American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 15, No. 5	May 2004

CONTENTS

Afrikaner Survival Under Black Rule
Very Important People
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Afrikaner Survival Under Black Rule (Part I)

Will the ANC dissolve a nation even the British Empire could not destroy?

by Dan Roodt

Southern Africa is the most acute and dramatic example of the worldwide struggle of white resistance against dispossession. What does the future hold for white South Africans, specifically for the Afrikaners? Their ancestors built South Africa; they are rooted to the land, and cannot easily leave it as the British and other whites do. In this extraordinary two-part essay, an Afrikaner weeps for the land and people he loves.

Who are the Afrikaners, or “Boers” as they are often called? A hundred years ago, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the popular British writer of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, asked much the same question in his book The Great Boer War:

Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the very centre of the British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply into Africa?

Elsewhere in the same book he answered his own question:

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer — the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.

A hundred years later, there is still a grain of truth in this description. Afrikaners still hunt; many accountants, lawyers and businessmen would rather buy a game farm than a yacht. They may collect antiques or rare books, but also rhinoceri, African buffalo and other game. They still go on treks to tame large stretches of African bush single-handedly.

It was these qualities that gave rise to a multifaceted agriculture in one of the driest countries in the world, where only six percent of the land is arable. In the Karoo, for example, which is similar to the Arizona desert, Afrikaners raise sheep on land most people would consider worthless. Blacks have never settled in the Karoo because they would not survive.

Afrikaners are a strong people, physically as large as most Dutch or North Germans, and resilient in the face of many hardships, such as the periodic droughts that wrack the country and ruin their crops. During the Angolan war in the 1980s, a force of never more than 3,000 white South African soldiers commanded by a few stern but charismatic Afrikaner generals stopped an army of 45,000 Angolans, Russians and Cubans at the Namibian border. Because of the Western arms boycott against South Africa, the Russians even had air superiority, but a small Boer force held them off through sheer courage and creative battle plans. Casualty figures now emerging from that war, cross-checked against numbers from Havana and Moscow, show an almost unbelievable number of enemy killed for every South African who fell. It is with the same grim determination that they now bury the dead in what amounts to an undeclared race war waged against them on farms, street corners, and in their suburban homes, where they are robbed, raped and killed.

The English South African novelist and 1991 Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer made a career out of caricaturing Afrikaners as oafish racists living out on farms, where they drink brandy, torture natives, and practice incest. In at least one respect she was right. Like the patricians of republican Rome or the peasant famers of Western Europe from whom they sprang, the Boers derive their strength from the land. The word “Boer” means farmer. The stoic values praised by Vergil in his so-called bucolic poetry are much the same as Afrikaner values, a sort of pious conservatism that obeys God, respects work, and embraces nature.

A number of Afrikaners have made their mark outside Africa: Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Charlize Theron, international models like Minki van der Westhuizen, whose pin-ups graced the US tanks in Iraq, and opera singer Mimi Coertse, who was the lead soprano for the Viennese State Opera for 20 years in the 1950s and ‘60s. Johan Botha, the current male lead of the Viennese Opera, is booked out years in advance in all the major operatic centers. The physical beauty of many Afrikaner women is a constant source of wonder to many. Even Miss Gordimer has admitted as much.

Back in South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki once famously referred to the country as “two nations — the one rich and white, and the other black and poor.” He was not entirely correct. There is no such thing as a white nation in South Africa, only the Afrikaner nation, along with a motley collection of English-speakers, Portuguese, Greeks, Jews, Germans, Italians, and the like. Under the old, so-called apartheid government, all young white men did military service, during which they were trained not only to be soldiers, but also in Afrikaans and patriotism; there was then a kind of white nation in the making. Now, the dominant blacks have adopted English, and are actively trying to undermine Afrikaans and the nation it represents.

The Afrikaner Nation

The sense of community one experiences among Afrikaners, at their schools, churches, cultural societies, arts festivals and concerts, is completely different from that among the English whites. The English South African, apart from the sizeable number who have intermarried with Afrikaners or been integrated to the point of becoming Afrikaners themselves, is an atomised individual, linked by his language and outlook not to Africa but to that powerful Anglo-American civilization that still radiates its influence from across the oceans. As such, he is fascinated by the model of the sovereign individual who wants to get rich quickly, and buy a better house with better security in a more lavish gated community. He is essentially apolitical and adapts to circumstances. He thinks he can outwit the black government in a double game in which he pretends to be in favor of affirmative action. He will play the game, get a black partner to stay in business, and mouth the multicultural clichés of his English newspaper that already has a black editor, while privately voicing his misgivings and making sure his passport is ready for a quick exit in case things go wrong.

In the rest of Africa, including the ex-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which once had a white community of 300,000, the sovereign individual model has not worked. One has only to read V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, set in the Congo, to get a feel for the vulnerability of atomized expatriots to the radical caprice of African politics.

Afrikaners are not sovereign individuals, generally speaking. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they went through a great Romantic movement, a flowering of literature, translations, music and historical reflection that bound them into a nation of the European type, a cultural nation or kultuurvolk as they like to call themselves.

This explains the extraordinary level of Afrikaner cohesion in the face of intense official hostility. In South Africa today, it is virtually illegal to maintain or run any institution except a private family without it being, in official parlance, “demographically representative.” The ANC hires thousands of inspectors to harass schools, universities, businesses — even family businesses — sports clubs, trade unions, newspapers, radio stations, hospitals and clinics about their racial composition. Strictly speaking, it is illegal to employ whites unless they make up less than 10 percent of the payroll. An Afrikaans-language radio station, Radio Pretoria, lost its license because it employed only whites, and is now in a major legal battle to survive.

Yet one should not underestimate the thousand little resistances carried out every day, in schools, companies, hospitals and elsewhere. Whole suburbs in Pretoria are policed not by the South African Police Department — completely black, with corrupt cops and hardened criminals in its ranks — but by an all-white private security company consisting, as one satisfied female resident put it, of “handsome young Boers.” Their patrols ensure a level of security unheard-of in crime-ridden South Africa.

Despite the laws and harassment, many people get away with running ethnic Afrikaner or white businesses. Suburban houses often shelter thriving companies employing up to a dozen white people who ply their trades, unbeknown to inspectors. Every remaining Afrikaans school outside the Cape Province with its large Afrikaans-speaking Coloured population is still 99 percent white, as are the Afrikaans classes at bilingual schools. Government incompetence, predictable in most African countries, makes for a less than perfect system. To police a white population of six million people actively going about their daily business is an arduous task, especially when two thirds of them enjoy a distinct culture the government can penetrate only with difficulty.

There are other bastions of Afrikanerdom. On Easter Friday last year, I took my children to a church service, accompanied by a classical music program. The Reformed Church on the outskirts of Pretoria was packed to capacity with about 1,500 people — not a single black face among them. According to the mores of the new South Africa, where mixing is de rigeur and legally enforced, this gathering was scandalous. Afterwards people drank tea or coffee and had melktert [milk tarts] and koeksisters [a fried dough dessert], Boer delicacies found everywhere in South Africa.

My children’s school still bears some of the marks of nationhood. It used to be known as a laerskool, the equivalent of grade school, and instruction was exclusively in Afrikaans. Under official threat, it has now become a “parallel medium” school, and a third of the children take classes in English. During the prize-giving ceremony, the names are called from the Afrikaans-speaking class, with the children standing on stage in a neat row in their school uniforms. The surnames are all familiar Afrikaner ones, deriving from our Dutch, French Huguenot, German and Scottish forebears. Further examination of the fresh young faces and healthy bodies shows that at least half if not more of the children are blond. An extraordinarily high number have sparkling blue eyes. In fact, standing next to the English-medium class in the same age group, they seem almost like a caricature of the Aryan ideal.

When the “English” names are called out, a multicultural array of children saunters onto the stage, some of them white English-speakers, others Africans with names that are difficult for their white teacher to pronounce, a few Indians and mixed-race Coloreds, a Portuguese or a Greek, as well as a few Afrikaner children whose parents have put them in the English-speaking class because they have succumbed to the fallacy that “the future is English.” The ceremony is punctuated by performances provided almost exclusively by the Afrikaner children, including a piece by Bach for piano and cello, played faultlessly by further caricatures of the Aryan ideal.

