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Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Axiology Ethnic cleansing Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Lost Opportunity

Excerpted from the 12th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The attractions of the vast and rich Orient for one Nordic conqueror after another are obvious. What is unfortunate is that none made racial considerations the basis of his program of conquest—and it could have been done.

Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a Nordic empire which could have stood against the rest of the world—including Rome—forever. The Macedonians and the Greeks shared common blood and had similar languages (ancient Macedonian was an altogether different language from modern Macedonian, which has its roots in the sixth century A.D. conquest of Macedonia by Slavic tribes). If, before invading Asia and defeating the Asian armies, Alexander had devoted his energies to forging just these two peoples into a unified population base, casting out all the alien elements which had accumulated in Greece by the latter part of the fourth century B.C.; and if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of total extermination—then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied freely and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.

But Alexander did not cleanse Greece of its Semitic merchants and moneylenders and its accumulated rabble of half-breeds, and he chose to base his Asiatic empire on the indigenous populations instead of on colonists. And so the Greco-Macedonian world, despite its uninterrupted prosperity and its maintenance of the appearance of might after Alexander’s death, continued its imperceptible downward slide toward oblivion.

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Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Demography Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Alexander the “Great”

This text has been merged within another entry (here)

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Demography Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Aryans and mongrels

Excerpted from the 11th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The foregoing remarks are especially well illustrated by the fate of a related group of Indo-European tribes whose members called themselves Aryans. Although the name “Aryan” is sometimes used to designate any person of Indo-European ancestry, it applies especially to the tribes which, beginning probably in the third millennium B.C., migrated eastward and southeastward from the ancient Nordic homeland, some going down through Turkistan and into Iran from the northeast—and some into the more easterly foothills of the Hindu Kush, in what is now Afghanistan.

The high Iranian plateau, much of it covered with grass, provided an ideal territory for the horsemen from the northern steppes. They multiplied and prospered, raiding their non-Indo-European neighbors in the Zagros Mountains or on the edge of the Sumerian plain from time to time, collecting slaves and booty. They maintained their racial purity scrupulously enough, however, so that, as late as the middle of the first millennium B.C., King Darius the Great could still proudly and truthfully boast: “I am an Aryan, the son of an Aryan.”

But Semites and other aliens became more numerous in Iran as the might and wealth of the Aryan Persians grew. In the reign of Darius’ son Xerxes, as we know from the Old Testament’s Book of Esther, Jews were already quite influential there. Today, 2,500 yeas later, the Iranians are no more Aryan than their Semitic neighbors, so thoroughly have the genes of the various races in that part of the world been mixed.

(Here Pierce writes several paragraphs about the conquest of India, then he adds:)





Crop of Half-Breeds

The first step may be a simple matter of military indiscipline: the rape of a few hundred dasyu women in a rebellious district after a revolt is put down by Aryan warriors. Twenty years later there will be a crop of half-breeds in that district, and some of the half- breed females will be much lighter and comelier than the average dasyu.

These light ones will be especially likely to be targeted for rape the next time there is a rebellion—or the next time a gang of drunken Aryans goes out on the town. And so, 20 years later, there will be some quarter-breeds around—and some of these may be light enough to be chosen as concubines by the local Aryan landlord.

Beware the almost-Whites!

And so it goes, century after century, with the simple Black-White picture gradually giving way to one in which there is a continuous range of mongrels between the two racial extremes. Near the White end of the spectrum there will be some who, although carrying some dasyu genes, will be almost indistinguishable from the true Aryans. Drawing the line between what is Aryan and what is not becomes more and more difficult. And as the racial picture becomes more blurred, the will to preserve the race is sapped. Many of the almost-Aryans will be bright and energetic citizens; style will be mistaken for substance; the keen edge of the Aryan race-soul will be blunted by imperceptible degrees.

(Nuristani kids from Afghanistan)

By the time the damage has become quite noticeable, racial decadence has become irreversible. The subtle but essential qualities of psyche and intellect in the Aryans which led to conquest and to the building of Aryan civilization are diluted to ineffectiveness in their almost-Aryan descendants 15 or 20 centuries later, even though fair hair and blue eyes may still be abundant.

That is what happened to Aryan Persia and Aryan India. And it is also what is happening to Aryan America and Aryan Europe today.

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Ancient Greece Demography Ethnic cleansing Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Extermination or Expulsion?

