The Inquiring Mind of Aldous Huxley

The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959, by Aldous Huxley, edited by Piero Ferrucci (Flamingo, paperback).

reviewed by Nick Camerota

BLOOD WILL TELL, says the old folk wisdom. Back in 1902, even the socialist H.G. Wells believed it. (In Anticipations, he held that the less advanced races, those “swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people,” who believe the world to be a charity institution, “will have to go.”)

But this idea seems to have been washed away by the rising tide of color and by the present, unreasoning insistence that all men are somehow “equal.” However, a brief look at the Huxley family shows us there is more truth than poetry in the old saying.

Aldous Huxley’s great uncle was Matthew Arnold. Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas H., was a friend and champion of Charles Darwin. Huxley’s father, Leonard, was a noted writer and editor. And Aldous’ brother, Julian, the distinguished biologist, is also far from retarded.

Wells, a student of T.H. Huxley, saw a strong physical resemblance between Aldous and his grandfather. The similarities seem to extend to qualities of intellect and character, since neither of them was afraid to express unpopular ideas.

Man and Technology

An albatross chick found on the beach of Midway Atoll that never grew
to adulthood. Its parents accidentally fed it bits of plastic from the
Pacific Ocean, and essentially choked it to death.

by Dr. William L. Pierce

TECHNOLOGY has come somewhat into bad odor among many of today’s young people. Sensitive souls who find themselves out of tune with the gaudy, gimmicky, and artificial world of 20th-century America often place the blame for this dissonance on the technology which has made all the gimmicks possible. This attitude is revealed, for example, by the pejorative use of the term “plastic."

DDT and Big Brother

Hostility toward technology also often finds expression among those genuinely and deeply concerned about wildlife and the beauties and virtues of our vanishing wilderness. DDT and mercury pollution, oil spills, smog, the mind-shattering racket of jet aircraft and diesel trucks, the chemical adulteration of foodstuffs, the unsettling thought that Big Brother may be electronically eavesdropping on our most intimate and personal affairs, the Niagara of household detergent wastes which are killing our lakes and streams — all these things are blamed on modern technology to which they are, undeniably, related.

Henry Williamson: Nature's Visionary

From National Vanguard magazine, Issue No. 117, 1997:

Henry Williamson: Nature's Visionary By Mark Deavin

The fact that the name of Henry Williamson is today so little known across the White world is a sad reflection of the extent to which Western man has allowed himself to be deprived of his culture and identity over the last 50 years. Until the Second World War Williamson was generally regarded as one of the great English Nature writers, possessing a unique ability to capture the essential essence and meaning of the natural world in all its variety and forms.

His most famous Nature book, Tarka the Otter, was published in 1927 and became one of the best-loved children's books of all time, with its vivid descriptions of animal and woodland life in the English countryside. It was publicly praised by leading English literary figures such as Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. Hardy called Tarka a "remarkable book," while Bennett declared it to be "marvelous." Even T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, admitted that "the book did move me and gratify me profoundly."

Tarka was awarded the coveted Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 and eventually attracted the interest of Walt Disney, who offered a small fortune for the film rights. Williamson, however, was concerned that such an arrangement might compromise his artistic integrity, and he rejected the offer.

Seventy years later, however, Tarka, like the majority of Williamson's books, is relatively unknown and has only just become available in print again. The reason: Like several other leading European authors, Williamson was a victim of the Second World War. Not only did his naturalistic message conflict with the materialistic culture that has pervaded the Western world since 1945, but he himself was a political fighter who actively opposed the war on ideological grounds.

Born in Brockley, southeast London, in December 1895, Williamson was educated at Colfe's Grammar School, Lewisham. He spent much of his early life exploring the nearby Kent countryside, where his love of Nature and animals and his artistic awareness and sensitivity were first stimulated. Never satisfied unless he had seen things for himself, he always made sure that he studied things closely enough to get the letter as well as the spirit of reality. This enabled him to develop a microscopic observational ability which came to dominate his life.

Williamson joined the British Army at the outbreak of war in 1914 and fought at the Battle of the Somme and at Passchendaele, where he was seriously wounded. It was this experience as a frontline soldier which was the redefining moment in his life and artistic development, stimulating in him a lifelong Faustian striving to experience and comprehend the "life flow" permeating his own, and all, existence.

