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When Scientific Ideology Was a Mask for Racism

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By ADAM KIRSCH

February 22, 2006

When Americans talk about racism, we are almost always referring to white discrimination against blacks. This is natural enough, since prejudice against African-Americans is the original and longest-lasting form of American race hatred. But racism, in its early-20th-century heyday, was about more than simple hatred, though a particularly insidious form of inhumanity always lay at its heart. As the word itself suggests, racism, like communism, originally purported to be a science, or at least a scientific ideology - that is, a way of ordering human life based on alleged facts about nature.

Those facts, as they emerged in the writings of 19th-century racial theorists, seemed to fit perfectly into the world picture advanced by Charles Darwin, who revealed the merciless truth about the survival of the fittest. As with species, so too with human races, thought people as different as the founder of eugenics, Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, and the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The future of humanity depended on ensuring that the best races multiplied and the worst died out. The problem was that, in modern Western societies, a foolish compassion preserved the fit and the unfit alike, and even encouraged the poor and "feebleminded" to continue propagating their inferior protoplasm (to use one of the racists' favorite demiscientific terms). Herbert Spencer, the Victorian sage who helped to popularize Darwin's ideas, put it very bluntly in his 1865 book "Social Statics":

Blind to the fact that under the natural order of things, society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even .... encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision.

The solution, to several generations of reformers in America and Europe, was obvious: "Unhealthy" human specimens had to be stopped from multiplying. Opinions on how this was to be accomplished, and what a perfected humanity would look like, varied widely among believers in eugenics. But one thing remained constant: The advocates of scientific racism, whether progressive American doctors or Nazi murderers, were always certain that they themselves belonged to the best racial stock.

Two new books tell complementary parts of this horrifying, deeply important story. In "Better for All the World" (Alfred A. Knopf, 402 pages, $30), Harry Bruinius focuses on the main American advocates of eugenics, who in the first third of the 20th century led the effort to sterilize people, mainly women, whom they deemed feebleminded, moronic, or generally undesirable. Mr. Bruinius reminds us of a historical irony we are generally happy to forget: that in the early 20th century, sterilization joined Prohibition and suffragism as one of the favorite causes of the progressive movement. In each case, Protestant progressives believed themselves to be carrying the banner of reason and justice, against the ignorant Catholic and Jewish immigrants who threatened to ruin the republic. Mr. Bruinius prints a shocking letter from no less a progressive hero than Theodore Roosevelt, the great trustbuster and conservationist, showing that he enthusiastically embraced the principles of! eugenics:

" It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. .... Someday we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type."

Mr. Bruinius's approach is to focus on the biographies of a few leading theorists of eugenics. Chief among them is Charles Davenport, the addressee of Roosevelt's letter. Davenport, the scion of an old Puritan family, transposed his father's religious zeal into the new key of modern science, working with all the passion of a true believer to convince America of the need to safeguard its protoplasm. (Margaret Sanger recalled him murmuring, "Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm," like a genetic Dr. Strangelove.) As the head of a research station at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, and a member of the American Breeders' Association, Davenport helped introduce the principles of Mendelian genetics to American farmers.

But his interest in breeding didn't stop with plants and animals. He wrote the major textbook on eugenics, "Heredity in Relation to Eugenics" ("the human babies born each year constitute the world's most valuable crop"), and established a Eugenics Record Office to compile family histories of as many Americans as he could get to answer his ludicrously vague questionnaires. Davenport's deputy Harry Laughlin, another of Mr. Bruinius's major subjects, argued that the "bottom" 10% of the American population should be sterilized.

Laughlin fell well short of his goal. But before World War II, Mr. Bruinius writes, more than 65,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized, mainly women who had been sent to mental hospitals on account of "feeblemindedness." This flexible category, like "moron," could hold anyone a doctor or judge considered too poor or too promiscuous to deserve the right to bear children. Many women were sterilized not just without their consent but without their knowledge, having been told that they were only getting an appendectomy.

The most famous victim of this policy, and the figure with whom Mr. Bruinius begins his story, was Carrie Buck, a 21-year-old Virginia woman whose case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell, a decision that deserves to be as infamous as Plessy or Dred Scott, the court upheld the states' right to sterilize people without their consent. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, in the opinion from which Mr. Bruinius takes his title: "It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."

