get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Saturday, December 27, 2008
On the Death of a Little Man
Fitting that Professor Samuel P. Huntington should die as a mixed race African-American man readies to become president of the country that Huntington claimed for himself and "his kind." And, although Barack Obama, graduated from Harvard Law School, I am sure that Prof. Huntington of Harvard University, never made the acquaintance of the young Obama. As I wrote in my inaugural post for this blog, Huntington articulated a shallow ideological basis for the most base and gutteral elements of our society; the cancer of racism and exclusion. As a favored son, which is to say a white, anglo-saxon, Protestant Brahmin of the ruling class, Huntington clearly feared the rise of so-called "non-Western," brown, yellow or black-skinned members into American society. No wonder that not even the East Coast establishment, to which he so tightly clinged, should put the racist codger into his grave with nary a murmur and an obituary befitting an nondescript actuary. Only two days before Huntington's death, Nobel Laureate, Harold Pinter met his maker and the contrast could not be more stark. Shortly after Chilean Dictator, Augusto Pinochet, crushed Democracy in Chile, the poet Pablo Neruda died, as if expressing in his being and in his death the spirit of that society. Despite brutal repression and martial law, thousands of Chileans lined the roads for Neruda's casket and blanketed the way with roses from end to end. When Pinochet died, he was a despised little man, not unlike Huntington, remembered mostly by his coterie of criminals but despised by everyone else. So goes Samuel P. Huntington, a little man buried and quickly forgotten. Pablo Neruda and Harold Pinter were big men. They live on. As they should. As the should.
If you liked this post, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can
get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.
get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Anti-immigrant Crusader, John Tanton revealed to be Racist and Anti-Semite
Tanton has long claimed that he is no racist — that, in fact, he came to his immigration restrictionism through progressive concerns for population control and the environment, not disdain for the foreign born. He characterizes himself as a “fair person,” and on his website he condemns the “unsavory characters whose views can easily be characterized as anti-American, anti-Semitic and outright racist.”
Fair enough. But what do Tanton’s letters have to say?
As it turns out, quite a lot. Although Tanton has been linked to racist ideas in the past — fretting about the “educability” of Latinos, warning of whites being out-bred by others, and publishing a number of white nationalist authors — the papers in the Bentley Library show that Tanton has for decades been at the heart of the white nationalist scene. He has corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and the leading white nationalist thinkers of the era. He introduced key FAIR leaders to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist group set up to encourage “race betterment,” at a 1997 meeting at a private club. He wrote a major funder to encourage her to read the work of a radical anti-Semitic professor — to “give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life” — and suggested that the entire FAIR board discuss the professor’s theories on the Jews. He practically worshipped a principal architect of the Immigration Act of 1924 (instituting a national origin quota system and barring Asian immigration), a rabid anti-Semite whose pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies was indicted for sedition in 1942.
As early as 1969, Tanton showed a sharp interest in eugenics, the “science” of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazis, trying to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization. His interest stemmed, he wrote in a letter of inquiry that year, from “a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them.” Some 30 years later, he was still worrying about “less intelligent” people being allowed children, saying that “modern medicine and social programs are eroding the human gene pool.”
Throughout, FAIR — which, along with Tanton, refused repeated requests for comment for this story — has stood by its man. Its 2004 annual report praised him for “visionary qualities that have not waned one bit.” Around the same time, Dan Stein, who has led FAIR since 1988 as executive director or president and who was copied on scores of Tanton’s letters, insisted FAIR’s founder had “never asserted the inferiority or superiority of any racial, ethnic, or religious group. Never.”
Blood and Soil
In the world view of John Tanton, successful societies are not based on a mere sharing of territory, values and political systems. Nations and their cultures, he has suggested on numerous occasions, are largely determined by biology — race.
In a Nov. 13, 1994, letter to white nationalist columnist Lawrence Auster, a regular correspondent, Tanton suggested that the Declaration of Independence was actually a document based on the “bond of blood and ethnicity — nationhood.” Almost a year earlier, in a Dec. 10, 1993, letter to Garrett Hardin, a controversial ecology professor, he said: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” On Jan. 26, 1996, he wrote Roy Beck, head of the immigration restrictionist group NumbersUSA (and then an employee of Tanton’s foundation U.S. Inc.), questioning whether Latinos were capable of governing California.
“I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society,” Tanton said in his letter to Beck, “but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.” Referring to the changing California public schools, Tanton wondered “whether the minorities who are going to inherit California (85% of the lower-grade school children are now ‘minorities’ — demography is destiny) can run an advanced society?”
For Tanton, the question was entirely rhetorical.
“The situation then is that the people who have been the carriers of Western Civilization are well on the way toward resigning their commission to carry the culture into the future,” he wrote in an Aug. 8, 1997, letter to Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, a fellow immigration critic. “When this decline in numbers is coupled with an aging of the core population … it begins to look as if the chances of Western Civilization passing into the history books are very good indeed.”
