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Editorial Comments
May 9, 2008
Eds.: Kathy Shaidle's Vdare article on the Canadian thought police is an excellent summary of the horrifying regime of political correctness that reigns in Canada. One incident is particularly striking. Richard Warman, who has made a career of bringing complaints to the Canadian Human Human Rights Commission (CHRC), was accused of stifling free speech by Paul Fromm. For example, Fromm wrote that Warman was "the high priest of censorship" and "the mortal enemy of free speech and free thought."
Warman then sued Fromm for defamation and won. The judge ruled that because Mr. Warman was acting legally in bringing complaints to the CHRC and because he had always been successful in these complaints, therefore he could not be reasonably accused of acting to stifle free speech.
There is an indisputable, thoroughly Orwellian logic to this. Canada has in fact outlawed certain types of speech. That's what the CHRC is all about. Mr. Warman, in collaborating with the CHRC, could not possibly be guilty of stifling free speech because the types of speech Warman is complaining about are not in fact allowed. One is not free to say these things.
Get it? In the opinion of the court, Warman could presumably be reasonably described as stifling illegal speech, but to say that he is stifling free speech is simply incorrect. Ergo, what Fromm wrote was defamatory. Pay up.
Perhaps Fromm should have phrased his complaints a bit differently: Warman (and the CHRC) are acting to stifle certain thoughts when they are expressed publicly. Minimally, at least some of the thoughts frowned on by Warman and the CHRC are completely reasonable and should be allowed in any civilized society. And first among such thoughts should be that criticism of the behavior of groups should be tolerated. It should be possible to criticize, say, the behavior of the organized Jewish community (which strongly supports the CHRC). And people should be able to note that in general Muslim immigrants have not assimilated into Western societies, or that blacks have lower academic achievement even after controlling for socioeconomic factors.
But Canada is now a police state, so don't even think about it. Literally.
Vdare
May 6, 2008 [article]
Patrick J. Buchanan's "The Way Our World Ends"
Eds.: As usual, Pat Buchanan puts his finger on the critical problem. Basing his comments on a report from the National Policy Institute, Buchanan notes that whites are ceding territory to other groups and failing to replace themselves.
Low fertility by itself would not be a disaster if whites continued to control their ancestral homelands and other territories they have dominated since their expansion out of Europe.
But quite clearly white control of their traditional homelands is in dire jeopardy. White societies have been defenseless against this onslaught, largely as a result of the triumph in the West of the political and cultural left. At the present time throughout the West, voices advocating an end to immigration into Western countries and programs of repatriation of non-white immigrants are silenced with all the power that the forces of political correctness can muster.
Having a sense of white identity and white interests has been relegated to the political fringe even though having an ethnic identity and a sense of ethnic interests is absolutely normal for all other peoples.
There is simply no public debate about these issues even though polls indicate that most white people are deeply anxious about the changes that are being foisted on them by political and cultural elites. As Buchanan points out, most Americans want to protect their culture and restrict immigration. But all of the presidential candidates [and, one might add, elites in the media and academic world] want to make millions of illegal aliens into U.S. citizens. Ending legal immigration isn't even on the table.
According to Buchanan, these trends are now irreversible: "Western Europe’s populations are being sustained by immigrants from the Maghreb and Middle East, Asia and Africa — and the baby boom among these black and brown peoples is lifting and changing the face of the Old Continent forever."
We're not as pessimistic. The same people who dominated and shaped the world for the last 500 years still have the energy and creativity to shape the future in a way that would secure their place among the peoples of the world. They are a sleeping giant that needs only to throw off the yoke of the political and cultural elites who have betrayed their interests over the last 50 years. Never say "forever".
Excerpts: An Augusta, Ga., group, The National Policy Institute, has meshed the figures on fertility rates with the continents and races on Planet Earth — to visualize what the world will look like in 2060.
In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world’s population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.
More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth — a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany — will vanish by 2060.
The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans. ...
Fleshing out the NPI picture is the U.N. population survey of mid-2007 that points to the 21st century disappearance of Western Man.
By 2050, a fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished. Ukraine will lose one-third of its population. Russia, 150 million at the breakup of the Soviet Union, 142 million today, will be down to 108 million. Such losses dwarf what Hitler and Stalin together did to these countries. ...
Western Europe’s populations are being sustained by immigrants from the Maghreb and Middle East, Asia and Africa — and the baby boom among these black and brown peoples is lifting and changing the face of the Old Continent forever. Islam is returning to Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. The Third World is coming to colonize the mother countries.