It is hard not to smile at some of the South African realities known only to the Afrikaner. The results of the matric examination, our equivalent of the high school diploma, were published at the end of December 2003. On the front pages of the English-language newspapers there were photographs of smiling black students celebrating their successes. One African girl in Gauteng province, which surrounds Johannesburg, received distinction — meaning marks of above 80 percent — in five subjects. In fact, standards have been lowered to the point that it is almost impossible for anyone who takes the trouble to write the examination to fail the matric, and getting a “distinction” is not what it used to be. Still, reading the Johannesburg Star, one would think the province teems with black geniuses, all personally congratulated by the provincial Minister of Education. One wonders what happened to all those Afrikaner children.

Then you buy the Afrikaans-language Beeld, and the truth emerges. Here there are rankings and statistics, and more pictures, this time of a youngster named Riaan Swanepoel from the Menlopark Hoërskool in Pretoria who got not five, not 10, but 19 distinctions. Of the 10 children in Gauteng province who got the highest overall marks in the matric exam, seven are Afrikaners from Afrikaans-language schools. Afrikaners probably represent 10 percent or fewer of the children in the province, yet won 70 percent of the top academic honors.

One discovers that the government’s game of subverting education so that just about everyone can pass, has started a new game among the highly competitive Afrikaans high schools of Pretoria: making the bright children take not just the six mandatory subjects, but 10, 15 or even 20 to see if they can shoot the lights out by getting more than 80 percent in all of them.

Of course, eventually the South African government will abolish exams and grades entirely, as they have already done for younger children. Afrikaans schools are now developing an underground system of traditional teaching methods, including grades, while keeping the official paperwork for “outcomes-based education” and “continuous assessment,” as if the schools were really following official edicts. At one major high school in Pretoria, the teachers recently had to work through the night to prepare phony paperwork for a government inspection. The officials left none the wiser, unaware that the infernal system that produces straight-A students who play chess, the piano, and that “aggressive, white male-dominated, racist sport, rugby” continues unabated.

But can this game of hide-and-seek continue? At the start of the 2004 academic year, there were more attempts to swamp the remaining Afrikaans-language schools with black students demanding instruction in English, even at schools with no space for them. It may be that in a few years’ time, Afrikaners will have to take their children out of school altogether; many already prefer home schooling or private microschools where technology is used to teach in innovative ways.

Language

Like so many nations, Afrikaners are bound together by their language, Afrikaans. The old South Africa was a bilingual country with English dominant in business, and Afrikaans used in government, in parliament, the military, the police and the education system. Afrikaners had firmly-established Afrikaans-speaking institutions at all levels. Now, because race-mixing and the Africanisation of the national culture — if such a thing exists — are official policy, breaking down the Afrikaner identity is a top priority. Government spokesmen rage that Afrikaans “is a barrier,” and they are right.

Although English is spoken as a mother tongue by only three million people (including more than one million Indians) out of 46 million, it is the official medium of “nation-building,” that forlorn dream of every African government since the 1950s. Afrikaans is widely spoken as a lingua franca by about 15 million people in South Africa and Namibia, especially outside the major cities, but it does not attract Africans, who see English as the instrument of power and prestige. Most South African blacks are so bewitched by the alleged power of English that when they visit Europe for the first time they are surprised to find that the people of France, Germany or Italy speak their own languages, not English.

The presence of an imperial language like English, with its global Hollywood culture appealing to the multicultural masses, sets the Afrikaners apart. Blacks avoid Afrikaans institutions, which they see as ethnically exclusive. Most of the black elite that rule in Pretoria prefer to commute from houses in Johannesburg 25 miles away, since they still think of the capital as an unwelcoming, Afrikaner city. The black attraction to English is driving some English-speaking whites to Afrikaans. In some towns on the East Rand, where middle class English-speaking whites cannot afford private schools, they have started sending their children to Afrikaans government schools to escape from their own English-speaking schools, which have been swamped by blacks.

(The same thing is happening in Brussels, where French-speaking Walloons have traditionally looked down on the Flemish, but now send their children to Dutch-language schools where they can still get a European education. The French-speaking schools have been taken over by North and West African immigrants, who want to learn an imperial language rather than Dutch. White-minority languages may become a haven for maintaining Western identities and education standards, both in Europe and in South Africa.)

Afrikaans may be a barrier to blacks, but there are also racial barriers and divisions within Afrikaans. Eighty percent of the four million mixed-race Coloureds speak Afrikaans, sometimes very beautifully in rural areas, but since 1994 the government has pushed for the Creolization of Afrikaans. For the government and media, speaking or writing “proper Afrikaans,” the standard, white, Germanic version of the language, is a sign of political conservatism and opposition to race mixing.

The new model is a debased version spoken by urban Coloreds, mixed with English words and expressions. Subverting Afrikaans and turning it into a Creole language would facilitate the linguistic and racial assimilation of the Afrikaners themselves. English, too, is changing quickly, and is no longer subject to what used to be the British norms; in many parts of the country it is also being Creolized, mixed with African words, the grammar and pronunciation losing their rigor.

At first, the official push toward Creolization met with little resistance, and was even welcomed in liberal or left-wing circles. Recently, however, there has been a backlash against non-standard forms of Afrikaans, as well as mixing the language with English. A broad front of Afrikaner authors and intellectuals, including homosexual and left-wing writers, now vehemently opposes any form of mixing or denaturing. This has drawn a new racial line in the sand, because Afrikaans-speaking Colored journalists and intellectuals instinctively lean toward a Creolized language, and eschew any form of purity, whether linguistic or racial.

Currently, Afrikanerdom is being scandalized by a novel that captures the ambiguities of even those Afrikaners who appear to have thrown over everything their ancestors stood for. The novel is Kontrei, published in 2003 by a 47-year old Bohemian living in one of the Johannesburg areas called Yeoville that has been taken over by blacks in the last five years. Once a Jewish quarter with synagogues and beautiful apartment buildings designed by famous South African architects, Yeoville is now a crime- and drug-ridden slum, lorded over by Nigerian and Congolese gangsters.

Writing under the pseudonym of Kleinboer (Little Boer), the author describes his life as probably the last white person left in Yeoville. He lives with an HIV-positive Zulu woman and her mixed-race child by a Portuguese man; he also regularly visits black prostitutes from all over Africa in the many brothels in adjacent Hillbrow, an area known as the Manhattan of Africa when whites still lived there, as recently as 15 years ago.

Academic studies show that it takes a prostitute in Johannesburg an average of six weeks to become infected with HIV. Although Kleinboer has, by his own admission, slept with over 400 black prostitutes, and though he lives with someone who is HIV-positive, he is a healthy man. He has a science degree, and is fanatical about wearing condoms. Despite free condoms and hundreds of millions of dollars for advertising campaigns by government, few blacks manage to practice so-called “safe sex.”

Kleinboer enjoys the rush of black life: sex at ten dollars a throw, the adrenaline of watching gang members kill each other, the free availability of drugs, in which he occasionally indulges. But he also answers the door with a machete, and sleeps with a loaded revolver under his pillow. During one of his forays into white society, Kleinboer tells his suburban host, “It is so nice to visit white people for a change that I wouldn’t mind paying you for the privilege. I could never leave my cellphone or car keys lying about in Yeoville as I do here, not even in my own home.”

Despite his almost incalculable distance from the Afrikaner society of Easter Friday services and school awards ceremonies, Kleinboer practises condom apartheid, and would probably never father a child with a black woman. Thus he hardly represents the model for the métissage or generalized race-mixing so often preached by visiting Westerners to South Africa, and who want to see whites cease to exist as a distinct racial and cultural group.

Even a racial Bohemian like Kleinboer writes in the white form of Afrikaans, his book is read by whites, and he knows how to participate in a Caucasian high culture that utterly excludes those around him. His live-in Zulu lover will never read what he has written, because she does not understand Afrikaans, and is unaware that she has become a household name among white Afrikaners who find their own dark suspicions about black life confirmed by Kleinboer’s humorous, decadent tale. Perhaps even for Kleinboer, the struggle for Afrikaans is emblematic of that wider resistance to being racially assimilated by the African masses.