His spiritual development continued after the war. In 1919 he read for the first time the visionary The Story of My Heart, which was written by the English Nature writer Richard Jefferies and published in 1893. For Williamson, discovering Jefferies acted as a liberation of his consciousness, stimulating all the stored impressions of his life to return and reveal a previously smothered and overlaid self. It was not just an individual self that he discovered, however, but a racial self in which he began to recognize his existence as but a link in an eternal chain that reached back into the mists of time, and which -- if it were permitted -- would carry on forever.

Williamson sensed this truth in his own feeling of oneness with Nature and the ancient, living, breathing Universe as represented by the life-giving sun. It also was reflected in his idea of mystical union between the eternal sunlight and the long history of the earth. For Williamson the ancient light of the sun was something "born in me" and represented the real meaning of his own existence by illuminating his ancestral past and revealing the truth of redemption through Nature. Like Jefferies before him, Williamson "came to feel the long life of the earth back in the dimmest past while the sun of the moment was warm on me ... This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness. From all the ages my soul desired to take that soul-life which had flowed through them as the sunbeams had continually found an earth." [1] 

After the war Williamson became a journalist for a time while beginning work on his first novel, The Beautiful Years (1922). Finally he decided to break all contact with London and in 1922 moved to an ancient cottage in Georgham, North Devon, which had been built in the days of King John. Living alone and in hermit fashion at first, Williamson disciplined himself to study Nature with the same meticulous observations as Jefferies, tramping about the countryside and often sleeping out. The door and windows of the cottage were never closed, and his strange family of dogs and cats, gulls, buzzards, magpies, and one otter cub were free to come and go as they chose.

It was his experiences with the otter cub which stimulated Williamson to write Tarka. He had rescued it after its mother had been shot by a farmer, and he saved its life by persuading his cat to suckle it along with her kitten. Eventually the otter cub was domesticated and became Williamson's constant companion, following him around like a dog. On one walk, however, it walked into a rabbit trap, panicked, and ran off. Williamson spent years following otters' haunts in the rivers Taw and Torridge, hunting for his lost pet.

The search was in vain, but his intimate contact with the animal world gave him the inspiration for Tarka: "The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone. His fur was soft and grey as the buds of the willow before they open up at Eastertide. He was called Tarka, which was the name given to the otters many years ago by men dwelling in hut circles on the moor. It means Little Water Wanderer, or Wandering as Water."

Williamson never attempted to pass any kind of moral judgment on Nature and described its evolutionary realities in a manner reminiscent of Jack London: "Long ago, when moose roamed in the forest at the mountain of the Two Rivers, otters had followed eels migrating from ponds and swamps to the seas. They had followed them into shallow waters; and one fierce old dog had run through the water so often that he swam, and later, in his great hunger, had put under his head to seize them so often that he dived. Other otters had imitated him. The moose are gone, and their bones lie under the sand in the soft coal which was the forest by the estuary, thousands of years ago. Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct."

Williamson actually rewrote Tarka 17 times, "always and only for the sake of a greater truth." [2] Mere polishing for grace and expression or literary style did not interest him, and he strove always to illuminate a scene or incident with what he considered was authentic sunlight.

He also believed that European man could be spiritually healthy and alive to his destiny only by living in close accord with Nature. Near the end ofTarka, for instance, he delightfully describes how "a scarlet dragonfly whirred and darted over the willow snag, watched by a girl sitting on the bank ... Glancing round, she realized that she alone had seen the otter. She flushed, and hid her grey eyes with her lashes. Since childhood she had walked the Devon rivers with her father looking for flowers and the nests of birds, passing some rocks and trees as old friends, seeing a Spirit everywhere, gentle in thought to all her eyes beheld."

Williamson's sequel to Tarka was Salar the Salmon, which was also the result of many months of intimate research and observation of Nature in the English countryside. Then came The Lone Swallow, The Peregrine's Saga, Life in a Devon Village, and A Clear Water Stream, all of which, in the eyes of the English writer Naomi Lewis, displayed "a crystal intensity of observation and a compelling use of words, which exactly match the movement and life that he describes."

To Williamson himself, however, his Nature stories were not the most important part of his literary output. His greatest effort went into his two semi-autobiographical novel groups, the tetralogy collected as The Flax of Dreams , which occupied him for most of the 1920's, and the 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight, which began with The Dark Lantern in 1951 and ended with The Gale of the World in 1969.

Williamson's experiences during the First World War had politicized him for life. A significant catalyst in this development was the Christmas truce of 1914, when British and German frontline soldiers spontaneously left their trenches, abandoned the fighting, and openly greeted each other as brothers.

