Kevin B. MacDonald (born January 24, 1944) is a retired American professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), best known for his use of evolutionary theory to analyze Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy". He is currently the editor of the Occidental Observer, which he says covers "white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West" and is described by the Anti-Defamation League as having "become a primary voice for anti-Semitism from far-right intellectuals."
MacDonald's most controversial claim is that a suite of traits which he attributes to Jews, including higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentricism, have culturally evolved to enhance the ability of Jews to out-compete non-Jews for resources. MacDonald believes this advantage has been used by a number of Jews to advance Jewish group interests and end potential antisemitism by either deliberately or inadvertently undermining the power of the European-derived Christian majorities in the Western world.
The university's psychology department, as well as the California State University, Long Beach academic senate, voted to formally dissociate themselves from his work in 2008.
The academic senate issued the following statement:
While the academic senate defends Dr. Kevin MacDonald's academic freedom and freedom of speech, as it does for all faculty, it firmly and unequivocally disassociates itself from the anti-Semitic and white ethnocentric views he has expressed.
Two words - "condemns and" (which had originally appeared between "unequivocally" and "disassociates") - were removed before the public issuance of the statement.
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Early years
MacDonald was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin of German and Scottish ancestry, and raised in a Roman Catholic family. He is an atheist.
His father was a policeman and his mother was a secretary. He attended Catholic parochial schools and played basketball in high school. He entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became an activist in the anti-war movement. During this period, he came to believe that the majority of the movement there consisted of people of East Coast Jewish origin (Culture of Critique, p. 104), which resulted in his decision to more closely observe and become hostile towards Jewish intellectual movements.
MacDonald became a philosophy major and abandoned leftist radicalism. Between 1970 and 1974 he embarked on a career as a jazz pianist, spending two years in Jamaica, where he taught high school. By the late 1970s he had left this career in favor of academia.
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Professional background
MacDonald is the author of seven books on evolutionary theory and child development and is the author or editor of over thirty academic articles in refereed journals. He received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966, and M.S. in biology from the University of Connecticut in 1976. He earned a PhD in 1981 (Biobehavioral Sciences) from the University of Connecticut, where he studied under Professor Benson E. Ginsburg, a founder and leader of modern behavior genetics, as his advisor. His thesis was on the behavioral development of wolves and resulted in two publications:
- "Induction of normal behavior in wolves with restricted rearing", Behavioral and Neural Biology, 33, pp. 133-62 (1981)
- "Development and stability of personality characteristics in prepubertal wolves", Journal of Comparative Psychology, pp. 97, 99-106 (1983)
MacDonald completed a post-doctoral fellowship with Ross Parke at the psychology department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983. MacDonald and Parke's work there resulted in three publications:
- "Bridging the gap: Parent-child play interactions and peer interactive competence", Child Development, 55, 1265-77 (1984)
- "Parent-child physical play: The effects of sex and age of children and parents", Sex Roles, 15, 367-78 (1986)
- "Parent-child physical play with rejected, neglected and popular boys", Developmental Psychology, 23, 705-11 (1987)
MacDonald was with the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSU-LB) from 1985, and was a full professor from 1995. He announced his retirement at the end of 2014.
He served as Secretary-Archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and was elected as a member of the executive board from 1995 to 2001. He was an editor of Population and Environment and is an associate editor of the journal Sexuality & Culture. He serves on the Advisory Board of The Occidental Quarterly, a journal that has been described by Max Blumenthal on the website of liberal magazine The American Prospect as "the premier voice of the white-nationalist movement", He became the blog's editor and makes occasional contributions to VDARE.com, an immigration reductionist webzine classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Peter Brimelow of VDARE denies that it is a white nationalist webzine, but acknowledges that it has white nationalist writers amongst its contributors. Brimelow does not list MacDonald as one of these.
