February 2010

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 21, No. 2 February 2010

CONTENTS

How to Build Your Own AR Club
Walking on Eggshells (Part II)
The 2010 Census
The Belgian Government Applies Sharia Law
Gloom, Despair and Agony
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters

COVER STORY

How to Build Your Own AR Club

What grew out of an AR conference.

As someone who had just arrived at his second American Renaissance conference once said, “It’s great to be among the living again.” He was right. There is nothing like spending a weekend with 250 other people who understand, and the contrast between that atmosphere and what we find in our daily lives could hardly be greater. However, you can be among the living a lot more often than the every two years when AR conferences are held. You can start an AR club in your own area, and get a dose of sanity whenever you need it.

This article explains how four men from the Chicago area met for the first time at an AR conference, and went on to build one of the more successful clubs affiliated with the magazine. I would like to explain how we went about it and what we learned, and I hope our experience will inspire others to start clubs.

The 2002 AR Conference was in late February, just five months after the September 11 attacks; it was the attacks that motivated me to subscribe to AR and go to the conference. Before that, I was already aware of the Left’s anti-Western and anti-white agendas. I had warned friends and family and anyone who would listen about multiculturalism, Islamic jihad, and Third-World immigration. I considered myself something of a paleoconservative, deeply influenced by Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan, particularly on issues of race and immigration.

Still, the Muslim attacks on our soil shocked me to the core. I began to believe paleo-conservatism was not enough, that the country needed something more nationalist and explicitly for our people — the sort of thing AR had long talked about. A ticket to a conference and a subscription to a magazine may not seem like much in response to the September 11 attacks, but that was my way of supporting an organization that spoke intelligently and civilly for white people like me, and in defense of our civilization.

I had attended a variety of political conferences on the Right, but this was my first race-realist event, and I didn’t know what to expect. Any reservations I might have had, though, were instantly allayed. I met wonderful and interesting people and was impressed by their high level: people with Ph.D.s in many subjects, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, teachers, retired police detectives, MBAs, internet developers, accountants and many retired people who were contributing their time and wisdom.

At any conference you can sense the energy level, and the AR Conference was charged with excitement, as people discussed dissident ideas with like-minded people face to face, many for the first time. There was always spirited conversation among conferees and speakers in hallways, the lobby, the bar, the restaurant, as several hundred people found themselves free — “Free at last! Thank God Almighty!” — free from the chains of racial orthodoxy. This was the atmosphere I wanted to take back with me to Chicago.

Many people had their state or city on their name tags, and during the banquet, the AR staff had the good sense to seat people by region. This was how I was able to meet three other people from the Chicago area whom I could have missed in the excitement of meeting and talking to so many other people. We agreed to meet again.

This was especially important for me because there were so few people I knew at home who shared my views. You can easily find conventional Republican, conservative, and libertarian groups, but they do not discuss the demographic and multicultural challenges facing the West. We established “Chicagoland Friends of AR” in order to talk about the things that really matter.

We held our first meeting at a European-themed restaurant in the Chicago suburbs one weekend afternoon shortly after the February conference, and it became our custom to meet at “Eurocentric” restaurants. The first meeting was small — just the four of us plus two guests, but it was a success. We recaptured the energy and conviviality of the AR conference.

Since then we have grown through a variety of ways. Each of us brought friends and family members to subsequent meetings, and we found members who left e-mail addresses on AR message boards or the comments pages on the AR website. As we grew, we were lucky enough to have a member with the Internet savvy to build a web page for the club: https://www.chicagoamren.com/. We used the site as a bulletin board for events and to recruit new members. We also used a service offered by the AR staff to reach other subscribers in the area (see sidebar). We were also able to contact people in the local chapters of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) and the Minutemen.

As the club grew we reached the point where we could invite speakers. The first guest to address the club was William H. Regnery II, the founder of such prominent white advocacy institutions as The Occidental Quarterly, Washington Summit Publishers, and the National Policy Institute. We found a Greek restaurant that would let us use its banquet room for no extra charge. The talk was a great success, with many additional new members showing up to hear it, and then signing up to stay informed about future meetings.

We have also invited Serge Trifkovic, author of The Sword and the Prophet, Michael Hart, author of Understanding Human History, and AR’s editor, Jared Taylor. Guest speakers are always a good way to boost turnout.

We have held a few movie screenings. One was of Africa Addio, a remarkable 1960s Italian documentary about the decolonization of Africa that was never distributed in the United States because of pressure from egalitarian groups. We also watched Islam: What the West Needs to Know, which featured one of our speakers, Dr. Trifkovic.

Along the way, the club worked out a number of decisions other groups might find useful:

1. How often to meet? We have found it best to meet once a month. That is often enough to keep members from losing interest and not too often to burn them out.

2. When to meet? We find Sunday afternoons work best, when traffic is light. A race realist club I know of in New York City meets on weekday evenings, shortly after work hours because many of their members are already downtown. Every club can find the schedule that works best.

3. Where to meet? A restaurant with a private meeting room is ideal. It is an imposition on a member to open his home for a meeting, and it may be a risk if there are new people coming whom none of us knows. Also, new people usually feel more comfortable meeting us in a public place rather than visiting the home of someone they have never met.

In a far-flung area, choosing a location that is convenient for everyone has to be a compromise. We have ended up alternating between locations in Chicago that suit the city-dwellers and suburban locations that others find more convenient.

4. How to stay in touch? We use the contacts members are willing to give us: usually e-mail or telephone. Some people prefer regular mail.

5. How to keep out Leftist spies and other riff-raff? In fact, there isn’t much of a problem with spies. The Left is terrified of people like us, and probably thinks we would shoot anyone who turned up without a sheet or an armband. In any case, a lefty trying to sound like a “racist” is practically a comedy routine and very easy to see through. Almost without exception it is not hard to sense who belongs in the club and who does not.

Once we had some rough-looking, tattooed types show up and invite the whole club to the Adolf Hitler birthday party they were organizing. I think our very down-to-earth, unmistakably middle-class demeanor put them off; they never came back.

That said, we are an “inclusive” group. Anyone who agrees with AR on the race and civilizational issues is welcome. Our members are Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. We have atheists, agnostics, and the occasional Odinist. We have Creationists and Darwinists, and everything in between. We have Zionists and ardent fans of Kevin MacDonald. We have Hispanic members, and were recently contacted by an Arab-American who is an AR fan and wants to join. All members are in fundamental agreement on the vital necessity for white survival and maintaining white majorities. If we have a litmus test, that is it, and our discussions are enlivened by the variety of perspectives our members bring to them.

At the other end of the spectrum, anti-white Leftists have called our club “extremist” and a “hate” group — so we are clearly doing something right. The Anti-Defamation League called us “extremist” for honoring the life of Sam Francis, and for inviting William Regnery to speak. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has put us on their Chicago-area “hate group map,” so we’re lumped in with the Nation of Islam, Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (anti-gay), the Council of Conservative Citizens, and the Jewish Defense League.

