Who Has a Claim to the United States

In a video recording of Jamie Kelso’s experience at CPAC, the argument was made that Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics have equal claim to the United States. Disappointingly (at least to me), this is what passes for White conservative opinion on this matter today.

Black activists today defend their equal claim arguing that the United States was built on the backs of Black slaves, implying that the United States would not have been possible without them. Hispanic activists go further, and assert that their claim is greater, arguing that they were in the continent first and that, in fact, Whites should not be in America at all.

Mr. Kelso’s position at the abovemented event was (1) that Whites have the right to a homeland and (2) that Whites in the United States have the right to call that country their homeland because it was built by Whites.

On the surface, the second argument seems a strong one, but in today’s context it is seriously undermined by the present day weakness of the first one.

That I consider the first argument weak nowadays may seem extraordinary to those who consider it irrefutable: after all, Whites did built the United States! Yet as an argument it is weak in the present day context because it not only depends on a false premise, but also relies on the implicit acceptance of a racial self-identification that is rejected by most White people today.

The argument "Whites have the right to a homeland" presupposes that rights have an existence independent of the consensus that is needed to make their enforcement possible.

That consensus does not exist today.

Only some Whites believe in the existence of such a right, and among them only some are willing to act in consequence. That is not a consensus in practical terms: that is a minority view.

The argument also presupposes that Whiteness is accepted as a valid category. Many White people today, however, do not accept that race exists, that the White race is a race, that they are members of a racial group, or that membership of that racial group has any value whatsoever. Many act as if they accept some or all those things, but only so long as there is no risk of being called a name by someone; in a debate, when called on the issue of the validity of their racial identification and interests as Whites, they reject them.

"Whites have the right to a homeland" is the type of argument that is used when preaching to the choir, when high-fiving among ourselves and patting each other on the back; not the type of argument that will sound convincing to a White person with conventional modern views on race.

Such a person does not accept "race", much less "White race" (pride of and identification with which they regard as evil), and therefore finds "White homeland" rather queer, if not outright immoral.

Therefore, in a time when none but a minority of Whites in the United States recognise their exclusive or primary right to the country, and / or when none but an even smaller minority is prepared actively to enforce that right, even where enforcement requires only expressing an opinion without apology or embarrassment, we can conclude that for all practical purposes Whites in the United States today do not have a right to claim the country as a White homeland.

The right may still exist in the abstract, in the minds of an unconventional minority of racially conscious White folk, but that does not make it exist in practice throughout the country today.

The right certainly existed in practice in the past, but that does not make it exist in practice today.

Evidence: tens of millions of Whites persist on voting into, and keeping in, office politicians who openly reject pro-White immigration laws. Even the existing immigration law is poorly or not enforced at all. When a supposedly conservative, politically active White youth is asked whether he cares about his racial heritage or the destruction of his race, he replies, "I don’t give a sh*t". When the question of to whom does the United States belong is posed to another such youth, he asserts in effect that to all peoples of all races, equally. These youths are not exceptional: they are the product of modern mainstream education and media and represent modern conventional opinion.

Of course, it does not have to be that way.

Nor does this mean that I accept the competing claims put forth by other groups.

To my mind, Whites in the United States are the only ones who could legitimately claim the country as their own.

I reject that Blacks have equal claim to the United States because Blacks made up but a small percentage of the historical American nation, and for whatever reasons, the economic output of Blacks on average has been vastly inferior to that of Whites. Indeed, in the contemporary United States Blacks cost more than they produce on the whole—particularly when we consider the cost of violent crime, affirmative action, and welfare recipience, where they are disproportionately represented. As Michael Levin argued in American Renaissance in 2002,

A propos whites’ supposed enjoyment of the un-or undercompensated fruits of black labor, reparationists frequently claim that “blacks built America.” This is patently untrue. At no time have blacks been a substantial part of the US population, and until the Second World War they lived largely in the rural South; they were a part of southern agriculture but played virtually no role in the development of the large cities, industrial complexes, universities and public projects that support American prosperity. In fact, it is precisely those parts of the country with the largest proportion of blacks that have traditionally been the poorest, which is the reverse of what we would expect if blacks were the source of American prosperity. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were English colonies that developed during the same period as the United States. If slavery was the basis of American prosperity, how did these countries achieve comparable levels of prosperity without it? Blacks did not contribute significantly to science, medicine or technology. America would have been different without blacks, but not poorer.

Indeed, it is conceivable that the United States would be even more powerful had there been enough of a consensus to return all of the emancipated Blacks back to Africa upon the abolition of slavery.

Blacks only have an equal (or greater) claim if Whites cease to assert theirs, as they did in Southern Africa.

I also reject that Hispanics (who are mostly mestizo or Amerindian) have a greater claim to the United States than do the Whites. There was no United States in the North American continent before the advent of the White man, and there would be no United States now had the White man not successfully colonised and organised the region in his own image. Had the White man remained oblivious of the existence of the continent we call America, no European-style nation states would exist there today; indeed, small parts of the continent would be controlled by mostly pre-historical tribes, isolated by large swathes of uninhabited space.

The famed Aztlan claim is particularly bogus, as Mexico lost the right to control that area by weakly settling it, by being defeated in war, and by selling that land to the United States.

They only have a greater claim if Whites cease to assert theirs, as did the White Spaniards in a different but more radical way when they interbred with the Amerindian and imported African population.

So much for competing claims.

The point of this article is that if debate-oriented activism is to be successful, it must among other things rely on arguments psychologically compelling to an audience with conventional modern views on race.

I say this not to devalue Mr. Kelso’s efforts, but rather to stress that if those efforts are to be more successful next time, we need to equip him and similar activists with better arguments and debating tactics. The fault is partly with the intellectual echelons of the Right, sections of which hang on to subcultural notions not applicable to the situation as we find it today. “Whites have the right to a homeland” is a archaism, a subcultural platitude, and in practical terms a fallacy where there is no consensus that makes exclusive White rights to anything—even in traditional White homelands—enjoy either moral sanction or the force of law.

Socialist Soviet Republic of Kanuckistan

I read with interest Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s account of his most recent experiences with the Canadian border authorities, who once again have denied entry to a law-abiding citizen on spurious or hastily manufactured grounds. This comes only some months after Richard Spencer’s own experiences, which resulted in him too being denied entry to the Great White North. And they are not the only ones. Even politically incorrect liberals like George Galloway, and peaceful U.S. protesters against the war in Iraq, have been banned. Here is a perplexing account by one of them:

The invitation said six members of the Canadian Parliament were to speak October 25 on Canada's Parliament Hill as members of a panel called "Peacebuilders Without Borders: Challenging the Post-9/11 Canada-US Security Agenda." I arrived at the Ottawa airport on the morning of October 25 expecting to be met by three members of Parliament and to hold a press conference at the airport.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Codepink Women for Peace and Global Exchange, was also invited by the Parliamentarians, but had been arrested the previous day for holding up two fingers in the form of a peace sign during the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing in which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified on Iraq, Iran and Israel-Palestinian issues. The October 24 committee hearing began with Codepink peace activist Desiree Fairooz holding up her red, paint-stained hands to Rice and shouting, "The blood of millions of Iraqis is on your hands." As Capitol Hill police took her out of the House hearing, Fairooz yelled over her shoulder, "War criminal, take her to the Hague." Shortly thereafter, two Codepinkers were arrested for just being in the room, and brutally hauled out of the hearing by Capitol police. An hour later, Medea and a male Codepinker were arrested for no reason. Four of the five had to stay overnight in the District of Columbia jail; Medea was one of those and missed the trip to Ottawa.

