American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 19, No. 9	September 2008

CONTENTS

When the River Ran Red
Why is There Inequality?
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters

COVER STORY

When the River Ran Red

A great Boer victory that was later undone.

by Arthur Kemp

The year is 1838. Dodging a flurry of spears, the Boer commander, Andries Pretorius, rides forward to seize a Zulu warrior. In the midst of an epic battle between more than 15,000 warriors and just 468 Boers, Pretorius has decided to take a Zulu alive. He wants to send the captive back to his king, Dingaan, to convey surrender terms to the Zulu nation.

The warrior has no intention of being taken alive, and jabs viciously at Pretorius with his assegai. This is a Zulu spear, normally a long-shafted throwing weapon, but the warrior broke its shank earlier for close-quarter stabbing. Pretorius gives up on capturing the Zulu, and tries to shoot him.

With a single-shot, muzzle-loading musket, he has only one chance of a hit. There is no time to reload in close combat. To his horror, Pretorius sees the smoke-trailing ball whiz past the Zulu’s ear. At the same time, the Zulu lunges forward, causing Pretorius’s horse to stumble backwards, throwing the white commander to the ground.

Leaping to his feet, he meets the attacking Zulu, who knows he is now on equal terms with the white man, who can no longer use his magic shooting stick and carries no weapon comparable to the assegai. Pretorius is now fighting for his life. He just manages to sidestep the spear point, striking it away with the butt of his gun.

Spinning round, the Zulu raises his spear high above his head and thrusts down, as he has been trained to do in the Zulus’ disciplined army. It is a blow that will be fatal if it strikes home, but Pretorius sees it coming. He grabs the spear point with his left hand to ward it away from his chest. The sharp point cuts deeply into his palm, embedding itself at an angle that makes it impossible for the Zulu to pull it out. Pretorius seizes the Zulu by the throat with his free right hand and throws him to the ground in an attempt to strangle him.

The Zulu struggles, and with the help of two good hands is about to break free, when one of Pretorius’s men comes upon the scene. He pulls the assegai out of the commander’s hand, and plunges it into the Zulu’s side, ending the struggle.

Pretorius remounts and heads back to the Boer camp for treatment. He is not worried, as he knows by now that this greatest of all battles between Boers and Zulus has already been won. The main Zulu army has been broken in two, and the river that runs along one side of the Boer camp is stained red with Zulu blood. The place and the tributary known previously as the Ncome will be renamed Blood River. Pretorius knows that the Zulu defeat, which will include some 3,000 killed on the battlefield, is a fit revenge for the deception and murder committed by the Zulus 10 months earlier.

Prelude to War

The great clash between the Boer and Zulu nations was not, as leftist historians like to claim, the result of ruthless white colonialism suppressing an indigenous people. It came about because the Zulus rejected an extremely reasonable attempt at negotiation by the Boers.

The Boers, pioneers of Dutch, French, and German descent, were the people who opened up much of what was later to become South Africa. Their first antecedents had landed on the southernmost tip of Africa in 1652, only 45 years after the Virginia Company settled on Jamestown Island.

When they arrived in the area now known as Cape Town, whites came into contact only with Hottentots and Bushmen. As the number of Europeans increased, they expanded east and north, only meeting their first black tribe, the Xhosa, some 500 miles away, on South Africa’s east coast. The Xhosas were migrating south, fleeing the warlike Zulu to the north, who were engaged in imperialist expansion of their own.

For just under a century white settlement halted at this eastern frontier border formed by the coast and firm Xhosa settlement. It was not, however, a time of peace, as Xhosa were constantly raiding the Boers who lived on the border. This caused much harm and discontent among the farmers, who blamed the Dutch-ruled colonial government back in Cape Town for the lawlessness.

It only added to the border farmers’ grievances when the British took the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1806 to prevent the colony from falling into French hands during the Napoleonic Wars. It was vital to control the merchant and naval refitting station on the way to the Far East. The new colonial masters not only started anglicizing the colony, when they abolished slavery they offered compensation that amounted to hardly a quarter of a slave’s value.

Exasperated by incessant Xhosa attacks and British attempts to suppress their language and culture, groups of frontier farmers, filled with a sense of manifest destiny not seen again until the opening of the American West, set forth to the north and the east in a movement known as the Great Trek. The trekkers (they became known as Voortrekkers, or pioneers, only after 1880) bypassed the Xhosa in search of new, unsettled territory, in which they could establish independent Boer nations. All told, it was only a small minority of no more than 12,000 Boers who made the trek to the future Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal regions. They traveled in several waves of covered, ox-drawn wagons much like the Conestogas in which Americans opened the West.

The Boer leader of the time, Piet Retief, had written the trekker “manifesto,” in which he spelled out the farmers’ long-held grievances against the British. By1836, the Boer wagons had crossed the great mountain range into Natal, in an act of audacity that few thought possible. The range, the highest in southern Africa, had been named the Drakensberg — the Dragon Mountains — because they were said to be impassable.

Retief had identified a large piece of uninhabited land to the north of the Zulu kingdom, which lay open to settlement. Retief knew that if he wanted the land for his people, he could take it unopposed. However, he wanted to live in peace with his Zulu neighbors, and before taking possession, he opened negotiations with the Zulu king, Dingaan. He wanted no misunderstanding between the two peoples.

He sent a letter to the Zulu king explaining why he wanted to speak to him, and first visited Dingaan’s capital — a large circle of reed and grass huts — on November 5, 1837. Retief left the main body of trekkers and went to the Zulu king’s capital, Umgungundhlovo (“the place of the elephant”), to negotiate a treaty that would allow Boers peacefully to settle land adjoining the Zulu kingdom. Dingaan said he would let the Boers live in Natal if they recovered cattle stolen by a Tlokwa chieftain. Retief and his men did so, and Dingaan agreed to give the land to the Boers.

Retief returned to Umgungundhlovo on February 3, 1838, to finalize the agreement. He arrived with 60 volunteers, including his own son and three children of other men — it was common for children to accompany their fathers on expeditions of this kind. The next day, Retief and Dingaan formally signed a treaty — the Zulu king made his mark by scratching an “X” on the document — giving possession of the land to the Boers. Delighted, the Boers sent scouts back to the main encampments to report the successful outcome and made ready to leave. As Retief and his party were about to saddle up, a messenger arrived from Dingaan inviting the Boer party to a special celebration to mark the signing. Retief was suspicious but did not want to offend Dingaan. As they had on previous visits, the Boers stacked their firearms neatly outside the reed walls and entered the royal enclosure unarmed.

As they ate and drank, a Zulu impi, or warrior unit, put on a dance for the guests. According to the account of a white missionary who was present, the dancing warriors drew ever closer to the Boers, till they were just in front of the seated whites. When the Zulu king leaped to his feet and shouted, “Kill the white wizards!” the impi fell upon the surprised Boers. Some of them drew their hunting knives and tried to fight off the attackers, but they were quickly overwhelmed.

The Zulu warriors bound the whites with reed ropes and dragged them to Hlomo Amabutho, the Hill of Execution, near the Zulu capital. There they clubbed the Boers to death, one by one, with Retief kept until last and forced to watch his son being murdered. After Retief’s heart was extracted and presented to Dingaan as proof that the Boer leader was dead, the bodies were left for the vultures, in accordance with Zulu custom.

Dingaan then gave orders for the full might of his army to attack the Boer camps. The settlers had received the message Retief had sent earlier and believed everything had gone well. They were therefore completely unprepared and badly undermanned. The 60 men in Retief’s party were all dead. Many other men had gone hunting, leaving only a light guard for the women and children. The Boers were so confident there would be peace that they had not even posted sentries. Just before dawn, barking dogs aroused the outlying wagons. Then, thousands of Zulu warriors attacked the several hundred trekkers — women, children, and old men — as they lay sleeping.

