Review: Bradley “The Iceman Inheritance”

The Iceman Inheritance Micael Bradley
©1978 Michael Bradley; originally published by Dorset Publishing, Inc.; reading 1991 Kayode Publications (New York) 1st printing

Figured I should finally read this and review it, since I have thought of and mentioned its premise a lot over the years. I first saw this IIRC in the 90’s. My family had it, and my father was talking about it, IIRC. It was a printing I can’t find now, where the cover showed an actual man made of ice, displaying a very aggressive looking expression.

The premise was that the rough environment of Ice Age Europe is what led “Western” civilizations to be overall “aggressive”, leading to their conquest of much of the world. The very first words; the “contention” (also the title of Part One), “This book is racist!” The irony being that the race being critiqued (“I will attempt to show that racism is a predisposition of but once race of Mankind…”) is the white race, and and by a white Canadian author!
Already hearing so much of what’s now called “dog whistling” rhetoric for over a decade back then, which extolled the virtues of the White Western Christian civilization, contrasted with the “laziness” of the black race (now encoded as “Western/American exceptionalism”), and developing a presentation of the Gospel as teaching all men are equal (made in God’s image), but “fallen” into being “sinful” (though in different manifestations often), it made sense as an a great proof of the Bible teaching.

But when I glanced at it, I found it full of discussion of prehistory and particularly evolutionary theory, such as frequent mention of the “Neanderthals”. While I was never a solid [young earth] “Creationist”, I at that point did not know what to make of either theory, and while opposing the conspiratorial rhetoric and rigid literalism of the more fundamentalistic creationists; I still was not ready to really deal with taking the problem as far back as neanderthals (pre-homosapiens or “mankind” proper; think: “cavemen” who are seemingly half-ape). I wanted something that placed man’s problems with “the Fall” into sin, that occurred in our current homo-sapiens state.
So I basically put it aside, and eventually gave the book away.

My mother later is given another one; the copy I have now, with the standard cover showing a hand smashing something with a rock. (This could also be found on Afrocentric book tables on the street). One time, later, when she was giving away books, including this one, I this time decided to keep it. So it sat on my shelf for years.

Forward to today’s political climate, where the more radical racists are coming out into the open, dubbed the “alt-right” (even to the point of denouncing the old dog-whistlers for their indirect language, which they call “cuckery”), and boldly pitching white supremacy in contrast to black “pathology”. They dress down all of our “problems”, and put together patterns of bad character, as I have cited in Makers-Takers and think nothing of how they could happen to end up in the “good” group. It’s just “fact” and “truth”, supported by statistics. As far back as the old writings on the Right Wing, I had cited the premise of the book, and pointed out that what is being pointed at in the black community is basically the same effect on a smaller scale. The rough environments we’ve been placed in have made us more aggressive; hence all the much touted “crime” in the cities. So we’re proven to be essentially all the same, just like the Gospel teaches!

This is basically the liberal response to everything, from crime, to even the genetic “bell curve” hypothesis, which had actually reared its head again in that mid 90’s period. But the alt-right just dismisses this, and focuses on what’s seen now, in the statistics, deeming the blacks “insoluble”, and going as far as to criticize the nation and its founders for bringing us here in the first place, and even dismissing the Constitution. (So the other conservatives who uphold those things are seen as betraying the race in favor of country, hence the likening it to “cuckolding”!)

Meanwhile, life seems to be getting rougher and rougher (for the average person), both economically, and organizationally (like how litigiousness causes agencies like mine to pile more and more rules and harsher penalties for breaking them), with those on the top (in power) gaining more and more, exponentially!
And all of this is justified with the rhetoric of “rugged individualism”, where this is just the way “nature” is; basically Darwinism’s “natural selection” being true socio-economically, (even to the staunch Creationists who blamed “Darwinism” for the fall of the nation!) and the poor and weak are always to blame for not “pulling their bootstraps”. Those who make it to the top are uncritically assumed to have an almost blameless character (and thus, the only ones who have “earned” their “freedom”, and thus should have almost no regulation in how they rule over others).

I kept finding myself more and more saying how they are creating a practical “Ice Age”, where it’s “dog eat dog” and survival of the fittest. This came to mind especially when watching Zeitgeist, with its discussion of the illusion of “scarcity” presented while there’s really an “abundance” being hoarded away. This is basically the survival instinct of an environment like a frozen wilderness, where you have to keep taking, storing, taking, storing… etc.; not because you necessarily really need all of it right now, but just in case you run out and can’t get any more. That is how the corporate world is geared, and passing it down to everyone else. And the aggression used to acquire stuff, and the “rugged individualism” used to justify it all, are just apart of the mindset.

All of this, in total irony given the right’s claim of how “exceptional” this society is. (Or, when they acknowledge what they think is wrong with it, it’s always other groups’ fault; whether the blacks, the Jews, or just the compromising “cucks” of either left or right. This, in the same breath of accusing blacks of “never accepting responsibility for anything”).

So this had me thinking more and more about this premise, and I figured I should finally sit down and read it, to see what it really says. Whether evolutionary or not, there must be something to it.