But who are the "manifestly unfit," and more important, who decides? For the Nazi "experts" on race profiled in Heather Pringle's "The Master Plan" (Hyperion, 464 pages, $24.95), the answers seemed no less self-evident than they were to Davenport and Laughlin. The supreme race was the Aryan, as Hitler, Himmler, and other leading Nazis never tired of repeating. The problem, as Ms. Pringle shows in her lucid, deeply researched book, is that the word Aryan had no determinate meaning. Originally a linguistic term invented in the 18th century to describe the hypothetical early language now called Indo-European, it was swiped by German racists to designate the primeval warrior race from which modern Germans purportedly sprung.

But for Himmler, a man whose credulity and intellectual feebleness would be laughable if their consequences hadn't been so monstrous, the honor of the Aryan name demanded more. All of human history had to be rewritten so that every important accomplishment could be credited to the Aryans. Aryans were the conquerors of India and Greece; Aryans founded an empire on the Black Sea; Aryans had occult knowledge of electricity thousands of years before it was discovered; Aryans stemmed from the lost continent of Atlantis, and before that possibly from outer space. No theory was too ludicrous for Himmler, whose SS was meant to reincarnate the Aryan warrior-farmer nobility. Even Hitler lost patience with his deputy's obsessions, preferring a more conventional worship of Greco-Roman antiquity. All of these fairy tales, however, had a deadly serious purpose: By establishing the permanent superiority of the German race, they meant to justify the annihilation of the Nazis' racial enem! ies, especially the Jews.

The evolution of Nazi racial "science," from comic idiocy to horror and tragedy, is cleverly told by Ms. Pringle through a focus on one bizarre institution: the Ahnenerbe, a research foundation under the aegis of the SS. Before the war began, the Ahnenerbe (a word Ms. Pringle roughly translates as "something inherited from the forefathers") specialized in sending archaeological expeditions to sites where the ancient Aryans allegedly left traces - rock carvings in Sweden, temples in Tibet. Like the Nazi Party as a whole, this little niche of Himmler's empire was extraordinarily hospitable to lunatics and charlatans. One of its "experts," Karl-Maria Wiligut, claimed to be descended from the god Thor, though he was a psychotic and child molester who had spent time in a Salzburg mental hospital. More disturbing, however, was the Ahnenerbe's ability to attract genuine scholars - archeologists, linguists, biologists - who eagerly prostituted themselves to Himmler for fancy titl! es and research grants.

It was during the war that the Ahnenerbe's crackpot racial science showed its true face. The story of Nazi medical experiments on Jewish prisoners is well-known, but Ms. Pringle sheds new light on it, showing how such tortures were directly related to Nazi eugenic theories. In the most gruesome case, SS scientists selected prisoners from Auschwitz as exemplary Jewish racial types, then gassed them and stripped the flesh from their bones in order to preserve their skeletons for research. Such experiments were a natural conclusion of Nazi racial principles, which held that the survival of the fittest required extermination of the Jewish "bacillus."

This language, of course, is frighteningly similar to that used by Theodore Roosevelt, when he warned against "the worst stock" and "citizens of the wrong type." Indeed, when it came to eugenics, the Americans blazed the trail for the Germans. As Mr. Bruinius notes, the Nazi law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring, passed by Hitler in 1934, was modeled after, and explicitly referred to, California's sterilization law. Fittingly, then, it was World War II and the revelation of the Holocaust that discredited the eugenics movement in the United States - permanently, one would like to say, except that the discovery of increasingly powerful genetic tools makes its revival by no means unthinkable.

The lesson Ms. Pringle and Mr. Bruinius have to teach is a vital one for our technological age: that scientists are not the best guides to the use or implications of their own work. There will always be credentialed ideologues willing to misrepresent self-serving lies as scientific truths. To avoid the perversion of science, we need something more than science - we need wisdom, a quality that no amount of laboratory research can discover.

SOURCE: http://www.nysun.com/article/27946?page_no=1

Most scientist that preach this are covert now a days or they will be labeled as racist.

