by Greg Johnson
Rushton is also the author of work on the reproductive differences entailed by the r strategy [high fertility and low parental investment] and the K strategy [low fertility and high parental investment], which he connects with average IQ (the K strategy positively correlates with a higher IQ).
This work can also be disputed if one takes account of the speed with which the birth and fertility rates can change inside a “homogeneous” population. The adoption of the K strategy by European populations is really only a relatively recent phenomenon: for centuries, in these populations as elsewhere, the large family was the rule. To me it seems imprudent to conclude that Europeans of Antiquity or the Middle Ages had a much lower IQ than we do today.
In Quebec, 200 years ago, the fertility rate was one of highest in the world, whereas today it is one of the lowest. This drop is certainly not explained by the collapse of IQ! In the United States, the white birth rate in 1800 was 55 births per year per 1000 inhabitants, whereas in 1980, it was no more than 14.9 births per annum. Should we think that the first figure expresses a K strategy when it is double the current birth rate of black Americans? Or should we think that American whites 200 years ago were twice as “r-selected” as black Americans today?
Moreover, if one examines the sexual strategies of males and females—a favorite subject of evolutionary psychology—one notes immediately that women tend to adopt the K strategy whereas men, being more naturally polygamous, tend to adopt the r strategy. If one accepts the reasoning suggested by Rushton, the average IQ of women should thus definitely be higher than that of men. But this is not the case.
Specialists in evolutionary psychology claim that there are important differences between the sexes, and that these were acquired during the evolution of the species. To what does the New Right appeal to support its “differentialist feminism”?
First to history. From the beginning, in Europe women were never considered mere objects. Male domination, on the other hand, has long been legitimated by Christian theology which, especially in the first centuries, presented women as defective beings and a “place of sin.” From the 19th century on, bourgeois society has constantly repressed feminine values. This is what justifies the demands of women.
But there are two forms of feminism: egalitarian feminism and identitarian feminism. The first thinks that the best means of ensuring the promotion of women is to work to gradually blur the distinction between masculine and feminine social roles. Women must be able to do “everything that men do,” but in this case, the male social role is implicitly taken as the model. The second, by contrast, holds that one can assert the equality of women only on the basis of their distinctness. The New Right supports the second tendency, represented in particular by Luce Irigaray, rather than the first, represented in particular by Simone de Beauvoir or Elisabeth Badinter.
For its part, evolutionary psychology shows that the differences between men and women go well beyond their sexual organs. In mankind, the brain itself is sexually dimorphic. Thus sex is not reduced to “gender,” to a social construction (as claimed in “gender studies,” which are characterized above all by their sterility and their extraordinary monotony). Sex is a biological reality on which multiple social constructions are grafted. Feminism is thus completely legitimate when it demands the recognition of the equal value of what is distinctly female and what is distinctly male. But equal value does not mean indistinctness.
In IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in a way answered Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999]). To the famous question of Yali: “Why do you whites have so much cargo and have come as far as New Guinea, while we blacks have so little cargo?” Lynn and Vanhanen could have answered, in substance: “Well, Yali, after having reviewed the results of IQ tests and economic indicators from some 81 countries around the world, we concluded that the intelligence of the population constitutes the principal factor determining national differences in economic development. We believe that intelligence is partly determined by environment, but that genetic differences actually explain most of the variation. The environmental factor that most influences the intelligence is the quality of food that fetuses and children receive from their mothers” (cf. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, “National IQ and Economic Development: A Study of Eighty-One Nations,” The Mankind Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, Summer 2000, 415–35). How would you answer Yali?
The “elites” are by definition always powerful in any political system. In the Soviet Union, they were in the service of the Communist party. In the regime of liberal globalization, they are in the service of capitalism. Thus it is not difficult today to establish a correlation between IQ and development. This correlation says nothing about the intrinsic desirability of the capitalist system or of the value of “development.”
The link between intelligence, social prestige, and the accumulation of riches is not valid, however, for all societies: in many traditional societies, social position is evaluated by the volume of wealth that can be redistributed or destroyed.
Furthermore, the correlations established by Lynn and Vanhanen have the disadvantage of being rather static. Viewed from a historical and dynamic point of view, they become less convincing.
To take only one example, if Argentina today is an economic basket case, whereas in the 1930s it was one of the world’s top five economic powers, it is certainly not because the Argentinean IQ abruptly crumbled, but because their country suffered from the liberal policies adopted by their governments under the pressure of the World Bank and the IMF.
Conversely, if China is experiencing extraordinary economic growth today whereas for centuries she was not at all concerned about “development,” it is not because Chinese IQ has made a sudden leap.
Today, the 225 richest people in the world together have the equivalent of the annual income of the 2.5 billion poorest. The owners of the largest American firms take on average 475 times the average wages of their employees, against 11 to 24 times for European owners. I doubt that IQ can justify such discrepancies or such positions.
