October 2010
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol. 21, No. 10 | October 2010 |
| CONTENTS |
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What Race Were the Greeks and Romans?
Racism, Schmacism
Hate on the March
The Galton Report: Ethnocentrism and Genetic Similarity Theory
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters
| COVER STORY |
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What Race Were the Greeks and Romans?
The evidence is clear — but often ignored.
Recent films about ancient Greece such as Troy, Helen of Troy, and 300, have used actors who are of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic ancestry (e.g. Brad Pitt, Gerard Butler). Recent films about ancient Rome, such as Gladiator and HBO’s series Rome, have done the same (e.g. Russell Crowe). Were the directors right, from an historical point of view? Were the ancient Greeks and Romans of North European stock?
Most classical historians today are silent on the subject. For example, Paul Cartledge, a professor of Greek culture at Cambridge, writes about his specialty, Sparta, for educated but non-academic readers, yet nowhere that I can find does he discuss the racial origins of the Spartans. Some years ago I asked several classics professors about the race of the ancient Greeks only to be met with shrugs that suggested that no one knew, and that it was not something worth looking into. Today, an interest in the race of the ancients seems to be taken as an unhealthy sign, and any evidence of their Nordic origins discounted for fear it might give rise to dangerous sentiments.
A hundred years ago, however, Europeans took it for granted that many Greeks and Romans were the same race as themselves. The famed 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, published in 1911, noted that “survival of fair hair and complexion and light eyes among the upper classes in Thebes and some other localities shows that the blond type of mankind which is characteristic of north-western Europe had already penetrated into Greek lands before classical times.” It added that the early Greeks, or Hellenes, were Nordic, one of “the fair-haired tribes of upper Europe known to the ancients as Keltoi.” Sixty years ago even Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and socialist, believed that the Hellenes “were fair-haired invaders from the North, who brought the Greek language with them” (History of Western Philosophy, 1946).
Scholars today recoil at this pre-1960s consensus. The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece, written in 1996, scoffs at the “undoubtedly dubious racial theories underlying much of this reconstruction,” but offers no theory to replace it, conceding only that “the origin of the Greeks remains a much-debated subject.” The Penguin author makes this startling admission, however: “Many of the ideas of racial origins were developed in the 19th century and, although they may have had some foundation in historical tradition, archaeology or linguistics, they were often combined with more dubious presumptions.” The author fails to list these dubious presumptions. Beth Cohen, author of Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art (2000), asserts that the Thracians, distant cousins of the Greeks, had “the same dark hair and the same facial features as the Ancient Greeks.”
In fact, there was a good basis for the 1911 Britannica to write about blonds in Thebes. Thebes was the leading city of Boeotia, a rich agricultural region in south-central Greece. Fragments from an ancient 150 BC travelogue describe the women of Thebes as “the tallest, prettiest, and most graceful in all of Hellas. Their yellow hair is tied up in a knot on the top of their head.” Pindar, a fifth century Theban lyric poet, refers to the Greeks as “the fair-haired Danaoi,” using a poetical name for the Hellenes. Likewise, in his Partheneia, or “Maiden Songs,” the seventh century BC Spartan poet Alcman, praised the beauty of Spartan female athletes, with their “golden hair” and “violet eyes.” He also wrote of Spartan women with “silver eyes,” meaning light gray. The seventh-century BC Greek poet Archilochus praises the “yellow hair” of one of his lovers, and Sappho — also of the seventh century BC — writes of her “beautiful daughter, golden like a flower.”
As late as the fourth century AD, Adamantius, an Alexandrian physician and scientist, wrote in his Physiognominica, that “of all the nations the Greeks have the fairest eyes,” adding, that “wherever the Hellenic and Ionic race has been kept pure, we see tall men of fairly broad and straight build. . . . of fairly light skin, and blond.” Several centuries of mixing had presumably changed the racial character of many Greeks, but blonds still survived, and Xanthos, which means “yellow” in Greek, was a common personal name.
Professor Nell Painter of Princeton, author of The History of White People (see “Whiting Out White People,” AR, July 2010), complains that “not a few Westerners have attempted to racialize antiquity, making ancient history into white race history.” She points out that the Greeks often painted their marble statues — “the originals were often dark in color” — that the paint wore off over time, and Europeans mistakenly concluded from the white marble that the Greeks were white.
Yes, the Greeks painted their statues, but the originals were not dark. Praxiteles’ Aphrodite, from the Greek city of Knidos, was the most famous and most copied statue in the ancient world. Hundreds of copies survive. Experts have determined from microscopic paint particles that Aphrodite was painted blonde. The Romans had their own name for this goddess, Venus, and likewise her “cult images” were ubiquitous and “painted with pale-coloured flesh and golden-blonde hair” (see Joanna Pitman’s On Blondes, 2003).
Phidias’ masterwork, the Athena Parthenos, stood in the Parthenon for nearly 1,000 years until it was lost, probably in the 5th century AD. When American sculptor Alan LeQuire set out to make a faithful copy for the full-scale Parthenon replica in Nashville’s Centennial Park he modeled it on descriptions of the original work. The 42-foot-tall Athena, unveiled in 1990, has light skin, blue eyes, and golden hair.
Many small terra-cotta figurines from Greece of the fourth century BC have survived with traces of paint. They show light hair, usually reddish brown, and blue eyes, as do larger statues from the time of the Persian Wars in the early fifth century BC. Even a cursory examination of ancient marble reliefs, statues, and busts reveals European features. Many of the faces could just as easily be those of Celtic chieftains or Viking kings.
There is more evidence of the appearance of the Greeks. Xenophanes, an Ionian Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century BC, was amused to note that different peoples believed that the gods look like themselves: “Our gods have flat noses and black skins, say the Ethiopians. The Thracians (despite Prof. Cohen’s observations above) say our gods have red hair and hazel eyes.” Indeed, a fourth century BC fresco of a Thracian woman, found in the Ostrusha Mound in central Bulgaria, shows distinctly red hair and European features.
The Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) called Troy the “land of fair women.” According to the Roman historian Diodorus Sicilus, who lived in the first century BC, the Egyptian god Set had “reddish hair,” a color that was “rare in Egypt, but common among the Hellenes.” Plutarch (46–120 AD) tells us that while the Theban general Pelopidas (d. 364 BC) was campaigning in central Greece, he had a dream in which a ghost urged him to sacrifice a red-haired virgin if he wished to be victorious in the next day’s battle.
Two racial types
There were two racial types in ancient Greece: dark-haired whites and fair-haired whites, as well as gradations in between. The earliest known inhabitants were of the former type. These included the Minoans, who were not Greeks at all, and who built an impressive civilization on the island of Crete. The Pelasgians, which is the name later Greeks gave to the pre-Hellenic population of mainland Greece, were also dark. They tended to have black, curly hair and olive-shaped eyes. Their type is plainly visible on many Attic (Athenian) vases, and has lead some scholars to conclude that all Greeks looked as they did.
Neither the Minoans nor the Pelasgians spoke Greek — the linear A inscriptions of the Minoans have still not been deciphered — so the Greek language must have arrived with the light-haired conquerors who migrated from the north, most likely from the middle Danube River Valley. According to Greek national myth, the Hellenes were descended from Hellen (not to be confused with Helen of Troy), the son of Deucalion. Hellen had sons and grandsons, who correspond to the four main tribal divisions of ancient Greece: the Aeolians Achaeans, Ionians, and Dorians.
Scholars today tend to dismiss such myths but they would not have survived if they had not been generally consistent with the long folk memories of ancient peoples. In this case they point to what classical scholars have long believed was a series of Hellenic descents upon mainland Greece and the Aegean islands. The first Hellenes to arrive were the Ionians and Aeolians; then a few centuries later, the Achaeans, and finally the Dorians.
