American Renaissance magazine
Vol 6, No. 8	August 1995

 

CONTENTS

The Morality of Survival, Part II
No More Voting by Race?
Halting the Flow
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Morality of Survival, Part II

If the West falls there will be no revival. Only a new morality can prevent collapse.

by Michael Masters

In Part I, Mr. Masters demonstrated that it is logically impossible for all people to subscribe to a one-world, “universal morality,” and that those groups that practice it will surely be displaced by those that do not. Mr. Masters now outlines the basis of a morality that would ensure survival.

The great majority of people, of any age and origin, do not concern themselves with the rise and fall of civilizations. Like fish in water, they are conscious of their environment only when it changes rapidly and threateningly, a rarity in most people’s lifetimes. Yet civilizations do fall, and the warning signs for ours have been present for more than a century. Rudyard Kipling’s line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” presaged the message of early twentieth century Americans, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose books, The Passing of the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color, helped bring about the immigration restrictions of 1924.

The 1924 national origins quota system was dismantled in 1965 during the wave of self-recrimination that accompanied the Civil Rights era. Should Chinese historians of the twenty-second century be writing the final history of Western civilization, no doubt they will cite the 1965 Immigration Act as the blow that broke the back of Western man.

Elmer Pendell, in his book, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct, surveyed historians’ theories as to why civilizations fall. They include Oswald Spengler’s analogy to individual aging and death, theories of moral decay, and theories based on ecological deterioration. Concerning the latter, Garrett Hardin notes in The Limits of Altruism: “No civilization has ever recovered after ruining its environment.” [emphasis in original] All of these theories have their appeal, yet none is a complete explanation for what is happening to the West.

Pendell’s own hypothesis seems closer to the mark. A civilization arises when natural selection produces a people of above-average intelligence. As the founders conquer natural culling forces, those who would have been removed from the population due to their lesser abilities survive and produce more children than the more intelligent founders. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and author of Hereditary Genius, first noted that ‘men of eminence’ have fewer children than the average. Eventually the intelligence level of the population falls below that needed to sustain civilization.

Pendell suggests another factor in the collapse of civilizations, the gradual adulteration of ethnically homogeneous founding populations through losses in wars and, in ancient times, the taking of slaves. The modern analogue of slavery is immigration. Tenny Frank, in his book History of Rome, wrote, “The original peoples were wasted in wars and scattered in migrations and colonization and their places were filled chiefly with Eastern Slaves.” We cannot speak of the spirit of Rome or the culture of Rome, Frank said, “without defining whether the reference is to the Rome of 200 BC or 200 AD.”

Theodor Mommsen wrote in The History of Rome, “The patrician body . . . had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries and in the time of Caesar there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes (clans) still in existence.” In 9 A. D. laws were passed requiring each patrician family to have three children. Lead poisoning has been implicated in the failure to reverse the decline of Roman blood, but the reasons do not change the outcome. Even in ancient Rome, slaves did not stay slaves forever, and their gradual suffusion through the population by intermixture would have contributed to Rome’s demise. The same situation, massive infusion of non-Western peoples and a birthrate below replacement level, threatens the West, and for reasons quite unrelated to lead poisoning.

After The Fall

Eric Fischer, writing in The Passing of the European Age, said that a new civilization never arises where an earlier civilization has died. If Pendell’s theory is correct and if the hypothesis of Tenny Frank and others explains the loss of a hereditary capacity for civilization, then Fischer’s observation has a genetic explanation. Civilization cannot arise on the site of an earlier civilization once the hereditary character of the people is permanently altered. This process is happening in the Western world today through immigration, welfare, and liberal policies that promote the submergence of ethnic groups into a global “melting pot.”

Should the West suffer the fate of Rome, there will be no recovery. Whether or not other civilizations arise among other peoples remains to be seen. Present economic success indicates that East Asia may be a future center of civilization. However, modern innovations flow predominantly from the creative wellsprings of the West. Whether innovation could be sustained in the absence of Western peoples remains to be seen. There is evidence that this might not happen; intelligence testing of Asians shows a relatively small standard deviation, suggesting a smaller right tail of the IQ distribution and a smaller percentage of innovative individuals.

Although dire predictions about the future are often ridiculed, it is wise to remember Rome — catastrophes can and do occur, and in a globally linked world, the consequences could be shattering. In The Limits of Altruism, Garrett Hardin cites Harrison Brown, author of The Challenge of Man’s Future, as the first person to recognize the vulnerability of the West’s advanced civilization. Brown focused on the role of metals in modern civilization and on the technology required to obtain metals. Prof. Hardin summarizes the situation:

Looking only at the copper component of the problem, we should note that preliterate man managed to create the Bronze Age only because of the ready availability of copper ores assaying greater than 20 percent . . . Only the most primitive of means are required to process high grade ores. But now we are reduced to extracting our copper from ores that assay less than 1 percent, and soon we will have nothing better than 0.1 percent. It takes a very sophisticated technology to deal with low-grade ores, a technology that only a large population of technologically advanced people can muster.

Prof. Hardin continues, “Our many technologies form an incredible network of mutual support, mutual dependence. If this network were disrupted . . . it is doubtful if our kind of technology could ever be rebuilt . . . On all counts, it looks as though our civilization, once fallen, will never be replaced by another of comparable quality.”

Prof. Hardin suggests two possible causes for the destruction of modern civilization: nuclear warfare and a population crash brought on by exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity. However, genetic submergence of the peoples with the innate ability to sustain civilization will do just as well.

The Roots of Western Order

The Map of Freedom, published annually by Freedom House, graphically demonstrates that free forms of government generally track population concentrations of people of European descent, a strong suggestion that freedom has a genetic origin. Although there are exceptions, notably Japan, which lost a nuclear war to the West and had a Western constitution imposed on it, the world of the free is largely the world of the Western European. The partially free include newly emerged Eastern Europeans and a scattering of other nations around the world. Much of Africa and Asia remains in the not free category.

Thomas Jefferson foresaw this. Fearing “importation of foreigners,” he wrote in Notes on Virginia, “They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as usual, from one extreme to the other . . . In proportion to their number, they will infuse into it [the nation] their spirit, warp or bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

Because economic inequality between groups inevitably produces envy, stable societies are almost always homogeneous. Multi-ethnic and multicultural societies live on the edge of dissolution. In such cases, the role of government turns to conflict management, as Brent Nelson points out in America Balkanized. “Government as conflict management is an emerging theme of public life in the U.S., a theme which recurrently manifests itself in the concepts of dialogue, mediation, sensitivity, tolerance, and balance. The latter terms are increasingly the shibboleths of American public life. The fiction is maintained that these concepts . . . will produce a final resolution of intergroup conflicts . . . [T]he reality is something quite other.” Laws against “hate crime” and “hate speech” reflect that other reality.