Excerpted from the 10th article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


And what a contrast between the Hellenes and their achievements, on the one hand, and what existed before—and has existed since—in Greece! That is not to say that every Greek of today is unimaginative or insensitive or ugly, but it is clear that something essential has been lost between the time of Aristotle and the time of his late namesake, Mr. Onassis. And the loss was at least as great between the time of Achilles and Aristotle, although the culture-lag phenomenon tends to mask this earlier decline in racial quality.

The Hellenic genes are still there, the genes of the race which gloried in single combat between equals facing one another on the field of battle and pitting skill, courage, and strength in a contest to the death, but they are now submerged in the genes of a race which always preferred to sling its stones from afar, to lie in stealthy ambush, to give a surprise knife-thrust from the rear. The race-soul which first envisioned the symmetry of the Doric temple and pondered the mysteries of existence as none before it has become inextricably mingled with one concerned, first and last, with personal advantage and disadvantage, profit and loss.

Extermination or Expulsion

This catastrophic mixing of bloods has occurred over and over again in the history and prehistory of our race, and each time it has been lethal. The knowledge of this has been with us a long time, but it has always failed us in the end. The Hellenes of Sparta and Athens both strove to keep their blood pure, but both ultimately perished. The only way they could have survived would have been to eliminate the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination, from the areas of the Mediterranean world in which they settled.

The Hellenes always possessed a certain feeling of racial unity, distinguishing themselves sharply from all those not of their blood, but this racial feeling was, unfortunately, usually overshadowed by intrarracial conflicts. The rivalries between Hellenic city-states were so fierce and so pervasive, that the Mediterranean natives were more often looked upon as a resource to be used against other Hellenes than as a biological menace to be eliminated.

Economics over Race

The ultimate downfall of the Nordic conquerors in Asia, just as in the Mediterranean world, can be traced to an economic consideration and to an error in human judgment. The economic consideration was that a conquered population, just like the land itself or the gold and other booty seized by the conquerors, had real value. Whether the people were enslaved or merely taxed as subjects, they were an economic resource which could be exploited by the conquerors. To drive them off the land or wipe them out completely would, from a strictly economic viewpoint, be akin to dumping captured gold into the ocean.

Such an action could be justified to a conquering tribe of Indo-Europeans only if they were willing to subordinate all economic considerations to the goal of maintaining their racial integrity into the indefinite future—and if they also had a sufficiently deep understanding of history to foresee the inevitability of racial mixing wherever two races are in close proximity. Unfortunately, even where the will for racial survival was very strong, the foresight was insufficient. Measures which were quite adequate to prevent racemixing for a few generations, or even for a few centuries, broke down over the course of a thousand years or more.

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Ancient Greece Athens Demography Miscegenation Pericles Racial studies Sparta (Lacedaemon) Who We Are (book) William Pierce

White suicide since Ancient Greece

Excerpted from the tenth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


At the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the Spartiates were able to field an army of 8,000 men against the Persians, but after the costly Spartan victory over Athens and her allies in the Peloponnesian War (431 -404 B.C.) Spartan numbers declined rapidly. When the Spartiates marched against Thebes in 371 B.C., there were too few of them to prevail. After their decisive defeat by the Thebans at Leuctra, the Spartan army numbered only 2,000 warriors. A century and a half later there were only 700 of them, and they passed from the pages of history.

The Spartiates never succumbed to racemixing, but they did succumb to their own lifestyle. They would have been well advised to eliminate the Helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether and to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas. Then they may well have been able to practice a successful eugenics program, maintain their moral health, and have a stable population too. But, of course, they did not have the advantage which hindsight gives us.

The other Hellenic tribes did succumb to racemixing. Their populations did not suffer the decline in numbers which the Spartiates did, but they suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination, perhaps more slowly but just as surely—and less cleanly.

Predominantly Nordic

Still, the earliest Athenians were, like the other Hellenes, predominantly Nordic in blood and culture. Their social structure was aristocratic, and they were ruled originally by hereditary kings, just as in the case of the Spartiates.

Although Athenian tradition credits the legendary King Theseus with the political unification of the various semi-independent townships of Attica into a single “greater Athens” during the Heroic Age, it is certain that this unification actually did not take place until long after the Dorian invasion. In any event, the monarchy did not last long in unified Attica, and at the dawn of history the Athenians were ruled by a coalition of noble families, the Eupatrids (“those who are well sired”).

Race-Based Citizenry

Even after Solon, however, democracy did not devour the Athenians all at once. Solon and the tyrants who gained power shortly after his administration, the Peisistratids, governed an Athens in which citizenship was still a racial matter, being based on membership in one of the kinship groups, or clans, which made up the Hellenic tribes of Attica.

