| Vol. 8, Nos. 7 & 8 | July-August 1997 |
| CONTENTS |
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The Myth of Diversity
Who Reads American Renaissance
Report From the Galtonian Front
Stout Fellows
The Long Retreat
Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense
The Future of the Species
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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The Myth of Diversity
Seldom have so many pretended to believe something so absurd.
The idea that diversity is one of the country’s great strengths is now so firmly rooted that virtually anyone can evoke it, praise it, and wallow in it without fear of contradiction. It has become one of the great unassailably American ideas, like democracy, patriotism, the family, or Martin Luther King.
The President of the United States glories in diversity. In May 1995, in a message recognizing the Mexican holiday, Cinco de Mayo, William Clinton said, “The Fifth of May offers all of us a chance to celebrate the cultural diversity that helps to make our nation great.” A few days later, when he designated May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, he said, “With the strength of our diversity and a continued commitment to the ideal of freedom, all Americans will share in the blessings of the bright future that awaits us.” In his 1996 speech accepting the nomination for President, he asked the audience to look around the hall and take heart in how varied the Democratic party was.
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In his 1996 Columbus Day proclamation, he said, “The expedition that Columbus … began more than 500 years ago, continues today as we experience and celebrate the vibrant influences of varied civilizations, not only from Europe, but also from around the world. America is stronger because of this diversity, and the democracy we cherish flourishes in the great mosaic we have created since 1492.”
Appeals to diversity are not just for domestic consumption. In a 1996 speech before the Australian parliament, President Clinton noted that both the United States and Australia were becoming increasingly diverse, and added, And, yes, we [Australia and America] can prove that free societies can embrace the economic and social changes, and the ethnic, racial and religious diversity this new era brings and come out stronger and freer than ever.
Hillary Clinton feels the same way. In February 1995, she spoke to the students of her former high school in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. She noticed there were many more non-whites among the students than when she was a student, 30 years earlier. We didn’t have the wonderful diversity of people that you have here today, said Mrs. Clinton. I’m sad we didn’t have it, because it would have been a great value, as I’m sure you will discover.
| Diversity has clearly become one of those high-sounding sentiments with which politicians lard their speeches. |
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Diversity has clearly become one of those orotund, high-sounding sentiments with which politicians lard their speeches. Of course, the idea that diversity at least of the kind that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are promoting is a great advantage for America is one of the most obviously stupid prop- ositions ever to see the light of day.
Nevertheless there is one kind of diversity that is an advantage. A contractor, for example, cannot build houses if he hires only electricians. He needs carpenters, plumbers, etc. a diverse work force. However, functional diversity of this kind is not what the Chief Executive is on about. He is talking about largely non-functional differences like race, language, age, sex, culture and even whether someone is homosexual. One might call this status diversity.
What advantages would a contractor get from a mixed work force of that kind? None. What are the advantages the United States gets from a racially mixed population? None.
The idea that status diversity is a strength is not merely a myth, but a particularly transparent one. Explaining why diversity is bad for a country is a little like explaining why cholera is bad for it; the trick is to understand how anyone could possibly think it was good.
In fact, diversity became a strength after the fact. It became necessary to believe in it because skepticism would be racist. Otherwise intelligent people began to mouth nonsense about diversity only because of the blinding power of the race taboo. After diversity began to include sex, mental disabilities, perversions, and everything else that was alien or outlandish, to disbelieve in the power of diversity was to show oneself to be intolerant as well as racist.
Of course it is only white societies and white groups within multi-racial societies that are ever fooled by guff about diversity. Everyone else recognizes the Clinton-Harvard-New York Times brand of diversity for exactly what it is: weakness, dissension, and self-destruction.
Immigration
Despite President Clinton’s view that diversity started with Columbus, for most of its history the United States was self- consciously homogeneous. In 1787, in the second of The Federalist Papers, John Jay gave thanks that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs …”
This is not exactly a celebration of diversity, nor was Jay an eccentric. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson were all explicit about wanting the United States to be a white country, and in 1790 the first federal naturalization law required that applicants for citizenship be free white persons. Until 1965, it was very difficult for non-whites to immigrate to the United States and become citizens (an exception being made for the descendants of slaves). Immigration law was explicitly designed to keep the United States a white nation with a white majority. It was only in the 1950s and 60s that the country turned its back on nearly 200 years of traditional thinking about race and began its long march down the road to nowhere.
| Once the country made the fatal assumption that race was a trivial human distinction, all else had to follow. |
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Once the country made the fatal assumption that race was a trivial human distinction, all else had to follow. Congress abolished not only Jim Crow and legal segregation but, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, put an end to free association as well. The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, which abolished national origins quotas and opened immigration to all nations, was a grand gesture of anti-racism, a kind of civil rights law for the entire world.
As has been pointed out in such books as Lawrence Auster’s The Path to National Suicide and Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation, the backers of the immigration bill were at pains to explain that it would have little effect on the country. Under the proposed bill, explained Senator Edward Kennedy, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset. Contrary to charges in some quarters, it will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area. The senator suggested that, at most, 62,000 people a year might immigrate.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he also downplayed its impact: This bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or power.
The point here is not that the backers were wrong about the bill even though in 1996, for example, there were a record 1,300,000 naturalizations and perhaps 90 percent of the new citizens were non-white. The point is that diversity of the kind that immigration is now said to bless us with was never even hinted at as one of the law’s benefits.
No one dreamed that in just 20 years ten percent of the entire population of El Salvador would have moved to the United States or that millions of mostly Hispanic and Asian immigrants would threaten to reduce whites to a racial minority in California by 1998. In 1965, before the discovery that diversity is our strength, most people would have been shocked by the thought of such population changes.
Today, the intellectual climate is different, but in entirely predictable ways. Racism looms ever larger as the greatest moral offense a white person can commit, and anyone who opposes the arrival of yet more non-whites cannot but be racist. There is therefore no longer any moral basis for opposing the prospect of minority status for whites, and what would have been an unthinkable prospect before 1965 must now be seen as an exciting opportunity. Thus did diversity become a strength, despite the suspension of disbelief required to think it so.
This is a perfect example of an assertion, for purely ideological reasons, of something obviously untrue. Like the equality of the races, the equivalence of the sexes, the unimportance of heredity, the normalcy of homosexuality, and the insignificance of physical or mental handicap, the strength of diversity is one of a whole series of monstrous absurdities on which liberalism depends.
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| Lookist Oppressor |
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Having started with race, diversity now includes just about anything. Feminists, angry people in wheel chairs, AIDS carriers, militant homosexuals, and people who would rather speak Spanish than English have all taken much of their style and impetus from the civil rights movement. Demands for inclusiveness almost always include the language of grievance and compensation pioneered by blacks. Fat people fight discrimination, ugly people struggle against lookism, and at least one local government has required that the stage set for a strip tease show be wheel-chair accessible. Anyone who opposes the glorification of the alien, the abnormal, and the inferior can be denounced with much fanfare and a huge sense of superiority. The metastasis of diversity is a fascinating story, but the disease began with race.
Occasionally a mainstream author sniffs around the edges of the population problem. At some risk to his professional respectability, columnist Scott McConnell of the New York Post has pointed out that if it will be such a good thing for whites to become a minority, there is no reason to wait until the next century. We could throw open the borders right now and become a minority in just a few years. Why deny ourselves and our children the great benefits of Third Worldism that we are planning for our grandchildren? he asks.
Advantages of Diversity
On those rare occasions when people actually attempt to defend diversity, the one claim they make with any semblance of conviction is that its advantages will become evident as the world becomes more international. It will be a great thing to have citizens from all around the world as nations have more and more contact; specifi- cally, our international population will boost American exports. Of course, since this view is based on the assumption that people communicate better with people like themselves, it is an argument against national diversity. If it takes a Korean to deal with the Koreans, how are Americans supposed to get along with the Koreans who live in America?
If anyone really thought a diverse population is good for trade, we would presumably be adjusting the mix of immigrants in accordance with trade potential. There would be no point in admitting Haitians, for example, since Haiti is a pesthole and never likely to be an important trade partner. After Canada, Japan is our largest trading partner. Does this mean we need more Japanese? No one ever talks about immigration this way, because no one really believes immigra- tion has anything to do with promoting exports.
The example of Japan in fact shows just how little racial diversity has to do with international trade. Japan is one of the most racially homogeneous nations in the world. By American standards, Japanese are hopeless racists, homophobes, sexists, and nativists. They even eat whales. Here is a country that should therefore be a complete failure in the international economy and yet it is probably the most successful trading nation on earth.
Taiwan and Korea are close behind, with China now recording huge trade surpluses with the United States. These countries are even more closed and exclusionist than Japan. If they could ever be made to understand the American notion of diversity, Asians would politely wait until we had left the room and then die laughing. Germany is likewise one of the world’s great exporting nations. Who would dream of thinking this was due to the presence of Turkish Gastarbeiter.
The fact that millions of Mexicans now live in the United States does not make our products more attractive to anybody certainly not to Mexico, which already has plenty of the things Mexicans know how to make. Diversity adds exactly nothing to our international competitiveness.
