The Western Contribution to World History

James C. Russell

"I shall begin by speaking about our ancestors, since it is only right and proper on such an occasion to pay them the honor of recalling what they did."

Thus wrote Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War 1 and so it is fitting to pay tribute to those whose deeds contributed toward the creation and defense of our Western Civilization. The deeds of our ancestors, which we have chosen to commemorate today, include those of a military, cultural and scientific nature.

In his book entitled The Birth of Europe, medieval historian Robert Lopez posed the question: "What enabled Europe to emerge finally on top?" His answer was "the absence of great invasions for a thousand years." 2 Hence we begin our survey of Western contributions by paying tribute to those who, throughout the history of the West, courageously repulsed alien invading forces.

The first great battle for the survival of the West occurred nearly 2,500 years ago, in 480 B.C. in Greece. Herodotus, the first great Western historian, describes this legendary battle in his History of the Persian War. When the Persians invaded Greece, the Greeks realized that they were outnumbered and needed time to reorganize their forces. They sought to delay the approaching Persians at a narrow mountain pass. The following selection describes a scenario not unlike that which confronts us today: the fear and resignation of the many, the outright treason of some, and the sacrifice of the few who fight valiantly against insurmountable odds. Herodotus wrote:

[7.207] The Greek forces at Thermopylae, when the Persian army drew near to the entrance of the pass, were seized with fear; and a council was held to consider a retreat. It was the wish of the Greeks generally that the army should fall back. But Leonidas, the Spartan King, gave his voice for remaining where they were.

[7.210] Four whole days went by, and Xerxes, the Persian king, expected that the Greeks would run away. When, however, he found on the fifth day that they were not gone, thinking that their firm stand was mere impudence and recklessness, he grew angry, and sent against them the Medes and Cissians, with orders to take them alive and bring them into his presence. Then the Medes rushed forward and charged the Greeks, but fell in vast numbers.

[7.212] During these assaults, it is said that Xerxes, who was watching the battle, thrice leaped from the throne on which he sat, in terror for his army. Next day the combat was renewed, but with no better success on the part of the Persians.

[7.213] Now, as the Persian king was in great distress, and knew not how he should deal with the emergency, Ephialtes, the son of Eurydemus, a Greek, came to him and was admitted to a conference. Hoping to receive a rich reward at the king's hands, he had come to tell him of a pathway which led across the mountain to Thermopylae. By this disclosure he brought destruction on the band of his fellow Greeks who had previously withstood the Persians.

[7.219] The news came that the Persians were marching round by the hills: it was still night when these men arrived. Then the Greeks held a council to consider what they should do, and here opinions were divided: some were strong against quitting their post, while others contended to the contrary. So when the council had broken up, part of the troops departed and went their ways homeward to their several states; part however resolved to remain, and to stand by Leonidas to the last.

[7.223] The Persians under Xerxes began to draw near; and the Greeks under Leonidas, as they now went forth determined to die, advanced much further than on previous days. . . . Now they took the battle beyond the wall, and carried slaughter among the Persians, who fell in heaps.

[7.224] Leonidas himself fell fighting bravely, together with many other famous Spartans, whose names I have taken care to learn on account of their great worthiness, as indeed I have the names of all the three hundred.

[7.225] Drawing back into the narrowest part of the pass, and retreating even behind the wall, they posted themselves upon a hill, where they stood all drawn up together in one close body. . . . The hill whereof I speak is at the entrance of the pass, where the stone lion now stands which was set up in honour of Leonidas. Here the Greeks defended themselves to the last, such as still had swords using them, and the others resisting with their hands and teeth; till the Persians, who . . . now encircled them upon every side, overwhelmed and buried the remnant . . . beneath showers of arrows.

This inspirational sacrifice of our ancient ancestors at Thermopylae led to a Greek victory over the Persians and permitted Hellenic culture to flourish. The seminal cultural and intellectual contribution of the Greeks to world history was an objective, logical world-view as embodied in the Aristotelean syllogism. As Revilo Oliver has noted:

The Occidental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Greek philosophers and has not since changed, is the mind of conceptual thought-of thought directed from the mind toward an object. The Oriental mind . . . does not think conceptually; its thought is never directed away from itself. The Oriental mind cannot separate what it is thinking about from itself. The capacity for objective thought is peculiar to the philosophical mind of the West. . . . [T]he unique civilization of the West [is] a unity-a single continuity that runs, with fluctuations but no break, from the ancient Greeks to ourselves. 3

The objective Greek world-view was expressed in the cosmological speculation of the pre-Socratic philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. Thales, who may have been the world's first astronomer, is reported to have predicted an eclipse that occurred in 585 B.C. 4 His speculation that water is the source of all things was made in such a way that has led him to be considered "the first man in history to suggest that there is an order in nature which the mind can comprehend." 5 Later, in the fifth century, by abstract reasoning, Democritus anticipated some of the basic concepts of contemporary atomic theory.

