Posted on December 1, 2006

O Tempora, O Mores! (December, 2006)

American Renaissance, December 2006

The Treason of the Elites

Non-white and specifically Muslim immigration is the greatest threat facing European countries but the Belgian political establishment is more afraid of domestic nationalists.

During municipal elections in 2000, the conservative Vlaams Blok (VB) won a third of the vote and 20 of 55 council seats in Antwerp, Belgium’s largest city. Besides its core Flemish nationalist vote, the VB won support for its tough anti-immigration platform. There have been recent reports on the measures the ruling Socialists then took to stop the VB: They struck a deal with the one group guaranteed to oppose the VB at every turn — Muslim immigrants. They gave non-citizens the right to vote in local elections, and passed a “Quick Citizenship Bill” that confers Belgian citizenship virtually on demand to any immigrant who has lived in the country for three years — in some cases just two years.

As then-Antwerp mayor Leona Detiege explained, “The Vlaams Blok is currently overrepresented because the immigrants are not allowed to vote.” In addition to eliminating this obvious injustice, the ruling parties sought to have the VB banned. They got their wish in late 2004 when a judge found the Vlaams Blok guilty of “racism” and dissolved it. It immediately reconstituted itself as the Vlaams Belang.

VB leader Filip Dewinter understands how the deck is stacked against his party in Antwerp: “The number of potential voters for our party is declining year by year. Currently a quarter of the population are immigrants. These people do not vote for us. Every year 4,000 indigenous Antwerpians move out and 5,000 immigrants move in.”

The result? In municipal elections held in this city of 450,000 on October 8 of this year, the Vlaams Belang made little progress. It was up by only half a percent, winning the same number of seats as in 2000. Relying heavily on the Muslim vote, the Socialist Party won the largest percentage (33.5) and captured the most seats (22). Seven of its newly-elected city councilors are Muslim. The establishment “conservative” party, the Christian Democrats, also ran Muslim immigrant candidates, two of whom were elected.

The VB may have the last laugh. Even though the party’s urban vote remains flat, its support in suburbs, small towns and the country is surging. [Paul Belien, Turning Red: Immigrants Tip the Balance in Belgian Local Elections, Brussels Journal, Oct. 9, 2006.]

Animals, Too

It isn’t just people who are suffering in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The nation’s exotic wildlife, a source of tourist income, is being slaughtered by hungry poachers and poorly-trained game wardens. Recently, wardens killed an elephant that was getting too close to a village rather than try to chase it away. They “kneecapped” it with small-arms fire to bring it down, and then shot it more than 40 times. Western tourists were “disgusted and heartbroken” by the cruelty.

The South Africa-based International Fund for Animal Welfare describes the state of Zimbabwe’s animal preserves — many of which, along with white-owned farms, were seized by the Mugabe government — as “absolutely outrageous.” Spokesman Christina Pretorious says poachers are eating antelopes and rhinos, and using them in native medicines. Hwange National Park, a 5,400 square-mile animal preserve used to have more than 2,000 lions. Now there are only 18 males and 200 females. [Angus Shaw, Zimbabwe Game-Park Conditions ‘Outrageous,’ AP, Oct. 19, 2006.]

Race and Robbery

The Home Office tracks crime in Britain. A detailed study of robberies it published in 2003 only recently came to our attention. Tucked away on page 26 are statistics about race and violence. In Birmingham, for example, blacks are just six percent of the population but are 64 percent of the robbery suspects. Whites are 69 percent of the population but are 85 percent of robbery victims. Asians are proportionately more likely to commit robberies than whites but manage to be robbed very infrequently (the tables below show crime rates and ethnic mix by area).

Race and Crime in the UK Race and Crime in Britain

A few simple calculations (which the report fails to make) lead to stark conclusions. On a per capita basis, blacks in Birmingham are no less than 70 times more likely to commit robbery than whites [(64/6) ÷ (11/69)], and Indians are seven times more likely. Blacks are about 74 percent more likely to be robbery victims than whites — undoubtedly because they live among other blacks — but Asians are less than one tenth as likely as whites to be robbery victims. All this suggests Asians are more careful than blacks about not robbing each other, and that both groups are quite willing to rob whites. Although the report does not include a breakdown of specifically how many blacks, for example, were robbed by whites, Asians or other blacks, it is safe to assume that any given black is many hundreds of times more likely to rob a white than the other way around.

The author of the report warns against drawing the obvious conclusions, asking the reader to: “consider wider socio-economic and demographic factors that mediate the levels of risk between different ethnic groups. Research suggests that these are more important in determining victim-offender characteristics than ethnicity itself.” This is the usual mush: Non-whites are more likely to be young, poor and live in ghettoes, and it is therefore social characteristics rather than race that make them criminals. [Jonathan Smith, The Nature of Personal Robbery (Home Office Research Study 254), homeoffice.gov.uk, Jan. 2003.]

