Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Send African migrants to Australia?

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

MK Danny Danon (Likud) asked Australian MP Michael Danby on Wednesday to propose, in parliament in Canberra, sending African migrants from Israel to Australia.
Danon and Danby discussed the issue during the Australian politician’s visit to Israel for the World Jewish Congress’s International Conference of Jewish Parliamentarians.
“The arrival of thousands of Muslim infiltrators to Israeli territory is a clear threat to the state’s Jewish identity,” Danon told The Jerusalem Post.
“The refugees’ place is not among us, and the initiative to transfer them to Australia is the right and just solution.
“On the one hand, it treats the refugees and migrants in a humane way. On the other hand, it does not threaten Israel’s future and our goal to maintain a clear and solid Jewish majority,” he explained.
Danon said Danby enthusiastically agreed to present the idea to the Australian Parliament.
Danby was not available for comment, however, as he was in-flight on his way back to Australia.
According to the Knesset’s Research and Information Center, there were 35,638 migrants in Israel as of May.
Fewer than 1 percent are recognized by the UN as refugees.
Some 61% of the migrants – 21,748 people – are Eritrean, however, and categorized as members of a “temporary humanitarian protection group” by the UN, because they cannot be returned safely to their home country due to internal strife.
“Since Australia has a policy of accepting refugees and groups under protection, I would appreciate it if you could promote a solution in which Australia would accept those who seeking refuge,” Danon wrote in a letter to the MP from Melbourne following their meeting.

Yeah, why would Australia want to keep its cohesion? How could Australia not benefit from thousands of low-IQ black and Muslim immigrants?

Posted in Australia, Immigration | Comments Off

Immigration Vs National Projects

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The last time America restricted immigration, it also had the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Great Society. But for some reason, progressives are unable to see the connection between ethnic homogeneity and the feasibility of progressive projects, or of any national projects really.

Washington Post:

But Sanders is on sound historical ground when he asserts that a permanent policy of open borders would have consequences that progressives would come to regret. It is a sad constant of human, and American, history that the solidarity needed to build workers’ organizations and social benefits waxes when people can overcome the divisions of ethnicity and tradition and wanes when they can’t. As Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen documents in “Making a New Deal,” her study of Chicago workers in the decades between the world wars, those workers’ efforts to form industrial unions in 1919 failed in large degree due to divisions between the various immigrant communities, and between them and the native-born. Their efforts succeeded, however, in the late 1930s, once those immigrants and their children had been in the United States long enough to forge a more common culture with other immigrant and native-born groups. It’s not that those groups had abandoned their traditional identities, but, with the federal government all but shutting down immigration in 1924, the pull of tradition and the effects of ethnic insulation were no longer continually renewed. Indeed, one of the most sobering facts of U.S. history is that the great social legislation of the New Deal and its successors came forth during the 40-year period (1924-65) when a federal ban on most immigration reduced the percentage of foreign-born Americans to an all-time low.

It’s also true that the nations with the most extensive social rights and benefits, and the highest levels of social and economic equality, have been the Scandinavian social democracies — and that, as these nations have become home to immigrants from developing nations and refugees from the world’s war zones in recent years, they’ve each seen right-wing nativist parties spring up and claim between 15 and 20 percent of the vote.

* Before the first real non-British immigration of 1850, this country had already worked out the first high-speed transportation (the train) and high-speed communication (the telegraph). We had defeated a world power twice, settled half a continent, and were heading to Japan’s shores. Not bad for a lack of vibrancy.

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Steve Sailer: People Who Think They Are Not White: Rabbi Tells Jews to Cut Up Their White Privilege Cards

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: Individuals respond to incentives, so it’s not surprising to observe an ongoing Flight from White currently.

This is in contrast to the Flight Toward White in the mid-20th Century. For example, the Census Bureau didn’t separately count Hispanics / Latinos / Mexicans in the 1950 and 1960 Censuses in response to the League of United Latin American Citizens’ contention that it would be better for them to just be officially classified as white.

Now, of course, the Census Bureau laboriously classifies Hispanics as its own Ethnicity. (Nobody else gets an Ethnicity, just Hispanics.) This 1970-2010 Census ploy allows Latinos to get the benefits of affirmative action while also allowing individuals to assert their racial whiteness (because that means a lot to many Hispanics). In the future, it would not be surprising if the Census Bureau promotes Hispanics to their own race.

Other groups want in on the action, too. For example, Arab-American pressure groups are pushing the Census Bureau to count “Middle Eastern / North African” individuals separately from whites on the 2020 Census.

And now, from an op-ed in the Washington Post:

Jews in America struggled for decades to become white. Now we must give up whiteness to fight racism.
Let’s teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.
By Gil Steinlauf September 22
Gil Steinlauf is the senior rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C.

Steinlauf is a modestly influential rabbi from a mid-range point on the spectrum. Here’s a 2014 article in The Atlantic by the Atlantic’s well-known ethnocentrist correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg:

When Your Rabbi Comes Out as Gay
Or, we live in remarkable times
JEFFREY GOLDBERG OCT 6, 2014
A few days ago, I posted a piece about my rabbi, Gil Steinlauf, the senior rabbi of Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C., the largest Conservative movement-affiliated synagogue in the nation’s capital. The post concerned an excellent Rosh Hashanah sermon he had delivered about Israel and Hamas.
It turns out that there was a lot more on Rabbi Steinlauf’s mind during the High Holidays than just the Middle East. This afternoon, he e-mailed his thousands of congregants to announce that he and his wife, Batya, a respected rabbi in her own right, were getting divorced, because he has come to the realization that he is gay.
There is sadness here, of course, because Gil and Batya have had, in many ways, a good, even model, marriage (their three children are testament to this), but there is also relief, and anxiety, and most of all a leap into the unknown.

