October 1991

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 2, No. 10 October 1991

 

CONTENTS

The Case of Japan (Part II)
Summer in the City
Homogeneity and Intelligence
Second-Rate Nation and Third World Country
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Case of Japan (Part II)

Japanese society is a perfect example of the advantages of ethnic homogeneity.

by Steven Howell

In the first part of this article, Mr. Howell described the vivid sense of peoplehood that is central to the Japanese national character. The second part shows how important this has been to Japan’s success.

Hiroshima, Japan

Credit Image: © Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com

One of the greatest differences between Japan and the United States is that at some basic level, Japanese are like the three musketeers: all for one, and one for all. Whatever it is that Japanese are up to, they are in it together.

This sense of shared purpose appears in a thousand pleasant ways. One is the virtual absence of crime. Anyone can walk anywhere in Japan at any time. If a shopkeeper has excess inventory, he puts it out on the sidewalk. No store in the whole country bothers with elaborate security systems that sound an alarm if someone makes off with the goods.

The cost of crime, jails, and law enforcement is a heavy burden not only on the American economy but on the American soul. In a country where people feel a duty to their tribe, the costs are far lighter.

Another result of homogeneity and national solidarity is the relative absence of social conflict. Since all Japanese come from the same stock, receive much the same education, and absorb the same traditions, they have the same expectations of each other. There are far fewer doubts than in America about what is proper and what is not.

One consequence is that most Japanese go to their graves without ever meeting a lawyer. In per capita terms, there are only one 20th as many lawyers in Japan as in the United States, and Japanese do not spend their time suing each other. When businessmen need a contract, they sit down and write it. They don’t need lawyers to help them. If there is a disagreement later on they work it out. People who never have to “celebrate diversity” actually have a good chance of understanding each other.

Another sign of how much Japanese have in common is the willingness of most adults to act in loco parentis when they see a misbehaving child. Only in a community of common values, where there is no doubt about right or wrong, do people bother to rebuke a stranger’s child. Japanese would want their own children scolded by strangers if they needed it; everyone benefits from well-mannered youngsters.

Many things would be impossible in Japan without a sense of common purpose. Lately, the country has been spending huge sums on enormous infrastructure projects. The four main islands of Japan have been linked with bridges and tunnels longer than anything else in the world. Networks of super express train tracks are constantly being laid, and skyscrapers are going up everywhere. With a land mass one 25th that of the United States and a population density 12 times greater, where does Japan find room for all this?

It makes room. When people have a larger view of the interests of society, they are willing to move out of the way of a super highway. Americans used to build bridges and dig canals. Now, any large-scale building project is likely to be paralyzed by noisy interest groups. About the only place left where American engineers can really flex their muscles is outer space, and budget cuts may soon put an end to that.

One of the best examples of how Japanese can all put their shoulders to the wheel and push together was the national campaign against pollution. In the 1960s, there was a real fear that the country would smother in its own industrial waste. Japan woke up to the problem, spat on its hands, and cleaned up the mess. It was a fine example of what a people can accomplish when it acts together.

Japanese understand perfectly that national solidarity grows out of what Japanese have in common with each other. They prize their homogeneity, and don’t want it diluted. Japan therefore takes no immigrants. Virtually the only way to become a Japanese citizen is to marry a Japanese, and even then citizenship is not automatic. The authorities look very carefully into the alien’s background and character, and give him every opportunity to change his mind. The process takes years, and is not complete until the alien is, in effect, adopted by a Japanese family and takes a Japanese name. Usually it is the in-laws who do this, but there is little recourse if they won’t.

Occasionally, Japan is pressured into taking in foreigners. Back in the 1970s, the United States practically forced it to accept a handful of Vietnamese boat people. It didn’t take the Vietnamese long to realize that they weren’t wanted, and most of them eventually moved on to America. The Japanese were quietly delighted.

In public, and in any international forum, Japanese mouth the expected clichés about one-worldism and borderless bliss, but they don’t believe them. They know that their smooth-running society requires a degree of national solidarity that can come only from racial and cultural homogeneity.

High-class Bums

Japanese solidarity might have led to a Scandinavia-style nanny state, with government cosseting at every turn. It did not. The Japanese family, which has always demanded loyalty and promised protection in return, has looked after the losers. This means that Japanese cities have nothing like the hordes of welfare-bred derelicts that are rapidly filling up every public space in America.

Japan has miles of underground arcades and covered shopping streets. In New York or Chicago, they would be rank with scruffy urban campers, and customers wouldn’t dare come around after sundown. In Osaka or Tokyo, one can go for days without seeing a single “homeless” person, and even Japanese bums are a cut above the rest. After all, it is a nation of 100 percent literacy, and I have seen vagrants curled up in a corner, reading a scavenged copy of the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal.

In the public places of American cities, half the people on the street may be bums and half the rest are dressed like bums. In Japan, virtually no one is poorly dressed, and if there is someone in a summer crowd wearing shorts and a T-shirt, it is probably an American tourist. Japan now has a sleek air of prosperity about it that makes even the swankiest American city seem ragged by comparison.

Keeping Japan Japanese

At a time when fashions slop from one country to the next as if there were no borders, it is a wonder that Japan has managed to stay so resolutely Japanese. It is a great help to be surrounded by water; anything that gets into Japan has to cross the ocean. Even with this advantage, Japan has been remarkably successful at quietly violating many of the rules that Americans have set up as moral imperatives for the planet. (Of course, there are countries no one cares about. Mauritania can even practice slavery since no one can find it on the map, but we have all heard of Japan.)

