Counter-Currents
On the Kevin MacDonald–Nathan Cofnas Debate
Part 2: Universalism vs. Particularism
Spencer J. Quinn
Nathan Cofnas
1,931 words
Part 2 of 4 (Part 1 here)
In the first part, I provide an introduction to this debate, a recap of Kevin MacDonald’s counter-Semitic opus The Culture of Critique (hereafter, CofC), a summation of Nathan Cofnas’ major arguments against CofC, and also call into question Cofnas’ objectivity in this debate.
As mentioned in Part 1, Cofnas employs two primary strategies in his attempt to analyze and ultimately refute CofC. The first is to adopt a “universalist” approach by finding counter-examples which do not easily fit into MacDonald’s “particularist” theoretical framework, and the second is to promote his Default Hypothesis as a more elegant alternative to what MacDonald offers in CofC.
This part will deal exclusively with Cofnas’ “universalist” approach.
Cofnas’ First Major Strategy: Universalism
For a visual depiction of the universalist-particularist axis, observe the Venn diagram below:
According to the “De Facto Ranking” from Part 1, MacDonald attempts to show in CofC that the people in the dark blue circle:
- led highly influential movements;
- had strong Jewish identities;
- had negative impacts on white society;
- and furthered Jewish evolutionary interests.
Through his use of universalism, Cofnas most often challenges MacDonald’s scholarship regarding Points 2 and 4 above for each of his subjects. By almost never even attempting to disprove Points 1 and 3, and by seemingly rejecting MacDonald’s use of particularism from the start, however, Cofnas reveals that his universalist approach poses only a trivial challenge to CofC. It’s also what makes their debate so tedious, since he and his team have dug up every scrap of evidence they could find that questions, down to the minute and second, the degree to which Boas or Freud or whoever really identified as Jewish, or really pushed for Jewish interests. This, of course, takes us far from general interest and forces MacDonald into a factoid competition with Cofnas over who can assemble the most obscure tidbits about this or that historical personage.
In the pink section, Cofnas finds white gentiles who, in essence, behaved like the Jews MacDonald describes in CofC. In Cofnas’ mind, this inconsistency weakens MacDonald’s theory since, presumably, gentiles could not possibly play prominent roles in movements which identify as Jewish. From Cofnas, page 9:
It is true that many of Boas’s students were Jews (e.g., Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier)—not particularly surprising given the high concentration of Jews at Columbia University at the time. But the most effective and indefatigable “Boasians” were not Jewish. MacDonald (1988a:26) notes that the students of Boas who “achieved the greatest public renown” were the gentiles Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He expounds: “As in several other prominent historical cases . . . gentiles became the publicly visible spokespersons for a movement dominated by Jews.” According to MacDonald (1988a:27), Boas “strenuously promoted and cited” Benedict and Mead as part of a ruse to hide the fact that the whole movement was designed to promote Jewish interests.
But MacDonald does not supply any compelling reasons to think that Benedict and Mead were under the control of Boas.
Cofnas’ sophistry accomplishes several things. It takes us away from the damage Boas did by leading the successful charge against Darwinism in the social sciences (one of MacDonald’s most important points). It also forces MacDonald to argue Benedict and Ruth’s motivations (did they follow the Jewish Boas out of self-interest? Sincere belief? The guru phenomenon?). Finally, by suggesting that Benedict and Mead were “under the control of Boas” according to MacDonald, Cofnas forces MacDonald into the tiresome task of clarifying what he did or did not write.
Cofnas pulls off the same trick with John Dewey, the liberal gentile philosopher who promoted progressivism and multiculturalism in the first half of the twentieth century, and psychologist Carl Jung, who for a time was the heir apparent of Freud’s school of psychoanalysis. Were these two gentiles appointed by powerful Jews to be the face of their nefarious movements? Were they leading lights in their own right who just happened to have a lot of Jewish associates and supporters? Or was it a combination of the two? This may be an interesting topic per se, but it has little to do with the reason why this debate is so important. Note also that no matter how you answer these questions, Cofnas’ universalism focuses more on Points 2 and 4 than on Points 1 and 3 in the De Facto Ranking. Like Oz, he succeeds in deflecting attention away from the true villains behind the curtain.