What would I say to Yali? I would initially try to explain to him that the “cargo civilization,” which is rich in material things but is spiritually increasingly vacuous, does not make those who live there happy and is not necessarily an example to be followed. After that, I would ask him to teach me what he knows. I would ask him about his language, the origin of his people, their customs and traditions, their beliefs and myths, the way they conceive the world and their names for the stars. I would try to learn from him rather than give him lessons.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
January 28 & 29, February 9, 11, 14, & 18, 2011
INTERVIEW WITH
HAROLD COVINGTON
GREG JOHNSON
_____________________
Could you give us a brief autobiography and tell us how you became involved in White Nationalism?
I was born in Burlington, North Carolina, in 1953. I had my first dose of racial reality at age 15 when I was thrown into an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which was bad by the standards of the day (1968) but which of course was a kindergarten compared to the racial situation that exists in our schools today. All we had to worry about back in my time was blacks with knives rather than organized gangs and drug dealers armed with semi-autos, and of course there were the hippy-dippy SDS-type radicals, many of whom I noticed even at the time appeared to be Jews. Homosexuals didn’t even come into the equation back in those days, and the drugs at school were just beer and grass and LSD, not ecstasy or coke or crack.
I won’t go off into a long digression about the various horrible racial experiences I had in high school, but on the day I finally left there, I looked back and made a silent personal vow that I would devote my life somehow to making sure that no young white person ever again had to go through what I had to go through
in that place. Again, I didn’t realize how relatively mild my problems had been and how terrible things would become in my lifetime.
For reasons I won’t get into, basically having to do with the fact that my father was a psychopath, he ordered me out of the family home, and I went into the United States Army at 17. My experiences in the military provided a further dose of racial reality, although once again I understand they were nothing compared to what young white enlistees go through nowadays when the military has in desperation lowered the recruitment criteria to include drug addicts, criminals, gang-bangers, etc.
I did my basic at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and then was sent for infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. At Fort Jackson I picked up a paperback book in the day room called The Order of the Death’s Head, by a German named Heinz Höhne. Rare among studies of the Third Reich, the book was actually reasonably objective, and it had the effect of more or less converting me to National Socialism. I remain a National Socialist in my personal outlook to this day. While I was stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, I joined the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), which was founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, and was then run by a man named Matt Koehl. I formed a unit of a Party front group called the White Servicemen’s League and ended up getting discharged early, albeit under honorable conditions. Nowadays, of course, I’d probably end up in Leavenworth for it.
After I got out of the army I served on permanent NSWPP staff at the headquarters in El Monte, California, under the now-legendary Lieutenant Joseph Tommasi, who was murdered in 1975. I then became editor of the Party newspaper White Power in Arlington, Virginia. In 1974 I worked for a construction company in Johannesburg, South Africa, for about six months, and then went to Rhodesia and joined the Rhodesian Army. In 1976 I was deported from Rhodesia for my activities with the proto-NS Rhodesia White People’s Party, along with two of my fellow Americans, Eric Thomson and Jeffrey Spencer. That’s an interesting example of conservatives being our true worst enemy. I was deported on the personal orders of Ian Smith, and we all know what Mr. Smith’s conservatism did to Rhodesia.
From then on it was the usual long Movement history of different groups, different approaches, all of them pretty much dead ends because there basically isn’t anything that can be done on an all-America basis in order to reverse the terminal decline of Western civilization on this continent, at least not without the use of a level of armed force which practically speaking, the Movement will never have at its disposal.
In 1982 I more or less went on the run for five years due to a legal situation which I’m still not certain it’s completely safe for me to get into, given the paranoid nature of our lords and masters these days and their eagerness to find something, anything, to use as an excuse to plop me down in the cell next to Bill White and Matt Hale. I ended up in Ireland, which at that time had no extradition treaty with the USA, due to the embarrassment and political complications for the Dublin government which would be caused by possibly extraditing IRA men back and forth across the Atlantic.
I learned a lot in Ireland. I didn’t just hang out in pubs guzzling Guinness; I read all the newspapers and watched RTE and BBC Northern Ireland; I made trips into the North; I talked to certain people (very carefully), and I sat quietly in certain known IRA pubs nursing a pint or two of Smithwick’s, listening and observing. Basically, in Ireland I saw how it’s done in the modern world, not in 1930s Germany, and it was an invaluable education.
It’s true the IRA didn’t win in the main sense of the term, but Communists though they are (and I know that), this small band of dedicated white working class men and women fought a major Western democratic military power to a standstill, and forced the Brits to buy them off instead of crushing them. Like Rocky Balboa, they went a full fifteen rounds with Godzilla and they were still standing at the end of it. The lesson I draw from this and other events in the past 20 years is that it can be done.
In 2000, in the aftermath of what Morris Dees did to Pastor Butler, I finally came out openly for territorial white separatism in the form of the Northwest Imperative.
