Scientists against Science

I am a Swede, born in 1919 in Finland, and I spent my childhood and adolescence in a couple of small towns within the Swedish speaking belt along the Gulf of Finland. As a member of a somewhat pushed-aside minority I soon realized the importance of legal rights for every individual in a community. I became an ardent opponent of totalitarianism and dictatorship. I was especially indignant over the National-socialist rule in Germany that denied rather elementary rights to some of the German citizens, however good it was for the great majority of the voters. Hitler's occupation of Bohemia-Moravia and his attack on Poland that unleashed World War II strengthened my aversion to the utmost. I realized that a large part of Europe could soon fall in the hands of a totally irresponsible dictator.

Soon, however, my own country was hit in the same way by another dictator, who appeared to be just as evil. We all, Finns and Finland-Swedes alike, tried to do our very best to hold our ground against the enemy. Personally, I served in the Finnish Civil Defence in the Winter War 1939-40 and later in the Finnish Coastal Defence in the Continuation War in 1941 and 1944. I had not been drafted, but I regarded it important that Finland should get back the territories that had been unlawfully acquired from my country. Before the war and between the periods of service, I studied architecture and urban planning in Helsinki and Stockholm. When the war ended, I learnt that the Germans had exterminated six million Jews together with a lot of Gentiles. I understood that the totally irresponsible Hitler had complete control over every man and woman in the German controlled area, so I naturally accepted the report that he had ordered all the Jews within this area to be exterminated and that the order had been effected by his obedient subjects.

After the war, I worked as an urban planner, mainly with investigatory assignments in connection with master plans, expropriations of large estates, etc. I found it necessary to use something like scientific methods in this kind of work. I soon took an interest in the sciences in general, and I have published several articles on scientific problems, especially after my retirement. I came to realize that the scientific method is applicable to historical research as well, and indeed is necessary if one wants to find out what happened in the past. Too many historians apply themselves to pondering about the causes and consequences of some version of events regarded as 'facts' – without making sure whether they have happened or not. Some time in the 1980s I heard rumors about historians who had called into question the German murder of six million Jews. I realized that I had never seen any detailed account specifying time, place, and method for this monstrous crime. So I started to look out for such an account and found the great work written by Raul Hilberg,[1] which seemed to satisfy my requirements.

A careful reading of Hilberg revealed, however, that his figures were merely assumptions, and I had to look for other books as well. Soon I came across a book, in which I encountered a certain Professor Robert Faurisson. Although he did not have all the answers, I realized that his method for solving knotty historical questions was certainly the right one. The more I have read of his writings, the more I have come to admire the strict exactitude that is his hallmark. I have made this exactitude my guiding-star as well.

Even if my studies have been mostly in other fields than National Socialist persecution of Jews, I realized that I could do my share also in this field. I simply made it my task to gather all the biographic notes in the Encyclopedia Judaica that dealt with Jewish personalities subject to German ruling during World War II. Thus, I could make sure what actually happened to at least one significant group of intended victims.[2] Below I have tried to demonstrate how some historians and scientists have grossly neglected the most elementary rules of their own profession – in flagrant contrast to the spirit of Robert Faurisson.

Introduction

In about 2,000 years, the prerequisites existed for people to realize that the earth is a ball that revolves round its axis. It is known that the Greek philosopher Ekphantos in the fourth century BC had arrived at this conception. Many others may of course have arrived at the same conclusion during these 2,000 years. In that case none of them were so bold as to express his opinion and the reason for it in public.

Instead, both laymen and astronomers stuck to a theory that did not tally as well with the observations but was maintained by authorities like Aristotle and the Catholic Church. It is commonly held that such a belief in authorities and 'notorious truths' belongs only to the past. This is, however, by no means the case.

It is true that both Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), after some hesitation, ventured to argue in favor of Ekphantos's theory. But even after their days, many scientists and scholars have accepted fallacies and forgeries that they have been qualified to expose. Witch trials continued to be performed during centuries. As late as 1757-1763 one was held in Sweden. This was 80 years after the Swedish doctor Urban Hiärne (1641-1724) had shown that the confessions were not based on actual events. Other scholars and scientists would probably have realized that Hiärne was right, but if so they kept silent.

In the 1920's, the microscopes reached such degree of resolution that one could count the number of chromosomes in the cells of various animals. It appeared that most mammals had 48 chromosomes in each cell. The determination of the exact number was still a bit difficult and someone reported having seen 48 chromosomes also in a human cell. And, after all, man is a mammal and should share fundamental properties with his relatives. So the number of 48 became a 'fact.' and this number was stated in all reference books and biological works well into the 1950s. At that time there were already plenty of microscopes with much better resolution. Lots of researchers must have looked at chromosomes in human cells and counted them. They must have arrived at a number of 46 – and kept strictly silent about their discovery.

Afterwards, the biological establishment must have regarded this neglect as so embarrassing that a veil of silence was drawn over it. One looks in vain for the names of the brave persons who in the 1950s succeeded in bringing out publicly what many others had already known.

The Big Bang

Still today there are a number of theories about reality, the tenability and acceptance of which are built on man's ingrained opinions and wishes. At the same time these theories do not comply with the criteria that apply to what is understood as scientific theories.

One of these theories concerns the putative primordial explosion, commonly known as the 'Big Bang.' And just as the astronomers for thousands of years had to set out from the earth as the center of the universe, so they are today obliged to submit to a similar reservation.

Instead of geocentricism we now have the 'Big Bang' theory, a modern myth of creation (originally made up by the Belgian cosmologist Georges Lemaître, 1894-1966). As long as the geocentric theory was compulsory, it was necessary to construct immensely complicated orbits for the various planets in order to make the observations fit the theory.

The Big Bang theory now requires making use of alternative theories about the elementary particles, partly such as to confirm the noted observations, partly such as to confirm the hypothetical state immediately after the bang. A great deal of work is put in on describing this imaginary state, which can never be open for observation or verification.