The early bronze-age Greek civilization (1600-1200 BC) was certainly influenced by Minoan and other eastern Mediterranean cultures, but it was unmistakably Greek. Linear B, which began to dominate Cretan culture around 1500 BC, has been deciphered and found to be an early form of Greek. Around the year 1200 BC this culture, known as Mycenaean, collapsed; its cities were destroyed and abandoned, and Greece entered a 400-year Dark Age. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions probably played a part in the destruction, and later Greeks attributed it to invasions from the north. Waves of Hellenic warriors swept down and burned the Mycenaean citadels and became the ruling race in Greece. They also sacked the city of Troy, and Homer’s Iliad is about them. They also seem to have snuffed out much of Mycenaean culture: Greeks stopped writing, and abandoned the arts, urban life, and trade with the outside world.
We know something about the early Hellenes from the Iliad. It was first written down in the late eighth century BC, at the end of the Greek Dark Age, after the Phoenicians taught the Greeks how to write again. It recounts events some four to five hundred years earlier. Although we think of the poem as being about the Greeks, Homer’s warrior heroes belong to the Achaean nobility, which suggests that it was the Achaeans who overthrew Mycenaean civilization, not the Dorians, who would descend upon Greece and displace the Achaeans a hundred years later. Archeology confirms this supposition, for Troy was burned around 1200 BC, and the traditional date for the Trojan War is 1184 BC. The Dorian invasion is dated by various ancient historians at 1149, 1100, or 1049 BC.
There is good reason to think that Homer was recording stories handed down during the Dark Age. He was a bard who lived in Ionia, a region on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, and if he were making the stories up he would have claimed that the heroes were Ionian. Instead, he sings praises to the light-haired Achaean nobility: Achilles, their greatest warrior, has “red-gold hair,” Odysseus, their greatest strategist, has “chestnut hair,” his wife Penelope has “white cheeks the color of pure snow,” Agamede, a healer and expert on medicinal plants, is “blonde,” and King Menelaus of Sparta, the husband of Helen, has “red hair.” Helen, likewise, has “fair hair,” and even slave girls are light-skinned: “fair-tressed Hecamede,” “fair-cheeked Chryseis,” and “blonde Briseis.” This is significant, for if even some of the slaves were blond it would mean the Nordic type was not unique to the Achaeans, that it was present elsewhere in the Aegean world.
Homer (and Pindar) describe most of the Olympian gods and goddesses as fair haired and “bright eyed,” meaning blue, grey or green. The goddess Demeter has “blond” or “yellow hair,” as does Leto, mother of Apollo, who is also described as “golden haired.” Aphrodite has “pale-gold” hair, and Athena is known as “the fair, bright-eyed one” and the “grey-eyed goddess.” Two of the gods, Poseidon and Hephaestus, are described as having black hair. As noted above, Xenophanes complained that all peoples imagine the gods to look like themselves.
It was the Dorians, the last Greek invaders, who ended Achaean rule and probably provoked a mass migration of Aeolian and Ionian Hellenes — no doubt including Homer’s ancestors — across the Aegean Sea to the coast of Asia Minor. The Dorians who settled in the fertile valley of the Eurotas in the southern Peloponnesus were the direct ancestors of the Spartans of the classical age, and they claimed to be the only pure Dorians.
Werner Jaeger, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at Harvard, writes:
The national type of the invader remained purest in Sparta. The Dorian race gave Pindar his ideal of the fair-haired warrior of proud descent, which he used to describe not only the Homeric Menelaus, but the greatest Greek hero, Achilles, and in fact all the ‘fair-haired Danaeans’ [another name for the Achaeans who fought at Troy] of the heroic age (Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 1939).
The classical Greeks made no claim to being autochthones, that is to say, “of the earth,” or the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, they took pride in being epeludes, the descendants of later settlers or conquerors. Two notable exceptions were the Arcadians and the Athenians, whose rocky soils presumably offered little temptation to armed colonizers. The historian Herodotus (484-420 BC) recorded that the Athenians were “a Pelasgian people [who] had occupied Attica and never moved from it,” as were the Arcadians. Language lends support to this view, for both the Athenians and Arcadians spoke unique dialects. They learned Greek from the northern invaders but retained Pelasgian elements.
Thus, classical Greece was a fusion, both cultural and racial, of these two types of whites. Some city-states, such as Thebes and Sparta, were predominantly Nordic. Others, such as Athens, were predominantly Mediterranean, and still others were mixtures of the two.
The Roman patricians
Nell Painter, author of the above-mentioned History of White People, finds it “astonishing” that the American Nordicist Madison Grant (1865-1937) argued in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) that the Roman nobility was of Nordic origin, yet there is good evidence for this view. There are many lavishly illustrated books about ancient Rome with examples of death masks, busts, and statues that clearly depict the Roman patricians not simply as Europeans but as northern European.
R. Peterson’s fine study, The Classical World (1985), which includes an analysis of 43 Greek, and 32 Roman figures, is persuasive. Dr. Peterson explains that the Romans painted their death masks to preserve the color, as well as the shape, of their ancestors’ faces. Blue eyes, fair hair, and light complexions are common. A good example of racial type is the famous portrait bust of Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic, which dates from the fourth century BC. Brutus’ face is identifiably Germanic, and so is the color of his eyes. The sculptor used ivory for the whites and blue glass for the pupils. Or take the famous marble head of a patrician woman from the late first century AD, which is often included in illustrated surveys of imperial Rome to demonstrate the fashion for curled hair. Her features are typically northern European: a delicate, aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and a face angular and long rather than round. Another classic example is the famous fresco from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, which shows four women undergoing ritual flagellation. They are tall, light-skinned, and brown-haired.
There is also evidence from Roman names. Rutilus means “red, gold, auburn” and stems from the verb rutilo, which means “to shine with a reddish gleam.” Rufus, meaning red, was a common Roman cognomen or nickname used for a personal characteristic, such as red hair. The Flavians were an aristocratic clan whose family name was derived from flavus, meaning golden-yellow. The Flaminians were another noble family whose clan name came from flamma, meaning flame, suggesting red hair.
According to Plutarch, Marcus Porcius Cato had “red hair and grey eyes,” Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the general and dictator, had “blue-grey eyes and blond hair,” and Gaius Octavius (Augustus), the first Roman emperor, had “bright eyes and yellow hair.” Recent analysis of an ancient marble bust of the emperor Caligula found particles of the original pigment trapped in the stone. Experts have restored the colors to show that the demented ruler had ruddy skin and red hair.
The love poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso, better known as Ovid, (43 BC to AD 17) offers much evidence of the color of upper-class Roman women during the early years of the empire. That Ovid ascribes blond hair to many goddesses — Aurora, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, and Venus — tells us something about the Roman ideal of beauty; that he describes many of his lovers the same way tells us that the Nordic type was still found in imperial Rome. “I’m crazy for girls who are fair-haired and pale-complexioned,” he writes in his Amores of 15 BC, but “brunettes make marvelous lovers too.” He admires the contrast of “dark-tresses against a snow-white neck,” and adores young girls who blush. One of his favorite lovers is “tall” with a “peaches-and-cream complexion,” “ivory cheeks,” and “bright eyes.” Another was a “smart Greek blonde.”
So where did the Romans come from? They were a Latin people, although according to legend that may have some basis in fact, there were also Greek colonists and Trojan refugees among the founding races. The Latins were one of eight Nordic Italic tribes — Apulii, Bruttii, Lucanians, Sabines, Samnites, Umbrians/Oscians and the Veneti — who migrated into the Italian peninsula around 1000 BC. Of course, Italy was not vacant. The Etruscans lived to the north of Rome in what is now Tuscany, and there were other darker-complexioned whites living in the peninsula. The Etruscans are likely to have been Carians from Asia Minor.