This resistance becomes increasingly necessary and difficult. The radical Indian minister of education, Kader Asmal, stated last year that there were no longer any Afrikaans universities — even though great institutions like Stellenbosch, Bloemfontein, Potchefstoom, Pretoria and the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) were built up by Afrikaners over more than a century. From now on they belong to the black state, which will turn them into English-language, multicultural institutions.

Intellectual Slaves

The demographic weight of the black majority, the reality of black power, and the persistant racial gap in skills and ability have put the Afrikaner in a strange position of servitude. White South Africans, particularly Afrikaners with their idealistic disposition and lingering patriotic feelings over a South Africa that no longer belongs to them, are in danger of becoming the intellectual slaves of blacks, much like the Greeks of Rome who educated Roman children and managed their masters’ households, estates, and businesses.

South Africa is creating a new kind of cognitive and racial hierarchy never seen in the world before. Since 1994, at least in government service, there exists a kind of caste system in which the top echelons are filled by blacks who occupy all the prestigious jobs with high salaries and perks. Just below are Indians or left-wing English-speaking whites being rewarded for loyalty to the black cause. Middle and lower management, as well as technical jobs such as accountant or computer expert, are filled by Afrikaners who will never be promoted beyond a certain level because of their ethnic origin. At the most basic clerical level again, huge numbers of blacks are employed for the simple tasks of filing, answering the phone, or handing things over a counter.

This same pattern is being repeated in the private sector, where hard-core intellectual and technical skills are provided by whites paid low wages. In private business, black managers who are appointed to fill race quotas are typically paid 50 percent more than their white counterparts, as the number who can hold down a job semi-functionally is so small that companies constantly bid up their services, using head-hunters and search agencies. These pampered black “executives” hop from job to job at ever-higher salaries, while whitey makes sure the work gets done.

Many South African blacks have intuitively understood that whites have handy skills and abilities. A white brain stuffed with mathematics, accounting, and organizational skills, as well as a Teutonic work ethic, can be very useful. Not so long ago, Mathata Tsedu, the black editor of the Sunday Times, South Africa’s largest-circulation weekly, wrote: “It pains me to say this, but my African colleagues who manage large companies or government departments tell me that to get a job done, you usually have to employ a white.”

Few blacks ever pass science and mathematics at school; according to official statistics, a white high-school student is 100 times more likely to pass mathematics at the higher grade required for university study than his black counterpart. This is despite the extra five percent “adjustment” in grades all blacks receive for studying in a supposedly second language, English. Although they are showered with corporate scholarships and money from foreign agencies and governments, almost no blacks get qualifications in rigorous intellectual fields like engineering, science, accounting and, until recently, medicine.

When bonds were still traded on a floor in Johannesburg, 80 percent of the traders taking risks on their own account were Afrikaner men. Probably more than half of stockbrokers are still Afrikaners. According to one expert on the South African software industry, as many as 80 percent of the computer programmers are young Afrikaner men. No one else can match them in sticking to tight deadlines, working through nights and weekends if necessary, and finding the most creative solutions to programming problems. Despite affirmative action, high-tech companies still employ them. In these companies, even among military suppliers, Afrikaans is usually the language most likely to be spoken around the water cooler.

In at least one government department it was found that none of the top black managers was fit for the job. In a race-neutral environment they would be fired. However, in South Africa blacks are never fired, even for gross incompetence, especially in a bureaucracy. The solution was to a create a series of new posts reserved for whites, who would report to their black heads. The whites would essentially do the jobs of their black bosses, except they would be at a subordinate level, a kind of intellectual slave. They would stay in the background and not detract from the prestige of their black masters. In the same department, the average black academic qualification is a grade ten, two years short of a high school diploma, while the average white has a post-graduate degree. Management tells whites they must get a master’s or doctoral degree if they want to keep their jobs, while they promise blacks a promotion if they manage to get a high school equivalency diploma.

Throughout the country, highly qualified whites often work for blacks with low qualifications and skills. They have to correct their grammar and spelling, and do simple calculations for them, while paying them obeisance and responding to their every whim. Blacks have conquered, not by the sword nor by the intellect, but by the womb, and constantly refer to themselves as “the majority.”

In South Africa, property is more and more defined as something a black person owns. A black may own a piece of land or a business outright, whereas a white may own it only in partnership with a black, or subject to conditions such as black empowerment or training for blacks so they can eventually take it over. There are many cases in which white intellectual slaves working for the government or major corporations must train up black replacements, after which they are fired because of their race.

Increasingly, whites are economic slaves as well. They pay 80 percent of personal taxes, despite earning only 50 percent of total salaries. Afrikaners as a group pay the highest portion of overall tax in South Africa — 36 percent — while white English-speakers pay 32 percent. When he was in exile in Britain, Mr. Mbeki is reputed to have said, “We will suck the whites dry,” and that is essentially what is happening. South Africa is like a small, first-world economy similar to that of Denmark or Norway, still run by whites, but which must support a welfare state for 40 million blacks and Coloreds.

In their treatment of whites, however, blacks suffer from an internal conflict that often produces contradictory behavior. Rationally, they should continue their domination, keeping white taxpayers and intellectual slaves within the system. In practice, blacks often veer toward irrationality by excluding whites purely on racial grounds, just as Robert Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe by driving white farmers off the land, only to trigger an economic and food crisis to be cleaned up by other white people working for the UN and international aid agencies.

When the remaining white officers in the South African army arrived back from their summer vacation in December last year, they found themselves fired for the following official reason: “whites lack credibility in Africa, and we sometimes have to engage in peace-keeping operations elsewhere on the continent.” Rumor has it that the South African army is already in dire straits, with 60 percent of its black troops suffering from AIDS. Alcoholism and indiscipline are rife. Firing the last remaining white officers will probably lead to the complete collapse of South Africa’s armed forces.

Exclusion on racial grounds is often absolute. Liberal and left-wing whites, especially communists, have been the staunchest allies of South African blacks. Yet after 1994, even Helena Dolny, the widow of Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, who had dedicated her life to the black cause, was fired and humiliated on racial grounds.

Many former liberals have simply run away since the advent of black rule, no longer able to stand the crime and the collapse of public institutions. One is the widow of liberal author Alan Paton, who stated upon her departure, “Our president has called those who leave the country cowards. I have to confess that I am now about to join the number of those cowards who are streaming out of the country.” Nadine Gordimer’s daughter finds it safer to live in the south of France than in South Africa.

Liberal and especially foreign whites, such as tourists, are usually the first victims of crime, as they lack vigilance, and trust black strangers more than they should. Anti-white racism and crime alienate even those whites who would otherwise serve blacks. Of course, when commentators do refer to the vicious outbreak of violence that has characterised the so-called new South Africa under black rule, it has mostly been to blame apartheid for the violence, forgetting that most of the young black perpetrators grew up under black rule.

So what are the prospects for an Afrikaner nation? A less peace-loving, pragmatic people would by this time surely have come out in violent revolt, if its children were virtually banned from the most sought-after medical and law schools, and excluded from jobs in government or major corporations on the grounds of race and language.

I suppose the real test of a nation is whether it can survive bad leadership and defeat. Afrikaners today suffer a domination almost as intense as that of the Greeks under 400 years of Turkish rule, during which Christianity and the Greek language were banned, and people had to keep the Bible and Greek books in secret recesses in their houses. Many people in South Africa, notably the anglophone intellectuals with their radical chic and admiration for everything African, have already pronounced the Afrikaner nation dead.

Yet a people who fought wars for two centuries, both against black tribes and the greatest empire of the time, who produced the finest body of literature on the African continent, a philosophy, and a highly intellectualized Calvinist theology, and that enjoys its own cuisine, customs and folk culture, does not one day cease to exist just because Nelson Mandela smiles into the cameras and declares the birth of a new nation on these shores.

It is somehow hard to believe that Thabo Mbeki’s African Empire will succeed where the British Empire failed, by eradicating, as Lord Alfred Milner put it around 1900, “the last vestiges of Afrikanerism from South Africa.” The ham-fisted way the South African government is trying to suppress the Afrikaner identity in favor of an imported quasi-American multiculturalism mixed with warmed-over pan-Africanism, is bound to provoke the slumbering Afrikaner spirit of resistance. The dogged Afrikaner nationalism of the 20th century that transformed the entire country must count as one of the most powerful movements ever to arise in Africa. To this day, South Africa is littered with the monuments and buildings erected during that flowering of nationalism, of which the majestic art déco of the Voortrekker Monument on a hill overlooking Pretoria is the most visible.

