Paul Gottfried On Lance Welton And "Positive Ethnocentrism"
05/07/2017
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Lance Welton posted an article on VDARE.com that I’m still trying to get my head around. Much of what Welton says seems indisputable, e.g., that Emmanuel Macron, just elected France’s next president, refuses to express French national loyalty and that he and his much older wife have no interest in leaving behind any French progeny.

I also share Welton’s revulsion for those French voters who elected such a person as their head of state rather than a true French patriot de bon aloi, Marine Le Pen. I have no problem accepting Welton’s conclusions, derived from a new study by Richard Lynn, Guy Madison and Edward Dutton, that the Third World populations coming into Western Europe are intensely more ethnocentric than the Macron-like Europeans who are celebrating their arrival.

And it’s likely that, if all things stay the same, these mostly impoverished, ethnically-conscious, and rapidly reproducing Third World-immigrants and their descendants will replace the multicultural, globalist post-Westerners.

Finally I have no problem with the attempt to distinguish between a negative ethnocentrism, which Lynn identifies with sub-Saharan reproduction strategies, and the positive ethnocentrism that he finds, for example, among South Asians. Clearly positive identification with co-ethnics as an extension of immediate family members is different from the practice of leaving behind lots of offspring as an extension of the progenitor.

But I don’t accept the apparently exclusive identification of positive ethnocentrism with bearers of low IQs living in poverty. Some of the most persistently ethnocentric groups, starting but hardly concluding with Jews and Japanese, have very high IQs.

It’s also doubtful that Europeans lacked a strong ethnic consciousness until fairly recently. Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Russians, etc. viewed themselves as being different from each other and preferred marrying and living in their own groups. Euro-Americans certainly considered blacks as being biologically different from themselves; and in the twentieth century European racial theorists even argued that Jews were inherently different from Aryans.

The attempt to present Euro-Americans as devoid of ethnocentric sentiments because of their commercial instincts is based on a very narrow historical perspective. It may reflect the effort to generalize over the centuries on the basis of the kinds of societies that Western Europeans (but not Eastern Europeans) have created in recent decades.

In the seventeenth century France was governed by a divine-right monarchy; and the French aristocracy claimed to be born of Frankish stock, unlike the inherently inferior Celtic-Roman serfs who worked on seigniorial estates.

Why is the France of the seventeenth century less “Western” than the one that Welton and his sources analyze?

Welton, and perhaps Lynn, make the mistake of assuming that the Western world and its inhabitants always resembled the kind of post-modern society they’re now observing. This may be like associating the present Harlem district of New York with the Harlem of the 1850s.

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