Work on Judaism
Theory of Judaism as a "Group Evolutionary Strategy"
MacDonald is best known for his trilogy that analyzes Judaism and Jewish culture from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, comprising A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and Its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998). He proposes that Judaism is a group evolutionary strategy to enhance the ability of Jews to out-compete non-Jews for resources. Using the term Jewish ethnocentrism, he argues that Judaism fosters in Jews a series of marked genetic traits, including above-average verbal intelligence and a strong tendency toward collectivist behavior, as manifested in a series of influential intellectual movements. MacDonald repeatedly emphasizes that he does not argue that all Jews in all circumstances display the traits he identifies; for example, his Understanding Jewish Influence argues that neoconservatism is a Jewish intellectual movement, while MacDonald also points out that American Jews generally favor the Democratic Party, not Republicans or conservatives and he also points out that in the 2000 US Presidential Election about 80% of the Jewish vote went to United States Vice President Al Gore, who was campaigning against George W. Bush, whose campaign MacDonald claims was heavily staffed with and influenced by neoconservatives.
On Jews and immigration policies
MacDonald says that "the organized Jewish community" has been the single most important and powerful group in favor of unrestricted immigration to the United States, and that the community has been acting in its "own perceived collective interests", regardless of whether these are in conflict with the interests of other Americans.
MacDonald's main thesis centers on the period preceding the 1965 Immigration Act when strict, country-of-origin based quotas existed, mostly favoring immigration from Europe. According to MacDonald, while most of the ethnic communities in that period were somewhat active in trying to affect the increase of immigration quotas from their own countries of origin (i.e., the Irish for immigration from Ireland, Greeks for immigration from Greece, etc.), only the Jewish community activists were requesting (and ultimately obtained in 1965) the dismantling of country-of-origin quotas and an increase in immigration across the board. This policy shift benefited primarily non-European immigration and had a profound impact on the U.S. demographics in the following decades. MacDonald says that Jews opposed immigration quotas because a diverse America was safer for Jews.
On neoconservatism
MacDonald published a series of three articles in The Occidental Quarterly on the alleged similarities between neoconservatism and several other influential intellectual and political movements that he claims are Jewish-dominated. He argues that "Taken as a whole, neoconservatism is an excellent illustration of the key traits behind the success of Jewish activism: ethnocentrism, intelligence and wealth, psychological intensity, and aggressiveness."
His general conclusions are that neoconservatism fits into a general pattern of twentieth-century Jewish intellectual and political activism. Since Leo Strauss, a philosophy professor, taught several of the putative founders of the neoconservatism movement, MacDonald concludes he is a central figure in the neoconservative movement and sees him as "the quintessential rabbinical guru with devoted disciples". However, elsewhere MacDonald has cautioned against exaggerating Strauss' influence on neoconservatism, writing "although the political philosopher Leo Strauss is indeed a guru for some neoconservatives, his influence is by no means pervasive, and in any case provides only a very broad guide to what the neoconservatives advocate in the area of public policy." He also has, unlike other critics of neoconservatism, argued that Trotsky and Trotskyism are not particularly influential on that movement, writing "The current crop of neoconservatives has at times been described as Trotskyists. As will be seen, in some cases the intellectual influences of neoconservatives can be traced to Trotsky, but Trotskyism cannot be seen as a current influence within the movement."
MacDonald contends that, like Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism, neoconservatism uses arguments that appeal to non-Jews, rather than appealing explicitly to Jewish interests. MacDonald argues that non-Jewish neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Donald Rumsfeld are examples of an ability to recruit prominent non-Jews while nevertheless preserving a Jewish core and an intense commitment to Jewish interests: "it makes excellent psychological sense to have the spokespeople for any movement resemble the people they are trying to convince."
Other ethnic groups
MacDonald has also written about other ethnic groups living in diaspora, such as overseas Chinese people and Assyrians.
