caused by racist doctrines and their pursuance through the massacre of entire populations and the extermination camps, it was only to be expected that Unesco would regard as its most urgent task the scientific criticism and moral censure of the notion of race. Hence the two successive declarations on race, in 1951 and 1952 respectively. Why two? This was because the first, sociologically inspired one was seen by biologists as too simplistic. After the second declaration, it seemed, Unesco was able to consider the problem to have been settled once and for all.

Around 1950, however, population genetics had not really come into its own. It nowadays prompts us to recognize that the oneness of the human person, which it does not question, is of greater complexity. Behind this oneness, it discerns what it calls fuzzy sets of genetic variants that cross and intersect, become isolated, disperse or run together in the course of time, and whose identification can be genuinely useful in medicine. While continuing to proclaim the oneness of the human person, we have to keep abreast of scientific research and make adjustments as necessary, which is what Unesco did in two subsequent declarations in 1964 and 1967. This is a particularly necessary task in view of some disquieting recent publications by biologists attempting to rehabilitate the notion of race, if only in acceptations differing from those it may have had in the past, but which nevertheless remain sensitive.

Recognition of cultural diversity and the protection of cultural identities under threat form the second segment of this mission of Unesco in which anthropology also sees its place. Unesco first conceived it from the angle of the world’s heritage, where such diversity is to be seen spread over time, as it were. It more recently undertook to envisage it also in space, including therein all its modalities throughout the world and which, being intangible and so devoid of tangible reality, are liable to disappear without trace.

[…]

Unesco has become convinced that languages are a treasure, in themselves for a start and because their disappearance entails that of beliefs, skills, usages, arts and traditions that are all irreplaceable items of the heritage of humanity.

As Unesco emphasizes throughout its material, these fears are unfortunately all too justified by the accelerated impoverishment of cultural diversity caused by this fearsome conjunction of phenomena called globalization.

[…]

For its part, Unesco has always recognized the existence of a link between cultural diversity and biodiversity. The 1972 Convention on the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage even then brought the two aspects closer together by associating with the cultural heritage ‘habitats of threatened species of animals and plants’. Unesco has moreover established worldwide some 500 biosphere reserves to safeguard remarkable cases of biodiversity.

Over the years, it gave this link ever greater importance in seeking to understand its reasons. Hence, in his Proposals for 2006–7, the Director-General emphasizes the existence of a ‘cultural diversity-biodiversity nexus’. It indeed seems to me that, to develop differences, for the thresholds making a culture distinguishable from its neighbours to become sufficiently clear-cut, the conditions are roughly the same as those fostering biological differentiation: relative isolation for a long period; and only limited exchanges, whether cultural or genetic. Cultural barriers are of much the same nature as biological barriers; the latter prefigure them all the more closely in that all cultures impress their mark on the body through styles of costume, headgear and ornament, through bodily mutilations and through body-language patterns; and they mirror differences comparable to those recognized between varieties within one and the same species.

Impressive amateur photos of Lake District fells

I just found some lovely photos on Flickr, posted by 'tricky'.

Derwent fells from the top of Maiden Moor

Boathouse on Derwent Water

Cat Bells ridge by Derwent Water