In 509 B.C., 85 years after the beginning of Solon’s administration, another “reformer,” Cleisthenes, took office, and he undertook a program of gerrymandering which laid the basis for changing citizenship from a racial to a geographic affair. From this point it was downhill all the way for Athens, racially speaking.

Half a century later the last remnants of power were transferred from the Areopagus to a popular council. All the abuses of mass party politics with which Americans are all too familiar were thenceforth the lot of the Athenians.

Law of Pericles

As the prosperity of Athens grew, more and more foreigners crowded into Attica, with intermarriage inevitably occurring. A temporary halt to the pollution of the Athenian citizenry by the offspring of aliens came in 451 B.C., when the great Pericles pushed through a law restricting citizenship to those born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. Only four decades later, however, in order to make up the enormous losses suffered in the Peloponnesian War, Athens bestowed citizenship on tens of thousands of foreigners.

And in the fourth century, although the citizenship law of Pericles remained on the books, every variety of Levantine mongrel was claiming Athenian citizenship. The banking industry of Athens, for example, was entirely in the hands of Semites, who had taken Greek names and were awarded citizenship for “service to the state,” much in the way Jews and Negroes have been elevated to the British “nobility” by the score in recent decades.

Darkening of Hellas

Intermarriage was rife, and the darkening of the Hellenes of Athens was well under way. Racial, moral, and cultural decline went hand in hand. The second-century historian Polybius described his countrymen as “degenerate, pleasure-seeking beggars, without loyalty or belief, and without hope for a better future.”

A century later, in the reign of Augustus, the Roman writer Manilius reckoned the Hellenes among the dark nations (coloratae genies). And so the Athenians, like the Spartiates, passed from the pages of history.

If it is difficult to believe that as great a state as Athens could pass from Nordic genius and glory to mongrelized squalor in a few centuries, just think for a moment of the racial transformation of America which has taken place in a single century. And imagine what America will be like two or three centuries hence (barring a White revolution), when Whites are a minority, outnumbered by both Blacks and Chicanos. America’s technology and industry may coast along for a century or two on the momentum acquired from earlier generations, as Athens’ culture did, but the American people—the real Americans—will have passed from the pages of history.

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Ancient Greece Demography Iliad (epic book) Indo-European heritage Miscegenation Philosophy of history Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Nordic invasion precedes rise of Classical Civilization

Excerpted from the tenth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:

Greece was invaded by Greek-speaking Northerners several times during prehistory. Those who arrived in the period 2,100-1,900 B.C. founded the great Mycenaean civilization, which flourished from the end of the l6th century until about 1,200 B.C.

Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey describe Mycenaean Greece, refers to the Greeks, or Hellenes, inclusively as “Achaeans.” In fact, however, the Achaeans were only one of the Hellenic tribes which were in Greece in Mycenaean times.

Aeolians and Ionians

In addition to the Achaeans, who occupied most of the Peloponnesus (the southern peninsula of Greece, in which Mycenae was located), there were the Aeolians and the Ionians, who occupied other portions of the mainland, many of the Aegean islands, and the west coast of Asia Minor. The Ionians, in particular, settled in Attica and were the founders of Athens.

These tribal divisions apparently predate the arrival of the first Hellenes in Greece, and it seems likely that the Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians invaded the Aegean region separately, over a period of several centuries.

And there were also the non-Greek Pelasgians, the Mediterranean aborigines, who occupied the lowest stratum of Greek society and substantially outnumbered the Hellenes in Mycenaean times. As pointed out in the last installment, the Mycenaean Greeks were influenced culturally by these Mediterraneans—and, as time passed, racially as well.

Divine-Born Heroes

In the late 14th and early 13th centuries B.C. more Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans arrived, coming westward across the Aegean in ships. They were Homer’s “divine born” heroes, the fathers and grandfathers of the warriors who sacked Troy about 1,250 B.C.: golden-haired Achilles, the sons of Atreus, and the other princes and kings of the Iliad. They settled in Greece, founded dynasties, and lived in a manner remarkably like that of northern Europe’s feudal lords more than 20 centuries later.

A couple of generations after the fall of Troy—exactly 80 years afterward, according to Greek tradition—a new group of divine-born warriors swept down on Greece, this time from the north. They were the Heraclidae, the supposed descendants of the blond demigod Hercules, and with them came the Dorians, the last of the major Hellenic tribes to reach the Aegean region.