The Big Bang theory also implies that time becomes an absolute concept, which is tantamount to disposing of the well-founded theory of relativity in a certain respect.

Just like the theory that the earth is a disc with an edge, we are now demanded to accept a theory of space-time shaped like a cone with a tip. An enormous amount of work is devoted to calculating and describing the properties of this purported tip – actually far more than was spent on describing that edge of the earth during the centuries.

Sophisticated explanations for a delusion?[3]

All other large-scale cosmological phenomena are nowadays interpreted with the aid of the theory of relativity. This has proved to be a good guide for understanding physical events of magnitudes far removed from human scale. The theory tells us that although space and time appear as two incompatible phenomena on our human scale, in the world of cosmology they nevertheless lose their distinctive characters, so to speak. There they become aspects related to the observer, somewhat like the directions called 'up' and 'down.' Only space-time as a whole may be treated as an invariant to all observers. In flagrant contrast to this, the Big Bang theory requires the dimension called time to be a finite and linear phenomenon and the dimensions of space to be limitless and curved, in which case time and space would seem to be clearly distinguishable from each other.

The Big Bang theory asserts that the extension of space-time is limited backwards in the time dimension, and that the density of matter was infinitely large at a certain point of time. These assertions do not follow from observations or measurements, nor do they follow from the applying of the natural laws that summarize our experience so far. On the contrary! The accepted laws of nature definitely exclude a state such as the Big Bang theory would imply. It is certainly possible to construct alternative cosmological theories that comply with the known laws of nature. The Swedish Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén has shown at least that much.

The observational basis for the Big Bang theory is weak indeed. If all the paths of cosmic objects are extrapolated backwards in time, they do not coincide in one point. Instead of the relation between velocity and distance being the same for all galaxies it differs by up to 20 percent.[4] Even colliding galaxies have been observed. Looking at parts of the universe in the remote time and distance, we find that the mean distance between cosmic objects was then smaller than in the near-by regions and that interaction between galaxies (perhaps even merger) was more common.²[5] (That is to say, the galaxies behave as gas molecules enclosed in an expanding vessel, not as particles scattering after an explosion.

Time in the Big Bang theory is comparable to the straight lines that can be drawn on the surface of a cone from its apex, while space resembles the ellipses etc. that are formed by the conic sections. The space-time of the theory of relativity, on the other hand, may be likened with the surface of a torus (the shape of a donut). On such a surface some of the closed curves do converge but without anywhere being infinitely tightly packed together. This surface helps us forming a concept of time being curved s well as space, only in another direction, so to speak.

Clearly, the Big Bang theory implies a deviation from the theories that are based on observations. Nevertheless the Big Bang theory is commonly accepted and hardly debated seriously among the physicists. Even the very useful theory of relativity has become subject to more critical books and articles than the Big Bang theory.

It did not help Professor Hannes Alfvén that he possessed the prestige of being a Nobel laureate when he criticized the Big Bang theory. The rest of the establishment just wouldn't listen to him when he tried to indicate the possibility of a cosmology in conformity with current deductive theories.

It reminds one of Galilei who indisputably was a distinguished astronomer with a good name and highly respected but nonetheless reduced to silence.

Alfvén also showed that the Big Bang theory does not explain what it purports to explain, i.e., the genesis and structure of the universe. Given that everything started with a limited quantity of almost infinitely dense matter, the questions remain: How was this dense matter created? How was time created (or was there a time before Big Bang)?

Furthermore, the Big Bang theory requires supplementary theories in order to explain the very unequal distribution of matter in space with groups of galaxies and groups of galaxy groups.

The sole observation that is held to confirm exactly with the Big Bang theory is a certain microwave radiation of low temperature that reaches us from all directions. Alfvén claimed that the temperature was lower than the theory would imply. Anyway, we have hardly seen any effort to find alternative explanations of the origin of this radiation.

The reason why the establishment physicists adhere to the Big Bang theory does of course not mean that they have thought it through and found it to be convincing. Most probably, each of them has noticed that the theory is 'established' and that the unwritten laws of the establishment require that its members do not call established theories in question.

The same situation prevails with regard to the dating of the genesis of the human species. Most specialists in this field stick to the five million years theory in spite of the evidence from the calculation based on the number of mutations that points to the double. Remember also the long period, during which the number of 48 chromosomes was beyond dispute.

At one time, in the days of Galilei and Bruno, it was the Catholic Church that was responsible for the conservatism among science. Today, the body of scientists themselves seems to have taken over the assignment of curbing the progress of science.

Thus the Big Bang theory has more or less superseded the 'Flat-Earth-axiom' as a heavy brake block that is effectively curbing cosmological thinking of today. Would not this be reason enough to dispose of the Big Bang theory, at least temporarily, and try some theory more in congruence with the theory of relativity?

Of course, this is a utopian thought. The reason why this will not happen is the fact that an enormous amount of scientific literature based on the Big Bang postulate has been accumulated. Most of this literature would turn into waste paper over night if the Big Bang theory were to be discarded. That is something that most astronomers would experience as almost a catastrophe to be avoided at all costs.

Shakespeare

From cosmology and physics, we now take a leap over to the humanities, more exactly to literary history. And just as in the case of cosmology it will not be a question of some peripheral detail. No, the authorship of some of the most esteemed dramas in history, including Hamlet, is at stake. In other words, who wrote the works of William Shakespeare?

Ever since the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) in his Essais de critique et d'histoire (1858) emphasized certain observable elements as essential for the coming into being of literary works, the environment has been reckoned as such an element. Whenever the author of a certain work is unknown or his identity is uncertain, a study of the work may nevertheless reveal his environment. That is to say, one will usually find quite evident connections between the work and the life experiences, the social class, the activities, etc. of its author.