The Boer historian, Gustav Preller, who interviewed survivors, left a harrowing account of the aftermath: “All around dozens and dozens of bodies . . . babies who had had their heads smashed open against the wagon wheels, women, dishonored and in some Zulu custom, their breasts cut off . . . [I]n a wagon, blood filled to a height of several inches, the life blood of an entire family ebbed out where they lay . . . Jan Bezuidenhout, one of the few young men who had not gone ahead with the Retief party, grabbed his four-month-old baby daughter out of her crib and ran off through the undergrowth . . . [H]aving lost his pursuers a few miles away, Bezuidenhout checked for the first time on his daughter in his arms. She was dead; a single spear stroke had killed her.”

The slaughter became known as the Weenen, the Dutch word for weeping, and a town of that name still stands near the site. Of the 600 Boers camped in the area, Zulus killed some 300, including 185 children. The rest survived because grazing requirements for their animals meant that the Boer camps had to be widely dispersed. If Dingaan’s men had scouted more thoroughly, found all the encampments, and attacked them simultaneously, the slaughter would have been far greater.

Pretorius arrives

The Boers now faced their greatest challenge. Their camps were full of wounded men, orphaned children, and widows. The Zulus had stolen an estimated 25,000 head of cattle and sheep during the Weenen slaughter, and ammunition was running low. The Zulu armies might return at any time, and they were a formidable force, as the Boers discovered when they launched a raid to avenge the massacre. On April 6, 1838, 347 trekkers under a divided command of Piet Uys and Hendrik Potgieter rode into Zulu territory only to be defeated by some 7,000 warriors not far from Umgungundhlovo in what became known as the Battle of Italeni.

This new disaster forced the Boers to face reality: They had to either abandon their quest for independence and return to the Cape Colony, or find some means to fight their way through. The widows and orphans argued strongly for pushing on. They knew that if they fell back to the Cape they would have to live on charity, whereas if Dingaan could be defeated they could at least recover their livestock. Many Boers were also convinced that God favored them, and that setbacks were only a test of faith.

It was at this moment of indecision that a popular lawyer named Andries Pretorius answered the trekker call for reinforcements, and rode into camp with 60 men and a brass cannon. The Boers appointed him commander in chief on November 25, and he immediately began preparing a strike against the Zulu.

His means were few. A force of only about 468 Boers, including three Scotsmen, set out on November 27 seeking battle. For extra protection, the Boer column of 64 wagons traveled four abreast, instead of the usual single file. Each night, they formed a circular defensive formation, known as a laager.

Pretorius realized that even with two front-loading cannon, his force was too weak to defeat the Zulu army in an open field. He therefore decided to draw the enemy into an attack on the Boer encampment. Each day patrols and scouting parties rode ahead, sometimes led by Pretorius himself, to make sure no unexpected surprises were waiting over the horizon.

On December 9, 1838, the Boer party reached the Zandspruit tributary of the Waschbank River. It was here that the Boer chaplain, Sarel Cilliers, first pledged during his nightly sermon that if God helped them defeat the Zulus, they and their descendents would celebrate that day in honor of God, and that they would build a church in commemoration. The Boers repeated this oath, known in Afrikaner folklore as “the covenant,” every night until they met the enemy.

There appeared to be no movement from the Zulu side. On December 12, Pretorius decided to move camp to the Buffalo River, hoping to provoke the Zulus by moving farther into their territory. That day, he sent out two patrols, one under the command of his deputy, Commandant Hans De Lange, and another, under the Scotsman Edward Parker. This latter group saw action when they came upon a small group of Zulus. They killed the warriors and took the women prisoner.

Pretorius drew up a message for Dingaan on a white cloth, explaining that he was leading a commando to punish the Zulus. If, however, Dingaan was willing to cooperate, Pretorius wrote, he was still willing to make peace — a generous offer in light of the earlier betrayal. He freed the prisoners and told them to give the message to Dingaan. He received no answer.

On December 13, the Boers spotted Zulus and what appeared to be a large number of cattle near their camp. Piet Uys had been tricked by such a ploy at the Battle of Italeni. Zulu warriors, crouching behind toughened animal-skin shields, looked like cattle from a distance, and Uys dropped his guard. He was killed in a surprise attack by the “cattle.”

Pretorius did not make the same mistake, and he sent a 120-strong mounted unit to investigate the “cattle.” They turned out to be Zulus, and in the short fight that followed the Boers killed eight warriors but suffered no casualties. Pretorius now suspected that the Zulus were preparing for battle.

On December 15 he moved the Boer camp to a position alongside the Ncome River, itself a tributary of the Buffalo River. A scouting expedition that day confirmed the presence of two huge Zulu armies a short distance away.

Pretorius prepared for battle. His men drew the wagons into a D-shaped formation, one side overlooking a large hippopotamus path facing the Ncome River, another side facing a soil erosion ditch, and the third side facing the open plain. Pretorius chose the site to limit the directions from which the Zulus could attack.

The laager was large enough to contain all the horses and oxen. The defenders tied the wagons together with leather ropes, and closed off all openings between and below the wagons with a Pretorius innovation, so-called fighting gates, which were slatted wood fixtures through which defenders could fire. They left two small openings, sealed with removable fighting gates, so cavalry could leave the laager. Finally, they attached lanterns to the ends of large ox-whips planted upright in the ground. These dangled in front of the laager and were to serve as forward lighting during the dark hours when Zulu usually attacked. Zulus captured after the battle said they had believed the lights waving in the breeze above the Boer camp were spirits, and that fear of the spirits kept them from attacking that night.

Battle is joined

In Pretorius’s own account of the battle, he wrote that as the mist cleared on the morning of December 16, he saw that the Boer camp was completely encircled by tens of thousands of Zulu warriors, even where the terrain would have made an attack difficult. Estimates placed the number of Zulus at between 15,000 and 25,000, although no official count was possible. Whatever the figure, Pretorius wrote that it was a “terrible sight.”

The Boers had been ready and armed since two hours before daybreak. The two cannon were in position, and the fighting gates closed. The defenders expected to run out of ammunition for the cannon, and had stacked up suitably sized stones at strategic points along the perimeter to fire as a last resort. The Boers would fire stones that day.

The front lines of the Zulu force were still, squatting, only about 40 paces from the wagons, waiting for the signal to attack. Pretorius decided to strike first. At his signal, three bursts of fire from the Boer guns and two blasts from the cannon broke the silence. The Boers’ orders were to then hold their fire. As the billows of gunpowder smoke lifted, they saw that the surviving Zulus had fled some 500 paces from their former front line, leaving behind dozens of dying and dead comrades.

The Boers then heard the noise of the Zulus breaking their spear shafts to make them into short, stabbing weapons. A frontal assault was coming. A few minutes later, the Zulu force stormed the wagons, screaming wildly, shields held high, and assegais in readiness. Withering gunfire ripped through the Zulu ranks, and while some managed to reach the wagons, they were gunned down before they could cut through the wagon canvasses.

Another group of Zulus tried to attack from inside the erosion ditch by standing on each others’ shoulders and scrambling over the edge. Pretorius ordered Cilliers, the fighting churchman, to see off the attack. He led a group of men out of the relative safety of the wagon perimeter, and they proceeded to kill some 400 Zulus. One Boer, Philip Fourie, was wounded when an assegai struck him in the side.