Dorian Invasion

The Dorians, who had settled in central Greece a few years earlier, proceeded to conquer the Achaeans, occupy the Peloponnesus, and extinguish Mycenaean civilization. But, in so doing, they prepared the way for the rise of a new civilization which would greatly surpass the old one.

The Dorian invasion was actually a more complex phenomenon than the preceding lines might suggest. It involved repeated interactions with other peoples on a protracted journey which, although generally southward, included a number of detours, loops, and rest stops. And their legendary leaders, the Heraclidae, had already been south once before, prior to the Trojan war.

It also involved the displacement of other peoples, and it came during a period when lesser Greek-speaking tribes were undertaking invasions of their own to the south. Displaced Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians migrated to new areas, sometimes displacing those people already there and sometimes amalgamating with them.

Blond but Rude

The Dorians were blonder than the Achaeans they conquered, but that is only because the Achaeans had been mixing with the Mediterranean aborigines for several centuries before the Dorians arrived; originally the two tribes had been of the same racial composition.

But the Achaeans were certainly more civilized than the rude, new arrivals from the north, and it was 400 years before Greece recovered from the cultural shock of the Dorian invasion. When the civilization of Classical Greece bloomed in the seventh century B.C., it comprised some elements of the old, Mycenaean culture and some which were the consequence of the social, political, and demographic changes wrought by the newcomers.

Dark Age

The four centuries between the Dorian invasion and the flowering of the literate Classical civilization are referred to by most historians as “the Dark Age,” for much the same reasons that the period between the fall of Rome, more than 15 centuries later, and the flowering of Mediaeval civilization is also called “the Dark Ages.”

In both cases a people of an older civilization, who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier but culturally less advanced people from the north. And in both cases a period of gestation took place over a dozen generations or so, during which a synthesis of old and new elements, racial and cultural, occurred, before a new and different civilization arose from the ruins of the old.

Historians’ Bias

Unfortunately, most historians tacitly assume that the records of political and cultural activity which have come down to us from periods of civilized literacy provide all the data needed to yield an understanding of the historical process. The state of development and degree of organization and complexity of city life are taken as a yardstick by which to evaluate the significance or historical importance of a particular period. And if one’s standards of value are geared to such things as the volume of commerce, the gross national product, or even the intensity of scientific, literary, and artistic activity, such a yardstick may seem, at first glance, to be proper.

Racial Values

But there are other standards of value, such as those of the National Alliance, which differ somewhat from the customary ones. For it is not in the external forms of organization and activity of a people that we see the most important criteria for making a judgment as to the significance of a particular period, but rather in the actual racial constitution of a people and in the dynamic processes which, for better or worse, are influencing that racial constitution.

Although the basic racial constitution of a people is always intimately related to that people’s achievements in commerce, science, industry, art, politics, and warfare, still the two sets of criteria can lead to fundamentally different evaluations of a given historical period.

This is a consequence of the fact that race building and decay are usually strongly out of phase with civilization building and decay.

Rise and Fall of Races

Thus, the long ages between the periods of maximum civil activity—ages which the historian customarily ignores as being of only slight importance—may very well be periods of the greatest interest from a standpoint of racial dynamics.

It is, of course, true that the periods of maximum civil activity are precisely those which yield a maximum of written records, artifacts, and the other raw materials from which the historian builds his tale. But relative abundance of evidence should not be interpreted as equivalent to relative historical significance, regardless of the historian’s value criteria.

The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance. This statement may seem self-evident to those already accustomed to looking at history from a racial viewpoint, but it is by no means generally accepted by historians today. Until it is, much historical writing will continue to be flawed in a fundamental way.

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Ancient Greece Demography Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Mixing and Retrogression

Excerpted from the ninth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:



From the far north they came, the xanthoi, the golden-haired ones: tall, blue-eyed and grey-eyed giants, on horseback and on foot, carrying their battleaxes and their spears, bringing their women and their wagons and their cattle. Warrior-farmers, craftsmen and traders, they worshipped the shining Sky Father and spoke an Indo-European language. They were the Greeks.

The Greeks—or Hellenes, as they later called themselves—crashed down upon the Mediterranean world in a long sequence of waves. The first wave, a relatively weak one—and more properly described merely as Indo-European rather than as specifically Greek—hit about 5,100 years ago, and it apparently took a roundabout course, passing first from the north into western Asia Minor, and thence, by way of the Cyclades and other islands of the southern Aegean, westward into Crete and Greece.

The Minoan civilization was in its essence, however, much more a Mediterranean than a Nordic civilization. The Greeks did not bring civilization to Crete; they brought only the tendency toward civilization and the capacity for building it inherent in the higher human type which they represented.

