Originally published in Nationalism Today, November 1983 Print

RACE: What the scientists say

The second in a series about the great racial scientists, by Steve Brady

No. 2: Hans Jurgen Eysenck

THE BACKGROUND of Professor Hans Jurgen Eysenck, Ph.D., D.Sc,. could hardly be less likely to predispose him toward any sort of support for the idea of inherited racial differences. Born in Berlin in 1916, he was forced to flee Hitler's Germany in the mid-1930's. He became known as a fervent and outspoken anti-Nazi and liberal, bitterly opposed to 'racism' in all its forms. After he escaped from the Gestapo, Eysenck was educated at the Universities of Dijon, Exeter and London, from which last institution he received his Doctorate of Philosophy in Psychology in 1940. Since then, apart from work at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital during the War and lecturing at two American Universities, Professor Eysenck has devoted his career primarily to founding and building up the University of London Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in South London, of which he has been Director since 1946 and Professor of Psychiatry since 1955. Today, Eysenck's Institute is among the most respected institutions of its kind in the world, pioneering research into mental illness and bringing hope to the lives of thousands of patients.

LEARNED JOURNAL

Apart from this work, Professor Eysenck has found time to edit a number of learned journals, notably the International Monographs of Experimental Psychology, and to write numerous books ranging from classic textbooks to best-selling popular works. He has had over 600 scientific papers published in British, American, German, Spanish and French Journals of Psychology.

As a refugee from Hitlerite Nazism, active in a traditionally egalitarian and heavily Marxist/liberal influenced field, Eysenck naturally gravitated toward the view, as he later admitted, "that racial IQ differences were due to environmental influences". But, unlike many of his equally multi-racialist contemporaries, Eysenck bore the mark of the true scientist: he was prepared to look at the actual evidence provided by the real world, even when it pointed inexorably to conclusions utterly at variance with his personal preconceptions and attitudes. In short, he was prepared to overcome his own prejudices in the service of Truth.

MONUMENTAL STUDY

When he was confronted with Professor Audrey M. Shuey's monumental study The Testing of Negro Intelligence in 1966, and Professor Arthur Jensen's epochal 1969 paper on racial differences in intelligence published in the Harvard Educational Review, both of which powerfully documented the vast weight of scientific evidence tending to demonstrate the existence of major and inherited differences in average intelligence between races, Professor Eysenck felt compelled to rethink his ideas. As he put it, in an exclusive interview courageously granted to the racial nationalist magazine Beacon, in 1976, he found the case for inherited racial differences in intelligence made by Shuey and Jensen to be "absolutely convincing, so I re-read all the literature and found I couldn't maintain the view I had held before". Would that other multi-racialists and ethnic egalitarians had Professor Eysenck's intellectual honesty and moral courage!

Fired by his new awareness of inherited racial differences in intelligence, Eysenck wrote his classic Race, Intelligence and Education (Temple-Smith, 1971) which powerfully argued the case for such inherent differences. Though Eysenck was careful to adopt a cautious note in drawing the obvious political inferences from such scientific realities, this book brilliantly and systematically demolishes the multiracialist pleas that the racial differences in average IQ, and other measures of intelligence, observed again and again over the last century, are the results of 'White racist society', Eysenck's Race, Intelligence and Education is a fine exposition of the psychology of race and IQ which every Nationalist should endeavour to read, the more so as it is not overly "hard going".

Also worth reading is Eysenck's The Inequality of Man (Fontana, 1975), in which he very ably argues the case for what is in fact the fundamental premise of racial nationalism - that human nature, the behaviour, intelligence, personality, and other mental attributes of peoples and races, is basically and primarily determined by genetic inheritance, not social environment. Hence any vision of a new and a better society must be determined by the constraints and potentialities of human nature, rather than simply blindly assuming that people and their most profound drives and motivations can be changed beyond recognition to fit The Plan, as Marxists and liberals do.

OUTSPOKEN COURAGE

For his outspoken courage in standing by his convictions, Professor Eysenck has been vilified, smeared by the media, and repeatedly beaten up by Red thugs. But, as he told a Nationalist interviewer, "It doesn't make any difference to what I say or write. I left Germany and went into exile because I cherish free speech .... and I wouldn't give it up for any threats".

Far from being the ignorant bigot which is the media stereotype of the believer in in racial difference, Professor Hans Eysenck has written: "Human problems.... have to be settled on a factual basis: not by emotion and prejudice, but only by careful factual research, unencumbered by bias and determined to follow the evidence wherever it may lead". As the only true 'scientific socialists', we echo the Professor's view.

We also echo his warning, that if the problem of Race is not solved, "it threatens to involve us in strife, both civil and international, which will make previous wars and commotions seem trivial". Reality or race war, repatriation or ruin, that is the choice before us, a choice starkly highlighted by the facts adduced by such eminent scientists as Professor Hans Eysenck.

[Textual note: the original printed magazine source for this article contained a rather unfortunate typographical error in the penultimate paragraph, with the words “not by” having been omitted. We have contacted the author who has confirmed that the above text is the correct version.]