American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 12, No.3	March 2001

CONTENTS

Return to the Dark Ages
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Return to the Dark Ages

Censorship is on the rise — is it coming to America?

by Jared Taylor

Americans think of Europeans as essentially like themselves. They believe European societies are like their own — rooted in the rule of law, freedom of religion, democratic government, market competition, and an unfettered press. In recent years, however, Europeans have given up an essential liberty: freedom of speech. It is true that in the United States prevailing orthodoxies on some questions are ruthlessly enforced but it is still legal to say just about anything. Not so in much of Europe. In the last decade or so countries we think of as fellow democracies — France, Germany, Switzerland and others — have passed laws that limit free speech for the same crude ideological reasons that drove the brief, unsuccessful vogue of campus speech codes in the United States.

Today in Europe there are laws as bad as anything George Orwell could have imagined. In some countries courts have ruled that the facts are irrelevant, and that certain things must not be said whether they are true or false. In others, a defendant in court who tries to explain or defend a forbidden view will be charged on the spot with a fresh offense. Even his lawyer can be fined or go to jail for trying to mount a defense. In one case a judge ordered that a bookseller’s entire stock — innocent as well as offending titles — be burned!

Just as Eastern Europe is emerging from it, Western Europe has entered the thought-crime era, in a return to the mentality that launched the Inquisition and the wars of religion. It is a tyranny of the left practiced by the very people who profess shock at the tactics of Joseph McCarthy, an exercise of raw power in the service of pure ideology. The desire not merely to debate one’s opponents but to disgrace them, muzzle them, fine them, jail them is utterly contrary to the spirit of civilized discourse. It is profoundly disturbing to find this ugly sentiment codified into law in some of the countries we think of as pillars of Western Civilization. At the same time, these laws cannot help but draw attention to the very ideas they forbid. Truth does not generally require the help of censors.

There are two subjects about which Europeans can no longer speak freely. One is race and the other is Nazi Germany. “Anti-racism” laws generally take the form of forbidding the expression of opinions that might stir up “hatred” against any racial or ethnic group. In some countries, it is now risky to say that genetic differences explain why blacks have, on average, lower IQs than whites or to say that non-white immigration should be prevented so as to preserve a white majority. There are probably parts of every issue of American Renaissance that could be banned in some European country, and we have an obvious interest in opposing censorship of this kind.

Far more prosecutions have taken place, however, in connection with what is called “Holocaust revisionism” or “Holocaust denial.” This appears to cover any skepticism about the generally-accepted view that the Nazis had a plan to exterminate Jews and managed to kill some six million, mostly by gassing. There is considerable variety in the laws that forbid disagreement on this matter, but the Jewish Holocaust has become the one historical event on which people in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, Poland, Austria, Lithuania (and Israel) can be legally compelled to agree. It is still legal to dissent from Holocaust orthodoxy in Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain, Ireland, and Croatia, but there is powerful pressure in some of these countries to join the censors. Third Reich Jewish polices are of no special interest to AR, but it is outrageous that any point of view on any question be forbidden.

In the United States there is widespread complacency over this blatant thought control practiced by our closest allies. This complacency proves the utter lack of integrity of those who make principled free-speech claims for Communists, pornographers, rap “artists,” and flag-burners, but who will not lift a finger to stop the persecution of “racists” and “Nazis.” Liberals get dewy-eyed over the First Amendment only when it suits them, and are quietly delighted to see their opponents dragged off to jail because of their opinions. Indeed, several thousand Europeans are arrested every year who, if they were leftists, would be lionized as “prisoners of conscience.” Indifference, even joy, over their fate is the contemptible sentiment that prevails across the political spectrum even in America.

France has had perhaps the most colorful history of modern European censorship, perhaps because it has the longest history of Holocaust revisionism. The leftist Paul Rassinier cast doubt on accepted views as early as the 1950s, but it was in 1978 that revisionism came to the attention of a larger European public. In that and the following year Prof. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyon published two articles in the newspaper Le Monde asserting that there were no execution gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. Mr. Faurisson, an expert at textual analysis who made his case from original documents, provoked a storm of opposition.

Nine anti-racist and concentration-camp survivor organizations brought civil and criminal suits against Prof. Faurisson for “falsification of history in the matter of the gas chambers,” a curious charge brought under the French anti-racial-discrimination law of 1972. In April 1983, the Paris Court of Appeals found Prof. Faurisson innocent of “falsification of history” but found him guilty of the equally curious crime of “reducing his research to malevolent slogans,” and made him pay a small fine. At the same time, the court upheld the right to express any opinion on the existence of Nazi gas chambers (presumably so long as it was not expressed “malevolently”), concluding that “the value of the conclusions defended by Faurisson rests therefore solely with the appraisal of experts, historians, and the public.”

This was a setback to the suppressers of free speech, who responded with what is known as the Gayssot law — named for the Communist deputy who promoted it — signed into law in 1990 by President François Mitterand. This law made it a crime punishable by up to 250,000 French francs (at that time approximately $50,000) or one year in prison or both to dispute the truth of any of the “crimes against humanity” for which Nazi leaders were charged at the Nuremberg trials. Prof. Faurisson, who had continued to publish views on the Holocaust, was the first to be convicted under this law, and was fined 100,000 francs in April, 1991, a penalty reduced on appeal to 30,000 francs. He has not given up his work and has been repeatedly found guilty of the same crime. At last count, he has also been physically assaulted ten times and on at least one occasion was nearly killed.

Although the Gayssot law was controversial when it was passed, the French are now happy with it. According to a 1998 Sofres poll, 79 percent think it necessary “because one does not have the right to say anything one likes about the extermination of the Jews.”

The extent of this sentiment explains why there were other convictions for Holocaust-related comments before passage of the 1990 Gayssot law. In 1987 the leader of the French National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined under anti-racism laws, not for denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers but merely for describing them as a “detail” or “minor point” in the history of the Second World War. Astonishingly enough, not only must a Frenchman affirm a certain historical fact, he must attribute to it a certain prescribed importance.

Another French celebrity-turned-thought criminal is Brigitte Bardot, the former actress. In retirement she has become an ardent animal-rights activist and has often denounced the ritual slaughter of sheep by French Muslims during the festival that marks the end of the Ramadan fast. She has also spoken in more general terms, lamenting that “my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims.” Like Prof. Faurisson, she is impenitent and has been fined at least three times — in 1997, 1998 and 2000 — under the 1972 anti-racism law. A judge concluded that Miss Bardot was guilty of inciting “discrimination, hatred or racial violence,” and that her condemnation of Muslim practices went beyond any possible concern for animal rights.

There has been a host of other less-well-known Frenchmen convicted under the censorship laws. In May, 1999, the editor of a small-circulation magazine Akribeia was fined 10,000 francs ($2,000) and given a suspended six-month sentence for writing favorably about Paul Rassinier, the founder of French revisionism. At his arrest, police strip-searched Jean Plantin and confiscated his two computers and a dozen computer disks, destroying the results of several years’ research. In September 2000, a 53-year-old French high school teacher in Lemberg in the Moselle region was fined 40,000 Francs ($8,000) and given a one-year suspended sentence for telling his students that the Third Reich gas chambers were used for delousing clothes and that the concentration camps were not extermination centers.

Censorship cases now get little attention in France unless there are unusual circumstances or the defendant is a celebrity. In July 2000, a local National Front politician in the Rhône-Alpes region, Georges Theil, was charged with “disputing the existence of crimes against humanity.” In what he thought was a private e-mail exchange and using a screen name, he had written, “Homicidal gas chambers never existed for the simple reason that they were simply and profoundly impossible.” Mr. Theil had not counted on the diligence of the French police, who tracked him down through his Internet service provider, Wanadoo, and hauled him into court where prosecutors asked for a six-month suspended sentence. Cases of this kind, which show how deeply the French police are willing to burrow into what people think are their private lives, have been completely ignored in the United States.

Two recent censorship trials that did receive international attention were “the Garaudy affair” and the successful attempt to shut down certain activities by the American Internet portal Yahoo. The Garaudy scandal is particularly instructive because it shows how willingly the left will sacrifice its own to the gods of Third Reich orthodoxy. Roger Garaudy was born in 1913, served in the French army, joined the wartime Resistance, and sat in the French National Assembly as a Communist, first as a deputy and later as a senator. For 25 years he was a major theoretician for the Communist Party, but broke with the comrades over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He continued to teach philosophy and promote anti-racism and socialism. He converted to Islam, and enjoyed great prestige as one of France’s most influential public intellectuals.

Over the years he took an increasing interest in the Palestinian cause, and came to believe Jews were exaggerating the horrors of the Holocaust in order to squelch criticism of Israel. This and other views expressed in his 1995 book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel (published in English in 2000 by the California-based Institute for Historical Review) unleashed not only a flood of criticism but likewise brought the octogenarian into court for violation of the Gayssot law. Prof. Garaudy’s impeccable credentials as a leftist and anti-racist were no defense. In February 1998, he was duly fined the equivalent of $40,000 after a trial that caused a sensation in France and throughout the Islamic world. Probably no event has prompted more interest in Holocaust revisionism among Arabs than the trial of this French Muslim who defended Palestinians. Religious and political leaders from Egypt to Iran denounced France for putting him on trial, and the wife of the president of the United Arab Emirates contributed $50,000 to his defense. Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz wondered about the health of Western societies in which it is commonplace to deny God but a crime to doubt the Holocaust.

