American Renaissance magazine
Vol 10, No. 2	February 1999

 

CONTENTS

Is There a Superior Race?
Crisis in the Front National
The French Press and the Crisis
Anniversary of a Calamity
The White Man’s Disease
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Is There a Superior Race?

A philosophical answer to the inevitable question.

by Michael Levin

Whether some races are superior to others is a question all racialists must consider, if only because their critics are sure to force them to. Just say that whites are, on average, more intelligent than blacks, and you will be told “Oh, so you think whites are superior to blacks.” If you say that Jews are, on average, more intelligent than gentiles you will be lectured that that sort of thinking led to the Holocaust.

Behind all this passionate confusion lie real issues. Academics tend to duck them, from a desire for scientific neutrality or simply to avoid trouble. They will say that race differences in IQ and temperament have nothing to do with questions of value, that the greater intelligence of whites, for example, is just a fact of nature like blood pressure. But very few people view intelligence this way, and I am sure the typical psychologist prefers that his children have IQs of 120 rather than 80. In fact, both views of racial differences are valid. The scientist’s “Sgt. Friday,” just-the-facts-ma’am approach is basically right, I believe, but at the same time, we must acknowledge that group differences touch people’s deepest hopes and fears.

To sort out these issues we must revisit an old riddle common in college philosophy courses: the place of value in the universe. The question is whether justice is “natural” or “conventional” — that is, whether right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly are objective features of the world, or fictions with no basis in the nature of things. Incidentally, only Europeans have ever reached the level of intellectual abstraction necessary to pose such questions, and the first to do so were the Greeks. They wanted to know whether judgments of good and bad are discovered or invented, whether they are based on reason or on mere projections of human emotion onto the real world. The skeptical view implies that nothing — including one or another race — is inherently better or worse than anything else.

The most eminent ancients — Socrates, Plato and Aristotle — did see value as an objective feature of reality accessible to reason, but they have always had opponents. Socrates’ contemporary, Xenophanes, joked that if horses could draw, they would draw their gods as horses. Plato thought that most men failed to understand the existence of objective good. According to him, the Greek-in-the-street thought that all sensible men were profoundly selfish but had reluctantly agreed to limit their pursuit of self-interest to avoid a catastrophic war of all against all. These agreed-upon limits set on selfishness — which are necessary evils — are the laws of justice. They are like traffic rules: It is useful for everyone to agree to stop on red and go on green, but no one imagines that there is something inherent about red that makes stopping when you see it obligatory. (It is a tribute to Greek genius that the hoipolloi had an opinion on so deep a question.)

Although I have great respect for the belief that God determines what is good and what is evil, I ’m afraid I must count myself among the skeptics. As I see it, nothing in the world is good or bad, or right or wrong, or better or worse. People, like other organisms, have preferences, some of which are more common in some groups than others, but none is objectively better or worse than any other. They just are.

It is not right or good that a lion catch the gazelle he is after, although a catch will certainly please him, and, as Xenophanes might have added, if lions could talk they would doubtless say that gazelle-catching was “proper” and “what all decent lions deserve.” Gazelles, for their part, dislike being caught and would, if given voice, accuse lions of violating their rights. In fact, the universe roots for neither. There is no neutral standpoint from which to rank the lion’s evolved appetite for gazelles against the gazelle’s evolved aversion to being lunch. It is not possible to say which is right or wrong.

So in my view it makes no sense to say that one race is better or worse, superior or inferior, to another. It makes as little sense as saying that lions are “better” than gazelles.

Before I go into my reasons for this, let me add a few words about that singular value called morality. Man alone has preferences about preferences, his own and those of others. For instance, most of us not only want to be honest and punctual, we want others to be honest and punctual, too. In fact, most of us feel distinctly uneasy about doing things we don’t want others to do. This higher-order desire, that our actions conform to general rules that we can also prescribe for others, is the essence of morality. A person is said to be conscientious or principled when he subjects his behavior to the golden rule, the how-would-I-like-it-if-everyone-did-that test.

Concern for morality, like other traits, is not equally distributed. In Why Race Matters and elsewhere I cite evidence that, on average, blacks are less concerned than whites about the golden rule. This is clearly suggested by the very high rates of black criminality not only in the United States but around the world. At a more mundane level it is also reflected, for example, in the unwillingness of many blacks to take turns and a tendency of blacks to “talk back” to movies (which displays a lack of sympathy with audience members who want to watch in silence).

Having taught philosophy for many years to a “diverse” student body, I have been able to compare the preferences and actions of different groups by using a classic philosophical conundrum. When I introduce ethics I always ask my students what you should do if a supermarket cashier gives you too much change, and there is no chance of discovery if you pocket it. While I have not kept precise statistics, disproportionately more black students say that “you’d be a fool” to return the money. Many back up their position by saying that the mistake is the cashier’s problem. When I ask what they would do if they were the cashier many reply, irrelevantly, that they wouldn’t let it happen to them.

Why conformity to universal rules is important to whites may be linked to another Caucasian specialty, the quest for scientific knowledge. The hallmark of scientific explanation is that it follows general rules. Whenever you say that A is why B happened, you implicitly refer to a law of nature. When you say the window broke because the baseball hit it, you have in mind that whenever glass of that sort is struck with a sufficiently great force, it shatters. We find events comprehensible when they fall into general patterns, and we find behavior acceptable only when it obeys rules. It is no coincidence that the race that invented science is also the one pre-eminently concerned with right and wrong.

Having said this, I reiterate that being moral — being concerned with the golden rule — isn’t better in any absolute sense than being amoral. It is a preference, neither right nor wrong, that some people feel more intensely than others, and that still others lack altogether.

Skepticism

The basic reason for skepticism about values is that they explain nothing. There are, as I see it, only two grounds for believing in something: It can be observed, or it is needed to explain something else that can be observed. I believe in elephants because I have seen them at zoos. I believe in electromagnetic waves because, if they didn’t exist, television could not be explained. Values are not observable — you cannot literally see the goodness of helping a blind man cross the street. Nor is there any phenomenon that requires values to explain it. Nothing in nature happens because it is right; lions chase gazelles and gazelles run away because of natural selection, not because it is “right.” Human beings act as they do, not because of right and wrong, but because of their convictions about right and wrong, and I believe these convictions are ultimately explained by natural selection.

So we seem to be back at the Sgt. Friday position, with its corollary that high intelligence and moral concern are not inherently better than dim-witted amorality. There is no progress over evolutionary time, just change — tendencies, for instance, for organisms to display more intelligence, but no direction towards something inherently better.

This position has its attractions, chiefly as an all-purpose reply to inevitable nagging about “racism”: You can doggedly insist on the facts of race and disavow any moral interpretation. But not only will this never satisfy egalitarians, it misrepresents what people ordinarily have in mind when they make comparisons. People do not usually intend some sort of cosmic, absolute judgment when they make comparisons or talk about superiority. Not even the most fanatical users of Apple computers claim that Macs are just better than PCs, period, in the eyes of God. What they have in mind is that Macs are better than PCs according to certain accepted standards like speed and ease of use. Beef is not graded according to some mysterious quality of inherent goodness, but by tenderness and marbling. Of course, accepted standards may change, but so long as the standards in force are clear, there should be no misunderstanding.

In fact, people have four definite standards more or less clearly in mind when they compare human groups, and relative to those standards it is possible to draw conclusions about different races.

1) The first of these standards is influence. The most salient test for ranking individuals is influence: How different would the world be if so-and-so had never been born? (Michael Hart uses this test in his book The 100, which is his list of the most important people in history.) Columbus is more important than Joe Blow because the world would have been very different without Columbus, whereas Joe Blow’s absence would scarcely have been noticed. This test applies to groups as well as individuals. The Greeks were more important than the Iroquois because they made more difference to the world as a whole.

It is a matter of verifiable fact that the influence of whites dominates mankind. Had blacks never existed, Europe and Asia would be pretty much as they are today. Had Asians never existed, the world would be somewhat different, but still recognizable. But a world in which there had never been Europeans is unimaginable. It is not just that everyone else has been Westernized in the superficial respects that are easy to criticize, like clothing and music. Western science and technology shape mankind’s building, trade, transportation, communication and education. Cars are almost everywhere, and where there aren’t cars there are bicycles — both Western inventions. People pay bills by check, an innovation of late medieval Europe. They erect large structures according to mechanical principles discovered in the West. Terrorists attack with guns of Western design and explosives mixed according to Western chemistry. Every high school student in the world learns Cartesian co-ordinates, another product of Caucasian ingenuity.

2) The other side of the coin of influence is emulation. Every other culture wants — covets — the control over nature that Western man has achieved by scientific methods of thought. It is important to emphasize this standard, for egalitarians always describe Caucasian influence as “imperialism,” as if whites forced it on the rest of the world. Not so; other countries would give a great deal for Western standards of living, infant mortality rates, longevity, productivity and individual freedom. While from a cosmic point of view no culture may be better than another, when all sides agree in prizing the products of one culture, there is from a practical point of view not much to argue about.

