David Duke Gets It Wrong About So-Called Khazar Theory—Again

by Jonas E. Alexis

I have discovered a long time ago that some people love to posit extraordinary claims but are not willing to follow those same claims to their logical conclusions. When you take time to point out where the issues lie and why the statement that Jewish behavior is genetic is logically incoherent and morally irresponsible, they just repeat the same old vacuous argument as if logic does not mean much to them.

Being incapable of criticizing Darwin, they simply surrendered to his intellectually contradictory worldview, in so far as they understood it, to the detriment of their own understanding.

I have argued for years that if Jewish behavior is genetic, then you cannot condemn it morally precisely because whatever happens genetically will inevitably happen consequently. As Richard Dawkins himself notes, “DNA neither cares nor knows.”[1]

From a Darwinian point of view, we are just “selfish genes.”[2] As science philosopher and popularizer, Daniel Dennett has said, “We are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all.”[3]

Moreover, the same “scientists” who posit the claim that Jewish behavior is genetic also maintain that morality is an illusion. Some of those same “scientists” have been caught numerous times deliberately tampering with the data.

So, there is no morality, but people want to condemn the behavior on morality! If people cannot see this obvious contradiction, then they are either working with a doctrine that does not allow them to think properly or they cannot understand reason.

There is more. If genes are the arbiter of our behavior, we are therefore doomed to “survival of the fittest.” The strongest genes will survive, and the weakest ones must be eliminated. This was exactly what Darwin and his staunch followers predicted. Social Darwinists picked that theme up and spread it across the continent.[4]

In response to the “Khazarian theory,” which makes far more provisional sense than its alternative, David Duke has recently raised written:

“Interestingly enough, the Khazar theory was launched, and is still to this day, driven primarily by Communist Jews and other Jews who promote it in the Gentile community as a refutation that the Jews can’t be racist because they are not a race!

“It is ironic that the three most prominent exponents of the theory that ‘the Jews are not a race’ all have almost exaggerated caricatures of features people ascribe as Jewish.”

First of all, the so-called Khazar theory predated Arthur Koestler, Eran Elhaik, and Slomo Sand. Koestler wrote The Thirteenth Tribe back in 1976. The old Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) and the new Jewish Encyclopedia (1962) were saying the same thing long before Koestler and others came on the scene.

Duke should have done a little digging. If he did know that the Jewish Encyclopedia had already dealt with this issue long before Koestler and others, I wonder why he has never addressed this.

Then Duke implicitly argues that there is a good chance that the theory might be wrong largely because Koestler, Elhaik, and Sand were all communists. This is a textbook example of the genetic fallacy. It is the idea that you cannot quickly invalidate a person’s belief by simply showing how it originated. Though sometimes this can be true, it is not always the case at all. And it doesn’t seem to be the case here.

For example, suppose little Johnny picks up a comic book from a trashcan that basically states that Joseph Stalin slaughtered no less than thirty million people. Is the statement wrong because little Johnny got it from a comic book, let alone from a trashcan?

But let us suppose that Duke is right. Then he still has to carry a huge burden. For centuries, rabbis from all walks of life have been saying that Jewish behavior is genetic. I am pretty sure that Duke would not consider Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson a nice guy. But he was propounding what Duke is currently postulating.

So, should we disregard what Duke is saying because Schneerson was a bad guy and was saying the same thing?

Duke is basically regurgitating what Darwin and his followers have propounded over the years. I have argued in numerous articles that the Darwinian paradigm is intrinsically contradictory and incoherent.

If one takes the paradigm seriously, it predicted that wars and conflicts are things that will get the so-called strongest ahead. Darwin’s book was entitled The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin was so sure about his theory that he later wrote in the Descent of Man:

“We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of everyone to the last moment…

“[If we] do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world.”[5]

Duke, a proponent of Darwinism, should be happy about what “Jewish supremacism” is doing in much of the West and the Middle East precisely because that was exactly what his intellectual father predicted and accepted.

Duke constantly inveighs against “Jewish supremacists” who do not want to go by morality and international rule of law, but Darwin and his intellectual children themselves would have taken issues with Duke here because they did not believe that morality is objective!