Modern usage
The labeling of a work today as being "scientific racism" is generally meant to imply that the research has been politically motivated and is attempting to justify racist ideology through the use of a veneer of science. This labeling is challenged by those who have conducted said research, who claim that their work was indeed objective and that the attempts to decry it are acts of political correctness or censorship. Some have compared the attacks on their work as akin to Lysenkoism.

Among those most prominently attacked as scientific racists in the late 20th century have been Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton (Race, Evolution, and Behavior), Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations), and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve), among others. Many critics of these authors, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, claimed that their refusal to renounce their work in the face of what they have claimed as later evidence against it indicates racist motivations. In turn, Gould has been accused by a number of scientists of misrepresenting their work and of being motivated in these attacks by his political views. Both Gould and Lewontin have given a course titled Biology as a Social Weapon, which, Gould explained, was intended to foster "a powerful political and moral vision of how science, properly interpreted and used to empower all the people, might truly help us to be free."

In 1996, Edinburgh University psychologist Chris Brand broke with convention by accepting that he was a 'race realist' or what the left routinely called a scientific racist — he was fired after a sixteen-month battle with his university (though later compensated financially for 'unfair dismissal' by a University not willing to argue its case in the public courts)

Most are discredited by the mainstream

And then you have the other side:
African American Racism in the Academic Community

*sigh*
It’s really a difficult decision to take a hiatus from this site to concentrate on my book, but then again, we seem to just be going round in circles.

How like you Otorongo, to print this article. Now what I would like you to do is to quote all the racist comments by Len Jefferies, Dr Ben and Dr Clarke.

You will agree that context and culture are funny things and what may be acceptable in one culture will be attacked in another. Now I am not going to bother with the rhetoric of the NOI, - although I found it somewhat “strange” that nowhere was it mentioned that Dr Clarke himself on numerous occasions dismissed not only Drs West and Gates, but the NOI as well. Anyway, I was privileged to not only hear Dr Jeffries speak on three separate occasions, but also have a brief conversation with him as well as Trinidadian Dr Tony Martin who is in Trinidad right now, by the way. What is so objectionable may I ask, about his and Dr Martin’s claim that rich Jews financed the enslavement of Africans? Indeed, I find it disingenuous that little mention has been made that in all of their lectures dealing with the involvement of Jews in the enslavement of Africans, Drs Jefferies and Martin also made mention of everyone else, including other Africans, who participated in the Middle Passage. Tony Martin in particular, when the controversy arose with him, requested several times to engage in public debates with those who opposed him, not only was he refused, but it appears little mention was even made of that fact that he HAD made such requests.

And for what it’s worth, no one denies that the Jews of the 15th-16th Cs in the royal courts of Catholic Europe were in a very difficult and fragile position. The story of these people including the conversos and Marranos, needs to be examined as an important analysis of the beginnings of modern-day racism. Western media in general and US media in particular, makes it a habit of sensationalising choice bits of a topic and blowing them up to appear as the issue. Rich Jews assisted in the financing of the slave trade, but not only of Africans, other non-Catholic whites as well including, possibly, Jews themselves who refused to convert. But like their modern counterparts the “capos” in the Nazi death camps, theirs was a virtually impossible position that I would not wish on anyone here.

I particularly want to see your quotes and analyses, Oto, with this “Ice People” argument ascribed to Jefferies because as far as I know and have heard from him, all he has said was that Europeans, because of the harsh wintry ecological conditions of ancient Eurasia, developed a curious form of mindset built on a foundation of conflict, warfare and xenophobia, as a means of simple survival. This has been echoed not only by the “racist” Bradley, but also by other authors in separate studies like former Catholic priest James Carroll in his study of the history of bigotry against Jews by the Catholic Church, “Constantine’s Sword,” I believe you remember the quote I gave you just a couple weeks ago from his book dealing with Germanic culture.

As for the “faggot” talk: like I said, what is acceptable in one culture is attacked in another, now in most African-influenced cultures, be it among the African-American community, in the Caribbean and in Africa itself, homosexuality was, to say the least, an anomaly. It is fashionable now to project gay rights and gay lifestyle upon everyone’s psyche, but the fact is that it is not something that is accepted in all cultures and let me point out one time, for me, that does NOT mean the all these other cultures are backward and barbaric, although that is in itself another fashionable trait: to mock traditional cultural beliefs. But the thing is that knowing people like Dr Ben, Jeffries, et al, they would give their lectures in mannerisms and even using vernacular, that would be well familiar with the African-American/Afri-Caribbean audience they are addressing. Whites may not like it or even understand it, tough. Moderate blacks may not like it either – although many of them say the same things in the privacy of their own homes – but I do understand that for them, they picked a road that hopefully was the best of both worlds and are doing their part to make things better for their people in the face of a very complex racist structure.