The affair took on yet another tragi-comic dimension when Abbé Pierre, one of the most popular and admired men in France, made a few offhand remarks in support of Prof. Garaudy. Abbé Pierre is a Capuchin friar whose real name is Henri Groulès. He came to be known as “the abbé” during his work with the French Resistance smuggling Jews out of occupied France. He has devoted his life to good works for the poor and for immigrants, and has a reputation something like that of Mother Theresa. He had become acquainted with Prof. Garaudy and shared his concern about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. After a few comments in favor of his old friend, he was horrified to discover that despite much backtracking and many apologies his reputation had vanished. He acknowledged he had not read the book, called on Prof. Garaudy to correct any errors, and disavowed any association with Holocaust denial. Even so, leftists whom he thought were lifelong friends turned on him, kicking him out of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, a French anti-racist organization of which he had long been a member. Perhaps the cruelest blow was his expulsion from Emmaus, the charitable organization he himself had founded. Although not charged with violation of the Gayssot law, Abbé Pierre fled to Italy and hid in a monastery until the controversy blew over.

The French case against the American Internet giant Yahoo, which is a gateway to search engines, auctions, shopping and much else caused only a brief murmur of disapproval in the United States, but is an ominous first step in bringing the Internet under the control of European censorship laws. The same International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism of which the abbé used to be member — known by its French acronym LICRA — joined the French Union of Jewish Students in suing Yahoo to stop Internet auctions of Nazi medals, arm bands, photos, autographs and the like. France’s anti-racism laws forbid commerce in anything “racially tinged,” and the California-based Yahoo promptly removed these auctions from its French web site.

This was not enough for LICRA and the Jewish students, who insisted that Yahoo find a way to block French Internet users from reaching Yahoo sites in the U.S., where auctions continued. Yahoo said it was technologically impossible, and the court appointed a panel of three computer experts — American, British, and French — to render a ruling. Two of the experts said it could not be done, but Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez chose to believe the Frenchman, who said it could. In May 2000, he gave Yahoo two months to make it impossible for French Internet users to reach the Nazi auctions. He said he would fine the American company 100,000 Francs (now $13,000) a day if it did not, since the sale of Nazi souvenirs offended “the collective memory of the nation.” Judge Gomez also ordered Yahoo to pay 10,000 Francs to the plaintiffs LICRA and the Union of Jewish Students. A LICRA spokesman hailed the ruling as a great victory for democracy, of all things.

The next month Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo, said his company would ignore Judge Gomez’ order. “Asking us to filter access to our sites according to the nationality of web surfers is very naïve,” he said, adding, “we are not going to change the content of our sites in the United States because someone in France is asking us to do so.” Six months later, in January 2001, Mr. Yang ate crow when Yahoo decided “voluntarily” to stop auctioning anything that bears a swastika or any other “hate” symbol such as a KKK insignia. “Yahoo recognizes that we were right,” exulted LICRA, and Ygal El Harrar, chairman of he Jewish students, welcomed “the return to its senses by the American company.” Incredibly, Yahoo claims daily fines had nothing to do with its decision. Noting that it already bans auctions of live animals, used underwear, and tobacco, it is pretending it is was only adjusting its list of forbidden products.

No one is fooled. Lee Dembart wrote in the International Herald Tribune on Jan. 15, 2001, that the precedent has now been set for any country to try to control the Internet all over the world. China could threaten to fine sites that promote the Falun Gong Buddhist cult, which is illegal in China. Arab countries could fine Internet sites that sell Jewish memorabilia, since such things no doubt offend their “collective memory.” But by and large the American media have had nothing to say about what amounts to the imposition of French law on Americans. Needless to say, there would be a frenzy of denunciation if it were not “Nazis” who were being shoved off the net but, say, abortion-rights activists.

Switzerland

In the minds of Americans Switzerland is an orderly, sensible country of decent, independent-minded people. It is also perhaps the only country that has ever brought censorship upon itself through referendum. Over the weekend of Sept. 24 and 25, 1994, the Swiss voted by a majority of 54.7 to 45.3 percent to make it a crime, punishable by fine and/or up to three years imprisonment, to “publicly incite hatred or discrimination” or “deny, grossly minimize, or seek to justify genocide or other crimes against humanity.” Half of all Swiss cantons voted against the new law but thanks to the overall majority, it went into effect Jan. 1, 1995.

Swiss authorities had not actually needed this law to censor foreigners. In November 1986, the Geneva police stopped two French Holocaust revisionists — Pierre Guillaume and Henri Roques — from giving a press conference and banned them from speaking publicly in Switzerland for three years.

The first Swiss citizen to fall afoul of the new law was Arthur Vogt, an 80-year-old retired school teacher. On June 3, 1997, a court in Meilen fined him 20,000 Swiss Francs ($15,000) for mailing copies of a revisionist book to seven acquaintances and for publishing a private newsletter in which he had written revisionist essays.

In December 1997, a court in Vevey sentenced Aldo Ferraglia, an Italian citizen, to four months in jail and court costs of 15,075 francs. He was also made to pay 28,000 francs in “atonement” to three Jewish organizations for having distributed a number of Holocaust revisionist books, including Roger Garaudy’s The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. At the Ferraglia trial the judge defended the new law by explaining it did not forbid opinion, only the public expression of certain opinions — a distinction that may be a little too fine for Americans.

By June of last year, there had been no fewer than 200 trials and 100 sentences based on the 1995 law. As in France, such trials no longer attract much attention. Probably few Swiss heard about it when animal rights activist Erwin Kessler went to jail for two months for writing that Jews who practice ritual slaughter of cattle are no better than concentration-camp guards.

The press took only slightly more notice of Gaston-Armand Amaudruz whom a Lausanne court sentenced to a year in prison for articles he wrote in his monthly newsletter Courrier du Continent, which he started in 1946 and had only about 500 subscribers, mostly in France. Mr. Amaudruz holds a doctorate in social and political sciences and has been a teacher of French and German. These are the words for which the 79-year-old paid with a year in prison: “For my part, I maintain my position: I don’t believe in the gas chambers. Let the exterminationists provide the proof and I will believe it. But as I’ve been waiting for this proof for decades, I don’t believe I will see it soon.” At sentencing, the judge criticized Mr. Amaudruz’ lack of remorse and noted that he had continued to violate the law, writing “Long live revisionism” in the issue of the newsletter that appeared just before the trial.

Perhaps the most prominent Swiss to be found guilty under the censorship law is 49-year-old school teacher Jürgen Graf. In March 1993, after the publication of his 112-page book, The Holocaust on the Test Stand, in which he cited reasons to doubt the accounts of extermination, he was fired from his job as a teacher of Latin and French at a private secondary school. The French banned the book in 1994. Before long Mr. Graf found himself in court, and in July, 1998, he was sentenced to 15 months in jail for various revisionist writings. Sentenced along with Mr. Graf was his 70-year-old publisher, Gerhard Förster, who got 12 months. The court fined both men 8,000 Swiss francs ($5,500) and ordered them to turn over 55,000 francs ($38,000) in proceeds from book sales. Presiding Judge Andrea Staubli said the defendants’ “remarkable criminal energy” and lack of remorse justified harsh punishment.

Their defense counsel protested that he could not even try to explain the reasons for Mr. Graf’s statements without, himself, being prosecuted under the same law. He also argued in vain that censorship law violated the free-speech provisions of the European Human Rights Convention which Switzerland has signed. Wolfgang Frölich, an engineer called to vouch for the authenticity of Mr. Graf’s findings, found himself threatened with prosecution if he testified. Just as absurdly, the court included The Holocaust on the Test Stand in its reasons for finding Mr. Graf guilty even though he wrote it before the 1995 censorship law.

Mr. Graf decided to flee the country rather than spend 15 months in prison. In November 2000, he ended up in Iran, where he planned to stay for some time. He has been welcomed by scholars in Tehran, and was invited to give lectures at Iranian universities. Mr. Graf does not intend to return to Switzerland until the country restores the right of free speech. As we will see, he is not the only European to go into exile rather than face jail as a prisoner of conscience.

Germany

Since the end of the Second World War, beginning with de-Nazification, Germany has had censorship laws unthinkable in the United States. Nazi songs, salutes, and symbols are illegal even in private, and the country has been as aggressive as any in trying to expand the effects of its own repressive laws beyond its own borders. By now, thousands of people have fallen afoul of anti-Nazi, and “incitement to racial hatred” laws, which violate the German constitution’s own guarantees of freedom of expression. Any number of quite remarkable cases of state-sponsored thought control have gone almost completely unreported in the United States.

Fredrick Toben was born in Germany in 1944 but emigrated with his parents to Australia when he was ten, and is an Australian citizen. He studied at Melbourne University and at universities in Heidelberg, Tübingen, and Stuttgart, and has a doctorate in philosophy. In 1994 he established the Adelaide Institute, in the Australian town of that name, to promote Holocaust revisionism. He sent some material to Germany, and was arrested in Mannheim in April 1999 during a visit. He was held without bail until his trial seven months later and was charged with “incitement to racial hatred,” “insulting the memory of the dead,” and “public denial of genocide.” The court sentenced Dr. Toben to ten months in prison but let him off with a fine of 6,000 marks ($3,500) on the strength of time already spent in prison. As in Switzerland, it is impossible to mount a defense against these charges. Defendants and even lawyers who try to explain or justify their statements have been immediately charged with additional offenses right in the courtroom.

