A Question of Sanity

[Reinhard]

A Question of Sanity
by Dr. William Pierce
Free Speech - February 1998 - Volume IV, Number 2

If you have been reading Free Speech for very long, you know that I nearly always focus on concrete facts, on hard news, on analyzing and interpreting what's happening in the world. I don't often deal with abstractions or with philosophical questions -- but sometimes I do. I hope you'll forgive me if I do so again.
In fact, I will get into some concrete, factual matters, but first I want to pose an abstract question. When a person observes behavior all around him that seems crazy, that seems insane, how does he know that it is not he himself who is insane rather than the people around him? When other people are doing and saying things which seem wholly unreasonable, how does he know that he is not the one who is unreasonable instead of the other people? Do we have any absolute standard by which to judge such matters?

Let me give a specific example of this problem. I have stated, both explicitly and implicitly, on a large number of occasions my belief that Blacks, or Negroes, or Afro-Americans, or whatever you want to call them, are inferior as a race to Whites, or European Americans, in the innate abilities involved in building and maintaining a civilization. That is, I've claimed that Whites are smarter and more creative than Blacks.

Now, in opposition to this the U.S. government, the schools, the churches, and the controlled media claim that there is no such difference in abilities between Blacks and Whites. A difference in skin color, yes, but that's all. There's no difference in problem-solving ability, in creativity, or in temperament between Blacks and Whites that gives Whites an edge at building or maintaining a civilization. That's the official dogma. Any government official, public school teacher, or minister in a mainstream church who contradicts this dogma -- or who even fails to support it with sufficient enthusiasm -- will be hounded by his more orthodox colleagues.

So who's crazy: I or all of those folks in the government, the schools, the churches, and the media? Am I like one of those poor, confused creatures who goes around with his right hand stuck inside his shirt claiming that he's Napoleon?

Or is my case more like that of an Italian teacher who, about 400 years ago, claimed that the earth revolved around the sun, while nearly everyone else in the government, the universities, and the church held the view that the sun revolved around the earth and that to say otherwise was evidence of either craziness or impiety? How do we decide?

If we go by the numbers, there certainly are a lot more crazy people who believe they're Napoleon than there are genuine Galileos. And, let's face it, most people who are totally out of step with everyone else should be suspected of being a little crazy.

Now, I don't mean to compare myself with Galileo. He was truly a great, creative genius, the sort of genius that our race produces perhaps once in a century, and he would be a historical celebrity even if he hadn't had a conflict with the authorities about his astronomical beliefs. But there are some things to be learned from his case which can help us answer the question of how we can judge who is sane.

First, let's note that Galileo was not alone in his beliefs. It was just that most people who believed as he did had the sense to keep their mouths shut -- at least in Italy. Galileo wasn't even the originator of the idea that got him into trouble. He had just looked at Copernicus' idea of the solar system and decided that it made a lot more sense than the Ptolemaic ideas that were Politically Correct at the time. Furthermore, if Copernicus' idea about the solar system hadn't had some important theological implications, Galileo wouldn't have gotten himself into trouble for it.

Galileo already had come up with a lot of new ideas which had amazed people, but they hadn't ridiculed him as being crazy or condemned him as being impious for these other ideas -- because these other ideas had no obvious religious significance. But the Copernican idea did have some religious significance, and that made a lot of difference, even to people who didn't take religion very seriously: people who had a vested interest in the status quo, and that included a great many bureaucrats and academicians.

A difference between the cases of Galileo and the fellows who believe they're Napoleon is that no one else agrees with the would-be Napoleons, either publicly or privately. Many other scholars agreed privately with Galileo but were too timid to say so publicly. A second difference is that there is no religious frenzy or religious bigotry involved when people consider someone's claim to be Napoleon. They laugh and decide he's joking or he's crazy, but they don't become indignant about it. They don't have a sudden attack of piety, the way they did in response to Galileo.

Another thing to note about Galileo's case: The scholars who privately agreed with him and accepted the Copernican idea did not do so for religious reasons. They did so because the Copernican idea made more sense than the Ptolemaic idea. It agreed better with the facts, with the evidence.