I presented immigration officials our letter of invitation from the Parliamentarians that explained Medea and I had been denied entry to Canada at the Niagara Falls border crossing on October 3, 2007, because we had been convicted in the United States of peaceful, non-violent protests against the war on Iraq, including sitting on the sidewalk in front of the White House with 400 others, speaking out against torture during Congressional hearings, and other misdemeanors. The Canadian government knew of these offenses as they now have access to the FBI's National Crime Information database on which we are listed. The database was created to identify members of violent gangs and terrorist organizations, foreign fugitives, patrol violators and sex offenders - not for peace activists peacefully protesting illegal actions of their government.

The immigration officer directed me to a secondary screening, where my request to call the members of Parliament waiting outside the customs' doors was denied. My suggestion that the letter of invitation from the Parliamentarians might be valuable in assessing the need for me to be in Canada was dismissed with the comment that members of Parliament do not have a role in determining who enters Canada. I suggested the laws enacted by the Parliament were the basis of that determination. I added that the reason I had been invited to Ottawa by Parliamentarian was to be an example of how current laws may exclude those whom Canadians may wish to allow to enter. I also mentioned Parliament might decide to change the laws immigration officials implement. I also suggested, since the Parliament provides the budget to the Immigration Services, they might notify the Parliamentarians awaiting my arrival that I had been detained. The officers declined to do so citing my privacy, which I immediately waived. The Parliamentarians were never notified by immigration I had arrived and was being detained. Only when my cell phone was returned to me by immigration officers four hours later was I able to make contact with the Parliamentarians.

After nearly four hours of interrogation, I was told by the senior immigration officer I was banned from Canada for one year for failure to provide appropriate documents that would overcome the exclusion order I had been given in early October because of conviction of misdemeanors (all payable by fines) in the United States. The officer said that to apply for a Temporary Resident Permit (TRP) for entry for a specific event on a specific date, I must provide to a Canadian Embassy or consulate the arresting officer's report, court transcripts and court documents for each of the convictions, an official document describing the termination of sentences, a police certificate issued within the last three months by the FBI, police certificates from places I have lived in the past ten years (that includes Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia), a letter acknowledging my convictions from three respected members of the community (the respected members that I will ask to write a letter have all been convicted of similar "offenses") and a completed 18 page "criminal rehabilitation" packet.

Additionally, besides obtaining the TRP, since I was being banned for a year from Canada, I would have to obtain a "Canadian Government Minister's consent." The officer said the TRP and the Minister's consent normally took from 8-10 months to obtain. In the distant future, to be able to enter Canada without a TRP, I would have to be "criminally rehabilitated" and be free for five years of conviction of any offense, including for peaceful protest.

The senior immigration officer took my fingerprints for Canadian records, escorted me to the airport departures area and placed me on the first plane departing for Washington, DC. In the meantime, the members of Parliament conducted the press conference and the panel without my presence, but certainly using the example of what had happened to me, and previously to Medea Benjamin, as incidents that the Parliamentarians are very concerned about, specifically their government's wholesale acceptance of information on the FBI's database, information that appears to have been placed there for political intimidation.

As if this were not enough, over the years we have also heard many equally bizarre, puzzling, and alarming tales of confiscations and book burnings by the Canadian customs authorities.

I have had my share of frustrations with them too. Over the years I have lost count of the number of times a packet containing music CDs supplied to our various distributor mail orders in Canada have been denied entry and either been sent back or stolen by the authorities. 

On the occasions when the packet was returned, the reason given was that there was no return address—a highly unlikely reason, as all our packets to distributors are sent out with return addresses. Even if that were true, the incident always begged the question: if there was no return address, how did the customs officials manage to get the packet returned to us? How did they know where to send it? The answer is that in each case they found the return address in the invoice that was inside the packet. Why did they return it then, instead of permitting it to reach its intended destination? Had they not already obtained the information they needed? Had they not satisfied themselves that we were not sending pipe bombs, doomsday viruses, rotting meat, stolen organs, or child pornography? 

On the occasions when the packet was stolen, I was forced to send out a replacement, with no guarantee that it would not also be sent back or somehow disappear into the customs officials' record collections—or their book-burning ovens. Sometimes it took three attempts before we were successful. And the most frustrating aspect of this exercise was the lack of any obvious or practical way to claim compensation from the Canadian customs, or even take them to task or embarrass them for the time and money they wasted me.

Even my wife, who occasionally likes to send letters or gifts to friends in Canada tells me that she has found it difficult to get anything into that country. Again, letters fail to arrive, packets disappear, or they both get returned to sender without logical explanation.

What do these people look like? What are their faces like? In the present context, the images I found were not encouraging:

And then there is the matter of Canada’s oppressive human rights legislation, state-sponsored thought limits, speech codes, censorship, and political correctness—the Canadian authorities’ Orwellian effort to keep Canadian citizens from ever seeing, reading, or hearing anything that might upset someone. 

Worse still, it seems some in Canada have fully internalised this mentality, as Jared Taylor found out in 2007 and Ann Coulter did in March last year: both were prevented from speaking by wild Leftist hoodlums, who have a well-established track record of violent intolerance towards tolerance. Presumably these thugs represent the core of that not insignificant segment of the population in Canada which, as a recent major survey has revealed, welcomes mass immigration from all corners of the world. (Out of the eight countries surveyed, Canadian attitudes towards immigration in general were friendliest.)

I need to stress that this is not a reflection of all Canadians or even Canadians in general. My criticisms here are directed at the Canadian government and state apparatus, at the class of citizens—most of them White—who staff that system, which through its embrace of political correctness, of a soft totalitarian or “muscular” liberalism, have made of Canada an inhospitable country for White folk in general and for those who do not embrace PC in particular.

Some may want to argue that this is a reflection on all Canadians because Canada holds democratic elections and that the Canadian government is what it is because Canadians chose that government, and therefore PC. Well, no: so-called democratic governments in the West are hardly a reflection of the wishes of the citizenry. Four in five Britons voted against keeping Tony Blair’s Labour government in power in the 2005 general election and yet the United Kingdom was saddled with another five miserable years of Labour. And it is the same elsewhere. If one looks at the aforementioned survey, most respondents—and often the overwhelming majority of them—in the countries survived were against immigration, against their governments’ pro-immigration policies, and yet said governments persist in keeping the floodgates open. (Bear in mind also that in the era of PC, many respondents will be reluctant to express an opinion that may be considered by others racist, even in the privacy of their own minds.) Worse of all, and most significantly, democratic elections in the West typically offer a choice of two flavours of vanilla. (Actually, I wish it were vanilla!)

Indeed, I have personal friends of long standing in Canada who are scornful and just as frustrated as I am with this insanity.

Not surprisingly, some of them have retreated into the forest.

I wonder how long this will last.

Interview with Richard Spencer

The newest installment of my ongoing series of interviews with personalities involved in politically incorrect writing and publishing features Richard Spencer. We learn about his previous experiences in the paleoconservative movement, his evolving career in the alternative Right, his thinking on the key issues of our time, his adventures with the Canadian border authorities, and his plans with Washington Summit Publishers and the National Policy Institute. To read the interview click here.

Attitudes to Immigration, Recent Data

The BBC reported recently that a recent survey of eight EU and North American countries—United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Spain—has uncovered that out of those Britons are, on average, the most anxious about immigration. The report painted British anti-immigrant sentiment with a broad brush, and, via the president of the German Marshall Fund, which commissioned the survey, made sure to include the statement: 

But the survey also shows that the more one is exposed to immigrants, the more one feels positively toward them.

That makes it all right, then. Phew!

Encouraged by the findings as I was irritated by the BBC’s approach to reporting, I decided to dive into the top line results to get a more accurate picture. I summarise these results below without comment.

