O Tempora, O Mores! (June, 1994)

The Beginning of the End

Nelson Mandela is now President of South Africa, and all liberals are rejoicing. No matter how much of a mess blacks make of the only properly functioning economy in Africa or how much cruelty they mete out to whites, the grisly gods of “democracy” have now been satisfied.

The incoherence of elite opinion was perhaps best summarized in an apparently innocuous headline in the New York Times: “Blacks Go to the Polls for the First Time in 300 Years.” Are we to believe that blacks were holding regular elections until the white man came along and made them stop?

In fact, the headline is not even true. South African blacks have been voting in municipal and local elections for years. They enjoyed far more democracy under white rule than do blacks just about anywhere else on the continent, where unapologetic dictatorship supported by occasional massacre is the rule.

Even the self-governance blacks had under whites is likely to end. What ordinarily happens when whites hand over power to blacks is “one man, one vote, one time.” Perhaps South Africa, with all the eyes of the world upon it, will actually stagger through another general election or two. It will not be long, though, before the ANC is entrenched in brutal, one-party rule and its leader is President for Life.

At this point even the Afrikaaners seem too demoralized by world-wide disapproval to put up the unified resistance necessary to build a homeland. Of course, the handover of the entire country to blacks has come about only because every white country in the world insisted on it. What could have been a prosperous, cohesive Afrikaaner nation is being strangled in its crib by Europeans and Americans.

Voice of Sanity

The Rothbard-Rockwell Report is a refreshingly sharp commentary on the forces of lunacy that are destroying our country. The April 1994 issue has an excellent cover story by Murray Rothbard entitled The Vital Importance of Separation. Professor Rothbard notes the ethnic and tribal tensions that are evident everywhere from the Middle East to what used to be Yugoslavia, and observes:

Beyond a small quantity, national heterogeneity simply does not work; the ‘nation’ disintegrates into more than one nation, and the need for separation becomes acute.

He explains that the obvious solution to South Africa’s agonies is Grand Apartheid, or the establishment of separate, sovereign nations based on race and ethnicity. He also points out that the desire for separation is perfectly legitimate. “Why,” asks Prof. Rothbard, “is it ‘racist’ to want to be left alone?”

Most remarkable of all, Prof. Rothbard follows his logic home to the United States:

We are now probably a lot more than two nations, and we had better start giving serious thought to national separation. To those who think that the main problem is restricting the number and types of immigration, the best answer is that such a policy is decades too late. We are already far more than one nation within the borders of the U.S.A., let alone worry about the immigrants. To greet the very raising of such questions with the mindless cry of ‘racism’ or ‘chauvinism’ misses the entire point.

We might not be able any longer to bring back the Old Republic across the entire land area of the 50 states. But we may be able to bring it back in a substantial part of that land area.

“We must dare to think the unthinkable . . .” concludes Prof. Rothbard, a man who practices what he preaches.

Information on subscriptions to the Rothbard-Rockwell Report is available from Box 4091, Burlingame, CA 94011.

The Cost of Set-Asides

One of today’s standard racial scams is set-asides — awarding public contracts to non-white companies at prices higher than the lowest bid. Naturally, this raises costs, sometimes by a great deal. A set-aside project to rebuild the King’s County Hospital in a blighted part of Brooklyn, New York is now 32 months behind schedule and virtually paralyzed.

Trouble began in 1991, when the project was taken away from the three original prime contractors and broken up into 110 smaller contracts so that inexperienced non-white companies could bid on them. The result has been a nightmare of botched, uncoordinated planning that has produced practically no construction. New York’s new mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, may decide to write off the entire effort and start over.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Clarence Norman’s involvement in the project has been particularly edifying. One of the most vocal proponents of reserving jobs for black companies, he turns out to have been a partner in a firm that was paid $2.5 million to locate them.

The ‘Crazy Check’ Game

The Social Security Administration runs a little-known program called Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which is a government handout for disabled people. A 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it easier for children with various afflictions to qualify for SSI payments, which are made to their parents.

Many black parents now urge their children to act crazy or deliberately do as poorly as possible on evaluation tests, so that they will qualify for SSI payments. This has been particularly popular in the poorer counties of Arkansas, where “crazy checks” have been a windfall. The usual stipend is $464 a month, which is supposed to be spent on special needs for the children, but which is routinely spent by parents on whatever they want.