The prosecution tried to charge Mr. Toben on additional counts because of articles on his Australia-based Adelaide Institute web page, but the court ruled that his only violation of German law was to have sent printed matter directly into Germany. Foreign Internet sites were not covered by the law even if Germans could read them. As Deputy Interior Minister Brigitte Zypries explained in July 2000, “That’s life and that’s the Internet. . . . You can’t build a wall around Germany.” Since the government could not use the most serious evidence against him, Dr. Toben got off lightly; the shortest previous sentence for his crimes had been two years, and the prosecution was asking for two years and four months.

However, in December 2000, in a very significant ruling that went virtually unnoticed in the United States, Germany’s highest court, the Bundesgerichtshof, reversed the lower court. It said German law applies to any ideas or images Germans can reach from within Germany, so someone who posts a swastika on a web page anywhere in the world is a criminal under German law. Dr. Toben, whose case provided the high court with the basis of this ruling, could presumably be the subject of an extradition request. As we will see below, Dr. Toben faces problems enough back home in Australia.

One of the few Americans to notice and comment on this extension of German (and French) law to the Internet was Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “We commend the German authorities for sticking to their commitment,” he said; “it’s their democracy, these are their laws.” He went on to praise the French, too: “We have to commend the Germans and the French for basically saying ‘In our societies, this is how we deal with the problems of hate, racism and Holocaust denial. You in America have your own laws, but at least respect our values.'” Perhaps Rabbi Cooper would be pleased to see European-style censorship in the United States.

The case of Germar Rudolf is likewise remarkable. Born in 1964, Mr. Rudolf graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from the University of Bonn and is a certified chemist. After serving in the German air force, he entered a Ph.D. program at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics. While still at the institute he carried out a forensic physical examination of the gas chambers of Birkenau and concluded that for a variety of technical reasons they could not have been used for executions. In 1993 he published his findings in what is called The Rudolf Report, and was promptly dismissed from the Max Planck Institute. A court in Stuttgart ruled that the report “denies the systematic mass murder of the Jewish population in gas chambers” and was therefore “popular incitement,” “incitement to racial hatred,” and “defamation.” The court rejected Mr. Rudolf’s request for technical evidence about the truth or falsehood of his report, ruling that the “mass murder of the Jews” is “obvious.”

Mr. Rudolf has continued to commit thought crimes, editing a compendium of revisionist articles called Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte [Foundations of Contemporary History]. In 1996 a court fined his publisher 30,000 marks ($18,000) and ordered all copies seized and burned. Police raided Mr. Rudolf’s apartment three times, and in 1996 he was finally sentenced to 14 months in prison. Rather than serve time he fled to England, which has anti-racist laws but where Holocaust denial is not (yet) a crime. He is now director of Castle Hill Publishers, which issues revisionist works, and publishes a German-language revisionist quarterly. Jewish groups have brought pressure on the British government to enact laws to outlaw Holocaust denial so that Mr. Rudolf can either be prosecuted in England or extradited to Germany. Like Jürgen Graf of Switzerland, unless free speech is restored in his homeland, he will go to jail if he ever returns. Recently he moved to the United States and has applied for amnesty as a political refugee. It will be interesting to see how the INS, which has stretched “political persecution” to include wife-beating and making fun of homosexuals, will avoid granting him asylum.

One German defendant who did not flee the country was the elderly historian Udo Walendy, publisher of the “Historical Facts” series of booklets. In May, 1996, the district court of Bielefeld sent him to prison for 15 months, and a year later a court in Herford added 14 more months to his sentence. He was also fined 20,000 marks ($12,000) when 12 copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were found in his possession. Judge Helmut Knöner of the Herford court took the curious position that Mr. Walendy was guilty not of a sin of commission but of omission:

“This [case] is not about what was written — that is not for this court to determine — but rather about what was not written. If you had devoted just a fraction of the same exactitude to highlighting the other side [of the Holocaust question], you would not have been sentenced.”

Here we find the tortured reasoning to which censorship laws invariably give rise. To have failed to write about a particular historical event in a balanced manner is a crime that can send a historian to jail. In the court’s view, this one-sided writing was “meant to disturb the public peace,” not withstanding the “exactitude” of Mr. Walendy’s work. Moreover, although Mr. Walendy has been a model prisoner he was denied the usual grant of release after serving two-thirds of his sentence. Authorities explained that this was because he was unlikely to change his views.

It is possible to argue that Austrian censorship laws have already claimed a life. In 1995, Werner Pfeifenberger, a German professor of political science published an essay called “Internationalism and Nationalism: a Never-Ending Mortal Enmity?” in a collection issued by Austria’s Freedom Party. A prominent Jewish journalist attacked the essay, accusing Prof. Pfeifenberger of writing in a “neo-Nazi tone,” and “extolling the national community.” Because the professor had criticized the 1933 Jewish declaration of an international boycott of Germany, the journalist also accused him of reviving “the old Nazi legend of a Jewish world conspiracy.”

The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia dismissed Prof. Pfeifenberger from his teaching position, and a court in Vienna prepared a case against him under Austrian anti-Nazi laws. On May 13, 2000, just a few weeks before the trail, Prof. Pfeifenberger took his own life. His lawyer explained that Prof. Pfeifenberger faced ten years in jail under the charges, did not expect a fair trial, and had already spoken of committing suicide. As in Germany and Switzerland, Austrian law does not permit a defendant to argue the veracity of his statements; offensive “tone” or “diction” is sufficient to secure conviction.

United States citizens have fallen afoul of German censorship laws — without the slightest gesture of support from their own government. Hans Schmidt of Pensacola, Florida, runs the German-American National Public Affairs Committee, which publishes a newsletter. Mr. Schmidt, who fought in the German army, moved to the United States after the war and became a U.S. citizen. In 1995, on a trip to Germany to visit family members, German authorities arrested him for having sent some of his newsletters to Germany. They held him in jail for five months but released him in conjunction with the first part of his trial. Mr. Schmidt, who could have been sentenced to five years in prison, slipped out of the country rather than stay for the rest of his trial.

Another American, Gary Lauck of Lincoln, Nebraska, was not so lucky. Known as “the farm-belt Führer,” Mr. Lauck is an unapologetic supporter of Nazism, and has shipped a considerable quantity of Nazi material to Germany. In March 1995, he was visiting Denmark, a country that does not have anti-Nazi laws, but in an operation of questionable legality, the Danes extradited him to Germany. In August, 1996, a Hamburg court convicted him of inciting racial hatred and distributing illegal materials — which he did legally in the United States and not in Germany — and sentenced him to four years in jail. He served his sentence and returned to the United States, where he continues to promote Nazism.

At almost the same time Mr. Lauck was on trial in Germany, the American citizen Harry Wu — a fervent critic of China — slipped into China illegally on a mission of support for dissidents and was arrested. The U.S. State Department mounted an extraordinary effort to secure his release, but completely ignored Germany’s prosecution of Mr. Lauck.

Another curious case involving the United States is that of a young German musician Hendrik Möbus. Mr. Möbus said provocative things about Jews, gave the Nazi salute during a concert, and later turned up in the United States. In a little-known incident in the summer of 2000, federal officers arrested Mr. Möbus with the intention of extraditing him to Germany, even though his offenses were not crimes in the United States. Apparently thinking better of this unjustifiable proceeding, the government released Mr. Möbus, who promptly turned the tables by suing for political asylum. With the help of William Pierce of the West Virginia-based National Alliance, Mr. Möbus has hired immigration lawyers to argue his case on the grounds that he will be persecuted for his political beliefs if he returns to Germany.

One of the common difficulties for applicants for asylum is that they must prove they face a realistic threat of persecution. In Mr. Möbus’ case, the German authorities have already issued an extradition request in which they openly state they want to send him to jail. Once again, it will be interesting to see how the INS responds.

Neo-Nazi music is increasingly popular in Germany, and bands play a constant cat-and-mouse game with the police. Most make their recordings in secret studios or across the border in Poland, and the recordings are then pressed in the United States. The CDs come back to Europe via Sweden, where the material is not illegal. Mere possession is a crime in Germany, but the authorities estimate there are more than 100 neo-Nazi bands operating clandestinely.

Some repressive measures fall short of imprisonment. In August, 2000, the German postal bank, which is part of the government-owned post office, systematically shut down all accounts used by any group it considered “far-right.” These included Germany’s two main nationalist parties, the German Peoples’ Union (DVU) and the National Democratic Party (NPD). Postbank chairman Wulf von Schimmelmann explained that the measure was “a contribution to political hygiene and cementing of democracy in Germany.”

Thought-control can take a comical turn. In August, 2000, Dresden police ordered a 25-year-old man to get a haircut because he had shaved the back of his head leaving only the letters “SS,” in the distinctive angular script used by the Nazis.

Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany for years, and German companies have been quietly enforcing the ban overseas as well. Publishing giant Bertelsmann polices its US-based website bookstore for titles forbidden in Germany, and is trying to do the same with Barnesandnoble.com, of which it owns 40 percent. Mein Kampf is banned in several other countries, including Holland and the Czech Republic, where distributors were recently fined. There is considerable irony in suppressing Hitler’s turgid autobiography. For years it was common to say that if only people had read it in the 1930s they would have stopped Hitler in his tracks. Now we must presumably be kept from reading it for fear we will follow its advice.