Along with its unself-conscious racialism, it is Japan’s insistence on separate sex roles that most provokes excitable Westerners. Men and women operate in different spheres and almost no one makes a fuss about it. Many companies have separate job tracks for men and women. Women are likely to quit working as soon as they marry anyway, so why train them for management?

At the same time, being a Japanese housewife is no idle lark. Most husbands hand over the entire pay packet to their wives, and live on an allowance. Women decide where the children will go to school, where to go on vacation, and whether to buy a house. Most important, they see to it that Japanese children keep doing enough homework to score at the top of every international competition. Japanese mothers are so single-minded about schooling that they are known as “education moms.”

All this housewifery is a deep insult to American feminists. They regularly march over to Japan, guns blazing, and explain to their Japanese sisters how oppressed they are. The Japanese listen politely and go on being oppressed. They don’t seem to mind living in a society with no latch-key children, very little juvenile delinquency, no illegitimacy, and a divorce rate less than half that of the United States.

Japanese also take a traditional view of homosexuality: they don’t like it. There is no trace of a “gay rights” movement, and plenty of Japanese sincerely believe there are no homosexuals in Japan. One thing of which there is very little is AIDS. At last count there were about 400 cases of AIDS in the whole country; the United States, with twice the population, has about 125,000 cases and over one million people are thought to be infected. In Japan, infected foreigners are promptly kicked out of the country, and Japanese are kept under close watch to see they don’t give the disease to anyone else.

Hierarchy

Yet another Japanese trait that is unfashionable but obviously good for the country is a firm belief in hierarchy. Although Japan is extremely homogeneous, there is little loose chatter about equality. Japanese accept that some people will end up at the top and others at the bottom, and they are generally cheerful about it. The old get the respect of the young, teachers get the respect of students, the boss gets the respect of his employees, and customers get the respect of everyone.

A visitor to Japan gets a whiff of this when be becomes a customer in a hotel or restaurant. Japan has a tradition of service that has none of the surly air of “I’m just as good as you, Buster,” that is so common in the United States. A waiter or bell hop’s job is to serve you, and he puts everything he has into his job. No one thinks it the least bit demeaning to treat customers as if they were princes. It is Japan’s way of doing a good job.

This yeoman love of a job well done is everywhere. In factories, on farms, and even in government offices, Japanese do their work with touching earnestness. Even the garbage man puts his heart into his job just as the company president does. And since Japan is a meritocracy, with none of the complications of a racial spoils system, the garbage man can dream that his son will grow up to become the company president.

Problems

Of course, it would be a mistake to think that homogeneity cures all woes or that Japan has no problems. Many countries, including our own, have problems that homogeneity cannot cure, and Japan has its own special troubles. My point is not that Japan has built a society that Americans or anyone else would necessarily find congenial. It is that they have built a society that Japanese find congenial.

There is much about it that only a Japanese could love. Japanese men have a nudge-and-wink attitude about sex that most Americans leave behind in junior high school. When they are drunk — and even when they are not — they can be some of the most childish, self-indulgent people on earth. Difficult as it may be to imagine, Japanese television is even more vulgar and inane than American television. A roomful of tittering women and leering men passes for a talk show, and on an especially unlucky evening one might find oneself watching a group of men trying to see who can break wind the loudest.

Only now are Japanese getting over their post-war sense of inferiority towards Caucasians. There is still a ritualized and increasingly empty admiration for the “American way of life,” and older Japanese still believe that America is a mighty nation that can do anything it sets its mind to. Younger Japanese suspect it no longer has much of a mind. Still, one undiminished object of admiration is the Caucasian esthetic. White models help sell everything from diamond rings to instant noodles. Plastic surgeons take the slant out of eyes and enlarge noses, and never the other way round. Some of those half-white children that America left behind have traded on their looks and become models and actors.

One of Japan’s most serious problems is one that a healthy society should not have: It has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Each Japanese woman has an average of only 1.53 children, well below the replacement level of 2.1. At a rate of 1.5, each generation is 25 percent smaller than the one before, and morbid statisticians have been trying to figure out how many generations it will take before there are no Japanese left.

It is important to note that neither this low birth rate nor an acute labor shortage have gotten anyone but socialists talking about immigration. There is some discussion of the possibility of bringing in carefully supervised work gangs from South East Asia, but most Japanese are against the idea. Instead, there is talk of raising the retirement age from 65 to 75.

The Price of Nationhood

From a conventional American perspective, this is foolishness. Without immigration, Japanese labor costs will be higher, and some things will be more expensive. That, however, is the point. Nationhood has a price. What sets the Japanese apart from Americans is their willingness to pay it.

No doubt there are many talented Japanese women who are frustrated to stay home with children rather than run companies — but each new generation of Japanese is more carefully reared than perhaps any other in the world. No doubt Koreans are unhappy to be disfranchised — but Japan does not have a foreign policy that is paralyzed by different internal ethnic groups. No doubt it is a misfortune to lose one’s house to a bridge pylon — but the whole nation may benefit from the bridge. No doubt there are Malays digging ditches in Sumatra for 25 cents a day, who could afford indoor plumbing and a motorscooter if they dug ditches in Japan — but long-term national cohesion requires that Japan’s ditches be dug by Japanese.

To be sure, there is frustration in Japan. Cohesion has its costs, and some Japanese will always be out of step. Nevertheless, this is a small price to pay for the blessings that today’s Japanese can expect to pass on to their grand children: unity, cultural integrity, family ties, love of country, and a uniquely Japanese national character. Japan is certainly “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic” and “nativist” — and perhaps the most successful society on earth.

