May 1998
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol 9, No. 5 | May 1998 |
| CONTENTS |
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What is the Role of the Family?
The President’s Dialogue on Race: A Critique
Thunder on the Right
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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What is the Role of the Family?
Childhood experiences may affect the race more than they do the individual.
Although the major media and those who formulate government policy have yet to acknowledge it, family environment does not determine intelligence or personality. For a society imbued with the egalitarian myth, it is unacceptable that important individual and group differences should have genetic origins. But even if family environment has little effect on individual traits, it can play a crucial role in instilling the values and expectations that determine the fortunes of the group. A child’s abilities and personality are largely established at birth, but the focus of his most important loyalties appear to be formed within the family. The traits and prospects for survival of the individual are generally impervious to upbringing; those of the group are not.
As for the question of what the family cannot achieve, David Rowe introduces the dilemma in his 1994 book, The Limits of Family Influence:
Most people believe that different rearing experiences have something to do with differences in the way children turn out. Parents who want bright children are told to read to them, and encouraged to take them to the library . . . Parents are warned to be affectionate lest a child become worried and anxious [and develop low self-esteem] . . . In our cultural beliefs, the idea that family experiences mold a child’s life course is strongly endorsed — that is, ‘As the twig is bent, the tree grows.’ A social scientist opposing this cultural belief would be dismissed as uninformed and possibly dangerous. In response, many people would recount stories from their own lives. Social scientists would mention the massive research literature showing influences of rearing on behavioral development. Nonetheless, many societies once accepted a flat earth; both experts and cultural beliefs, on some occasions, may be wrong. (p. 1.)
The most recent and best scientific evidence shows that the whole gamut of environmental factors that vary among families — social class, income, quality of schools, parenting style, two or single parents (the list is endless) — have very little effect on a child’s personality or intelligence or whether he develops mental illness. Generations of social scientists who put the emphasis on family environment are plain wrong. In fact, the failure to pay attention to genetic influences has resulted in the colossal misinterpretation of a century’s worth of research.
It is easy to see where common observation might lead people astray. Bright parents, who spend time talking with their children, tend to have brighter children than do dumb parents who ignore their children. Crazy people who live chaotic lives tend to have children who grow up to be crazy. It seems obvious to all that the experiences of children in their families determine developmental outcomes.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare, Darwin, and even the ancient Greeks knew that particular forms of insanity tended to be inherited and that intelligence was a family trait that is also sometimes inherited. Indeed, Sir Francis Galton, who was the first modern scientist to attempt precisely to gauge the importance of heredity versus family environment, worried that his findings might be disbelieved because they seemed to prove too much; he himself was surprised that family experience seemed to account for so little.
Galton’s 19th century discoveries have largely been rejected by mainstream 20th century social and psychological science, but not because of better evidence. Rejection has been mainly for theoretical and ideological reasons. Liberalism abhors inequality, especially genetic inequality. It views inherited diversity as evil, and it did not take Hitler to make it so. The egalitarian movement antedated National Socialism; Hitler has just made it easier to demonize the truth. Ambitious social engineers hate genetic differences because they mean that social reform cannot remake mankind.
Once hereditary differences were ruled out, research could be done on the correlations of family traits with child outcomes, with the assurance that differences in family environments were always the cause. Many thousands of studies have been done, leading to one of the best-established generalizations of modern science: most traits tend to run in families.
Another well-established generalization is that individual differences tend to be stable across the lifespan. Mentally retarded adults were often developmentally disabled when children; timid children tend to become shy adults. This gave rise to one of the central tenets of environmental determinism and egalitarianism, namely that early experiences must be crucially important. Who has not heard that vital, formative experiences occur before age six? As intervention programs like Head Start continue to fail, the cutoff age for formative experience just gets pushed further back. Government social engineers start muttering that they could solve all of society’s problems if only they could get their hands on your children before age two.
Debunking the Myths
One of the first scientific studies of recent times to debunk the egalitarian myth was an investigation of schizophrenia, which is well known to run in families. Although the incidence in the general population is about one percent, the incidence among the children of schizophrenics is about 10 to 15 percent. Therefore, most children of schizophrenics — indeed about 90 percent of them — do not become schizophrenic, and most schizophrenics do not have a schizophrenic parent. Nevertheless, the incidence among children of schizophrenics is fully 10 to 15 times higher than in the general population.
Given that schizophrenia runs in families, literally thousands of studies were done to discover what rearing patterns caused it, and researchers found that family backgrounds of schizophrenics did tend to be different from those of normals. The environmental determinists came up with theories about “schizophrenogenic mothers,” inconsistent parents, and “icebox moms,” who caused schizophrenia in their children.
Of course, in most human families the parents provide both the rearing environment for children and the genes. Yet more studies of families could never have separated genes from experience as a cause of schizophrenia, because the source of the family environment is the same as the source of the genes.
Len Heston, now at the University of Washington, finally cut through the fog in 1966. He tracked down adults who were the adopted-away children of schizophrenic mothers. Because these people were reared in normal family environments they should be normal — if family environment causes schizophrenia. In an amazing finding reminiscent of Galton’s concern about seeming to prove too much, it turned out that the incidence of schizophrenia is exactly the same, however children are reared. Much additional research has verified Heston’s discovery: Schizophrenia is a genetic condition. The best evidence at the present suggests that being reared by normal parents does not decrease the likelihood of developing schizophrenia, for someone with genes from a schizophrenic.
Contrary to a century of theory in abnormal psychology and psychiatry, there is little or no credible evidence that family environments cause any form of mental illness. Much research on bipolar affective disorder (manic-depression) suggests a similar conclusion: Broadcasting tycoon Ted Turner probably inherited his manic-depression from his suicidal father. Although he may have acquired “Hanoi” Jane Fonda from a flawed adult environment, gene-influenced bad judgment could also be a cause.
The only way to disentangle genes from experience in assessing the causal role of the family is to make it possible for them to vary independently from each other. It is hard to design and carry out studies like this, so most social scientists don’t bother. In the past, there was no reason to, because genetic influences were thought to be evil and could be ruled out in advance anyway.
Studies that separate genes from experience in family influences are mostly adoption and twin research. The modern spate of unwed mothers, broken homes and remarriages also provides material: Lots of families with both full- and half-siblings, who may or may not be raised by a common birth parent. Children with different degrees of relatedness who are reared in the same environment (by people who may not be their biological parents) offer a different angle from which to distinguish the effects of heredity from environment.
