‘Philosophy’

Today in the morning the first thing I did when I got up was to take a walk in the street. Whenever I go for a walk I think. Keeping in mind what we said yesterday about the pretentious academic profession called ‘philosophy’, I remembered a passage from my book El Grial that is worth translating into English:
 

______ 卐 ______

 

In the mid-1970s, when I wanted to study philosophy, I treasured one of the most popular philosophical dictionaries in the Spanish language: that of the Italian philosopher Nicola Abbagnano. After sleeping for decades in an era that hid fundamental questions from me, when I became awake it occurred to me to see what Abbagnano’s dictionary of philosophy said about National Socialism, but there was no article about it. So I looked up the word ‘Racism’ and was in for a surprise. After a good introductory paragraph, Abbagnano wrote the most propagandistic falsehoods one can imagine, breaking even the tone of his usual academic prose. We mustn’t forget that Abbagnano finished writing his dictionary in 1960, when the West knew nothing about the Third Reich except Allied propaganda. It is therefore not surprising that an Italian professor had to bow to such a narrative. But I would like to focus on his article:

Racismo (English racialism; French racisme; German Rassismus; Italian razzismo). The doctrine according to which all historical-social manifestations of man and his values (or disvalues) depend on race, and which enunciates the existence of a superior (‘Aryan’ or ‘Nordic’) race destined to be the guide of the human race. The founder of this doctrine was the Frenchman Gobineau in his Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (1853-1855), aimed at defending aristocracy against democracy.

Not long ago, by the way, I added Count Gobineau’s book to my library, but let’s see what Abbagnano says next:

Towards the beginning of the 20th century a Germanophile Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, spread the myth of Aryanism in Germany in Die Grundlagen des XIX Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the 19th Century, 1899), identifying the superior race with the Germanic race.

Here the problems begin, because that is not a myth. It is no coincidence that, until very recently, the Aryans have dominated culture, science, technology, and the political world.

Anti-Semitism dated back to ancient times in Germany and therefore the doctrine of racial determinism and the master race found easy dissemination there, resolving itself in support for anti-Semitic prejudice and the belief that there is a Jewish conspiracy for the conquest of world domination and that therefore capitalism, Marxism and, in general, cultural or political manifestations that weaken the national order are Jewish phenomena.

Here it is already raining ignorance. Abbagnano writes as if the Jewish problem were hallucinatory: a German prejudice. The best way to answer the late Abbagnano is simply to say that it is not hallucinatory. When Abbagnano was in his prime, Jews were over-represented not only among Lenin’s willing executioners, but the civic associations that lobbied to open the doors to mass non-white migration to the United States were Jewish. Those who doubt the veracity of these claims should read two books that document this, one by a Gentile and one by a Jew: Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique and Albert Lindemann’s Esau’s Tears.

After the First World War, racism was for the Germans the myth of consolation, the escape from the depression of defeat, and Hitler made it the foundation of his politics.

Abbagnano was a scholar. It seems improbable that he was unaware of a few things in Western history. The paragraph above implies that racism was a 20th-century German myth. The truth is that racism is millennia old: from the Aryans who invaded India and developed a Brahmanical religion so as not to contaminate their blood; from the ancient Egyptians who posted signs that no blacks were allowed in their lands beyond a certain latitude; from the blond Spartans of ancient Greece who had very strict rules to avoid interbreeding with non-Dorians, to the Visigoths who burned at the stake any Goth who married a mudblood in ancient Hispania. Republican Rome used to practice patrician inbreeding to avoid mixing with the lower classes; the patricians being more Aryan than the plebeians (not to mention the slaves). Racism was not Hitler’s invention. All that the Germans of the century in which Abbagnano and I were born did was to provide racism with the scientific basis, and the political impetus, that such a healthy instinct required. The philosopher’s ignorance continues:

The doctrine was elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930). Rosenberg asserted a rigorous racial determinism. Every cultural manifestation of a people depends on its race. Science, morality, religion and the values they discover and defend depend on the race and are the expressions of the vital force of the race. Therefore, truth is always such only for a given race. The superior race is the Aryan, which from the North spread in antiquity through Egypt, India, Persia, Greece and Rome, and produced the ancient civilisations: civilisations that declined because the Aryans mingled with inferior races. All the sciences, the arts, the fundamental institutions of human life have been created by this race. Opposed to it is the parasitic Jewish anti-race, which has created the poisons of the race: democracy, Marxism, capitalism, artistic intellectualism, and also the ideals of love, humility, equality spread by Christianity, which represents a Roman-Judaic corruption of the teaching of the Aryan Jesus.

