May 2011

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 22, No. 5 May 2011

CONTENTS

Will the South Rise Again?
The Case Against Affirmative Action
The Galton Report: Arab and Persians on the Characteristics of Blacks
The Eastern Migrations of the Aryans
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters

COVER STORY

Will the South Rise Again?

Opportunities for white advocates.

On April 12, 150 years ago, Confederate forces in Charleston fired the first shots in the name of Southern independence. Five years later, the fact of secession had been thwarted at the cost of 600,000 lives, but the spirit of secession still lives in the hearts of many Southerners. What are the prospects for Southern independence a century and a half after the firing on Sumter?

Firing on Fort Sumter

Southerners firing on Fort Sumter.

It is the best of times and the worst of times for the neo-Confederate movement. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC, which plays host to presidential candidates and leading conservative organizations from around the country, the crowd cheered when Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano denounced Abraham Lincoln as a “tyrant.” States around the country are considering and even passing measures related to nullification, state currencies, state authority based on the Tenth Amendment, prohibitions on federal agents enforcing certain laws, and even outright secession. With the rise of the largely white Tea Party movement, the Ron Paul-inspired Campaign for Liberty, and intense popular dissatisfaction with and even fear of the Obama regime, fierce opposition to the federal government and the reclamation of state authority have become increasingly mainstream talking points for the conservative movement and its almost entirely white constituency. An implicitly white political movement has been created that is largely in sympathy with the states’ rights, limited government rationale of the War for Southern Independence.

On the other hand, the war on Southern heritage continues unabated, with almost constant defeat for the Confederate cause. The Colonel Reb mascot at Ole Miss was retired for fear of offending blacks, especially football players. Even at the University of South Carolina, football coach Steve Spurrier has complained about the “damn Confederate flag.” There have been repeated attempts to rename buildings honoring Confederates at Vanderbilt, the University of Texas, and even the University of Alabama. The Detroit branch of the NAACP gave an award to Kid Rock for his support of the city of Detroit, but faced a boycott because the white musician occasionally has a Battle Flag on stage during performances.

Whereas the flag once flew throughout the South and even throughout the country, representations on clothing are now banned at many high schools, and military recruits with Confederate tattoos are turned away on suspicion of “racism.” Whereas the Confederate flag was once apolitical, it is now controversial even among white Southern conservatives and, perhaps even more worryingly, Southern football fans.

It is a familiar story: any implicitly white movement provokes ever more frantic attempts — especially by whites — to suppress explicit white consciousness. As the Left demonizes their symbols, whites retreat, and hope the controversy will blow over. This is the story of modern American conservatism and nowhere more so than in the South.

For now, however, the South is certainly the most conservative part of the country and some Southern states are practically one-party fiefdoms of conservative Republicans. Only in the South do whites vote as an ethnic bloc for the Republicans, thus overwhelming the similarly monolithic black vote for the Democrats.

Whites in the South can therefore still harbor the illusion that they are in control, and that each new concession to the forces of egalitarianism will not fundamentally change the power structure. But even in this extremely race-conscious area, white conservatives fear to speak in defense of their own group, and instead wrap themselves in a race-blind conservatism that emphasizes tax cuts, limited government, and rhetorical adherence to Christianity.

Unfortunately, as Marx said about capitalists, Southerners are giving their enemies the very rope with which they will be hanged. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, the low-wage, anti-union variety of capitalism in the South encourages massive immigration by low-skilled, mainly Hispanic workers who then vote Democratic alongside blacks. At the same time, in a reversal of the Great Migration of 1910 to 1930, blacks are returning to Dixie in search of jobs. Census figures show that Northern whites are also moving into the South, bringing liberal delusions and either indifference or outright hostility towards a Southern heritage with which they have no connection.

Mississippi Senator Trent Lott

Mississippi Senator Trent Lott

White Southern politicians who think they are in control at home sometimes fail to realize how much the rest of the country fears and despises them. When Mississippi Senator Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party in 2002, he was immediately set upon by “civil rights groups” and even by “conservatives” eager to protect themselves against charges of racism. Anxious to preserve his status as Majority Leader, Mr. Lott groveled, most notably on Black Entertainment Television, but lost his position anyway.

Last year in Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell issued a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month, but was forced to withdraw and revise it because it failed to mention slavery and was therefore considered insulting to blacks. Blacks were hardly a constituency Mr. McDonnell needed to placate — he was elected despite losing the black vote nine to one. It was criticism by whites that forced his hand.

Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi, is spoken of as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, but liberals keep him under constant scrutiny for traces of “insensitivity.” Late last year, he praised the Citizens’ Council for having kept the Ku Klux Klan out of his home town of Yazoo City, but no one must say anything positive about a group that supported segregation, so Mr. Barbour was forced to call the council’s positions “indefensible.”

If race-neutral conservatives are disappointing, overt Neo-Confederates are more promising. The League of the South hosts conferences and meetings openly calling for secession. Predictably, the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the league a “hate group,” and disapprovingly notes its reference to the “Anglo-Celtic core culture” of the Southland.

Beyond the league and a few other overt political groups, there are “soft” Confederate groups, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, re-enactors, and other historical and heritage organizations with hundreds of thousands of members sympathetic to the Southern cause. Towns and cities throughout the South have memorials to those who fought and died for Southern independence. The newfound respectability of ideas such as nullification, secession, and Civil War revisionism provide many opportunities for outreach into the growing libertarian movement.

Southern National Congress

In November 2010, the Southern National Congress, a self styled “voice for the Southern people,” met in Tennessee with several hundred delegates from throughout the South. The group claims to be a kind of “government in exile,” or proto-Congress for the Southern nation, where various questions are discussed, including possible resistance to the federal government. I attended as an observer — not a delegate or registered participant — and witnessed the debates. They were dishearteningly similar to what could be expected at a meeting of Tea Party activists.

Inaugural meeting of the Southern National Congress

Inaugural meeting of the Southern National Congress

The group discussed various resolutions, which were ratified or rejected. One resolution called for the Southern National Congress to state that it was not based on any kind of racial or cultural identity, to reach out to “non-traditional” constituencies, and to declare all who believe in “liberty” to be true Southerners. It also called on all Southerners “and all Americans” to protest the expansion of the federal government. Another delegate rose in opposition and pointed out that if the Southern National Congress is serious about Southern independence, it must assume there is a Southern people necessarily rooted in kinship and culture. Furthermore, calling Southerners “Americans” seemed to defeat the very idea of separation.

The delegate who proposed the resolution, as well as several others, raised the specter of Nazi Germany and suggested that any attempt to define a Southern culture was the equivalent of fascism. Other delegates responded angrily to this. The Congress, voting by states, ultimately defeated this attempt at political correctness, but just barely: eight votes to seven.