6. Who runs the club? We have no legal structure, but the four of us who started the club act as an informal board, largely making decisions of where and when to meet. At meetings, the “board” asks for opinions of members.

7. Education or activism? Some people show up seeking a more politically active club, along the lines of, say, the Minutemen or the CofCC, and may be disappointed to learn we are mainly a discussion group. We see our club as more of an “intellectual salon” than a campaign headquarters. We emphasize books, ideas, speakers, and so on. This does not mean we exclude discussion of politics or discourage people from being politically active; far from it. Indeed, we often discuss upcoming political and activist events, but we are mainly interested in ideas.

This, however, may simply reflect the personalities of our members. There is no reason why different AR clubs need not have different characters, and I can easily imagine a club becoming very involved in local and even national issues.

8. How much structure? Many civic organizations have formal agendas and ceremonies, follow Roberts Rules of Order, or have a definite structure to their meetings. Our meetings tend to be more unstructured. If we bring in a speaker, of course, the meeting is more formal. I know of other clubs that have tried a more structured approach with assigned readings and so forth, but they failed. Members skipped the assigned readings or other preparation, and drifted away.

If anything, we may have gone too far in the direction of the “bull sessions” that crop up on the margins of AR conferences, but that was the feeling we wanted to preserve. The club in New York City I referred to earlier has a social hour, then a formal hour of discussion, followed by another social hour. This, too, sounds like a promising format.

9. Outreach. Be on the lookout for local events that might attract new members. When we invited Dr. Trifkovic to speak, we knew of an immigration reform conference that was meeting in Chicago a few weekends before our event. Some of us attended the conference and passed out flyers about our club and the Trifkovic event. That helped us build attendance.

If you do hold an event — say a speaker, or a screening of something like the movie Zulu or Craig Bodeker’s A Conversation About Race (Mr. Bodeker will be speaking at the AR conference in February), you can ask the AR staff to alert other subscribers in the area or even to announce your event on the AR web page. It’s good to remind local subscribers about your group even if they can’t come to a particular meeting.

Also, you should know that some people will show up who will seem like wonderful new members to your club — and then never come back. We have a long list of people who share our views and have attended a meeting or two, but for whatever reason do not return. We are still able to reach many of these people. They are still for our cause and read our announcements with interest.

We know from the Internet and the AR web page that we are far from alone and isolated, but for us there is nothing like meeting like-minded people face to face. In our case, good friendships have formed outside of club meetings, and members invite each other to parties, weddings, dinners, and other social events.

There are now several clubs around the country that are moving from “survival” to “stability.” After a network of such clubs is established, we expect to move beyond just our own fans and members. Clubs could sponsor public debates or bring speakers to a local library or college and encourage others to subscribe to AR. In time, we can bypass the Left’s stranglehold on the media, and more and more people will find the confidence to promote the principled white racial consciousness that is necessary for our race, for our civilization, and for our very survival.

SIDEBAR

Recruiting with the Help of AR

AR offers a handy way for AR readers to meet other subscribers in their area. Because AR guarantees the confidentiality of subscribers, it cannot simply send you the addresses of people who live nearby. Instead, if you specify the area you would like to cover, AR will tell you how many subscribers are in that area and ask you to prepare a mailing for them. You then write a letter introducing yourself, describing what you have in mind, and explaining how the recipients can contact you. AR will copy and mail the letters and charge you a modest fee for postage and handling. That way, subscriber information remains confidential, and recipients can choose to reply to you or not. Whether your contacts grow into a full-blown AR club or just establish friendships and networks, it is a great way to meet like-minded people.

Reilly Smith is an lawyer who lives in Chicago.

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ARTICLE

Walking on Eggshells (Part II)

How to be white in multicultural America.

Part I, in the January issue, described the complex etiquette whites must follow in all matters relating to race, and the price they pay for violating it. Non-whites are generally exempt from these requirements.

There is another kind of pressure blacks and other non-whites do not face. They can say pretty much anything without being called a “racist.” Claire Mack is a former mayor of San Mateo, California. In a 2006 newspaper interview, she complained that too many guests on television talk shows were “wrinkled-ass white men,” and wondered why there were not more blacks. No one ever asked her to apologize.

Daisy Lynum, a black commissioner of the city of Orlando, Florida, angered the city’s police when she complained that a “white boy” officer had pulled her son over for a traffic stop. When the police union demanded an apology, she refused, saying, “That is how I talk and I don’t plan to change.”

When a white man explained to Willie Brown, then mayor of San Francisco, that racial preferences for blacks could hurt whites, he replied, “I don’t care about your idiot kids.” Mr. Brown’s political career suffered no harm.

Charles Barron of the Brooklyn city council once explained at a rally for reparations for slavery, that he sometimes wants to go up to a white person, tell him, “You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing,” and then “slap him just for my mental health.”

During his 2002 reelection campaign, Sharpe James, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to his light-skinned black opponent as “the faggot white boy.” A largely-black electorate returned him to office.

Comments like these would have ruined the careers of white politicians.

One of the clearest examples of blacks not having to face the same music as whites is from the autobiography of Nathan McCall, who worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. In Makes Me Wanna Holler, he wrote about an episode from his early years:

The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy . . . came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood . . . Somebody spotted him and pointed him out to the rest of us. ‘Look! What’s that motherfucka doin’ ridin’ through here?! Is he crraaaazy?!’ . . . We caught him on Cavalier Boulevard and knocked him off the bike . . . Ignoring the passing cars, we stomped him and kicked him. My stick partners kicked him in the head and face and watched the blood gush from his mouth. I kicked him in the stomach and nuts, where I knew it would hurt. Every time I drove my foot into his balls, I felt better . . . one dude kept stomping, like he’d gone berserk . . . When he finished, he reached down and picked up the white dude’s bike, lifted it as high as he could above his head, and slammed it down on him hard . . . We walked away, laughing, boasting, competing for bragging rights about who’d done the most damage.

Mr. McCall expressed no regrets for this brutality, and this and subsequent books were so successful he had to leave the Post to meet the demand for his lectures.

Whites, on the other hand, can’t even name sports teams without checking with the diversity police, but the deck is stacked against them whichever way they turn. A team named the “Rebels” is unacceptable because it glorifies slave-owning Confederates but the name “Indians” is unacceptable because it insults Native Americans. Obviously, what is going on here has nothing to do with consistency, but with trying to find any possible way to thwart and hector whites.

It is obvious that the Army named an attack helicopter the Apache out of admiration for fighting skills of Indians. The people who named teams the Atlanta Braves or Washington Redskins clearly felt the same way. In any case, Rebels have been more or less wiped out, and activists are hard at work trying to exterminate the few Indians who survive. In 2009, a 17-year lawsuit to abolish the Redskins finally came to an end only because the US Supreme Court refused to hear it. In California, activists persuaded the legislature to forbid the use of any Indian-related team name by any public school, except for schools near “Indian-controlled land.” Indians on reservations are the only people who can use Indian names.

The Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Triple-A baseball team, the IronPigs has a large, furry pig mascot. Two days after naming it “PorkChop,” the team had to change it because a Hispanic said it was insulting. Guillermo Lopez, vice president of the Latino Leadership Alliance, said that decades earlier he had been called “pork chop.” The team owners said they had never heard of the term being used that way — neither have I — but they renamed the pig “Ferrous.”

Houston wanted to name its soccer team the Houston 1836 after the year the city was founded, but Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia led Hispanics in a campaign against the name. She said it was no good because that was the year Sam Houston defeated Santa Ana’s army at San Jacinto, securing Texas independence. That should have made the name even better, but the team owner folded and changed the name to the Houston Dynamo.

Occasionally some misguided white person tries to stand up to the pressure, but he usually doesn’t last long. Americans have apology fits from time to time, and between 2005 and 2008, the legislatures of Alabama, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida all officially apologized because their states had once permitted slavery. One Virginia delegate, 79-year-old Frank Hargrove, was having none of it. There’s been no slavery for 140 years, he said, and “our black citizens should get over it.” Of course, the heavens fell on poor Mr. Hargrove, and he quickly wilted. He didn’t just change his mind and express the “profound contrition” required of the apology. He went even further and introduced a proposal to make Juneteenth — June 19, 1865, when the last slaves found out they were free — a Virginia state holiday.

The great irony in all this self-flagellation and groveling is that it is other whites who make it possible to keep whitey in a state of fear. There is no better way to advertise racial virtue than to kick a fellow white after he has been smacked down for “insensitivity.” If at least a few whites in the Virginia legislature had stood with Mr. Hargrove, he might have stuck to his original, sensible guns, but he was a target too tempting for other whites to resist. Spitting on him was an irresistible chance to prove that elusive negative: that they were not “racists.”

In his excellent book White Guilt, black author Shelby Steele argues convincingly that black power exists only as a byproduct of white guilt. Blacks have nothing like enough real power to push whites around if whites locked arms and refused to be pushed, but blacks have two enormous advantages. First, most whites are spineless and give in right away. Second, even if a few show fight, the spineless ones — who only under these circumstances cease to be inert — gang up on them. It is whites who have loaded the gun, handed it to blacks, and told them, “Here’s the trigger, fellas.” And, of course, every other race is now fully armed.

Signs of change?

Are things changing? There may be some signs that they are. Barack Obama’s endless spending and his ideas about medicine have stirred up vehement opposition, almost exclusively from whites. Lefties insist this is “racism.” Actress Janeane Garofalo — although why anyone pays attention to inconsequential twits like her is a mystery — said of the anti-tax Tea Parties, “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell says she doesn’t trust people who say socialized medicine will encourage people to depend on the government rather than their own resources: “That language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.” As usual, leftists claim to be able to read the minds of people they have never met. They just know why people went to Tea Parties even if they never went to one themselves.

What is most striking about these accusations of “racism” is that they are a virtual admission that whites do have sound racial reasons for objecting to high taxes and new handouts. No one knows how many whites have conscious, racial motives for yelling about high taxes and “Obamacare.” The fact remains that they have every reason to oppose yet more government indebtedness their grandchildren will have to pay off. They have every reason to fight a giant medical bureaucracy that will put indigent, alcoholic, illegal immigrants on the same waiting list for brain surgery and dialysis as tax-paying US citizens. Whenever there is debate about government spending and lefties accuse their opponents of “racism,” you can be sure that the plan is to milk whitey.

So far, these accusations aren’t working. Whites who have no racial motive and just oppose creeping socialism are getting angry about the name-calling. Whites who do have a conscious racial motive already know it and certainly aren’t going to change their minds just because actresses and Princeton profs start screeching. Very few whites are actually going to admit to racial motives, but, for now, it doesn’t matter.

If Barack Obama fails to socialize medicine or manages only to tinker a bit with the system, he will be badly wounded. The great black hope is proving to be dangerously vulnerable, and no matter what happens, he will be badly battered even before he brings up the issue that really matters: amnesty for illegal immigrants.

That is when whites will show whether they have been completely denatured or whether they are capable of doing something in their own interests — and doing it in their own name. There will be a terrific fight over amnesty that will make the current debate about medicine look like a minuet. White people are slowly getting angry enough to say it out loud: that they refuse to sit quietly while their rulers turn the United States into a Third-World dung heap. This will be one of the all-time great battles over the future of the country, and there is an excellent chance we will win.

Mr. Trueaxe is a Washington, DC-area businessman.

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ARTICLE

The 2010 Census

The Census Bureau is confused about race.

The 2010 census forms will be mailed to Americans in February and March. Although nearly every journalist and public figure says race does not matter, the form offers more choices than ever for racial classifications. Some people say there is no scientific basis for race, though this does not stop them from supporting affirmative action and other forms of discrimination against whites. In any case, the racial categories our government uses are badly muddled.

The 1890 census had a relatively simple way of counting Americans. It divided whites into three categories: 34,358,348 native whites, 11,583,075 native whites with foreign parents, and 9,121,807 foreign whites. They accounted for nearly 88 percent of the total population. In addition, the census reported 6,337,980 Negroes, 956,989 Mulattoes, 105,135 Quadroons, 69,936 Octoroons, 107,475 Chinese, 2,039 Japanese and 58,805 Civilized Indians. Hispanics had to be counted as either white or Civilized Indian.

The Census Bureau defined an Octoroon as anyone with 1/8 Negro ancestry or less, but how many people know who all eight of their great-grand parents were? I suspect quite a few Octoroons didn’t even know they were supposed to classify themselves as black. Even Quadroons are technically more white than black, and a Quadroon would not really be telling a lie if he said he was white. Later the bureau simplified things by counting only blacks and mulattoes, with a mulatto defined as someone who had at least a trace of Negro ancestry but was not fully black.

In the 2000 census, 12.9 percent of the population said it was black, and only 0.6 percent claimed to be black plus some other race. Many more blacks than that are mixed, so it is interesting that only a small number either know they are mixed or cared enough to say so on the census form. Most blacks appear to be following the “one drop rule.”

This year’s census form asks whether you are Hispanic before it even asks your race, and it lists many options:

  • Not of Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin
  • Mexican, Mexican Am. [sic], Chicano
  • Puerto Rican
  • Cuban
  • Another Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin — Print origin, for example, Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.

After you have decided whether you are Hispanic, here are the “race” options. You can check just one or as many as you like:

  • White
  • Black or African Am. [sic], or Negro
  • American Indian or Alaska Native — Print name of enrolled or principle tribe.
  • Asian Indian
  • Chinese
  • Filipino
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Vietnamese
  • Native Hawaiian
  • Guamanian or Chamorro
  • Samoan
  • Other Asian — Print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.
  • Other Pacific Islander — Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on.

In case these choices are not enough you can check “some other race” and print whatever you like.

The Census Bureau doesn’t understand race. It seems to think Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans are different races, and explicitly offers “Thai” or “Cambodian” as racial categories. Those are not racial categories any more than “French” or “English” would be. It is interesting that the bureau counts the fine distinctions between different Asian nationalities but throws all “whites” into the same pot.