And America? According to the Pew Research Center, the Hispanic population of the United States will triple to 127 million by 2050, as Mexico’s population grows to 130 million. An erasure of the U.S. border, or merger of the two countries, or the linguistic, cultural and social annexation of the American Southwest by Mexico appears fated.
Yet, last October, in another Pew poll of 45,000 people in 47 countries, a majority in 46 expressed fear of a loss of their traditional culture.
Sixty-two percent of Americans told Pew we should do more to protect our way of life. Three-fourths of Americans wanted more restrictions on immigration. Yet all three presidential candidates voted amnesty for the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens.
Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.
Otherwise, we all go out with a bang. [article]
Eds.: Jewish Double Standards Department
A consistent theme of Jewish behavior is its lack of principle. That is, there is a long list of behaviors in which Jews exhibit double standards. In the contemporary world, this is most obvious with respect to Israel — a point that has been noted in these pages several times. This fits well with the general clichè that for Jews policies are evaluated according to whether they are "Good for the Jews" rather than whether they conform to moral principle. As Alison Weir notes in the following Op-Ed, what is good for the Jews in Israel is quite different from what is good for Jews in the U.S., and therefore Jews have quite different values in the two countries.
She also discusses the fact that Israel does not have a constitution. It's really the same point: Constitutions, like moral principles, limit flexibility in the pursuit of interest. However, if a constitution is in place, as in the United States, the strategy is to mold it so that it conforms to Jewish interests. For example, it is well known that Jewish activists have successfully altered the standard interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to conform to Jewish interests in Church-State relations.
What Our Taxes to Israel are Funding
Alison Weir, of If Americans Knew, writing in the Greenwich Citizen.
April 4, 2008
While US media almost never report this, the fact is that their religions are routinely disparaged, their economic situation is far inferior, their children are taught in school that Jewish culture is superior to all others, and periodically there are outright attacks on their institutions and texts -- in 1980 hundreds of copies of the New Testament were publicly and ceremonially burnt in Jerusalem under the auspices of a Jewish organization subsidized by the Israeli Ministry of Religions. Today, thousands of Muslims and Christians under Israeli occupation are prevented from worshiping in their holiest churches and mosques.
I am continually astounded at the stance of people such as Rabbi Hurvitz, who support Israeli discriminatory practices. It seems to me that either one is against discrimination based on race, religion, and ethnicity, or one is not. It seems a bit hypocritical – or at least to reveal that one's behavior is governed by interest rather than principle – to be for such practices when one benefits, and against them when one does not.
It seems that when Rabbi Hurvitz is a member of a minority (Jewish Americans constitute approximately two percent of the American population) he applauds a secular state in which the majority religion relinquishes its traditional symbols and culture in the name of freedom of religion. When he is a member of the majority, on the other hand, he advocates a state where a religious symbol is on the very flag itself, and where individuals must carry ID cards denoting their religious background.
Second, it is odd that Rabbi Hurvitz brings up the Constitution, given that Israel itself has deliberately chosen not to adopt one – a far cry from the US system, in which fundamental principles and rights were codified at the very beginning of our national existence and can only be modified through a long and tedious process of public involvement. [more]
May 5, 2008
Times [London] Online
The mainstream party candidates walked off the stage when Richard Barnbrook stepped up to speak after becoming, early on Saturday morning, the first member of the British National Party to win a seat on the London Assembly. Mr Barnbrook was unpeturbed.
He expects to be treated as a pariah for the next four years, but insists that he will not be cowed. “If I have to be a lone wolf I will be one,” he told The Times.
Mr Barnbrook, 47, said that he intends to become the voice of “true Londoners”, fighting against political correctness and preferential treatment for racial minorities. He will press for the Union Jack to be flown permanently over City Hall, for burkas to be banned from public buildings and for official celebrations to mark St George's Day. He will resist the planned construction of a huge new mosque, the biggest place of worship in Britain, in Newham, East London. [more]
New Video: Arthur Kemp of the British National Party on the right of Brits (and other whites) to have their own ethnostate and end immigration.
The Absolut World ad: Memories of white ethnonationalism
April 14, 2008
Eds.: Gregory Rodriguez's op-ed (Absolut Canard, L. A.
Times, April 14) reminds us that there was a time when whites had a sense of racial pride and a sense that the United States was theirs. Rodriguez writes:Here in the U.S., our nationality is not supposed to be defined by ethnicity or race. But for much of our history, it was. Despite our diversity, the U.S. was long in the grip of white racial nationalism, which held that only whites were true citizens of this land. By the early 19th century, many white Americans believed that they were members of a superior Anglo-Saxon "race" destined to shape the world. The nonwhites they encountered on their way were deemed inferior and doomed to subordination or extinction.
