American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 8, No.12	December 1997

 

CONTENTS

Madison Grant and the Racialist Movement
Grant in his Own Words
Blood and Soil
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Madison Grant and the Racialist Movement

The distinguished origins of racial activism.

by George McDaniel

Perhaps more than any other man, Madison Grant created what we might call the “racialist moment” in American history. This was the period beginning approximately with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt (who wrote that the Negro was a member of “a perfectly stupid race”) and continuing through the administration of Warren Harding, during which the country discarded its remaining, melting-pot sentimentalism about blacks and foreign immigration. The period also saw the emergence of a new science, eugenics, which promised to banish inherited evils. This era of explicit, intellectual racialism lasted until approximately the Great Depression, then withered under Franklin Roosevelt’s massive shift to the Left, and finally collapsed during the war with Nazi Germany.

Madison Grant (1865–1937) worked tirelessly for the racialist movement for almost this entire period. He joined, chaired, and often founded its organizations. He counted among his closest associates U.S. Presidents, top industrialists, best-selling writers, and some of the greatest scientists of the time. And he wrote two of the seminal works of American racialism: The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and The Conquest of a Continent (1933).

Grant was born in New York in 1865, just as the first of the modern white-against-white conflicts was closing. He was descended from Jacobites who came to the colonies from Scotland after the defeat of “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in the Forty-Five uprising (1745), and throughout his life retained the Jacobite brand of conservative fire. He was graduated from Yale in 1887 and received a law degree from Columbia in 1890.

The Passing of the Great Race was published in 1916 to immediate popular success. It established Grant as an authority in anthropology, and laid the groundwork for his research in the emerging science of eugenics. It was read by presidents, dictators, scientists, and common people alike, and even today — excoriated as it is — it has much to teach. The impact of the book can be understood only in the cultural milieu in which it appeared.

Immigration just after the War Between the States proceeded at great speed. The decade of the 1880s saw the arrival of 5,246,613 immigrants, and in 1882 alone, 788,992 were admitted. Two hundred twenty thousand Chinese came from 1854 to 1882. Subsiding a bit in the nineties, the influx rose again after the turn of the century, averaging over 800,000 arrivals each year between 1900 and 1914. Most of these were immigrants from parts of the world unfamiliar to Americans: Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the Balkans, and Turkey. Many newcomers brought Marxist and anarchist ideas alien to the old American stock.

Just as it does today, the American identity faced a two-pronged threat: a large influx of aliens and the presence of a large Negro element. Negro migration to the Northern industrial cities brought a slow awakening to the entire country of the true nature of the race problem, and Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel, The Clansman, was one of the first works in the new century to focus on it. The book’s sympathetic account of the first Ku Klux Klan encouraged a reappraisal of often-sentimental notions about blacks.

In a sense, this reappraisal came to a head in August, 1908, in Lincoln’s own Springfield, Illinois. A black habitual criminal attacked a white girl in her bedroom and, while being pursued by her father, turned and killed him with a razor. At least one other attack on a white woman was also reported, and the white people responded by killing two blacks and burning down a crime-ridden black neighborhood called the “Badlands.” Thousands of local blacks fled Springfield. It was this event that inspired the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Springfield in 1909.

In 1915, a new entertainment medium widened the audience for the racialist message when D.W. Griffith debuted his film masterpiece, Birth of a Nation. Based upon The Clansman, and, to some degree, on Dixon’s 1902 novel, The Leopard’s Spots, this movie was hailed as a technical triumph even by its harshest critics. Nevertheless, the NAACP, along with other black and some Jewish organizations, picketed the movie and threatened violence in the cities where it opened.

The success of the film was in some doubt when Dixon contacted his old Johns Hopkins classmate, President Woodrow Wilson, and arranged a special showing at the White House. Wilson is said to have leapt to his feet, exclaiming, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

With the news that the President loved it, audiences flocked to see Birth of a Nation. During its opening in Atlanta, William J. Simmons announced the founding of the second Ku Klux Klan, in nearby Stone Mountain, Georgia. This Klan organization went on to sweep the country, becoming especially strong in the Midwest.

The Passing of the Great Race was published the next year, in 1916. Grant intended it as a call to American whites to counter the dangers both from blacks and non-traditional immigration. Adopting the then-popular racial taxonomy of William Z. Ripley in The Races of Europe, Grant describes the three European subraces of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. As was common in his day, he unabashedly favored the Nordic and went to great pains to contrast Nordic civilization and traits with that of other races and subraces. For example, he faulted Nordic, altruistic devotion to blacks and other unsuccessful groups, a devotion that always proves self-destructive.

Grant concluded that America should abandon a largely open-door immigration policy. He favored a eugenics program that would promote the Nordic race and discourage the expansion of the colored races in the white world. In particular, he condemned miscegenation.

It is worth noting that one of the reasons Grant and other racialists opposed the new immigration was that it brought alien ideologies. The First World War had seen the triumph of Bolshevism, and continuing immigration from Eastern Europe brought Marxists. Like most racialists, Grant saw socialism as unfit for Nordics. When he was helping found the Galton Society in 1918, he wrote to the other organizers: “My proposal is the organization of an anthropological society . . . confined to native Americans, who are anthropologically, socially, and politically sound, no Bolsheviki need apply.”

The Passing of the Great Race became an immediate best-seller, with new editions in 1918, 1920, and 1921, multiple printings, and translations into German, French, and Norwegian.

It was reviewed favorably by Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and by periodicals as diverse as the Journal of Heredity and The Saturday Evening Post. The editor of the Post commissioned a series of articles on immigration in a similar vein, and in an editorial in the May 7, 1921, issue wrote: “Two books in particular that every American should read if he wishes to understand the full gravity of our present immigration problem: Mr. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and Dr. Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color. . . . These books should do a vast amount of good if they fall into the hands of readers who can face without wincing the impact of new and disturbing ideas.”

The Passing of the Great Race did indeed fall into the hands of such readers, turning up in the personal libraries of some of the most important figures of the day. It was typical, for example, that Dr. Rupert Blue, Surgeon General of the United States, gave a copy personally to Sir Henry Wellcome the British pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Grant was not alone in sounding the alarm. Some of the other books published during this period include: Mankind at the Crossroads by E.G. Conklin (1914); America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro by Major R.W. Shufeldt (1915); The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard (1920, Introduction by Grant); Race and National Solidarity by Charles Josey (1923); Applied Eugenics by Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson (1923); and The Fruit of the Family Tree by Alfred E. Wiggam (1924). These were all intended for a mass audience, but academic textbooks soon joined them, including Genetics and Eugenics by W.E. Castle (1916) and Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics by H.H. Newman (1921).