The congress then moved on to other topics, including when it was proper to begin resistance against the federal government. In most countries, such a discussion would be called sedition. However, despite some heated rhetoric about the government possibly clamping down on the group, there was no danger that the Department of Homeland Security would burst through the doors and muzzle theoretical discussions and allusions to the American Revolution. In contrast, the fear of being called “racist” was real, immediate, and struck fear into the delegates. It is a sign of evil times that people can boast openly about being armed and ready, but still look over both shoulders and whisper if they believe Southerners have a real culture tied to a racial identity. I would note that I did not see any blacks in attendance, but if one had shown up, he might very well have been put in charge.

Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America (GOA) concluded the conference with a speech about states’ rights, limited government, and the 2nd Amendment. GOA does excellent work and the speech was informative and entertaining, but most of it was about the intricacies of various inter-party battles in Washington, DC. It seemed incongruous that a congress dedicated to Southern independence essentially ended with a call to vote for conservative Republicans.

Confederate Flag Controversy

Credit Image: © Erik S. Lesser / ZUMAPRESS.com

Today, even neo-Confederates identify the South less with a particular people or ethnic group than with a political temperament and cultural viewpoint that can presumably be adopted by anyone who moves there. Though racial consciousness is everywhere in the South, many Southerners are extremely defensive, and seem to feel the need to “prove” to those who look down on them that they are not “racist,” and that even Southern independence would have nothing to do with race. Neo-Confederate attempts to invent whole units of “black Confederates” who supposedly fought for the Lost Cause in its final days are a sad relic of these failed attempts to wash themselves clean of the sin of racism. As with conservatives in general, neo-Confederates, almost all of whom are white, dare not speak in defense of themselves as a group. Even the Confederate cause itself is not a movement of national liberation so much as an expression of a small-government, traditional-Christian brand of politics.

Southerners are not a subjugated group like the Irish in 1900 or even the Flemish of today. Instead, white Southerners become conscious of their identity only when they feel they have lost control of America itself. Working through legitimate institutions, Southerners can then claim to be the torchbearers of the true American faith.

Before the War Between the States, the South dominated national politics. With the election of Abraham Lincoln and the prospect of a ban on slavery in new states, Southern leaders realized that political power in the long run would shift to the North. Secession came not through radical groups arming in the hills, but through the state legislatures claiming to defend the Constitution from a tyrannical government.

For white advocates, this is both a problem and an opportunity. It is a problem because the ideological fixations of Southerners undermine the potential of organizing as whites in defense of white interests. Appeals to abstractions such as “limited government” that have to be explained and justified are harder to rally around then appeals to identity and ethnic interest. It is not in the name of abstractions that Hispanics mobilize by the millions to protest immigration laws or blacks mobilize to vote for Mr. Obama. They march and vote out of pure racial/ethnic consciousness — that powerful and essential sentiment even Southern whites feel compelled to deny to themselves.

When Southerners refuse to define themselves as a distinct people it also opens the door to attempts to “diversify” the Southern movement, to include anyone or anything that straggles into a meeting. The result is even more embarrassing pandering than that of the Tea Party, as blacks and immigrants and everyone else become fit heirs to the traditions of Lee and Jackson.

This creates a chilling effect on serious activists who want to talk about ethnicity, culture, kinship, and racial reality. The raceless, politically correct Southern “culture” offered by some conservatives is the usual pattern of implicitly white and explicitly anti-white, with the obvious examples of white Southerners fanatically supporting black football players or Southern evangelicals crusading to adopt more Haitians or reduce the black abortion rate while ignoring these problems among whites.

At the same time, white advocates have a priceless opportunity in the South, one available nowhere else. Southern nationalism is probably the only movement in America similar to the Flemish or Catalan independence movements in Europe. It is localist, implicitly white, and can appeal to traditional symbols. It has a ready support base of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people already organized in institutions throughout the South.

Filip Dewinter

Filip Dewinter of the Vlaams Belang — a Flemish nationalist party.

While Southern symbolism is controversial, Southern advocates can still cloak themselves in the Confederate flag without provoking the same kind of professional destruction and personal attacks suffered by openly pro-white advocates. Although the liberal media and busy-body watchdogs brand them “haters,” neo-Confederates can still win mainstream political support, hold conferences, and openly organize far easier than can a group such as American Renaissance.

The ideological problems and contradictions within Southern nationalism are still present, and it is easy to roll our eyes at the spectacle of neo-Confederates trying to win black support for Southern independence. However, this is not their fault — it is the fault of white advocates within the South who have not built on the sizable foundation that exists. There is a huge opening within these groups for intelligent white advocates to work for gradual change.

It is easy to list the failings of Southern conservatism from a white racial perspective. However, people do not organize according to theory; they organize according to self-interest, but are also subject to social pressures. People must be approached from within their own experiences. Talking about race and IQ may frighten some people away; talking about heritage, pride, and history is a much easier way to build bridges to white conservatives.

Even watered down implicitly white conservatism will become untenable as the United States becomes increasingly non-white. As that happens, the conservative white South will be out of step with a majority non-white country that can simply overwhelm it in federal elections. As the minority population increases within the South, white Southerners will lose power.

This is an opportunity. As white Southerners lose their illusion of control, autonomy and independence will look more attractive. If white advocates can get through to Southerners and provide skilled leadership, implicit white conservatism will give way to explicit white consciousness simply because there will be no other choice. The political constituency for white advocacy exists in the Southland. The infrastructure is already built. More importantly, the cultural and demographic base is ready and waiting. If we are not satisfied with yet another call for tax cuts in Alabama, white advocates need to seize this opportunity before it is too late.

Gregory Hood has been active in conservative youth movements in the US.

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BOOK REVIEW

The Case Against Affirmative Action

Its lies laid bare.

Steven Farron, The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character and Other Lies, New Century Books, 2010, 349 pp., $24.95 (soft cover).

Steven Farron, author of this relentless critique of racial preferences, was a professor of Classics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, until 2001. That year he resigned his academic position in order to study American affirmative action and other policies that grew out of the unequal success of different groups. Prof. Farron is a man of strong views; this is reflected in the title of his book: The Affirmative Action Hoax.

The Affirmative Action Hoax by Steven Farron

There is much debate about the real motives for reverse racial discrimination. In his book Equality Transformed, one of the best-informed observers, historian Herman Belz, has written that during the 1970s, against a background of race riots in many American cities and the “fragging” of white Army officers in Vietnam, American elites redefined “discrimination” as “disparate impact.” They then implemented affirmative discrimination as “the price society had to pay to prevent further violence in the black community.” Rather than explain their rationale candidly, however, America’s leaders proffered one falsehood after another. The Affirmative Action Hoax relentlessly exposes these falsehoods, and Prof. Farron argues that dissembling has been so extensive it amounts to a deliberate hoax.