It so happens that it was during early conflicts with Mexico that Americans began to understand territorial expansion in racial terms. Rather than view the Texas Revolution of 1836 as a struggle by aggrieved American colonists against tyrannical rule in Mexican territory, white Americans largely saw it as a racial clash. As historian Reginald Horsman has written, even Sam Houston saw the struggle, which resulted in the creation of a short-lived Texas Republic, "as one between a glorious Anglo-Saxon race and an inferior Mexican rabble." Likewise when considering the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, James Buchanan, President Polk's secretary of State, argued that "our race of men can never be subjected to the imbecile and indolent Mexican race."
Rodriguez, of course, views this as the bad old days and promises that today's Mexicans and Mexican-Americans have absolutely no interest in retaking the territory Mexico lost. We'll see.
The article brings home the fact that the vast majority of whites today condemn the history of white ethnonationalism so apparent in the early decades of the 19th century and still lingering in the early decades of the 20th century. Yet, ethnonationalism is alive and well throughout the rest of the world. And many of the ethnic activists who are the deadly enemies of white ethnonationalism actively promote their own ethnic interests.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that a people without a sense of ethnonationalism is defenseless against the onslaughts of others. The percentage of whites in traditionally white countries continues to decline, and the white percentage of the world population is now around 10%.
Whites feel guilty for the accomplishments of their ethnonationalist ancestors. Yet their own place in the world is due in large part to the exploits of their ancestors. If they don't wake up, they are going to lose a lot more than Mexico lost.
Jimmy Carter’s recent visit to the Middle East
Eds: The treatment Jimmy Carter received during his recent visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories should shock all Americans. Israel, supposedly an ally of the United States, repeatedly refused requests for adequate security during his visit. Given the hatred of many Israelis toward Carter for his criticism of the brutality of the occupation and the apartheid state that Israel has erected on the West Bank, Carter surely needed protection.
Nevertheless, one comes away from reading the report impressed by Carter’s calm, articulate explications of the situation in the Middle East.
by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan: April 13–22, 2008Excerpts: Since Israel had declined to approve a previously planned visit by three of us Elders (Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, and me), I expected a similar negative reaction when I substituted this trip on behalf of The Carter Center. Sure enough, all my requests to meet with ministers of the government were publicly rejected and, more seriously, three requests from our Secret Service detail to work with Israeli security were rejected. This was our first experience of this kind in more than 125 foreign nations we've visited since leaving the White House. (After several news stories on this subject, when we returned to Israel, Shin Bet security met us at the airport and worked with us.) [more]
Israel's UN ambassador calls Jimmy Carter 'a bigot'
Yahoo News
April 25, 2008
Eds. The Jimmy Carter is "a bigot" comment of the Israeli ambassador is clearly an attempt to interpret Jimmy Carter's actions within a traditional Jewish ideology of anti-Semitism rather than in the context of international relations and human rights. For example, China has been recently been heavily criticized for human rights abuses. But not even the Chinese accuse these critics of anti-Chinese bigotry.
To call it bigotry is to make a special claim — that the long history of anti-Semitism gives Israel a unique sacrosanct status which makes it immune from normal scrutiny.
And it makes people who have the temerity to make such charges into anti-Semites worthy of being consigned to the lowest regions of Hell. Indeed, the fanatically pro-Israel Frontpagemag.com has pulled out all the stops in its campaign against Carter. Check out Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews. Great photo of Carter. Political propaganda at its worst. [article]
Eds.: Anyone connected to the internet receives a plethora of messages hawking homestudy courses to become a Crime Scene Investigator.
Well, CSIs have a promising future — and not just on television.
According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust five states are now spending more on prisons than on colleges.
They were (listed in order of spending the most proportionally on prisons for 2007) were: Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware.
Minnesota, which interestingly also has one of the highest average IQs among the 50 states, spends the least on prisons relative to higher ed —17 cents on orange jumpsuits for every dollar on caps and gowns.
For the 50-state box score on Cell Blocks versus Campuses see the report in Inside Higher Education.
Eds.: L.A. Times article on liver transplants for illegal aliens: The Ethics of Open Borders
April 13, 2008
Today's L.A. Times has a heart-wrenching article that depicts an illegal alien who came to the U.S. to get a liver transplant. She received two transplants in 1989, shortly after her arrival, and then another in 1998.
Now she's 21 and she needs yet another transplant. The problem is that her state-funded insurance has run out.
But the situation is not hopeless. All she had to do was to notify the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service that she is illegal and presto, she might be eligible for another round of free medical insurance.
But it's not certain that she will qualify, and that presents the moral drama that the article is designed to highlight.
