Saturday, January 11, 2020

"No One Is Attacking Boas"

Well, looking online for recent discussion of Franz Boas I found this at Jstor  The Cult of Franz Boas and his "Conspiracy" to Destroy the White Race  by L. D. Baker, from 2010.   It begins with a crypto-Nazi magazine article from 1997, fifty-five years after Boas died, which lists him as #12 in a list of those who have "Damaged White Interests" a list that begins with Lyndon Johnson, the president who did more than any to advance racial and ethnic and religious equality.  It's such an interesting list, matched with a list in a parallel column of "Those Who Have Advanced White Interests" which I may go over in a different piece - or not, I don't have the time to write everything I'd really love to, I've got to earn a living.

I haven't read the paper, it's behind a wall I cannot afford to breach, I believe it is a discussion of the kinds of attacks on Boas such as I mentioned and not an attack, though I haven't read it.  

Here is, unfortunately, a more recent attack from the Nazish Frank Hilliard, in an April, 2016 piece entitled, The Alternative Right Belongs To The Darwinians [Note, I do not link to Nazi websites or their allies]. 

All of which means nothing to most people because if they express an interest in the Alt-Right they’re afraid they’ll be accused of racism. This is a real tar baby in modern discussions on race, even for physical anthropologists who have shied away from making comments on the subject because of the influence of Columbia University physical anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942). Boas, whose grandparents were observant Jews, turned the discipline from the study of biology into the study of culture, claiming humans could be changed by social and environmental factors and downplaying the role of genetic inheritance.

However, as I’ve just shown, culture is downstream from biology just as law is downstream from culture. To claim otherwise is to confuse cause and effect. Indeed much of the failure of modern day social programs can be laid at the feet of Boas’ followers, from the Great Society, to school busing programs, to demolished public housing complexes in St. Louis and Chicago. None of these programs worked because none of them dealt with the root cause of the problem.

Surely, after 75 years of failure, someone somewhere needs to return anthropology — the study of humans — to studying humans as the animals we are. We need to study humans at least as well as we do dogs, sheep, cattle or horses. We need categories, we need statistics, we need to establish (actually re-establish) the relationship between these categories and their social and cultural by-products.

Note that he, as in my first post of the day, cites the same decades of failure of the would-be scientific study of these topics as a reason to adopt the racism of Darwinism, of which, in the same piece he says,

There are two views of human development: those of the Darwinians and those of the Progressives. We in the Alternative Right belong to the Darwinians because we believe in science, the scientific method, and the value of observation and analysis. The Progressives, on the other hand, are repelled by their observations of the human condition and attempt to replace science with a belief system they can manipulate. Progressives are Utopians; while we on the Alt-Right are Realists.

I will remind you, again, that the Nazis claimed the same thing for Nazism, that it was merely "applied biology" and I will remind you of what I said the other day about Darwin, by his own declaration, said his theory of natural selection was founded in the political-economic theories of Thomas Malthus which were absolutely founded in the same economic and class inequalites that were created by the entirely artificial laws drawn up for the benefit of, first the English, then the British elites underlying the British class system and such ancillary components of that as the Poor Law (to be expanded under the influence of such "science" into the even worse New Poor Law) the semi-enslaved legal status of peasants, etc. It was inevitable that such as became Nazis and neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc. would adopt it because Darwinism, as Marx correctly noted, framed the entirety of biology with the British class system. 

Hillairds' use of science, those who he attacks for not hewing to the line of Darwinism - many of whom just happen to be Jews, what a coincidence - is not very different from the kind of cleaned up attacks made by Darwinists in science against their fellow scientists, many of whom are, as well, convinced of the reality of natural selection. 

He also says:

Why we believe in these policies is very interesting. It’s because, as Darwinians, we think the nation should exist as a gene pool, since we come from a European background, a European gene pool. We think the same argument should apply to other ethnic and racial groups. Thus, we support the Kurds in their demand for a country of their own. We support Israel as a land for the Jews, Japan as a land for the Japanese, Congo for the Congolese, and so on. Each race/ethnic group is like an extended family for the people in it, and this large extended family should have a home of its own. Again, this used to be standard fare for Classical liberals, but again it has fallen into disfavor.

I will remind you of the 1925 paper of the major figure in the history of Darwinism, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, a paper whose antisemtic science was, we know, cited in Nazi scientific literature in regard to their "eastern policy" in the years leading up to the Einsatzgruppen beginning the mass murder of Polish and Russian Jews and Slavs, was pretty much expressing the same conclusions.  It was Darwin, in the letter to G. A. Gaskell who went to the logical conclusion of natural selection in proclaiming that the British imperialist genocide would be a boon to the world.  Look in my Archive, I posted their entire correspondence.  

Beyond the many examples of very recent rounds of kicking around the remains of Franz Boaz, I could, literally, give you dozens and dozens of things said by people such as the author of the neo-Nazi mass killer's manual, The Turner Diaries, William Pierce (#11 on the "good" list cited by Baker, as mentioned above) and more genteel echos of the same by others on that list, Arthur Jensen #10 (whose scientific racism had the full and active support of Francis Crick, as documented in letters to his scientific colleagues, and I am sure other Darwinist racists and eugenicists) Charles Murray, author of the Bell Curve, #14 on the list, and the Nobel Prizewinning physicist William Shockley who, when he was on a media tour promoting his Darwinist racism and his Nobel Prize winner Stud Farm scam was told, I believe by Richard Lewontin, that by the age at which Nobels are given out the sperm of such donors was likely so riddled with mutations that it would probably produce monsters, as, in fact, Darwinism has.   I guess the Nobeled physicist didn't take that rather well evidenced finding of genetics into account.   It is certainly something that is better evidenced than natural selection and the scientific and class-based bigotry it is founded in as well as, unsurprisingly, supportive of. 

PS.  I forgot that I meant to point out that this claim by Hilliard - "We need to study humans at least as well as we do dogs, sheep, cattle or horses." is a variation of something both Charles Darwin claimed in On the Origin of Species and, again, in The Descent of Man, that the entirely artificial practice of animal husbandry could teach us something about the workings of nature, something taken up over and over again by Darwinists in their eugenic claims, including his son Leonard Darwin who was saying the same thing as he was bemoaning Germans under the Weimar government refusing to institute eugenics,  something which in April 1939 he said with satisfaction had turned around in the Nazi eugenic laws of 1935.  

The idea that animal husbandry can reveal anything of knowable validity about how evolution happened is an enormous leap of faith that refuses to see many of the problems with that attempt, among those that the characteristics bred for, in many cases, renders the poor animals that result dependent on the artifices of human care to survive or thrive as opposed to animals of the same species allowed to breed themselves.  It is pretty astonishing that such a ridiculous line of claims could be claimed to produce enhanced "fitness" or some kind of biological superiority.  I don't know, maybe most of those who bought it never really had that much familiarity with animals on a farm. 

Update:  "You don't know what you're talking about."  

I would invite anyone to read my archive of pieces on these topics, search "darwin", "darwinism" "eugenics" "natural selection" etc.   I don't think someone would read what I've written would honestly say I've written hastily on opinion instead of citation of the primary documents.  Of course, that's not going to stop anyone who wants to lie from lying. 

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