Am I crazy for asserting that Blacks and Whites are inherently different and unequal in their civilization-building abilities, or is there something wrong with all of the people in the government, the schools, the churches, and the media who claim that I am either crazy or impious -- that is, a "hater" -- for saying so? As in Galileo's case, my assertions of racial differences are not original: they are not my idea. I have simply looked at the evidence, at the facts, and have based my conclusions on them. So have a great many other people, scholars and otherwise, many of whom, unfortunately, are too timid to say so publicly.

One other very important similarity with the case of Galileo is that the question of racial differences or racial equality has enormous theological implications. The theology involved, of course, is the modern one which has superseded Christianity, even in the churches: the theology of Political Correctness. And just as in Galileo's day, there are many people in the government, the schools, even the churches, who don't take this theology seriously -- who don't really believe it -- but who have a vested interest in maintaining it and therefore will ridicule or condemn anyone who questions it.

So again, who's crazy: I or the egalitarians? How do we judge?

Let me tell you how I judge such cases: I look at the evidence, at the facts, and I look at the people involved on each side of the issue, at what I know about their characters and their intelligence, and I look at the context, social and historical. But first and foremost I look at the evidence.

I look at the historical record -- or lack thereof -- in the Black areas of Africa. I look at the performance -- or lack thereof -- of Blacks in the other parts of the world, such as the Americas, the Caribbean, and more recently, Europe. And I look at the records of criminal activity, of illegitimacy, of drug abuse. And I look at intelligence tests and at racial biometric studies which were done back before it became Politically Incorrect to measure brain sizes and morphologies. And I see a consistency in all of these things. They all fit together: the lower intelligence, the thicker skulls and smaller brains, the greater criminal activity, the historical lack of performance. And I conclude that Blacks almost certainly cannot build a civilization if left to themselves, and they almost certainly will destroy any civilization built by others if they are allowed to become a very large presence in it.

And I compare my conclusions with the conclusions of others. I note that before the Second World War virtually everyone -- scholars, bureaucrats, churchmen, even the media -- came to the same conclusion. Certainly, ordinary White people were universal in their opinion about the differences in abilities between Whites and Blacks -- although we always want to be careful about relying on public opinion.

There were a few religious bigots, a few rabid egalitarians, who even back before the war denied all of the evidence of Black inequality and insisted that their lack of performance was the consequence of White oppression and that their lower scores on intelligence tests were due to "cultural bias." But most people considered these bigots, these egalitarian zealots, to be a little crazy.

Then after the war the Jews who control the media launched an all-out campaign to persuade everyone that the bigots were right after all. With the public advent of television in the 1950s, the media bosses gained an enormously powerful tool for changing public opinion, and as they began persuading substantial numbers of the most impressionable segments of the White public with television dramas portraying Blacks as noble, intelligent, and unjustly treated -- and also portraying Whites who objected to mixing with Blacks as primitive, hateful, and repulsive -- the politicians, the churchmen, and the more ambitious academics saw which way the wind was blowing and began to side with the egalitarians too.

The 1960s were the real turning point in this postwar propaganda campaign. That's when the Jews in the media, working closely with the Jews in the universities, managed to turn American society upside down. They encouraged drugs, permissiveness, hedonism, and youthful rebellion. They ridiculed every traditional belief and standard.

The Vietnam war -- or rather the government's vacillating and pusillanimous conduct of that war -- was a great help to them. Organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society and the Youth International Party and a hundred others, nearly all led by Jews, marched in the streets with Viet Cong flags, burned American flags, occupied and trashed university administrative offices, burned campus ROTC buildings, bombed U.S. military installations, encouraged young men to burn their draft cards, and generally raised hell, all with the approval of the mass media. All of this was in the middle of a war, in which 58,000 young Americans were being killed, and the U.S. government did nothing to stop the massive treason that was going on in this country. The consequence of this was to shake the confidence of nearly everyone. Everything that people had believed was called into question.