The Boers then wheeled one of their cannon out of the laager, pointed it into the ditch, and fired a shot that literally blew apart the assaulting party. The survivors fled the ditch in disarray. This sparked a temporary retreat by the Zulu, and marked the end of the second unsuccessful attempt to break the Boer lines. The wounded Boer, Fourie, returned to the wagon circle for treatment.

As the Zulus waited for new orders, Pretorius ordered another burst of cannon fire into their ranks, provoking a spontaneous charge against the wagons. Although it was the longest single assault of the nine-hour battle, it was utterly defeated, as the Boers cut down wave after wave of attackers. Gun barrels got so hot men had to hold them with wet cloths for reloading.

As the third attack fell back, the Boers launched their first surprise counterattack, as the mobile fighting gates swung open and a cavalry unit charged the Zulu lines. Shooting from the saddle, the Boers tried to turn the Zulu lines to their left. Desperate Zulu resistance, which saw hundreds more of their number killed, stopped the encircling action, and the Boer horsemen rode back to the wagons. They regrouped and launched a second attempt, driving the Zulus further away. A third mounted charge finally broke through the Zulu lines. The Boer cavalry then turned and attacked the Zulus from the rear. Pinned between the cavalry and cannon fire from within the wagon circle, the main Zulu force facing the open plain scattered.

A reserve Zulu force tried to cross the Ncome River to attack the laager but so many warriors were gunned down that their blood stained the water red. Pretorius himself then led another cavalry charge from within the laager. Cut to pieces, with thousands dead, the Zulu army, which had courageously charged repeatedly against a better-armed enemy, finally broke ranks and fled.

Pretorius divided his cavalry into two units and sent them in pursuit. Mounted Boers killed hundreds of warriors during a three-hour chase. It was during this pursuit that Pretorius was wounded. Two other Boers, including Fourie, suffered nonfatal assegai wounds, but these were the only Boer casualties. An estimated 3,000 Zulus died on the battlefield, and many more died later from wounds.

The Aftermath

Early the next morning, Pretorius ordered the camp broken, and marched the commando straight to the Zulu king’s capital. He was confident the Zulus no longer posed any significant threat, but he hardly expected the sight that awaited him on December 20 at Umgungundhlovo. Dingaan had fled with his wives and cattle, leaving the circular camp of reed huts burning, as a symbol of the destruction of Zulu power.

On the outskirts of the capital the Boers found the skeletons of Retief and his men. “Their hands and feet were still bound fast with thongs of ox hide,” wrote Cilliers, “and in nearly all the corpses a spike as thick as an arm had been forced into the anus so that the point of the spike was in the chest.” Retief, who was identified by the remains of a satin vest he had worn, still had a leather bag draped over his shoulder bone. In it was the treaty, signed by Dingaan, giving the Boers the unoccupied land to the north. According to one of the Boers who saw it, the treaty was astonishingly well preserved — as if it had been “left in a closed box.” Pretorius’s men buried Retief and his party on Christmas Day 1838.

Dingaan fled north but was captured by a rival tribe, the Swazis. Earlier, he had persecuted the Swazis, and they murdered him in revenge. The new Zulu king, Mpande, was officially installed in 1840, and confirmed the contents of the treaty with the Boers, who established their first republic in southern Africa. Also in 1840, in fulfillment of their covenant, the Boers built a church to mark the Blood River victory.

The Battle of Blood River entered the Afrikaner psyche as a divinely-inspired victory, and December 16 became a public holiday in South Africa, celebrated each year with festivals, church services, and reenactments. The battle represented the victory of European civilization over the darkness of Africa, of Christianity over heathens. It helped justify white supremacy and the self-appointed right of Afrikaners to rule over, not apart from, the black tribes.

Yet the Battle of Blood River, in many ways, symbolized all that was wrong with the white settlement of southern Africa, and why that experiment failed. The Boers are to be praised for wanting to settle unoccupied land peacefully, and for seeking the friendship of neighboring peoples, but neither they nor their descendents understood that demography is the arbiter of nations. Those who form the majority population of a territory will rule that territory, no matter how powerful a ruling elite may be. They will determine its culture and society. A majority-European population will create a society that reflects European values and norms. A majority-African population will create a society that reflects African norms.

The Boers never understood this. Even at the Battle of Blood River they had at least 60 black servants and an indeterminate number of mixed-race servants, who helped load weapons. Parker, one of the Scotsman, had more than 100 black servants.

To the present day, the overwhelming majority of Afrikaners have black servants who work on farms, in factories, and in homes. Afrikaners failed to understand that by giving the native population the benefits of European civilization, blacks would grow in numbers and overwhelm their society. The Cape Colony and the original Boer republics, which were largely uninhabited by natives when they were settled by Europeans, are today home to tens of millions of Africans.

The Church of the Vow, built by the Boers in 1840, still stands in the town of Pietermaritzburg, named after Piet Retief. But Pietermaritzburg, supposedly the symbol of the Boer victory over the Zulus, is today part of a municipality called Umgungundhlovo, named after Dingaan’s capital. It is also the capital of the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and its population is more than 95 percent black.

The Church of the Vow stands alone, graffiti-scarred and abandoned, in a dirty downtown slum. Its decay illustrates the fatal error made by the victors of the Battle of Blood River, that of ignoring the demographics of race. If whites had taken possession of those unoccupied lands and kept them for themselves alone the history of South Africa would have been entirely different.

If the Boers had inhabited and worked their own land rather than rely on black labor, the states they created might still be strong and independent today. Their decision to use non-white labor was a critical error that undid all of the sacrifices of the early pioneers.

The only way to maintain a civilization is for the majority to occupy its own land with its own people, and to do its own manual labor. This law governs the rise and fall of civilizations, and the victors of Blood River ignored it, to their cost.

Mr. Kemp was born in Rhodesia and educated in South Africa.

SIDEBAR The Vow Here we stand before the holy God of heaven and earth, to make a vow to Him that, if He will protect us and give our enemy into our hand, we shall keep this day and date every year as a day of thanksgiving like a sabbath, and that we shall erect a house to His honour wherever it should please Him, and that we also will tell our children that they should share in that with us in memory for future generations. For the honour of His name will be glorified by giving Him the fame and honour for the victory.

ARTICLE

Why is There Inequality?

Richard Lynn offers the most convincing answer.

Richard Lynn, The Global Bell Curve, Washington Summit Publishers, 2008, 360 pp., $19.95 (softcover).

reviewed by Jared Taylor

Richard Lynn, emeritus of the University of Ulster, continues his astonishingly productive work in the field of race and IQ with the publication of his fourth book in the field, The Global Bell Curve. In earlier books, such as IQ and Global Inequality, Prof. Lynn discussed the national and regional consequences of population differences in intelligence. In The Global Bell Curve he concentrates on what these differences mean for multi-racial societies. In a systematic treatment of virtually every country with significant racial minorities, he has found the same socioeconomic hierarchy Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray found in their 1994 study of the United States, The Bell Curve: whites and Asians at the top, with other races following in consistent order.

What causes this hierarchy? Prof. Lynn is perhaps the first scholar to take a single explanation — group differences in IQ — and apply it rigorously to all major multi-racial societies. He has thus established what might be called a general theory of inequality and tested it in dozens of countries. The results are clear: Groups differ in average IQs, and it is this that largely determines their success or failure, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances.

Out of India

There are several population groups that have been scattered around the world — whites, Jews, Africans, Chinese — and scholars have often commented on how consistently these peoples either rise to the top or sink to the bottom in multi-racial societies. It is less well known that Indians can be studied in the same way.