Rabbi Steinlauf’s op-ed goes on:

At the start of a new year, Jews in America should consider their place in our country’s racist social constructs.
Adapted from a Rosh Hashanah sermon delivered at Adas Israel Congregation.
This summer, I had a conversation with a young woman about her Jewish identity. She told me how she grew up in a family that was very involved in her synagogue. She went to Jewish day school. She had been to Israel multiple times. But she felt very far from her Jewishness. She simply couldn’t find the relevance of Judaism as she was making her way on her own in the world. I asked her what she did feel passionate about. She told me she has been reading and thinking a lot about racial justice. What moved her was the #BlackLivesMatter movement — how, in light of Ferguson, Charleston and seemingly endless incidents of injustice against black people in our society, she felt a need to grapple with the racism that is so pervasive in this country and how it affects her identity.
“As a white woman,” she said, “as the product of so much white privilege, it makes me all the more angry to see how other white people so blindly and carelessly feed into the racial climate of our society.” “So the fact that you are white makes this issue all the more painful, all the more personal for you?” I asked. “Yes,” she said.
I certainly identified with her angst. I find the reality of American racism unbearable: the legacy of slavery; the institutional discrimination that is so pervasive; the scourge of mass incarceration of black Americans, with its collateral damage on families; the ongoing blight of housing segregation; the role of law enforcement in furthering racist systems and hierarchies; all this, and so much more. My answer to her, and my answer for all American Jews during these Days of Awe, is that finding our true Jewish identity can begin by questioning our whiteness.
In a flawed and racist society, we Jewish Americans are prospering, reaching the top echelons of privilege and power. With racism and injustice entrenched year after year, generation after generation, we must now ask ourselves: What role do we play in that injustice now that most of us live as white people in America? We must cease to consider ourselves to be part of the social construct of whiteness, despite all the white privilege that America affords us, privilege that eluded many of our parents and grandparents. Starting in this new year of 5776, we must teach our children that we are, in fact, not white, but simply Jewish.
The great blessing and promise of America to our ancestors was that it was a land of opportunity, where we are all recognized as equal, where nothing, not even the heavens, is beyond our reach. We all know that the saga of Jews in America is a stunning success story. Our success here is built on the efforts of the first generations of American Jews who struggled mightily to assimilate — to slough off the ways of the old country, to out-American the Americans. In many ways, today it’s difficult for us to appreciate how remarkable this success is.
Well into the 20th century, we Jews were barred from the whitest country clubs.

Have I ever mentioned that obsessing over country clubs is like … a Thing?

We couldn’t buy houses in the whitest neighborhoods.

I grew up on the wrong side of the hills from a neighborhood called Beverly Hills, so I guess that gives me a bizarre, offbeat perspective on what America was like in the past because who else ever heard of a place called “Beverly Hills?”

Even today, some of us remember being called anti-Semitic names, having pennies thrown at us or being beaten up because we are Jewish. But that young woman I spoke with this summer, and most of her young adult Jewish peers today, can hardly fathom being singled out, being treated as “other,” because of their Jewishness. And the main reason why anti-Semitism is no longer mainstream in our society is because sometime in the last half century, we convinced America that we, too, are white.

Who can forget how Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin was unmasked as Jewish in 1863 and instantly sold into slavery? And of course there were those shocking incidents in apartheid South Africa when it was discovered that the ownership of the De Beers diamond monopoly wasn’t white. And there was the complete box office flop in 1927 of the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, because its star, Al Jolson, wasn’t white. Remember how Queen Victoria told Disraeli, “You’d be my favorite Prime Minister, except you aren’t white”?

All those years of singular focus on making it in America paid off!
These days, the country clubs and exclusive neighborhoods are as Jewish as they are WASPy.

Somebody alert Matthew Weiner!

… The brilliance of being Jewish, though, is that we stubbornly refuse to fit into any social construct of power or oppression. We are simply Ivri’im, people from “somewhere else,” people who struggle with God and justice, who demand that the rest of the world does, too, and see every human life as sacred because we are all in the image of God. And the truth is, we have never belonged to one race alone. The Torah tells us that we left Egypt with the “erev rav,” with a mixed multitude of peoples. Around the world there are Jews of color, Asian Jews, Jews of all kinds. The idea that Jews are white is not only ridiculous, it’s offensive to who we really are!

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The eternal question: Is it good for the Jews?

Is it good for the Jews to be white in 2015 America? No. Alright then, let’s figure out a way to convince people that we’re not white.

No more complicated than that.

Of course, I’d argue that Jewish leaders aren’t playing a particularly smart long game, but, hey, I’m just some goy so what do I know.

* One of the most telling phrases in life is ‘everyone loves a winner’ and the converse – nobody loves a loser – is equally true. The ‘flight from white’ can be explained in those terms.

* John F. Kennedy was attacked by Protestant ministers as a Papist, so in his 1960 Houston speech to the ministers, he defended himself as first and foremost an American.

It seemed to work out okay for him.

Major Dreyfus’s enemies attacked him as a Jew and his supporters, such as Zola and Clemenceau, defended him as a Frenchman. The Dreyfusards eventually won a huge victory, both in terms of symbolism and policy.

Daniel O’Connell referred to Benjamin Disraeli as a Jew in Parliament, and the future Prime Minister defended himself by, more or less, attacking the Irish as bog-ignorant potato-heads.

“Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

* What one needs to understand about Jews is that their shell game is all based on identity.

All that confusing “Is it a race?” “Is it a religion?” “Is it a culture”, “Is it both?, all boils down to identity.

The Jewish identity is *one big country club* based on identity. That’s the irony. That’s why they get their shit so torn up on the subject and why they go to great lengths to destroy everyone else’s.

All their rituals are self-reinforcing markers for in-group identity.

They aren’t a race, they aren’t a religion, they aren’t a culture.

They are a mutually serving, externally exploiting, self-identifying in-group of parasites. That’s all that they are.

You can’t say that publicly of course. But that’s what it is. Everyone who has a critical brain knows it.

Have you not noticed that *everything*, and I mean *everything* these days is about identity?

* Yes, everything is about identity – and if you ask me it’s no coincidence.
The general population is meant to fight amongst themselves, in order to not direct their anger and critique upwards. We’re meant to look at ourselves, and our fellow citizens, in terms of race, gender and religion — even though most of those qualities play a marginal role in everyday life — to prevent us all from realizing we’re ALL being screwed over by the joint financial/political establishment. Divide and conquer.
Truth is, and always has been, that those abstract qualities in a person mean very little compared to one’s material wealth.
And leftists — as usual — are the ones who most sheepishly swallow this false narrative because it appeals to their simplistic world view (blacks versus whites, women versus men, good versus evil).
The truth is, gender/racial/religious discrimination has probably never been less prevalent than it is today — whereas economic injustice has never been more prevalent in relation to the total wealth.
I’m not sure it was deliberate, but either way identity politics has got to be the most ingenious tool ever created by neoliberals — it essentially converted all leftist opposition to collaborators.

* Anyone who has worked in heavy industry for the last 20 years knows that the worst thing you can be is a straight, white, anglo, Christian, able-bodied male. For each one of those you are not, there is money and promotion to be had. The new king of the hill is something like a crippled black or brown lesbian Wiccan.

* Being an outsider is fun. Hate is an energizing thing. Being aggrieved gives you the de facto upper hand.

It’s terrible to be the assumed majority. Majority means oppressor. And that’s no fun.

* The new king of the hill in the KKK Crazy Glue Coalition Of The Democratic Party Fringes is either being a Black Hispanic like Juan Williams, a Black Muslim like Ahmed the clock boy, or a Black World War T like Laverne Cox.