Even a single study, well conducted, can provide much information. However, with the power of computers and modern analytical techniques, the results of different studies with different designs can be combined. The data from multiple family types can be analyzed together — like solving simultaneous equations — to test theories that best explain real world data.
When adoption studies were first done in the 1920s and 1930s, the results indicated that both genes and family environment contributed to individual differences in intelligence. These studies contributed to the “open minded” interpretation that both heredity and family environment are important. These early studies were limited, though, by the fact that they compared young adopted children with parents (biological and adoptive) who were already adults.
Further breakthroughs came only in the late 1970s, with the first studies of grown-up adopted children. After puberty, as a child begins to choose his own activities and associates, the correlations between child and adoptive (non-genetic) parent decrease to the point that they are not significantly different from zero. This finding is contrary to the environmentalist expectation of a cumulative effect of family environment. At the same time, as children grow up, the resemblance to the genetic parents who never reared them increases. Likewise, by the time they become adults, the correlations among adopted (non-related) siblings average around zero.
These results hold for intelligence and for the “big five” indices of personality — extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, intellectual openness — as well as measures of mental illness. These findings from adults, that there is no family resemblance among adoptees that are not genetically related, leads to the eye-opening conclusion that all of the commonly observed similarities among family members on such traits are caused by shared genes, not shared family environments.
What Use is the Family?
These studies do not indicate that environment has no effect on intelligence and personality. They show only that the ways that families are different from each other — the differences social scientists thought were so important — have essentially no effect. For intelligence, which is the most intensively studied of all the mental characteristics, by the time people are adults, about 75 percent of the individual differences appear to be due to genetics, perhaps 10 percent may be due to measurement error, and the rest is presumably due to environmental factors we don’t understand. Whatever those factors are, they are almost certainly not family income, social class, or education of the parents, that is to say, the characteristics on which liberalism pins its hopes.
The heritability of personality seems to be generally less than that of intelligence: About 50 percent of the variation among adults appears to be genetic. However, measures of personality are less reliable than measures of intelligence, which means that measurement error is greater. That puts a cap on the apparent importance of inheritance. However, as with intelligence, the environmental influence on personality does not seem to be related to the various ways in which families differ from each other. We don’t know what it is, but we know what it is not.
How can it be that families have so little effect on the development of children? One explanation is that for important traits, individual development is deeply ingrained, buffered from environmental perturbation, so that the genetic potential of the individual will develop almost regardless of the details of the rearing environment. This is the “cast iron theory of the mind.” Children develop their unique individuality into adulthood even in spite of, rather than because of, what we as parents do to them.
Throughout history and prehistory there have been many periods during which children have been reared amid the horrors of famine, war, pestilence, or predation. Studies of special cohorts in the modern era that have suffered from these misfortunes suggest that calamity has little effect on development of intelligence or personality. Today, the range of environmental differences found among families in modern societies is typically very small by comparison. The human psyche appears to resist damage or change. The other theory is the “spun-glass theory of the mind” that is favored by modern meddling liberalism. It holds that the human psyche is a delicate, fragile thing. Without a precisely optimal rearing environment it will fail to develop properly. Of course, prescriptions for what is optimal keep changing with the latest fads of progressive liberalism, but the bulk of the available evidence strongly supports the cast iron theory.
Galton, therefore, was generally correct. The environmental differences provided by different families have little effect on individual differences. However, this does not mean that different family environments are unimportant. The family, and its surrogates such as school, club, church, and state, are fundamentally important for human survival. They are necessary for the survival of the individual, the family’s genes, and the family culture because they influence a child — and influence the group through the child — in ways that have not been thoroughly studied. If we draw an analogy between an infant and a computer, most (but not all) of the hardware and operating software is genetically determined. But much of the contents of many of the files — most of the numbers in the spreadsheets, for example — are written by environmental experiences, many of which are determined by the family.
Sir Francis Galton
Some of the same studies mentioned above that showed little influence of family environments on some things showed their fundamental importance for others. Whether or not teen-agers profess a belief in God is almost entirely a matter of shared family environment. So is denominational affiliation. Family environment almost alone seems to determine attitudes toward racial integration. The cultural standards you value are almost entirely determined by your family, or family surrogates such as the schools. The contents of the psyche, therefore, but not its style or capability are determined by family environment.
It is not always certain, however, where personality ends and culture begins. It is clear that a child who is genetically destined to be intelligent and conscientious almost regardless of where or how he is reared is going to speak the language of the people around him. He will probably adopt their religion, preferences, and politics, too. Therefore, a child — bright or dumb, extroverted or not — if raised in a family that espouses modern liberalism’s views of a progressive utopia, is almost certainly doomed never to experience a feeling of sublime pleasure from handling an engraved work of art that happens to be a side-by-side double-barreled shotgun of the supreme quality that is labeled a “Best Gun.” Of course, it is natural that people have differences of opinion; it is when the indoctrinated products of other families’ prejudices feel a moral compulsion to prevent me from exercising preferences they abhor — that is what is unacceptable.
Race destroyers like Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) certainly can have a profound influence on the cultures of families and the survival of their genes because of the propaganda they spread via family surrogates. The SPLC runs a “Teaching Tolerance” program that saturates schools and teachers with well-prepared materials that glamorize miscegenation and promote multiculturalism.
More broadly, it is interesting to note that Head Start and other centralized government programs aimed at children have been convincingly shown not to affect intelligence — which refutes the claim on which they were initially sold to the public. Our liberal masters are nevertheless determined to expand these programs rather than drop them. Why? Could it be that they understand the effectiveness of propaganda in shaping the contents and values of young minds even if the efficiency of those minds is not affected? As all totalitarians know, propagandizing the youth is a particularly effective way to modify the cultural values of a population.
A very dramatic example of the effects of environment can be found in modern Japan. Today’s Japanese are genetically no different from those of 50 years ago. And yet it would be hard to find a nation that has more dramatically changed its stance towards war, aggression, and militarism. The Japanese still love their country but they no longer invade their neighbors or die in banzai charges. What is more, they are probably no long capable of a banzai charge.
The effects of environment are just as clear in the case of nations that were divided by Communism. Koreans and Germans were not changed biologically by half a century of scientific socialism, but the contents of the collective psyche were so thoroughly refashioned that people on the other side of the border seemed like strangers to each other.
These are differences that are just as dramatic as the change in white Americans brought about by the revolution in racial thinking. Biologically, whites are no different from their turn-of-the-century ancestors. And yet in their terror of being thought “racist,” in their inability to take even the most elementary steps to preserve their nation and culture, they are as different from their ancestors as the cowed North Koreans are from South Koreans.
