O Tempora, O Mores! (March, 2000)
American Renaissance, March 2000
The Harp That Once
South Africa’s National Symphony Orchestra, the country’s number-one classical orchestra, is shutting down after 75 seasons. It used to be supported by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, but three years after blacks started running the network they cut the orchestra off. It lived meagerly on corporate sponsors for two years before collapsing. The musicians asked the government for help but the government now has money only for African arts. (Daniel Wakin, Top South African Orchestra Closes, AP, Jan. 20, 2000. Anton La Guardia, South African Orchestra Closes as Funds End, London Telegraph, Jan. 25, 2000.) Similar things have happened here. Oakland, California, used to have a top-flight recording symphony, but when the city went black the orchestra went dark. The New Orleans symphony also went under as city demographics changed, though it managed to revive after promising to put on hip concerts that would attract blacks.
Many Jews are worried by the high rate at which Jews marry gentiles — an estimated 50 percent world wide, and 52 percent in the United States. Charles Bronfman of Seagram Co. and Wall Street millionaire Michael Steinhardt have founded an organization called Birthright, which has already raised $210 million to sell Jewishness to Jews and persuade them to marry each other. It’s main activity is bringing diaspora Jews to Israel, where they go on tours and get courses in everything from Jewish sex to Jewish business opportunities. In January, Birthright flew no fewer than 6,000 young Jews to Israel — 4,000 from North America and 2,000 from Europe, the former Soviet Union, and South America. Any young Jew who had never been to Israel was eligible for the 10-day, all-expenses-paid trip. Applicants were chosen by lottery.
Mr. Bronfman, who explains that the program’s success will be judged by whether it reduces intermarriage, says: “I’m trying to make Jews. You can live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you’re losing a lot — losing the kind of feeling you have when you know throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.” Last we heard, Judaism was supposed to be a religion rather than a sub-race, but never mind. People certainly do care whether friends and neighbors have DNA similar to their own. No doubt Mr. Bronfman will now understand why Jörg Haider and so many other Austrians want to keep Austria Austrian. (Lee Hockstader, ‘Selling’ Jewishness, Washington Times, Jan. 17, 2000, p. A1.)
In his State of the Union speech, the Great White Father said the following:
‘Within 10 years — just 10 years — there will be no majority race in our largest state of California. [He got it wrong; whites became a minority some time in the late 1990s.] In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in America. In a more interconnected world, this diversity can be our greatest strength. Just look around this chamber. Look around. We have members in this Congress from virtually every racial, ethnic, and religious background. And I think you would agree that America is stronger because of it.’ The White House press release reports that at this point, Mr. Clinton’s speech was interrupted with applause. (White House press release, President William J. Clinton State of the Union Address, Jan. 27, 2000.)
More Mush From the Times
It’s worth dipping occasionally into the New York Times Magazine to see whether liberals ever learn. Alas, a recent article called “What No School Can Do” shows they do not. It starts with an admission that the 1960s convictions about the surefire ways to make ghetto blacks as smart and productive as whites haven’t worked. School integration, Head Start, and $100 billion in federal school money have made a barely perceptible dent in the racial gap. “Comprehensive school reform” and every conceivable new teaching gimmick still leave the typical black 17-year-old reading at the level of a white 13-year-old. Could unequal outcomes be part of human nature?
Impossible. The mistake, says the Times, was to assume schools by themselves could do the trick. Even middle-class black children are already behind by the time they start kindergarten because, say the experts, of “difference[s] in child-rearing habits and peer culture between the black and white middle class.” Unfortunately, “these are forms of private behavior that are both overwhelmingly important and extremely difficult to reach through conscious acts of intervention.” As for ghetto children, we must change “the ecology of the lower-class child in order to increase the probability that he will be more successful in attaining normative skills.” The solution? Get black children out of their homes and into the hands of liberals as soon as possible. Lather them with uplift for hours a day — from birth, if possible. Since Head Start didn’t work, super-intensive Head Start will. The failures of liberalism can only be corrected with more liberalism. No mention of genes, of course, in an article that is like a physics textbook that never mentions gravity. (James Traub, What No School Can Do, New York Times Magazine, Jan. 16, 2000, p. 52.)
More Mush From Up North
The Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine has a treat in store: Some time this spring about 30 refugees from the West African country of Togo will arrive in this overwhelmingly white community. No one knows if they speak English or can hold down a job. Never mind, says James Carignan, a Lewiston city councilman and dean of Bates College, simply having them around will be wonderful. “Great cities are diverse cities,” he explains. “They are multicultural in character. We are too homogenous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He is sure that “the 30 new neighbors from Togo and those from around the world who will follow them will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” (James Carignan, Refugees Bring Skills, Ideas and At Little Cost to Residents, Sun Journal (Lewiston), Jan. 2, 2000.)
‘Inviting Vandalism’
Last year there was much shrieking when the city of Richmond decided to include Robert E. Lee in a series of outdoor portraits of famous Americans. There were plenty of blacks on display, of course, but a special committee had to be appointed to wrestle with the gigantic moral problem of memorializing the South’s best-loved general. Now someone has burned the mural with a molotov cocktail on the same day someone scrawled “kill white devil” on Lee’s statue on Memorial Avenue. “I would say if you put it [the portrait] back up you are inviting another act of vandalism,” says City Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin (birth-name not reported), who was against putting up the portrait in the first place. A committee of wise men is now pondering what to do. It’s not hard to imagine the national outcry that would follow if an image of Martin Luther King were burned and a white official said fixing it would only invite more vandalism. (Richmond’s Mural Burners, Washington Times, Jan. 22, 2000, p. A11.)