This is not to say that other cultures always realize or admit that they emulate the West. They often treat the fruits of Caucasian science as natural resources they are entitled to. Negotiations about sea-bed mining are forever breaking down when backward countries demand that the Western world give them their “fair share” of the world’s mineral wealth. They ignore the fact that it takes Western ingenuity and effort to extract it, and that effort and ingenuity deserve to be rewarded. But it is clear that if a magic wand could give the Third World Western skills, Third-World critics of “imperialism” would wave it without hesitation.

Western values are emulated not just collectively, but individually. Everyone admires the traits in which whites excel, chiefly intelligence. Do not be fooled by the esteem in which athletic and sexual prowess are held by some groups. Intelligence may not be valued as highly elsewhere as it is at an American university but there is no culture in which the local equivalent of “bright” is not a compliment nor “stupid” an insult. The picture is fuzzier for traits like law-abidingness, but on the whole Caucasians and Mongoloids excel Negroids in individual traits that members of all three groups prize. In many of these same traits Mongoloids slightly excel Caucasians, while in others — perhaps originality — Caucasians excel Mongoloids.

To repeat, it is a verifiable fact that all cultures agree on the value of certain traits. This is why racialists are always accused of claiming racial superiority when they note the high intelligence of whites. The average person values intelligence, and assumes that other people, including psychometricians and racialists, do too. So when he hears whites described as more intelligent than blacks, he naturally concludes that the speaker is calling whites superior. This, after all, is the inference he would draw from the same data. Deep down, even egalitarians view intelligence as an important standard of personal value, so, since they would conclude that whites are superior if they admitted to themselves that whites are more intelligent, they foist this view on racialists. Hearing someone say a steak is tender and juicy, you would as a matter of course assume he is praising it. You would be surprised and a little doubtful if he insisted he was only describing the steak’s properties.

3) Closely related to the emulation standard is that of efficiency. Given certain goals or ends common to all groups, one group is considered “superior” when its means to those ends are most efficient. “Better” often means “is a better means.” Crop rotation, for example, is better than sacrificing to the Sun God, because it produces a bigger harvest. By this means-ends test, Caucasians have created a verifiably better civilization because it more readily secures certain universal goals.

Every group has wanted indoor lighting, for instance. Most have achieved it with dangerous, expensive fire, while whites achieved it with cheap, easily controlled electricity. Every culture has wanted the ability to travel from one place to another. All have attained walking speed — about 3 miles per hour. A few have mastered the horse, allowing them to move at about 10 miles per hour. Caucasian mastery of jet propulsion allows people to travel in comfort at 600 miles per hour.

Of course, the desirability of speed and indoor lighting are not inscribed in stone, and one can imagine a society consciously eschewing them. The Pennsylvania Dutch still ride carriages rather than drive cars. But since the desire for technological advance is in fact so widely shared, and Caucasians are better at achieving it than anyone else, Caucasians are “superior” in the sense of having developed the best means to certain universal ends.

Technological preeminence is not the only source of Caucasoid means-ends superiority. Let me describe some recent experiments that shed light on how Western moral attitudes create wealth and other generally accepted goods. Western morality is more efficient.

Suppose someone gives me $10, but with the following proviso: I am to offer you any part of that $10, from one cent to $5 to $9.99. You then decide whether or not to take my offer. If you take it, you get what I have offered and I keep the rest. If you reject my offer, the $10 is taken back and we both get nothing. We both know these conditions. What do I offer you? What offer should you accept from me? (There is a real-world parallel: Having discovered there is gold on my land, but being physically weak, I offer you a share of the profits to mine it for me. If you turn me down, the gold stays in the ground and neither of us is any better off. What deal should we strike?)

From a strictly logical point of view, one would expect you to take any offer, down to a penny for you and $9.99 for me. After all, even a lopsided deal like that leaves you a penny richer. However, when this “take it or leave it” game has been tried on Germans, Americans, Yugoslavs, Japanese and Israelis, offers that deviate significantly from $5 for each person are almost always rejected — in effect punished — and no player ever accepts a split as unbalanced as $2.50 for him, $7.50 for the fellow making the offer. What is more, very few players from these countries ever offer a deal significantly more advantageous to himself than $5/$5, perhaps because each player knows that no such offer will be accepted.

The reason for this seems to be a sense of equity, probably innate, that moves players to punish behavior they see as unfair, even at some cost to themselves. This moral indignation, though it may appear irrational and counterproductive, is one of those rules by which sensible men bind themselves for the sake of their own and everyone else’s long-run profit. For imagine a society of egotists with no compunction about making lopsided offers in the interest of maximizing short-term gain. No one egotistical enough to feel entitled to a $9.99/1¢ split is likely to settle for the one cent when someone makes that lopsided offer to him, so in such a society few beneficial bargains will be made. In such a society I will offer you one percent of the profits for mining my gold, you will give me a piece of your mind, and we will both remain poorer than we need to be. In a society where everyone has a sense of equity and 50/50 offers are apt to be made, these offers are also apt to be accepted, and everyone will become better and better off. Emphasis on equity leads to mutually enriching bargains.

My sense is that Mongoloid moral systems put less emphasis than Caucasoid on conscience but endorse similar rules of fairness. I would love to see take-it-or-leave-it experiments with subjects of different races, although I cannot imagine such experiments being allowed in the present climate. I would predict that racial differences would be found in the lopsidedness of offers made and in offers accepted, with whites and Asians tending toward a 50/50 equilibrium, with blacks more inclined to make — but disinclined to accept — offers deviating from this midpoint. Please recall the “you’d be a fool” view of keeping incorrect change. This attitude would surely encourage short-sighted, unbalanced offers; would it also lead to the acceptance of such offers (since a penny is better than nothing) or militate against them? I suspect the latter, but I would like some data.

4) A fourth criterion of group excellence is power: When the ordinary person calls one group superior to another, he may mean that members of the first group can be counted on to defeat equal numbers of the second in battle. However unlovely, this is a standard people often have in mind, and there is no doubt that Caucasians predominate. The weapons they have invented would allow easy conquest of the planet, and they would meet resistance only from societies that have managed to imitate the weapons of the West. Nor is there much doubt that, say, a thousand Caucasoid males could organize themselves into a more effective fighting force capable of defeating a thousand Negroids. It is not clear that whites would have equal success against Asians, but again it must be remembered that ever since the Middle Ages, Asian armies have done reasonably well against white armies only by using white inventions. If in our imaginary 1,000-on-1,000 battle each group is restricted to weapons developed by its own society, whites would certainly win every time.

This standard is not as brutish as it sounds, since, for better or worse, military power is the upshot of traits that are admired in their own right: courage, intelligence (to devise better weapons and better treatment for the wounded) discipline, audacity, and concern for the group.

Superiority by this standard also has some interesting demographic implications. The first is that whites may well govern — that is, occupy virtually all positions of power — no matter what ideology is dominant. Blacks and non-European Hispanics may become more numerous in the United States, but even in a democracy they will have to have someone to vote for, and whites will generally manage to be the ones that get into a position to be elected. (We see this with the sexes: there are more female than male voters, but at the national level virtually all leaders are men.) This may explain why whites rule in Brazil, even though the black population is proportionally much larger than in the United States. It is not that blacks think whites are more fit to rule, it’s just that the naturally dominant group always does dominate.

Thus, I fully expect that when 2050 rolls around, and assuming (as the demographers assure us) whites become a minority, whites will still rule because they will be better organized. However, at some point they will be unthroned through sheer weight of numbers — perhaps by the 22nd century.

Thus, according to four common criteria — influence, emulation, efficiency and power — whites come out on top, but as I have pointed out, a determined skeptic can reject all four. We can fully expect egalitarians to reject them, at least in public: “What’s so great about influence or intellect or the capacity for moral thinking?” I doubt that anyone can mean this question seriously, but it can’t be answered except by appealing to other standards egalitarians can also disingenuously challenge. All anyone can do is point out that we do care about these things, and ask anyone who doesn’t to suggest traits we should care about more.

As I emphasize in my book, the values we have as individuals and as a culture are the ones we can’t help but use. While upbringing counts to some extent, our values are the heritage of eons of selection. We are born with them. That is the way we are. One can be objective about one’s own values for a few hours in the study, but detachment becomes impossible as soon as the world presses in. Values are like emotions. I know intellectually that the grief I might feel for the death of a son is a biological adaptation — nature’s way of making sure I take better care of my other offspring — but realizing that emotions are a trick of neural wiring would not reduce my suffering one bit.

The much touted “wisdom of the East” that teaches the extirpation of emotions is foolish. It can easily counsel an alienation from one’s own deepest commitments, and this trivializes life. The Western approach of engagement with the world, with its attendant risks of suffering, is more honest.

Each group therefore finds its own standards best, and judges the rest of the world by them. How could it be otherwise? A group of people that disapproved of its own nature would suffer a spiritual dissonance not conducive to survival, and psychologists tell us that pride in one’s ethnic group is a sign of mental health (although this sort of pride is supposed to be reserved for non-whites). By Caucasian standards Caucasians are best.

Critics of white “ethnocentrism,” like Capt. Reynaud in Casablanca, pretend to be “shocked I tell you, shocked” that whites give the highest grades to white writers, artists, composers, statesmen and inventors. What do they expect? If blacks preferred non-black culture, these same critics would say that whites have taught blacks to hate themselves. In any case, even if ethnocentrism is bad it is inevitable. We have the values we have, and we have no choice but to apply them.