In modern times, there have been substantial Indian populations in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. There are Indians in Malaysia, Indonesia, Fiji, throughout the Caribbean, and in parts of South America. As Prof. Lynn notes, they have a consistent pattern of mid-level achievement that is entirely consistent with their mid-level average IQ.

How did Indians get to all these places? In almost every case, white colonizers brought them when free blacks (or other local populations) were unwilling to do the work slaves had done. In the Caribbean, for example, former slaves disappeared into the back country and became subsistence farmers rather than work for wages at their old jobs. The only way to get the harvests in was to import a new work force.

In Africa itself, white colonists did not arrive in large numbers until after abolition, so there was never a tradition of plantation slave labor. But here, too, blacks were content to live at subsistence level rather than work for wages on railroads or plantations. As Sir Harry Johnston, a British colonial administrator in Natal, noted, the black man “has, as a rule, a strong aversion to continuous agricultural labor . . . Though they made useful domestic servants and police, [they] were of but little use in the plantations.”

As a British member of parliament, Herbert Samuel, pointed out in 1902: “The progress of these portions of Africa would have been slow indeed, had it not been possible to draw upon our Asiatic possessions for unlimited supplies of subordinate labor . . .” The Portuguese, Dutch, and Germans also replaced unreliable native labor by importing Indians. The result was a host of complex, multi-racial societies from which Prof. Lynn has drawn useful conclusions.

All across Africa the pattern is the same. Although Indians arrived as impoverished indentured laborers, they very quickly moved ahead of Africans and became traders and bureaucrats. In several British colonies, white administrators responded to black resentment by making special efforts to recruit black officials, but went back to hiring Indians because the differences in ability were so great. In Kenya in the 1920s, the British worried that Indians were dominating the economy, and set up preference programs for public contracting. Again, blacks could not do the work, forcing the British to rely on Indians. The retail trade was almost entirely in Indian hands.

Prof. Lynn quotes sociologists Floyd and Lillian Dotson’s 1960s explanation for why blacks did not open shops:

[T]his demands a knowledge of arithmetic and bookkeeping which would be completely beyond the average African. He does not know prices or where to buy stock advantageously. He does not know in detail what each item costs him, and he doesn’t bother to figure out a fixed mark-up, item by item. For this reason, he often sells at a loss without realizing what he is doing.

The Dotsons added that blacks often thought sales revenue was pure profit and did not realize most of it had to be reinvested in new inventory.

Prof. Lynn notes that by 1971, 90 percent of the Indians in Tanzania were in white collar or at least semi-skilled jobs, whereas the figure for blacks was only 40 percent. Wherever statistics are available, Prof. Lynn shows that there is a strict racial hierarchy in terms of income, poverty, illegitimacy, and crime, with Indians invariably more successful than blacks. These outcomes are entirely consistent with an average IQ for Indians in Africa of about 87 as opposed to an African average of approximately 70. Indians have an IQ advantage over Africans as great as the advantage of whites over blacks in the United States.

In South Africa, there is another racial ingredient in the form of “coloreds,” who are a white-black mix. Their performance is similar to that of Indians, and is midway between that of blacks and whites. In all these societies, Prof. Lynn has found a negative correlation between average IQ and fertility, with the less intelligent groups reproducing more successfully than the more intelligent.

Racial hierarchies in the Caribbean islands fit the same pattern. When freed black slaves refused to do agricultural work, desperate planters brought in Indians, Chinese, and even a few Portuguese. Many of the islands therefore have five racial groups: whites, blacks, mulattos, Indians, and Chinese. In the 19th century, the British novelist Anthony Trollope visited the islands and noted bluntly that “the Chinese and the Coolies (Indians) greatly excel the Negro in intelligence.” After a visit to Guyana on the South American mainland he concluded: “The Coolies (Indians) and the Chinamen have an aptitude for putting money together . . . the Negroes as a class do not have this aptitude, consequently they lie in the sun and eat yams.”

Throughout the islands, Chinese have done extremely well, often exceeding whites in income and socioeconomic status, and having the lowest crime and fertility rates. Mulattos do not do as well as whites or Chinese but consistently make more money and commit fewer crimes than blacks.

Cuba, with a population that is 37 percent white, 51 percent mulatto, and 11 percent black, is an instructive case because the Castro revolution has strenuously fought for racial equality. It has not succeeded. Elites remain overwhelmingly white, and in 1994 blacks and mulattos rioted for better treatment. A government survey in 1995 found that 58 percent of whites thought blacks were less intelligent than whites, 69 percent thought them lacking in “decency,” and 68 said they opposed miscegenation.

Haiti, by far the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, is 95 percent black and 5 percent mulatto. Prof. Lynn reports that “nothing is known of the intelligence of the population of Haiti,” but it is not hard to guess. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola, is 16 percent white, 73 percent mulatto, and 11 percent black, and has three times the per capita income of Haiti. In Haiti, the ruling class is mulatto; in the Dominican Republic, it is white.

Overseas Chinese

In Southeast Asia, it is the “Overseas Chinese” who offer the most interesting study of consistent racial differences in achievement. Chinese began moving into the area in the 19th century, and immediately gained a reputation for competence and industriousness, bringing commerce and urban life to many areas that had little of either. When the Spanish decided to make the Philippines as profitable as possible, they encouraged Chinese immigration. In 1914, King Rama VI of Thailand called Chinese “the Jews of the East.”

Prof. Lynn concludes from the available testing data that Chinese in Southeast Asia have IQs of 105 to 107 — slightly higher than the Chinese average — suggesting some self-selection for emigration. High intelligence has given them a great advantage over the native populations. Indonesians, for example, have an estimated average IQ of 87 to 89, and as the table below shows, Chinese dominate the economies of the regions. Prof. Lynn concludes that the higher the percentage of Chinese in the population, the higher the standard of living.

Local people resent Chinese success. When Indonesia became independent from Holland in 1949, founding president Sukarno (like many Javanese, he had only one name) established a socialist system, partly because he feared there would be no way to control the Chinese in a free-market economy. Chinese took over much of the economy anyway, and in 1965 to 1966 there were mass killings of Chinese, often with government encouragement. There were more attacks in 1974 and 1998. Since 1982, Indonesia has had quota systems that are supposed to level inequalities in education and wealth but have not had much effect.

Malaysia had serious anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur from May to July 1969, which led the government to declare a state of national emergency. The official death toll was 196, but journalists and others cite figures ten times higher. The resentment against Chinese dominance that fueled the riots led to a series of very aggressive preference programs for Malays called the New Economic Policy. There are even different standards of university grading for Malays so their grades are no lower than those of Chinese students.

About 8 percent of the Malaysian population is Indian, and preference policies work against them, too. Prof. Lynn notes that with average IQs in the upper 80s, they have no advantage over the Malays, but seem to work harder and are moderately more successful.

Singapore became heavily Chinese because the British found that Malays were unreliable workers and imported Chinese to take their places. (In like manner, Chinese and Japanese were encouraged to migrate to Hawaii because Hawaiians would not work in commercial agriculture.) Lee Kwan Yew, who led Singapore to independence and was prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has stated bluntly that there are racial differences in learning ability and that Malays simply cannot compete with Chinese. Prof. Lynn agrees, noting that the Chinese have a 15 to 16 point advantage in average IQ. Mr. Lee also caused a stir by publicly denouncing the sharp dysgenic fertility in both Chinese and Malays. He set up incentives for college-educated Singaporean women to marry and have children, but lifetime fertility in Singapore, now at 1.08 child per woman, is so low that he extended incentives to the whole population.