Let us imagine the ultimate outcome for two different groups of families engaged in long-term competition for survival. Families of the first group indoctrinate their children in the belief that they are different from and better than any other people. They are told others will harm them if given a chance. They constantly remind each other of the wrongs others have done them in the past or present. They are encouraged to criticize other groups and to breed only within their group. They learn that this is a hostile world, in which it is their prime obligation to care for and provide mutual support for members of their own group.
By contrast, a prescription for racial and cultural suicide is easy to formulate. Imagine a different group of families, which allow their children to be taught that their ancestors were personally responsible for many of the evils of the present world. They learn that it is their obligation to atone for the sins of their group. Should they, themselves, be harmed it is divine to turn the other cheek. Moreover, their culture is merely one — and a not very nice one — among a diversity of others. They must never criticize other groups, and it is neat to celebrate diversity, even in choice of mates. They must treat all members of other groups and other families as if they were brothers, and it is best and most noble to treat members of other groups better than they treat their own. In the real world of competing groups that play by different rules, this will lead to total elimination, both genetically and culturally.
As the title of David Rowe’s important book emphasizes, there are limits on family influence with regard to the development of individual differences in intelligence and personality characteristics. At the same time, family indoctrination and support is of unlimited importance for the very survival of a family’s individuals, genes, and culture.
Glayde Whitney is professor in psychology, psychobiology and neuroscience at Florida State University.
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The President’s Dialogue on Race: A Critique
From the very beginnings last summer of President Clinton’s “national dialogue on race” and the creation of his Advisory Board on Race, the purpose has been clear. It not been to initiate or maintain a genuine dialogue that reaches beyond what the New York Times has called “banal chatter,” let alone to examine in an impartial way the very material threats to domestic harmony that our current immigration policy and various trends of racial thought and behavior represent. The real purpose of the “dialogue on race” was evident in Mr. Clinton’s own remarks at the time it was initiated, and it has been apparent in the various hearings the advisory board has conducted over the last several months.
President Bill Clinton
In his commencement address in San Diego last June announcing the initiative, the president remarked that “A half century from now, when your own grandchildren are in college, there will be no majority race in America.” Mr. Clinton is to be commended for being the first president to say what has hitherto been unsayable — that U.S. Census Bureau projections show that by the middle of the next century, barely 50 years from now, non-Hispanic whites for the first time in American history will cease to be the majority of the U.S. population. That projection, first reported by the Census Bureau in 1992, let alone its cultural and political implications, has yet to sink into the American public consciousness, and had Mr. Clinton chosen to make Americans aware of the significance of that transition and its meaning, I would find no fault with him.
Instead, both the president and his advisory board have taken the demographic and racial transformation of the United States as a given, an inevitability that cannot be halted or reversed, and the president himself a few days prior to his San Diego speech even welcomed the transformation. Speaking to a group of journalists in Boston, Mr. Clinton stated, “This will arguably be the third great revolution in America . . . to prove that we literally can live without in effect having a dominant European culture. We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society. We’re not going to disintegrate in the face of it.”
Again, Mr. Clinton is correct that the racial and demographic transition from a majority white to a majority non-white population will indeed mean the end of the “dominant European culture” that has prevailed throughout American history and on which our civilization — our form of government and laws, our language and literature, our religion, and our manners, customs, and tastes — is based. Unlike many supporters of an “open borders” immigration policy, Mr. Clinton apparently does not believe that we can alter the racial composition of our population without also altering the cultural character of our nation, and if he had seen this transformation as a problem to be avoided, again, I would have found no fault with him.
Yet the fact that the President of the United States appears to welcome the end of our “dominant European culture” is ominous, since it means that the chief executive no longer considers that cultural identity to be worth conserving or even that it can be conserved, and it is in this that the real purpose of Mr. Clinton’s race initiative is to be found. Its real purpose, in short, is simply to accommodate white Americans to the racial transformation of their country and the imminent destruction of their culture.
Hence, from that perspective, it is hardly surprising that the board should spend little time listening to the critics of affirmative action or that it be so concerned to show that all racial problems in the United States are really the fault of whites, that these problems can be resolved only when whites are made conscious of their guilt and responsibility, and that the guilt and responsibility of whites for racial problems are rooted in the very dominance of the European culture whose termination the president welcomes. Nor is it surprising, given that real purpose of the initiative, that various members of the commission in the last few months have positively discussed national reparations for slavery or that the failures, racial animosity, and “hate crimes” of non-whites are never discussed. The president himself set the tone for this way of framing the “dialogue” in his remarks in San Diego last summer. “We still see evidence of bigotry from the desecration of houses of worship, whether they be churches, synagogues or mosques, to demeaning talk in corporate suites.” “Bigotry,” in other words, is entirely confined to white arson of black churches and to cases, such as the one alleged against Texaco, of white corporate managers discriminating against non-whites — both of them instances of “bigotry” that have now been widely challenged if not actually discredited.
The manner in which the public sessions of the race advisory board have dealt with unexpected expressions of dissent from the public reflects this intentionally one-sided view of race relations. When the board met in Fairfax County, Virginia, last December, a white man interrupted its proceedings by complaining that “there’s no one up there talking about white people.” The gentleman was brusquely removed by police officers, and former Education Secretary, Bill Bennet, who happened to be sitting with the advisory board that day, promptly denounced him as a “fool.” When another white critic of the panel made similar remarks during one of its sessions in California earlier this year, he too was summarily bounced by the police.
Yet, in March, at a board meeting in Colorado, 20 American Indians presented similar grievances about the lack of representation of their own group but did so in a rather more disruptive way: They donned ski masks, shouted, whooped, and beat tom-toms, and made it impossible to conduct a meeting at all. When the commission reconvened the next day, it once again became a shouting match. No one was called a “fool” or removed by police. “The issues are deeply felt,” explained the board’s executive director, Judith Winston. And so they are — at least when they are felt by non-whites.
Of course it is whites who should be whooping about an anti-white inquisition that is being passed off as “dialogue.” We have yet to hear from Mr. Clinton or his race panel any mention of instances of black or other non-white bigotry, such as the kidnapping, gang rape, torture and murder of Melissa McLauchlin in South Carolina in 1992 by blacks in retaliation for what one of her killers called “400 years of oppression” by whites, or the obviously racially motivated assault, rape, and murder committed against three white youths by a group of six black men in Flint, Michigan on June 19, 1997, barely a week after Mr. Clinton’s San Diego address, or any number of other racially motivated crimes committed against whites by non-whites or against non-whites by other non-whites for ethnic or racial motivations. The chatter of the “national dialogue” is indeed largely banal, but the banalities are confined to only one perspective and one overriding purpose, that of holding whites alone responsible for all racial wrongs.