Racial diversity is also supposed to bring cultural enrichment, but what are its real achievements? The culture of ordinary Americans remains almost completely untouched by the millions of non-white immigrants who have arrived since 1965. Perhaps they have now heard of the Cinco de Mayo festival, but even if they live in California or Texas how many Americans know that it commemorates a Mexican military victory against the French?
Immigrants do not teach us about Cervantes or Borges or Lady Murasaki and it would be silly to think they did. Chinese stowaways do not arrive with a curator’s knowledge of Ming ceramics and copies of the Tao-te Ching in their pockets. The one cultural artifact immigrants bring with them is their language which increasingly becomes an Americanized farrago that would astonish their countrymen but the so-called culture of immigrant settlements is a tangle of peasant folkways, Coca-Cola, food stamps, T-shirts with writing on them, and truculence.
High culture and world history cross borders by themselves. Who in America first learned of Tchaikovsky or the Mayans from an immigrant? Nearly every good-sized American city has an opera company but it wasn’t established by Italians.
What, in the way of authentic culture have Miami’s dwindling non-Hispanic whites gained from the fact that the city is now nearly 70 percent Hispanic? Are the art galleries, concerts, museums, and literature of Los Angeles improved by the fact that its population is now nearly half Hispanic? How has the culture of Washington, D.C. or Detroit been enriched by majority-black populations? If immigration and diversity bring cultural enrichment, why is that the places being the most intensively enriched are the places where whites least want to live? Like the trade argument, the cultural enrichment argument collapses with a pinprick.
It is true that since 1965 more American school children have begun to study Spanish, but fewer now study French, German, or Latin. How is this an improvement? People can, of course, study any language they want without filling the country with immigrants. Virtually all Norwegians speak excellent English, but the country is not swarming with Englishmen.
Any discussion of the real advantages of ethnic diversity usually manages to establish only one benefit people really care about: good ethnic restaurants. Probably not even William Clinton would claim that getting an authentic Thai restaurant in every city is a major national objective.
Public Services
At a different level, it is now taken for granted that public services like fire and police departments should employ people of different races. The theory is that it is better to have black or Hispanic officers patrolling black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Here do we not have an example of one of diversity’s benefits?
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| For Whites Only |
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On the contrary, this is merely the first proof that diversity is a horrible burden. If all across America it has been demonstrated that whites cannot police non-whites or put out their fires it only shows how divisive diversity really is. The racial mix of a police force touted as one of the wonders of diversity becomes necessary only because officers of one race and citizens of another are unable to work together. The diversity that is claimed as a triumph is necessary only because diversity does not work.
The same is true of every other effort to diversify public services. If Hispanic judges and prosecutors must be recruited for the justice system it means whites are incapable of dispassionate justice. If non-white teachers are necessary role models for non-white children it means that inspiration cannot cross racial lines. If newspapers must hire non-white reporters in order to satisfy non-white readers it means people cannot write acceptable news for people of other races. If blacks demand black television newscasters and weathermen, it means they want to get information from their own people. If majority-minority voting districts must be set up so that non-whites can elect representatives of their own race, it means that elections are nothing more than a racial headcount. All such efforts at diversity are not expressions of the inherent strength of multi-racialism; they are admissions that it is a debilitating source of tension, hostility, and weakness.
Just as the advantages of diversity disappear upon examination, its disadvantages are many and obvious. Once a fire department or police force has been diversified to match the surrounding community, does it work better? Not if we are to judge from the never-ending racial wrangles over promotions, class-action bias law suits, reverse discrimination cases, acrimony over quotas and affirmative action, and the proliferation of racially exclusive professional organizations. Every good-sized police department in the country has a black officers’ association devoted to explicit, racially competitive objectives. In large cities, there are associations for Asian, Hispanic, and even white officers.
Many government agencies and private companies hire professional diversity managers to help handle mixed work forces. This is a new profession, which did not exist before the idea that diversity is a strength. Most of it boils down to trying to bridge the gaps between people who do not understand each other, but since it concerns subjects about which management is afraid to ask too many questions, some of it is pure snake oil.
Maria Riefler has trained Nestle, Walt Disney, Chrysler and Chevron. She likes to divide employees into groups that represent the body and the triune brain. This is supposed to help them understand how stereotypes are hidden deep within the primitive part of ourselves.
It is a very peculiar strength that requires the constant attention of experts and other bumcombe artists. Like hiring black police officers to patrol black neighborhoods, diversity training is an admission that a mixed work force is a liability.
This is the merest common sense; it is hard to get dissimilar people to work together. Indeed, a large-scale survey called the National Study of the Changing Work force found that more than half of all workers said they preferred to work with people who were not only the same race as themselves, but were the same sex and had the same level of education. Even more probably felt that way but were afraid to say so.
These days there is much chirping about how diversity is going to improve profits. American companies are hard-headed about profits. A great deal of research, much of it quantitative, goes into decisions about product lines, new markets, establishing joint ventures, issuing stock or moving the head office. If there has been any serious research showing that diversity improves profits it would have been first-page news long ago. Not even the most desperate data massage seems to have produced a study that can make such a claim.
Just how big a headache diversity actually is for companies is clear from the endless stream of news stories about corporate racial discrimination. In just one month November, 1996 diversity made quite a lot of news. Texaco agreed to spend $176 million on black victims of company racism, and lawyers for the firm that sued Texaco were getting about ten calls a day from people asking how to file for discrimination settlements. Just a few days later, 22 former employees of the nation’s largest printing company, R.R. Donnelley and Sons, sued over what they claimed was $500 million worth of racism.
In the same month, both the U.S. State Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms settled multi-million dollar class action discrimination suits brought by blacks. Likewise in November, three blacks brought a class action suit against an Avis Rent-A-Car franchise with outlets in North and South Carolina, claiming they had been turned away because of race. Within the month, the owner of Avis said it would break its contract with the franchisee, and hired a law firm to check up on other Avis operators. Every one of these cases, which are expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally damaging, is a consequence of racial diversity and these were just the cases that made the news.
It would be edifying to count the number of public and private organizations that exist in the United States only because of its diverse population, and that are not needed in places like Japan or Norway. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and every state and local equivalents of these offices exist only because of racial diversity. Every government office, every university, every large corporation, and every military installation has employees working full-time on affirmative action, discrimination claims, and other diversity issues.
Countless outreach programs, reconciliation commissions, blue-ribbon panels, and mayoral commissions fret professionally about race every day. Not one of these would be necessary in a nation of a single race. There must be tens of thousands of Americans consuming hundreds of millions of dollars every year enforcing, adjusting, tuning, regulating, and talking pure nonsense about the racial diversity that is supposed to be our strength.
Indeed, Tom McClintock, a former candidate for controller of the state of California estimated that before the 1996 state ballot initiative was approved to abolish racial preferences, the annual cost just to administer California’s affirmative action programs was from $343 million to $677 million. This figure did not include the cost of private preference programs or the cost of state and local anti-discrimination machinery, none of which was affected by the 1996 measure.
If diversity were a strength people would practice it spontaneously. It wouldn’t require constant cheer-leading or expensive lawsuits. If diversity were enriching, people would seek it out. It is in private gatherings not governed by some kind of civil-rights law that Americans show just how much strength and enrichment they find in diversity. Such gatherings are usually the very opposite of diverse.
Other Races
Generally speaking, whatever timid opposition to diversity that ever arises is characterized as the whining of resentful, ignorant whites. Nonwhite are thought to have a better appreciation of the importance of inclusiveness. This is just so much more nonsense. Now that immigration has added Hispanics and Asians to the traditional black-white racial mix, fault lines are forming in all directions.
Though we are told over and over that it is ignorance and lack of contact that cause antipathy, it is groups that have the most contact that most dislike each other. This is why outreach and bridge building do not work, as even the New York Times unintentionally revealed in a June 18, 1990 headline: Ethnic Feuding Divides Parade for Harmony.
The idea that hostility is cured through contact is now enshrined as part of the diversity myth. George Orwell touched on this in his essay, England Your England:
During the war of 1914-1918 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired.
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In America one need not go overseas to have contact with foreigners. What has been the result? In Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York City, blacks have tried to drive Korean merchants out of their neighborhoods. They firebomb stores, assault shop keepers, and mount boycotts against people who don’t look like us. In Los Angeles, relations were so bad that in 1986 a Black-Korean Alliance was formed to reduce tensions. It staggered on uselessly until late 1992, when it was dissolved in mutual recrimination and accusations. The more blacks and Koreans talked to each other the angrier they got.