What became of the Nordic Greeks and Romans? Their numbers were reduced and thinned through war, imperialism, immigration, and slavery. Protracted internecine war was devastating. The Hellenes lost relatively few men in their two wars with the Persian Empire (490, 480-479 BC), but they were decimated by the ruinous series of inter-Hellenic wars that followed. The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) pitted Athens and her subject Ionian cities against the Spartan Dorian confederacy. That was followed by 35 years of intermittent warfare between Sparta and Thebes (396-362 BC), which pitted Nordics against Nordics. These wars so weakened the Greek republics that they fell under Macedonian rule about 20 years later (338 BC), bringing to an end the classical age of Greece.
Money was, as always, a racial solvent. Theognis, a noble poet from the Dorian city of Megara wrote in the sixth century BC: “The noblest man will marry the lowest daughter of a base family, if only she brings in money. And a lady will share her bed with a foul rich man, preferring gold to pedigree. Money is all. Good breeds with bad and race is lost.”
The Roman experience was similarly tragic. All of her later historians agreed that the terrible losses inflicted by Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) were minor compared to the horrendous losses Rome inflicted on herself during the nearly 100 years of civil war that followed the murder of the reforming Tribune Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC.
Immigration was the inevitable backwash of imperialism as slaves, adventurers, and traders swarmed into Rome. Over time, slaves were freed, foreigners gave birth to natives, non-Romans gained citizenship, and legal and social sanctions against intermarriage fell away. By the early empire, all that was left of the original Roman stock were a few patrician families.
The historian Appian lamented that “the city masses are now thoroughly mixed with foreign blood, the freed slave has the same rights as a native-born citizen, and those who are still slaves look no different from their masters.” Scipio Aemilianus (185–129 BC), a statesman and general of the famed clan of the Aemilii, called these heterogeneous subjects “step-children of Rome.”
One hundred and fifty years later, Horace (65–8 BC) wrote in Book III of the Odes:
Our grandfathers sired feeble children; theirs
Were weaker still — ourselves; and now our curse
Must be to breed even more degenerate heirs.
The last Roman writers therefore came to see their own people as both morally and physically degenerate. The subtext of Tacitus’ (56-117 AD) ethnological treatise Germania is a longing for the northern vigor and purity the Romans had lost. He saw the Gauls and Germans as superior to the Romans in morals and physique, and Roman women shared this admiration. Blond hair became the rage, and German and Gaulic slave women were shorn of their blond or reddish-brown hair to make wigs for wealthy women. By the time of Tertullian (160-225 AD), so many Roman women were dying their hair that he complained, “they are even ashamed of their country, sorry that they were not born in Germany or Gaul.” In the early second century AD, the satirist Juvenal complained of the dwindling stock of “the bluest patrician blood,” which is a figurative phrase for the nobility, whose veins appear blue through their light skin.
Viewed in a historical context, it is almost as if today’s northern Europeans have set out perfectly to imitate the ways in which the Greeks and Romans destroyed themselves. In both Europe and America, patriotic young men slaughtered each other in terrible fratricidal wars. In North America, the descendants of slaves are the majority in many great cities. Both continents have paid for imperial ambitions with mass immigration of aliens. Will we be able to resist the forces that brought down the ancients?
Mr. Sims is an historian and a native of Kentucky.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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Racism, Schmacism
Ridicule: the ultimate weapon.
James Edwards, Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the “R” Word to Push the Obama Agenda, TPC Press, 2010, 161 pp., $14.99 (soft cover)
If James Edwards’s Racism, Schmacism weren’t so infuriating, it would be a delight. Actually, it is still a delight in spite of being infuriating. It is infuriating because of the absurdity of the official attitudes toward race in America that Mr. Edwards exposes. It is a delight because he does it, not just with anger and outrage — though clearly he believes there is ample reason for both — but with a sense of humor. If Ann Coulter were about three times more race conscious, she would write this book.
The author is the host of the weekly radio program The Political Cesspool, broadcast from Memphis every Saturday and available on the Web here. Mr. Edwards describes his program as “not for the politically correct or faint of heart.” The same can be said for his book.
Mr. Edwards devotes chapters to such things as President Obama’s Reverend Wright; to the anti-white bias in the National Football League; to Van Jones, the “environment czar,” who was a little over the top even for the Obama administration; and to many of the race hucksters and self-loathing whites with whom the readers of American Renaissance are all too familiar.
Mr. Edwards starts with John McCain’s 2008 election campaign. Senator McCain, he says, was so afraid of being called a racist that “it’s a wonder he didn’t drop out of the race and endorse Obama.” Mr. McCain bent over backwards to avoid the “racist” smear, repudiating ads that mentioned Reverend Wright and disavowing supporters who used Mr. Obama’s middle name “Hussein.” Democrats called him a racist anyway. Why? Because, as Mr. Edwards points out, to the race-baiting political left, all white people, especially “conservatives” and Republicans, are racists by definition. Mr. Edwards urges his readers to understand and ignore the charge of “racism.” It is merely the left’s way of trying to cow its opposition.
Chapter after chapter points out examples of seemingly innocuous behavior by whites that gave rise to charges of “racism.” For example, Jennifer Cunditt, a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines, was encouraging passengers to find seats on her airplane (Southwest does not assign seats) and recited the following rhyme over the PA system: “Eeny meeny miny mo, pick a seat we gotta go.” Although Miss Cunditt, who was in her early twenties, swore she had never heard the catch-a-nigger-by-the-toe version of the rhyme, Southwest was forced to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight a lawsuit brought by irate race hucksters.
In another case, a Dallas county commissioner at a meeting referred to a county office as a “black hole” into which money habitually disappeared. A black county commissioner and a black judge, who were in attendance, interpreted the reference as a racial slur and demanded an immediate apology. In yet another case, the mayor of Columbus, Georgia, actually apologized because a city police officer ate a banana in the presence of a busload of blacks. There was more “food racism” when a child in Lewiston, Maine, left a ham sandwich in sight of a group of children of Somali Muslim immigrants. The child was suspended, and investigated by something called the Center for Prevention of Hate Violence. In Cincinnati, the federal Department of Justice was called in when the school system unwittingly fed a beef taco to a Hindu child.
Mr. Edwards demolishes what he calls “rainbow conservatives.” These are whites who believe that, any day now, blacks are going to start voting conservative. They’re finally going to figure out that they’re just being used by the liberals, who really don’t have their best interests at heart. Blacks will soon realize that due to their “family values” and innate conservatism on social issues, their true ideological home is the Republican Party. In reply, Mr. Edwards points out that nearly three out of four black babies are born out of wedlock, that black women have abortions at nearly five times the white rate, and that blacks are “seven to eight times more likely to commit crimes than white people.” The long-awaited black conversion to “family values” and conservatism is a fantasy.
Mr. Edwards notes that the infamous Jeremiah Wright of Obama’s home church is well known; not so, the work of the black theologian James Cone on which much of Rev. Wright’s theology is based. Rev. Cone summarizes his philosophy: “If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . .” Barack Obama attended Reverent Wright’s sermons for 20 years, but would now have us believe he never listened.
At least Reverend Wright was never appointed to anything. Mr. Obama did, however, appoint Van Jones to the post of “green jobs czar,” whatever that is. Mr. Jones’s earlier claim to fame was as a rabble rouser during the Rodney King riots in San Francisco. He later recalled that during the riot, “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be part of. . . . [T]he verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.”