Liver transplants aren't cheap. Each costs $490,000 plus $30,000 per year for medication. And livers for transplant are in short supply, so transplants for illegals prevent American citizens from getting them.
No problem. Giving transplants to illegals is entirely ethical according to D. Michael Shapiro, vice-chairman of the ethics committee for the donation program. "People are people, and when you make an incision in an organ donor, you don't find little American flags planted in their organs."
We wonder if Dr. Shapiro would have a similar sense of ethics for a donor program in Israel that would result in a Palestinian getting an organ from an Israeli while Israelis die because they can't get organs. People are people.
Shapiro's ethics is the ultimate in open borders ideology. The logic would seem to imply that recipient lists should be expanded to include all of humanity. After all, with this logic, there is no ethical reason why the program should be restricted to those who managed to get to the U.S. And surely there must be some law that would make U.S. tax payers foot the bill. After all, people are people.
Finally, the article presents the issue as a moral imperative for Americans. The print version of the article (but not the internet version) is headlined "Spared as children — then cut loose." The article appears under the heading "Life in the Shadows." The idea seems to be that if illegals were made legal this moral catastrophe in which illegal immigrants might be on their own for medial insurance at age 21 could be ended at last. [article]
U.K. Black leader supports Enoch Powell
Eds: The Brits are staring into the abyss predicted by Enoch Powell 40 years ago. Yesterday Simon Heffer's article unabashedly supported Powell. (See below.)
Now Trevor Phillips, a leftist who has recently become an opponent of multiculturalism because it is leading to a racially segregated England, acknowledges that “out of control immigration policy” has sparked a “cold war in some parts of the country, where very separate communities exist side by side... with poor communication across racial or religious lines.”
To quote Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin'.
Trevor Phillips warns of immigration 'cold war'
Daily Telegraph
April 20, 2008
Mass immigration has led to a racial "cold war" among rival ethnic communities, the head of Britain's race relations watchdog has warned. [more]
Enoch Powell: The Speech They Can't Forget
April 19, 2008
Eds: Pinch yourself. The Daily Telegraph, Britain’s largest circulation daily, just ran the following article by Simon Heffer, in praise of the late Enoch Powell's famous "rivers of blood" speech. Is the tide starting to turn on immigration? (Notice the many comments at the end.)
Simon Heffer
Daily Telegraph (London)
April 19, 2008
... [Enoch] Powell reported in his speech what he found to be the alarmingly strong views some of his constituents in Wolverhampton had about mass immigration, the way it was affecting their lives and the strain it was putting on local public services. He said he knew there would be "a chorus of execration" that he could say such things. But he asked a more important question as an MP whose electors bring him a deeply unsettling problem: by what right, instead, would he have remained silent? ...
Many of our immigrants have assimilated over the past 40 years. Equally, many have chosen not to. Four of them murdered 52 innocent people on London's public transport network nearly three years ago. Others, according to the police and the security services, are busily engaged in trying to repeat the incident. So far they have been thwarted: but for how long?
This is all the legacy of those who refused to take Powell seriously; of militant Leftists who mischievously cry "racism" to avoid any sensible debate on immigration; of well-heeled politicians who saw no harm in driving millions of poor immigrants into ghettos, with a perfect disregard for their welfare and for that of the people already living in those places; and of ministers in this very Government who for years saw no reason to enforce immigration controls at all, in the interests of deliberately destroying our national identity.
Powell was the greatest Conservative thinker in political life in living memory. He foresaw what were then unimaginable tensions caused by forcibly altering the character of a country. We should remember him tomorrow with enhanced respect. For he was right. [more]
Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech
That Old Black Magic Meets Organ Harvesting
Disreputable transnational corporations providing a black market in healthy young organs from Third World countries to satisfy the needs wealthy Western geezers living on borrowed time?
That’s the stuff 'medical thrillers' are made of. Affluent whites feeding like biotech vampires on hapless inhabitants of the nether regions of the North-South divide. The theme appeals not only to third world activists, but is a staple of liberal looniedom in the West.
Great pulp for potboiling paperbacks and made-for-TV movies.
Less likely to make it to either prime time or the best seller list are stories of "organ harvesting" in the Third World of Third Worlders for Third Worlders by Third Worlders.
But the latter is sad fact, not macabre sci-fi. And it’s motivated by what can only be called the blackest of black magic.
Dateline Kinshasa — the capital of the heart of darkness itself, formerly the Belgian Congo, later the Congo (Kinshasa), then Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kinshasa is being swept by a wave of panic and lynchings as penis theft panic hits the capital.