Brown and Proud

A new study has found that ethnic pride makes people happier. Psychology professor Lisa Kiang of Wake Forest University asked 415 US ninth-graders to keep track of worrying events like exams and homework assignments, and to record how they felt — whether they were happy, sad, nervous, etc. Ethnic pride reportedly kept them calm.

In Prof. Kiang’s stilted terms, “Adolescents with a high ethnic regard maintained a generally positive and happy attitude in the face of daily stressors and despite their anxious feelings. So, having positive feeling about one’s ethnic group appeared to provide an extra boost of positivity in individuals’ daily lives.” Prof. Kiang thinks society ought to encourage strong ethnic identity — at least for minorities. She studied only Chinese and Mexican students. [Ethnic Identity Gives Teens Daily Happiness Boost, newswise.com, Oct. 22, 2006.]

Brown and Not Proud

We reprint the following item verbatim and in toto:

Brown University acknowledged yesterday that its cofounders were linked to the slave trade. It said it would establish memorials, forums, and a center to educate its students and the public about slavery.

A 106-page report, ‘Slavery and Justice,’ released on Brown’s website, said that members of the family for whom the Providence, R.I., school is named were slave owners. Family records show that the four Brown brothers owned at least 14 slaves in the early 1770s, the report said.

It recommended that the university sponsor forums on slavery, rewrite its history to include the Brown family’s role in the slave trade, and create a research center on slavery and justice.

Brown said it would ‘pay particular attention’ to recruiting students from Africa and the West Indies. [Brown University Liked to Slavery, Bloomberg News, Oct. 16, 2006.]

Your New Neighbors?

First came Hmong tribesmen from Southeast Asia, and then the Bantu from Somalia. The next group of primitives scheduled to arrive in the US, courtesy of the State Department and United Nation High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), is from Burundi via Tanzania. Although the civil war in Burundi is over, the refugees will not be going home because the UNHCR thinks they would face “particular reintegration problems.” Many were born in Tanzania and might not fit in back home, but the Tanzanians certainly don’t want them. The first of 13,000 Burundians will start arriving by end of March 2007. They probably will not be the last. There are 200,000 Burundian refugees in camps in Tanzania, and the UNHCR wants them settled as quickly as possible. [Burundi Refugees to Settle in US, BBC News, Oct. 17, 2006.]

The Truth Hurts

President Bush’s No Child Left Behind program requires schools to give students standardized tests, the results of which are supposed to show which students are doing badly. Schools are then supposed to get them up to snuff. Of course, all the testing does is demonstrate the well-known racial achievement gap: Whites and Asians perform well and blacks and Hispanics do not.

Emily Matras is the editor-in-chief of the Red & Black, the student newspaper at Hillsborough High School in Hills-borough, Florida. She got the results for her school from the Florida Education Department website, and wrote an article, illustrated with a table, describing the performance gap. At the last minute, Principal William Orr ordered that the article be removed. The staff stayed at school until 8 p.m. the night before the paper came out, snipping out the article with scissors. The staff also stapled a note to each issue explaining that the school offered to reprint the issue without the offending article, but that the staff chose not to delay publication.

Student journalists were baffled. “It [the article] did not condone anything immoral. It didn’t talk of drug use or pregnancy or teen violence,” says features editor Simone Kallett. “It was a very fact-based article.” So why the censorship? As Principal Orr explained, “If it’s something that has a potential to hurt students’ self esteem, then I have an obligation not to let that happen. I don’t think it’s the job of the school newspaper to embarrass the students.” [Letitia Stein, School Newspaper Censored, St. Petersburg Times, Oct. 24, 2006.]

More Diversity, Less Trust

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has briefed both former President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has also discussed his work at Buckingham Palace. His best known book, Bowling Alone, examines how modern society promotes alienation by undermining traditional notions of community. This does not make him a conservative. His advice to the British, struggling to deal with unassimilable Muslims? “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us. We should construct a new us.” Societies, he says, “have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed.”

Prof. Putnam’s latest research looks at the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust, and paints a “bleak picture” of diversity’s “corrosive” effects. His conclusion: the more diverse a community, the less likely its members are to trust people. “In the presence of diversity, we hunker down,” he explains. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

While ethnic diversity is bad enough, racial diversity is worse. In communities of many different races, people “don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” Prof Putnam says. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.” He found that Los Angeles — ”the most diverse human habitation in human history” — has the least amount of trust.

It is not possible to get copies of Prof. Putnam’s diversity research. It’s conclusions run so counter to the “diversity is strength” mantra that he is withholding publication until he can come up with proposals to mitigate diversity’s dangers. Publishing without that, he says, would be “irresponsible.” [John Lloyd, Study Paints Bleak Picture of Ethnic Diversity, Financial Times (London), Oct. 8, 2006.]

Future Subscriber

Assistant editor Stephen Webster and his wife Alicia are pleased to announce the birth of their second child, Bradford Hamilton, born on Oct. 30. He joins older sister Samantha, who celebrated her first birthday in September. Mother and baby are doing well.