The philosophy of this era also contributed the notion of areté, which is sometimes translated as virtue, but might better be described as a career-specific drive for excellence and its fulfillment. It is from this ancient Greek ideal that the modern exhortations of: "Be the best you can be" and "Reach your highest potential" are derived. In Homeric literature the areté of the warrior was bravery coupled with victory. The areté of the philosopher was knowledge, and optimally abstract knowledge about the process of obtaining knowledge itself or "contemplation."

Greek philosophy was complemented by literature, sculpture and architecture. The comedic and tragic works of the early Greek dramatists from Euripides to Æschylus served as models for literature throughout the history of the West and the surviving amphitheaters serve as reminders of the active participation of the ancient Greek populace in their local culture.

Greek sculpture followed the general cultural dictum of Protagoras that "Man is the measure of all things." It depicted ideal human forms such as Myron's Discus Thrower 6 and Praxiteles' Aphrodite whose ethnic characteristics serve as a reminder of a more homogeneous past. The inspiring architecture of the Acropolis, and particularly the Parthenon, remains a standard for public buildings to this day. The mathematical contributions of the Greeks go beyond the Pythagorean theorem and include Euclidean geometry and the application of mathematics to physics and military technology by Archimedes.

Unfortunately for the ancient Greeks, Alexander the Great, who died in 323 B.C., despite being an astute tactician, unwittingly became the first apostle of multiculturalism and demonstrated the ethnocultural dangers of empire-building. After conquering Persia, in an apparent effort to consolidate his rule, Alexander married a Persian princess, dressed as a Persian nobleman and encouraged his officers to marry Persian women. Alexander "declared that all men were alike sons of one Father and . . . he prayed that Macedonians and Persians might be partners in the commonwealth and that the peoples of his world might live in harmony and in unity of heart and mind." 7

Predictably, Alexander's goal of imposing Hellenic civilization upon his newly-conquered subjects was not accomplished. Instead, many immigrants from the conquered Eastern territories made their way to Greece with the result being cultural and genetic dissonance, as well as religious syncretism and a condition of social confusion sometimes referred to as anomie. These Eastern immigrants contributed toward the de-Hellenization of Greece by importing their world-rejecting escapist mystery cults which began to appeal to the native Greek population due to the sociocultural stress they were experiencing. The individual anxiety and depression associated with anomie also contributed toward what has been described as a "failure of nerve" which had political and military consequences as well.

Later, in the Hellenistic era, as Greece became immersed in the cultural diversity of its Eastern subject peoples, Greek philosophy reflected the Eastern orientation toward the interior life of the mystical and supernatural. While Plato's view of a separation between a transcendent and immutable world of ideas and earthly world of corresponding inferior forms may be a reflection of Middle Eastern dualism, in his Republic, Plato defends the fundamental unit of Greek life, the polis or city-state. In his famous allegory of the cave, Plato conveys his belief that the ruling class should be drawn from those philosophers, who upon attaining knowledge, leave behind the shadowy distortions of the cave but feel compelled to return and risk their lives attempting to enlighten their countrymen who languish in ignorance.

It might be noted that the model of the Greek city-states and the medieval model of a conglomeration of local European ethnostates both correspond closely to the optimal model for human evolution by encouraging the development of a variety of competing population groups within the boundaries of Europe. Ancient efforts at empire-building and contemporary trends toward globalization thwart the operation of this fundamental life process.

Commenting on the impending end of human evolution in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, British geneticist Steve Jones, one of the Encyclopedia's three editors, has noted that a "pattern of small, isolated and partially inbred populations has characterized humanity for most of our evolutionary history." However, "no longer will the human species be made up of a network of small and isolated populations, each evolving more or less independently. Instead future generations of humanity will behave much more like a single genetic unit." Jones concludes:

Many geneticists believe that evolution is particularly rapid in groups of small populations that exchange occasional migrants. . . . The rapidity of human evolution may be partly due to our tribal structure, whose genetic effects were increased by repeated bottlenecks experienced as human populations spread into new parts of the world. Increased mobility means that this phase of history is now at an end, and perhaps, that human evolution is now almost over. 8 [Emphasis added.]