Re “One settler, one bullet”

You really want to go there? You really want to discuss the rationale that leads up to a statement like that? You really want us to discuss the actions of European settlers in Africa from the heels of the 1884 Berlin Conference right up to the liberation struggles in the 1980s? The many atrocities committed – and the types of atrocities for that matter – by not only the settlers, but by mercenaries such as Mike Hoare, “Colonel” Callan, Executive Outcomes, the infamous Selous Scouts? What about the experiments in poisons and the murderous campaigns and operations financed by PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Firestone, DeBeers, Shell, Bayer, Cadbury’s? The “Keeni-Meeni” counter-gang operations in Kenya, in fact the whole British legacy in Kenya and Asia which is the subject of at least two books “Histories of the Hanged” and “Britian’s Gulag”. As a matter of fact, modern-day Jews, Israelis, had more than a passive role in Africa during the 70s and 80s.You really want us to open that bag of worms?

No Rebuttals??,.. come on this is a great topic. I have nothing to add,(not surprised) but im enjoying it.

I understand where you're coming from on this one.
Having myself seen Dr. Jeffries speak, I never understood the kickup over his teachings back then -- nor will I ever. As you pointed out, he spent so precious scant seconds of time mentioning Jews as among the contingent of many peoples (including Africans) who were a part of the slave trade. For reporters wide and far and people like the above writer to make it out as if it was some central theme of his lectures and classes was ridiculous and nothing short of bold-faced lies. Curious -- actually, no, completely expected -- that the writer never bothered to pick any quotes from Dr. Jeffries or disprove anything mentioned.

A similar thing happens on this board; if you make the egregious "mistake" of merely mentioning the race of American plantation owners of the 19th century and earlier, you are automatically charged with the crime of verbally implicating an entire race of being precluded to and involved in slavery.

I also love the writer's sandwiching of African "holocaust" in quotation marks. Classic disrespect. Let's look at the meaning of the word holocaust:
2 : a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire <a nuclear holocaust>
What exactly was the Middle Passage? A Royal Caribbean vacation package?? As noted here, the word holocaust is and has been used many times in vernacular to describe catastrophic and destructive events. But when it's applied to the Middle Passage and slavery, oh no, suddenly that particular application is disengenious??

Hmm and the plot thickens.

Sorry dog, I totally forgot about you.

Jeffries
"There was a conspiracy planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, with people named Greenberg and Weisberg and Triglani and whatnot. Russian Jewry had control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a system of destruction for the Black people."
"That which occurred in Europe, the European Nazi Holocaust of the European Jew has to do with white on white crime. It has nothing to do with African people, Asian people, Native American people."
"Jews are a race of skunks and animals that stole Africa from the Black Man"

Sorry, but his endorsement of Bradley and Jeffries is enough for me. He might not be an overt racist, but he sure congratulates the ones that have the mentality. And you should know by now there are self-haters in any group. So Bradley is no exception.

If they only claimed rich Jews, and rich Africans and other exploiters of human kind, we would befine, but you know well they didn't. The rhetoric they had was definitely very anti-jew.

I'm sure you have the sources to back the claim.

Something you would state, but something that was not enphasized in any place I have seen Martin mentioned.

I remember reading an interview from Jeffries. He made similar claims. He said, he could back every claim he made of Jews. I have heard White racists say the same thing about blacks and criminality. Of course this completely ignores the vast majority that are not criminal. He also tried to excuse his philosophy, just like you are, trying to claim that this is a mentality developed in the ice age region. Of course this doesn't explain why violence occured in the middle east, and in warm southern Europe. Or Egypt, for that matter.

The claim that Europeans brought homosexuality is a joke. It existed in Africa before Colonialism. Wide spread or not, to claim that it's a Euro corruption is racist. It assumes that all anomalies ahve to come from the evil other.