Recent statistics on “hate crimes” suggest some truths that the president and his race commission are unwilling to face. While 66 percent of the perpetrators of “hate crimes” in 1996 were white, 20 percent of the perpetrators were black. In other words, “hate crimes,” while conventionally held to be confirming evidence of the continuation of violent white bigotry and racism, are in fact disproportionately committed by blacks, who compose only 12 percent of the population, while whites, composing some 74 percent of the population, are underrepresented as “hate crime” perpetrators.
Aside from deliberate outrages against whites, the responsibility of non-whites for a legion of their own social failures and problems must be discussed if the “dialogue on race” is to have any real meaning. There is no need to repeat here the dreary statistics about black crime rates, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, venereal disease and AIDS rates, unemployment, and other indices of social failure and social dysfunctions, but it is increasingly implausible to blame all of them on whites. Nor do I mean to single out blacks. Hispanics also show similar but usually less dramatic indications of social failure and dysfunction. The teen-age illegitimacy rate among Hispanics (at 11 percent) now exceeds that of blacks (at 10 percent), and both exceed the illegitimacy rate for non-Hispanic white teenagers (4 percent). Hispanics are also more likely than blacks to fail to graduate from high school.
Taxpayers, particularly white middle-class taxpayers, are the ones who pay the public burden of these failures of non-whites, and they also are often the victims of black and other non-white crimes and social dysfunctions. In addition, of course, the fiscal burden and the administrative impact of civil rights enforcement, affirmative action, and other state-enforced privileges for non-whites are also borne by whites, especially white men. But on top of bearing most of the financial burden for public costs arising from these non-white dysfunctions, in addition to having to confront every day the physical danger of non-white violence and crime, and in addition to enduring the larger national social decomposition that non-white failures and dysfunctions cause, whites are now told chirpingly by their president that all racial bigotry is due to them and that the “dominant European culture,” by the norms of which most white Americans continue to abide, is going to come to an end and that he welcomes it.
The purpose of the president’s race initiative, then, whether manifested in his own words, in the actions of his advisory board, or in what the advisory board and the president fail to discuss or forbid to be discussed, is not “tolerance,” “diversity,” “harmony,” “equality,” or “justice.” The real purpose is to accommodate white Americans to the end of their culture and their dominance as a majority of the American nation and as the cultural core of the nation, and to manage their adjustment to the coming non-white dominance of the near future. The real issue of the president’s race initiative, then, is, as so many things are, a question of power — in this case, racial power.
White Americans today are confronted with the two most overwhelming facts of our time — first, the coming demographic transformation of American society from a majority white to a majority non-white society, and, secondly, the emergence of what can only be described as an explicit racial consciousness among non-whites that identifies whites as their enemies and oppressors, a racial consciousness that is encouraged and exploited and certainly seldom challenged by many whites themselves, whether liberal or conservative. This racial consciousness ranges in its expression from a mild but unquestioned assumption of non-white solidarity in conflict with whites to outright, militant hatred of whites, but whatever its form of expression, white Americans need to ask themselves what will be their fate as a white minority in a non-white society where the racial demonology created by non-whites prevails, and they need to think hard about the answers they reach.
White Americans also need to question and indeed reject the very premises of the president’s “dialogue” — that the racial and cultural transition to a non-white America is inevitable or desirable; that whites somehow possess a monopoly on racial bigotry, the perpetration of racial injustice, or racial consciousness and solidarity; and that it is morally incumbent on whites to alter their behavior, their culture, and their sense of moral and social responsibility in deference to non-white and often anti-white demands. If there is anything we as a nation have learned since the civil rights movement thirty years ago, it is that race is a reality, a natural as well as a cultural and social reality, and that the denial of racial realities that has been written into our laws, our public conduct, and our national public discourse is a denial of a major truth about human beings. Every other race and ethnic group in the United States has learned or is presently learning this truth, and only white Americans deny it, deny themselves their own racial consciousness, and deny the threats to their civilization and to their own safety that their denials invite. If we are to have a real dialogue on race, then let us have one, but let it be one in which white Americans engage only if they are able and willing to claim the identity and the heritage to which they have every right.
Dr. Francis is a syndicated columnist. This article is adapted from remarks he delivered on March 11, 1998 in New York City.
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Thunder on the Right
France is in an uproar as the Front National exercises its power.
For two weeks in March, France went through a multi-stage electoral process for local governments that set the country on its ear. Although the Front National (FN) improved its share of the vote by only one percent over the previous local elections in 1992, its 15 percent tally was enough to make it king-maker in many contests. For the first time since the front has been fielding candidates, prominent figures in the mainstream right made vote-sharing deals with it, sending the political and chattering classes into something approaching hysteria. Serious journalists have written about the “destruction of the [mainstream] right” and of “threats to French democracy.” When a racial-nationalist party wins votes, it is apparently such a threat to democracy that the other parties have banded together to discuss how to rig the electoral process in ways they think will cripple the front. So much for the will of the people.
French politics are of a uniquely Gallic complexity. Local elections are held every seven years both for regions (of which there are 22 on the French mainland) and for cantons (of which there are nearly 2,000). To begin with the regional elections, they are by single-round ballot, and parties win seats in proportion to their percentage of the vote — unlike the winner-take-all system in the United States. A few days after balloting, the 1,829 elected councilors of the 22 regions elect presidents of regions. Regions can be thought of as equivalent to American states, and the regional presidents are like governors.
This year, the FN won 3,270,000 votes, which lifted its tally of regional councilors to 275, compared to 239 seven years ago. The two essentially interchangeable “conservative” parties, the Union for French Democracy (UDF) and the Rally for the Republic (RPR), saw their combined number of councilors drop from 623 to 547, while the combined figure for Socialists and Communists rose from 433 to 543. Given the fragmentation of the vote (more than 20 different parties, including Greens and a Hunters and Fishers Party, won seats), there were only two regions in which either the left or the mainstream right won an outright majority. Thus, in 19 of the 22 regions, the front had enough seats to swing the vote for regional president to either the right or the left.
