May 10, 2006
David Horowitz
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
4401 Wilshire Drive, 4th Floor
Los Angeles, California 90010
VIA FACSIMILE AND MAIL
Dear Mr. Horowitz,
While you and FrontPage Magazine manage to fight the culture wars without a whiff of racial bigotry, the same cannot be said of one of your contributors, Lawrence Auster.
His writings since 1994, especially those gathered for inspection on his View From the Right website (hereinafter “VFR”), demonstrate that Mr. Auster harbors an active animus toward black people as black people.
This is a charge not to be made lightly. (Having been slurred by the Left, you understand this probably better than most.) I hope you won't take this letter lightly, and will forgive its length.
Auster on 'black inferiority'
Mr. Auster's most detailed exploration of race was written in 1995, but was first published in the Spring 2003 edition of The Occidental Quarterly, under the title “Racial Differences in Intelligence: The Evolution of One Person's Views.” (He posted this essay on his blog on January 10, 2003; it's available on VFR, as well as the Occidental Quarterly website, via their respective archives.)
In this essay, Mr. Auster goes beyond an examination of black intelligence (which at least can be objectively measured) to draw conclusions about “the civilizational character” of black people as a whole, and their profoundly different nature as beings.
“Following the arguments and actions of black leaders, and listening to black callers on talk radio,” he writes, “led me over several years to an increasingly bleak view of black thinking styles,” to the point where he is now “convinced… of an inherent, dangerous weakness in black ways of thought.”
For instance, he describes “the 'hustle'”: “the way many blacks at all levels - from street people and politicians to celebrated 'intellectuals' like Cornel West - did not use ideas as ideas, but as a hustle, as a way of manipulating people's feelings.” While allowing that “there are many blacks who are rational and logical and intellectually competent,” Mr. Auster says “the preponderance of irrationality among the black population is hard to ignore.”
How to explain this preponderance of irrationality? “Through numerous experiences and observations,” he writes, “I started to have the sense that blacks are more 'non-objective,' they understand things in a much more personal, subjective way than whites. They seem to have much less interest in knowledge or beauty for its own sake.”
The ramifications of this for white society are self-evident; “it means that blacks are in fact less endowed with the qualities that make civilization possible, particularly Western civilization.”
Mr. Auster goes on to discuss the “moral passivity of blacks,” their “demonstrably lesser orientation toward the common political good and a moral and stable social order.” Granting, again, that “there are many decent, upright black people,” Mr. Auster argues that “there is a notable failure on the part of blacks effectively to resist the bad people in their communities. … That is why black countries, and black-run cities in America, are the way they are. …
“The personal decency of individual blacks does not translate into the ability to resist public evil, the aspiration to enforce social order. Those things require a degree of moral will, intelligence, and organizing energy that blacks, collectively, do not possess.”
These deficiencies are, in Mr. Auster's words, “inherent” and “intrinsic” in blacks as a race. And “so long as the truth of racial differences is not recognized, whites will always end up being blamed… for a black inferiority that is not whites' fault.”
This thesis of inherent black inferiority, found in the last half-century only on the outmost fringes of American politics, perhaps isn't enough to indict Mr. Auster as a bigot. Perhaps, as he would have his readers believe, he reached these conclusions after a rigorous, good-faith consideration of the observable world. (A “personal journey of discovery” is how he describes it.)
Let's ask whether Lawrence Auster exhibits such hallmarks of bigotry as the use of dehumanizing epithets to describe black people.
Well, on VFR, he has.
Auster on 'the savages'
On January 22, 2006, Mr. Auster made reference to the 1993 murder of Amy Biehl, a white American, by a group of blacks in South Africa. One blog correspondent then described this and other black-on-white murders as “the act of wild beasts,” and he blamed white elites for it: “God damn them for opening up the cages of the ape houses of the world and then pointing at us shrieking 'Racist!' whenever we flinched at what tumbled out of them.”
In response, Mr. Auster didn't distance himself from this sort of language. On the contrary, he said this correspondent was “entirely correct,” and Mr. Auster issued his own denunciation of the “'compassionate,' liberal white society that unleashed the savages on us and took away our ability to defend ourselves.”
Clearly, to call black people “the savages” is to invoke contempt, and it reflects Mr. Auster's own.
(In his use of the word “savages,” Mr. Auster brings to mind Bob Grant, the New York radio talk-show host. Grant's on-air habit of calling blacks “savages” provided the ammunition for a left-wing protest campaign that got Mr. Grant fired from WABC in 1996. Soon after that firing, Mr. Auster, in a letter to National Review's John O'Sullivan, defended Bob Grant as “the champion of New York's besieged middle class,” one of the “major conservative voices in this country,” and the victim of a “wave of repression.” This letter can also be found in VFR's online archive.)