The effect was felt at both the state and federal level. Twenty-four states passed laws encouraging sterilization of those who were retarded, insane, or had criminal records. At the Federal level, in 1921, Albert Johnson, head of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, began a series of hearings on immigration. He appointed Harry Laughlin, who in 1922 would be one of Grant’s co-founders of the American Eugenics Society, as an expert witness on eugenics. In 1922, Laughlin reported extensively on racial differences in IQ as measured by the new army intelligence test.

In 1923, Grant’s close friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, the famous paleontologist who named “tyrannosaurus rex,” spoke enthusiastically about intelligence testing: “We have learned once and for all that the Negro is not like us.”

This was precisely the kind of thing Grant and others had been saying for years. These ideas helped pass the Johnson Act of 1924, which established national origin immigration quotas of 2 percent of the number of foreign-born already in America as determined by the census of 1890. This greatly reduced the flow of immigrants from non-traditional sources, a policy that remained essentially unchanged until 1965.

Grant called the act a “new Declaration of Independence,” and his entry in The Dictionary of American Biography credits him with helping it pass. In its 1937 obituary, the New York Times said of Grant’s book: “Besides being a recognized book on anthropology, it has often been called to Congressional attention in the passage of restrictive immigration laws. . . . Mr. Grant . . . helped frame the Johnson Restriction Act of 1924.”

Eugenics

Grant was active throughout the 1920s, serving as president of both the Immigration Restriction League and the Eugenics Research Association. He was also treasurer of one of the most important events in the history of eugenics, the Second Eugenics Congress of 1921. This event continued the pattern of the First Eugenics Congress, which had been held in London in 1912, with Winston Churchill as one of the sponsors and at which Prime Minister Arthur Balfour delivered the inaugural address. The second congress was hosted by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. More than 300 delegates came from Europe, Latin America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. No German scientists were invited because of the policy of ostracism that continued after the war.

Among the notables in attendance were future President Herbert Hoover, Alexander Graham Bell (the Congress’s honorary president), conservationist and future Governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot, and Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the museum, was president. Harry Laughlin was in charge of exhibits, and Lothrop Stoddard handled publicity. One hundred eight papers were presented on topics ranging from plant and animal genetics to anthropology and political science. The conference signaled the vitality of a young science that was nevertheless destined to die an early death.

Madison Grant continued to lobby for immigration control even after the passage of the Johnson Act. In 1927, he and other eugenicists signed a “Memorial on Immigration Quotas,” urging the President and Congress to extend “the quota system to all countries of North and South America . . . in which the population is not predominantly of the white race.”

Grant continued to write. In 1930, along with Lothrop Stoddard, Harry Laughlin, Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, and others, he contributed to The Alien in Our Midst, subtitled Selling Our Birthright for a Mess of Pottage.

The book was Grant’s idea and — like Conquest a few years later — was written to defend the 1924 immigration act. It included essays on race and immigration from both contemporary writers and from great Americans of the past like Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and George Washington. The book was widely distributed to legislators and editors by the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies.

In 1933, Grant’s second major work, The Conquest of a Continent, appeared. In it, he explained why he wrote the book:

A controversy immediately arose over this new basis [the national origins immigration quotas], as it was to the interest of every national and religious group of aliens now here to exaggerate the importance and size of its contribution to the population of the country, especially in Colonial times. . . . The purpose of this opposition was to warp public opinion in regard to the merits of various national groups and to exaggerate the non-Anglo-Saxon elements in the old Colonial population. This book is an effort to make an estimate of the various elements, national and racial, existing in the present population of the United States and to trace their arrival and subsequent spread.

He then embarks on what Henry Fairfield Osborn in the introduction calls the “first racial history of . . . any nation.” Especially interesting today is Grant’s analysis of the Negro problem. He writes: “Among the various outland elements now in the United States which threaten in various degrees our national unity, the most important is the Negro.” He discusses several proposed solutions.

First, “slow amalgamation with the Whites,” he rejects immediately, arguing that this would “produce a racial chaos such as ruined the Roman Empire.” He considers repatriation at somewhat greater length, but rejects this as well, for reasons no longer applicable in our time: “Today, [repatriation to Africa] is not possible, because Africa, with the exception of Liberia, is under the control of white states, which certainly would not welcome such an enormous addition to their own color problem. . . .”

The third solution Grant considers is the establishment of a separate black nation within the territory of the United States. This he tends to reject because it would involve the abandonment of large sections of the South, but he admits that something similar had already occurred in some areas, both in America and, especially, in the West Indies:

This has actually happened in some places along the lower Mississippi River, where the numbers of the Negroes have become so overwhelming that the few remaining Whites have simply moved out and abandoned the district to them. It has happened and is happening in the West Indies. Haiti and Santo Domingo have been entirely turned over to Negroes and other examples of West Indian Islands almost abandoned to Negroes can be found.

In the final analysis, Grant has no easy answers to the problem. He urges states to adopt laws prohibiting intermarriage and he castigates Christian churches in the North for “trying to break down the social barriers between Negro and White.” Social separation is paramount, he says, and to that end public opinion “might well stop exalting the Mulatto and thereby putting its stamp of approval on miscegenation. Negroes should be encouraged to respect their own racial integrity.” And, finally, contraception should be made “universally available to them.”

Perhaps because Passing of the Great Race had been so influential, Conquest of a Continent provoked an immediate storm of opposition. On December 13, 1933, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, Richard E. Gutstadt, sent the following letter to the publishers of a number of Jewish periodicals:

Gentlemen:

Scribner & Sons have just published a book by Madison Grant entitled ‘The Conquest of a Continent.’ It is extremely antagonistic to Jewish interests. Emphasized throughout is the ‘Nordic superiority’ theory, and the utter negation of any ‘melting pot’ philosophy with regard to America.

We are interested in stifling the sale of this book. We believe that this can be best accomplished by refusing to be stampeded into giving it publicity. Every review or public criticism of the book of this character brings it to the attention of many who would otherwise know nothing of it. This results in added sales. The less discussion there is concerning it, the more sales resistance will be created.

We therefore appeal to you to refrain from comment on this book, which will undoubtedly be brought to your attention sooner or later. It is our conviction that a general compliance with this request will sound the warning to other publishing houses against engaging in this type of venture.

In fact, Grant wrote very little about Jews, noting only his view that they were of Central European, Khazar origin: “It is doubtful whether there is a single drop of the old Palestinian, Semitic-speaking Hebrew blood among these East European Jews.”

Nevertheless, by this time, Hitler had begun consolidating power in Germany and his excesses were undermining eugenics and scientific racial theory. The New York Times, in its review of Conquest, was quick to make the connection: “Substitute Aryan for Nordic and a good deal of Mr. Grant’s argument would lend itself without much difficulty to the support of some recent pronouncements in Germany.”

Grant actually had occasion to caution others about the National Socialist government. In 1934, he wrote to Laughlin warning that American eugenicists should be careful in their relations with Germany and should “proceed cautiously in endorsing” the actions being taken by the German government.