Reception
Academic reception
MacDonald has a webpage devoted to replies to his critics. Laurence Loeb of the University of Utah (writing for the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review) described A People That Shall Dwell Alone as a "tour-de-force" and a "watershed contribution to the understanding of Judaism and Jewish life", based on a "cautious, careful assembling of evidence." His first work received positive reviews from scholars including Hans Eysenck, John Hartung, Richard Lynn, and Roger D. Masters. However, a number of other responses, especially after publication of the second and third books of MacDonald's trilogy, were more negative.
John Tooby, the founder of MacDonald's field of evolutionary psychology, criticized MacDonald in an article for Salon in 2000. He wrote, "MacDonald's ideas--not just on Jews--violate fundamental principles of the field." Tooby posits that MacDonald is not an evolutionary psychologist, and advocates models incorporating group-selection theory, a view of natural selection whose importance is disputed.
MacDonald has been accused by some academics in Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization of employing racial "techniques of scapegoating [that] may have evolved in complexity from classical Nazi fascism, but the similarities [to which] are far from remote."
Steven Pinker, while acknowledging that he had "not plowed through MacDonald's trilogy and therefore run the complementary risks of being unfair to his arguments, and of not refuting them resoundingly enough to distance them from my own views on evolutionary psychology", states that MacDonald's theses are unable to pass the threshold of attention-worthiness or peer-approval, and contain a "consistently invidious portrayal of Jews, couched in value-laden, disparaging language".
Reviewing MacDonald's A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Sander Gilman describes MacDonald's argument about a Jewish group evolutionary strategy as a "bizarre" one which "recasts all of the hoary old myths about Jewish psychological difference and its presumed link to Jewish superior intelligence in contemporary sociobiological garb." Eugen Schoenfeld states the book contains "sloppy scholarship" and that MacDonald's comparison of Jewish collectivism during the biblical period with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English individualism "indicates a total ignorance of the impact of industrialization on Western societies."
John Hartung, a theorist of human behavioral ecology, said MacDonald's The Culture of Critique was "quite disturbing, seriously misinformed about evolutionary genetics, and suffering from a huge blind spot about the nature of Christianity."
The One People's Project claims that MacDonald has promoted anti-Semitic propaganda under the guise of what he says is a legitimate and academic search for truth. He has been accused of misrepresenting the sources he uses in that regard. For example, Dr. Barry Mehler, an educator at Ferris State University, noted that MacDonald had claimed that "Jewish opposition to the 1921 and 1924 legislation (to limit immigration) was motivated less by a desire for higher levels of Jewish immigration than by opposition to the implicit theory that America should be dominated by individuals with northern and western European ancestry." MacDonald based this on a dissertation entitled "American Jewry and United States immigration policy, 1881-1953" by Sheldon Morris Neuringer. Nueringer's thesis posited that Jewish opposition in 1921 and 1924 to the anti-immigration legislation at the time was due more to it having the "taint of discrimination and anti-Semitism" as opposed to how it would limit Jewish immigration. Mehler stated "It seems to me Mr. MacDonald is misrepresenting Mr. Neuringer in this case and I posted my query hoping that a historian familiar with the literature might have a judgment on MacDonald's use of the historical data."'
Reviewing MacDonald's Separation and Its Discontents in 2000, Zev Garber writes that MacDonald works from the assumption that the dual Torah is the blueprint of the eventual Jewish dominion over the world, and that he sees contemporary antisemitism, the Holocaust, and attacks against Israel as "provoked by Jews themselves." Garber concludes that MacDonald's "rambling who-is-who-isn't roundup of Jews responsible for the 'Jewish Problem' borders on the irrational and is conducive to misrepresentation."
In 2001, David Lieberman, a Holocaust researcher at Brandeis University, wrote a paper entitled Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald's Research Techniques, where he noted how one of MacDonald's sources, author Jaff Schatz, objected to how MacDonald used his writings to further his premise that Jewish self-identity validates anti-Semitic sentiments and actions. "At issue, however, is not the quality of Schatz's research, but MacDonald's use of it, a discussion that relies less on topical expertise than on a willingness to conduct close comparative readings", Lieberman wrote. Lieberman accused MacDonald of dishonestly made up lines from the work of Holocaust denier David Irving. Citing Irving's Uprising, which was published in 1981 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hungary's failed anti-Communist revolution in 1956, MacDonald asserted in the Culture of Critique:
The domination of the Hungarian communist Jewish bureaucracy thus appears to have had overtones of sexual and reproductive domination of gentiles in which Jewish males were able to have disproportionate sexual access to gentile females.