Other Countries

Until 1995, Spain was a popular refuge for dissidents facing prosecution elsewhere in Europe but in that year it passed new laws putting it firmly in the camp of the censors. The first conviction came in November, 1998, when bookseller Pedro Varela was sentenced to five years in jail for “incitement to racial hatred” and “denying or justifying genocide.” His case began in December, 1996, when police raided his Librería Europa bookstore in Barcelona and confiscated 20,000 volumes. Nearly two years went by before he went to trial because many of the books were in English, French, or German, and the court insisted that they be translated into Spanish. In addition to the five-year prison term, the court fined him 720,000 pesetas ($5,000) and ordered all 20,000 books burned-even though only 30 of some 200 titles were found to violate the law.

In December 1998, Mr. Varela appealed the sentence to the provincial court or Audencia of Catalonia, which ruled unanimously in April 1999 that the censorship law violates guarantees of free expression in the Spanish constitution. The case will now go before the Constitutional Tribunal in Madrid. In the meantime, Mr. Varela’s 20,000 volumes have not yet been burned, but he has not gotten them back either. He restocked his store and continued to operate, but in January 1999, a mob of “anti-fascists” smashed through the protective metal shutters of his shop, ransacked it, and burned hundreds of books. Police arrived but did nothing. Mr. Varela rebuilt his store and continues to sell books.

In Britain, despite campaign promises from Tony Blair that Labour would ban Holocaust denial, in early 2000 Parliament resisted pressure from Jewish groups to do so. Home Office Minister Mike O’Brien explained that the government was unable to “strike a balance between outlawing such offensive statements while ensuring that freedom of speech is not unduly restricted.” Since 1986 the Public Order Act has made incitement to racial hatred an offense, but Jewish groups argued this law was inadequate because prosecutors have been unable to show that Holocaust denial incites hatred. This is not to say that these laws have never been used. Although enforcement is sporadic, a few racial nationalists have been convicted.

Originally prosecutors had to prove a defendant intended to stir up hatred, but that was difficult. Later the laws were broadened to permit conviction if hatred was stirred up whatever the intent, but that was also hard to prove. Now, it is sufficient to show a “likelihood” that some act will incite racial hatred, and it was on this basis that Spearhead editor John Tyndall and British Nationalist editor John Morse were tried together and convicted by a single jury in 1986. The prosecution’s tactic was to read page after page of “offensive” material in court and the cumulative effect seems to have convinced the jury what they wrote was “likely” to incite hatred. The judge decided the crime deserved six months in jail. Mr. Tyndall, who after serving his sentence returned to editing Spearhead, despises incitement laws but believes they have the beneficial effect of keeping racial nationalists from using intemperate — and ultimately unpersuasive — language.

Nick Griffin, now head of the British National Party, received a suspended sentence after a similar conviction in 1998. He also edited a magazine, which discussed Holocaust revisionism and opposed non-white immigration to Britain. In his case as well, there seems to have been no clear line between acceptable and unacceptable opinions; his magazine apparently created an overall atmosphere that was “likely” to incite hatred.

Some British anti-racism measures approach outright insanity. A recently-passed law forbidding “racially threatening or abusive words” was recently invoked against a Cambridge man who got into a whispered argument in a library. A woman overheard Robert Birchall tell Kenyan-born Mugai Mbaya to “go back to your own country,” and reported him to police. Mr. Birchall was fined 100 pounds. In the city of Gloucester police officers are reported to have been sent to eat in ethnic restaurants and listen in on the conversations of other patrons so they can charge them with crimes if they say rude things about other races.

Perhaps even more than to Europeans, Americans feel kin to Canadians and perhaps Australians — fellow English-speakers who have established themselves far from the homeland. But here, too, traditions of free speech have crumbled under the pressure of special-interest groups. In October 2000, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission ordered Frederick Toben back from prison in Germany-to remove Holocaust revisionist material from the web page of the Adelaide Institute. Commissioner Kathleen McEvoy said Mr. Toben violated the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act by “having published materials inciting hatred against the Jewish people.” She also ordered Mr. Toben to post a lengthy apology. Mr. Toben refused, saying he would not apologize for material he believed to be factual and that any proceeding against him was immoral if truth was not permitted as a defense. The government-funded commission has no enforcement powers, but could initiate proceedings to have Mr. Toben jailed for contempt.

In Tasmania, the commission has also accused an associate of the Adelaide Institute, 58-year-old Olga Scully, of selling anti-Jewish material and putting it in mailboxes. She also refused to apologize, and the commission announced plans to take her to court. The Russian-born grandmother says she is not intimidated and is “quite prepared” to go to prison.

It will be a surprise to many Americans to know that our next-door-neighbor Canada now has a nearly 20-year tradition of censorship. In 1981 a well-liked secondary school teacher and mayor in Lacombe County, Alberta, named Jim Keegstra was reported to be telling his social studies students that Jews run the world. The school board fired him — which it no doubt had the right to do — but Canadian authorities also charged him with violating section 281 of the criminal code, which prohibits spreading hate against an identifiable group. Mr. Keegstra remained unrepentant during a ten-year legal battle that took him to the Canadian Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction.

The most famous Canadian thought criminal is undoubtedly Ernst Zündel, a German who immigrated to Canada in 1958 and established himself as a commercial artist. Since the mid-1970s he has published and publicized Holocaust revisionist materials, and in 1983 he was charged under section 181 of the criminal code, which prohibits spreading “false news” that the purveyor knows to be false.

His case became something of a cause célèbre, and the trial dragged on for eight weeks before reaching a conviction. Mr. Zündel filed numerous appeals and in 1992 the Supreme Court ruled the law under which he was convicted unconstitutional because it was “an unjustifiable limit on the right and freedom of expression.”

Mr. Zündel was not out of court for long. At the urging of Jewish groups, he was brought before the Canadian Human Rights Commission in what must be one of the most Kafkaesque censorship proceedings of modern times. There is a section of the Canadian criminal code written to outlaw telephone answering machines with “hate messages.” It makes it illegal “to communicate telephonically” “any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred [for reasons of race, ethnicity, etc.].” In a tortured interpretation of this law, Mr. Zündel was charged on the basis of a web page that contains Holocaust materials by him and by others. Although the site is commonly known as the “Zündelsite,” it is based in the United States and run by an American.

Ironically, the Human Rights Commission has been asked to find Mr. Zündel guilty because he is associated with a foreign web page that publishes articles that, in print form, have been found to be legal in Canada. Indeed, the first and lengthiest of the pamphlets cited in the charge is the very one cited in the previous case that was thrown out by the Canadian Supreme Court! What is more, this case has dragged on for an astonishing five years. At the same time, the chairman of the Human Rights Tribunal has conceded that “the truth is not an issue before us. . . . The sole issue is whether such communications are likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” Mr. Zündel, who has spent an estimated $140,000 on the case, recently gave up even trying to defend himself, saying “I would rather save my money and appeal their grotesque ruling when it comes out.” Amazingly, the case continues to drag on without him, with final arguments expected in late February.

Yet another prominent censorship victim has been Doug Collins and the newspaper that used to publish him, the North Shore News. In February 1999, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal found Mr. Collins guilty of acts “likely to expose Jews to hatred or contempt.” Found criminal were four columns he wrote in 1994. Interestingly, the tribunal decided that taken individually none of the columns was a criminal act, but taken together they were. The tribunal ordered Mr. Collins and the North Shore News to desist from further incitement to hatred, and to pay $2,000 to a Jewish man who had brought the charges, as compensation for injury to his dignity and self-respect. It also ordered the paper to publish the judgment in full, which was perhaps the first time the government ever forced a Canadian newspaper to print something against its will. Mr. Collins now publishes on the Internet.

Canadian authorities have been very unpredictable in their enforcement of laws against “incitement of hatred.” They have never been bothered by the lyrics of black rap “musicians” who openly urge blacks to kill whites, but it has taken a very close look at academic studies of racial differences. Canadian customs authorities have seized many shipments of books from the United States including Race, Evolution and Behavior, by Philippe Rushton. Prof. Rushton, who teaches psychology at the University of Western Ontario, has been himself investigated for inciting hatred and nearly lost his job because of his carefully-researched studies of racial differences. Other books Canadian customs have held at the border include Shockley on Eugenics and Race, Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson, The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson, and The Immigration Invasion by Wayne Lutton and John Tanton.

The United States does not have censorship laws but we are creeping in that direction. Hate crime laws are an ominous step, because they add penalties to crimes based on motive. Until the passage of hate crime laws sentencing did not depend on the motive of a crime but whether it was premeditated or spontaneous. You could punch a man because he was fat, black, insulted you, or seduced your wife, and you were guilty of assault. Now, certain motives — that is to say certain thoughts — bring heavier penalties. In February of this year, a Houston, Texas, judge sentenced 21-year-old Matthew Marshall to no fewer than ten years in jail for burning a cross in front of a black family’s house. People who commit gruesome violent crimes often get less jail time.

We have also had a few cases of censorship almost as absurd as those that have begun to crop up in England. In August, 1998, Janis Barton was leaving a restaurant in Manistee, Michigan, and walked by another group waiting to be seated. Those in the other group spoke to each other in Spanish, and Mrs. Barton said, out loud, “I wish damn Spics would learn to speak English.” One of the Spanish-speakers filed a complaint and Mrs. Barton was charged with the crime of committing “insulting conduct in a public place,” on the grounds that what she said were “fighting words” that could provoke violence. A jury bought that argument and the judge sentenced Mrs. Barton to 45 days in jail (she served only a few days). This is an odd case that may not be repeated, but it clearly shows the direction in which hypersensitivity to the feelings of non-whites is taking us.