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The 1990 foreword mentions an unpublished manuscript by Sigmund Freud (published as “A Phylogenetic Fantasy”) that suggested that Western man’s psychosexual aggressions were produced by glacial evolution during the last European Ice Age, as Bradley had first argued seven years earlier.
The introduction, by John Henrik Clarke of Hunter College summarizes the history of race. “There was no Europe in ancient times. The geographical area that would later be called Europe was not a functioning entity in world affairs when early civilizations were being developed in the Nile Valley and other river valleys in Africa and later in Western Asia (now mistakenly called the Middle East) and in mainland Asia in countries like India, China and later, Japan”. The first real show of European literacy began around 1250BC, with Homer’s Odyssey and the Iliad. They then “soon made a glaring discovery – Europe could not furnish them with enough food to properly feed them or enough material to properly clothe them. They began to look with covetous eyes at the more developed parts of the world”. What followed were the invasions of parts of Africa and Asia by the Greeks, Assyrians and Iranians (Persians).

The racism that plagues us today would have its origins in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Europe was stricken by poverty and established the slave trade to begin its economic recovery. The “official rationale of the Atlantic slave trade” started with a papal-sanctioned authorization of Spain and Portugal to reduce to servitude “infidels”, who had held Europe at bay since the age of the Crusades. While Europeans did enslave other Europeans for a much longer time than they enslaved Africans, this did not give birth to racism, but did lay the basis for feudalism.
They also at the time began colonization of the world, and what they call “colonization” of the Bible and the image of God. This created a contradiction, where they portrayed God as loving mankind and “no respecter” of men, but also who favored them over other people. Meanwhile, “The Europeans who were successful in Europe generally stayed in Europe”, so the New World became established by “a large number of people who were failures at home”. So, “Many of these Europeans felt called upon to make non-Europeans feel inferior so they they could convince themselves that they were a superior people”.
In the 20th century, with the rise of the “Yellow Peril” of Japan, this was when pseudoscientific racism began, and the propagation of the Teutonic origin theory.

Chapter 1 is on the “Greek gift” of Western technology and discusses medicine, nuclear war and the affect on the climate (greenhouse gas, etc), done in the name of “progress”, the “grain of truth” which “we” brought to “them“.
Chapter 2 is the “Greek gifts” of Western psychology and philosophy.
“Paradoxes” become “conflicts” (struggle between the spiritual and material, “free world” vs communism etc). “This weakness is alienation“, either from one truth of the paradox, or the other. We have to separate things.”
(Within Western religion, “paradox” is only used as a last resort to cover up incoherencies in doctrine, to silence questions when they have no further explanations. Examples are many arguments for the Trinity, God’s “love” versus “hatred”, free will vs election, and salvation or “sanctification” by “grace” (and imparted “power”) versus our own efforts. So in practice, they have become “conflicts” that have done what else, but cause “alienation” and division in the Church, into hundreds of denominations, many loudly denouncing others for “rejecting truth”, that to them is embodied in these “paradoxes” that they see as only becoming “conflicts” because of their opponents’ obstinance).

He then introduces the concept of “The Cronos Complex“; the title of his earlier book. That is that we differ from other species by our conception of time as a “territory”. Animals of course have “territories” that are spatial. I define space as a set of coordinates that are randomly accessible. You can go back and forth from one point to another. Time is sequential; about causation, and where we can’t go back to already passed points. This, animals can’t comprehend. So if you think of it, they really do not think in terms of time. They, with their “instincts” are totally in the “here and now”. Something happens, and they instinctively react. They do have memory, including things learned through stimulus-response. But they do not have the ability to preserve the past or plan for the future. Man has institutions like burial and religion, which is “past-present communication”, where writing is a “present-future communication”.
So just like with spatial territory, “we brought with us into the new dimension means of asserting and defending our territory” (p.16). This right away reminds me of conservative Christians’ polemics on the downfall of America, or even the West or white race in general. Clearly, they are defending “territory” (from the past) they see as being taken from them (in the present and future). So this territorialism actually ends up holding back further “progress”, where we feel threatened by the future. (p17f). So, “Man is a biological creature attempting to inhabit an environment that is non-biological. This is the paradox of human existence.” (p.18-9).

But he still got the sense that the Cronos complex didn’t tell the whole story; there was a second level of understanding, which was racial. This leads to chapter 3, “Child of Fire and Ice”. He starts off going into different mythologies, such as the Nazis’ “fourth cycle” the legend of Niord, the first hunter, who defeated the Worm Oroubourous by the use of fire, and deep in the earth, he became encased in ice, and Neitzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, about the Persian prophet trying to keep the Iranian religion pure in the Caucasus and other middle eastern mountains. So most European peoples preserved some memory of coming from the east and originating in the Caucasus-Pamir chain of mountains.

