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age 1 of 5 May 18, 2013 01:28:22AM M

Book Review: Might Is Right or the Survival of the Fittest, by Ragnar

Redbeard theoccidentalobserver.n

Originally published in 1886; 2005 edition edited by Darrell W. Conder; available from .Occidental Press

Reviewed by Anthony Hilton

Note: In biology, adaptive means (very precisely) promoting the survival and reproduction of an organisms gene

Natural selection is the logical and empirical process whereby forces of nature affect the survival and reproductiof some genes over others. The terms, natural selection and selection pressures (particular causes of selection)help one think clearly.

Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during the Franz Boas-dominated second half othe 20th Century. According to Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological forces andinstead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruisby developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social Darwinism was the idea that nature was red intooth and claw, so that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other animals, and be as ruthless as wlike: kill, kill, kill!! Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since it is part of what weinherit rather than learn, and it would be unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we inherite

them, they be adaptive and therefore good.must

But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because, say, a tornado, was natural didnt mean we had like it. That would be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral confusing what is withwhat should be. It was also pointed out that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but vsuch non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion of milk in adulthood and better immune systems.No red in tooth and claw there. Survival of the fittest was declared a tautology, meaning only that thoseorganisms that ended up having the most surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biologys jargon, thfittest but only because fittest no longer meant that the fittest somehow deserved to survive, or might beexpected to survive, but only that they in fact did survive.

The book under review, (MIR), would certainly be considered by many to be theMight Is Right, reductio adof 19th-century Social Darwinism. Ragnar Redbeard (RR) was evidently greatly enamored of Darwinabsurdum

theory of natural selection including sexual selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females influencwhich genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like Darwin, could not have known about genes or modernmolecular biology. Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important modern term, inclusiv

: A mans family is part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his ownfitnesslife (p. 49).

Ragnar Redbeard was a pen name, but , he was anwhoever he wasextremely well-informed, erudite person, albeit with a rather florid literary

style which might be off-putting for some readers. I came to find both styland content quite amusing. In fact, it occurred to me more than once that Iwas reading a satire, one suitably embellished by esoteric Biblicalreferences and Victorian phraseology: a worthy companion to Mark Twaiand .H. L. Mencken

On the other hand, suppose MIR was not a satire. Then why would anyonein the 21st century look twice at such a book? One reason would be theemergence today of a rethinking of conventional wisdoms: in economics(OK, communism is out, but arent there big problems with unregulatedmarket economies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and fractional reserv

banking?), in politics (what happened to the Republican Party and true
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age 2 of 5 May 18, 2013 01:28:22AM M

?), human nature ( ?), or raceconservatives we dont all have the same IQrelations (diversity is ?). Much of this rethinking is taking place on the internet, of course.not a utopia

Some have even concluded late in their lives that theyve been the butt of a big ideological con game. Theyeventually realize that humans, either individually or in groups, cannot possibly be at all equal except in therestricted sense of each person theoretically having one vote (one idiot, one vote). And is really alldemocracythat sacred? Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated byHollywood, the mainstream media, and obscure elites. But many of us have given up on utopias and now simplywant to obtain or defend a half-decent way of life which we are awake enough now to see is severely threatened ifnot already lost given the ubiquity of muggings, rapes, and car-jackings in US cities, the Wall Street shakedownthe dumbing down of schools. So, having had so many of our assumptions about what is right or good turnedup-side-down, maybe we should re-examine Social Darwinism too.

So consider several issues raised in MIR.

Much of MIR focuses, albeit a bit repetitively, on what RR perceives as an unending history of horrible treatmentmeted out by humans on their enemies and the logical and empirical imperative of relying on might in the normacourse of human affairs. He probably commits one empirical excess in an especially misanthropic diatribe in ChapIV: While stating that the story of Jews stealing and murdering Christian infants in order to use their blood forPassover rituals is a myth, he accepts as fact an exceedingly high estimate of the frequency of human cannibalism perhaps understandably given the dearth of reliable anthropological evidence 100 years ago.

Now, the anti-Social Darwinists complain that evolution and natural selection are always so horribly bloody.notQuite right. However, that does not mean that violence is never adaptive. Consider Genghis Khan whose Ychromosome has been found by geneticists to be so due to the fact that the leaders of thewidespread across AsiaMongol armies controlled the women in the areas they conquered.

Actually, RR may be advocating power more than bloody battles, thus helpfully broadening the concept of mighNo one has to tell us that power is extremely important to human lives, but again, we should pay attention. This issis at the heart of a recent between Eric P. Kaufman and Kevin MacDonald concerning the precipitous declindebateof the West and of WAS(P) and Northern European dominance of the United States.

