Psychology and White Ethnocentrism

A variety of obstacles to ethnic defense is discussed, with particular attention paid to understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying white guilt.

by Kevin MacDonald

While growing up I would often read accounts of European heroes who had battled for their people and for great causes. William Wallace, Robert Bruce and the Scots against the English, Sir Francis Drake leading the battle against the Spanish Armada, Charles Martel and the Franks defending Europe against the Muslims, King Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylae, and many others. Those days seem over now. Our political leaders are actually managing the displacement of their own people, and very few white people have the courage to do anything other than vote them back into offi ce. Or they vote for the other party, which simply changes the faces of the managers. How can it have come to this? One might think that evolution would have equipped us with powerful mechanisms of ethnocentrism and group identity that would ensure that such a thing could never happen. We would naturally stand up for our people and fight the good fight, even at great cost. We would willingly die for our people—like William Wallace, whose death is described as follows:
On 23 August 1305, following the trial, Wallace was taken from the hall, stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse to Smithfi eld Market. He was drawn and quartered—strangled by hanging but released near death, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, beheaded, then divided into four parts (the four horrors) at the Elms in Smithfi eld. His preserved head was placed on a pike atop London Bridge. It was later joined by the heads of his brother, John, and Simon Fraser. His limbs were displayed, separately, in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Aberdeen.1

But there are no William Wallaces or mass movements of racial defense for Europeans, and the question is why this is so.

The even more important question is how we can use our understanding of psychology to chart a path to legitimizing and building a movement of racial defense. This paper begins by describing the two worlds of psychology: the world of automatic, unconscious mechanisms that form our ancient evolutionary heritage, and the world of more recently evolved conscious processing that makes us distinctively human. Ethnocentric tendencies are automatic, unconscious mechanisms, but despite the power of these ancient mechanisms, they can be suppressed or diverted from their original purpose by cultural programming that takes advantage of some recently evolved cognitive machinery: the conscious processing mechanisms of the human prefrontal cortex.

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2007-07-28