The decrease in reproductive isolation resulting from increased mobility may not be without dire consequences. Although an immediate effect may be a reduction in genetic diseases, Jones aloofly concedes, that apparently "this phase cannot last: sooner or later the harmful genes will again reappear in double dose, so that future generations may have to pay the price. . . ." 9

After the decline of Greece, Rome followed a similar pattern of initial homogeneous cultural achievement followed by empire-building and consequent alien immigration. In order to increase tax revenues, aliens were granted citizenship with its attendant tax obligations. The heterogenization of the Roman Empire contributed to social, psychological and religious destabilization resulting in the increased appeal of religious cults which offered an artificial, non-biological sense of community in this world and the hope of salvation in the next. In a study entitled, Enemies of the Roman Order, historian Ramsay MacMullen has remarked that by the fourth century A.D.:

The civilization called Roman, . . . yields to another, compounded of heterogeneous elements formerly suppressed. . . .[B]eliefs about the supernatural, once illegal or contemptuously relegated to ploughboys and servant girls, after the first century began to infect even the educated, and were ultimately embodied as a principal element in late antique philosophy. . . . In the end [the fourth century A.D.] . . . . [t]here was little "Roman" left in the Roman empire. Rather, the "un-Roman" elements had come to the fore, and now controlled the world in which they lived. 10

As Rome grew weak, its enemies saw an opportunity to overrun the West. In 452, Attila the Hun and his Asiatic hordes proceeded Westward as far as Chalôns in central Gaul. Fortunately, the Roman general Aetius and the Visigothic leader Theodoric put aside their historic rivalry and united to face Atilla. Unfortunately, then as well as today, there were those of the West who allied themselves with the enemy. At the battle of Chalôns it was the Ostrogoths. Nevertheless, the combined Roman and Visigothic forces succeeded in repelling the Huns. 11

In the beginning of the eighth century the integrity of the West was once again threatened. The Moors, led by Abd-er-Rahman had crossed the Pyrenees and fought their way north toward the city of Tours. But on October 10, 732 at the Battle of Tours their fortune changed. According to the medieval Chronicle of St. Denis:

The Muslims planned to go to Tours to destroy the Church of St. Martin, the city, and the whole country. Then came against them the glorious Prince Charles, at the head of his whole force. . . . [H]e fought as fiercely as the hungry wolf falls upon the stag. By the grace of Our Lord, he wrought a great slaughter upon the enemies of the Christian faith, so that - as history bears witness - he slew in that battle 300,000 men, including their king by the name Abd-er-Rahman. Then was [Charles] first called "Martel," for as a hammer of iron, of steel, and of every other metal, . . . he dashed and smote in the battle all of his enemies. And what was the greatest marvel of all, he lost in that battle only 1500 men. 12

Early Christianity had found fertile ground for its message of individual salvation among the alienated, heterogeneous, urban inhabitants of the declining Roman Empire. Later, in the Early Middle Ages when Christian missionaries sought to convert the Germanic and Celtic peoples, it became apparent that for Christianity to be accepted by a more cohesive, homogeneous, pastoral-warrior society, it needed to appeal to the different concerns of that society. Hence, Early Medieval Christianity appealed to matters of group survival such as victory in battle, healthy families, and abundant crops and livestock. Germanic Christianity addressed these pre-Christian folk-religious concerns through local patron saints and clergy and their holy relics. In an apparent attempt to convert the Saxons who had been persecuted by Charlemagne, an adaptation of the New Testament known as the Heliand was composed in Old Saxon. It portrayed Christ and his apostles as a Germanic warrior-band. Eventually a Middle Eastern salvation religion was transformed into a European folk religion and Christianity became more closely identified with Europe, especially with the emergence of the notion of "Christendom."

Early Medieval Christianity provided a spiritual impetus and a source of solidarity that are likely to have contributed toward European victories over invading forces. The bond between religious and temporal spheres increased under Charles Martel's Carolingian descendants. They tended to view Christianity as the religion of a Roman Empire which they admired and sought to reconstruct. The application of religious fervor toward Western military exploits is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in a twelfth-century treatise of St. Bernard of Clairveaux entitled, In Praise of the New Knighthood. Written as an exhortation to the Knights Templar and other Crusaders, it distinguishes between fighting for "empty glory" or "earthly possessions" and fighting to assert Euro-Christian dominance in the Holy Land where Euro-Christian pilgrims and shrines had been attacked.