It's interesting to note that whenever Mr. Auster addresses the race question in FrontPage Magazine, he doesn't give full voice to his views. In “Guilty Whites” (September 30, 2005), he presents one of the “racial facts of life”: “that only blacks can raise the aspirations and conditions of blacks.” He summons up “the tradition of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.” But Mr. Auster doesn't mention his belief that blacks as a class are, and always have been, and shall ever be, cognitively and morally incapable of rising past a certain point in America, which is the bottom.
From his 1995 essay: “[E]ven in the complete absence of any racial oppression, blacks with their lower abilities will still tend to end up at the bottom of any biracial or multiracial society.”
I am left to wonder why Mr. Auster didn't share this opinion, in its stark fullness, under the banner of FrontPage Magazine. Did he censor himself? Or was he guided editorially to “tone it down”?
In a July 9, 2004, essay for FrontPage, Mr. Auster prefaced his critique of multiculturalism with this “caveat”: “When I speak of America's 'dominant Western culture,' or of its 'majority culture and people,' these are not intended as code words for whites.” Really? Everywhere else he writes, Mr. Auster favors the phrase “white majority culture.”
He continued: “Individuals of non-European ancestry are and can be full members of America's majority Western culture. … A Japanese-American can become an American by embracing this culture - this culture shaped by Anglo-Saxon and Protestant traditions - as his own. … The same is true for individuals of any ethnic or racial group.”
He sings a different tune on his blog. On October 20, 2003, Mr. Auster dismisses “dogmatic equalitarianism” and its “belief in man as a blank slate, without inherent qualities that make him inferior or unassimilably different.”
Can an inherently “inferior” or “unassimilably different” foreigner become a “full member” of America's white majority culture? The real Lawrence Auster doesn't think so, which is why (on March 9, 2006, in reference to Islam) Mr. Auster declares that we must reject the “radical liberal belief in the non-discriminatory tolerance and acceptance of the Other.” We, the majority culture, must be free to discriminate against, even cast out, the Other.
Auster on 'separation between the races'
The real Lawrence Auster, at least in regards to race, finds his home in such unabashedly racialist outlets as Occidental Quarterly, American Renaissance and The Citizens Informer (quarterly newsletter of the Council of Conservative Citizens).
He begins to describe his ideal vision of America in the essay “How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable,” posted on VFR on May 18, 2005, and also published in The Citizens Informer:
“Government and law must not discriminate by race. But the same does not apply to society. [Italics in the original.] Society consists of human beings, and race is a part of what human beings are…”
He continues: “The liberal equality of individuals under the law is part of the essence of America. But it must not be America's primary value. … If our nation is to survive, it must have ideals and goals higher than the liberal project of treating all people equally…”
For example, America could outlaw the religion of Islam. This notion Mr. Auster broached in a posting to Ilana Mercer's website, Barely a Blog, on January 17, 2006:
“I do not… support all free speech as a matter of principle,” he writes. “A society that makes the liberal values of freedom and tolerance its highest values has already signed its own death warrant, because it has given up any principled basis to defend its own existence from that which is incompatible with its existence. …
“If we understood the truth that Islam is fundamentally antipathetic to our civilization and freedom and has no place in our society, I think it would be reasonable for us to outlaw the Muslim religion and outlaw the preaching of Islam.
“What is my guiding principle here? It is that freedom in any given society must have limits.”
What are the ramifications of this “guiding principle” for America's black citizens? To the degree that Mr. Auster has thought it through, he provided a clue in a speech he gave at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994. (The speech, published in the American Renaissance newsletter, is also available for purchase on audiotape):
“There are… only two sane options for black-white relations in this country,” Mr. Auster said. “Either blacks… accept a society where white Western standards of law, behavior and intellectual life are dominant and where advancement will be open for blacks only on an individual, not a collective basis; accept their status as an ethnic minority and be grateful to be living in a white society where they have goods and opportunities undreamed of in a black society; or else, if blacks are not willing to accept these things, then to avoid race warfare there must be peaceful separation between the races.”
Wow.
Is Lawrence Auster a white separatist? During the Q&A after this speech, an audience member suggested that the black leadership class won't accept a rollback of group entitlements “without rioting, terrorism, and essentially a civil war,” therefore Mr. Auster's “second scenario” - racial separation - is the only alternative. Mr. Auster responded: “In the long run, you may very well be right.”