Take some of the more recent dramatists, and you will find in their plays surroundings and experiences that were familiar to the author. For example, Eugene O'Neill, the foremost American dramatist, has obviously revived much of his own life in his plays. We may notice the setting in Desire under the Elms and Ah, Wilderness! and compare them with the places where he spent his young days. The same with Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis (Main Street/Brainerd, Minn.), William Faulkner (Yoknapatawpha County/the South) and many others. In Shakespeare's plays we find nothing of the sort. Instead, we notice foreign settings in more than half of his plays and historically given settings in most of the remainder. We find no setting in a country town, nothing about the life behind the scenes of a London theater. How could Shakespeare neglect to use the resources consisting of all the surroundings that were familiar to him? Other authors seem to have considered this a virtual gold mine.

These authors and their works have been portrayed and analyzed by a number of literary historians, and an important part of the analysis has been precisely to demonstrate the influence of the surroundings. Not so when it comes to Shakespeare. According to the establishment in the field of literary history, this author grew up in a country town and as an adult earned his living as an actor in London. But in his works we find no English country town setting and nothing about life behind the scenes of a theater.

The environment that appears rather distinctly in several of Shakespeare's dramas is something entirely different. To begin with, the language reveals a certain addiction to the dialect spoken in a belt lying north of a line from Chester in the west to Hull in the east. It is usually called the Northern dialect. Out of the more than 150 dialectal words found in Shakespeare's works, two thirds are not used outside Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, the counties that constitute the said belt. The remaining third is composed of words with a wider circulation and words specific for Scotland and/or the northernmost part of England. There are no reports about Shakespeare having ever lived in the northern part of England, and it is considered certain that he did not live there during his childhood and adolescence when his linguistic habit was formed.

Also the social environment that emerges from the dramas is rather clearly defined. We note, e.g., 26 different words for horse that occur altogether 430 times, and 43 appellations for dog used on 430 occasions. Sheep and lambs are mentioned 126 times, game hunted by the landed gentry 223 times. Pigs and laying hens normally held by burgesses and townsmen are more sparingly mentioned, the hen nine times, chickens ten times, while the rooster shows off with 23 references. Words for ducks, geese, and turkeys are on the same level.

Turning now to food and drink, we note that the bard managed to include no less than eight brands of wine in different parts of his works, as well as some hundred dishes, exquisite sweets and spices.

The leisure pursuits of the peerage and gentry, such as tennis, bowling, and falconry, are granted their proper attention in Shakespeare.

Also, there can be no mistake about the bard being thoroughly acquainted with medicine. His knowledge of medicine is surpassed only by his familiarity with law and jurisprudence. Many of his medical and legal terms are of the type seldom used by other than professionals.

It is striking that Shakespeare in most cases chooses foreign places as the scene for his non-historical plays. It is only The Merry Wives of Windsor that plays in contemporary English environment, but then all the scenes are placed within reach of a Royal Castle. In almost all the plays, except this one, there is at least one duke, prince, or king among the parts.

Uncountable scenes play at court, and the author seems to be wholly familiar with courteous customs. As far as I know, nobody has discovered any marked departure from what other sources tell us about the court customs.

Normally, all this would have been analyzed in detail by the literary historians, who in that case would have arrived at the conclusion that the author of Shakespeare's works cannot be a son of a townsman without university education who never sat his foot outside England. This procedure has not been performed. The professionals have not drawn the natural conclusion. Instead, some of them presented elaborate hypotheses about how the ordinary Stratfordian might have acquired all the knowledge that the dramatist demonstrably possessed.

The reason why the established researchers adhere to the 'Stratford theory' is of course the same as in the case of the Big Bang. No qualified literary historian who has studied Shakespeare's works thoroughly would have found the accepted theory plausible. Instead, they have all noted that the theory is 'established' and that the unwritten laws of the establishment require that its members do not call established theories into question. Within the history of literature this is even more important than within physics. A member of the establishment may actually feel himself forced to effectively counteract the publication of (and thereby information about) other theories than the established one.

Some years ago a certain professor at the University of Lund was consulted as an expert for recommending printing subsidies for books on arts subjects. Thus, she had the opportunity to recommend a subsidy for a book containing a number of facts that supported Abel Lefranc's almost century-old theory on the Shakespeare authorship. As a matter of course, she recommended rejection of the subsidy for such a difficult to refute dissident theory. Her only problem was to find plausible formal reasons for the rejection. Usually professors are proficient in this art, and the one in question tackled her task successfully. She even managed to include a saving clause as a matter of precaution. She wrote:

It is undeniably an achievement worthy of a professor, to put off – without taking up a stand – the argumentation for what she called “the problem concerning the authorship of the most important work of the English language.”

The publication of the book was delayed several years, and when it finally appeared, the public libraries in Sweden were deterred from buying it by means of a disparaging review published by the central librarian buying department.

At present an English version of the book is available on the Internet, see [… now defunct; ed.].

Myth Maker Mead

In 1928, the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78) published her thesis for a doctorate, titled Coming of Age in Samoa.[6] This had been approved by her teacher Franz Uri Boas (1858-1942), who also wrote the preface. The book was going to acquire the highest possible importance for the disciplines called 'sociology' and 'anthropology.' It was to take about 60 years, before Derek Freeman finally was able to expose Mead by telling the truth about the Samoan customs.[7]

In 1925, newly married Mrs. Mead had received a scholarship for fieldwork in American Samoa aimed at studying the behavior and development of typical Samoan girls from puberty to marriage. She expected to find a community with sexual morals that permitted free liaisons between puberty youths, contrary to the restrictions enjoined by the American morals.

Professor Boas had instructed Mead first to verify the existence of the free morals in Samoa and then to establish how the behavior and development of the Samoan youths had been affected by these morals.