If today’s ethnic minorities become a majority it will be beyond the power of Western peoples to control, peacefully by means of the ballot, the destiny of the nations that were once their own. There is no guarantee that protections prevalent in Western societies will be preserved in societies that become non-Western. There is no historical reason to believe that governments based on principles of individual liberty will survive the disappearance of Western peoples.

Post-colonial Africa is enlightening. For the most part, the Dark Continent is reverting to its ancestral ways, suitably updated by the infusion of Western weapons, as evidenced by carnage in Somalia and Rwanda. That this disturbs our heightened Western sense of compassion is understandable. But sentimentality should not blind us to the long term implications for our own survival. Nature’s books are being balanced in Africa, and they will be balanced in the West, either by us or by Nature itself. Just as giving food to people who cannot feed themselves simply hastens an inevitable population crash, bringing third world people into the West simply hastens the transformation of the West into an extension of the third world.

The European tradition of ordered, self-governing liberty is probably part of our genetic heritage. Throughout the third world, governments range from anarchy to dictatorship. That too, is surely genetic. Those few non-European countries that appear to be free have generally maintained democracy through intimate contact with the West. If Europeans are marginalized and ultimately absorbed by the third world, the idealism of Western liberalism that permitted the third world invasion will have proved to be a lethal genetic flaw.

Few concepts are more ingrained in Western thought than respect for the “rule of law.” The West has a history of order that predates the eight-hundred-year-old Magna Carta. Roman Law was supreme in the Mediterranean world for nearly a thousand years. Unique among the peoples of the earth, the people of the West recognize, at least in theory, the subordination of government to individual rights. But laws have been instrumental in bringing on the current crisis. Although there is virtually no popular support for immigration in the Western world, it is everywhere proceeding under laws passed by governments elected by the people.

In the end, laws are no better at ensuring liberty than the people who make and enforce them. Sir Roger L’Estrange said, “The greatest of all injustice is that which goes under the name of law.” America’s Founders recognized the existence of a natural order to freedom that supersedes laws made by men. Although the American concept of liberty owed much to British and French political thought, the American act of creation, the Declaration of Independence, provided perhaps the best-known expression of “natural law” ever penned. Writing about securing “unalienable Rights” endowed by “Nature and Nature’s God,” Thomas Jefferson wrote:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, having the foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The rights Jefferson identified, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” were set forth by George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, ratified on May 6th, 1776. Mason’s work was the basis for Jefferson’s statement, but the Mason version is superior because it eschews Jefferson’s poetic nonsense about all men being created equal. Mason’s language still stands as a monument of Western political thought:

[A]ll men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Mason’s words are preferable to Jefferson’s for two reasons. First, he said that men are “equally free,” not “equal.” The difference is vast. There is ample evidence that Jefferson understood the difference as well as Mason, but much of the dispossession of Europeans in their own homelands can be traced to exploitation of this egalitarian philosophy by later Western liberals.

Second, Mason states directly the central thesis of natural law: People cannot, by any agreement, deprive their posterity of rights. Natural law is therefore the fulcrum on which rests the case that immigration is genocide. The governments of the West have no right to impose present levels of immigration and race mixing on their people. Nor are we morally bound to accept them.

The Ultimate Moral Principle

Mason recognized the role of “safety” as a motive for the creation of law and government. Others have said the same thing. William Blackstone wrote, “self-defense is justly called the primary law of nature . . . [It] cannot be taken away by the laws of society.” Jefferson wrote, “A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.”

Their message is simple. Laws alone, independent of their survival utility, are not, and cannot be, the underlying basis of civilization. In the end, whoever makes and enforces the laws has the power to determine who lives and who dies. Survival is the ultimate principle upon which all enduring moral systems must be based. This is the third, and final, cornerstone of any permanent moral order, for any people who “divest” their posterity of the right to existence will vanish, and their flawed moral system will vanish with them.

All systems of law and government must serve the imperative of survival. Speaking on the eve of the War for Southern Independence, and in the aftermath of John Brown’s attempt to incite a slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry, President James Buchanan expressed the fear felt by white Southerners who saw their very existence imperiled: “Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and therefore any state of society in which the sword is all the time suspended over the heads of the people must at last become intolerable.” Where law and survival were in conflict the Founders took their cue from Cicero: “Laws are silent in the midst of arms.”

The West is surrendering the power of life and death into the hands of third world aliens. In a world ruled by the dual “code of amity, code of enmity,” this decision, which was never subjected to systematic scrutiny by an informed electorate, is tantamount to suicide. Sometime in the next century, the sword Western society has suspended over its own head will become intolerable. What our response will be remains to be seen. If there is no response, the long descent into night is sure to follow.

Which Way Western Man?

What would be lost with the passing of Western civilization and its peoples? Two thousand years ago, the Roman historian, Tacitus, wrote in De Germania that the peoples of the Germanic tribes possessed a fondness for personal freedom, an independence of spirit, an unusually high status accorded women and a deep affection for the land. These traits have survived twenty centuries. Without the West, will the spirit of individual liberty persevere? The Map of Freedom suggests not. Despite the tendency of liberals to denigrate the only culture on earth that would tolerate their presence, these virtues uniquely characterize only Europeans and their civilization.

Now, the descendants of those same Germanic tribes, the ancestors of much of the white world, and the creators of the only advanced technological civilization the world has ever known, are on the road to extinction. Do Western moral principles require that its creators commit suicide in order to fulfill those principles? Such a belief is insane. It therefore follows that if the West is to survive it must come to grips, as Jean Raspail foresaw, with the profoundly destructive nature of its moral beliefs.

Any enduring moral order must be based on the following principles: 1) a dual code of morality, which is of evolutionary origin, binds the members of ethnic and racial groups together; 2) universal, self-sacrificing altruism in a world in which racial cohesion is elsewhere the norm is lethal; and 3) the imperative of survival and the primacy of self-preservation supersede all laws made by man.

What then, must we do? Raymond Cattell, in his book A New Morality From Science: Beyondism, called for a reversal of the universalist creed and creation of many social laboratories where evolution can proceed without harm or subjugation of anyone by anyone else. Wilmot Robertson urged this path as the basis of nationhood in The Ethnostate. Richard McCulloch has elevated this principle to a “racial Golden Rule” in The Racial Compact.

The only course that gives cohesive groups a chance to survive is ethnic separation. Without separation, the dual code of morality will ensure a long, chaotic period of strife and bloodshed. Eventually, what racial conflict does not finish, miscegenation, diminished birthrates, and physical and psychological displacement will. Personal liberty and individuality, without which Europeans simply cannot exist, will disappear long before the European genetic heritage is completely submerged. Lest this outcome seem remote and therefore of no concern, let the time scale of Rome’s decline be always kept in mind. Though those reading this may or may not live to see the collapse of the West, the white children being born today may well suffer it.