So what should you say if someone asks you whether you believe in racial superiority? Ask him what he means by “superior,” what standards he has in mind. If he can’t or won’t answer, remind him that the question was his. If he doesn’t know what “superior” means, he is as much as admitting that he doesn’t know what he is talking about — and if he doesn’t know what he is talking about, why should you continue the conversation?

If he says accusingly “You know darn well what I mean,” pin him down: Tell him you know what you mean, but not what he means. If you finally elicit a concrete standard from him apply it, but remind him that any aspersions cast are his. For instance, if he says creation of material wealth is a measure of superiority, point out that, yes, white societies are richer than others and therefore better by his criterion, and that it is he, not you, who is assuming the value of wealth. This tactic will shame the most shameless egalitarian. In his heart he believes that, by his own criteria, whites (and Asians) are better than blacks. Since he will never admit this, with luck you can at least get him to go away.

Prof. Levin is in the Department of Philosophy of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This article is adapted from his remarks at the 1998 American Renaissance conference. A review of his book, Why Race Matters, was the cover story of the October, 1997 issue of AR.

ARTICLE

Crisis in the Front National

A split into two warring factions is a jarring setback for French nationalists.

by Jared Taylor

The Front National, the party that has attracted world-wide attention for its ringing demand that France remain French (see AR, April and November, 1998), is in the midst of an ugly and destructive internal power struggle. The party now appears to have split into two irreconcilable factions, one loyal to the FN’s founder and president Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the other under the leadership of his former second-in-command, Bruno Mégret. It is now likely that French nationalists will face the June, 1999, elections for the European parliament with their forces divided and badly weakened. The split, which has provoked spiteful behavior on both sides, is especially regrettable because it appears to have arisen largely from personal rather than political disagreements.

The FN was founded in 1972 by Mr. Le Pen, who has dominated it ever since. His movement has always attracted very capable lieutenants, and Mr. Mégret, who has been with the party since 1985, is one of the most capable. For the last several years he has been the most prominent of Mr. Le Pen’s inner circle, and has been considered to be the most likely successor to the 70-year-old president of the party.

The current crisis, which burst into hideous bloom in December, may have had its origins in the party congress in Strasbourg in March 1997. In the elections for top party positions (other than president), Mr. Mégret won the largest number of votes, followed by Jean-Yves Le Gallou. They both outpaced Bruno Gollnisch, thought by some to be Mr. Le Pen’s favorite. Samuel Maréchal, who is married to one of Mr. Le Pen’s daughters, came in a distant 19th, and another daughter, Marine, did not even win office. Mr. Le Pen was displeased. He reportedly tried to keep the vote count a secret and even went so far as to claim that a “computer malfunction” caused his daughter’s poor showing.

Some observers believe that it was the Strasbourg vote that first shook Mr. Le Pen’s confidence in his hold on the party. Later in 1997 he put considerable responsibility in the hands of Jean-Claude Martinez, a man hostile to Mr. Mégret, but did not, himself, appear to be undermining him. When he was asked in a January 1998, press interview whether Mr. Mégret might succeed him as head of the party, he replied “Why not?” but added that there could be other candidates, too.

The FN had an excellent showing in the French regional elections that spring and relations appeared to be back to normal until Mr. Le Pen made the notorious “Jany” decision. The president of the FN had been found guilty of assault during a brush with a socialist candidate during the regional elections, and it seemed likely that as part of his punishment he would temporarily lose the right to stand for office. The next big campaign was to be for the European parliament in 1999, with balloting by list of party candidates. This is a system common in Europe, in which each party presents a list of candidates to the voters, who do not vote for individual candidates but for political parties. Each party then wins seats in proportion to the number of votes the party receives. If the FN won enough popular votes to give it, say, 15 seats in the Euro-parliament, the first 15 names on its candidate list, in descending order, would take office. The most secure position for a candidate, therefore, is at the head of the list. Candidates further down the list fail to win office if the party does not get enough popular votes.

Who was to head the FN list if Mr. Le Pen could not run for office? In mid-June, Mr. Le Pen proposed Jany, his young and relatively recent wife who, though charming, has never held office. This did not sit well with many in the party, who found it highly irregular that an untested spouse should head the list rather than a seasoned party leader. In July, Mr. Mégret visited Mr. Le Pen at his home to lodge a formal protest against this choice but Mr. Le Pen held firm. Later that summer Mr. Mégret stated publicly that he thought Mrs. Le Pen a poor candidate and added that “if the chief cannot stand, it should be his second in command who takes his place.” Shortly thereafter, Mr. Le Pen pointedly observed that in the FN there is “only one number, and that is number one.”

Tension continued into the fall, before the crisis reached a temporary resolution. The appeals court reduced Mr. Le Pen’s period of ineligibility from two years to one, which meant he could run in the June, 1999, elections. Jany Le Pen no longer had to head the FN list, and party activists hoped for peace and reconciliation. They didn’t get it. On Nov. 18, José Péruga, an FN city councilman and third-generation conservative activist who had, on three occasions, stated before television cameras that Bruno Mégret would be a better candidate than Jany Le Pen, was expelled from the party. The one-sentence expulsion letter charged him with “repeated breaches of discipline.”

This was only the beginning. During a November meeting of the inner circle, during which Mr. Le Pen reiterated that he was the sole head of the party and that his was the only photograph approved to be hung in party offices, he alluded to the financial difficulties the FN was facing. Not long after, on December first, the party fired two popular and well-regarded officials who were close associates of Mr. Mégret — “for reasons of economy.” Jean-Yves Le Gallou spoke for many when he grumbled that there was plenty of FN money less well spent than their salaries. Mr. Mégret himself objected to the dismissal of “two of my closest and oldest collaborators,” which he called “brutal and without cause.”

Just four days later, a meeting of the FN’s national council that was supposed to be a strategy session for the upcoming Euro-elections, turned into a shouting match. The two former employees were officially barred from the meeting, but one, Nathalie Debaille, managed to elude security and slip in by a side door. The room erupted with cheers, and cries of “Nathalie,” while a furious Mr. Le Pen vainly called for order. He was met with jeers and catcalls — the first time party members had booed him in 25 years. In the tumult he called an emergency meeting of the FN’s powerful, 30-member political bureau, which remained closeted for two hours. Later, back in general session, Mr. Le Pen made a call for unity and promised a full party congress for December 27, 2000.

The next day, in a statement that many friends of the FN found difficult to forgive, Mr. Le Pen accused Mr. Mégret and his supporters of rallying an “extremist, activist, and even racist minority” within the party against him. He also used, for the first time, the term “right-wing extremists,” which is the pejorative formula the press generally uses to describe the front, and suggested that Mr. Mégret resign from his high position as “general delegate” of the FN.

The name-calling was too much for many activists. Pierre Vial spoke of Mr. Le Pen’s “overgrown personality cult,” and predicted that the previous day’s national council was the beginning of a reevaluation of how the front does business. Sure enough, the next day, Serge Martinez of the party’s political bureau called for the FN’s full membership to be canvassed on the question of whether to hold an emergency party congress. According to party by-laws, a congress will be held if 20 percent of the — 42,000 registered members formally request one, and only a party congress has the theoretical power to remove the party’s president — Mr. Le Pen — from office. Mr. Martinez, once a close personal friend of Mr. Le Pen, was promptly suspended from the political bureau.

Two days later, on Dec. 9, Mr. Mégret voiced his support for a party congress and was removed from his FN position as general delegate. The next day, Mr. Le Pen was on the radio, accusing Mr. Mégret of having carried out a months-long campaign of “subversion, seduction and intrigue,” and of attempting a “putsch.” The following day, Mr. Mégret and four of his closest colleagues — all members of the political bureau — were fired from their party posts, an act from which there appears to be no turning back.

Since then, the civil war has degenerated into farce and invective. Mr. Martinez, who first called for the emergency party congress, accused Mr. Le Pen of diverting mail from the post office box Mr. Martinez had opened to receive the petitions of party members. He has since published copies of Marine Le Pen’s pay stubs, claiming that the youngest daughter gets $6,000 a month from the front for less than full-time work. In Marseille, a raiding party from one faction was got up to force its way into the offices of the other faction and seize membership lists; there were no injuries but criminal charges have been filed.

On regional councils all over France, elected FN members have divided into factions during official meetings and treated each other with exaggerated politeness or stony silence. Mr. Mégret, who had long refrained from invective, has called Mr. Le Pen “an absolute monarch” who prefers to remain in “sterile opposition” rather than actually win power. Jean-Yves Le Gallou says that Mr. Le Pen “was once the locomotive of the Front National but is now a ball and chain.” And throughout it all, Mr. Le Pen has continued to purge dozens of former supporters — including Pierre Vial and even the mayor of Marignane — whom he now calls “felons” and “mutineers.” Divisions in the party have raised thorny questions about party funds. In 1997 the French government supported the party to the tune of about $7 million, in proportion to its electoral successes. Where does the money go, now that elected officials are at war with each other? Banks that had been prepared to lend money for the Euro-parliament campaign are backing out for fear the party could go broke. There is sure to be a legal battle over who may use the Front National name and tricolor flame logo.