For affirmative action purposes, it really pays to be double or even triple a Minority. Juan Williams can play both the Hispanic victim card and the Black victim card. Ahmed can play both the Muslim victim card and the Black victim card. Laverne Cox can play both the Transgender victim card and the Black victim card.

Posted in Jews, Whites | Comments Off

Meanwhile, In Sweden

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Meanwhile in Sweden:

“In Sweden’s Ikea attack, two migrants, two slayings and rampant fear of refugees” reads one headline

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/29/in-swedens-ikea-attack-two-migrants-two-murders-and-rampant-fear-of-refugees/

Another story on the same attack: “‘Mad’ stabbings turn Ikea store in Sweden into a house of horrors”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/11/mad-stabbings-turn-ikea-store-in-sweden-into-a-house-of-horrors/

According to the Post:

Immigration, in particular, has become a touchy subject in Sweden, a country that has long prided itself on its tolerance. Germany, France and Sweden have combined to accept a majority of the asylum-seekers flooding into Europe from Africa and the Middle East.

This rise in asylum-seekers has spurred a backlash in Sweden. Last year, the far-right Sweden Democrats party became the third-largest in parliament after pushing for a crackdown on crime and immigration.

“It’s always people from other countries that do these things,” Jorgen Grubb, Sweden Democrats chairman in Malmo, told Reuters after the recent grenade attacks. “What Malmo needs is to put up a red stop sign.”

Statistics don’t show a significant rise in crime, however. Sweden, a country of almost 10 million, reported only 87 instances of lethal violence last year, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. That number is roughly the same as over the previous decade.

In Vasteras, police fear that Monday’s attack could unleash reprisals against immigrants.

Revenge attacks are possible but not likely, said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College.

“There is a rising climate of intolerance and even some acts of violence against E.U. migrants. We’ve seen that,” he told The Post in a phone interview. “And yes, some right-wing forces may try to exploit [today’s attack], but I think the Swedish public is sensible enough … to understand the circumstances.”

Posted in Europe, Immigration, Islam, Sweden | Comments Off

Daily Caller: Kamala Harris demands ‘opportunity … open to everyone’ — but had special career help from powerful boyfriend

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

DailyCaller.com from 2012:

Addressing the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night in Charlotte, N.C., California Attorney General Kamala Harris told a crowd of 20,000 that she wants an “America where opportunity is open to everyone … where everyone plays by the same set of rules.” The first big boost to her career, however, came not because of her legal prowess but because her boyfriend was California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen once called Harris “the Speaker’s new steady.” He went on to become the first black mayor of San Francisco.
As Brown’s time as speaker drew to a close in 1994, he named Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that came with a $72,000 annual salary. Brown had previously appointed her to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.
She “was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.

It seems that sleeping her way to the top is not Kamala’s favorite conversation gambit. She prefers to whine about growing up in racist Stanford and Berkeley.

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald J. Harris, met as graduate students at UC Berkeley. They divorced when Harris was 5.
“My Indian mother knew she was raising two black daughters,” said Harris, whose birth in 1964 came two weeks before Californians voted to allow racial discrimination in housing. “But that’s not to the exclusion of who I am in terms of my Indian heritage.”
Steeped in Indian culture, Harris and her sister, Maya, now a civil rights lawyer and senior policy advisor to Hillary Rodham Clinton, visited family in Madras on occasion. Harris remembers Aretha Franklin’s gospel rendition of “Young, Gifted and Black” as a soundtrack of her youth in a black middle-class neighborhood in the flats of Berkeley. Her parents often joined civil rights protests.
“I grew up going to a black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple,” Harris recalled as she sipped an iced soy latte at a Berkeley coffee house.
On weekends, the girls would visit their father in Palo Alto, where he was an economics professor at Stanford University.
“The neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with us because we were black,” Harris said. “We’d say, ‘Why can’t we play together?’ ‘My parents — we can’t play with you.’ In Palo Alto. The home of Google.”
Harris tells crowds that even liberal Berkeley waited nearly two decades before carrying out the Supreme Court’s 1954 mandate to desegregate public schools. Her elementary school class in the 1970s was only the second one to integrate Berkeley schools with busing, she recalled.
Harris spent her high-school years in Montreal, where her mother worked as a breast cancer researcher at a McGill University hospital. After Howard University, Harris got her law degree at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

The Los Angeles Times does not bother to get other sources to back up her tales of oppression. Count me as skeptical about some of her stories of suffering. You really think kids in Palo Alto would not play with black kids?

In my childhood, the only people who thought it was ok to hate people purely on the basis of race were blacks. I never recall anyone from my childhood even say the idea that we can’t play with black kids.

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Nationalism Vs Multiculturalism

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* “Seventy two years after Nazi Germany recruited Muslim refugees to serve as Waffen SS stormtroopers, memories still linger of the deadly combination of Teutonic fascism and military-age Muslim men.”

* Jewish activist Anetta Kahane wants to destroy Europe via non-European immigration.

She, like so many Jews, say Europe cannot work or survive unless it goes multi-culti, but being small and nationalist seems to work for Israel.

* There are tons of non-Jewish whites calling for the exact same thing and tons of Jews calling for the exact same thing in Israel. The Jewish hypocrisy of ethnic sovereignty for me but not for thee is real but is small.

The bigger hypocrisy is the left-wing doctrine that every other major ethno-religious group are allowed to keep their ethnic identity and sovereignty except whites. This group should tone down the Jewish criticism on this front and focus on this broader hypocrisy which is more accurate and more easy to communicate.

* Australia and Israel were founded or settled by extra-hardy men.

Convicts and terrorist-refugees.

They know what it means to take. What you take can be taken away.

A thief is more aware that what is now ‘his’ can be stolen by someone else.

* Heed the voice crying in the wilderness, “Gradually, then suddenly!”

How did the Western Empire, the greatest legal, social, cultural and martial edifice the world has ever seen, fall? Gradually, then suddenly. How did Constantinople, the cultured, cosmopolitan jewel of the Earth, fall? Gradually, then suddenly.

The Austro-Hungarian empire and glorious, Classical Liberal Europe? Gradually, then suddenly.

The Soviet Union? Gradually, then suddenly.

Assad’s Syria? Gradually, then suddenly.

How did the only State in human history to explicitly found itself on Anglo-Saxon ideals of inalienable rights and lex rex fall? It uprooted Tradition. It enacted universal suffrage. It worshipped Mammon. It imported millions of people hostile to its ideals and its founding ethnic stock. Gradually, then suddenly.

It’s all over but the weeping.

* Steve’s image of Israel is a tad idealized. He probably has no idea what a bunch of idiots sit on the Israeli supreme court and how they thwart, at every turn, sensible measures against those Africans who got through before the fence was completed.

