Every day I think that the Republicans have sunk as low as they can, another candidate shocks and surprises me with how retrograde and radically reactionary s/he can be.
Meet Jim Russell, who I hope will be the worst of the worst of this year's Republican candidates. Who IS this Jim Russell? Does he hail from the hills of Alaska, OR the rural spaces of flyover country in Idaho OR North Dakota or the deep, deep, deep South? Nope, Jim Russell resides in Hawthorne, New York, Westchester County, and he's running against longtime Democrat Nita Lowey.
Is Jim Russell a recent newcomer to politics, swept in as a Republican candidate this year in a Tea Party fever? No, Jim Russell ran against Ms. Lowey in 2008, and claims that he ran quite respectably. In addition, Russell claims that he has run in several other races as well.
What's so odious about Jim Russell? Well, Maggie Habermann of Politico (a website NOT exactly known for being frightfully left-wing) has unearthed an essay of Russell's from Occidental Quarterly (which wraps white power in vestments of intellectual gibberish). Russell's Anti-Integrationist Essay
This lovely essay, The Western Contribution to World History, has a bland title which masks some pretty offensive writings. I checked Ms. Haberman's links to Occidental Quarterly and it appears that Russell's essay has since been expunged from this august website. However, Ms. Haberman has been kind enough to save us some juicy quotes from Russell's "Western Contribution to Civilization:"
"(T.S.) Eliot described some conditions for an optimal society: ‘The population should be homogeneous. . . . What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and culture combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.’"
Do you see that folks? Mr. Russell does not like "free-thinking Jews!" And this is a man who lives in a suburb of New York City? Why haven't politically conservative Jewish-American heavyweights such as Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol condemned this lunatic? (Oh, I guess that they were too busy fighting against that "mosque.")
Here's another Russell gem:
One wonders how a child’s sexual imprinting mechanism is affected by forcible racial integration and near continual exposure to media stimuli promoting interracial contact. The most serious implication of human sexual imprinting for our genetic future is that it would establish the destructiveness of school integration, especially in the middle and high-school years. One can only wonder to what degree the advocates of school integration, such as former NAACP attorney Jack Greenberg, were conscious of this scientific concept. It also compounds the culpability of media moguls who deliberately popularize miscegenation in films directed toward adolescents and pre-adolescents. In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.
I guess that Mr. Russell does NOT like the mixing of the races. I think that it's pretty safe to say that Russell doesn't approve of our President's parents. The great mystery is why Russell lives just outside of New York City, the most multi-ethnic urban area in the country. In another passage, Russell condemns popular culture and even SHAKESPEARE because of artworks depicting interracial relationships:
The sociobiological warfare that our youth is subjected to is likely to be even more diabolical since it appears to deliberately exploit a biological theory of sexual imprinting at the critical period of sexual maturity. Movies like this past year’s spate of miscegenationist titles, Save the Last Dance, Crazy / Beautiful and O, a parody of Othello, appear deliberately designed to exploit the critical period of sexual imprinting in their target audiences of white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women
I guess that the media has been swooning over Ms. O'Donnell's witchcraft to notice this idiot's racist scribblings. It's a lot easier for the media to laugh at Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell than this racist, who is more "respectable" because he has a Ph.D. in Religious Philosophy and dresses up his prejudices in pretty words. In addition, Mr. Russell does not drive a rusty pick-up truck, marry his cousin, or live in a shack ten miles from civilization, like the stereotypical white racist that the media can make fun of. In fact, Russell is more worthy of criticism than the stereotypical poor white uneducated "redneck" that we liberals like to ridicule. Russell, an allegedly educated man, is a full-blown racist DESPITE his education. Russell should know better.
The media claims that Russell is a "conservative Christian," which is an insult to both conservatives AND Christians. I wondered what psychotic sect Russell belonged to. I subsequently learned that Russell alleges to be a Roman Catholic, but has written a book, "Broken Bonds," which is highly critical of the Catholic Church's position on US immigration. It does not take a wild guess to prognosticate that Russell thinks dimly of immigrants.
It would be nice if Jews, Catholics, conservatives and liberals all came out against this poor excuse for a candidate of a major party. Remember, this is ONE Republican abomination you can't blame on the Tea Party. Unfortunately, according to Jim Russell's campagain website, he's gotten some GREAT endorsements: Endorsed by the NYS Republican Party and NYS Conservative Party. Ed Kowalski, of 9/11 Families For A Secure America, personally endorses Russell for Congress. Russell's Campaign Website
It appears that "The Western Contribution to World History" has a direct link: The Western Contribution to World History
UPDATE: Well, the NYGOP has cut Russell loose, Salon has reported.
For giggles, here's a review of Russell's "The Germanization of Medieval Europe.":
Here are highlights from a review of his book (reviewed by Thomas F. X. Noble, The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Jun., 1995), pp. 888-889):
In this book James C. Russell grips the obvious with a grim tenacity and pronounces it a discovery of vast and original proportions. Russell argues that Christianization efforts among the Germanic peoples resulted in a "substantial Germanization" (p. 3) of Christianity. I do not know what I reprehend more in this study: its execrable prose, its shoddy scholarship, or its capacity to misunderstand the very issues it seeks to elucidate. Russell uses the passive voice more times than a lifetime vouchsafes to any author, generally eschews primary sources except when citing them from anthologies or from other people's notes, scissors and pastes 106 long, indented quotations into 209 pages of text, and omits no opportunity to put turgid jargon where sturdy English would do nicely.
...
[T]o reify "Germanic" is to fall into a kind of racialism typical of the nineteenth century but distressing at the end of the twentieth.
...
This poor effort contributes little to an old and worthy scholarly effort but it does confirm the validity of a verse of Alexander Pope's that has become a cliche: "A little learning is a dangerous thing."
If the GOP cannot repudiate an actual Nazi running under their banner, well, lord help us.
NY GOP Distances from Russell