Many local campaigns are in jeopardy. Mr. Mégret had planned to run for mayor of Marseille, but admits it will now be a much harder fight. “What do you do,” he asked a group of supporters, “when you go into the market place and our opponents call us ‘racists’ and say: ‘It’s your own president who calls you that’?”

There has also been heartache of the most painful kind. Marie-Caroline Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s eldest daughter, lives with one of the “felons” who support Mr. Mégret. Her father has accused her of being “linked to one of the leaders of sedition,” adding bitterly that “it is perhaps a law of nature that carries a daughter towards her husband or her lover rather than towards her father.” Marie-Caroline was sent to her father with an olive-branch proposal to reunite the two factions in a confederated “national movement,” but the plan went nowhere.

Meanwhile, the “Mégretists” claim to have gathered 15,500 signatures of party members in favor of an emergency party congress — well over the 20 percent figure specified in the by-laws. They have announced a congress to be held Jan. 23 and 24 in Marignane, the mayor of which is a “mutineer.” Bruno Gollnisch, now effectively number two man in the Le Pen faction, has called it a “pirate congress that will be held despite all statutory regulations,” and has warned that participants will be expelled from the front.

On Dec. 23, Mr. Martinez called on reporters to come watch him present copies of the signatures to FN headquarters six days later. The press obligingly showed up only to find that the building was closed for the holidays. Mr. Mar-tinez admitted that he knew in advance it would be closed, but brandished petitions for the television cameras, claimed that “the real FN will be the one that emerges from the congress,” and accused Mr. Le Pen of violating party by-laws by not supporting the congress.

The split now appears irreconcilable, and there are likely to be two separate and hostile “Front National” lists before the voters for the Euro-elections. According to a poll published on Dec. 28 by the leftist newspaper, Libération, ten percent of the electorate is likely to vote for the Le Pen group and only four percent for the “Mégretists.” Mr. Mégret called the poll “tendentious” and “meaningless” while Mr. Le Pen claimed that his party base was “95 percent faithful.”

Is this terrible crisis really nothing more than a clash of personalities? Not entirely. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a very unusual and flamboyant figure in contemporary French politics. His charisma and oratory have won the FN a loyal following, but he is not cut from the elite-school, semi-aristocratic cloth from which the French like to fashion their politicians. He has also drawn what many consider to be unnecessary fire because of provocative comments about such things as the holocaust and racial differences. For some time, a number of FN activists have thought it high time that Mr. Le Pen stepped aside to let men like Bruno Mégret and Bruno Gollnisch take charge. They are both very much in the intellectual mold of the French politician: Mr. Mégret is a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, and Mr. Gollnisch is a lawyer and graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques. Both have the polish the French elite admires, and there is considerable sentiment in the FN that although the other parties feel compelled to demonize the front so long as Mr. Le Pen is at the helm, they would be willing to work out real power-sharing deals once he were gone.

In a Jan. 1 article, the leading French paper, Le Monde, which has always inveighed against the front, expressed the same idea as a fear rather than a hope:

“It is the spin-off Front National that we should fear rather than the Front National that remains faithful to Jean-Marie Le Pen, because it is only the ‘bureaucrat’ Bruno Mégret rather than the ‘prophet’ Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has the technical ability to establish the new order proclaimed by the ‘prophet’.”

Others suspect that Mr. Le Pen has simply been in opposition for so long that he has developed a “bunker” mentality. As Mr. Mégret put it in an interview on Dec. 5:

In politics there are two ways to betray your principles. One can abandon them for emoluments and high office, and I totally condemn this kind opportunistic politics. But you can also betray your principles by not doing what is necessary to ensure victory and by seeking refuge in the comfort of perpetual opposition.

It is now all too likely that Mr. Mégret will be leading his own opposition party. He may now be able to put his theories into practice — but with far fewer means than he would have liked.

SPECIAL REPORT

The French Press and the Crisis

The great irony of the struggle ripping the FN apart is that for the first time in its history the press is giving it blanket coverage. For years, the FN has faced the blackout: Despite its remarkable electoral successes, the media have ignored it when they could and treated it with contempt when they could not. Now, the leading leftist daily, Le Monde, has been running major stories about it nearly every day, and whenever a member of the political bureau turns around someone points a microphone at him.

Perhaps because they have been starved for media coverage for so long, FN leaders have rushed to make use of the press — against each other. Public insults have only hardened positions and embittered protagonists. Rivarol, the tart, nationalist weekly that has long supported the front, wrote in its Dec. 18 issue:

“There is only one way out of this disaster: No more interviews, no more press conferences, no more press releases. There must be radio and television silence for ‘only silence is golden.’”

The carnage continued unabated, while the leftist media jeered and the nationalist press fretted. Some supporters took sides. National Hebdo is a privately-held weekly of which Mr. Le Pen is the principal shareholder. Its editor, long-time Le Pen supporter François Brigneau, was well aware that it could be his last article for the paper when he reproached the FN president, calling his behavior “heart-breaking” and “dispiriting.” “I can never consider as traitors to their party or to their homeland those leaders who have called for an emergency congress,” he wrote.

Présent, a daily affiliated with the traditional Catholic movement, has kept a strictly neutral editorial line, carrying statements and press releases from both camps. The weekly Minute has not taken sides, but in a Dec. 16 editorial observed, “We are convinced that there are no ‘traitors’ nor ‘felons,’ but men who are all earnest in their desire to carry their ideas forward.”

Rivarol has been shouting “Cease-fire!” since the beginning. Its editor, Camille Galic, points out that the front’s “sole reason for existence is the salvation of the French and the preservation of our people,” and her paper has been deeply critical of anyone who weakens the FN. “We show no maturity,” she wrote “in tarring today’s adversary, who may have been yesterday’s leader or comrade in arms. The reconciliation of the troops, if not of the leaders, should be our sole objective.” In her last editorial of the year, she wrote, “Peace on earth to men of good will, for the only desire that should prevail today is to save France.”

Sadly, there is no peace today within the Front National.

ARTICLE

Anniversary of a Calamity

The arrival of the Empire Windrush heralded the betrayal of two peoples.

by Adrian White

Fifty years ago, an aging rust bucket of a ship called the Empire Windrush crawled into Tilbury Docks of London at the end of a 5,000 mile voyage from Kingston, Jamaica. On board were 492 Jamaicans in search of work in England. No-one foresaw on that day that within half a century British children would become a minority in the schools of our capital city. Yet so it has come to pass.

The Windrush’s cargo was not exactly welcomed ashore. One Labour minister expressed the belief and indeed the fervent hope that Jamaicans would not be able to stand an English winter. They proved him wrong. Characteristically, the British people grumbled, their rulers expressed private reservations, but no-one actually did anything. Throughout the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Afro-Caribbeans flooded into England in the steps of Windrush’s advance party. Despite serious rioting in Notting Hill brought on by racial tensions, the establishment looked the other way and did nothing.

In 1956 Lord Salisbury, continuing the Cecil family’s tradition of public service, warned in cabinet of the danger of continuing mass immigration, but Prime Minister Harold MacMillan refused to incur the hostility of the liberals inside and outside the Tory party by checking the flood. On the contrary, he and his successors acquiesced throughout the 1960s in a huge influx of Asians, who differ both from us and from one another not only ethnically, but also in religion, so ensuring that the tripartite sub-continental civil war between Hindu, Sikh and Muslim would one day be fought out on the streets of British towns and cities.

The 1970s saw more Asians move here after they had been expelled from East Africa. These newcomers had been in Kenya and Uganda for a century. Multiracial societies are less irreversible than liberals think! During that time they kept themselves apart (to coin a phrase) from the Africans, refusing to integrate into societies which they came to dominate economically, while feeling no loyalty to them, instead retaining traditional family, religious and communal links to India. India incidentally was very willing to take these long lost children back. The truly despicable Ted Heath took a day off from his main work of selling our national independence to Brussels, to betray the British identity of Leicester, by virtually insisting that the Ugandan Asians should go there instead of returning to their country of ethnic origin. Oddly enough, Heath now chooses to live in the idyllic surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral Close, instead of one of the little Asias that he created in his anxiety to show off his “anti-racist” credentials.

After Margaret Thatcher famously expressed her “understanding” of people’s fears of being swamped by coloured immigrants, some expected a change for the better. They were wrong. Her time in office was marked by very high levels of immigration. Whole new groups such as Vietnamese, Ghanians and Nigerians settled here in great numbers, adding to the marvelous diversity of our society, so well illustrated in 1981 and 1985 by the Brixton, Handsworth, Toxeth and Broadwater Farm riots. John Major’s wretched premiership saw Somalis streaming in, taking advantage of our absurd asylum laws, to be followed by ghastly “new Labour’s” special contribution, hordes of Czech gypsies, unwanted in their own country, but welcomed to Dover by our Tony.

Economic migrants posing as refugees are even now entering the country at an officially acknowledged rate of over 60,000 a year. The true figure is probably over 100,000.