With regard to her assignment, the young doctoral candidate could hardly have chosen a place less suited to the fieldwork required. The prevalent sexual mores in American Samoa of the 1920's were considerably more rigorous than those of the United States. At the wedding, the bride had to prove her virginity in public. Girls who had experienced premarital sexual intercourse were punished and disgraced. Although Mead was informed about these customs by local authorities, she remained firmly resolved to pursue her original plan. This implied profound interviews with a sample of 66 Samoan puberty girls.

The planned interviews did not materialize, however, but Mead nevertheless considered having gathered useful data about 25 of the girls. She mentions that thirteen of them had no heterosexual experience whatsoever. None of the other twelve (who had menstruated altogether 350 times) had ever been pregnant – a fact that even Mead herself found remarkable. She suggested that promiscuity might have a contraceptive effect! Among the twelve supposedly 'promiscuous' girls, Mead mentions one having had sexual intercourse with her uncle. The Samoans held this to be a criminal act. It remains uncertain what exactly was known about the 'heterosexual experiences' of the other eleven.

Even these scanty data should have convinced a scholarly-trained researcher that Samoa was not a place suited for carrying out the prearranged assignment. A study of previous reports on Samoan customs would also have shown that the expected common promiscuity was quite simply non-existent. On the contrary, the girls were keen on preserving their virginity until marriage, lest they be branded as inferior. In Samoa, the bridegroom took pride in marrying a virgin, and the bride felt happy to be able to give him the precious gift of her virginity, the finishing touch added to her grandiosely displayed sexuality.

Mead, anyway, still remained some months in the colony in order to apply herself to gathering ethnographical material for an American museum. While visiting a couple of minor islands, she one day took a walking tour jointly with two Samoan girl friends of her own age. These twenty-five-year-old women were still unmarried – contrary to Mead who, however, concealed her marriage during her Samoa sojourn. The girl friends were full of fun and joked gaily with Mead about her erotic preferences. Mead, on the other hand, asked her friends questions about their sexual life. Since there was nothing to tell and since it was customary for Samoan girls not to discuss their sexual life, they instead invented cock-and-bull stories about having indulged in debaucheries – just as 'everybody else.' One of the friends incidentally possessed the rank as 'ceremonial virgin,' implying that she (with preserved virginity) was worthy of marrying some highborn man. These Samoan women did not imagine that they actually contributed to a sociological investigation. They just found it amusing to indulge in the kind of jocular pranks that is a popular leisure pursuit in Samoa.

Margaret Mead endorsed by the U.S. Government.[8]

Although Mead understood and spoke some Samoan, she was ignorant about the Samoan ways of expressing humor. And before all, she was anxious to get some confirmation of her notion about the promiscuous life among the Samoan youth. She therefore swallowed uncritically the jokes of her friends, taking them for the truth pure and simple. She accepted that adolescents (and even a ceremonial virgin) regularly stayed the night with youths of the opposite sex – without this giving rise to any intervention or sanction. She must have thought that the ceremonial proving of virginity was a farce with most of the principals wangling.

After having obtained these pieces of 'information,' Mead wrote off definitely the plan to carry out profound interviews with a number of girls. In her book she nevertheless dwells on alleged “promiscuous customs” without any account for the actual source (which was of course her two joking friends). Incidentally, the lack of accounting for sources is a general feature of her thesis.

Mead pretends to account for three types of premarital 'affairs:' 1) clandestine date 'under the palms,' 2) public escape (leading to marriage) and 3) ceremonial wooing. As a matter of fact, she reckons with yet another type: 4) insidious rape on a sleeping girl (who thereby is supposed to lose any possibility of marrying any other than the perpetrator). Mead provides no data about the relative frequency of the various types, but she constantly intimates that type 1 is the normal and generally accepted pattern.

At the same time she notes quite correctly that a proposed bride convicted of lost virginity was punished with stone-throwing that could seriously injure or even kill the victim. At least this had been the custom before Christianity and American law mitigated the methods of punishment.

The only basic data accounted for in Mead's thesis are found in the table of the 25 girls mentioned above. Among the scanty data in the table is a dubious statement about 17 girls having “homosexual experience” without any specification of what it means. The text lacks any description of homosexual activities. The nearest thing is the observation that girls coming together in a group often playfully snatch after one another's genitals. Beside data on homo- and heterosexual experience the table contains data only on menstruation and residence.

Mead combines the unconstrained attitude and the free morals, which she mistakenly ascribes to the Samoans, with the absence of stress and neurotic reactions that she alleges to have noticed. This unverified allegation forms a glaring contrast to her very circumstantial description of a number of maladjusted individuals, noted suicides, runaways, etc.

Besides the almost total want of documentation of source data, the thesis also lacks the account of previous research that forms an elementary part of every normal doctoral thesis within the humanities. For instance, she does not mention Charles Wilkes's observation in 1839 that “there was no indiscriminate intercourse in Samoa.“[9] The reader is left in total ignorance about which of the observations were made by Mead and which were collected from previous literature. A thesis with such serious wants is normally not accepted, and 26-year-old candidate Mead hardly expected anything else.

But the miracle did happen. Professor Boas accepted this deficient composition without calling for any revision, nay, not even for the least amendment. The deficiencies cannot have escaped his attention, and if he read the text fairly critically, he must have been struck by the many contradictions and unfounded conclusions. We must assume that Boas was motivated not by scientific conscientiousness but rather by a political ambition.

“The foremost anthropologist of America” thus vouched for Coming of Age in Samoa being a “painstaking investigation”. He asserted that the book was based on a study of teenage girls in Samoa that aimed at determining to what extent certain social attitudes are due to physiological conditions and to what extent to cultural ones. And he established that Mead had found that “with the freedom of sexual life, the absence of a large number of conflicting ideals, and the emphasis upon forms that to us are irrelevant, the adolescent crisis disappears.” Such declarations induced most anthropologists to accept Coming of Age in Samoa as a carefully scientific work. Even Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) considered the book as a first-rate example of descriptive anthropology, an excellent reading beyond criticism, convincing for the professional and fascinating for the layman. (Coming of Age in Samoa is still used as a course book at the Stockholm University.)

