by John Young
http://www.westernvoices.com/audio/john_young/jy20070408.mp3
Welcome to Western Voices, I’m John Young.
Allow me to apologize for not completing the three-part series on our ethics today. The final installment in that series will be completed next week. Instead, this week, we decided it is more important to address the new approach to activism that you’ll be seeing from European Americans United.
European Americans United is not just a new organization, but an entirely new direction compared to any pro-European-American organization that has ever existed. We assembled a team of dedicated, experienced and insightful individuals who examined every aspect of existing pro-European activism in order to determine why, after decades of effort, it had not only failed to gain ground, but even put our people in worse circumstances than before. Our aim as an organization is to shed all of the errors of the past and become part of the American mainstream, a part of household conversation, and a part of American life. Such aims cannot be accomplished by doing the same things that have a track record of failure in the past. Rather, they require a bold new approach.EAU is generating a lot of interest, and membership applications are starting to roll in. Along with those applications come questions regarding activism – people who understand the plight of our folk are ready to get active. In many cases, those questions carry implicit assumptions that EAU activism follows along the same lines as old obsolete organizations that have failed to have the slightest influence on America’s political direction. That’s why I’m addressing our activism today – our members and potential members need and deserve some answers.
Like everything else in EAU, our approach to activism is based upon principles and ideas as informed by research and experience. We actively question everything, and never continue with an old approach simply because “that’s the way it has always been done.” Instead, we go back to fundamentals: clear objectives, clear principles, strong ethics and exhaustive research on what techniques will most effectively allow us to meet our objectives.
The first thing to understand and accept is that the old ways are not only ineffective, but actively detrimental. I am going to explain why by first explaining both the Doctrine of Dynamic Silence and the mechanism of peer pressure.
Dynamic Silence was invented by Rabbi Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee in 1947 as a method of closing off all access to the public media – and thus the larger culture – for people or organizations deemed to have an unacceptable point of view.(1) In spite of minor changes and adaptations, it can still be understood as being comprised of two parts. In the first part, unfavored individuals are denied unmoderated exposure to the public. In the second part, only negative aspects of the unfavored individuals are reported. This starts a downward spiral of de-legitimization in the public eye in which the harder unfavored individuals try to get public exposure, the more negative and unflattering that exposure becomes until, finally, nobody wants to be associated with the ideas of beliefs of the unfavored individuals.
An example of Dynamic Silence is the regular appearance of Daniel Carver on the Howard Stern show. With no disrespect intended for Mr. Carver, he continually throws out all manner of racial epithets against non-Europeans that are so disgusting I won’t even repeat them. As a result, anyone hearing Mr. Carver on Howard Stern’s show comes to associate pro-European-American attitudes with the worst aspects of our people, and avoids even the appearance of advocating such attitudes like the plague. By contrast, you will never see a measured and rational pro-European advocate such as Kevin Lamb or Kevin MacDonald on mass media; and if you ever do you can bet it will be in a moderated context that dilutes their positive impression.
Keep the idea of Dynamic Silence in mind, and use it to analyze media coverage of various sorts, and you’ll see it in action every day regarding a whole host of issues. We’ll talk about it again in a minute.
Now I want to describe, in a straightforward way, the mechanism of peer pressure. Humans are social creatures, and conformity with group norms is the standard behavior of humans. This is not an entirely bad thing, since through most of human history our existence has been precarious, and losing valuable individuals to unnecessary conflict at many points along the way could have spelled our doom. The natural human tendency to go along with group norms thus serves to minimize conflict and increase cooperative effort. Therefore, examined over a time horizon of millions of years, it has been a net benefit to humans of all sorts.
The power of peer pressure has been demonstrated in a variety of studies. A very notable study was reported by Dr. James Dobson.(2) In this study, a group of ten students were shown three lines, and asked which of the three was longest. Unknown to the tenth participant, the other nine students were previously instructed to always vote – incorrectly – that the medium-length line was the longest. In 75% of cases, the tenth student voted with the other nine, even though the correct answer was obvious. One of these 75% stated: “I must not have been listening during the directions. Somehow I missed the point, and I’d better do what everybody else is doing or they’ll laugh at me.”
Think about that for a moment. This is a circumstance where the worst possible outcome of an incorrect answer was seen by the participant to be nothing worse than being laughed at. Yet in 75% of cases, the tenth student voted with the other nine. Pressure to conform is much more powerful in circumstances where failure to conform is met with not merely laughter, but questions about one’s moral worth as a human being, or even sanity.
So it shouldn’t come as a shock to discover that global corporatists, proponents of unlimited immigration and other assorted ne’er-do-wells make liberal use of at least the perception of peer pressure to achieve their aims. Consider, for a moment, that the average adult American spends four hours and thirty-five minutes in front of the television every day(3), an amount that generally constitutes ALL of their waking hours that aren’t spent at work or commuting. In fact, Americans as a group are so glued to mass media that “music, television and films” are viewed to actually BE American popular culture.(4) As a result, mass media can be and are used to influence and change American public opinion through contrived perception of peer pressure. Examples of this are too numerous to list.