Williamson later spoke of an "incoherent sudden realization, after the fraternization of Christmas Day, that the whole war was based on lies." Another experience that consolidated this belief was when a German officer helped him remove a wounded British soldier who was draped over barbed wire on the front line. He was thus able to contrast his own wartime experiences with the vicious anti-German propaganda orchestrated by the British political establishment both during and after the war, and he was able to recognize the increasing moral bankruptcy of that establishment. In Williamson's view the fact that over half of the 338 Conservative Members of Parliament who dominated the 1918 governing coalition were company directors and financiers who had grown rich from war profits was morally wrong and detestable.

This recognition, in itself a reflection of an already highly developed sense of altruism, meant that Williamson could never be content with just isolating himself in the countryside. He had to act to try to change the world for the better. Perhaps not surprisingly he came to see in the idea of National Socialism a creed which not only represented his own philosophy of life, but which offered the chance of practical salvation for Western Civilization. He saw it as evolving directly from the almost religious transcendence which he, and thousands of soldiers of both sides, had experienced in the trenches of the First World War. This transcendence resulted in a determination that the "White Giants" of Britain and Germany would never go to war against each other again, and it rekindled a sense of racial kinship and unity of the Nordic peoples over and above separate class and national loyalties. [3]

Consequently, not only was Williamson one of the first of the "phoenix generation" to swear allegiance to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, but he quickly came to believe that National Socialist Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, pointed the way forward for European man. Williamson identified closely with Hitler -- "the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is the happy child," seeing him as a light-bringing phoenix risen from the chaos of European civilization in order to bring a millennium of youth to the dying Western world. [4]

Williamson visited Germany in 1935 to attend the National Socialist Congress at Nuremberg and saw there the beginnings of the "land fit for heroes" which had been falsely promised the young men of Britain during the First World War by the government's war propagandists. He was very impressed by the fact that, while the British people continued to languish in poverty and mass unemployment, National Socialism had created work for seven million unemployed, abolished begging, freed the farmers from the mortgages which had strangled production, developed laws on conservation, and, most importantly, had developed in a short period of time a deep sense of racial community. [5]

Inspired to base their lives on a religious idea, Williamson believed that the German people had been reborn with a spiritual awareness and physical quality that he himself had long sought. Everywhere he saw "faces that looked to be breathing extra oxygen; people free from mental fear." [6]

Through the Hitler Youth movement, which brought back fond memories of his own time as a Boy Scout, he recognized "the former pallid leer of hopeless slum youth transformed into the suntan, the clear eye, the broad and easy rhythm of the poised young human being."

In Hitler's movement Williamson identified not only an idea consistent with Nature's higher purpose to create order out of chaos, but the physical encapsulation of a striving toward Godhood. Influenced by his own lifelong striving for perfection, Williamson believed that the National Socialists represented "a race that moves on the poles of mystic, sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance ... Everything is of the blood, of the senses." [7] 

Williamson always believed that any spiritual improvement could only take place as a result of a physical improvement, and, like his mentor Richard Jefferies, he was a firm advocate of race improvement through eugenics. He himself was eventually to father seven children, and he decried the increasing lack of racial quality in the mass of the White population. He urged that "the physical ideal must be kept steadily in view" and called for the enforcement of a discipline and system along the lines of ancient Sparta in order to realize it. [8]

In 1936 Williamson and his family moved to Norfolk, where he threw himself into a new life as a farmer, the first three years of which are described in The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941). But with the Jews increasingly using England as a base from which to agitate for war against Germany, Williamson remained very active through his membership in the British Union of Fascists in promoting the idea of Anglo-German friendship. Until it was banned in 1940, Williamson wrote eight articles for the party newspaper Action and had 13 extracts reprinted from his book The Patriot's Progress. He called consistently for Hitler to be given "that amity he so deserved from England," so as to prevent another brothers' war that would see the victory only of Asiatic Bolshevism and the enslavement of Europe. On September 24, 1939, for instance, he wrote of his continuing conviction that Hitler was "determined to do and create what is right. He is fighting evil. He is fighting for the future."

Williamson viewed the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France as a spiteful act of an alien system that was determined to destroy the prospect of a reborn and regenerated European youth. And his continued opposition to it led to his arrest and internment in June 1940, along with Mosley and hundreds of others. His subsequent release on parole was conditional upon his taking no further action to oppose the war. Silently, however, Williamson remained true to his convictions. Visiting London in January 1944, he observed with satisfaction that the ugliness and immorality represented by its financial and banking sector had been "relieved a little by a catharsis of high explosive" and somewhat "purified by fire."