This kind of thinking led Tanton to defend racial quotas imposed on immigrants. In a Nov. 3, 1995, memo to FAIR boss Dan Stein and the entire FAIR board of advisers, Tanton defended the infamous “White Australia” policy that restricted non-white immigration into that country from 1901 to 1973, saying it was not racist, but intended to protect native-born labor (the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act outlawed racial quotas in Australia). Tanton also mocked the idea that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, banning Chinese immigration to the U.S., was racist.
Similarly, Tanton has defended America’s Immigration Act of 1924, which formalized a racial quota system that was only dismantled in 1965. In fact, as shown in his correspondence, Tanton has long lionized a principal architect of the act, John B. Trevor Sr. (In addition to founding the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, Trevor was an adviser to the extreme-right, anti-Catholic Christian Crusade of Billy James Hargis, who regularly referred to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as Communist documents.) Tanton arranged for the Bentley Library to house the papers of both Trevor and his son, long a Pioneer Fund board member and a close friend of Tanton’s until his 2006 death.
Despite the elder Trevor’s extremely unsavory past, Tanton has sent his unpublished autobiography to numerous friends, including, on Nov. 21, 2001, FAIR board member Donald Collins. In a cover letter, Tanton told Collins that the work of Trevor — who distributed pro-Nazi propaganda, drew up plans to crush uprisings of “Jewish subversives,” and warned shrilly of “diabolical Jewish control” of America — should serve FAIR as “a guidepost to what we must follow again this time.”
Communing with the Movement
John Tanton has not merely flirted with and adopted many of the core ideas of white nationalism over the past three decades. He has carried on correspondences with some of the key leaders of the white nationalist movement, meeting and even vacationing with some of them, and pushing many of their central ideas.
Over the years, his closest friend on the white nationalist scene seems to have been Jared Taylor, the man who began publishing American Renaissance, a racist, pseudo-scientific magazine focusing on race, intelligence and eugenics, in 1990. (“When blacks are left entirely to their own devices,” Taylor wrote in its pages a few years ago, “Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”)
Tanton, who met Taylor shortly after American Renaissance began publication, seems to have been particularly taken with Taylor’s angry opposition to affirmative action, spelled out in Taylor’s 1992 book, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. On Nov. 12, 1993, Tanton wrote Taylor and three of his American Renaissance colleagues — Wayne Lutton, who would later work for Tanton; Sam Francis, a white nationalist ideologue then working as a Washington Times columnist; and Jerry Woodruff, who wrote for the nativist publication Middle American News — suggesting that their new journal take on literary critic Stanley Fish, who had defended affirmative action in an article for The Atlantic. Tanton enclosed “a little something” for Taylor’s “start-up costs.”
Tanton promoted Taylor’s efforts repeatedly. On Dec. 15, 1994, he wrote a friend to suggest that he read Taylor’s 1992 book. More remarkably, on Jan. 24, 1991, he wrote to the then-president of the Pioneer Fund, Harry Weyher, about Taylor’s American Renaissance effort. And as recently as April 20, 1998, Tanton wrote to several FAIR employees, including Dan Stein, to ensure that they were receiving American Renaissance mailings: “I write to encourage keeping track of those on our same side of the issue, but who are nonetheless our competitors for dollars and members.” (The bolded words were underlined in Tanton’s original letter.)
Tanton also corresponded for years with the late Sam Francis, a one-time Washington Times columnist who was fired after details of a racist speech he gave at an American Renaissance conference became public. From 1999 until his death in 2005, Francis edited the crudely racist and nativist Citizens Informer, the tabloid published by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), an organization that says it “oppose[s] all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”
What may have been most remarkable of all was Tanton’s endorsement of a proposal from another friend — Peter Brimelow, who would later start a racist anti-immigration website — that FAIR hire Sam Francis to edit its newsletter. That proposal, which Tanton sent to FAIR’s Dan Stein on Nov. 3, 1995, was made two months after The Washingon Times fired Francis for racism.
Tanton’s contacts with other white nationalists also are instructive:
• Beginning in the late 1980s, Tanton corresponded regularly with Virginia Abernethy, now a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University. Abernethy is a member of the CCC and recently described herself as a “white separatist.”
• On June 26, 1996, Tanton wrote to Sam Dickson — a Georgia lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan, written for and been on the editorial advisory board of Holocaust denial publications, and spoken at several of the biannual conferences put on by American Renaissance — to thank him for a good time during a visit by Tanton and his wife. “The next time I’m in Atlanta,” Tanton wrote Dickson, “I hope to take one of your ‘politically incorrect’ tours.”
• In a Dec. 23, 1996, letter, Tanton complained that it was hard to write checks for Theodore O’Keefe, who was involved for years in the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, because O’Keefe would only use a pen name. It was not clear from the letter what O’Keefe had written for Tanton.
• On June 17, 1998, Tanton wrote to Stan Hess, who was then a member of the CCC, about Hess’ proposal to open a FAIR office in California (the letter was copied to Stein). The letter recounted how Tanton had “presented” Hess’ idea to the FAIR board. Hess was arrested later that year for burning a Mexican flag at an Alabama CCC rally that was attended by an unrobed Klansman. Hess would go on in 1999 to help form the neofascist American Friends of the British National Party and, later, to become California state leader of a group headed by neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke.