Can you explain the Northwest Imperative, and tell us how you came to believe in it?
The Northwest Imperative is based on the conviction, an accurate one, that the United States of America in its present form is doomed, and that it is necessary to the physical survival of the white race that we establish a Homeland for all of our people worldwide somewhere on the North American continent. Economics, demographics, and logistics dictate that the best location for such a Homeland is here in the Pacific Northwest. In addition, we have a long history here of commitment and martyrdom here in the Northwest: Bob Mathews and the Order men, Sam and Vicky Weaver, Gordon Kahl, and our latest martyr from the Northwest Front, Jeff Hughes of Vancouver, Canada.
The essence of the Northwest Idea is to reduce the problem to manageable proportions. We are simply too weak, disorganized, and too few to take over the United States, and we need to accept that just ain’t gonna happen. Instead of a whole huge continent and 300 million mostly hostile people to worry about, we reduce the problem geographically and demographically to three and a half states with about 12 million people, mostly white. Given the inevitable coming implosion of the United States and the collapse of the central authority in Washington, D.C., when they run out of money to pay their mercenaries, bureaucrats, and enforcers, the Northwest Imperative is do-able in a way that no other plan we’ve ever come up with is doable.
The Northwest Imperative also reduces the problem to that of a colonial war, and there are numerous models from the last century as to how to wage and win a colonial war. The objective is to make the disputed territory ungovernable and turn it into a massive rathole down which the occupying power bleeds money, manpower, and resources until it can’t stand the hemorrhage any longer and cuts its losses. The most important statement in any of my Northwest novels, so important that I have various characters say it over and over again in all four books, is this: “In a colonial war, it’s never the generals who surrender. It’s the accountants.”
Can you tell us what you are doing to promote the idea of a Northwest homeland and to prepare for its concrete realization?
We have formed the “Party” of the Northwest novels, called the Northwest Front, although it isn’t really a Party yet and probably won’t be for some time. Right now it’s just what the name says, a broad front rather than a party. We have participation from people who are involved with other groups and from people who are involved with none. There is no formal membership status, no chain of command, and no hierarchy. We provide what support we can to anyone who lives here or who is willing to come here to the Homeland and work for Northwest independence.
Eventually that will have to change, of course. Eventually there must be a disciplined, fighting revolutionary Party of political soldiers, but that’s going to take us a while. White Americans are the sloppiest, laziest, most narcissistic and most undisciplined people in the world, and they simply can’t wrap their minds around a European concept such as the political soldier. Not yet. They will have to change, or they will perish from the earth.
Like most of the people in the racialist movement today, my awakening and education were enormously aided by the internet. You yourself have a substantial web presence. Yet you are known as a staunch critic of movement’s strong dependence on the internet. Can you explain your views on the virtues and limits of the internet for White Nationalism?
The internet is a reality of 21st century life. I understand and accept that. It can no more be un-invented than gunpowder or nuclear power can be un-invented. The Net has become a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless, in my opinion.
For one thing, the internet is largely sterile politically. It produces almost nothing except more Net. Somebody sees a great pro-white web site and they are inspired with enthusiasm—to build another web site. There is this immense disconnect between what is
essentially a fantasy world in cyber-space and the real world out here where white people are unemployed and foreclosed white families are beginning to live in tent cities called Obamavilles.
The internet gives the white male a feel-good factor which he doesn’t have to earn. He sits down at his computer after work with a bowl of nachos and a few cold brewskis, he plays around on VNN or surfs the web looking for racial stuff, maybe he makes a post or two, and then at the end of the evening he gets up and staggers off to bed with the feeling that he has accomplished something, but he hasn’t. All he has done is to generate words, and words are no good on earth if they never translate into physical action.
The internet provides the white male with a substitute for action, and with a place where he can hide. Yes, I understand that most of us have jobs and families and homes we have to protect, but the fact remains that at some point in time we are going to have to stand erect once more, like men, and not with our heads hung down and our eyes lowered and our feet shuffling in the presence of our Jewish and liberal lords and masters. The internet does not facilitate the strengthening of the one ancient virtue of our people which we need most of all to rediscover: simple physical courage.
Finally, the internet provides something that our highly dysfunctional people cannot resist: consequences-free misbehavior. This is not just a Movement phenomenon; it’s a white thing. The internet is a looney bin, and everyone knows it. The internet is where sick and twisted and often quite deranged people go to vomit. I have never seen anything like some of the filth, the depravity, the idiocy, and the just plain raving madness that I find on the internet every day. I know quite ordinary and apparently stable, functional, and successful people who sit down behind that keyboard, and all of a sudden they get a visit from Mr. Hyde. You’ve heard of discovering one’s Inner Child? It’s like the lure of consequences-free misbehavior on the internet unlocks some people’s Inner Nut.