Steven Howell is the pen name of a consultant to American companies doing business in Japan.

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ARTICLE

Summer in the City

In New York, “racial tension” is just another name for black lawlessness.

by Marian Evans

David Dinkins, the black mayor of New York, likes to call his city “a gorgeous mosaic” of races and cultures. The city has had a particularly gorgeous summer.

The excitement began, just up the Hudson River, in Albany. Like many cities, Albany tries to buy peace in the summer by staging events designed to divert minorities. One such effort was the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival, held on July 20th. Leonard Jeffries, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at the City College of New York, was invited to speak, and speak he did.

In a two-hour lecture, he explained that American blacks were suffering because Russian Jews in Hollywood had combined with the Mafia to “put together a financial system of destruction of black people.” He later broadened his theme to say, “The white boy can’t be trusted . . . these white folks, even the good ones, you can’t trust. There’s a devilishness out there when it comes to this African thing.” Prof. Jeffries’ speech was broadcast, state-wide, at public expense.

Although the professor has long been known as a white-hater, these remarks seem finally to have touched a nerve. New York papers launched a full-scale campaign against him, and for a week or so Prof. Jeffries became the columnists’ punching bag. His theories of black superiority were trotted out, as was his claim that if it were up to him, he would wipe all white people “off the face of the earth.” One of his more choice observations was reported to be that the space shuttle explosion was “the best thing to happen to America in a long time,” because it might prevent whites from “spreading their filth through the universe.” These were not private, unguarded remarks; this is what Prof. Jeffries teaches his students.

New Yorkers were unhappy to learn that Prof. Jeffries is paid $71,000 a year by the state of New York. A Jewish member of the state assembly gathered signatures for an open letter condemning the professor’s “extreme anti-Semitism and anti-white bias.” Other assemblymen threatened to cut City College’s funding if it didn’t fire Prof. Jeffries.

It is unusual for whites to make such a fuss over blatant anti-white remarks, but whenever they do, blacks rally to defend their own. All sixteen black assemblymen refused to sign the letter condemning Prof. Jeffries. On August 11th, 500 blacks marched through Harlem in a show of support. James Small, who manages the student center at City College, told the crowd that “the people trying to silence our teachers’ voices are trying to silence our voices.” Dr. Edward Scobie of the athletic department claimed that “everybody who hates Dr. Jeffries hates us and hates Africa.”

On August 15th, a crowd of 1,000 gathered in a black church in Brooklyn, to cheer a videotape of Prof. Jeffries’ speech. Afterwards, in a rousing finale, Rev. Herbert Daughtry brought the roaring crowd to its feet as he waved clenched fists and shouted: “Up, you mighty race! Fight, you mighty race!”

Four days later, blacks in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn did exactly as they had been told. A Hasidic Jew, driving in convoy, fell behind his party and ran a red light in an attempt to catch up. His car was hit by cross traffic, jumped the sidewalk, and smashed into two black children. When the driver got out of the car to see what had happened, he was immediately beaten by angry blacks, who then robbed him.

Two ambulances — one from a private, Hasidic service and the other from the city — arrived almost simultaneously. Police directed the Hasidic crew to take care of the beaten driver, and the city ambulance took the black children to the hospital. One of them died.

Blacks began to converge on the scene, and spread the rumor that the Hasidic para-medics had given the Jewish driver first aid but had deliberately ignored the badly injured black children. A mob started throwing rocks and bottles at police, who were trying to restore order. Twenty blacks were arrested and 26 police officers were injured. Three hours after the accident, rampaging blacks fell upon a Jew dressed in classic Hasidic garb. Twenty or so surrounded the hapless Yankel Rosenbaum and chanted “Kill the Jew,” while a 16-year old stabbed him to death.

The next night, black rioters were out in force. They looted stores, burned buildings, and destroyed parked cars. Ten more police officers were injured before a heavy rain finally cleared the streets. Both New York’s black mayor and its black police chief seemed to think that the trouble was over. The next evening they went to Crown Heights to spread calm, and were met with volleys of bricks, bottles, and obscenities. They narrowly escaped being caught up in a third night of rioting.

This time, a Hasidic man was badly slashed with a knife, and police were peppered with shotgun pellets. More cars were burned, shops were looted, and at least six white journalists were attacked. Gangs of blacks pulled white motorists from their cars and thrashed them. One of their targets was columnist Jimmy Breslin, who had taken a taxi to Brooklyn to see what was happening. A shout went up that there was a white in the car, and a horde of black children smashed the windshield and poured into the taxi. The black driver took to his heels while Mr. Breslin was robbed, beaten, and stripped to his underwear. He was knocked down, and would probably have had his brains dashed out with a baseball bat if a large black man with a knife had not appeared and told the young robbers to leave. They snarled but obeyed.

The next evening, noting that “diplomacy” had failed, Mayor Dinkins ordered 2,000 police into the area and told them to arrest all rioters. Brooklyn was finally quiet again — at a cost of $4 million in police overtime. By strange coincidence, this was the second anniversary of the death of Yusuf Hawkins, who was shot by whites in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Mayor Dinkins proclaimed the day “Yusuf Hawkins Day.”

After the rioting was stopped, the New York Times editorialized piously about the need for “continuing efforts to ease race relations.” It urged the city to “foster communication between blacks and Hasidim.

The problem is not a lack of communication. The problem is the inevitable friction of two very different groups living side by side. Crown Heights is 80 percent black and ten percent Hispanic. The remaining ten percent are virtually all members of the Jewish Lubavitcher sect, which established its headquarters in Crown Heights decades before it went black. Most whites moved out long ago.