Tanton on ‘the Jews’
In some ways, given his ideas, it’s not surprising that John Tanton would cozy up to white nationalists and their fellow travelers. What is unexpected, even among long-time observers of the FAIR founder, is his attitude toward “the Jews.”
In the late 1990s, Kevin MacDonald, a California State University, Long Beach, professor, was finishing up a trilogy of books that purported to show that Jews collectively work to undermine the dominant majorities in the host countries in which they live, including the United States. MacDonald said that Jews pursue these tactics — including promoting non-white immigration into white-dominated nations — in order to weaken the majority culture in a bid to enhance their own standing. He would later go on to speak and write for white nationalist groups across America.
Tanton liked what he read. On Dec. 28, 1998 — the same year that the last two books of MacDonald’s trilogy were published — he wrote MacDonald, saying, “I hope we can meet some day.” On that same date, Tanton sent a memo to Dan Stein and the FAIR board of directors about a MacDonald paper “on the segment of the Jewish community that has an open borders mentality.” The paper, Tanton said, “would be fertile for group discussion at the forthcoming board meeting.”
Earlier that month, on Dec. 10, 1998, Tanton also sent MacDonald’s work to Cordelia Scaife May, a now-deceased millionaire philanthropist who gave regularly to far-right causes and was a close Tanton friend. “I’m sure [MacDonald’s article] will give you a new understanding of the Jewish outlook on life, which explains a large part of the Jewish opposition to immigration reform,” he wrote.
Tanton’s criticism of religious groups wasn’t limited to Jews, however. Over the years, he — like some principals of FAIR — lashed out at a variety of religious denominations, especially Catholics, for their welcoming attitude toward immigrants coming to America from the Third World. In his letter to the FAIR board suggesting a discussion of Kevin MacDonald’s theories, for instance, he described “the Roman Catholic Church [and] several of the Protestant denominations, the Lutheran Church in particular,” as being among “our opponents.” In an earlier, May 24, 1994, letter to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA, he said that “one of the problems with churches is that they see themselves as universal, and as transcending national boundaries.”
Endorsing Eugenics
For years, FAIR President Dan Stein has hotly denied that his organization had anything to do with eugenics. “Eugenics,” he wrote in a 2004 op-ed in the Kansas City Star, “is pure junk science, and it is utterly unrelated to FAIR’s efforts to bring order to immigration in America.” Two months later, in a press release attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for suggesting otherwise, the group called SPLC’s reporting “utterly specious” and “McCarthyist.”
The press release went on to accuse the SPLC of unfairly linking FAIR to “a long discredited pseudo-science of eugenics” by noting the group had accepted $1.2 million from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund, ending in 1994. The release also claimed that the idea that FAIR had an interest in eugenics had been disproven.
Apparently, John Tanton failed to get that message.
On Dec. 30, 1994 — at the end of the year that FAIR finally stopped soliciting Pioneer donations (after negative publicity) and issued its denunciation of eugenics — Tanton wrote to German academic Wolfgang Bosswick to defend the Pioneer Fund, saying its critics were the “hard (Marxist) left in the United States.”
On Sept. 18, 1996, he wrote to now-deceased California multimillionaire Robert K. Graham, a eugenicist who started a sperm bank to collect the semen of Nobel Prize-winning scientists: “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news [to less intelligent individuals], and how will it be implemented?”
On May 21, 1997, Tanton wrote to Richard Lynn — a race “scientist” who claims that black people “are more psychopathic than whites” and suffer from a “personality disorder” characterized by a poverty of feeling and lack of shame — to congratulate Lynn on his book, Dysgenics, on how less intelligent individuals are outbreeding the intelligent. The next year, on Feb. 9, 1998, he wrote to Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher to propose that Weyher hire Lynn to write “a study of Barry Mehler.” Mehler, the Ferris State University professor who founded the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, is a harsh critic of race science and eugenics.
FAIR officials may not have known of these contacts, but they certainly knew of others. On Oct. 29, 1998, for instance, Tanton wrote a memo for his file on Harry Weyher discussing the Pioneer Fund’s new website and a paper on “sub-replacement fertility” by Roger Pearson, a notorious race scientist who heads the Institute for the Study of Man. The memo was copied to FAIR’s Dan Stein and K.C. McAlpin, the executive director of ProEnglish, a group on whose board Tanton now sits.
Most remarkable of all, however, was the Feb. 13, 1997, gathering organized by Tanton at the New York Racquet and Tennis Club. Three years after FAIR had stopped taking Pioneer Fund money, Tanton brought FAIR board members Henry Buhl, Sharon Barnes and Alan Weeden — along with Peter Brimelow, future founder of the VDARE.com hate site — to a meeting with Pioneer Fund President Harry Weyher. The meeting, held expressly to discuss fundraising efforts to benefit FAIR, was memorialized in a Feb. 17, 1997, memo that Tanton wrote for his “FAIR Fund-Raising File.” A year later, on Jan. 5, 1998, Tanton wrote to John Trevor, a Pioneer Fund board member and the son of the notorious pro-Nazi eugenicist John Trevor Sr., to thank him for his personal “handsome contribution” to FAIR.