Babel in the Court
Last month we reported on a local court decision that forbad the exclusion of non-English-speakers from jury duty in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. District Judge Robert Robles based his decision on the New Mexico constitution, which clearly states that no one can be kept off juries because of an “inability to speak, read or write the English or Spanish languages.” The state Supreme Court has now ruled that Judge Robles was right, and all courts in New Mexico must provide interpreters to deaf-mutes and illiterate Somalis. Aside from the cost and trouble of hiring interpreters, their presence in the jury room could change the dynamic of jury deliberations, which are supposed to be inviolate. Simultaneous interpretation is never completely accurate, either, but a spokesman for the state airily explains that if there are beefs about language, the parties can always appeal. (Loie Fecteau, Justices: Language No Barrier for Jury Duty, Albuquerque Journal, Jan. 20, 2000.)
Same Old Story
Al Lipscomb is a Dallas city council member and longtime black activist who likes to turn everything into an Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson-style racial issue. Mr. Lipscomb has just been convicted of 65 counts of bribery. He admitted taking 33 $1,000 monthly payments from a local taxicab company, but says these were just gifts and had no effect on his vote. He also appears to have taken $7,000 from a notorious nudie bar in exchange for trying to get the police to leave it alone. His conviction and prosecution are being widely denounced in “the community” as more evidence of white racism. (Robert Ashley, Dallas’ Most Well-Known Civil Rights Activist Convicted of Bribery, Dallas Examiner, Jan. 28, 2000.)
A black teenager in Lancaster, California, has admitted he lied when he claimed skinheads beat him up. The boy, whose name has been withheld because he is only 15, picked a fight with a black classmate, but got the worst of it when another boy pitched in against him. The fight banged up his braces, on which his mother had spent a lot of money, so he decided to blame the damage on “racists.” His mother promptly phoned the authorities, who put out an all-points bulletin. The teenager confessed when his tale began to fall apart and his friends started telling a different story. (Solomon Moore, Black Youth Admits He Lied About Hate Crime, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 27, 2000.)
Unknown but Famous
Remember Patricia Roberts Harris? We didn’t. She was Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Since she was a black woman, she just had a commemorative postage stamp issued in her honor, making her the 23rd in the Black Heritage series. She joins others we had forgotten or never heard of like Jan Matzeliger, Percy Julian, Allison Davis, Ernest Just, and Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable. (US Postal Service Press Release, Unsung Hero for Civil Rights and Public Service Honored on latest Black Heritage Series Stamp, Dec. 27, 1999.)
Buchanan Speaks
On a campaign swing through the West, Reform Party contender Patrick Buchanan has been talking more sense about immigration than any other politician in years. At the Arizona-Mexico border he called illegal immigration nothing less than “an outright invasion of the United States,” and walked through a hole in a dilapidated border fence to show that the Clinton administration’s idea of enforcement is “a disgrace.”
In a major address at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, Mr. Buchanan warned that Third-World immigration is giving rise to “separate ethnic nations within a nation.” “If we want to assimilate new Americans — and we have no choice if we are going to remain one nation — we must slow down the pace of immigration,” he added. He pledged that as President he would crack down hard on illegal immigration and would cut legal immigration from 800,000 a year to 300,000. He went on to say those parts of the country with many immigrants suffer from a host of social problems, such as high crime rates, depressed wages, and stretched social services. He is one of the few public figures with the courage to point out that the obvious solution is to stop letting in so many people. (Scott Lindlaw, Buchanan Targets Heavy Immigration, AP, Jan. 19, 2000.)
NO FEAR
David Duke has started a white rights group called National Organization For European-American Rights (NO FEAR). He announced the founding at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on January 21st. The next night, 75 members of the group joined him for an inaugural dinner in Philadelphia. Mr. Duke’s speech at the dinner was taped by C-SPAN and covered by local media.
NO FEAR will be based in Mandeville, Louisiana but already claims membership in 30 states. In his press conference Mr. Duke explained the focus of his new group: “European-Americans face a situation where we’re going to be outnumbered and outvoted in our own country . . . If the present immigration rates continue . . . the European-American people will basically be lost as an entity. We are losing our heritage and our way of life.” (Janelle Carter, David Duke Forms White Civil Rights Group, Boston Globe, January 22, 2000.)
NO FEAR can be reached at (504) 626-7714 or on-line at www.davidduke.org.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that state prison systems may practice segregation — of inmates with AIDS. In January, it let stand an Alabama appeals court decision under which authorities kept AIDS carriers out of certain recreational and educational activities. Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are the only states that systematically test all inmates for AIDS and segregate the infected. Prison authorities note that there is violence, sex, bloody fights, and intravenous drug use going on in prisons, and healthy inmates should be protected from the risk of infection. (James Vicini, U.S. High Court Allows AIDS Segregation in Prisons, Reuters, Jan. 18, 2000.)