Given his self-ideation as a paragon of rational thinking, I doubt that Mr. Auster would classify any of his ideas as “extremist.” Or perhaps he believes that an extreme threat demands an extreme response. Because he certainly feels that the white race faces an extreme global threat. The extremest, in fact: extinction.
“There is now a conscious world movement to destroy the white race,” Mr. Auster wrote on August 12, 2003, in a posting to Ben Domenech's blog. “… America and the rest of the formerly white West are being rapidly engulfed by the non-white world. … What we're talking about is the cultural and physical disappearance of these historically white nations.”
Clearly, Mr. Auster's nightmare visions of white racial obliteration have got him all hung up on non-whites, including now even the physical bodies of non-whites. Just a few weeks ago (April 25), he posted this on VFR, in response to a reader on the topic “Why does race matter?”:
“The non-white races are deeply different from the white in their bodily structure, appearance, mentality, personality, and other qualities. A Chinese person as an individual can adopt British culture, but will still have differences from the British, though, as an individual, or a few individuals, that would not affect the British society. If millions of Chinese came into Britain and even 'assimilated,' their physical differences from the British, combined their mental differences, combined with their renewed sense of themselves as people brought on by their numbers, will make them stand out and challenge the norms and identity of the British.”
How can one even refute rationally the argument that non-whites are mentally and physically undesirable as citizens in white societies, whether they culturally assimilate or not? On race, Mr. Auster's feet are firmly planted in a place beyond reason.
A double standard on bigotry?
The irony of all this is that Lawrence Auster knows bigotry when he sees it, and he speaks loudly against it… when that bigotry is targeted at Jews.
In his “Open Letter to Patrick Buchanan” on your website four years ago, Mr. Auster's analysis of Mr. Buchanan's “ugly” foreign policy positions, his “brutal demonization” of Isreal, led him to find in Pat Buchanan “a profound, unspoken… animosity toward Jews.”
Six months ago, on his VFR blog, Mr. Auster called out Kevin MacDonald on his anti-Semitism, while FrontPage has just gotten around to it. “In MacDonald we find… anti-Semitic conclusions that are as crude, and as implicitly murderous, as anything found in Nazi writings.”
And it was the tinge of anti-Semitism, Mr. Auster says, that caused him to disassociate himself from Jared Taylor's American Renaissance movement a decade ago.
Time and again, Mr. Auster condemns anti-Semites as “evil, stupid, and to be shunned.” (VFR, April 22, 2006) “I've said it before and I'll say it again: the hard-core Israel haters and anti-Semites are the scum of the earth.” (VFR, May 4, 2006)
Yet Mr. Auster trafficks in gross generalizations about the moral deficiencies of black people as black people, about the “dangerous weakness in black ways of thought”; he opines about the “inherent” nature of “black inferiority”; he has referred to blacks as “savages” (and isn't bothered by others who do, such as Bob Grant); he publicly ponders the need for a “separation between the races” in the United States. He has never denounced anti-black bigotry in the manner that he denounces anti-Semitism. And why should he? Believing as he believes, how else could one view black people but with hostility?
At best, Mr. Auster has a double standard on bigotry which calls into question his intellectual probity. At worst, he is a racialist ideologue with an animus towards blacks and other non-whites, calling into question his character.
Auster's 'respect for David Duke'
One of the most remarkably revealing things Mr. Auster has written appeared on his blog on August 1, 2003. The subject was neo-Nazi websites:
“When I first got my computer a few years ago I checked out the various far-white sites like StormFront and National Alliance. I listened to several of [National Alliance founder] William Pierce's weekly speeches. And since he said some intelligent things I agreed with, I listened. But as I got a sense of the evil place that he and others like him were really coming from” - (an anti-Semitic place, doncha know) - “combined with the sheer monotony of their invocation of hate, I dropped them.
“Similarly,” Mr. Auster went on, “I had some respect for David Duke, prior to reading 'My Awakening' [Duke's 1998 autobiography]; namely I felt his standing up in an activist fashion for European-American rights was a righteous thing to do, even though I knew he was a sleaze. But in that book he reveals himself as basically a Nazi. After he published the book, he got even more obsessed and made the Jews the focus of everything. It's amazing.”
I'll tell you what's amazing, Mr. Horowitz. David Duke is probably the most publicized white bigot of the last quarter-century, dating back to when this ex-Klansman launched the “National Association for the Advancement of White People” (while maintaining his ties to the Klan). And Mr. Auster isn't embarrassed to say he respected Duke's racial activism… until it became focused on the Jews!
As for William Pierce, who in the '60s was a top advisor to George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, the Jew-hatred shouldn't have come as a shock. But what were those “intelligent things I agreed with” in Pierce's speeches? What drew Mr. Auster to this far-out fringe-dweller in the first place?