Another aspect of Grant’s career that he considered intimately related to his work in racial science was conservationism, and his involvement with nature and wildlife was long and varied. Just as with the racialist movement, he was ever the leader. In 1895, along with Theodore Roosevelt and a handful of others, he co-founded the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society), and served as its secretary until 1924. He helped found the American Bison Society in 1905; was president of the Bronx Zoo for many years; was co-founder and president of the Bronx Parkway Commission (which built the road to the Zoo); co-founder of the Save the Redwoods League; and a founding member of the Boone and Crockett Club, which helped establish Yellowstone National Park.

In an excellent essay in the April, 1995 issue of The Mankind Quarterly, Roger Pearson writes about the link between conservation and racial thinking:

The success of the conservationist movement in the United States at this vital period in the nation’s history was facilitated by the sympathy of President Theodore Roosevelt, who was deeply concerned about the threat to the quality of both the natural and human stock of America. . . .

With Madison Grant serving as secretary and later as president, the Boone and Crockett Club was largely comprised of eugenicists and eugenics sympathizers. Renowned as one of the more active members of the eugenics movement, and especially for his efforts to preserve the ‘Old American’ component of the American population, Grant worked just as ardently to preserve the natural heritage for future generations of Americans and should be remembered always with honor as one of the nation’s greatest benefactors.

Despite disavowals by American eugenicists, Nazism had already begun to erode support for the eugenics movement by the 1930s. German policies played into the hands of people like the anti-eugenicist, Franz Boas of Columbia, a socialist who launched a one-man crusade to destroy eugenics and “undermine the belief in race as a primary factor in cultural behavior.” Through his many books and students (including Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu), Boas’ views began to prevail.

Even so, Grant’s efforts never flagged. In 1932, he again served as treasurer of the third and final Eugenics Congress. This Congress was also held at the Museum of Natural History, and included as sponsors Mrs. E. H. Harriman, Mrs. H. B. Dupont, Dr. J. Harvey Kellogg (of Kellogg’s cereals), and Leonard Darwin.

Conquest was published in 1933, after which Grant served on the advisory board of Eugenical News. He continued to write, to plan, to lobby. But the old days were ending. A schism had developed among eugenicists between those who favored “negative eugenics” and those in the “mainstream” who promoted “positive eugenics.” Moreover, Nazism was rapidly discrediting the science. By mid-decade, Osborn had died, and Grant himself died on May 30, 1937. The man who had devoted so much of his life to preserving his race left no children.

Two years later, Hitler invaded Poland. From then on, eugenics would be equated with concentration camps, Nazi doctors, Holocaust, and war crimes. As a science it was dead. Ironically, Grant’s views on nature and wildlife have been largely adopted, and conservation is at the forefront of mainstream thought. Of course, Grant receives little credit for this. His dreams of racial preservation, which he saw as part and parcel of nature conservation, are reviled today by all but a few. They owe it to the memory of this early activist to carry on his work, to ensure that the ideals of Madison Grant do not perish.

George McDaniel is the American Renaissance Web Page Editor.

ARTICLE

Grant in his own Words

From The Passing of the Great Race

“In the democratic forms of government the operation of universal suffrage tends toward the selection of the average man for public office rather than the man qualified by birth, education, and integrity . . . [F]rom a racial point of view, it will inevitably increase the preponderance of the lower types and cause a corresponding loss of efficiency in the community as a whole.”

“Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically . . .”

“The name ‘Aryan race’ must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time . . . an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past.”

“The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship.”

“Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it, but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Either the races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort, or else they ultimately amalgamate, and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.”

“The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers, a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur, and our present reliance on the influences of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values.”

“This [the Mediterranean] is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycenaean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State.”

“One of its [the First World War’s] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe . . . This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul.”

From The Conquest of a Continent

“The antipathy of the English settlers to the Indians was far too great to lead to the sort of miscegenation which was encouraged by the French . . . In the British colonies the half-breed was looked upon as an Indian . . . It was not until within the lifetime of those now living that an infusion of Indian blood became a subject of pride . . . unless one makes exception for such isolated tales as the somewhat grotesque Pocahontas tradition in Virginia.”

“There is nothing like [Indian cruelty] in history in any part of the world and the result was that the aboriginal Indians were regarded as ravening wolves or worse and deprived of all sympathy, while the Whites stole their lands and killed their game. No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.”

“Although the [American] revolution grew out of economic and political causes, it represents primarily one of those costly and unfortunate internecine wars in which the Nordics have been prone to indulge at intervals for two or three thousand years, and which have done so much to weaken them as a race.”

“The Mongol is not inferior to the Nordic in intelligence, as is the Negro, but represents such a divergent type that the mixture between Nordics and Chinese or Japanese is not a good one. The overflow of these Asiatics into our Pacific Coast might have Mongolized the States there had not the American laboring man taken alarm and secured legislation forbidding their immigration.”

“The Southerners understand how to treat the Negro — with firmness and with kindness — and the Negroes are liked below the Mason and Dixon line so long as they keep to their proper relation to the Whites, but in the North the blocks of Negroes in the large cities, migrating from the South, have introduced new complications, which are certain to produce trouble in the future . . .”

“[T]he intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and . . . most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real Negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood . . .

“No doubt the Mexican Indian is well suited to his environment, and his traditional habits are well suited to him. This does not mean, however, that either has any important contribution to make to the United States which would be realized by a northward mass migration of agricultural and industrial serfs. On the contrary, the Mexican immigration to the United States, which is made up overwhelmingly of the poorer Indian element, has brought nothing but disadvantages.”

“The law of 1790 providing that no one could become a citizen of the United States except free Whites was the law until the aftermath of the Civil War added the word ‘black’ or ‘of African descent’ to those who could be naturalized. This last provision should be repealed and the blacks with the South American and Central American Indians put on the same footing as the Orientals.”

“We see the Nordics again confronted across the Pacific by their immemorial rivals, the Mongols. This will be the final arena of the struggle between these two major divisions of man for world dominance . . .”

BOOK REVIEW

Blood and Soil

The world-wide struggle for ethnic dominance.

The Demographic Struggle for Power: The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World, Milica Zarkovic Bookman, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1997, 273 pp., $47.50.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

The Demographic Struggle for Power is one of the most straightforward and factual accounts now available of how ethnic animosity creates conflict and violence. In a study that focuses on the Balkans but covers all parts of the world, Prof. Bookman takes for granted a central fact of human nature that multi-racial dreamers ignore: Ethnic identity and the desire to preserve it are among the most powerful forces on earth. Perhaps because she is a Slav, Prof. Bookman does not find it necessary to account for group consciousness or to apologize for it. Her purpose is merely to catalogue the policies to which it gives rise.