Mr. Edwards devotes an entire chapter of Racism, Schmacism to the Henry Louis Gates incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which resulted in Mr. Obama’s now-famous “beer summit” on the White House lawn. The facts — as well as Prof. Gates’ infantile behavior — are well known, and Mr. Edwards reminds us of the president’s own prejudiced remarks:
I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that . . . but . . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly . . . [T]here is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.
Mr. Edwards replies: “It’s true that blacks are stopped more often than white people, but it’s not disproportionate at all. There is a very good reason blacks are stopped more often than whites — they commit crimes at far higher rates than white people.” Mr. Edwards points out that the affair was something of a turning point for Mr. Obama. His poll numbers began dropping, and have not stopped.
Some of the most maddening parts of Racism, Schmacism illustrate the overwhelming bias of the media, particularly the entertainment industry. The author advises readers to watch television and movies with a critical eye, to be alert to the ways they portray the races.
In television commercials, in particular, Mr. Edwards writes: “[W]hites . . . especially white men, are constantly held up as objects of ridicule and hatred. They’re humiliated, made to look stupid, silly, spineless, helpless, obnoxious, contemptible, and in more and more cases, evil. To top it off, they’re almost always paired with a non-white, usually a black person, who’s the exact opposite — he or she is smart, quick witted, well dressed, good natured and has it all together.”
For example, in a commercial for the financial firm ING, a foolish white person is quizzed by a perceptive black about his know-nothing investment plan. In a series of AOL ads that feature a stupid white person trying to buy stamps for an e-mail message, the white is always corrected by a superior, ever-patient non-white.
Mr. Edwards gives many more examples, but the point is clear: whites let themselves be ridiculed, lectured to by “superior” non-whites, and generally denigrated. They lap it up without the slightest sign that they understand what is being done to them.
The hypocrisy of the liberal establishment, the naiveté of some conservatives and of many whites in general, and the out-and-out ludicrousness of modern American race relations are parallel themes of this book. James Edwards has many, many examples of each and he relates them with an élan that will have you chuckling, in spite of the evidence of the serious trouble they represent. For those who want to follow up on his research, he carefully footnotes the source of each anecdote and quoted passage, pointing to easily accessible websites.
This book is a gem, and I am looking forward to his next one.
James Guy Roberts is a writer of fiction and a political and cultural commentator. His website and blog are at www.jamesguyroberts.com.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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Hate on the March
The SPLC’s war on free speech.
Wayne Lutton, Editor, “Profiteers of Hate,” The Social Contract Press, Spring 2010, 235 pp., $7.50 (soft cover)
The Social Contract is a quarterly publication about immigration, assimilation, and demographics. It was founded by John Tanton, the Michigan ophthalmologist who has, more than any other person, established and directed the modern immigration control movement. Among the influential organizations he has founded are the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies, and U.S. English. The Social Contract is published by the Social Contract Press, whose best-known title is a reprint of Jean Raspail’s haunting 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints.
The Social Contract (TSC) always offers an excellent mix of news and commentary on immigration-related matters, but the Spring 2010 special issue, “Profiteers of Hate,” is especially notable for its collection of articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Many of the issue’s contributors are seasoned veterans of the fight to bring sanity to immigration policy — John Vinson, Jerry Woodruff, Brenda Walker, Kevin Lamb, Peter Gemma — and together they have written what may be the best profile of the SPLC available.
The SPLC, incorporated in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1971, is devoted to smearing and silencing groups with which it disagrees. Its main method is to call people with dissident views on race or immigration “haters,” with the intention of discrediting and marginalizing them. The center’s most notable successes, however, have been financial. Starting with a mailing list of contributors to George McGovern’s presidential campaign against Richard Nixon in 1972, it has been hugely successful at parlaying wild, direct-mail threats of “racism” and “xenophobia” into hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. It is now based in a sparkling, six-story, bomb-proof headquarters its critics call “the poverty palace.” As TSC notes, the Direct Marketing Association had good reason in 1998 to induct the center’s founder, Morris Dees, into its Hall of Fame.
Mr. Dees, himself, was never shy about his goals. When he first started in business, his partner at the time, Millard Fuller, has reported, that “Morris and I . . . shared the overriding purpose of making a lot of money. We were not particular about how we did it . . .” “Anti-racism” has therefore not always been Mr. Dees’ stock in trade. TSC notes that in 1958 he was the campaign manager for Alabama’s segregationist attorney general, McDonald Gallion, and that in 1961 he did legal work for the Ku Klux Klan. He says he later had a conversion experience and changed his views on race.
He did not change his views on money. In 1978, the center promised that if it ever managed to accumulate a nest egg of $50 million, it would stop the expensive and distracting business of fund raising and live off its capital. When it had $55 million, however, it announced that it would take $100 million for it to feel comfortable. According to its latest tax filings it is now sitting on over $120 million — much of it in complex instruments like limited partnerships — and spent $5.76 million on ways to scare yet more money out of the gullible. That was twice as much as it spent on what was supposed to be its main purpose: legal services for alleged victims of civil rights abuses.
Many of the center’s own employees have been dismayed by its obsession with fear-mongering and money-grubbing. TSC reports that once the center’s entire legal staff resigned because Mr. Dees kept evoking alarmist threats of “racism” and would not concentrate on issues the lawyers thought were important for blacks: homelessness, voter registration, and preference programs. Another staffer who quit later said that the center was just cashing in on “black pain and white guilt.” The libertarian magazine Reason has written that “the Southern Poverty Law Center would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise funds.”
In 1994, the SPLC’s hometown paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, was a finalist for a Pulitzer award for a series of investigative articles about the center’s deceptive fund raising. The paper also learned that 12 of 13 current and former black employees complained of “racism” at the SPCL. That same year, when Mr. Dees was asked if he needed an affirmative action program to get a little more diversity in management, he had a surprising reply: “Probably the most discriminated people in America today are white men when it comes to jobs.”
Hate everywhere
The SPLC spooks people into giving it money by claiming that racism is everywhere, constantly on the march, probably right in your neighborhood. For years, its favorite bogey has been the Ku Klux Klan, despite the fact that the Klan has, at most, 2,000 members, of whom 10 percent are thought to be FBI informants. Some localities in which the SPLC has detected the presence of “the Klan” have challenged its findings, pointing out that residents haven’t seen any sheets or hoods. TSC reports that Mark Potok, a frequent spokesman for the SPLC, has a ready answer: “Just because the Klan, which refers to itself as the ‘invisible army,’ can’t be seen, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
One of the SPLC’s favorite scare tactics is to count the number of “hate groups” around the country — always growing, of course — and warn that only a stiff check made out to itself can quell the menace. Every mailing address, every chapter of every suspect organization ranks as “a group,” so in 2000, when the center baptized all 90 chapters of the League of the South as bigots, the list of “hate groups” surged by a terrifying 24 percent. In 1998, when the Council of Conservative Citizens and its 33 chapters were inducted into the ranks, they accounted for half the rise in the number of “hate groups.”
For years there have been complaints that there was no criterion for calling something a “hate group,” but the center now says it has to do with improper opinions about “immutable characteristics,” such as race. The center has decided that homosexuality is inborn and immutable, so improper opinions about that are hate, too. Muslim jihadis and Communist bully boys are not haters, however, because their unfortunate opinions are about religion and class, which are mutable. The center would no doubt tell us Jews are a religion and not race, so Jewishness is presumably mutable, but improper opinions about Jews are nevertheless hate. Perhaps the most flagrant departure from the center’s own alleged criterion is to have called an immigration-control organization like FAIR a “hate group.” Nationality and legal status are, alas, all too mutable.
