chlamor
10-15-2007, 09:08 PM
RACE! THAT MURRAY BOOK
December 1994
Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial. The idea of any sort of radical or "revolutionary" social change became unfashionable among intellectuals and social scientists. The political and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century have altered that perspective, and observers are now more willing to entertain the idea of sudden revolutionary change.
Well, one vital and recent social change has been not only truly revolutionary but has occurred at almost dizzying speed. Namely: Until literally mid-October 1994, it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability. What used to be widespread shared public knowledge about race and ethnicity among writers, publicists, and scholars, was suddenly driven out of the public square by Communist anthropologist Franz Boas and his associates in the 1930s, and it has been taboo ever since. Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.
While, in contrast to many other countries, the professional egalitarian left in the United States has not been able to use government censorship as one of its weapons of expulsion, it has used every other smear and bullying tactic, high and low, to drive any such sentiments out of public life, to suppress discussion and scholarship, as well as any genuine freedom of inquiry or research in what had long been a flourishing area of study. In a deep sense, this was an early manifestation of Political Correctness, after which other virulent forms of PC were added on top of this previous foundation. In the area of scientific research, the last truthful comprehensive book on the subject, Race, by the great British scientist John R. Baker, was published by the distinguished Oxford University Press in the 1970s. But Oxford Press was virtually forced, by intense pressure, if not to withdraw the book openly, at least to suppress it in practice by giving it as little circulation as possible.
For the rest of society, the racial thought police were able to suppress journalism, and to eliminate all Racially Incorrect traces not only of media sentiment, but even of humor, and the rich American heritage of ethnic humor has almost been stamped out of existence.
The basic tactic of the egalitarian left rulers was, of course, not to dignify any books engaging in candid inquiry into the race question by openly rebutting them. After all, to engage in any sort of public debate, in lecture hall or in print, with The Enemy runs the risk of the egalitarian actually losing, or at least demonstrating to lay intellectuals or to the general public that maybe a plausible case can be made for this horrible heresy. So the ruling tactic of the left was to engage in what Harry Elmer Barnes, in another connection, called "the blackout," and for the rest to smear the heretic relentlessly with the usual PC smear labels we have come to know and love so well: "racist," "fascist," "Nazi," "sexist," "heterosexist," and so on. Better to black out and smear, to marginalize the heretic into shame and oblivion.
The political situation of the 1930s and 40s was used to cunning effect by the egalitarian left to stamp out all opposition. Any expression of racial home truths was automatically lambasted as "fascist," "Nazi," and therefore ultra-rightist. In fact, all of this was a fabrication. The leading "racial scientists" from the 1890s until the 1930s were in agreement across the ideological and political spectrum. In fact, most of the leading racial scientists were Progressives, left-liberals, and New Dealers. In that period, only Communists and other Marxists were egalitarians, for ideological reasons. But the Commies were able to use their extensive ideological and propaganda machine during that era to somehow link Nazi persecution of Jews to racism, and with doctrines of racial superiority and inferiority. In that way, the Commies were able to bully or convert all manner of liberals and leftists, including those ex-Trotskyites and liberals who would much later become neoconservatives. This left the conservatives, who were the least amenable to Marxist influence, but who in turn were bullied into submission by being smeared savagely as "Hitlerite" for any expression of racialist views.
In point of fact, however, it should be clear that Hitler and the Nazis did not persecute Jews because they believed Jews to be inferior in intelligence. And as for blacks, there were too few blacks residing in Europe for the Nazis to bother about, much less persecute. Where pre-World War II racialism was politically relevant was, e.g., in immigration-cutting policies in the United States, and in sterilization of welfare mothers as part of various state welfare programs. Both of these policies, however, could be and were supported on other than racialist grounds.