Cofnas also employs universalism when he brings up a long list of Jews who do not fit in the mold found in CofC. In his “Analyzing Kevin Macdonald’s ‘Culture of Critique’ and the alt right’s embrace of anti-Jewish Ideology,” Cofnas writes:
Most significantly, I found that Jews were clearly overrepresented in the leadership of violently opposing political movements—a fact that favors the default hypothesis. Although Jews have been overrepresented among prominent blank-slatists and anti-hereditarians (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Ashley Montagu), they have also been some of the most prominent defenders of the concept of human nature and hereditarianism (e.g., Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Hans Eysenck, Richard Herrnstein). Many of the most important supporters of Israel are obviously Jewish, but some of the biggest critics of Israel are also Jewish (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Judith Butler). . . . Psychoanalysis was led by Jews, but its most important opponents were Jews (e.g., Karl Popper, Hans Eysenck, Aaron Beck). Many leading opponents of white nationalism are Jewish. But at the first conference of the one major non-anti-Semitic white nationalist organization—American Renaissance—in 1994, four-out-of-ten of the invited speakers were Jews (including an orthodox rabbi).
Cofnas hits MacDonald with such objections too many times to count, and MacDonald’s response is always the same: he understands the Jewish community is not monolithic; he even said so in CofC. But addressing the diversity of Jewish viewpoints was never his intention. Here is a typical MacDonald response ( “Second Reply to Nathan Cofnas,” page 10). See if you can sense his losing patience with Cofnas in his phrasing:
But as I keep repeating (which again makes me think motivated cognition is in play here), I am not arguing that all Jews even have the same sense of Jewish ethnic interests or even any sense of Jewish ethnic interests. Some are only weakly involved, some may be strongly identified but rationally disagree on strategy and tactics with the dominant movement. I do want to study specific movements that are influential, and I want to determine the extent to which Jewish identities and perceptions of Jewish interests are important for the main figures. There is nothing wrong with leaving it at that. Jewish viewpoint diversity and its relation to the extent of Jewish identity and sense of Jewish interests are certainly important topics to study, but not germane to CofC.
So universalism butts heads with particularism, and neither wishes to give an inch. But if you reject the paradigm a scholar chooses for his work, why bother criticizing the work? Why not just criticize the paradigm? If Cofnas had objected to MacDonald with a paper entitled “Kevin MacDonald’s Particularist Approach to Influential Twentieth-Century Jewish Political and Intellectual Movements Should be Shunned Because it Makes Jews Look Bad and Opens the Door for Anti-Semitism,” that at least would have been honest. He would be sparing MacDonald and his readers hours of tedium and would be taking up where MacDonald left off. He may be right or wrong, of course, but at least he wouldn’t be launching blatantly prejudicial attacks on an important work and besmirching the reputation of an innocent scholar.
I have final points to make about Cofnas and his universalism. The first is, his Jewish counter-examples often challenge Point 4 of the De Facto Ranking by bringing up Israel. How can the Jews in CofC be promoting Jewish evolutionary interests when they opposed Zionism or Israel? Aren’t Jewish interests and Israeli interests one and the same?
This puts MacDonald in a bit of a bind since it forces him to admit that not all Jews agree on what Jewish interests are, while at the same time arguing that they are indeed pursuing Jewish interests. This, then, leads to the following objection: If the Jews themselves cannot agree on what Jewish interests are, why should we believe what the gentile Kevin MacDonald has to say about it? Is it because he knows the Jews better than the Jews do? Or is it because he defines Jewish group interests as whatever works against gentile group interests? I believe this is a fair objection. And while MacDonald does a fine job of addressing it (both in this debate and in CofC), he does have to do more work than merely insisting on his particularist model, as he does in the quoted passage above. Although this isn’t MacDonald’s fault, I’m afraid his explanations in this regard might come across as less convincing to readers who are skeptical of him to begin with.
I believe that Israel, however, is a red herring and gives Cofnas a means by which to introduce unnecessary complications into this debate. A slight reworking of the theoretical framework of CofC, however, can easily remove Israel from the discussion, thereby stripping Cofnas of one of his most powerful weapons. I will offer more on this in Part 4 of this series.
My second point is that many of these counter-examples should be ruled out, regardless of their attitudes towards Israel. For one, Cofnas unfairly trots out Jews who were beyond the timeline of CofC. The words “twentieth century” appear in the book’s subtitle, so this time frame should have been clear to him. So why bring up Karl Marx, who died in 1883? Why mention George Soros who, in 1998, when the book was published, hadn’t yet become the prominent Leftist and globalist he is today? In his comments to MacDonald’s “Reply to Nathan Cofnas,” Cofnas even brings up the overrepresentation of Jews in the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS was founded in 2005, well outside of CofC‘s time frame. How could any of these be seen as reasonable objections?