Another worrying step towards censorship is a law passed just last December 15, which requires all libraries receiving federal money to use content filters on computers connected to the Internet. The idea is to protect people from pornography, violence and “hate speech,” but the makers of filtering software invariably give it a leftist slant. The federal government is using the power of the purse to restrict access to certain views and information.

What These Laws Mean

The full-blown, unabashed censorship laws in Europe and Canada are a giant step backwards in the history of Western Civilization. It was perhaps one of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in human thought to recognize that the social cost of suppressing “error” is far greater than the damage unchecked “error” can do when men are free to refute it. It is cause for great sadness that our European brethren have stepped back into the mentality of the witch hunt, forcing their citizens into exile and making them prisoners of conscience.

Indeed, it is in the defense of prisoners of conscience that Amnesty International (AI) made a name for itself, and cases like those described here would appear to be tailor-made for them. According to their own publications, prisoners of conscience are “people who are imprisoned, detained or otherwise physically restricted anywhere because of their beliefs, color, sex, ethnic origin, language or religion, provided they have not used or advocated violence.” Every person mentioned in this article and thousands more have been charged with crimes because of the non-violent expression of beliefs. AI goes on to say that “all people have the right to express their convictions and the obligation to extend that freedom to others” and that “Amnesty International seeks the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience.”

A number of people have appealed to AI to intervene on behalf of imprisoned Holocaust revisionists but AI refuses. In 1995 it affirmed “Amnesty International’s intention to exclude from prisoner of conscience status those who advocate the denial of the Holocaust. . . .” They took this step on the grounds that dissent from accepted views on the Holocaust means one has “advocated national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” What this means is that AI does not consider someone a prisoner of conscience unless it agrees with him.

It is probably true that some of the people charged under incitement laws really do want to stir up hatred — something that however reprehensible is legal in the United States and should be legal everywhere — but there is no evidence whatever that this is the motive of people like Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Toben, Pedro Varela or Germar Rudolf. It is the people who oppose their work who appear to be driven by hatred. Furthermore, as British prosecutors have found, it is unclear just how disputing the existence of gas chambers or the number of Nazi victims incites hatred against anyone. People are not suddenly going to start hating Jews just because a pamphlet convinces them the Nazis killed only one million rather than six million.

It would be more plausible to say that anyone who harps on slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation is inciting hatred against whites, or that anyone who describes the way Indians mutilated the bodies of Custer’s men at Little Big Horn is stirring up hatred against Indians. If you scoff at the miracles in the Bible are you inciting hatred against Christians? If not, why not? After all, neither the truth of the statements nor the intent of the speaker matters. Laws of this kind cry out for abuse and invidious application.

Obviously of concern to American Renaissance is the possibility that any description of race or sex differences could be considered incitement to hatred. What if the French and the Germans decide discussions of race and IQ are hate-mongering? This is actually more logical than saying skepticism about gas chambers makes people hate Jews. Will AR be banned in Europe? Will people who write for AR be arrested if they go to Europe?

Laws about inciting hatred are really very simple: If you hurt the feelings of certain people you can be charged with a crime. So far, the people about whose feelings one must be most careful are Jews. Pressure from Jewish organizations has turned what may have been intended as universal prohibitions into prohibition of opinions that upset Jews.

Laws of the French, German, and Austrian type that specifically prohibit Holocaust denial likewise reflect the pressure of Jewish organizations. There is only one historical event in all of human history — an event of particular interest to Jews — about which the law forbids dissent. Legally requiring acceptance of a historical event is an absurdity on its face, but why just this one? In January 2000, the French National Assembly voted officially to recognize the Turkish “genocide” of Armenians during the First World War. There are many people who strongly dispute the number and circumstances of these deaths; Turkey angrily withdrew its ambassador after the vote. No doubt there will be vigorous “genocide denial,” “whitewashing of crimes against humanity,” and “insulting the memory of the dead.” Why will this not be a crime in France? One can only conclude that it is because Armenians have less influence than Jews.

But the real shame is how few people, either in Europe or the United States, are willing to oppose this clampdown on freedom. The left loves to quote lines attributed to Martin Niemoller (1892–1984), the German Lutheran minister interned by the Nazis:

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

The message, of course, is that we must be vigilant against wrongs done even to people with whom we may disagree, because if we do not resist evil we may some day be its victims. European censorship laws are precisely the kind of creeping evil Niemoller warned against, but the left ignores them because it has no principles and the right ignores them because it has no spine. Censorship is therefore on the march in Europe and licking at our own borders. We have entered a new Dark Age.

SIDEBAR The Law is an Ass The laws under which Europeans, Canadians, and perhaps now Australians can be prosecuted for thought crimes are of several kinds. The first includes the French Gayssot law, which, though amazing, clearly says what it means: No one is to dispute the genocide or other crimes against humanity for which the Nazi leaders were put on trial at Nuremberg after the war. There is no ambiguity about this. Anyone who says the Nazis did not have an extermination program is a criminal. Laws that forbid “incitement of hatred” are much more ambiguous. These laws are particularly frightening because there is no way to know what they mean. Presumably, if it is against the law to “incite hatred” there should be no conviction unless it is proven that something caused hatred. The prosecution should produce someone who, having read the offending work or heard the offending speech or seen the offending picture or symbol, became a hater. None of the censorship laws requires this. Courts have decided without the slightest evidence that anyone who takes a position on certain questions-even if all he does is deliver this view to subscribers who have paid to receive it-is “inciting hate.” The other breath-taking aspect of these laws is that intent does not matter either. It makes no difference if someone sincerely believes he is uncovering the truth; if what he says can be construed as likely to incite hate, he can end up in behind bars. Finally, there are laws that have no clear meaning at all. What does it mean to “glorify National Socialism” or “insult the dead” or “whitewash the crimes of the Nazis”? Crimes that depend on wording as vague as this-and there have been plenty of convictions under them-are close kin to Communist laws that forbade “anti-Soviet behavior” or “parasitism.” These were justly decried in the West, but there is almost complete silence about anti-Nazi laws. In the United States vague prohibitions of this kind are clearly unconstitutional. Another astonishing aspect of these laws is that truth is not a defense. Once again, in the United States, the law is clear: Truth is an absolute protection for anyone charged with making hurtful, damaging, or embarrassing statements about anyone or anything. In the American colonies this tradition dates back to the famous John Peter Zenger trial of 1735. Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, was charged by British authorities with publishing articles “tending to raise seditions and tumults among the people of this province, and to fill their minds with contempt for his majesty’s government.” Zenger was arrested, jailed, and tried. Jurors, however, were persuaded that “truth ought to govern the whole affair of libels,” and in concluding that what Zenger had written was true, both set Zenger free and, in effect, rewrote the law. To many people, it seems preposterous that anyone who disputes gassings at Auschwitz or doubts Germany’s extermination program could appeal to the truth as a defense. However, in cases of this kind facts are of so little importance that there have been convictions for statements that appear to be almost certainly true. British historian David Irving, who in 2000 lost a celebrated libel case against an anti-revisionist author, was fined $30,000 by a German court for telling a German audience that the Auschwitz gas chamber is a post-war reconstruction. Even the Polish curator at Auschwitz has conceded it is a fake, but Mr. Irving is a criminal and the curator is not. A different German court is seeking Mr. Irving’s extradition for having said the same thing to a different German audience. James Alexander, one of the lawyers who defended John Peter Zenger, would have been appalled. “Freedom of speech,” he wrote after the trial, “is a principal pillar in a free government: when this support is taken away, the constitution is dissolved and tyranny erected on its ruins.”

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Jackson Follies

The Chicago Sun-Times has published a remarkable set of articles describing how Jesse Jackson shakes down white-owned companies in the name of “minority participation” with the effect of making his already-rich black friends-and family-even richer. He has discovered that companies are most vulnerable when they want to merge because large mergers often require federal approval. In the communications business, in particular, Rev. Jackson has had the help of Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard, a Clinton appointee who agrees that mergers should be vetted to make sure they benefit minorities.

The Sun-Times series shows that Rev. Jackson repeatedly tried to block mergers until the merging companies made fat contributions to his Citizenship Education Fund (CEF), the very entity that recently made suspect payments to the mother of Rev. Jackson’s out-of-wedlock child. Typical of the reverend’s antics was the SBC/Ameritech merger. In May 1998, Rev. Jackson urged President Clinton to block the merger. The next year SBC and Ameritech gave $500,000 to CEF and promised to hire a minority firm to manage its pensions, and Rev. Jackson pronounced the merger “in the public interest.” In April, Ameritech announced it would sell its cell phone business to a partnership that includes Rev. Jackson’s old buddy Chester Davenport. Later that year, the FCC approved the merger.

The GTE/Bell Atlantic merger worked the same way. In December 1998, Rev. Jackson said the merger must benefit minority customers and businesses. The next year Bell Atlantic and GTE gave the CEF $1,000,000. GTE then put up the vast majority of the $3.3 billion to buy Ameritech’s cellular business, while Jackson buddy Chester Davenport got a seven percent stake and the title of “Chairman” for just $60 million or less than two percent of the purchase price. In May 1999, Rev. Jackson blessed the merger and the FCC approved it in July.