National Socialism's wartime defeat, however, dealt Williamson a heavy blow. Decrying the death struggle of "the European cousin nations" he lamented that "the hopes that have animated or agitated my living during the past thirty years and four months are dead." [9]

Consequently, his first marriage broke up in 1947, and he returned to North Devon to live in the hilltop hut which he had bought in 1928 with the prize money from Tarka.

But it was not in Williamson's character to give up on what he knew to be true and right, and, as his most recent biographer makes clear, he never recanted his ideas about Hitler. [10]

On the contrary, he continued to publicly espouse what he believed, and he fervently contested the postwar historical record distorted by false Jewish propaganda -- even though his effort resulted, as he realized it would, in his continued literary ostracism.

In The Gale of the World, the last book of his Chronicle, published in 1969, Williamson has his main character Phillip Maddison question the moral and legal validity of the Nuremberg Trials. Among other things, he muses why the Allied officers who ordered the mass fire bombing of Germany, and the Soviet generals who ordered the mass rape and mass murder during the battle for Berlin, were not on trial; and whether it would ever be learned that the art treasures found in German salt mines were put there purely to be out of the way of the Allied bombing. He also questions the official view of the so called "Holocaust," stating his belief that rather than being the result of a mass extermination plan, the deaths in German concentration camps were actually caused by typhus brought about by the destruction of all public utility systems by Allied bombing.

In the book Williamson also reiterates his belief that Adolf Hitler was never the real enemy of Britain. And in one scene Phillip Maddison, in conversation with his girl friend Laura, questions whether it was Hitler's essential goodness and righteousness that was responsible for his downfall in the midst of evil and barbarity:

Laura: I have a photograph of Hitler with the last of his faithful boys outside the bunker in Berlin. He looks worn out, but he is so gentle and kind to those twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys.Phillip: Too gentle and kind Laura ... Now the faithful will be hanged.

Williamson also remained loyal in the realm of political ideas and action. When Oswald Mosley had returned to public life in Britain in 1948 by launching the Union Movement, Williamson was one of the first to give his support for an idea which he had long espoused: the unity of Western man. Contributing an article to the first issue of the movement's magazine, The European, he called for the development of a new type of European man with a set of spiritual values that were in tune with himself and Nature.

Such positive and life-promoting thinking did not endear Williamson to the powers that be in the grey and increasingly decadent cultural climate of post-Second World War Britain. His books were ignored, and his artistic achievement remained unrecognized, with even the degrees committee at the university to which he was a benefactor twice vetoing a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate. The evidence suggests, in fact, that Williamson was subject to a prolonged campaign of literary ostracism by people inside the British establishment who believed he should be punished for his political opinions.

For Williamson, however, the machinations of trivial people in a trivial age were irrelevant; what was important was that he remained true in the eyes of posterity to himself, his ancestors, and the eternal truth which he recognized and lived by. In fact, as one observer described him during these later years, he remained a "lean, vibrant, almost quivering man with ... blazing eyes, possessing an exceptional presence [and a] ... continued outspoken admiration for Hitler ... as a 'great and good man.'" [11]

Certainly, Williamson knew himself, and he knew what was necessary for Western man to find himself again and to fulfill his destiny. In The Gale of the World he cited Richard Jefferies to emphasize that higher knowledge by which he led his life and by which he was convinced future generations would have to lead their lives in order to attain the heights that Nature demanded of them: "All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me. I rejected it wholly. I stood bare-headed in the sun, in the presence of earth and air, in the presence of the immense forces of the Universe. I demand that which will make me more perfect now this hour."

Henry Williamson's artistic legacy must endure because, as one admirer pondered in his final years, his visionary spirit and striving "came close to holding the key to life itself."

He died on August 13, 1977, aged 81.