Prof. Farron concentrates on affirmative action in American higher education, and does not hesitate to name the guilty. He demonstrates, for example, that an article by Eugene Garcia, the dean of Berkeley’s School of Education, was full of “blatant lies.” He shows that one of the best known defenses of affirmative action, The Shape of the River (1998), by Derek Bok and William Bowen, was filled with so many falsehoods that the distinguished authors — one a former president of Harvard and the other a former president of Princeton — deserve the appellation Prof. Farron bestows on them: “liars.” Prof. Farron also shows that justices of the US Supreme Court have endorsed egregious sophistries.

Prof. Farron takes particular pains to expose the pioneering misrepresentations about “diversity” that Justice Lewis H. Powell included in a concurring opinion in an especially important case, University of California v. Bakke (1978). Justice Powell wrote that the US Constitution prohibits government agencies and the recipients of government grants from discriminating on the basis of race. However, he added that the Constitution allows colleges and universities to foster intellectual debate by seeking a “diverse” student body and faculty that include “a wide variety of interests, talents, backgrounds, and career goals.”

Justice Powell took the unusual step of discussing and applauding what he called Harvard’s “illuminating example.” He accepted that Harvard was in good faith when it claimed it considered each student as an individual, adding that “the race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases . . . [but] the [Admissions] Committee does not set target-quotas.” “Tipping the balance” suggested only a slight edge for individuals from underrepresented groups. In fact, race was a tremendous advantage for black and Hispanic applicants, and the consistent admission, year after year, of approximately the same number of poorly qualified minorities showed that Harvard was clearly filling quotas.

Justice Powell’s comments on “diversity” served as the rationale for many universities and for the majority of the Supreme Court, in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) in justifying affirmative racial preferences in academe.

Jews and gentiles

Prof. Farron provides an especially interesting account of the origins of “diversity” and other non-academic considerations for university admissions. He writes that before 1920, Ivy League institutions “admitted students almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria.” By 1919, however, “the proportion of Jews at elite American colleges was several times the proportion of Jews in the American population: for example, 20 percent at Brown and Harvard, nearly 25 percent at the University of Pennsylvania, and 40 percent at Columbia” (in 1920, Jews were 3.4 percent of the US population).

In response, Ivy League schools began to use scholarships to attract gentile students, even if they did not have the most outstanding academic qualifications. To boost the proportion of gentiles further, the elite colleges also considered applicants’ participation in music, athletics, debating, school publications, and student government. Some schools proposed a new goal: creating a “student body [that] will be properly representative of all groups in our national life” by “building up a new group of men from the West and South and, in general, from good high schools in towns and small cities.” Other schools emphasized the importance of “character” and “personality.” In the 1930s, Stanford assigned a 40 percent weighting to these attributes.

Prof. Farron shows that the purpose of promoting “diversity” — as an alternative to strict academic qualifications — was to limit the enrollment of Jews. At Columbia, administrators wanted Jews to be no more than 20 percent; at Harvard, 15 percent; at Yale 10 percent; at Stanford, 3 percent. The leaders of these institutions, however, came to recognize that quotas were at odds with widespread opposition to explicit discrimination. “My [original] plan [quotas] was crude, and its method . . . unwise,” the president of Harvard wrote to the president of Amherst in 1923. In 1945, an administrator at Yale confided, “[T]he Jewish problem continues to call for the utmost care and tact.” The solution was indirect discrimination under the guise of “diversity” or “character” rather than open quotas.

Prof. Farron writes that by embracing “diversity” these schools “saved themselves from Jewish inundation.” “During the 1930s, the proportion of Jews at Harvard varied between 14 and 16 percent (five times the proportion of Jews in the American population), which nearly perfectly matched [the] original proposed quota of 15 percent.” Beginning in the 1920s and for four decades, the Jewish proportion of undergraduates at Yale amounted to no more than 12 percent, “just marginally more than [the original] goal of 10 percent.”

The dean of Yale medical school explained in 1934 that “the number of Hebrews admitted . . . has never been more than 10 percent,” although “from 50 to 60 percent of the applicants . . . each year are Hebrews.” At Cornell Medical School, the proportion of Jewish students was reduced from 40 percent to 10, while Columbia reduced its proportion of Jewish medical students from 50 percent to 20. The proportion of Jews at Columbia Law School was reduced to 11 percent, while the proportion of Jews in engineering, dental, pharmacy, and veterinary schools declined by 24 percent, 35 percent, 45 percent, and 70 percent, respectively.

By recounting this history, Prof. Farron demolishes Justice Powell’s contention that the Ivies had not sought quotas but were fostering intellectual diversity. However, Prof. Farron does not explore what might have been lost by removing all barriers to Jewish admission. Many Ivy administrators believed that Jewish students would not assimilate the values of the Anglo-American mainstream unless the proportion of Jews was limited. The Jewish students were said to live at home, eat their lunches from brown paper bags, and retain cliquish loyalties they had formed in ethnic neighborhoods. They were said to remain only half assimilated. Summarizing this argument, the New Republic declared in 1922, “Five Jews to the hundred will necessarily undergo prompt assimilation. Ten Jews to the hundred might assimilate. But twenty or thirty — no. They would form a state within a state.”

By the 1960s, significant discrimination against Jews was a thing of the past, but some questioned the extent to which Jews had assimilated. Carl Bridenbaugh touched on this in his 1962 presidential address to the American Historical Association. Bridenbaugh began by noting that modern historians had lost “the priceless asset of a shared culture.” He noted that by the 1960s “many of the younger practitioners of our craft, and those who are still apprentices, are products of lower middle-class or foreign origin . . . They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders in our past and feel themselves shut out.”

Bridenbaugh wondered if the rising generation of alienated young scholars would appreciate the values of those who had led America in the past. Or would a new generation of self-consciously ethnic historians transform academic American history into a critique of the nation’s shortcomings? It is possible to argue that Bridenbaugh was on to something, and that it was these initial inroads that led to the present trend of viewing history from the cramped perspective of “race, class, and gender” rather than as the story of a nation.

Prof. Farron also neglects to make a crucial comparison between the earlier discrimination against Jews and today’s “affirmative action.” Admissions officers in the Ivy League were discriminating against a group they considered alien and unassimilated in favor of applicants who were gentile, like themselves. This was a classic case of in-group favoritism (though it still allowed Jews access to America’s top universities in numbers far disproportionate to their percentage of the population).

The “affirmative action” that followed was completely different: White administrators discriminated in favor of racial minorities and against whites like themselves. The public justification — the promotion of “diversity” — may have been the same, but the effect was to punish gentile whites rather than advantage them. Prof. Farron does not even take notice of this crucial difference, much less offer an explanation for what motivated white admissions officers, in effect, to discriminate against their own children.

The problem of IQ

Prof. Farron is what might be called “an IQ absolutist.” Early in his book, he quotes Arthur Jensen: “If there is any unquestioned fact in applied psychometrics, it is that IQ tests have a high degree of predictive validity . . .” He also emphasizes that “scores on standardized tests are the best measures of knowledge and aptitude,” and that “innumerable extensive studies have demonstrated without exception the predictive accuracy of grades, the SAT, LSAT, etc.”

