STATEMENT OF PROFESSOR KEVIN MACDONALD

1. I, KEVIN MACDONALD, Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901 USA, will say as follows:-

2. I have a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences from the University of Connecticut. I have published six books (including two edited books) and over 30 academic papers in the area of evolutionary approaches to human behavior, particularly in the field of evolutionary psychology and the application of evolutionary psychology to understanding ethnic conflict in history (e.g., Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis. New York: Plenum, 1988). I am editor of the journal Population and Environment, published by Human Sciences Press, a division of Kluwer Academic Publishers. This journal deals with issues related to the interface between environmental issues and human population, including issues of ethnic conflict. I am also Secretary/Archivist and member of the Executive Board of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the main academic organization dealing with the application of evolutionary biology to the study of human affairs.

3. Since 1991 I have been involved in extending the evolutionary paradigm to the study of Judaism. This project has resulted in three books:

A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CONNECTICUT: Praeger, 1994; 302 pp.) delineates key aspects of Judaism within an evolutionary theory of groups. The basic proposal is that Judaism can be interpreted as a set of ideological structures and behaviors that have resulted in the following features: (1) the segregation of the Jewish gene pool from surrounding gentile societies; (2) resource and reproductive competition with gentile host societies; (3) high levels of within-group cooperation and altruism among Jews; and (4) eugenic efforts directed at producing high intelligence, high investment parenting, and commitment to group, rather than individual, goals.

Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CONNECTICUT: Praeger, 1998; 325 pp.) develops an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism. The basic thesis is that Judaism must be conceptualized as a group strategy characterized by cultural and genetic segregation from gentile societies combined with resource competition and conflicts of interest with segments of gentile societies. This cultural and genetic separatism combined with resource competition and other conflicts of interest tend to result in division and hatred within the society. A major theme of this volume is that intellectual defenses of Judaism and of Jewish theories of anti-Semitism have throughout its history played a critical role in maintaining Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The book discusses tactics Jewish groups have used over the centuries to combat anti-Semitism. Particularly important are discussions of Jewish self-interest, deception, and self-deception in the areas of Jewish historiography, Jewish personal identity, and Jewish conceptualizations of their ingroup and its relations with outgroups.

The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CONNECTICUT: Praeger, 1998; 376 pp.) Ethnic conflict is a recurrent theme throughout the first two volumes, and that theme again takes center stage in this work. However, whereas in the previous works ethnic conflict consisted mainly of recounting the oftentimes bloody dynamics of Jewish-gentile conflict over the broad expanse of historical time, the focus here shifts to a single century and to several very influential intellectual and political movements that have been spearheaded by people who strongly identified as Jews and who viewed their involvement in these movements as serving Jewish interests. Individual chapters discuss the Boasian school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a semi-cryptic manner.

4. The main point of my testimony is that the attacks made on David Irving by Deborah Lipstadt and Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League should be viewed in the long-term context of Jewish-gentile interactions. As indicated by the summaries of my books, my training as an evolutionist as well as the evidence compiled by historians leads me to conceptualize Judaism as self-interested groups whose interests often conflict with segments of the gentile community. Anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been a pervasive feature of the Jewish experience since the beginnings of the Diaspora well over 2000 years ago. While anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior have undoubtedly often been colored by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group competition exactly as expected by an evolutionist. Particularly important have been the themes of separatism-the fact that Jewish groups have typically existed as recognizably distinct groups and have been unwilling to assimilate either culturally or via marriage to the wider society, the theme of economic, political, and cultural domination, and the theme of disloyalty.

Because anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been such a common response to Jews as a Diaspora group, Jewish groups have developed a wide variety of strategies to cope with their enemies. Separation and Its Discontents discusses a great many of these strategies, including a very long history of apologia dating to the ancient world. In the last century there have been a great many intellectual activities, most notably many examples of Jewish historigraphy which present Jews and Judaism in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light, often with little regard for historical accuracy. Most importantly for the situation of David Irving, Jewish groups have engaged in a wide range of political activities to further their interests. In general, Jews have been active agents rather than passive martyrs; they have been highly flexible strategizers in the political arena. The effectiveness of Jewish strategizing has been facilitated by several key features of Judaism as group evolutionary strategy-particularly that the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean. In all historical eras, Jews as a group have been highly organized, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they have been able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their group goals.

