The Occidental Quarterly: Western Perspectives on Man, Culture, and Politics (Winter, 2020-2021)

The Winter issue of The Occidental Quarterly contains 123 pages of scholarly writing on a variety of topics. Andrew Joyce leads off with an article on the middleman minority theory as an attempt to explain the Jews-the essential idea being that in traditional societies and even into the modern world the Jews and other groups such as the Overseas Chinese, as tight-knit ethnic groups were able to fill various economic niches between elites and the rest of the population, such as lending money and forming trans-national trading networks.A major trend in recent scholarship has been to denigrate the achievements of the West, especially in comparison to the Chinese. Ricardo Duchesne shows quite clearly that the Chinese mind was never able to transcend being embedded within their clan-type, kinship-based culture, a culture that led to thought processes highly embedded in a social context. The West, on the other hand, because of its fundamental individualism and analytic thinking style, has exhibited the ability to think in terms of universal concepts independent of context-concepts that are central to science and to understanding how cultures themselves are embedded in historical context.Tomislav Sunic applies his expertise on communism and European politics to the contemporary upsurge in acceptance of an ideology of authoritarian, top-down control associated with the recent successes of the Black Lives Matter and the antifa. "It is a great self-delusion common to many American conservatives, both old and new, to imagine that they can avert the rise of communism by preaching the capitalist gospel of permanent economic growth. Contrary to a well-entrenched communist-Trotskyite dogma, communism can very well thrive in and within a capitalist free market economy."F. Roger Devlin provides an extensive review of Emmanuel Todd's Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus. Todd, an anthropologist and demographer based in France, focuses mainly on variation in family structure around the world, e.g., proposing links between authoritarian, collectivist families and communism. Families are at the deepest level of culture, and they change only very slowly.Brenton Sanderson is a prolific contributor to TOQ and a first-rate thinker on issues related to culture as well as immigration and multiculturalism, especially in his native Australia. Here we present Kevin MacDonald's foreword to Sanderson's Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism. As Sanderson notes in the Introduction, "The Jewish Question is foundational to the demographic transformation of the West, the revolution in its sexual and ethical mores, and to the trajectory of Western politics, art and culture." We can't avoid talking about it if we want to be honest about what is happening. But doing so is a thankless task, a reason for being scorned and ostracized, fired from one's job, barred from influential positions in the media and academic world.Antonius J. Patrick reviews Vicomte Léon de Poncins' Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion which makes clear that Jewish activism had a central role in the tectonic shift in Catholic theology that came about with the Second Vatican Council. "The justification that Jewish intellectuals used was that the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism was the culmination of Gentile oppression and hatred which stemmed back to the time of Constantine's emancipation of the Church and his patronage of it. Once given power, both Church and state persecuted the Jews over the next two millennia."Finally, Andrew Joyce reviews Aaron Sorkin's film on the trial of the Chicago 7. "The overall impression, despite Sorkin's bleaching of Jewishness from the trial, is that of brave, big-hearted Jews and Blacks against cruel WASPs and violent police."