RR is quite successful in demonstrating the ubiquity of power relations, and then is surprisingly convincing in hisargument that striving for power is not only an essential and inevitable feature of life but is highly desirable as acourse of action for any man wanting to make a success of his life (RR seems to be addressing primarily males.)

About equality: one of RRs main messages is that there is no such thing, in any practical sense, and never will be;the idea of equal rights is nonsensical. Instead, people vary in their abilities and other characteristics all over thelot. People have always been and always will be in a state of competition; so that the only thing to do, really, is tostrive to compete as well as one can and forget about ever being treated equally. The only way to be treated as onewould like is to have the power to enforce such treatment.

An obvious implication for Whites in the West is that anyone happily waiting for other races and ethnies to treat usequally or even well, once they take over (very soon) as majorities in the US and Europe, is an illusion. With the

votes they will simply run our countries as they see fit and to hell with us.

STOP!! Devout Christians will find the next paragraphs offensive! Read at your own risk!

RR provides an extraordinarily articulate, and to me hilarious, critique of Jesus Christ and Christianity.Might-makes-right being his number one rule, he has nothing but contempt for Christs Sermon on the Mount andcelebration of the weak, the poor, the miserable. RR values the courageous, the powerful, the ruthless. Why in theworld would any sane person value, desire, or want to emulate what Christ recommended?

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[W]e must either abandon our reason or abandon ChristAll that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he
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glorifies all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces. He praises the humble and he curses the proud. Hblesses the failures and damns the successful. All that is noble he perverts all that is atrocious he upholds. Heinverts all the natural instincts of mankind and urges us to live artificial lives he advises his admirers to submit iquietness to every insult, contumely [outrage], indignity; to be slaves, de-facto. this preacher of all eunuch-virtu of self-abasement, of passive suffering. (p. 7)

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Anyone who wonders if Christianity is fundamentally a malevolent Jewish stratagem for emasculating willgoyimfind this treatise exhilarating. Everything within the Christian church seems designed simply to fleece the flock:

The bliss of a sheep! How superlatively delightful? How divinely glorious? And a Jew as the Good Shepard, wholeadeth his lambs to green pastures, and quiet resting places, the pleasant waters by. For two thousand years orso, his fleecy flocks have been fattening themselves up with commendable diligence for the shearing-shed and tbutchers-block. (p. 14)

With RR, not even the golden rule goes unscathed on the grounds that it makes no sense to follow it given thano one else does. Shades of the alternative Golden Rule: .He who has the gold, makes the rules

The theme extends to practical politics where deceitful Ideals are cunningly woven by dexterous political spiders,capture and exploit swarms of human flies (p. 18). He follows with a searing analysis of Americas Declaration

Independence which he says begins with an unctuous falsehood, a black, degrading, self-evident lie a lie whicno one could possibly believe but a born fool. With insolent effrontery it brazenly proclaims as a self-evident truththat all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights (p. 19The subsequent democracy as practiced by Americans is viewed as an elaborate con game, a view that shouldstrike a chord after the recent bank bailouts and the Iraq war.

We must then ask ourselves: Is the extreme altruism advocated by Christianity at all responsible for the West giviaway the farm? Think about Teddy Kennedy and his Jewish associates who opened up America to immigrationfrom the whole world.

RRs attack on Christianity and equality of course begs the question of alternatives. As a friend recently remarke

While many people (in our movement and without) sneer at what they see as an emotional crutch for weaklings, thfact remains that the birthrate is closely correlated with a hopeful, optimistic view of life. No society has ever beenable to function without a religion. And it is most unlikely that anyone will be able to create a religionless society ithe future.

If that is true, and this writer agrees, a major contribution to the survival of our people, the indigenous people of theBritish Isles and Europe including those who migrated to the Western Hemisphere, would be to develop a religiou

to Christianity. Such a would regard the survival of our people as its primary sacred goal andalternative religionhopefully would be more consistent with scientific knowledge. It would establish communities of the like-minded common ethny (as Jews have done). It would develop either new rituals or utilize those imagined as originating in

or times. Perhaps, as a friend suggests, some existing Christian communities, especially those whospagan Druidic

main goal is community, could be gradually retro-fitted along these lines. Keep the harmless features ofChristianity, especially the European cultural details, but throw out or simply ignore everything that RR is makingfun of.

What then do we now make of the main issue raised by MIR, the relationship between ?what is and what oughtRR seems to be saying that what is (e.g., human ruthlessness) determines directly what ought.

First, we should note that evolutionary biologists/psychologists have in recent years argued strongly that our valueand morals do in aspects of human nature (what is) that evolved biologically. Actually, pretoriginate David Humemuch figured this out back in the 18 century. This would be the first link between brain mechanismsth(emotions, motives) that are adaptive and what a person feels is the right thing to do even if the feeling of right is

logically distinguishable from what really is right.
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age 4 of 5 May 18, 2013 01:28:22AM M

That distinction is the basis for the naturalistic fallacy critique of Social Darwinism. has wellOliver Curryreviewed why this fallacy is, itself, a fallacy: The logical distinction between is and ought does not detract fromthe empirical relationship between what is adaptive and what a person normally values.