Prof. Farron shows that in modern times the “magnitude of preference” for black and Hispanic candidates is enormous: generally in excess of one standard deviation. To mention just two of Prof. Farron’s many, many examples: in 1995 the law school at Berkeley accepted every black applicant with an undergraduate grade-point average between 3.25 and 3.49 and a LSAT score between the 70th and 75th percentiles, while rejecting every white and Asian in the same GPA and LSAT range. At the same time, the average MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) scores of black and Hispanic students enrolled at Harvard Medical School were 100 points (approximately one standard deviation) below the average score of whites who were rejected by all American medical schools.

In 1963, at the beginning of the era of desegregation, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, Robert Osborne, predicted that double standards eventually would lead to “differential marking and evaluation systems [for] the two groups.” Prof. Farron shows that this has come to pass. America’s colleges and universities have accommodated non-Asian minority students with a much-publicized “grade inflation.” Many press reports have called attention to the increase in the proportion of “A” grades, but Prof. Farron maintains that “the most important effect has been a dramatic decrease in the failure rate.”

This means that as more minorities benefit from preferences, the test-score and class-rank gaps between black and white students have increased, but the disparity in graduation rates has narrowed. This does not, however, eliminate differences in competence. In 1983, in four states (California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona) about 75 percent of white candidate teachers passed teacher competence tests on the first try, as compared to about 25 percent of blacks. Among all medical school graduates who took the National Board Examination for the first time in 1988, the pass rate was about 87% for whites, 83% for Asians, 64% for Hispanics, and 49% for blacks.

Many people were angry to learn of the extent and the effects of affirmative discrimination. In California, Michigan, and Washington, the state constitutions were amended to forbid racial discrimination by state agencies, and other states enacted statutes to the same effect. By and large, however, America’s colleges and universities continued their discriminatory policies. This persistence was so determined as to amount to a second era of “massive resistance” (which usually refers to white resistance to public school integration in the 1950s and 1960s), although the mainstream media rarely labeled it as such. In 1995, when asked what Berkeley would do about the impending prohibition of racial discrimination, Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien candidly replied, “We can come up with some tricks.”

The Affirmative Action Hoax describes the many “tricks” American universities have used. One of the simplest was to stop using standard admission tests. The number of four-year colleges that stopped requiring applicants to take either the SAT or the ACT increased from 100 (out of some 2,000 four-year colleges and universities) in 1994 to 730 in 2005. Another “trick” was to assign twice as much weight to achievement tests as to aptitude tests — and then allow students who were reared speaking a foreign language to take an achievement test in their native language, say, Chinese, Korean, or Spanish.

Since the language tests did not benefit blacks, many colleges also turned to “holistic” assessments. This usually involved hiring additional admissions officers to scrutinize applications and give extra credit to black and Hispanic candidates who had been reared by a single parent and done fairly well (or sometimes just managed to survive) in a high-crime, gang-infested neighborhood.

Another “trick” was to admit all students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their class. This allowed the University of Texas to admit non-Asian minority graduates of predominantly black and Hispanic high schools, even if their combined Verbal and Math SAT scores were in the 800s (out of 1,600), while rejecting white and Asian applicants with SAT scores in the 1400s.

Prof. Farron reports, however, that holistic admissions officers rarely took account of poverty, since this did not boost the number of blacks or Hispanics. Prof. Farron explains that poverty did not “help” because “poor whites and Asians are much more academically able than poor (and even rich) blacks and Hispanics.”

The Affirmative Action Hoax is the most thorough and outspoken of the many books that have criticized affirmative action. It is, in fact, a lawyer’s brief against reverse racial discrimination. If our society welcomed dissenting points of view, these qualities would ensure publication by a major trade press for, as one literary agent recently reminded me, a book about public policy must be argumentative, since “today all books about policy are argument books.”

What the agent said is generally true, but readers of American Renaissance know that there are limits to argument. The agent’s wisdom does not apply to works that lie outside the boundaries of conventional discourse. Since The Affirmative Action Hoax is such a work, readers are indebted to the Seven Locks Press for publishing the original edition in 2005 and to the New Century Foundation for publishing this newly revised edition in 2010.

Raymond Wolters is the Thomas Muncy Keith Professor of History at the University of Delaware.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

ARTICLE

The Galton Report

Arab and Persians on the characteristics of blacks

In the year 410 the German Visigoth Alaric and his army sacked Rome and destroyed the Roman Empire in the West. The Eastern Empire survived but its intellectual life came to an end in the sixth century AD, when Emperor Justinian closed the colleges in Athens and the scholars migrated to Baghdad. Europe entered the Dark Ages, which lasted some 600 years. During this time, Muslim civilizations flourished in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) and in Iran. These civilizations had slaves of a variety of ethnic and racial groups, including blacks, who were mainly purchased in Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa.

The Arabs and Persians were therefore familiar with blacks, and in some cases wrote about them at length. Their descriptions were almost always negative and many middle-Easterners continue to have a low opinion of blacks, who are not generally welcome as immigrants.

The American scholar Minoo Southgate has summarized, in her own words, the characteristics of blacks most commonly recorded by mid-Eastern writers: “In both Arab and Persian Islamic writings, blacks are accused of being stupid, untruthful, vicious, cowardly, sexually unbridled, ugly and distorted, excessively merry, and easily affected by food and drink.” She also quotes a number of sources directly.

The first Arab scholar known to have commented on the low intelligence of blacks was Al Jahiz (d. 868 AD), who wrote, “We know that the Zanj [East Africans blacks] are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind, and the least capable of understanding the consequences of actions.” Al Jahiz also claimed that “despite their dimness, their boundless stupidity, their obtuseness, their crude perceptions and their evil dispositions, they make long speeches.” He concluded that “like the crow among mankind are the Zanj for they are the worst of men and the most vicious of creatures in character and temperament.”

A century later, Maqdisi (also known as Al-Muqaddasi, fl. 966 AD) wrote that “the Africans are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.” The 12th century Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi described blacks as having a “lack of knowledge and defective minds,” adding, “Their ignorance is notorious; men of learning and distinction are almost unknown among them, and their kings only acquire what they know about government and justice from the instruction of learned visitors from farther north.”

Another Arabic scholar, Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadani, (c. 903 AD) wrote that “the people of Iraq . . . do not come out . . . overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the East Africans, the Somali, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two.”

In 1343 AD, an anonymous Arab published a romance about Alexander the Great entitled Iskandarnamah in which he wrote that “the East Africans are slight-witted, and God, most high, has created them stupid, ignorant, and foul.”

These observations were made of East African blacks with whom the Arabs were most familiar, but they knew something also of the blacks of southern Africa. The celebrated polymath Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406) wrote: “To the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.”