I don't want to recount the whole history of that period of artificial turmoil and change in American society. The point is that public opinion can be manipulated, and public opinion is not a reliable indicator of what's true and what isn't. That was the case in Galileo's day, and it's also the case today. It's important to have public opinion on your side for political reasons, but that has little or nothing to do with right or wrong.

What we should examine more carefully are the opinions of the authorities -- the people who formulate the propaganda line for the mass media and for what is taught in our schools. Is the 180-degree change in this propaganda line during the past 60 years based on facts and sound reasoning? I get a lot of hate mail from people under the influence of this propaganda: mail from people who tell me that I am crazy because I do not believe that Blacks and Whites are the same. And very often these people parrot back to me what they have been taught by the authorities. I hear the same propaganda statements parroted over and over again. For example: "You are crazy for wanting to preserve the White race. There is no such thing as a pure race. We all have ancestors of all races if we go back enough generations. So there is no pure White race for you to preserve." The unstated implication of this is that, since we're already mongrelized, there's nothing wrong with more mixing, and we shouldn't try to stop miscegenation. It's too late. There's no point in it.

How's this for an equivalent argument: "There's no point in bathing, because no matter how carefully we bathe there always are still some germs left on us: under our fingernails, perhaps, or in our ears. So let's just stop bathing, since we can't really be clean anyway."

Another of their standard arguments is this: "There's more variation within the races than between the races. The whole concept of separate races makes no sense." In plain language, what this argument says is that it's possible to find two people, both nominally "White," who differ from each other more in intelligence, skin tone, and other mental and physical characteristics than Colin Powell, say, or some other octoroon nominally classified as "Black," differs from some people classified as "White." And because this large range of characteristics among individuals who nominally belong to the same race exceeds the difference between a few selected individuals who nominally belong to different races, we should ignore the average differences between the races as a whole.

I guess this argument sounds especially good in some of our "melting pot" cities like New York, where one can find just about every shade of racial mixture imaginable, some of them classified as "White" and some as "Black," "Asian," or "Hispanic." But what this argument really tells us is that we need to do quite a bit of racial housecleaning to make up for some of the dysgenic practices of the past few centuries. It should not convince us that there's no difference between Swedes and Haitians.

It is also good to look a little more carefully at what genetic variation means. Much of our genetic makeup goes into providing for the basic, bodily functions of life. All mammals have a great deal in common genetically. All warm blooded animals have cells in their body nourished by blood, and they have many of the same biochemical processes going on inside them. A lot of our genetic makeup goes to provide for these basic functions. A human being and a chimpanzee are over 90% identical in genetic makeup. When it comes to genetics small differences mean a lot.

Here's another way to look at it: everyone realizes that all dogs have more in common with each other than they do with horses. However, no one would argue that this means that there is no significant difference between a poodle and a pit bull.

The point is that these propaganda statements of the egalitarians are specious. That may not be apparent to the people who write hate letters to me, but the media bosses and the teachers who preach this line have a better grasp of logic than the public. Perhaps they do have some sound arguments on their side, but if so they're keeping them hidden; all of the ones they use to support their position publicly are full of holes -- and they know it. And this is something else I take into consideration in judging who's sane and who isn't.

Finally, there's the matter of motive. The people who turned America upside down in the 1960s did so by building a coalition of a lot of different types of people with a grievance against the traditional White male establishment: feminists, Jews, homosexuals, Blacks and other non-Whites, along with a lot of permissively raised, thoroughly spoiled young Whites. It is from this 1960s coalition that today's new establishment has come, the establishment that now dominates the government, the churches, the universities -- and especially the mass media. These people have a vested interest in maintaining the myths on which their coalition is built, and their principal myth is that of egalitarianism.

Everything I've said today amounts to this: Don't let yourself be buffaloed. Don't let yourself be persuaded to accept anything that doesn't make sense to you, just because the people trying to buffalo you are loud and well organized. Look at the facts. Analyze the arguments. Think about the motives of the people who are telling you that you're crazy if you don't accept their ideas and their policies. Have confidence in yourself. When you see the government promoting policies which seem crazy to you, and you see the media and the churches and the schools all parroting the same party line, remember Galileo.

We'll get the inmates locked back in their cells yet!