For example, Jews engaged in a very wide range of activities to combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1914, including the formation of self-defense committees, lobbying the government, utilizing and influencing the legal system (e.g., taking advantage of libel and slander laws to force anti-Jewish organizations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans, and funding organizations opposed to anti-Semitism composed mainly of sympathetic gentiles. Jewish organizations commissioned writings in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as exemplified by academically respectable publications that portrayed Judaism in negative terms. Academic works were monitored for such material, and Jewish organizations sometimes succeeded in banning offending books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages. The result was to render such ideas academically and intellectually disreputable.

A theme of anti-Jewish writing in the contemporary U. S. has been that Jewish organizations have used their power to make the discussion of Jewish interests off limits. Individuals who have made remarks critical of Jews have been forced to make public apologies and suffered professional difficulties as a result. Quite often the opinions in question are quite reasonable-statements that are empirically verifiable and the sort of thing that might be said about other groups or members of other groups. For example, media critic William Cash (1994), writing for the British magazine The Spectator, described the Jewish media elite as "culturally nihilist," suggesting that he believed Jewish media influence reflects Jewish lack of concern for traditional cultural values. Kevin Myers, a columnist for the British Sunday Telegraph (January 5, 1997) wrote that "we should really be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group, without being called anti-Semitic. Frankness does not feed anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does. The silence of sympathetic discretion can easily be misunderstood as a conspiracy. It is time to be frank about Jews." Myers goes on to note that The Spectator was accused of anti-Semitism when it published the article by William Cash (1994) referred to above. Myers emphasized the point that Cash's offense was that he had written that the cultural leaders of the United States were Jews whose Jewishness remained beyond public discussion.

Cash stated that there is a double standard in which a Jewish writer like Neal Gabler is able to refer to a "Jewish cabal" while his own use of the phrase is described as anti-Semitic. He also noted that while movies regularly portray negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, Cash's description of Jews as "fiercely competitive" was regarded as anti-Semitic. As another example, Marlon Brando repeated statements originally made in 1979 on a nationally televised interview program to the effect that "Hollywood is run by Jews. It's owned by Jews." The focus of the complaint was that Hollywood regularly portrays negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups but not of Jews. Brando's remarks were viewed as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) and the Jewish Defense League (Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1996, F4).

These claims regarding Hollywood are empirically verifiable claims, but the response of major Jewish organizations has been to label the claims "anti-Semitic" and attempt to ruin the careers of the people involved. Both Cash and Brando have apologized for their remarks and, as part of their apologies, visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (Forward, April 26, 1996). (Cash's apology occurred some two years after publication of his remarks.) The Forward article suggests that Cash has had trouble publishing his work in the wake of the incident. Moreover, the same issue of Forward reported that the publisher of Cash's comments, Dominic Lawson, editor of the London Spectator, was prevented from publishing an article on the birth of his Down Syndrome daughter in The New Republic when Martin Peretz, the owner, and Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, complained about Lawson's publishing Cash's article. There is abundant evidence that Peretz strongly identifies as a Jew and for his unabashed policy of slanting his journal toward positions favorable to Israel.