There is no “racial tension” in Crown Heights, in the sense that both sides have grievances. There is simply black lawlessness. It is true that a black child was run over by a Jewish driver. As it happens, in October 1989, a black driver — with no insurance and a suspended license — ran over and killed a Jewish child. In January 1990, a black man ran over and killed an 89-year-old Jewish man who was crossing the street. In neither case was the driver beaten. There was grieving but there were no disturbances.

This time also, a pedestrian was killed by accident. But the death of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Hasidic Jew, was murder. The looting and arson that followed were the exclusive work of blacks. What possible lack of “communication” from Hasidim could provoke or justify it? What justifies beating and robbing motorists simply because they are white?

As a 13-year-old later explained to the New York Times, “it was fun throwing bottles at the cops.” As a 12-year-old put it, “It made me feel strong because we were with a lot of black people.” Most of the black residents of Crown Heights are recent immigrants from the Caribbean. They do not even have the excuse that white Americans enslaved them. What went on for three days in Crown Heights was not racial tension but typical black behavior — behavior that is encouraged by blacks and excused by whites.

The chairman of the City College African-American Studies Department says that whites should be wiped off the face of the earth. When whites object, blacks rally to his defense and a minister urges on his congregation with shouts of “Fight, you mighty race.” Whom is the congregation supposed to fight? The clear message is that blacks are justified in hating whites and in getting whatever they want by, according to the popular phrase, “any means necessary.”

Even if whites object to the idea of being exterminated, liberal dogma virtually supplies justifications for it. Slavery was the greatest evil ever done by man. Blacks are “victims” of poverty. They are beset by “hopelessness” and “underprivilege.” America is “institutionally racist.” White liberals seem to think that telling blacks how wicked white people are will make blacks love them. Naturally, it does the opposite. Any black who listens to white liberals long enough will think that beatings were too good for whites.

Mr. Breslin is entirely typical. His assailants were actually caught and he was asked to identify them. He reported that he was saddened by the “hopelessness” of their lives. He explained that he went through with the complaint as a kind of civic obligation. “It’s like jury duty,” he explained; “You’re a citizen, and you’ve got to do it.” Two of Mr. Breslin’s assailants were 14 years old. The other was eleven. Mr. Breslin seems to have forgotten that they tried to kill him — simply because he was white.

The riots in Crown Heights lasted three days. They came to an end only when 2,000 riot police appeared on the streets. There will be more black uprisings. There will be more affirmative action. There will be more editorials about the need to “foster communication” and “defuse racial tensions.” Prof. Jeffries, who cannot be removed because he has tenure, will keep saying that whites do not deserve to live. Rev. Daughtry will keep urging the mighty race to fight. We can be sure that Mayor Dinkins will never proclaim “Yankel Rosenbaum Day.” And America will go one pretending that a multi-racial society is not only possible but desirable.

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ARTICLE

Homogeneity and Intelligence

Although homogeneity is one of Japan’s great strengths, homogeneity is by no means a sufficient condition for national success. Parts of Africa are racially and culturally homogeneous, but show few signs of great achievement. It is the race and culture that matter.

Ever since the 1920’s, when comparative test were first done, Japanese have consistently scored as well or better than whites on intelligence tests. The best current studies, in which wealth and class are kept comparable, show that the average Japanese IQ is approximately 10 points higher than the white, American average. This is the case, whether non-verbal tests are used to compare Japanese in Japan with Americans in America, or whether standard tests are used to compare Japanese-Americans with white Americans.

There is some question, however, about the shape of the distribution curve for Japanese IQs. If the shape were the same as that for whites, that is to say that variance from the average were just as great, Japan would have an overwhelming advantage in numbers at the very high end of the curve. Given a 10-point advantage in the average, Japan would have four times as many people with IQs over 130, and 14 times as many with IQ’s over 160. This would give a decisive advantage over us in virtually every field of endeavor.

Both test data and experience with Japanese suggest that Japan does not enjoy such a preponderance of geniuses. Americans who know the country well are impressed by a consistently high average ability, but find few outstanding intellects. Japans meager contributions to science, mathematics, philosophy, and economics likewise suggest no great advantage in Japanese brain power.

It is likely that Japanese intelligence ranges are as homogeneous as everything else in Japan. According to best estimates, Japan has been genetically isolated since about 300 A.D. This could have produced an unusually tight distribution of intelligence. Rather than the 15-point standard deviation in IQs that is found in other groups, Japan’s standard deviation appears to be smaller. The distribution curve for intelligence would therefore be higher and narrower than that of other groups.

If this is the case, the real benefits are found at the other end of the curve. Japan appears to have fewer feeble-minded people to look after than other countries do. Most common criminals have below average IQs, and Japans low crime rate is probably related to its tight distribution of intelligence. Japan has a very low welfare burden, and relatively few case of mental retardation. The advantages of good stock lie in what is rare as much as what is abundant.

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BOOK REVIEW

Second-Rate Nation and Third World Country

Art Carey, The United States of Incompetence, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991, 203 pp., $17.95

Reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Art Carey, an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, woke up one morning to find that a bridge he crossed to get to work every day was closed. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had let it deteriorate so badly it was no longer safe. For 16 months, as Mr. Carey took a long detour to work, he cursed the rotting bridge, which had become a symbol for what he calls “a disease that’s consuming the soul of America . . . an epidemic of incompetence that is turning the United States into a second-rate nation and Third World country.”