It’s not that Tanton didn’t understand, just as well as Stein and the other leaders of FAIR, exactly how controversial eugenics was. After starting his own eugenicist group, the Society for Genetic Education, in 1996, he wrote to Graham, the California eugenicist, to discuss public relations strategies. In a Sept. 18, 1996, letter, Tanton explained how his new group’s website “emphasized mankind’s use of eugenic principles on plants and the lower animals as a way to condition the public to the idea of genetic manipulation, and raise the question of its application to the human race.” Elaborating, he added: “We report ways [eugenics] is currently being done, but under the term genetics rather than eugenics.”
Immigration and Race
Throughout its history, the United States has been subjected to periodic outbreaks of xenophobic nativism, angry reactions to waves of immigrants who are seen as somehow different than “real” Americans. These movements, directed at different times at Germans, Catholics, Jews, Asians, southern Europeans, blacks and others, have typically been undergirded by racist stereotyping. Again and again, the new immigrants are described as stupid, ugly, disloyal, diseased and more.
Today, no one disputes the vulgar racism of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, which grew to nearly 4 million members on the strength of hating Catholics and Jews. And much the same can be said of nativist movements from the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, who saw German Catholics as dangerous subverters of American democracy, to the racist demonization of Mexican “wetbacks” during the 20th century.
But John Tanton and his Federation for American Immigration Reform have repeatedly claimed that they are different, that FAIR and its founder are not linked to the irrational fears and hatreds of the past. Their critics, they say angrily, are simply tarring them with the brush of racism to unfairly denigrate their arguments.
As the Bentley Library files show, that is far from true.
get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
The Ideology of Peter Brimelow
The Nativist ideologue, Peter Brimelow, insists that he is not a racist but rather is merely looking to engage this nation in a dialogue as to its direction. The issue, he argues, is whether the complexion of this country, both figuratively and literally, should be changed by the growth of non-whites who are not Anglo-Saxon Protestants? The terms of this "debate," as well as the persons entitled to debate this issue, per Brimelow and his nativist bretheren, are highly instructive as to the nativist mindset and more particularly as to Brimelow's true purpose. We are to assume that this is simply a dry policy issue, not unlike farm support subsidies. Why, so the unstated refrain goes, do liberals get so enraged over the mere invitation to such a debate? Instead of engaging us, so the narrative proceeds, does the immigrant lobby attack us as racists, xenophobes or extremist right-wingers? All we want, so Brimelow would conclude, is a fair and open debate -- no holds barred.
A central premise of Brimelow's argument as advanced in his nativist tome, Alien Nation, is that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed the racist national-origin categories which had governed immigration policy since the enactment of the the restrictive and racist Immigration and Restriction Act of 1924, was a great mistake which irrevocably changed the "character" of this country. If it were possible, Brimelow would turn back the clock and undo the changes wrought by the 1965 Act. Accordingly, the persons entitled to a voice in this debate are the white Anglo-Saxon protestants who comprised the overwhelming majority of citizens in 1964. Anyone born of non-white immigrants should not be entitled to a voice because such people are not the progeny that gave birth to this, "our country." This is especially true of anyone who immigrated to this country after 1965 from any country that was not formerly a part of the United Kingdom. This exclusion would apply to anyone born from such emigrant stock, no matter how assimilated or removed from the original immigrants. Accordingly, underlying this debate is a racist premise, nonwhites need not voice their views or concerns. The message to nonwhites, per Brimelow, is "shut up, while we decide your fate!"
And what are the terms of Brimelow's complexion debate? We have already established that since nonwhites are not a part of this debate any recourse to self-interest, group-identity and the elements of sovereignty for nonwhite are off the table just as they were off the table for the indigenous population after Europeans arrived in the New World. If anyone is to speak for Latinos, Asians and even African-Americans, it has to be vis-a-vis the good graces of white overlords, not unlike Colonialism, which Brimelow has championed. As any student of the American legal system will tell you, an adversary who is absent at his own trial has no chance of redeeming himself. The verdict, for those tried in absentia, is a dead certainty.
Having assured that their deliberations will not be encumbered by those whose fate they are debating, Brimelow's nativists are not content to let the outcome be endangered by inconvenient truths. The nativists who write for VDare, Michelle Malkin's website or ALIPAC, make no bones about their disdain, even hatred, for nonwhites and for nonwhite immigrants. Hence, the marriage of nativist ideology with racism. Brimelow, who is himself racist, prominently features racists, Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald and Patrick Buchanan, amongst others. These writers are not a counter-balance for pro-immigrant writers, they are the core of authors who regularly perorate in nativist publications. Such views are the heart of the definition of bigotry, a stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own, no matter how true. So much for debate. This is not the presentation of positions, it is the shouts of the hooligan.