Jean Raspail also believed that the end was not far off. In the introduction to the 1985 edition of The Camp of the Saints, he wrote, “The Roman empire did not die any differently, though, it’s true, more slowly, whereas this time we can expect a more sudden conflagration . . . Christian charity will prove itself powerless. The times will be cruel.”

Louis Veuillot, the 19th century French writer, captured the dilemma facing the West in confronting peoples who do not conform to Western moral principles. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.” The West must recognize this appeal for compassion by “the wretched refuse of [the non-Western world’s] teeming shore,” for what it is: a form of beguiling parasitism that can, by definition, only seduce those with Western moral principles.

In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler wrote, “One grows or dies. There is no third possibility.” The peoples of the West must come to believe in and act in accordance with the only moral principle Nature recognizes: for those who live in harmony with Nature, survival is moral. For those who do not, the penalty is extinction. Without this understanding, Western Man, progenitor of law, compassion, technology and a spirit of quest that is unparalleled in the history of the human race, will perish at the hands of those who do not possess the same innate spark. For the sake of our children who are yet to be, let us choose life — by whatever means we must — while the choice is still ours.

Mr. Masters’ essay, “We Are A People,” appeared in the May-June issue of Southern Patriot. His review of Garrett Hardin’s The Immigration Dilemma will appear in the Summer issue of The Social Contract.

ARTICLE

No More Voting by Race?

The Supreme Court takes up the vexed subject of race.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision on racially gerrymandered legislative districts is an excellent example of the incoherence of official American thinking on race. It demonstrates both how “anti-discrimination” turns into racial preferences and how readily blacks sacrifice principle for the only thing they really care about: power. Most amusingly, though, the entire controversy highlights the dishonesty of the prevailing liberal view that race should be an insignificant factor in the lives of Americans.

Since about 1990, the Justice Department has been forcing states to draw bizarrely-shaped legislative districts designed to include as many non-white voters as possible so as to guarantee victory for non-white candidates. Like all racial preference policies, district gerrymandering was justified on the basis of a law that would ordinarily have been understood to forbid it. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forbad states to discriminate against voters on the basis of race, and invalidated such things as literacy tests that had been used, mostly in the South, to keep blacks from voting.

Over the years, what was originally an “equal treatment” law has been amended and reinterpreted into an “equal results” law. Large voting districts are often “integrated” even if the actual neighborhoods in which people live are segregated. Districts in which non-whites are a minority of voters usually elect white representatives, so if the 12 percent of the U.S. population that is black were evenly distributed to make up 12 percent of every voting district, there might not be a single black elected official. Racially gerrymandered districts are deliberately drawn — in wild shapes if necessary — to segregate voters by race and ensure that blacks and Hispanics can elect representatives of the same race. This policy is as much at odds with the original Voting Rights Act as racial preferences are contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The liberal interpretation of the Voting Rights Act is, of course, racialist through and through. In the name of increasing the numbers of non-white elected officials, liberal theory quietly accepts arguments of a kind that it ordinarily rejects with the greatest vehemence: that people of different races have different interests, that they therefore wish to be represented by people of their own race, and that these differences should be recognized by law. From this it is only a small step to voluntary segregation in all areas of life.

This has made for a hugely entertaining irony in American laws that tell us we may take no legal notice of the races of our neighbors, policemen, employees, or childrens’ classmates, but that encourage voting on the basis of race. Most whites care a great deal more about the races of their neighbors than about the race of their congressman but, as usual, the law takes away our freedom where we value it most.

In its June 29th decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against racial gerrymanders. This is a return towards the egalitarian view of race and of the Constitution — that racial categorization is wrong and that the Constitution is color-blind. As an indicator of how far we have traveled from the days of voluntary association, in the current controversy over gerrymandering it has been “conservatives” who talk the usual foolishness about how wrong it is to categorize people by race.

As usual, blacks look no further than their own loss or gain. Full of righteous indignation when segregation keeps them out of schools, jobs or neighborhoods, they delight in segregation of voting districts so long as it gets them into office. The typical black reaction has been that of Wade Henderson, legal director fo the NAACP, who called the decision “the first step in the resegregation of American electoral democracy.”

The Supreme Court decision was based specifically on the 11th congressional district of Georgia, which has now been invalidated. The black incumbent, Cynthia McKinney, responded in straightforwardly racialist terms. She promised that in her waning days in Congress she will introduce a bill to permit proportional representation by race. This is the logical next step. If blacks want to vote for blacks, why not set aside 12 percent of the seats in Congress for them?

Despite this decision, the saga of the racial gerrymander is not over. In its usual mumbling way, the Supreme Court did not completely rule out race as a reason for redistricting; it merely cannot be the “predominant” factor. This means that the dozen or so districts drawn under orders from the Justice Department specifically to make safe seats for blacks and Hispanics are very probably illegal. However, there will be no end of employment for lawyers and judges who will argue over districts in which race was one factor in redistricting but not necessarily the primary one.

Moreover, this decision applies to all electoral districts in the country — those for aldermen and state representatives as well as Congressmen. Senators and Governors are about the only officials whose districts are exempt from challenge. The costs of racial incoherence and judicial indecisiveness will therefore be borne at all levels of government.

BOOK REVIEW

Halting the Flow

Two more excellent new books on immigration.

Immigration and the American Identity, Rockford Institute, 1995, 232 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Importing Revolution: Open Borders and the Radical Agenda, William R. Hawkins, American Immigration Control Foundation, 1994, 209 pp., $8.00 (paper)

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

To its great credit, Chronicles has been perhaps the one “mainstream” magazine consistently to oppose large-scale third-world immigration to the United States. Although it has never made sustained racial-biologicals arguments, Chronicles has convincingly made just about every other case against a policy that it does not hesitate to call a disaster.

Immigration and the American Identity is a collection of articles that have appeared in the magazine over the past ten years. Among the 26 essays by 22 different authors there are so few duds it would be uncharitable to name them. For the most part, this is a refreshingly brisk attack on contemporary bromides.

Although much of the public debate is a fog of numbers “proving” that illiterate Guatemalans either do or do not pay more in taxes than they get in social services, Thomas Flemming, editor of Chronicles, explains that his magazine took the position early on that welfare and taxes are not what matter. It is the quality and cohesiveness of the United States that matter.

Chilton Williamson puts it this way: “You could ‘prove’ to me that, without the immediate transference of the entire population of Hong Kong to the state of California, the United States would be in a major economic depression by the middle of next year, and I would still be against transferring it there.”