Nonetheless, Israel does have a fence, its Prime Minister is on the side of his people (even if not as forcefully as some would like), and the demographics are looking good. The way things are looking now, demographics will sooner compel France to uproot Christian settlers from St. Denis and Avignon, than Jewish settlers from Gush Etzion.

Of course it’ll be bad for Israel if Western Europe becomes Muslim (and thus hostile), but there’s a whole eastern half to Europe, and they’re not stupid the way the West is. Though I don’t for a moment want to minimize the world-historical tragedy western Europe’s suicide represents for civilized people, whatever our religion, everywhere.

* I’d say that was one hell of a damn good column: more ideas per words than anything of the sort that I can recall reading. A valiant effort to influence (or spark) the most important debate in America. On that note, I have faith that Steve is like Goethe’s Faust, and in time will be rewarded for ceaseless striving—(whatever his personal recognition among the “mainstream” may be or become).

But it occurs to me, and I’m sure I’m not the first it has, that the forces working against patriotic immigration reform may be built into the system. I’m thinking of public choice theory (which needs a new chapter on ethnic-interest lobbies). When Silicon Valley says America does not produce the number of computer engineers that their industry needs, the critics who say they are fibbing are few but moreover amorphous, and anyways won’t likely ever convince very many who matter that their knowledge of the industry’s detailed requirements surpasses that of the captains of that industry. So, in order to attenuate bullshit like the H1-B visa program, the proposal ought to be unionization of computer engineers, or whatever profession is threatened by nefarious capitalists advocating economic immigration. (Why is that never mentioned?)

By the same logic, instituting Buzz Mohawk’s elegant proposal presumes that there is a lobby that can stand taller than La Raza and the Muslim-American equivalent: a vested lobby for the Common Good. But the point is, the Common Good lobby has been in steady decline since 1789. Well, that’s why we have elections, you say, when politicians attuned to popular sentiment (roughly the common good) win against the ones who aren’t. Yet that won’t do, as it is obvious that presidential campaign promises mean nothing, because the US Congress is a parliament of whores, and it’s up to the whores to start the process of reform. Except, that is, for a form of reform as reticence, of that extra-legal maneuver the Executive Order, since we should assume The Dream Act was a seminal precedent. The use of Executive Orders should be raised as an essential issue in the news cycle concerning the next election, instead of merely vague rhetoric about Obama’s lack of respect for the Constitution. That way provides another proposal: make the Republican candidates sign one of those pledges, that delineates how they will and won’t use executive orders, or at least some statement of principles regarding their proper use. Then use it to bludgeon whoever won’t sign it from either party.

Or maybe abusing the Executive Order is exactly the way a more sensible immigration policy will come about.

* Maybe there’s a few European Jewish leaders–somewhere–expressing concern, but the overall message i hear from Jews remains the same old same old–multiculturalism and diversity precious sunshiny rainbows to be striven for and scary “xenophobia”, “far right”, “Nazi” boogeymen ever lurking about. Basically, it’s the eternal Jewish propaganda–no one–especially white Christians–is entitled to a nation; all nations must be open and penetrable by Jews.

The NYT is flogging that day and night–one Jew after another pompously pontificating–no matter how utterly ludicrous the argument. And as far as i can tell it’s the same message from every organ of the establishment (of cosmopolitan globalism) in Europe as well.

I started a recent European trip visiting a couple of family friends in Germany. First stop was in the Rhineland and two Saturday’s back we had a nice dinner with our hosts and a couple of their daughters and their families. The migrant issue was topic #1.

Our host basically thought there was no German democracy. That it was a joke. His wife mentioned how she’d expressed skeptical thoughts to a friend in the market and her friend had said she thought the same but was afraid to say anything. Then another woman came up and said the same–she was against this but was afraid to say anything. More women jumped into the discussion saying the same.

One of our hosts’ daughters–who’d had a crush on me when she was about four and i was much younger and handsomer (and not yet a dad)–wondered why Jewish leaders didn’t speak up as this can’t be good for them and they are the one group no one can label as “Nazis”. (I had to explain it to her–anti-nationalism uber alles.)

As far as i can tell, Jews–at least at the leadership level–would rather European civilization be run into the ground, then speak up and say “well maybe people really are entitled to have their own nations”.

* A few thoughts from a resident of Vienna.

1. The Freedom Party actually is the direct historical descendant of the Austrian NSDAP, hard to deny that. Most of the hard core party members are very anti-Semitic in private, and Jews distrust them with good reason. That said, they long ago dumped most of the true Nazi ideological baggage. There is not much “pan-German”sentiment, there is very little revanchism other than maybe a desire to reclaim South Tirol. If you remove the mission of putting the German people at the center of history from Nazism, then you no longer have Nazis, just provincial middle class people looking to preserve their traditional life style and keep outsiders at bay. Strache is a congenial guy and certainly no Hitler. Unfortunately, like a lot of the far right in Europe (Berlusconi, Putin, etc.) the FPÖ leadership is incredibly corrupt and seems more concerned with enriching themselves and their friends than actually preserving Austrian culture. The FPÖ ran the province of Carinthia for years and it was a fiscal disaster. Of course, the other parties are corrupt as hell as well. In Austria personal interest tends to trump ideology most of the time, it is very much like Italy in that way.

2. For that matter, Austrians are still pretty anti-Semitic in general, especially in private. A real danger that Austria faces is that radical Islam is a fairly congenial ideology for Austrian misfits on the edge of society. ISIS has had success recruiting native Austrians, as well as Bosnian immigrants into their ranks already. And the number of Jews in Vienna is actually growing, mostly due to Jews from the former USSR.

3. The Freedom Party’s message has not been nearly as overtly “anti-Islam” as the NYT claims. Strache is campaigning mostly against too much immigration in general, and too much welfare spending on people who don’t deserve it. Fairly standard conservative messages that the “respectable” conservatives – the ÖVP – have abandoned, to their shame. Austria is a small parochial country. Most Austrians don’t even want Orthodox Christian immigrants. Hell, a lot of native Austrians don’t even like Germans.

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3558327/Israels-anxiety-as-Jews-prefer-Germany.html

Encouraged by generous laws encouraging them to immigrate, which have only now ended after Israeli lobbying, Jews from the former Soviet Union have flooded into Germany.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/world/middleeast/in-exodus-from-israel-to-berlin-young-nations-fissures-show.html?_r=0

Berlin is a far more pleasant place to live than Syria, or Israel. Moreover, when there are anti-Semitic attacks by immigrants in Germany it will be blamed as the killing of Jews in France has been, on European anti-Semitism Antisemitism is European in origin, and alien to Islam, so Muslim immigrants have been infected by the European virus of hate, and it is still a probem that Europeans are responsible for.