With the exception of Chomsky (whom I believe deserved greater attention in CofC than he received), many of Cofnas’ counter-examples also fail because they lacked the far-reaching influence of the Jews MacDonald discusses in CofC (Point 1 of the De Facto Ranking). MacDonald defends himself perfectly well on this account, such as when he demonstrates that Jewish hereditarian Richard Herrnstein, admirable scholar though he was, did not have anywhere near the impact of a Stephen Jay Gould. Therefore, placing Herrnstein on equal footing with Gould in CofC just because they were both Jewish, yet held opposite views, would have violated MacDonald’s stated methodology. Cofnas, it seems, prefers to just count heads and ignore influence, as if this is at all persuasive (I’ll see your Freud, Adorno, and Gould and raise you one Popper, Bloom, and Herrnstein!). Yet he only counts heads when it is convenient to his critique. Above, he provides a list of six Jewish Boasians (seven, if you count Boas himself) only to focus on two gentile ones (Mead and Benedict). Why? Because those two were more influential than the others. So how can Cofnas fault MacDonald for including influence in his methodology when he does it himself?
If he wants to be taken seriously with his universalist objections, Cofnas needs to show more respect for the parameters MacDonald chose for CofC. He also needs to find a tack and stick with it.
Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel, White Like You.
11 comments
‘This, then, leads to the following objection: If the Jews themselves cannot agree on what Jewish interests are, why should we believe what the gentile Kevin MacDonald has to say about it? Is it because he knows the Jews better than the Jews do? Or is it because he defines Jewish group interests as whatever works against gentile group interests? I believe this is a fair point’
How tiresome
such weak sauce
Let me break it down for those people who might be new to the problem of the Jews. Very simply Jews are a levantine people whose social structure is corporate. This alone would make them outsiders in the (relatively egalitarian,individualistic) Europe of yesteryear. You have the ultra orthodox who are the more pure ones and on the opposite end of the spectrum you have the half Jews e.t.c. As people who have never lived in thier own territory and been self sufficient (even the Hebrews by thier own admission were desert raiders who invaded Palestine and took it over), Jews simply are not able to operate along the principals adopted by other nations wether settled (agricultural) or nomadic (nomads generally are not truly nomadic but migrational- they appear in the same places seasonally from year to year). Therefore the idea that Jews can apply political principles to thier own existence in the same way other peoples do is mistaken.
I will repeat myself: Jews have to do what is good for Jews as a tribe that is dependent upon a host society to continue existing.
Take for example the classic getout clause used by Jews to pretend that they are not monlithic- Two Jews three opinions. This implies that not only are Jews divided on which issues to support but that they are also unable to reach a consensus. Of course both ideas are wrong. As another well known commentator on the Jewish problem has said on another site: ‘two Jews three opinions- about what is best for the Jews’. Jews have to adopt whatever positions they eventually do with only the knowledge that they are a foreign, essentially parasitic tribe who are there on the sufferance of thier hosts nations. Not for a thousand years have Jews been truly indispensable to western Europe’s economy and even then they only were because the Arab invasions caused Europe to fall into the dark ages (see the book Mohammed and Charlegmane, also the dark ages were remarkably progressive with what little had been salvaged). Tribal solidarity comes first, and it is through this lense that the left/right dichotomy is seen along with all other political attitudes/opinions. Jews might fight about what they consider is best for the Jews but this is not the same as a self sufficient population arguing about political principals. When white people look at Jews argiung left/right politics what they are really doing is reading themselves into the other and not seeing Jews as what they are- a middle eastern tribe who have chosen to live parasitically off of other nations, chiefly by employing a dual moral code and using usury. Now of course part of the Jewish strategy is to encourage exactly this type of thinking but that is not the point.
Also Israel does not count because every Israeli is subsidised by 8000 dollars of White taxpayers money. Zionism has failed in it’s main goal of trying to make the Jews ‘a nation like all others’. Israel is a horribly divided societt kept together by hatred/fear of outside enemies which seeks to conquer nost of the middle east (yinon plan e.t.c).
As per my comment regarding nomads above Jews have far more in common with Gypsies (lower caste Indians who entered Europe and leeched off of Christian charity-damned altruistic White people) than they do with say Bedouin arabs. They Bedouin live off of thier camels in a harsh environment- both gypsies and Jews head for the centre of other peoples civilisations and practice theft, one group by pickpocketing the other group by usury.
