Another inconvenient truth
It is an article of faith among conservative American traditionalists that western civilization—Graeco-Roman civilization softened and strengthened by two thousand years of western Christianity—is superior to any other. If western civilization is indeed superior, then one would like to believe that any people, anywhere in the world, given only a chance, could and would adopt it. In the 1960s, I think, most Americans did believe that any people indeed could and would. Our current president plainly still believes, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer of the rest of us today do.
That race goes only skin deep, that the tribes of the world are fundamentally equal, has been the mighty political dogma of our generation. The dogma has been mandatory, enforced by severe informal penalties against any who openly doubt. The dogma is in trouble today, though, because ordinary Americans like you and me credit it less and less.
The world has changed greatly in forty short years. Back then, much of the Old World was only just emerging from the long shadow (or from the warm light, depending on your point of view) of European colonial rule. Our own, segregated black minority in the United States had achieved a level of civilization never approached by any negro people in history. It seemed cynical then to suppose that the demise of colonialism and the death of Segregation would not enable the brown millions at last to join modern society, or to construct societies the equal of our own.
Alas, four decades have taught another lesson. Loosed at last from white domination, black America has lurched drunkenly from western cultural norms, gravitating toward the norms of the black Carribean and black Africa—flagrant, promiscuous and violent. Blacks newly migrated to Europe, where there never were but a handful of blacks before World War II, behave so, too. The circumstances and histories, even the languages, of the various black peoples in question diverge so manifestly that one searches in vain for a credible factor other than race to explain these peoples’ common fate. (The reader familiar with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel will be aware how hard Mr. Diamond searches for precisely this factor to explain. The main flaw one finds in Mr. Diamond’s interesting work is that he fails, in the end, to acknowledge that no truly adequate factor is found. Mr. Diamond pointedly ignores the plain implication of his own work that a race’s geographical environment shapes the race biologically no less than culturally. One suspects that Mr. Diamond privately is perfectly aware of the implication and even believes it, but that he feels compelled by Political Correctness formally to deny it.)
Hardly less recently freed from colonial rule than black Africa, much of southeast Asia now rapidly modernizes. There are of course many important differences between southeast Asia and black Africa—just as there are many important differences between Alabama and Iceland, between most any other randomly chosen pair of spots on earth—but between southeast Asia and black Africa in particular there is no difference more obvious than that southeast Asians inhabit the one, black Africans the other.
And it is at precisely this point in the discussion that the minions of Political Correctness invariably intercede. They neatly demand that you and I dismiss the foregoing observations without seriously considering their truth. If you and I demur, then, in a shabby rhetorical inversion, they audaciously accuse us of prejudice.
It takes one to know one, I guess.
After their abortive insult—if you and I, declining politely to back down, press the point—our opponents invariably begin offering excuses, a multitude of putative reasons why someone, anyone, but the blacks themselves were responsible for general black failure in so many disparate places and circumstances. Such excuses and reasons seemed credible in the 1960s inasmuch as they explained a purely temporary inequality between the races, but today the excuses and reasons ring hollower with each passing year. The relevant racial differences seem increasingly permanent, whereas the single obvious trait that black people—as, separately, white people and each other people—around the world share is their race. One can still believe that race does not explain, but to do so, one must selectively ignore many of the most obvious relevant facts.
One then remembers the several countries of Central and South America, inhabited in part by another troubled race: the American Indians. In the 1960s, U.S. Americans tended to dismiss those countries as “banana republics,” unworthy of serious consideration, lumping them with Franco’s fascist Spain and Salazar’s fascist Portugal as products of a common, degenerate Iberian culture. A serious observer today however finds Latin America to divide about as neatly along racial lines as the rest of the world does.
One hears a lot about “the poor” in Latin America. The name “the poor” is a misleading label which purposely obscures the fact that the people referred to are basically blacks and Indians. After all, the Argentine son of a half-Russian, half-Italian mother and a half-German, half-Spanish father is seldom much poorer in Argentina than you or I are in the United States. It is the Mexican of Aztec blood who is the poor one. Regarding Mexico, there are tens of millions of prosperous whites in that country, but you wouldn’t know it unless you had been there, because the millions of poor Mexicans today trespassing the U.S. are almost none of them white.
One then remembers our own North American Indians, unpersecuted these last hundred years, secure on their reservations yet with full access to American society during that time. They fail, too. A pattern emerges. Whether you and I wish it so or not, the pattern is a pattern of race.
