Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, has taken over the leadership of the Pioneer Fund following the recent death of its former administrator, Harry F. Weyher.
The Pioneer Fund was established in 1937 by the American white supremacist multimillionaire Wickliffe Draper and others who were supportive of Nazi race policies in Germany. The incorporation papers of the Fund states its policy to support the "procreation of the white colonial stock" and to finance research into "problems of race betterment" and "problems of heredity and eugenics in the human race."
One of the first actions of the Pioneer Fund was to pay for the distribution of a Nazi propaganda film, "Hereditary Defective" to high schools, colleges, and churches across the US. The film was produced by the Racial Political Office of the Nazi Party, and had been authorized directly by Adolf Hitler.
In the 1950s and 60s, the Fund aligned itself with white racist factions opposed to the desegregation of education. At the same time, Wickliffe Draper worked closely with the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, which was itself chaired by Pioneer Fund associate director, Francis E. Walter. In the Committee's interrogation of Paul Robeson, the famous African-American singer and Communist activist, Robeson asked Walter if he was trying to keep "decent people out of the country." Walter responded, "No, only your kind." Robeson said, "Colored people like myself." Walter again responded, "We are trying to make it easier to get rid of your kind, too."
Since the mid-1960s, Pioneer Fund money in the millions of dollars has bankrolled numerous racist and fascist psychologists - Rushton, Jensen, Cattell, Shuey, Eysenck, and many others - as well as William Shockley's scheme to pay African-Americans to have themselves "voluntarily" sterilized.
In the early 1970s, the Pioneer Fund paid the Foundation of Human Understanding to distribute hundreds of free copies of pamphlets by white supremacist psychologists Richard Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen to the registrars' offices of universities across the US in a blatant attempt to influence administration policies against the admittance of African-American students. This same tactic was employed in Canada in the late 1990s, when a Rushton pamphlet was mass-mailed to psychology and sociology professors across the country.
Rushton, referred to as "one of the most notorious race scientists in the world" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been a recipient of Pioneer Fund money for almost twenty years. In the year 2000 alone, tax records indicate that Rushton received $US 473,825 - approximately three-quarters of a million dollars in Canadian funds.
Rushton maintains that Africans have larger genitals, breasts, and buttocks than white people, and that there is an inverse relationship between brain size and the size of sexual organs. Rushton further claims that Africans have far less intelligence than white people, and that therefore, the evolutionary "survival strategy" of Africans does not rely on intelligence, but on promiscuous sexual breeding. This fraudulent analysis has led Rushton to claim that genetically inherited sexual promiscuity is responsible for single-parent families and the AIDS epidemic among Canadians and Americans of African descent.
Joining Rushton on the editorial board of the Pioneer Fund is Richard Lynn, a psychologist with the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland. Lynn, who shares Rushton's racist positions, and has also long benefited from Pioneer Fund largesse, further claims that Africans are "more psychopathic" than whites, and have a marked tendency to develop "psychopathic personalities" which leads them to be more aggressive, more reckless, and more prone to lying than whites.
Lynn has been an associate editor of the fascist journal "Mankind Quarterly," whose editorial board and circle of contributors has included Corrado Gini, a leading biologist in Mussolini's Italy and author of "The Scientific Basis of Fascism," and Ottmar von Verschuer, a racist scientist in Nazi Germany and mentor to Josef Mengele, the "butcher of Auschwitz."
"Mankind Quarterly" is itself financed by the Pioneer Fund, and has been edited by Roger Pearson, who founded the neo-Nazi Northern League in 1958, along with several former Nazi SS officers. It should come as no surprise that "Mankind Quarterly" has published numerous papers by Philippe Rushton and the circle of racist and fascist scientists whose work has been paid for out of the bank accounts of the Pioneer Fund.
The connection between racist science and fascist politics could not be more evident. Indeed, as long ago as 1989, Rushton gave a speech to the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, an organization founded and led by Toronto-based anti-immigrant and pro-fascist propagandist Paul Fromm.
Fromm, in turn, has for years peddled and promoted Rushton's books, and in 1990 he authored the pamphlet, "Race, Evolution, and AIDS: What Rushton Really Said." At the present time, Fromm continues to sell his pamphlet, as well as Rushton's "Race, Evolution, and Behavior," and Glayde Whitney's "Race, Genetics, and Society." Whitney, a University of Miami racist psychologist also financed by the Pioneer Fund, wrote the introduction to Klansman David Duke's autobiography "My Awakening," available along with the other titles through Fromm's organizations.
With right-wing governments in power across Canada and the USA, funding for science that legitimately serves the people is drying up. The corporate-driven political agenda has no need for history, sociology, philosophy, or any academic discipline that does not cater to the direct accumulation of private profit.
But with Philippe Rushton's ascendancy to the control of the Pioneer Fund, the floodgates will be opened to every racist and fascist propagandist that hides behind the cloak of science. Segregation, the destruction of affirmative action, the elimination of non-white immigration, and eventually the establishment of a whites-only political state: these are the social policies that have always guided the Pioneer Fund and which will undoubtedly find many willing ears in this period when imperialism is tottering on the brink of fascism.
January 2003