I should hope that this would be the last time I will have to remind people in this movement that Jews are not Europeans but knowing what I have come to know over the last 10 years I really doubt it *sigh*.
Further to my previous comment
One of the reasons why debating Jews is generally unadvisible is that Jews do not think like Europeans do. They are able to ape objectivity and appeal to science and rationality but ultimately these are European creations not Jewish ones. Anybody with a passing familiarity with the world of the Shtetl/ kabbalah/mizrahim in Israel would agree with me (the rabbi would decide how to interpret reality to the best of the group and dissenters would be purged). Put simply Jews do not have the luxury of being objective. If for example we debated them and won what would they do -voluntarily leave Europe and go off in the wilderness to die? (again Israel does not count it is literally bankrolled by whites). Jews decide what is in thier tribal interest first then they argue. They dont have the luxury of doing any less. They often ask themselves the question (verify this on social media/read thier newspapers) ‘is it good for the Jews’. Europeans (easily the most self sufficient of the human peoples) can consider things objectively Jews do not have that luxury. Cofnas and Macdonald’s debate will never be settled because one of them is very consciously arguing in bad faith and indeed cannot choose not to if he wishes that his tribe should continue. Of course there is also the option of Jews and Whites living together in harmony but Jews simply do not work that way- Jewry is a political organism and it seeks after it’s own ends mostly by trying to harm it’s host. Every culture that has ever seriously played host to the Jews (usually really wealthy ones that are better to parasitise) is history and this is not by accident.
‘If he wants to be taken seriously with his universalist objections, Cofnas needs to show more respect for the parameters MacDonald chose for CofC’
Why would anybody take Cofnas and his critique at face value after having actually read it? It might be necessary for the sake of the review to pretend to be impartial but who does not see what is really going on here? For the record Pinker put Cofnas up to it so he wouldn’t have to get his reputation dirty.
I think a rather easy response to jews also being the strongest opposers of immigration and Israel is simply that Jews have protections that whites do not. Noam Chomsky can retain his power and influence even though he is critical of Israel precisely because he is a jew. If a white person dared to voice those opinions, he would lose his job and be ostracized by society. It is even worse when it comes to immigration there are some exceptions but the fact remains that Jews are the only ones who can still retain a lot of their influence. They are not subject to the same risks whites are so of course they will be overrepresented in opposition.
Chomsky is a clever sophist whose work will be forgotten when there are no more Jews (i.e our society will have gone into collapse and they will have all moved to China where the money is) to produce a cult of personality for him. There have been many Chomskys all throughout history and most of them have been relegated to obscurity. Just last week I was reading about an ex-marrano in holland who was famous in his time for his humanistic philosophy. Let me see if this rings a bell- he supported womens rights (Jews are one of the most patriarchial peoples around) individualism, enlightenment and secularism. Acclaimed in his day he is now essentially forgotten. This will happen to Chomsky. His reputation is held up by intellecual bullying and fraud.
To give one example Chomsky was famous in the seventies for pointing out the corruption of WASP elites by dissecting how they had faked the gulf of tonkin incident and started the vietnam war on false pretences. But when Chomsky had a choice between pointing out how the neoconservatives (a jewish intellectual movement) had done much the same thing with the Iraq war Chomsky chose tribal solidarity over intellectual honesty and never condemned the neocons even though they had at least a two decade long paper trail demanding regime change in Iraq.
It is such a shame for him that his cousins did this because Chomsky would have gone on conning the world and gotten away with it. Now for anyone with a brain in thier head he just looks like a massive hypocrtite in choosing not to dissect the motivations of his coethnics in the same way as he did with all others.
I can understand an 18 year old college student taking him at face value and being defeated by his sophistry (the whole im just a humble American act- Chomsky lives in one of the whitest towns in the United States and invests a portfolio of two million dollars in an inheritance tax shielded investment in arms companies *various books pointing out leftist hypocrisy) but anyone who has seriously considered the world and thier place in it should now a fraud when they see one. The result is he is just another gatekeeper- controlled opposition like all the other so called oppositional Jews. They will never put thier principals first only thier tribemates and since thier tribemates unquestionably since the 1960s run this world you can see how they will only let intellectual discourse go so far.
Any movement that is not explicitly anti-semitic will eventually be taken over and neutered by them. This is how Jews operate. they use fraud and word games to redirect any group away from damaging thier goals. Immigration opposition is pointless because it will be infiltrated and destroyed.