The results of such collective stacking of our nation’s funeral pyre are now becoming apparent even to the most dim witted and willfully blind of our compatriots. A London Research Centre study reveals that English children are now in a minority in London schools. One child in three in London schools does not speak English as a first language. Many important provincial cities are in even worse case than the capital, particularly in the Midlands, but also in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Politically correct Labour councils discriminate against the indigenous population in jobs and housing. Elderly, poor, frightened white people who have the misfortune to live in richly diverse multicultural areas cower behind bolts and bars in their decaying blocks of rent-subsidized council flats, too afraid to go out after dark for fear of falling prey to marauding packs of “youths.” Oppressive laws designed to stifle debate cow the indigenous population into silence (isn’t it wonderful to live in a free country?). Gangs of Bangladeshis carry out vicious assaults in broad daylight on white youths in Regent’s Park. They know that they have little to fear from a police force whose commissioner is uninterested in racist attacks if the victim is white.

Where do we go from here? The first step is to recognise that the blame for what has happened does not rest with the immigrant and immigrant-descended communities, who have come to Great Britain in the misguided pursuit of a better life than they imagine that their own countries can offer them. At the beginning, they were encouraged to do so by employers of labour anxious to keep down wages. Later, politicians in both main parties gave them a false picture of their likely reception, so betraying both the indigenous population and the immigrants. Our own leaders have failed and betrayed the British people, and continue to do so. William Hague’s cavortings at last year’s Notting Hill carnival (he called it “Britain’s greatest cultural event”) help to explain why life-long Conservatives are now abandoning their party in droves.

The next step is to consider what can realistically be done to improve matters. A good beginning would be to enforce the law as it stands. Hundreds of thousands of Africans, Asians and even Latin Americans are present in this country illegally. The Home Office, the immigration service and the police should prioritise the apprehension, detention and expulsion of illegals. The disgusting individuals, many of British origin, who traffic in illegal immigrants and bogus marriages, should be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law and severely punished. Naming and shaming such creatures would be very salutary.

Many illegals work in the aptly named black economy for unscrupulous employers, who welcome cheap labour, whatever the source. Slum landlords house these people, knowing or suspecting that they ought not be in our country. The Swiss have made it a crime to employ or house illegal immigrants. So should we. A few prosecutions of tacky company directors who knowingly employ illegal immigrants on social security to flip hamburgers in their disgusting “restaurants” and Rachmanite landlords who fill up fire trap tenements with sweated labour would work wonders in discouraging those who put their own interests before those of the nation.

Next, the asylum laws must go. Asylum seekers should be permitted to remain in the country only at the Home Secretary’s discretion, for which he must be politically answerable to Parliament, and in the last resort, the British people, who would have ample opportunity every five years to express a view on his stewardship. Obviously we would welcome any Solzhenitsyns who happen to arrive on these shores, but Hutus who have murdered their Tutsi betters and Somalis whose clan warfare has reduced their own country to a waste land need not apply. No more do we need or want Islamic fanatics who hate Western society, yet use the national territory of the United Kingdom as a base for their terrorist activities against friendly foreign states and important economic partners such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria and indeed France, whose governments justly resent our refusal to curb the criminal activities of dangerous terrorists posing as refugees.

Were these relatively modest measures to be applied, the non-European population of the United Kingdom could be significantly reduced, probably by about a million, which of itself would represent a big improvement on the present state of affairs. What of the longer established millions who would yet remain?

Contrary to optimistic liberal predictions from the 1960s, these communities are not integrating. Young Afro-Caribbeans are much more alienated from our society than their elders, brought up to look to England (however mistakenly) as their mother country. Adapting Lord Tebbit’s perceptive “cricket test,” how many “Black British” flew Jamaican flags to show support for the Reggae Boyz’ valiant efforts against much better paid opposition during the World Cup, but felt not a shred of interest in the progress of the English side? How many young Asians are rediscovering their ancestral religious and cultural heritage, rejecting multicultural deracination in favor of communal and religious identities deeply rooted in the Indian sub-continent but, shall we say, not entirely relevant to Wolverhampton? Second and third generation Afro-Caribbeans and Asians are less and not more British than their parents and grandparents, who often identified with the Queen and the flag, feeling an unrequited love for all things British, for which their children care not at all, preferring the red, yellow and green Rastafarian colours, the saffron banner of Hindu militancy, and the green flag of fundamentalist Islam to the Union flag.

It is likely that a policy of encouraging resettlement by financial subsidies would be very popular both with the indigenous and the immigrant and immigrant-descended populations. Asian religious leaders have suggested that “return to the house of Islam” is the only option for devout Muslims unwilling to see their children lose their religious and cultural identity in an alien land. Radical and innovative thinkers in the black community are openly debating the possibility of return to the Caribbean or even Africa as the only alternative to the demeaning underclass existence of social security, hamburger flipping “jobs” and criminality, which is all that white liberal society offers them in the deep but unacknowledged latent racism and snobbery that underlies its phony, patronizing condescension to all those, black and white, not born in Hampstead with silver spoons in their mouths. Many in the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities retain strong links with relatives and friends in their countries of origin, would easily integrate into their social structures, and are by no means reluctant to consider the option of return.

Fifty years on, the time has come to face up to the problems of our disintegrating, swamped, violent, hopeless and utterly failed multi-racial society, lest England should one day become a new Rwanda, Sri Lanka, or Bosnia, running with rivers of blood.

No-one chooses to be born into a particular group, so we should have hatred for none, except perhaps our own political class, who have so shamefully betrayed their own people. We should also have no illusions. Except that we take action to reverse the disastrous policies of the last fifty years, all history shows that Britain will have no better a fate than Kosovo.

Notes

— Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, 1893-1972, held various ministerial posts. He strongly opposed immigration, once noting that a proposal to permit deportation of criminal immigrants did not address the real issue, which was “whether great quantities of negroes, criminal or not, should be allowed to come” at all. He was a prominent defender of Enoch Powell after the 1968 “rivers of blood” speech.

— William Hague is the current leader of the Conservative Party. The Notting Hill Festival is an annual street carnival held in one of London’s black neighborhoods. Last year, Mr. Hague called the festival “Britain’s greatest cultural event.”

— Peter Rachman, 1919-1962, was an unscrupulous London slumlord.

— Norman Tebbit is a Conservative spokesman in the House of Lords. The Jamaican soccer team that competed in last year’s World Cup was called the Reggae Boyz.

Mr. White lives in South London. This article first appeared in the July-September, 1998, issue of Right NOW! (BCM Right, London WC1N 3XX, UK), and is reprinted with permission.

BOOK REVIEW

The White Man’s Disease

Anti-racism on the rampage in Britain.

The Commission for Racial Equality: British Bureaucracy and the Multiethnic Society, Ray Honeyford, Transaction Publishers, 1998, 313 pp., $44.95.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Robert Frost once defined a liberal as someone who can’t take his own side in an argument. Since perhaps the 1960s, even whites who consider themselves “conservatives” have behaved like liberals if the subject was race. When non-whites make demands in the name of race, far from taking their own side in the argument, whites act as if they don’t even have a side.

One might assume this was a uniquely American affliction born of remorse for slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, but one would be wrong. As Ray Honeyford shows in this book, the British are just as susceptible to racial brow-beating, double standards and extortion as Americans. In fact, despite completely different historical experiences of race, the two countries have developed anti-white ideologies and bureaucracies that are virtually identical. In some respects the British may even behave more spinelessly than we do.

Mr. Honeyford’s perspective is one of plain common sense sharpened by more than a little direct experience. He is a retired teacher who spent many years in the big-city schools where the effects of Britain’s attempts at multi-racialism have been most acute. To begin where he ends, he argues strongly that all anti-discrimination laws, along with the bureaucracy that has sprung up to enforce them, should be abolished.

Although Britain’s experience with large numbers of non-whites dates only from the 1950s (see previous article), the country enacted typically repressive race relations laws with astonishing speed. Mr. Honeyford traces the chain of events that led to these laws back to the British Nationality Act of 1948. It was passed during a wave of post-war gratitude to the colonies for their support in the war against Germany, and granted citizenship and residence rights in England to all subjects of the crown. At the time, no one expected that the empire would disintegrate by 1960 or that masses of ex-colonials would head for Britain. The arrival of thousands of non-whites led to the 1958 race riots in the Notting Hill section of London, and in 1962 Parliament shut the door on mass immigration. Mr. Honeyford suspects that guilt over this necessary measure contributed to passage of the first Race Relations Act in 1965 — just one year after the landmark Civil Rights Act in the United States.

In some respects the first law was only a modest step towards tyranny: It banned discrimination only in public accommodation and not in employment or housing. It set no penalties for infractions nor did it set up enforcement machinery, though it did establish something called the Race Relations Board to examine complaints of discrimination. More ominously, the act established a new crime: incitement to racial hatred. In order to convict, it was necessary to prove that a defendant intended to incite hatred, which was hard to do, but he could be found guilty even if the “hatred” he incited led to no action of any kind. It became illegal to encourage an emotion.