Basically, it was during the “ice age”, called Würm I, where we had the cave fires amidst all the ice. Hence, “fire and ice”.
So (p.26), it is right away pointed out that out of this geological backdrop, “Not intelligence, nor morality, not ‘spirit’, but aggression, is responsible for the white man’s superiority. Aggression is responsible for the expansion of Caucasoids, both geographically and culturally, at the expense of other races.” As far as psychosexual matters, “We have a low frustration level because glacial adaptation robbed us of sufficiently effective sexual displacement activities. Our philosophical and religious conflicts are the result of a glacial distortion of primate behavior-patterns”.
This would explain the sexual repression in historic Christianity, where sexual mores were so meticulous and obsessively focused on and the “morality” of nations, and “holiness” of individuals were primarily judged based on, while other evils were OK if not championed. The one the most notable to me, being racism.

He then points out there is nothing innate or external about “superiority”, for in an earlier epoch, the ape-tending pongids were “superior” to hominids in adapting to the forests covering much of the earth. But it was the change of the earth’s climate, from Miocene to Pliocene, where the earth entered a drought millions of years long, “hominid liabilities in the Miocene became assets during the Pliocene”. The failure to adapt to the forests left adaptational options open for the new environmental conditions. Neither the pongids nor the hominids had the least responsibility for this. It was basically “fate”, or the matter of timing, even over talent and temperament. This is something today’s “rugged individualists” refuse to comprehend.

Not intelligence, morality, nor ‘spirit’, but aggression, is responsible for the white man’s “superiority”, meaning their expansion at the expense of other races. There is nothing innate or external about this

Part Two is where we get into the Neanderthal-Caucasoids.
Chapter 4 “The Concept of Race” starts off discussing the viewpoints of two writers, Lother Tirala, a Nazi proponent of “Race”, and Ashley Montagu, an liberal proponent of “non-race”. Linnaeus (1785) was an early includer of man in the animal world, recognizing only one species, divided along the continental masses, into “europaeus”, “asiaticus”, “americanus” and “afer”. Buffon (1749) introduced the term “race” to mean “variety”.
Montagu had shown that modern racism stems from two separate fonts: a justification of slave economics, and inherent ans erroneous assumptions in systems of classification in evolutionary constructs. So, “It is ironic that both religion and Darwinism were used to justify racism, since each system vehemently opposed the other” (p.34). Both have used it against each other, down to the present. (I remember being so irritated to see racism mentioned in creationist Henry Morris’ Revelation Record; the first time I had ever seen it addressed in a fundamentalist apologetic work; but only to be blamed on evolution —along with every other evil in the world! What about all the Genesis-believing Christians who [erroneously] said that God cursed “Ham”, the supposed father of the black race?)

At this point is introduced another name used frequently, C.S. Coon, who divided the blacks between the “Congoids” or contemporary black “negroes”, and the “Capoids”, who were the Bushmen and Hottentots, who differed from the [Congoid] Bantu they were enslaved by. This became one instance of race-based slavery the medieval world would know about. So, “what the blacks imposed on the Capoids was soon to be imposed upon the blacks by white Europeans”. (Coon’s full racial classification consists of “Caucasoid”, “Mongoloid”, “Australoid”, “Congoid” and “Capoid”. I believe the official system now narrows it down to Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid).

Yet, the natives of Africa and the Americas would actually be described by explorers (such as Vasco da Gama and Columbus) as superior in some ways (especially morally) to Europe’s peasants! Yet only a century later was when they would suddenly be characterized as “filthy, lazy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and only fit for slavery” (which is what we are more familiar with in our history today). This was because medieval Europe considered slavery a circumstance rather than a mark of moral inferiority, and so, enslavement would be justified purely by the technological ability to do so. But it was the Church that aimed to provide a rationale for the circumstances, which was, regardless of how moral and intelligent they were, they were not yet Christians, and so slavery offered an opportunity for their conversion and the saving of their souls! (We see here how the Gospel was changed into purely a political tool, and no longer had anything to do with scripture. And the Christian world would later wonder why so many people reject it as “irrelevant”. What’s not covered, and you don’t really hear about anymore, is the earlier period of slavery, where they tried to forbid the converting of slaves. This probably connected with them not being seen as human. Eventually, of course, conversion became a handy tool to dominate over them).
So we see the origins of the debate that rages on today, as to whether the poor (and the minority “community” in general) are suffering from a series of bad circumstances, or their own moral inferiority.

There was also a division in both Europe and America, between North and South, where in both cases, the North was the first to oppose slavery. The north, because of the climate, became more industrial (through steam power), where the south remained more agricultural, and the large numbers of Africans and Amerinds were easy to exploit (p.37).
Where “Generations of slavery and lack of social and educational opportunities for black and Amerind fulfillment had inevitably resulted in poor development of these people and their offspring in comparison with the whites”, nature began to be appealed to as creating this inferiority, and by extension, “the order that God established”, and on the other front, notions of “less evolved” races, perhaps held by Darwin. He surmises the “sobering thought” that if Origin of Species had been published a decade earlier, the US might still be afflicted by slavery today! (p.40).