Notes

1. Ann Williamson, Henry Williamson: Tarka and the Last Romantic, (London, 1995), 65.

2. Eleanor Graham, "Introduction" to the Penguin edition of Tarka the Otter (1985).

3. Higginbottom, Intellectuals and British Fascism , (London, 1992), 10.

4. Henry Williamson, The Flax of Dreams (London, 1936) and The Phoenix Generation (London, 1961).

5. Henry Williamson, A Solitary War (London, 1966).

6. Higginbotham, op. cit., 41-42.

7. J. W. Blench, Henry Williamson and the Romantic Appeal of Fascism , (Durham, 1988).

8. Henry Williamson, The Children of Shallow Ford, (London, 1939).

9. Higginbotham, op. cit., 49.

10. Ann Williamson, op. cit., 195.

11. Higginbotham, op. cit., 53.

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Eugenics: the Upward Path

From National Vanguard Magazine Issue No. 86, May 1982:

Eugenics: the Upward Path

By Jan Keown

The impact of biological science on modern social thought is one of the most compelling dramas in all of human experience.  On the one hand, for the first time we now understand some of the underlying mechanisms of the creation and transmission of the human characteristics.  We know how heredity and environment interact to augment or degrade the quality of races and nations.  Moreover, we now have the ability to manipulate both factors in order to produce a race of superior human beings who could be the embodiment of that most ethereal of our dreams:  the Nietzschean Superman.

As fate would have it though, these advances in knowledge have come at a time when the world is in the grip of extremely destructive and irrational forces – a time when the ruling powers and the thoughtless masses alike worship the false god of universal human equality and see the devil in any dream of human betterment.

Overcoming these negative forces – or, at least, bypassing them – will be the mission of all progressive and racially conscious men and women for the foreseeable future.

In the beginning, natural forces of selection ensured that, on the average, each generation of our ancestors was stronger, tougher, and cleverer than its predecessors.  The environmental pressures of the Ice Age world sloughed off the dead wood of our race with machinelike efficiency.

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“We drown the weakling and the monstrosity.  It is not passion, but reason,  to separate the useless from the fit.”  - Seneca

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And we may with reasonable safety assume that the earliest Europeans possessed the healthy pragmatism regarding defective specimens of their own kind which is usual among primitive tribesmen of other races even today:  useless mouths were a burden which the noble savage was uninclined to support.  The Roman statesman Seneca stated the case for these primitive eugenicists when he wrote, in the first century of our own era, “We drown the weakling and the monstrosity.  It is not passion, but reason, to separate the useless from the fit.”

The upward evolutionary spiral continued until the end of the Ice Ages, resulting in the Cro-Magnon man who was superior physically, and perhaps intellectually (judging from his larger brain), to anything we know today.

With the dawn of the Neolithic era and the coming of the agricultural economy, natural selective pressures eased, and sentiment began to interfere with a rigid pruning of inferior human material.  Inevitably, while technology and social organization advanced, the quality of our ancestors imperceptibly began to decline.

Eventually, in place of the reflective eugenics of the tribal primitive, a new form of human quality control began to take shape in Classical Greece.  The need of the city-state for healthy warriors coalesced with the Greek ideal of physical and intellectual perfection to produce, in Sparta, the first government-administered eugenics program of which we know.

Always outnumbered, ruling a resentful helotry and continually occupied with warfare or preparation for warfare, Sparta took great care to safeguard the quality and quantity of its citizens.  There were penalties for celibacy and for late marriage, as well as for a bad marriage.  A Spartan who fathered three children was excused from the night watch, and after his fourth child he was exempt from taxation.

All newborns were subject to an examination by the Elders.  The child was taken to the Council Hall, and if it met the standards of the nation it was accepted.  If found wanting it was hurled into an abyss on the slopes of Mt. Taygetus.  “It was better for the child and the city that one not born from the beginning to comeliness and strength should not live,” was the sentiment attributed by Plutarch to Sparta’s great, semi-legendary lawgiver, Lycurgus.

Xenophon testified in the fourth century B.C. that the Spartan eugenics produced a race unparalleled in vigor:  “It is easy to see that these measures produced a race excelling in size and strength.  Not easily would one find people healthier or more physically capable than the Spartans.

With the decline of the Hellenic age, the ideals of the Greek eugenics disappeared from the world scene.  Indeed, during her later days, forgetting Seneca’s precepts, Rome so neglected the quality of her people that the great edifice of her Empire staggered and then fell before the vigor of the unspoiled Germanic tribes of the misty North.

These hardy people, so magnificent in their pagan naturalness, carried all before them.  The momentum of their onrushing energies took them to new heights of achievement which culminated in a world empire and the cultural-technical miracle which we know as Western civilization.

These accomplishments were accompanied, one regrets to say, by a new onset of the insidious process of racial degeneration – a process which had earlier been held in abeyance by the healthful and natural life-style of the uncivilized North.  This is always the price paid for a preoccupation with the externals of life, and a neglect of its essence.  But in the middle of the last century two men emerged who would offer a new opportunity to reverse the downward trend in racial quality:  Charles Darwin and Francis Galton.