Prof. Bookman assumes that whenever ethnic groups — or races or nationalities or language groups or any other self-identified tribes — live in the same territory there will be competition. Its usual form is to try to increase the numbers of one’s own group at the expense of others with the eventual goal, stated or not, of displacing them and taking their territory. Each member of one’s ethnic group is a natural ally, and greater numbers mean political, economic, and military power. Demography is destiny, which explains the title of the book.

Virtually every group understands this and acts accordingly — sometimes violently. “The war of numbers may precede, accompany or follow the war of militias,” writes Prof. Bookman. Indeed, she quotes a United Nations study to the effect that between 1989 and 1992 there were 82 separate wars (defined as organized violence that caused at least 1,000 deaths). Of these 82, 79 — or 96 percent — “took place within borders and among different ethnic or religious groups.”

Most of The Demographic Struggle for Power is devoted to descriptions of the different ways governments and ethnic groups engage in what Professor Bookman calls “demographic engineering,” and the great strength of this book is the number of examples it presents from around the world. Ethnic competition is clearly universal.

The first step in demographic engineering is simply to count people, but this can be politically explosive: “Decennial census enumerations have always caused inter-ethnic turmoil as the relative strength of ethnic groups is revealed.” As Prof. Bookman explains, “the census is like an election that ethnic groups attempt to win in order to justify their economic and political power.” Likewise, when there is universal suffrage, elections themselves become ethnic head-counts.

When the census includes figures on minorities there is pressure to rig the results. In Burma, for example, the military sometimes chases undesirable tribes out of an area before census-takers come through. In both Macedonia and Kosovo, Albanians have boycotted the census so they could later claim they were undercounted. Since 1961, Pakistan has stopped asking questions about ethnicity because the figures are so inflammatory. Saudi Arabia and Mauritania do not release census data, presumably because the ruling nationalities are embarrassingly small.

One way to keep the number of undesirables down is simply not to count them separately. In Turkey, Kurds officially do not exist (and can be arrested for using their language in public or singing Kurdish songs). Likewise, since Bulgarians don’t like Macedonians in their country, they do not recognize them with a census category.

For years, Yugoslavia tried to get its citizens to identify themselves as Yugoslavs, and the number of people who checked that category peaked in 1981. Ten years later, as the nation began to break apart, Yugoslavs once more became Serbs, Croats, Albanians, etc.

The Nigerian census of 1962-63 is now seen as one of the causes of the Biafran war. The 1962 count showed that northern tribes had lost their majority. The results were disputed and there was a recount, which was also disputed. It was in this inflamed atmosphere that Biafra declared independence in 1967, starting a war that lasted until the new nation was finally crushed in 1970.

Although Prof. Bookman does not mention the United States in this context, non-whites understand the importance of the census. Hispanics insist that illegal aliens be counted along with citizens, and blacks bitterly oppose a “multi-racial” category that might reduce their numbers.

Of course, nationalists understand that the best way to get satisfactory census figures is to have a growing population. European governments have paid child allowances for generations. Jews all around the world urge each other to have more children. Soviet women who had six children or more became Heroines of the Soviet Union. Communist Romania banned birth control and made abortions difficult for everyone but Gypsies. Communist Poland cut back on day care in the hope that women would stay home and rear more children. Newly-independent Croatia is doing the same thing; it promotes “the mother as educator of children” rather than worker.

Nationalist policies are often directly competitive. One Serbian leader, Zeljko Raznjatovic (better known as Arkan), urged Serbian women to have at least four children to offset Albanians, “who reproduce like rabbits.”

Ethnic groups often cast an uneasy eye on others with a faster rate of growth. Jews in Israel fear Arabs, and South African whites fear blacks. Indian Hindus fear that Muslims are outbreeding them and have demanded a change in laws that permit Islamic polygamy. The (Indira and Sanjay) Gandhi policy of sterilization was ostensibly for all Indians but Muslims felt it was directed against them and rioted.

Non-whites routinely suspect whites of doing to them what they might do if they had the power. In South America, peasants have thought measles injections from the United States were sterilization drugs. Filipinos have believed the same thing of tetanus shots given by Americans.

Assimilation is another way to increase the numbers of one’s own group. As Prof. Bookman writes, “the educational system is one of the most effective methods of assimilation insofar as it reaches individuals at an early age and can control their minds over an extended period of time.” This is why language of instruction and school curriculum are so hotly contested in multi-ethnic societies.

Assimilation need not be voluntary, and attempts to swallow an alien people are often nothing more then cultural suppression. During the occupation of Korea, the Japanese punished the use of Korean in public. Turks in Bulgaria have been forbidden to speak their language and forced to take Bulgarian names — up to 300,000 have left the country rather than face forcible assimilation. Prof. Bookman writes that during the massacre of Armenians by the Turks, some Armenian women were spared if they agreed to convert to Islam and marry Turks.

One of the most brutal expressions of forcible assimilation is attributed to Mile Budak, Croatian minister of education during the Second World War: “One third of the Serbs we shall kill, another we shall deport, and the last we shall force to embrace the Roman Catholic religion and thus meld them into Croats.”

Prof. Bookman explains that assimilation can work only if peoples are basically similar: “When race is the distinguishing feature, assimilation efforts become irrelevant.”

“Ethnic cleansing” is the new name for an ancient technique for ridding a territory of undesirables. At the end of the Second World War, at least 10 million Germans were expelled from their homes in Eastern Europe. The partition of India displaced 10 million people, as did the creation of Bangladesh. Many nations have expelled Jews. The most extreme form of ethnic cleansing is extermination and, as Prof. Bookman notes, it is as old as mankind.

She also notes that doing away with unwanted people has only recently become an offense. During the 19th century, it was the standard way to deal with American Indians, Australian Aborigines and other native populations, but today in the Balkans it is considered barbaric.

Prof. Bookman notes, though, that population transfer is sometimes the only realistic solution: “If evictions are complete and permanent, then they may in fact be the precursors to peace.” It is worst when people must move in the midst of war and communal massacre: “If more inter-ethnic population transfers were planned, the damage to people and property would be significantly lower.” A good example of planned, reasonably orderly transfer took place under the auspices of the League of Nations after the Greco-Turkish war of 1922, when large numbers from both sides crossed the border. Expulsion is not always a solution, however, especially when there is a possibility of return. The Palestinians have shown that nationalist sentiment can continue for generations, even in exile.

Some population movements are encouraged by authorities but are theoretically voluntary. The French, for example, have paid North Africans to go home, and the Germans have paid Vietnamese (who were working in the former East Germany) to leave. In the Balkans, out-groups are sometimes denied employment or police protection in the expectation that they will leave. Saudi Arabia once forced out one million Yemenis by not renewing their residence permits.

Some of the former Soviet republics have made it obligatory to use the local language at work, which forces some Russians out of their jobs. In Latvia, Russians may not own land.