Basically, from here, much of the book gets into the origins of all men, rather than just the Caucasoids, especially when comparing Coon’s and the other anthropologists’ theories. He says he agrees with Coon’s theories of the races having different pre-human (Homo-erectus) ancestors, the Australoid-Pithecanthropus and Mongoloid-Sinoanthropus lines who crossed the ‘sapiens threshold’ separately (p47ff); but questions his objectivity in certain areas of the origins of races, where they lend to racist doctrines; like the Caucasoid and Mongoloid passing the sapiens threshold the earliest and thus being the most highly evolved, some Australoids straddling the threshold, and the Congoids being the newest and “mysterious”. Africa was the cradle of civilization, but only in the sense of being a “kindergarten”; “Europe and Asia were our principal schools”.
So ironically, I’ve seen where the alt-right, also accepting Neanderthal origins, uses it as more evidence of their supremacy, rather than any maladaptation. This would probably represent the strain of Coon’s theory.

P52-3 is a discussion and illustration of how all the major continents are cone shaped, narrowing toward the south, and so southern groups of people, such as the Bushmen (Capoids) and Australoids, were trapped, and easily conquered, or having to flee the continent (as in the case of the Australoids).

Chapter 5 is now on the Neanderthal-Caucasoids, which starts off on the “Heidelberg jaw” and other fossils. Coon tries to argue for a 300,000 or 400,000 year antiquity of sapience in Europe, against the disagreement of other experts.

The “Neanderthals” were named after Joachim Neander, originally “Neumann”; both meaning “new man”, which then was used by Dr. H. Schaaffhausen for a skull found in Neander’s Valley two centuries later.
The last glacial period; Würm, began 100,000 years ago, deepened into intense cold which then moderated 40,000 years ago in what’s called the Göttweig Interstadial, and then became savagely cold again until 8-10,000 BC with the last retreat of the glaciers. The Neanderthals died out with the warmer weather of the Göttweig Interstadial, when more modern men migrated to Europe. So the last Würmian cold snap was endured by modern men who were the ancestors of modern Europeans today.
I would have thought these peoples’ maladaptation to that climate would be the premise, but it seems this book focuses more on the Neanderthals. Mentioned (p.70) is that some scientists are divided in their opinion of the Neanderthals, and that they may have moved to Eurasia from elsewhere as the advancing Würmian glaciers drove more modern men out (so they were from the European-Caucasoid stock mixing with the Sinanthropus-Mongoloid), but there is some evidence some Neanderthal traits developed in Europe itself.
We next get into descriptions of the Neanderthals, beginning from the skull of LaChapelle aux Saints. They had the low broad skulls, with foreheads sloping back from large brow ridges and the prognathous jaw. You know, the typical “caveman” image. Eventually, Cro-Magnon was discovered and upheld, while Neanderthal came to be despised. Neanderthal did have some culture (awareness of the “past-present-future” continuum) though, with evidences of burial and religious sophistication.

Chapter 6 returns to the theme of “Fire and Ice: Psychobiology”, which basically continues the previous chapter with physical and cultural descriptions (Neanderthal faces were twice the size of modern ones and their heads an inch bigger in every direction but up, and also their short, stocky bodies likely “absurdly” round). Here, he discusses the Venus figurines and makes the odd suggestion of their wide hips or “hippiness” (larger than the norm for other races), being “typical” of European women (p.93, 107), and thus a holdover from the Neanderthals. That would make sense for them, but among today’s people, the Caucasians are usually slimmer, and blacks and other warm-climate women have the stereotypical “child-bearing hips”. So I’m not sure what this claim is about.
We also get a drawing of their huge feet and the insinuation that surviving remnants may have been the “abominable snowmen” of central Asia north of the Caucasus chain! (p.96, But for some reason, not the “Yeti” of the Himalayas).

In quotes from Montagu and Ivan T. Sanderson (respectively, below), debunked is the myth that Caucasoids are the most refined race, and Negroids are the most primitive; but rather closer to the opposite: “If racists would take the trouble to visit their local zoo and for a moment drop their air of superiority and take a dispassionate look at one of the apes, they would find the hair of these creatures lank, and that their lips are thin, and that their bodies are profusely covered with hair. In these characters the white man stands nearer the apes…”. I remember the Ansaars; the one time Brooklyn-based pseudo-Islamic sect that used to sell all the oils in the subway, had in one of their books a crude illustration making this point. People apparently associate Africans with apes because of the brown color, but for African people it’s their actual skin color. For apes, the color is mostly the fur, and under the fur, as the Ansaar booklet pointed out, is pinkish skin!
“The Negro so-called ‘race’ is apparently the newest and is the least pongid-like of all” (Ironically, Coon had tried to use the Negroes being newer as proof they were more primitive!) Sanderson then points to the same points regarding the lips and hair, as Montagu, and adds that the Mongoloids are very different from both. These primitive characteristics are inherited from the Neanderthal.
Next, he goes back into the cronos complex and territorialism, including through religion, and comparisons of the Congoid and Capoid and sexual dimorphism.