During the past sixty years, racial research or expression of views by intellectuals has been marginalized and almost literally driven underground by pressure from above and from below. But in October, 1994, with incredible speed, the entire culture did a 180-degree turn. Upon the publication by the respected Establishment, The Free Press, of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, expressing in massively stupefying scholarly detail what everyone has always known but couldn't dare to express about race, intelligence, and heritability, the dam suddenly burst. It's not that all the reviews were favorable. Not at all. But the crucial point is that the Blackout suddenly collapsed; the Herrnstein-Murray book (since Herrnstein died before publication, it is now for all publicity purposes "the Murray book") is remarkably everywhere, attacked in Newsweek as well as the predictable New Republic, treated as The Cultural Phenomenon of the year. Not only that: the attacks may be bitter, but they are not the traditional mindless smears: no one has dismissed the book as "racist," "fascist," "neo-Nazi," and all the rest.
There are many mind-boggling aspects to the Herrnstein-Murray breakthrough. The Bell Curve is becoming a runaway bestseller, certainly for a non-fiction work on a serious topic; and yet, it is not a book that more than a handful of scholars are actually going to read. How often do we see a 900-page work, filled with boring statistics and social science jargon, become a coffee-table book, the sort of book that my dear you simply have to display to show that you are abreast of the times?
Perhaps the most mind-boggling cultural response, one that most needs explanation, was that of the Queen of middlebrow, the newspaper that Sets the Line telling intellectuals, media people, journalists, think-tankers, etc. what to think: the august New York Times Sunday Book Review. In fact, we can, for once, pinpoint the cultural and social revolution on the Race Question to one precise date: October 16, 1994 – the date when the august Establishment New York Times ostentatiously threw in the towel. For the Sunday Book Review devoted the front cover, and three entire pages to a blockbuster review of three recent "racist" books, a review which not only did not engage in the usual Marxoid smears, but was objective, respectful and actually favorable! We have to realize, in the first place, that such a length for a review in the Sunday Times is unprecedented; authors will kill for the publicity of having part of a page in the Review, much less three full pages. Second, instead of the usual Times practice of turning books of this type over to Harvard Marxist hatchetmen, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and biologist Richard Lewontin, or one of their ilk, the review is by New York Times science reporter Malcolm W. Browne, who treats these works in a way similar books should have been treated over the past six decades.
Not only that: the Herrnstein-Murray book almost drowns its subject in statistics and qualifications, and it tries to downplay the entire race issue, devoting most of its space to inheritable differences among individuals within each ethnic or racial group. Truly incredible is the treatment Browne gives to the far harder-core, more ideologically explosive though also strictly scientific work of Professor J. Phillippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, published by the respected and courageous Transaction Publishers affiliated with Rutgers University. Transaction has been, for decades, one of the very few publishers in America genuinely devoted to freedom of intellectual inquiry and freedom of scholarly expression. The third work is the unabashedly conservative-libertarian book by Smith College education professor Seymour Itzkoff, The Decline of Intelligence in America (Praeger). Not only are all these books treated soberly and favorably by Browne, but he also points out the shamefulness of the suppression of such views and research for decades. Thus, Browne writes that "the articulation of issues touching on group intelligence and ethnicity has been neither fashionable nor safe for the last three decades," but that these books are "worth plowing through and mulling over." For Browne agrees with these scholars that "the time has come to grasp the nettle of political heresy, to discard social myths and to come to grips with statistical evidence." And Browne concludes what for the Times is a massive review, that "the most insistent plea of the four authors is for freedom of debate and an end to the shroud of censorship imposed upon scientists and scholars by pressure groups and an acquiescing society." He then notes that Herrnstein and Murray write that "for the last 30 years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas," and adds that the "time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject." Browne's ringing last sentence: "It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise." Wowie!
HOW COME?
So how do we explain this phenomenon? How do we account for the fact that straight talk on race, intelligence, and heredity has gone, in one week, from being taboo to being almost old-hat? What in blazes has happened?
In the first place, those who believe in the accidental theory of history have their work cut out for them. No one can convince me that, on a subject of such delicacy and of such magnitude, that this tremendous change of opinion was purely a matter of intellectual fashion, of spontaneous combustion, or sudden consideration and deep conviction. No topic can shift from being shamefully Naziish to respectable and even scientific status overnight and by sudden acclamation (the surprise here, to repeat, is not simply the favorable and long review in the Times, but that the critics suddenly shifted from blackout-and-smear to mere hostility and widespread publicity). Surely, in this particular case, the unprovable "paranoid" view that a few powerful Establishment figures pushed some button is far more plausible an explanation.