There are now schools and school districts completely dominated by blacks and Hispanics, which have race wars involving no whites at all. Some examples? Locke High School in Los Angeles is almost exactly half-black and half-Hispanic. In February 1996, 50 police officers had to be called in to break up a pitched battle involving hundreds of students. After order was finally restored and school dismissed, police in riot gear had to keep students from rejoining battle in the streets. What touched off the battle? Hispanics were annoyed certainly not enriched by the February observances of Black History Month.
| Hispanic students rioted because of the February observances of Black History Month |
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A similar incident took place at Los Angeles’ North Hollywood High School, when it took police in riot gear to calm a melee that started when an estimated 200 to 700 black and Hispanic students pitched into each other. The spark was reportedly a clash over what kind of music to play at the homecoming dance, neither side having felt particularly inclusive.
Norman Thomas High School is located at Park Avenue and 33rd Street in Manhattan. In 1992, tension between blacks and Hispanics erupted into a free-for-all involving both boys and girls. The only thing people cared about was skin color, explained one 16-year-old. The New York City Board of Education has rapid mobilization guards for just such emergencies.
Farragut High School in Chicago is two-thirds Hispanic and one third black. Recently, racial tension built up to what the principal called total polarization, and it became dangerous to let students mix without police supervision. At the height of the tension, extra- curricular activities were canceled for 30 days and the school’s homecoming football game had to be played without a single student in the stands, for fear they would attack each other.
In Huntsville, Texas, Hispanic students say they need to arm themselves against violent blacks. In Dallas, Hispanic parents say their children are afraid to go to school for fear of attacks by blacks. Tensions of this kind are usually reported only in local newspapers, and are probably quite widespread.
There is the same racial animosity in jails. Guards keep some cell blocks in a near-constant state of lock-down because blacks and Hispanics kill each other if they are allowed to mingle. Life in prison is more intensely integrated than anywhere else in the country. If diversity is such a good thing why is racial segregation always one of the top demands when prisoners list their grievances?
Of course, high-school fistfights and jailhouse brawls are nothing compared to what can happen when diversity really goes wrong. In the summer of 1967, 83 people were killed and nearly 2,000 injured when blacks rioted all across the country. The national guard had to be called out to stop violence in Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Newark, northern New Jersey, and Detroit.
Nor are race riots a relic from the 1960s. The single worst outbreak in the nation’s history was in Los Angeles in 1992, when rioters killed 58 people and injured more than 2,300. They also burned 5,300 buildings, causing nearly a billion dollars in damage. There was smaller-scale violence all of it directed at whites in Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York City, and Richmond and San Jose, California.
The Los Angeles riots showed that Hispanics can behave as badly as blacks. Although the grievance was ostensibly about a miscarriage of justice for the black criminal, Rodney King, more than half of the 15,000 people arrested for looting were Hispanic.
Diversity can pit one set of Hispanics against another. Puerto Ricans in Miami have rioted, claiming to have been excluded by the city’s Cuban power structure. Cubans get everything; we get nothing, explained one rioter. The greater the diversity, the more varied the possibilities for disaffection and violence.
| Diversity of the kind that is supposed to benefit the United States is a problem wherever it is found. |
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There has been a Sahara of hot air about why blacks riot, with the official pronouncement on reasons dating back to the Kerner Commission Report of 1968: “[T]he most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.” Whatever one may think of this finding, there is one conclusion no one can deny: Race riots cannot happen without racial diversity.
An occasional glance at a newspaper is all it takes to learn that diversity of the kind that is supposed to benefit the United States is a problem wherever it is found. Every large-scale and intractable blood-letting, be it in the Middle East, Ireland, Burundi, or the former Yugoslavia is due to diversity, that is to say, people who differ from each other trying to live in the same territory.
Most of the time, the reasons for discord are not even as salient as race. They can be religion, language, or ethnicity. From time to time, Americans have fought each other for these reasons, but race is the deepest, most constant source of antipathy. Unlike language or religion, race cannot change. Differences between men that are written deep into their bodies will always be a source of friction.
The Diversity Double Standard
Diversity, of course, is only for whites. Wherever only whites gather charges of racism cannot be long in coming. On the other hand, it would be tedious to list the racially exclusive non-white gatherings the country takes for granted. Shule Mandela Academy in East Palo Alto, California is only a little more outspoken than most when its students meet every morning and pledge to think black, act black, speak black, buy black, pray black, love black, and live black.
The same racial double standard is found in national policies. It is only white nations Canada, the United States, and Australia that permit large-scale immigration. Non-white nations are careful to maintain racial and cultural homogeneity and most permit essentially no immigration at all.
Some nations, of course, could attract no immigrants even if they wanted to; there is not much pressure on the borders of Bolivia or Uganda. However, as soon as Third World countries become even only a little bit more prosperous than their neighbors they quickly become keen to keep strangers out. Malaysia, for example, recently announced that in the case of repeat offenders, it will flog illegal aliens, their employers, and anyone who smuggles them into the country. The Ivory Coast, which is better-run and more successful than its West African neighbors, has launched an Ivoirite (Ivorian-ness) campaign to expel all residents who cannot prove that their grand parents were born within the national territory.
Even nations that are unattractive to immigrants sometimes display their feelings about diversity by expelling what few aliens arrived in the past. Idi Amin became ruler of Uganda in 1971. The very next year, his government expelled the 70,000 to 80,000 Indians and Pakistanis whom the British had brought in to be merchants. Black Ugandans, who did not like dealing with people unlike themselves, were delighted.
Hundreds of thousands of poor Mexicans sneak into the United States every year, but even Mexico is attractive to some Central Americans, whose countries are poorer still. Mexico guards its southern border with military troops, and is ruthless about expelling illegals. Not even United States citizens have an easy time moving to Mexico, which has no intention of diluting its national culture in the name of diversity.
Only whites babble about the advantages of diversity. One of the alleged advantages is so nutty, it is hard to believe it can be proposed by people capable of human speech, but since we are shooting fish in a barrel why not fire a final round? We are told that since whites are a minority of the world population (they are about 15 percent of the total), they should happily reconcile themselves to minority status in America, that such a status will be good training for life on an ever-shrinking planet.
Of course, in a world-wide context, every human group is a minority. There are many more of everyone else than there are Hispanics or Africans, for example. Does this mean that Mexicans and Nigerians, too, should strive to become minorities in Mexico and Nigeria? Like so much that is said about race or immigration, this idea falls to pieces as soon as it is applied to anyone but whites.
It is only whites who have ever attempted to believe that race is a trivial matter, so it is only whites who think it may be racist to preserve their people and culture. Having decided to deny the findings of biology, the traditions of their ancestors, and the evidence of their senses, they have denied to themselves any moral basis for keeping out aliens. They have set in motion forces that will eventually destroy them.
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| Vanishing mammals? |
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E. Raymond Hall, professor of biology at the University of Kansas, is the author of the definitive work on American wildlife, Mammals of North America. He states as a biological law that, two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area. (emphasis in the original) Human races are biological subspecies, and Prof. Hall writes specifically that this law applies to humans just as it does to other mammals: To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.
Human nature is part of animal nature. Racial diversity, which only whites promote and always at their own expense is nothing more than unilateral disarmament in a dangerous world. If current population movements continue, and if the thinking of whites remains unchanged, there will be little doubt as to which group s fate will be the disaster and oblivion Prof. Hall so confidently predicts. 
| ARTICLE |
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Who Reads American Renaissance?
Responses to the AR Reader Survey.
In September 1996, all AR subscribers received a reader survey. As the months began to pass, some began to ask when we would print the results, and several wondered if we were too embarrassed to print them. One subscriber even wrote that he had been thinking of letting his subscription lapse, but was resubscribing only so he could see the results and we had better not disappoint him. We are sorry to have taken nearly a year to finish this project, but it took time to tabulate the replies.
Three hundred ninety-one subscribers returned their surveys. This is only a fraction of the readership, and we cannot know how representative it is. However, two indicators suggest that it is a good sample. We know that 4.5 percent of AR subscribers are women, and the percentage of women among the respondents 4.8 percent was virtually the same. Also, a comparison of the postmarks with the geographical distribution of subscribers suggests that every region and foreign country responded in about equal proportions.
| Average Income | $48,300 |
| Median Income | $45,000 |
| Average Age | 53 |
| Median Age | 52 |
As the table on general characteristics shows, readers are a mature group, with an average age of 52. The oldest is 95 and the three youngest are 19. Readers are also well paid. Both average and median incomes are around $45,000. Forty-three (out of the sample of 391) report incomes of more than $100,000, and one claims an annual income of one million dollars.
| Have Children | 224 |
| Own a Firearm | 268 |
| Believe in God | 262 |
| Practice a Religion | 177 |
| Have Run for Office | 41 |
| Like the Illustrations | 337 |
| Now Registered with a Political Party | 264 |
| Was Once Liberal on Race | 174 |
| Is Now Liberal on Race | 0 |
| Read AR Just to Follow the Opposition | 0 |
| Avr. No. of People Who Read Each Issue of AR | 2.3 |
Although a handful did not specify race, the huge majority of readers said they were white, or some variant of white. One fascinating character described himself as psychologically Aryan, ¾ negro. He reports that his racial views developed in the 1940s from reading Spengler, de Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Hitler.
