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Boston Bombing Aftermath: David Sirota and Ben Shapiro claim Jews are not part of White America

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David Sirota’s  blog hoping that a White guy was responsible for the Boston terror has gotten quite a lot of mileage (“Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American”). The basic idea is that if it’s a Muslim, say, people might start thinking that increasing legal immigration by 50% and amnestying God knows how many illegals in a time of high unemployment—the Senate bill that insane Republicans think will bring them back to power—might not be a good idea. That’s because , if it’s a Muslim, people will start blaming whole groups of people and maybe not want to continue importing more of them.

Or maybe they’ll tend to just blame immigration itself. (See LATimes: “Boston suspects’ background threatens to derail immigration bill.”) The bombers appear to be ethnic Chechnyans and Muslim, although at this point it can’t be said exactly what their motives were. In any case, it’s pretty obvious that these immigrant bombers don’t have much love or respect for America.

So Sirota is right that people like him should hope that it was a White guy. But I rather doubt he would like the logic: It’s probably true that quite a few people would blame an entire group or even all immigrants for the actions of a few people. But that’s not really the issue. Even the least likely to stereotype would reasonably wonder why any of the group are here if even a small number are causing such death and destruction.  Even if a tiny percentage of immigrants of a certain sort turn out to be terrorists who wreak major havoc (VDARE has documented the immigrant mass murder syndrome), it’s still a very bad policy to bring them in, especially when the only reasons for doing so are to meet the political goal of the left in swamping the White majority and the Republican’s goal of destroying the labor market.

The same can be said about crime, low IQ, and high rates of welfare dependency and single parenting, although it would take more than a few bad apples to sway the argument on these issues. (High percentages of illegal immigrants [58% in Texas, 55% in California] are already on means-tested welfare; the new bill ensures that they will continue to do so, likely at much higher rates.) Of course, for the left and now the Republicans envisioning all those welfare recipients voting for Marco Rubio, no cost is too high in the drive to eclipse White America.

But it’s worth pondering the other side of the coin—that a White American bomber would not result in stereotyping Whites. Anti-White activist Tim Wise took the opportunity presented by the Boston bombings to claim that the fact that Whites do not suffer group stigma for such an act is yet another example of “White privilege”—a “privilege” enjoyed by any demographic majority. But of course that’s the real reason why Wise and Sirota are exercised: they hate the fact that there is still a White majority. (See here for TOO articles mentioning Tim Wise.) Read more

High-Voltage Hate: Hypocrisy on Free Speech in Britain

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Enlightenment Values

If you’ve ever handled a slug, you’ll know that you have to wipe  your hands afterwards. It would be wrong to compare the British anti-fascist Denis MacShane with a slug – he’s not a hermaphrodite or a mollusc, after all – but contact with Denis has similar effects. You’ll have things to clean up afterwards. I wrote about this former Labour Member of Parliament in the article “Rotten in Rotherham”, where I noted two important but apparently contradictory facts:

1) He oversaw a parliamentary report into antisemitism that suggested it be made a criminal offence to read hate-inciting material on the internet.

2) He wrote a comradely review of You Can’t Read This Book, Nick Cohen’s book on free speech and claimed to stand with Voltaire and other “giants of the Enlightenment” for free speech and against censorship.

I concluded that he was lying about his solidarity with Voltaire. But there’s more to be said. MacShane wasn’t only lying: he was revealing either his complete ignorance or his impudent chutzpah. Here again is the suggestion in the MacShane-helmed Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism (2006):

The former Home Office Minister Paul Goggins MP gave evidence of a model which could possibly be applied to racist material on the internet. In the case of child pornography it is now an offence to download images from the internet, and it may be possible to develop a similar law in regard to material which could incite racial or religious hatred. (Report, para. 186, pg. 37)

Here again is MacShane’s praise of Voltaire in his review of Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book (2012):

Surely there is no greater badge of honour than to stand with the giants of the 18th century, who insisted rationality should be given equal status to superstition. … The right of men (always men) dressed in long robes to censor words and thought is increasing, not diminishing. In the end, Cohen rightly argues, we have to assert the Enlightenment values of both Voltaire and Mill as they argued for free speech. (You Can’t Read This Book, The Observer, Sunday, 12th February, 2012) Read more

