Suicide–Or Murder?

Kaufmann’s Rise and Fall of Anglo-America

By Kevin MacDonald

Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America presents the case that Anglo-America committed what one might call “suicide by idea”: White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their attachment to Enlightenment ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans simply followed these ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion. The result: immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world, multiculturalism became the cultural ideal, and WASPS willingly allowed themselves to be displaced from their preeminent position among the elites of business, media, politics, and the academic world.

Kaufmann, who is Reader in Politics and Sociology at London University’s Birkbeck College, explicitly rejects the proposal that the decline of Anglo-America occurred as a result of an attack by some external force. His concept is therefore a direct contrast to my view, argued at length in my book The Culture of Critique, that the rise of Jews to elite status in the United States and the influence of particular Jewish intellectual and political movements, especially the push for mass and indiscriminate immigration, were key contributions–necessary conditions–to the demise of WASP America.

My view is that the outcome was the result of ethnic conflict over the construction of culture (PDF), that is, the rules and norms by which a society functions. Indeed, the fall of Anglo-Saxon America is a textbook case of how deadly the conflict over the construction of culture can be.

In this review —an adapted version of a longer paper posted on my Occidental Observer website–I will show where Kaufmann goes wrong, mainly because he ignores the Jewish role in the decline of Anglo-America. But it must be said that he provides a fascinating historical overview. In this respect, his book resembles a similar conceptually faulty but factually rich work: Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century…

 
Continue at VDARE.com