As he explains, there is infinitely more to a nation than GNP, but for those who can see no further than that, a Haitian rafter who gets over his sea-sickness and finds a job is just as fine an American as the descendants of Pilgrims. The Let-‘em-All-In school claims that America is unique in that it is an idea, which is open to everyone. Despite some chatter about “democracy” and “freedom” the idea that counts is a booming economy. Although no citizen of any nation should ever have to refute something so stupid, Clyde Wilson was patiently doing so ten years ago:

[F]or many of us America constitutes not an idea but a quite tangible land and tradition which we like to consider not everybody’s and anybody’s but ours; a land and tradition to which we relate not as an abstraction but as a link with our forebears and our posterity.

Often the noisiest proponents of the view that anyone can become an American are people who, themselves, only recently did so. Dr. Flemming points out that “the American culture created by earlier immigrants [has] been submerged” by newcomers, some of whom think they can explain the national character and traditions to old stock Americans.

Thus it is that, as Peter Brimelow explains, the Ellis Island Museum of Immigration now promotes the breath-taking lie that from the very moment of its founding, America was multi-ethnic and multi-racial. Of course, neither blacks nor Indians were citizens and everyone else was white — and 80 percent were British. Christian Kopff points out that to participate fully in our society is to take part in traditions that may go back to the Ancient World, traditions that are not instantly adopted.

Although explicitly racial arguments can still make Chronicles nervous, several of the contributors point out that any policy that reduces European-Americans to a minority will irrevocably change the nation for the worse. Also, it is pretty clear what Garrett Hardin is talking about when he calls it “passive genocide” for a nation to admit into its territory a different, more rapidly breeding population: “It may be that no one is ever killed; but the genes of one group replace the genes of the other. This is genocide.”

Likewise, Mr. Williamson clearly means “people of non-European stocks and cultures” when he writes: “The stranger is within the gates, and he smells blood. I do not mean that he is bloodthirsty; he simply senses our weakness and is ready to exploit it as far as he can.” Mr. Williamson notes that we are cooperating in that exploitation as part of a quasi-religious mission to redeem the world through the purity of our intentions: “But if we do succeed in crucifying ourselves, after our crucifixion we shall not rise again, and there will be no inheritors and apostles of our peculiar faith. The Third World — its cultures, its peoples — will remain emphatically in place, but we ourselves will have perished forever . . .

Samuel Francis can, of course, be counted on to write clearly about race. In his devastating dismissal of “multicultural” schooling he observes, “It is all very well to point to black cotton-pickers and Chinese railroad workers, but the cotton fields and the railroads were there because white people wanted them there and knew how to put them there.”

Of course, even aside from the threat of racial and cultural dispossession, some aspects of immigration are so awful that even a denatured country like ours might be expected to put them right. Wayne Lutton lists a few: Nigerian con men love fleecing Americans “because they are so trusting;” third worlders bring us leprosy, typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis; Chicano students openly call for Mexican occupation of the American Southwest.

Chronicles contributors have advanced another argument against immigration that in our current era of chic environmentalism should be decisive but, somehow, is not. How can it possibly be to our advantage, asks Donald Huddle, for immigrants to make the state of California grow more rapidly than India or Pakistan? And once again, Mr. Williamson:

It is considered ‘humanitarian’ to fret about population growth and its effects on the natural environment at the global (which is to say, at the abstract) level; but ‘racist,’ ‘xenophobic,’ ‘uncompassionate,’ and ‘un-American’ to worry about the population crisis as it immediately affects the United States, the only place in the world where we are in a position to be able to do anything about it.

Prof. Hardin adds that by accepting the overflow from Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico or Haiti we only foster the illusion that these countries do not have population problems.

Although speculation about the motives of others is always chancy, several authors do wonder why people favor immigration. In what may be the most original and provocative article of all, Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that the ruler of a mass democracy has no incentive to improve the quality of a nation’s population: “Bums and inferior people will likely support his egalitarian policies, whereas geniuses and superior people will not.” Claes Ryn notes that Americans have abandoned the traditional path of virtue that makes difficult personal demands. The new, undemanding virtue merely expresses “altruistic sympathy, tearful ‘compassion’ for favored suffering groups,” of which non-white immigrants are handy examples.

Samuel Francis suspects that wretched alien refuse is fodder for big-government social engineers: “Third World immigration allows for the importation of a new underclass and provides unglimpsed vistas of social manipulation in the form of new opportunities for managing civil rights, ethnic conflicts, education, health, housing, welfare, social therapy, and assimilation itself.”

Foundation Run Amok

The question of motive is central to another recent book about immigration policy, Importing Revolution. William R. Hawkins has studied how the Ford Foundation promotes groups that hate the United States and wish to transform it. Professor Hawkins finds that whether or not the Ford bureaucrats are, themselves, Marxists, they have given millions of dollars to people who are.

Communists have always seen foreigners as a revolutionary element that may yet radicalize the sleepy American proletariat; every shirtless Mexican is a potential Leninist. In this context, Prof. Hawkins has unearthed a number of quaint statements by Ford recipients. James Cockcroft, for example, has written that “U.S. workers must rally to the expression of solidarity with workers of all types in their common struggle against world capital, which is determined to break labor’s spirit and to engulf young workers in renewed regional or world war.”

Mr. Cockcroft who, in 1986, had predicted that “American democracy may well be the ultimate domino,” was a speaker at a “Breakdown the Border” conference in El Paso in 1987. According to the conference organizers, one of its main issues was, “Will the oppressed close ranks and oppose the attacks on the immigrants who have a deep hatred and experience in fighting U.S. imperialism and are an important force for revolution?”

Prof. Hawkins reports that according to one popular Marxist theory, the proletariats in the imperialist countries are, themselves, so gorged on the fruits of third-world exploitation that they must be liquidated along with the ruling class. To this end, as many non-whites as possible should be brought to the United States to reduce wages for Americans and stir up revolution.

In fact, American communism has always had a foreign smell. During the 1920s perhaps only one in ten party members were native born Americans. Even years later, natives who asked to join were invariably suspected of being spies.

Of the many far-left organizations to fatten on Ford money, the National Lawyers Guild is perhaps the most effective. The guild pays lawyers to thwart every effort by the INS to do its job, and may win top honors for the most damage done for the least money.

The guild celebrated its radicalism at its national convention in 1987. According to a report in the Marxist weekly, Frontline, guild founder Marty Popper praised “the political diversity that is characteristic of the Guild — from liberals to social democrats to communists . . .”

Even the Washington Post has marveled at the radical lawyers’ success in hobbling the INS:

[B]ecause of [activist] lawyers, the Haitians who are coming illegally [in 1980 and 1981] are perhaps being accorded more legal rights than those who obey the law. To force the government to provide due process for the Haitians, the lawyers have raised not only the merits of individual cases, but also virtually every possible legal issue to trap the government in its own bureaucratic tangle . . . ‘Fighting [the INS] is like shooting fish in a barrel . . . ,’ said Ira Kurzban, who is leading the lawyers.