For example The WSJ The Return of Anti-Semitism says

Anti-Semitism entered Islam from the outside, in the form of two classic … carried by the very cultures that Europe itself infected with the virus […] Anti-Semitism has existed for a very long time. One critical moment came around the end of the 1st century C.E., when the Gospel of John attributed to Jesus these words about the Jews: “You belong to your father, the Devil.” From being the children of Abraham, Jews had been transformed into the children of Satan.[…] Crusaders, on their way to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in Northern Europe, in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than submit to the mob and forcible conversion to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry—and the portent of worse to come. […] Despite what some intemperate voices claim, anti-Semitism has no genuine provenance within Islam. The historian Bernard Lewis drew a wry distinction: Islam has traditionally had contempt for the Jews, he said, not hate—adding, “From contempt you don’t die. From hate you do.” Anti-Semitism entered Islam from the outside, in the form of two classic myths imported from Europe. […] Tragically, Europe, having largely cured itself of anti-Semitism, now finds it returning, carried by the very cultures that Europe itself infected with the virus.

Re. “the Serbian Christian Orthodox” — about 100,000 people here — “are his allies against the Turks”. Germany has announced Serbs etc will be immediately returned to Bosnia. Germany’s leadership wants non Europeans, Muslim if possible. the greens and the left will back keeping Serbs out so more non European Muslims can be admitted to Germany.

* “….for putting refugees on trains that led them not west to Austria, but to a camp in Hungary. This, said Chancellor Werner Faymann, a Social Democrat, “brings up memories of our Continent’s darkest period.”

This is the second time in recent weeks that some European politician has compared putting immigrants on trains to the historic one way ticket to the labor/death camps. Is this really an apt comparison? One group really didn’t want to be herded onto rail cars and would rather have been anywhere else, while the other is clamoring loudly for passage and eagerly looking forwards to life at the other end of the ride. Something is amiss here. This type of offhanded comparison seems to trivialize the experience of the people who died in WW2.

* There is a fairly common complaint that the reason the “extreme” parties are gaining support is that the lamestream parties won’t address immigration. Those who are spouting that line need to open a dictionary and look up “tautology.” Any lamestream party or figure that actually does address immigration will be said to be extreme, far-right, Nazis.

The only way possible for that not to be tautological is if “address immigration” in this case means the lamestream party floating enough immigration restriction rhetoric to co-opt the growth of the “extreme” party that actually wants to do immigration restriction, but do it only up to election day, then forget about it the day after.

* You don’t seem to understand that Zionists are fully in favour of Muslim immigration into the West.

This is because, with Israel completely surrounded by tens of millions of Muslims who have a passionate hatred for the Jewish state, their only viable strategy is to promote a sharp antagonistic division between the West/Israel on the one side and the Muslim world on the other. They can then use the West’s military and economic strength against Israel’s enemies.

Muslim immigration into the West furthers this cause by creating hostility between the native whites and the invading Muslims.

Zionists are perfectly happy to see the West degraded, even though this effects Jews living in the West, so long as they believe Israel’s interests are advanced.

* many jews look at moorish spain as their ‘golden age’ (never mind it wasn’t so golden for Christians) as spengler noted, they are psychologically more comfortable with muslims than Christians.

Lastly, they fear homogenous europeans, – northern europeans in particular – far more than they fear muslims – and if you look at the track record of jews in say, New York City – they are far more hostile to Christianity than Islam.

* One awkward fact is that the most anti-immigration parties in Europe really are the direct lineal descendants of some really nasty organizations – fascists, WW2 era collaborators, poujadists and the like. They happen to be correct on this particular issue. People are complicated.

* Of all the rhetorical means by which the Left polices dissent (e.g., accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.), the accusation of Nazism is by far the most potent. No decent person wants to be called that, for obvious reasons.

And yet, this sort of article makes you wonder why you should bother to dispute even that dreaded label. If it’s “Nazi” to want to preserve a country’s people and culture for future generations, then I guess most of us here are “Nazis.” If kicking out people who broke into your country is “ethnic cleansing,” then I guess we’re for “ethnic cleansing.” Fine, whatever. Guilty as charged.

Now, I think it’s ridiculous to paint immigration restrictionism as Nazism, especially when, as Steve points out, it’s the migrants themselves who are more likely to commit violence against Jews or subscribe to an aggressive, supremacist ideology. From a historical perspective, projecting Nazism onto current affairs is about as meaningful as applying the label of “Bonapartist” or “Roundhead.” From a personal perspective, I’m afraid I wouldn’t make a very good Nazi, being only marginally whitish and liking the Jews that I know. The Party would take away my streng geheim fascist decoder ring.

Even so, I just don’t care anymore what the Left calls us. I don’t care what -isms or -ologies the Left cares to attribute to our views. What does it say when even the worst slur in the Leftist lexicon is losing its censorious moral force for me? Moreover, I have the vague feeling that a lot of people on the Right are reaching this point, especially young people.

I think and hope that the “cuckservative” meme portends such an impending defection of conservatives from the Cathedral. The power of the “cuckservative” put-down lies in the contempt it connotes for the acceptance of your adversary’s values system. Such acceptance, of course, presently characterizes much of the mainstream Right.

Cultural power is a funny thing, though. It’s extremely effective at molding public opinion, until it isn’t. Someday the Left will deploy the full force of its shaming, propaganda, and bullying, and we’ll all just shrug and say, “Call us whatever you want. Go f*** yourselves.” Only when we answer to our own consciences as to what is good, true, and moral will we enjoy self-determination again.

Posted in Europe, Immigration, Israel | Comments Off

Will European Soccer Fans Turn Nationalist Soldiers?

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* An example of a soccer fan club turning to militant nationalist politics when the rubber hit the road is early 1990s Yugoslavia.

Down in Serbia, a certain unsavory, underworld, and semi-criminal character who called himself Arkan was by that time long active in Serbian football hooliganism (a phenomenon which transcended the Iron Curtain). As things fell apart for Yugoslavia, Arkan transformed the football fan club he led into a kind of pro-Serb nationalist militia. His political militia soon took the name “Arkan’s Tigers” and gained fame in battle. It was active through the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Arkan became a Serbian nationalist hero. Serbia was in a time of crisis and needed heroes; football gave it one.

In principle, the same could happen in any European country today, given the right circumstances.

* In the former Yugoslavia, soccer games were one of few occasions where nationalism was expressed openly. It is no surprise that many soccer fan clubs later evolved into paramilitary militias.

* An American, Dr. Mark Dyal, has published on “radical right wing” political tendencies among Ultras in Rome, Italy.