The Data

Apparently, 60% of Britons follow news about immigration closely (as opposed to 37% of Americans). Only 37% think it is either the most important or next most important issue facing the country (Americans: 55%; Spain: 62%), but 68% discuss it, following 76% Spaniards and 85% of Italians, 77% and 80% of whom respectively follow news about immigration and immigrant integration closely. Three quarters of Britons think there are a lot of immigrants, and nearly half think there are too many (less than a quarter of Americans do). Most respondents’ greatest worry is immigrants’ ability (or inability) to respect national political institutions and laws, followed by immigrants’ ability to speak the local language, although a surprisingly low percentage of Italians or Spaniards—6% of them—seem to care.

The interesting thing, in view of these findings, is that 68% of Britons believe the myth, propagated by the media (and unsubstantiated by evidence, as far as I know), that legal immigrants help fill the jobs Britons will not do; this is the majority view everywhere else too, and the percentage remains over 50% when myth is applied to illegal immigrants. Yet, nearly 60% of Britons think there are too many foreign-born people in the country already; 60% think they cost more than they contribute in taxes; 65% see immigrants as more of a problem; and between 50-75% think they impose a burden on social services, depending on whether immigrants are legal or illegal. Two thirds of Britons would like illegal immigrants thrown out.

Respondents in the surveyed countries are closely divided—percentages in the 40s and 50s—on whether immigrants should be allowed to stay.

Consistently with our critiques of global capitalism, the overwhelming majority of the respondents in all the countries surveyed (except the Netherlands) believe that immigrants are exploited in the workplace. Most Americans, Britons, and Spaniards think that immigrants bring down wages of native citizens, but on the whole respondents are divided.

Britons are most sceptical of the view that immigrants “enrich” (multiculturalist’s use of that term has always irritated me) the country with new customs and ideas; the majority of respondents elsewhere (roughly 5-6 in 10) buy the enrichment line, led by Americans, Canadians, and Germans. Where Americans and Britons agree is that immigrants take jobs from native workers; and where all agree is that available jobs are scarce. And all seem to agree, despite their millions of unemployed, despite jobs being scarce, that there is a shortage of workers that immigrants help to fill. Only 5 in 10 of North American respondents and only 4 in 10 of EU respondents were in full-time employment.

The issue of jobs is clearly imperfectly understood by the respondents: while most think jobs are taken away by immigrants, they are more or less evenly divided on the issue of whether immigrants create new opportunities by setting up new businesses, with approximately 5% not knowing the answer.

What is clear is that naturalisation criteria is badly out of kilter with what native citizens regard as important: at the moment, barring convictions and other such disqualifiers, length of residence is used in many European countries as a criterion for naturalisation (in Britain it used to be that 5 years’ residence was enough); whereas most citizens are concerned about immigrants’ assimilability (i.e., their ability to respect national political institutions and laws and speak the language).

Americans are more or less sceptical of Third World development as a deterrent for immigration, while about half of Britons support the idea. Italians seem keen, with 80% favouring it as a solution. What is overwhelmingly clear, however, is that 85-90% respondents want stronger border controls, and 75-90% would like to see employers of illegal immigrants more harshly penalised.

Only between 1-5% of respondents think governments in their respective countries are doing a very good job managing immigration; except in Canada, the majority think governments were doing a poor or very poor job. Americans are by far the angriest, with nearly three quarters taking this view, followed closely by the United Kingdom and Italy. Similarly, most respondents think their governments are doing a poor or very poor job in integrating existing immigrants.

The interesting thing about respondents’ answers to the question of who should be responsible for deciding immigration levels, most thought this was the national government’s prerogative, not the local government in the US or the EU in Europe. The survey does not appear to have offered an option for citizens being allowed to decide.

Respondents are more or less divided on the issue of granting voter rights to immigrants, with percentages in the 40s and 50s.

Despite an overwhelming opposition to more immigration and an clear majority who thinks there are too many immigrants, there is considerable support for the idea of bringing yet more immigrants to potential solve worker shortages arising from an aging population; and respondents are mostly unwilling to work longer in order to reduce the perceived need for immigrants. In fact, they are willing to allow even more immigrants in if they are doctors, nurses, and, to a lesser extent, care workers.

Overwhelmingly, most of the respondents—between 78-92%—had few or no friends born in another country. Of EU respondents, 89% where White, with the rest being in the low single digits. Of North American respondents, 71% where White, 12% Black, and 12% Hispanic. In all cases, between 90-97% of respondents were born in the country where they were surveyed. In Britain, however, only 60% were citizens.

In the EU countries, and using conventional / modern definitions of the term, respondents tilt slightly Left (32% Left, 29% centre, 28% Right = 61% centre-to-Left vs. 57% centre to Right); in North America, they tilt Right (22% liberal, 30% middle of the road; 39% conservative = 52% middle to liberal vs. 69% middle to conservative).

Geirr Tveitt

The Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt, who lived from 1908 to 1981, was plagued by bad luck in the final half of his life. Tveitt was ostracized in the decades after the Second World War for the Pagan, Pan-Germanic, and racialist (but never National Socialist) views he had defended in writing and expressed in his music during those years, and in 1970 his cabin in Hardanger burned to the ground, destroying 4/5 of the almost 300 original scores it contained. Among many other things, three of Tveitt's six piano concertos perished in the flames.

Tveitt's oeuvre—what's left of it—is multifarious, replete with hundreds of art songs and folk song arrangements as well as large, ambitious masterworks, such as the ballet Baldurs draumar (Balder's Dreams) and the magisterial Sonata Etere. Although Tveitt's music is not atonal, most of it is not based on the major and minor keys, but on the modal scales familiar from the folk music traditions of many countries, including Norway. Several Norwegian composers, most famously Edvard Grieg, had incorporated elements of their country's folk music into compositions in the 19th century. But Tveitt, who grew up in the Norwegian heartland and made extensive studies of its music, found Grieg's folklorism affected and superficial. He was probably the first Norwegian composer to assimilate fully the principles that governed the traditional music of his country, and to adhere to those principles in his own works even when they clashed with those of the classical tradition. Tveitt's music has cosmopolitan influences as well: his piano writing combines the ethereal textures of Ravel and Debussy with the sonorous virtuosity of Rachmaninov and Liszt; his orchestration often echoes the Stravinsky of Petrushka, The Firebird, and The Rite of Spring.

Tveitt was born in Bergen, Norway's second largest city and one of Northern Europe's most important ports. His roots ran to nearby Hardanger, a rural region centered around the eponymous Hardangerfjord; the name Tveit (one T) comes from the family's ancestral home there. Tveitt, the son of a nationalistic high school teacher, grew up among books and pianos, and heard the music of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle during visits to Hardanger. Although not a child prodigy, he was musically precocious, composing chamber pieces and founding an orchestra in his late teens. At around the same time he became interested in pre-Christian Norse culture, changing his birth name, Nils, to a Norse and angular Geirr and adding an additional T to the end his surname.

According to biographer Reidar Storaas, it was not given that Tveitt should decide on a career as a composer; he could just as well have gone the way of a linguist (Tveitt wrote in an archaic, Norse-inflected Norwegian for which he had devised his own vocabulary and grammar), a writer, or a concert pianist. But he did eventually decide on composition, and went to study at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1928. His teachers there considered him brilliant, but were often frustrated by his fixation on the modal scales of traditional Norwegian music: for although Tveitt was a Germanophile, he had little use for the German music of his time, be it Brahms or Schoenberg. Like his fellow composers Béla Bartók and Ralph Vaughan Williams he wanted to forge a music unique to his country, and believed that he could only do this once it had been rid of some of its Teutonic influence.