Chomsky never shot an Israeli. Palestinians Etc have opposed them in Tangible ways.
His opposition to Israel isn’t REAL.
No please do not do that. There is a difference between genuine critique based on real universailist values and what Chomsky does. Chomsky is exactly what he says he is-a Zionist and quite a clever one too. He will quietly say that israel’s existence is fait accompli then say that there should be a one state solution ideally (there never will be that is the whole point) based on some futile sense of justice. He encourages his followers to offer milquetoast critique of Israel, meanwhile the genuine best you can hope for two state solution is constantly deferred. He also uses the common Zionist trick of conflating the arab-israelibconflict (which is largely over or would be if Israel would stop seeking to destabilize the regionb for lebensraum) with the palestinian-israeli conflict which has a clear genesis and a clear solution.
“Violently opposing political movements” are usually nothing more than controlled opposition. Marx and Marxism are the most important example of that. Marx did denounce Judaism,
at least to a certain extent, but when did the left ever really stand up to it? The Bolsheviks pursued
a strategy of extermination against the Russian orthodox church. So much for Marxist-Leninist atheism.
At the same time, the building of synagogues in Russia flourished. Stalin, he himself a half-Jew, was surrounded by Jews. What would have happened to him had he not led the purges? These purges were overwhelmingly directed against white Russians of all extractions.
A more recent and minute example on the right can be found here in Sweden. The Sweden Democrats are officially opposed to mass immigration. But they have greatly diluted their stance. Their most recent, much toned-down policy paper on the issue was written by a female Jewish member by the name of Paula Bieler. A slew of whites were forced to leave the party due to usually emotional utterances on their part that were deemed to be too politically incorrect. The party is now tightly controlled from the top by a tiny leadership circle to which Paula Bieler belongs. Apart from this circle, it is really only Jewish members who still get on the record with any kind of recognizable anti-immigration rhetoric. The broader, overwhelmingly white membership has been nearly totally silenced. Even Sweden Democrats who are members of parliament are affected by that. Their only MP who still makes engaging speeches is a guy by the name of Kent Ekeroth. You guessed it, he is a Jew. But even Ekeroth may be forced to leave the party. He is said to be heading for the Alternative for Sweden, a new party founded by former members of the Sweden Democrats. Once he gets there, it will be the same old pattern all over again.
On a side note, Sweden is so small and the Jewish minority is so tiny that the country may actually be a laboratory example of how Jews infiltrate white societies. Some of the richest families have Jewish
backgrounds. The print media are overtly controlled by Jews. And there are a number of ancillary Jews occupying not very important-looking but actually very useful positions throughout Swedish society. For example, there is this Jewish (and actually very Jewish looking) professor of criminology by the name of Jerzy Sarnecki. He is usually rolled out by the media when it is time to get some academic backing in downplaying immigrant crime rates. This sprinkling of Jews in surprisingly strategic ways actually refutes the null hypothesis of everything just being down to their urban living patterns and supposed intelligence. What is the prima facie probability of members of such a small ethnic minority showing up in just the right places throughout society so that they may further their ethnic interest most effectively?
The only thing you can say against Kevin MacDonald is that he may not have provided enough detail
on controlled opposition being another part of the Jewish strategy. The way they infiltrate consist of skewing the direction of any opposing movement they cannot prevent from emerging. The emergence of modern leftism was unavoidable given the conditions of the 19th century. So, what happened?
A Jew came along who wrote a manifesto and a number of books claiming to explain what he called capitalism. The very term “capitalism” is fundamentally misleading to begin with because it implies that resources are accumulated before they are spent, the accumulation of capital being a central topic and tenet of Marxist theory. But this thesis fails to account for how the financial sector creates money through credit. It always worked that way even under conditions of an official gold standard. If attention is directed away from that, then the spheres of finance and real-world production are conflated, something leftism has been hard at work at ever since. You end up with a “violently opposing movement” rendered ineffective and severely detrimental to the interest of whites due to a skewed ideology supplied by the usual suspects. The bankrolling of the Bolshevik revolution by Jewish Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff was, in the end, only logical.
Marx was a Pied Piper. So is Noam Chomsky.
A friend of mine and I got in argument about controlled opposition and I think people should take care we should not be conspiratorial sounding with the language. But it can be easily shown that everywhere on the spectrum of acceptable political beliefs that it is to the benefit of jews and the detriment to whites.
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