The laity readers were naturally just as shortsighted and uncritical, as was the great Malinowski. A publisher anticipated this and published the corny trash with an alluring get-up. Margaret Mead became famous. The criticism was reduced to articles in stray journals with limited circulation.

Mead obtained her doctor's degree and learnt a useful lesson: By feigning to present science one can wield political power. Real scientism is not necessary. More important is to display opinions that are well-timed and held by the authorities. Referring to source material that others are unable to check makes it still easier to produce the desired conclusions. Mead was not slow to use this new knowledge.

A few years after the sojourn on Samoa, we find her in the interior of New Guinea, once again engaged in fieldwork. This resulted in a book titled Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.[10] This work was seen in many quarters as the definite confirmation of the anti-Darwinist theories that had been launched by John Broadus Watson (1878-1958), by Boas, and to a certain degree by herself in Coming of Age in Samoa. It was well known that Darwin had contrived to explain the origin of species through favored reproduction by the fittest individuals in a certain environment. Darwin had also shown that the first step in this process implied the emergence of various races, each one in some way adapted to the environment of its members. Boas had publicly pleaded that this mechanism did not apply to the species Homo sapiens, save in the case of some superficial qualities such as skin pigmentation. And J.B. Watson asserted that practically any child could be brought up to any kind of adult person, doctor, lawyer, artist, manager and, why not, beggar or thief, all irrespective of his or her congenital talents.

Now let us examine the content of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, a book that the professionals let pass without subjecting it to anything like real criticism. The book describes the behavior of men and women among three primitive tribes living in the interior of New Guinea. Regarding the tribe called Tchambuli Mead reports the following facts: “Until the Tchambuli boy and girl reach the age of six or seven, the two are treated exactly alike.” After that age, while “the girl is rapidly trained in handicrafts and absorbed into the sober, responsible life of the women, the boy is given no such adequate training for his future role.”

This was of course an excellent opportunity to study the effect of possible genetic differences between the sexes, since the environment factor was identical for boys and girls during the important childhood days. Mead herself stresses the importance of this period when she states:

According to Mead there was no difference in conditioning, and the culture was of course one and the same for all the children. Anyway, we find that, although the men were physically stronger, just as in most races, the Arapesh people depended on the fishing of the women. The men were permitted to do the 'shopping,' i.e., the intertribal trade.

To be preoccupied and at once laugh with the group is something of a feat that few (if any) – except Mead – have had the opportunity to witness. Unfortunately, the reader is bereft of a detailed description of this rare phenomenon.

The men were theoretically and legally the rulers, but emotionally they were subordinate. They were the conspicuous maladjusted, subjected to neurasthenia, hysteria, etc. – all according to Mead. A better example of sexually inherited traits would be hard to find. In spite of the identical upbringing until the age of seven, the girls were simply “absorbed” into the sober life of the typical individual of a mentally solid character. The boys, on the other hand, were apparently less susceptible to training; they did not even learn faultless execution of the big flutes until later, and they frequently disobeyed their seniors. In other words, there is nothing that speaks against the possibility that a certain hysteroid trait was established already in the boy of seven. Anyway, the boys apparently accepted the idle hanging-about life just as naturally as the girls accepted diligence after the period of identical upbringing. Every indication seems to point at a case of sex-linked heritage. Since it is well known that color-blindness and hemophilia are inherited in a way that makes the male sex much more susceptible to these diseases, a hysteroid trait could of course follow the same pattern – especially within such a small tribe with much in-and-in marrying.

Mead's conclusion was, however, that she had found evidence proving that the temperamental difference between men and women in the Western society are nothing but “artificial standardizations” and “social fictions for which we have no longer any use”.

Another thing that Mead noticed was that “the society” (i.e., the traditional norm) decrees that the men ruled the women, but in practice it was the other way around. In other words, people did not care a damn about what that 'society' had told them to do. In spite of her own observation of this gross deviation from the norm, Mead maintains that it is “the society” or “the culture” of the tribe in question that “selects” the temperament that becomes typical of the members of each sex.

The two other tribes that Mead studied in New Guinea were the Arapesh and Mundugumor, between which she noted a remarkable difference in the average temperament. She also noted that the Aarapesh were “slight, small-headed, and only sparsely hairy”, contrary to their nearest neighbors (and “linguistic relatives”), who are “squatter, heavier, with huge heads and definite beards.”

The Mundugumor resided a hundred miles away and spoke a different language. Among them, the percentage of twin births was reported to be higher than among other New Guineans, and even childless women were able in a few weeks to produce milk nearly enough to rear a child. Now, as far as we know, the size of the head, the growth of hair and beard, the frequency of twin births and the ability to lactate before child-bearing are typical racial characters inherited from generation to generation by means of the genes. Therefore, there is little doubt that the Arapesh and Mundugumor were of different hereditary stock. In other words, they represented two distinguished sub-races.

A careful study of Mead's reported observations reveals part of the mechanism that caused the temperamental differences. To begin with, the Arapesh territory was not exposed to the raids of the headhunters, since it was a barren and infertile mountain land almost devoid of fish and game. No wonder, then, if the slight, vegetarian inhabitants led a life characterized (by Mead) as “primarily maternal, cherishing, and oriented away from the self towards the needs of the next generation.” This in turn would have permitted even weaker children to survive, thus upholding and strengthening the non-aggressive, unselfish temperament.

The Mundugumor apparently had a higher birthrate, since among them “only the strongest children survive.” Moreover, not all newborn babies were allowed to live. Among the members of the tribe there was a small number of “really bad men who are aggressive, gluttons for power and prestige; men who have taken far more than their share in women” etc. All this would of course tend to increase the proportion of genes for toughness and aggressiveness. It was quite natural that the survival and excess reproduction of the strongest and most violent in Mundugumor had eventually produced a people that was held in such terror “that no other people will venture to occupy” their territory, although it was “a good coconut and tobacco land.” To be sure, they were rich too, “they have a superabundance of land, their fishing barads are filled with fish,” as Mead assures us. The Mundugumor temperament had not always been quite so aggressive; Mead found good evidence for a previous state less ravaged by violence.