The lynchers are not European neo-colonial corporate enforcers or mercenaries in the pay of Western intelligence services. They are locals.
And the lynchees are native sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises.
According to Reuters African service, "Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur."
The rumors of "penis theft" have been dominating Kinshasa's call-in radio shows, where listeners are advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings. The sorcerers are said to simply touch their victims, thus causing their genitals to shrink or disappear. Then they attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
Mere mumbo jumbo? Not according to the natives. Twenty-nine-year old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station testified that "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny."
Meanwhile in nearby Gabon, which because of its oil and mineral wealth enjoys the highest Human Development Index (a composite of life expectancy, literacy, education, standard of living, and per capita Gross Domestic Product) in SubSaharan Africa, children are being murdered to provide the parts for magic amulets.
Despite its wealth and high (for black Africa) level of education and standard of living, mutilated bodies of children and young adults, drained of blood, line streets of Libreville (no joke, that's the name), Gabon's capital. There are gaping holes in their bodies where their genitals and other organs have been ripped out.
According to some reports, Gabonese politicians use these gruesome black magic rituals to boost their chances of winning lucrative government posts. The rationale is that eating the genitals and other organs of children brings good luck.
So much for wealth + education = democracy and human rights.
Eds.: The attack on the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem is once again roiling things in Israel. This Yeshiva is a center of Jewish religious nationalism and is associated with the Gush Emunim settler movement. The ideology behind this movement can be traced to Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982).
The following is from a review in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky. It is an excellent summary of the Rabbi Kook's ideology.
What particularly concerns the authors is the total contempt which Jewish fundamentalists show toward non-Jews. Rabbi Kook the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism, said, “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
Rabbi Kook’s entire teaching, which is followed devoutly by, among others, those who have led the settler movement on the occupied West Bank, is based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late16th to the early 19th century. “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala,” the authors write, “is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary. If an influential Christian bishop or Islamic scholar argued that the difference between the superior souls of non-Jews and the inferior souls of Jews was greater than the difference between the human soul and souls of cattle, he would incur the wrath of all and be viewed as an anti-Semite by most Jewish scholars regardless of whatever less meaningful, positive statements he included.” [more]
Hillary Clinton aide establishes new standard of fealty to Israel
Dana Milbank, wrote a column, aptly titled "the audacity of Chutzpah," on a Jewish leadership conference where representatives of the three presidential candidates were grilled on their attitudes toward Israel. The response of Ann Lewis, Hillary Clinton's representative, is astounding in its assertion that the proper role of the US president is to support the decisions of Israel. Lobby? What Lobby?
Next question to [Obama representative Dan] Kurtzer: Obama's assertion that he needn't have a "Likud view" — that of Israel's right-wing party — to be pro-Israel. Kurtzer explained that Obama wanted to see a "plurality of views."
Silence in the room.
Role of the US president is
to support Israeli decisions
To that, [Clinton representative Ann] Lewis retorted: "The
role of the president of the United States
is to support the decisions that are made by the people of
Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among
the political parties."
The audience members applauded.
[McCain representative Lawrence] Eagleburger piled on.
"There's a distinction between those you do talk to," he
said, "and those who declare themselves as intent on the
destruction of the state of Israel. And if that's their
policy, I think we ought not talk to them." More applause.
[more]
EDs.: Peter Mckay, a columnist for the London Daily Mail, wrote a column in which he claimed that British government support for sending schoolchildren to Auschwitz was based on “the misguided belief that it’ll make them always take Israel’s side.” He preceded this comment by writing
“So far as I know, there aren’t any school trips to the scenes of Stalin’s crimes in Russia, Mao’s in China, Pol Pot’s in Cambodia — or any other genocide centres. So why are British children herded round Auschwitz, for which we had no responsibility?"
The column stirred up the usual firestorm of criticism. (Whatever could he have been thinking?)
Amazingly, this column has disappeared from the Daily Mail website, even as comments on the column appear on other websites, particularly in the Jewish media. An article on the affair at TotallyJewish.com notes that Mckay's comment has been condemned by the British Board of Deputies, the main Jewish organization in England.
It will be interesting to see if Mr. Mckay's days as a columnist for the Daily Mail have drawn to an end. We rather doubt that Mckay's apology will appease his critics, since he is sticking with his main point. And he is disagreeing with a fundamental feature of Jewish activism, at least since the 1970s, in which the Holocaust has been promoted as a core cultural icon throughout Western culture, not only in Germany.
However, we would go beyond Mckay's comment to note the function of the Holocaust is not only to advance the cause of Israel but to promote multiculturalism generally. See Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life.