This was quickly followed by the 1968 Race Relations Act, which extended non-discrimination to employment, housing, and provision of goods and services. It was in 1976, however, that the current anti-racist machinery was firmly bolted into place. Yet another Race Relations Act abolished the Race Relations Board, replaced it with the Commission for Racial Equality, and gave the CRE the broad powers it now enjoys. Most significantly, the CRE was authorized to issue Codes of Conduct, which spell out in great detail how the British must behave in order to avoid racial discrimination. The CRE was also given the authority to investigate alleged violations and issue corrective orders. (These can be appealed, but anyone who is subject to a CRE order is guilty until proven innocent.)

Perhaps most remarkably, the act wrote into law a key concept that it would take the U.S. Congress another 15 years to recognize: disparate impact, or what is known as “indirect discrimination” in Britain. According to this doctrine, any job standard or requirement that disproportionately disqualifies non-whites is automatically suspect and must be justified in excruciating detail. Finally, Parliament made it easier to convict on a charge of incitement to racial hatred. It is now no longer necessary to prove intent: So long as a judge or jury can be persuaded that speech could inspire hatred, even the sweetest of motives is no defense.

Mr. Honeyford argues that any law against incitement of feelings is noxious, but that it says much about the race-obsession of today’s Britain that racial hatred is the only kind an Englishman may not incite. He may promote class hatred all he likes — and plenty of lefties do — and he may promote religious or national hatred. But as Mr. Honeyford explains, the 1976 act was based on the view that “blacks and Asians face such profound hostility at the hands of the majority population that they cannot reasonably be expected to make any real progress, unless they enjoy legal protection, and privileged access to public goods.” Since the British were so hopelessly “racist,” government interference in freedom of speech, contract, and association were required on an unprecedented level.

And that, of course, is what they got. The CRE now has a staff of 200 busybodies and has drafted “codes of practice,” for employment, housing, and education. These codes have a murky judicial status in that although their requirements for racial head-counting, sensitivity training, “numerical goals,” etc., etc. are not legally binding, any large company that fails to follow them can find itself under investigation. Investigation is a kind of terror tactic whereby the CRE makes the largest possible media din while it runs a company or local government body through the wringer. It then likes to take several years going through records, interviewing employees, and generally making a pest of itself before it announces — inevitably — that it has unearthed the most shocking wickedness.

It then issues its usual series of demands for humiliating, costly, and time-consuming “remedies.” If the offender does not want to set “numerical goals,” appoint a vice president for minority affairs, hold regular “diversity” seminars, or any of dozens of other measures the CRE may demand, it can appeal in court — a different costly and time-consuming undertaking. All the while, the CRE’s publicity department (65 of its 200 employees work in it) ensures that the ordeal is as widely reported as possible. To Mr. Honeyford’s disgust, most targets of CRE strong-arming meekly do as they are told, with the invariable result that “it is not enough for an employer not to discriminate. He has positively to seek to entice blacks and Asians into his organisation.” It takes only a few high-profile investigations to keep virtually all employers in line. It is now widely understood that the commission’s mantra is “proportional representation” and no anti-white measure should be overlooked in order to achieve it.

Another important activity of the CRE is to ladle out public money for research on race relations. Needless to say, the recipients are lefty-liberal off-white groups with names like Federation of Black Housing Organizations, Muslim Ummah Solidarity Movement, and Black Rights, U.K. Mr. Honeyford observes that what whites think about living in a multi-racial society should presumably be of some interest to the bureaucrats, but “when one considers the way in which the CRE distributes its public money, it is as though this sector of the population does not exist.” Just as in the United States, efforts to “improve” race relations have ceased to be a matter of reconciling the interests of majority and minorities, and are instead outright minority advocacy.

This involves flagrant double standards. For example, the law of 1976 allows race to be part of employment decisions only when employees of a particular race can better meet the “special needs” of people of the same race. “Special needs” are invoked to justify hiring only blacks to provide social services to blacks, or to prevent whites from adopting or fostering black children. Mr. Honeyford notes that “since the notion of ‘special needs’ is such a nebulous one, the scope for the CRE to engage in special pleading on behalf of ethnic minorities is virtually unlimited.” Needless to say, whites have no such “special needs,” so “same-race policies appear to operate in only one direction.”

Another common double standard is to assume that statistical disparities in the achievement or treatment of non-whites are apodictic proof of “institutional racism,” but to ignore disparities that point the other way. One CRE report raged about the fact that blacks in a school district were four times more likely to be suspended than whites. The same report found that Asians were only one fifth as likely as whites to be suspended, but this even greater disparity was of no interest or significance. Mr. Honeyford points out that 37 percent of white men have white-collar jobs, but 45 percent of Indians and 48 percent of Chinese do. This is the sort of difference the CRE grandly ignores, but it can be counted on to fly into a fury whenever disparities run the other way.

Despite its passion for statistics and equal representation, the CRE reports with no trace of irony that two thirds of its employees are non-white. This is a serious disproportion for a country with a minority population of 5.5 percent, but helps explain the extent to which the CRE has become nothing more than a publicly-funded scheme to enrich non-whites and secure special privileges for them.

The CRE has recently been sniffing around public libraries. These it has found unacceptably British and homogeneous, so it has announced that “in all library services — those without, as well as those with multiracial communities — an awareness of the multicultural nature of our society as a whole should be recognized and promoted.” Note that this is to be goal of all library services. One of CRE’s missions is to have libraries stock books in foreign languages — but it cares only about foreign languages spoken by non-whites. German or French books are not, in its view, a meaningful form of “diversity.” As Mr. Honeyford points out, the CRE really wants to turn libraries into immigrant cultural centers; it never suggests that they might help assimilate immigrants to what is left of the British way of life. For whites, libraries are to have one clear message: “Our transformation into a much less homogeneous population than hitherto is to be perceived and transmitted exclusively as a cultural enrichment.”

Another way to encourage immigrants to keep their languages is to insist on mother tongue instruction in school. There is an increasing clamor for this among British lefties, and one of the arguments the CRE likes to make is that since parents in Wales can have their children taught in Welsh, Indians in Britain should get instruction in Urdu. The difference, which the CRE fails to understand, is that Welshmen living in England would never dream of asking for instruction in Welsh.

Mr. Honeyford makes the important point that not only has the CRE won the support of elite opinion, it faces no organized opposition. The BBC, for example, works on joint productions with it that are nothing more than anti-white propaganda — which it believes implicitly. In 1994, for example, it reserved 46 percent of its high-status trainee positions for non-whites. As Mr. Honey-ford points out, this is probably legal in Britain, but even if anti-white discrimination were not legal, the CRE would not investigate it. On the contrary, discrimination is the only way to meet the “numerical goals” it is so fond of setting.

Mr. Honeyford warns that the CRE is constantly asking for more power and that the current Labor government might actually grant it. The CRE cannot now launch an investigation of a company or government body on pure hunch. In the current climate of racial grievance it is not hard to gin one up, but the CRE must have a complaint before it starts snooping. This it finds intolerable and wants complete freedom of action. What is worse, when it finds discrimination — which it always does — it wants its remedies to be beyond appeal. It wants to be able to issue commands that must be obeyed. Given the CRE’s unerring ability to sniff out “racism” virtually anywhere, this would essentially make it the most powerful organization in the country — which, no doubt, it longs to be.

Mr. Honeyford’s position against the CRE is libertarian: Government has no right to meddle in private contracts or to force people into unwanted association. He claims to abhor racial discrimination, but argues that we should be free to practice it. “The notion that people should be compelled to love their neighbor,” he writes, “. . . is never far from CRE policymaking.”

Despite his good arguments, excellent research, and illuminating case studies of CRE bullying, Mr. Honeyford fails fully to understand the CRE. He pointedly refuses to accuse it of bad will or to question its motives. But from the facts he presents it is clear that this is a bureaucracy — two thirds of whose employees are non-white — that simply seeks advantage for non-whites at the expense of whites. Its purpose is racial imperialism, not racial reconciliation. It has found a way to use the white majority’s own money to disadvantage whites economically and politically and advance the interests of non-whites. Its objectives are precisely the same as those of American “civil rights” organizations, which are unapologetic expressions of a racial will to power.

The great riddle is why white-majority societies permit this, why whites have lost the ability to take their own side in an argument. The unhappy truth seems to be that this potentially fatal disability is found in every white country that has opened itself to multi-racialism.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

I, Fraud

Rigoberta Menchu is an anti-white, women’s rights, darling-of-the-left Guatemalan who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for uplift work among her people, the Quiche Indians. Her fame derives largely from a 1983 autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu, about how harrowing it was to grow up among the oppressed. The book is required reading in many American university courses in history, anthropology, and political science. After several years of research and interviews, an American anthropologist has now found that many of the events described in her book are false. David Stoll discovered, for example, that although Miss Menchu wrote about a brother who starved to death, and another who was burned to death by soldiers, this was pure fiction. She also described a land dispute with wicked white people, but the real dispute was with her own relatives. She claimed she had received no education but in fact attended two private boarding schools on scholarship.

The New York Times has also confirmed many of the book’s falsehoods, but Prof. Stoll doesn’t want to be judgmental: He says he is “not attacking the laureate herself, but a story that did serve a useful purpose at one time” because it called attention to oppression. Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, is aware of Prof. Stoll’s findings but says “there is no question of revoking the prize.” Miss Menchu, of course, says Prof. Stoll’s research is a racist campaign against her.