Hypotheses to deny the race factor abound, as familiar to you as to me: slavery, segregation, colonialism, bigotry, discrimination are supposed to explain. The main body of these hypotheses joins to imply a sort of vague, ongoing conspiracy of the world’s whites to hold the brown man down. More honorable hypotheses, the minority (Mr. Diamond’s is a leading example), posit rational causes in history, geography, natural resources and culture. What most such hypotheses have in common unfortunately is their thin basis in fact—or, at least (as in Mr. Diamond’s case), their selective disregard of fact. It is extremely difficult to explain coherently the stark difference between ex-colonies in Asia, like Vietnam and Malaysia, and ex-colonies in Africa, like Zimbabwe and Angola, while ignoring the obvious factor of race. This is especially true once one correlates black-run Zimbabwe and Angola with, say, black-run New Orleans and Detroit.
There exist at least six Hispanic countries with relatively few American Indians or blacks: Argentina; Uruguay; Chile; Costa Rica; Portugal; Spain. Of the six, Argentina remains politically unstable, but all six countries are rich. The rest of the Hispanic world does have large Indian and/or black populations—”the poor,” as they are disingenuously called, whereas they were more accurately described as “the brown.” As far as I know, there is not one single Latin American country with large Indian and/or black populations in which those populations do not constitute the poor. If you believe this a Caucasian conspiracy, you believe more than I do.
Italians and Germans have settled throughout South America. Japanese have settled all along the continent’s west coast. Everywhere these people have settled, they have assimilated and grown rich. Ashkenazi Jews have settled in small numbers here and there, and if they have not assimilated everywhere they are anything but poor. These are not statements of hate or bigotry; they are just facts. In today’s U.S. immigration crisis, they are facts the people of the United States can no longer afford to ignore.
The peoples of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Wales, Scotland, Ulster, Ireland, Flanders, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland’s German cantons, Liechtenstein, South Tyrolia, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland all enjoy remarkably similar societies and standards of living today. The most obvious nation left from the group, Estonia, so recently freed from the shadow of Stalinism, even now converges toward the same, northwestern European cultural norm. The several nations named speak several mutually unintelligible languages and have lived such variously divergent histories over the past twenty or thirty centuries that the degree of cultural convergence they show, coupled with the relative lack of examples of countries outside the group which closely fit the pattern, can hardly but indicate a shared tribal cause. We live alike because we are alike. The French, Italians and Greeks live not so dissimilarly because they are in fact not so dissimilar. Blacks and American Indians live differently because they are different. Of course it is never quite as simple as that, but that does appear to be the general pattern of the world.
Why a mysterious Providence has made different the races of man is perhaps not for you and me to question. That it has is neither for you and me to deny, because if man is indeed made in the image of God, as I believe, then each of us reflects a unique facet of His visage. The separate tribes, nations and races of the world are the wealth of mankind, a wealth lost when all are indiscriminately intermixed.
I am well aware that conclusions like the ones this article reaches go under the discreditable rubric of racism. Few sane, well adjusted Americans of our generation could possibly want to be racists; but facts are facts, and no amount of sophistry can make them go away. There seems little credible evidence that western civilization can in fact exist apart from western man. If such an observation be derided by the name “racist,” then what is the semantical utility of the name? Is the name merely an insult? Or, rather, is the name also a convenient means to suppress politically inconvenient truth?
I am not sure, I hope that I am wrong, but I believe and fear that some time between 1990 and the present America has passed an invisible line, beyond which true racial reconciliation in the United States is no longer possible. By Edwin S. Rubenstein’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, white babies are on track to be an actual minority of U.S. births by 2011, just four years from today. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s parents and grandparents. The demographic trend is clear, and the slide doesn’t stop at 50 percent. Forty percent, 30 percent, 20 percent status and less are all coming for U.S. whites.
Or will come, if pre-1965 Americans, white and black—or just white, if our blacks insist on pursuing a separate national course (we must not deceive ourselves on this point)—do not decide that we actually want to survive as an identifiable, historically rooted nation, blood and soil. We can survive. We retain the means. What we yet lack is the will, and the will is growing. But, fast enough?
If I knew how to get from here to there, believe me, I would tell you. I do not know. However, the necessary first steps for Americans to take are clear: secure the southern U.S. border; halt most immigration, or at least most non-white, non-Judeo-Christian immigration; conduct government business solely in the English language; deport such illegal aliens as happen to fall into the hands of local police; enforce existing laws against the employment of illegal aliens, thereby inducing such aliens to begin voluntarily deporting themselves. I believe that we should also suppress Islam within our borders. The sooner we do the first things, the less the chance that second and third things will ultimately be needed. We Americans should start the first things therefore without further delay.
Thanks to the badly misguided 1960s U.S. Civil Rights legislation and the vast expansion of U.S. immigration attendant to it, our nation has reached a fundamental contradiction: a nation is, inherently, a people, a kin who share a common history and ancestry. Small numbers of ethnically compatible immigrants who desire to assimilate can be assimilated. Large numbers of ethnically incompatible immigrants who do not desire to assimilate cannot be assimilated. Between the “can” and the “cannot” lies a broad, ambiguous middle ground, which Americans of the present generation are going to have perforce to explore.
HJH