Ibn Khaldun also wrote: “Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because Negroes have little that is human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” Khaldun could have been quoting Aristotle, who wrote that “it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.” Aristotle also likened slaves to animals, calling the ox the poor man’s slave.

Persians who observed blacks reached similar conclusions. The geographer al-Qazwini (1203 – 1283) asserted that blacks are characterized by “weakness of intelligence,” and Hudud al-Alam (c. 982 AD) wrote that “as regards southern countries, all their inhabitants are black on account of the heat of their climate . . . Most of them go naked. . . . They are people distant from the standards of humanity . . . Their nature is that of wild animals.”

The Persian scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni did not comment on the intelligence of blacks but wrote (c.1030 AD) of what he considered their primitive nature: “[T]he Zanj [blacks] are so uncivilized that they have no notion of a natural death. If a man dies a natural death, they think he was poisoned. Every death is suspicious with them, if a man has not been killed by a weapon.”

Maqdisi (fl. 966 AD) asserted of blacks that “there is no marriage among them; the child does not know his father, and they eat people.” Some three centuries later, the Persian scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201-1274) concluded that the human races had different levels of intellectual development and that East African blacks were at the lowest level: “If all types of men are taken, and one placed after another, the Negro from Zanzibar does not differ from an animal in anything except the fact that his hands have been lifted from the earth . . . Many have seen that the ape is more capable of being trained than the Negro, and is more intelligent.”

In the 14th century, Several Arab and Persian scholars noted that blacks have strong sexual drives, large sex organs, a manic temperament (see “Galen on the Merriment of Blacks,” AR, Dec. 2010) and a strong sense of rhythm. Dr. Southgate observes that “the notion of the blacks’ unbridled sexuality occurs in many Arab and Persian Muslim sources, some of which reveal the white man’s fear of the black man’s superior sexual prowess.”

Similar accounts are found in the One Thousand and One Nights, the collection of stories of largely 9th century Persian origin told by the young bride Scheherazade. These stories were translated in the 19th century by the British Arabist Richard Burton, who noted that there are several stories about Persian wives who seek satisfaction with black slaves. These “debauched women,” he wrote, “prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts” and because “the deed takes a much longer time and this adds greatly to women’s enjoyment.”

Observations about black sexuality have been confirmed in contemporary times by Prof. Philippe Rushton, who has documented the large sex organs and strong sex drives of blacks, which he ascribes to high levels of testosterone.

The purpose of quoting these ancient authors is neither to belittle blacks nor, indeed, to accept the complete accuracy of their accounts. It was obviously wrong to describe blacks as animals or to claim that apes were more intelligent. Still, these accounts cannot be dismissed as mere prejudice or the desire to flatter one’s own group by insulting others. Arabs and Persians recognized the intelligence of the Greeks, for example.

Europeans who first entered those parts of Africa that had never been explored by Arabs brought back similar accounts of very low levels of cultural development. Entirely aside from whatever prejudices they might have brought with them, their factual observations cannot be dismissed. The Oxford scholar John Baker summarized the observations of such 19th-century explorers as John Speke, Samuel Baker, Henry Fynn, Paul du Chaillu, David Livingstone, and Georg Schweinfurth in his classic book Race. Throughout vast areas of sub-Saharan Africa, they did not find a written language, a calendar, a multi-story building, a mechanical device, a beast of burden, or use of the wheel.

Contemporary black-run societies, whether in Africa, Haiti, or in enclaves in the West are further evidence for race differences in intelligence and the ability to maintain civilization. There is no question that some blacks are capable of considerable achievement when they can avail themselves of opportunities in other societies, but even aside from the psychometric, genetic, and physiological data, it is difficult to see today’s insistence on the equivalence of all races as anything but wishful thinking and a deliberate refusal to consider the evidence.

J.P. Rushton Race, Evolution and Behavior. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000.

Minoo Southgate: Negative images of Blacks in some Medieval Persian writings. Persian Studies,1984, 17, 3-36.

John Baker Race. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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ARTICLE

The Eastern Migration of the Aryans

The Indo-European Expansion.

More people are native speakers of Indo-European languages than of any other linguistic group. All the languages of Europe — except, curiously, Basque, Finnish, and Hungarian — are Indo-European, as are many ancient and modern Asian languages: Sanskrit, Tocharian, Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, etc. The nearly three billion people who speak these languages are all the cultural descendants of the early Indo-Europeans, who are thought to have appeared some time before 3000 BC in what are now the Russian steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas. Who were these people, and how did they extend their influence so broadly? How, especially, did they spread their culture so far East?

Aryans Entering India

Aryans Entering India. Illustration from “Hutchinson’s History of the Nations”

The early Indo-Europeans spoke something called Proto-Indo-European, but this language is an abstraction. It is only by working backward from known Indo-European languages that we have an idea of the original, long-extinct language of the originators. Some scholars have even argued that it is therefore uncertain whether there really was a distinct and original Indo-European people.

However, if one traces any language to its origin it must lead to a particular people. A language cannot develop apart from an ethnic group that enjoys a long period of stability in a discrete territory. That was the case with the Latin-derived Romance languages. They developed during the so-called Dark Ages, when there was little commerce or travel, no large-scale wars, and no mass migrations.

We can therefore conclude that the original Indo-European language must have been spoken by a homogenous people living in a particular area. Before the current era of political correctness, scholars took for granted the existence of this people, whom they referred to as Aryans. The term comes from the Sanskrit word Arya, meaning “one of noble character,” and dates back to before the time of Christ. The name Iran means “land of the Aryans.” Part of the post-World War II discrediting of the term “Aryan,” which was part of Nazi ideology, has involved casting doubt on the very existence of an original people who could have been the source of the Indo-European languages.

However, migrations of an original people who spread both east and west from their home in the Russian steppes are the only plausible reason why Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, has the same roots as Latin, Greek, and German. Farsi, the language of Iran and a modern form of Persian, also shares the same roots. It cannot be an accident that the word for “three” is treis in Greek, tres in Latin, drei in German, tri in Russian, tri in Bengali, and tre in Tocharian (see below). How else could Persians — who are not European and live far from Europe — speak languages that are related to those of Europe? The most obvious explanation is conquest by Aryan, Indo-European speakers, probably in the second millennium BC.

In an earlier article, I wrote about the conquest of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy during the same period by the Aryan, Indo-European Phrygians, Hellenes, and Italics (see “What Race Were the Greeks and Romans?” AR, Oct. 2010). It is entirely likely that other Aryan tribes travelled south-eastward into Southwestern Asia. Until the Second World War, scholars believed that conquering white warriors formed the ruling aristocracies of ancient Media (the land of the Medes), Persia, and Vedic India, and ruled over darker-skinned people.