SCIENCE WILL OUT
So why did this incredible turnaround occur? In the first place, there is the important point that, praise the Lord, science and truth, though long delayed and deferred, will eventually win out. In the long run, truth cannot be suppressed. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion of genetic and intelligence research, here and in Europe, despite the atmosphere ranging from subtle to brutal suppression. Despite the lack of government or Establishment foundation research funding, despite academic assaults on scholars, and student and community thugs preventing such researchers from lecturing or teaching, there has been an overwhelming accumulation of scientific data confirming, time and again, what everyone knows from his own and from others' observations.
Of the two authors of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray is the best-known in conservative circles as a neoconservative/left-libertarian researcher whose elaborate statistics confirmed what everyone knew anyway: that the welfare state injures, rather than benefits, its alleged beneficiaries, and only aggravates the problem. So what else is new, Charlie? But the real star of the duo is the late Harvard Professor Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist who was no conservative at all, but instead an old-fashioned left-liberal, that is, one of the rare liberals still dedicated to genuine freedom of inquiry and to the search for scientific truth. When, two decades ago, Herrnstein became interested in intelligence and heritability, and before he had even ventured into the troubled area of race, he suddenly found his classes and lectures invaded and himself physically assaulted by the student-community left. Refusing to be intimidated, Herrnstein pressed on, regardless of threats or of the developing storm of Political Incorrectness.
<snip>
SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL?
If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?
Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.
In any case, there is cause for jubilation these days, for it looks as if the left-egalitarian blackout-and-smear gang has been dealt a truly lethal blow.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch75.html
Murray Rothbard, the founder of modern libertarianism, once wrote that it was an “almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.”
Not as straightforward as a lynching but there it is. Welcome to Hurricane Alley.
To repeat:
But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.
December 1994
Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial. The idea of any sort of radical or "revolutionary" social change became unfashionable among intellectuals and social scientists. The political and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century have altered that perspective, and observers are now more willing to entertain the idea of sudden revolutionary change.
Well, one vital and recent social change has been not only truly revolutionary but has occurred at almost dizzying speed. Namely: Until literally mid-October 1994, it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability. What used to be widespread shared public knowledge about race and ethnicity among writers, publicists, and scholars, was suddenly driven out of the public square by Communist anthropologist Franz Boas and his associates in the 1930s, and it has been taboo ever since. Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.
While, in contrast to many other countries, the professional egalitarian left in the United States has not been able to use government censorship as one of its weapons of expulsion, it has used every other smear and bullying tactic, high and low, to drive any such sentiments out of public life, to suppress discussion and scholarship, as well as any genuine freedom of inquiry or research in what had long been a flourishing area of study. In a deep sense, this was an early manifestation of Political Correctness, after which other virulent forms of PC were added on top of this previous foundation. In the area of scientific research, the last truthful comprehensive book on the subject, Race, by the great British scientist John R. Baker, was published by the distinguished Oxford University Press in the 1970s. But Oxford Press was virtually forced, by intense pressure, if not to withdraw the book openly, at least to suppress it in practice by giving it as little circulation as possible.
For the rest of society, the racial thought police were able to suppress journalism, and to eliminate all Racially Incorrect traces not only of media sentiment, but even of humor, and the rich American heritage of ethnic humor has almost been stamped out of existence.
The basic tactic of the egalitarian left rulers was, of course, not to dignify any books engaging in candid inquiry into the race question by openly rebutting them. After all, to engage in any sort of public debate, in lecture hall or in print, with The Enemy runs the risk of the egalitarian actually losing, or at least demonstrating to lay intellectuals or to the general public that maybe a plausible case can be made for this horrible heresy. So the ruling tactic of the left was to engage in what Harry Elmer Barnes, in another connection, called "the blackout," and for the rest to smear the heretic relentlessly with the usual PC smear labels we have come to know and love so well: "racist," "fascist," "Nazi," "sexist," "heterosexist," and so on. Better to black out and smear, to marginalize the heretic into shame and oblivion.