After finishing his studies at the Conservatory, Tveitt lived in Paris and then Vienna for a few years before returning to Norway. Among the pieces he wrote and premiered during his time abroad were his First Piano Concerto, which some sources list as his first opus, and the Two-Voice Studies, which are technical exercises based on the modes of Norwegian folk music. The First Piano Concerto inverts the traditional concerto pattern of two fast movements with a slow movement in the middle, bookending a lively, Lydian-mode folk dance with two introspective slow movements ushered in by the solo piano.

During the 1920s, Tveitt began to compose a series of large-scale works with Neo-Heathenistic themes. This culminated with 1934's Balder's Dreams, a monumental ballet loosely based on the poetic Edda and featuring parts for a speaking narrator, multiple solo singers, and a set of nine specially built steel drums tuned to the pentatonic scale. The third movement of 1958's Sun God Symphony, a condensed version of Balder's Dreams, is entitled Dansen i pileregnet (Arrow-Dance). The movement is a balletic illustration of an extract from the Poetic Edda. In it, the goddess Frigg has made everything in nature promise to do no harm to her son Balder, the most beloved of the gods. Shortly afterward the Æsir are amusing themselves at a feast by bombarding Balder with axes, stones, and arrows (hence the title of the movement), knowing that he will not be harmed thanks to Frigg's deal-making. But Loki, a trickster, has learned that there is one thing from which Frigg has extracted no promise—the mistletoe, which seemed too inconsequential to be of any danger—and convinces one of the gods to plunge a mistletoe branch into Balder's chest, killing him instantly. Balder's death is universally mourned, but it is only Odin who realizes its full significance—for Odin alone knows that the event is a portent of Rangarok, the end of all things. Tveitt illustrates the  “arrow-dance” with a light texture of interweaving ostinatos, gradually building up to Balder's death and a dissonant, brass-driven climax.

The interwar years saw Tveitt's cultural and religious opinions take on a political character. Many Norwegian intellectuals and artists of the time held revolutionary conservative, Völkisch, Pan-Germanic,and Neo-Heathenistic views, with the publication Ragnarok forming a loose nexus for their movement. In the mid-1930s, Tveitt, by then one of the most famous young composers in the country, started writing for Ragnarok and quickly became a part of the inner circle of intellectuals that kept the magazine running. The Ragnarok circle, influenced by philosopher Hans S. Jacobsen, completely rejected Judeo-Christianity in favor of the polytheism of pre-Christian Scandinavia and derived from this a Pan-German political philosophy that emphasized the unity and racial purity of the Germanic peoples. That was no problem for Tveitt, whose Neo-Heathenism had always gone hand in hand with a dislike of Christianity, an animus that may resulted from his Pietist mother's overbearing and strict style of parenting. This extract from a 1934 letter gives some indication of how extreme his opinions were at the time:

I fear that the Fimbulwinter has set in at last! People have little interest in old Norwegian, jazz and Grieg-style mediocrities predominate, the Jews are raping our women, and young people are brought up by the “Labor” Party's whore handbooks and “sexual education.

The Ragnarok circle was ambivalent about Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism in general. While many in it sympathized with some of the goals those movements pursued, few considered themselves members of them. Norway's main fascist party, Nasjonal Samling, and its leader Vidkun Quisling never held much appeal for them: Quisling, a bourgeois Protestant, was more occupied with anti-Communism than race, and one historian writes that the party as a whole consequently held views that were nationalist and conservative, not radical and Pan-Germanic. Things did not improve when, after Germany's invasion of Norway in 1940, Quisling was sidelined by Reichskommisar Josef Terboven, who in the eyes of the Ragnarok circle, treated Norway more like a colonial protectorate than a stronghold of the Germanic empire. Tveitt, who moved from Oslo to Hardanger shortly after the occupation, allied himself with the Norwegian resistance movement, hiding resistance fighters from the authorities and sabotaging Terboven's schemes through his position as a cultural consultant to the government. One photograph taken after the liberation of Norway shows him in the uniform of a local guide for Britain's Hardanger command. There is no evidence, however, that Tveitt's anti-Nazism led to or was caused by a turnabout in his religious, political, or cultural opinions—nor, indeed, that he was a great supporter of the Third Reich even before the war and the occupation.

This did not deter many in the postwar era from painting Tveitt as a “collaborationist.” In Norway as elsewhere in Europe, leftists in politics and modernists in art saw de-nazification as an opportunity to do away with ideological opponents. Tveitt, a right-wing Germanophile who wrote tonal, folk-inflected music, was targeted by both groups. Frozen out of the Norwegian establishment he toured Europe as a concert pianist, playing recitals before thousands and reportedly throwing his audience into a “paroxysm of ecstasy” on at least one occasion. Things gradually improved for him in the following decades: Parliament granted him an artist's salary in 1958, orchestras began to play his music again, and he continued to compose prolifically. A notable postwar work is the 29th Piano Sonata (“Sonata Etere”) from 1951. Under its conventional three movements, the sonata hides a form that abandons Classical development in favor of a cyclical structure tied together by a recurring motto theme. The theme appears explicitly at the beginning of the first and third movements, and permeates the rest of the sonata in various ways.

Tveitt suffered another blow in 1970, when most of his works were lost in the fire. In the years before his death in 1980, he had developed a drinking problem and found it increasingly difficult to compose. Still, Tveitt's last major composition, the 1974 cantata Telemarkin, is every bit as good as his early works; it even includes a solo part for Hardanger fiddle. Tveitt's late compositions also include another notable work for that instrument, namely the Second Concerto for Hardanger Fiddle and Orchestra. Like the 29th Piano Sonata, the concerto is a three-movement structure with a slow set of theme and variations in the middle; and like it, the Second Hardanger Fiddle Concerto is a cyclical work. In the middle of the third movement a wistful theme, first introduced in the second, reappears fully harmonized for the first time, bringing the apparent climax of the whole concerto to a poignant pause.

In recent years, a spate of CD releases and concert performances have given Tveitt's music a Renaissance in Norway and abroad. It has not been without controversy. Anti-racist and left-wing groups continue to paint Tveitt as an unapologetic Nazi sympathizer, and they have garnered the support of some historians. (A newspaper article from 2003 about a recently published book on Tveitt's involvement with Neo-Heathenism declares that Tveitt thought that Vidkun Quisling was "not enough of a racialist," which sounds damning until you realize that Quisling was not a racialist at all.) But although the postwar Norwegian establishment's treatment of him is an instructive example of the way in which “anti-fascism” has become an ideological battering ram, Geirr Tveitt was far more than a pitiful victim of overzealous de-nazifiers. He was a genius, and his works constitute an important but neglected contribution to the aesthetics of the revolutionary Right.

Major Interview with Kevin MacDonald

As part of a series of interviews I have been conducting elsewhere with dissidents involved with writing and publishing, I have conducted a major interview with Professor Kevin MacDonald. 

Much has been written about him, but all of it, and even what he has written about himself, has focused on his intellectual background and current thinking on ethnic competition, immigration, twentieth century Jewish intellectual movements, and Leftist bias in Western academia. I wanted to find out more about the man behind the monster. What is it like to be a controversial professor? What is he like as a person? What about his pre-academic life? In his replies, we discover many previously unknown facts about Professor MacDonald, we obtain something closer to a full-length portrait of the man, and are even treated to never-previously-seen photographic images from his past. Whether you are a friend or a foe, what you will find there will illuminate, enlighten, and entertain—not to mention shatter some popular misconceptions. You can read the interview here.

Talk About Getting it Backwards

In the United Kingdom there is an over-paid and perfectly superfluous civil servant, Trevor Phillips, who earns his self-important living as the chief of the “Equality Commission”.

The Daily Telegraph reports that in a speech to be delivered before the Policy Exchange think tank,

he will argue that the phenomenon of subprime home loans, which led to the 2008 banking collapse, emerged because even wealthy black families could not obtain regular mortgages.