The AT&T/TCI merger worked the same way. Only after AT&T pledged $425,000 to CEF and gave a black bond-dealing house (that just happened to have close ties to Rev. Jackson) $750,000 worth of business did the FCC approve the merger. When CBS merged with Viacom the deal somehow wouldn’t go through until Viacom promised the CEF $680,000.

CEF has been raking in about $14 million a year and though the Sun-Times doesn’t comment on its activities, others have noted that its IRS filings are riddled with dubious entries. “There are red flags all over this,” says Cleta Mitchell, a Washington expert in non-profit tax law. One New York Post columnist wonders whether the IRS is deliberately turning a blind eye while the Jackson empire flouts the laws. [Rod Dreher, Does IRS Let Jesse’s Group Violate Tax Law? New York Post, Feb. 7, 2001, p. 26.]

When the CEF gets merger payoffs, another black who just happens to benefit is Percy Sutton, owner of Inner City Broadcasting. Mr. Sutton has been a Jackson pal for years and was finance chairman of the reverend’s 1988 campaign for President. Rev. and Mrs. Jackson were among the original investors in Inner City, and in 1988 their shares were reliably reported to be worth $250,000-now, probably about $1 million. Rev. Jackson is working hard to persuade Viacom to sell its UPN television network to Mr. Sutton but refuses to say what effect this will have on his personal holdings.

The Sun-Times tells another edifying story about how Rev. Jackson’s sons Yusef and Jonathan ended up owning an Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship in Chicago. There are only about 700 distributors and since they have a monopoly on Anheuser-Busch products in their territories they are enormously profitable. They usually stay in families for generations and almost never change hands. The story dates back to 1982, when Rev. Jackson launched a “this Bud’s a dud” boycott of Anheuser-Busch because it had only three black distributors. The company obligingly set up a $10 million fund to help non-whites buy distributorships. As an interesting sidelight, a black-owned paper in St. Louis, where Anheuser-Busch is based, reported that Rev. Jackson had demanded $500 each from black businessmen to help support the boycott. The reverend sued the paper but dropped the suit when a judge ruled that the paper could inspect the Jackson organization’s financial records.

In 1998 the River North distributorship in Chicago ended up in Yusef’s and Jonathan’s hands. They refuse to say how much they paid but public records show they took out a $6.7 million loan from NationsBank. Somehow this managed to cover a business Anheuser-Busch had spent $10.5 million to build. These days Anheuser-Busch is mum about how many non-whites own distributorships and now that his boys have one, Rev. Jackson doesn’t seem to care anymore. Interestingly, Yusef and Jonathan refuse to say how many minority employees they have. [Chuck Neubauer and Abdon Pallasch, Jackson’s Protests Benefit His Family, Friends, Sun-Times, Feb. 4, 2001. Tim Novak and Chuck Neubauer, Jackson Sons Quiet on Hiring, Sun-Times, Feb. 4, 2001.]

The Jackson gravy train may be about to jump the tracks. There must be considerable head-shaking in corporate boardrooms at the news that the right reverend took his pregnant mistress along with him on his mission to cure William Clinton of promiscuity back in the Monica Lewinsky days. A Republican FCC may cooperate a little less in the holdups, too, but it remains to be seen whether the new administration has the spine to audit the Jackson gang to see where the money really goes.

Bastardy in High Places

Jesse Jackson is not the only prominent black to be making babies by accident. Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco, is about to have a child with his chief fund-raiser, a 38-year-old white divorcée named Carolyn Carpeneti. Miss Carpeneti, who has accompanied the mayor on a number of trips, received $380,000 for fundraising during the last mayoral campaign. Mr. Brown, 66, has been separated from his wife Blanche for 20 years. He says he plans neither to divorce nor to remarry. [Willie Brown Fathers Child With Aide, AP, Jan. 19, 2001.]

Murder in Black and White

It is well known that young men commit the most murders and that young black men are particularly murderous-but exactly how murderous? A reader has called to our attention a Department of Justice web page that presents racial calculations of the kind that almost never see the light of day. For every year between 1976 and 1999, it lists the percentages of the population accounted for by white males, aged 14-24, and by black males of the same ages. It then cites the percentage of all homicides committed by these two groups. The results are eye-opening. Since 1992, blacks of the most homicidal ages have accounted for only 1.1 percent of the population but in 1999 they committed 27 percent of the murders. That means they kill at 24.5 times the national rate. It was in 1993 that the 1.1 percent were friskiest, accounting for 33.2 percent of all killings.

Whites aged 14-24 account for 6.1 percent of the population and in 1999 committed 18 percent of the murders, which means they killed at just under three times the national average rate. Simple arithmetic tells us blacks of the most dangerous age kill at eight times the rate of the most murderous whites, which is the proportion that holds for both populations as a whole. In fact, since the Department of Justice’s figures for “whites” include Hispanics, they inflate the white murder rate, so the racial differences are even greater than their figures suggest. [FBI, Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976-1999.]

White Foolishness

Matthew Robinson is a Ph.D. criminologist who has taught criminal justice at Appalachian State University in North Carolina for seven years. He recently sent AR an email message in which he claimed that the figures in our celebrated report The Color of Crime are wrong. We wrote back politely saying we craved correction and this is how he replied:

Murder is a behavior defined by legislators, who happen to be predominantly wealthier, older, white, males (so the ways they kill people are not considered murder — one example is corporate violence — how many of the Ford and Firestone executives are black?)

When considering all forms of intentional and negligent killing (including corporate homicide), the vast majority of killers are white, and their killings are perpetrated on people of all races.

It is unusual for one’s critics voluntarily to make themselves look ridiculous so we wrote back to ask if Dr. Robinson were having a joke with us. He is entirely serious.

‘Got Me a White Bitch’

On January 25, during the morning rush hour in New York City’s Penn Station, a 38-year-old black woman named Janice Pasterisa approached a white woman and asked the time. As the white glanced at her watch, Miss Pasterisa slashed her in the face with a four-inch blade. She was soon cornered by four police officers but turned to attack them, too. After she was finally subdued, she is reported to have said “I got me a white bitch, and I’m proud of it.” It took 30 stitches to close the wound in the face of her victim, whose name was not disclosed. (Ikimulisa Sockwell-Mason and Rocco Parascandola, Crazed Slasher Held in Penn Sta. Attack: Cops, New York Post, Jan. 26, 2001.]

Momma Was a Hooker

Now that the state of Florida has banned racial preferences in admissions, colleges are thinking up new ways to get non-whites. The University of Florida had decided to require a student essay about an important event. Nowhere in the instructions are applicants told to tell hard luck stories but the word quickly got out that the university wants to hear bad news. The theory is that someone who has had troubles is a better applicant than someone who has had a happy childhood, and the hope is that the troubled will be non-white. People who read the essays, which are graded one through six, are instructed to ignore race but to be on the lookout for children who didn’t know their fathers-a choice form of non-white adversity. Plenty of whites come from broken homes these days, so mere divorce doesn’t get much sympathy. Childhood trauma also counts for more than grammar or spelling. [Karla Schuster, UF Seeks Diversity in Adversity, South-Florida Sun-Sentinel, Jan. 15, 2001.]

Higher Education?

In its latest issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that:

A total of 41,140 Ph.D.’s were awarded by 392 American universities in 1999, down 3.6 percent from the previous year . . .

Over all, for American citizens, the number of minority doctoral recipients increased by 5.1 percent. Asian-Americans and American Indians showed the largest increases-12.8 percent and 15.9 percent, respectively. The number of black Ph.D.’s increased by 7.6 percent, while the number of Hispanic doctoral recipients decreased by 7.4 percent.

What does this story leave out? The figures for whites. If the total number of Ph.D. degrees awarded was down 3.6 percent and the numbers for minorities are up, it means only one thing: Whites got fewer degrees. The publication doesn’t tell us how many fewer, presumably because it doesn’t care.

The same issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an article by Stephen Steinberg in the winter issue of New Politics. Mr. Steinberg, who teaches urban studies at Queens College of the City University of New York says the expression “race relations” doesn’t do justice to the problem. He says we should talk about “racial oppression” instead. He also says we should say “occupational apartheid” rather than “discrimination.” He adds that it is an “abysmal failure of sociological imagination” not to have come up with better language to describe the effects of white racism. [Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 9, 2000.]

Watch Whom You Date

Young homosexuals have grown up knowing how AIDS is transmitted, but are still getting the disease at high rates. According to a recent study, 12 percent of homosexuals between the ages of 23 and 29 have AIDS and, charmingly, only about one third know it. Many homosexuals have gone back to the most risky form of business-anal sex without a condom-presumably because they think new drugs can hold the disease in check. The infection rates among young homosexuals by race are exactly what one would expect: Asians-three percent; whites-seven percent; Hispanics-15 percent; blacks-30 percent. Blacks now account for more than half of the estimated 40,000 new cases of AIDS every year. Blacks as a group are 10 times more likely than whites to get AIDS, and 10 times more likely to die from it. Many black homosexuals have sex with women too, and infected black women outnumber infected white women four to one. Joe Pressley of the New York AIDS Coalition says one 15-year-old black girl told him, “Don’t tell me nothin’ about no AIDS because that won’t impact me. And if I was to get it, all I’d have to do is take a pill in the morning and I’ll be O.K.” [Daniel Haney, AIDS Rampant Among Young Gay Blacks, AP, Feb. 5, 2001. Bob Herbert, An AIDS Epidemic Surges Among Black Americans, New York Times, Jan. 12, 2001.]

