Grégoire Canlorbe Interviews Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor and Grégoire Canlorbe
— Paris, September 2018

3,298 words

Samuel Jared Taylor is a Japan-born American white advocate. He is the founder and editor of the online magazine American Renaissance. Taylor is also the president of American Renaissance’s parent organization, New Century Foundation.

Grégoire Canlorbe: With the benefit of hindsight, what was the Golden Age of race relations in the USA? May it have been segregation? 

Jared Taylor: There has never been a Golden Age of race relations. I think it’s impossible to have a Golden Age of race relations because race relations are inherently conflictual.

Segregation was better in the sense that when Blacks and Whites do not come into contact, there is less conflict. It was also better in some respects for Blacks because, today, an intelligent, hardworking black person can get out of a black neighborhood and live in a white neighborhood. During segregation, competent, intelligent Black people lived in Black neighborhoods, and they could be role models. For that reason, there are many Blacks who say that segregation was better for Blacks because they had a full range of rich people/poor people, working people/non-working people, married people/single people, whereas, now, the black neighborhoods often have only the worst of the Blacks. Many have become areas of great degeneracy, which are very bad for Blacks and very bad for the country.

Many readers will not believe this, but at least in the South, when there was a clear hierarchy with Whites above and Blacks below, it was easier to have genuine, affectionate relationships.  No one dares talk about it now, but there was often a sentiment that can only be described as love between whites and the blacks who worked for them. I believe this was possible only because the hierarchy was clear—people of both races knew what to expect of each other. The depiction of Huck and Jim in Huckleberry Finn captures something of this kind of affection. It is much more difficult to have genuine friendship that crosses racial lines in our current era of equality by fiat despite biological inequality and in a time of strident Black identity politics.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Thomas Jefferson spoke in favor of freeing and deporting Afro-American slaves. As such, do you think he would welcome the re-emigration of Congoid and Arab colonizers out of Europe?

Jared Taylor: Certainly. He would very much support that. Thomas Jefferson was not at all unique in wanting to repatriate black Africans. Many distinguished Americans wanted the same thing. President James Monroe was very closely involved in establishing the country of Liberia. The capital Monrovia is named for James Monroe because he helped establish Liberia. Even Abraham Lincoln—although he is revered in the United States as the Great Emancipator—wanted to send freed blacks away outside of the United States. He did not want the United States to be composed of free Blacks and free Whites living together. He wanted all the Blacks to leave the United States.

These people could never have imagined a Europe in which there were many Blacks, many Arabs, many Asians. They would have considered this a terrible form of national, racial, and cultural suicide. 

Grégoire Canlorbe: Compared with that of Founding Fathers, does race consciousness mean a significant political issue for President Trump?

Jared Taylor: I don’t think Donald Trump thinks seriously about race. He is always accused of being racist, but, although he understands that, for example, Muslims do not integrate very well in the United States and he does not like illegal immigrants coming into the United States and going on welfare, I don’t think Donald Trump understands that for the United States to continue to be part of Western civilization, it must have a white majority. He may understand this but simply be afraid to say so out loud, but I think it more likely that he just doesn’t understand.

Grégoire Canlorbe: America is often thought of as the Calvinist country par excellence. Yet the Founding Fathers were imbued with the Pagan culture of the old Greco-Latin world. Nowadays, what does remain of it in the American way of life?

Jared Taylor: It is true that the United States was founded by people who were nominally Protestants. I’m not sure it would be accurate to call them Calvinists. They were Anglicans, they were Presbyterians, and they were Catholics, even in the beginning. The state of Maryland was founded by Catholics, for example. But parts of Scandinavia and Germany were also Protestant. I’m not sure it would be correct to say that the United States has been more shaped by that kind of Protestantism than Germany or Scandinavia. Increasingly, the United States is becoming less and less religious.

It would be incorrect, I think, to say that the United States, culturally or politically, reflects Calvinism. That might have been the case in certain areas, certain parts of the country. Someone like the General Stonewall Jackson—he believed in a severe and retributive form of Presbyterianism. So, that strand of thinking was certainly present in the United States up until a certain period. But today, I would not say that the United States is Calvinist. The United States is increasingly not even Christian. And many of the people who claim to be Christian are just as liberal or multicultural, or just as pro-immigrant as atheists.

The ordinary American, I think, is completely detached from anything that could be called Greco-Latin. Of course, the monuments of American architecture—the Capitol Building, or the archives building, or even the White House: all of them reflect Greco-Latin architecture. Our upper house is called the Senate; literature and the law are sprinkled with Latin phrases. But in terms of appreciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the classics of Roman literature, Greek tragedy, most Americans have very little contact with that. And if they have any contact at all it is for a brief period in university. I would guess that if you were to ask most university students: “Have you ever read a Greek play?” or “Have you ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey?” most would probably say no.