David Mckay's apology:
McKay told the
Jewish News that he was sorry for any offence caused to
the Jewish community or Holocaust survivors but stood by
his comments regarding Israel, he said: “My complaint is
against the 'we're all guilty' zealots who shy away from
assigning specific responsibility on the Germans.
“I don't see how children could be reminded of what was
done to the Jews of Europe by being taken to Auschwitz
without this inclining them subsequently to support
Israel. Visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington (for
an article) certainly had this effect on me. It occurred
to me this might have been why the museum is sited on
Capitol Hill - to keep the crimes against the Jews at the
forefront of lawmakers' thinking.” [more]
Her letter refers to
a
Times article on a talk she gave to the Greenwich (CT)
library. This talk was originally cancelled because of
pressure from pro-Israel critics. In a comment on the
circumstances surrounding her talk, Weir notes that her
talk "generated controversy among those who don't want
facts about Israel to reach the general public, and so it
appeared that the library was going to cancel my talks,
claiming that they 'offended public sensitivities,'
(which, as I'm sure you know, they certainly don't!)
However, there was an outcry against such censorship —
reported by local newspapers, radio, and television (in
fact, this was covered as far away as New York and
Boston), and the talks went on — in a far larger venue
than originally proposed. Moreover, they were attended by
at least 600 people, and were extremely well received —
and were covered by local television stations, newspapers,
etc.
The New York Times ended up writing about this in the
front section of the Sunday paper, and even the writer,
who slants toward Israel, reported:
'When the speech ended, Ms. Weir was met with thunderous
applause, and across the room there was a widespread sense
of satisfaction that someone was saying what needed to be
said.' [more]
Americans … find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism. But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. ...
The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation.
In areas where that separation [along ethnic lines] has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly. ...The ethnonationalist view has traditionally dominated through much of Europe and has held its own even in the United States until recently. For substantial stretches of U.S. history, it was believed that only the people of English origin, or those who were Protestant, or white, or hailed from northern Europe were real Americans. It was only in 1965 that the reform of U.S. immigration law abolished the system of national-origin quotas that had been in place for several decades. This system had excluded Asians entirely and radically restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe. ...
In short, ethnonationalism has played a more profound and lasting role in modern history than is commonly understood, and the processes that led to the dominance of the ethnonational state and the separation of ethnic groups in Europe are likely to reoccur elsewhere. Increased urbanization, literacy, and political mobilization; differences in the fertility rates and economic performance of various ethnic groups; and immigration will challenge the internal structure of states as well as their borders. ...
Whether politically correct or not, ethnonationalism will continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century. One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history. ...
These ethnically homogeneous polities have displayed a great deal of internal solidarity, moreover, facilitating government programs, including domestic transfer payments, of various kinds. When the Swedish Social Democrats were developing plans for Europe's most extensive welfare state during the interwar period, the political scientist Sheri Berman has noted, they conceived of and sold them as the construction of a folkhemmet, or "people's home." ...
Should Muslim immigrants [to Europe] not assimilate and instead develop a strong communal identification along religious lines, one consequence might be a resurgence of traditional ethnonational identities in some states — or the development of a new European identity defined partly in contradistinction to Islam (with the widespread resistance to the extension of full EU membership to Turkey being a possible harbinger of such a shift). ...
More or less subtle forms of ethnonationalism, for example, are ubiquitous in immigration policy around the globe. Many countries — including Armenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Serbia, and Turkey — provide automatic or rapid citizenship to the members of diasporas of their own dominant ethnic group, if desired. Chinese immigration law gives priority and benefits to overseas Chinese. Portugal and Spain have immigration policies that favor applicants from their former colonies in the New World. Still other states, such as Japan and Slovakia, provide official forms of identification to members of the dominant national ethnic group who are noncitizens that permit them to live and work in the country. Americans, accustomed by the U.S. government's official practices to regard differential treatment on the basis of ethnicity to be a violation of universalist norms, often consider such policies exceptional, if not abhorrent. Yet in a global context, it is the insistence on universalist criteria that seems provincial. ...
Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue. The challenge for the international community in such cases is to separate communities in the most humane manner possible: by aiding in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new homeland, and providing financial aid for resettlement and economic absorption. The bill for all of this will be huge, but it will rarely be greater than the material costs of interjecting and maintaining a foreign military presence large enough to pacify the rival ethnic combatants or the moral cost of doing nothing. ...
Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity — the extent to which national consciousness is culturally and politically manufactured by ideologists and politicians. They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power. It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a mistake to think that because nationalism is partly constructed it is therefore fragile or infinitely malleable. Ethnonationalism was not a chance detour in European history: it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation, it is a crucial source of both solidarity and enmity, and in one form or another, it will remain for many generations to come. One can only profit from facing it directly. [more]
Feb. 28, 2008
After last year’s defeat of the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill, John O’Sullivan’s published a cover story in American Conservative magazine entitled Getting Immigration Right: How conservatives blocked the open-borders establishment. (Read Steve Sailer’s comments here.) It opened with an amusing account of how O’Sullivan, in his then-role of editor of National Review, maneuvered my own 1992 Time To Rethink Immigration? NR cover story, which he (perhaps too generously) said " launched the modern American debate on immigration", past the magazine’s proprietor, Bill Buckley. This whole opening passage was a salutary reminder of the extreme inhibitions that had prevented even established conservative intellectuals from addressing immigration policy up to that point.
And, alas, subsequently. The glaring omission from O’Sullivan’s article was the fact that after 1998 National Review "stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause", as Wall Street Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley accurately gloated (July 3, 2000), and did not return to the issue until some time in 2002. The reason for this, of course, is that Buckley fired O’Sullivan without warning and purged the magazine of immigration reformers (e.g. me). ...
But Buckley’s betrayal was not without wider significance. It raises the question of whether the current National Review editors’ belated opposition to the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill was anything more than an opportunistic effort to insert themselves at the head of a parade, which they will abandon when their assessment of their career requirements shifts. After all, the amnesty they now congratulate themselves on opposing was the monomaniacal obsession of a president they slavishly supported, although his views were obvious.
Indeed, O’Sullivan himself provided an example of this opportunism. He writes:
"Bill Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq."
I predict that Kristol will return to immigration enthusiasm once he has helped persuade Bush (or McCain) to attack Iran. [more]
[Mos Def] is everything that white people dream about: authentic (”he’s from Brooklyn!”), funny (”he was on Chapelle show!”), artistic (have you heard “Black on Both Sides?”), an actor (”he’s in the new Gondry film!”) and not white (”I don’t see race”)."
(Note: For those readers who haven't heard of him, Lander writes that despite being white, Michel Gondry is another cultural icon that white people like, most likely because he did cool things like direct David Chappelle's Block Party and lots of music videos for bands like Daft Punk. His latest is Be Kind Rewind whose title alone should make it a white person classic. Lander says "it might be the biggest event in white person film since The Royal Tenenbaums.")
Another of Lander's example shows the powerful sense of guilt that seems to haunt all whites, even for trivial stuff like not recycling:
If you are in a situation where a white person produces an empty bottle, watch their actions. They will first say 'where’s the recycling?' If you say “we don’t recycle,” prepare for some awkwardness. They will make a move to throw the bottle away, they will hesitate, and then ultimately throw the bottle away. But after they return look in their eyes. All they can see is the bottle lasting forever in a landfill, trapping small animals. It will eat at them for days, at this point you should say 'I’m just kidding, the recycling is under the sink. Can you fish out that bottle?' And they will do it 100% of the time!
So the bad news (not exactly news) is that whites are not at all racially conscious and even look up to non-whites as cultural icons. And they are excruciatingly scrupulous about doing the right thing, even when it comes to recycling a plastic bottle.
But the good news is that whites may at least be beginning to see these traits as white. As Gregory Rodriguez (who doubtless eagerly awaits the minority status of whites) notes in a Feb. 25 L.A. Times op-ed:
As unusual as Lander's site is, it is also part of a sociological trend among whites who live in increasingly non-Anglo cities and regions: their transformation into a minority group. Whites used to think of themselves as standard-issue American — they had the luxury of not having to grapple with the significance of their own racial background; they were "us" and everyone else was "ethnic." Not anymore.
"Demographic shifts have put a new kind of pressure on that category of people who were once just considered the norm," says Mike Hill, author of "After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority." "White identity is becoming particularized and minoritized. No longer the normative category, it's becoming one of many identities."
This pressure naturally leads to a greater sense of self-consciousness as the new minority begins to negotiate their relationships with members of other minorities (everyone else).
Exactly right. It's a very small and even grotesque beginning, given the traits that Lander points to. But perhaps at long last white people will start thinking of themselves as a group — a group with some very peculiar and maladaptive traits. Does any other group worship cultural icons from another race? Is any other race so incredibly prone to guilt that they have an anxiety attack for failing to recycle a bottle. People like this doubtless feel a sense of moral uplift when they vote for Barack Obama.
Being so spectacularly guilt-ridden and self-hating is perhaps viable in a society that is overwhelmingly and permanently white. But such attitudes are suicidal in a society rapidly becoming non-white.