Paul Fromm on the Demise of Free Speech in Canada

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Paul Fromm, a pro-White activist who writes for his CAFE (Canadian Association for Free Expression) website, has an article on a recent ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court that once again indicates the power of the cultural left at the highest reaches of Western societies “The Whatcott Decision – A Grim Day for Christians and Freedom of Speech“). The case involves a $15000 fine (plus court costs likely to be north of $150,000) imposed on an evangelical Christian who distributed leaflets containing criticism of homosexuality based on Biblical teachings. Some excerpts and comments:

The decision is pure cultural Marxism. It reflects the triumph of *Frankfurt School* social science which has captured most Western universities. While economic communism collapsed and was defeated, cultural communism was spread by the *Frankfurt School*. Basically, it sees the world divided up into two classes: oppressors – those would be White Christians, and especially sexually healthy White males – and the oppressed – those would be women, homosexuals, Jews, and certain other racial minorities. To overthrow the “oppressors” and to establish universal equality – not of opportunity but results – the *Frankfurt School* targeted loyalty to family, country and religion. There began a concerted campaign of “deconstruction” whereby political heroes, cultural heroes – the dismissal of traditional English literature as the writing of dead, White males – and traditional Christianity were mocked and attacked. These ideas have captured the upper echelons of Canada’s judiciary and bode poorly for freedom of speech.

The Whatcott decision holds that in human rights cases:

· Truth is no defence;
· Intent is no defence;
· No harm needs to be proven to have been caused to a “vulnerable” minority;
· A minority is designated as “vulnerable” not because of any evidence – the court admits concrete evidence is often lacking, but on the mere say-so of a human rights commission or court;
· Christians are not protected from hatred as they are not a “vulnerable minority.”  Read more

Historiographical Refutation of Patrick O’Brien’s Global Perspective on the Scientific Revolution

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The current issue of The Journal of Global History (March 2013) has an opening article by Patrick O’Brien, Professor of Global History at the London School of Economics and Political Science,  with a long title, “Historical foundations for a global perspective on the emergence of a western European regime for the discovery, development, and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge,” which concludes, rather diffidently, that “historians of global economic development might wish to retain the ‘older’ view of the ‘Scientific Revolution’” (15). The global historians O’Brien has in mind are Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Ian Morris, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, A. Gunder Frank, Patrick Manning, David Christian, and indeed almost the entire world and global history professoriate and the multiculturalists who dominate our educational institutions.  The research of these historians has been invariably about the so-called “similarities” — economic and institutional — between Europe and Asia before the Industrial Revolution, not the Scientific Revolution.

Nevertheless, altogether they have generally insisted that the rise of modern science was a global phenomenon. For example, Frank has written that Newtonian science was not peculiar to Europe but “existed and continued to develop elsewhere as well” (1998: 188–89).  Armesto has shown no hesitation stating that the science and philosophy of Copernicus, Kepler, Laplace, Descartes and Bacon was no more original than the neo-Confucian “scientific” revival of the seventeenth century — both were “comparable in kind” (2007: 630). Morris has also said that an intellectual movement in 17th to 18th century China known as Kaozheng “paralleled western Europe’s scientific revolution in every way – except one: it did not develop a mechanical model of nature” (2010: 473)—a rather large difference  given that nature can’t be understood scientifically without such models. Parthasarathi, in his recent book, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (2011) has rejected the ‘older’ claim that Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions, tracing the divergence instead to different competitive and ecological pressures structured by global dynamics.

Now, while O’Brien thinks that these historians have been “successful” in their “assault upon a triumphalist tradition of European global economic history” (2), he questions, guardedly, their claim that the rise of modern science was a global phenomenon. The Scientific Revolution, he writes, was “something less than a short, sharp discontinuity in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, and more a profound conjuncture locatable for its time in the history of western Europe” (23). Yet, O’Brien accepts the idea that world history should be the study of “connections in the human community,” the story of humanity’s “common experience” (Manning, 2003), an idea which precludes seeing historical transformation in terms of the “internal logics” of nations or particular civilizations. The result is one of the most convoluted, awkward, befuddling, and unscholarly papers I have read.  Read more

Peter Hitchens’s Show of Guilt: Enoch Powell Was Right

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Now that Britain has been utterly transformed to the point that turning back the muilticultural assault and reclaiming the traditional British nation would be cataclysmic, we are treated to some hand-wringing in the mainstream media. In his “How I am partly to blame for mass immigration” Peter Hitchens writes that when he was a Trotskyite supporting as much immigration as possible,

it wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain. We saw immigrants – from anywhere – as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.  Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people – usually in the poorest parts of Britain – who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly ‘vibrant communities’.  If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.