On 16 December last, the Afrikaners commemorated their victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 — known as the Day of the Covenant, but ridiculously rechristened “Reconciliation Day” by the new government. While tens of thousands of Afrikaners gathered in typical fashion all over the country at their own expense to affirm their traditional vow to be true to their God and their people, Mr. Mbeki and his cohorts organized a grand gathering on the lawns of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, spending two million dollars of taxpayer money on free food in the hope of attracting 20,000 people. However, only 2,000 of Mr. Mbeki’s followers showed up, and truck-loads of food went to waste, while at least 5,000 Afrikaners attended a ceremony a few kilometers away at the Voortrekker Monument.

Reflect upon it: Afrikaner patriotism and national sentiment are derided by the media, both locally and internationally, as right-wing racism, and their language and identity are officially suppressed. At the same time, Mr. Mbeki’s brand of multicultural, Afro-nationalism and black pride is propagated by the state and embellished by the media and dozens of conformist commentators. One then realises that perhaps the weakness lies not so much with the downtrodden “white tribe of Africa” whom the world sees as backward hillbillies, but possibly with South Africa’s radiantly confident rulers whose power is literally skin-deep, founded as it is on a late 20th century fashion for the color black.

Afrikaner Weaknesses

And yet, despite their obvious strengths and courage, Afrikaners suffer from several weaknesses characteristic of Western man. Most are practising Christians, endowed with a sense of altruism that may yet prove fatal. The three mainstream Afrikaans churches already encourage their members to look after AIDS babies abandoned by black mothers. Afrikaans newspapers carry stories about the selfless devotion of adoptive parents who are raising children of the race that is oppressing and killing them.

As for the non-Afrikaner churches, both the Church of England and the Catholic Church have been thoroughly infiltrated by Africans. The Anglican Church in South Africa is now a black church with a black archbishop who preaches white surrender and black entitlement. Protestant churches everywhere in the West have become hotbeds of capitulationist thinking, and welcome Third-World immigration into even the most ancient white homelands.

In The World and the West, Arnold Toynbee wrote that “technology is, of course, only a long Greek name for a bag of tools . . . But all tools are not of the material kind; there are spiritual tools as well, and these are the most potent that Man has made.” Just as communism used to be a Western weapon in the hands of Russia, as Toynbee remarked in the 1950s, so Christianity has become a piece of occidental technology in the hands of today’s Africans.

Another major Afrikaner weakness is dependence on cheap labor. There have long been warnings about this, but to no avail. At a time when race relations were more natural, black labor was satisfactory to black and white alike. Even today, apart from the super-rich nomenklatura connected to the state and big business, black South Africa consists of a slave class that would not survive without white masters.

One could do a whole linguistic analysis of all the words in Afrikaans that have to do with “master” or baas, which literally means “boss.” There is oubaas, old master, an endearing term for an elderly white person, the white patriarch who provides jobs. When a friend visits her land holdings, the remaining blacks in the area lament the death of the oubaas, and the good times when there was a white provider who could train them, employ them and look after them. Then there is kleinbaas or young master, the son in the household, who would eventually fulfill that role and is therefore already worthy of respect.

Not long ago, as part of the government’s meddling in land ownership, a large white farm was bought out and turned over to more than 1,000 blacks as part of their “liberation.” Soon a deputation visited one of the white agricultural unions that usually spends its time defending its members’ remaining property against spurious black land claims. The new black farmers asked for a baas to come and tell them what to do and to stop the infighting. I do not know if they got their baas, but when the famous citrus farm, Zebedelia, was facing bankruptcy after being handed over to blacks, it got a white baas. Within a year or two, Zebedelia was again exporting oranges to the rest of the world.

However, in most cases such racial patronage is no longer possible, and whites cannot freely harness the labor of blacks the way blacks harness the brains of whites. The Orania experiment next to the Orange River in the remote Northern Cape shows that Afrikaners do not need black labor. Foreign journalists flock to Orania as if to some exotic zoo to see 800 white Afrikaners living self-sufficiently and in peace, without crime and drugs, digging their own ditches, laying their own bricks. If the Oranians can do without servants, gardeners and the plethora of glorified beggars who clutter our lives for a few rand a day, so can the rest of us. Ever since the founding of Cape Town by Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, white reluctance to do manual labour when thousands of natives were prepared to work for a pittance has been the downfall of any attempt to set up an autonomous and self-sufficient white society.

In the 1880s, President Paul Kruger ordered that white farmers were to have no more than five black families on their land; the law was widely ignored. By some estimates, at that time the Boers formed an absolute majority in the two northern republics [the Orange Free State, now Free State province, and the Transvaal, now broken up into Gauteng, North West, and Northern provinces], but a century of black population growth aided by Western medicine and nutrition has reduced Afrikaners to a tiny and oppressed minority in their own country.

And yet, even in dispossession, the Afrikaner retains much of his traditional nature. Blacks, as recipients of affirmative action largesse and handouts from government and the private sector, have experienced breathtaking social mobility never before seen in the history of black people anywhere. The typical image of the South African black today is sitting behind the steering wheel of a Mercedes convertible or a BMW SUV. That is, apart from the millions who subsist in shanty towns that the vast government housing projects never seem to clear away.

By contrast, the typical Afrikaner probably still drives a pick-up truck. In fact, the market for these utilitarian vehicles, called bakkies in South Africa, is still 60 percent Afrikaans, even though Afrikaners represent only five percent of the population. Makers of German luxury vehicles have long forsaken Afrikaners for the new breed of well-heeled government official or corporate mogul produced by the system of so-called black economic empowerment.

Dr. Roodt holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes/St. Denis). He is a well-known novelist and Afrikaner commentator who has played a leading role in what has become known over the past four years as the “Third Afrikaans Language Struggle.” Like his ancestors, he is forced to live in a laager, a Johannesburg security village surrounded by an electrified fence and cameras, and patrolled by armed guards. His article will conclude in the next issue.

BOOK REVIEW

Very Important People

An account of European genius.

Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 B.C. to 1950, HarperCollins, 2003, 688 pp. $29.95.

reviewed by Samuel Francis

Nine years after publishing The Bell Curve, one of its co-authors, Charles Murray, has produced Human Accomplishment, a mammoth examination of world history and the people Dr. Murray believes are its most important intellectual figures. His purpose is to determine who has “accomplished” the most and why they did so. While his own accomplishment is impressive in itself, some of the questions readers would have wanted answered are not even raised.

Surprisingly and disappointingly, Dr. Murray has little to say about the role of genetics in determining or facilitating “human accomplishment,” and virtually nothing (with one exception) to say about the heritability of intelligence. Instead, the bulk of his book is devoted to formulating a list of 4,002 individuals from around the world who lived between 800 BC and 1950, who “have achieved great things.” Namely, as he writes on the first page of his introduction, “They have discovered truths about the workings of the physical world, invented wondrous devices, combined sounds and colors in ways that touch our deepest emotions, and arranged words in ways that illuminate the mysteries of the human condition.”

That is what he means by “human accomplishment,” and he therefore excludes other, also impressive achievements such as military victories, the building of large fortunes, and political organization. His criteria thus rule out people like Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, or John D. Rockefeller. In other words, “human accomplishment” as he defines it is confined to “great things” that fall “in the domain of the arts and sciences.”

Dr. Murray selected his 4,002 leading figures by surveying a large series of standard biographical and historical references (e.g., the 16 volume Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, the 18-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography, etc.) and choosing people in the arts and sciences who are “mentioned in at least 50 percent” of them. The survey also includes non-Western cultures — China, India, Japan, and the Arab world — in such fields as literature, the visual arts, and philosophy. Dr. Murray’s examination of science includes non-Western as well as Western figures, at least in principle; his list of non-Western achievers in the science categories is pretty short.