Grégoire Canlorbe: “Another thing that struck me [in the American],” wrote psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Gustav Jung, “was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood. The emotional way an American expresses himself, especially the way he laughs, can best be studied in the illustrated supplements of the American papers; the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt laugh is found in its primordial form in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro. American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro. The vivacity of the average American, which shows itself not only at baseball games but quite particularly in his extraordinary love of talking—the ceaseless gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this—is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe.”

How do you assess Jung’s analysis, according to which white Americans are psychologically melanized?

Jared Taylor: I think with regard to American music, there’s some truth in that. And there’s something that Jung doesn’t mention, and that’s American cuisine. Blacks have contributed to a certain kind of Southern cooking. But the idea that the behavior of Whites—their manner of laughing or their manner of speaking—is influenced by Blacks, I would disagree with that. I think, aside from music and cooking, certainly—I don’t know when that quote was written—there is very little about the day to day habits and activities of Americans that I think owes much to an African influence. There is a certain number of young whites who are influenced by rap music, for example. These are people who wish to act like black people, but they have a particular name: they’re called “wiggers.” That’s short for “white Niggers.” These are white people who think it is cool to speak and to act and to dress in a way that imitates blacks. But they are a distinct group—a very distinct group—and they’re not representative of most Americans.

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is sometimes argued that an individual is primarily defined by his (allegedly natural) caste, and only secondarily by his race. In other words, a white warlike aristocrat is—both on a psychological and a physiological level—closer to a Japanese samurai and an Indian kshatriya than he is to a white merchant or a white laborer. A commonly evoked example is that of Jules Brunet, a French Army officer who came to Japan to help the emperor and eventually joined the samurais’ rebellion against him. That man, who became a samurai, was accepted by the Japanese as one of their kind. The movie with Tom Cruise, though a complete fiction, was based on that story. Do you agree with this view of things?

Jared Taylor: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure that you would find all the same castes in all different races. I’m not sure that any African country has produced the kind of aristocracy—a “noblesse oblige” kind of aristocracy—that we might find in Europe. Nor has the United States produced quite that same kind of aristocrat. I suppose that if you were talking about a medieval European aristocrat, and you were trying to compare that state of mind to that of a Japanese samurai, you would find certain similarities, that’s true, but they would be divided by very profound things. They’d be divided by religion. They would be divided by culture. They might have a similar sense of inherent superiority. They might also have a sense of being responsible for governing their country. But I believe that the gulf between such groups would be very great. Would there be enough in common to make them more similar to each other than to the surrounding peasantry? That is a difficult question to answer.

It is increasingly difficult to draw distinctions between a Western aristocrat and an ordinary Western person. A sense of caste, of being destined by birth to rule has essentially disappeared from the West. We do have: working class, middle class, upper class. We have intellectuals. Now, would you say that a European intellectual has so much more in common with an Asian intellectual that the European would be more comfortable with Asian than with a European working-class person or even middle-class person? Depending on the individual, that might be the case. People might find a certain commonality because of their particular focused interests, but ultimately, in the long term, people who share the same race, the same religion, the same culture are probably going to have more in common than with people who are a different race, different religion, and different culture, even if their role in society is a similar one.

I’ve never heard of this Frenchman, Jules Brunet. Perhaps he did exist. Did he live long enough in Japan really to master the Japanese language? Did he convert to Shintoism or Buddhism? Did he marry a Japanese woman? How deeply, really, did he sink into Japanese culture? Because, even today, at a time when it is easier to cross borders and cross barriers, and people are much more accepting of differences, it is very difficult for a European, even if he has mastered Japanese, even if he is married to a Japanese woman, to be accepted as genuinely Japanese. I know of a number of Americans who went to Japan, and, ultimately, fell in love with Japan, but in the end realized that Japan did not fall in love with them. They can be there for many years, and they understand Japanese etiquette, manners, culture, history, language, but they’re not accepted because they’re not biologically Japanese. So, my suspicion is that the experience of this Frenchman, even if he were technically speaking a samurai—I would be very surprised if he was considered Japanese in any fundamental way because the Japanese do not think of non-Japanese as really their people.

Grégoire Canlorbe: It is not uncommon to put on an equal footing the Empire of Japan (which lasted from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the enactment of the 1947 constitution of modern Japan) and the imperialistic undertakings by Nazi and Fascist regimes. Having spent your childhood in Japan, and knowing the Japanese culture intimately, do you hold this claim for a fair comparison?

Jared Taylor: They were allies, but only in the most tenuous sense. There was never any cooperation or strategic planning between Japan and Nazi Germany, and the imperialism of Japan had existed well before National Socialist imperialism. The idea of Japanese Empire was based on European empire. The Japanese were angry that they were kept out of China, for example, or Africa. They had no particular interest in Africa, but they based their colonial empires on the European model. Japan annexed Taiwan and Korea after the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars in 1895 and 1905. This was well before the Nazis ever did anything. The annexations and the colonization of Manchuria, for example—these were done in the name of expanding the Japanese empire, securing raw materials. They were much more an imitation of African empire than anything that was similar to Nazi conquest.

