Archive for the ‘Reinventing Apartheid From The Left’ Category

The Real Wicked Determinists

Thanks to the Nazi belief in blood and destiny, there is a widespread assumption that evolutionary psychology, which is once again building our self-understanding on the biological sciences, must necessarily be racist. In fact, the discipline has virtually nothing to say about human “races”. The genetic differences between population groups are rather small and behaviourally […]

A Solution To The Dilemma

In Alexander Kielland’s 1883 novel, Poison, a husband and wife fight over whether their son should be confirmed or not. The worldly husband is thinking of the son’s prospects in society, the idealistic freethinker wife does not want the boy to be a hypocrite; it is about expediency versus truth. Our own age has found […]

Back To “Blood And Soil”?

Nazi racial theory was the fruit of a shotgun marriage between physical anthropology and linguistics. Although not for lack of trying, the former science was unable to produce any convincing classification of human “races”. So a fatal error was committed, and “race” was defined by language instead. Since there appeared to have been an Indo-European […]

The Invention Of Ancient Peoples

If I had been alive in 1861 to hear Massimo d’Azeglio say, “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians”, I would have asked him, “If there are no Italians, why should you wish to make an Italy?” For the paradox of 19th-century nationalism in general is that “the People” were created by the […]

Ethnokitsch And The Roman Legions

One example of the perfect circularity of ethnokitsch is Romanian forenames. Visitors find that most of the people they meet are named after Roman emperors and poets, for example Tiberiu and Ovidiu, and draw the conclusion that the Romanians are direct descendants of the Romans. The locals will not hasten to contradict them. In reality, […]

Dead Languages Our Heritage

In my lifetime, many languages have been brought back from the dead. The streets of Toulouse are named in both French and Occitan, and in the pubs of Caernarfon you may find teenagers flirting in a language until recently confined to their chapel-going great-grandmothers. Now, linguistic variety and richness is a very good thing in […]

Doing Our Cultural Thing

Whereas the word “culture” once generally meant the high arts, this elitist sense is now almost obsolete; the anthropological usage has so triumphed that “culture” now means “the stuff people do”, down to hot dogs and mud-wrestling. If “culture” is everything I do, therefore, and my “culture” must be protected, venerated and practised, then it […]

Brown Crackers

Many Europeans are currently exercised about unappealing behaviour in their immigrant communities: female genital mutilation, honour killings and suchlike. Most of the debate revolves around ethnicity and religion, equating Islam with all sorts of bad things. The offensive behaviour is not, however, a consequence of the mere fact that the immigrants are Muslim, but to […]

The Unique Love Of Family

Ask any ethnicity what their national culture is all about, and they will all answer with some variant of “love of family”. Or else it revolves around eating a lot, or asking the man in the sky for stuff. So everyone’s national culture, which they take such pains to differentiate from all other cultures, is […]

Where Is The Party For Short Bald Men With Beards?

At one point in the late twentieth century it appeared as if politics was doomed to become a matter of dickering between group spokespeople, all confident that everyone with the same physical and sexual specifications would stand behind their proper fraction leaders. Moreover, all “minority” groups were conceived as naturally belonging together in a rainbow […]