This week, disordered thoughts. I’m not sure what other kind might
be applicable in today’s world.
I just got back from Washington, where I addressed the American
Renaissance conference. I hate airplanes. They have the charm of Greyhound
buses without the comfort.
AmRen, as we say, had invited me to talk about Mexico as it appears from
the inside. The organization was alleged to be a vicious racist organization.
The more easily frightened of my associates in the crime of journalism tried
to warn me off. They told me that my mere presence at the conference would
destroy my reputation. (Which reputation is that, I wondered?) I was given
to believe that, at lunch, the conferees would form hunting packs and set
forth to lynch children of color.
What the hey, I thought. I knew their web site, and knew that what it said,
while highly incorrect politically, was usually exactly right factually. Their
breakout of racial statistics on crime is horrifying, for example, but impeccable,
coming from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization
Survey. AmRen’s writings consequently are often denounced but seldom
disputed. It doesn’t pay to dispute what you know to be true. Anyway,
I didn’t see how I could add to the sum total of evil in the world by
describing Mexico.
I landed at Dulles and made my way to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, site of this
witches' sabbath. Police were everywhere. It seemed that protesters had threatened
to shut down the meeting. I hoped so. Protesters are fun. They are frequently
idiots and do curious and diverting things. Having checked in, I went to the
cocktail reception and was gravely disappointed.
On average the attendees were middle-aged, well-mannered men worried about
unchecked immigration from Mexico. This is a hideous racist position? Try
a national referendum on the matter and you will find that most of the United
States agrees. Blacks in particular want the illegals to go home.
Listening to the speakers, I concluded that AmRen suffered chiefly from an
intense political incorrectness. Everything they said was either true or well
within the bounds of reason. Most of it I had seen in mainstream publications.
The sin of the speakers was that they spoke without abashment and equivocation.
The barely restricted tidal wave from the south, they said, is profoundly
changing American society without the consent of the governed. It is. The
consequences have not been thought out, they said. They haven’t.
Probably AmRen’s fundamental idea is that multiculturalism is not a
good idea, that countries are much better off when they have a homogeneous
culture, or at least a dominant one. Mix cultures in one country, and you
get trouble. Observation confirms the proposition. In Canada, you find hostility
between English and French; in Sri Lanka, Tamils and Sinhalese; in the US,
black, white, and brown; in Mexico, Mexicans and indigenes; in Malaya, Chinese
and Malays; in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites; in France, French and Africans; in
Vietnam, Vietnamese and Montagnards; in India, Moslems and Hindus; in Cambodia,
Cambodians and Vietnamese; in South Africa, blacks and whites; in Burundi,
Hutus and Tutsis, and so on. And on. And on.
So what do we think we are doing?
One of the speakers was Phil Rushton, of the University of Western Ontario,
whose specialty is the study of racial differences in intelligence. Only among
the ideologically befogged is the subject beyond the pale. The evidence for
these differences would be voluminous if there weren’t so much of it.
Further, measurements of intelligence are reproducible and highly correlated
with success of both individuals and groups. The people who do these studies,
as for example Rushton, are highly intelligent themselves and cautious in
their conclusions.
It amuses me that such as Rushton are often regarded as right-wing racists,
drone. They point out that Jews are intellectually superior to other whites,
which is hardly a traditional right-wing view; and that East Asians are smarter
than whites, also not normally regarded as a white racist idea. Look at the
IQ hierarchy they find: Jews at the top, followed by, East Asians, whites,
South American mestizos, American blacks, African blacks. Now compare the
intellectual achievements of the groups. Kinda sorta fits, don’t it?
But we can’t talk about this because (a) we wouldn’t like the
results, and (b) because it takes an eighth-grade understanding of mathematics
to grasp a standard deviation, which eliminates most of the population.
Anyway, my turn came. I stood manfully on the podium and proceeded to tell
the assembled that Mexico wasn’t what they most likely thought, which
it isn’t. I don’t know to what extent they quite believed me.
Americans tend to have little experience of other countries, most often no
experience, and it is hard to separate a distaste for massive immigration
from a dim view of the country from which the immigrants come. This is not
unique to AmRen.
The audience was anything but homogeneous. Someone who had been to various
such conventions said the crowd consisted of twenty percent Neo-Nazis and
twenty percent Jews. Jews, yes; Neo-Nazis, perhaps. If the latter means people
who want to exterminate this or that group, I encountered none. The closest
anyone came was an overwrought dingaling who, in question and answer, denounced
me as a race traitor for having married Violeta, my Mexican wife. I considered
an appropriate but anatomically unorthodox repositioning of my microphone.
However, the audience told him to sit down and shut up. Later a dozen people
apologized for his behavior, and I met a fair number of men who had Chinese,
Mexican, and Colombian wives. Race traitors all, I suppose.
In a country less repressive of dissent than the US, a discussion of immigration
might seem advisable. It is perfectly true that in many countries the white
population is in decline—Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, and so on. It
is also true that floods of arguably inassimilable immigrants from comparatively
backward countries—those of Africa, South America, the Arab world—are
a rapidly growing fraction of the population in these dying nations. In their
own countries they have shown no ability to function at the intellectual level
of Europeans. They will change utterly—are changing—their new
countries. Apart from restaurants and manual labor, they seem to contribute
little. If this isn’t so, tell me why it isn’t.
Can Mexicans assimilate? In small numbers, sure. My waitress in the bar was
a pretty young Mexicana who spoke perfect English. She wasn’t going
to assimilate. She already had. But millions and millions? With their kids
already doing very poorly in school? I hope but doubt. The price of being
wrong will be high.
This, it seems to me, merits thought. It isn’t getting it.