In The United States of Incompetence, Mr. Carey vents the frustration he feels as he watches his nation decline. He also tries to explain its decline, and to point a way out of the morass. The book is in fact an impressive collection of horrifying tales about a once-great nation gone wrong. But no cure is possible without correct diagnosis. Mr. Carey refuses to accept the conclusion to which his own evidence points — that the most obvious cause of decline is that welfare and immigration policies are filling America with incompetent people.

Mr. Carey defines his problem broadly: “Incompetence has become a catchword for a larger malaise. Simply stated, we have lost our purpose, our moral ambition, our sense of social obligation.” The bulk of his book is an account of the five factors he says are responsible for America’s failures: a decline in morals, which undermined the family, which led to bad education, which produced a slipshod work ethic, which resulted in the disappearance of quality. Whether or not one accepts this neat causation scheme, there is no doubt that America is failing in all these areas.

America now churns out illiterates at an alarming rate. Twenty-three million of us, he says, are “functionally illiterate” and another 46 million are “marginally literate.” Half of the 17-year-olds still in school can’t understand a newspaper editorial or 12th grade text book. New York Telephone must test nearly 30 people to find a single one who is qualified to be an operator. At the same time, the work ethic has been replaced by what Mr. Carey calls the “new American dream [of] winning the lottery — riches without effort, reward without talent, gain without pain . . . happiness is freedom from work . . . the definition of bliss is infinite leisure.”

“Family life” in America now includes 11-year-old crack-addicted mothers, and in 1989, 12,000 drug-addicted children were born in New York City alone. Americans kill each other at such a clip that the country has a homicide rate more than 20 times higher than that of Denmark, West Germany, Austria, or Japan. As Mr. Carey puts it, our streets are filled with a “mutant strain of urban animal,” and his own city of Philadelphia is “reminiscent of Beirut, Calcutta, or war-ravaged Dresden.”

All this leads to “a desperate sense that the barbarians have taken over, that a hostile and anti-social underclass is proliferating uncontrollably.” Quite so. We all feel this. What caused it and what could stop it?

Facing the Facts

Here Mr. Carey refuses to face facts. He traces America’s decline to the anything-goes mentality of the 1960s that ridiculed the notion of moral standards and social norms. Everything has gone down hill ever since, he says, and what we need is a good talking-to. Mr. Carey’s prescriptions for rejuvenation ring with such phrases as “resurgence of moral bravery,” and “lowering the threshold for moral insult.” But does he really think that sermons on moral bravery will have the slightest effect on mutant strains of urban animals?

If Mr. Carey thinks that decline began in the 1960s, he has missed two crucial events of that era: the enormous expansion of welfare and the huge influx of non-white immigrants. Both have had devastating effects on America’s moral and national foundations. Spending on welfare, which is a program that pays women with an average IQ of 85 to stay home and have babies, increased 540 percent in real terms between 1960 and 1982, while the number of families on the dole went from 15 in a thousand to 65 in a thousand. We have, indeed, produced a mutant strain of animal, for never before has a country so ruthlessly taxed its most competent citizens in order to pay its least competent to multiply.

At the same time, immigration policy since the 1960s has reduced the white population of the country from 90 percent to 75 percent. A great many of the newcomers are losers by any standard. When over a million illegal aliens who had been amnestied by the Immigration Reform Act crept out of the shadows, California discovered that its share had an average of only four years of education, and that 80 percent couldn’t speak English well enough to hold a job.

The other painfully obvious fact that Mr. Carey refuses to acknowledge is that so much of what he calls incompetence is disproportionately the work of blacks and Hispanics. Although he lards his book with statistics, he almost never breaks down the horror figures by race. When he rants about illiteracy, he fails to tell us that blacks and Hispanics are, respectively, three and three-and-a-half times more likely to be illiterate than whites. He despairs of shattered families, but never tells us that while 15 percent of white babies are born to single parents, 34 percent of Hispanic babies and an astounding 63 percent of black babies are illegitimate. He lambastes indolence and irresponsibility, but hasn’t noticed that blacks are six times as likely as whites to be on welfare and Hispanics are 3.6 times as likely. He does not care to tell us that 52 percent of Hispanic students drop out of high school or that blacks are 46 times more likely than whites to have syphilis.

Throughout Mr. Carey’s book, there is a transparent determination to ignore race. Many of the race-unspecified instances of barbarism he cites are almost certainly stories about non-whites, and he coyly refrains from mentioning race when he writes about well-publicized outrages. For all his readers would know, the Central Park jogger was raped by white college boys, and the Utah tourist stabbed to death on a New York subway platform was killed by Japanese-Americans.

A dose of his own medicine

Nevertheless, Mr. Carey is no fool, and occasionally he glimpses what is really wrong with America. For example, he points out that standards — whose absence he is constantly deploring — require judgments of superiority and inferiority. He even insists that a healthy society is one that has widely accepted norms of behavior and standards of conduct. “Openness sounds nice . . . .” he writes, “[but] the problem is that openness is inimical to quality because it insists on indiscriminateness. Why? Because the opposite of indiscriminateness is — egads! —  discrimination . . . A society afraid to acknowledge the best because it’s afraid to acknowledge the worst is a society where quality is doomed.” Mr. Carey could do with a dose of his own medicine.

Although Mr. Carey manages to recognize that a society cannot cohere and function without “shared duties, values, loyalties, habits of mind and qualities of heart,” what does his prescription for America call for but more diversity! Diversity, he says is “the marrow of our greatness, the wellspring of our strength.” Through immigration and diversity America will continue to “renew and invigorate” itself. It would be hard to draw a more ridiculous — or more politically correct — conclusion from the facts that Mr. Carey has given us.