Part Three takes simply the title of the book. We think, finally, he’s going to get more to the central point. Chapter 7 is on “Love and Expression”. “Love is the middle ground between aggression and the ability to reproduce. A pair-bond, ‘love’, is displaced aggression. It is aggression ‘shoved aside’, literally, so that the partners can reproduce without threat.” (p130) “Lovers’ quarrels” and “playful fighting” are examples of this displaced aggression. While all peoples have similar courtship antics, only the West is said here to have a fully developed concept of “love”, as seen in the church-approved ‘courtly love’. A distinction is made between “eros” and “agape” (representing all other forms of love. It ignores the further distinctions, as found in scripture, of “philos“; and also “storge“, which is familial). “Just as the ‘love’ we call eros allows us to reproduce in the face of threat and aggression, so the ‘love’ we call agape allows us to live in the material world while yearning for the relationships awaiting us in eternity. Agape is that place where the needs of material survival are met while the realization of a past-present-future continuity is preserved.” He eventually gets into subjects such as female orgasm in western society and religious groups such as the Catharism/Albigensianism that produced the Troubadours of Provençal (langue-d’oc) fame and were destroyed by the prevailing Catholicism.
(Ironically, the Cathars/Albigenses are appealed to by some Baptists and various sects, in what’s called the “Trail of Blood” theory, where they try to trace their denominational lineage back to the original apostolic church via this persecuted group and others, seen as representing “the true Church through the ages”, in contrast to the powerful Catholics. Most of these modern sects have a heavy pietistic strain, and would probably reject the “romanticism” of the Troubadours as “sensual”, so they really do not know what they are talking about in identifying with this associated religious group, but then some try to say our knowledge of all of them is distorted by the persecutors.)

He along the way points out that the ancient Egyptian civilization was not a Western, Caucasoid achievement, but rather a multi-racial achievement. By 1500BC,
they began to record the invasions of the “sea peoples”. (p141) Rather than them swamping the Egyptian cultural influence (their numbers weren’t yet sufficient enough), they themselves were “Egyptianized”. (Mentioned is George Gurdjieff, a mystic who also created the “Enneagram of personality” concept discussed increasingly it seems, in typology circles. He was influenced by central Asian literacy and regarded Western fiction as “irrelevant”). Our “novels” focus on themes such as “love conquers all”, “love lost”, “love searched for”, or conflicts between eros and agape.

Chapter 8 is “Psychobiology in History and Society”. This discusses man’s control over nature, and defining “progress” in terms of increasing materialism. It then quickly goes back into the history of the different groups, and holds up ancient Egypt and China before the coming of maritime Europeans. Both incorporated progress, but neither were threatened by it, and should be emulated by Caucasoid civilization. Also is a discussion on how these civilizations differed in war. Being a soldier was not something romanticized as a glorious occupation in Egypt or China, and ships were designed differently, with Europeans having multiple levels in order to have more manpower, while Chinese and Egyptians simply made the one deck longer if needed, until materials limitations halted the size. This gets into the Western “frustration with nature”, leading to the urge to control it, through the desire to increase power and output.
Spending so much time on ship design, “we will not have to spend so much time on other progressive achievements which have more relevance to our crises”, so briefly mentioned are affects on health such as acupuncture, color and music (which Gurdjieff claimed the Egyptians used to stimulate plant growth). The orientation of pyramids affected the decomposition of organic substances! Where Westerners turned away from the “excess of sensation of technology and materialism”, then the cure must be the “asceticism” of some eastern philosophies. But the civilizations of China, Egypt and pre-Caucasoid India were not stable (and perhaps more fulfilling) because of asceticism, they were balanced, being highly erotic as well. (All three societies being “obsessed with fashion and cosmetics and jewelry), and had erotic art, yet both men and women were sex objects, rather than just women). So this then goes into western sexual maladaptation (and its resultant aggression) compared to those societies. So “our sexual-sensual behavior is not typical of civilized society but more resembles the sexual-sensual behavior of ‘primitive’ cultures retarded by adverse environmental conditions” (p184). This then uses as examples the dresses that overemphasize (distort) the hips or buttocks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the demand for differentiation in sex, like parents’ complaints not long before the book, of boys wearing long hair.

Chapter 9 is “Ouroubouros Unfettered”

This mainly discusses the possible future outcomes of “the Iceman inheritance” on the world:

1) Western man will destroy all of visible life off of the planet

2) Western man will destroy its own culture and industrialism and the rest of mankind will establish something similar to the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, with perhaps some vestiges of Western technology

3) Extra-terrestial intervention which might impose some new pattern upon us

4) Western Man, through self-examination, can overcome his problem and modify his behavior

5) Western man and the rest of the world can continue to “progress” along the lines already established by contemporary culture and technology

The first and last are right away eliminated as “vanities of power”, as human life is too resilient and adaptable to be destroyed by Western folly, but yet, the environment is too limited and delicate for things to go on as they are. (I’m surprised he didn’t mention the danger of us destroying all human life and possibly all life together, with our nuclear technology).

That leaves the other three. The one he believes is most likely, based on the pattern of history, is Western Civilization collapse on itself. (Looks that way to me as well).
He still then addresses the other two scenarios. So then we get several pages on the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (including UFO sightings, scientific evidence, with Carl Sagan and others mentioned). I myself too have wished, or thought this might be our only hope. Technically, God would fall into this category, hence my believing in a “Second Coming” of Christ when I saw that this was the key message of the Bible. However, since it seems that was something already fulfilled by the events shortly after the scripture canon was closed, it’s back to square one on that front. So likewise, even after all of this, intervention still appears unlikely and that “we will be left alone to solve our own problems”.