Recalling the existing medieval nexus between European self-identity and Christendom the following words of St. Bernard may be interpreted as a religious rationalization, if not an encouragement to assertively defend Western interests. Bernard writes:

The knights of Christ may safely fight the battles of their Lord, fearing neither sin if they smite the enemy, nor danger at their own death; since to inflict death or to die for Christ is no sin, but rather, an abundant claim to glory. . . . The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. 13

The religious themes of medieval art and literature appear to have been complemented by the subliminal appeal of the racial features of the subjects portrayed. Persons of European descent, regardless of their religious orientation, are likely to find representations of religious figures appealing. The many excellent Madonnas painted during this period may also indicate a racially healthy celebration of fertility.

The Renaissance artists and sculptors, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, resurrected the Classical ideal of the human form and created works of incomparable beauty. The subject matter of art and sculpture began to once again include the Classical deities, royalty, and other members of the secular elite. In the Romantic period, positive portrayals of the common folk, as well as idealized and legendary depictions of the heritages of the European nations became popular in art and literature. The literature of this period likewise drew upon the West's Classical heritage as well as European legends and history, as is evidenced by William Shakespeare's choice of subjects for his plays exemplified by Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Henry IV.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, southeastern Europe became the target of Muslim aggression. Turks and Tartars plundered the countryside, taking captives and holding them for ransom, or worse, selling them as slaves. In 1682, Poland and Austria formed an alliance against a possible large-scale Turkish invasion. In March of 1683, a Turkish army of over 140,000 soldiers started marching northward and laid siege to Vienna. As the Turks were about to break through the walls of Vienna, the Polish warrior-king, Jan Sobieski arrived with 30,000 troops. On September 12, 1683 the Battle of Vienna ensued, and according to the following contemporary account:

The battle . . . lasted fourteen or fifteen hours; the slaughter was horrible, and the loss of the Turks inestimable, for they left upon the field of battle, besides the dead and prisoners, all their cannon, equipment, tents and infinite riches that they had been six years gathering together throughout the whole Ottoman Empire. The battle ended by the infantry in the trenches, and on the Isle of the Danube, where the Turks had an artillery battery. The night was spent in slaughter, and the unhappy remnant of the Turkish army saved their lives by flight, having abandoned all to the victors. 14

The Age of Exploration actually began with the heroic expeditions of our Viking ancestors to Iceland, Greenland and North America, or Vinland, as they referred to it. The Vikings also contributed to the development of trade routes throughout Europe and to the creation of Russia. The accomplishments of Christopher Columbus have recently come under criticism by contemporary opponents of the West. In 1992, American Indian groups protested a parade in Denver to commemorate the 500th anniversary of his discovery of America, which was promptly canceled as a result. Public recognition of the contribution of Columbus' sponsor, Queen Isabella of Spain, has fared even worse. She was denied even the minimal recognition of a stamp being issued in her honor, apparently due to her expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492, the same year not only of Columbus' discovery, but also of the Spanish victory over the Moors in Grenada and the subsequent Euro-Christian re-conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula.

More recent exploratory contributions of the West include the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the exploration of the polar regions by Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd, Robert Peary and Sir Edward Shackleton. Just before Shackleton's ship, the Endurance reached Antarctica in 1915, it became trapped in ice-flows and was eventually destroyed by icebergs. Shackleton and a few off his men began a search for help. After an 850-mile journey in a 20-foot craft through some of the worst weather and seas on record, Shackleton reached a small outpost of civilization from where he called for help. He then returned to the men he had stranded. Remarkably, throughout the entire ordeal, not a single man died.

Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Kepler developed the mathematical and astronomical foundations of space exploration, which in this century was accelerated by the work of Robert Goddard, Werner von Braun and Arthur Rudolph. Rudolph's service to the United States space program was rewarded by essentially being hounded out of the country after the government, at the behest of a shrill minority of ingrates, threatened to revoke his pension.

The most sublime contribution of the West has been its music. The works of Handel, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms are revered the world over. Special respect is due to those composers who incorporated a national consciousness into their compositions, including Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Edvard Grieg, Antonin Dvorak, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jan Sibelius, Giuseppe Verdi and John Philip Sousa. From Rienzi and the Ring cycle, to Parsifal, Wagner captured the Western ethos and developed what he termed Gesamtkunstwerke or "total art productions" in which he not only composed the music, but also wrote the lyrics, designed the stage sets and costumes, and eventually built his own opera house. One of the greatest tragedies of our time is the deliberate alienation of our youth from their classical musical heritage.