Prof. Lynn finds a consistent pattern throughout the region of Chinese outperforming the native population in terms of income, crime, poverty, illegitimacy, life expectancy, years of education, etc. In only one area are the lower-IQ groups more successful: they are more fertile than the Chinese.

Latin America

In Brazil, it is Japanese instead of Chinese who have established themselves as the elite minority. Japanese first came in 1908 at the encouragement of the government for the usual reason: Freed blacks — some three to four million Africans were shipped to Brazil as slaves — refused to do agricultural work. Brazil now has 1.25 million Japanese.

From 1872 until 1940 the government also had an official policy of encouraging immigration from Europe. As can be seen below, the white population reached a high of 64 percent in 1940, but whites are now slipping into minority status as the black population grows through natural increase. The percentage of mulattos has increased through black-mulatto intermarriage.

Although Brazilians have often claimed there is no racial tension in their country, it is very much a “pigmentocracy,” with whites and Asians at the top and blacks at the bottom. Lighter-skinned blacks disdain those with dark skin and try to live apart from them.

The military police in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo have an unwritten policy of fighting street crime by shooting black criminals. In 1991, for example, there were 1,171 official killings of criminals by police in Sao Paolo and probably many more that were unreported. By contrast, that same year New York City police killed 27 people. In Rio, police go on unofficial night patrols to kill black and mulatto street children.

In Brazil, Japanese now outperform whites in income, years of education, and arrest rates. They also have the lowest fertility. Prof. Lynn notes that in one of the rare exceptions to general patterns, the fertility of Brazilian mulattos is higher than that of blacks.

The rest of Latin America is likewise a clear “pigmentocracy” with blacks at the bottom. As the British anthropologist Peter Wade wrote in 1997, “[S]tereotypes of blacks all over Latin America commonly include ideas about their supposed laziness, happy-go-lucky attitudes, disorganized family life, taste for music and dance, and so on . . .”

Like Brazil, several other countries, such as Argentina and Paraguay, encouraged Asian immigration. Peru now has 120,000 Chinese and 50,000 Japanese, who are at the top of the Peruvian social structure. Again, immigrants were to replace the labor of freed slaves (in Surinam the Dutch imported Indians, noting that the ex-slaves were “unmanageable and unreliable”).

Latin American countries vary greatly in the number of pure-blooded Amerindians in their populations — Bolivia has 55 percent, a majority; Argentina and Costa Rica have 1 percent or fewer. With an estimated average IQ of 87, Amerindians are second to or equal to blacks in poverty, crime rates, and fertility.

The West

The first five blacks arrived in Britain as slaves in 1555, and from the late 16th century and increasingly in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was fashionable for rich families to have one or two black slaves. They often wore iron collars to indicate their status. During the American Revolution, British forces encouraged slaves to run away, and several hundred ended up in London as beggars. This prompted the British to establish Sierra Leone as a resettlement site for freed slaves whither they expelled most of the American blacks.

Only after the Second World War did large numbers of non-whites arrive in Britain. In 1948, Clement Atlee’s government passed the British Nationality Act, which allowed imperial subjects to immigrate. Just weeks later, the first boatload of blacks arrived from Jamaica, and 10 years later there was the first British race riot in Notting Hill, London.

Although British blacks have only about 13 percent white ancestry as opposed to 25 percent for American blacks, they have about the same average IQ of 85 or 86. It is likely that those who manage to reach Britain are somewhat more intelligent than other Caribbean blacks.

Britain also has a large number of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, and at 92, there seems to be no difference in the average IQs of these groups. This is a higher figure than for the Asian home populations, and Prof. Lynn suspects it is the result of better nutrition and selective migration.

The highest-IQ population in Britain is Jews, with an average of 111, followed by Chinese at 103. The group hierarchy in terms of income, crime, poverty, school achievement, etc. is entirely as expected, in the order of Jews, Chinese, whites, South Asians, and blacks. Like American blacks, although they are at the bottom of society, British blacks report higher self-esteem than whites. Likewise, as in the United States, black women do relatively better than black men. As the table above shows, fertility by racial group in Britain is dysgenic.

In Australia, the aboriginals are a primitive people descended from New Guineans. From earliest contact, whites thought them unintelligent. One Briton described the native as “a nomad, who knows neither pottery nor metal work, has no domesticated animals, and he does not till the ground,” adding that “two or a pair represent the extent of the numerals.” Tasmanians were even more primitive. They are the only people thought never to have learned how to make fire. They never hafted a sharp stone onto a wooden handle to make a spear or ax. This low level of development reflects aboriginal IQ scores that average 62 to 66, the lowest figure for any human group.

Aboriginals have a murder rate 10 times that of whites, and aboriginal women are 45 times more likely than white women to be abused by their husbands. Aboriginals never discovered fermentation, and many became alcoholic after contact with the British.

Many aboriginals live in government-supported settlements. In the 1980s, the German sociologist Hans Schneider described the residents: “They have not accustomed themselves to garbage disposal with the result that the surrounding bush land is littered with old cans, bottles, tires, transistor radios, and batteries. Rusty car bodies and unauthorized garbage dumps can be seen everywhere . . . They just sit around in a state of boredom and hopelessness . . . Faulty machinery is simply left where it breaks down and transistor radios are thrown away when the batteries are flat.”

Interestingly, like blacks, aboriginals have high levels of self-esteem. Their fertility is well over four per woman, so despite high infant mortality and short life expectancy their population doubles every generation. By contrast, Chinese immigrants are outcompeting white Australians just as they have Southeast Asians. Differences in success rates have been so striking that in 1994 Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore predicted that Australians would become the poor white trash of Asia (see “The Australian Immigration Crisis,” AR, Jan. 2008).

New Zealand was first discovered by the Dutch in 1642 and got its name from the Dutch province of Zealand. The Maoris, who had been on the islands since perhaps 1000 AD, had no written language and most were hunter-gatherers. A few practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, but worked the land with simple sticks. They have a relatively high average IQ of 90, but a 1950s report found that “adolescents and adults alike tend to become demoralized, apathetic, and unwilling to take even the simplest steps to improve their lot.” Today, Maoris are at the bottom of society, with high rates of crime and poverty, though Maori women do better than Maori men.

As often happened after first contact with Europeans, the Maori population went into a steep decline, but stabilized in the 20th century. It is now growing steadily while whites fail to reproduce. As in Australia, the small but growing Asian population is overrepresented in the top schools and best-paying jobs.

In Canada, group differences in achievement fit the standard pattern. Although Jews first arrived between 1890 and 1914 as penniless refugees who spoke neither English nor French, by 1951 they had become the group with the highest incomes. The first Chinese came as laborers in 1858, but further arrivals were cut back by pro-European immigration policies that continued until 1962. Canadian immigration now operates according to a point system that is supposed to let in only productive immigrants, but many illegals and fake refugees abuse the system. Asians are the top-performing group after Jews.

Blacks have almost exactly the same social profile as in the United States and Britain. At 87, Amerindians have the same average IQ as in the rest of the Americas, and though they are not as violent as blacks they tend to be poorer. Their fertility rate is about twice that of the white rate of 1.8.

Prof. Lynn notes that French Canadians — for whom he can find no IQ data — have traditionally been poorer and less educated than English-speaking Canadians. They have sometimes complained of discrimination, but Prof. Lynn does not see how Quebeckers, as the majority population in a region that has always had considerable local control, can justify that claim. In any case, he notes that in recent years the achievement gap has narrowed.

The Global Bell Curve has a long chapter on group rankings in the United States, but there are no surprises here; American outcomes are consistent with the rest of the world.