But inevitably racial mixing occurred, sometimes soon and sometimes later. The Nordics would disappear into the mass, and the civilization they had created would lose its vital spark, stagnating and eventually retrogressing, although it might coast for centuries on its momentum after the disappearance of the Nordic element before retrogression set in. (Racemixing and retrogression were avoided only when the Nordics exterminated the non-Nordic natives of an area instead of merely conquering them. But then there was left no large serf-class for the maintenance of a culturally innovative aristocracy.)

Because the Mediterraneans were only conquered and not exterminated; because they formed the bulk of the economic base on which Greek society rested; because the lifestyle of Hellenes themselves changed, becoming more dependent on agriculture than before; and because race mixture inevitably followed conquest, it is not surprising that the religion of the conquerors underwent a change and assimilated many elements from the religion of the conquered natives.

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Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Racial Classifications

Excerpted from the sixth article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:



European anthropologists have developed a somewhat involved scheme of racial classification to comprise these non-White Mediterraneans, with groupings designated as Hither Asiatic, Oriental, Hamitic, etc.

Since we are concerned only with the ancestors of today’s Whites, we will not become involved further with the subtleties of these groupings but will merely try to indicate whether any particular Mediterranean group should be considered fully White, marginally White, or non-White. Because of the racial mixing which has taken place in the Mediterranean area, with a consequently large number of gradations of racial character, such indications may sometimes be arbitrary.

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Arthur de Gobineau Aztecs Blacks Crusades Intelligence quotient (IQ) Liberalism Madison Grant Marriage Mayas Napoleon Philosophy of history Pre-Columbian America Racial studies Science

Will Durant on race

Chapter IV of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History is titled “Race and History.” Although one of my favorite books is Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), the Durants were already in the train on its way to political correctness when, after the ten first volumes of their monumental The Story of Civilization (1935-1967), they published The Lessons of History in 1968.

It is symptomatic that in the blogosphere people like to quote chapter passages where the Durants subscribed to political correctness in racial maters (search for “Chapter IV” here): blaming the environment, not blacks, for the poor cultures at Sub-Saharan Africa and concluding the chapter with the sentence that “racial antipathies” cannot be cured except by “a broadened education.”

Apparently the Durants were completely ignorant about IQ studies and HBD in general (see this splendid interview of Henry Harpending by Craig Bodeker). Also, when in the chapter on race in The Lessons of History they write about Mayan and Aztec cultures they completely ignore that both cultures were based on organized serial killing. (See for example my own book chapter on pre-Columbian cultures, a subject that I am far more knowledgeable than the Durants.)

If any “lesson of history” has been learnt it is that you can write ten or eleven thick volumes about civilizations and, still, be totally immersed in the Matrix of your own age and culture.

Below, the complete Chapter IV, where the Durants try to rebutt the theory of Madison Grant:



There are some two billion colored people on the earth, and some nine hundred million whites. However, many palefaces were delighted when Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, in an Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), announced that the species man is composed of distinct races inherently different (like individuals) in physical structure, mental capacity, and qualities of character; and that one race, the “Aryan,” was by nature superior to all the rest:

Everything great, noble, or fruitful in the works of man on this planet, in science, art, and civilization, derives from a single starting point, is the development of a single germ; … it belongs to one family alone, the different branches of which have reigned in all the civilized countries of the universe… History shows that all civilization derives from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.

Environmental advantages (argued Gobineau) cannot explain the rise of civilization, for the same kind of environment (e.g., soil-fertilizing rivers) that watered the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East produced no civilization among the Indians of North America, though they lived on fertile soil along magnificent streams. Nor do institutions make a civilization, for this has risen under a diversity, even a contrariety, of institutions, as in monarchical Egypt and “democratic” Athens. The rise, success, decline, and fall of a civilization depend upon the inherent quality of the race. The degeneration of a civilization is what the word itself indicates—a falling away from the genus, stock, or race. “Peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various mixtures of blood which they undergo.” Usually this comes through intermarriage of the vigorous race with those whom it has conquered. Hence the superiority of the whites in the United States and Canada (who did not intermarry with the Indians) to the whites in Latin America (who did). Only those who are themselves the product of such enfeebling mixtures talk of the equality of races, or think that “all men are brothers.” All strong characters and peoples are race conscious, and are instinctively averse to marriage outside their own racial group.