As part of her uplift work, Miss Menchu was a leader of the URNG, a Marxist guerrilla movement that caused havoc in Guatemala for decades. She insisted on a policy of unconditional victory and would not enter into peace talks even after she won the Nobel Peace Prize. (Nobel Winner’s Story Challenged, AP, Dec. 15, 1998. Alfonso Anzueto, Nobel Winner Menchu Defends Book, AP, Dec. 17, 1998. Stephen Schwartz, A Nobel Prize for Lying, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 1998.)

Stay Out of Jail

According to a report on prison rape to be released by Human Rights Watch, white male prisoners throughout America are often gang raped and traded as “sex slaves” by black inmates. Some prison guards appear to encourage this. The report will seek to draw attention to what it calls the “staggering presence” of prison rape.

The report will come too late for Michael Blucker, a 29-year-old white man from Illinois who was repeatedly gang-raped by blacks while serving a sentence for burglary in Illinois’ Menard State Penitentiary. “I was the only white man in a gallery [wing] of more than 100 prisoners,” explains Mr. Blucker. Eventually he was claimed by an entrepreneurial black “owner.” “He would physically threaten me and threaten to have harm done to my wife outside prison. Every day, I would be sold as a sex object while he was given money and cigarettes and marijuana and alcohol in return.”

Mr. Blucker said he was once attacked by a group of blacks while he was taking a shower. They knocked him unconscious with bricks they pulled out of the wall and then raped him. “I couldn’t tell you if it was one, three, 10 or 15 people,” he says, “All I know is that I felt very unwell.” Mr. Blucker needed extensive surgery for his injuries. He complained to prison officials about the attack but was met with indifference. Mr. Blucker, who is now a free man, also contracted the AIDS virus while in prison. (Fergal Keane, White Men Traded As “Sex Slaves” of Black Prisoners, Sunday Telegraph (London), Dec. 6, 1998, p. 31.)

Since this is not the sort of thing American newspapers like to write about, Mr. Blucker had to find a British paper to publish his story.

A Swedish Dilemma

For decades, Sweden has been the world’s great busy-body, always telling other people how to solve social problems. It was a Swede, Gunnar Myrdal, who preached egalitarianism to the Americans in the 1944 book, An American Dilemma, and the Swedish government gave millions of dollars to the African National Congress during the fight against white rule in South Africa. Sweden is now finding out that racial harmony doesn’t come so easily after all.

After having let in a large number of refugees in the last few years, ten percent of its population is non-Nordic — and not integrating. The New York Times reports that “with immigrants making up more than 80 percent of its 14,000 residents, [the Swedish town of] Rinkeby is a virtually segregated community in the country . . . that once preached racial and ethnic tolerance to the rest of the world.” The Times goes on to note that “the assimilation and acceptance of diversity that the country loudly wished to see in other mixed societies has not occurred here.” Indeed, Swedes steer clear of Rinkeby, which they consider dirty and crime-ridden.

One of Rinkeby’s few remaining Swedes is the deputy director of the district, Dag Jutfelt. “It was so easy in the 60s and 70s to look at television and say, ‘That’s wrong,’” he says. “It turns out we didn’t know so much about the rest of the world when we were telling them how to live.” In fact, there has been so little assimilation that Swedes talk of “third-generation immigrants.” (Warren Hodge, A Swedish Dilemma: The Immigrant Ghetto, New York Times, Oct. 6, 1998.)

The Asian Experience

Ying Ma, a 23-year-old Chinese-American wrote recently about growing up among blacks in Oakland:

My name soon became ‘Ching Chong,’ ‘Chinagirl’ and ‘Chow Mein.’ Other children laughed at my language, my culture, my ethnicity, and my race.”“On rides home from school I avoided the back of the bus so as not to be beaten up. But even when I sat in front, fire crackers, paper balls, small rocks, and profanity were thrown at me and other ‘stupid Chinamen.’

On the sidewalks, black teenagers and adults would creep up behind 80-year-old Asians and frighten them with sing-song nonsense: ‘Yee-ya, Ching-chong, ah-ee, un-yahhh!’

In poor neighborhoods across this country Asians endure daily racial hatred just as I did. Because of their language deficiencies, their small size, their fear of violent confrontations, they endure in silence . . .

So each day they grow more bitter against a group that much of America refuses to acknowledge to be capable of racism: African Americans.

If vocal Asian activists are able to work themselves into a frenzy attacking everyday political tussles and editorial cartoons for their alleged racist motivations, they are obviously capable of confrontation. Why then do we never hear these national activists condemning black racism against Asians in our inner cities?

(Ying Ma, Black Racism, The American Enterprise, Nov./Dec. 1998, p. 54.)

The Price of Black Rule

In 1997, 109 doctors left South Africa, the highest level recorded in a decade. So many have left over the last few years that the country now “imports” doctors from — of all places — Cuba. As part of a program started in 1996, 404 Cubans now work in South Africa’s rural clinics and hospitals. Some of the South African doctors who have stayed question the competence of the Cuban doctors but South African Health Ministry spokesman Vincent Hlongwane dismisses such criticism as “racism” and resentment at losing income to Cubans. (Kathy Chenault, South Africa Brain Drain Leaves Shortage of Doctors, San Francisco Examiner, November 22, 1998, p. A-20.)

A Quota By Any Other Name

In response to a court order banning racial preferences, Texas legislators passed a law last year requiring state universities to admit the top ten percent of seniors from each high school class in the state. This essentially preserves racial preferences for blacks and Hispanics, since many Texas high schools are largely segregated.

This fall, Lydia Davila, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is one of the winners in the new system. She finished at the top of her class in a high school that is 95 percent Hispanic. Her SAT scores were lower than the average at the University of Texas at Austin so she gets special help from a tutor and attends remedial classes that are kept small to help non-whites.

One of the losers is Elizabeth John-son. Miss Johnson, who is white, was an honors student at one of the best high schools in the state, but was not in the top ten percent. She was initially denied admission and had to complete a grueling summer program in order to enter the university. “I feel because of where I live, because of where I was born, I am being punished,” says Miss Johnson. She has friends who were denied admission to the University of Texas and had to attend community college.

University officials are happy with the program, but they were disappointed that more non-whites did not take advantage of it. They will publicize it more vigorously next year. (Patrice Jones, Top-10 Law a Boon to Minorities in Texas, Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1998, p. 1.)

Gray Davis, the newly-installed Democratic governor of California has just announced a similar plan for his state university system. California universities have recently abandoned long-standing racial preferences and have seen the number of non-white college students drop. Mr. Davis now wants to admit anyone who graduated in the top four percent of his high school class, no matter how poorly he does on standardized tests. The new governor is so pleased with this idea that he announced it on the very day he was inaugurated. The regents of the UC system appear likely to approve the new plan. (Michelle De Armond, Calif. Gov. Floats Admission Plan, AP, Jan. 5, 1999.)

Africans on the Way

After several years of genocidal warfare, the Hutu and Tutsi who live in the African countries of Rwanda and Burundi have a fearsome hatred for each other. So fearsome, in fact, that mixed Hutu-Tutsi couples no longer want to live among either group. The United Nations has given such people refugee status, and 228 of them are getting new homes this year — in the United States. They have been checked to be sure they do not have AIDS, and a special refugee organization has given them an orientation course on what to expect in America: everything from “racism” to the fact that a driver’s license is required to operate a car. The refugees will be going to various different cities so perhaps you can look forward to new neighbors.

Last December, a different set of Africans arrived in Houston, Texas, as the first group of octuplets to be born live in the United States. The parents are from Nigeria, and gave the children names like Chukwuebuka Nkemjika and Chinecherum Nwabugwu. One, which weighed only 10.3 ounces at birth, has died. The others are in intensive care and are expected to require about $250,000 each in medical care before they leave the hospital. The father, Iyke Udobi, faces a Feb. 8 trial on an assault charge for hitting his mother-in-law with a chair and for threatening his pregnant wife. (Tom Kenworthy, Octuplets ’ Father Faces Assault Charge in Family Incident, Washington Post, Dec. 24, 1998, p. A2. Jeff Franks, Octuplets’ Mother Leaves Hospital, Washington Post, Dec. 31, 1998, p. A3.)

Hail, Caesar

In November, black Congressman Julius Caesar Watts was voted in as Chairman of the Republican Conference. This makes him the fourth highest-ranking Republican in the House, and he will run weekly closed-door meetings in which GOP lawmakers decide which laws to pass. Mr. Watts, first elected in 1994, represents a rural Oklahoma district and has weathered a series of tax evasion scandals. He also happens to be the only black Republican congressman, and at least a few people think this has something to do with his lofty position. One well-known columnist wrote, “J.C. Watts could hardly have picked a better time to be black . . . To say that Watts, after only four years in Congress, was better qualified than Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the seasoned incumbent he beat [for the job of conference chairman], would be laughable . . .” Who was brave enough to say the obvious? Liberal black columnist Clarence Page. (Clarence Page, J.C. Watts Benefits From Racial Preferences, Tulsa World, November 27, 1998, p.33.)