Of course, sell the message to your audience. Play on their distrusts and they will agree with you more. Pull them in. Comedians, orators, etc do it all the time. Doesn't make the message better.

By practicing a modified version of fascism. Build the community within and sell them on the enemies as well.

You forgot King Leopold. The abuses were horrible. The memories are terrible. Many Africans have personal reasons to hate. But hating the children who may be innocent is still racism. I can understand those who were personally victimized in their own families. Not people who are a generation or more removed, and support the mentality from afar. You can open the bag of worms. Then prove to me all 'whites' in Africa (as they are all considered settlers) were seeding those worms.

ok, if you won't believe a Black person speaking on the part played by Jews (not all, and yes among others) in the African Holocaust, will you believe a Jewish Rabbi and University Professor?

http://www.blacksandjews.com/MarcLeeRaphael.html

Who says I didn't believe that there were jews that played a part? Just like today and the racist opression of palestinians, and in my law school which was predominantly jewish I saw plenty of jewish racism. I also saw many jews who stood up to that racism.

We know of many Africans who were involved in the slave trade.

So why not start a website called http://www.BlackSlavesAndAfricans.com

Why write whole books and websites trying to target a whole group
http://www.blacksandjews.com

And make it seem like Judaism was pro-slavery. Was it? How much of the Jewish diaspora was involved in the slave trade?

Are Jews "a race of skunks and animals that stole Africa from the Black Man?"

Comparing the African Holocaust to the Jewish Holocaust as to a suffering of two people is fine, but to claim one was more painful, or whatever is foolish. THe dead and tortured saw no difference. And those that later became opressors, the Jewish slave traders, the Idi Amins, The conservative Israeli fantaics, are not representatives of the all.

interesting...

Much of your arguments are, as you like to say, “strawmen”.

But let’s look at some of the salient points:

Jeffries
"There was a conspiracy planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, with people named Greenberg and Weisberg and Triglani and whatnot. Russian Jewry had control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a system of destruction for the Black people."

But in books like “An Empire of their Own” which documents the Jewish cornering of the entertainment business in Hollywood, pretty much the same thing was shown. And this book, to my knowledge, was written by a Jew.

But putting things into context, given the fact that the Jews themselves were victims of virulent racism and religious bigotry in the US, which itself was a holdover from the very long bigotry against Jews in Europe going back to the Roman Empire, and given the nature of US racism and theory of whiteness itself, it is understandable that Jewish filmmakers would capitalise on the stereotyping of Africans and African-Americans in early Hollywood. Also there is still much debate about just how many Jews, including those who would have been otherwise well-meaning, subscribed to the Hamitic myth as it was applied to African people.

Their links with the Mafia should not be news either; that was almost a matter of natural course in the 1920s to the 60s (some may say even now) – remember the name Bugsy Siegel? Further in books like “Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determines Success in the new Global Economy” by Joel Kotkin, it is shown that Jews, like may other ethnic and linguistic groups, organised trans-national cultural links usually tied to some symbolic or real homeland or cultural foundation. These links – like say, fraternities such as the Freemasons – provided real monetary, spiritual and sometimes even armed support that spanned the globe (I kinda like that one, wish we could get a clue, Drop Squad anyone?). Often people would be members of lodges like the Masons, Rosicrucians, or organisations like the Mafia and still have even deeper ethno-cultural links with their kin. What’s so newsworthy about that?

That which occurred in Europe, the European Nazi Holocaust of the European Jew has to do with white on white crime.

Well it was. What’s wrong with that statement? The Nazi atrocities against the Jews was indeed “white-on-white” crime

It has nothing to do with African people, Asian people, Native American people."

Well I’ll take issue with that. It had a lot to do with us and Asian people and not just b/c there were Africans who perished in the death camps along with Jews, gypsies and Russians. The Nazi theories of racial superiority grew out of a wider racialism of Europe and Euro-America going back to the 18th C at the very least.

Jews are a race of skunks and animals that stole Africa from the Black Man

When was this statement made and in what context? I mean, by itself it is indeed an unfortunate statement to make (although the charge that they “stole” Africa from Africans is itself not untrue. It’s just that, of course, it was also stolen by the Arabs, Romans, English, Belgians, Spanish, French and in some cases given away by the Africans themselves.

