Keynes was a racist – shock horror.

Keynes once said, "We should encourage small political and cultural units. It would be a fine thing to have thirty or forty capital cities in Europe, each the center of a self-governing country entirely free from national minorities (who would be dealt with my migrations where necessary).”

Well that’s a bit un-PC, to put it mildly. In fact if you expressed the above sentiment nowadays, the politically correct would explode with contrived righteous indignation.

Of course it could be argued that Europeans are so similar racially, that the above idea of Keynes’s is not racist. However, anyone repeating the above sentiments nowadays would most certainly be accused of racism, not to mention xenophobia, Nazism, and every other expletive imaginable.

Incidentally I got the above quote from "Where Keynes Went Wrong" by Hunter Lewis, p.316. And he got it from "John Maynard Keynes" by Robert Skidelsky (vol3) p.218.


It get’s worse, or funnier (take your pick).

Another interesting bit of historical “shock horror” is that for several years after WWII, the British political left favoured Eugenics: that is denying those with defects the right to reproduce, or even disposing of them. And Eugenics is of course traditionally associated with Nazism.

Indeed The Guardian (Britain’s leading left of centre broadsheet newspaper) had doubts about the National Health Service when it was first set up, and on the grounds that the NHS would make it easier the feckless and defective to survive and reproduce.

Now this will of course have the sanctimonious section of Britain’s political left baffled. That is, they’ll be baffled as to how intelligent people, particularly left of centre intelligent people can accept the above sort of views. But that just illustrates the ignorance of the sanctimonious section of the political left in 2012.

The explanation is that the views adhered to by both political left and political right have nothing to do with REASON, as Simon Jenkins recently pointed out.

In other words if you try arguing in favour of Eugenics or preserving European sub-cultures (as per Keynes), you’d get nowhere. And it wouldn’t matter how good your arguments were, because REASON does not determine political views. What DOES DETERMINE political views is fashion, propaganda, the conventional wisdom, and so on.

Put another way, 90% of the human race (the intelligentsia included) are robots: they’ll think what they are told to think, and do what they’re told to do. The current deficit hysteria in the U.S., brought about in part by the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of propaganda funded by Pete Peterson is an example.

Or put it yet another way, if you are born into a society where a popular form of entertainment consists watching lions eat Christians in your local Colosseum then there is a 90% chance you’ll be happy watching lions eat Christians.

Or as Edmund Burke put it, “Custom reconciles us everything.”

As to Eugenics, there is a perfectly good argument in favour of Eugenics, namely that what with modern medicine and comfortable 21st century lifestyles, the genetic quality of the human race will be deteriorating, because survival of the fittest no longer operates to any great extent. That deterioration may in the future be countered by gene therapy of some sort. But if not, and if you want the human race to survive, then Eugenics is the only way forward.

Of course the latter argument could be flawed. I’m happy to listen to geneticists or similarly well qualified persons who think there is indeed a flaw there.

But don’t expect a reasoned response to the latter argument from the politically correct.

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