“Hostility, Rivalry, and Romanità: An Ethnographic Study of AS Roma’s Ultras”

The 15-month ethnographic study of the fan organizations, or “Ultras,” associated with the Italian professional soccer team A.S. Roma assesses the role that a critical understanding of modernity plays in their self-conception. Using participant observation, interviews, and questionnaires I found that the deep philosophical commitments of the Ultras, drawn from Roman political, social, and cultural history, motivate a radical and aggressive engagement with political liberalism as well as an attack on the cosmopolitanism they believe accompanies the transformation of soccer into global big business. The oppositional aesthetic of the clusters of fan groups produces some instances of exemplary violence against the state and occasionally against foreign nationals resident in Rome, but perhaps more typically provides a profound political understanding of how, by their lights, modernity betrays the local values they believe should be the basis of an authentic Roman culture and life.

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Prof. John Mearsheimer: “Turkish Foreign Policy: A Realist’s Assessment”

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Published on Oct 9, 2012: Prof. John Mearsheimer from University of Chicago gave a lecture entitled “Turkish Foreign Policy: A Realist’s Assessment” on 4 October 2012 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey.

John Mearsheimer says: “It is almost impossible for the Americans to cut a diplomatic deal with the Iranians. The Israel Lobby won’t let that happen…. I hope I am wrong. If we don’t cut a deal with the Iranians, what will happen? We are going to continue to threaten to attack Iran and that may lead them to getting nuclear weapons. We might attack them anyway and that might start a major war in the Middle East.”

“The United States can’t deal with this [Iran] problem in a smart way [because of the Israel Lobby].”

“You are going to have problems with Israel because of the Palestinian issue… Israel is not going to let the Palestinians have a viable state… Israel is going to be an apartheid state… It is going to be impossible for you to be friends with Israel for moral and strategic reasons as long as it is an apartheid state… The United States and the Israel Lobby are enabling Israel to turn itself into an apartheid state.”

“The Americans need you. That’s why the Israel Lobby won’t cause you much trouble… The Israelis need you… That’s why they are trying to repair relations.”

Posted in Iran, Israel, Turkey | Comments Off

How Can The USA Protect Itself From Flash Mobs Of Illegal Immigrants?

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: There are currently 418 million people in South America, and the U.N. says there will be 510 million by midcentury. What are the odds that at some point something will go wrong in Latin America that interested parties in the U.S. will try to define as justifying our own Camp of the Saints? Last year, the Obama administration tried to pass off Central American gang violence as justification for letting in unaccompanied youths. Next year, it could be an earthquake, hurricane, civil strife, recession, inflation, sexism, homophobia, or transgender insensitivity.

And for that matter, if the population of Africa keeps doubling—because encouraging Africans to show some restraint and responsibility is racist—what’s to stop a flash mob from coming from Africa? Sure, it sounds implausible today with Africans currently flocking toward Italy, but keep in mind that Australia had boat people coming all the way from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, which is as far from Darwin, Australia, as Dakar, Senegal, is from New York.

While these graphs may seem daunting, note that the small country of Israel has largely sidestepped the surges endangering the rest of the wealthy white world because its leadership has the foresight and will to take precautions. The latest debate in Israel is not over how many Muslims to let in, but over whether Israel’s high Jewish birthrate is ecologically sustainable.

Here are a few suggestions for America:

First, any asylum seekers who show up in America uninvited should be immediately flown to a safe haven where their application and the authenticity of their documents can be investigated thoroughly. I’d nominate the U.S. military’s Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, where a hygienic tent city could be set up on its 12 square miles of fenced-in grounds. Authentic refugees would appreciate the security of being protected by the world’s strongest military, while the usual crowd of fraudsters would be discouraged by finding themselves right back in a banana republic, 1,525 miles from the Texas border.

Second, use social media. These are not particularly formidable people who are trying to overwhelm us. They tend to be superstitious—Arabs, for example, are often freaked out by a dog, especially a black dog—and easily spooked by evidence that they aren’t welcome.

Third, provide visual evidence for social media that flash mobs aren’t welcome, such as nonviolent demonstrations. Last year’s peaceful protests by American citizens in Murrieta, Calif., had impact.

Fourth, as my reader Buzz Mohawk writes:

Set a concrete limit on the total number of immigrants that will be allowed into the US per year. Make it known that “migrants” and “refugees” will count as part of that number, thus reducing visas and opportunities for everyone else’s favorite race or interest group.

The point of this is to use divide-and-conquer strategies to set ethnic lobbies in the U.S. battling one another over a finite pie, instead of the present policy of encouraging everybody to rhetorically gang up on straight white men as the source of all evil. This policy would incite the Muslims to point out why America would be nuts to let in more Hispanics, and vice versa.

Fifth, as my reader Alfa 158 suggests, the U.S. government could easily penalize elites in the sending countries:

If applicants are denied refugee status and their home country refuses to accept them back, stop issuing any visas for that country. Even the elites who don’t want to emigrate here will hate the idea of not being able to send their kids to school in the US, or make the occasional luxury shopping spree trip.

Much of the Mexican ruling class, for instance, is vulnerable to being denied visas to visit the luxury homes they’ve corruptly acquired in Texas, Florida, and New York. Trump Tower, for instance, is likely home to Mexican elites who could be pressured into cooperating with American border protection the way Egypt and Jordan cooperate with Israel.

Sixth, and most of all, the U.S., like other Western democracies, needs new elites. While there is quite a bit that patriotic citizens can self-organize to accomplish in their own defense, nothing compares to the luxury that Israelis enjoy: a government that is on the side of its democratic majority.

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The Misguided Advocates of Open Borders

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Luke Ford

Frank Salter writes in 2010: The poor quality of analysis behind Australia’s abandonment of traditional assimilationist immigration policy reached its apotheosis recently in a spate of articles by well placed commentators. The proposal of the moment was open borders, immigration unrestricted by consideration of all factors save for security. Most Australians will reject the proposal as absurd. Unfortunately the analytical basis for policies followed by federal governments since the 1970s has not much differed apart from economic criteria.

Prof. Mirko Bagaric (SMH, 7 April 2010, p. 15[i]), professor of law at Deakin University, argues for unrestricted immigration from the poorest to the richest countries as the best means to reduce Third World poverty. Initially his article came as a pleasant surprise to one who applies biological concepts and methods to the study of human society. Prof. Bagaric opened by stating two truths about human ethnocentrism: “[M]ost still prefer people of their own type and find different cultures jarring”; and “It is in the human DNA.” [ii]

However from that point the article provided almost no hint that humans are an evolved species with an interest in survival. Prof. Bagaric superficially discusses three interests that could be affected by open borders – material prosperity, national security, and cultural tradition – more of which later. This leaves many interests unmentioned.

Unrestricted migration would harm Australia’s national interests in ways documented by scholars in economics, sociology and related disciplines. Much of the harm is predictable from what is known about the dysfunctions of diversity. They include growing inequality in the especially invidious form of ethnic stratification. No one likes to be ruled over by a different ethnic group or to see his own people worse off than others. The result is resentment or contempt, depending on the perspective taken.