Lieberman, who noted that MacDonald is not a historian, debunked those assertions, concluding, "(T)he passage offers not a shred of evidence that, as MacDonald would have it, 'Jewish males enjoyed disproportionate sexual access to gentile females.'"
Criticism by the ADL and the SPLC
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) claims of MacDonald that "he put the anti-Semitism under the guise of scholarly work... Kevin MacDonald's work is nothing but gussied-up anti-Semitism. At base it says that Jews are out to get us through their agenda ... His work is bandied about by just about every neo-Nazi group in America."
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) includes MacDonald in its list of American extremists, Extremism in America, and written a report on MacDonald's views and ties. According to the ADL, his views on Jews mimic those of anti-Semites from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Responses to MacDonald's critics
Overall
MacDonald has written that his critics have not judged his work on its merits, but instead believe "the subject is taboo and discussing it should be forbidden. Frank Salter, a critic of multiracialism, has argued that much criticism of MacDonald is rooted in "ignorance of his scholarship and a confounding of political and scientific issues".
Southern Poverty Law Center
MacDonald claims he has been the target of a campaign against him by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others. He holds, among other complaints, that SPLC publicity, such as "The Thirteen Scariest People in America" and "Promoting Hate--California Professor is Font of Anti-Semitism", contain misrepresentations and distortions of his work. Heidi Beirich, the author of the reports, had traveled to California State University-Long Beach to interview students, faculty, and administrators about MacDonald.
Among the claims MacDonald takes issue with is Beirich's claim in her report for the SPLC that he "suggest[s] that colleges restrict Jewish admission and Jews be heavily taxed 'to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth.'" In his rebuttal, MacDonald reproduces the full passage as follows:
Moreover, achieving parity between Jews and other ethnic groups would entail a high level of discrimination against individual Jews for admission to universities or access to employment opportunities and even entail a large taxation on Jews to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth, since at present Jews are vastly overrepresented among the wealthy and the successful in the United States.
MacDonald claims he was simply discussing a hypothetical ethnic spoils system. He writes, "There is a big difference between advocating something and discussing this as a grim likelihood. I am discussing the possible consequences of a hypothetical ethnicity-based spoils system." Heidi Beirich claimed MacDonald blames the deaths of "millions of people" on "the failure of Jewish assimilation into European societies". MacDonald rebutted that he contends that inter-group competition is at the root of anti-Semitism and bloody conflicts between Jews and non-Jews throughout history: "I think that my critics essentially want me to assert that Jewish behavior is utterly irrelevant to anti-Semitism, and I cannot accept that point of view. I am hardly alone in supposing that Jewish behavior--very often Jewish success--must be taken into account in any adequate theory of anti-Semitism."
MacDonald summarized what he considered the prospect of a fair representation by the SPLC's Beirich: "Given Ms Beirich's poor record in accurately portraying my writings, I had no confidence that she would conduct and report on an interview with me in a non-biased way. Nevertheless, I offered to be interviewed by her if she would answer my concerns about her previous writing about me. She has not responded to this offer." MacDonald specifically named six points which he demands Beirich address before he grants her an interview, in a series of emails between himself and her, published on his website.
CSULB comments
MacDonald has been highly critical of the SPLC assessment of him, including the November 2006 visit to CSULB's campus by Heidi Beirich. Shortly after the visit, the University issued a statement supporting MacDonald's academic freedom. Beirich acknowledged the university supported MacDonald "unequivocally".