FRANCIS GALTON

Galton was born in 1822 into a talented, middle-class English family.  Endowed with a soaring intellect, he was a marvelous example of the Victorian gentleman-scholar.  He made significant contributions to geography, meteorology, anthropometry, and criminology.

The turning point in Galton’s intellectual life came with the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by his cousin Charles Darwin.  Galton said of this event, “Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.”

In particular, its effect on Galton was to initiate in him a lifelong concern with the science of racial improvement.  He coined the term “eugenics” for this science, from the Greek words meaning “well born.”  Galton devoted the remainder of this life to thinking, writing, and lecturing about the concept of the uplifting of the race through wise breeding.

Galton saw that the welfare of a nation was guaranteed not by any material resource it might possess, but by the collective hereditary qualities of its citizens.  He was convinced that by suitably modifying the social environment it was possible to gradually raise the physical, mental, and moral level of successive generations.  By the same token, he saw processes at work which, if nothing else was done to intervene, could permanently cripple the nation.  He wrote in the 1894 National Review, “It has now become necessary to better the breed of the human race.  The average citizen is too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”

Galton also understood the nature of the principal obstacle in the path of the reforms he wanted to introduce.  As he put it, “…there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”

When he dies in 1911 Francis Galton left a world which he had changed profoundly.  He had forged a new way of looking at man and at life.  The reverberations of his hammer blows are still echoing around us.

While he created an imposing theoretical framework, however, Galton never really attempted to put his idea into practice.  In fact, the father of eugenics never fathered any children of his own.  To see the eugenics idea in action we must look to the small-town New England of the 1830’s.  Utopian communities were not uncommon in the 19^th-century America, but the Oneida Community was unique, as was its leader, John Humphrey Noyes.

Noyes was born in 1811 in Brattleboro, Vermont.  In 1833, during one of the religious revivals that were sweeping New England, he adopted a creed known as Perfectionism, which held that man can achieve a state of sinless perfection.  He became so adamant in his beliefs, however, that he alienated his fellow Perfectionists and was declared persona non grata by them.

JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES

Not one to be discouraged easily, in 1841 he decided to start his own group, in Putney, Vermont, beginning with himself, his wife, his brother, and his two sisters.  Within a short time the group’s membership had increased to 35 persons.

Always the dominant personality and ideological fountainhead, Noyes evolved an idea which was to prove vital to the eugenics program which lay ahead for his group.  His doctrine of “complex marriage” provided the basis for a genuine social revolution in miniature.  The theological justification is obscure, but in effect it meant that everyone in the group was married to everyone else.  In fact, exclusive love was declared sinful.

On practical grounds, marriage was seen as undesirable because it prohibited scientific selection and limited the best males to the number of children that one woman could produce.  Noyes said, “Certainly, scientific propagation is impossible so long and so far as mating is done by promiscuous scrambling, which is the very nature of marriage.  If the time has really come for scientific propagation, then the time has come for the departure of marriage and the reconstruction of society on the principles which allow science to lay its hands on the business of mating.” 

Their unorthodox social arrangements eventually aroused the ire of their more conventional neighbors, and the group moved to Oneida Creek, New York, which was then a frontier settlement.  Arriving in 1848, they began building their community.  At this time they were 87 in number.  Beginning from scratch they spent 20 years creating their utopia.

During this time Noyes prepared for the day when his projected eugenic breeding program, which he called “stirpculture” (from the Latin stirps, meaning stock or lineages), would begin.  Evening lectures were given by breeders on inbreeding, judicious crosses, and other tricks of the trade.

By 1869 the stage was set for the first attempt at scientific breeding.  In 20 years of hard work Noyes and his followers (by then numbering around 250) had built a thriving community.  They had houses, farms, factories, printing presses, and money in the bank.  They were united behind a dynamic leader and were of one mind and one accord as to how they should proceed.

The women who were to take part in the program pledged:  “We have no rights or personal feelings in regard to child-bearing which shall in the least degree oppose or embarrass Mr. Noyes in his choice of scientific combinations.”  The men likewise promised:  “We desire you may feel that we most heartily sympathize with your purpose in regard to scientific propagation, and offer ourselves to be used in forming and combinations that may seem to you desirable.  We desire to be servants of the truth.  We are your true soldiers.”