Before the elections, the mainstream right held the presidency of 20 of 22 regions, and if it had been willing to form coalitions with the FN, it could have held all these regions and perhaps even added another. Therefore, knowing that it could play kingmaker in so many regions, the front made what it considered “minimalist” demands in exchange for its votes for the election for regional president: It would support any candidate of the right who agreed to emphasize crime control, defend French cultural identity, and refuse to raise taxes. It asked for no commitment on immigration. If a candidate of the right would not accept this program, the FN councilors would vote for an FN regional president, thus splitting the conservative vote and allowing lefty coalitions to elect regional presidents — even if, together, the right and the FN had the combined votes to elect presidents of the right.
This proposal naturally left many UDF and RPR councilors licking their chops. The mayors of Nice, Cannes, and three other cities on the Riviera urged the parties of the right to “respect the electorate that by a majority wished that the region stay on the right,” that is, to work with the front rather than, once again, destroy themselves for the benefit of the left. The UDF, in particular, broke into virtual civil war over the issue, but the leaders of both “conservative” parties forbade any coalition-building with the front.
Philippe Seguin, leader of the RPR, which is the party of French President Jacques Chirac, said that cooperating with the FN would lead to a “moral, political and economic impasse.” President Chirac himself went further, saying that cooperation with the “racist and xenophobic” front would “risk damaging France, its values, its image.” The leader of the Socialists, Lionel Jospin, said cooperation would “be an attack on France’s image in Europe and the world,” and “a danger for our democratic life.” Pascal Perrineau, head of the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies, saw the issue in terms of power. He called the front’s minimalist offer “belly-dancing,” saying that its real message was “I seduce you, I embrace you to save your region, and then I choke you when your party explodes.”
The UDF very nearly did explode. Seven of its outgoing regional presidents accepted the FN’s conditions and were returned to office. Their logic could not have been clearer. As Jacques Blanc, who kept his seat as president of Languedoc-Rousillon explained, “You cannot govern this region with insults or by refusing to recognize reality.” François Mancel of the RPR, trying to win reelection as president of the Oise region, pointed out that the right “was gutted in the legislative elections . . . Must we do it again and again?” The most prominent of the UDF renegades was Charles Million, who had been defense minister from 1995 to 1997. Jacques Chirac personally telephoned to ask that he not work with the front but he defied the president.
This series of defections, in which the FN was treated like an ordinary party of the right, set up a terrific media din and was widely hailed as a sea change in French politics. Alain Genestar, editor ofJournal de Dimanche wrote: “The right of today is not capable of suppressing the extreme right. Nothing will be the same again.” The well-known political historian, René Rémond agreed: “From now on the political landscape might be organized around two poles: the Socialist party and its allies, against a Front National around which the debris of the moderate right will revolve.”
On the heels of these seven elections for regional president, FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen proposed a deal in two other very important regions, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (PACA) in the south, and Ile-de-France, which contains Paris. The latter had long been a stronghold of the right, and after the vote for councilors, the line-up was 86 on the left, 83 on the right, and 36 with the FN. Mr. Le Pen offered to have his councilors vote for the RPR candidate — without even proposing the “minimalist” demands — if the right would support his bid for president of PACA, where he was elected councilor. In this southern region the left had 49 seats versus an even split of 37 for the right and 37 for the front. After an orgy of denunciation and recrimination the right decided to walk the plank rather than work with the FN. The FN and the right therefore split the conservative vote in both regions, and the two presidencies went to the socialists.
Nor did the success in the seven other regions last very long. The UDF high command gave its renegades one week to resign their positions as regional president or be expelled from the party. In the face of tremendous pressure, two resigned immediately. Two others waffled for a day or two before returning to the fold. Three thumbed their noses at the party bosses and vowed to stay on as president, but not without making a point of distancing themselves from the front. In a particularly ungrateful attempt to parade his respectability, Charles Millon, the former defense minister, called Jean-Marie Le Pen a “fanatic, a 1920s fascist lost in our era.” He claimed that he could woo FN voters back to the mainstream right:
If we do not want to resolve this issue, we will see a real revolt . . . Those four or five million people who are worried, desperate and unhappy and often vote out of spite for the front will become 10 million. Some day we will have a presidential election with two candidates, one from the left and one from the far right.
There has been some confusion in the regions that lost their presidents. The Socialists profited from UDF timidity in Midi-Pyrenées and took the top job. In Bourgogne, the UDF man who resigned was reelected, once again with FN votes. This time he vowed to stay on. By early April the presidencies of the two other regions were still unfilled but the left seemed likely once again to profit from stupidity on the right.
After the high drama in the regions, the second round of the cantonal elections — which are less important anyway — was an anticlimax. The mainstream right failed to cooperate with the front, and lost ten of the 74 departments it held before the election. (There are 95 departments in all, composed of the 2,000 or so cantons, at which level the actual voting takes place.) The French press noted gloomily that in those cantons surrounding cities in which the front holds the mayor’s office, the front did particularly well. Those who have experienced FN rule seem to like it.
Over all, the left once again rode to victory while the right slit its own throat. Instead of holding on to its 20 mainland regions and perhaps even adding one, the right tossed several regional presidencies and ten departments into the hands of the left.
At this point it is not certain the UDF will survive as a political party. The seven defections — several of which appear to be permanent — have led some of its leaders to consider disbanding and trying to reformulate as a “center-right” party. The crack-up could well produce “debris” that drift towards the front.
Indeed, the front has shown that it is now at the epicenter of French politics, and it is not only potential allies who have noticed. In the region of Haute Normandie, when word got out that a UDF candidate was going to be voted in as president with the FN’s help, protesters actually invaded the hall where the vote was taking place. There have also been huge, anti-FN demonstrations all over the country. In Paris, 30,000 lefties marched through the streets, chanting “F as in Fascist, N as in Nazi. Down with the Front National.”
Recently, to a chorus of gloating on the left, Jean-Marie Le Pen himself was fined and given a suspended sentence because he got into a pushing match with opponents during the legislative elections last year. The court has stripped him of his right to hold office, but Mr. Le Pen has appealed the decision. He will continue as regional councilor and member of the European Parliament until a ruling is made on the appeal — perhaps in two years. This kind of harassment, from which politicians of any other party would probably be spared, only shows how much the establishment fears the front.
At the same time, even the most level-headed observers note that if only on a procedural basis, France faces a very serious political crisis: The more the French electorate votes for the right, the more power the left holds. This distortion of representative government cannot continue much longer. Contemptibly enough, the “conservative” reaction has been to try to rig the system. President Chirac has announced talks with the leaders of all the parties — except the front — to discuss ways to change the electoral system so as to keep the front out of office. He says France’s democratic values may not be compatible with a system of proportional representation that seems to give the front too much power.