And that

“it's not a thing that the bankers and economists like to talk about, but the American financial crisis was precipitated at least in part by racial prejudice.

“Why were so many minority families taking these expensive loans?

Because discrimination left them with no choice.

“The rapid growth of the sub-prime market in the past decade probably owed more to the history of racial discrimination than any other factor.” [my emphasis]

And that

Racism did not cause the crisis … we would probably have faced a meltdown at some point even if all the loans had been to white folks. [my emphasis]

... there is no doubt that when the full story is unravelled we'll find that a racial factor did play a role in what happened. 

In other words, racist United States bankers are to blame for the credit crisis.

Now, my understanding is that where a racial factor played a part in the credit crisis was in the desire by a number of United States presidents, particularly Bill Clinton and G. W. Bush, to increase home ownership among Blacks and Hispanics. As it was pointed out in 2008,

To encourage broader homeownership, did not Congress amend the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 to require commercial and mortgage banks to lend to high-risk borrowers? Banks that failed to comply were hit with fines and faced rejection when they requested mergers and branch expansions. Suddenly the subprime mortgage business boomed, and Countrywide Financial became its poster child.

As usual, Mr. Phillips’ Emmental logic, treats inequality of outcome as synonymous with inequality of opportunity. If Blacks and Hispanics in the United States owned proportionally fewer homes, it was not because they were less productive and less financially reliable than the Whites, but because of White racism. And if Black and Hispanics produced less and were less reliable financially, it is because of White racism too. Never mind that it was White presidents pushing to boost Black and Hispanic home ownership.

Bankers are undoubtedly guilty, but they are guilty of greed, which drives them to prey on anyone, irrespective of race, creed, age, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. 

Mr. Phillips is worried about a disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities of the budget cuts being implemented by the coalition in its efforts to reduce the previous Labour government's colossal deficit. What he means by “disproportionate”, however, is not “out of line with ethnic minority averages” but “out of line with the White average”.

In other words, because on average Whites perform better economically, Mr. Phillips is requesting preferential treatment for minorities—preferential treatment he knows he is likely to get, because of White anti-racism. After all, that is why he is here, earning a fat living at British taxpayers’ expense, doing absolutely nothing useful, and even advising think tanks without feeling the need for solid research.

Cuts? I say shut down the Equality Commission and have Mr. Phillips get a job in the real world.

This is Why It's Important

Decades too late, Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron has stated the obvious: multiculturalism has failed.

According to the BBC, '[a]ddressing a security conference in Germany, David Cameron argued the UK needed a stronger national identity . . .'

In a sane world, this would be reason to rejoice. We would expect tight border controls, as desired by nine tenths of the population; we would expect illegal immigrants rounded up and thrown out, as desired by three quarters of the population; and we would expect nationalism and, yes, Whiteness, emphasised and celebrated in media and education.

Unfortunately, however, we do not live in a sane world.

While Mr. Cameron 'signalled a tougher stance on groups promoting Islamist extremism', and while 'Mr Cameron suggested [that] there would be greater scrutiny of some Muslim groups that get public money', and that '[m]inisters should refuse to share platforms or engage with such groups', he also said 'Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism'.

So, the reason the multicultural experiment has failed is that there has not been enough muscular liberalism. I am sure Jared Taylor has some interesthing thoughts on Mr. Cameron's extraordinary conclusion.

Completely unselfconscious, Mr. Cameron continued:

Let’s properly judge these organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights … Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy…?

These are the sorts of questions we need to ask. Fail these tests and the presumption should be not to engage with organisations.

Am I the only one at a loss for words here?

How can Mr. Cameron not see how liberalism, universalism, and egalitarianism cannot eventually but result in a multicultural society? After all, a sincere belief in universal human rights and equality before the law make it impossible to exclude from a society the kind of immigrants who are incompatible with a strong national identity: it is impossible to deny them entry on the basis of their ethnic background; it is impossible to deny them access to employment; it is impossible to deny them access to citizenship; it is impossible to deny them access to public office; and it is therefore impossible in the long run to prevent them from changing their hosts’ indigenous culture and society until they are fractured by fundamental differences on the issues that are most important to each group’s most committed members.

A strong national identity is perforce traditionalist, particularist, and inegalitarian. It is dependent on localisation, specificity, and uniqueness, as this is, stabilised into a tradition over many generations, what differentiates the indigenous from the alien, then native from the foreigner. A strong national identity, therefore, implies that what is indigenous takes priority over what is alien. It is incompatible with multiculturalism or diversity.

The success of the liberal project was predicated from the beginning on the destruction of traditional forms—and by extension, in replacing what was local, specific, and unique, with global, vague, and generic abstractions.

In short, aggressive liberalism is aggressively hostile to a strong national identity.

What Mr. Cameron’s embarrassing statements, following Angela Merkel's analogous remarks last year, serve to highlight is how far removed “conservatism” in modern politics has become from traditionalism, and therefore how meaningless it has become. It used to be that conservatives were identified with tradition, as tradition is inherently conservative.

Mr. Cameron’s statements, therefore, also highlight why radical change of the present political paradigm is needed, and why it cannot be radical if it is not founded on traditional principles. 

Boardroom Shuffle

The Daily Mail reported the other day that British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is studying the possibility of imposing compulsory quotas for women in company boardrooms—a demand previously made by Labour’s Harriet Harman, and previously derided by the Conservatives while in opposition. Apparently, Mr. Cameron is drawing inspiration from Scandinavian countries, where companies are required by law to ensure that at least 40% of board members are women.

No mention has been made of exactly how this will improve operational efficiency, the quality of products and customer service, or profitability.

I have no problem with women in boardrooms if they are there for the right reasons—meaning, they are the most skilled persons for the job not currently employed elsewhere. But I do have a problem with the government, which knows nothing about my company’s needs, telling me whom I must hire and whom I must promote, to what positions, and how soon.

Having long known management consultants whose clients have been either among the industry leaders nationwide or prestigious multinationals (indeed, one of the consultants, now retired, worked for one of the latter), one certainly cannot dismiss the famed glass ceiling for women in management as pure feminist agitprop: although this is less the case nowadays, there has been, and there still is, a tendency among some to take women less seriously in corporate environments, and this has inevitably impacted on promotions. (If executive women are sometimes unpleasant, masculine, and abrasive, it owes as much to the need to be heard and be taken seriously as it owes to feminism. This would be consistent with social identity theory, which predicts that in conflict situations competing groups will grow to resemble each other, even if ingroup members’ perceptions of the outgroup come increasingly to exaggerate ingroup-outgroup differences, real or perceived. In a male-dominated environment, women competing for resources, and equipped with an adversarial group identity by the feminists, will inevitably adopt male tactics and characteristics.)

Having said this, however, and with the caveat that mediocrity and incompetence abound all the way up and down the corporate ladder, irrespective of sex, there are also women who do not deserve to be taken seriously, who are hypersensitive, and / or who, found lacking in efficacy and / or industry, exploit equality legislation to obtain undeserved advantage. And, more importantly, there are also many women who do not dream of being ball-busting executives: indeed, many are content to have economic autonomy, while others would rather be at home looking after their families.

The underlying assumption with quotas is that (a) every person has the same potential to do a job as well as any other given the same opportunities; and (b) when a person who is not a member of a protected category is not successful with a job application it is always unjustified, unless another member of a protected category has been successful instead.

Mr. Cameron’s brand of feminism cannot accept that women may tend to order their priorities differently from men, and that his may have contributed proportionally to different outcomes vis-à-vis the corporate ladder. As usual, inequality of outcome is equated simplistically with inequality of opportunity.