Obviously the whole concept is open to predictable objections: that the selection of sources is biased or unrepresentative or otherwise inadequate, that the concept of “accomplishment” emphasizes science at the expense of other fields of achievement, that the time limits of 800 B.C. to 1950 A.D. also skew the results and are also arbitrary. The early time limit excludes not only Pharaonic Egypt and most of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations but also the early Chinese and Indian civilizations, while the 1950 limit can be accused of eliminating non-whites, women, and other fashionable victim groups that today are widely believed to have been emancipated only in our own enlightened decades. Predictably, these objections were the first to be made in the reviews of Human Accomplishment, and throughout the book (indeed, far too much so) Dr. Murray responds to these objections and does a pretty good job of it.

You can quibble with the methods and standards by which Dr. Murray came up with his 4,002 individuals, and you can criticize the book for ignoring less cerebral but arguably even more significant accomplishments such as the defeat of Persia by the Greeks, the destruction of Carthage by Rome in the Punic Wars, the organization of the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church, the founding and rise to power of such institutions as IBM, AT&T, or La Cosa Nostra, and other non-intellectual achievements. And even if you accept the methods and standards Dr. Murray uses, you can question the particular accomplishments and those who made them. Does the Marquis de Sade really belong in the inventory of “Human Accomplishment” in Western literature regardless of how many encyclopedias carry entries for him? Does Arthur Conan Doyle? Is the invention of the steam engine, for all its world-historical significance, on a par with the formulation of Newton’s Laws of Motion or Aristotle’s logic? Dr. Murray doesn’t say it is, but all are included in the “human accomplishment” index, and there seem to be any number of such disparities in “accomplishment” as he has defined and measured it.

In any case, the results of his survey are predictable. White European men predominate, especially in the last few centuries: “from the middle of 15C [Dr. Murray’s rather contrived abbreviation for “15th century”] to the beginning of 20C, almost everything came from Europe,” and, “What the human species is today it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.” On page 297, Dr. Murray has a map of the European peninsula showing where those responsible for Western accomplishments grew up, and the region it describes is of interest.

“If we ignore national borders,” he writes, “and instead create the most compact polygon that encloses 80 percent of the places where the significant figures grew up, it forms the shape in the figure below [see next page], with borders defined by Naples, Marseilles, the western border of Dorset County in England, a point a few miles above Glasgow, the northern tip of Denmark, and a point a few miles east of the city that used to be Breslau in German Silesia (now Wroclaw in Poland).”

This is the “European Core” as Dr. Murray calls it. It is also more or less the core area of the Nordic subrace in Europe.

Of the 4,002 important people Dr. Murray surveys, women constitute a mere 88, and nearly half are in literature. There are a number of non-Westerners like Arabs, Indians, and Chinese on his list, but Africa and the Negro race are not even a blip. No gushing about the mind-boggling achievements of George Washington Carver here. Dr. Murray has a brief discussion of the possible role of IQ in accounting for why males so vastly predominate over females, though he doesn’t think it’s significant.

For the remainder of his book, the co-author of The Bell Curve doesn’t mention IQ, race, or genetics — except with reference to one group: Ashkenazi Jews. As he explains:

The rapid pace at which they entered the inventories as soon as the barriers were even partially lifted is astonishing. The period 1870-1950 saw the addition of 1,277 significant figures to the Western inventories. If Jews had produced significant figures strictly in accordance with their representation in the population, about 28 of those 1,277 should have been Jewish. The actual number was at least 158 (data on ethnicity were not available for many of the less prominent significant figures, and some Jews have doubtless been missed).

Dr. Murray devotes two pages to discussing how the higher Jewish IQ may account for this level of achievement. I have no reason to challenge his interpretation or his attribution to Jews of a far more significant role in human accomplishment than their numbers would suggest, but there are questions to be raised. First, as Dr. Murray acknowledges in a footnote, he has counted as Jewish anyone who has one parent who was known to be Jewish; to what degree has that definition expanded the number of Jews in his lists? Second, why did Jews contribute almost nothing to human accomplishment before the 19th century? We can count the Old Testament (which has had an influence in the West because of Christianity), a handful of secular Jewish writers of antiquity, the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and the 18th century composer Felix Mendelssohn and his father, a prominent philosopher of the time, and a few others, but that’s about it.

Dr. Murray names only 11 Jews in his inventories before “19C.” If Jews are so smart, why didn’t they invent logic, the calculus, or the steam engine or crank out such masterpieces as The 120 Days of Sodom or The Hound of the Baskervilles?

Dr. Murray’s answer is that they were persecuted and excluded, and no doubt that’s part of it, but a good deal of Jewish culture discouraged innovation and scorned interaction with the gentile world, whether it was receptive to non-Christians or not. Spinoza, after all, was excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his philosophy. In the case of some “half Jews” like the writer Michel de Montaigne, whose mother was a Spanish Sephardic Jew, he was accepted into gentile society as a practicing Catholic. It was their adherence to their religion in an orthodox Christian culture that both kept Jews from participation and caused their exclusion.

It is not entirely clear why Dr. Murray is prepared to invoke IQ in discussing Jews but says nothing about it as an explanation for the level of accomplishment (or non-accomplishment) by other groups. Dr. Murray in fact resorts to a purely cultural explanation as to why the West — the white race from ancient Greece to modern times — has accomplished most of what has been worth accomplishing. In both Greek philosophy from the time of Aristotle and in medieval Christianity, the West embraced the belief that life has a purpose. “A major stream of human accomplishment,” Dr. Murray writes, “is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.” But purpose itself, he says, is not enough; there must also be “autonomy,” the belief that one is able to achieve the purpose of his life, a belief that involves a high degree of individualism. The non-West lacks or even rejects such beliefs.

Buddhism and Daoism (Chinese Taoism), he says, lacked both purposiveness and autonomy. “Both [religions] taught that purposeful action in one’s life is a snare and delusion . . . It is safe to say that neither Buddhism nor Daoism was a religion calculated to energize people to fulfill a purpose in this life on earth,” and individualism and autonomy were smothered by “familistic” and “hierarchical” social and cultural constraints. Islam insisted on a high and inexorable purpose but flunked the autonomy test, with its insistence on an ironclad fatalism. Arabic culture in the Middle Ages at first embraced Greek and Western science and philosophy but later rejected them in favor of an Islamic fundamentalism that, according to Dr. Murray, has kept the Arabic world behind ever since. Only in the Aristotelian Christian West was a cultural norm of a purposive life and the autonomy to achieve it institutionalized.

Dr. Murray’s argument is plausible as far as it goes, and he is hardly the first to make it. But he never wonders why it was only the West that formulated and adopted philosophies, ethical systems, and a religion that postulated purpose and autonomy. Kevin MacDonald has argued that Western individualism itself has genetic and racially particular roots, and if Dr. Murray’s theory about the importance of belief systems of purpose and autonomy holds any water, the genetic and racial foundations of such systems ought to be examined.

Dr. Murray concludes Human Accomplishment on a pessimistic note. Human accomplishment as he has defined and measured it has been declining in both science and the arts for the last century or so. After several pages of considering alternative explanations for the decline, Dr. Murray concludes, “Western European culture had a coherence in its values and institutions that did in fact begin to come apart during 18C [the 18th century], prompted by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.” The disruption of Western cultural coherence helped undermine the belief systems of purpose and autonomy, and the intellectual legacy of the late 19th and 20th centuries in what he calls “nihilism,” the denial that life has a purpose or that human beings can achieve it. The thought and influence of figures like Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Jean Paul Sartre helped finish off what coherence remained.

Although Dr. Murray regards religion as essential to human accomplishment, his concept of religion includes such things as Confucianism and Aristotelianism. He writes:

Confucianism and classical Greek thought were both essentially secular, and look at the cultures they produced. But both schools of thought were tantamount to religion in that they articulated a human place in the cosmos, laid out a clear understanding of the end — the good — toward which humans aim, and set exalted standards of human behavior. And that brings me to the sense in which I use religion stringently. Confucianism and Aristotelianism, along with the great religions of the world, are for grownups, requiring mature contemplation of truth, beauty, and the good. Cultures in which the creative elites are not engaged in that kind of mature contemplation don’t produce great art.

In the end, it’s not clear what Human Accomplishment really accomplishes. Dr. Murray, by any reasonable standard, has shown that Western white men have produced most of human civilization, but we already knew that, and those of us who didn’t will refuse to learn it from Dr. Murray. We also know that our civilization is in decline, and Dr. Murray has something to tell us about why, though what he has to say is in my view incomplete. His portrait of cultures that encourage or discourage human accomplishment is far too over-drawn and needs a good deal more detailed discussion of how the religious and philosophical frameworks helped or harmed creativity, and his correlations between them are not always at all clear. Dr. Murray should have expanded his chapters on those themes considerably, but that would no doubt have taken him off in directions in which he doesn’t want to go.