The real criterion for designation as a “hater” is to take “right wing” positions the SPLC doesn’t like. The center’s publication Hate Watch says it is “keeping an eye on the radical right;” no mention of the radical left. Spokesman Mark Potok has admitted he was in high dudgeon over anti-abortion activists who threatened abortionists, but he ignored the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, which use the same tactics but “are not right-wing groups in any sense.”
MEChA, the Mexican student organization that wants to kick whites out of the American Southwest and establish a country called Aztlan, is also innocent of “hate.” As Mr. Potok explains, “We have found no evidence to support charges that the organization is racist or anti-Semitic.” At the same time, the center’s publication, Teaching Tolerance, ran a glowing profile of William Ayers, who was a bomb-thrower with the Weather Underground, and more recently a fast friend of Barack Obama. Teaching Tolerance failed to quote Mr. Ayers’ well-known reflections on his colorful past: “I don’t regret setting the bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Of course, he was never a “hater.”
One of the most interesting pieces in TSC’s special issue is an interview with Laird Wilcox, founder of the Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Political Movements, a vast repository of political books, pamphlets, and magazines that is housed at the University of Kansas. Mr. Wilcox has long been an observer of the political fringes, both right and left. He once tried to keep count of political groups he considered extreme, but gave up because it was impossible to tell what was real and what was just a PO box. He points out that the Internet now makes it possible for a single energetic blogger to look like an army, and he has nothing but scorn for the SPLC’s claims to know how many “hate groups” stalk the land. He points out that if the SPLC really cared about racial violence, it would concentrate on criminal gangs. Hispanic gangs, in particular, are notorious for driving blacks out of their territory, sometimes killing them at random, but the SPLC is far more worried about white people who study racial differences in IQ.
Mr. Wilcox has come to despise the left’s self-righteousness, noting that the anti-racist movement “has developed many of the destructive traits that characterize moral crusades, including the demonization of critics and dissenters.” As for the SPLC itself, “It has specialized a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation, a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.”
He calls the center’s brown baiting tactics “ritual defamation,” and adds that one of its rules is “to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it.” He concludes that “the primary goal of ritual defamation is censorship and repression.”
These are, of course, the SPLC’s real goals. For a group that claims to “teach tolerance,” it has no tolerance for dissent from today’s race dogmas. By splashing out the “hate group” label it hopes to drive dissenters out of respectable society and silence them. As Mr. Wilcox points out, it never refutes its opponents; they are “haters,” so whatever they say can be dismissed without examination. The pity is that so many lazy journalists go along, and accept the SPLC’s caricatures rather than find out for themselves what dissidents really think.
Start to finish, the center is an expression of profound contempt for Americans. Its mission is to protect the gullible masses — always just a step away from genocidal mayhem — from the slightest skepticism about 1960s clichés about “diversity” and racial equality. It does not debate, it defames. It does not refute, it reviles. As TSC points out, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become the most grotesque example of the very thing it purports to combat: hatred.
The special issue on the SPLC is available in hardcopy for $7.50 and online for free at: www.thesocialcontract.com. For phone orders please call 800-352-4843. The mailing address is The Social Contract Press, 445 East Mitchell Street, Petoskey, MI 49770.
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The Galton Report
“I feel your pain.”
Charles Darwin noted in The Descent of Man (1871) that “sympathy is directed solely towards members of the same community, and therefore towards known, and more or less loved members, but not to all the individuals of the same species.” Some 20 years later in Principles and Ethics (1892), the British sociologist Herbert Spencer elaborated on this obvious but politically incorrect truth. He coined the terms “in-group amity” for our positive feelings towards members of our own group and “out-group enmity” for the propensity to dislike and often to feel hostility to other groups.
These concepts were developed in America by William Graham Sumner, a professor of sociology at Yale, in his 1906 book Folkways. He introduced the term “ethnocentrism” to describe the fact that people normally support, and prefer to associate with, others of their own ethnic and racial group. At the same time, people normally do not support or associate with others not of their own ethnic and racial group, and frequently dislike them. In the social sciences, the active dislike of other ethnic and racial groups is called prejudice, especially when whites feel it towards minorities, but much less frequently, if at all, when other ethnic and racial groups feel it towards whites.
Sumner’s concept of ethnocentrism was updated and refined by Prof. Phil Rushton of the University of Western Ontario in the 1980s by means of what he called Genetic Similarity Theory. He proposed that people have an inherited tendency to like, seek out, marry, and form mutually supportive relationships with others who are genetically similar to themselves. He suggested that the reason for this is that in the evolutionary past this helped people propagate their genes more effectively, since those who are genetically similar have many genes in common, and these genes are more likely to survive and increase in future generations when the individuals carrying them cooperate. This advantage is further increased if these genetically similar groups discriminate against genetically dissimilar groups and put them at a disadvantage.
These ideas have recently been investigated by Dr. Xiaojing Xu and his colleagues at Peking University. They showed Europeans and Chinese videos of peoples’ cheeks being pricked with a needle, and measured electrical activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the area of the brain that responds when people perceive that others are suffering pain. They found that Europeans experienced activation of the ACC when they saw Europeans having their cheeks pricked, but not when they saw Chinese suffering in the same way. A similar effect was found with the Chinese, who showed the empathic ACC activation only when they saw suffering of their own race.
Professor Alessio Avenanti of the University of Bologna and his colleagues have further elaborated on this phenomenon. They showed Italian whites and immigrant blacks, born in Africa and living in Italy, videos of hands being pricked with a needle. When whites saw white person’s hand being pricked, they registered a “signature empathic brain response” (technically, motor-evoked potentials recorded in the left motor cortex) indicating that they were emotionally disturbed. When they saw a video of a black person’s hand being pricked, they did not register the “signature empathic brain response,” indicating that they were emotionally indifferent to seeing a black suffering pain.
The blacks who viewed the same videos reacted in the opposite way. When they saw a black hand being pricked, they registered the “signature empathic brain response,” again indicating that they were emotionally disturbed, but when they saw a white hand being pricked they were emotionally indifferent.
Subjects were also shown a video in which the hand being pricked was purple. Remarkably, in this case, both blacks and whites registered the “signature empathic brain response,” indicating that they were emotionally disturbed by seeing someone of the “purple” race suffering pain.
Prof. Avenanti and his colleagues interpret the results as showing that people are emotionally disturbed by seeing someone of their own race and also people of a different (“purple”) race suffering pain, except when they have had experience with the different race. It is likely that people have a genetically programmed propensity to learn, probably in childhood, to empathize with members of their own race but to feel indifferent to suffering experienced by members of another race with which they are familiar.
This conclusion makes sense in the light of common observation. Whites make large voluntary donations to alleviate suffering from famine, earthquakes, and other disasters afflicting “purple” people, that is, people they do not know, who live far away in such places as Africa, Haiti, or Pakistan. Whites are less inclined, however, to make voluntary donations to alleviate the suffering of other races they do know. Perhaps this explains why America does not have the generous welfare state characteristic of European countries. When welfare states were established in Europe during the 20th century, the more affluent were willing to support the less affluent because the whole population belonged to the same race, and affluent whites felt sympathy (to use Darwin’s word) for the suffering of the less affluent. People felt they were part of an extended family and the well-off were willing to support the less fortunate. In America a welfare state would require whites to support blacks, and because whites have personal experience of blacks, they are less sympathetic to their suffering and unwilling to pay for its alleviation. At the same time, it is well known that blacks make charitable contributions almost without exception to organizations set up to help blacks.
This tendency to help one’s own race is also called “The Florida Effect.” In Florida, a large population of elderly whites pays only grudgingly for schools that will benefit students who are mostly black and Hispanic. Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia are the most racially homogeneous states, and spend the highest proportion of gross state product on education. Exhortations about the positive value of “diversity,” and the importance of “multi-culturalism” appear to be ineffective because they founder on the rock of human nature.