Pure chance in combination with certain differences in soil and topography apparently have produced genetic differences between tribes in the interior of New Guinea, similar to those that Darwin noted in other species in the Galapagos.

Mead, however, drew an entirely different conclusion than did Darwin. She stated:

She paid no attention to the obvious differences in racial traits and in diet, and appears happily surprised that “two people who share so many economic and social traits, who are part of one culture area […] can present such contrast in ethos, in social personality.” She concludes that there is no longer any basis for regarding such traits as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children as sex-linked. These traits are just “set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe” and outlawed for all in another. “There is no other explanation of race, or diet or selection that can be adduced to explain” the differences between Arapesh and Mundugumor. “Only to the impact of the whole of the integrated culture upon the growing child can we lay the formation of the contrasting types.”

Mead thought that there were hereditary differences between individuals, so that the enigmatic “culture” in a certain tribe could pick up one distinctive character and reshape all the members after this model. In another tribe, the “culture” would pick up another character as model, hence the temperamental differences between tribes. We must assume that the “culture” was a kind of deus ex machina that just appeared out of nothing and without any cause and chose now one model, then another.

It was to elapse some years after the death of Dr. Mead before the New Zealander Derek Freeman could publish the result of his many years' work on checking the factual information and the conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa. Only then it was revealed how immensely Mead had misrepresented the mores of American Samoa. But even if all her factual information had been correct, her lack of scientific method should have sufficed to make at least trained professionals realize that her study did not prove anything of what it pretended to prove.

The same applies to her study of the three tribes in New Guinea, the factual information of which has not been checked even now.

But even an uneducated layman can realize that Sex and Temperament is about three genetically distinctive tribes with different diets and to some extent practicing genetic selection. Therefore, the typical temperaments of these three tribes are absolutely useless for drawing conclusions about any “culture” as a causative factor. To draw conclusions from this material about the origin of typical male and female temperament in the Western society is sheer hypocrisy.

The sociological establishment has certainly pilloried itself by cherishing Coming of Age and Sex and Temperament for more than half a century.

Stalin, 'Champion for Peace'

Many books about World War II describe how Stalin, in 1939, maneuvered in order to keep the Soviet Union outside the war that he expected soon to break out. The Western Powers would not allow him the buffer that he said was indispensable. That is to say, they did not consent to the entry of Russian troops into the Baltic States and Poland against the will of these states, something that Stalin had demanded during his negotiations with the Western Powers for an anti-German treaty in early summer of 1939.

Most established historians argue that in such a situation, where the Western Powers refused to endorse Stalin's plan to invade and annex Poland and the Baltic States, Stalin had no alternative but to enter into a pact with Hitler instead. By way of example, A.J.P. Taylor (1906-90), the well-known English Professor of History, wrote:[11]

He thinks the Ribbentrop-Pact was in the last resort anti-German:

Apparently Taylor thinks that the Germans would have taken Moscow if not the Pact had limited the penetration.

The actual result of the Pact was, however, that Poland ceased to function as buffer in case of a German assault. A professorial chair at Oxford seems to be tantamount to a license to write sheer rubbish.

The situation at Cambridge was similar. The historian Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982) wrote already in 1952:[12]

Carr assures that the “bastion” created by means of the Pact, “was and could only be a line of defense against potential German attack.”

Even so, according to Carr, the Pact gave Stalin another and more important advantage. It granted that “if Soviet Russia had eventually to fight Hitler, the Western Powers would already be involved.” Here Carr conveniently disregards the fact that both treaty parties were notorious breakers of treaties. None of them attached any importance to signatures on a piece of paper. Carr himself knew that the Pact did not prevent Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941. How could the same Pact have prevented Hitler from attacking, let us say, in October 1939 as a direct continuation of the Poland campaign? The fact that he did not was, of course, due to quite other motives than any respect for a given word.

Also the guarantee (through the Pact) that the Western Powers would be at war before a possible attack on the Soviet Union did not exist. Such a guarantee would have required a Soviet pact with the Western Powers instead; something Stalin had declined. With such a pact no German troops could have reached Soviet territory before the outbreak of a German war against Poland and her two allies.

Hitler had chanced upon a pact with Stalin in the hope thereby to deter the Western Powers from fulfilling their obligations to enter the War on the side of Poland. There seemed to be a good chance for this hope to materialize. After all, the Western Powers did not go to war when Hitler broke the Locarno Pact in 1936 (occupying the Rhine district), neither to fulfill the French guarantee to Czechoslovakia in 1938, and not even to fulfill the joint guarantee to Rump-Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In August 1939 the conditions were far less favorable for the Western Powers, after the Soviet Union had declared both non-intervention and backing up Germany with a generous trade agreement. On the other hand, there was no guarantee either that Hitler should go to war against the Western Powers before he turned against the Soviet Union. In his book Mein Kampf he had declared that a two-front war was a certain road to disaster.

Stalin and Molotov at Yalta, securing the spoils of the most atrocious war in mankind history.

Taylor and Carr seem to have been obsessed by a desire to describe Stalin (1879-1953) in the most favorable light apart from any logical considerations. In spite of their lack of evidence they have 'established a school.' Still now, at the turn of the century, one finds Stalin described as a peacekeeping leader who eventually fell victim to a war instigator beyond his control, namely Hitler. Most encyclopedias agree that the Pact was a defensive measure in some way or another. That was certainly exactly what Stalin wanted his “useful idiots” to believe.