A commission headed by Noyes had the final say over who would mate with whom.  Usually a couple applied for permission to mate, but at times the commission took the initiative in selecting matches.

In the ten years between 1869 and 1879, 58 children were born as a result of the stirpicultural experiment.  Of these, nine were fathered by Noyes himself, who was then in his sixties.

The results of the experiment were encouraging.  No mothers were lost, and no deaf, dumb, blind, crippled or idiotic children were born.  Although no intelligence tests were given to the children, their longevity statistics are interesting.  By 1931 the oldest of the “stirpicults” was 52, the youngest 41.  According to actuarial statistics there should have been 45 deaths by that time, this rather high number reflecting the high infant and child mortality rate in the U.S. population in the second half of the 19^th century.  In fact, however, only six of the 58 had died.

Noyes left the Oneida Community in 1876 in the wake of a religious dispute.  It is ironic that while the founder of modern eugenics, Francis Galton, had rejected the Bible-based “creation” fable and the other Judeo-Christian myths, the only eugenic breeding community in America found is justification in the Bible and was wracked by Scriptural quibbles.  Soon after Noyes departed, complex marriage and stirpculture were abandoned.  In 1881 the community was dissolved.

Noyes, in retirement in Canada, claimed not to be discouraged by the collapse of the Oneida Community.  He said, “We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it, and returned without the loss of a man, woman, or child.”

At about the time the Oneida Community was coming to an end, America was beginning to embrace the eugenics idea with a rising tide of enthusiasm.  By the turn of the century the nation was entering an era which could almost be called the golden age of eugenics.  The progressive movement welcomed biological reform as a natural corollary to political reform.  The 26^th President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, said, “Some day, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world.”

Leading geneticists and other scientific and civic celebrities were solidly behind the movement.  In 1906 the American Breeders Association set up a commission on eugenics, among whose members were botanist Luther Burbank, geneticist Edward G. Conklin, and David Starr Jordon, president of Stanford University and vice-president of the Boy Scouts of America.  According to Jordan, “The blood of a nation determines its history.”

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[B]y 1928 three-fourths of the nation’s universities taught eugenics.

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Eugenics organizations were formed all across the country.  Madison Grant, the noted author and president of the New York Zoological Society, formed the Galton Society in New York.  Another group, the Eugenics Education Society, had branches in a score of cities.  In 1913 the Eugenics Association was founded.  The Eugenics Committee of the United States, later called the American Eugenics Society, began operating in 1822.

The new science of eugenics was highly regarded in the academic world of 60 years ago.  In fact, by 1928 three-fourths of the nation’s universities taught eugenics.

Sterilization was proposed as a eugenic solution to the problem of crime.  Vasectomy, which originally was a substitute for castration, was first performed in Indiana in 1899.  The Indiana legislature passed the first state sterilization law in 1907, making sterilization mandatory for confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and other institutionalized people when deemed appropriate by an expert board.  Thirty states had sterilization laws by 1931.

In 1924 eugenics advocates played a key role in gaining passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, which was intended to preserve the predominantly Nordic racial character of the United States.  James J. Davis, President Coolidge’s secretary of labor, speaking in support of that act, said:  “We should ban from our shores all races and all individuals who are physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually undesirable and who constitute a menace to our civilization.”

Five years after its greatest triumph, the eugenics movement met with disaster.  With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 the eugenics societies dried up and blew away.  The grim, immediate problems of economic survival took precedence over idealistic concerns for future well-being.  Finally, the coming to power of the liberal-minority coalition under Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 drove the last nails into the coffin of the eugenics movement.

Ultimately, even had it not been for the disasters of Depression and FDR, that movement would have run up against its own limitations.  All the talk, all the committees, all the college courses, despite their beneficial effects on legislation in the first quarter of the century, could not have achieved their desired ends.  The movement was at odds with the democratic-capitalist spirit of the country.  A meaningful eugenics program must be a prime national goal with the full support of a determined leadership behind it.  It must be part of a total revolution involving a whole people.

Just such a revolution was coming to fruition in Germany in the fateful year of 1933, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.  Never before had a national government come to power fully committed to the biological ennoblement of the nation.  In the words of Wilhelm Frick, Hitler’s minister of the interior:  “The fate of race-hygiene, of the Third Reich, and of the German people will in the future be indissolubly bound together.”