True, some National Socialists fantasised about an Aryan Jesus, Hitler included; but as we saw in the section on Jesus in my previous volume, 21st century New Testament studies have revealed that, in real history, Jesus of Nazareth didn’t even exist. But let’s return to the Italian philosopher. The reprint I own of Abbagnano’s Dictionary is from 1987. My original copy from the mid-1970s is now in the hands of a friend of the Arboledas Park [see The Human Side of Chess]. It is not worth quoting his entire article, ‘Racism’, pages 977-8 in the Fondo de Cultura Económica edition, but I should point out that it is on page 978 that the dictionary becomes nonsense. This is Abbagnano’s first nonsensical sentence: ‘There is no such thing as an “Aryan” or “Nordic’ race”.’ While it is true that, if one wants to write accurately one could say ‘ethnic group’ instead of ‘race’, the Nordics as an ethnic group do exist. The malevolence in an assertion like Abbagnano’s is similar to denying that races exist. Abbagnano’s second nonsensical claim deserves to be indented:

There is no proof whatsoever that race or racial differences influence in any way cultural manifestations or the possibilities for the development of culture in general. Nor is there any evidence that the groups into which mankind can be distinguished differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development. On the contrary: historical and sociological studies tend to reinforce the view that genetic differences are insignificant factors in determining the social and cultural differences between different groups of men.

I dare say that such a paragraph invalidates not only the article ‘Racism’ but the whole dictionary. What is the use of so much ontology, so much theory of knowledge, so much metaphysics and logic of academic philosophers if they are unable to see the most elemental thing of the empirical world? What value can the so-called social sciences like the sociological studies that Abbagnano mentions—opinions in fact—bring to us as opposed to the exact sciences? If there is one thing that has been clear since Darwin and his disciples in physical anthropology (Franz Boas’ ‘social anthropology’ is pseudoscientific), it is the difference in cranial capacity between, say, blacks and whites. Moreover, there are psychometric tests on baby blacks adopted into the homes of wealthy whites. Such studies not only show that IQ varies between races, but also between men and women. Among active chess players there are no black chess grandmasters. And the world championships have to be divided between men and women, while the latter have been unable to reach the crown that has been won by champions such as Capablanca, Fischer and Carlsen.

If there is one thing that raciology, the study of human races, teaches us, it is that genetic differences between humans are determining factors in social differences (I have already mentioned Jared Taylor’s group that brings together all these scientific studies). The ivory tower of philosophers like Abbagnano, who all they do is bend the knee before the current narrative, should be the laughingstock of anyone who has overcome political correctness.

There is also no evidence that breed mixtures produce biologically disadvantageous results. It is very likely that ‘pure’ races do not exist and have never existed over time. The social outcomes, both good and bad, of miscegenation can be attributed to social factors.

Passages like that move me to say that what goes on in the minds of academics like Abbagnano is on the level of the Byzantine discussions of other times: thinking of angels on the head of a pin instead of real and concrete facts. The notable Italian philosopher seems to be deliberately dissociating reality. Any honest Italian can see that the mixed people of Sicily with the Turks in the south belong to an inferior culture than the whiter Italians in the north of the peninsula. And let us not speak of how, by interbreeding with Indians and blacks, the Iberians produced an inferior stock to their Anglo-German counterpart north of the Rio Grande. What on earth is Abbagnano basing his statement that there is no historical evidence that admixture produces disadvantages in mestizo offspring? The answer is not hard to find. In the last paragraph of his article we see that Abbagnano subscribes, religiously, to the suicidal universalism of the West: the heritage of the universal Catholicism of his country’s church. Let us hear what Abbagnano, who was born and died in Italy, opines about racism:

…it is an extremely pernicious prejudice, because it contradicts and hinders the moral tendency of humanity towards universalist integration and because it turns human values, beginning with truth, into arbitrary facts that express the vital force of race and thus have no substance of their own and can be arbitrarily manipulated for the most violent or heinous ends.

Violent ends? Who were the biggest genocidaires in World War II, the racists or the anti-racists? The most common way of lying by academics and the media is omission. The classic case of lying by omission is the Holocaust of Germans perpetrated, after 1945, by the Allies when the Germans had already surrendered; not to mention Lenin’s and Stalin’s wilful executioners and their tens of millions of dead.