Revolutionary students didn’t come from such ‘vibrant’ areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London). We might live in ‘vibrant’ places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins. But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients – not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives. When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as ‘racists’.What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?

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Rotten in Rotherham: Denis MacShane, Doublethink and the Coming Slave-State

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The Right Honourable Denis MacShane

The Right Honourable Denis MacShane

Comrade Catholic

Unstintingly generous with others, Tony Blair’s New Labour were sternly austere with themselves. While toiling to create thousands of new laws and regulations for the rest of us, for themselves they had a single stark and simple rule: “To the pure in heart, all things are permitted.” And who in New Labour came purer-hearted, or more self-permissive, than the Rt. Hon. Denis MacShane, né Matyjascek, a Privy Councillor, “informal envoy” to Tony Blair, and quondam Member of Parliament for the Yorkshire constituency of Rotherham? Saluted as an “old comrade” by a fellow Oxonian, the Trotskyist/neo-conservative Christopher Hitchens, the Roman Catholic MacShane has devoted many decades to the struggle against fascism and for justice, equality and freedom. Alas, in our fallen world, this made him a marked man. On Friday 7th November, 2012, the cross-party House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee suspended him for twelve months for submitting false invoices and fraudulently claiming thousands of pounds in expenses.

The Labour chairman of the committee described his conduct as the “gravest case which has come to the committee for adjudication” and Denis saw no choice but to fall on his anti-fascist sword:

In the light of the Parliamentary Commissioner’s decision, supported by the Committee of Standards and Privileges, to uphold the BNP [British National Party] complaint about expenses claimed in connection with my parliamentary work in Europe and in combating antisemitism, I have decided for the sake of my wonderful constituency of Rotherham and my beloved Labour party to resign as an MP. (“Denis MacShane resigns as MP over expenses,” The Guardian, 2 November 2012)

Denis was not alone in his distress and bewilderment that a complaint from so vile a source should have been upheld. The lawyer Mark Stephens, a friend and fellow anti-fascist, appeared on BBC Radio 4’s World at One to condemn the committee’s finding in these uncompromising terms:

The most important thing here is that if people who are anti-fascist, people who have fought against semitism [sic], then in those sort of circumstances – in those circumstances – people will be deterred from doing that in the future, they will become targets… I have worked with Dr Denis MacShane for over thirty years on campaigns and anti-fascist work. This is a huge victory for racists and fascists who have in my opinion abused the parliamentary complaints system to destroy an honourable member of parliament who is a political opponent of the BNP… the chilling effect of this process will deter principled members of Parliament from rooting out prejudice and fascism wherever it may be found. (See here.) Read more

Monogamy and the Uniqueness of European Civilization

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One of the arguments against gay marriage is that allowing gays to marry would eventually lead to polygamy, or even marriage between man and goat. Or between a man and his son to avoid inheritance taxes. And indeed it might. But the issue  of polygamy has already been before the Supreme Court, and the opinion—which upheld monogamous (heterosexual)  marriage as the only legitimate form of marriage—is of contemporary interest because of how it defended traditional monogamous marriage.

The Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. United States (1878):

Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people. At common law, the second marriage was always void (2 Kent, Com. 79), and from the earliest history of England polygamy has been treated as an offence against society. After the establishment of the ecclesiastical courts, and until the time of James I., it was punished through the instrumentality of those tribunals, not merely because ecclesiastical rights had been violated, but because upon the separation of the ecclesiastical courts from the civil the ecclesiastical were supposed to be the most appropriate for the trial of matrimonial causes and offences against the rights of marriage, just as they were for testamentary causes and the settlement of the estates of deceased persons.

By the statute of 1 James I. (c. 11), the offence, if committed in England or Wales, was made punishable in the civil courts, and the penalty was death. As this statute was limited in its operation to England and Wales, it was at a very early period re-enacted, generally with some modifications, in all the colonies.

The court then points out that the same Virginia convention that recommended religious freedom also enacted James I’s death penalty for bigamy. Read more