Mr. Carey argues repeatedly that America is rife with incompetence because Americans cannot or will not live up to standards. As he says, America is becoming “a second-rate nation and a Third World country.” What Mr. Carey cannot or will not see is that this is because America is increasingly a nation of second-rate and Third World people.

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Strange Fruit in Idaho

On July 30, a dark-skinned man was found hanged with his hands tied, in the arboretum at the University of Idaho at Moscow. Since northern Idaho is home to the minuscule but much-reviled Aryan Nations white racialist group, the press immediately concluded that a black man had been lynched by vicious whites. The story, and the accompanying public breast-beating, were front-page news in the Northwest, and Moscow officials got hundreds of telephone calls from worried citizens. Every available black “leader” had a microphone thrust in his face and was asked his views. Non-whites started talking about the need to buy guns and to travel in groups.

The story soon began to unravel. The dead man turned out to be an Iranian, who had become dark and bloated after several days of exposure. Friends explained that he had tried to hang himself once before, but had used his hands to save himself. His hands were tied with a slip knot that he seems to have rigged himself. A suicide note was discovered.

None of this put an immediate stop to press reports about a probable lynching — the story was just too good to drop. When the evidence of suicide became overwhelming, some papers lapsed into disappointed silence rather than publish a correction. Many people in Idaho probably still think there was a lynching.

The suicide, and the reaction it provoked, are vivid symbols of what America officially believes about race: When things go wrong for non-whites, whites must be the cause.

Strange Loot in Massachusetts

In a country where people will believe the worst of whites even without evidence, it is always a temptation to supply some.

Last spring, a black man named Andrew Denton decided to burgle the home of his Aunt Mornell, one of the few blacks who live in the rich, white, Boston suburb of Milton. He and accomplices made off with diamond jewelry, three VCRs, liquor, and stereo equipment, and made a shambles of the house. Before they left, they tried to pin the job on whites, by writing anti-black graffiti on the walls.

One town official was suspicious from the start. As he explained: “Racist attacks usually involve malicious vandalism. The perpetrators don’t usually pick through belongings looking for valuables. I’ve never seen a racial incident like this.” This didn’t prevent the usual hand-wringing, and the town of Milton issued a statement condemning “bigotry.” No one appears to be have been embarrassed to learn that it was all a fraud.

Most states now have special penalties for people convicted of “hate crimes.” We know of no state that punishes someone for faking a “hate crime.”

Crime Wave Hits Orange County

Orange County, not far from Los Angeles, has a population that is still 65 percent white. Like most wealthy white suburbs, it is obsessed with racial correctness, and horrified that “hate crimes” are on a sharp upswing. In the first seven months of 1991, the county had 38 of them, more than double the number for all of 1990. Andy Romero, the county Sheriff, announced in August that police efforts to combat “hate crimes” were “on a par with homicides, officer assistance calls and disaster responses.”

What sort of horrors have put Orange County into such a state of racial emergency? On July 22, the Orange County Register published a complete list of the year’s crop of “hate crimes.” Herewith, verbatim and in toto, are the “hate crimes” for the months of April and May.

  • A black woman, who with her white husband was featured in a newspaper article, receives phone calls asking, “What are you doing married to a white man?” [Race of caller(s) not specified.]
  • A black woman hears racial epithets as she jogs in her neighborhood.
  • A woman reports that her elementary school-age son is being harassed at school by a white child.
  • A Cypress City Council member tells a League of Cities meeting, “I thought when they killed (openly gay San Francisco Supervisor) Harvey Milk, they would finally put some men back on the board.”
  • White students at a Fullerton high school throw golf balls into the campus quad, hitting Asian students.
  • An Iranian family’s home in Saddleback Valley is burglarized, and a swastika is scratched on their new BMW car.

Residents of Orange County are no doubt comforted to know that if grade school children call each other bad names, the Sheriff will leap into action just as swiftly as if there were a murder. We can’t help wondering what the penalty is for that “crime.”

Talk is Not Cheap

Calling people bad names is a punishable offense, at least when adults do it. One hot day in 1990, a black truck driver named James Wells walked into a fast food chain store called El Pollo Loco and ordered a large soft drink. The manager (race unspecified) gave him five ice cubes but Mr. Wells wanted more. The manager refused. When Mr. Wells insisted, the manager said, “get out of here, you black nigger.”

Mr. Wells sued in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming that his civil rights had been violated. This August, he won the case and El Pollo Loco was ordered to pay him $3,000 for discrimination, and $10,000 because the judge found that Mr. Wells was “victim of an act of violence or intimidation based on race.” The company had to pay another $3,000 for the astonishing reason that calling Mr. Wells a black nigger was found to be slander.

A similar case recently went to trial in Fort Lauderdale (FL). James Tribble, a blue-collar white man, was displeased when a realtor offered to sell the house next door to a black. He called the realtor and left the following message on an answering machine: “People in the neighborhood would like to give you a message — the niggers are looking at that house; they’re not going to be very happy whatsoever if one does move in, and neither will you. Goodbye.” The realtor called a detective, and Mr. Tribble met him at the realtor’s office. “Yeah, I made the phone call,” he said, and screamed that he didn’t want any niggers or Cubans or Puerto Ricans moving in next door.

For expressing his opinion — admittedly very rudely — Mr. Tribble was sentenced to three months in jail and to 100 hours of community service. Free speech can cost a great deal in the United States.

The Joys of the Open Road

By strange coincidence, America’s flagship black city and its premier Hispanic city have both become more dangerous for motorists this summer.