The Indo-Iranians

Historian John Haywood writes in The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations (2005) as follows:

[T]he Persians were one of two Indo-Iranian nomad peoples, the other being the Medes, who had migrated into Iran from central Asia around the eighth century BC. While the Medes settled on the Iranian plateau, the Persians migrated further south, finally settling between the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition) reports that the word Aryan “was used as a national name not only in India but in Bactria and Persia.” In a stone inscription found near Naqsh-e-Rostam, Darius the Great of Persia (522 – 486 BC) described himself thus: “I am Darius, the Great King, . . . a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineage.” He was clearly proud of his Aryan ancestry. Was it something that set him apart from the mass of Persians? If not, why mention it? It is not possible to know the race of the original Medes and Persians or whether concubinage and intermarriage darkened a once-lighter nobility.

An ancient frieze of glazed bricks from Susa is displayed in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Made during Darius’s reign, it shows a Persian archer with blue eyes. Yet the same archer has tawny skin and almond-shaped eyes and looks, frankly, Persian. The famous Roman floor mosaic from Pompeii depicting the Battle of Issus (333 BC) shows Alexander and his Macedonians as white and European but Darius III and his Persians as brown and Middle Eastern.

By contrast, the Alexander Sarcophagus uncovered near Sidon, Lebanon, in 1887 and dating to the late 4th century BC, depicts white Macedonians slaying equally white Persians. Made of marble in the shape of a Greek temple, one side has colored bas reliefs depicting battle scenes from the Macedonian-Persian War, the other a hunting expedition in Persia. It now rests in the Instanbul Archaeological Museum. A modern reproduction has restored the original colors. The Persians have small noses, white skin, fair hair, and even blue eyes. Yet the Greek historians and geographers of the classical era do not describe the Persians that way.

The Ajanta cave paintings outside Bombay, India, date from the 7th century AD, nearly a thousand years later. They depict three Persian envoys: One is dark, one is of mixed race, but the third is white, with blue eyes and fair hair. A possible fourth Persian, not an envoy, is also shown as white.

In short, the evidence is inconclusive but consistent with a mixed-race population and Aryan immigration.

The Indo-Aryans

It is now politically incorrect to talk of an Aryan conquest of India in the 2nd millennium BC, but many scholars continue to believe there was such a conquest. The chapter on “Vedic India” in The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations (2005) begins thus: “Around 1500 BC, the Aryans, nomads from Central Asia, crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains into the Indian sub-continent. The Aryan language gained ascendancy over the indigenous languages and was the ancestor of Sanskrit, the language of classical Indian literature and of the modern Indic languages including Hindi and Urdu.”

We know from both archeology as well as literary evidence that these Eastern Aryans ate beef, burned their dead (but not surviving widows), and had more in common with the Aryan-speakers of Europe than with the Hindus of today. The Rig Veda (c. 1400 BC) is an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns, and one of the four canonical texts of Hinduism. It is also the only literary source for early Aryan history in India.

According to Hans F.K. Gunther’s The Racial Elements of European History (1927), the conquering Indo-Aryans called themselves the Haris, meaning “the blondes,” and, according to the Vedas, they called the dark skinned indigenous people the Dasas, or “slave bands of black descent.” These people were later called Dravidians. Like the Greeks, many of their gods were blonde. The Vedas describe the Storm God Indra as having cheeks, beard, and hair the color of gora, which is Sanskrit for “golden-yellow.”

The Aryans themselves separated into three classes, or castes: the Brahmins, priests and scholars; the Kshattriyas, nobles and warriors; and the Vaisyas, farmers and craftsmen. This parallels the division of Proto-Indo-European societies into clerics, warriors, and herder-cultivators. We find the same division in Rome: flamines, milites, and quirites.

In India, below the three higher classes were the Sudras, or slaves, who were non-Aryan. In an attempt to preserve these social and racial divisions and codify ancient customs, the Brahmins drew up the Laws of Manu. They forbade intermarriage, and in some cases even social mingling among Indians of different castes. They also recognized the existence of three instead of two racial groups: more or less pure Aryans, dark-skinned Sudras or Dravidians, and the Varna-Sankara (those of mingled colors). The Sanskrit word for caste, varna, literally means “color.” The caste system can be viewed as the world’s most long-lived and elaborate system of racial separation.

Although it survived into modern times, the caste structure failed to preserve the Aryan racial type. Higher-class Indians are never blond or fair skinned, though they are taller and lighter than other Indians and some have Aryan features. Examples are the actress-model Aishawarya Rai and the Indian-American Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, whose parents are Sikhs. Color prejudice and a preference for lighter skin remain strong both in India and among Indians of the diaspora.

The Tocharians

The Tocharians, or Tokhari, were the easternmost Aryan branch. They spoke Tocharian, an extinct Indo-European language that scholars believe is one of the oldest Indo-European tongues. They settled in the Tarim Basin of the Takla Makan Desert, north of the Tibetan Plateau, circa 1800 BC. Today this is within Xinjiang province of northwestern China.

The Indo-Aryans knew these people as the Tukhara, and Romans knew them as the Serae. Pliny the Elder, the Roman geographer, tells of an embassy to the Emperor Claudius from the island of Taprobane, now Sri Lanka. The ambassador spoke of a white people living north of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan chain. In his Natural History (6.24), Pliny reports that “these people exceeded the ordinary human height, had flaxen hair and blue eyes.”

In his Geographica (11.8.1), Strabo, the Greek geographer, referred to this people as the Tochari and believed they were the easternmost branch of the Scythians. Their existence might explain why some ancient Chinese texts give famous leaders European characteristics. For example, in his Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the poet Li He (790-860 AD) describes the heroic General Li as “green-eyed.”

This literary evidence is corroborated by archeology. In 1977, several well-preserved mummies were discovered in the arid Takla Makan Desert. Their racial type is unmistakably European. They have angular faces, long noses, round eyes, and reddish-blond hair. Their clothing is of finely woven wool, brightly colored and patterned, much like that worn by the Celts of Western Europe. An artistic reconstruction of a female known as “the Beauty of Loulan” looks Scottish or German.

The ancient Tocharians were gradually pushed out or absorbed by surrounding populations. Those in the eastern Tarim basin were driven out by Chinese expansion in the second century BC, and in the 7th century AD Turkic tribes conquered the western Tarim basin. The disappearance of the Tocharians and the darkening of the Indo-Aryans and Medes stand as a warning of the fate that awaits Europeans who live side by side with other racial groups.

How did they spread?

What accounts for the astonishing success of the Indo-Europeans? When they emerged from their homeland they encountered countless other small tribes. Why did they prevail? It is known that they had domesticated the horse — perhaps they were the first to do so — and cavalry is a great military advantage. However, as the American plains Indians showed, people can quickly become good horsemen.