Finally, Dr. Murray’s book is not particularly interesting to read. He spends far too much time batting back and forth possible objections to his arguments and explaining his statistical methodologies, and he also has tendencies to pontificate about matters largely irrelevant to his argument, and to lecture readers about what should be high-school history and general science. Most of all, however, Charles Murray is one of the relatively few mainstream writers capable of telling the declining Western world something important about the racial foundations of its civilization and why that foundation is beginning to crumble. The greatest failure of this book is that he hasn’t done it.

Samuel Francis is a frequent contributor to American Renaissance.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Gangsta Vote

Democrats have come a long way since the early 1990s, when Tipper Gore lobbied to have rap albums marked with parental guidance stickers. In this year’s presidential primaries, all of the Democrats courted the rap vote. Howard Dean expressed a taste for rapper Wyclef Jeanne. In a campaign ad, Wesley Clark proved his knowledge of hip-hop by commenting on the future of the rap duo OutKast. Later, he quoted an OutKast line on his campaign trail, saying the rappers “make you shake it like a Polaroid picture,” whatever that means. This group, as well as “Ginuwine,” Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, and “Q-tip,” gave a concert at a Democratic fundraiser attended by major Democratic figures such as William Clinton, Albert Gore, and John Kerry.

In an interview on MTV, John Kerry defended gangsta rap. “I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ‘cause it’s important.” He did concede, however, “When you start talking about killing cops or something like that, it bothers me.”

To illustrate the values the Democrats are sanctioning, here are some lyrics from OutKast, which seems to be the party’s favorite group:

Breakin’ knees and elbows like I used to break my curfew

My mama used to tell me if a nigga ever hit me

Just to pick up the closest thing and knock the living s**t out of he.

(“Bowtie”)

Well it is I, the pimp playin’ nigga that you heard about

Yeah, I got the money and a half a million dope houses

I got the hookers on the go and playa rhymes that I f**k with.

(“Claimin’ True”)

Some rappers are trying to start their own social and political movement. Former rapper Russell Simmons has founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, which, according to its website, “is dedicated to harnessing the cultural relevance of hip-hop music to serve as a catalyst for education advocacy and other societal concerns fundamental to the well-being of at-risk youth throughout the United States.” Hip-hop commentator “Davey D” has edited a book called How to Get Stupid White Men out of Power. This June will see a “National Hip Hop Political Convention” in Chicago.

One of the central issues of the hip-hop political movement is the Florida presidential vote of 2000. There has never been any proof of fraud in this election, but it strongly colors the rap outlook. As Kaine, of the Ying Yang Twins says, “It’s like ‘Why should I vote if it don’t count,’ because Florida was way against Bush. But that’s where Bush’s folks are at. How is it that the only state that had to get recalculated was where Bush’s folks are at?” [James McNally, Rappers Unite for Political Power, BBC News, March 3l, 2004. Gun-Toting Outkast Rapper Featured at Democratic Event, WorldNetDaily, March. 26, 2004. Rich Rock, “I’m Fascinated by Hip-Hop,” says Prez Candidate John Kerry, SOHH.com, March 31, 2004. Chuck Creekmur, “To Vote or Not to Vote: Hip Hop Artists and Activists Weigh In, BET.com, Jan. 28, 2004.]

America Goes Brown

On March 18, the Census Bureau released preliminary population projections, based on the 2000 Census, predicting that by 2050, whites will make up just 50.1 percent of the population. As late as 1990, whites were 75 percent of the population; in1960 they were 90 percent. If the census projections turn out to be accurate — and if anything, the bureau tends to underestimate — America will have ceased to be a white nation less than a century after opening the floodgates to mass Third-World immigration with the 1965 Immigration Act.

Between now and mid-century, the Census Bureau forecasts the US population will increase by no less than 48.8 percent to 419,854,000. Of the 137,729,000 new people, fewer than 15 million will be white. The largest gain will be among Hispanics. The Census Bureau expects their number nearly to triple — from 35,662,000 in 2000 to 102,560,000, and to make up close to a quarter of the population. The number of Asians, currently 3.8 percent, will also triple, increasing from 10,684,000 to 33,430,000, and will make up eight percent of the overall 2050 population. The Census Bureau predicts a 71.3 percent increase in the black population, or an additional 25,543,000. Blacks will therefore be14.6 percent of the population in 2050, up from 12.7 percent in 2000.

The bureau predicts that the overall population growth rate will begin to slow around 2030, as white baby-boomers die off, but non-white growth rates will continue to be strong. Between 2030 and 2040, the Hispanic population will grow by an additional 19.9 percent; the black, by 10.8 percent; and the Asian, by 24 percent. The white population will barely increase at all between 2030 and 2040, and will actually decrease (for the first time in American history) between 2040 and 2050. Demographically speaking, by 2050, whites in America will be a dying race.

Before releasing the new projections, the Census Bureau was officially forecasting the end of white America at around 2060, using numbers from the 1990 Census. After analyzing the results from 2000, they shaved off a decade. The actual 2000 count of 281,421,906 surprised census takers, who were expecting 275,816,000 at most. The projections based on the 1990 Census were so far off — 5.6 million people is the equivalent of nearly two Chicagos — because they did not anticipate the immigration boom of the 1990s, during which legal immigration averaged 700,000 to 900,000 per year, and occasionally topped one million. Researchers estimate that anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 illegal aliens settled in the US each year during the decade.

Since the 1970s, immigration has been driving US population growth. More than 30 million immigrants have settled here since then, 90 percent of whom are non-white, and they and their children account for more than 70 percent of the overall population increase. It is uncontrolled Third-World immigration — both illegal and legal — that is condemning whites to minority status in their own country.

Because the immigration invasion shows no sign of slowing (President Bush’s amnesty proposal has already prompted an increase in border crossings), whites could well become a minority even earlier than 2050. As we have seen, the actual census count in 2000 exceeded the highest projection based on the 1990 census — and that was only a ten year forecast. The only certainly is that we are facing a non-white tidal wave. Ten years from now, barring a dramatic reversal in immigration, the Census Bureau could be issuing a press release announcing that projections based on the 2010 census show whites becoming a majority sometime around 2040 — if not sooner. [Mike Bergman, Diversity, Slower Growth, Census Bureau Press Release, March 18, 2004.]

Hating the ‘Haters’

During an exchange in an English class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) last February, a student told his instructor he opposed homosexuality. The next day, the instructor, Elyse Crystall, sent email to all the students in the class, saying, “What we heard Thursday at the end of class constitutes ‘hate speech’ and is completely unacceptable. It has created a hostile environment.” She referred to the student by name, calling him “a white, heterosexual, Christian male,” who “can feel entitled to make violent, heterosexist comments and not feel marked or threatened or vulnerable.” The following Monday, Miss Crystal apologized to the class with a second email message, writing that her earlier message had “crossed a line and inhibited free speech.”

In March, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights told UNC it was launching an investigation to determine if Miss Crystall were guilty of harassing the student, and whether the university reacted appropriately. The feds will also be checking to see if harassment of conservative students who express their views is common on the UNC campus, which claims to uphold principles “of intellectual independence . . . free speech and expression.” [Feds Investigate ‘Hate Speech’ Incident at UNC-Chapel Hill, AP, March 27, 2004.]

Textbook Horrors

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) has introduced the “Recognizing the Importance of Western Civilization Resolution” in the House of Representatives, to combat the anti-Western bias of schools. He recently delivered a long speech to Congress in which he described the bias in school textbooks. One now in use in an Arizona district is called 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures and was, in the author’s words, written “in response to the bicentennial celebration of the 1776 American Revolution and its lies.” Its purpose is to “celebrate our resistance” to American colonization. Chapter headings include “U.S. Conquest and Betrayal,” “We Are Now a U.S. Colony in America,” and “They Stole the Land.” The book also calls Davey Crockett a cannibal, and describes the defenders of the Alamo as slave owners and Indian killers.