So he ends on the final possibility, of consciously changing our behavior. Hope-offering examples are provided of Neanderthal-Caucasians being able to live in relatively gentle and non-expansive communities (with the Celtic-Cathars/Albigenses as the main one), in addition to the other cultures. Drawing upon Cyrano de Bergerac, our main adversary is our vanity. “Instead of denying the existence of biological determinates in our behavior, we must somehow find the courage to look them straight in the mirror. If we can only find the courage that Cyrano lacked, we may yet live. And if we do not find love, we may at least discover compassion for ourselves ad others”.

It is the (often unnecessary) aggression based upon the notion of cultural-religious-moral racial rightness that makes Western behavior unique, over the “comparative aggression” of others. No other people has shared this justification for aggression and expansion

The appendix is “Objections, Counter-arguments and Retorts”. The main one being the complaint we’ve heard a lot in today’s racially charged rhetorical environment, of non-White societies being made into paradise, when they were really full of “Comparative aggression”. When writing Makers-Takers, I ran across a South African White Nationalist site where in the same breath as blacks being portrayed as subhuman monsters, but rebuffing criticism of the white race and western civilization, a commenter asks, incredulously, that according to the “liberals”, “How could one civilization [i.e. whites] be so bad?” (Shouldn’t the question be, how could they think blacks could be so bad, or whites could be so good? If it’s possible for one group to be so bad, then it’s possible for the other one as well).
Now, while just finishing this, someone posts some new video of some cowboy looking person challenging an Indian telling him to get off his land with the “fact” that that Indian’s tribe had moved in and killed off a previous tribe. The point, if it was OK when you did it, then it’s OK for us to do the same to your land. Commenters give their usual tripe about “the losers whining after centuries” and “that’s life, get over it”. Of course, this ignores that those same people, the descendants of the conquerors, are now whining, or no, screaming more than anyone else, that they are being “conquered”, or even destroyed (by the very people they are giving all of this tough talk to; whether the minorities, illegal immigrants, the godless liberals giving everything away to them, etc.) Why is that any different?

Recently, calling this out on a similar FB post, I’m given the whole rationale. Life doesn’t give past losers the right to complain, but it does give people currently under “attack” the right to “defend themselves”. So this means, they can tell others to “stop whining” and to be “thankful” for all the goodness of this society, but they can whine about being destroyed (when others simply oppose them for their aggression), or this nation “no longer” being “great, and thus themselves not be thankful for anything. In other words, they have “rights” to demand better things in life, but not others. It basically corresponds to this division they’ve made between “rights” and “entitlements”, with those criticizing others for “entitlements” being the ones who truly have the “rights”, —based simply on who’s in power now. It’s “Might makes right”, pure and simple. (Some of them, perhaps in the back of their mind realize that the same “nature” or God that allowed them to rise to power can one day allow someone to usurp it from them, but part of their “self-defense” is the blaming of what they fear will happen in the future on those seen as making them weak and giving the birthright away to others; so they can hypothetically lose some day, but it will be the fault of “the forces of evil”, like liberals and moderates, and so they can do all they can to try to prevent this now by vigorously fighting these enemy “others”).

That’s what explains this huge attribution shift; why both can do the same things (Romans 2), but only one is right. Who determined this (i.e. who has the “right” to complain, or what is a “right” or an “entitlement”), we don’t know. (But since there are so many Christians in this movement, then the idea that “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away” still condemns their attitude, since it means they might be fighting God’s will. Also, from this, and even a nontheistic perspective; the neurotic focus on survival of the “race” or “culture”, especially as many of these people, Christian or not, claim to be “post-racial”). It’s “extended ego”, not any concern for the laws of either God or nature, and so the whole premise is mired in pure deceit.

So Bradley denies, saying that examples of non-Western aggression had been offered. “I have not intended to suggest that Neanderthal-Caucasoids have always proved more aggressive than anyone else… but merely that this major group of Mankind has a tendency toward higher aggression and that this has, in the aggregate, affected the pattern of history in obvious ways.
On the other hand, some examples given for exceptional non-Caucasoid aggression do seem to evaporate under closer scrutiny, especially with the quality of the aggression manifested.”

For the Mexican-Indians, he connects their aggression, especially connected to their religion, to Old World ideas and behavior, and hence, “yet another iceman inheritance imposed upon non-Western peoples”. (The Spaniards, for instance, found many religious parallels between Europe and Mexico. The suggestion, apparently, is that some of this had been brought over the Bering Strait by their ancestors). Until more data is analyzed, “the religious wars of Middle America’s populations cannot be used as an argument against this thesis.”
For the Mongol expansions, it’s about the quality of the aggression, meaning it was “normal” aggression, motivated by overpopulation (environmental necessity) rather than psychological motivation. “The West has expanded even when unnecessary…in order to impose Western culture and religion on others. Or from the motivation of sheer greed, or from all these motivations combined in a mutually supportive justification structure. It is this expansion and aggression based upon the notion of cultural-religious-moral racial rightness and intolerance that makes Western behavior unique. I submit that no other people has shared this justification for aggression and expansion…certainly not the Mongols.”
He also presents argument regarding Japan, the Eskimos, and the Capoid and Australoid extinction at the hand of non-Caucasoid people.