Friedrich Nietzsche, who himself criticized Darwin but embraced him unconsciously,[6] saw this as a huge problem. Will Durant, interpreting and citing Nietzsche, wrote:

“If life is a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive, then strength is the ultimate virtue, and weakness the only fault. Good is that which survives, which wins; bad is that which gives way and fails. Only the mid-Victorian cowardice of the English Darwinians, and the bourgeois respectability of French positivists and German socialists, could conceal the inevitableness of this conclusion.

“These men were brave enough to reject Christian theology, but they did not dare to be logical, to reject the moral ideas, the worship of meekness and gentleness and altruism, which had grown out of theology.”[7]

Durant moves on to say:

“Darwin unconsciously completed the work of the Encyclopedists: they had removed the theological basis of modern morals, but they had left that morality itself untouched and inviolate, hanging miraculously in the air; a little breath of biology was all that was needed to clear away this remnant of imposture.”[8]

This is certainly true. Almost all of the Encyclopedists ended up denying a key element of morality and interpreting nature in a completely materialistic way. La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine—Man: a Machine—was based on the premise that man is just matter and chemistry.[9] D’Holbach started with his materialistic idea and forced it upon reason and science.

Other philosophes did the same thing. Aldous Huxley wrote that the reason La Mettrie formulated his materialistic worldview was not primarily because of intellectual reasons, but because his “predominantly erotic” desires compelled him to do so, as indicated at the end of L’Homme Machine.[10]

If Darwin can talk about “favored races,” who is David Duke to tell Jewish supremacists that they are not part of what Darwin envisioned? On what basis should we judge whether a “race” is ornately favored?

In The Descent of Man, Darwin clearly understood that his principle would create havoc if applied consistently. “At some future period,” he lamented, “not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”[11]

Other British intellectuals quickly digested that idea with great speed. Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” added,

“The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong…are the decrees of a large far-seeing providence.”[12]

Darwin himself put a similar spin on this issue. “The very poor and reckless,” Darwin lamented, “who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life.”[13]

There is no doubt that Social Darwinism was a logical extension of Darwin’s own ideas,

“which envisaged the individual members of any given species competing against each other for the available resources—out of which competition the fittest individuals survived, perpetuated their kind, and thus contributed to the betterment and evolution of their species.”[14]

Sir Arthur Keith, anthropologist and Darwin’s biographer, was indeed a pacifist. But given that he was a Darwin sympathizer, he could not see anything wrong with wiping out the weak through wars, “for the real health of humanity and the building of stronger races.”[15]

This brings us to a central point. I have said this before and I will say it again: Darwin’s intellectual children cannot logically condemn Zionism or “Jewish supremacism” without contradicting themselves or without dumping Darwin’s ideology in the dustbin.

If survival of the fittest is actually true, aren’t Zionists or Jewish ideologues thriving to survive, eliminating rival competitions through deceptive means? What are the moral parameters? No serious Darwinist has ever been able to get out of that contradiction without abandoning Darwin’s central thesis.

In fact, Darwin was confronted with this dilemma right after the publication of the Origin of Species. A Manchester newspaper quickly realized that Darwin was logically advertising the idea that “might is right” and that “every cheating tradesman is also right.” Darwin disagreed with no serious justification. Yet one year before he died, Charles Darwin proved that his critics were right all along. He said,

“I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is!

“The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”[16]

Interestingly enough, Darwin lived by contradiction throughout much of his intellectual life. He said in the Origin of Species:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”[17]

Yuri Slezkine of the University of California[18] has told us that the twentieth century belongs to “Jewish supremacism.” Perhaps this was the “civilized race” that Darwin was talking about.

Darwin did not like the logical consequences of his ideas any more than Duke does. But Darwin ended up living in contradiction because he had no other alternative. In fact, many of his disciples and admirers were quite shocked to realize that Darwin did not want to take his ideas to their logical conclusions.

Darwin’s ideas would have long been abandoned and placed in the dustbin of history had it not been for capitalism, which E. Michael Jones defines as “state-sponsored usury.”[19] In fact, people like Spencer “provided the defenders of laissez-faire capitalism with the intellectual justification to oppose state interference in the market forces.”[20] Noted historian of biology and prolific scholar Peter J. Bowler notes that Darwin

“projected the competitive ethos of capitalism onto nature and then bent all his observations to fit into the pattern imposed by his own mind. Darwin did not discover natural selection: he invented it and then sold it to a world that was only too willing to see its own values provided with a ‘natural’ justification.