Detroit has had to invent a new category of crime, “Robbery Armed, Unlawful Driving Away an Auto,” for the recently fashionable caper of stealing cars from their drivers at gunpoint. This summer, “carjacking” is up 400 percent over the previous year. As many as ten people a day lose their cars to gunmen, and in August, two people who resisted were shot and killed.

Police are warning drivers not to stop at gas stations at night, and to be careful at stop lights. Police also say that a particularly low breed of criminal commits these crimes; they can’t figure out how to break into a car and hotwire it.

In Miami, “roadside robbers” are less interested in cars than in money. They lurk at stop signs, traffic lights, or drive-through windows, and wait for a car to stop. Then they smash the windows with a brick and steal purses and wallets. Another trick is to bump a car from behind, and loot it when the driver steps out to inspect the damage. At one Miami intersection, Third Avenue and Northeast 200th street, there were so many robberies that police doctored the stop lights. Now they blink yellow or red so that drivers need not stop for so long.

This summer, there are more than ten such robberies a day — twice as many as there were two years ago. Police are telling motorists to lock their valuables in the trunk and to run a red light rather than sit still for dubious characters.

Asian Clergyman Learns the Old Racial Con Game

St. Luke’s Episcopal, serving the parish of Pacific Heights, is one of the wealthiest churches in one of the wealthiest parts of San Francisco. It was therefore fertile territory for swindles practiced by Victor Wei, the Chinese-born rector. Church officials recently discovered that over the past several years, Rev. Wei has extracted as much as $150,000 from parishioners by telling them that he needed money for important good works. Some 30 people gave him up to $10,000 each for what they thought were clandestine missions to save Chinese and North Korean Christians from persecution. Rev. Wei simply pocketed the money.

There is no telling how long Pacific Heights parishioners might have gone on rescuing imaginary Asians if Rev. Wei had not come under scrutiny for a different reason: a former seminarian reported that a counseling session had led to an adulterous, four-month liaison. When some of Rev. Wei’s other curious practices began to come to light, he threatened to kill a member of the vestry committee who was calling for closer financial scrutiny. “I may have to kill her,” he said, “I may have to cut her head off.”

Even when the extent of Rev. Wei’s malfeasance became known, St. Luke’s was reluctant to dismiss him. The church’s two assistant clergy and two other staffers resigned in protest over Rev. Wei’s continued tenure, and other San Francisco-area Episcopalians began to call for his removal. In August, St. Luke’s finally suspended him for three years. Rather than press criminal charges, church officials asked him to return the money. Rev. Wei did not do so, and said he was considering filing for bankruptcy.

According to latest reports, St. Luke’s was negotiating with the rector over continuing benefits, such as whether Rev. Wei would be allowed to keep on living, rent-free, in the rectory. In return, Rev. Wei would sign a declaration that he would not sue the church for racial discrimination.

Welcome Wagon for Illegals

Motorists are paying the price in California, as well. There is a section of Interstate 5, just north of the Mexican border, that is a common crossing point for illegal immigrants. It is eight lanes wide, and 100 illegals have been hit and killed trying to get across. Rather than stop the illegals at the source, the authorities have tried to make it easier for them to cross the highway. They have put up signs warning drivers to watch for sprinting Mexicans, and have installed special flood lights so that drivers can see illegals better at night. 1991).

This summer, the California Department of Transportation decided to close off the passing lanes and funnel traffic into just two lanes going each way. The idea was that this would slow cars down, and illegals wouldn’t have so many lanes to negotiate. The median strip is now flanked by two empty lanes on both sides, and once they make it that far, illegals can take a siesta before they cross the rest of the way. The word quickly went South, and the number of people making the crossing doubled to 2,000 per day, and is still headed up.

The Border Patrol does not make arrests on the median strip for fear that illegals will run into traffic and be killed. The chief of the San Diego Border Patrol, Gustavo De La Via suspects taco vendors and taxi drivers will soon set up business in the empty lanes.

The Invasion Moves North

Once they make it into California and Texas, Hispanics are discovering that those parts of the United States have become rather like home — too much crime and poverty, too many surly bureaucrats and bad schools. What do they do? They head north, where America still has a few pockets of white tranquility that have not yet been “culturally enriched.” In the last ten years, the Hispanic population of midwest states has burgeoned. Minnesota saw a 68 percent increase; Illinois 42 percent, Kansas 48 percent, Wisconsin 48 percent, and Nebraska 32 percent.

As white people always do, these solid Midwesterners have welcomed the harbingers of cultural depredation. Last year, the Iowa legislature passed a law requiring companies to pay for interpreters if more than ten percent of the work force speaks the same foreign language. City fathers have set up Anglo-Hispanic Welcome Committees, and police are taking Spanish lessons.

Some small towns are losing characteristics that may be generations old. Willmar (MN), for example, has always been strongly Scandinavian. In the last five years, its Hispanic population has grown from nothing to 2,000 — 11 percent of its population of 17,500. All over the Midwest, bumper crops of Hispanic children have forced school that had never even heard of bilingual education to hire foreign teachers. In some communities, crime and welfare rates have shot up.

Why is it that white people fail to see the obvious — that Hispanics, who have turned much of the Southwest into the image of their underdeveloped homelands, will only do the same to the Midwest?

Equal Justice for All

One night in 1987, New Jersey state troopers were making a routine check of a freeway service area. About midnight, they noticed someone asleep in a car parked in front of a Roy Rogers restaurant. One of the officers walked up to the car with a flashlight and saw a knife with a three-inch blade on the floor. When the driver woke up and rolled down the window, the trooper also noticed an open can of malt liquor. When the officer asked the man to step out of the car to take a balance test for drunkenness, the man furtively hid something in his back pocket. The officer discovered that it was cocaine, and brought the man in for illegal possession.