New Jersey’s 2002 guidelines for teaching history in the public schools contained no mention of the Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, or the Mayflower. The first five pages of the section on World War II in a textbook used by Palm Beach County are exclusively about such fashionable topics as sex roles in the armed forces, racial segregation and the war, women and the war effort, and the relocation camps for Japanese.

A popular textbook published by McDougal Littell says US soldiers killed women and children at the battle of Sand Creek, but fails to mention that Indians killed white women and children the summer before the battle. This book contains a 107-line discussion of the relocation of the Japanese, but never mentions the Bataan death march. It contrasts Mao Tse Tung’s benevolence towards peasants favorably with Chiang Kai-Shek’s treatment of them; the death of 65 million Chinese after Mao came to power is unrecorded. It calls the immigration reformers of the 1920s racists, as it does all others who oppose unlimited immigration.

Holt Rinehart Winston’s American Nation in the Modern Era contains exercises for students to criticize, but never to defend 19th century immigration restrictions. Such “radical multiculturalist philosophy” is, Mr. Tancredo states, “the norm.” [Tom Tancredo, Rewriting American History, Speech to House of Representatives, March 3, 2004.]

Racial Indecency

On Satuday, March 20, a black weekend radio DJ, Raqiyah Mays, told her audience she opposed interracial dating. The following Monday, her bosses at New York’s WWPR-FM fired her because of “inappropriate remarks.” They said the station got complaints from listeners “who were displeased and felt alienated as a result of her actions.”

Miss Mays says she is shocked. “I said I was concerned about interracial relationships when the African-American community has our own inner work and healing to do. If I see a white woman dating an African-American man, I feel, as do many African-American women, that there is one less black man available to us. I wasn’t speaking against anybody,” she explains, “I was just being honest . . . I am being censored not for sexual indecency, but racial indecency.” [David Hinckley, DJ Fired for Race Remark, New York Daily News, March 23, 2004.]

Bad Chemistry

New York City pays high school chemistry teacher Elihu McMahon $77,000 a year to do nothing. Because of his history of insubordination, incompetent teaching, improper grading, sexual harassment, and racist remarks to students, administrators won’t let the 69-year-old black man near a classroom, but union rules make it nearly impossible to fire him. During the past 15 years, the city has paid $600,000 for his non-services. [Chuck Shepherd, He Gets a Buck for Doing a Nothing Job, News of the Weird (Syndicated Feature), Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 18, 2004, p. E7.]

The Wages of Altruism

Mexicans often cross the border into the United States to get free, high-quality medical care unavailable in Mexico. Sometimes the cost to us is considerably greater than the cost of treatment. On March 21, a medical helicopter crashed en route to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, killing the pilot, a paramedic, the three-month-old patient, and his mother, Ana Lillia Urias. Mrs. Urias had brought her baby across the border for treatment. [Medical Helicopter Crash Kills 4 in Texas, USA Today, March 22, 2004, p. 3A.]

Elite Betrayal

Many of Britain’s top landowners, celebrities, and children of establishment figures are reportedly disillusioned with Christianity and are converting to Islam. According to a study by Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt, the son of Lord Birt, former director-general of the BBC, more than 14,000 mostly elite white Britons have converted.

Many British converts have been inspired by the writings of Charles Le Gai Eaton, a former diplomat and author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, who says, “I have received letters from people who are put off by the wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity and they are looking for a religion which does not compromise too much with the modern world.” “We’re all the rage,” says Emma Clark, the great-granddaughter of former British prime minister Herbert Asquith. “I hope it’s not a passing fashion.” Miss Clark recently helped design an “Islamic” garden for Prince Charles at his Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire.

Yahya Birt says it was “the overall profundity, balance and coherence and spirituality of the Muslim way of life which convinced me [to convert].” He hopes an inspirational figure like Malcolm X will emerge in Britain and encourage mass conversion of whites. “You need great transitional figures to translate something alien (like Islam) into the vernacular,” he explains. [Thousands of British Elite Embrace Islam, Al-Jazeerah News, March 12, 2004.]

Rent-a-Negro

A black Portland, Oregon “artist” named damali ayo (she prefers all lower-case, like black author bell hooks) has put up a satirical website (rent-a-negro.com) offering to rent blacks to people who need diversity for career or leisure. As she explains:

As we all know, the purchase of African Americans was outlawed many years ago. As times have changed the need for black people in your life has changed but not diminished. The presence of black people in your life can advance business and social reputation. These days those who claim black friends and colleagues are on the cutting edge of social and political trends. As our country strives to incorporate the faces of African Americans, you have to keep up. Rent-a-negro offers you the chance to capitalize on your connection with a black person.

The rate for a Negro is a steep $350 per hour for businesses and $200 for individuals, and the renter must pay extra to hear a Negro opinion, to touch the Negro’s hair, or to call the Negro “sista” or “girlfriend.” The website quotes satisfied customers: “After seeing me with her, people wanted to know more about ME!” “I’ve never gotten so much attention!” “I introduced her to my mother — family conversations haven’t been boring since!” Most visitors to the site get the joke, but Miss ayo says she has had dozens of serious requests. [Negroes for Rent, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Summer 2003.]

Russian-Korean Americans

Of all the strange people to wash up on American shores, Russian Koreans are among the strangest. Thousands of Koreans left their homeland for the Russian Far East in the latter half of the 19th century to escape famine and Japanese imperialism. In the 1930s Stalin sent them to what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia on the suspicion that they might spy for Japan. After Uzbeks and Kazakhs gained independence, they started discriminating against the uninvited Koreans, so the US let in many as refugees. They speak Russian rather than Korean, do not practice Korean customs, and often have strange, hybrid names like “Lubov Nyu” and “Irina Tyan,” so they find themselves isolated from their co-ethnics in California, where they have settled. “There’s a strong strand of hyper-nationalism among Korean Americans,” says John Lie, a professor of Korean studies, so it is naturally difficult for “non-standard” Koreans to find acceptance.

Russian-Korean Elsa Rafikova, née Choi, is determined to make America a more welcoming place for non-standard Koreans, and has established a church for them in Los Angeles. “I am trying to build a Russian-Korean-American community,” she says. “I want to unite our people.” In order to gain the friendship of her co-ethnics, Mrs. Rafikova has learned Korean, which she speaks with a Russian accent. [Ann M. Simmons, Minority Within a Minority, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 2003.]

A Good Idea

Edwin Rubenstein, an economic consultant in Indianapolis, has come up with a novel solution to the illegal immigration problem. Noting that economists have long held that you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax, he suggests taxing illegal aliens — or at least the remittances they send home. There were $32 billion in remittances to Latin America in 2002, a third of which went to Mexico. Six million Hispanics regularly send money home, using banks and wire service companies, resulting in at least 70 million such transactions a year. Taxing them could be as simple as collecting a sales tax. The money collected could then be used to offset the cost of providing medical services and education to illegals and their children. But more importantly, a tax on remittances would discourage immigrants. As Mr. Rubenstein says, “Tax them and they will go away.” [Edwin S. Rubenstein, A Supply-Side Solution For Illegal Immigration, VDare.com, Jan.26, 2004.]

Grade Inflation

In 1995, an assistant registrar at Southern University, the nation’s largest black college, started taking bribes from students who wanted better grades. For $75 a grade, he would change the computer records and improve transcripts. More than 540 current and former students, both graduate and undergraduate, appear to have availed themselves of his services. Some students paid to have as many as 20 grades changed, and may lose their degrees. [Adam Nossiter, Southern U. Charges 541 Students in Grades Scandal, AP, April 1, 2004.]

Tales from the Congo

There is confused and cruel fighting on Congo’s lawless northeastern region, but the main conflict is between the Hema, tall herdsmen similar to the Tutsis of Rwanda, and the shorter Lendu. The Hema took over the plantations the Belgians left behind when they fled in 1960, while the Lendu are subsistence farmers who originally occupied the land. For some time, rumors of atrocities — especially of cannibalism — have trickled back to civilization, and there have now been enough reports to leave little doubt that some Congolese are eating each other (See AR, March 2003, July 2003, Dec. 2003).

Petronille Vaweka, president of the Special Assembly in nearby Ituri province, believes both tribes use cannibalism as a psychological weapon to terrify their enemies. “You can’t hide it, the Lendu kill. So do the Hema, but they kill in secret. Now in this war, [stimulated] with drugs, they cook people and eat them. No one can lie — both sides have eaten each other,” she says.