In the field of medicine, from Hippocrates to Galen and from William Harvey to Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming, who discovered the powerful antibiotic effect of penicillin, and Christian Barnard, who performed the first heart transplant, Western medicine has distinguished itself without parallel. One of the effects of the accomplishments of Western medicine had been a global increase in longevity and consequent population increase in so-called "under-developed nations" at the same time that the population of European nations is contracting. Similarly, the Western advances in transportation to which Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, and Charles Lindbergh contributed, have inadvertently, all but obliterated the West's geographic isolation. As a result we must develop a heightened awareness of alternate social isolating mechanisms, such as physical appearance, if we wish to enhance our prospects for survival.

The authors of the great epic literature of the West, from Homer and Virgil to the authors of Beowulf, the Norse sagas, the Song of Roland and the Nibelungenlied have provided our People with inspiration for future noble deeds. A modern epic that is now being re-enacted in Australia's recent confrontation with a boatload of refugees, is Jean Raspail's Camp of the Saints, which should be required reading for all persons of European descent who labor under the pseudo-morality of self-destruction. Friedrich Nietzsche also provides a critique of misdirected altruism which he describes as the "morality of decadence." In his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote that:

[A] morality in which self-interest wilts away-remains a bad sign under all circumstances. This is true of individuals; it is particularly true of nations. The best is lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking. Instinctively to choose what is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted by "disinterested" motives, that is virtually the formula of decadence.

No discussion of morality, religion and science would be complete without acknowledging Raymond Cattell's important works, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (Pergamon, 1972), and Beyondism: Religion from Science (Praeger, 1987) Cattell's accomplishments in personality assessment, psychometric testing, and other fields resulted in his being nominated for a life-time achievement award by the American Psychological Foundation. However, two interlopers' protestations which were graciously amplified by a New York Times report, succeeded in postponing the award until an investigation could be made into Cattell's personal beliefs on race. In the meantime, Cattell withdrew his name from consideration for the award and died. 15

Most advances in communication from Gutenberg's printing press to the telegraph and television were Western contributions. From Samuel Morse, Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi to Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Philo Farnsworth came great inventions with the potential to enlighten and fortify our People. Yet this potential was never realized. Instead these inventions were hijacked by Mayer, Thalberg, Warner, and Cohn et al who sought to utilize our media for their financial gain, or worse, to manipulate our opinions and behavior.

Philo Farnsworth was a fourteen year-old Mormon farm boy in Idaho when he first conceived the design of the television. He later not only invented the cathode-ray tubes used for the first television, but also the first simple electron microscope. During the 1960s he worked on a nuclear fusion process to produce clean energy. At the time of his death in 1971 he held more than 300 U.S. and foreign patents, but to this day Farnsworth's contributions are virtually unknown.

When Radio Corporation of America's president, David Sarnoff, learned of Farnsworth's independent progress, he sent a spy to observe Farnsworth's research so that RCA could register patents for the new invention before Farnsworth. Even though after a protracted legal battle, Farnsworth won the patent rights, television production was halted during the war years, and by the war's end the patents began to expire. Depressed, Farnsworth retired to Maine where he began to drink heavily, suffered a nervous breakdown and received shock therapy. Finally, his home burned to the ground. Meanwhile Sarnoff basked in glory, promoting himself and the spy he had sent to steal Farnsworth's research, as the "father of television."

Before his death in 1971, Farnsworth noted with dismay the direction which television had taken. His son Kent recalls that his father "felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives." The elder Farnsworth's advice to his son regarding television was: "There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet." 16

Two other virtually unknown Western inventors whose contributions have shaped the modern world were Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce who developed the microchip. They found a way to mass-produce entire networks of miniature electronic components on a single crystal or "chip." Kilby used chips made of germanium and while Noyce used chips made of silicon, hence the name for that area of California farmland that has become known as "Silicon Valley." Kilby, a former associate of William Shockley, founded Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in 1957, while Noyce founded INTEL in 1968. Robert Noyce died in 1990, while Jack Kilby was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for "basic work on information and communication technology."