Explanations

Needless to say, Prof. Lynn is not the first person to notice that different races achieve at different levels, nor is he the first to wonder why. However, the usual approach is to study inequality in a particular country, say Brazil, and then cobble together ad hoc explanations with names like “the culture of poverty” or “institutional racism.” In any society in which whites are at or near the top, “racism” is the inevitable explanation for why some groups do poorly.

These explanations may seem plausible in a limited context but fail completely as a general theory of group differences. How, for example, do the tiny populations of whites in some Caribbean islands — sometimes just 1 or 2 percent — manage to oppress huge majorities of blacks? Who established and runs the “institutional racism” that keeps the blacks of Haiti poor? How have Asians and Jews always managed to defeat white “racism” and climb to the top? When the British brought over Indian peasants to work the fields in Africa or the Caribbean they presumably had a “culture of poverty.” How did they shake it off? Why did they do so much better than Africans but not as well as whites? Most attempts to explain group differences in achievement never consider these questions, and no theory that ignores IQ can even begin to answer them.

The late Nigerian-American anthropologist, John Ogbu offered a slightly ambitious theory. He proposed that “voluntary minorities” do well while “involuntary minorities” do not. In other words, Chinese and Jews, who freely emigrated were successful, whereas blacks, who were forcibly transported, failed. Leaving aside whether Jews escaping pogroms were “voluntary minorities,” this theory doesn’t work. Mexicans are a voluntary minority in America but do not behave like Chinese or Jews. Blacks are a voluntary minority in Canada and Britain but behave like blacks. North Africans are a voluntary minority in France. Haitians were involuntary migrants to the Caribbean, but quickly became the ruling majority. Is there an Ogbu theory about “involuntary majorities” to explain why Haiti is such a mess?

As Prof. Lynn demonstrates, group traits are durable. Indeed, his approach to race in this book may seem more powerful to some readers than any accumulation of IQ scores, brain-size studies, theories about regression toward the mean, or definitions of psychometric g. There is something relentlessly convincing about examining a race or sub-group, whether it is Japanese, Chinese, Jews, blacks, Europeans, or Indians, and finding that wherever they are, whatever their circumstances, their achievements as a group are almost perfectly predicted by their average IQ.

Most people understand that behavior is a result of some combination of genes and environment. If groups always act the same no matter what the environment, it is very convincing evidence that genes explain why some outperform others. It is hard to imagine how anyone could get to the end of The Global Bell Curve and think otherwise.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

His True Constituents

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has done more harm to America than perhaps anyone else alive. He led the Senate in voting for the 1965 Immigration Act, a bill he said would not alter the demographic mix of the country. He worked hard for the 1986 amnesty bill, which he promised would legalize only 1.1 to 1.3 million illegals but has legalized more than 3 million. He promised there would never be another amnesty, but tried, along with John McCain, to pass another amnesty last year. He will push for more amnesty next year whoever becomes president. Tireless work deserves recognition from constituents, and the senator finally got it.

On July 18, the Mexican government announced it had presented the Order of the Aztec Eagle to Sen. Kennedy in recognition of his decades-long service in “defending the rights of immigrants,” denouncing “injustices suffered by immigrants,” and for promoting “initiatives to promote full political participation and increased access to health and education services for the Mexican-American community.” [Mexico Awards Highest Honor to Sen. Kennedy, Reuters, July 19, 2008]

Sen. Kennedy received the award 39 years to the day after he drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick Island and left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car.

No White Heroes

Black actor and left-wing activist Danny Glover, best known for playing Mel Gibson’s sidekick in the Lethal Weapon series, wants to make a movie about black Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint, scheduled for release in late 2009, will have a budget of $30 million — modest by Hollywood standards — but Mr. Glover had trouble raising the money. Needless to say, the problem was “racism.” “Producers said ‘It’s a nice project, a great project . . . where are the white heroes?’ I couldn’t get the money here, I couldn’t get the money in Britain. I went to everybody. You wouldn’t believe the number of producers based in Europe, and in the States, that I went to. The first question you get, is ‘Is it a black film?’ All of them agree, it’s not going to do good in Europe, it’s not going to do good in Japan,” he says, adding, “Somebody has to prove that to be a lie! Maybe I’ll have the chance to prove it.”

Mr. Glover’s problems were finally solved by his old pal, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who gave him $18 million to fight the “the Hollywood film dictatorship.” Filming will begin early next year in Venezuela. [Danny Glover’s Slavery Film Lacked ‘White Heroes,’ Producers Said, AFP, July 25, 2008.]

‘Switcheroonie’

The city of Denver invited black jazz singer Rene Marie to sing the National Anthem before Mayor John Hickenlooper’s annual State of the City address on July 1. The tune was “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but Miss Marie didn’t sing Francis Scott Key’s words. Instead she sang the first verse of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which is known as the Black National Anthem. Many Denverites were furious. The mayor tried to downplay the switch, but when anger grew, especially on local talk radio, he held a press conference to accuse Miss Marie of “deceiving” the city. “Her actions show a certain lack of understanding for how strongly our community feels about patriotic symbols and traditions,” he said, “and certainly overshadowed a day of great importance to our city.”

Miss Rene doesn’t care what the mayor thinks. “I pulled a switcheroonie on them,” she says. “When I decided to sing my version, what was going on in my head was: ‘I want to express how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person.’ ” She also added that she “doesn’t feel like an American.” When asked if she intends to apologize, she said, “No, I do not.”

Barack Obama sided with the whites. “Well, ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing’ is a beautiful song that has been sung in African-American churches and other events for a very long time,” he said. He did concede, however, that “we only have one National Anthem,” and that “if she was asked to sing the National Anthem, she should have sung that.”

Here are the lyrics. The second verse is the most openly resentful.

Lift every voice and sing,

‘Til earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on ‘til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chast’ning rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

‘Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,

God of our silent tears,

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light,

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,

Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;

Shadowed beneath Thy hand,

May we forever stand,

True to our God,

True to our native land.

[David Montero, Obama: ‘We Only Have One National Anthem,’ Rocky Mountain News, July 3, 2008. The Anthem Shuffle, Rocky Mountain News, July 3, 2008. Daniel J. Chacon, Hickenlooper ‘Deceived’ by Jazz Singer’s Black Anthem Choice, Rocky Mountain News, July 2, 2008. Thanh Truong, ‘Black National Anthem’ Stirs Controversy for City, 9News.com, July 2, 2008. Denver Shocked as Singer Opts for ‘Black National Anthem’ Over ‘Star Spangled Banner, Fox News, July 2, 2008.]

The Race Beat

“Few subjects permeate every corner of American life more fully than issues of race and ethnicity. So, few assignments have more potential to expand our understanding of America than writing about race and ethnicity.” So wrote Associated Press managing editor Mike Oreskes, in announcing the appointment of AP’s new race man, Jesse Washington. Mr. Washington, a former “hip-hop” journalist and AP’s entertainment editor, beat out 448 other candidates for the job. His chief qualification? He is black — or at least half black: “Son of an interracial marriage, Jesse is, as he puts it, ‘a kid from the projects who went to Yale and married a doctor. I’m a person who fits in everywhere and nowhere.’ ” He replaces Erin Texeira. [Joe Strupp, AP Appoints New National Race and Ethnicity Writer, Editor & Publisher, July 17, 2008.]

Asians on Top

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia, is one the nation’s most prestigious public schools. It is notoriously difficult to get in; more than 2,500 students took the exam for the 485 places in next year’s freshman class. Although they are only 16 percent of the population of Fairfax County, Asians won 219 of the places (45 percent) and for the first time will outnumber whites, who won only 205. Last year, Asians took 38 percent of the places.