Forty-five percent of respondents were once liberals on race one reports that his liberalism was a youthful spasm that lasted about 20 minutes and the rest have always had a clear view. We were hoping that some of the liberals we know to be monitoring AR would respond, but none did.
Two thirds of respondents believe in God, a figure lower than the national average of well over 90 percent. Fewer than half practice a religion, however. Of those who practice religion, the great majority are Christian, but among the respondents were two Odinists, a Buddhist, a mystic, a Nature-worshiper and a Swedenborgian (!). Two claim to practice religions of their own. One Jewish subscriber does not believe in God but nevertheless practices Judaism
| Catholic | 36 |
| Christian | 34 |
| Baptist | 22 |
| Protestant | 16 |
| Presbyterian | 15 |
| Jewish | 13 |
| Methodist | 10 |
| Lutheran | 8 |
| Episcopal | 5 |
| Identity | 4 |
| Mormon | 4 |
AR readers are well educated. Seventy-two percent of respondents have a college degree and one third have advanced degrees. They also appear to be fairly active in conservative organizations.
| Bachelors | 147 |
| Masters | 71 |
| High School | 55 |
| Ph.D/Ed.D | 40 |
| JD | 17 |
| Associate Degree | 16 |
| Some College | 15 |
| MD | 6 |
In their spare time, they are mainly readers and sportsmen, but there are three knife-makers, ten genealogists, 11 film-makers, 11 woodworkers, four reenactors, and one who wrote bullfighting without saying whether he was a fighter or a fan.
| Reading | 151 |
| Sports (all kinds) | 102 |
| Music | 73 |
| History | 61 |
| Guns/Shooting | 49 |
| Gardening | 44 |
| Politics | 42 |
| Writing | 40 |
| Hiking/Camping | 36 |
| Computers | 27 |
| Traveling | 27 |
The musical tastes of AR readers are no surprise, with classical music the overwhelming favorite. This category includes the 20 or so respondents whose replies were more specific: Baroque, German opera, chamber music, etc.
| Classical | 171 |
| Big Band | 91 |
| Country & Western | 28 |
| Rock and Roll | 21 |
| Oldies | 20 |
| Jazz | 9 |
| Folk | 7 |
Their favorite novelists are of the manly genre, though further down a list that runs to 260 different names, one finds writers like Anthony Trollope (3), Voltaire (3), Nathaniel Hawthorne (2), and Oscar Wilde (2). One jokester entered ABC, NBC, and CBS as his favorite purveyors of fiction, and another wrote William Clinton and Albert Gore.
| Mark Twain | 34 | J.R.R. Tolkien | 15 |
| William Shakespeare | 27 | Thomas Wolfe | 15 |
| Jack Lonon | 26 | William Faulkner | 12 |
| Tom Clancy | 25 | Joseph Conrad | 11 |
| Charles Dickens | 23 | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 11 |
| Ayn Rand | 23 | Ernest Hemmingway | 11 |
| George Orwell | 20 | Jean Raspail | 10 |
| Edgar Allen Poe | 18 | John Steinbeck | 9 |
| Rudyard Kipling | 16 | Arthur Connon Doyle | 8 |
Readers subscribe to magazines with a conservative tilt; Chronicles, Instauration, American Spectator, National Review, and New American are the most popular. However the entire list, including magazines read by only one respondent, runs to over 300 different titles, so there are readers who take the New Yorker (8), Bon Appetit (5), Mother Earth News (3), Soldier of Fortune (3), Organic Gardening (2), Beekeepers (1), and Opera News (1).
| Chronicles | 76 | Journal of Historial Review | 19 |
| Instauration | 69 | National Vanguard | 19 |
| American Spectator | 58 | Time | 18 |
| National Review | 48 | Barnes Review | 16 |
| New American | 32 | Commentary | 16 |
| Southern Partisan | 29 | Newsweek | 15 |
| US News | 29 | Confederate Veteran | 14 |
| Spotlight | 28 | Rothbard-Rockwell | 14 |
| National Geographic | 25 | National Rifle Assoc. | 13 |
| Readers Digest | 25 | Atlantic | 12 |
| Truth At Last | 24 | Guns and Ammo | 12 |
| Conservative Chronicle | 23 | Reason | 12 |
| Sam Frances Letter | 19 | Right Now | 11 |
| Human events | 19 | Sobran’s | 11 |
Respondents could list more than one favorite non-fiction writer, so the list has more than 350 names. An openly partisan sample puts your servant at the top of the list, followed by columnist and AR contributor, Samuel Francis. Michael Levin, Richard McCulloch, and Lawrence Auster are further down the list, each with three nominations, and Fr. James Thornton got two. Philippe Rushton got six votes and Carleton Putnam three, but there were some surprises: two respondents listed Vladimir Lenin as one of their favorite writers.
| Jared Taylor | 54 | H.L. Menchen | 11 |
| Samuel Francis | 38 | Murray Rothbard | 11 |
| David Irving | 37 | Peter Brimelow | 10 |
| Thomas Sowell | 21 | Revilo Oliver | 10 |
| Joseph Sobran | 20 | Bible Authors | 10 |
| Charles Murray | 19 | Arthur Jensen | 9 |
| Freidrich Nietzshe | 14 | John Toland | 9 |
| Wilmont Robertson | 13 |
When it comes to non-Americans who have harmed or helped the white race, three names appear on both lists: Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Jesus Christ.
| Adolf Hitler | 75 |
| Christopher Columbus | 38 |
| Jean-Marie Le Pen | 37 |
| Charles Martel | 18 |
| Winston Churchill | 17 |
| Arthur de Gobineau | 17 |
| Jean Raspail | 15 |
| J. Philippe Rushton | 14 |
| Charles Darwin | 13 |
| John Tyndall | 12 |
| Isaac Newton | 11 |
| Queen Isabella of Spain | 10 |
| Martin Luther | 10 |
| Houston S. Chamberlain | 9 |
| Hendrick Vervoerd | 9 |
| Jesus Christ | 8 |
| Oswald Spengler | 8 |
| John Calvin | 7 |
| David Irving | 7 |
| Nietzshe | 7 |
| Margaret Thatcher | 7 |
| Adoph Hitler | 112 |
| Karl Marx | 89 |
| Gunnar Myrdal | 76 |
| Winston Churchill | 70 |
| Joseph Stalin | 69 |
| Nelson Mandela | 65 |
| Vladimir Lenin | 46 |
| F.W. DeKlerk | 27 |
| Mahatma Gandhi | 17 |
| Sigmund Freud | 13 |
| The Rothchilds | 13 |
| Fidel Castro | 12 |
| Jean-Jaques Rousseau | 12 |
| Desmond Tutu | 12 |
| Muammar Qaddafi | 11 |
| Mao Tse-Tung | 9 |
| Jesus Christ | 9 |
| Ayatollah Khomeini | 7 |
| Ashley Montague | 6 |
| Cecil Roberts | 6 |
On the list of Americans who have advanced our interests, partisans were once again at work, but the names still make for interesting reading. Eight respondents thought O.J. Simpson was helpful to our cause, and Marcus Garvey and Rodney King each got two votes. Once again, AR contributors Michael Levin and Lawrence Auster got three each. The complete list runs to nearly 300 names, and includes Audrey Shuey, John Tanton, Otto Scott, Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Lord, Michael Hill, and Alan Simpson.
| Jared Taylor | 120 |
| Patrick Buchanan | 66 |
| David Duke | 64 |
| Thomas Jefferson | 55 |
| Samuel Francis | 45 |
| Robert E. Lee | 43 |
| George Washington | 36 |
| Wilmont Robertson | 33 |
| Nathan B. Forest | 31 |
| Arthur Jensen | 30 |
| William Pierce | 27 |
| Teddy Roosevelt | 27 |
| Charles Lindburgh | 26 |
| Charles Murray | 26 |
| George L. Rockwell | 26 |
| William Shockley | 23 |
| Andrew Jackson | 21 |
| Ronald Reagan | 21 |
| Henry Ford | 19 |
| Lothrop Stoddard | 19 |
| Jefferson Davis | 17 |
| George Wallace | 17 |
| Jesse Helms | 14 |
| James Polk | 13 |
| Rush Limbaugh | 12 |
| Abraham Lincoln | 12 |
| Madison Grant | 11 |
| Carleton Putnam | 11 |
| Louis Farrakhan | 10 |
| Ed Fields | 10 |
| Revilo Oliver | 10 |
| Peter Brimlow | 10 |
| Pete Wilson | 10 |
| John C. Calhoun | 9 |
| Richard Herrnstein | 9 |
| Theodore Bilbo | 8 |
| James Madison | 8 |
| O.J. Simpson | 8 |
| Lyndon Johnson | 230 |
| Franklin Roosevelt | 140 |
| William Clinton | 107 |
| Abraham Lincoln | 96 |
| Theodore Kennedy | 94 |
| Earl Warren | 95 |
| Martin Luther King | 87 |
| John Kennedy | 67 |
| Jesse Jackson | 49 |
| Richard Nixon | 33 |
| James Carter | 30 |
| Franz Boaz | 26 |
| Dwight Eisenhower | 25 |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | 24 |
| Harry Truman | 22 |
| Woodrow Wilson | 22 |
| Robert Kennedy | 21 |
| George Bush | 19 |
| Morris Dees | 15 |
| Louis Farrakhan | 15 |
| Hubert Humphrey | 14 |
| Thurgood Marshall | 13 |
| David Rockefeller | 13 |
| William Brennen | 11 |
| Thaddeus Stevens | 8 |
| Jack Kemp | 7 |
| Margaret Mead | 7 |
| John Wilkes Booth | 6 |
| Felix Frankfurter | 6 |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | 6 |
There were several questions that left room for open-ended replies, most of which could be put into fairly broad categories. We asked readers who had once been liberal on race why they had changed. The most frequent reply was experience with non-whites (46). Several people mentioned being attacked by blacks or serving in the military with non-whites, or having to manage them at work. The next most frequent reply was, essentially, that age and experience had opened their eyes (45). Other reasons were: Studied racialist and scientific literature (42), Experienced or learned of the excesses of civil rights laws (26), Was shocked by the demands and attitudes of blacks (15), Learned about non-white behavior, primarily through the news (14), Offended by racial double standards (12), Fear crime by non-whites (12), Amazed by the antics of liberals (9), Saw effects of non-white immigration (6), Someone personally opened their eyes (4), Natural revulsion for miscegenation eventually won out over liberalism (4).