We must ask, then, if there is anything more important to us than our own survival and that of our close relatives. Ithere isnt, then how could we do anything more ethical or morally correct than doing whatever is adaptive for usand ours? For us, whatever is adaptive should be morally correct, no?

But wait! Morally correct for whom? Isnt there a flaw here in the anti-Social Darwinists reasoning? They have in

mind a morality that not only applies to everyone on the planet but a morality of which the consequences arebeneficial to all of humanity, not just ourselves and relatively close kin. Sounds like a corollary of Christianity!(Unless Jesus intended that his principles apply only to relations among fellow Jews.)

Such a moral principle necessarily stands outside of human evolution in the sense that, according to all the widelyaccepted theory in evolutionary biology, such a moral principle could not have evolved as an adaptive trait ofindividuals. A moral principle is certainly not a measurable physical force like gravity, permeating everything. Itexists only within a persons brain.

This does not mean that people could not act according to such principles. But it would mean that doing so wouldnot automatically feel good in the same way that helping oneself or helping ones family feels good. With enoug

propaganda, of course, nearly anything is possible. But thats what it is: Propaganda.

This is probably whats behind the controversy over government-run health care in the US: For most Whites, itdoesnt feel good to support a program where they would pay disproportionately for medical care for the hordes ofnon-Whites who now populate the country even if they could be convinced it was good for the country as awhole.

A universal principle of doing whats best for humanity also runs into problems because of individual differences:

1) Sociopaths/psychopaths apparently lack normal moral feelings/values. They feel no guilt, so nothing like auniversal moral imperative to help humanity there.

2) The fact that, say, the desire for revenge is found throughout the world as a human universal, would beconsistent with it being adaptive. But individuals will still vary in the strength of that desire which is subject to thenatural selection common to all biological variables.

Finally, a universal principle of doing whats best for humanity fails to deal adequately with conflicts of interest.Individuals are often in competition because of different : Hunters feel morally justified in shooting a deerinterestseat. The deer, were he capable of such thought, would feel differently about being shot. No common morality thereSame logic within our species. What seems morally justified to the Hatfields will not be to the McCoys.

So there would not seem to be a universal moral code by which everyone would agree on the same ethical course oaction in a particular circumstance. Bye, bye Christianity.

So RR may have been onto something in taking his strongly Social Darwinist position. His books heuristic valuelies in the hard-nosed, un-blinking acknowledgement that life is tough; one had better get used to it, get prepared foit early in life, appreciate the warriors among us and never go soft (except, as RR says, around close familymembers and close friends!) If you cease being prepared, youll get run over by those who are tougher and moreruthless.

MIR is not advocating indiscriminate homicide, since the real focus of the game, evident by the end of the book, issimply power, which can be obtained in myriad ways. A further caution would be that what has been adaptive inthe past may not be so in the future since relevant selection pressures may change. What is adaptive in one situatiomay not be so in another.
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age 5 of 5 May 18 2013 01:28:22AM M

Long term, the unanticipated consequences may be the most important. Biologically, it might seem adaptive tosimply slaughter your enemy. But as once suggested, whether one adheres to a policy of an eyeDaly and Wilsonfor an eye or a massacre should depend on whether an attempted massacre of ones enemy seems likely to betotal. If they dont all get killed, the survivors may have a long memory and your own survival and reproduction msuffer.

Here one might reflect on the Nazis final solution that ended well before completion: The surviving Jews havedisplayed great energy in obtaining reparations and hunting down escaped Nazis. The is thEmpire Strikes Backsituation facing the British, as descendents of once conquered peoples have non-violently emigrated to the U.K.Similarly, Mexicans are subjecting the American Southwest to a by presenting themselves as a usefureconquistalabor force and congenial nannies.

There is a lesson in MIR, then, for anyone attempting to protect his family or his nation or a collection of alliednations, depending on which ones adversary is targeting. For example, Whites in America and Europe todaylevelare generally under threat. The lesson would be to gain power, economic as well as territorial, establish enclaveswherever convenient but eventually, as the late Sam Francis declared, re-conquer the whole of ones country. A fewChristians may balk at this, but encourage them to be hypocrites.

A slogan recently seen on a T-shirt, Fighting Solves Everything, may be an oversimplification. But the attitude igood one. Inculcate it in your children.

MIR is available for only $10.00 from the . Get it for your friends and relatives.Occidental Press

Anthony Hilton ( ) is Assoc. Prof. (retired) in the Psychology Department, Concordia University, Montreemail him

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