A university spokeswoman stated: "The university will support MacDonald's academic freedom and freedom of speech." MacDonald was initially pressured to post a disclaimer on his website stating "nothing on this website should be interpreted to suggest that I condone white racial superiority, genocide, Nazism, or Holocaust denial. I advocate none of these and strongly dissociate myself and my work from groups that do. Nor should my opinions be used to support discrimination against Jews or any other group." He has since removed that disclaimer. In addition, the Psychology Department on December 4, and 6th, issued three statements: a "Statement on Academic Freedom and Responsibility in Research", a "Statement on Diversity", and a "Statement on Misuse of Psychologists' Work".
A spokeswoman for CSULB, said that at least two classes a year taught by all professors--including MacDonald--have student evaluations, and that some of the questions on those evaluations are open-ended, allowing students to raise any issue. "Nothing has come through" to suggest bias in class, she said. "We don't see it." Jonathan Knight, who handles academic freedom issues for the American Association of University Professors said if there are no indications that MacDonald shares his views in class, "I don't see a basis for an investigation" into what goes on in his courses.
CSULB dissociates from MacDonald's views
In late 2007 California State University-Long Beach's Psychology Department began the process of formally dissociating itself from MacDonald's views on Judaism, which in some cases are "used by publications considered to publicize neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology." The department's move to dissociate followed a discussion of MacDonald's December forum presentation at meeting of the department's advisory committee that concerned his ethics and methodologies.
Late in 2006, a report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center after an on-campus investigation labeled his work antisemitic and neo-Nazi propaganda, and described increasing concern about Macdonald's views by CSULB faculty members (see above). In an e-mail sent to the college's Daily Forty-Niner newspaper, MacDonald noted that he had already pledged not to teach about race differences in intelligence as a requirement for teaching his psychology class, and expressed that he was "not happy" about the dissociation. The newspaper reported that in the e-mail, MacDonald confirmed that his books contained what the paper described as "his claims that the Jewish race was having a negative effect on Western civilization."
A majority of the Department voted to release an April 23, 2008 statement saying, "We respect and defend his right to express his views, but we affirm that they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach." It expressed particular concern that "Dr. MacDonald's research on Jewish culture does not adhere to the Department's explicitly stated values".
In an April 28, 2008 statement, the school's anthropology department noted that it had no wish to interfere with MacDonald's First Amendment rights. However, it noted in the statement that "we have the right, if not the obligation, to denounce his writings on race, ethnicity and intelligence that promote intolerance, as not only inaccurate, but as professionally irresponsible and morally untenable."
Affiliations
A 2006 article in the American left-wing periodical The Nation reported that MacDonald's 2004 Understanding Jewish Influence: A Study in Ethnic Activism "has turned MacDonald into a celebrity within white nationalist and neo-Nazi circles." Writing in the Journal of Church and State, Professor George Michael noted that MacDonald's work "has been well received by those in the racialist right, as it amounts to a theoretically sophisticated justification for anti-Semitism", and that on the far right MacDonald "has attained a near reverential status and is generally considered beyond reproach".
A colleague of MacDonald, Martin Fiebert criticized MacDonald for being cited by white supremacist, Aryan nationalist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi organizations. The SPLC criticized MacDonald for holding panels and working with Virginia Abernethy, a self-described "white separatist" and member of the white nationalist organization Council of Conservative Citizens which has described blacks as "a retrograde subspecies of humanity."
The SPLC criticized MacDonald for publishing in, and receiving a $10,000 grant from The Occidental Quarterly, which the SPLC claims is a white supremacist organization. He is now also a member of the publication's Editorial Advisory Board, as well as the main contributor to its website and editor of its blog. In October 2004, he accepted the Jack London Literary Prize from The Occidental Quarterly, using the award ceremony as an occasion to argue for the need for a "white ethnostate" to maintain high racial birthrates. In his acceptance speech, he stated, "The best way to preserve ethnic interests is to defend an ethnostate--a nation that is explicitly intended to preserve the ethnic interests of its citizens." According to MacDonald, one of the functions of such a state would be to exclude non-European immigrants who are attracted to the state by its wealth and prosperity. At the conclusion of his speech, he remarked:
The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own displacement is the ultimate foolishness--an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions.