We are told that Hispanics can be of any race, but if that were true, it would be logical to classify them by race and eliminate the Hispanic category. Spaniards — who are European but can claim to be Hispanic — would call themselves white, and most Latin Americans would be South American Indians, along with some number of Africans or Negroes. It is just as well the census has a “Hispanic” category, however, because most Mestizos would claim to be “white,” artificially increasing that category.

The census form gives no hint as to whether Portuguese or Brazilians are “Hispanic,” and Brazilians, in particular, are likely to be confused, especially if they are dark-skinned. Officially, the Census Bureau says they are not Hispanic. Nor are Basques or people from Belize or the Azores. However, this has the awkward effect of making lily-white Spaniards potential beneficiaries of racial preferences, while ruling out swarthy Brazilians. Years ago, the Small Business Administration took the lead in rewriting the preferences definition of Hispanics so as to kick out the Spaniards, keep out the Portuguese, but include non-white Portuguese speakers. This made it possible to keep the racial lines neatly drawn in a consistently anti-white manner despite the Census Bureau’s definitions. Virtually every other group that hands out benefits by race has adopted this anti-white definition.

The “white” category, however, is unsatisfactory because it includes people who are clearly not white: Arabs, Persians, Afghans, and North Africans. The Census Bureau, which is at such pains to distinguish between Fijian and Tongan “races,” apparently thinks Egyptians are no different from Scots — they’re “white.” Some people suspect this is a dodge to keep the decline in the percentage of whites from looking even more alarming than it already does, but it’s probably just bureaucratic stupidity.

I would recommend that the Census Bureau eliminate the white category and replace it with three others: Europeans, Arabs, and West Asians. Perhaps it should even divide Europeans into Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans; after all, a Neapolitan looks more different from a Dane than a Korean does from a Chinese. If the census broke out the non-Europeans, the figure for whites would drop below 50 percent even sooner than the current forecast of 2042 or so. This is a milestone many liberals look forward to; why not give them this victory a little earlier?

To further complicate things, many anthropologists believe all humans have a common ancestor who lived near what is today Kenya about 150,000 years ago. If that is true, everyone could say he was African or African American. This is handy when you apply to college or for a job. If someone tells you you are not an African American you can reply, “My ancestors are from Africa. I hope you are not going to discriminate against me because my skin is lighter than that of some of my cousins.”

When whites get their 2010 census forms and fill in the “race” information, I suggest that they check the “other” box and write in “European” or a specific country of origin. Another option would be to honor their ancestors of 150,000 years ago and say they are African American. Or is it more important to get results that can be compared to previous censuses so we will know what is happening to our country?

However you fill out your form, you can be sure that Hispanics and Asians will be crowing over the results, while whites grin nervously, trying to pretend that long-term oblivion is what they always wanted.

James Schneider is the founder of the Center for Perpetual Diversity (perpetualdiversity.com), an organization dedicated to preserving the European element of diversity.

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ARTICLE

The Belgian Government Applies Sharia Law

European “submission” to Islam.

People are generally unaware of what is going on in their own country because the media cover up so many important facts. La Dernière Heure [a French-language Belgian daily paper] somehow failed to toe the line in a recent article, in which it reported that pork is no longer served in a number of prisons, including the prison of Forest-Bruxelles [a prison for women in Brussels], and that pork was taken off the menu several years ago. Ittre prison [a luxury prison with single cells that opened near Forge de Clabecq in 2002] can accommodate all manner of dietary whimsies, religious or not. According to La Dernière Heure, 80 percent of the inmates at Forest-Bruxelles are Muslims — this fact itself is not usually for public consumption.

Because pork must not be handled with the same utensils used for cooking halal [Muslim kosher] meals, having two separate kitchen at Forest-Bruxelles was too expensive. To solve the problem, management decided that since pork was forbidden for Muslims, they would simply ban it for all prisoners. It has become the rule in this country that Belgium adapts to Muslims and not the other way around.

Sharia rules now apply to more and more products: meat, chicken, drinks, deserts — there are even halal cosmetics, which do not contain the slightest trace of pork gelatin. The craze for religious prohibition knows no bounds.

A Muslim alderman — a Socialist by the name of Daif — introduced sharia cooking in the public schools of Molenbeek St-Jean, a Belgian town of 70,000. After several months, however, the experiment came to an end because it was too difficult to keep track of which students were keeping halal and which were not. The solution was, again, to eliminate pork from the menu for all students, so that what is banned for some is banned for all.

The same goes for dress codes for girls in public schools. The traditional Belgian dress codes must make way for Sharia. According to the Islamists, to forbid veils would be an act of Islamophobic, racist dictatorship. They demand “submission” — that is what Islam means, after all — rather than adopt the customs of the countries in which they live. It is this intransigence that is pushing Sharia so successfully in Europe; according to press reports, there are already 80 Sharia tribunals in Britain.

In Holland as well there are a number of prisons that serve only halal food. A non-Muslim in Sittard prison brought suit against this practice, and the prison was forced to end the Islamic regimen it had introduced. According to the Dutch press, there were at least five other prisons that served only halal meals and they, too, had to stop. It appears that the Dutch Minister of Justice had some kind of profitable arrangement with the companies that were supplying halal meat to the prisons.

And halal is big business. The certification process is a monopoly, and halal inspectors impose a religious certification tax that brings millions of euros into the coffers of Islamic organizations that, in turn, support mosques. The most frequently cited estimate for the size of the halal market in France alone is €4 billion. The German Islam Council has set up the European Halal Certification Institute to supervise certification for the entire continent, though there are a number of smaller organizations.

Halal is run by Muslims for Muslims, so non-Muslims have no share in the profits. Muslims patronize the Muslim butcher, the Muslim grocer, the Muslim fish-monger, the Muslim baker, the Muslim hairdresser, the Muslim pharmacist, and, if at all possible, the Muslim doctor. There are Islamic banks and Islamic travel agencies. In Belgium there is a guide to restaurants that serve halal food, and owners must pay €18.50 a month to be listed — yet another profitable Islamic monopoly. Revenue from businesses off this kind mostly circulates among other Muslims for the benefit of the community, resulting in a kind of “Muslim autarky.”

Muslims complain about Islamophobia, but they do their best to live beyond the bounds of the European Community, of European practices, and of European culture. How can they complain of ostracism when they shut themselves away from non-Muslims in a closed community that increasingly practices Sharia law?

There is an organization in Dublin, of all places, called the European Council for Fatwa and Research, whose job is to introduce Sharia in Europe and to supervise its obligatory practice when that happy day comes. The fatwas, or official orders that it issues, are meant to be followed by all Muslims living in Europe. In its official statements, it has made its priorities clear: “The Sharia cannot be amended to conform to changing human values and standards, rather, it is the absolute norm to which all human values and conduct must conform; it is the frame to which they must be referred; it is the scale on which they must be weighed.”

On cannot help wondering what anti-discrimination groups like the Human Rights League [established in 1889 in France in order to defend Alfred Dreyfus during the “Dreyfus Affair,” and now one of France’s best-known anti-“racism” organizations] will do about this. They have been tireless in their defense of non-Europeans; when will it dawn on them that Europeans have rights, too?