Were it not because the imposition of quotas is a zero sum game, where every person who is favoured by the quota system is another person who is displaced in turn, I would be thinking that this is not about equalising outcomes, but about maximising tax revenues: after all, more women in senior executive positions means more women in the high income tax bracket.

What is certain is that any quota system will result in less qualified women displacing better qualified men. Definitely not in every case, as there are many very talented women out there and many incumbents who do not deserve to be where they are, but it will definitely happen. And where this happens, the quality of the decision making at boardroom level will be lower, which will impact negatively on the entire organisation, and even the consumer.

Any quota system will also impact negatively on women, as those attaining boardroom positions will fall immediately under suspicion of being there because of the quota system rather than because of professional merit. You can well imagine the rage and frustration of a genuinely deserving woman executive—one who probably had to strain to be taken seriously—in the presence of sceptical male colleagues who will now, in addition, have reason to see her as an affirmative action beneficiary, rather than a fully qualified partner. And, in addition to undermining this women’s authority at the boardroom level, quotas will also undermine their authority among those directly below them, for the better-qualified men who were passed over for promotion will certainly not take their new woman bosses seriously. Some men, demoralised, may engage in passive aggression and reduce their output, possibly going on strike by doing exactly no more and no less than what they are paid to do, interpreting instructions literally and keeping strictly to the 9 to 5 schedule, even, or especially, when there is a crisis. Some may take a page from Hermann Melville’s novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener, and practice outright passive resistance. Other men, infuriated, may work double-time actively to undermine their new woman bosses.

Aware of this, women executives, whether at boardroom level or on their way there, will certainly notice and act accordingly. Quotas are likely to exacerbate an antagonistic climate of competitive nastiness.

This will be far from helpful when organisations are already rife with all manner of intriguers, sycophants, back-stabbers, opportunists, hypocrisy, deception, bruised egos, pettiness, and personal hatreds; and where there are plenty of free-loaders, time-servers, gossips, and blunderers who rise purely because of their adeptness at blame transferring and gluteal osculation.

As usual, feminism, rather than reconciling the sexes in a spirit of teamwork, drives a wedge between them and sets them at war with each other. This is not how the alternative Right would approach matters of sex and gender: over here we view the sexes as complementary, each endowed with their own unique skills and ways of doing and seeing things, but ultimately working in concert. Feminism is all about us-versus-them; it is a force of destruction and revenge, not a constructive effort towards synergistic harmony between the sexes.

And there is also the matter of free association. Supposedly, we enjoy it in our democratic society. In reality, we are often denied it: millions of people we do not want around us are imported or allowed in, with government collusion or sanction, and settled in our communities, making them, the high streets, and the transport system, far more unpleasant than it needs to be. And now, as employers, should Mr. Cameron go ahead with Labour’s idea, and should less-qualified women be promoted over better-qualified men to meet minimum government quotas, we will have to suffer annoying, odious, incompetent partners and directors on the boards of our companies, holding positions of immense responsibility, being paid large sums of money, and causing more headaches than it is worth, rather than the persons we would have chosen on the basis of merit, talent, and personality.

And what next? Previous experience suggests this is to be thin end of a wedge, which will open the way for further, and even more unpleasant, impositions; more quotas, to ensure the full spectrum of colour, creed, gender, age, IQ, disability, HIV status, and sexual orientation is uniformly represented in every area of private and professional life, irrespective of relevance or merit, without the option to choose whom we would rather work or associate with. So much for meritocracy and free association.

Perhaps the response will be greater automation, and the dispensing with of humans whenever possible, for fear of whom one may be forced to work alongside with. Perhaps the response will be emigration: many companies, fed up with the previous Labour government’s predatory tax code, relocated their businesses out of the United Kingdom, in favour of more fiscally amenable pastures. Perhaps the response will be outward compliance, followed by subterfuges and workarounds—subtle psychological warfare to force resignation of affirmative action beneficiaries in hopes that another, better candidate will fill their positions. Or perhaps the response will be a call for more women in coalmines, construction, and oil drills.

Personally, I would prefer a system and a culture based on merit and teamwork, where men and women contribute with their own unique perspectives and approaches to action in the effort solve the different problems in life. Whatever the wrongs of the past, quotas is not the solution.

Well before Labour’s seizure of power in 1997, I knew Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would be trouble. Even my most pessimistic forecasts were eventually exceeded by the dynamic duo. And now, in the six months following 13 years of heavy-handed Labour government, with the nation groaning under the iron heel of that miserable party, it is clear that under David Cameron’s coalition we are in for yet more of the same.

Winglord's Heroica

I have found commentators on the Right to be deeply polarised concerning modern popular music. There are those who think only Classical music is real, and anything made after the 1890s equals noise, from Arnold Schönberg onward. Then there are those who say that, actually, even today we can find positive developments in modern popular music, even if they are not to everyone’s taste.

In earlier writing about music, I have concentrated on Black Metal, whose cultural roots I traced back to the Völkisch movement of the nineteenth century—although, of course, one could, if determined, keep excavating deeper into time without limit. The album under review today, however, does not belong to the Black Metal genre, but would be classed as Neo-Classical, with a few hints of Martial Industrial (the two genres overlap, and are contiguous, and in key ways ideologically congenial, with the more Völkisch forms of Black Metal; and indeed disaffected Black Metal fans have been known to “graduate” to the more refined Martial Industrial, Neo-Classical, Neo-Folk, Dark Ambient nexus of genres, which are not always sympathetic to the miscreants on the other side of the divide).

Heroica is as apt a title for this album as one can imagine, as it swirls with neo-Romantic beauty and heroic pathos, somewhat reminiscent of Beethoven. Their music is synth based, and has the epic quality of an epic film soundtrack, but the approach to composition, the melodic development, and the dark atmosphere, is pure nineteenth-century Classical, with apocalyptic rhythms and some diversions into Electro Pop on tracks two and eight, complete in the latter case with male narration and angelic female vocals. Despite the obvious heroic feel, however, this is not as martial as H.E.R.R.’s The Winter of Constantinople, let alone Kreuzweg Ost’s masterful Edelrost. Neither does Heroica have as modern a feel as the latter two albums, the former being almost entirely instrumental.

Winglord is designed to fill the listener’s mind with images of “Europe’s slumbering grace and splendour”; and it is, according to the press release, “about the longing for a more heroic spirit—and a worthier way of life . . .” These are certainly welcome sentiments in present day Western society, and may herald an eventual turning of the tide when one considers that this is not one isolated case, but part of a thriving network of modern popular music genres, comprising hundreds of artists, predicated on the comprehensive rejection of the values of 1789. The power of music is not to be underestimated, for it can, under the right conditions, rouse feelings of a violence and of an intensity that transcend all rationality, that can defeat any logic, argument, or economic imperative. Few other forms of human expression have such power.

Visit Winglord’s website and listen to a few samples (here is one). And if you find that you would like to hear more in this vein, support the work of this talented musician, and buy his music: do not steal it and do not make it available for thieves to steal; buy it, offer to pay double even, and play a part in pulling modern popular music in a positive direction.

Never Stop

I would like to thank all of those who have already contributed toward Alternative Right during our 2011 fundraising campaign. It is gratifying to know that you appreciate the work we—the authors, the editors, and the developers—do here.

So far we are just under two thirds of the way to our goal of $25,000.  This means we are most of the way there, but not quite. A final push is needed to wind up the campaign.

As I mentioned not long ago, one of the things I liked most about Alternative Right when it first launched was that it was the most modern and aesthetically accomplished website of its kind. Another thing I liked was the fact that it was driven largely by a dynamic crop of younger writers, whose articles appeared alongside those of experienced professional academics and authors, like Paul Gottfried, Kevin MacDonald, Derek Turner, to name but a few. The liveliness of the website and its continuously growing readership over the past year attest to its winning formula. And I am sure many of our political enemies are exasperated—even if they try not to say it—by the fact that our camp is capable of presenting its arguments in an elegant, vibrant, and intelligent fashion.