The irony could not be more exquisite. When the front wins too many votes in a democratic election it becomes a “threat to democracy” and democracy must be tinkered with. At the same time, the socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin presides over a cabinet with two Communists in it. Of course, the Communists have been invited to President Chirac’s little get-together to discuss ways to thwart the democratic will of people who are so perverse as to vote for candidates who say “France for the French.”
What is happening now in France is one of the clearest examples of how thoroughly entrenched anti-white thinking has become, not just in the United States but around the world. The France of “liberty, equality, fraternity” considers itself one of the ramparts of democracy. Also, like their counterparts everywhere, French politicians will usually do just about anything to stay in office. That for fear of being thought “racist,” French “conservatives” will not only try to sabotage democracy but actually hand over political power to the left is an astounding commentary on the power of racial taboos.
As always seems to happen when the issue is racial nationalism, otherwise reasonable people completely jump the tracks. At this rate, it is not impossible to imagine a socialist or even “conservative” French government trying to annul the outcome of an election it didn’t like. If there is a threat to French democracy it is clearly not the Front National. It is the hysteria and hatred born of racial dogma that are a threat to the democratic expression of a people’s wishes.
| IN THE NEWS |
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O Tempora, O Mores!
Pledging Allegiance — to Which Flag?
A March 21st change to the Mexican constitution grants dual nationality to Mexicans. Previously, any Mexican who became a naturalized citizen of a foreign country was stripped of all rights as a Mexican. The change is retroactive, which means that virtually all Mexican-Americans — even those born in the United States — can regain their nationality, if they apply within five years. The new provisions grant dual nationality but not dual citizenship, the only difference being that dual nationals may not vote in Mexican elections or hold high political office. However, there are strong pressures to remove this distinction, and Mexican-Americans may be voting in Mexican elections by 2000. This could turn the American Southeast into an important electoral battle ground for Mexican politicians.
There are two aspects of the new law that Mexican-Americans care about particularly. One is that they will be able to own property and make investments in Mexico without the restrictions placed on foreigners. Many will now buy retirement homes in Mexico and spend their American social security there. Dual nationality also removes the final reservations many Mexicans may have had about naturalization.
As Leticia Quezada, a Los Angeles school board member explains, “I never stopped feeling Mexican. I have become a United States citizen because this is where I live, where I have made my professional life. I have made a commitment, but it’s sort of an intellectual commitment, whereas emotionally I’m Mexican. I want to be Mexican. I feel very close to the country of my birth.” The INS expects a surge in applications for U.S. citizenship now that Mexicans can retain their ancestral nationality and most of its privileges.
Elsewhere, the Dominican Republic plans to let Dominicans living in America vote in its elections in 2000. Fernando Mateo, a businessman from the Bronx who has lived 35 of his 40 years in the U.S. says, “what I want to focus on is making my country [Dominican Republic] the best country in the world.” The recently elected president of South Korea, Kim Dae-jung has promised to extend dual citizenship to Koreans living in America.
According to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling, naturalized U.S. citizens who swear an oath renouncing allegiance to other countries are not legally bound by it. The oath is retained only for its “symbolic value.” (Jonathan Tilove, Rise of the ‘Ampersand American’, San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 15, 1998, p. A-17. James F. Smith, Mexico’s Dual Nationality Opens Doors, L. A. Times, March 20, 1998.)
Different Values
David Abernathy III is a black Georgia state senator who represents a black district in Atlanta. He was recently arrested for possession of marijuana. State representative Bill Clark, who is white, recently wrote a guest editorial for the Augusta Chronicle, explaining why he will not try to impeach Mr. Abernathy:
It seems to me that representatives are sent to Atlanta to represent the values of the people who sent them. Sen. Abernathy does this. His people in downtown Atlanta, however, have different values from ours. If given a chance, they would legalize marijuana tomorrow. They see marijuana laws as ‘white man’s laws.’ I can vote to try to force north Georgia morals on Sen. Abernathy, but we may start something we can’t stop. White middle class Americans will soon become a minority. I don’t want Sen. Abernathy trying to force Atlanta morals on us.
Get rid of Sen. Abernathy and, unless there is a change in their value system, they will send another just like him.
(Rep. Bill Clark, Different Values: a Question of Principle, Augusta Chronicle, Feb. 11, 1998, p. 5A.)
Ethnic Cleansing
Hawaiian Gardens is a mostly Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles County that seems to be driving out its black residents. Black children complain they are picked on in school and that Mexican gangs attack them. After three recent racially-based murders and a spate of assaults, blacks are leaving. Melinda Harris left the neighborhood after her son was thrown through a window by Mexican gang members and nearly killed. She says, “If there is one thing I could tell black people still living there, it’s ‘Get out as soon as you can.’”
Measures to stop violence and “celebrate diversity” have failed. A multicultural fair drew only four blacks, and a series of interracial dialogues never materialized because not enough people were interested. Many Hispanic officials are not willing to admit there is a racial problem while some Mexicans are proud to be running blacks out.
A 21-year-old gang member says, “Three [murders] ain’t that much. Believe me there should be a lot more dead ones.” Another Mexican claims, “Niggers come here thinking they’re gonna take over, but there ain’t no blacks here and there never will be.” Others claim they are only acting in self-defense, “Blacks don’t give a f***. They see a Mexican with new shoes, they go after him and try to steal them from him.” (Ron Russell and Victor Mejia, City of Fear, New Times (Los Angeles), Feb. 12-18, 1998, p.13.)
Seeing the Light
Syndicated columnist Charley Reese seems to have woken up to a few basic facts. In a recent column he notes that “[diversity] is a breeder of perpetual conflict. There’s no nation on earth with a diverse, multicultural population that is politically stable, democratic and prosperous.”
He also goes on to say that:
America is already experiencing an undeclared race war . . . The world is a graveyard of once powerful and prosperous nations and empires. Unequal distribution of wealth, of resources, of opportunity, is, always has been, and always will be a fact of life.
European-derived people seem to have lost the will to survive. Biologist Garrett Hardin has said, ‘The politicization of universalism by Western elites and their legal and social institutions . . . has deluded many European-derived people into believing that it is immoral to survive as a distinct group. As a result they can find no reason to resist the Third World flood inundating the West.’