Likewise, Central American illegals in California are represented by Ford-funded lawyers who are specialists in finding every loophole and throwing up every possible obstacle during INS deportation hearings. No doubt there is Ford money behind the lawyers who hijacked California’s Proposition 187.

Prof. Hawkins notes that the only time the National Lawyers Guild has ever opposed bringing aliens into the country was in 1975, when President Gerald Ford wanted to admit several thousand Vietnamese orphans. The guild quite naturally sided with the Communist regime, which wanted to keep the children.

Of course, not all immigration advocates who receive Ford money are openly or even privately Marxist. Many simply hate the white, European character of the United States.

Prof. Hawkins describes the effect that massive Ford Foundation support has had on Hispanic organizations. LULAC, or the League of United Latin-American Citizens was founded in 1929 as a grass-roots Mexican-American advocacy organization. It was open only to U.S. citizens, stressed the use of English, and opposed Mexican nationalists and Hispanic separatists. Its members were middle-class immigrants who sought assimilation on American terms. It supported the Border Patrol and cheered the arrest of illegals.

LULAC began to change shortly after 1968, when Ford started helping rival Hispanic organizations. One of these was the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), which Ford started with a grant of $2.2 million — twice the amount its organizers asked for. With the active support of Jack Greenfield of the NAACP, MALDEF quickly established itself as militantly pro-Hispanic. It has used the courts to promote bilingual education and has been a tireless advocate of giving all the benefits of citizenship — including the vote — to aliens, legal or not. MALDEF claims, truthfully, not to advocate open borders. It wants open borders only for Mexicans. By 1992, MALDEF had swallowed more than $18 million in Ford money.

The National Council of La Raza (“the race”) takes similar positions, and between 1967 and 1992 received over $10 million in Ford money. Major corporate donors like IBM, AT&T, General Mills, and General Motors also give these groups money.

Despite the fact that they scarcely have real Hispanic constituents — MALDEF is said to get no more than two percent of its budget from Hispanics — these organizations have dragged the old, assimilationist LULAC markedly to the left. LULAC no longer stresses the responsibilities of citizenship but takes positions little different from those of MALDEF. Far from supporting the INS, in 1992 a past president of LULAC, Jose Velez said the Border Patrol was “the enemy of the people and always will be.”

In 1989, the new, racialist LULAC also began to receive Ford money and had gotten more than $600,000 by 1992, but MALDEF is still the foundation’s raven-haired boy. Ties were further cemented when a Ford trustee, Harriet Rabb joined the MALDEF board in 1986.

Ford is clearly pushing some Hispanics in directions they would not naturally go. Polls repeatedly show that Hispanic-Americans — citizens, non-citizens, legals and illegals — oppose more immigration from Mexico. Immigrants come here because things are better in el Norte. Most Mexicans have a dim understanding that the only thing millions more of their brethren would do is turn Texas into Chihuahua.

Prof. Hawkins reports that before Ford money began to flow, Hispanic politicians were natural products of their communities: successful businessmen who reflected the assimilationist aspirations of the majority. Now, hot-house Hispanic organizations can parachute lefty, well-funded candidates into neighborhoods and push aside community leaders.

Chicano nationalists are not hard to understand, but why do whites want to destroy America? Prof. Hawkins argues convincingly that many of the most mischievous are Marxists, but for how much longer can American Communism survive the death of the real thing? Many pro-immigration lawyers are Jews, who no doubt want to keep the golden door open for their coreligionists. But countless whites have been stripped of any sense of the legitimacy of their own interests. They practice the suicidal altruism of which Garrett Hardin writes.

Robert Frost reportedly defined a liberal as someone who could not take his own side in an argument. Pro-immigration whites do not even seem to realize they have a side. As Samuel Francis writes in the forward to Importing Revolution, “[I]n order to curb immigration, it is necessary first to assert the existence, integrity, and legitimacy of the Western and American way of life — to assert, in other words, the legitimacy of a ‘we’ against the demands of a ‘they.’”

Immigration and National Identity is available from the Rockford Institute, 934 North Main St., Rockford, IL 61103. Importing Revolution is available from American Immigration Control Foundation, Box 525, Monterey, VA 24465.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Affirmative Action on the Ropes?

Affirmative action took several solid blows in June. The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government cannot establish racial preferences for non-whites just because it feels like it. There must be a compelling national reason that requires discrimination against white people. A clear finding of past discrimination against non-whites is virtually the only “compelling reason” that is likely to stand this level of scrutiny. However, the Supreme Court did not categorically forbid discrimination against whites and men as it forbids discrimination against non-whites and women. Nor are clear cases of past discrimination against white men likely to be grounds for future relief of any kind. All the same, this will make it much harder for the government to set racial hiring quotas. The state of Oregon has already lifted its requirement that federally-funded highway projects use a certain percentage of non-white and female contractors. [Viveca Novak, Oregon Lifts Rules on race for road work, WSJ, 6/23/95., p. A16.]

Pete Wilson, the Governor of California, was a step ahead of the Supreme Court and officially abolished every racial preference it was within his power to abolish. This means the end of hiring “goals” for 150,000 full-time state employees, and the elimination of 150 state boards that advise various parts of the state government on affirmative action.

Gov. Wilson did not have the power to forbid racial preferences in state universities, but he formally requested them to set aside race as an admissions criterion. Just as an exercise, the University of California at Berkeley calculated how a pure meritocracy would affect its student body. The number of Hispanics would drop from 15.3 percent to 3.0 — 6.3 percent, blacks from 6.4 percent to 0.5 — 1.9 percent, and Indians from 1.2 percent to 0.1 — 1.0 percent. The number of Asians would rise from 41.7 percent to 51.6 — 54.7 percent, and the number of whites from 29.8 percent to 34.8 — 37.3 percent. [Sarah Lubman, Campuses mull admissions without affirmative action, WSJ, 5/16/95.]

Meanwhile, amazing things continue to happen in the name of race. Arnold O’Donnell, of whom we wrote in the July “O Tempora” section, has managed to have himself classified as “disadvantaged” and is therefore eligible for contracting set-asides. He had argued that as the white owner of a small construction business operating in the black-run District of Columbia, he faced more discrimination than anyone else in town. In June, a judge agreed. [Paul Barrett, A white man is ruled eligible for set-asides, WSJ, 6/13/95]

The Democratic National Committee is handing out “goals” for the states to meet in selecting their delegations to next year’s national convention. It told the New York State Democrats that their 288-man delegation had better be 26 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic, four percent Asian, and have “at least one Native American.” [No quotas here, Wash times, 6/6/95.]