This essay appeared on November 10, 2009, at chantducoq.blogspot.com, which chronicles European submission to Islam. The author identifies himself only by his first name because he could be prosecuted under Belgian law for “inciting hatred” against Muslims. Translation from the French by AR.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

BOOK REVIEW

Gloom, Despair and Agony

The time for happy talk is over.

John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, Crown Forum, 2009, 272 pp., $26.00.

John Derbyshire is one of the few grown ups still writing for National Review, and his articles, blog postings and “Radio Derb” podcasts are about the only reason to visit National Review Online (NRO). He is an engaging writer with an interest in many things — politics, mathematics, science, poetry, and history — and has the breadth of knowledge and experience to write about them with a politically-incorrect forthrightness that makes one wonder how he manages to survive among the Buckleyites. We Are Doomed considers the prospects for the modern conservative movement, and as the title suggests, it is not optimistic.

We Are Doomed by John Derbyshire

Back in 2004, when it was clear to all observers outside of the White House that George W. Bush’s Iraq strategy wasn’t working, an unidentified senior presidential aide explained to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind that the “reality-based community” was outmoded and that it was a mistake to “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” The aide went on:

That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

What that statement illustrates — aside from the astonishing arrogance of the Bush administration — is what Mr. Derbyshire identifies in We Are Doomed as the central failing of the modern conservative movement: its inability to accept reality, whether in foreign policy, education, immigration, or for that matter, nearly any other aspect of society. Conservatism, he writes, “has been fatally weakened by yielding to infantile temptations: temptations to optimism, to wishful thinking, to happy talk, to cheerily preposterous theories about human beings and the human world.”

As a result, conservatism cannot give society the dose of cold, hard reality it needs to deliver itself from these temptations. Thus we foolishly try to democratize the Middle East, bring in uneducated Somalis and expect them to become productive citizens, and assume that all inner-city blacks could go to Harvard if only we shoveled enough money at them. A true conservative, Mr. Derbyshire argues, is by nature pessimistic. He understands the fallen nature of mankind, and ought to pour cold water on any attempts at mass uplift. That conservatives do not do this shows only how successful the liberals have been at getting them to swallow and internalize their agenda.

Needless to say, the vast majority of Americans who call them “conservatives” are abusing the language. As the late Sam Francis used to point out, anyone who isn’t even interested in conserving his own racial stock is a freak, and certainly not a conservative. And when so-called conservatives adopt the Left’s puerile optimism about revamping human nature and transforming the world, they are not so much conservatives as dupes.

It has not always been this way. Mr. Derbyshire reminds us that America’s Founding Fathers were a pessimistic lot, given their Calvinist religion and the unforgiving nature of life in the early colonies, where death — whether from disease, childbirth, accident, or Indian — was a constant companion. If the early settlers were inclined to forget this, “there were always bears, wolves, and crop failures to remind them of the biological facts.” As America grew, and the frontier advanced beyond the Eastern seaboard, the “optimistic rot” began to set in. Calvinism gave way to Unitarianism, which paved the way for Transcendentalism, which led to the birth of “the modern style of vaporous happy talk.” Mr. Derbyshire observes that the reformers abolished slavery, improved the social condition of women, reduced “promiscuous drunkenness” and some other things, but over time, these blessings turned into blights.

Improving the lot of workers led to “featherbedding, the Teamster rackets, auto companies made uncompetitive by extravagant benefits agreements, and government unions voting themselves ever-bigger shares of the fisc. The campaign for full civil rights and racial justice turned into affirmative action, race quotas, grievance lawsuits, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and everlasting racial rancor.” As early as Prohibition, it was clear that progressives were at war with human nature itself, a war that continues to this day.

There are many fronts in the war against human nature, and the bulk of We Are Doomed is spent surveying them. First up is diversity, which, Mr. Derbyshire writes, is nothing to celebrate. Much of what he cites, from the work of Harvard professor Robert Putnam to individual examples of racial conflict are familiar to AR readers (see, for example, “Diversity Destroys Trust” in the September 2007 issue), but he does have an entertaining spin. He regards diversity as a cult and a false ideology, and notes that the “downside of ethnic diversity will keep cropping up throughout my book” (it does). Mr. Derbyshire understands the diversity mindset quite well, and boils it down to its essence as follows:

Different populations, of different races, customs, religions, and preferences, can be mixed together in any numbers or proportions at all, with harmonious results. Not only will the results be harmonious, they will be beneficial to all the people thus mixed. They will be better and happier than if they had been left to stagnate in dull homogeneity.

This is hogwash, of course, but there are people who believe it. Mr. Derbyshire refers to them — the lawyers, educators, corporate and government bureaucrats who make their livings shilling for diversity — as “Diversicrats,” and fears that they will never give up. He is dismayed that so many first-rate minds, like Prof. Putnam’s, have been corroded by an ideology that is “demonstrably — easily demonstrably — false” and is particularly disappointed that so many conservatives, who should know better, have embraced it. By doing so, they “have surrendered key political positions: equal treatment under the law, allegiance to one nation, freedom of association, public education in one language . . .” Had conservatives not given in to the Diversicrats, “we might have maintained the principles of a free republic, and saved ourselves much trouble and expense.”

Mr. Derbyshire is equally disgusted with politics — “We have . . . lost our republican virtue, traded it in for a passel of gassy rhetoric” — and modern culture — “It’s not so much the filth aspect of pop culture as the impression that there’s nothing there.

Mr. Derbyshire cites the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, who performed at Barack Obama’s inauguration. “I had never heard of this lady before the president-elect tapped her for the inauguration spot,” he writes. “Taking a wild shot in the dark, I guessed her to be a whiny black feminist, as most female poets are nowadays.” After providing examples of her work, he writes, “You could sum up her thematic range as ‘I’m black! Black black black! And I have a vagina!” He laments the feminization of society, and even questions the wisdom of women’s suffrage, noting that “women incline to socialism much more naturally than men.”

Of education, Mr. Derbyshire writes, “There is no area of social policy where we see more clearly the destructive effects of the modern epidemic of happy talk, no area where the magical thinking of our intellectual cheerleaders is so clearly, painfully at odds with cold grim facts.” He goes on to provide grim fact after grim fact demonstrating that the people running the “edbiz” don’t have a clue about how to educate children — “From false premises they proceed to false conclusions” — but notes that nothing is likely to change, given the powerful influence of the teachers unions over both political parties.

The racial achievement gap, the behavior gap, the math gap between boys and girls — closing all of these gaps is the single most important goal for educationists. It is where all the money and effort goes, and explains why honors and gifted programs have to be cut back. What do the uplift artists have to show for all this? Nothing, but they persist in trying to find a way to close the gaps because they cannot admit they are biological and cannot be closed. Education therefore becomes “a vast sea of lies, waste, corruption, crackpot theorizing, and careerist logrolling.”