Shortly after being liberated from a Nazi Prisoner of War camp, Jean-Paul Sartre penned the classic tome, Anti-Semite and Jew. In this seminal essay, Sartre explored what animates the anti-Semite, the racist and the bigot. The anti-Semite is not concerned with an actual Jew (qua Jew) just as Brimelow is not concerned with real Latinos or Hispanics. For the racist, hate of the other is, among other things, a way by which to "lay claim to the nation in which they reside, and an oversimplified conception of the world in which the antisemite sees "not a conflict of interests but the damage which an evil power causes society." Nativism, like antisemitism is not an idea in the commonly understood sense of the word: it is not a point of view based rationally upon empirical information calmly collected and calibrated in as objective a manner as is possible. It is not an idea, ‘It is first of all a passion.' (Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, (Schocken Books, Paris, 1948), p.10.) It is a deep passion, 'Some men are suddenly struck with impotence if they learn from the woman with whom they are making love that she is a Jewess. It is an involvement of the mind, but one so deep-seated and complex that it extends to the physio-logical realm, as happens in cases of hysteria.' (Ibid. p.10-11)
Sartre comments that, ‘It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than of reason. But ordinarily love the objects of passion: women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves.’ (Ibid. p.18.) He chooses to reason from passion, to reason falsely ‘because of the longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may intervene to cast doubt on it.’ Anti-Semites are attracted by ‘the durability of a stone.’ (Ibid.) What frightens them is the uncertainty of truth. (Ibid. p.19.) ‘The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith.’ (Ibid.) He has escaped responsibility and doubt. He can blame anything on the Jew; he does not need to engage reason, for he has his faith.
Anti-Semitism is a way of feeling good, proud even, rather than guilty at the abandonment of responsibility and the flight before the impossibility of true sincerity. (Ibid.) The anti-Semite abandons himself to the crowd and his bad faith, he ‘flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness, and choosing for his personality the permanence of the rock, he chooses for his morality the scale of petrified values.’ (Ibid. p.27.) He pulls down shutters, blinds, mirrors and mirages over his consciousness to keep himself in his bad faith away from his responsibilities and his liberty. The anti-Semite is afraid ‘of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews.’ He is ‘a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself.’ (Ibid. p.53.)
The nativist, like the anti-Semite and the racist, expounds at length on the great evils wrought by the subject of his hatred. The fact that most of his "views" are false or gross distortions is of little consequence. What matters to the hater is the confirmation of his hatred. Hence, the pathological fixation on the social ills supposedly wrought by "the menace." The crime of one becomes the guilt of all who share the criminal's ethnicity. The drain on society, however false, becomes an article of faith which no amount of reason will remove. Hispanics are demonized for each and every action which any one of the group commits. As well, the fact that an immigrant is working at low wages with false documents is not an indication of economic need but rather an indication of mendacity and venality common to the whole group. All characteristics must bear out the durability of his hatred for this evil race. The nativist constantly resorts to images of defilement, the dark rapist who preys on white women, nay who preys on under-age girls, the avaricious alien who steals not only your job but your very bread. Our culture, the white Anglo-Saxon culture is constantly said to be at risk, defiled and sullied. The nativist is so steeped in his hatred that he unconcsiously parrots the very same tired arguments of such anti-Semitic tomes as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such is the nature of anti-Semitism, racism and nativism. And this truly is what Peter Brimelow wants to advance when he calls for a debate on the "immigration question." It is not a debate but a call to action, all true whites stand up for your race, you are at peril. Brimelow is not concerned with real Latinos, Hispanics or immigrants. For the nativist, hate of the other is a way by which to lay claim to the nation in which they reside, and an oversimplified conception of the world in which the nativist sees not a conflict of interests but the damage which an evil power causes society.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Continuing Marriage of neo-Nazi Extremists, Nativists and Racists
The associations between criminal extremist enterprises and so-called mainstream anti-immigrant advocacy organizations has been a source of concern for groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and, of course, to the victims of such hate groups. On eristic ragemail we have written about these connections and have provided links to information on such groups. In this regard, there is an extremely informative article in Searchlight Magazine (which bills itself as anti-fascist and anti-racist) by David Williams. Although, the article covers the 2006 meeting of the racist webzine, American Renaissance, its description of the well-established relationships between groups such as FAIR and neo-Nazi organizations if extremely incisive. The article is entitled, “BNP leader embraced by top US Nazis.” American Renaissance held a similar gathering this year but it was not as well-attended, perhaps a reflection of waning influence. In any event here are some excerpts from Williams’ excellent article. For the past 12 years Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, which is published by his New Century Foundation from Oakton, Virginia, has sponsored a series of biennial conferences the first of which took place in 1994 in Atlanta, Georgia with a hundred people. American Renaissance is a pseudo-scientific racist magazine, which uses IQ tests and eugenics to promote the “clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites”. Taylor’s dogged determination to “concentrate on what unites” and to “expand the consciousness of race” drew a large crowd, approximately 300, a record number of racists though they preferred the term “white preservationists,” who sat and listened to speeches centred on the theme of “The Global Crisis: Perspectives from Europe, Africa, and Australia”. In keeping with its global perspective this year’s conference had a truly international flavour with speakers including Nick Griffin and Derek Turner from England, Professor Andrew Fraser (Australia), Professor Philippe Rushton (Canada), Dr Dan Roodt (South Africa), Dr Guillaume Faye (France) and Sam Dickson (America).