Ten years ago, a new communications medium was introduced in the West. From 1991 to 1995 the number of World Wide Web users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million. Today it stands at over 500 million. The man responsible for creating the World Wide Web from the pre-existing less user-friendly basic Internet structure was Tim Berners-Lee. He created the Hyper-Text Mark-up Language, which is used to post text and graphics to a website, and the protocol language used to communicate between users and websites, as well as a web-browser prototype. Unlike so many others who hopped on the dot-com bandwagon to make a quick fortune, Berners-Lee has been content to work quietly behind the scenes from M.I.T. directing a non-profit consortium that seeks to maintain Internet software compatibility and hence ensure open access to the World Wide Web. Let us be ever vigilant against those who seek to restrict freedom of expression via this new and vital medium.

During the first half of the twentieth century, some Western poets exhibited a concern for the preservation of our cultural and genetic heritage. Ezra Pound was tortured by U.S. troops for his radio broadcasts advocating peace during the West's fratricidal Second World War. Pound was a mentor of T. S. Eliot, and helped Eliot edit The Wasteland, a critique of Western decadence. Eliot described some conditions for an optimal society:

The population should be homogeneous. . . . What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and culture combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated. 17

A major contribution of the West has been its concern for the protection of the global environment. In 1847, George Marsh, a Vermont Congressman became the first public advocate of environmental conservation when he called attention to the destructive impact of deforestation and proposed a land management plan. In 1864, Marsh published an influential analysis of conservation issues entitled Man and Nature. The naturalist writings of Henry David Thoreau also contributed toward the public awareness of conservation issues in America. Rachel Carson initiated the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1964. She astutely observed that "Man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself." 18

Garrett Hardin has applied environmental ideals to the problem of human over-population in his 1993 book Living Within Limits. Even more perceptive is his 1999 book entitled The Ostrich Factor: Our Population Myopia. The recent works of the "father of sociobiology," E. O. Wilson, on Biodiversity and Consilience are also important in this regard. In Concilience, Wilson warns us:

Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. . . . Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become. 19

Perhaps the greatest contributions of the West to world history have been Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's discovery of the fundamental laws of genetics as well as their eugenic application. Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin made such important eugenic observations in his founding work, Hereditary Genius, that Darwin himself included references to them in his Descent of Man. The pioneers of the eugenics movement included Harvard geneticist Charles Davenport, who founded the Carnegie Institute's genetics and evolution laboratories at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Davenport convinced the widow of railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman to endow a Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. Harry Laughlin was the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at the Carnegie Institute from its inception in 1910 until 1921 and its Director from 1921 until 1940.

One of the earliest American adherents of eugenics was Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president from 1908 to 1933 of the American Museum of Natural History and a respected paleontologist and geologist who taught at both Princeton and Columbia Universities. He is credited with significantly expanding the staffing and funding of the scientific department at the Museum. In 1921, Osborn hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics at the Museum. By that time, eugenics had become a worldwide phenomenon and the exhibition reflected that, with exhibits from 22 states and the District of Columbia and 16 foreign countries, including Australia, China, Cuba, India, Norway, and Peru. The Conference was attended by future President Herbert Hoover and Charles Darwin's son, Leonard, who was the Chairman of the International Eugenics Commission. In 1932, the Third International Eugenics Congress was also held in New York at the American Museum of Natural History. Mrs. Harriman was among the sponsors, as was Mrs. DuPont and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the homeopathic physician and cereal company executive, who also founded the Race Betterment Foundation.

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Commenting on the Human Genome Program, Watson has stated: "We used to think our fate was in the stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes." 20 William Shockley not only received the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of the transistor, but also led a one-man crusade against dysgenic American policies. Despite threats on his life, Arthur Jensen persevered in studying the relationship between IQ and race. In Canada, neither state-sponsored censorship nor private harassment has deterred J. Philippe Rushton's inquiries into Race, Evolution and Behavior. The importance of applying eugenic measures in the West becomes evident from Richard Lynn's recent work on Dysgenics and his just-released seminal work Eugenics: A Reassessment.