To quote some of the more pungent responses: My Southern pappy was right; my Ivy League profs were wrong. Blacks are now blacker, Hispanics are more Hispanic, and whites are becoming vegetables. As I matured I realized I had been duped. I grew up in Minnesota where few blacks live. I lived six years in Manhattan and 12 years in L.A. and my views changed completely. I moved into a mixed neighborhood and my neighbors were not Bill Cosby or Sidney Poitier. I moved to Los Angeles from Portland Oregon! I started living in Oakland, CA. I was raised by a social worker father. Then I went to high school and actually had to deal with blacks as they really are.
What type of material would readers like to see more often in AR? Many respondents were kind enough to say they liked the editorial mix as it is (49). Others want more articles about History (29), More O Tempora items (29), Solutions to our problems (27), Promotion of white consciousness (20), Pro-white activism, domestic and foreign (18), Book reviews (17), Science and genetics (17), Exposés of government and media bias (15), Exposés of non-white thinking and behavior (14), Immigration/demographics (13), Racial differences and IQ (13), Discrimination against whites (10), Exposés of Jews (9), Legal/Constitutional matters (8), Crime (7), Useful statistics (7), Christian points of view (6), First-person accounts (6), Anti-white thinking and behavior (5).
One reader wanted interviews with interesting people. Two, to our considerable surprise, wanted treatments of 19th and 20th century German anti-liberals, and one wanted articles that credit enemies of the West with IQs of more than 70. Another urged us to publish more inspirational, analytical, thoughtful letters. We publish every one we get.
What did AR readers want to see less of? There were far fewer complaints, but they are worth noting: Christianity/religion (22), Statistical and technical material (12), IQ and racial differences (8), Evolution (7), Articles by Jews (7), Scholarly/philosophical articles (5), Long articles (4), Accounts of non-white behavior (4), Genetics (3), Pessimistic articles (3).
The survey was mailed in the issue following the one with a cover story by an Orthodox priest, Fr. James Thornton. Several referred specifically to this article as the kind they do not like. Some readers think we have too much in the way of boring book reviews, subjective bulls**t, and boring essays by second-raters. Well, we’re opposed to these things, too.
What did readers like least about AR? The most frequent complaint, we are happy to say, is that AR does not have enough pages and articles. The table belows registers multiple complaints on a wide range of issues. One reader complained about mild Southern chauvinism, and was presumably not asking for a more pronounced Southern chauvinism. Another thought we could increase circulation with a swimsuit edition, and one dislikes the ugly fellow at the head of the letters section. One reader didn’t like the sense that a small, smart, horrendously overworked group of people a mere handful are behind it. We don’t like that either.
| Does not have enough pages and articles | 46 |
| Does not deal with the Jewish question | 23 |
| Appears too infrequently | 15 |
| Does not offer solutions to racial problems | 8 |
| Is too mild/tolerant/broadminded | 7 |
| Does not have a large enough circulation | 5 |
| Illustrations are irrelevant | 5 |
| Is too Christian/religious | 5 |
| Makes depressing reading | 4 |
| Needs more different writers | 4 |
| Articles are too long | 4 |
| Articles are too technical | 4 |
| O Tempora section is unneeded/too long | 4 |
| Includes articles about evolution | 4 |
| Is too extremist | 3 |
| Is meanspirited | 3 |
| Ignores good non-whites | 3 |
| Needs photos | 2 |
| Needs fresh material | 2 |
We hope the results of the survey are as interesting to you as they have been to us. As your editor, I try to produce a publication that satisfies its readers, and I have thought a great deal about your suggestions and complaints. At the same time, AR has an educational purpose that goes beyond satisfying either my reading preferences or those of subscribers. We are grateful to all of you who took the time to fill in your surveys, and look forward to any other suggestions you may have to make AR as good and effective a publication as possible.
| ARTICLE |
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Report From the Galtonian Front
A sampling of recent science literature.
This is the first in an occasional series of articles by Prof. Whitney that will summarize the latest scientific findings in areas of interest to readers of AR. We are pleased to introduce this unique and valuable column.
More on the Genetic Reality of Race
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Although readers of AR are well informed about the genetic reality of human races (see Diversity in the Human Genome , AR, March 1997), more is becoming public knowledge all the time. The April 1997 issue of American Journal of Human Genetics contains a report from a project whose principle goal was to identify a set of genetic markers that would allow the confident determination of ethnicity, for use in a forensic setting. The authors point out that crime suspects are often easily categorized by simple observation, but it has been more difficult to specify the race of an unknown suspect from crime scene residue such as blood or semen.
The genetic markers often used for DNA fingerprinting of individuals are not necessarily suitable for distinguishing races. The investigators set out to survey published and unpublished data sets to see if they could come up with a set of markers, already known, that could be used to specify the race of unseen perpetrators. Although individuals of various races share many genes, there are plenty of PSAs [population-specific alleles] useful for the task at hand. A PSA is a gene that is unique, or almost unique, to one race.
The present report concentrates on the three population groups that constitute 95 percent of U.S. residents: blacks, whites, and Hispanics. It is easiest to separate African ancestry from everything else, because Africans are genetically most different from all other human races. However, the task requires the combination of results across a profile of PSAs, because of the admixture of genes in the miscegenated population of the U.S. It is estimated that genes of European ancestry constitute about 25 percent of the genes in contemporary African Americans, while the European genetic component is about 60 percent of today’s Hispanic population. It would not be difficult to select similar sets of markers to differentiate other populations and combinations. [Shriver, M. D. (and 6 co-authors), (1997) Ethnic-affiliation estimation by use of population-specific DNA markers American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 60, pp. 957-964.]
Priests Have Different Genes
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The Cohanim, or priests, are still recognized by some Jewish groups as descendants of the kohen gadol or high priest of the days of the first temple of Solomon 3,000 years ago. Entry into the priesthood, which is different from the rabbinate, is by strict patrilineal descent, and a man can become a priest only if his father was a priest. Being a priest carries social and religious obligations that help preserve the identity of Jewish communities, and surveys of Jewish cemetery gravestones suggest that priests make up approximately five percent of the seven million males of the world Jewish population. (For a wealth of background information see MacDonald, K. (1994) A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. Westport CT: Praeger Publishers).
Something else that follows strict patrilineal descent is the human Y chromosome, since it is the Y chromosome that determines maleness. Every male has one, and he passes it to his sons. Accordingly, a group of investigators from America, Europe and Israel set out to see if the Y chromosome of Cohanim might be characteristically different from the Y chromosomes of lay Jews. For six gene markers on the Y chromosome, they compared samples of priests and lay persons from Ashkenazic (Jewish communities of northern Europe) and Sephardic (Jewish communities of North Africa and the Middle East) populations.
Sure enough, within each population the priestly Y chromosomes were significantly different from those of the laymen. Further, Ashkenazic and Sephardic priests resembled each other, while differing from their respective communities. The authors state This result is consistent with an origin for the Jewish priesthood antedating the division of world Jewry into Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities, and is of particular interest in view of the pronounced genetic diversity displayed between the two communities. [Skorecki, K., (and 7 co-authors), 1997, Y chromosomes of Jewish priests , Nature, Vol. 385, p.32.]
Oriental IQ Averages About 105
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New data from Taiwan are consistent with those from most previous studies in suggesting that children of Japanese and Chinese ancestry tend to have slightly higher IQs than the Caucasian peoples of the United States and Europe. Newly available data include scores on a standard test of intelligence, the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices, for a representative sample of 2,476 Taiwanese at 9 to 12 years of age. After performing appropriate conversions and comparisons to British IQ data, Professor Lynn estimates that this sample of Taiwanese have an average IQ of 104.7.