In 1899 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman who had made Germany his home, published Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), which narrowed the creative race from Aryans to Teutons: “True history begins from the moment when the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.” Dante’s face struck Chamberlain as characteristically German; he thought he heard unmistakably German accents in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians; and though he was not quite sure that Christ was a German, he was confident that “whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or dishonest.” German writers were too polite to contradict their guest: Treitschke and Bernhardi admitted that the Germans were the greatest of modern peoples; Wagner put the theory to music; Alfred Rosenberg made German blood and soil the inspiring “myth of the twentieth century”; and Adolf Hitler, on this basis, roused the Germans to slaughter a people and to undertake the conquest of Europe.

An American, Madison Grant, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), confined the achievements of civilization to that branch of the Aryans which he called “Nordics”—Scandinavians, Scythians, Baltic Germans, Englishmen, and Anglo-Saxon Americans. Cooled to hardness by northern winters, one or another tribe of these fairhaired, blue-eyed “blond beasts” swept down through Russia and the Balkans into the lazy and lethargic South in a series of conquests marking the dawn of recorded history. According to Grant the “Sacae” (Scythians?) invaded India, developed Sanskrit as an “IndoEuropean” language, and established the caste system to prevent their deterioration through intermarriage with dark native stocks. The Cimmerians poured over the Caucasus into Persia, the Phrygians into Asia Minor, the Achaeans and Dorians into Greece and Crete, the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy. Everywhere the Nordics were adventurers, warriors, disciplinarians; they made subjects or slaves of the temperamental, unstable, and indolent “Mediterranean” peoples of the South, and they intermarried with the intermediate quiet and acquiescent “Alpine” stocks to produce the Athenians of the Periclean apogee and the Romans of the Republic. The Dorians intermarried least, and became the Spartans, a martial Nordic caste ruling “Mediterranean” helots. Intermarriage weakened and softened the Nordic stock in Attica, and led to the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and the subjugation of Greece by the purer Nordics of Macedonia and Republican Rome.

In another inundation of Nordics—from Scandinavia and northern Germany—Goths and Vandals conquered Imperial Rome; Angles and Saxons conquered England and gave it a new name; Franks conquered Gaul and gave it their name. Still later, the Nordic Normans conquered France, England, and Sicily. The Nordic Lombards followed their long beards into Italy, intermarried, and vitalized Milan and Florence into a Renaissance. Nordic Varangians conquered Russia, and ruled it till 1917. Nordic Englishmen colonized America and Australia, conquered India, and set their sentinels in every major Asiatic port.

In our time (Grant mourned) this Nordic race is abandoning its mastery. It lost its footing in France in 1789; as Camille Desmoulins told his cafe audience, the Revolution was a revolt of the indigenous Gauls (“Alpines”) against the Teutonic Franks who had subjugated them under Clovis and Charlemagne. The Crusades, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War depleted the Nordic stock and left it too thin to resist the higher birth rate of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples in Europe and America. By the year 2000, Grant predicted, the Nordics will have fallen from power, and with their fall Western civilization will disappear in a new barbarism welling up everywhere from within and from without. He wisely conceded that the Mediterranean “race,” while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordics and the Alpines, has proved superior in intellectual and artistic attainments; to it must go the credit for the classic flowering of Greece and Rome; however, it may have owed much to intermarriage with Nordic blood.

Some weaknesses in the race theory are obvious. A Chinese scholar would remind us that his people created the most enduring civilization in history—statesmen, inventors, artists, poets, scientists, philosophers, saints from 2000 b.c. to our own time. A Mexican scholar could point to the lordly structures of Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures in pre-Columbian America. A Hindu scholar, while acknowledging “Aryan” infiltration into north India some sixteen hundred years before Christ, would recall that the black Dravidic peoples of south India produced great builders and poets of their own; the temples of Madras, Madura, and Trichinopoly are among the most impressive structures on earth. Even more startling is the towering shrine of the Khmers at Angkor Wat. History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin.

Difficulties remain even if the race theory is confined to the white man. The Semites would recall the civilizations of Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, Palestine, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Islam. The Jews gave the Bible and Christianity to Europe, and much of the Koran to Mohammed. The Mohammedans could list the rulers, artists, poets, scientists, and philosophers who conquered and adorned a substantial portion of the white man’s world from Baghdad to Cordova while Western Europe groped through the Dark Ages (c. 565-c. 1095).

The ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome were evidently the product of geographical opportunity and economic and political development rather than of racial constitution, and much of their civilization had an Oriental source. Greece took its arts and letters from Asia Minor, Crete, Phoenicia, and Egypt. In the second millennium b.c. Greek culture was “Mycenaean,” partly derived from Crete, which had probably learned from Asia Minor. When the “Nordic” Dorians came down through the Balkans, toward 1100 b.c, they destroyed much of this proto-Greek culture; and only after an interval of several centuries did the historic Greek civilization emerge in the Sparta of “Lycurgus,” the Miletus of Thales, the Ephesus of Heracleitus, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Athens of Solon. From the sixth century b.c. onward the Greeks spread their culture along the Mediterranean at Durazzo, Taranto, Crotona, Reggio Calabria, Syracuse, Naples, Nice, Monaco, Marseilles, Malaga. From the Greek cities of south Italy, and from the probably Asiatic culture of Etruria, came the civilization of ancient Rome; from Rome came the civilization of Western Europe; from Western Europe came the civilization of North and South America. In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

Attempts to relate civilization to race by measuring the relation of brain to face or weight have shed little light on the problem. If the Negroes of Africa have produced no great civilization it is probably because climatic and geographical conditions frustrated them; would any of the white “races” have done better in those environments? It is remarkable how many American Negroes have risen to high places in the professions, arts, and letters in the last one hundred years despite a thousand social obstacles.

The role of race in history is rather preliminary than creative. Varied stocks, entering some locality from diverse directions at divers times, mingle their blood, traditions, and ways with one another or with the existing population, like two diverse pools of genes coming together in sexual reproduction. Such an ethnic mixture may in the course of centuries produce a new type, even a new people; so Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans fused to produce Englishmen. When the new type takes form its cultural expressions are unique, and constitute a new civilization—a new physiognomy, character, language, literature, religion, morality, and art. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type. The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. In the long run such differences of tradition or type yield to the influence of the environment. Northern peoples take on the characteristics of southern peoples after living for generations in the tropics, and the grandchildren of peoples coming up from the leisurely South fall into the quicker tempo of movement and mind which they find in the North.

Viewed from this point, American civilization is still in the stage of racial mixture. Between 1700 and 1848 white Americans north of Florida were mainly Anglo-Saxon, and their literature was a flowering of old England on New England’s soil. After 1848 the doors of America were opened to all white stocks; a fresh racial fusion began, which will hardly be complete for centuries to come. When, out of this mixture, a new homogeneous type is formed, America may have its own language (as different from English as Spanish is from Italian), its indigenous literature, its characteristic arts; already these are visibly or raucously on their way.

“Racial” antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture—of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.

Categories
Blacks Catholic Church Demography Deranged altruism Emigration / immigration Ethnic cleansing Madison Grant Miscegenation Neanderthalism Protestantism Racial studies Universalism

The European Races in Colonies



Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, is a classic in race studies. Below, a few excerpts from the chapter, “The European Races in Colonies” (no ellipsis added):


For reasons already set forth there are few communities outside of Europe of pure European blood. The racial destiny of Mexico and of the islands and coasts of the Spanish Main is clear. The white man is being rapidly bred out by Negroes on the islands and by Indians on the mainland. It is quite evident that the West Indies, the coast region of our Gulf States, perhaps, also the black belt of the lower Mississippi Valley must be abandoned to Negroes. This transformation is already complete in Haiti and is going rapidly forward in Cuba and Jamaica. Mexico and the northern part of South America must also be given over to native Indians with an ever thinning veneer of white culture of the “Latin” type.

In Venezuela the pure whites number about one per cent of the whole population, the balance being Indians and various crosses between Indians, Negroes and whites. In Jamaica the whites number not more than two per cent, while the remainder are Negroes or mulattoes.

In Mexico the proportion is larger, but the unmixed whites number less than twenty per cent of the whole, the others being Indians pure or mixed. These latter are the “greasers” of the American frontiersman.

Where two distinct species are located side by side history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the South; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates. This is a disagreeable alternative with which to confront sentimentalists but nature is only concerned with results and neither makes nor takes excuses. The chief failing of the day with some of our well-meaning philanthropists is their absolute refusal to face inevitable facts, if such facts appear cruel.

In the Argentine white blood of the various European races is pouring in so rapidly that a community preponderantly white, but of the Mediterranean race, may develop, but the type is suspiciously swarthy.

In Brazil, Negro blood together with that of the native inhabitants is rapidly overwhelming the white Europeans, although in the southern provinces German immigration has played an important role and the influx of Italians has also been considerable.

Throughout history it is only the race of the leaders that has counted and the most vigorous have been in control and will remain in mastery in one form or another until such time as democracy and its illegitimate offspring, socialism, definitely establish cacocracy and the rule of the worst and put an end to progress. The salvation of humanity will then lie in the chance survival of some sane barbarians who may retain the basic truth that inequality and not equality the law of nature.