Discrimination takes many forms. In Croatia, non-Croatians pay higher property taxes. Israelis tightly control the rights and movements of Arabs, and on the island of Fiji, only native Fijians may own land. In Communist Romania, Hungarians were paid sub-standard wages and many were used as forced labor to build the Black Sea-Danube Canal. In Turkey, the army has simply evacuated more than 800 Kurdish villages since 1990, driving the inhabitants into Iran or Iraq.

Iraq, in turn, has diverted the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to dry out the marshes inhabited by Shiite Muslims. It is no longer possible to fish or grow rice, and some 200,000 Shiites have fled to Iran.

A common nationalist demand is that borders be redrawn to coincide with ethnic boundaries. Since the end of the Cold War there has been an unprecedented upsurge in the number of nations that are trying to become nation-states, and virtually all secessionist movements are along ethnic lines.

Prof. Bookman notes that the West has been dangerously inconsistent in its treatment of secession movements, approving of independence for Slovenia and Croatia but not for Serbia, and only reluctantly for Macedonia. It supported Eritrean independence but did nothing for Chechnya. Prof. Bookman points out that simply changing borders is often not enough — it would take five times as much land as actually exists in the Balkans to satisfy the demands of every group.

Prof. Bookman has constructed a numerical index to show which nations use the largest number of “demographic engineering” techniques to control the composition of their populations. Among contemporary states, Israel gets highest marks, with 91 out of 100. Other high scorers are Bosnia (73), Sudan (64), China (64), and Sri Lanka (55). South Africa scores a modest 36.

Prof. Bookman notes that national frictions could be resolved if every nation were to become a homogeneous nation-state, but adds that the world community does not approve of such straightforward solutions.

What are other ways to keep peace? Prof. Bookman says that internal administrative boundaries should not coincide with ethnic territories. Nigeria redrew its map after the Biafran war; the four original administrative units were chopped up into 19 smaller ones, thus dividing ethnic groups. This was supposed to encourage regional multi-ethnicism rather than ethnic nationalism.

Prof. Bookman also says it is a bad idea to grant regional autonomy in stages, because this only encourages more demands. She also adds that ethnic conflict is worse during economic downturns, since each group suspects others of robbing it. Ethnic competition is also likely to be at its most intense when the numbers of competing groups are moving towards parity. A large majority can safely ignore minorities and a small minority may have only limited aspirations, but when numbers become comparable the crucial question of who governs may hang in the balance.

Although Prof. Bookman seldom mentions the United States, her book is filled with lessons for those who wish to learn. The most obvious is that American whites, like those in Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, are behaving unlike any other group on earth. Far from engaging in ordinary “demographic engineering,” massive non-white immigration and welfare policies that promote high non-white birth rates are a form of demographic self-destruction.

Prof. Bookman explains that the basic law of ethnic consciousness is that it puts the interests of one people before those of others. These interests can be advanced by any number of means, from immigration restrictions to ethnic cleansing. In the United States, whites are the only group without any organized system to defend their interests, and in the demographic struggle for power, unilateral disarmament is the first step toward oblivion.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Miami Vignettes

Miami police officer Gary Eugene recently got a radio call about a wife beating. When he arrived at the Little Haiti address he found a woman tied to a bed and a man swinging a piece of wood. The Haitian couldn’t understand what the problem was. “I wasn’t beating someone else’s wife,” he explained. “This is my wife.” (Yves Colon, Spousal Abuse Meets its Match Over Airwaves, Herald (Miami), Sept. 15, 1997, p. B1.)

In September, a beachcomber named “Jimmy” was briefly in the news when he spotted an alligator that swam onto a popular Miami beach. Reporters learned that Jimmy was looking for “blue bags,” which contain small animal sacrifices, usually a chicken. They also contain a money offering, typically $3.00 or $4.00. “That’s how I make my living,” explained Jimmy. (Arnold Markowitz, Injured Gator Caught on Hobie Beach, Herald (Miami), Sept. 27, 1997, p. B1.)

Miami has a city ordinance that prohibits ownership of roosters and requires that hens be kept no less than 100 feet from a neighboring residence. The main reason is noise. Hens are bad enough but beginning at about 5:00 a.m. roosters are unbearable. Miamians have learned to bear it. As Robert Ferrera from the Dominican Republic explains, “This is our culture and chickens are part of it.” Except for serious cases — say, if someone converts his entire garage into a chicken coop — the city has given up enforcing the ordinance, and the police ignore complaints about chicken noise. One problem is that many chickens are “undocumented” — running around loose with no known owner who can be cited. (Manny Garcia, Miami’s Sleepless Are Crying Fowl, Herald (Miami), Sept. 9, 1997, p. 1A.)

In October a group of men burst into a funeral home, tossed out the grieving relatives, and performed a Santeria religious ritual with the corpse. One man used ashes to draw a cross on the forehead, another put a bottle of rum in the corpse’s hand, and one lit candles. After chanting Santeria mumbo-jumbo for a while, the men got into an argument and started shooting each other. “They were involved in a pretty wild gunfight. There was blood on the carpet, shell casings, lots of shell casings on the floor,” explained police Lieutenant Bill Schwartz. Seven men were taken into custody and one was in critical condition with a gun-shot wound in the chest.

The grieving family had never seen the men before. “It was bizarre,” says Lieutenant Schwartz. (Bizarre Religious Ritual Erupts into Wild Gunfight at Miami Funeral Home, Reuters, Oct. 22, 1997.)

Disadvantaged Asians

Unlike most universities, the Small Business Administration still believes in affirmative action for Asians. Results are predictable. In the ten years to 1996, the Asian share of subsidized “8a” contracts for the “disadvantaged” has gone from 10.5 percent to 23.7 percent, while the black percentage has dropped from 50.5 to 36.7. The Hispanic percentage has held steady at around 30. In New York City, the Asian share has jumped from 3.5 percent to 64.1 percent while that of blacks has fallen from 36 percent to 18.1 percent. Asians have been taking over in Alabama, of all places. In ten years, their share of 8a contracts went from 2.5 percent to 46.3 percent while that of blacks dropped from 88 percent to 31.1 percent. Besides being smarter, Asians are much better than blacks at spreading the word about 8a to other Asians, and when their nine-year period of eligibility ends they often pass along the contracts to relatives.

Asians who start business are actually less likely to be “disadvantaged” than whites. Between 1978 and 1987 the average Asian business got off the ground with $53,600 in capital while the average white started a business with $32,000. Of the Asian entrepreneurs, 57.8 percent had college educations vs. 37.7 percent for whites. (Rochelle Sharpe, Asian-Americans Gain Sharply in Big Program of Affirmative Action, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 1997. p. 1.)

Snow White Next?