Diversity has also been associated with reduced democracy, slowed economic growth, falling social cohesion and foreign aid, as well as rising corruption and risk of civil conflict.[iii]

The loss of social cohesion bears emphasis. Disapproving of birds flocking together is beside the point; it is a biological fact that needs to be taken into account.[iv] Rising diversity within human societies tends to drive people apart, causing them to take sanctuary in individual pursuits and ethnic communities. The practical consequences are reduced public altruism or social capital, evident in falling volunteerism, government welfare for the aged and sick, public health care[v]and a general loss of trust.[vi] Ethnic diversity is second only to lack of democracy in predicting civil war.[vii] Globally it correlates negatively with governmental efficiency and prosperity.[viii]

Thus the thrust of accumulating research in several disciplines indicates that unrestricted mass immigration would be disastrous for wealthy countries. Some of this research has been well publicised; some has been published in Australia.

There are also philosophical issues that deserve comment.

I found the single-minded concern with Third World poverty puzzling, especially coming from a declared moral universalist. It is true that poverty would be reduced for those immigrating to the wealthy West, but do not the populations of industrial countries also have interests – in ecological sustainability and national continuity – that would be injured by the influx of millions of foreigners? Should not global problems be solved in ways that optimize interests instead of benefiting one population at the expense of another? Should we not be aiming at win-win outcomes?

From the global perspective, humanity as a whole stands to lose from overpopulation. As the late Garrett Hardin pointed out, allowing poor countries, which generally have high birth rates, the expedient of offloading excess population on low-birth rate regions reduces the incentive to solve their own population problem, for example by tackling the poverty and under-education of women. Global overpopulation can only be solved one country at a time, not by rewarding profligacy.

Another philosophical issue is Prof. Bagaric’s equating parochialism with morally repugnant “racism”. Surely that is not true, firstly because “racism” has no agreed definition and has been deployed for ideological and ad hominem purposes. It is more an instrument of abuse than of reason. If its use cannot be avoided it should be reserved to describe ethnically aggressive statements and acts, not the peaceful expression of pro-social sentiments common to humans everywhere.

Secondly, the notion that preference for one’s own people is immoral ignores the universal interest we all share in particular affiliations. All humans share parochial interests that give rise to social preferences. It would be maladaptive not to prefer people of our own type, beginning with kin. And in general this preference is moral. Bearing and caring for our own children, choosing friends on intuition, and having a special affection for our own country cannot be equated with hating others.[ix] A liberal society that allows free expression of these moderate preferences is hardly the moral inferior of one in which the elite scolds and punishes the people’s aspirations to have a country of their own.

The universality of parochial interests contradicts Prof. Bagaric when he states: “For most of human history there have been few migration limits. . . . A relevant reason [for restricting immigration] cannot be a person’s birthplace. This is merely a happy or unhappy coincidence.” The anthropological reality is the precise opposite: until recent decades almost all human society have sought to prevent permanent mass migration. Hunter gatherers and primitive agriculturalists, farmers and herders have all laid claim to a territory and fiercely defended it. Marriage partners have been found almost exclusively within the ethnic group, encompassing the local dialect. The psychological motivations for this are well established in such predispositions as social identity mechanisms, collectivism, assortment by similarity, innate cognition of human kinds, and rational choice.[x] Evolutionary origins of territoriality and ethnocentrism are indicated by their being human universals as well as being found in apes. And from the evolutionary perspective, which acknowledges the limited carrying capacity of all territories and of the world itself, it is maladaptive to allow one’s lineage – family, clan, or ethnic group to be replaced by others.[xi]

The vital interest all societies have in controlling a territory also falsifies the assertion that national security consists solely of defending individual citizens from attack by vetting immigrants for terrorist connections as is already the practice with tourists. Unlike tourists, immigrants affect the receiving country’s identity and cohesion. Societies have a corporate interest in retaining national sovereignty, which entails control of a territory, which in turn implies the will to defend against displacement in that territory. Inviting the world to a country as prosperous as Australia would result in the displacement of the Australian people inside their historical homeland.

The final philosophical point I shall discuss is the claim that open borders are somehow consistent with liberal thinking, that everyone in the world has the same rights. The problem with arguing from rights is that they can conflict, as implicitly admitted in the disclaimer that no one should infringe on others rights. Arguments based on interests have the same problem, but also the advantage of undercutting a mountain of abstractions. More to the point, the father of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, though generally a universalist who set his disciples on a course away from the natural sciences, was sufficiently acquainted with the real world to support liberal nationalism:

“Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart . . . One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies they choose to associate themselves.”[xii]

Mill also wrote:

“Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”[xiii]

Mill is not the final word on these subjects but he does show that basing an argument on rights does not logically entail open borders.

The calibre of open-borders arguments raises questions. How could the research documented above be ignored – not even hinted at – by a professional academic in the age of google? Individual scholars are technically responsible for covering the literature bearing on their research. But in this case there is the mitigating circumstance of the general state of the social sciences in Australia and overseas. Three weeks after Prof. Bagaric’s article appeared I have not come across one academic rebuttal. The SMH has not published a reply by another professor pointing out the obvious empirical fallacies, the failures of scholarship, the sloppy and inflammatory language. Neither has there been a storm of denunciation by colleagues or the media; no multiply-signed letters sent to newspapers defending the credibility of Deakin University or the humanities and social sciences. Nothing on radio or television. The online comments were overwhelmingly critical and were generally cogent but none of these authors identified as an academic. It seems that ordinary citizens have retained their common sense, while intellectuals are ominously silent.

Mike Steketee, a senior journalist at The Australian newspaper (10 April 2010[xiv]), appears to disagree with Bagaric. He also takes issue with Chris Berg,[xv] a research fellow at the Institute for Public Affairs, who advances a similar case for unrestricted immigration. Steketee writes that advocating open borders is “well intentioned” but would cause “chaos”, without describing the latter state. Well intentioned? He agrees with Bagaric and Berg that opening the floodgates would be ethical and that it would reduce Third World poverty. It would be the liberal thing to do in light of universal human rights: “[W]e believe individuals have the same rights, wherever they live”. But alas democracy would get in the way. Voters would reject the dissolution of the nation state and the installation of a world government. They continue to support (immoral) tough treatment of boat people. Mr. Steketee thinks that despite the proven benefits of immigration the Australian people wish to retain “control of their destiny”, implying that a rational electorate would let go and accept a much larger immigrant intake.

It seems that Mr. Steketee cannot fault Mr. Bagaric or Mr. Berg on social or ethical grounds. Indeed, he agrees with them that the free movement of people across borders is ideal. His disagreement, such as it is, concerns public relations and the pace of transformation that is politically feasible.