Sociobiology has been applied to religion by Walter Burkert in his interdisciplinary study entitled Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion (Harvard, 1996). In an earlier work, Burkert wrote "Religious ritual is advantageous in the process of selection, if not for the individual, then at least for the continuance of group identity." 21 Burkert's view is echoed in the following paragraph from the Seattle Times summary of the paper, "The Neural Basis of Religious Experience" by V. S. Ramachandran, et al, at the University of California, San Diego:

"It is not clear why such dedicated neural machinery . . . for religion may have evolved," the team reported yesterday at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. One possibility, the scientists said, was to encourage tribe loyalty or reinforce kinship ties or the stability of a closely knit clan. 22

While Judaism has functioned to sustain the Jewish People, contemporary Western Christianity has, on the contrary, deliberately dissociated itself from its European ethnocultural heritage, and has focused on "universal social justice." There is now afoot a conscious effort to de-Europeanize and to re-Judaize Christianity, through scriptural revision, internal treachery and external pressure. One possible strategy to counter these efforts is to encourage a re-Europeanization of Christianity into a European folk religion. Such a strategy might be bolstered by the argument that Euro-Christians should only accept the folk-affirming form of Christianity accepted by our ancestors and not accept the specious "bait and switch" arguments of liberal Christians who try to indoctrinate us with universalist propaganda. Thought-provoking discussions of past, present, and future religious and ethnocultural encounters may be found in Samuel Huntington's timely Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996), and Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy's December 1994 Atlantic Monthly article "Must it be the Rest Against the West?" The study of the rise and fall of civilizations has captivated many Western minds, from the racial speculations of Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant to the organic model of Oswald Spengler and the challenge-response model of Arnold Toynbee. More recent works on this perplexing subject have been written by Francis Parker Yockey, Carroll Quigley, Lawrence Brown, James Burnham, William Gayley Simpson, and Elmer Pendell, who, in his excellent inquiry into Why Civilizations Self-Destruct observed that:

In our own civilization we see a lessening of the struggle for survival. Welfare does away with natural selection. Nothing in our present environment can serve as an adequate substitute for the harsh means evolution adopted to prevent the weaker elements of civilizations from playing a major part in the formation of subsequent generations. Compassion, unfortunately, is the enemy of biological progress. 23

Pendell therefore proposed a marriage law that would limit the number of children permitted in a family based upon the intelligence of the parents.

Due to the relaxation of selective pressures as a civilization matures, in most instances the genetic quality of the founders of a civilization is greater than the quality of those who inhabit it during its decline. One may be led to wonder that since the net result of a few hundred years of civilization, without some form of eugenic mechanism, is usually the undoing of millennia of genetic evolution, whether it might be better for a formal civilization never to emerge, hence preserving and perhaps increasing the genetic quality of a more rural, more independent population, within which selective pressures could operate more freely.

In addition to his work on I.Q., Rushton's Genetic Similarity Theory provides a biological basis for understanding the enduring preference of genetically similar individuals for each other. It also provides insights for resolving many of the ethnic conflicts which exist in the world today. 24 Kevin MacDonald's work on religion, and particularly Judaism, as a group evolutionary strategy, is essential for a thorough understanding of our current predicament. 25

While liberals and universalists constantly yammer about "bringing us all together", and how "diversity is our strength," it may be suggested that the biological function of human language and culture is just the opposite, that is, to keep discrete groups apart. In my own view, culture in humans is analogous to instinct in other species. Species with more complex brains tend to rely less on instinct and more on learned behavior, which in humans, includes culture. For culture in human societies to accomplish that which instinct accomplishes in non-human societies, it must establish a sense of group identity so that the individual knows whom to act altruistically toward and whom to mate with. In short, among humans, culture functions sociobiologically as an isolating mechanism.

The organized anti-Western media of today seem to scour the gutters of the ghetto for the most vile filth imaginable and then serve it up to our children as "their culture." Perhaps Konrad Lorenz's animal behavior research might provide us with some clues as to how MTV has succeeded in contriving the acceptance, if not preference of white adolescents for "rap music" and its attendant so-called "hip-hop culture" of fashion and language. Lorenz gained some popularity for his theories of imprinting when he acted as a substitute for a mother goose soon after her eggs had hatched. Since goslings imprint upon the first moving object they see after they are born as if it were their mother, the little goslings began following Lorenz.

The time during which imprinting occurs is called the "critical period" or "sensitive period." 26 This initial form of imprinting shortly after birth is known as "filial imprinting." Among humans, it is believed that there is a period of linguistic imprinting during which a baby imprints upon a particular language. There is another form of imprinting that is believed to take place during sexual maturation. This "sexual imprinting" is a process by which animals identify what traits suitable mates should possess. 27 Females are usually more deeply influenced by sexual imprinting. Animals tend to imprint upon the traits of their parents and siblings, since they have the most social contact with them.

It has been demonstrated that finches raised by foster parents of a different species of finch will later exhibit a lifelong sexual attraction toward the alien species. One wonders how a child's sexual imprinting mechanism is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact.