When you combine mass media as a form of peer pressure with the doctrine of Dynamic Silence, you have a very efficient machine to delegitimize and even pathologize practically any point of view, without regard to objective truth.
This prior point, or combination of points, is extremely important to understanding EAU’s unique approach to activism. We do NOT “go negative.” Going out of our way to call all sorts of attention to the various high crimes of malignant people will only serve to confirm the worst suspicions of unsuspecting folks who have already been pre-programmed to associate pro-European-American advocacy with hatred and even genocide. Littering lawns with fliers describing a riot in Los Angeles or a ship that was bombed nearly 40 years ago serves no positive purpose, and serves to delegitimize our point of view as a whole in our target audience.
Take a look at flyer distribution for a moment. How many people listening to this program actually joined a pro-European advocacy organization after getting a flyer weighted-down with kitty litter thrown into their lawn? I would honestly be surprised if there is a single person. The purpose of flyer distributions has never been to recruit members. Rather, the purpose has been to attract media attention. But what kind of media attention do such distributions attract?
Well — the article usually starts with an expression of shock and outrage, and a few quotes from a man or woman claiming to have suffered some form of psychological damage by seeing the literature. The fact that the person is usually — just coincidentally, of course — the spouse of a regional director of the ADL is naturally omitted. Then there is general lamentation about how the hands of the police are tied, but how our heroes at the ADL are working to get laws passed making the distribution of “hate” literature a crime.
In the aftermath, millions of dollars of donations roll into the SPLC and ADL, the town becomes an official ADL “No Place for Hate” community, and the folks distributing the literature have nothing to show for it but a depleted bank account at best, and a $500 fine for littering for each piece of literature at worst. This is emphatically not a productive focus for activism, because all it accomplishes is the strengthening of our enemies while turning off the very people we need. So EAU members never do midnight littering runs to spread so-called literature that reinforces every negative stereotype about us.
Instead, our intent is to concentrate on the positive. But before I describe the details of our positive activism, I would like to re-visit that study on peer pressure because it has another important component.
After testing students where nine out of the ten were instructed to deliberately pick the wrong answer as earlier described, researchers went back and repeated the experiment with only eight picking the wrong answer, and one picking the right answer. Just that little bit of difference – one person – had an astonishing affect on the remaining test subject. Under such circumstances, instead of only 25% of students having the confidence to choose the correct answer, fully 65% had that confidence. Just one person showing confidence in a demonstrably correct point of view can have a dramatic effect on the response of others. We need to provide that one person.
How do we bring that one crucial person into contact with our target audience? The answer to this question is the focus of EAU’s activism, and is amazingly simple: through positive engagement in the community that brings our members into direct contact with our people.
Our activism by necessity is broad-based. It includes such commonplace but effective measures as soliciting contact with elected officials over important legislation, staging demonstrations to call attention to corporate miscreants and setting up a news site with the best information available for our folk. But at the direct local level, it also includes philanthropy. That is to say charitable personal one-on-one engagement with the most vulnerable of our people.
Right now, as I speak, there are European American children who are going to bed hungry, in homes without heat, or in ragged clothes. Right now, as I speak, there are gifted children who have no effective mentoring; and there are bright European American kids who can’t afford to go to college because all of the scholarships available are for anyone but them. Right now families are about to break up, and could be kept together through proper mediation and intervention. The list of the needs of our people goes on and on, and there is a governmental and social service vacuum in that arena.
Yes, by all means, we will be conducting European Culture Festivals, staging demonstrations and overwhelming the mailboxes of our elected officials with constituent letters. But we will also be actively engaged crucial cornerstones of our communities, worthy of respect rather than derision. And there, where we provide not only valuable services but exemplary role-models is where we will make the deepest impact ever made by a pro-European-American organization. We will build support a mile wide and six feet deep, and the more we build it, the bigger it will grow. It will completely bypass the doctrine of Dynamic Silence and provide crucial reinforcement for right-minded ideas.
So, those of you involved in local chapters: forget flyer distributions. Instead, look around your community and at the members of your chapter and carefully consider what your aggregate skills can do to improve the lot of European Americans in your community, then roll up your shirtsleeves and get to work.
European Americans United is like no organization that has ever existed, and we stand poised to accomplish all of our objectives through the intelligent application of sound principles and research. We have the knowledge, we have the skills and most importantly we have YOU. What I have described is just the beginning, and it will be up to you to discover the needs of your community and develop plans for addressing those needs. Such plans require the approval of our Board of Directors, but are otherwise only limited by our principles, our ethics and your own energy and creativity. Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for our new nation-wide initiatives.
Western Voices is brought to you by the hard-working men and women of European Americans United. This is John Young, thank you for joining me again today.
(1) Kaplan, Jeffrey “Right Wing Violence in North America, Part IV”
(2) Dobson, James “A Case Study on Peer Pressure”
(3) Center for Screentime Awareness “Screen-Time Fact Sheet”
(4) Princeton Survey Research Associates/Pew Research Center (1999)