Arguably the most important chapter in the book is on human nature, in which Mr. Derbyshire provides a concise summary of the state of the nature vs. nurture debate, although he prefers the terms Culturist and Biologian. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the science knows that the Biologians have the upper hand — decisively so. To the extent that the general public does not understand this it is testimony to the power held by the Culturists — who include most of the media and educators. Conservatives are largely AWOL in this debate, because many of them adhere to a belief Mr. Derbyshire calls Religionist. The Religionists do not accept the science of the Biologians, which makes them easy prey for Culturist, diversity-friendly propaganda. Again, for most AR readers, this is settled territory.

Race realists will also be familiar with many of the arguments in the chapter on immigration. Mr. Derbyshire has little patience for sentimentalism in any aspect of public policy, and none at all when it comes to immigration — which as he reminds us, is simply another national policy, like farm supports or national parks maintenance. It should be based on the national interest, not on nostalgia or some hazy moral imperative. Mr. Derbyshire deplores what he calls the hypermoralization of immigration, and considers the complicity of “cheerily optimistic conservatives” in this as “perhaps their greatest sin against good sense and proper conservative skepticism.” “Romantic moralizing,” he adds, “belongs on the political Left.”

The problem with too many of today’s immigrants is not just that they are not assimilating, but that they are actually absimilating, that is, moving further away from mainstream American society. This is especially true of Mexican immigrants — second and later generations do worse than their parents — and of second-generation Muslims, who are far more likely than their parents to go radical. And yet to point out this or any other problem with immigrants leads to accusations of nativism and racism, often at the hands of conservatives, too many of whom, Mr. Derbyshire writes, “have been cheerleaders for a vast experiment in social engineering.” He continues:

Rather than carefully project the results of the experiment, they simply declare those results to be inevitably good, on no grounds at all but their own vapid optimism and wishful thinking. Aren’t conservatives supposed to be hostile to social engineering schemes? Why do so many conservatives swoon with approval at this one, while snarling at immigration skeptics as heartless xenophobes? The question is rhetorical. I have no idea what makes people so stupid and dishonest.

Mr. Derbyshire is similarly contemptuous of conservatives who promote international crusades to spread democracy and engage in nation building, naively asserting that American exceptionalism will somehow protect us from the consequences of bad policies, and who use their positions in government and business to squander American wealth and to bury our children and grandchildren under a mountain of debt.

Normally in a work that paints a bleak picture, the author tries to end on a positive note, offering a ten-point plan that will turn things around. Not this time. Mr. Derbyshire is firm: We are doomed, and the best we can hope for, “if we approach the universe more realistically — pessimistically” is better preparation for the nasty consequences nature is sure to throw at us. He also allows for the possibility — the very slight possibility — that the happy-talk scales will fall from the eyes of conservatives, but he’s clearly not betting on it.

We Are Doomed, despite its serious subject matter, is an entertaining, even witty book. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe it as light reading, but it is more a work of Internet-era opinion journalism than of scholarship. There are no footnotes or index. Still, it is refreshing to read a mainstream author who is not only undeceived about race, but willing — even eager — to talk about it in a way that verges on race realism.

Overall, however, race realists will find little that is new in We Are Doomed. Most are already pessimistic, and have long since given up on the mainstream Right. Most likely to profit from this book are conservatives who are beginning to lose faith, who are starting to doubt that diversity is a strength, are tired of pushing one for English, who wonder why the newspapers don’t print the races of criminal suspects, and are starting to notice the correlation between good schools and white neighborhoods.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Speak Spanish or Else

Charlie Guzman and a couple of friends went into the laundry room of their apartment complex in Immokalee, Florida to wash some clothes. Mauricio Escalante, a 33-year-old illegal alien and some of his pals were already using the facilities and the two groups of men began talking. The discussion grew heated because Mr. Escalante objected to Mr. Guzman speaking English instead of Spanish. Mr. Escalante went to a nearby apartment, grabbed a knife, came back and stabbed the 17-year-old Mr. Guzman to death. Mr. Escalante was no stranger to the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, but because his prior offenses were only for public drunkenness, he was never turned over to immigration authorities for deportation. [Brent Batten, Immokalee Stabbing Shows Another Side of Immigration Debate, Naples News, Dec. 21, 2009.]

White Science

Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, suffers from America’s universal failing: blacks and Hispanics do worse than whites and Asians. This must be particularly galling to ultra-liberal Berkeley, because the gap is even greater than the already yawning state average. What to do?

The school’s governance council, which is made up of teachers, parents, and students, has decided to eliminate all the science labs and fire the five teachers who run them, and spend the money on “underperforming” students instead. Paul Gibson, an alternate representative on the governance council, says the decision was made in large part because the science labs mainly benefit white students.

Mardi Sicular-Mertens, who has taught science at Berkeley High for 24 years, insists that the labs help blacks and Hispanics, too. She notes that there are 12 black students in her AP classes and that her environmental science classes are 17.5 percent black and 13.9 percent Hispanic. Apparently no one dares argue that science labs are important even if whites are the main beneficiaries.

The proposal to terminate the science labs will be on the agenda for the next meeting of the Berkeley School Board. The board usually endorses the recommendations of high school governance councils without debate. [Eric Klein, Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs, East Bay Express, Dec. 23, 2009.]

Unfit to Print

On Christmas Eve, two gunmen shot and killed Salvation Army Major Philip Wise outside the organization’s community center in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Mr. Wise was walking in with his three young children, when the men approached, demanded money, and murdered him. The gunmen fled into a nearby housing project and, as this issue went to press, were still at large.

The local newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and the Associated Press both filed stories on the incident, but the AP story forgot to mention the shooters’ race. It noted that both killers were still on the loose, so a description could have been helpful. The story did, however, offer the alert reader a clue when it noted that the shooting took place is “a low-income neighborhood troubled by gangs and drugs.”

The Arkansas Democrat Gazette gets credit for including the race of the killers, and for running a photo of Mr. Wise, clearly showing he was white. [Chad Day, Major Shot at Salvation Army, Dies, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Dec. 25, 2009. Major’s Shooting a Tragedy for Community, Say Authorities, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Dec. 25, 2009. Tom Parsons, Salvation Army Major Shot in Front of 3 Children, AP, Dec. 25, 2009.]

Aiding and Abetting

Ricardo Dominguez is an associate professor of “new media arts” at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He describes himself as an “artivist” — an artist-activist — who helps illegal aliens. With the aid of researchers from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Mr. Dominguez has invented something he calls the “Transborder Immigrant Tool.” This is an inexpensive Motorola cell phone retrofitted with a GPS system to help illegals sneak across the border. It helps with basic orientation, records distance from the destination, and shows where there is water. Mr. Dominguez, who has received some $15,000 in grants to develop his “immigrant tools,” plans to sell them for around $30.00 each. He hopes churches and Hispanic activist groups such as Border Angels and No Mas Muertes will distribute them to Mexicans. The telephone’s signal will be encrypted to avoid detection by the Border Patrol. Mr. Dominguez claims the Transborder Immigrant Tool is designed “to save lives” rather than promote illegal crossings, but admits that “in terms of the civil disobedience we follow, we consider the right of safe passage to be a trans-global right.”