John Brimelow (twin brother of Peter Brimelow, author of the influential anti-immigration tract Alien Nation) who runs the popular VDARE.com website attended and was observed cloistered in the atrium consorting with [Klansman] Black and his cohorts.But it was not only the keynote speakers who were of interest. The list of those attending this year’s conference read like a veritable “who’s who” of American white supremacy. Particularly prominent among the attendees were the contingent from Stormfront.org, the world’s largest white supremacist website – slogan “white pride, world wide” – run by the former Alabama Klansman Don Black, who in 1981 tried to invade the island of Dominica and set up a white supremacist state. The venture failed and Black was jailed for three years.
John Brimelow (twin brother of Peter Brimelow, author of the influential anti-immigration tract Alien Nation) who runs the popular VDARE.com website attended and was observed cloistered in the atrium consorting with Black and his cohorts. A controversial figure for some within the American Renaissance milieu, David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (who was succeeded by Black), was there as were the far-right radio talk show host Hal Turner, Mark Weber, director of the California-based Holocaust denial outfit the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), Kevin Strom of National Vanguard and David Pringle, both former members of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. There was also a large contingent of Canadians led by Paul Fromm of the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee. Fromm is a friend of the Holocaust deniers Lady Michelle Renouf and Ernst Zündel who, much to Fromm’s annoyance, is currently on trial in Germany.
The after dinner speech was delivered by Rushton, Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and currently the president of the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 for the “racial betterment” of the white race by funding spurious racial science projects dedicated to proving its genetic superiority. The Pioneer Fund has made a series of large financial grants to Taylor’s own New Century Foundation, the company behind American Renaissance. Rushton’s speech, replete with slides, on “New Research on Socio-biology” was dedicated to proving that IQ tests showed blacks to be genetically inferior to whites, though his imputation that on “average” Asians might have a higher IQ than whites left more than one diner at our table with a bitter taste in the mouth after an otherwise pleasant meal.
The conference threw into stark relief the increasing synergy between British and American racists. Those who had tired of the speeches or merely wished to stretch their legs could peruse the stalls at the back of the hall, many of which were giving away mountains of free literature. One of the first we encountered was the Occidental Quarterly stall run by James Russell, a member of its editorial board. Also on Occidental Quarterly’s board are Derek Turner and the controversial Leeds university don Frank Ellis. Coincidentally the stall next to Russell was that of Washington Summit Publishers (WSP) run by yet another Occidental Quarterly editorial board member, Louis Andrews of Augusta, Georgia. It is Andrews who manages the American distribution of Right Now!. WSP publishes Race Differences in Intelligence by Richard Lynn, emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, who like Taylor is a recipient of Pioneer Fund grants. WSP also reprints “classic” Aryan and eugenic tracts including a homily to the antisemitic philosopher Count de Gobineau as a pioneer of genetics.
Other stalls included those run by Joe Sobran, who was fired from his job as senior editor of the National Review in 1993 on account of his antisemitism, and Social Contract Press whose journal Social Contract is edited by Dr Wayne Lutton who sits alongside Taylor, Andrews, Russell and Derek Turner on the editorial board of Occidental Quarterly. Social Contract Press also publishes The Camp of Saints by Jean Raspail, an apocalyptic vision of immigration peddled in this country by Right Now!
The “Jewish Question” was, noted one attendee, “always present in the thinking of those I met, either at the forefront of our conversation or just below the surface”. Indeed Griffin “made reference to it several times” during the course of dinner with several American activists on Friday night. However, it came very publicly to the fore on Saturday afternoon and has generally dominated discussion of the conference on white nationalist websites since then… After thanking him for a speech which had “stirred our genes” [David] Duke, whose charisma appears to have been surgically enhanced of late, asked Faye if there weren’t a more insidious threat to the West than Islam? “Tell us what it is” came a call from the back of the room. “I’m not going to say,” said a coy Duke to rising laughter.
Martin Hart, a squat right-wing Jewish astrophysicist who has attended all the American Renaissance conferences since 1996, took umbrage to this, not least because he had only just reassured Hershel Elias, a new initiate to the American Renaissance circuit from Philadelphia, that although the conference was “infiltrated by Nazis and Holocaust deniers” this should not detract from his enjoyment of the gathering. “You fucking Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting,” Hart shouted at Duke before storming out of the hall followed by boos and catcalls. As one can tell from a glance at the Stormfront forums Hart appears to have woefully misjudged the audience!
Sarcasm aside the dispute between Duke and Hart highlights the uneasy alliance between the socially conservative “race realists” such as Taylor and Baum, who believe antisemitism detracts from the real task of opposing immigration, and the hardline antisemites gathered around Stormfront for whom antisemitism is the issue. Indeed Stormfront, although generally supportive, regards American Renaissance as a “soft core” organisation, useful because its broader appeal on race and immigration issues enables it to function as “an entry level portal for those still learning the racial basics” and for that reason “it has value”. The verbal fracas and its fallout reveal just how unstable are the foundations upon which Taylor is trying to build his coalition.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM Responds to Eristic Ragemail
On Friday, July 11, 2008, Eristic Ragemail published a transcript of a conversation between Ragemail and Peter Brimelow. Today, Peter Brimelow and his buddy, Cronulla submitted a response (Click on response to see Brimelo’s response) which is posted herein. Read what Peter Brimelow has to say in defense of his controversial views.
get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.