Most of the accounts appear to be from Hemas, who claim to have suffered at the hands of Lendu. Vivienne Nyamutale says that while the Lendu held her captive, she saw them cooking and eating people. She also says they set up camps where they held Hema women for systematic rape.

Chantal Tsesi, also a Hema, tells of waking up to the sound of gunfire as Lendu tribesmen burst into her house in August 2002. “They cut of my arm. They cooked it while they were drinking our mandro [homemade beer], and ate it with the rest of the beans and rice,” she says. “They told me they were going to find my husband and eat his heart.” She spent four months in a hospital recovering from her amputation, but says that later, armed Lendu went from bed to bed, killing the patients. Her husband, who managed to avoid being eaten, left her because he could not get much work out of a one-armed wife.

Mrs. Tsesi’s mother, Eliza Dz’da, says Lendu attacked her home, where she lived with her other daughter Georgette, and her four children. The Lendu killed her family, and then tore down a shed to get wood for a fire. “They took our food and cooked pieces of Georgette and the children,” she says.

The most famous claim of cannibalism is that of Amuzati Nzoli, a Congolese pygmy, whose report was the first to get worldwide attention. He is now something of a celebrity, and has left the forest for the capital Kinshasa. There he finds comfort in the arms of local prostitutes, whom he calls his “girlfriends,” and runs a brisk trade, demanding gifts from reporters in exchange for telling his story. He used to claim that after armed men attacked his village in the fall of 2002, he watched from the bushes while they cooked and ate his family. “They even sprinkled salt on the flesh as they ate, as if cannibalism was all very natural to them,” he said at the time. Now, he says only that he saw his family butchered. “They were cutting them the way they cut meat,” he recalls, but says he did not stay for the meal. [Eliza Griswold, The Truth Behind the Cannibals of Congo, The Independent (London), March 26, 2004.]

Wisdom of the Aged

Interracial marriage was still illegal in more than a dozen states, including Virginia and North Carolina, when the US Supreme Court unanimously declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in its 1967 decision, Loving v. Virginia. Richard P. Loving, a Virginia white man, married a black woman in Washington, DC, in 1958. When the couple returned to Virginia, state authorities charged them with interracial marriage. They were tried, convicted, and sentenced to a year in prison. The presiding judge suspended the sentence on condition that the Lovings leave the state. They moved back to DC, and eventually filed the suit challenging the constitutionality of the law.

North Carolina’s 1855 law banning interracial marriages read as follows: “All marriages, since the eighth day of January, eighteen hundred and thirty-nine, and all marriages in the future, between a white person and a free negro, or free person of color, to the third generation, shall be void.”

A revised law banning interracial marriage was still on the books in North Carolina as late as 1976; one state legislator said they had kept it “as a sentimental gesture.” It read: “All marriages between a white person and a negro or between a white person and person of negro descent to the third generation, inclusive, or between a Cherokee Indian of Robeson County and a negro, or between a Cherokee Indian of Robeson County and a person of negro descent to the third generation, inclusive . . . shall be void.” [“To the third generation, inclusive” sounds as though one black grandparent disqualified someone from marriage but that one black great-grandparent did not. We invite informed readers to shed light on this question. — Ed.] It appears that later legislators thought mixing with blacks was bad for Indians, too. In 1977 the North Carolina legislature officially lifted the ban, and validated all marriages voided by earlier state laws and court rulings.

In the years since Loving, Americans — whites in particular — have softened toward miscegenation. As late as 1983, only 43 percent approved of black-white intermarriage, and for whites the figure was a low 38 percent. Blacks, at 71 percent, were far more liberal. By 1997, white acceptance of miscegenation had risen to 61 percent, and that of blacks to 77 percent. The national figure was 64 percent, but no fewer than 83 percent of young people, aged 13 to 17, approved of interracial marriage. A 2002 survey found that the overall approval rate remained much the same, at 65 percent. Older people, who are likely to be grandparents, are the least likely, at 30 percent, to be keen on interracial marriage. Among 50- to 64-year olds, 53 percent approved, while three fourths of 30- to 49-year-olds and 86 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds did not object to miscegenation. [Kelly Starling-Lyons and Brooke Cain, Laws on Interracial Marriage, News and Observer (Raleigh), Jan 13, 2004, p. 3E.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I have just finished reading Thomas Jackson’s review of the Sarich & Miele book, Race: The Reality of Human Differences, in the April AR. You may also want to review a parallel book: Spencer Wells’s The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Princeton University Press, 2002). Mr. Wells’s findings complement those of Prof. Sarich and Mr. Miele. He studied DNA markers from the Y-chromosome and from mitochondrial DNA, which do not re-combine during sexual reproduction, and allow a calculation of when lineages separated. He concluded that there have been at least 2,000 generations since races differentiated. At 20 years per generation, this adds up to at least 40,000 years, a figure quite close to that cited by Prof. Sarich and Mr. Miele. Two thousand generations are easily enough for behavioral differences to become established.

For example, basic psychology textbooks cite R. C. Tryon’s 1940 study on maze running in rats. By inbreeding both the good maze runners and the poor maze runners, in just 20 generations Prof. Tryon ended up with populations that had no overlap in their ability to figure out mazes. The worst of the best were better than the best of the worst. Forty years ago, Jerry Hirsch of the University of Illinois achieved the same differentiation in flies, in terms of their biases for flying up rather than down when going through a maze. As Sarich & Miele note, dog breeds show huge behavioral differences but hardly any detectable genetic differences. A few dog breeds probably began to differentiate with the rise of herding and agriculture approximately 15,000 years ago, but most current breeds are much more recent.

Racial separation for 2,000 generations is a firmly-established time frame for the evolution of racial differences in behavior, and certainly shifts the burden of proof onto those who claim these differences are due exclusively to environment. However, Mr. Wells is very circumspect about race; the only differences he discusses are in the frequency of certain genetic markers.

Wade C. Mackey, Spring, Tex.

Sir — I’d like to comment on the Thomas Jackson review of the Sarich and Miele book. I have read the book myself, and was not as impressed as was Mr. Jackson. First, even though the authors do make several good points in support of the concept of race, they leave out many crucial arguments that have been made in AR. Considering that the authors found room to discuss, in depth, the Coon-Montagu feud, as well as the sexual preferences of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, the omission of important data is unfortunate.

Second, and much more important, Mr. Jackson overstates the level of fairness in the last section of the Sarich-Miele book. The only place the authors discuss the “pros” of ethnostates is briefly in a chart that compares this option to “meritocracy” and to race quotas. The main text of the book does not directly address the ethnostate option at all. The authors provide a rambling commentary on the “emergence of ethnopolitics,” but the concept of ethnostates is one they’d rather not delve into. Also, the authors’ embrace of an aracial, individualistic “global meritocracy” is so pronounced they seem not even to notice what they are saying. For example, they begin by stating that such a meritocracy would be a “positive-sum game” that would benefit all groups. On the very next page, they admit that in such a scenario immigration may well result in the extinction of European-derived peoples, while leaving all other groups intact.

Indeed, it is frightening that such unthinking racial masochism can be found in a book written by two white men, which has as its major premise the idea that race is real and important. Can we wonder that non-whites and race-deniers are even more extreme in their complete disregard for the legitimate desires of some whites for their own racial survival?

Ted Sallis, Tampa, Fla.

Sir — In his article on the American Cause conference in the April issue, Jared Taylor wondered whether there was much anti-immigrant feeling among Hispanics. I work with a number of Puerto Ricans; I can attest that there is, and it is very strong. In fact one of my coworkers wrote the following letter, which appeared in the Feb. 12 issue of the Newark Star-Ledger.

Howard Berkeley, Millburn, N.J.

As a proud American of Puerto Rican background, I am outraged by the media inference that we support illegal immigrants. In fact, we suffer like other citizens, for in addition to crime, disease, terrorism and declining economic opportunity, our beautiful little island is being overwhelmed by hordes of lawbreakers pouring across the Mona Passage from the Dominican Republic.

Equating the inhabitants of a territory that has been under our flag almost as long as Hawaii with lawless immigrants is unfair and hurtful.

Luz Quinones

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