The phones will also have short poems loaded on them — no doubt in Spanish. “We wanted to have a hospitality tool,” he explains, adding, “At the core of the poems is a rethinking of the idea that good fences make good neighbors. Borders do not make good neighbors. We should be welcoming.” [Bill Morris, Border Crossings: There’s an App for That, Sphere.com, Dec. 18, 2009.]

Mexican Manners

On December 16, Mexican naval troops managed to kill one of Mexico’s most notorious drug kingpins, Arturo Beltrán Leyva. The “Boss of Bosses” died in a hail of lead along with six henchmen during an attack on his luxury compound in the resort city of Cuernavaca. Mexican media hailed what was undoubtedly the greatest success in President Felipe Calderón’s three-year war on the cartels, and the lone soldier killed, Marine Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Córdova, was declared a national hero and given a state funeral.

Beltrán Leyva’s cartel, the Zetas, wasted no time in showing they were still in business. Hours after the funeral, gunmen burst into the marine’s family home in Paraiso and murdered his mother, his sister, his aunt, and his brother, and seriously wounded another sister. The message was clear: anyone who fights the drug cartels risks having his family exterminated.

Sadly, President Calderón made the revenge killings possible by revealing Ensign Córdova’s identity and letting the media cover his funeral. Mexican troops normally wear black ski masks during operations to avoid being recognized and prevent retaliation. The identities of two other marines who were wounded in the raid remain secret.

President Calderón vows that he is unintimidated, but the criminals are rattling sabers, too. Following Beltrán Leyva’s death, signs began appearing in Cuernavaca reading, “It’s not even the beginning of the war . . . you’ve made the terrible mistake of messing with THE business.” [Ruth McLean, Mexican Drug Gang Massacres Family of Hero in Revenge for Boss’s Death, Times (London), Dec. 24, 2009.]

Bad Ideas

People planning crimes would do well to avoid the following:

1. Dreadlocks. On December 23, employees of Greer’s Food Tiger in Mobile, Alabama, noticed a man stuffing steaks into his pants as he walked through the aisles. The store manager challenged him and grabbed him by the hair, which made him drop several items. The man, Gregory York, managed to flee with at least two packs of steaks, but police caught him a short time later, thanks to the detailed description they got from the store manager, who had a good look at Mr. York while holding him by his dreadlocks. [Jamie Burch, Store Manager Grabs Shoplifter By His Dreadlocks, WKRG-TV (Mobile), Dec. 23, 2009.]

2. Baggy pants. On December 23, career criminal Hector Quinones burst into a Manhattan apartment and killed his former prison cellmate, Carlos Rodriguez, Jr., and the man’s father, Carlos Rodriguez, Sr. He then stabbed to death the 87-year-old grandfather, Fernando Gonzalez, just as the wife of Mr. Gonzalez, returned to the apartment with her daughter. Mr. Quinones took a shot at Mrs. Rodriguez, grazing the back of her head. He then lunged for the daughter, who just managed to step out of reach when he tripped over his low-slung pants. She ran into a bedroom, climbed out onto a fire escape and called for help. Mr. Quinones tried to kick down the door, but then decided to make a break for it down another fire escape. Again, he tripped over his baggy pants, and this time, he fell three stories to his death.

Police think Mr. Quinones wanted to rob his former associate. They found a “significant amount” of heroin and a smaller amount of cocaine in the apartment, as well as a lockbox stuffed with cash. [Larry Celona, John Doyle and Laurie Kamens, Killer Tripped on Baggy Pants, Plunged to Death after Slaying Three, New York Post, Dec. 18, 2009.]

Majority Minority

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $102 million to win a third term in November, just squeezing by a black man, former New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson, with just 50.6 percent of the vote. Missing from much of the post-election analysis was the fact that. for the first time, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians cast the majority of votes. Non-whites have long been the majority in New York, but because so many are not citizens, there were more white voters. Whites were 56 percent of the electorate in 1989, 55 percent in 1993, 53 percent in 1997 and 52 percent in 2001. In the 2009 election, whites were just 46 percent, followed by blacks at 23 percent, Hispanics at 21 percent and Asians at 7 percent.

Demographic change has helped non-whites win several prominent offices. In 2000, Mr. Thompson became the first black comptroller and in Queens, Helen Marshall became the first black borough president. In November, John Liu took over from Mr. Thompson, becoming the first Asian elected to city-wide office.

In an interview after the election, Mr. Thompson told New Yorkers they should expect to see “even more diverse candidates.” Bruce N. Gyory, a political consultant, notes that “all the room for growth in the electorate is amongst Hispanic, Asian, biracial and black New Yorkers.” He adds that “this polyglot electorate will demand the jigsaw-puzzle skills of coalition-building and diplomacy.” [Sam Roberts, For First Time, Minority Vote Was a Majority, New York Times, Dec. 25, 2009.]

TB Roars Back

Tuberculosis (TB) kills more adults worldwide — two million a year — than any other infectious disease. One in three people across the globe is infected, though only 10 percent of them will develop active TB. The disease has been found in 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummies, and killed as many as one in four Americans and Europeans as late as the 1850s. In 1944, doctors began treating TB with antibiotics, which were so effective that by the end of the 1960s, then-US Surgeon General William H. Stewart announced it was “time to close the book on infectious diseases and declare the war against pestilence won.”

TB is now making a comeback, thanks to misdiagnosis, misuse of antibiotics, and immigration. In the Third World, ill-educated doctors failed to treat TB effectively, and it spread among the poor. Immigrants flooding into the West spread it to places where it had been virtually eradicated. Even when Western doctors recognized TB, their patients often failed to complete the full course of antibiotics. This let the bacterium mutate into various more powerful forms: multi-drug resistant (MDR), extensively drug-resistant (XDR) and extremely drug-resistant (XXDR). Doctors estimate there are more than 500,000 annual cases worldwide of MDR-TB, which cost $100,000 each to treat. There are fewer cases of XDR, but it is more lethal, killing 52 of the 53 people who were diagnosed with it in South Africa in 2006. There are only a handful of XXDR cases worldwide, but it is deadlier still.

America got its first case of XXDR-TB in 2007 — though this was kept from the public until just a few weeks ago. Peruvian Oswaldo Juarez was in the US studying English when he was diagnosed, and it took nearly two years of isolation in a Florida sanitarium to cure him to the point where he was no longer contagious. Dr. David Ashkin, a leading TB specialist who treated Mr. Juarez, says that while his case of XXDR was the first in the US, it won’t be the last. Mr. Juarez’s cure cost taxpayers $500,000 — money Dr. Ashkin believes had to be spent. “This is an airborne spread disease . . . so when we treat that individual, we’re actually treating and protecting all of us. This is true homeland security.”

“There’s a lot of MDR and XDR-TB that hasn’t been diagnosed in places like South Africa and Peru, Russia, Estonia, Latvia,” says Dr. Megan Murray, a tuberculosis specialist at Harvard. “We think it’s a big public health threat.” Dr. Lee Reichman, a TB expert at the New Jersey Medical School, says, “You’re really looking at a global issue. It’s not a foreign problem, you can’t keep these TB patients out.”