Monday, July 7, 2008
It’s like deja vu, all over again!
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelous’s quote is a timely reminder, as evidenced by the excellent article by Edmundo Rocha on “Immigration Crack-Downs: A Little Bit of History Repeating.” We have previously covered the great repatriation of Latinos in the 1930s, the majority of whom were citizens of this country. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-American citizens were forcibly exiled to Mexico. Hence, the nativist nightmare that many Latinos and other minorities live with, is the fear that history will repeat itself. Rocha’s article covers, in broad strokes, the history of nativism and repression applied to Latinos, Japanese and other ethnic groups.
Advocates for "enforcement only" would like nothing better than to see a future in which most of the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US be removed, either through coercive means or voluntarily. In a climate of fear and defensiveness, there is a psychological need to assign blame and fight back against the perceived enemy. It is not the first time that fear has triggered the adoption of tough immigration policies. For example, it was economic insecurity that triggered the racism that contributed to the passage of the infamous laws excluding Chinese immigrants from the US in the late 1800s.
The general invisibility of Latina/o civil rights abuses during the last century has left a large majority of Americans unaware of the forced removal of approximately one to two million persons from the United States during the Great Depression. The 1930s marked the first time in the history of international migration between the US and other countries that the federal government sponsored and supported the mass deportation of immigrants.
Unfortunately, throughout US history, when harsh measures are done in the name of national security, it is often directed at unpopular ethnic/racial minorities. It is easy to draw a parallel between the repatriation of the 1930s and the internment of the Japanese to the measures taken by the US government after September 11 because the policies that were passed after 9/11 proved to be no different. Racial profiling in this sense is a tool that Americans turn to when a perceived outsider threatens to damage the status quo.
Ample evidence has been put forward on Eristic Ragemail that the nativist agenda is considerably broader than simply “protecting our borders.” At the extremes, nativists embrace racist eugenics theories that would sweep up not just illegal immigrants but all ”inferior races”. Those who are concerned with human rights and the dignity of all human beings should look upon the current nativist wave not merely as anti-immigrant but as profoundly racist and extreme. In that regard, history dictates that we realize that to act on behalf of the voiceless is to act on behalf of humanity and perhaps forestall another grave tragedy in human history.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
On the use of the term “illegal alien”
Ever since George Orwell pointed out the pernicious nature of words being used as code, we have recognized that in political debate words are often freighted with much that is concealed. In the current climate, nativists insist, actually demand, that undocumented immigrants be referred to as “illegal aliens.” If you can classify a whole group of people with a pejorative –alien --and then group them as “illegal,” you have carried out a neat trick: you have stripped a whole group of people of their humanity. Once dehumanized, any ill-treatment is judged by lesser standards, perhaps less moral than ones we apply to animals. I found the following essay, a non-political posting from the Mother Tounge Annoyances blog, quite instructive on this point.
On the "Illegal Alien"
How are you doing? Today I’d like to examine the term “illegal alien” and why its use bothers me so darned much.
Let’s be vulnerable and deeply honest with each other, okay? How often do you hear Americans use the term illegal alien with some discernable trace of prejudice and/or racism? Can you detect any shades of hypernationalism and/or ethnocentrism in this usage?
Speaking for myself, I am disappointed whenever I listen to news commentary or participate in a personal discussion and an individual refers to undocumented immigrants as “illegals” or “illegal aliens.” I’m not saying that (a) I can ‘read’ people’s motivations without asking them directly; or (b) The majority of those who use the term “illegal alien” do so with conscious or unconscious prejudicial intent.
On the other hand, I’ve found that, more often than not, when I ask an individual directly, eyeball-to-eyeball, if their use of “illegals” or “illegal aliens” belies some sort of anti-immigrant prejudice, my rigorously honest conversational partners tend to answer in the affirmative.
It’s time to parse some words. First let’s examine the phrase illegal alien. Wikipedia has an excellent entry on illegal immigration. Following is some relevant text from that piece:
The term “illegal alien” is conferred legitimacy by its official use in federal statutes. An illegal alien is a foreign national who resides in another country unlawfully, either by entering that country at a place other than a designated port of entry or as result of the expiration of a non-immigrant visa. Alternative terms include “illegal immigrant” and the euphemisms “undocumented immigrant,” “undocumented worker,” and “paperless immigrant.”
The Wikipedia author(s) make a good point in saying that some folks argue over the adjective illegal because an immigrant who illegally crosses the U.S. borders or overstays his or her visa intentionally has, in fact, “violated our laws and customs in establishing residence in our country. He or she is therefore a criminal under applicable U.S. laws.” (Reference: Adversity.net)
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective and noun alien in a couple of different ways. In definition B1a, the noun alien (used in an adjectival sense) means “a person belonging to another family, race, or nation; a stranger, a foreigner.”
Definition B1b in the OED pertains to our colloquial understanding of the term alien: “Science Fiction. An (intelligent) being from another planet, especially one far distant from the Earth; a strange (usually threatening) alien visitor.”