In its usual deranged way, the 1990 court ruling permits retroactive lump-sum payments of as much as $10,000 for newly eligible children, and a family with three or four “crazy” children can make a very nice living. Since the 1990 ruling, the number of disabled children in Arkansas has more than doubled, and in heavily black counties it has tripled.

The head of the Arkansas agency that distributes “crazy checks” resigned just as stories of abuses began to appear in the press. Cassandra F. Wilkins-Slater, who is black, plans to move to Washington to join her husband, who is Federal Highway Administrator. She is expected to take a job with the Social Security Administration.

Another Day in Harlem

William Washington is a bum who was being treated for tuberculosis at Harlem Hospital in New York City. On April 20th, he sneaked into the room of a 42-year-old female patient on a respirator and raped her. Mr. Washington has the AIDS virus, but has not given it to his victim. She was already infected.

West Heads North

Cornel West is one of those superstar black professors who writes his own ticket. He used to be director of the Afro-American studies department at Princeton, but will soon be leaving for Harvard. Princeton’s student newspaper, musing on the move, published the cartoon reproduced here. Blacks roared but the paper stood by its cartoonist.

More Money for King Day

Martin Luther King is the only American honored with a national holiday on his birthday. His is also the only national holiday supported by a government commission to make sure it is properly celebrated. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to extend the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission for another five years and to give it $2 million.

Miraculously, New Hampshire still does not recognize the day as a state holiday. This year, for the ninth time, a move to recognize King failed in the state house. New Hampshire is not entirely innocent of orthodoxy. On the same day that other states celebrate King’s birthday, it celebrates Civil Rights Day. King Day opponents, argue that since there were many people who fought for civil rights, no one man should be singled out for honor.

Cumulative Voting

Lani Guinier, Bill Clinton’s short-lived nominee to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has long been a proponent of what is called cumulative voting. The theory is that in jurisdictions with racial minorities, all voters should have not just one but several votes. If everyone has, say, five votes and there is one black candidate in a field of several candidates, blacks can pile all their votes onto the black while whites split their votes.

Such systems have already been ordered by judges in Chilton County, Alabama and Worcester County, Maryland. The next step will be to formalize representation by racial quota in all elected bodies.

Holy Cow

Hindus think cows are holy, and in India, laws generally forbid the slaughter of any cattle not diseased, disabled, or over the age of fifteen. Butchers in India are mostly Muslims, and do not worship cows. They practice a lucrative back door business of quietly delivering steaks to closet meat-eaters. It is common to falsify age certificates and even to slash the legs of healthy cows so they can be declared disabled and then butchered.

A new, much tougher cow-protection law has recently been passed by the city of New Delhi. It is now illegal not only to kill any cow but to possess beef. Police may raid shops and homes, and the accused must prove that what he was about to eat was not beef. Cow-killers will be held without bail.

The law also provides for the aged cattle that may no longer be slaughtered. The city will establish ten shelters, to which the old and infirm among Delhi’s estimated 150,000 cows can retire in peace rather than face the knacker’s knife.

Why are Hindus so fond of cows? As one Delhi priest explains, “That which serves you with its milk is your mother . . . So would you kill your mother?” In 1921, Mahatma Gandhi observed that “Hindus will be judged . . . by their ability to protect the cow.”

Rather Sad

Dan Rather, television anchorman, is in the news business. An article he recently wrote for the loony left magazine, The Nation (April 11, 1994), suggests that he actually holds some of his biases in check when he is on camera. In a piece called “Away, Dixie,” he celebrated the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, and concluded with these words:

The list goes on and on: Vietnamese-Americans, Arab-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Americans from every corner of the globe are daily subjected to abuses of civil rights, to violence, hatred and inhumanity. Across the country.

Don’t try to tell me or any other New Southerner that civil rights was and is a ‘Southern problem.’ The Old South shared the worst of its legacy with all Americans.

Silence Reigns

This spring, there was a series of muggings of old people in the Glenwood Homes complex of Brooklyn, New York. Young thugs would lie in wait for grandmothers to come out of their homes, then knock them down and take their money. New York papers noted with some concern that there had been a dozen such attacks and that in the latest outrage, a woman had been thrown down with enough force to break her hip and shatter her skull.