Sorry, but his endorsement of Bradley and Jeffries is enough for me.

“Strawmen”

If they only claimed rich Jews, and rich Africans and other exploiters of human kind, we would befine, but you know well they didn't

Using that logic, I take it that all Americans invaded Iraq and all Americans ousted Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

Additionally, Jeffries, Martin and Dr Clarke in numerous lectures, some of which I have on tape, always pointed out that rich or prominent Jews/Xians, etc were the ones in question. It doesn’t surprise me that this topic was isolated and pounced upon by US media but I don’t see why this is being done here.

I'm sure you have the sources to back the claim

Well you can start with the book “The Jewish Onslaught” by Martin…….oh wait, that’s right, HE wrote it so that cannot be factual, ok, forget that. Had some good reprinting of letters written by Jewish and Xian academics and editors in it though.

Something you would state, but something that was not enphasized in any place I have seen Martin mentioned

Well he did, ok? A little less googling and a little more digging might turn up something. In “Onslaught” itself he says: It may be that the Jewish establishment has concluded that a prostrate African-American population, to be oppressed or paternalised as the times warrant, will continue to be its insurance against a Euro-American reversion to European anti-Jewish activity.

I also think you need to find out exactly what Jeffries and Diop was saying with regards to this “Ice People/Sun People” AKA “Northern Cradle/Southern Cradle” theory before you pontificate. They never dismissed the existence of violence in tropical regions, what they were dealing with was the centrality of violence and xenophobia which was by no means universal. Again, I cite Carroll’s study, which was from a totally different perspective as was the works of James Parkes or Bronislaw Geremek. I understand you are a military man, if so, you and I share something in common. Years ago when I was studying and comparing different forms of warfare I was greatly surprised to learn that in places like pre-colonial Africa and in North America, wars were fought but the intention was to kill as little of the enemy as possible. In the Collier’s Encyclopedia (of all places) it is recounted how during the Zulu wars against the British, when the Zulus realised that a British unit they had surrounded, had run out of ammunition, a party was allowed to pass through UNHARMED to go for fresh stocks of ammo and food.

Now Otorongo, tell the class what would have happened if the situation was reversed.

Then in Ancient Egypt, although iron was known, it was not used extensively in weaponry, if at all. As such their weapons were inferior to those used by many of their enemies. The point is that the rationale for using the best materials for war and killing was not the same everywhere.

The claim that Europeans brought homosexuality is a joke. It existed in Africa before Colonialism

I’m sure you will furnish a link for this one. I have looked for evidence – cause I remember that was one of the accusations against Shaka as well as one of the excuses used by the feminists in the 80s to justify lesbianism – and found quite the opposite. I do know that at various celebratory times there was/is an element of transvestism – here in Trinidad, the African celebration of Carnival just ended and one of the central themes in traditional ‘Mas was role-reversal including men wearing women’s clothing (Dame Lorraine and the wearing of nighties on J’Ourvert morning). Now although a number of homosexuals would take advantage of that opportunity, it had nothing to do with being homosexual itself and was a survival of traditional African mas celebrations in Africa (which would be beginning right about now until May).

And no, I didn’t forget Leopold, but I was referring to the atrocities committed in the later half of the 20th C. The argument that “hating the children who may be innocent” is as general and nonsensical as, well, hating the children who may be innocent. So what about the “children” who not only benefited from their parents and grandparent’s thievery and murder but participated in it when they came of age? As for the oft-used argument by you that “people who are a generation or more removed” etc, shows you know nothing about African cultural thought (or even Jewish cultural thought, to name but one) and I have no time to explain it to you.

…..the Jewish slave traders, the Idi Amins, The conservative Israeli fantaics, are not representatives of the all.

NOW you’re making some kind of sense. Why not we focus on that and how they poison things for everyone else?

Damn, at work. Will respond in depth when I get home.

So you claim.

Not really. I am a realist, and see a lot of faults in ethnocentrism in Judaic communities. Being a ‘goyim’ of Jewish decent (I have ‘conversos’ in my ancestry), I find Jews an interesting subject. Much like Afrodiasporic people. I grew up around Jews in Perú and was around them in college. I know they can be racist. Especially the Ashkenazi Jews. But there is no concerted block. I have seen as many Jews shooting down Jews for racism as I have seen racist Jews. One thing you won’t see as much, is Jews airing their dirty laundry. They are uber protective of their identity. I remember them shooting down “Kings of the Deal” which dealt with much of what “An Empire of their Own” did, but was written by a non-Jew. But I go on a semi-tangent.