Hmm. For completeness, let us examine the adjective and noun illegal. The OED defines the adjectival sense of illegal in definition 1a as “Not legal or lawful; contrary to, or forbidden by, law.”
When the OED defines illegal as a noun, the entry reads starkly in definition B1: “illegal immigrant.”
Yeah yeah yeah—some folks might contend that my distaste for the phrase illegal alien boils down ultimately to a sturdy dose of semantics with a big ol’ pinch of political correctness thrown into the mix.
Linguistically and definitionally, the phrase illegal alien technically works to describe an undocumented immigrant, unauthorized migrant, or whatever euphemism you’d like to use. See Adversity.net for another set of definitions related to the terms alien, immigrant, illegal alien, and undocumented immigrant.
My purpose in this blog post is not to delve into the issue of illegal immigration in general. Heaven knows there are enough Joes and Janes rantin’ about this subject in their own personal weblogs. And good for them! Civilized discourse and freedom of expression are, to my understanding, at the heart of American democracy.
All this definitional stuff aside, however, I ask you to switch off your analytical minds for a moment and consider the following question with your hearts:
When you hear someone refer to an undocumented immigrant as an “illegal alien,” do you feel that this phrase in any, shape, or manner dehumanizes the person in question? Moreover, do you feel that the phrase may be intended to dehumanize the immigrant?
Obviously, I feel this way. And if you visit Web sites such as IllegalAliens.US, you’ll see that there exist plenty of people who disagree with me. Fine and fine.
Here is my “take” on the matter, folks: Men, women, and children who migrate from one country to another, whether they do so legally or illegally, are living, breathing, human beings who are worthy of dignity and respect.
Am I proposing that people change the way they speak or write? Not exactly. Instead, I would suggest that American citizens (a) ask themselves honestly what cultural assumptions (if any) underlie their use of “illegal alien”; and (b) consider that because this phrase is ‘loaded’ on many different levels, perhaps using a less inflammatory phrase to describe these men and women may be advisable.
What do you think? Does the phrase “illegal alien” bother you at all? Or, by contrast, do you think that any controversy regarding its use is a “tempest in a teapot”? Or…what? I look forward to learning from you. Have a wonderful day!
Detainee Deaths lead IG to conclude that ICE needs to account for its treatment of immigrants
A special review of immigration detainee deaths by the Federal Inspector General has concluded that ICE, the agency in charge of immigrant detensions, has been lax in reporting detainee deaths. Recent reports have brought to light the malignant state of medical care given to immigration detainees. Worse still, is the failure of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in reporting or covering up deaths of immigrants while in detention by ICE or private contractors. As reported by the The New York Times.
The federal immigration agency should report all deaths in detention promptly, not only to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, but also to state authorities where required by law, the inspector general has recommended after a “special review” of the deaths of two immigrant detainees.
Congress, advocates for immigrants and the news media have highlighted the lack of systematic accountability in such cases, and documented problems with the medical care provided in the detention system, a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities.
That inspection, by the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, also found that only 11 of 20 detainees with chronic conditions were regularly scheduled for chronic care clinics, and that its policies did not fulfill requirements to notify the Homeland Security Department — the system’s parent agency — or the Justice Department of deaths.
International and domestic human rights groups have called on ICE to account for the poor treatment of detainees, especially as it concerns medical care. Among, the human rights groups condemning ICE are Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, Asian human rights groups and Human Rights First, amongst other human rights groups.
Eristic ragemail has previously posted on specific cases of medical neglect and death by ICE and its private contractors.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
John Tanton and Peter Brimelow Publish Racist Tract Together
As if we needed more evidence that John Tanton, founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA, is a racist extremist, Peter Brimelow has put together an anthology of his favorite racist writers for the latest issue of Tanton’s magazine The Social Contract. Eristic Ragemail has previously pointed out that the so-called grass-roots anti-immigrant organizations are in actuality a creature of a select cabal of extremist nutwings. If anybody had any doubt about Tanton’s racist proclivities, this should put them to rest. (Peter Brimelow makes no bones of his racism, defending it as a bulwark against “political correctness.”) John Tanton, founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and a dozen other nativist organizations, still proclaims agnosticism on the inferiority of non-whites, despite statements clearly belying such racism. The whole of the latest issue of The Social Contract exclusively features writings from the extremist website VDare with the unbowed racist, Steve Sailer featured prominently. Take this gem from a recent Sailer article, (one of a racist multitude) “there’s a much simpler explanation for why white kids spend no more time on their homework than black and Hispanic kids, yet score vastly higher on achievement tests: because they are, … smarter.” Next time the media runs a quote from FAIR or NumbersUSA, invite them to peruse this issue of John Tanton’s publication: The The Social Contract loves VDare and its stable of racists.
P.S. All this racist crap is paid for by you, the taxpayer. VDare is a so-called “non-profit” corporation.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Roll of Anti-Immigrant Groups
Symsess, of American Humanity, was kind enough to send a family tree of the nativist web which you can find here .
| | |||
|
If you liked this post, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can
get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