“The scientists’ efforts to portray Darwin as a purely objective researcher are merely a device used to conceal the ideological foundations of science itself.”[21]

Modern Darwinists like Michael Shermer would agree that capitalism and Darwin’s survival of the fittest or cut-throat competition are concentric circles. Shermer also agrees that Darwin and Adam Smith had a kindred spirit when it came to the philosophical understanding of the struggle for existence. “Darwin scholars largely agree that he modeled his theory of natural selection after Smith’s theory of the invisible hand.”[22]

“Survival of the fittest” was first coined by Herbert Spencer, but Darwin spread it in the political spectrum. It was quickly picked up by Spencer’s devoted disciples, namely, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who used it in economic dealings.[23]

In his autobiography, Carnegie declared that he himself used to travel with Spencer.[24] After Carnegie fell under Darwin’s and Spencer’s theories, he admitted that “I began to view the various phases of human life from the standpoint of an evolutionist.”[25]

In a similar vein, John D. Rockefeller declared:

“The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. . . . This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature.”[26]

Scholar Stephen T. Asma writes,

“James G. Kennedy, in his book Herbert Spencer, informs us that in 1896 ‘three justices of the Supreme Court were avowed Spencerians and participated in decisions recognizing corporations as individuals, and disallowing government regulation of contracts with regard to hours of work, a minimum wage, or child labor.’ Spencer himself adamantly opposed all state aid to the poor on the grounds that it would be an interference with the ‘natural’ developmental process.

“In other words, unpleasant though it might at first seem, we must stand aside and let the Malthusian forces crush the weak and incompetent, the homeless and jobless—but we can take some consolation in the fact that it was ‘fated’ by nature to happen.”[27]

What we are seeing here is that Darwin’s idea, as a philosopher of science and Darwin admirer Michael Ruse himself has argued, is an ideology that has moral and intellectual consequences.[28] Why did intellectuals quickly gravitate toward that ideology? Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin provided some answers back in 1997:

“We take the side of science [Darwinian evolution] in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[29]

In other words, you cannot provide a serious critique of the theory because people like Lewontin will not allow it. Then you have Darwinists repeatedly saying, “You see, no serious scientist doubts the theory.”

Well, duh! Look what happens if you do doubt it or provide a genuine rebuttal to it. A classic example would be Thomas Nagel of New York University. For years, Nagel maintained that Darwinian evolution provides the best explanation for life.[30]

But Nagel dropped that position in his recent book Mind and Cosmos, in which he cogently argues that “the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.” Instead of responding to Nagel’s arguments in a rational manner, Daniel Dennett said:

“I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang. They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

Biologist Jerry Coyne commented, “Nagel is a teleologist, and although not an explicit creationist, his views are pretty much anti-science and not worth highlighting.” Without an iota of coherent rationality, Coyne even likened Nagel’s conclusion to astrology.[31]

Michael Chorost of the Chronicle of Higher Education seemed to have been puzzled by Coyne’s comment because

“The odd thing is, however, that for all of this academic high dudgeon, there actually are scientists—respected ones, Nobel Prize-winning ones—who are saying exactly what Nagel said, and have been saying it for decades. Strangely enough, Nagel doesn’t mention them. Neither has his critics. This whole imbroglio about the philosophy of science has left out the science.”32]

What we are seeing here is that people like Dennett and Coyne are using “science” in a promiscuous way. I see the same thing with David Duke. He cites an article by the Jewish Daily Forward which had a headline entitled: “Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal.”

But Duke did not even tell his readers that the same Jewish Daily Forward published a later article entitled: “’Jews a Race’ Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert.” It was actually based on the work of Eran Elhaik. Elhaik was criticizing the work of Harry Ostrer, who previously published a pretentiously scholarly book entitled, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. Elhaik simply asked Ostrer a scientific question:

“It was a great pleasure reading your group’s recent paper, ‘Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,’ that illuminate[s] the history of our people. Is it possible to see the data used for the study?”

This is not a communist question. If Ostrer professes to go by the scientific method, then he would be more than happy to present the data to other scientists like Elhaik. But Ostrer had other purposes in mind:

“Ostrer replied that the data are not publicly available. ‘It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do,’ he wrote. ‘Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people.’”[33]

Is Ostrer’s behavior here a representation of a serious scientist? If you say yes, then this is an infallible sign that you are again under an ideological system that does not allow you to see things the way they really are.