Walt Disney has released a multi-ethnic Cinderella. The title character, of course, is black, as is her fairy godmother. The prince is a Filipino, the queen is black, and the evil stepmother and nasty step-sisters are, of course, white. Typical dialogue: “I’m your fairy godmother, honey . . . You got a problem with that?” (Michael Hill, Millennium “Cinderella,’ TV Week (Washington Post), Nov. 2-8, 1997, p. 3.)

Borzellieri Bounces Back

Frank Borzellieri, who analyzed his unsuccessful run for New York City Council in the previous issue, is now a weekly columnist for the Ledger, a Queens newspaper. As this excerpt from his first column shows, Mr. Borzellieri writes the way he campaigns:

Problems which appear on the surface to have nothing to do with race — crime, housing, welfare, property values — need only be examined slightly beneath the surface to see that race is the central factor. The racial composition of a city will reveal as much about its crime situation as the city’s law enforcement policies. Likewise, race governs many decisions people make in their personal lives — where they buy a home, where they work, where they send their children to school, who they marry and what clubs they belong to . . . Not even the most devout white liberals, who claim to love multiculturalism and extol integration as vitally important, would by a home and live with their children in a black neighborhood. Such liberals demonstrate a grasp of reality in complete contradiction to what they profess to believe. (Frank Borzellieri, Race: America’s Eternal Cross, Ledger (Queens), Oct. 9, 1997.

Dat Ol’ Black Magic

Two NAACP national board members have admitted stealing money entrusted to them, and two others are under investigation. The most famous case is that of Hazel Dukes, who was appointed by New York City mayor David Dinkins to run the city’s Off-Track Betting Corp. She stole $13,000 from a woman who had taken extended leave from the corporation for cancer treatment. The woman gave Miss Dukes access to her bank account, and only recently discovered it had been looted. When Miss Dukes was head of OTB she made history of sorts by managing to run the bookie operation at a loss. She fired white employees for such openly racial reasons that the city had to pay millions in damages. She continues as an NAACP board member and close personal advisor to Chairwoman Myrlie Evers-Williams.

James Ghee was recently sentenced to six months in jail for stealing more than $38,000 from an estate that was in his trust. He is still on the board. Rev. Henry Lyons, whose marital and financial antics have come under national scrutiny, is also still on the board. Yet another member, Bobby Bivens, was recently arrested when he was found to be more than $20,000 behind on child-support payments.

The NAACP adopted a new code of ethics in 1995 after several scandals came to light. Former board chairman William Gibson had run up more than $112,000 in phony expenses, and former executive director Benjamin Chavis had run up $32,000. Mr. Chavis also used several hundred thousand dollars in NAACP funds to pay hush money to a woman who accused him of pawing her. Chairwoman Evers-Williams says she does not defend the current crop of directors but notes that none has so far been accused of stealing NAACP money. “It’s a very different situation,” she explains. (Paul Shepard, NAACP to Review Ethics Policy, AP, Nov. 3, 1997.)

More Hands in the Till

A black lady lawyer from Chicago whom Ebony magazine described in 1994 as one of “30 Leaders of the Future” has been disbarred for embezzlement. In 1995 and 1996 she stole $17,589 from the scholarship fund of the Black Women Lawyers Association. When her theft was discovered, Stacey Burnham tried to repay the money but her check bounced. (Patricia Manson, Lawyer Who Took Scholarship Funds Merits Disbarment: Panel, Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Sept. 22, 1997, p. 3.)

Found the Culprit

The city of Chicago has finally figured out why there are so many vacant and vandalized houses in some neighborhoods. According to a city-commissioned report, mortgage lenders have been “lining their pockets,” making loans to risky borrowers who miss payments and lose their homes. The mortgage companies get away with this because the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guarantees repayment of loans to certain substandard borrowers. A spokesman for the National Training and Information Center, which prepared the study, says federal safeguards are needed to stop the “devastation block-by-block, family-by-family.”

Of the 5,500 FHA loans that have gone sour since 1987, 4,000 were made in black neighborhoods. There has been enormous pressure on both public and private lenders to lend money to blacks to prove they are not “racist.” Now the FHA is accused of “devastation.” (Leon Pitt, FHA Loan Practices Hit, Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 16, 1997, p. 1.)

African Research Breakthrough

We reproduce the following Reuters news item verbatim and in toto:

An academic from Ghana surprised a world population conference in Beijing on Wednesday by presenting research on family planning based partly on interviews with the dead. Using soothsayers, Philip Adongo asked village ancestors for advice on the ideal size of a family in a tribal area of the west African nation.

‘If I only heard from the living, I wouldn’t get a very good balance,’ he explained. ‘This study has been the first to be conducted of respondents who are deceased.’ The study concluded that small families worked better in a modern society.

(African Population Expert Quizzes the Dead, Reuters, Oct. 15, 1997.)

Fighting Back

The University of Michigan has a typically discriminatory admissions policy. A black or Hispanic with a 3.0 grade-point average and a score 22 or 23 on the ACT examination has a 90 percent chance of being admitted while a white or Asian with the same qualifications has a 13 percent chance. The Center for Individual Rights, which took the Cheryl Hopwood case against the University of Texas Law School, has filed a suit against the University and is being enthusiastically supported by several Michigan legislators. The university expects to spend one to three million dollars defending its discriminatory admissions policy — Michigan taxpayers will pick up the tab. (Rusty Hoover, U-M Admission Fight Costly, Detroit News, Oct. 30, 1997.)

Really Fighting Back

A black 17-year-old walked into a diner in Jackonsville, Florida, wearing a mask and carrying a shotgun, and ordered everyone on the floor. When he grabbed a waitress and tried to make her open the cash register, a 69-year-old patron drew a gun and shot the robber. An 81-year-old also drew a gun and started blazing away. Dervonne Marquise Moore ran away but was arrested at a hospital when he showed up for treatment. Florida led the way in letting citizens carry concealed weapons. (Masked Robber Shot by Customers in Diner, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Sept. 26, 1997.)

Sunk Without a Bubble

A 76-page Government Accounting Office review of the United States Commission on Civil Rights found that the agency has “limited awareness of how its resources are being used.” Records are reportedly “lost, misplaced, or non-existent.” The report notes that “management of projects is haphazard or nonexistent.” This is about as close as bureaucrats ever come to saying the place is a mess. Somehow, this report seems to have gotten no publicity. (GAO Report GAO/HEHS-97, July 8, 1997.)

Life in the Big City

A white graduate student who lives in New York City was going home at midnight when she became the victim of a gang-initiation ritual. Three girls from Harlem, aged 12, 13, and 15, surrounded her at Park Avenue and 69th Street. Without a word, one pulled out a 5-inch box cutter and slashed Rahny Bang in the neck. She managed to stagger into her building and call for help. Her attackers were quickly captured. Police note that a slightly different cut would have severed Miss Bang’s carotid artery and she would have bled to death on the sidewalk. According to one officer, the three young assailants “showed absolutely no remorse when they were busted.” They were trying to qualify for membership in the Bloods gang, which originated in California and requires that candidates slash a stranger without provocation. (Murray Weiss & Bill Hoffmann, Three Girls Busted in Park Ave. “Gang’ Slash, New York Post, Oct. 2, 1997, p. 10.)