This of course ties into the whole “Scriptural” component of the justification. Scripture really condemns the means of “expansion” and also condemns self-justification; we are supposed to admit our own sin and then show the same mercy we believe we have received, toward others. But scripture instead was taken out of context, where conquests or judgments seen in the Old Testament were taken as commands for “Christian” nations thousands of years later who did not receive the actual commands recorded there.
This is part of what Western “Christian” civilization has been held up to, and their validity dismissed for (Romans 2:24). But all conservative defenders can do is point to others; “what about them“? (Even though they know this would never fly, before God; but they are so sure they are right with God, and again, they criticize others as “never accepting responsibility”!) But those “others” are the ones you consider to be “godless heathens”, and yourselves the faithful Christians. You’re supposed to set the example of godliness, as the “light to the nations”, not appeal to them as justification of your own ungodliness in the same breath as condemning their ungodliness! This is why it seems popular culture is so against traditional Western and Christian “values”. (See also, Eph.4:27, John 9:41, Luke 12:48).

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So the book does make and support its point, but it goes off into so much other details, it seems more like a general study of anthropology. So it doesn’t seem really hard-hitting enough. (I of course am looking for something that will be a good counter to both mainstream Right “dog whistling”, and alt-Right “supremacy”). It’s too easy to get lost in all the details about human evolution in general. What I had hoped to see was more specific connections with modern behavior and beliefs.

What I find as a cause for concern is the direction the author has seemed to go in the nearly 40 years since publishing the book, and as I saw in researching him for this project, it is possibly anti-semitism. Jews were barely mentioned in the old printing, but this newer publication promotional: http://www.michaelbradley.info/books/iceman/iceman_promo.html is subtitled “A frightening publication history of Jewish media suppression”. It’s compared to the Nation of Islam’s The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.
So on the page, he covers his history promoting the original publication.

Then, in early 1981, someone figured out the implications for Jews in the book’s presentation of evidence…

I had never considered this myself because it had been a long time since I had taken my own Jewish origins into any account. I had never even thought about any “Jewish implications” of the book. Neither did the Jewish publisher of the original Canadian edition, Larry Goldstein. And, obviously, Dr. Judith Posner had not thought about any “Jewish implications” either when she wrote an Introduction for The Iceman Inheritance – unless, of course, courageous Judy Posner simply had more affinity with all of humanity than with her own ethnic group. Jews were blandly mentioned on half a page in the 226-page book.

After 1981, some bookstores that had formerly carried the book were threatened with boycott and fire-bombing by Jewish pressure groups.

This eventually leads into something called the Khazar theory. I had recently been hearing this, probably from some FB “friends” with some radical “libertarian” or paleo-con leanings (who post things that may ultimately tie into the alt-right). It basically says the common “white” Jews (particularly the Ashkenazis) were actually descended from a Caucasian tribe from the Russian steppe. They “converted en-masse to Judaism about AD 740 in order to avoid religious, cultural and political control by either Moslems in Persia or by Christians in Byzantium. These ‘Jewish’ Khazars, along with Alans, Bulgars, Magyars and other minor steppe tribes, were subsequently dispersed all over Central and Eastern Europe about 500 years later by the Mongol invasion of AD 1218.”
He even points to the common physical traits, such as the faces of people like Barbara Streisand and Julia Roberts. (BTW, Donald Fagen would be a textbook example of that as well).

On one hand, this view was enticing, because I’ve always held the position that the original Israelites of the Bible were people of color, like the modern Palestinians and others, and even some current day Israelis. But it seems when you look at most people called “Jews” today, they are pure “white”, many even with blonde hair and blue eyes. Even though “white supremacists” reject them as part of their race, when growing up, they were always called “white” and identified themselves as such. The Census even considers them “Caucasian”.
So it is so easy to assume, as apparently the entire Church did, that these were what the people of the Bible looked like. Sure enough, nearly every Sunday-school and Bible illustration of Moses, Joseph, Judah, David, all the prophets, and Jesus and the apostles, are all white. It’s then further assumed the Israelites were the original racial stock, so the whiteness is then further projected back to Abraham, Shem (even though most will acknowledge the true Caucasian race as stemming from Japheth along with the Mongoloids), Noah, and the first humans, Adam and Eve.

This went right along with the racism of the Western Church. Whites, whether Israelite or not, were the “chosen” race. Blacks were “cursed” Ham.
(Hislop’s Two Babylons clearly identified Nimrod as “black”. Herbert Armstrong, who I entered the faith through, drawing upon Hislop in Mystery of the Ages, then proclaims all the “chosen” figures, from Adam to Noah and his sons, to “God’s chosen nation Israel”, to Jesus, as “white”, of course taking care to add “not that the white race is in any way superior” ⦅these people, including today’s “dog whistlers”, refuse to understand how innuendo works⦆, and admitting “God does not reveal in the Bible the precise origin of the different races”, but with what Wikipedia would call “weasel words”: “it is evident”, “happened to be”, prefaced with “undoubtedly”, with no evidence!
The point, the main sin in the pre-flood era and the Tower of Babel afterward was intermixing of races, which God had “separated”; and a desire “still inherent in human nature today”, with talk of the “unblemished, perfect lineage”, and an analogy to animal “thoroughbred or pedigreed stock”! (p148. The eternal “Wonderful World of Tommorrow” he concludes the book on, will continue these “boundaries” God has set!)