The Wall Street Journal reports that big, self-righteous American companies have started pressuring their outside law firms to hire more non-whites. American Airlines requires law firms to file quarterly statements on how many women and non-whites worked on airline business, and threatens to stop using firms that employ too many white men. Chrysler, Aetna Life & Casualty, General Motors, and AT&T also pressure law firms to hire women and non-whites. [Amy Stevens, Lawyers and Clients, WSJ, 6/19/95.] Presumably, this is legal. The Supreme Court will see more affirmative action cases.

Small Victories

Last year, the City Council of Lansing, Michigan changed the name of one of the city’s main streets from Grand Avenue to Cesar Chavez Avenue. Now that they have had a chance to express themselves on the question, the people of Lansing have voted by a crushing majority to change the name back. A local Hispanic “leader’s” reaction: “This nation is becoming unglued and we’re heading for destruction in the near future.” [Eric Freedman, Lansing vote to rename chevez [sic] avenue angers Hispanic residents, Detroit News, 6/14/95.]

In Baltimore, a public outcry by whites has thwarted a federal program to sprinkle public housing throughout neighborhoods where everyone else works for a living. When word got out that the Department of Housing and Urban Development was going to send forth Baltimore’s poor blacks into working-class neighborhoods, residents made a huge stink and forced local politicians to object. HUD then canceled similar plans for New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago, claiming that it had failed sufficiently to educate the neighboring white communities. [Karen De Witt, Housing voucher test in Maryland is scuttled by a political firestorm, NYT, 3/28/95, p. B10.]

The INS is making a sweep through the South to round up illegal aliens. During a raid on a Guntersville, Alabama poultry plant, American workers barred the doors to keep illegals from running away, and cheered as agents did their work. Citizens also congratulated INS agents who stopped off at a local restaurant for lunch. “We’re experiencing fantastic support from the public . . . .” said an INS spokesman, [Carol Robinson, Workers block doors, cheer sweep of aliens, Birmingham News, 6/15/95, p. 1A.] a sentiment rarely expressed by federal employees these days.

Back Home in El Salvador

The Justice Department has finally started deporting alien criminals. In the last two years, it turfed out 144 Salvadoran gang members, and another 700 will be loaded onto airplanes as soon as their prison terms are over. Back home in Central America, these louts continue their lives of crime, but have encountered an unexpected obstacle. A mysterious group called the Black Shadow has emerged to deal with them. In the first five months of this year, Black Shadow dispatched an estimated 23 gang members, and put the fear of God into many more, who are determined to get back to easier pickings in the United States. [Tim Johnson, For gang members, it’s a violent homecoming, Miami Herald, 5/29/95, p. 1A.]

Panther Tales

Hollywood’s latest pack of anti-white lies is a movie called “Panther.” Written and directed by the black father-and-son team of Melvin and Mario Van Peebles, it is supposed to be about the heroic adventures of the Black Panther Party. The main plot line is the FBI’s plan to “neutralize” the panthers by means of what J. Edgar Hoover calls “the final solution.” FBI agents meet with mafia dons to cooperate in a grand scheme to flood black neighborhoods with heroin and destroy black people. Along the way, white policemen routinely kill and brutalize blacks, while the main activity of the black panthers is to give hot breakfasts to hungry children.

Even Bobby Seale, who was a black panther and should know, says “90 percent of everything in the film never happened.” When asked where he got the story on the heroin plot, Van Peebles p [138]re said “I have no corroborating evidence . . . [but] I think it’s very close to fact.” The movie, interspersed with contemporary news footage and featuring characters who are supposed to be Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, gives no hint that it is mostly fantasy. [David Horowitz, Hollywood’s latest outrage, NY Post, 5/17/95.]

PC Gone Wild

The June 1995 Reader’s Digest included the following short item:

From The Fresno Bee (California): “An item about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts ‘back in the African-American.’ The item should have said ‘back in the black.’”

Go Pick on Whitey

The Westcliff Mall in Dallas, the only black-owned shopping mall in Texas, employs Nation of Islam (NOI) guards. In June, the guards caught four blacks, aged 12 through 16, who were stealing a cash register. The boys were then held at a NOI meeting room for four hours, during which time they were stripped naked and whipped repeatedly with belts and bamboo canes. When the boys parents learned what happened they complained to the police, who arrested four guards on kidnapping charges.

This provoked immediate outrage among Dallas blacks, who called the four-hour beating “a return to lost community values.” It is not hard to imagine what they would have called it if whites had whipped the boys. Gaoloku Lagbara, who owns the mall explained why he uses NOI security forces rather than the police:

“We try to sit these kids down and tell them ‘This is a black mall. Do you realize what you are going? Why would you steal from a black man?’”

The Dallas grand jury has declined to indict the guards but the boys’ parents have filed a civil suit against them. [Nation of Islam members accused of beating boys, Birmingham News, 6/15/95. Todd Bensman, Releases sought in beatings of 4, Dallas Morning News, no date. Allen Myerson, Black Muslim guards are accused of flogging 4 boys at a Dallas Mall, NYT, 6/16/95, p. A8.]

Courage in Low Places

On June 2nd, the Behavior Genetics Association held its annual meeting, in Richmond, Virginia. The outgoing president, Prof. Glayde Whitney of Florida State University, gave the traditional presidential address. Prof. Whitney, who has made his reputation in animal genetics, surprised many in the audience by speaking about racial differences in crime rates. He gently suggested that there might be a genetic explanation for these differences.

Two people sitting at the head table walked out during the speech. One, the president elect of the organization, later returned and apologized to the waiters — “our black brothers” — who had been in the room. Prof. Whitney was shunned for the remainder of the conference. During a meeting of the association’s executive committee no one would even look at him, though one person replied when Prof. Whitney spoke to him directly. The editor of the association’s magazine, Behavior Genetics, has been asking that presidential addresses be submitted for publication but specifically refused to publish this one. As usual in cases of this kind, there has been public condemnation but private approval of Prof. Whitney’s remarks. Fortunately, he has tenure.

Hurrah for Prof. Whitney. Let us hope his courage will be an example for others.

Down Mexico Way

One of the best paid lines of work in Mexico is law enforcement — such as it is. This is because policemen get la mordida, “the bite,” for not enforcing the law. High level police officers put the bite on the subordinates. As one patrolman explains, “When you start your job, the first thing is to go to the chief to be told where to go, what to do, and how often to pay.” Officers then put the bite on the public.

Big-time cops make out like, well, bandits. Drug dealers routinely pay them off, on the principle of plata o plomo, “silver or lead.” If they don’t take the silver, police can expect a stiff dose of lead. Two senior lawmen were recently assassinated because they uncharacteristically refused to accept the $100,000 a month that drug dealers offered them to look the other way.