The freshman class at TJ, as the school is known, will have only 10 Hispanic students and nine blacks, a gain over the 2001 school year, when the combined total if blacks and Hispanics was only nine. In 1994, TJ had 50 blacks and Hispanics, but it also had an admissions policy that allowed for “racial and ethnic variations” in grades. In the late 1990s, in the wake of a number of court decisions, TJ established uniform standards and the number of blacks and Hispanics plummeted.

Asians are beginning to dominate many of the nation’s elite public high schools. In New York City, which is 10 percent Asian, they are the majority at Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School. In San Francisco, which is 30 percent Asian, they are 60 percent of the students at selective Lowell High School. Some Asians claim that as their numbers increase, they face unofficial quotas, like those imposed on Jews in the early 20th century. [Michael Alison Chandler, At Magnet School, an Asian Plurality, Washington Post, July 7, 2008.]

Race and Rank

Blacks are 17 percent of the military, but only nine percent of officers. The number of blacks at flag rank (general or admiral) is six percent. There is only one black among the 38 four-star generals or admirals. Since President Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, only 10 blacks have won four stars: five in the Army, four in the Air Force, and one in the Navy.

The number of black generals is unlikely to increase in the near term because fewer blacks are joining the military since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (13 percent of recruits vs. 22 percent), and blacks are less likely to serve in combat arms, which is the best way to rise in rank. In 1998, one quarter of active-duty black officers were in combat arms, but in 2008 the figure was only one fifth. Nearly half of all black officers are in supply, maintenance, engineering and administration — double the rate for non-black officers. [After 60 Years, Black Military Officers Rare, AP, July 23, 2006.]

Traditionally blacks have joined the military to get job training. Whites — especially Southern whites — join because they want to fight.

What did Doudou do?

In July, we reported that Senagalese lawyer Doudou Diene, the UN’s “special rapporteur for racism” was in the US sniffing out “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.” Mr. Diene has stopped sniffing, and though he won’t release findings until he reports to the UN next spring, Louis Farrakhan’s newspaper gives us a whiff of what he found.

The Final Call quotes Ajamu Baraka, executive director of something called the U. S. Human Rights Network. Mr. Diene’s visit was an “opportunity to expose the underbelly of White supremacy in the country,” he says. “We definitely feel that this was an important and timely tour. Our analysis revealed that the Bush administration is utterly out of touch with the reality of racial discrimination in America.”

Mr. Diene appears to have chosen his interviews carefully. The Final Call reports:

In Miami, Mr. Diene heard testimony from Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, director of the American Muslim Association of North America, who discussed issues related to immigration, racial profiling and discrimination against the dress of Muslim women.

Aesop Ameen, director of the association’s prison committee, talked about the difficulties Muslims experience in prison when trying to adhere to their faith, including challenges when trying to pray.

Muslim civil rights advocate Ahmed Bedier explained to Mr. Diene how ‘Islamaphobia’ and ‘anti-Muslim rhetoric’ from officials and pundits are contributing to hate crimes against Muslims across Florida.

In New Orleans, blacks “were particularly elated with the opportunity to tell their stories” about the “broader implications” of Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Diene also heard about conditions at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, “a former 18,000-acre slave plantation.” [Saeed Shabazz, UN Investigator on Racism Completes US Tour, The Final Call, June 25, 2008.]

Free At Last

Ron and Carrie Oliver say life has gotten much better in their Manassas, Virginia, neighborhood in the year since Prince William County began cracking down on illegal immigrants. The Hispanic family that planted corn in front of their house is gone. So are the neighbors who hung hammocks in their front yard. The loud music, the beer bottles, and the dirty diapers are all gone, too. Mrs. Oliver says she and her husband can walk through the neighborhood without carrying a gun. “So much has changed,” she says happily.

Hispanics have left behind vacant homes, many in foreclosure, that bring down real estate prices, but the whites who have stayed don’t seem to mind. “We have far less residential overcrowding, and that was driving people crazy,” says Greg Letiecq of Help Save Manassas, which lead the fight against illegal immigration. “We’d much rather live next door to a vacant house. With an empty house, there’s hope that the house is going to have somebody move into it that’s going to be a good neighbor, rather than an overcrowded house that is a neighbor from hell.”

Manassas is better in other ways. Police in Prince William County have turned 757 illegal aliens over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in the past year, and crime has dropped nearly 20 percent. The number of limited-English speaking children in the schools is down nearly five percent. Free addiction treatment and in-home care for old people now require proof of citizenship. Most significantly, Prince William is now a model for other communities hoping to rid themselves of illegals. “We’ve started a wildfire in terms of other localities and states adopting similar tactics” says County Chairman Corey Stewart. [Nick Miroff, A Hispanic Population in Decline, Washington Post, July 10, 2008.]

Talking is Dangerous

Jo Calvert-Mindell considers herself tolerant, inclusive, and open-minded — just what you would expect from a community volunteer in Canterbury, England, and a Liberal Democratic Party council member. “The last thing I am is a racist,” she insists, but the local police thought otherwise.

Last fall, Miss Calvert-Mindell was woken three times by drunken, rowdy students from the nearby University of Kent, who were knocking over trash cans on her street. She dressed, went outside, and told them: “Why can’t you go back to where you come from and make some noise there? I bet your families and neighbors wouldn’t put up with it . . . What gives you the right to frighten my elderly neighbors, cause damage and keep us awake at night?” She then called police, who chased the students away.

Unfortunately for Miss Calvert-Mindell, two of the students were Asians (in Britain this means Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi), and they have accused her of “racism.” Four months after the incident, police arrested her and charged her with “using racially aggravated threatening words or behavior.” She went to court and explained that when she said “Go home,” she meant, “Go back to your houses.” In July, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped charges.

Miss Calvert-Mindell isn’t satisfied; she wants an apology from the police (why not from the Asian students?). “The authorities today are so sensitive to being criticized for being racist,” she says, “that any claim of racism just raises their antennae, instead of using common sense.” So far, the police will not apologize. Superintendent Chris Hogben says, “An allegation was made that was fully investigated. A case was presented to the CPS and the decision was made to prosecute.” [Grandmother Arrested on Race Charges after Telling Rowdy Asian Students to ‘Go Home,’ Daily Mail (London), July 25, 2008.]

Helping the White Poor?

When the African National Congress (ANC) took over South Africa in 1994, it started preference programs for blacks in hiring and school admissions that have made it hard for whites to get jobs. There are now whites as well as blacks who are poor. Blue-collar Afrikaners have been hit hardest, and they account for most of the 10 percent of the white population classified as poor (50 percent of blacks are poor). ANC president Jacob Zuma, who wants to replace Thabo Mbeki next year as president, is promising poor whites that if he is elected, he will make sure they get handouts. On a July 24 visit to a predominantly white area outside Pretoria, Mr. Zuma said, “As long as I live and as long as we are together, I am going to be asking them [government officials] what is happening [to you]. There is no door in government that cannot open when I knock.”

Whites are skeptical. “Seeing is believing,” says Max Mostert, “We will see if he delivers. Then we might support him.”

[Paul Simao, South Africa’s Zuma Pledges Help for Poor Whites, Reuters, July 24, 2008.]

Breaking the Taboo

The Belgian city of Antwerp has 80 churches, many of which were built by Roman Catholics in the mid-19th century in the hope of triggering a religious revival. Christianity is now on the decline in Antwerp, as it is in Europe as a whole. Many of Antwerp’s churches are empty, and others serve only a handful of worshippers.