Brave words were matched by action in the new Germany.  Private organizations engaged in eugenics education, such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics, were reorganized as government agencies.  On July 14, 1933, the Hereditary Health Courts were set up to supervise the sterilization of congenitally defective Germans.  In their first year of operation over 50,000 sterilizations were performed.

Pro-family and pro-child propaganda encouraged Germans to have large families.  Marriage loans at no interest were made available to young couples, one-fourth of the principal being canceled with the birth of each child.

On December 12, 1935 Heinrich Himmler, the national leader of the SS, instituted the Lebensborn (“spring of life”) program.  The Lebensborn concerned itself with families of especially good stock.  It provided support for large families and help for expectant mothers and children.  It fought against the abortion of healthy children and tried to raise the position of the unmarried mother.

HEINRICH HIMMLER

Germany was well on the way to a revolutionary new age of racial dynamism, but an aroused world Jewry had other ideas.  The rest is history.

With the destruction of Germany the eugenics idea was “discredited.”  Anyone since that time daring to express concern about problems of racial quality has found himself under attack by the New Inquisition.  A taboo on racial thought in the academic world is rigidly enforced, and the new orthodoxy of human equality reigns without challenge.

Thinking about our genetic position today is an essentially unpleasant duty.  The trends are all negative.  Live in the modern industrial states of the West is as racially unhealthy as can be imagined.

It is ironic that in the midst of this racial disaster area the science of genetics is making tremendous progress.  While the society around them lurches toward a biological debacle, the geneticists are gaining new knowledge at an exponential rate.  What is lacking is the motivation on the part of the governmental-academic establishment to use this new knowledge for the improvement of the race.

Nevertheless, the knowledge is available to those who are willing to use it.  Although some if its applications require all the machinery of modern high technology, others are relatively simple, needing little more than a willing and informed group of men and women.

One of the simplest and potentially most effective applications of the new knowledge is artificial insemination.  In the 1940’s Dr. A.S. Parkes found that sperm treated with glycerol could be frozen and stored for an indefinite period.  Concurrently, the Nobel Award-winning geneticist, H.J. Muller, proposed a national sperm bank, which every woman could draw on to have children by exceptional fathers.  This idea has been revived recently – and hysterically condemned by the controlled media.

On the distaff side, new techniques can also be used to increase the spread of desirable genes.  Hormone injections can cause a female to superior quality to super-ovulate, releasing up to 30 eggs at one time.  After surgical extraction and fertilization the eggs are implanted in average, healthy females, where they are carried to term.

Controlled inbreeding could also have a pronounced eugenic effect.  As opposed to outbreeding, which tends to hide and spread recessive defects, inbreeding can be made to have a cleansing effect on the gene pool.  By sterilizing any defective offspring, it is possible eventually to produce faultless, true-breeding thoroughbreds.

Experimenters with fruit flies have inbred brothers and sisters for 75 generations without loss of fertility or vigor.  The same has been done with rats for 25 generations.

There is also an interesting human precedent.  In ancient Egypt brother-sister marriages were much in vogue, especially among royalty.  James G. Frazier writes in The Golden Bough, “Marriage between brother and sister was the best of marriages, and it acquired an ineffable degree of sanctity when the brother and sister who contracted it were themselves born of a brother and sister, who had in their turn also sprung from a marriage of the same sort.”

During the long XVIIIth Dynasty (1570-1320 B.C.), generally regarded as one of the greatest periods of ancient Egypt, this practice was carried on for centuries.  All indications are that the results were excellent.  The mummified bodies which the Egyptians thoughtfully provided for our examination are uniformly clean-featured and well-formed.

It must be realized that effective eugenic practices would involve a substantial amount of social and psychological reorientation in the group employing them.  A really aggressive eugenics program would require extensive modification of the ordinary societal myths, norms, and biases.  The benefits to posterity, however, would be incalculable:  the biological equivalent of the old alchemist’s dream of transmuting lead into gold.

It seems obvious that the chances of eugenics principles being applied on a national scale anywhere in the West during the present era are nil.  This society is rotting from within, undermined by contradictions which prevent it from facing reality and confronting the most basic of problems.  With the old order paralyzed by its own outdated values, it will be up to the standard bearers of a new order to guide our people through the coming crisis and ultimately lead them to the greatness which is their destiny.

The upward struggle of life is far from ended.  Our present stage of evolution is but a way station on the path to unimaginable future glories.  Friedrich Nietzsche put it this way in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “The Superman is the meaning of the earth.  Let your will say, ‘The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth.’”