MacDonald testified in defense of convicted Holocaust denier David Irving, where he alleged that the suppression of Irving's work was "an example of Jewish tactics for combating anti-Semitism." MacDonald stated "I also felt that Lipstadt exaggerated the extent to which Irving denied the Holocaust, since there are many places in his writings where Irving describes Nazis engaged in organized killing of Jews. MacDonald was quoted as saying he was an "agnostic" in regards to the Holocaust, though he denied the accuracy of the quote. MacDonald's testimony caused a backlash among his colleagues. Deborah Lipstadt's lawyer Richard Rampton thought MacDonald's testimony on behalf of Irving was so ridiculous that he did not bother to cross examine him. Indeed, Mr Justice Gray said in his judgment that the testimony provided by MacDonald was insufficient to establish that he was the victim of a conspiracy from the "traditional enemies of free speech" (i.e. Jews) to discredit Irving.
Staunchly anti-Zionist journalist Max Blumenthal (the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a high-ranking Democratic Party operative), has written that MacDonald has an extensive following among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, which Blumenthal claims is inherently linked with MacDonald's political leanings (i.e. "Republicanizing the Race Card"). Former Ku Klux Klan leader and former U.S. Representative David Duke praised MacDonald's work on his website.
When MacDonald won his award from The Occidental Quarterly, the ceremony was attended by David Duke; Don Black, the founder of white supremacist site Stormfront; Jamie Kelso, a senior moderator at Stormfront; and the head of the neo-Nazi National Vanguard, Kevin Alfred Strom. In 2005, Kelso told The Occidental Report that he was meeting up with MacDonald to conduct business. MacDonald is featured in the Stormfront member Brian Jost's anti-immigration film, The Line in the Sand, where he "blam[ed] Jews for destroying America by supporting immigration from developing countries."
Beirich told the Los Angeles Times, "Not since Hitler's Mein Kampf have anti-Semites had such a comprehensive reference guide to what's "wrong with Jews". His work is widely advertised and touted on white supremacist websites and sold by neo-Nazi outfits like National Vanguard Books, which considers them "the most important books of the last 100 years."
In 2010, MacDonald accepted a position as one of the eight members of the board of directors of the American Freedom Party (previously the American Third Position), which declares America a white Christian nation and advocates for limiting "non-white" immigration into the United States. In January 2010, he began acting as director of the newly founded political party. A statement on their website reads, "If current demographic trends persist, European-Americans will become a minority in America in only a few decades time. The American Third Position will not allow this to happen. To safeguard our identity and culture, and to secure an American future for our people, we will immediately put an indefinite moratorium on all immigration." James Edwards, who has interviewed MacDonald on his radio show The Political Cesspool, serves on the American Freedom Party's Board of Directors.
Books and monographs
- MacDonald, K.B. Understanding Jewish Influence: A Study in Ethnic Activism, with an Introduction by Samuel T. Francis, (Occidental Quarterly, November 2004); ISBN 1-59368-017-1 Introduction online
- Burgess, Robert L. and MacDonald, K.B. (eds.) Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development, 2nd ed., (Sage 2004); ISBN 0-7619-2790-5
- MacDonald, K.B. The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger 1998); ISBN 0-275-96113-3 (Preface online)
- MacDonald, K.B. Separation and Its Discontents Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Praeger 1998); ISBN 0-275-94870-6
- MacDonald, K.B. A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism As a Group Evolutionary Strategy, With Diaspora Peoples (Praeger 1994); ISBN 0-595-22838-0
- MacDonald, K.B. (Ed.), Parent-Child Play: Descriptions and Implications (State University of New York Press, 1993)
- MacDonald, K.B. (Ed.) Sociobiological Perspectives on Human Development, (Springer-Verlag, 1988)
- MacDonald, K.B. Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (Plenum, 1988)
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