We live in a society unique for its velocity. Constant upgrades and innovation—technological, intellectual, aesthetic, lexical, informational—are key to survival in our ever more crowded, ruthless, and intensely competitive world. To remain relevant, to attract readers, and to be taken seriously, we have to both be and look as good or better than the competition. We cannot afford for those who are behind to catch up with us, and we cannot afford those who are in front to leave us so far behind that we are not taken seriously anymore. This means we must ensure we have the means to update the website’s design, update the software, add new features, add new modules, improve functionality, improve content, and upgrade servers, so that the website can cope adequately both with its steadily growing traffic and the occasional spike. This also means we must ensure that we can continue to attract both new and recognised talent.

One of my stated aims as an editor has been to make inroads into the mainstream. By making inroads I mean making more of the many frustrated citizens who look for an alternative aware that we exist, and that they will find here not only discussions, analyses, and information they will not find in the establishment’s media, but an edgy, serious, and professional website. The latter is essential if the former is to succeed, as obvious visual and intellectual excellence makes new readers more likely to share a link or recommend the website to a friend. Moreover, because people are sensitive to status, a website with obvious status markers exasperates the Left, who hate the idea of other people taking pride in rejecting their ideology. On the internet, status is displayed through sophisticated design, language, and technology.

Related to this is the need to offer professional and business opportunities outside of the dictats of political correctness. If we want to see more from authors and publishers who do not sell out to the system of White disprivilegement; if we want to make it possible for others to join them; and if we want new, talented writers not to feel they have to sell out in order have successful and remunerative careers, it is up to us to make it materially possible. Realistic career prospects are necessary if we are to reverse the brain-drain that has been engineered by the Left in its efforts to simulate legitimacy and outthink its opponents: without such prospects, our ability to recruit men of real talent and ambition will be limited.

One of the biggest factors preventing frustrated citizens from publicly and visibly speaking out against immigration and multiracialism in Western societies is the threat of economic sanctions—the fear that they will lose their jobs and therefore lose their markers of social status as a result of a politically incorrect remark or attitude. Indeed, economic sanctions is one of the establishment’s most commonly used tools to maintain submission. If we are able to offer legitimate professional and business opportunities outside the politically correct economy we can rob that tool of its effectiveness. In the media age, educating and opinion-making via the internet, such as we do here at Alternative Right, play a vital role in this process.

Richard and I understand that donors like to know that their money will have concrete and measurable results. What are, then, our plans for Alternative Right in the coming months?

One of them is a dedicated reviews section, covering books, the arts, and entertainment; this searchable tool will help many readers decode the perfidy of modern culture, high and low, as well as alert them to what is worth supporting. People are generally very engaged with popular culture, which, as we know, contains an ideological message but which is also consumed uncritically as entertainment; therefore, while it may be unpalatable to many of us, we have to ensure our perspective on what is being fed to the public is out there, turning up frequently in Google searches and landing readers on this website.

Another plan is to make Alternative Right iPhone friendly. This will enable mobile users to access Alternative Right’s content in an easy-to-navigate format. This is also a status marker, which reflects positively on the website, as it projects conscientious and technologically savvy design and development.

Yet another plan is for donors to have access to a private forum, where they will be able to interact with the authors of Alternative Right, participate in scheduled Q & A sessions, and get the inside scoop on events and developments relating to this website, its editors, and contributors. This will enable us better to connect and strategise.

This is for starters. We have numerous plans and ideas beyond these. The idea is for Alternative Right to converge technically with, and eventually surpass, the most advanced mainstream websites, and for it to provide more and even better content in the radical traditionalist mould. The more active we can be, the more material we can get out there, the higher the quality of our content and presentation, the more we will be able to build a wide and discerning readership, and the more we will be able to offer a like-for-like alternative perspective on what is pumped out by the present media, political, and academic establishment. Remember: revolutions begin with scribbles, so what we do, our opinion making here on the internet, impacts on attitudes and behaviour out there in the real world. By gradually showing the young, educated, professional classes and university students that they are not alone, that there are many other young, educated, professionals who share their frustrations with the establishment and its tired system, we can gradually drain the Left of brains, funding, and expertise—and also have some fun in the process. We have to get to the stage where it is embarrassing for ordinary citizens to say that they support the ideas of the Left—where Leftism is considered stupid, boring, and déclasé.

$9,000 is a small sum in the greater scheme of things. The Left, the neo-cons, would love to know that we cannot raise even that small sum from our tens of thousands of readers. Every hour that the thermometer on the right stays still is an hour that our enemies are smiling, their ovoid heads filled with smugness and self-importance. Gentlemen like Tim Wise, who only some months ago, blogged to tell us we are engaged in a battle the meaning of which we do not remotely understand,

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.

There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” -- a bunch whose white members were by and large a gaggle of miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.

So to hell with you and all who revere you.

By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.

Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.

Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.

And

You will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement—hell you’ve all but done that now—thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.

If you care to wipe the smile off his face, if you care to see him rage in his little office, if you care to crush his hate-filled visions of White fear and capitulation, make that thermometer on the right explode—today,—right now; push the mercury skywards, don’t let it stop, and turn up the heat in Tim’s fevered brain—give him a pounding headache and then rattle his cage until he screams. Let him see that we will not suffer his taunts in silence; that when we’re bitten, we bite back, harder and deeper than his ilk ever dared; that we will continue to push forward and upwards, fearless and relentless, and that nothing will stop us—not now, not ever.

Work Until You Drop

The BBC reports today:

The Default Retirement Age (DRA) is to be phased out this year, the government has confirmed.

It means employers will no longer be allowed to dismiss staff just because they have reached the age of 65.

The Department for Business said that as well as benefiting individuals, "the freedom to work for longer will provide a boost to the UK economy".

Those who have read Mister will recall the recurrence of harried elderly White workers performing low-status jobs, of which 'Picasso', the irascible nonagenarian taxi driver of the year 2023 was a prime example. The novel was written between May 2007 and June 2008, so elderly workers, forced to keep working in order to keep their heads above water in a floundering and debt-ridden economy, is yet another sad prediction that has come true.

The phrase 'a boost to the UK economy' spins the fact that this end of the default retirement age results from the realisation, admitted, that there is not going to be enough money to pay all the welfare commitments successive governments have made in the efforts by politicians to get themselves elected. 

Meanwhile, the phrase 'ageing population', because it refers to a generalised phenomenon driven by several causes, conceals the unwilliness of the government to make the economy more family friendly: indigenous Europeans are delaying starting a family, having smaller ones, or not having them altogether, partly because of the cost relative to their incomes—resulting from, on the one hand, pressure from the consumer culture, and on the other, inflation, predatory taxation, and labyrinthine regulation—is seen as too high. (Another factor is Marxist feminism.)

Also concealed is the implicit realisation that the levels of immigration that would be required to close the fiscal gap is high enough to risk serious social disturbance and a significant rise in support for anti-immigration parties: one way of increasing the workforce without importing or creating new citizens is to allow existing citizens to work for longer.

By painting this legislative development as an act of government generosity, the report also misrepresents the facts. The desired implication is that the government is now 'allowing' those eager to work to do so for longer, and 'forcing' employers not to retire and not to deny employment to workers above a certain age. It fits in with the equality discourse that permeates modern culture. But the reality is that working past 65 is not a choice for many (because many hate their jobs), but a necessity. As we well know, Western governments have incurred unpayable debts and, as predicted by Kotlikoff years ago, they have decided money printing is the only way out: they cannot raise taxes nor cut welfare programmes enough without causing a revolution. The consequence is, of course, inflation, and neither incomes nor pensions being able to keep up with the devaluation of the currency. Most workers will increasingly have to work until they drop, occupying progressively more menial positions as age takes its toll.