In all the tut-tutting over violence, no one had the nerve to point out that all the attackers were black and all their victims white. The New York Post finally spilled the beans, quoting a detective who said he had been told by one of the young muggers: “Of course I knew they were white people. It was a pact we made — only white people.”

O Albion

A reader just back from a month-long stay in England reports that the white man’s disease is well advanced.

Apparently, there are not enough non-white lawyers in Britain. In his address to the latest class of recruits to the ranks of Queen’s Counsel, no less a person than Lord Mackay of Clashfern expressed his deep concern over the insufficient number of blacks and browns.

This has become such a worry that a blue-ribbon panel was recently appointed to learn why 45 percent of non-white candidates for the bar fail their examinations while only 16 percent of whites do. Try as it might, the group could find no “evidence of direct or indirect discrimination,” but it could scarcely declare the matter closed.

It concluded that the tradition of old-fashioned dinners, which aspiring barristers must attend, is unfriendly to non-whites. Good manners, grace before dinner, and claret are alien and intimidating. The panel also noted that a meal of red meat might offend non-whites. Likewise, the year-long Bar Vocational Course was found to be insufficiently structured, with non-whites more likely to sink than swim. The Society of Black Lawyers dismissed the report as a “white-wash.”

Elsewhere, a Hindu worker has filed racial discrimination charges be cause the dress code of Harrod’s department store forbids women to wear rings in their noses. Parliament is gearing up to pass a law that would add up to five additional years in jail for any crime that had a racial motivation and the Labor Party is wondering whether to create safe legislative seats for Muslims.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense is doling out money to women it dropped from the armed forces because they got pregnant. British regulations had required women to resign from certain positions if they became pregnant, but in 1990 this was found to violate a directive from the European Community that outlaws sex discrimination. Britannia, which once ruled the waves, duly truckled to Brussels bureaucrats and is now settling more than 4,000 cases of wrongful dismissal. Settlements are likely to cost the ministry about £50 million; in April, an ex-army major was sent home with £300,000.

Adrian Hicks, a former Grenadier Guard, thinks this is not quite cricket. He points out that all 4,000 current claimants knew the terms of service when they signed up, and thinks that a Brussels-ordered £300,000 for loss of a job is preposterous. Mr. Hicks lost both his legs in a training accident. After a long court battle, he received £ 105,000.

Bad Case of Nameism

Leslie Perez is running for Democratic Party chair in Texas’ Harris County. She was born a man, Leslie Ashley, but underwent a sex change operation several years ago, and took the name Perez from a man she met while serving a prison sentence for murder.

Hispanics in Harris County say she is falsely trading on her name — she is white — in the hope of winning Hispanic votes. Miss Perez does not actually claim to be Hispanic; she has merely declined to identify her race on candidate forms.

No Safe Haven

North Dallas is wealthy and overwhelmingly white. Mayor Steve Bartlett lives there, as does Ross Perot. This spring there has been a series of more than 20 driveway robberies, in which thugs followed motorists home and held them up at gun point. In two cases they shot and killed the drivers. All victims have been white; all perpetrators black.

A neighbor of one of the murdered men is a 33-year-old woman who was raped at gunpoint three years ago in a different neighborhood. She moved to North Dallas to escape crime.

School Days

It has been an unhappy spring in some of America’s public schools. In Harlem, a 14-year-old stormed into class with four accomplices and pistol-whipped a teacher while his students looked on. Edgar Valentino, whose nose was broken, is Hispanic, and his black assailant claimed Mr. Valentino was abusive.

In March, the championship game for the New York City high school basketball league ended in a brawl, as hundreds of spectators poured onto the court and brained each other with folding chairs. All students had been checked for weapons so there were no deaths. Mob violence at New York high school sporting events is so common that games are often played in locked, all-but-empty gymnasiums.

In Detroit, where high schools have metal detectors, young gang members slipped past security and settled a score with a student by pistol-whipping him in front of his teacher and classmates. On the way out, they fired a few shots for dramatic effect.

In Washington, DC, one high school student brushed against another at a water fountain. The second student took offense, drew a weapon, and shot the first one four times.

Some people still claim it is racist for whites to send their children to private schools.