The higher the office the better the reward. Mario Ruiz Massieu was able to deposit $9 million in just one American bank account on a salary of $70,000 a year. He was deputy attorney general in charge of narcotics. Jobs like this are, of course, for sale. When an American narcotics officer who frequently works south of the border told a Mexican officer that he had recently been made deputy chief of his office, the Mexican replied, “My God, that must have cost you a bundle.”

One of the irksome features of this system for American law enforcement officers is that it is impossible to get any cooperation from the Mexicans if they want to arrest a criminal who has been generous to the local police. “He [the local policeman] has his relationships and they become untouchable while he’s there,” explains one American officer, “but you can move against other people.” “I used to get upset about it,” he adds, “but you can’t sulk.” [Peter Blevin, The greedy get silver and the honest get lead, Miami Herald, 6/5/95, p. 1A.]

Back to Africa

Santeria is a primitive Afro-Cuban cult that involves frequent animal sacrifice. It became popular in the Miami area, as more and more lower-class Cubans followed their betters across the sea. Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah that because Santeria is a “religion,” its Santero priests can ignore animal cruelty laws, and perform their blood-thirsty rites entirely as they please. The American Civil Liberties Union argued the case for Lukumi Babalu Aye and even won $400,000 in court costs in the process.

Shortly after the ruling, a Santero invited television crews to witness the triumphant killing of 15 animals in his apartment. He started with a goat, cutting the throat and twisting the head right off the body. Most sacrificed animals are cooked and eaten, but those that are used to cure diseases are thought to have absorbed the illness and should not be eaten. Instead, the cult requires that the corpses be left in certain places, often on street corners.

Now that it is officially a religion, Santeria is coming out of the closet. Botanicas, or spirit shops, deliver animals of all kinds, suitable for sacrifice, to home or office. Goats are $45 a head and botanicas accept credit cards. The press coverage of the long legal fight over Santeria has even introduced a whole new clientele to Santeria. More and more black Americans are now buying aerosol cans with convenient English labels like “Love Spray,” “Jackpot Money Spray,” “Gamblers Spray,” or “The Seven African Powers.” Bathwater additives with names like “Do My Will” and “Come to Me” are also popular. [Aminda Gonzalez, Santeria still shrouded in secrecy, Miami Herald, 6/11/95, p. 1B.]

The Athens of the Caribbees

An election, which is what President Clinton was prepared to spill American blood in order to bring about, has taken place in Haiti. The results were, in the words of official American observers, a complete “national breakdown of the electoral process.” Hundreds of polling places opened late or did not open at all. Tally sheets were scattered about, mixed together, altered, and sometimes even thrown away. The American observers found “a total absence of safeguards against fraud, tampering, disappearance and destruction of election material.”

The New York Times cannot quite figure out this exercise in democracy, which has just been “restored” to a nation whose population is 80 percent illiterate: “It is not easy to determine whether last week’s irregularities were the product of deliberate wrongdoing or simply an extraordinary display of incompetence.”

Of incompetence, there was plenty. Many people thought they were voting for President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and were surprised not to see his picture on the ballot. Others voted for all candidates. “The level of ignorance was the worst I have ever seen,” said a Brazilian observer.

Perhaps the best summary of the election was provided by Carmen Christophe, former mayor of Port-au-Prince, who was a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies. When asked to explain her platform, she replied, “Deputies don’t have programs, they just vote on proposals in Parliament.” When asked why she was running if she had no ideas of her own, she replied, “I am a politician.” [Larry Rohter, So far at least, inept is the kindest word for Haitian democracy, NYT, 7/2/95.]

Miami Vice

Miami, the Hispanic capital of America, also appears to be the country’s medical fraud capital. Federal officials have yet again unearthed a criminal medical organization that bilked Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance companies out of millions of dollars. The ringleader was Dr. Jesus Castillo, who hired other Hispanics to fake illnesses and stage automobile accidents. Everyone got kickbacks when insurance paid for expensive treatments that were usually never given.

The accident scam started with Hispanics dragging battered automobiles onto the street and claiming they had just had a crash. When that wasn’t convincing, they developed a technique called the “swoop and squat,” whereby three cars driven by miscreants would gang up on an unsuspecting driver and box him in. The lead car would swerve in front of a confederate, who jammed on the brakes. The innocent driver, boxed in between the third car and the curb, would smash into the car in front. The riders would then claim awful injuries that required expensive treatments from Dr. Castillo. The unsuspecting motorist who was lured into the collision often got a ticket from police.

Lisa Chutjian Pinto, Lilia DeJesus Gonzalez, Joaquin Garcia, Rogelio Cabrera, Digna Lopez, and Francisco Alcantara were all arrested along with Dr. Castillo. [Tom Dubocq and Manny Garcia, FBI: Doctor’s scam cost U.S. millions, Miami Herald, 5/25/95, p. 1A.]

Bridges Between Communities

Pelham and Mount Vernon are neighboring towns in New York State. Pelham is 8.8 percent black but Mount Vernon is 55.3 percent black, and the household income in Pelham is close to twice that of Mount Vernon. The two are separated by the Hutchinson River Parkway, and 30 years ago a footbridge was built over the parkway to connect the towns.

For years, young blacks from Mount Vernon have used the footbridge as an escape route after committing crimes in Pelham. During the 1970s, Pelham authorities tried locking the gates to the bridge at night, but the locks were smashed. Now, the bridge is so frequently used for crime that Pelham has officially petitioned the state to tear it down. The reaction of Mount Vernon’s black mayor: “It’s naked racism, no question about it.” [Jacques Steinberg, Bridge over a chasm of tension, NYT, 6/17/95, p. 21.]

Lessons in Hypocrisy

American blacks take it for granted that slavery in America was the greatest sin in the history of the United States, if not of the entire world. Slavery is still practiced in Africa, but this is of little interest to them. An organization called American Anti-Slavery Group, Inc. has reported on attempts to get blacks to do something about it.

For two years, they sent literature to Jesse Jackson but his office sent packages back unopened. Finally a spokesman told them Rev. Jackson would not touch the issue because it seemed anti-Arab. The group sent material to every member of the Congressional Black Caucus; they have taken no public action. Randall Robinson, the head of Transafrica, who has been a tireless campaigner against South African apartheid, cannot be persuaded to do anything about African slavery either. [Mohamed Athie & charles Jacobs, Action due on slavery in Africa, letters to the editor, NY Post, 6/26/95, p. 18.]

Back of the Balcony

Most American movies open on Friday night, when the largest audiences can be expected. However, film distributors have discovered that this is not good timing for black violence movies. Huge, nasty crowds showed up for Friday night openings of “New Jack City,” “Boyz N the Hood,” and “Juice,” and then went on rampages. Black movies now open on Wednesdays to smaller, less dangerous crowds. [Robert Butler, Midweek openings of ‘ethnic’ films aim to avoid Friday-night violence, Miami Herald, 5/31/95, p. 1E.]