The political situation of the 1930s and 40s was used to cunning effect by the egalitarian left to stamp out all opposition. Any expression of racial home truths was automatically lambasted as "fascist," "Nazi," and therefore ultra-rightist. In fact, all of this was a fabrication. The leading "racial scientists" from the 1890s until the 1930s were in agreement across the ideological and political spectrum. In fact, most of the leading racial scientists were Progressives, left-liberals, and New Dealers. In that period, only Communists and other Marxists were egalitarians, for ideological reasons. But the Commies were able to use their extensive ideological and propaganda machine during that era to somehow link Nazi persecution of Jews to racism, and with doctrines of racial superiority and inferiority. In that way, the Commies were able to bully or convert all manner of liberals and leftists, including those ex-Trotskyites and liberals who would much later become neoconservatives. This left the conservatives, who were the least amenable to Marxist influence, but who in turn were bullied into submission by being smeared savagely as "Hitlerite" for any expression of racialist views.
In point of fact, however, it should be clear that Hitler and the Nazis did not persecute Jews because they believed Jews to be inferior in intelligence. And as for blacks, there were too few blacks residing in Europe for the Nazis to bother about, much less persecute. Where pre-World War II racialism was politically relevant was, e.g., in immigration-cutting policies in the United States, and in sterilization of welfare mothers as part of various state welfare programs. Both of these policies, however, could be and were supported on other than racialist grounds.
During the past sixty years, racial research or expression of views by intellectuals has been marginalized and almost literally driven underground by pressure from above and from below. But in October, 1994, with incredible speed, the entire culture did a 180-degree turn. Upon the publication by the respected Establishment, The Free Press, of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, expressing in massively stupefying scholarly detail what everyone has always known but couldn't dare to express about race, intelligence, and heritability, the dam suddenly burst. It's not that all the reviews were favorable. Not at all. But the crucial point is that the Blackout suddenly collapsed; the Herrnstein-Murray book (since Herrnstein died before publication, it is now for all publicity purposes "the Murray book") is remarkably everywhere, attacked in Newsweek as well as the predictable New Republic, treated as The Cultural Phenomenon of the year. Not only that: the attacks may be bitter, but they are not the traditional mindless smears: no one has dismissed the book as "racist," "fascist," "neo-Nazi," and all the rest.
There are many mind-boggling aspects to the Herrnstein-Murray breakthrough. The Bell Curve is becoming a runaway bestseller, certainly for a non-fiction work on a serious topic; and yet, it is not a book that more than a handful of scholars are actually going to read. How often do we see a 900-page work, filled with boring statistics and social science jargon, become a coffee-table book, the sort of book that my dear you simply have to display to show that you are abreast of the times?
Perhaps the most mind-boggling cultural response, one that most needs explanation, was that of the Queen of middlebrow, the newspaper that Sets the Line telling intellectuals, media people, journalists, think-tankers, etc. what to think: the august New York Times Sunday Book Review. In fact, we can, for once, pinpoint the cultural and social revolution on the Race Question to one precise date: October 16, 1994 – the date when the august Establishment New York Times ostentatiously threw in the towel. For the Sunday Book Review devoted the front cover, and three entire pages to a blockbuster review of three recent "racist" books, a review which not only did not engage in the usual Marxoid smears, but was objective, respectful and actually favorable! We have to realize, in the first place, that such a length for a review in the Sunday Times is unprecedented; authors will kill for the publicity of having part of a page in the Review, much less three full pages. Second, instead of the usual Times practice of turning books of this type over to Harvard Marxist hatchetmen, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and biologist Richard Lewontin, or one of their ilk, the review is by New York Times science reporter Malcolm W. Browne, who treats these works in a way similar books should have been treated over the past six decades.