Another triumph for alert police officers? No, racial harassment. The man was a Jamaican, with his hair in dreadlocks. His lawyers argued that he would not have been approached if he had been white, and this summer a state appeals court upheld Judge Mathias Rodriguez’ earlier ruling that the police acted out of racial prejudice. The discovery of the cocaine was therefore found to be improper, and the charges of possession were ordered dropped. It doesn’t matter that the trooper was right to think there might be something wrong. Since the man was black, the officer had no right to approach him. If he had found cocaine on a white man there would have been no problem.

A ruling like this is arrant nonsense. Police officers always make selective investigations. If they are looking for cocaine dealers, they stop young, black men with exotic hairdos rather than middle-aged white women in business suits. They would be fools not to. The New Jersey court of appeals is asking the police to disregard years of experience, ignore statistics, and set aside common sense. Ultimately, the court is saying that police must not approach the most likely suspects if they happen not to be white. As an astonished assistant prosecutor for New Jersey put it, “The judge is saying because the fellow sitting over there is a member of a minority he can’t be approached because the officer recognizes him as a member of a minority.”

I Grieve for my Country

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist who campaigned for the presidency of his country in 1990. He has no illusions about what others think of Peru: “It is spoken of outside its borders — when spoken of at all — as a horrible caricature of a country that is slowly dying because of the inability of Peruvians to govern themselves with even the minimum of common sense . . .” Many Americans who see their own nation destroying itself understand Mr. Llosa perfectly when he adds: “It is less exact to say that I love my country than that it is continually in my thoughts and a constant mortification. I cannot free myself from it, and it grieves me deeply.”

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LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — The other day when I went to the automatic teller machine to withdraw some cash, the old button-pressing routine that I could do in my sleep didn’t work. I had roared through the obligatory first step; I must now tell the machine whether I would like my instructions in English or Spanish.

Our local newspaper is full of advertisements placed by people offering to clean houses. Almost without exception, they assure the reader that they can speak English . . . Every day, the third world sinks its roots a little deeper into the Santa Clara Valley.

Paul Hamilton, Los Altos (CA)

Sir — In the cover story of your September issue, Steven Howell congratulates the Japanese on their firm sense of racial identity. Perhaps he can explain why Japanese companies have been so active in supporting minority causes in the United States.

In 1987, Toyota Motors Sales Co. sponsored a telethon by the black singer Lou Rawls. It has since started a national minority scholarship program, and it sponsored the six-hour civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize.” It also underwrote an edited, two-hour version to be shown in Japanese schools. Yasuda Trust and Banking Co. in Los Angeles also has a scholarship program for black, Hispanic, and Indian children. The United Negro College Fund reports that it may take a long time to woo Japanese corporate contributions but the payoff is terrific.

Another example of the easy-touch Japanese company is Sanrio Toy. It’s black-face Sambo doll, with big eyes and thick lips, was a big success in Japan, but raised the ire of American blacks. It didn’t take long for Sanrio to acknowledge its “ignorance” and donate $275,000 worth of toys to black children’s organizations. It also funded studies of American “diversity” and paid for non-white children to visit Japan.

It seems to me that Japanese are just as vulnerable to racial con jobs as we are.

George Stoltz, Pueblo (CO)

A few Japanese may be taken in by the you-are-rich-because we-are-poor argument, but I believe that most Japanese companies that give money to non-whites see it as an inexplicable American custom that must be adopted as a cost of doing business here. Much more typical Japanese thinking is the way the auto companies like Nissan and Honda have decided on locations for their American factories. They invariably choose sites where the labor force is likely to be overwhelmingly white.

Steven Howell

Sir — I recently heard a superb presentation by one of your spokesmen on the Boston WBZ talk program run by David Brudnoy — this regarding ethnic-immigration (and related) matters. I teach a a local college but of course dare not ever mention racial matters in class. But in private conversation with students I often comment on them — and always in line with the views of American Renaissance.

You will be glad to know that most of the students here are on the “right” side of issues.

Name withheld, Lexington (VA)

Sir — I was amused by your September O Tempora mention of how Orange County (CA) explains away the fact that non-whites and illegal aliens consume a vastly disproportionate amount of social services: The problem, says a spokesman, is “demographic” rather than “ethnic.” What a joke.

Last April, neighboring Los Angeles County fessed up to having spent $276 million in 1990 on health, education, and welfare benefits for illegal aliens. The federal government spent $250 million on AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) payments in the country, and about half of that went to illegals. If people who have broken our laws to get here are entitled to welfare payments, why not people who obeyed the law and stayed in Mexico? Welfare and medical payments for illegals make me furious.

You also mention that the EEOC has launched a Spanish-language campaign to let illegals know that they can sue for race or sex discrimination without being turned over to the Border Patrol. In a California court case earlier this year, a fast food chain tried to dismiss just such a sex-bias case brought by an illegal.

It argued that aliens working for American companies overseas do not have the right to sue under US “civil rights” laws, so an alien who was here illegally should not have that right either. The judge ruled that aliens working overseas were specifically excluded by law from civil rights coverage, but civil rights laws are silent on the subject of illegals. They therefore have the right to sue. Presumably, if they are ever finally kicked out of the country, illegals can take their court awards with them back to Mexico or Guatemala. How can Americans be such saps?

John Payton, Fullerton (CA)

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