At the same time as he fed propaganda phrases to the masses, Stalin wanted to inform his intelligent henchmen of the real purpose of the Pact. He also found various ways to do it without disturbing the belief of the idiots. The members of the Politburo could be informed in plain language at a secret meeting, of course. This took place on August 19, 1939, just four days before the signing of the Pact. The minutes from this meeting were kept secret until the beginning of the 1990s. The historians are therefore excused for not having read Stalin's famous August 19 speech during the preceding 50 years.

Foreign communist leaders had to be informed in a roundabout way. One of these ways went through the Times, where a news item containing the essence of Stalin's speech appeared on August 26, 1939. By way of introduction, the item said that[13]

The really important parts of this 'communication' are the statements that the Soviet Union “would have checked the Axis,” and that the Pact gives hope for a war, which will weaken the Axis and democratic powers so that revolution might be secured. The fifth paragraph was probably added in order to give the “useful idiots” something to chew, lest they should notice the real message.

A few days later. the European war broke out according to plan. The intelligent readers, trained in Marxism-Leninism, would then have understood Stalin's policy and prepared themselves for the coming “social revolution,” i.e., the Sovietization of Europe.

Many historians apparently write about the Pact without checking the contemporary follow-up even in the most distinguished newspapers. No wonder then that they have missed the more complete summary of Stalin's speech that was published on September 8, 1939. This occurred in the Swedish evening daily Svenska Pressen in Helsinki, a paper with a rather limited circulation. It began with a statement that all superior Communist leaders in Russia and abroad received a circular in dialogue form the day before the Pact was concluded. Most of the dialogue follows, with a couple of exclusions indicated. The main points are the following:

The final aim of the Comintern is still the same as before: world revolution. However, all attempts at activating revolution have failed. According to certain arguments from Marx, Engels, and Lenin (omitted from the news item) a lengthy war could hasten the outbreak of revolution. But a pact between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers would not hasten the coming of such a war, because it would cause Germany to resign from plunging into any military adventure. On the other hand, a Russo-German pact (implying Russian neutrality) would make it possible for Germany to realize her plans of aggression.

Therefore, in order to hasten world revolution, the Soviet Union should support Germany so that she can start a war, and then try to affect the war to become a lengthy one. By way of conclusion, the news item states that the circular was drawn up in the Kremlin by Stalin and all the members of the Politburo of 1939, except Khrushchev. The purpose is said to be to forestall discontent among the Communist leaders.[14]

It should have been one of the most important tasks for the foreign press attachés to report the full text of this news item to their respective governments. It seems, however, that none of them did.

Apparently, Stalin felt that all this was not enough. So three months later he granted the Pravda an interview. The editor “asked Comrade Stalin for his opinion of the Havas report of 'the speech' allegedly made 'by Stalin to the Politburo on August 19', in which he is said to have expressed the thought that the war should go on as long as possible, so that the belligerents are exhausted.” (See Stalin's speech!) The Pravda then quotes Comrade Stalin saying

1. that it cannot be denied that it was France and England that attacked Germany and consequently they are responsible for the present war;
2. that Germany made peace proposals to France and England, proposals supported by the Soviet Union on the ground that a quick end to the war would ease the situation of all countries and peoples;
3. that the ruling circles of England and France rudely rejected Germany's peace proposals.[15]

In the vast literature about the beginning of World War II, there is no mention of any Havas report on Stalin's speech of August 19. The report may not have existed at all.

The Pravda interview was published on November 30, 1939, the very day when the Soviet Union started an outright war of conquest against Finland.

Those who had studied Marxism-Leninism certainly knew that “easing the situation for all countries” would not promote world revolution in the least. And every reader of the Pravda would understand that if Stalin had spoken about “the war” on August 19, 1939, he would have referred to an expected or planned war, not any “present war.” The road to war was opened only on August 23 (with the Pact), and Hitler embarked on it on September 1.

Stalin's real attitude to war should emerge from the manner, in which he translated words into deeds the very day when the interview was published. Those 'in the know' were thus sufficiently informed that Stalin had concluded the Pact in order to make possible a war with prospects of exhausting the belligerents. The date of publishing would confirm that the phrases about peace were for the sake of appearance only.

Historians and Kremlinologists may be excused for not knowing about the item in the Svenska Pressen. It was republished (in English translation) only in 1984.[16] To overlook the Pravda interview is, however, remarkable, to say the least.

Every serious historian certainly realizes that neither Stalin nor Hitler felt himself bound to pacts, vows, or other commitments. All accept that at least Hitler entered into the Pact with the intention to break it at the first suitable moment. Still, they cling to the thought that the Ribbentrop Pact prevented Hitler from breaking it during precisely 22 months. What if Hitler had seen a suitable moment turning up after 22 days? Certainly, Hitler could have attacked the Soviet Union at any moment between October 1939 and June 1941, if he had seen fit to do so, pact or no pact. It is obvious that the strategic possibility for an attack did not appear at any time before May 1941. The Pact did not protect the Soviet Union in the least.

In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler had made it clear that he considered a war on two fronts as a disaster for Germany. An attack on Poland in August 1939 implied the risk of a war on two fronts. The Western Powers had promised to go to war on behalf of Poland in case of a German attack. In a talk with General von Brauchitsch on August 14, 1939, Hitler expected Great Britain not to fight for Poland – but he was not quite sure. But if Mr. Chamberlain would become convinced that no support from the Soviet Union was to be expected, British passivity would be as good as guaranteed. Since Hitler knew that Stalin could break the Pact at any moment, it did not protect Germany either.

Therefore, Hitler's reason for the Pact must have been to make sure that the Western Powers should not interfere when he attacked Poland. Hitler based his opinion on a piece of information about a British officer of the General Staff having estimated the power of the Polish Army. The officer would have reached the conclusion that Poland's resistance would break down quickly. Knowing this, Hitler thought that the British General Staff would advise the Government not to engage in a war without any prospect of success.[17] Even when the Western Powers did declare war, Hitler consoled himself and his entourage that “England and France evidently had declared for appearances only, in order not to lose face before the world.”