‘Take Us Back’

The Indian Ocean island of Anjouan is part of the Islamic Republic of the Comoros. In 1975, it voted for independence from France along with the other Comoro islands but Mayotte, only 25 miles away, voted to stay with France. Needless to say, life is vastly better on Mayotte, and after 22 years of poverty and 17 coups and coup attempts, the Anjouanais have lost their taste for independence. They want to be a French colony again, and have notified Grande Comore, the capital island, that they want to leave the Islamic Republic. Grande Comore says no.

In September, Grande Comore launched a tragi-comic invasion of Anjuan to keep it in the fold. By the time the 300 invaders managed to cover the 23 miles to the smaller island they had not eaten for 24 hours and many were seasick. Most of the troops didn’t even know they were supposed to put down a rebellion. At the first sign of resistance most ran away and dozens deserted. As many as 40 may have been killed.

Anjouan is in limbo. It claims it is no longer part of the Comoros and insists on flying the French flag. France, so far, refuses to take it back. (Suzanne Daley, Indian Ocean Island Yearns to Retie Colonial Bond, New York Times, Sept. 29, 1997.)

Crimes Unspeakable

Charlene Wise is a 35-year-old mother of eight who lives in Philadelphia. For two months she kept her five-year-old daughter, Charnee, in the basement and occasionally left her some scraps on a plate at the top of the stairs. The basement had a dirt floor, and no furnishings or ventilation. The five other Wise children (ages 10 through two) who were living at the house occasionally looked in on Charnee and told their mother the child was weakening. Mother Wise told them not to worry and to tell no one. A few weeks after Charnee starved to death, Miss Wise told her eldest daughter, 18-year-old Denisha who was living elsewhere, what she had done. The daughter told police. Miss Wise, who is reported to be a drug addict, explained to police that she just didn’t like Charnee. Police report that the little girl’s rotting remains weighed 12 pounds. (Barbara Laker, Mother Put Girl, 5, in “Dungeon,’ Let Her Starve, Herald (Miami), Sept. 19, 1997, p. 5A.)

Rushton to the Rescue

Stephen Jay Gould, prolific writer and columnist, has spent his life defending the view that genes have virtually no influence on individual and racial differences. One of his best known pieces of propaganda is a book called The Mismeasure of Man, which was originally published in 1981 and “revised and expanded” in 1996.

In a brilliant, devastating article in Personality and Individual Differences (“Race, Intelligence, and the Brain,” July, 1997, pp. 169-180), J. Philippe Rushton of University of Western Ontario reveals how Dr. Gould simply ignores or distorts inconvenient data. Even better, National Review has published an abbreviated version of the article (“The Mismeasures of Gould,” Sept. 15, pp. 30-34.) showing what a fraud this darling of New York Review of Books really is. Scientists have long complained that Dr. Gould cooks the data, and it is a major achievement to have published this thorough debunking in a popular magazine.

No More Indians

The Los Angeles Board of Education has ordered all schools to eliminate Indian names for sports teams. No more braves, chiefs, warriors or Mohicans. As John Orendorf of the board’s American Indian Education Committee explains, “This is a civil-rights issue, and if we leave civil rights to local control, blacks would still be on the back of the bus.”

One school reports that its girls’ volleyball team is particularly attached to the name “warriors,” and another estimates that it will cost $250,000 to buy new uniforms, logos, stationery, etc. One school tried to explain that no one would name a team for a group it did not admire but the board decided that “a mascot is inherently a subordinate role . . . and it is intolerable for us to continue the practice.” (K.L. Billingsly, L.A.’s Decision on Indian Mascots Stirs Much Debate, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1997, p. A9.)

Somehow, the reasoning seems to work the other way when Southern schools call their teams the Rebels. This is intolerable glorification of the Confederacy.

Sensible Black Man

In the rococo world of racial politics, blacks are sometimes the only people who talk sense. Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond had cleared all the obstacles to establishing an undergraduate major in African-American studies, until it ran into a single holdout on the State Council of Higher Education. Ordinarily, the council rubber stamps whatever a university decides, but Jeff Brown, the only black member, doesn’t see the point of African-American studies. He has pored over the syllabus, read some of the texts, and the more he learns about the major the less he likes it. He thinks a degree in black studies does not prepare students for a job and that the program exaggerates racism.

Says Mr. Brown: “If you spend four years at VCU learning that minorities are relatively powerless and subject to unequal treatment, if you don’t hate white folks when you start this major, you sure are going to by the time you graduate.” (Philip Walzer, Black-studies Plan Has Virginia in an Uproar, Colorado Daily (Boulder), Oct. 9, 1997, p. 1.)

Third World Metropolis

New York City is full of executives but it is hard to find capable low-level workers. Many companies have moved out for precisely this reason, though they would never say so publicly for fear of being called “racist” or anti-New York.

Jean Zatorski is personnel director of a Pfizer pharmaceutical plant in Brooklyn. “The majority of my workers think that they are doing a good job simply by showing up,” she says. Seventy-three percent of the workers are non-white and all think they are “being discriminated against.” When she fires workers and they threaten to hire lawyers, “I pray they do,” she says; “At least then I’ll be dealing with someone rational.” She has EEOC discrimination forms all ready for sullen ex-workers who files complaints. She has never lost a case.

Clay-Park Labs, a major employer in the Bronx, has to keep an extra five to ten percent in excess workers on the payroll to make up for chronic absenteeism. “On a day when everyone comes to work, they have nothing to do,” says the chief operating officer.

New York City workers are so unsocialized, bad-mannered, and ill-dressed that they must be hidden from customers and head-office executives. Service personnel get belligerent when asked to do their jobs. Secretaries with ordinary skills are so desirable and sought after they can make $50,000 a year. (Heather Mac Donald, Gotham’s Workforce Woes, City Journal, Summer, 1997, p. 41.)

Sensible Japanese

As has been widely reported, European countries like Sweden, Belgium, and Finland are beating their breasts because up until a few decades ago they sterilized defectives. Japan, it turns out, had similar eugenics laws, and sterilized 16,520 women without their consent between 1949 and 1995. Unlike the Europeans, the Japanese are shrugging off criticism. They point out that the operations were legal, documented, and on the public record. (Japan Says Forced Sterilizations Merit no Payments, no Apology, New York Times, Sept. 18, 1997.)