Many Jews were the brokers, bankers, and financial advisors of Medieval Europe. They weren’t allowed to do anything else, but in this aspect that was seen as unclean at the time, they learned to excel. Jewish communities have learned to broker deals and many of their people will always have resources among them to help them thrive in any arena not closed to them. Many Jewish communities in Europe flourished within the constraints they were allowed to live in. Others much more restricted, like the Eastern European Jews did not, and do not have a history of business deals. In fact many became communist, until Russian ethnocentrism began the pogroms. Most Jews who became big business moguls were secular and may pay homage to ethnic lines but not as much to religious ties.

There is no surprise that in a media that was seen as experimental and looked down upon the Eastern media establishment, they were able to flourish and yes, even create a dynasty. Within the constraints of the mentality of American culture. Their bread and butter relied on popular support.
In the words of Neil Gabler, the author of the book you mention:
“Can it be that the godfather of the Jewish cabal that excludes Wasps, blacks and Brits pays obeisance to a higher authority? It can, because the studios and telecommunications empires that Cash identifies as predominantly Jewish are owned and controlled by non-Jews: MCA by Mashushita, Columbia and Tri-Star by Sony, Fox by Murdoch, Time-Warner by stockholders and a corporate board.”

“The godfather of the Jewish cabal that excludes Wasps, blacks and Brits” is a reference to “Kings of the Deal.” I don’t think there is any attempt to subjugate blacks as much as there is a desire to sell movies and a referencing of what will sell most in the majority White populace. If they see a trend, they will exploit it.
The biggest ‘plot’ I have seen would be in the portrayal of Arabs and German, in the media. Germans in the past and Arabs in the current times. Not Blacks.

By the way, most of the Moguls descend from Western European Jews, not Russian Jews.

The statement that Jews plotted a system for black destruction is blatantly false and racist. That a lot of Jews from one group of Judaism succeeded in the entertainment world. Is a far cry from that claim.

Jewish filmmakers made what would sell and was popular at the time. They would twist it as much as they could to help themselves, but not enough to lose their audience. There was no plot destroy any group. They perpetuated what was already there. They weren’t trying to rock the boat.
The “Hamitic myth” or fabled “Curse of Ham” is a Christian invention. For an honest look at Jews and perceptions of blacks, I recommend you read: “The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” by David Goldenberg.

Very true. Good book to mention. To explore the dark side of ethnocentric links a good book to read is “World on Fire : How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability” by Amy Chua. This still does not address Jeffries or Martin’s claims of a Jewish plot to undermine Blacks.

You answered your own question. The Nazi Holocaust had everything to do with racism and intolerance and Blacks were also exposed to this hatred. And to deny the relationship or minimize the experience as one irrelevant to explore is racist. To claim that if it is ‘white’ on ‘white’, it is not an issue, then it should be ignored is racist. And, in fact, to ignore ‘black’ on ‘black’ racist acts is just as flawed. As many groups that could be considered Black have had racist attitudes to each other. Racism isn’t confined to the classical racial categorizations. Races are different social constructs in different cultures.

Leonard Jeffries, "Our Sacred Mission," National Black United Front, (Text of a speech given to the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, July 20, 1991);
"Anti-Semitism Among Black Student Groups," Jewish Virtual Library, (Originally published as Schooled in Hate: Anti-Semitism On Campus, Anti-Defamation League, 1997), but the context is irrelevant. It's racist. And please show me of any Jewish colony in Africa. There were Jews that participated in the slave trade as merchants. In other words these profiteers took what was there and made money on it. But please show me how they were active participants on colonialism in Africa.

Hardly. If he agrees with their claims then he buys into their beliefs. Do I blame him? Not really, he was raised in the segregated south. This does not take away from his positive accomplishments, or those of Ben-Jochannan, for that matter. But the racist beliefs are there. The Afrocentric beliefs are there. Its reactionary. They are products of their times, and you need to take the positive and slowly weed out the negative that was valid for their times, but not conductive for the future.