These results are generally consistent with most other studies in suggesting that on average Orientals score higher than Caucasians. A notable exception is a well-known study by educational psychologist H. Stevenson and colleagues. Dr. Stevenson reported that children from Taiwan, Japan, and the American City of Minneapolis performed the same on ten different cognitive tests. Here Prof. Lynn points out that Dr. Stevenson’s Minneapolis sample were virtually all white, and that whites in Minnesota are known to have an average IQ of 105, a bit above the national average of 100. Thus, if Dr. Stevenson found no difference between Minneapolis (avg. 105) and Japan or Taiwan, his results are consistent with the rest of the literature in suggesting that Orientals average about 105.
Prof. Lynn concludes, My suggested reading of the data is that 26 studies all indicating slightly higher mean IQs in Japanese, Chinese and other East Asian populations is too many for happenstance and that these results probably have to be accepted as valid. [Lynn, R. (1997) Intelligence in Taiwan , Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 44, No.4, pp. 585-586.] (Professor Lynn’s book, Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, was reviewed in AR, April 1997).
Caucasian Resistance to AIDS
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Sure to provide grist for black conspiracy theorists is a new report concerning genetic resistance to HIV infection. DELTAccr5 is a gene that, when homozygous (a person has two copies, one from each parent) appears to provide strong resistance to HIV infection, even after repeated high-risk exposures. Being heterozygous (having one copy) for the gene may delay the progression to full-blown AIDS of people harboring the virus. Previous work had found the DELTAccr5 gene to have a frequency of about 10% among people of European ancestry, and to be absent elsewhere.
Armed with a newly devised test for the gene, the authors screened 3,342 individuals from a globally-distributed range of populations. The gene was found at low frequency throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent the traditional home range of Indo-European (Aryan) peoples. Rare and isolated occurrences of the gene elsewhere in the world were most likely the result of recent European gene flow into the indigenous populations. [Martinson, J.J. (and 4 co-authors), (1997) Global distribution of the CCR5 gene 32-basepair deletion, Nature Genetics, Vol. 16, No. 1, May, 97]
Glayde Whitney is past-president of the Behavior Genetics Association. He is a professor in psychology, psychobiology and neuroscience at Florida State University.
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Stout Fellows
As an antidote to today’s degeneracy, it is good to read novels that date from the days before the white man lost his nerve. Beau Geste, is the classic 1924 story about life in the French Foreign Legion. It is a rip-roaring tale later made into a photoplay starring Ronald Colman. The author, Percival Wren (1885-1941), was an English hunter and world traveler who served in the legion, and the book is stuffed with manly virtues.
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It is also stuffed with what are, by today’s standards, odious prejudices, two of which are in full view in the book’s very first scene. After several years of separation, George Lawrence of the Nigerian Civil Service happens upon Henri de Beaujolais, Major of the Spahis (native North-African cavalry commanded by French officers):
For de Beaujolais, Lawrence had a great respect and liking as a French soldier of the finest type, keen as mustard, hard as nails, a thorough sportsman, and a gentleman according to the exacting English standard. Frequently he paid him the remarkable English compliment, One would hardly take you for a Frenchman, Jolly, you might almost be English, a bouquet which de Beaujolais received with less concern by reason of the fact that his mother had been a Devonshire Cary.
Although the Spahi officer was heavily bearded, arrayed in what Lawrence considered hopelessly ill-fitting khaki, and partially extinguished under a villainous high-domed white helmet (and looked as truly French as his friend looked truly English), he, however, did not throw himself with a howl of joy upon the bosom of his cher Georges, fling his arms about his neck, kiss him upon both cheeks, nor address him as his little cabbage. Rather as his old bean, in fact.
Both men are serving in Africa, a pestilential continent that must be brought to heel and taught civilization by the white man. Lawrence, as it happens, is finally due for leave out of Africa :
[T]he train would take him, after a three days’ dusty journey, to the rubbish-heap called Lagos, on the Bight of Benin of the wicked West African Coast. There he would embark on the good ship Appam, greet her commander Captain Harrison, and sink into a deck chair with that glorious sigh of relief, known in its perfection only to those weary ones who turn their backs upon the Outposts and set their faces towards Home.
Thus are we quickly introduced to the British view of the world: Englishmen are the standard according to which all Europeans must be judged, and it is Europe’s duty to be master of the tropics. There is no soul-searching in Beau Geste about empire; it is the white man’s natural calling.
Nor is there any question about the superiority of the British. In the Foreign Legion, the book’s three English heroes meet all manner of Europeans, but the Germans are louts, the Italians and Portuguese are thieving cutthroats, the Americans are stout but simple, and though the French are capable of producing an occasional man of parts, they never quite get it right.
The story is one of valor, treachery, and innumerable opportunities for the heroes three brothers to show of what stuff they are made, and it is here that Beau Geste is even more of a departure from the present than in its antique nationalism. The brothers hew to the highest possible code, and will not violate its slightest part no matter how great the reward. They will not perform a dishonorable act, no matter how insignificant, even to save their own lives.
These Englishmen behave as if their motto were death before dishonor, but they would have thought the phrase far too grandiose. Heroism is simply a matter of gentlemen doing their duty, though they do permit themselves to say Stout fellow, to each other after surviving the worst.
Did real people ever behave this way? Probably not. However, our ancestors were reared to ideals like these. Honor was not a joke or an empty phrase for them. Today, it would be impossible to publish a book that takes duty for granted, whose characters do not calculate advantage. Today Percival Wren would be laughed out of every publishing house in New York City and in London, would probably be arrested for violating the Race Relations Act.
For this, of course, we pay a price. Boys who watch Beavis and Butthead do not grow up to be the same men as boys who read and thrill to Beau Geste.
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The Long Retreat
The University of Mississippi and the Second Reconstruction.
The Band Played Dixie: Race and Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss. Nadine Cohodas, The Free Press, 309 pp., $26.00
The rapid abandonment of Southern resistance to integration is much remarked upon, but little understood by white Americans who fear for their race’s future. In the fall of 1962 the University of Mississippi, long viewed as a bastion of racial awareness, was the site of a famous struggle between the federal and state governments over the admission of a black, James Meredith. It was one of the pivotal battles in the fight to preserve segregation.
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The eventual admission of Mr. Meredith is a well known victory of the civil rights movement, which has today become part of the sacred multi-racial history of America. Less well known is the background of Ole Miss, as the school is affectionately known, and why it achieved such symbolic significance. The University’s past helps illustrate the nature of the South’s racial, cultural, religious and historical passion in the days before liberalism brought it to its knees.
What happened after September, 1962 is a grim chronology of constant defeat that European Americans would do well to understand if they hope ever to reassert themselves in the land of their ancestors.
The Band Played Dixie, by Nadine Cohodas, recounts the story of pre-integration Ole Miss, the details of the Meredith affair and the school’s subsequent history. Its perspective is decidedly on the side of racial mixing, and the author accepts the dogmas of egalitarianism. Nonetheless, she has done her homework and the facts are by and large left to stand on their own.
A Southern Bastion
The University of Mississippi opened its doors in the small town of Oxford on November 6, 1848. It was founded to support the process by which a culture transmits itself across generations. At first it succeeded admirably. A little over a decade after its founding, a few weeks before secession, a student group called the University Greys began military training. A month after the war began the school was forced to close, since all but five students had volun- teered for Mr. Davis’ army.
By 1865, 111 out the 135 University Greys were dead. The monument erected to their memory on campus reads: In honor of those who with ardent valor and patriotic devotion sacrificed their lives in defense of principles inherited from their fathers and strengthened by the teachings of the Alma Mater.
A commencement address by Reverend T.D. Witherspoon in 1867 showed insights his descendants would do well to keep in mind: We must have an educational literature of our own, or we have no security for the future against a thralldom far worse than that of the bayonet.
In 1882 the school admitted women. The case for their admission was light years removed from contemporary dogma: We are not teaching women to demand the rights of men nor to invade the place of men. The goal was merely to improve the sensibilities of her aesthetic faculties, of the moral and religious parts of her being, which fit her for the ways of modest usefulness … and which invest her with that true womanly character that constitute the charm of social life and the queen of the house.
In the 1920s, the ideals of Ole Miss were still intact. The chancellor, Albert Hume, once wrote that a hypothetical professor who would suggest that Robert E. Lee was a traitor would find his position instantly vacant. He would be told, if claiming academic freedom, You are free, but so are we, and you may not trample underfoot what we regard as sacred so long as you hold a position in our institution.
In 1936 the school adopted Rebels as the nickname for its athletic teams. In 1948, at the height of the enthusiasm surrounding the Dixiecrat’s departure from the Democratic Party in protest of Truman’s support for early civil rights legislation, Ole Miss began the practice of having the cheerleaders run onto the field at football games waving Confederate flags while the band played Dixie. Cheerleaders then tossed bundles of flags to the crowd, which would wave them throughout the game. The school’s mascot became Colonel Rebel, dressed as a Southern plantation owner.