Avenanti, A., Sirigu, A. & Aglioti, S.M. (2010). Empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-race pain. Current Biology, 20, 1-6.
Rushton, J.P. Genetic similarity, human altruism, and group selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1989, 12, 503-559.
Xu, X., Zuo, X., Wang, X. & Han, S. (2009). Do you feel my pain? Racial group membership modulates empathic neural responses. Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 8525–8529.
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O Tempora, O Mores!
Rally — Or Else
On August 28, controversial conservative radio and cable television talk show host Glenn Beck held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, ostensibly to “restore American honor.” Joining Mr. Beck were former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Alveda King — niece of Martin Luther King — some baseball players, and between 300,000 and 500,000 overwhelmingly white “Tea Party” activists. The rally was on the 47th anniversary of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, which led to accusations that Mr. Beck was trying to “hijack the legacy.” The event was more of a religious revival than a political rally, with Mr. Beck, an enthusiastic Mormon convert, going out of his way to prove his anti-“racist” credentials by putting one non-white after another behind the podium. During her talk, Alveda King said she hoped “white privilege” would one day become “human privilege,” and that America would soon “repent of the sin of racism” and return to honor. The crowd reportedly cheered.
There was not one word about immigration or race preferences, and scarcely a word about shrinking the size of government. It was, in short a complete waste of time, and proves either that Glenn Beck has no idea what is wrong with the country or has been turned to jelly by the prospect of being accused of “racism.”
Al Sharpton organized a counter protest at the other end of the Mall to “reclaim the dream” and denounce Mr. Beck’s temerity in evoking King. By all accounts, Mr. Sharpton’s counterdemonstration was a shabby affair, drawing just a few thousand people. Many in the crowd were either members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — which bused people in from New Jersey — or employees of the Department of Education. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a close associate of President Obama, raised eyebrows by appearing at Mr. Sharpton’s elbow and addressing the sparse crowd. Eyebrows went up further when it came to light that the Department of Education had sent out an e-mail message to its 4,000 employees “inviting” them to the Sharpton event. According to David Boaz of the Cato Institute, such an “invitation,” while not technically illegal, was nonetheless “highly inappropriate.” “It sends a signal that activity on behalf of one side of a political debate is expected within a department.” He pointed out there would have been outrage if a Bush cabinet member urged civil servants to attend a Glenn Beck rally.
Another speaker at the Sharpton rally was SEIU DC-area chapter president Jaime Contreras, who said of the crowd attending the Beck rally: “Shame on them . . . They represent hate-mongering and angry white people. The happy white people are here today. We will not let them stand in the way of the change we voted for!” [Lisa Gartner, Education Secretary Urged His Employees to Attend Sharpton’s Rally, Washington Examiner, Aug. 30, 2010. Jim Hoft, Al Sharpton’s Counter-Freedom Rally Attracts Only 3,000 Supporters, GatewayPundit.com, Aug. 28, 2010.]
Lies Like a Rug
While President Obama and his family vacationed on Martha’s Vinyard at the end of August, a small army of designers and decorators gave the Oval Office a makeover. The centerpiece of the new look is a specially-made wheat- and cream-colored rug, featuring the presidential seal in the center, and with five historical quotations chosen by Mr. Obama around the edge. They are from Presidents Kennedy, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts, with the fifth supposedly from Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is reported to be Mr. Obama’s favorite quotation.
If the White House had bothered to check, it would have discovered that this phrase, long attributed to King, was actually uttered in 1853 by Boston abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, a white man. King, no stranger to lifting the words of others, actually credited Parker for coming up with the phrase, but somehow, over time, it became identified as King’s own.
The White House isn’t revealing how much the redesign cost, saying only that it was consistent with what Presidents Clinton and Bush spent, and that no taxpayer funds were used. [Jamie Stiehm, Oval Office Rug Gets History Wrong, Washington Post, Sept. 4, 2010. Kenneth R. Bazinet, President Obama’s New Oval Office at White House Has Distinct NY Accent, New York Daily News, Sept. 1, 2010.]
Neither Fish Nor Fowl
Thirty years ago, under pressure from the US Department of Justice to ensure blacks had a chance to serve as class officers, the Nettleton, Mississippi, School District established a rule whereby only whites could run for certain school offices one year, and only blacks the next year. As Nettleton, population 2,000, is two thirds white and one third black, the rule benefited black students. This worked smoothly until Brandy Springer’s 12-year-old daughter, who is half American Indian, wanted to run for sixth grade class reporter, only to be told that she couldn’t because the job was reserved for blacks this year. Miss Springer, a white woman who recently moved to Nettleton from Florida, has four mixed-race children, two of them with an Indian, and two more with a black.
An outraged Miss Springer beefed about the policy on a website for mixed race-families, mixedandhappy.com, and soon the media were pestering the school board. Shortly thereafter, the district buckled and said it would do away with the old rules and let anyone run any time. This was too late for Miss Springer, who had already pulled her children out and moved to another district. [Holbrook Mohr, School’s Race Rule Prompts Mom to Pull Kids Out, AP, Aug. 27, 2010.]
Last Refuge
Ethically-challenged Harlem congressman Charlie Rangel, 80, who is facing a Congressional trial on 13 charges stemming from his failure to pay taxes on property he owns in the Dominican Republic and not declaring investments on his tax returns, is facing a strong primary challenge from Adam Clayton Powell. IV, the son of the Adam Clayton Powell Mr. Rangel beat back in 1970. Faced with the end of his lucrative career, Mr. Rangel is doing the desperate-black-man dance, and wrapping himself in the mantle of the “civil rights struggle.” Speaking before a friendly crowd in Harlem on Aug. 29, Mr. Rangel said, “All of you remember that this fight is never, never going to end. I’m just one of the foot soldiers; just one of those [who] fought in the march so that one day our kids [will] be able to say, ‘Do you remember when there was bigotry and prejudice in this country? Do you remember when there wasn’t fairness?’ ” adding, “This is not Charlie Rangel’s struggle. All over this country these things are happening.” [Sally Goldenberg, Desperate Rangel Wraps Self in Civil Rights, New York Post, Aug. 30, 2010.] Perhaps he should have heeded Barack Obama’s advice to “end his career with dignity” by resigning.
Black Jobs
The government tells us that the following are the ten occupations with the largest percentages of blacks:
- Barbers — 35.0 percent
- Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides — 34.0 percent
- Residential advisors — 29.6 percent
- Security guards and gaming surveillance officers — 28.6 percent
- Postal service clerks — 28.3 percent
- Baggage porters, bellhops, and concierges — 27.1 percent
- Postal service mail sorters, processors, and processing machine operators — 26.4 percent
- Taxi drivers and chauffeurs — 25.7 percent
- Bus drivers — 24.9 percent
- Parking lot attendants — 24.4 percent
And the ten occupations with the smallest percentage of blacks:
- Artists and related workers — 0.8 percent
- Environmental scientists and geoscientists — 1.0 percent
- Cost estimators — 1.1 percent
- Farmers and ranchers — 1.4 percent
- Dentists — 1.4 percent
- Surveying and mapping technicians — 1.4 percent
- Farm, ranch, and other agricultural managers — 1.5 percent
- News analysts, reporters and correspondents — 1.8 percent
- Millwrights — 2.1 percent
- Miscellaneous physical scientists — 2.1 percent
We suspect that these statistics somehow left out one of the most heavily black categories of all: federal government employee. [US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Characteristics by Race and Ethnicity, 2009.]