That sounds like liberal hogwash. Eighty-two percent of American patients with the various forms of drug-resistant TB are foreign-born. There are ways to screen immigrants for TB, but to do so efficiently would require concentrating on people from certain countries, i.e., profiling. If Americans can’t even bring themselves to admit that young Muslim men are more likely than Japanese grandmothers to be terrorists, they are certainly not going to admit that Vietnamese are more likely than Danes to have TB.

Other diseases are developing drug-resistant strains. Scientists say a mutated form of malaria has been discovered in Cambodia, a growing number of AIDS patients in Africa are infected with a form that is harder to treat, and drug-resistant staph infections kill more people in the US each year than prostate and breast cancer combined. [Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza, First Case of Highly Drug-resistant TB Found in US, AP, Dec. 27, 2009.]

Kwanzaa Fizzling?

Kwanzaa is a holiday for blacks, created in 1966 by black power radical, convicted felon, and tenured professor at California State University, Long Beach, Ron Karenga, (see “We Wish You a Phony Festival,” AR, February 2002, for a closer look at the colorful professor). Kwanzaa has been blessed by the media, the post office, the President, and the greeting card companies, but fewer blacks are lighting the black, red, and green candles and observing the seven principles: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity) and Imani (faith).

Camille Zeigler, president of the Atlanta Alumnae Chapter of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, says many of the girls who attend the sorority’s annual Kwanzaa celebration know very little about the holiday. Sorority member Evita Broughton celebrated Kwanzaa for the first time with her family four years ago, but has skipped it ever since. “It felt like a school project that lasted seven nights,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I had that connection. I tried to share my experiences with others but no one else was celebrating it.”

Keith Mayes, an assistant professor of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition, estimates that just 500,000 to 2 million of the nation’s 40 million blacks celebrate the holiday. He says Kwanzaa has evolved away from its radical roots, and is now all about “inclusion, diversity, goodwill, multiculturalism.” He notes that white institutions now celebrate it as part of their commitment to diversity. This no doubt drives away some blacks.

Others reject it for other reasons. Nicole Duncan-Smith of Brooklyn, thinks Kwanzaa detracts from Christmas and doesn’t think it has anything to do with African heritage. She also notes that Kwanzaa’s founder’s felony conviction was for torturing two women who were in a faction of blacks opposed to Prof. Karenga. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder of BOND (Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny) and author of SCAM: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America, believes the holiday is racist. “Get rid of it,” says Rev. Peterson, who is black. “Reject it completely. Just as we would do if a white racist came up with a false holiday to celebrate whiteness.”

The Obamas do not celebrate Kwanzaa, but like his predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the President issued an official Kwanzaa message, in which he said that the seven principles of Kwanzaa “have sustained us as a nation during our darkest hours and provided hope for better days to come.” [Megan K. Scott, Kwanzaa Celebrations Continue, But Boom is Over, AP, Dec. 17, 2009.] When the British burned Washington, Madison was no doubt greatly comforted by them.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

Letters from readers
LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — AR did confused country-music fans a real service by publishing “Implicitly White, Explicitly Anti-White.” Discussions about the anti-white tendencies of some performers take place every day among thinking fans, but we are not likely to see such careful arguments laid out in print. This is another case of our culture being corrupted and used to undermine traditional Americans and their heritage. Thank you for this thought-provoking and informative article.

D. Tyrone Crowley, Prattville, Ala.

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Sir — The review in your January issue of the book about Mexico was eye-opening. I did not know drug smugglers have a patron saint to whom they make grateful pilgrimages after a successful run. Nor had I heard about the cult of Santa Muerte (“Saint Death,” of all things) that seems to attract underworld types. This is the kind of deep superstition one expects of Haitians or Congolese pygmies.

But even more surprising is the brazenness of the top criminals. Can you imagine Bernie Madoff living it up in a top-security prison, carrying on affairs, running his con game just as before, secure in the knowledge that his men would spring him? Or someone on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list taking over Peoria, flying in hundreds of guests and the latest top-40 band, and holding a 24-hour party?

Anything bad is possible in a country as rotten as that. It’s no wonder half of all Mexicans admit to pollsters that they would move in with us if they could.

Carter Jennings, Cheyenne, Wyo.

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Sir — You may recall that early this year, the Pentagon issued a report warning that Mexico is on it way to becoming a “failed state,” to use the current euphemism for descending into savagery, and that a “wholesale collapse of civil government” is entirely possible.

I have no love for Mexicans, but in their defense, if the drug trade has produced thugs powerful enough to threaten the government it is only because Americans buy their products. I find the libertarian arguments in favor of legalizing drugs convincing. We would be better off if drugs were legal, and the Mexicans would be much better off.

And it is worth thinking about what would make life better for Mexicans. If Mexico begins to look like Somalia, just think how many Mestizos will head north. If we keep fighting this foolish “war on drugs,” Mexico could reach the point where it made sense to invade the place, destroy the cartels, and prop up the government. If there is any country on earth where the folly of “nation building” could conceivably be defended it is Mexico.

Of course, we would never go in and straighten out Mexico, no matter how badly it needed it. That would be “insensitive” at best and “imperialist” or even “genocidal” at worst. Better to let the country collapse than open ourselves to such charges!

Charles Hartwell, Albuquerque, N.M.

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Sir — I was very interested to read in the January cover story about radio host Dennis Prager’s account of the company that puts together focus groups to evaluate radio programming. Mr. Prager says that the company does not include blacks in the groups because white people won’t say what they really think as soon as a black person expresses an opinion. They are afraid to disagree with a black for fear of being thought “racist.”

Reflect, for a moment, on what this means. What does cowardice of this kind bring to jury deliberations, faculty hiring committees, school boards, or legislatures? Just imagine how many terrible things have happened because whites said nothing for fear of offending a black person.

This reminds me of something Michael Levin wrote about in Why Race Matters. He noted how easily blacks work themselves into a fury about “racism” or “oppression,” and described how this effects whites. Most whites do not get furious over nothing, so they assume blacks must have a good reason to be angry. They may not completely grasp what a furious black is complaining about, but they believe that if he is screaming he must have a real grievance. So they give in.

The same thing happens when blacks riot. Whites believe blacks are expressing legitimate rage over real injustices. Because whites cannot imagine rioting for no good reason, they do not think blacks would either. All this keeps whites cowed and blacks on the moral offensive.

I think most blacks would be unable to describe the process in the terms I have, but they have an instinct for keeping whites off balance. Whites will continue to be treated this way until they show some backbone.

Jeffrey Goldsmith, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

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Sir — Your collection of racial anecdotes in the January cover story reminds me that many blacks just want to humiliate whites whenever they can. James Baldwin, the black novelist petted and adored by whites in the 1950s and 1960s, put it this way:

[T]here is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods. . . . simple, naked, and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low . . .

Sarah Wentworth, Richmond, Va.

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