Also, some white supremacists held black skin as the “Mark of Cain”. Though all of Cain’s descendants were supposed to have perished in the Flood. They’ll probably say Ham’s wife had the genes; just as Armstrong says Eve had the “yellow” and “black” genes, passed through Noah’s son’s wives, though without ever connecting this to Cain.
Armstrong also held to “Anglo-Israelism”, which says that the US and Britain are two of the lost ten tribes of Israel, with other northern European nations being the other tribes. One of the conclusions from this is that all of the conquest and slavery that benefited these nations were fulfillment of the “promise” made to Abraham! He also took the prophecy of Amos 9:9, about the exiled nation “For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth” as proving the race is totally “pure”. They never mixed with any other group; not one single person apparently, so all the “Israelites” you see today: Jews, Anglos, Nordics, etc., are the same exact pure “race” we read about in the Bible!

Anglo-Israelism is one of the main “heresies” evangelical apologetics condemns Armstrongism for, but you really wonder why they would even bother on that point, when it is compatible with, and in actuality, the logical extension of, much of traditional American evangelical preaching on politics and morality! Think, “God is taking away his blessings on our nation and cursing us because of all the sin today!”, as if we are breaking a specific national-divine covenant like the one made with Biblical Israel. Only Armstrongism is fully consistent in that.
Of course, to white supremacists, “Judah” rejected her Messiah, so then it’s their racial “cousins”, the other “chosen” people, the white “Christian” nations, whether linked lineally to Israel or not, who now inherit the “birthright” as the new “chosen” nations!)

So this “Khazar” theory would totally debunk that whole premise, and explain why Jews appear to be Caucasian (aside from trying to argue that it’s purely from mixing). So Bradley is tying it in with his Neanderthal “Iceman” premise, and now claiming they are trying to suppress the theory because of it. You can see more of this here.
So looking up the Khazar theory, I see it is lumped in with “antisemitism”, and also (as it would figure) held by alt-right groups. It’s claimed to have been refuted, as no real genetic evidence connects Jews to this eastern group. So I’m not messing with that theory. (At least not until there is some more solid verification of it, and agreement that it is not simply antisemitic propaganda). There may have been some mixing with that group, but I just don’t trust anything alt-righters say. (Of course, they claim everyone is suppressing their “truths”, and it ultimately becomes more pre-supposed, biased conjecture than anything else).

Interestingly enough, those other “Russian steppe” groups mentioned above are the ones associated with the “Gypsies”, who were already, historically despised by Westerns. So it figures antisemites would benefit by tagging the Jews in with those peoples.
However, the initial basis of antisemitism, that they were the “murderers of Christ”, would then fall flat, as the gentile Khazars, being hundreds of miles away, had nothing to do with the Crucifixion. The modern advocates of this theory don’t seem to be thinking of that.

Of course, alt-righters are also against blacks, while this guy’s original premise seemed to be to admit the error of racism, explaining it anthropologically. So I’m really not sure where he’s coming from. (Him being part Jewish doesn’t necessarily help. Hitler himself apparently was as well. There are self-hating Jews, just as there are self-hating blacks). As mentioned before, some alt-righters even hold the Neanderthal origin theory as proving superiority.

Still, I think there is something to the basic premise, regarding “aggression” (whether it goes all the way back to Neanderthals, or the “modern people” who suffered similar conditions later). This is essentially what’s being held up in the Right as the very “character” others, especially the blacks, lack, and particularly in the whole “rugged individualism” premise of modern politics and economics (drawing upon their heavily romanticized “American frontier” roots).
Again, it feels like this society is becoming a virtual Ice Age, not literally, but politically and economically. They insist it is “exceptional”, but then they appeal to raw “nature” (including, again, the Christians; who largely voted for the unscrupulous Trump), and everything is being run like a frozen cave in the middle of Würm. Everyone just covers themselves and passes the buck to the less powerful, and no one cares. Again, dog-eat-dog; survival of the fittest, in the name of the “market” as justification for unbridled “nature”. Yet, we’re so much above the animals, and other people!

So with the alt-right on the warpath today, with the utter gall to be boldly wielding their views as infallible “truth” as if God shouted it down from Heaven, and never thinking in the least, that it might be “too good to be true” that they are so superior, or having no sense of any negative side to their achievements, this is something they should be checked with, especially since they hold to a central part of the premise, regarding the Neanderthals. Aggression is not really “superiority”. Perhaps in a survivalistic sense, but definitely not in a moral sense! For every “good”, there is a shadow of “bad”, so what is “exceptional” with technology and even religion has also been exceptionally “bad”, in some of what has been done with it. So this is something they should constantly be made aware of. And it’s certainly better than other theories, such as the ones of black “Muslim” and “Hebrew” groups that explain these things by “demonizing” the race, quite literally!

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