Many of us realise that we live in an absurd age, and one of the most absurd media events of last month was that of Peter Mandelson's pal David Aaronovitch (like Mandelson, a former Communist, now turned New Labourite) being given ample TV time and pages of broadsheet space in order to attack Arabs for being 'anti-Semites'. Even though some of the poor Arabs he berated were living in Palestine under almost perpetual Israeli bombardment, they were the villains of the piece!

Underlying all of Aaronvitch's arguments was an exceptionally ethnocentric world view. To him, it would seem that Gentiles don't really exist at all except as irrational haters of his people, either actively menacing or at best passively hostile. Fortunately, in gaining an understanding of how such strange views came into being and how they now dominate the world of media and politics - we can go to the works of Kevin MacDonald.

Kevin MacDonald has an academic post as Professor of Psychology at California State University. His special interest is in applying evolutionary psychology to gain a better understanding of the nature of ethnic conflicts and rivalries. Specifically, in his massive three-part 'magnum opus', he makes an exhaustive study of Jewish-Gentile relations throughout history. The books are: A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and its Discontents and The Culture of Critique.

MacDonald's tone is - with the exception of some parts of The Culture of Critique - cool, neutral and detached. He brings out some facts that could hardly be described as 'anti-Semitic', such as the finding, given in A People That Shall Dwell Alone, that the average Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is a full 15 points higher than that of Caucasians.

Evolutionary strategy

Fundamentally, MacDonald sees Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, designed to aid competition against other groups. He points out that Judaism - with its extensive customs, priestly regulations and restrictions - enabled Jewish survival throughout many years scattered in the midst of other populations from ancient times onwards, a unique achievement matched by no other ethnic/religious grouping.

In MacDonald's words: "The Jews were the only ethnic group to survive intact after the upheavals that occurred at the end of antiquity. After the barbarian invasions and the collapse of the Roman Empire, there were further assimilative processes. The agricultural peoples of the Middle East, with the exception of the Jews, lost their identities in the early Islamic period (Goitein, 1974). Moreover, Christianity steadily disappeared in parts of the Arab empire, but flourishing Jewish communities remained even after Jews were relegated to a subservient, humiliated status. Similarly, Lea (1906-07, 139ff) notes the existence of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Celt-Iberians, and Romans in seventh-century Spain, but only the Jews survived as an independent ethnic group - the others presumably becoming completely assimilated via intermarriage."

According to MacDonald's analysis, the Greeks and Romans were in general relatively relaxed about ethnicity and what we would today term 'multi-culturalism'. Foreigners could become naturalised just by adopting the language and culture of the Graeco-Roman world. In contrast, the whole point of Judaism, its entire raison d'etre, was the resisting of alien cultures, and the maintaining of strict separation.

Jewish measures to maintain racial purity

While the peoples conquered by the Greeks and Romans eventually assimilated their conquerors, the Israelites - as is shown by a reading of the Books of Joshua and Isaiah - tended to commit genocide in order to create and retain an ethnically pure state.

Separation and Its Discontents studies the extent to which Jewish group behaviour stimulates 'anti-Semitism'. MacDonald sees most 'anti-Semitism' as a mirror image of the Judaic viewpoint. 'Anti-Semitic' Gentiles - whether white, black or Asian - in most cases merely have equally strong emotional attachment to their own ethnic identities as do ethnically conscious Jews.

Though his subject matter is controversial, MacDonald continues to maintain his neutral stance. He doesn't suggest that Jewish behaviour is worse than any other peoples', merely that their tactics are often more successful than are those of Gentiles. MacDonald would presumably assent to Ezra Pound's sensible statement that: "It is nonsense for the Anglo-Saxon to revile the Jew for beating him at his own game." He is careful to avoid any conspiracy theorising on the grand scale as in the style of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and instead concentrates on what can be proved from the evidence of different academic disciplines.

Gentile reaction

In Separation and Its Discontents, he examines three different eras of 'anti-Semitism', namely the later Roman Empire, 15th century Spain and National Socialist Germany, coming to the conclusion that each of these episodes involved the birth of powerful Gentile group cohesion, as a direct reaction to the almost overwhelmingly successful group strategy of Judaism.

But while A People that Shall Dwell Alone and Separation and its Discontents are of great interest in understanding the historic basis of Jewish-Gentile relations and ethnic conflict in general, The Culture of Critique is of vital importance in understanding the 'here and now'. The Culture of Critique is subtitled An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements.