Australia and New Zealand, where the natives have been virtually exterminated by the whites, are developing into communities of pure Nordic blood and will for that reason play a large part in the future history of the Pacific. The bitter opposition of the Australians and Californians to the admission of Chinese coolies and Japanese farmers is due primarily to a blind but absolutely justified determination to keep those lands as white man’s countries.

In Africa, south of the Sahara, the density of the native population will prevent the establishment of any purely white communities, except at the southern extremity of the continent and possibly on portions of the plateaux of eastern Africa. The stoppage of famines and wars and the abolition of the slave trade, while dictated by the noblest impulses of humanity, are suicidal to the white man. Upon the removal of these natural checks Negroes multiply so rapidly that there will not be standing room on the continent for white men, unless, perchance, the lethal sleeping sickness, which attacks the natives far more frequently than the whites, should run its course unchecked.

The Negroes of the United States while stationary, were not a serious drag on civilization until in the last century they were given the rights of citizenship and were incorporated in the body politic. These Negroes brought with them no language or religion or customs of their own which persisted but adopted all these elements of environment from the dominant race, taking the names of their masters just as to-day the German and Polish Jews are assuming American names.

Looking at any group of Negroes in America, especially in the North, it is easy to see that while they are all essentially Negroes, whether coal-black, brown or yellow, a great many of them have varying amounts of Nordic blood in them, which has in some respects modified their physical structure without transforming them in any way into white men. This miscegenation was, of course, a frightful disgrace to the dominant race but its effect on the Nordics has been negligible, for the simple reason that it was confined to white men crossing with Negro women and did not involve the reverse process, which would, of course, have resulted in the infusion of Negro blood into the American stock.

The United States of America must be regarded racially as a European colony and owing to current ignorance of the physical bases of race, one often hears the statement made that native Americans of Colonial ancestry are of mixed ethnic origin.

This not true. The Nordic blood was kept pure in the Colonies because at that time among Protestant peoples there was a strong race feeling, as a result of which half-breeds between the white man and any native type were regarded as natives and not as white men.

Concentration of whites in the American Continent


In the Catholic colonies, however, of New France and New Spain, if the half-breed were a good Catholic he was regarded as a Frenchman or a Spaniard, as the case might be. This fact alone gives the clew to many of our Colonial wars where the Indians, other than the Iroquois, were persuaded to join the French against the Americans by half-breeds who considered themselves Frenchmen. The Church of Rome has everywhere used its influence to break down racial distinctions. It disregards origins and only requires obedience to the mandates of the universal church. In that lies the secret of the opposition of Rome to all national movements. It maintains the imperial as contrasted with the nationalistic ideal and in that respect its inheritance is direct from the Empire.

Race consciousness in the Colonies and in the United States, down to and including the Mexican War, seems to have been very strongly developed among native Americans and it still remains in full vigor to-day in the South, where the presence of a large Negro population forces this question upon the daily attention of the whites.

In New England, however, whether through the decline of Calvinism or the growth of altruism, there appeared early in the last century a wave of sentimentalism, which at that time took up the cause of the Negro and in so doing apparently destroyed, to a large extent, pride and consciousness of race in the North. The agitation over slavery was inimical to the Nordic race, because it thrust aside all national opposition to the intrusion of hordes of immigrants of inferior racial value and prevented the fixing of a definite American type.

There has been little or no Indian blood taken into the veins of the native American, except in States like Oklahoma and in some isolated families scattered here and there in the Northwest. This particular mixture will play no very important role in future combinations of race on this continent, except in the north of Canada.

The native Americans [i.e., whites] are splendid raw material, but have as yet only an imperfectly developed national consciousness. They lack the instinct of self-preservation in a racial sense. Unless such an instinct develops their race will perish, as do all organisms which disregard this primary law of nature. Nature had granted to the Americans of a century ago the greatest opportunity in recorded history to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people and had provided for the experiment a pure race of one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth, a stock free from the diseases, physical and moral, which have again and again sapped the vigor of the older lands. Our grandfathers threw away this opportunity in the blissful ignorance of national childhood and inexperience.

The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.

As to what the future mixture will be it is evident that in large sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. He will not intermarry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat-shop and in the street trench with the newcomers. Large cities from the days of Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium have always been gathering points of diverse races, but New York is becoming a cloaca gentium which will produce many amazing racial hybrids and some ethnic horrors that will be beyond the powers of future anthropologists to unravel.