Confident that their way of life would preserve their racial and cultural identity, the students at Ole Miss were little disturbed by the 1954 Brown decision. In 1956 a student poll showed that only 19 per cent (the vast majority of whom were northerners) supported integration. Relying on the firm rhetoric of its political leaders, the South thought it could resist the second reconstruction. It was in for a surprise.
Tolerance and Gradualism
The Band Played Dixie gives ample evidence of the two errors that have led to the dismantling of traditional social structures throughout Western nations in this century. The first is a mistaken idea of the type of dissent the social fabric can tolerate. In societies as diverse as post-Franco Spain, post-Verwoerd South Africa, and the post-World War II South, authority neglected its primary task which is the placing of life’s fundamental assumptions beyond the boundaries of debate. Once these assumptions become subject to critical debate they are endangered. Leftists have always understood this, whether it be Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or the ruthless controllers of contemporary public discourse. The right has rarely grasped it.
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| Lingering traditions — homecoming 1996. |
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The second error is the belief that revolutionary movements can be satisfied by granting minor concessions. It didn’t work for Louis XVI or Nicholas II and it utterly doomed South Africa and the American south.
Miss Cohodas notes a report presented to the university’s trustees in the fall of 1958 by two university alumni, state representative Wilburn Hooker and former representative Edwin White, which detailed substantial cracks in the school’s commitment to what they saw as its basic principles. They noted that books supporting integration were displayed prominently for browsing on the library s shelves while those favoring segregation were kept in the stacks. They cited many professors who were less than sympathetic to the Ole Miss world view. These were not frivolous points. One need only think of how much today’s top universities, for example, safeguard their students from exposure to racialist arguments. However, Miss Cohodas tells us, White and Hooker appeared to have been rebuffed in their crusade to rid Ole Miss of the alleged heretics.
Barnett’s Surrender
The sorry tale of Governor Ross Barnett’s secret negotiations with the Kennedys in the fall of 62 has been detailed elsewhere, but Miss Cohodas also touches on it. In public, Barnett was telling his people that, No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor, and We must stand up like men and tell them never! We will not drink from the cup of genocide. In private, he was begging Bobby Kennedy to allow him to make a theatrical public stand in opposition while allowing Meredith to enter the school.
A popular song of the time illustrates the people’s faith in their leader:
Never, Never, Never, No-o-o Never, Never, Never
We will not yield one inch of any field,
Fix us another toddy, ain t yieldin to nobody,
Ross’s standing like Gibraltar, he shall never falter
Ask us what to say, it s to hell with Bobby K
Never shall our emblem go from Colonel Reb to Old
Black Joe.
Miss Cohodas presents a rather one-sided picture of the violence that swept the campus after Meredith’s admission, suggesting that it was demonstrators rather than the federal forces who struck first. Her bibliography lacks Earl Lively’s 1963 book, The Invasion of Mississippi, which presents a perspective on those events unadulterated by the Washington regime’s propaganda line. Whatever the details, though, the surrender had been accomplished; Ole Miss was integrated.
The Slippery Slope
The token presence of one black on campus was just the beginning. As the final chapters of The Band Played Dixie amply demonstrate, the South could have continued its resistance in many forms, but it chose instead to bow down; not overnight, but slowly, inch by inch. Miss Cohodas details it all. By November first of 1962, Chancellor Williams was warning the student body to accept Mr. Meredith’s presence peacefully or be expelled. Despite opposition from a group called the Rebel Underground, which labeled Williams a liar and a Quisling, students and faculty obeyed.
The next year Ole Miss played against an integrated football team for the first time. (In South Africa this was one of the first capitulations of the post-Verwoerd government, which agreed to a match with an integrated rugby team from New Zealand. Less than thirty years later the same National Party surrendered the entire country without firing a shot.)
In 1966, a liberal student group had Bobby Kennedy speak on campus (!), and the event proceeded peacefully. Kennedy’s words had an unintended ring of truth to them: You have no problem the nation does not have. You carry no burden that they too do not carry.
By 1969, there was a Negro history celebration and a Negro History Week. A sit-in on the steps of the chancellor’s office led to the inevitable creation of a Black Student Union. The following fall, with over two hundred black students attending Ole Miss, the basketball team was integrated.
According to Miss Cohodas the reason was the realization that Ole Miss was not going to be competitive unless it tried to get the best players around regardless of their skin color. (This was an old argument. In 1947, Pee Wee Reese refused to sign a petition launched by Dixie Walker to protest Jackie Robinson’s presence on the team because he didn t care what color he was so long as he could help the Dodgers win. Why are there no tributes to the idealism of Dixie Walker?)
At Mississippi Southern the school’s mascot, General Nat, referring to Nathan Bedford Forrest, had been shelved in 1970 to placate black football players. In 1972 Ben Williams became the first black to suit up for the Rebels, and black studies courses began at about the same time. By June, 1976, Williams was voted to the honorary campus leadership position of Colonel Rebel!
Blacks had slowly found their way into the driver’s seat. An attempt to provide Colonel Reb with a horse to be named Traveler in honor of General Lee’s mount was nixed because of black protests. In 1980, over two dozen Rebel football players were black, and in April, 1982, the first black was elected to the cheerleading squad. He promptly announced that he would not wave the Battle Flag at games.
In the 1980s the university began various affirmative action programs to lower admissions standards for blacks, and it actively sought black professors. James Meredith, invited back to speak at a commemoration event celebrating his admission, said that the Confederate flag, Colonel Rebel, and Dixie must be removed as school symbols and songs.
In 1990 Miss Ole Miss was black. By the mid nineties the Confederate flag was furled. No longer would the cheerleaders rush out onto the field waving the flag of their forefathers.
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| A Tradition until the 1990s. |
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Lately, we read that Ole Miss has just hired a public relations firm to study the university s image, which is apparently still unacceptable. Although polls taken in Mississippi show that the school’s supporters want no more dismantling of tradition, Chancellor Robert Khayat wants new supporters. His goal is to make Ole Miss 35 percent black.
Game’s End
And so it was over. In a little over three decades the University had been transformed from a bulwark of Southern tradition to an instrument of the multi-racial revolution.
As the battle for Ole Miss raged in 1962 a wise man remarked to me that if the university did integrate we could expect three things. 1) Southerners would be called upon to reject the heritage of their ancestors. 2) Integration would lead to crime, taxation and a breakdown of the social order. 3) Miscegenation would lead to the end of the white race. The first has come to pass. The second is all around us, except that whites survive by hiding in the suburbs and paying protection money in exorbitant taxes. Why has miscegenation not led to the end of the white race? Perhaps because non-whites have too much racial pride to mingle with whites.
Will whites ever regain the racial consciousness needed to reclaim power in their own land? If it is to be our fate to follow South Africa into the abyss, we will have many to thank. Among them will be the Washington liberals who enforced integration while insulating themselves from its effects. Also responsible are the Southerners of the 50s and 60s, who so craved comfort and respectability. They first deceived themselves into thinking that fiery words were the same as firm resistance, and then completely jettisoned their racial and cultural identities. Can a race, the blood of whose proudest peoples such as the Southerners and the Afrikaners has clearly grown anemic, long survive? The answer will be ours to give.
Victor Craig is the pen name of a clergyman and academic who remembers the fall of ’62 all too well.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense
Defamatory material from the Anti-Defamation League.
Danger: Extremism, Alan M. Schwartz, Ed., 1996, 308 pp., $19.95 (soft cover)
Guidebooks about right-wing extremism are not ordinarily of interest to anyone but the people who write them. However, the third edition of the Anti-Defamation League’s list of miscreants, Danger: Extremism, came to our attention because it includes several pages on American Renaissance. We were curious to see what sort of company we are said to keep, and were intrigued by the psychology of an anti-defamation league that writes unkind things about people who have never given it a thought.
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Watchdog is a curious calling. In a 13-page introduction, the authors have a go at explaining what they are up to but appear mainly to have assumed the duty of deciding which opinions are not merely incorrect but despicable. They then go hopelessly wrong by jumbling together violent criminals with people who express these opinions and basically treating them the same. In this way the book implies that disagreement with its positions is or certainly should be criminal.
No one needs the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to tell him that murder and arson are wrong, but which opinions are at the same moral level? The introduction explains: The ultimate threat to American society posed by extremism cannot be measured without first gaining a sense of what defines the American mainstream. The ADL is happy to define the mainstream for us but this is trickier than it lets on. As Danger: Extremism concedes elsewhere, one of its cherished enemies, David Duke, received a majority of the white vote in two state-wide elections in Louisiana. Does this tell us anything about the mainstream ?
The introduction’s central statement of the mainstream is this: The growth of opportunities to realize political freedom can be best seen in the evolution of the U.S. Constitution, which through the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the emancipation of slaves and the enfranchise- ment of women greatly elaborated at least in theory the document’s original concept of American citizenship.
Whatever this sentence may actually mean, we are to think of the history of the United States as a remarkable flowering of the principles of inclusion and social equality. The evil of right-wing extremism lies in opposing this march to progress.