Not only that: the Herrnstein-Murray book almost drowns its subject in statistics and qualifications, and it tries to downplay the entire race issue, devoting most of its space to inheritable differences among individuals within each ethnic or racial group. Truly incredible is the treatment Browne gives to the far harder-core, more ideologically explosive though also strictly scientific work of Professor J. Phillippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, published by the respected and courageous Transaction Publishers affiliated with Rutgers University. Transaction has been, for decades, one of the very few publishers in America genuinely devoted to freedom of intellectual inquiry and freedom of scholarly expression. The third work is the unabashedly conservative-libertarian book by Smith College education professor Seymour Itzkoff, The Decline of Intelligence in America (Praeger). Not only are all these books treated soberly and favorably by Browne, but he also points out the shamefulness of the suppression of such views and research for decades. Thus, Browne writes that "the articulation of issues touching on group intelligence and ethnicity has been neither fashionable nor safe for the last three decades," but that these books are "worth plowing through and mulling over." For Browne agrees with these scholars that "the time has come to grasp the nettle of political heresy, to discard social myths and to come to grips with statistical evidence." And Browne concludes what for the Times is a massive review, that "the most insistent plea of the four authors is for freedom of debate and an end to the shroud of censorship imposed upon scientists and scholars by pressure groups and an acquiescing society." He then notes that Herrnstein and Murray write that "for the last 30 years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas," and adds that the "time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject." Browne's ringing last sentence: "It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise." Wowie!
HOW COME?
So how do we explain this phenomenon? How do we account for the fact that straight talk on race, intelligence, and heredity has gone, in one week, from being taboo to being almost old-hat? What in blazes has happened?
In the first place, those who believe in the accidental theory of history have their work cut out for them. No one can convince me that, on a subject of such delicacy and of such magnitude, that this tremendous change of opinion was purely a matter of intellectual fashion, of spontaneous combustion, or sudden consideration and deep conviction. No topic can shift from being shamefully Naziish to respectable and even scientific status overnight and by sudden acclamation (the surprise here, to repeat, is not simply the favorable and long review in the Times, but that the critics suddenly shifted from blackout-and-smear to mere hostility and widespread publicity). Surely, in this particular case, the unprovable "paranoid" view that a few powerful Establishment figures pushed some button is far more plausible an explanation.
SCIENCE WILL OUT
So why did this incredible turnaround occur? In the first place, there is the important point that, praise the Lord, science and truth, though long delayed and deferred, will eventually win out. In the long run, truth cannot be suppressed. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion of genetic and intelligence research, here and in Europe, despite the atmosphere ranging from subtle to brutal suppression. Despite the lack of government or Establishment foundation research funding, despite academic assaults on scholars, and student and community thugs preventing such researchers from lecturing or teaching, there has been an overwhelming accumulation of scientific data confirming, time and again, what everyone knows from his own and from others' observations.
Of the two authors of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray is the best-known in conservative circles as a neoconservative/left-libertarian researcher whose elaborate statistics confirmed what everyone knew anyway: that the welfare state injures, rather than benefits, its alleged beneficiaries, and only aggravates the problem. So what else is new, Charlie? But the real star of the duo is the late Harvard Professor Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist who was no conservative at all, but instead an old-fashioned left-liberal, that is, one of the rare liberals still dedicated to genuine freedom of inquiry and to the search for scientific truth. When, two decades ago, Herrnstein became interested in intelligence and heritability, and before he had even ventured into the troubled area of race, he suddenly found his classes and lectures invaded and himself physically assaulted by the student-community left. Refusing to be intimidated, Herrnstein pressed on, regardless of threats or of the developing storm of Political Incorrectness.
<snip>
SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL?
If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?
Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.
In any case, there is cause for jubilation these days, for it looks as if the left-egalitarian blackout-and-smear gang has been dealt a truly lethal blow.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch75.html
Murray Rothbard, the founder of modern libertarianism, once wrote that it was an “almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.”
Not as straightforward as a lynching but there it is. Welcome to Hurricane Alley.
To repeat:
But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.