Part of the white delusion is to suppose that deep down, everyone is just like them and could be made to be just like them with a little tinkering:
It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.
A great way to make white people feel good is to tell them about situations where poor people changed how they were doing things because they were given the ‘whiter’ option.
In fact of course, there is no reason at all to suppose that the non-white future will be at all like these pathetic self-haters. There is no reason whatever to suppose that the soon-to-be non-white majority will be so fastidiously moral and anxiety ridden. Unlike whites, these groups are aggressively asserting their interests, and there is little reason to think they will stop when they become the majority.
Indeed, quite a few of the prospective non-white majority have the same negative opinion of whites that these progressive whites have of themselves. Mos Def is their cultural icon, but he is also a "socially conscious" rapper, who is nothing if not deeply ethnocentric and none too fond of white people.
But these white people are still living in a dream world where they lunch on expensive sandwiches and agonize about getting the exactly right high-performance bicycle.
It's going to be a rude awakening.
Lander points out:
"Too many white people don't like to be reminded that they're white. They like to think that white people are those evil corporate right-wingers or the uneducated masses who vote the wrong way. But 'enlightened whites' are white people too and have just as much of a group mentality as they think the red staters have."
They do indeed have a group mentality, but one that is leading them to oblivion. Making the group mentality explicit and then deconstructing it for its child-like ignorance of real-world realities is certainly a start.
Video re Freedom of Speech in Canada
Eds: This intriguing You-Tube video is the first of several segments of Ezra Levant's increasingly well-known appearance before the "Canadian Human Rights Commission" defending freedom of speech. This is a case, along with that of Maclean's magazine and Marc Steyn, in which Jews' freedom to make statements deemed offensive by Muslims is being infringed. (Levant republished the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.) The publicity it has received in Canada contrasts with the years' of persecution of Canadian non-Jews for making statements deemed offensive to minorities by the CHRC thought police. This so-called "hate" speech is notoriously ignored by the establishment media but is well documented by CAFE, the Canadian Association for Free Expression.
A post-racial country? It's easy to talk about but much tougher to accomplish.
Los Angeles Times
Comment on "Ethnic diversity drains altruism"
EDS. Once again, we find that ethnic diversity leads to less altruism and less cohesive communities. But the lead researcher, Ernest Healy, remains optimistic, suggesting that "government help" overcome the problems. So I guess we can expect initiatives for mandated altruism and coerced cohesiveness. The philosopher asks, is mandated altruism still altruism?
Ethnic diversity drains altruism
theage.com.au
Feb. 11, 2008
Excerpts: MIGRANTS from non-English-speaking countries are less likely to be volunteers than Australian-born people or migrants from English-speaking nations, a study shows.
Ethnically diverse neighbourhoods have lower levels of volunteering even among their Australian-born residents. ...
When you create societies from mixed backgrounds it may not lead to overt violence … but to something scarier, a withdrawal from the civic sphere," Dr Healy said, "a feeling of less connectedness." ...
The findings appear to support research by Robert Puttnam, of Harvard University, that ethnic diversity can hasten a withdrawal from "collective life".
Dr Healy said the assumption that multiculturalism leads automatically to strong cohesive communities without government help may have been naive. [more]
Eds: Genital mutilation in the UK
Continuing a recent theme, we highlight again the lack of assimilation of Muslims into Western societies (see below for more examples). This item shows that the men from these cultures must be pretty desperate if they have to resort to having their women’s genitals mutilated as a way of ensuring their paternity (the likely motive). Are their women that prone to unfaithfulness? Or are their men unable, because of personality or character weakness, to inspire fidelity? Who knows? But it’s either a matter of dysgenics or a dysfunctional culture, neither of which has a place in Western societies. The following is disseminated by the network, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, which obviously objects to such practices. Rather than simply objecting, they should encourage emigration back to Muslim societies.
UK: Hundreds of girls in Liverpool subjected to genital mutilation
The most recent figures from Liverpool maternity services identified 237 women with FGM in three years.
Feb. 10, 2007
Liverpool Daily Post via
Women Living Under Muslim Laws
"African tribal elders are being flown into the UK to mutilate young Liverpool girls in a “heartbreaking” cultural tradition.
Health officials today revealed girls aged between four and 11 are also being taken abroad during school holidays to be illegally circumcised.
Gynaecologists at Liverpool’s Alder Hey children’s hospital said they had seen young girls suffering complications after undergoing female genital mutilation (FGM). In extreme cases, young girls can die of complications. It can also cause damage to surrounding organs and spark infection and urinary problems. In the long term, girls can be left infertile and prone to severe infections and pelvic diseases. ...