For the Indo-Europeans to have conquered so many different peoples they must have had an advantage that was hard to copy. In their fascinating book, The 10,000 Year Explosion (see “Science Refutes Orthodoxy — Again,” AR, May 2009), Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran propose an explanation: lactose tolerance. They point out that the 13910-T allele that gives Europeans the ability to digest milk is relatively recent, and milk drinkers have a great advantage over other herders: dairying produces about five times more calories per acre than raising beef for slaughter. Lactose tolerant Indo-Europeans could therefore support more fighting men on the same amount as land.

Milk is good for you. Excavations of ancient burials have shown that milk-drinkers can be an average of four inches taller than their lactose-intolerant neighbors.

Herdsmen also tend to be more warlike than farmers because cattle are much easier to steal than heaps of grain. A successful raiding party can make off with a fortune in livestock, so there is a premium on daring and violence. Milk-drinkers are also mobile. Their food source moves with them whereas farmers are stuck to their land. Mounted, mobile, milk-drinkers could strike by surprise at the moment of their choice.

The merest genetic accident may have been an important factor in Indo-European expansion.

Mr. Sims is an historian and a native of Kentucky.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Life Sentence

A twenty-something Chinese woman living in Brooklyn was “Juror No. 799” in the jury pool for the murder trial of reputed mob boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano. When she filled out her juror questionnaire, the woman was either very honest, or very foolish. In response to a question asking her to name three people she least admired, she wrote, “African-Americans, Hispanics and Haitians.” When federal judge Nicholas Garaufis asked her why she answered that way, the woman replied, “You always hear about them in the news doing something.” The judge pointed out that in her questionnaire she had mentioned an uncle who was a member of a Chinese gang and was serving a life sentence for murder. He asked why she didn’t therefore include Asians on her list of least-liked people. “Maybe I should have,” she replied. The woman also said New York City police officers were “lazy,” and use their sirens to avoid traffic jams. “This is an outrage, and so are you!” declared Judge Garaufis.

If the woman wrote “racist” comments to avoid being selected for jury duty, her plan backfired. The judge ordered her to report for jury duty each day “until the future, when I am ready to dismiss her.” [John Marzulli, Judge Gives ‘Juror No. 799’ Indefinite Jury Duty after She Makes Racist Remarks on Questionnaire, New York Daily News, April 6, 2011.]

Immigrant Welfare Use

A recent report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) using 2010 census data found that immigrant households with children are using more welfare than US natives. Fifty-seven percent of illegal immigrant households with children and 56 percent of legal immigrant households with children use at least one welfare program while only 39 percent of US natives with children do. The highest rates of immigrant welfare use are in Arizona (62 percent); Texas, California, and New York (61 percent); Pennsylvania (59 percent); Minnesota and Oregon (56 percent); and Colorado (55 percent). CIS also noted that the biggest spongers are from the Dominican Republic (82 percent) and Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent) while those least likely to have a foot in the public trough are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).

While many new legal immigrants cannot use welfare for the first five years, CIS found that many immigrants receive benefits because they have either been in the country more than five years, use programs the ban does not apply to, or get welfare through their US-born children. [Steven A. Camarota, Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children: A Look at Cash, Medicaid, Housing, and Food Programs, Center for Immigration Studies: Backgrounders and Reports, April 2011.]

Kansas Immigration Bill

Kansas State Representative Lance Kinzer (R-Olathe) proposed an Arizona-style immigration bill in March that would require citizenship checks on new employees, anyone seeking public aid, and anyone the police think may be an illegal. When the bill went before the Kansas House Judiciary Committee, Lana Reed, a former bilingual specialist at the Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, testified that illegal immigrants used false documents when applying for welfare benefits and that her employers told employees to “turn a blind eye” to fraud.

Opponents argued that the bill would stretch police departments too thin, make it hard for businesses to hire workers, and be a headache for providers of medical services. Although Secretary of State Kris Kobach insisted that the bill would save the state millions of dollars, it was defeated by a Republican-majority house. [Steve Kraske, Former Kansas Welfare Worker say Illegal Immigrants Abused the System, Kansas City Star, March 10, 2011.]

Bye Bye, Bay Area

According to new census data, the white population of the San Francisco Bay-area declined by 185,000 between 2000 and 2010, while the population of Asian and Hispanics rose. “I’m not surprised,” says Michelle McGurk, spokesman for San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed. “When I go to a third-grade classroom what I see is totally different than in 1995 or 2000.” There are 150,000 fewer white children living in the Bay area than ten years ago — and 34,000 fewer black children. At the same time, there are 100,000 more Hispanic children, and 50,000 more Asian children.

The number of white children declined in all but two of California’s 58 counties, and not just because whites have few children. Many white families left the state. Why? Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, blames the high cost of housing. He says whites want to own a single-family home by the time they are 30 whereas Hispanics and Asians are willing to cram more people into a house and share expenses. [Aaron Glantz, Census: Whites Leaving Bay Area, Bay Citizen (San Francisco), March 30, 2011.]

White Noise

Music may soothe the savage breast, but if it doesn’t, Portland, Oregon police hope it will at least get the savages to move along. Since November, the transit department has been playing classical music at train stations as a way to stop undesirables from loitering and prevent crimes that occur “when people just hang around.” Portland police lieutenant John Scruggs had heard of the effects of classical music in other cities and thought it might work.

Lt. Scruggs says it’s too early to be sure, but the music appears to be doing its job. Oregon legislators are pushing a bill through the state house that would pipe classical music into other crime-plagued transit stops in the greater Portland area.

The effect of classical music can be defeated. Police in West Palm Beach, Florida, tried to keep people from loitering in front of an abandoned downtown building but gave up on the “Bach, Beethoven-type of stuff” after a just a few weeks. Criminals destroyed the speakers.

In Britain, police chase away trouble with a device called the Mosquito, which emits a high-frequency sound that adults can’t hear because of age-related hearing loss but hurts the ears of young people. [Nigel Duara, Oregon Cops Hope Classical Music Deters Loiterers, AP, April 2, 2011.]

TV for Blacks

All black-themed television, including Black Entertainment Television, requires a cable subscription. A new network, Atlanta-based Bounce TV, hopes to change that by offering over-the-airwaves broadcasts aimed at black audiences. “We are basically targeting the rabbit-ear consumer,” says Ryan Glover, formerly with Turner Broadcasting. He wants to “fill the void for people who are hungry for more African-American related programming, stories, characters, sports and events.”

Bounce TV, which plans to start broadcasting in the fall, will target blacks aged 25 to 54 with syndicated shows and movies and, of course, sports. Bounce has signed a deal to air football and basketball games from the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, the country’s largest black athletic conference. As it grows, it hopes to add original content and eventually reach half the nation’s 100 million households.

Bounce founders include Martin Luther King III and former Atlanta mayor and UN ambassador Andrew Young. [Errin Haines, Network Aimed at Black Audience Announced for Fall, AP, April 6, 2011.]