Stalin, on the other hand, knew that the German attack on Poland would trigger off the war that he needed, and he even told Ribbentrop:[18]

The reason for his knowledge was, of course, the fact that he had agents in the highest circles of the British Government, viz. Blunt, Burgess, McLean, and Philby, to mention those who have been exposed.

Hitler made no secret in those August days about his being in great hurry to get an agreement with the Soviet Union. It was obvious that he did not dare start his Polish campaign without some proof of Stalin's neutrality. Within a few weeks the autumnal rains would begin and render a campaign impossible.

To summarize: Stalin realized that without a pact with Germany there would not be any attack on Poland and therefore no war between Germany and the Western Powers. By accepting an agreement with Hitler, he could have the European war, of which he had spoken ever since 1925 as something that would act “accelerating and facilitating the revolutionary battles of the proletariat.”[19] There was Stalin's motive to conclude a pact with his arch-enemy Hitler – whom he could not possibly trust in the least.

The above line of argument is carried out in the book The Incompatible Allies (New York 1953) by the German diplomat Gustav Hilger and a certain Alfred G. Meyer. They conclude, however, that Stalin provoked the war only in order to gain precious time for rearmament[20] (implicitly: to be able to complete his rearmament before the German attack). Hilger and Meyer disregard the fact that Hitler could not attack the Soviet Union without conquering Poland in advance. And the Pact was a prerequisite for conquering Poland!

More recent authors, such as Geoffrey Roberts and Gabriel Gorodetsky, disregard much more in their books on Stalin. In The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War (1995) and Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (1999) there is no mention of Stalin's speech of August 19, 1939, and no discussion of the value of a pact between two notoriously untrustworthy persons.

Actually, most historians have failed to draw the logical conclusion that Stalin used the Pact as a means to start a World War. Roberts and Gorodetsky had the opportunity to read Stalin's own unveiled words. Other historians have had access to his veiled words in Pravda and the Times. And everybody could have looked up what initiated persons thought about Stalin's intentions at the time. Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson, and Stalin's biographer Boris Souvarine gave their opinion along the same lines as Stalin in his speech. Already in September 1936, the French General Schweisguth anticipated that Stalin aimed at releasing a ruthless war, into which the Soviet Union should enter only when the primary belligerents were exhausted.

A weighty confirmation emerged in 1951, when the defected Soviet Colonel Grigori Tokaev published his book Stalin Means War. In this book, Tokaev testified as to what he had been taught at lectures at the Military Air Academy in 1939 and later. One of these lectures was concerned with one theme alone – that the USSR should coerce Britain and France into fighting Germany to the death and, simultaneously, coerce Germany to fight Britain and France to the death.[21] Concerning the Pact, Tokaev mentions what he learned from an authentic source two days after its ratification.

In Tokaev's opinion; Stalin understood perfectly well that by releasing Hitler from dread of fighting upon two fronts, he was irreparably inflicting a second world war on mankind.[22]

It is obvious that there have been clues for any one who wanted to search into the motives of Stalin and the causes of the Second World War. In the last few years, even Stalin's speech of August 19, 1939, has been available. Every serious historian writing on Stalin ought to be familiar with it, of course. In spite of this, there seems to exist an ideological resistance among the professional historians against recognizing Stalin as the instigator of WW II. The general public is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the sole profiteer of the war was also the very person who instigated it, former bank robber Iosif Vissarionovich Dzugashvili, alias Stalin. Instead, many people still see Stalin as the peace loving defender of the Russian people.

Churchill and Roosevelt must take on a large part of the responsibility for this state of affairs. They posed as authorities setting the tone, already by encouraging Poland to persecute its German minority and to refuse any negotiations with Germany about it. As soon as the Soviet Union joined the belligerents against the Axis powers, the two Western leaders took great pains to present Stalin in the most positive light that they could accomplish. Things came to such a pass that they – against their better judgment – accepted Stalin's version of the Katyn massacre as a German mass murder. When the war was over, this partial attitude had spread to most historians.

The estimation that Churchill published in 1948 passed by without any critic reacting. He wrote:[23]

Even to be said by Churchill, this is really a bit on the naive side. “The Russians” did not, as is well known, carry on any policy, realistic or not. That was done by the autocratic Stalin alone, and he already had the use of a strong line of defense. Every historian should be able to realize the unsuitability of occupying Estonia and Latvia under the circumstances. A forced occupation calls for military resources, which thereby are split up. Stalin's policy also resulted in the loss of a number of potential allies in an eventual defensive war against Germany: Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania.

Nevertheless, rash pronouncements of this kind were seen in book after book. A contributory cause may be the Nuremberg trial that had canonized certain opinions about the war as 'politically correct.' Among these was the dogma that only the Germans and the Japanese committed war crimes. As a consequence, among Hitler's crimes is counted his failure to capitulate in 1943 when he could have spared a couple of million German lives. At the same time, Stalin gets the credit for not having capitulated in 1941, when he could have spared millions lives of his subordinates. Instead, he fought on until he had conquered eastern Europe, which meant the loss of still more millions of lives. These losses accumulated well into the last months. (The final result was about 27 million dead, as counted from the censuses before and after the war, admittedly including millions of concentration camp deaths.)

Belief in authority and group pressure seem to be capable of making most academic historians ignore the rules imparted to them at their university education, nay, even to ignore common sense.

In sharp contrast to that shines the celebrity of these contributions, Dr. Robert Faurisson.

Carl O. Nordling, Swedish citizen, born in Helsinki in 1919 as a Finland-Swede. Qualified as an architect and urban planner in Helsinki and Stockholm, where he moved after the Winter War in 1940 and where he is still living. Served in the Continuation War in 1941 and 1944 alternating with studies. Professional work has been mostly in the field of demographic and other statistical investigations connected with master planning. After retirement he is doing historical research and has published a great number of articles in various scientific fields in Swedish and English.

Notes