Islam, on the other hand, is growing. There are 36 mosques in Antwerp, but many are small and overflowing. Antwerp deputy mayor Philip Heylen wants to “break the taboo” and solve the problem by turning churches into mosques. “Churches were built as places of worship and they should not be used as shopping malls,” he says. “We’ve had a positive response from members of the Muslim community, which is open to the idea of converting them.”

Some Muslims have more sense than that. “This is dangerous and will only lead to resentment,” says one. “It is better to keep places of worship strictly separate.” [Bruno Waterfield, Belgium’s Dwindling Churches to be Converted into Mosques, Telegraph (London), June 9, 2008.]

‘Hideously White’

In 2001, BBC Director General Greg Dyke attacked the service for being “hideously white,” and promised to make it more diverse. Trevor Phillips, Britain’s top race man and chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says British television is still “hideously white where it matters,” and that non-whites feel left out. He says television has “a responsibility to reflect Britain’s diversity,” adding that television makes do with “tokenistic and stereotyped representations” of non-whites, presents “extreme and exaggerated characters,” and fails to “reflect the realities of contemporary ethnic minority culture.”

More specifically, Muslims say plot lines about them focus too much on arranged marriages. Indians complain that they are usually cast as shopkeepers rather than as professionals. Blacks complain that they show up on TV as criminals rather than as doctors and architects. [Nicole Martin, Britain’s Most Popular Television Programmes ‘Too White,’ Says Trevor Phillips, Telegraph (London), July 19, 2008.]

We can look forward to future programs about black architects, Pakistani philanthropists, and white muggers.

Still Blaming Whitey

“Hate crimes” are reportedly on the rise in Los Angeles County, with blacks and Hispanics leading the way as both victims and perpetrators. The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission notes that in 2007 “bias crimes” were up 28 percent over the previous year to 763, even as crime in general declined. Hispanic-on-black was the largest “hate” category, followed by black-on-Hispanic. Hispanics were also the most frequent perpetrators of “bias crimes” against homosexuals. On a per capita basis, Hispanics were about 20 percent more likely to commit a racial hate crime than whites, and blacks were more than twice as likely.

Many “hate crimes” undoubtedly go unreported. During the first half of 2007, Pasadena police investigated 69 cases in which blacks robbed and beat low-wage immigrants. Police Chief Christopher Vincino thinks race was at least a partial motive in those cases but says it was “impossible to meet the legal criteria required” for official classification.

Authorities agree that “bias crime” reporting is unreliable, and fluctuating numbers do not necessarily mean a real increase or decrease, but experts think there has been a genuine rise in racial violence. Incidents against Muslims, however, are reported to have dropped to seven from 25 in 2006.

Although whites play a diminishing role in “hate crimes,” some people still manage to blame them for the increase. Amanda Susskind, Pacific Southwest regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, traces the violence to “hate” rhetoric on the Internet, driven in part by an estimated 110 white supremacist organizations nationwide. One county official says that some Hispanic gang members who target blacks have been found with neo-Nazi materials. Brian Levin, who directs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State, San Bernardino, concedes that greater ethnic diversity might have something to do with the rise in “hate crimes,” but also blames what he calls “increasingly inflammatory rhetoric” about illegal immigration.

For unexplained reasons, the report treats “white supremacist” crimes separately, claiming that 17 percent of the 2007 total involved certain “signs,” such as swastikas. The report does not describe “hate” criminals of any other race as “supremacists.” [Teresa Watanabe, Latino-vs.-Black Violence Drives Hate Crimes in L.A. County to 5-Year High, Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2008. Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, 2007 Hate Crime Report, 2008.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Mr. Stix has written a thorough, well-written article, but I’m not sure things are quite as bad as he suggests. I have spent a lot of time on Wikipedia, and although the biases he documents are pervasive, I think Wikipedia is generally not quite as bad as most of the corporate print media. Thanks to active editors such as Mr. Stix, at least the censors have the facts called to their attention, and some are just too big to cover up. What is more, every Wikipedia article has a “discussion” page, where you can find the arguments race-realists and others have made, even if their changes have been edited out. It takes some time to go through those pages, but whenever I use Wikipedia for anything even faintly controversial — and let’s face it: Wikipedia is handy — I always check the “discussion” page to see what’s been censored. And in the process, it’s easy to reinstate a well-documented point.

Ellen Westerman, Florence, Ala.

Sir — I would ask Nicholas Stix, “Why bother with Wikipedia at all?” I think it is a waste of time to try to work within “the system” of Wikipedia to correct its inaccuracies and lies. Mr. Stix’s observations and work are obviously honorable, but I think his desire to “fix” Wikipedia is futile. Censorship, for want of a better term, should be expected. The only way to beat those who run the mainstream media is to create our own. American Renaissance is an example of this.

Instead of trying to work within the guidelines of the egalitarian propagandists at Wikipedia, perhaps Mr. Stix should consider writing for a pro-white online encyclopedia such as Metapedia (metapedia.org).

Mark Farell

Sir — I think Jared Taylor is wrong about Barack Obama in the August issue. First, I would bet any amount of money that even as I write these words, independent Republican strategists are working on a series of Jeremiah Wright television ads. Mr. McCain will denounce the ads, but will be privately delighted by them, and they will carry him into the White House.

A real dilemma for Mr. McCain would arise if there were no independent Republican organizations and he, himself, had to decide whether to “play the race card” against Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain has wanted to be president ever since he got into politics, and will never have another chance. Like every candidate who gets this far, he will stop at just about nothing. What agony it would be for him to turn his back on a winning strategy — and the top job — just because he was afraid of what the New York Times would say. Fortunately for him, someone else will make that choice, and voters will have their noses rubbed very hard in Jeremiah Wright for about two weeks before Election Day.

And that brings me to something else Mr. Taylor got wrong. It is true that white Americans have been softened up with years of fancy blacks on TV and at the State Department, but they had no choice. In November, Americans will finally have a choice and, in effect, will vote against all those fancy blacks. They will do the same thing they do whenever they have a chance to vote on racial preferences: There will be a resounding “no.”

Carmen Storey, Hampton, Va.

Sir — Mr. Taylor should have mentioned one more reason Mr. Obama will be our next president: Many whites think blacks will finally shut up if one of their own is in the Oval Office. In that sense, a vote for Mr. Obama is a vote against blacks — just the sort of crazy, apparent contradiction race brings out in politics. Blacks will never shut up, of course, but maybe whites will know better next time.

Steven Epstein, Sunnyvale, Ca.

Sir — Janet Fielding’s and Elizabeth Garnett’s letters in the July issue [taking F. Roger Devlin to task for misogyny and for emphasizing the importance of women as child bearers in his June cover story] exemplify the weakness of feminist thinking. They’re basically solipsistic, focusing mainly on women without considering the complementary nature of the sexes or the common good. As their great-grandmothers better understood, it is not “unhelpful,” “retrograde thinking” or “boorish” to believe that women’s wombs are as crucial to a society’s survival as are good men to serve as husbands and fathers.

Our problem is that “liberated” women often forget how to encourage or rear good men. What is lacking in their feminist arguments is the objectivity feminism derides as “male” thinking. The “freedom, careers and incomes” Miss Garnett relishes are often available only because “men like to have women around,” and one must not ignore differences in brains, thought patterns, and behavior, or the dubious value of manly women doing men’s jobs (or as Roger Scruton puts it, appearing to do them). Calling men “vapid and self-absorbed” for preferring feminine, companionable women simply defies reason.

W. E. Chynoweth, Sanger, Calif.

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