Mexican Merry-making

Mexicans in New York City form relatively non-criminal gangs that take out their violence mostly on each other. Police note that Mexican immigrants do not deal drugs, run prostitutes, or launder money. Most work hard at manual labor, but in their off hours they gather in groups with names like the Mexican Boys, the Wild Chicanos, or Los Niños Malos. They develop intense rivalries and like to beat each other up. In 2000 police recorded 49 stabbings, shootings, and assaults involving Mexican gangs, and 10 deaths. In 2001 the Mexicans were going at each other harder than ever and by January 20 of 2001 there were already three deaths. “When they come across someone they don’t like, they pull out a knife or a gun,” a police spokesman explains. [Larry Celona and Bill Sanderson, Upsurge of Gang Killings by Mexicans Puzzles Cops, New York Post, Jan. 21, 2001.]

Unsung Teenage Victims

Christal Jones was a white teenager who grew up in Burlington, Vermont. At some point she let herself be lured to New York City by tales of bright lights and excitement. She ended up a prostitute for José Ritchie Rodriguez, a pimp who managed to trick at least 10 country girls into sex slavery. Mr. Rodriguez, who goes by the name “Romeo,” liked to have his name tattooed onto the backs of his teenagers, so Miss Jones got a Romeo tattoo. In February, she was found smothered to death in a seedy brothel in the Bronx. [Philip Messing, Bronx Teen Sex Slave Died by Smothering, New York Post, Feb. 7, 2001.]

In California, a group of Hispanics tortured and killed a white Delano teenager in what the local prosecutor calls “the worst murder crime scene I’ve ever seen.” Jorge Vidal, Keith Serialez, and Gerardo Zavala have been arrested for lying in wait for Eric Jones, age 17, to teach him a lesson for allegedly trying to steal Mr. Vidal’s car. The men took Mr. Jones to a garage where they beat him and used electric cord to shock him. Then they cut off his clothes with scissors and buggered him with what press reports call “a foreign object.” They turned up a car radio to drown out Mr. Jones’ screams. One man stabbed Mr. Jones in the back with a screwdriver and others wrote unreported comments on his skin with a blue magic marker. By this time all three men decided they would have to kill Mr. Jones to keep him from talking. They stuffed him into the trunk of a car, drove him out into a lonely part of Tulare County, where one of the men shot him at least nine times. Mr. Jones’ ordeal lasted nearly two hours. [Jennifer Fitzenberger, Slain Teen Put Through Torture, Fresno Bee, Feb. 1, 2000.]

Indians to the Rescue!

David Yeagley is a Comanche Indian and a humanities professor at Oklahoma State University. He thinks whites have gone soft and are giving the country away to foreigners. “I’m trying to come to the rescue here and say to the white man, look, don’t destroy everything you have. If you don’t want the country, give it back to me! Don’t give it away to someone else.” “White guilt,” he says, “is the biggest flaw in the American psyche.” Dr. Yeagley says whites no longer instill the necessary fighting spirit in their children and says they should feel proud of their ancestors’ achievements just as he feels proud of his. Of the Comanches, he says: “They were the lords of the south plains. They kicked out all the other Indians. They had no tolerance for other Indians, no tolerance for white people, no tolerance for anybody except themselves.” [Richard Poe, A Comanche Patriot Tries to Save the White Man, NewsMax.com, Jan. 17, 2001.]

No Shortage of Blacks

In April 2000, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management sent to Congress its annual report, “Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program,” which covers October 1997 to September 1998. It says 17.1 percent of the federal work force is black, compared to 11 percent of the comparable civilian work force. No fewer than 62 percent of the workers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are black compared to a figure of 6.4 percent for comparable jobs in the private sector. At the General Services Administration, the figures are 28.2 percent versus 7.2 percent, and for the Office of Personnel Management itself, they are 26.7 percent versus 7.5 percent.

Everywhere the Same

Although blacks account for about two percent of the British population aged 10 and over, they accounted for 28 percent of the robbery arrests during 2000. This means British blacks are about 19 times more likely to be arrested for robbery than are other Britons, a figure even higher than the ten-fold difference in the United States. In London, where 7.5 percent of the population is black, 57 percent of arrested robbers were black. Needless to say, as in the United States, excuse-makers say the figures reflect only police racism. [Philip Johnson, 28 pc of Robbery Arrests are Black People, Says Report, Telegraph (London), Jan. 19, 2001.]

Meanwhile, the British town of Oldham reports a sharp rise in racial attacks on whites. “During the past 12 months, 572 racial incidents have been investigated by police — which is a record level,” says Eric Hewitt, Chief Superintendent of Oldham police. “Out of these attacks, 60 per cent of the victims were white.” He says the most common attacks are by gangs of five to 20 Pakistanis or Bangladeshis who seek out lone white men. So far there have been no deaths, but Mr. Hewitt is worried: “While these gangs are hitting victims over the head with bricks or stabbing them, there is a serious risk that someone will be killed and this cannot be overstated.” When Asians do not actually attack whites they often shout abuse at them and drive them out of the neighborhoods. Many whites are now afraid to leave their homes. [Samantha Mannion, Huge Rise in Race Attacks on White Men, Oldham Evening Chronicle, Jan. 31, 2001.]

The Obvious is so Hard to See

When they write about foreign countries, mainstream authors sometimes show a grasp of reality that completely eludes them when they look at the United States. Below are excerpts from a recent article in Foreign Affairs:

If you look around the Balkans today you’ll see that democracy movements are tentatively sprouting in the two ethnically pure Balkan states that caused the most trouble during the Bosnian war: Serbia and Croatia. And democracy is least alive and well in the place where NATO and U.S. troops are present, namely multi-ethnic Bosnia (and Kosovo).

[F]ive years and $5 billion in aid have done little to produce a new generation of Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats who could live together in a self-sustaining multi-ethnic democracy.

Why? Because democracy means the willingness to have your group or party be outvoted and have power go to the competing group or party, observed the Johns Hopkins University foreign affairs expert Michael Mandelbaum. To do that, though, the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.

Bosnia can be democratic and self-sustaining, but only if the country gives up being unified and multi-ethnic. Or Bosnia can be multi-ethnic, democratic and unified, but not self-sustaining. NATO would have to hold it together forever. [Thomas Friedman, Not Happening, Foreign Affairs, Jan. 23, 2001.]

Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You

As they have for some years, immigrants continue to bring tuberculosis. TB had been essentially eradicated here but Third-World immigrants are bringing in new strains that resist the usual antibiotics. Since 1993, the US-born population has had TB at a rate of 5.8 cases for 100,000, but the foreign-born has had more than five times that rate: 32.9 per 100,000. The rate for the foreign-born is expected to climb to 50 in two years. Immigrants from Vietnam are most likely to be infected, with a rate of 138, followed by Haitians at 119. Tuberculosis is spread by air-borne germs, and the average carrier infects about 20 people. Only a minority of these get immediate, full-blown TB; the rest harbor the disease in a “latent” state, which can become active later. Immigrants coming legally to America are supposed to produce chest X-rays that show they are healthy, but there is a brisk overseas trade in phony X-rays. Needless to say, the million or so illegals who come in every year don’t even bother with phonies. [August Gribbin, CDC Report Links TB, Immigrants, Washington Times, Dec. 13, 2000.]

Clever, Those Chinese

Every year some 24,000 Chinese students come to universities in the United States. Many of them prepare for standardized tests at the New Oriental School in Beijing. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers standardized exams, recently warned university admissions officers all around the country to be skeptical of scores of Chinese applicants on the Graduate Record Examination and the Test of English as a Foreign Language. It appears that New Oriental has been stealing test questions and slipping them to students. Scores of Chinese applicants were suspiciously high from October 1999 to September 2000, but ETS has been having trouble with New Oriental for years. In 1996, 1997, and 2000 ETS confiscated unauthorized material.

There are many ways to steal test questions. Sometimes they are photocopied at a test administration center or simply taken right out of the center. People who take the test can be hired to copy down questions during the exam or during a break. ETS is now suing New Oriental for copyright infringement.

Life in the New America

President George W. Bush’s appointment of Roderick Paige as education secretary may have won points with the racial head counters, but it has set the stage for all-American ethnic warfare back where Mr. Paige comes from: the Houston, Texas, school district. Mr. Paige was the first black superintendent of a district that is now 54 percent Hispanic, and immigrants were hoping for one of their own when Mr. Paige got the nod back in 1994. Hispanics have the usual complaints-there aren’t enough Spanish-speaking teachers and the district doesn’t do enough to keep Hispanics from dropping out-and are unlikely to take it quietly if the new superintendent is not Mexican. Tatcho Mindiola, director of the Center for Mexican-American Studies at the University of Houston, says, “If the district does not go out of its way to sincerely search for a Mexican-American superintendent they are going to catch a lot of grief.” The New York Times, which reported this story, takes it for granted Hispanics should lobby for ethnic interests rather than ability and experience. [Jim Yardley, Houston School Chief to Test Hispanic Will, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2001.]