The number of American kindergartners has grown since 2000, from 3.8 to 4 million, and the number who are neither white nor black is up sharply. Hispanics make up 25 percent of all 5-year-olds, up from 19 percent in 2000. Hispanic five-year-olds now outnumber blacks by nearly two to one. The percentage of black kindergartners has fallen from 15 percent to 13 percent since 2000, while that of whites has fallen from 59 percent to 53 percent. Asians have seen a one percent rise to five percent, while American Indians remain constant at one percent. The number of mixed-race five-year-olds is also up one percent, and is now three percent of the national total.
In 2000, 81 percent of five-year-olds spoke English at home, but that number is now 78 percent. The number of those who speak Spanish at home increased from 14 to 16 percent. “In some districts, 40 percent of their kids are Latino and 4 percent of their teachers are,” says W. Steven Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “It’s a huge gap.”
White displacement used to happen mostly in cities, but now the most rapid transition is in rural and suburban areas. Lake County, Indiana, a Chicago suburb, saw its under-20 population go from 51.8 percent white in 2000 to 47.1 percent in 2008. In rural Nebraska’s Colfax and Dakota counties, the share of young whites is down from 60 percent in 2000 to about 45 percent in 2008. Kenneth Johnson, demographer at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, says the shift will only speed up, noting that the number of Hispanic girls entering childbearing years is up 30 percent since 2000. “It’s only the beginning,” he says. [Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, Kindergartens See More Hispanic, Asian Students, USA Today, Aug. 27, 2010.]
Obama Elementary
A few hundred fortunate students in Upper Marlboro, Maryland (in largely black Prince George’s County, outside of Washington, DC) have the honor of attending Barack Obama Elementary School this fall. The school is the seventh in the nation to be named after the current president. Fifth grader Brianna Hooker is excited. “The president is one of the smartest people . . . you could know,” she says. “I think it would be really exciting to go to a school [named] after someone who’s really smart.”
Prince George’s County Public School Board member Rosalind Johnson is tired of criticism of the decision to name the school after an increasingly unpopular chief executive who’s been in office only 19 months. “The fact that we have an African-American president is historic,” she says. “[Nothing] can change the historic nature of that event, [and] this school provides documentation that that event occurred.”
The school features a glass display case full of newspaper articles describing how Mr. Obama won the Democratic Party nomination and the general election, and photos of his inauguration. [John Henrehan, Barack Obama Elementary School Opens Monday, Fox5 (Washington, DC), Aug. 20, 2010.]
Beat Whitey Night
On Friday, August 20, Des Moines police responded to several reports of assaults outside the Iowa State Fair. Groups of young blacks were beating up whites, including 36-year-old Jammie Carroll, who suffered severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones, and nose. According to a report filed by one of the officers, there “was a group of 30 to 40 individuals roaming the fairgrounds openly calling it ‘beat whitey night.’” The violence continued over the weekend, and on Sunday evening, blacks beat two police officers as they tried to make arrests. One officer said someone knocked him down while he was trying to cuff a suspect, and several black teenage then started kicking him. He and his partner suffered injuries to their heads, necks and backs.
Some of the thuggery was brazen. Beth Longren, a 25-year-old white woman, was filming the turmoil when a 17-year-old black girl walked up to her and slapped her in the face, right in front of police — who arrested her. Des Moines resident Laurie Christensen said she had never seen such naked hostility. Groups of blacks “have been openly taunting the police — in the street right to their faces,” she says.
Des Moines police and civic leaders are reluctant to admit the obvious, although police spokesman Sgt. Lori Lavorato came close when she told reporters, “It’s all under investigation, but it’s very possible it has racial overtones.” Two weeks later, Des Moines Police Chief Judy Bradshaw replaced Sgt. Lavorato. Chief Bradshaw claims investigators found “no credible evidence” to suggest there were “racial overtones.” Sgt. Lavorato has been reassigned to the traffic unit. [Daniel P. Finney, Police Spokeswoman Moved After Remarks on Fairgrounds Fights, Des Moines Register, Sept. 3, 2010. Tom Alex, Police Say It’s ‘Very Possible’ Attacks Near Fairgrounds had Racial Overtones, Des Moines Register, Aug. 24, 2010.]
Unwanted Immigrant
New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, is an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to nearly all antibiotics. Medical authorities consider any microbe that has the gene for making NDM-1 a “superbug” and a potential “major global health problem.” Although it originated in India, bacteria that can make NDM-1 have been reported in Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States. How did it spread? Experts blame medical tourism, in which Westerners travel to India to take advantage of cheap procedures like kidney transplants and cosmetic surgery. The first cases began appearing in Britain in 2008, and have been traced to patients who were in Indian hospitals.
NDM-1 is generally found in E. coli and Klebsiella pneumonia bacteria. Those infected often get urinary-tract infections, pneumonia, or blood infections. If patients get sick in hospitals without good antibiotics they may die, because there are so few treatment options. Timothy Walsh, a professor of medical microbiology and antimicrobial resistance at Cardiff University in Wales, says there is “real concern” about NDM-1 at the global level, adding, “Because of medical tourism and international travel in general, resistance to these types of bacteria has the potential to spread around the world very, very quickly. And there is nothing in the [drug development] pipeline to tackle it.” [Jill Mahoney, Doctors Brace for More Cases as Indian Superbug Hits Canada, Globe and Mail, Aug. 11, 2010.]
Sang Huynh and his family had not yet settled into their new home in Happy Valley, Oregon, in August when they found a note attached to the front door ordering them to leave, and another reading, “Last warning. We will burn your house down if we have to.” Along with the notes were a pack of matches and a bottle of gasoline. Further investigation revealed that someone had spray painted “chink” and “gook” on the outside of the house. The Huynhs called police, who in turn called the FBI. As support for the Huynhs poured into city hall, Mayor Rob Wheeler called the threats and vandalism “totally unacceptable and disturbing” hate crimes, adding, “This is clearly the work of a disturbed individual or misguided vandals.”
And so it was. The culprit was Sang Huynh’s 16-year-old son. Detectives say the boy was afraid of attending a new school where he didn’t know anybody, and is “very remorseful about his conduct.” He will face no charges. [David Krough, Happy Valley Teen Admits Hate Crime Hoax, KGW-TV (Portland), Sept. 3, 2010. David Krough, Happy Valley Family Threatened With Hate Crimes, KGW-TV (Portland), Sept. 2, 2010.]
Bloody Chicago
Chicago has had a violent summer. In August alone, 59 people were murdered, up from 51 in 2009, and there were seven murders during the first two days of September. Many of the killings are gang-related, which led to a secret meeting on Aug. 17 between police superintendent Jody Weis, federal prosecutors, and local gang leaders. At the meeting, Mr. Weis told the gang bosses that if they did not stop the killing, the police would make their lives miserable, “doing everything from towing their cars for parking violations, to ramping up parole visits, to pulling them over repeatedly for traffic stops.” Mr. Weis also threatened to charge them under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Mr. Weis’s intimidation effort failed. One gang member at the meeting dismissed the threats as a “gimmick,” and the next weekend, five people were killed and 25 more wounded in mostly gang-related violence.
The gang bosses are fighting back in the press. Several held a news conference in early September to denounce “police harassment.” Vice Lords member Jim Allen said it was unfair for Mr. Weis to hold leaders responsible for the actions of individual gang members. Former gang member and self-styled community activist Mark Carter asked, “Is the mayor going to be held accountable for the corruption that takes place under his watch?” adding, “[T]he biggest gang in the city of Chicago is the Chicago police department.” [Chicago Gang Members Criticize ‘Gang Summit,’AP, Sept. 8, 2010. Tracy Swartz, Tracking Homicides in Chicago, RedEyeChicago.com, Sept. 2, 2010. Darrell McKinney, 15, Killed In Gang Crossfire: 4 Others Slain, Huffington Post, Aug. 30, 2010. Chicago Warns Gang Leaders to Stop Violence, AP, Aug. 30, 2010.]