Lessons in Hypocrisy

Public school teachers constantly tell us that their schools are vital social institutions that must always be improved with more money. However, in many towns public school teachers are far more likely than other people to send their own children to private schools. In Baltimore, 43.6 percent of the teachers send their children to private schools, as opposed to 18.1 percent of the city as a whole. In Boston, the percentages are 48.9 and 29.9; in Cleveland, 52.8 and 25.2; in Grand Rapids, 55 and 27.3; in Toledo, 49.4 and 26.7. In the nation as a whole, black and Hispanic public school teachers are slightly more likely than white teachers to send their children to private schools. [Dennis Doyle, Lessons in Hypocrisy, WSJ, 1/13/94.]

In other news, it has been reported that the most rigidly segregated cities in the United States — Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia — are all in the North, the region that so loves to instruct the South on how to treat blacks. [Immigration — Slow but Steady, U.S. News and World Report, 2/28/94, p. 8.]

Rising Tide

In 1990, New York City was 43 percent white, down from 63 percent in 1970. At this rate, it will be only 35 percent white by the year 2000. During the 1990s, Hispanics will have gone from 24 to 29 percent, Asians from seven percent to ten percent, and blacks from 25 percent to 26 percent. The largest 30-year decline for whites will have been greatest in the Bronx, where they were 50 percent of the population in 1970 but will be only 14 percent in 2000. Hispanics will have gone from 28 percent to 52 percent and will be the majority. [David Firestone, Major ethnic changes under way, NYT, 3/29/95, p. B1.]

Cambodian Doughnuts

Cambodians now own about 80 percent of the doughnut shops in California, and have nearly driven Winchell’s Donut Houses — which used to dominate the market — out of the state. “Where we had one Winchell’s shop, they now have three or four Cambodian shops,” explains a Winchell’s spokesman; “They were very happy with a much lesser volume.” In Los Angeles, there is one doughnut shop for every 7,500 residents, as opposed to one for every 30,000, which is the standard in the rest of the country. [Seth Mydans, Cambodians now rule California’s doughnut empire, Seattle Post Intelligencer, 5/29/95, p. A2.]

Integration, Disintegration

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a Washington organization that tries to maintain historic neighborhoods. One of the areas it is trying to preserve is the Farish Street District in Jackson, Mississippi, about which it says this:

“After the Civil War, Farish Street became the heart of a thriving, self-sufficient African American community. The end of segregation signaled the decline of independent neighborhoods like Farish Street and today the area suffers the neglect common to many inner-city communities.” [Trust pamphlet, “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places 1995.”]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Michael Masters’ cover story, “The Morality of Survival,” is a perfect article to show to friends who believe that racialists are motivated by hate. The truth, of course, is that writers for AR are responsible thinkers, who believe that all peoples and cultures deserve homelands, free from interference.

Mr. Taylor’s report of his experiences with black students does not surprise me. Blacks of normal intelligence — at least all those I have met — enjoy setting aside the taboos and having free-wheeling discussions about race. Some are in favor of ethnostates; none regards black criminals as revolutionaries.

The most closed-minded reactions come from the academic and intellectual elite. A black construction worker or community college student is not normally close to tears of rage over “racism,” unlike a professor at a prestigious college or a poetess like Nikki Giovanni. We will have an easier time with everyday folks than we will with the elites — of all races.

Paul Neff, Cambridge, Mass.

Sir — I have read Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation, and agree with your reviewer who finds it to be the first even tentatively racialist treatment of immigration to be published by a mainstream press. However, Mr. Brimelow does not seem willing to stick to his guns in public debate. I watched his performance in a debate on “Firing Line” and was disappointed that he would never say clearly that, indeed, race is a vital part of any immigration policy. This, of course, is exactly what his opponents were hoping he would say so that they could accuse him of “racism.” However, until Mr. Brimelow is willing to state the importance of race, he is implicitly conceding that race is not important, thereby accepting the premises of his opponents. In so doing, he concedes defeat from the outset.

All of us have positions to protect, and I admire Mr. Brimelow for his composure under a very disagreeable assault, especially from Ira Glasser of the ACLU. Nevertheless, I suspect that Samuel Francis, Larry Auster, Richard McCullough, Rabbi Mayer Schiller or Jared Taylor would have held their ground and thereby completely changed the terms of the debate.

Arthur McCracken, Nashville, Tenn.

Sir — Articles like the one by Michael Masters are the reason I subscribe to AR. And I loved the illustration on page three, showing the progressive degeneration from man to frog. It was, of course, an all too appropriate depiction of the course we have set for ourselves.

Brian Kidd, Rochester, N. Y.

Sir — May I attempt to resolve the conflict between Prof. Michael Levin and Mr. Lawrence Auster?

Mr. Auster maintains correctly that on average blacks are less intelligent than whites; he cautions us that none of this discounts any given individual black from fair consideration.

Prof. Levin cites the above data, and concludes that whites are therefore justified in their “wish to avoid blacks.” This rankles Mr. Auster, who feels that avoiding blacks in general is unfair to those individual blacks who are to the right in the bell curve.

Actually, these two views are compatible, the distinction being delineated by Rabbi Mayer Schiller in an earlier AR article, in which he asserted that even though a majority of blacks are not lawbreakers, there will be enough lawbreakers in any sizable black population to justify avoiding the entire population. Thus, in choosing one’s school, neighborhood, or club it unfortunately makes sense to avoid blacks.

It is an ugly truth, but here it is: The more blacks we have in this country, the poorer we will all be. Is that unfair? Ask God. Is it unfair to intelligent, law-abiding blacks that whites should avoid all blacks, including them? Certainly it’s unfair, and therein lies the dilemma of different races attempting to co-exist in the same territory — a situation found nowhere in nature except among humans.

D. Katz, Pembroke Pines, Fla.

Sir — The weakness of Americans never fails to amaze me. Your July “O Tempora” item about Mexican plans for dual citizenship — so that Mexicans can stay Mexican but still vote Mexican interests in the United States — describes what could hardly be a clearer sign of the Hispanic desire for conquest. Yet, official America muddles along without even noticing. What would it take to get the press and the liberals to react? What if the President of Mexico told the President of the United States, face to face on national television, that Mexico expects to extend its influence and its population until the Western states are part of Mexico? And that 50 years after that he expects the Mexican flag to fly over Washington? I suppose the New York Times would ask us to “feel the pain” of our poor southern neighbor and “show sensitivity” to its expressions of national pride. I sometimes think that nothing short of explicitly genocidal violence will ever rouse whites.

Steven Greenwood, Huntsville, Ala.