The sheep and the goats are therefore easily divided; anyone who thinks Washington and Jefferson or even Theodore Roosevelt got it right more often than Theodore Kennedy or Janet Reno is a hatemonger. Anyone who finds greater wisdom in some of the social arrangements of the country’s first 180 years than in the last 40 is an enemy of civilization.
The book’s authors would probably not insist that Mr. Kennedy and Miss Reno are actually wiser than the Founders. They would claim only that the march of liberalism is simply carrying forward their good work. Therefore, if the Constitution did not actually mention women in combat, welfare for non-citizens, homosexual marriage, and massive non-white immigration, this was an oversight. Without putting it in so many words, the ADL has decided who are the spiritual heirs to the nation that began in 1776, but in so doing it has disinherited anyone who actually agrees with the Founders on certain matters.
So what is the danger and who are the extremists? Although the authors concede that the days are long gone when the Ku Klux Klan had five million members, there is still much to worry about. First, quite a few people don’t care for the federal government, and now that someone has actually blown up a federal building, it seems that any outspoken opponent of government power can be suspected of plotting violence.
More ominous [than this] is the rhetorical support these extremists have received from the mainstream. When the National Rifle Association decries the high-handed tactics of federal agents, when G. Gordon Liddy suggests that they should sometimes be dispatched with shots to the head, when Congressmen permit themselves to be interviewed on Radio Free America this is disturbing evidence of the porousness of the line separating the mainstream from the fringe. Not even the mainstream can be trusted!
Another big worry are skinheads. The ADL seems to have counted 3,500 of them, and we learn that their numbers have not increased since 1993, but they are still a threat. The militia movement, of with the ADL counts 15,000 members, is an even bigger threat. Of greatest concern, however, appears to be the World Wide Web. Those who claim to champion the American way might have praised this breakthrough in free speech, but no: wild-eyed, long- discredited, paranoid fantasies pass easily through cyberspace, looking spiffy on the screen. Boobus Americanus might just fall for ideas not pre-digested by higher authority.
Throughout the book, we have the left’s favorite analysis tool: links. A certain ostensibly reputable scholar is linked to a disreputable scholar who is linked to a certifiable nut who is linked to a man who once had lunch with a man who is in jail for throwing a bomb. This way, people can be denounced, not for what they say or do, but for what other people say or do, and tens of thousands of people can be anointed with the odor of fertilizer and jet fuel.
The greater part of Danger: Extremism is given over to short chapters on 57 individuals and 28 organizations. Among them are the names one would expect Tom Metzger, David Duke, Willis Carto, William Pierce but most are unknown to anyone but specialists. Who is Richard Scutari or Oren Potito, Joseph Dilys, Shawn Slater or Margos Margoian? These chapters are boring. Who cares about the leadership struggles of Klan factions or about the odd views of people one is never likely to hear of again?
The most lasting impression this section leaves is that the people it parades as terrifying hate-mongers are, for the most part, utterly ineffectual. Of the 57 the ADL would have us be on the lookout for, three are dead, three are in jail, four are solitary pamphleteers, three are with the Klan (which the ADL concedes is essentially moribund), and three appear to have retired from whatever it was the watchdogs were watching them do. Of the rest, aside from the names one recognizes, it is nearly impossible to judge their influence. What sort of damage do Dan Gayman, Gordon Winrod or Kim Badynski to pick names almost at random really do?
Then there are the exotics. Robert Brock, is the only known African-American participant in the white supremacist movement. This is the book’s silly conclusion from the fact that Mr. Brock has apparently talked to Kluxers about the creation of a black American homeland. There is also Harold Von Braunhut who, if the book got the facts right, is a pretty unusual fellow. He is a Jewish businessman originally from New York City, holder of more than 167 patents, and an official in the Aryan Nations, which militantly advocates anti-Semitism. No doubt he, too, is a fearful disturbance of the peace.
Part of the time, the ADL itself seems to be laughing at the boobishness of the people we are supposed to fear. The authors love to write sic all over the misspellings and bad grammar they quote, and here is an important message from an important hatemonger: The moment I am seen to go out with a bag, the Jewish poisoners employ thousands … to guard subway stations, bus stops, and all U.S. mail boxes so that the Jews can know where I go and, specifically, into which U.S. mail boxes I mail my letters containing this document, which the Jews instantly steal. This person is a nut, not a menace to democracy.
| American Renaissance, great force for evil that it is, gets four hand-wringing pages. |
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The 28 organizations the book profiles are likewise very mixed. Seven are defunct, either because their leaders are all in jail or because they have disbanded. Three apparently petered out back in the 1980s, and one wonders why the ADL still worries about them. Of the rest, once again it is hard to judge their level of menace or effectiveness. The Jubilee, Common Law Courts, Christian Defense League, Committee to Restore the Constitution, American Promise Ministries are they really a danger to anyone? There is no way to tell from this book.
After all, American Renaissance, great force for evil that it is, gets four hand-wringing pages more than the National Alliance or Liberty Lobby. Why? AR is a publication that uses pseudo-science to justify racism. It gathers racists together in the guise of academic seminars. It calls Arthur Jensen a pioneer despite the fact that Prof. Jensen has received money from the wicked Pioneer Fund. One of its key contributors is the wicked Samuel Francis, and such wicked people as Michael Levin and Philippe Rushton have spoken at its conferences. And that wicked Jared Taylor has been heard to say, Israel will change in countless, unacceptable ways if it ceases to be Jewish just as America will change in countless and unacceptable ways if it ceases to be white. Is this what one expects to find in a book the ADL advertises with a flyer whose blood-red headline screams: Who Are The Most Violent Extremists In America Today?
Threats to Jews
It is easy to mock Danger: Extremism’s alarmism, but in all fairness it has unearthed some hair-raising threats to Jews. One Identity Christian leader has reportedly claimed, “My Bible says that the Jews are the people of Satan … And our God has commanded us to exterminate them.” One of the watchwords of something called SS-Action Group is reported to be “Six million more.” One group is said to have distributed literature reading: “When you’ve had enough and you’re ready to kill Jews call …” The tiny number of people who really carry on this way probably do bear watching by the police.
But of the 20,000 murders and 1,000,000 aggravated assaults committed in this country every year, how many are the work of right-wing extremists ? This book frets about middle-aged whites tramping through the woods with rifles but ignores young blacks shooting up cities with pistols. They are more afraid of men with ideas than of thugs with guns. That can be the only reason to have included AR in this uneven mix of eccentrics, felons, skeptics, dissenters, skinheads, and Kluxers.
And this leads to what must be the real purpose of Danger: Extremism to blur the line between thought and crime. People who are sure of their ground do not defame their opponents or treat them like criminals. Only people who fear debate, who lack conviction, who dread the exposure of their own shabby prejudices are driven to make bogeymen out of cranks and to treat dissent as if it were a crime.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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The Future of the Species
Heredity and Humanity, Roger Pearson, Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1996, 160pp., $16.00 (soft cover)
In Heredity and Humanity, anthropologist Roger Pearson sums up a lifetime of investigation into the most fundamental human question: the genetic future. In this short, but important book, he traces the course of man’s understanding of heredity, and describes the terrible damage that has been done under the current reign of egalitarianism. He concludes with the cautious prediction that modern genetic research will eventually undermine egalitarian dogma, but reminds us that Nature exacts a high price extinction from any species that flouts its laws.
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Dr. Pearson points out that men have always had an intuitive understanding of breeding; that the ancient Greeks, for example, examined the lineages of their spouses with as much care as that of their horses. The discovery of Mendelian genetics and the introduction of evolutionary theory established the basis for a science of heredity, and Dr. Pearson recounts the speed with which eugenic thinking spread across Europe and America. It was soon so well established that the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, under its entry for civilization, predicted that the future progress would include the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity.
This promising beginning was upset by a sequence of misfortunes from which science and society have yet to recover. Dr. Pearson traces the work of anthropologist Franz Boas who, with his disciples at Columbia University, drove biology almost completely out of the social sciences. He also recounts the rise of Marxist genetics, and the damage done by Lysenkoism. After the defeat of Nazism, the minds of nearly all intellectuals were captured by an egalitariansim so fierce that it amounted to willful blindness.
In the latter part of his book, Dr. Pearson describes the difficult, persecuted work of scientists, who have tried to reestablish the importance of genetics. As author of Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe (reviewed, AR, June, 1992) Dr. Pearson is recognized as an authority on the subject, and leaves no doubt that the work of Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson, Thomas Bouchard, and many others is building up a virtually unassailable scientific basis for the racial and genetic views of the early eugenicists.
Dr. Pearson also has high hopes for the Human Genome Project, which will finally vindicate eugenics by demonstrating its principles at the most basic, molecular level. The real question is when the egalitarian media will pass on to the public what is now common knowledge to specialists, and how soon public policy will be based on fact rather than fantasy.
Dr. Pearson expresses some fear that even in the face of the most convincing evidence, Europeans will continue to support dysgenic polic