Similarly, Noam Chomsky, the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist, describes his experience with the ADL:

In the United States a rather effective system of intimidation has been developed to silence critique. . . . Take the Anti-Defamation League. . . . It's actually an organization devoted to trying to defame and intimidate and silence people who criticize current Israeli policies, whatever they may be. For example, I myself, through a leak in the new England office of the Anti-Defamation League, was able to obtain a copy of my file there. It's 150 pages, just like an FBI file, [consisting of] interoffice memos warning that I'm going to show up here and there, surveillance of talks that I give, comments and alleged transcripts of talks . . . [T]his material has been circulated [and] . . . would be sent to some local group which would use it to extract defamatory material which would then be circulated, usually in unsigned pamphlets outside the place where I'd be speaking. . . . If there's any comment in the press which they regard as insufficiently subservient to the party line, there'll be a flood of letters, delegations, protests, threats to withdraw advertising, etc. The politicians of course are directly subjected to this, and they are also subjected to substantial financial penalties if they don't go along. . . . This totally one-sided pressure and this, by now, very effective system of vilification, lying, defamation, and judicious use of funds in the political system . . . has created a highly biased approach to the whole matter. (Chomsky 1988, 642-3)

Consider also the comments of columnist Joseph Sobran, who was forced out of his position as columnist at National Review for remarks critical of Israel:

The full story of [Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it's taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls. Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it's highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralyzing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you. It's a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. (Sobran 1996, 3).

It is my view that the campaign to suppress the publication of David Irving's biography of Goebbels (Washington Post, April 4, 1996) is another example of these tactics. After an article by editorial columnist Frank Rich condemning the book appeared in the New York Times (April 3, 1996), the ADL successfully pressured St. Martin's Press to rescind publication despite the fact that this book, relying on previously unknown diaries of its subject, is a major scholarly achievement-an indispensable work for those writing on the history of the Third Reich. Deborah Lipstadt's work contributes to this atmosphere of suppression-particularly her statement that Irving is not a historian. Quite simply, it is widely acknowledged among professional historians such as Gordon Craig, A.J.P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper that David Irving is a brilliant researcher and a compelling writer. His work is required reading for serious students of the Third Reich and World War II.

I suppose that the motivation for this campaign of suppression is because of Irving's involvement in disputes about the nature and extent of the Holocaust-that in the absence of such activity, Irving's biography of Goebbels would have been published without incident. However, I submit that Irving's other activities should not result in the suppression of Irving's historical research and the general denigration of his work that is apparent in Lipstadt's work.. To be sure, Irving, like many historians, may indeed see events through a filter of personal political and intellectual convictions. This is a commonly acknowledged difficulty that afflicts all of the social sciences, and Jewish social scientists have certainly not been immune from these tendencies. In my book Separation and Its Discontents, I devote much of a chapter to many examples of the historigraphy of Jewish history written by Jews-surely not exhaustive-in which there are clear apologetic tendencies-tendencies to view the Jewish ingroup in a favorable manner and to pathologize anti-Semitism as irrational and completely unrelated to the actual behavior of Jews. These works have been published by the most prestigous academic and commercial presses. Other commentators have noticed similar apologetic tendencies in Jewish historiography, including, most notably Albert Lindemann in his recent book Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Revealingly, Lindemann's examples of biased historical research include the work of Jewish Holocaust historians Lucy Dawidowicz and Danial J. Goldhagen-a clear indication that the area of Holocaust studies remains politically charged. Moreover, in The Culture of Critique I describe several highly influential intellectual movements (Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research) that presented themselves as science but were strongly influenced the Jewish ethnic agendas of their founders, particularly combating anti-Semitism.

Intellectual blinders and political agendas are a fact of academic life. However, even were it to be proved that David Irving does indeed bring a certain set of biases to his work, even the most biased researchers may well contribute invaluable scholarship. Science emerges when the work of all investigators becomes part of the marketplace of ideas and when scholars are not vilified and their scholarship censored simply because their conclusions fly in the face of contemporary orthodoxy.

Cash, W. (1994). Kings of the deal. The Spectator (29 October): 14-16.

Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Politics. Black Rose Books: Montreal-New York.

Sobran, J. (1996). The Buchanan frenzy. Sobran's (March): 3-4

SIGNED: .....

KEVIN MACDONALD,

Professor of Psychology

California State University-Long Beach,

Long Beach,

CA 90840-0901 USA