Truth is no Defense

A Chicago police district commander has been given a cut in pay and a transfer after his district released a report that was candid about a certain ethnic group: “Hispanic men still think that the way to control their family members and spouses is to strike the other person.” Also: “In the Pilsen neighborhood it is common for the Latino population to drink in the public way” and this “leads to urinating in public.” Police chief Matt Rodriguez promptly cut Thomas Kuroski’s pay by $24,000 a year and sent him to the traffic section. Mayor Richard Daley approves, saying “immediate action was necessary.” (Michelle Roberts, Offensive Report Leads to Shakeup, Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 18, 1997, p. 14.)

All’s Fair in War

Daniel Mofokeng, a former South African guerrilla commander and now an officer in the South African army, says that all whites were legitimate targets during the fight against apartheid.

“It would . . . be a fallacy in the context of white South Africa to talk about innocent civilians,” he explained, adding that the deaths of whites “were nothing to apologize for.” As for bank robberies, “it was APLA’s [Azanian Peoples Liberation Army’s] responsibility to repossess what rightfully belonged to the oppressed and dispossessed.” The best-known of the APLA’s raids was the “St. James Attack” on a white church. Gunmen threw grenades into the church during a crowded evening service and then charged inside, firing automatic weapons. (Remorse, Cable News Network, Oct. 8, 1997.)

Supply and Demand

Since last June, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has fired 22 employees for issuing false driver’s licenses. Since a valid license requires proof of legal residency, buyers are mainly illegal immigrants who pay as much as $2,600 for a license. Hundreds if not thousands of illegal licenses have been issued, some for as little as $100 a piece. (Stacy Finz, Prove of DMV Corruption Extends to Mountain View, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 31, 1997, p. A17.)

Simple Swearing

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform thinks the current citizenship oath is to complicated for foreigners to understand and recommends something simpler.

Current oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; or that I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by law; or that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

Recommended oath:

Solemnly, freely, and without any mental reservation, I hereby renounce under oath all former political allegiances. My sole political fidelity and allegiance from this day forward is to the United States of America. I pledge to support and respect its Constitution and laws. Where and if lawfully required, I further commit myself to defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, either by military or civilian service. This I do solemnly swear.

(Current, Proposed Citizenship Oaths, AP, September 30, 1997.)

Just Making Ends Meet

Antonio Ortiz used to live in Trenton, New Jersey. In June, his neighbors heard “a gunshot and a thump” in his apartment but found his door locked. When police arrived they found Mr. Ortiz, a drug dealer, still alive but with a mortal gunshot wound to the head. Since there were no weapons in the disordered apartment, police thought they had a murder on their hands. They changed the report to suicide and burglary when other witnesses explained that two black teenagers had jumped over Mr. Ortiz’s second-floor balcony immediately after he shot himself. They ransacked the apartment, stole Mr. Ortiz drugs and weapons, and escaped before the police arrived. (Chris Dolmetsch, Street Scavengers, The Trentonian, June 22, 1997, p. 5.)

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Kudos to SFC Steven Barry for his October article exposing the real racial situation in the U.S. Army. Though neocons like Bill Bennett hold up the army as a racial model for America, veterans know better.

The army is more than 30 percent black. Because of affirmative action, many blacks hold positions of authority over non-blacks. Like black government officials, black officers use their positions to help their racial comrades. In one mandatory “sensitivity” class, a black equal opportunity sergeant told us that no one was allowed to wear clothing with the confederate flag on it. When asked about Malcolm X attire, he explained there is a difference between “racism” and “civil-rights.”

Several soldiers, including two Hispanics, told me they would not pursue a military career because of blacks and their racist abuse of power.

James Lubinskas, Cromwell, Conn.

Sir — My husband is 81 and I am 74 and we’re glad we won’t be around much longer to see what is happening. We feel sorry for the young people of today. The U.S. was wonderful when it was 90 percent white, but I know it’s “racist” to say that.

I used to be a “tolerant” person but I am that no more. I see the crime, the deterioration, and the constant complaining about whites. I hate the government for what it is doing to us.

Name Withheld, Winston, Or.

Sir — I enjoyed the September articles about Christianity. It is common to note that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America, but whites need a Christianity that positively asserts their racial identity. We don’t have that now.

T. R. Kelly, Salt Lake City, Ut.

Sir — We are in debt to the heroic work of Frank Borzellieri. While most of us lack the means, the right location, or the “fire in the belly” to make a run for local office on the Eurocentric ticket, Mr. Borzellieri has the latter two in great abundance and might have won if he’d had enough money to overcome dishonest election officials and lying newspaper columnists. Hang in there, Mr. Borzellieri; the game is still afoot.

O. M. Ostlund, State College, Pa.

Sir — Frank Borzellieri’s article was excellent. The inside story of a local political campaign was a real eye-opener. I hope he runs again and this time gets the support of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Middle American News, Nationalist Times, and Instauration. Keep fighting.

Robert Briggs, Punta Gorda, Fl.

Sir — I am sure most of your readers have heard the news about Nushawn Williams, the charming young blackamoor who has been spreading AIDS in western New York State. There are conflicting reports on how many women he swived after he knew he was infected but the number may be as high as 75. Nine new cases have reportedly been traced to him. How does this square with your November review of a book that insists AIDS is virtually impossible to transmit through vaginal intercourse? Did young Mr.Williams take these lassies a la grecque? According to some reports, he plied his sweethearts with money, marijuana, and “other drugs.” Did he share needles with them, too?

Your typical west-New York girl does not have sex with shaggy black strangers in exchange for drugs. Whatever these demimondaines are telling us now, they may well have gotten the virus in some way other than ordinary copulation with Mr. Williams.

Another reason to think there is more to the story than so-far reported is that if Nushawn Williams was such a successful AIDS-monger why haven’t we heard his story many times before? The crack houses must be full of the likes of him. Why doesn’t every inner-city crack smoker have AIDS?

I float these speculations only on the assumption that the author you reviewed is right about AIDS, but his story and the news story don’t add up.

Thomas Judge, Binghamton, N.Y.

Sir — In describing the latest craze among blacks for alligator shoes you mention a Detroit preacher who “stomps and taps his way through a sermon, emphasizing points with his flashy two-tones.” I was reminded of this when I read recently that churches in Africa are now sending missionaries to the United States. According to the pastor of one Nigeria-based church, this is because “the church in Africa is on fire, while the church in America is for the most part losing zeal.” The article goes on to note that all African churches are characterized by “exuberant worship.”

“Exuberant,” of course, is the kind way to describe black American worship. (As I recall, that cold-hearted Swede, Gunnar Myrdal, wrote disapprovingly of American black churchgoers “rolling in a sawdust pit in a state of ecstasy.” My question is this: Why do blacks worship “exuberantly”? It seems to me this is a racial difference Michael Levin and Philippe Rushton should look into.

Andrew Harding, Tully, N.Y.