I believe we are now at the point where the ruling class will have to be replaced or we will proceed into the gloomy and dismal future where their false beliefs and bad actions are taking us.
(Charley Reese, The Ruling Class Can Ruin Us All, King Features Syndicate, Dec. 15, 1997.)
Frederica Massiah-Jackson is a black judge in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. In January, President Clinton proposed her as a judge for the federal Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Judge Massiah-Jackson has been known to scream profanity at lawyers arguing cases before her, and she has twice denied that abdominal gunshot wounds constitute “serious injury.” Once she urged defendants to “take a good look at the faces” of undercover police officers who were testifying against them and “to be careful out there.” Judge Massiah-Jackson denied saying this until transcripts were produced. Judge Massiah-Jackson once broke into tears after a jury found a man guilty of raping a 10-year old girl saying, “It’s not that I think the rape didn’t occur, but five years is a lot of time.” She has imposed only one harsh sentence during her tenure of more than ten years, explaining that it was because the defendant was a “Caucasian.” Opposition to Judge Massiah-Jackson eventually became so strong that in March she withdrew from consideration. (Mona Charen, Here’s President Clinton’s Idea of a Fine Judge, Augusta Chronicle, March 16, 1998, p. 4A.)
Publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary have received more than 2,000 letters and calls from people complaining about its definition of the word “nigger.” In accordance with its usual practice, it starts with the oldest definition, “a black person.” In its usage note it goes on to say that the word is “perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English” and is “expressive of racial hatred and bigotry,” but some middle-class blacks don’t want the word in the dictionary at all. In the face of a threatened boycott of its products, the 150-year-old publisher has appointed a committee to review how it defines offensive words. (Trudy Tynan, AP, Censorship or Sensitivity? March 17, 1998.)
Chickens Home to Roost
A Miami federal judge has ruled that the city discriminated against 105 non-black police officers in 1992 when it promoted unqualified blacks. Judge James Kehoe ordered the city to promote the officers and to give them $2 million in back pay. Gary Eugene, a Haitian officer, was promoted despite finishing 107th out of 114 on the promotion exam. The city claimed the promotions were necessary to ease racial tensions in the city. (AP, Judge: Miami to Give Cops Back Pay, March 18, 1998.)
A federal jury in Ohio has awarded $122,000 to a journalism teacher who claimed he was denied a job because he is white. When he applied for a position at Bowling Green State University in 1994 he was passed over in favor of a black woman with less teaching and publishing experience. John Hartman noted that the woman hired before him was then paid out of something called the Minority Enhancement Fund, which was set up to increase the number of non-white professors. (Jeffrey Selingo, Jury Backs Professor Who Says He Was Denied a Job Because He Is White, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 1998.)
Reginald Denny is the truck driver who was nearly killed by black rioters during the 1992 Rodney King post-verdict riots in Los Angeles. He later embraced the mother of one of his assailants and excused their behavior because of the hard times they had faced. He now thinks racism was to blame for his beating — but racism on the part of the police, not the rioters. He and three other whites who were attacked have filed a $40 million suit against the city of Los Angeles, claiming that police did not quell the riots because they did not care what was going on in the non-white parts of town. Police “racism” therefore left them at the mercy of angry blacks. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering the case. (Minerva Canto, AP, Judge: Riot Beatings Not Racial, March 2, 1998.)
President William Clinton has been running around Africa apologizing for slavery, but Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni says he needn’t bother. “African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them,” he said. “If anyone should apologize it should be the African chiefs.” As for the view that the American President should make some kind of public atonement for slavery, Mr. Museveni says, “I don’t have time for that diversion or rubbish.” He notes that some Africans who were sent off to the New World were lucky because they would otherwise have been killed in tribal wars. (Nicholas Kotch, Reuters, No Need for Clinton Apology, March 26, 1998. AP, Museveni: Slavery Was Also the Fault of Africans, April 1, 1998.)
Of course, if Mr. Clinton had really wanted to denounce slavery he didn’t have far to look. Ever since Sudan became independent in 1956, there has been intermittent rebellion by the Christian-animist blacks in the south against the Muslim Arabs in the north who run the country. The fighting has been more or less continuous for the past 14 years, and an estimated 1.5 million people have died from war, famine, and disease. The Muslim government in Khartoum considers counter-insurgency a jihad, or holy war, and lets its fighters treat the black rebels entirely as they please. Government militias therefore take their pay in loot and slaves, robbing older blacks, killing young men, and taking women and children as slaves. The human booty goes north, where an estimated 10,000 blacks are held as slaves. They are chattel and can be killed, mutilated, bartered, or sold. A Swiss charity called Christian Solidarity International buys and frees slaves in Sudan, but some critics say its efforts only drive up the price and create greater incentives for raiders. (Karin Davies, AP, Slave Trade Fed by Sudan’s Civil War, Feb. 8, 1998.)
The Elusive Truth
Conservatives have often argued that opinion polls understate conservative views because people are afraid to voice dissent from prevailing liberalism. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press recently tried to see if this is true. They compared the results of a standard telephone survey with those of a more “rigorous” one, in which the people who refused to participate by telephone were contacted in person. The researchers claim that for the most part the opinions reported were the same — with one exception. “The Pew experiment suggests that accurately measuring racial antagonisms may be a problem in all survey research,” the report said.
The study found, for example, that in the “rigorous” survey, 64 percent of the whites said that if blacks can’t get ahead it is their own fault, with 26 percent blaming racial discrimination. In the more informal survey, the split was 56-31. Of course, neither approach takes into consideration the possibility that the results would move even further on racial questions if respondents could be anonymous. (AP, Study: Polls Include Conservatives, March 27, 1998.)
Thanks to Hispanic immigration, the American Catholic church is being transformed. The change is most apparent in Los Angeles, where an estimated 70 percent of Catholics are Hispanic and 60 percent speak Spanish at home. Proficiency in Spanish is a requirement for graduation from seminaries in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and in Los Angeles, Spanish masses are better attended than masses in English.
In parishes where Hispanics are starting to take over from older whites, “there are basically two churches that share the same building but are not a community,” notes John Coleman, a religious sociologist at Loyola Marymount University. Many whites move away from such parishes, and contributions drop. Some priests do not like the Aztec practices Hispanics incorporate into their worship or their habit of caressing and speaking to religious statues.