Berg’s article strikes a radical libertarian stance that also fails to discuss collective interests. Instead he focuses on moral claims, namely that all humans have equal moral worth regardless of where they live (p. 1). He also emphasises the benefits of immigration to immigrants. The following provides the gist of the remainder of his argument:

“But immigration is good for the developed world, too. It’s good for the economy—immigrants end up being entrepreneurs and shopkeepers; employees and employers; and consumers and producers. More people mean more creativity, more opportunity, and more culture. Migrants bring skills, knowledge and international connections (p. 3).”

As Mr. Berg does not distinguish immigrants by education or origins, every sentence of the above quote is either outright false according to available research or contentious. Immigrants from impoverished countries do not provide overall benefits to advanced economies, though they help some employers by reducing wages.[xvi] Inequality rises. In the United States Third World immigration increases the size of the overall economy but reduces per capita incomes. It is the latter that affects living standards. Immigrants from different cultures differ dramatically in their educational performance and entrepreneurship for several generations.

Prof. Bagaric writes off the nation as essentially racist. Mr. Berg thinks that “[t]here’s really nothing that special about national borders or the nation itself.” This is a strong claim but it becomes clear that Mr. Berg thinks that a nation is a state, failing to make an elementary and important distinction.[xvii] A nation is at its core an ethnic group living in its homeland, with shared elements of culture and means of communication. A nation can exist without its own state, an example being the Kurds. And most states are not limited to one nation’s territory. All nation states are built around a founding ethnic core.[xviii] However even without this distinction Mr. Berg is wise to state that: “A nation is the most convenient mechanism by which the institutions of liberty can be delivered.” (p. 4) True enough, but is that not a good reason for libertarians and all who treasure civil rights to defend national integrity?

The intellectual void surrounding the concept of the nation becomes most apparent when Mr. Berg wonders why an otherwise consistent libertarian, Murray Rothbard, thought that culture is worth defending by restricting immigration (p. 6). He quotes Rothbard’s reason thus: “[A]s the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples.” Not a bad reason. It could be supported by other examples of regimes that have used the demographic weapon, such as China in Tibet or Indonesia in West Irian. The extraordinary thing is that Mr. Berg offers no comment after quoting Rothbard. It is as if the concepts being used, “ethnic” and “destroy the culture and languages” failed to register. But they are real. Australian policy makers should bear in mind that ethnic nationalism is still a powerful force that tears countries and empires apart and creates new nations. Recent examples are the dismemberment of the Soviet and Yugoslavian empires in the 1990s. When people are allowed to choose they vote for policies that make or keep them as the ethnic majority. The result is that spreading democracy creates relatively homogeneous small states with heightened social capital and its flip side of social stability, efficient government, low corruption, more democracy, and higher economic growth.[xix] Why would a libertarian want open borders? Why would anyone want to become a minority in his own country?

By the way, one can add to Rothbard’s excellent reason for defending the cultural integrity of nations. All the benefits of relative homogeneity (and thus of assimilation and prudent immigration) documented above belong to nations, not to multi-ethnic states. One can also extend Rothbard’s reasoning. The Soviets attempted to Russify Estonia and Latvia as a means of controlling those territories. They assumed that the ethnic-Russian minorities would maintain their identity distinct from that of the target nations. As these national communities shrank in relative size they were meant to become just another competing ethnic group, national unity would be replaced by a multi-ethnic state, and the capacity of the original Estonian and Latvian nations to strategise on their own behalves would be diminished. This is what Rothbard was getting at. And who would put it past the Soviets to have reckoned that if demographic transformation could be continued long enough, the original nation would die. Another might arise in its place but that would take a long time and would not replace what was lost to the original nation.

These two pieces, one by a senior press commentator, the other by a researcher with a respected think tank, confirm the impression that the egregious standard of analysis behind open borders advocacy is not an aberration. It is deeply embedded at the elite level of Australian political culture. The problem lies with an influential tradition well established within the universities and intellectual class as a whole.

How have so many scholars come to ignore accessible knowledge about human nature and interests? Australia’s 39 universities employ thousands of lecturers and professors in relevant disciplines. Any one of them should be able to expose elements of the case for open borders. A first year student of social anthropology should know that borders have always been closed to replacement-level migration. Students of government and sociology should know in outline the cases for and against diversity. How can bold assertions such as those in the three articles examined here go unremarked? What is being taught at our universities?

A century ago the social sciences began suing for divorce from the biological sciences.[xx] Reconciliation began in the 1970s but sociology, political science, large sections of anthropology and much of the humanities remain aloof. Add to that the political straight jacketing of these fields, an important reason for their doctrinaire rejection of biology, and it is not surprising that we see utopian socialism of the most naive variety emanating unchallenged from the professoriate. The world of ideas is one arena in which diversity is an unalloyed benefit, where homogeneity demonstrably degrades standards.

The evidence refuting the case for open borders also applies to the scale and diversity of existing immigration policy. Any policy is suspect that threatens a country’s ecological sustainability, increases diversity or tends to subordinate the core ethnic group. Such a trend was already in place for several years before historian Geoffrey Blainey warned that immigration from non-traditional Asian source countries was outrunning its welcome in the mid 1980s.[xxi]

Ethnic stratification is taking place. Aboriginal Australians remain an economic underclass and some immigrant communities show high levels of unemployment. Anglo Australians, still almost 70 percent of the population, are presently being displaced disproportionately in the professions and in senior managerial positions by Asian immigrants and their children.[xxii] The situation is dramatic at selective schools which are the high road to university and the professions. Ethnocentrism is not a White disorder and evidence is emerging that immigrant communities harbour invidious attitude towards Anglo Australians, disparaging their culture and the legitimacy of their central place in national identity.[xxiii]

The democratic process has been prevented from correcting our maladaptive immigration policies due to bipartisanship – a long-term deal between the major political parties to keep immigration issues off the table at election time. The collusion began responsibly enough as a measure to facilitate assimilation during the massive post-WWII immigration program from Europe. By the 1970s bipartisanship served to shield both parties from majority objections while they profited from multicultural politics, garnering votes from immigrant communities in exchange for immigration favours. Arguably this collusion would have been difficult to sustain if a substantial number of academics and commentators had spoken truth to power.

Instead, the rapid transformation of Australia by mass Third World immigration has been a top-down revolution in which exclusivist politicised circles within academia have been complicit by commission and omission. Political leaders and citizens alike look to intellectuals for the facts and analysis needed to make wise policy. In technical matters we have been well served, but not with regard to issues of population and diversity. The policy failure is not limited to the present federal government. It goes back decades, as does the failure of the nation’s brain trust. Correction will necessitate tackling the intellectual and ideological corruption of the humanities and social sciences by reintroducing some intellectual diversity and free speech, the only way to reestablish open-minded scholarship and teaching.

Posted in Australia, Immigration | Comments Off