Born to be Fat

German researchers have found a gene-the GNB3 825T allele-that can make you fat. It appears to be a “thrifty” gene that helped cavemen survive food shortages, but it is not often needed today. Ninety percent of blacks, 50 percent of Asians and 30 percent of whites carry at least one copy of this gene, and 60 percent of blacks, 20 percent of Asians and 10 percent of whites carry two copies. Eight percent of young Germans who did not have copies of the gene were found to be obese while four times as many who had two copies were fat. The researchers found that only two hours of exercise a week is enough to counteract the effect of the gene and avoid getting fat. [Daniel Haney, ‘Caveman’ Fat Gene May Trigger Obesity, Diabetes, AP, Dec. 16, 2000.]

It’s in the Genes

Researchers have discovered a genetic mutation that explains why Mexicans-and Mexican-Americans in particular-suffer from so much Type 2 diabetes. People get this form of diabetes after they become adults, and Mexican-Americans are nearly three times more likely to get it than other Americans. The mutation is also more common among blacks than whites.

Type 2 or “adult-onset” diabetes was once largely restricted to people over age 40, but obesity brings it on much earlier and it is now found in children as young as 12. Mexicans in America are fatter than Mexicans in Mexico, and therefore get the disease more often. The gene and its mutation are consistent with a 30-year-old theory about “thrifty” genes that are benign in lean times but have damaging effects when people eat too much. [Thomas Maugh, Mutated Gene Tied to Diabetes in Some Groups, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 27, 2000.]

Preferences for Whites?

For years racial and death-penalty activists have been claiming-implausibly but very loudly-that there is racial discrimination in death sentencing. In federal cases, U.S. attorneys must run potential death-penalty cases by a special committee at the Department of Justice and then the U.S. Attorney General finally decides whether the prosecutor should seek capital punishment. According to a 2000 study, prosecutors asked the department to let them go for the death penalty for 36 percent of eligible white criminals, compared to only 25 percent of blacks and 20 percent of Hispanics. Janet Reno in turn recommended capital prosecution for 38 percent of eligible whites, 25 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Hispanics. There may or may not be good reasons this, but one death penalty expert says it could be affirmative action. “It’s entirely plausible that the department would overreact because of criticism of the racially disproportionate population on the federal [death] row,” says Kevin McNally of the Resource Counsel Project in Kentucky.

A lawyer has accordingly decided to claim that his murderer client got an unfair capital charge because he is white. In 1997 Coleman Johnson of Newport News, Virginia, killed 24-year-old Tammy Baker with a pipe bomb because she was eight months pregnant with his child, and he didn’t want to pay for support. Defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin says the government must now prove it wasn’t making racial quotas when it sought the death penalty. [Bombing Suspect Claims Death Penalty Sought Because He’s White, AP, Dec. 17, 2000.]

Download The g Factor

In 1996, there appeared an excellent little book on IQ called The g Factor, by Christopher Brand of Edinburgh, Scotland. (His book is not to be confused with the likewise excellent and more comprehensive volume of the same title by Arthur Jensen-reviewed). Mr. Brand’s book had been on the market only a few days before the British press discovered that it dealt frankly with race, and began to shriek about “racism.” Publisher John Wiley and Sons promptly withdrew The g Factor from stores and destroyed all copies. Since then, the book has had a meager samizdat existence, but thanks to the Internet it is now available to everyone. It can be downloaded for free, in HTML format, from https://www.douance.org/qi/brandtgf.htm#pres. The site is French/English bilingual but English-speakers should be able to find their way around and can download the text in English. As the web page says, The g Factor is “short, clear and complete, not censured, and scientific.” The electronic version has also been brought up to date in light of recent research..

Who’s Happy?

There is actually a branch of social science called “happiness research,” though it has tended to go by more sedate-sounding names like “quality of life studies” or “life satisfaction.” Basically, it boils down to asking a lot of people how happy they are, and comparing how they reply with how they live. Michael Hagerty is a professor at University of California at Davis and an ardent student of happiness. He has analyzed decades of happiness research to find out where the happy people live. In a comparison of 20 countries he found that far and away the happiest were the Danes, followed by the Dutch, the Norwegians, and the Luxembourgers. Prof. Hagerty explains: “For the most part, the top-rated countries are small and homogeneous.” As for Denmark, he says:

“People there have a similar world view and a similar religion, so that it’s easier for them to communicate and to understand each other’s motives. They don’t have race problems, they don’t have crime problems, and they have political freedom.”

Prof. Hagerty says the happiest part of the United States is what he calls the “the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) region” — Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, followed by the “west north central” states of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. He says one of the most important ingredients of happiness is close ties with family and friends, and that these are more common among people who live in the heartland.

In a different finding he also says that once people get past the poverty level, more money does not make them happier. [Keay Davidson, Science Tracks the Good Life, Chronicle (San Francisco), December 24, 2000 , p. A1.]

Demography Marches On

According to the Census Bureau, by 2010 21 percent of American children will be Hispanic, 14 percent will be black, and only 59 percent will be white. Nickelodeon, the television channel watched by the largest number of children under 12, has gotten a jump on the demographics by launching a new program called “The Brothers Garcia.” It is about a model family with a father who is a history professor, a mother who runs a beauty salon, and four children ages 9 to 14. The entire cast and “creative team” are Hispanic, which is a first for an English-language program for American television. Fox and the Disney channel, who were caught napping, promise similar fare early this year. [Dale Russakoff, Keeping Up With the Garcias, Washington Post, Sept. 23, 2000, p. A1.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I read your Feb. review of Hegemon with great interest. This book is another example of the ability of American intellectuals to understand other countries but not their own-or to at least keep quiet if they do. Author Steven Mosher understands that China is a proud country whose citizens are united in the desire to advance Chinese interests. What could be more normal and healthy? And yet, rather than learn how to strengthen and unify America he wants China to become divided and weak like us.

Of course, there is always an exception to this otherwise universal desire that countries lose their distinctiveness and become multi-culti losers: Israel. It’s OK for Israel to be proud, united, patriotic, war-like, and ethnically exclusive — the very things Mr. Mosher decries in China and would no doubt oppose in America.

Janice Koop, Salt Lake City, Ut.

Sir — Letter-writer Sam Harrell makes some good points in the Feb. issue [arguing against Sam Francis, saying that an overtly racial appeal by Republicans might not attract more white voters], but he doesn’t understand the racial and political situation. Most left-wingers, liberals, and those who vote Democrat are not part of the “PC” movement. They vote Democrat because they think it is the best party for them, not because they have been brainwashed by people like Joe Feagin. A healthy majority of white people — Democrat and Republican — are opposed to mass immigration and affirmative action. Conservative ideas and platforms are losing their strength, because conservatives have crafted policies that led to social disruption and misery. If anything, this election should tell us that conservative principles are incredibly weak, and as a vehicle for white survival, totally useless.

Who has been in control of the House and Senate for the past decade? Republicans! For the past 20 years, the Oval Office has been occupied by conservatives, including Republican-lite Bill Clinton. The United States is the most conservative nation in the world, and it is the conservatives who should be blamed for many of the problems we face. Between George W.’s elitist tax-cut plan and his conservative rhetoric about many important issues, white people saw George Bush was the wrong candidate for them. It is a mistake to think left-leaning elements of the white population would be unreceptive to a racial message. It is countries like France, Italy, and Germany, which have strong socialist and left-wing traditions, that are experiencing the greatest upsurges in support for nationalist candidates. Indeed, it seems that many nationalists are filling the void left by the left-wing politicians who sold out their own people and betrayed their own constituents. Why should America be any different?

As for identity politics, whites are really no different from other races. While there are a few over-educated liberals (and over-educated conservatives!) who buy into the PC movement, racial appeals won’t “scare off” whites as Mr. Harrell fears. In Louisiana people on the left and right voted for David Duke because he represented a genuine alternative. If American conservatives want to see the electoral potential of conservative sleaze wrapped up in a non-racial, ‘patriotic’ package, they should look to Jörg Haider’s faltering Freedom Party. Better yet, they should look to Pat Buchanan.

Brian Copp, Dallas, Tex.

Sir — As an English Canadian of many generations living in Quebec, I am all too familiar with ethnic conflict. Without going into detail let me assure you that what has happened to my people (English Quebecers) at the hands of French-speakers could happen to Anglo-Americans.

Furthermore, recently we have experienced massive non-European immigration, and native English as well as French Canadians are beginning to experience similar social problems we have long associated with the U.S. Suddenly we have areas of our major cities where it is unsafe to be if you’re white. We have ethnic gangs controlling neighborhoods, injuring, robbing and assaulting native English and French Canadians for no other reason than who we are.

It is becoming apparent to many of us (in private conversations among ourselves) that having these people in our midst is a mistake. I am now utterly convinced that while individuals of any stripe may be friends, cultural blocs or tribes compete for power and the resulting competition produces winners and losers. Although individuals are able to connect to each other, cultural groups cannot. Where there is tribal competition for power, resources, etc. there will be casualties.

I have seen the attack against my culture, people, and way of life by my own socialist-oriented government, and I’ve felt the effects of its policies in my life. I freely and completely reject multi-culturalism (bi-culturalism failed) and have begun to embrace my Anglo heritage more completely than ever before. I feel greater kinship with an Anglo-Saxon in Georgia or New Zealand than I do with my Chinese-Canadian neighbor in the next apartment. This is a simple truth, a commonsense understanding.

Your efforts are unifying and vitally important to our people and I congratulate your efforts. I would like to see an international Anglo revival that helps to reestablish our traditional places in our own countries.

Name Withheld, Quebec, Canada

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