Sadly, David Duke mentioned none of these issues in his article. Sadly, he could never tell his readers that many other scientists have tempered the data to fit their ideological hermeneutics. In fact, this has had a long tradition in the sciences.[34]

Here is the conclusion. If Duke wants people to take him seriously, he needs to address the fundamental issues. Furthermore, he needs to tell us forthrightly how “Jewish supremacists” can get rid of their bad behavior. He also needs to tell us how Christ and his disciples and even people like Gilad Atzmon and Mortimer Adler and Jews over the centuries got rid of theirs. When Alan Colmes raised a similar question to Duke, he responded:

“Certainly [Christ] spoke a doctrine that was diametrically opposed to what Judaism was and is…The Talmud is the core of Judaism. It is an extremely racist and ethnocentric religion.”

Precisely. This is where the issue begins and ends. It is this Talmud that allows rabbis from the first century to this very day to say weird things.[35] It is that particular book that eventually provided the political and ideological worldview of “Jewish supremacists.” They have embraced its political or subversive ideology directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. This is why Benjamin Netanyahu can say that Israel’s legal system is based on the Talmud.[36]

The fact that Christ spent much of his ministry trying to persuade the rabbis of his day to come to grips with metaphysical Logos actually proves that the issue is not really genetic. If it were, then Christ and his disciples were stupid to reason with those people.

If the rabbis were just machines or robots, as modern Darwinists propound, then there was no way for them to change their behavior. This is not a hard concept, and David Duke needs to address these issues before he can move to his next point. His last interaction with E. Michael Jones doesn’t seem to show that he will ever address these issues logically precisely because he is operating under a system that does not allow him to see things the way they really are.

It is a little disappointing because Duke does have a good grasp of Zionism and how the West has been bamboozled by “Jewish supremacism.” I would certainly recommend many of his videos, but it is really frustrating because he doesn’t want to follow his own worldview to its logical conclusions.

Citations

• [1] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 155.
• [2] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
• [3] Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2003), 2-3.
• [4] See for example Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Decline of Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
• [5] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, 1936), 901.
• [6] For points of contention on these issues, see John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Gilles Deleuze and Hugh Tomlinson, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); Dirk R. Johnson, Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965 and 1999).
• [7] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926 and 1961), 401.
• [8] Ibid., 402.
• [9] See Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
• [10] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 272.
• [11] Darwin, The Descent of Man, 112.
• [12] Quoted Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 317.
• [13] Ibid., 326.
• [14] Ibid., 318.
• [15] Ibid.
• [16] Ibid., 319.
• [17] Darwin, Origin of Species, 459.
• [18] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
• [19] See his recent study, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014).
• [20] Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 35.
• [21] Peter J. Bowler, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8.
• [22] Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: How Biology and Psychology Shape Our Economic Lives (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008), 24; see also James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Economics in the Shadow of Darwin and Marx: Essays on Institutional and Evolutionary Themes (London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006).
• [23] See for example Stephen T. Asma, “the New Social Darwinism: Derving Your Destitution,” The American Humanist Association, September/October 1993.
• [24] Andrew Carnegie, The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (London: Constable & Company, 1920), chapter 25.
• [25] Ibid., 168.
• [26] Quoted in Asma, “the New Social Darwinism: Derving Your Destitution,” The American Humanist Association, September/October 1993.
• [27] Ibid.
• [28] Michael Ruse, “How Evolution Became a Religion,” National Post, May 13, 2000; “Is Darwinism a Religion?,” Huffington Post, September 21, 2011.
• [29] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” New York Review of Books, January 1997.
• [30] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130-131.
• [31] Michael Chorost, “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2013.
• [32] Ibid.
• [33] Rita Rubin, “’Jews a Race’ Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert,” Jewish Daily Forward, May 7, 2013.
• [34] See for example J. S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Frank Spencer, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Eugenie Samuel Reich, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010); Robert Bell, Impure Science: Fraud, Compromise and Political Influence in Scientific Research (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1992); Horace Freeland Judson, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2004).
• [35] See for example Peter Schaffer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
• [36] Marissa Newman, “Netanyahu reported to say legal system based on Talmud,” Time of Israel, May 8, 2014.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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