The transformation has political ramifications. Bishops in California were very active in opposing ballot initiatives to discourage immigration and abolish affirmative action, and the church is an increasingly strong voice for expanded welfare programs. But churchmen are only playing to their new constituencies the way politicians do. As one priest explains, “If you want a growing church, work with the immigrants. The Spanish-speaking masses are full, full, full, and the Anglo ones are dying.” (Anne-Marie O’Connor, Los Angeles Times, Church’s New Wave of Change, March 25, 1998.)
Calling a Spade a Spade
The following letter, which we reprint verbatim and in toto, appeared in the Jan-March edition of BBC Focus On Africa:
I have been in this world for almost 35 years. During my lifetime, we have become used to describing African countries as ‘developing.’ But I don’t think that in all my years I’ve seen any development on this continent that is worth writing about. If anything, we are seeing the destruction of what was achieved during the early years of our independence. The only countries in the world that deserve to be called “developing” are those in the Far East, which have made giant strides. In Africa, the only country undergoing meaningful development is South Africa. Elsewhere, the infrastructure is falling apart. Anybody who has been away from Nairobi for the last 20 years would think they were in hell if they were to return today. Why deceive ourselves that we are developing when we are degenerating? Let’s call a spade a spade. (Kenya Gatunda, Underdevelopment, BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, Jan-March 1998, p. 62.)
Trooping the Colors
The 900-strong Household Cavalry are the Queen of England’s personal guard. They ride magnificent horses and wear plumed helmets and red tunics, but they are all white. Even the Prince of Wales has noticed and complained. In 1996, the Commission for Racial Equality officially concluded that the unit was guilty of “institutional racism.” In 1990, the Household Cavalry got its first black recruit, but he quit after what was reported to be insufferable racial abuse. The only incident noted in the press was that a fellow trooper once tossed a banana at him during a drill.
Since the Commission for Racial Equality reached its devastating conclusion, the unit’s officers have advertised in foreign-language newspapers, scoured inner-city employment centers, and even sent the men to play sports against black teams. They have even considered hiring an American black to help guard the queen. Still no black faces. “We have invested massive resources . . . (but) they are not coming through as quickly as we would like,” says Col. Simon Falkner who commands the horsemen.
The Household Cavalry is part of the 3,500-man Household Division, which has only 24 black or Asian men in service or in training. In march, the division commander, Gen. Evelyn Webb-Carter ordered his officers, who come mostly from the upper-class, to recruit 200 black or Asian soldiers within 2-1/2 years. (Maureen Johnson, Queens Guards Recruit Minorities, AP, March 26, 1998.)
Register for the ConferenceThis issue should contain registration materials for the AR conference to be held in Northern Virginia over the week end of Aug. 28-30. We have reduced rates for early registrants so please do not delay. If you need more information please call us at (703) 716-0900. |
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — I have never had a high regard for the French. I have had some professional contact with them, and generally found that they fit all the anti-French stereotypes: they are arrogant, self-absorbed frog-eaters who will make a pass at your wife if given half a chance. Not since Napoleon have they fielded an army worth the name.
However, I am tremendously impressed by the work of Jean-Marie Le Pen as reported in the April issue of AR. Here is a man who clearly has seen the demographic threat to our people and culture, and who has devoted his life to fighting the forces that are bringing us down. No one in the United States even begins to approach him in dedication or success. I would never have thought it would be the frogs who take the lead in the struggle to save Western Civilization, but it sounds as though they deserve our heartfelt thanks and respect. They face the same opponents we do but they — unlike us — are really beginning to fight back.
I never dreamed I would ever end a letter with: Vive la France!
Alan Todd, Muldrow, Ok.
Sir — Jared Taylor hints that the FN may one day govern France. I would love for this to happen, but I believe the French armed forces would be ordered in to prevent it. Perhaps troops from other European countries — maybe even the U.S. would be called in to “protect democracy.” Leftists love democracy only when it gives them power.
Name Withheld, Toronto, Canada
Sir — I was tremendously encouraged by your report on the Front National and its increasing successes. At the same time, what is happening in France is evidence of the incredible strength of suicidal liberalism. The front has now elected hundreds of candidates to office and even governs three cities in southern France. Its leaders have shown themselves to be sober, responsible men (and women). Their message is the clearest sort of common sense. And yet the press and the rest of the political establishment continue to treat them like lepers.
Usually, it does not take long for success to open all doors. No matter how vulgar or ill-bred, the rich rise in society. Political power likewise wins friends and respectability. People are willing to do business even with Communists once they are in office. But the moral quarantine of the Front National continues year after year. There could be no stronger testimonial to how deeply self-hatred has been pounded into today’s whites.
Charles Cuneo, Salt Lake City, Utah
Sir — I read with great interest your April O Tempora account of the South African woman who is appealing for refugee status. In Australia, claiming that she is a victim of racial persecution. Whatever the merits of her individual case, I feel sure that genuine, large-scale persecution of whites in that country is only a matter of time. Within a decade or so I predict hundreds of thousands of white South Africans will be streaming out of the country with only the clothes on their backs. People who are staying now because they cannot take their wealth outside the country will consider themselves lucky to get out alive.
What position will your American INS take when that happens? Will it treat them as victims of persecution or reject them as “racists” who would contaminate America. I can almost imagine the Congressional debates.
Name Withheld, Birmingham, England
Sir — I have read The Menace of Multiculturalism, which was reviewed in the last issue. James Lubinskas gives it only a qualified endorsement because it does not take the AR position on race, but I think it belongs in the same category as Alien Nation, and The End of Racism. These books, like The Menace of Multiculturalism, were written by mainstream conservatives with solid qualifications, who explicitly place Western Civilization above the barbarism and squalor of the Third-World. They helped start debate in their respective fields. Hopefully, Prof. Schmidt’s book will do the same.
Charles Bradley, Mobile, Ala.
Sir — In his review of Scalp Dance, Steven Schwamenfeld quotes the following description of what life was like for a plains Indian woman: “She is bought and sold; wife, mother, and pack animal, joined in one hideous and hopeless whole.” This has, of course, been the status of women in virtually all non-Western societies, and certainly in all primitive societies. It is only among whites that sentiments such as chivalry or gallantry took root, and their origins are ancient. Tacitus himself writes of the high status of women among the Germanic tribes and marvels that men of even the highest status content themselves with only one wife. “Wife, mother, and pack animal.” Such is the station of women in most of Africa, Asia, and South America. And this is why it so amuses me when “feminists” promote multiculturalism and cultural relativism. I have come to take a certain pleasure in the hypocrisy with which they ignore or even extol practices they would abominate if they could find white people guilty of them.
Carla Fittipaldi, Phillipsburg, N.J.