David Duke Awakes

David Duke has announced that he will run for Congress in the special election for the seat of Robert Livingstone, the short-lived replacement for Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Duke has campaigned frequently for public office. After serving one term in the Louisiana House of Representatives he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990 and for governor of Louisiana in 1991. In 1996 he ran in an open primary for the U.S. Senate. The district Mr. Duke will be contesting is just north of New Orleans and is 85 percent white. He is likely to find strong support.

The 48-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People has also recently published an autobiography and political testament called My Awakening. The 716-page volume traces the development of Mr. Duke’s thinking on race and Jews, and contains many photographs of the author as well as other illustrative material. It concludes with a quotation from George Orwell: “In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Sooner Than Suspected

Demographers predict that in only two years whites will become just another minority in the state of California. Earlier predictions had given the state seven years. Now, the numbers for the year 2001 are expected to be: whites 49 percent, Hispanics 31 percent, Asians 12 percent and blacks seven percent. In 2021, Hispanics are predicted to outstrip whites and become the largest racial group in the state.

Greg Rodriguez at the Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University kindly explains what it will be like in “post-Anglo” California: “Assimilation happens, and it happens to everyone . . . The only difference is that now, as we bump into each other more and more, whites will change and assimilate too.” (Ramon G. McLeod, California Will Be Bursting at the Seams by 2040, Demographers Say, San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 1998, p. A25.)

Whites Can Do no Right

The University of Rhode Island student newspaper, which is called The Good 5 Cent Cigar, recently published a cartoon about the abolition of affirmative action at Texas universities. A white professor is greeting a black who is entering his class. “If you’re the janitor, please wait until after class to empty the trash,” says the Professor. “If you’re one of our minority students, welcome!” The cartoon was meant to be an attack on the abolition of racial preferences, but that made no difference. Black students pronounced themselves insulted and marched to the paper’s editorial offices, where they whooped and threw newspapers on the ground. The Student Senate duly cut off funding for the paper and there has been a mass meeting to discuss “racism” and the First Amendment. The Student Senate repented of its actions and restored funding after volunteers raised money from private sources to keep the paper going. Students say they have never seen the campus in such a state of excitement, but senior Karyn Smith — race unspecified — says it’s useful excitement. “The good thing is they’re exposing racism on this campus,” she says. (Janet Kerlin, Cartoon Triggers Racial Tensions, AP, Dec. 10, 1998.)

Joining the Shakedown

Nicaragua has joined the crowd of plaintiffs that want to get money out of American tobacco companies. The country is suing on exactly the same grounds as several states that recently received huge damages awards: It claims that the companies concealed the dangers of cigarette smoking and wants compensation for smoking-related medical expenses paid by the government. In May of last year Guatemala filed a similar suit against the companies. (Another Latin American Country Files Suit in the U.S., Business Wire, Dec. 10, 1998.)

Out the Elephant’s Arse

Britain’s top art award, the Turner Prize, has been given to a black named Chris Ofili who uses elephant dung in his “paintings.” The winning work is called “The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars Part 2.” It depicts a fat black pop star bursting out of a tinsel outfit and is dotted with blobs of elephant dung. Mr. Ofili used to get his dung in Zimbabwe but now collects it at the London Zoo. “It is pretty straight-forward,” he explained. “It comes out of the elephant’s arse, it dries up and is ready to go.” The Turner prize is worth about $33,000 and the awards ceremony is broadcast live from the Tate Gallery in London. Mr. Ofili’s reaction on learning he had won? “Oh man. Thank God. Where’s my cheque?” (Paul Majendie, Elephant Dung Artists Wins Top British Art Prize, Reuters, Dec. 1, 1998.)

Stop the Police

Chandler, Arizona, a fast-growing and ambitious suburb of Phoenix, had a problem: The downtown was looking increasingly shabby and Mexican. For five days, beginning on July 27, 1997, city police combed the town looking for illegal immigrants. They found and deported 432 — all but three of them from Mexico — in what was considered to be a very successful operation.

Since then the yelping has not stopped. Naturally, the police asked scruffy-looking Mexicans for proof of citizenship, and some scruffy-looking Mexicans turned out to be U.S. citizens. “They just can’t stop people based on looks,” says a Phoenix lawyer, Stephen Monto-ya, who has filed one of several law suits against the city. He says the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was violated because white people in the area were not stopped. Would Mr. Montoya complain if people were stopped because of the way they looked if there had been crimes associated with a Klan rally?

The local papers have piled on with the usual liberal nonsense, and every conceivable government agency has investigated. The police have been bullied into hiring a “Latino liaison”, and Hispanic activists have launched a recall effort against the mayor and two city councilmen who supported the raid. Two and a half years later, the pot is still boiling and, needless to say, illegals have the run of the town. (Hector Tobar, An Ugly Stain on a City’s Bright and Shining Plan, Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1998.)

This is yet another example of racial hysteria making it impossible for the police to do their work. Anyone looking for illegal aliens in Arizona would be a fool not to look for Hispanics, just as anyone looking for crack cocaine dealers in Detroit would be a fool not to look for blacks. Police are more suspicious of men than of women and of young people than of old people; that kind of common-sense is acceptable but racial distinctions, even when they are just as valid, apparently are not.

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — If the points made by Joseph Fallon in his Jan. book review are true — and I have no reason to suspect they are not — he has, indeed, uncovered one of the starkest misuses of history in recent times. I would bet that not one American in a thousand knows that the camps for the Japanese were government-funded refuges rather than jails. Because they are so widely believed to have been concentration camps, the wartime U.S. government is now better known and more widely condemned for the humanitarian aspect of the program — free accommodation for Japanese excluded from the West coast — rather than for exclusion itself. Ironically, the exclusion program might now be less fervently condemned if the Japanese had been left to fend for themselves!

Likewise, who in America knows that Germans and Italians were subject to harsh government action during the war? I can only conclude that Mr. Fallon is correct: Selective reading of history as gross as this can only be the result of the anti-white hostility that has become so fashionable.

Theodore Collins, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Sir — Sharon Cummings’ letter to the editor in the December issue concluded with the observation: “White people are wimps.” How true. We, as a race, do not have the will to survive or even combat the forces that are trying to destroy us. In fact, whites actively contribute to their own demise, unlike no other people in the history of the world.

Perhaps late in the next century when white Americans are a minority, we will realize what we did by surrendering, but by then it will be too late. Does anyone really believe that Hispanics and blacks will be as benevolent toward whites then as we are to them now? There won ’t be civil rights for whites — and we will have surrendered without firing a shot. White people really are weak and afraid, and we will reap the consequences.

Name Withheld, Chattanooga, Tenn.

Sir — Samuel Francis’ December article has an interesting analysis of the phrase “all men are created equal,” but it seems to me that it is a paraphrase of the scriptural verse, “God is no respecter of men.” As such it is a refutation of monarchy. Although we may well discuss what Jefferson meant by “equal,” there can be no doubt that he did not mean that men were biologically equal. Even dimwits can see that all men are not born with the same eye color or gift for music. The left enjoys playing on the ambiguity of words like “equality” to distort the debate to their liking.

Arthur White

Sir — Samuel Francis argues that the old republic came to an end with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which incorporated the equality clause of the Declaration into the Constitution, thereby introducing a “universalist and egalitarian regime.” Not so. Lincoln was a confirmed segregationist and white supremacist, as were all of his successors in office at least through Woodrow Wilson. The transformation of the United States into a “universalist and egalitarian regime” came considerably later, in the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Francis seems to have fallen for the historical sleight-of-hand of current apologists of equality who wish to dress up their pedigree by tracing it back to Lincoln.

Name Withheld, Roanoke, Va.

Sir — The O Tempora item in the Jan. issue about Israelis developing a weapon that would kill only Arabs is just the latest version of the Medieval “blood libel” of Jews. The London Times writers didn’t have the facts, but they wanted to believe the Israelis were doing this. The story was exposed as false in the Forward [weekly Jewish newspaper edited in New York].

Theron Raines, New York, N.Y.

Sir — Although I had to grit my teeth to read the illustration that accompanied it, I am glad you published the Jan. account of the murder campaign against white farmers in South Africa. I have since lain awake at night, thinking about farmers being tortured to death for no reason except that they are white. In healthier times all of Europe would have declared war on a government that permitted atrocities of this kind, but today we do nothing. Far from doing anything about it, whites prefer to pretend it is not even happening. How did we sink so low?

François Boyer, Quebec City, Canada

Sir — I suppose you have heard since the last issue that the Neo-Confederate history course, “North Carolina’s Role in the War for Southern Independence,” was disbanded. Once blacks started bellowing about “racism,” you could hardly expect a little North Carolina school like Randolph Community College to hold out for long. News reports suggest that the president of the college put an end to the course purely on the basis of what he had read in the papers — so much for anything remotely like due process.

Name Withheld, Charlotte, N.C.

Sir — So we are to have Malcolm X on a stamp and a squaw [Sacajawea] on the new dollar coin? At this rate, it is surprising that when the new versions of the $20, $50, and $100 bills came out, they didn’t replace Jackson, Grant, and Franklin with multi-culties.

Carol Cunningham, Albany, N.Y.