MacDonald boldly asserts of the 20th Century, one of the most disastrous eras in recorded in history, that:-

'The 20th century in Europe and the Western world, like the 11th century in Spain, was a Jewish century because Jews and Jewish organisations were intimately and decisively involved in all of the important events. If I am correct in asserting that Jewish participation was a necessary condition for the Bolshevik Revolution and its murderous aftermath, one could also argue that Jews thereby had a massive influence on later events.'

Of course, such comments, in even a heavy academic book, bring about the usual howls from the usual quarters, but this is yet another example of extreme Jewish ethnocentrism. Israel Shamir's humorous side about such attitudes sums up the situation: "How dare you say 'The Americans nuked Hiroshima'? I am an American, and I did not nuke Hiroshima." As the anecdote indicates, other nationalities do in general seem much less hypersensitive to criticism.

As MacDonald indicates, the Communist regime established in Russia in 1917 was dominated, not by Russians, but by 'ethnic outsiders', chiefly though not exclusively Jewish. He goes on to say that this was not a 'Nazi' perception by any means, but one shared by the leading politicians in the Western World, such as Balfour, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson. Indeed Churchill was most forthright on this matter with his famous article of 1920 which referred to a "world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation."

MacDonald notes that Jewish individuals were not only prominent in the Soviet leadership, but also numerous in the secret police apparatus - the Cheka, GPU and NKVD - that ran the largest system of concentration camps in the world. He quotes Leonard Schapiro to the effect that: "Anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator."

Along with German historian Ernst Nolte, MacDonald says that the heavily Judaic composition of Communism - as seen also in Bavaria and Hungary, as well as Russia - was one of the prime reasons for Hitler's wish to destroy the USSR and for the anti-Jewish measures of the German National Socialists. Thus the 1917 Revolution was the defining event of the 20th Century, since without it in all likelihood there would have been no World War II and no Cold War.

MacDonald's succinct summing up of the years that followed 1945 is that: "The victory over National Socialism then set the stage for the tremendous increase in Jewish power in the post-World War II Western World. This new-found power facilitated the establishment of Israel, the transformation of the United States and other Western nations in the direction of multi-racial, multi-cultural societies via large-scale non-white immigration, and the consequent decline in European demographic and cultural pre-eminence."

This quote neatly brings us to one of the major themes of The Culture of Critique: how and why did this Euro-American decline come about, and in such a comparatively short time?

MacDonald comments that:-

'At the intellectual level, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against the idea that races even exist and against the idea that there are differences in intelligence or cultural level between the races that are rooted in biology. They also spearheaded defining America as a set of abstract principles rather than an ethno-cultural civilisation. At the level of politics, Jewish organisations spearheaded the drive to open up immigration to all of the peoples of the world. Jewish organisations also played a key role in furthering the interests of other racial and ethnic minorities, and they led the legal and legislative effort to remove Christianity from public places.'

White Gentile weakness

But underlying all this is a specific weakness on the part of white peoples. MacDonald suggests that Northern Europeans, due to their background of Ice Age Europe, were less subject to ethnic competition, and therefore evolved to be much less ethnocentric, xenophobic and collectivist than Middle Easterners and Asiatics.

Hence the extreme vulnerability of our people, when subject to persistent 'cultural warfare', as was practiced during the 20th century. Now central to the psychological assault on Western values is the 'Holocaust' cult, which MacDonald describes as "the elevation of Jewish experiences of suffering during World War II... to the level of the pivotal historico-cultural icon in Western societies."

MacDonald quotes an Israeli writer, Boas Evron, on this quasi-religion, as saying that: "the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present." As a result of this manipulation, 'perpetual-victim' status is assigned to a dominant political, intellectual and economic group, since - to pick just a few statistics from the US out of many - out of a population proportion of 2-3 per cent, Jewish executives make up 60 per cent of the media élite, and Jewish per-capita income is double that of the country's Gentiles.

Additionally, the way is made clear for the massive US subsidies to Israel, and the perpetual warfare that this engenders (now claiming, at the time of writing, a US serviceman a day in occupied Iraq). Says MacDonald:-

'My perception is that the Jewish community in the US is moving aggressively ahead, ignoring the huge disruptions Jewish organisations have caused in the West (now mainly via successful advocacy of massive non-European immigration) and in the Islamic world (via the treatment of Palestinians by Israel). Whatever the justification for such beliefs, US support for Israel is by all accounts an emotionally compelling issue in the Arab world. A true test of Jewish power in the United States will be whether support for Israel is maintained even in the face of the enormous costs that have already been paid by the US in terms of loss of life, economic disruption, hatred and distrust throughout the Muslim world, and loss of civil liberties at home.'