The late Dr. Pierce, a former University of Oregon physics professor, was indeed intelligent… way more erudite than David Duke. In a 1977 speech titled “Has the White Race Become Too Liberal to Survive?”, Pierce's driving concerns and even his language - the “rising tide of colored immigrants in which we are being engulfed,” the imminent threat of white extinction, the “moral paralysis” of whites in the face of it, the soul-sickness of Western liberalism and the folly of “equalitarianism,” on down to his endorsement of Jean Raspail's polemical anti-immigrant novel “The Camp of the Saints” - all are close to Mr. Auster's own concerns and language. Except that William Pierce has always dared to go beyond theoretical talk to hint at action. Violent action.
From his 1977 speech: “Ultimately, we need to… relearn the eternal wisdom that there can be no life unless there is also death. … There's nothing brutish about accepting the facts of life. … The morally responsible person is not an insensitive person, he's not a person motivated by hatred, he's not a crude and violent person. … But he faces the facts. … And he is also ready to kill - without hatred, without passion - when killing is necessary, instead of wringing his hands and moaning about not having the right.”
When Pierce then broaches the need for “radical and ruthless solutions of the black problem and the Chicano problem,” you don't have to be on the rightward slope of the Bell Curve to know what he means.
Again, I have to wonder: If William Pierce never mentioned “Jewish propaganda in the news and entertainment media,” if he'd stuck instead to “the wave of brown invaders,” would Lawrence Auster still be listening to his speeches with interest?
Mr. Auster's freely acknowledged attraction to the racist dogmas of William Pierce and David Duke, before being repulsed by their anti-Semitism (as if it weren't all of a piece), raises serious doubts as to his good will.
In fairness to Mr. Auster, he has lately expressed his disgust of William Pierce, “whose explicit aim and desire was the violent death of every Jew on earth” (VFR, March 5, 2006), in no uncertain terms. He also disavows any intent to injure or oppress non-whites, explaining that his belief in God (or “transcendence”) leads him to accept even an “inferior” person as a “fellow human being” (VFR, February 6, 2004).
But after his 1994 American Renaissance lecture, an audience member suggested that, given America's looming dark demographic future, the moral imperative “to judge all men as individuals” is not “a viable long-term solution.” Mr. Auster replied:
“Part of the essence of our culture is… a respect for the uniqueness of the individual. If we were to lose that completely, in a pure, race-conscious, collectivist kind of mentality, that would be so awful, I mean…” And then: “I guess it would be better than a complete disappearance of the white race from the planet Earth, but it's not something that I would want to see.”
What sort of white governing mentality would Mr. Auster like to see? For this, we can look to the white-nationalist British National Party, to which Mr. Auster blew a big kiss last week. (“How could I not wish a party well whose platform is right on so many points?” [VFR, May 4, 2006])
Mr. Auster doesn't run from the fact that the British National Party “was once a seriously anti-Semitic party,” and that its chairman, Nick Griffin, has “an anti-Semitic background.” But here is the key to Mr. Auster's granting moral legitimacy to the BNP: Nick Griffin now repudiates anti-Semitism. Mr. Auster has repeatedly praised him for “seriously criticizing anti-Semitism” and trying to rid his movement of Jew-haters.
In a reverse of his attraction/repulsion dynamic vis-à-vis David Duke and William Pierce, Mr. Auster, having congratulated the BNP for “distancing itself from its anti-Semitic past,” now feels comfortable endorsing it as a political movement.
On May 4, Mr. Auster posted a summary of the British National Party's platform, pulled from the general-interest website Answers.com. On BNP's list of proposals, along with a national-service requirement and withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the E.U., there's this: “A massively-funded and permanent programme… to irradicate, by voluntary resettlement to their lands of racial origin, non-white ethnic minorities living in Britain.”
“I like the whole thing,” Mr. Auster declares.
Thing is, that information from Answers.com is out of date. The BNP's “General Election Manifesto 2005,” available online, indicates that the party has softened its position - or at least its rhetoric - regarding non-whites. Gone is the word “irradicate.” (Gone is the word “non-white,” too!) The BNP now states: “A massively-funded and permanent programme… will aim to reduce, by voluntary resettlement to their lands of ethnic origin, the proportion of ethnic minorities living in Britain.” [Emphasis added.]
But Lawrence Auster signed on to the old verbiage: the irradication, or uprooting, of non-whites. “I like the whole thing.” I guess that puts Mr. Auster to the right of even Nick Griffin. Which makes him an extremist indeed.
Best regards,
David Mills