The most serious implication of human sexual imprinting for our genetic future is that it would establish the destructiveness of school integration, especially in the middle and high-school years. One can only wonder to what degree the advocates of school integration, such as former NAACP attorney Jack Greenberg, were conscious of this scientific concept. It also compounds the culpability of media moguls who deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents. In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.

The sociobiological warfare that our youth is subjected to is likely to be even more diabolical since it appears to deliberately exploit a biological theory of sexual imprinting at the critical period of sexual maturity. Movies like this past year's spate of miscegenationist titles, Save the Last Dance, Crazy / Beautiful and O, a parody of Othello, appear deliberately designed to exploit the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.

The current of misdirected altruism that permeates contemporary Western society is dangerous when it is divorced from biological reality. It would be better to ignorantly adhere to the laws of human evolution, as do most primitive peoples, than to understand these laws and yet deliberately disobey them. It would be most tragic if the people who discovered the theory of evolution were to perish due to a failure of will to apply it to their own destiny.

It is our duty to maintain and advance the Western continuum that originated in ancient Greece and earlier. To falter at this critical juncture is to allow our people to approach extinction. The greatest achievement of the West will be our extrication from our current dilemma. If we succeed in our efforts, the chroniclers of this age will celebrate our valiant struggle in the epic literature of the future - if we fail, there will be no such literature and our beleaguered descendants will mock us in our graves.

James C. Russell, Ph.D., is the author of The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation (Oxford University Press, 1994)

Endnotes

1. Rex Warner ii. trans., Thucydides: the Peloponnesian War 4, (London: Bodley Head, 1954), p. 116.
2. Robert S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1967), pp. 120-21.
3. Revilo P. Oliver, America's Decline: The Education of a Conservative (London: Londinium Press, 1987), pp. 216-17.
4. Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, Reginald E. Allen, ed. & intro. (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. Detailed photographs of this marvelous work are available at:http://www.phil.uni-erlangen.de/~p1altar/photo_html/plastik/maennlich/bewegt /diskobol/diskobol.html
7. W. W. Tarn, Alexander the Great (1948; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), p. 147.
8. Steve Jones, et al, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
9. Ibid.
10. Ramsay MacMulllen, Enemies of the Roman Order (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. viii-ix.
11. The Gothic historian Jordanes describes the battle in Chapter 38 of his History of the Goths, which is translated in William Stearns Davis, ed., Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources, 2 Vols. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13), Vol. II: Rome and the West, pp. 322-25.
12. William Stearns Davis, ed., Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources, 2 vols. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13), vol. II: Rome and the West, pp. 362-364.
13. Bernard of Clairveaux, Liber ad milites Templi: De laude novae militae, trans. Conrad Greenia in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Vol. 7, Cistercian Fathers Series: 19, (Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, Mich., 1977).
14. The Secret History of the Reign of John Sobieski, The III of that Name, King of Poland, containing a particular account of the siege of Vienna. . . . trans. François-Paulin Dalairac (London: Rhodes, Bennet, Bell, Leigh & Midwinter, 1700), pp. 355-364.
15. An excellent detailed account of this outrage may be found in Glayde Whitney, "Raymond B. Cattell and The Fourth Inquisition" Mankind Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 1 & 2, Fall/Winter 1997, pp. 99-124.
16. Neil Postman, "Philo Farnsworth" in Time: 100 Scientists http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/farnsworth.html
17. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer in Modern Heresy (London: Faber, 1934), p. 20.
18. Rachel Carson, in a CBS television interview in 1963: http://www.sover.net/~mjez/newspapercolumns/rachelcarson.htm
19. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. ?.
20. James D. Watson, quoted by Leon Jaroff in Time 20 March 1989.
21. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
22. Seattle Times, Oct. 29, 1997.
23. Elmer Pendell, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct (Cape Canaveral, Florida: Howard Allen), p. 126.
24. J. Philippe Rushton, "Genetic Similarity Theory and the Roots of Ethnic Conflict" Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies 23:4 (Winter 1998): 477-86.
25. Kevin MacDonald, A People that Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998); The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998).
26. John Archer, Ethology and Human Development (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).
27. Todd, P.M., and Miller, G.F. "Parental guidance suggested: How parental imprinting evolves through sexual selection as an adaptive learning mechanism" Adaptive Behavior, 2 (1), 5-47. See also David T Lykken and Auke Tellegen, "Is Human Mating Adventitious or the Result of Lawful Choice? A Twin Study of Mate Selection" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1993: vol. 65. no. I, 56-68.



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