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Sunday, November 17, 2019

DAVID REICH CH 11 LOT OF DOUBLE TALK

He argues from a Whig contemporary concept of racial stereotypes, and reduces that concept itself to a false paper tiger of primordial racial purity.

That may have been what it was for some in the 19th and 20th Centuries, but the concept of purity was only one aspect of the concept of race, and many were less concerned about primordial racial purity than about characteristic differences among races regardless of how old they were or of what their origin re population mixing in prehistory happened to be. Racial differences were there before the eyes of everyone, regardless of whether they derived from a pure or an impure lineage, and regardless of how far back it happened to have gone.

The extreme cases he discusses of very long duration complete endogamy surely must have had element of racial stereotyping and prejudice associated with them, visible ways of identifying appropriate from inappropriate groups and individuals for mating, or even social interaction.

It appears that endogamy was the rule rather than the exception for many populations, whereas mixture was normally the product of aggression, whether caused by population and environmental pressures, cultural traditions, or other things.

Natural or unnatural selection seems to have played little or no part in some mixture and population replacement outcomes, which owe more, surely, to racially marked rivalries, the effects of numbers, disease, migration, flight, etc,  than to them. Neanderthals were not selected against. They were fought against.

Get some good images of what modern humans and Neanderthals each looked like, based on the best genetic information available, and it will look to you, as it looked to them, like a race war, or better still, a war between two different well defined kinds of creatures.

It seems unlikely that either of them grounded their rivalry on arguments of racial impurity of the other of the kind that motivated Nazism and that accords with Reich's restricted population purity definition of racism.

But see also Reich's reference to the Rig Veda and his discussion of impurity there to justify invasion and population replacement of the ANI by West Eurasians, and my comment on that here. 

As I said elsewhere, even if a Whiggish interpretation of the  the West Eurasians as having been  wrong about the purity of their population lineage were true, their false purity belief would tell nothing against the truth and the reality of their racial differences from the ANI whom they conquered, enslaved, and interbred with.

The fact that the West Eurasians themselves were an impure mixture left untouched the obvious racial and genetic differences between them and the highly endogamous (more pure, ironically) ANI. 

The ANI and the West Eurasian were obviously racially and genetically different from each other, whether the West Eurasians were pure or not, and in fact whether the ANI were pure, or thought they were pure or not, either!

Just to give you a modern, non Whig illustration, think about Tocqueville's reference to Northern white racism. It was more intense than in the South.  

It seems to me that such racism had little here to do with a concept of racial purity, although a stigma for racial mixing did play a part. It had more to do with fear, economic rivalry, and a religious superstitious concept of evil associated with the black throughout history, but also a religious concept of religious impurity from the Old Testament re Moses' negro wife.

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