Sweden Sours
Since the beginning of the Iraq War, Sweden has accepted tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees, far more than any other European Union country. Foreigners now make up more than ten percent of the population, with Iraqis the single largest group. In 2007, 18,559 Iraqis sought asylum in Sweden, three fourths of whom were let in. Many Swedes are tired of their country being used as a dumping ground, and in 2008, a Swedish court ruled that refugees had to start showing that their lives were actually in danger in their home countries. As a result, only 2,297 Iraqi refugees applied for asylum last year, with fewer than 25 percent getting in. [Andrew Ward, Sweden Loses Patience With Refugee Champion Role, Financial Times, Aug. 18, 2010.]
Immigration is an issue in upcoming parliamentary elections, with polls showing that the “far-right” Sweden Democrats could win their first seat. So frightened are the media that they are refusing to air the party’s anti-immigration ads. A television ad that did not run was of a race between an elderly white woman and several women in burqas pushing strollers. The message was that the Sweden Democrats would keep pension funding at the expense of immigration. The TV4 television network rejected the ad, saying it violated Swedish laws banning messages that promote racial or religious “hatred.” Meanwhile radio network SBS refused to broadcast an ad that told voters “on September 19, you can choose between hitting the breaks on immigration instead of hitting the breaks on pensions. Vote for the Sweden Democrats.” Party leader Jimmie Åkesson says, “That media representatives in this way would take on the role as censors and filter the message voters receive before the election is nothing less than a threat to democracy.”
A party must get 4 percent of the vote to win a seat in the Swedish parliament. At the end of August, the Swedish Democrats were polling 4.6 percent. [Sweden’s Far-Right Furious: ‘Democracy in Danger,’ Swedish Wire, Aug. 30, 2010.]
Camp of the Saints, 2010
In Jean Raspail’s dystopian 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, Europe falls to an unarmed invasion of impoverished Indians who arrive in a vast fleet of ramshackle freighters. In August, Canada got a taste of dystopia when the tramp steamer Sun Sea, loaded with 492 Tamils from Sri Lanka, appeared off the coast of British Columbia after a three-month voyage. The Tamils are a minority ethnic group who claim to be persecuted by the majority Sinhalese. The Tamil Tigers fought for independence for their part of the island but the Sri Lankan government defeated them in 2009 after 25 years of bloodshed. Canadian authorities fear that the Tigers put militants aboard the Sun Sea in an attempt to reconstitute themselves in Canada, which is home to the third largest community of Tamils in the world, after Sri Lanka and India. During the war, the Canadian Tamil Congress sent lots of money to the Tigers, which the Canadian government considers a terrorist organization.
The “refugees” are now in two jails. The government thinks the Tigers are watching the outcome and may send more of their men. There are thought to be several more ships crammed with Tamils in Asian waters that may be en route to Canada. “Refugees” were encouraged by the success of 76 Tamils who shipped in last October. They were all let in while authorities process their claims — which can take years.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is worried that Canada is getting a reputation as a soft touch for asylum claims. “I think Canadians are pretty concerned when a whole boat of people comes — not through any normal application process, not through any normal arrival channel — and just simply lands,” he says. By a margin of five to one, Canadian citizens want the Tamils booted out. [Kathryn Blaze Carlson, Harper Mulls Law Change to Block Boatloads of Asylum-seekers, National Post, Aug. 17, 2010. John Ibbitson and Marten Youssef, Boatload of Migrants a Wake-up Call for Canada, Globe and Mail, Aug. 12, 2010. Brian Lilley, Send Tamil Migrants Home: Poll, Ottawa Sun, August 20, 2010.]
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — In the previous issue, David Yeagley wrote a critique of my article, “War With the Comanche.” I am honored that Dr. Yeagley took the time to reply to something I wrote and I turn the other cheek to all his criticisms but one. In my article I deliberately emphasized the role of the white man’s firepower as an important factor in his victory. The fact is that whites know how to crew cannon, and this has given us the edge for a long time. I do not apologize for this advantage.
Dr. Yeagley did hit the nail on the head when he wrote that in reliving past battles the white man “can look back into history to find a sense of well-being and purpose. There he can at least imagine again what it feels like to be brave, strong, and victorious.” He also writes, “Perhaps Mr. Hengest is trying to suggest that Americans need to be more like Comanches: repel the invaders . . .” Of course, I am. We must cast off our chains and defend our territory, institutions, and kin. We’ve been through hard times before, but this time the chains are of our own making.
The war between the Texans and the Comanche is over. That conflict was resolved on the field of battle by our ancestors, and today, America’s white and red races face the same threat of dispossession.
Duncan Hengest, Va.
Sir — I could not help but be deeply saddened by “The Wages of Idealism” in the September issue. How many well-meaning, good-hearted young whites like Miss Abel are led into harrowing experiences by the suicidal propaganda of our times? How many never find their way out? I am so glad that Miss Able was rescued by a clear-headed boyfriend, but how many liberals have boyfriends who read Paved With Good Intentions? The psychological war on our young people is unquestionably the most insidious and maddening part of racial orthodoxy.
Thomas Curling, Louisville, Ky.
Sir — I took special interest in “The Wages of Idealism” when I read that the author, Tracy Abel, received a bachelor’s degree in sociology. I taught sociology at Florida State University, and I can assure you that a student can pass through the BA, MA, and PhD programs without ever knowing there are differences in IQ between blacks and whites. Instead, students learn that racism in various forms is the only reason for black failure.
It wasn’t until the mid 1990s, when I read the The Bell Curve and Race, Evolution and Behavior, that I realized I had been complicit in dispensing propaganda. Maybe Miss Abel’s professors actually believed what they were teaching, which would make them naïve, or they didn’t, which would make them dishonest. Either way, the students lose.
Phillip Blood, Worthington, Ohio
Sir — Thank you for your recent letter regarding recently retired Rutgers professor William H. Tucker’s book, The Cattell Controversy.
While I have not read Professor Tucker’s book, I am aware that it was published by the University of Illinois Press, one of the nation’s most highly regarded academic presses, and was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, requiring peer review. Nevertheless, I appreciate your taking the time to express your criticism of Professor Tucker’s scholarship.
Richard L. McCormick, President, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
Sir — You wondered why people like Prof. William H. Tucker distort the views of Raymond Cattell, asking whether it is because they are “so blinded by hate that they cannot understand the words they are reading.” They’re not blinded by hate as much as by fear. They fear that if the American people ever grow tired of carrying the White Man’s Burden and lay it down, the egalitarian glue that holds society together will dissolve, bringing turmoil and a new class of elites.
The thinking of today’s elites is that, for the sake of social peace, blacks (and other non-whites) must be accommodated in nearly every possible way. This includes generous welfare programs, racial hiring and college admissions quotas, tolerance for anti-social behavior, and devoting public education to black uplift at the expense of white children.
As AR knows, it also means viciously suppressing any truth, scientific finding, idea, or opinion that might upset black sensibilities or even remotely threaten their current status in society. That is why racial taboos are erected and enforced by establishment thought policemen like Prof. Tucker.
Name Withheld, Pittsburgh, Pa.
Sir — Tracy Abel tolerated mind-boggling levels of abuse. I would have exploded. The worst thing she did was to let the racists of color turn her against her boyfriend, who by her account was a decent white man. I am very happy that my parents were the exact opposite of hers on racial issues. White submissiveness, as Jared Taylor has pointed out, is possibly a greater factor in our displacement than black or brown chauvinism.
Paul Dronovich, San Francisco, Calif.
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