Yellow-on-Yellow

On February 6, in eastern Los Angeles County, a Chinese man walked into a Korean restaurant to order take-out food. Seven Korean men were eating there and one approached him, asking if he was Korean. The man said he was Chinese, picked up his order, and left. The Koreans followed him outside where they beat and kicked him, leaving him with cuts and bruises all over his body and a large cut on the top of his head that required medical staples. The Koreans, who the police say attacked “for no apparent reason,” also damaged the victim’s car and stole his wallet and GPS device. Police later arrested four men who say they are members of the Korean street gang, Asian Mafia Assassins. The DA charged them with robbery, assault, and hate crimes. [Chinese American Man Beaten by Korean Americans in Alleged Hate-Crime Attack, Authorities Say, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 24, 2011.]

Pirate Proposal

Back in February, Somali pirates seized the yacht of the Johansen family of Copenhagen, Denmark, as it sailed through the Gulf of Aden. Father Jans, mother Birgit, sons Rune and Hjalte, and 13-year-old daughter Naja now share quarters with other hostages on board another seized vessel, the Panamanian-flagged cargo ship Dover. The pirates are demanding a $5 million ransom in exchange for the Johansens, but their chief told Danish reporter Kristian Kornoe he would let the family go free if they let him marry 13-year-old Naja. Mr. Kornoe was unable to speak to the Johansens, but he did see them. “The family is tired and angry,” he said. “The smell is unbearable . . . it is hot, the water is filthy.”

“The offer of marriage was simply a way of applying psychological pressure, a show of force,” says Danish psychologist Henrik Ljung. “It’s an extremely effective tool if you want to raise money.” [Somali Pirate Offers to Release Danish Family in Exchange For Hand of Daughter, 13, Daily Mail (London), March 28, 2011.]

Inundated

Thanks to its open-door immigration policy, the British Labour Party, which governed from 1997 to 2010, presided over the largest population explosion in Britain since the Saxon invasions during the Dark Ages. The British think tank MigrationWatch has found that 3.2 million foreigners — about one a minute — immigrated to Britain under Labour. That figure does not even include illegals, one million of whom are suspected to be in the UK.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of MigrationWatch, says, “This has been a clear failure of democracy due in large part to the Left’s deliberate tactic of stifling reasoned debate with accusations of racism. In the years to come, immigration will be seen as Labour’s great betrayal,” adding, “The sheer scale of what has occurred is changing Britain fundamentally and irrevocably and in ways the majority of the population did not ask for, were not consulted about and did not wish to see.”

Labour calls the report “unbalanced, misleading and highly political” and says there was a lot of immigration because Labour strengthened the British economy. Labour’s own think tank report from last year contradicts this, acknowledging that “immigration under New Labour has changed the face of the country.”

Of the 3.2 million foreigners, 80 percent are from outside the EU, and most are non-white. [James Slack, How Three Million Migrants Came to UK Under Labour in Biggest Population Growth Since Saxon Times, Daily Mail (London), Feb. 22, 2011.]

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Letters from readers
LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Last year, with the assistance of AR, word went out that a Yankee Chapter of Friends of American Renaissance was being organized in southern New England. This first call for members was duly answered, and so far, Yankee AR members have gathered freely on several occasions at public locations within ten miles of the root of all evil: Harvard University!

At these early meetings, we informally exchanged ideas, observations, philosophies, and have also begun to bond as comrades — a vital step in forging an activist organization. The next step for the Yankee Chapter is to build up our membership as much as possible. With this is mind, we are issuing a “Second Call to Breakfast” for AR readers in our region who have the faith, conviction, and steadfastness to join us in the work of defending our priceless Western Civilization.

Please contact me at the address below. AR readers from outside the region are invited to get in touch to share advice, information, and solidarity.

R. J. Scrone, 15 Ferriter St., Quincy, Mass. 02169-1006

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Sir — I read Heinrich Zaayman’s article about the faithful dog in the March issue, “Boxy Lays Down His Life,” and was completely overwhelmed by it.

There are two lessons here for Americans: Always be armed and willing to use force in self-defense; never surrender your government and country to barbarians and savages.

The question is this: Are Americans now too stupid to learn these lessons?

John W. Altman, Tuscaloosa, Ala.

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Sir — New Scientist is a weekly magazine covering developments in science. It is liberal-to-left in perspective, and in favor of government funding for everything. It eschews the slightest hint of eugenics and dashes away from anything that smacks of quantifiable racial distinctions. It is the sort of magazine that could easily call race a “social construct,” although I have not yet seen it do that.

Given all that, you can imagine my surprise when New Scientist printed the following on p. 35 of its February 12, 2011 issue, in a sidebar to an article on genetic recombination in egg and sperm production:

One surprising discovery is that some people do a more thorough job of [genetic] shuffling than others. . . . What’s more, such differences extend to entire populations. For example, low levels of recombination are more common in people of African descent — who are more genetically diverse to begin with — than in Europeans. This suggests that evolution strikes a balance between the benefits of genetic diversity and the risk of introducing genetic errors through recombination.

Truth will out in the strangest places.

David Touchstone, Bossier City, La.

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Sir — Upon reading your cover story in the March issue (“A Busy Month for American Renaissance”) about the sabotaged AR conference (it was not “scuttled;” scuttling is something you do to your own ship), I was favorably impressed with the comments of all of the speakers except Sam Dickson.

Mr. Dickson wants to discard the term “race realist” and replace it with “race communitarian,” which comes from “commune,” which is inextricably associated with communism. His other choice, “racial idealist,” brings to mind the failed utopian schemes devised by intellectuals who think they can dream a society into existence.

Mr. Dickson also called for an ethnostate that embraces homosexuals, whereas all of history shows that once a civilization openly tolerates deviant sexual behavior, it is already in the process of collapse.

Finally, Mr. Dickson says “racial idealists should be Euro-Zionists.”

But the most shocking aspect of the article is that Mr. Dickson’s conclusion “was met with a sustained standing ovation.” How could the best and brightest of the movement be unable to see through Sam Dickson’s charade.

Viktor A. Hisrchmann, Pensacola, Fla.

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Sir — Thank you for your report on the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the April issue (“How Far Will They Go?”). The final sentence, “The Conservative Political Action Conference will have to live up to its name or it will find it no longer has a country worth conserving,” could not be more true.

So, the only reference to race was the explicit denial of its importance? No surprise there, and no dissent either, I’ll wager. Going with the flow makes life easier. By your account, only two panelists came out swinging: former congressman Virgil Goode, who would be happy to reduce immigration to close to zero, and Kevin DeAnna, who wisely separates the libertarian from the conservative-traditionalist when it comes to defense of the West.

It sounds as though it was mostly paeans to Ronald Reagan and a lot like Mr. Reagan himself: He abandoned Mel Bradford in favor of the neo-cons, signed up MLK for a national day off, and started us down the path to amnesty for millions of illegals.

Steve J. Medve, Canton, N.Y.

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