And during those periods, the Japanese tried very hard to convert Koreans and Taiwanese into Japanese speakers—make them culturally Japanese. I don’t think the Germans had any idea of turning Russians or Poles into German-speaking people. So, the mentality of the Japanese and the Japanese empire was much more like that of Europeans who taught Africans to speak their languages. The British had no idea that Indians would ever become like Britons, but they taught them English. They taught them certain British ways. It’s my impression that the German conquest of the East was, frankly, more exploitative than Japanese empire building.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Concerning America’s own quest for hegemony, do you see Trump’s foreign policy as a continuation of the classical strategy of ensuring the warlike presence in Europe and isolating Russia?

Jared Taylor: I don’t think Trump himself has a grand strategic view. I don’t think he has thought deeply about these questions. There are people around him who have various more strategic and more carefully thought-out plans. It is certainly my impression that someone like John Bolton is not favorable towards rapprochement with Russia. Steve Bannon was more interested in reestablishing friendly relations with Russia, but Bolton is not. And I don’t think Donald Trump has enough consistent control over American foreign policy and enough of a consistent vision to establish the kind of rapprochement that I think would be very desirable for the United States and Russia. Instinctively, he seems to think that Russia could be a friend, that Vladimir Putin is not a bad man. But there are many, many people in the foreign policy establishment of the United States who are deeply suspicious of Russia, and I think for superficial and mistaken reasons. Donald Trump has an instinctive sense that the Russians can be and should be our friends. But I don’t think he has the consistency or the force of personality to singlehandedly impose a foreign policy on an establishment that is deeply suspicious of Russia.

Grégoire Canlorbe: How do you sum up the long-term consequences of the infamous American Civil War—depicted in Gone with the Wind—on the fate of White Americans and the face of American society?

Jared Taylor: Well, let us imagine what would have happened if the Confederate States of America had succeeded in becoming independent. Let us imagine that Abraham Lincoln had been unable to conquer the Confederacy and it had become independent. Clearly, that would have reduced the overall power of the United States of America. America would not be nearly as dominant as it is today. Imagine it without the 13 confederate states. It would be an important power, unquestionably, but not as dominant.

One of the objectives of the Confederacy was to import yet more black slaves. The slave trade had ended in 1808. The Confederate States of America, if it had succeeded, would have imported yet more blacks from Africa. I think that would have been a catastrophe. Slavery could not have continued, even in the South. It’s impossible to imagine slavery continuing into the 20th century. And, eventually, there would have been probably some kind of egalitarian pressure on the South. Would the Confederacy have turned out like South Africa today, with a majority of blacks now dominating and discriminating against whites? I don’t know. I would like to think that the Confederacy would not have been reduced to such a state.

It becomes very difficult to imagine a future for an independent Confederacy with a large number of blacks. How long would slavery have survived? What sort of social organization would there have been between the races after slavery was abolished? Would there be of segregation? Would there be a kind of apartheid? How long would that have lasted? We can imagine a future—a present—in which the Confederacy were still trying to maintain a segregated hierarchical population. It would be shunned. It would be kicked out of the United Nations. It would be subject to all sorts of trade sanctions. It’s an intriguing idea, if you imagine a successful confederacy, but it’s impossible to imagine the details.

But there’s no question that if there had been two English speaking nations in North America, the combined force of the United States would not have been nearly so great. And if you imagine a divided United States, would the United States have gone to war—the First World War—on the side of France and Britain? Perhaps, not. If there had been two United States, would there have been a massive, English speaking power that went to war against Nazi Germany? Would Japan have attacked the United States? It’s impossible to know. But, if the Confederacy had been successful, it is possible to imagine a future in which Germany might have won the First World War, or Germany might have won the Second World War. There could have been huge consequences of this kind. Now, what the relations with Russia would have been, it’s impossible to say.

Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Is there something you would like to add?

Jared Taylor: If Europeans are to be replaced, I would far prefer that we be replaced by Asians than by Africans or Middle-Easterners and, certainly, by Muslims. I hope, of course, that Western civilization will survive, that white people will carry their civilization and their biological substrate forever into the future. I hope that’s what happens. But, if we are—if we really are—to be bred out of existence, or if we do not reproduce ourselves, if the continent of Europe becomes non-white, if North America becomes increasingly non-white, I would prefer they became Asian rather than African, Middle Eastern, or Latino. Asians are a high IQ group, and they would organize superior societies, whereas if the United States became populated by people like Guatemalans, Haitians, Syrians, then the United States would become a Third World mess.

This conversation of Jared Taylor with Grégoire Canlorbe, Vice President of the Parti National-Libéral (nationalist, archeofuturist, and freemarketist), took place in Paris, in September 2018.