I suspect other Western countries with default retirement ages still in place will be forced to follow. They may at first extend the retirement age, but they will eventually 'liberalise' or 'relax' employment legislation and it will be sold to the public as a way to keep active and boost the economy, just as it has been done here.

The De-Niggering of Huck Finn

Much is made in the mainstream media of the alleged perfidy of certain revisionist historians on the Right, whom they accuse of falsifying documents, whitewashing, and distorting history to suit a political agenda. Yet, alert students of history know well enough that the Left is not above revisionism. Indeed, in Leftists we find yet another example of accusers who are guilty of doing similar things they accuse others of doing, and who, in fact, do it on a much wider scale. Leftist revisionism is not limited to history, but extends even to classic works of literature. The latest example of politically motivated revisionism was reported by the BBC earlier today:  

Furore over 'censored' edition of Huckleberry Finn

A new edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is causing controversy because of the removal of a racially offensive word.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben says the use of the word "nigger" had prompted many US schools to stop teaching the classic.

In his edition, Professor Gribben replaces the word with "slave" [219 times] and also changes "injun" to "Indian".

. . .

Two days ago, the publisher, New South Books, posted this on their website:

In a bold move compassionately advocated by Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben and embraced by NewSouth, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn also replaces two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words, this intended to counter the “preemptive censorship” that Dr. Gribben observes has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists nationwide.

According to the BBC, the publisher has received dozens of telephone calls and hundreds of emails protesting the falsification of Mark Twain’s work. Noteworthy is the fact that the act of censorship is being presented as the well-intentioned exact opposite. Could it be that Professor Gribben was so frustrated by the self-censorship pervading centres of learning that he saw his revision of the original text as making the best of a bad job? The Irish Times reports:

“Let’s get one thing straight,” says Gribben, an Aubern University professor who has been vilified by both the left and right. “Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.”

To which the Irish Times reporter repliers:

But he isn’t here and he can’t answer for himself. Maybe Twain would have screamed in indignation that his work was being robbed of its original meaning.

Indeed, Mark Twain was sensitive about his prose. The BBC again:

Mark Twain did not take kindly to editing.

He is quoted as saying that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter".

And when a printer made punctuation changes to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain wrote later that he had "given orders for the typesetter to be shot without giving him time to pray".

More egregiously, the self-censorship Professor Gribben is attempting to work around appears driven mainly by spineless White lecturers, not by angry Black students. The Irish Times article highlights this quite well:

Gribben, a likeable straight talker, is adamant that he is not robbing Twain of anything, merely making a small change so that English teachers are no longer embarrassed to read out loud in class.

. . .

I wondered what other black people thought of the N word and whether removing it from Twain would help bury a painful past or save white America from confronting its own history. I was pondering all on the subway on the way home when I heard two black teenagers talking. “Hey nigga, what’s up with you?” said one. The reply was instant “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me nigga, something wrong with you though.”

Enter white Irish reporter with a copy of Huckleberry Finn and a massive avalanche of awkwardness. I stutter through an explanation of my article and show them a few of Mark Twain’s offending passages.

The first, 17-year-old Laurence Johnson, picks up the book, studies it for a moment and shuts it suddenly.

“So he said ‘nigger’. So what? People think slave owners called us African-Americans?” he says loudly. His friend laughs, so do some middle-aged black women sitting nearby, all of whom nod in agreement. Johnson, who is in his final year of high school in Brooklyn, puts himself in the place of a slave owner counting his slaves.

“One, two, three, four . . . damn, we got an African-American escaped up north!”

More laughter, some of the women are clapping their hands. “It’s about the timing,” says one of them, Katicha Spencer, a 42-year-old dental nurse from Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. “If some white person said that word to me, I’d be mad as hell. But if it’s from 100 years ago, and it’s someone trying to get the flavour of what people are saying, then that’s what people said. You can’t sugarcoat the past of this country, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.” Her friends nod in agreement. “Mark Twain’s alright,” says one. “He’s not my boss.” Katicha gives her a high five and they laugh as they leave the train.

Another problem is that similar falsifications are also being effected with minor works of literature, where the arguments given to justify the bowdlerisation of Mark Twain cannot possibly apply. In 2002, Deodant Publishers, printed an edition of Bram Stokers’ Lair of the White Worm, with some. . . cosmetic alterations. An Amazon reviewer noted:

this Deodand version is not the original. It has been edited. One word has been changed throughout the book, but only in specific places: The 'good guys' do not say the "N" word, they say "native." The 'bad guys' use the "N" word.  

I do not remember any public debate triggered by the bowdlerisation of this book, which makes me wonder about the extensiveness of this practice, and whether we can trust modern editions of pre-PC literature by classic authors any longer. How many have been quietly edited in this way? How many more will they falsify, whitewash, or distort to suit, conform, or respond to the Left’s political agenda?

It reminds of the Stalinist practice of erasing inconvenient individuals from official photographs, following the individuals’ politically motivated murder. It seems old habits die hard…

Perhaps readers would like to share their views on this subject, in a polite and civilised fashion, with Prof. Alan Gribben (email: agribben@aum.edu).

Similarly, because businesses understand no other language but the once mighty Dollar, you may wish to give the publishers of Prof. Gribben’s revised Twain editions (due out in February) an idea of how enthusiastically you will be rushing to buy your copies: info@newsouthbooks.com.

Happy New Year 2011

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

On behalf of myself and Alternative Right, I would like to wish you a happy new year. May it bring you robust health and glorious good fortune (as well as unrelenting calamities and reverses to our enemies).

Despite my less than cheerful predictions yesterday, I feel very positive about 2011 and look forward to an action-packed year, during which I hope we will break new ground and celebrate multiple accomplishments.

All the best.

My Predictions for 2011

More Deficits

In a democracy, politicians cannot help promising more than is deliverable. Even if the system is rigged to perpetuate its founding ideological paradigm; even if on every election voters are asked to choose between nearly identical options—as a minimum any given politician seeking to keep his job or improve his personal and professional prospects needs to ensure that he is regarded by voters as the least bad of available options. The similarity within, and between, the parties and the individual politicians creates a highly competitive environment that provides every motivation for politicians to overcommit, stretching the truth, if not outright lying, before an election, and worrying about how to obfuscate broken promises once (back) in office.

Any attempts to reduce budget deficits will be driven by the sudden fear of economic consequences likely to lead to social unrest; after all, social unrest could develop into a revolution where they end up in exile, in prison, or worse. Because in a capitalist system the economy becomes all important, growth being an ends in itself; because disciplined restraint and aim-directed privation are anathema to a consumer culture; because elections run in four or five year cycles—avoiding pain and creating the illusion of a recovery within the electoral horizon takes priority over creating an economy that is stable in the long term; thus for 2011 the premium will remain on reflating bubbles, on quick fixes, using every imaginable subterfuge to levitate economic indicators for as long as the ruling party remains in power. The obvious and most election friendly method to achieve this is running deficits—or, expressed more honestly, money-printing, which enables incumbent politicians to spend immediately without raising taxes or cutting social programmes, while also deferring the consequences (taxes, inflation) until after the next election.

Although there has been some alarm at the high deficit levels, and although there is anger at the bank bailouts, the economic pain currently being experienced by the voter is still being attributed to the recession, a recurring economic phenomenon with varying and nebulous causes. Therefore, I suspect ruling politicians will suffer further loss of prestige (mainly through their failure to get the economy going fast enough), but they will be able to manage the decline for another year. 

More and Higher Taxes

Citizens have become accustomed to huge levels of public debt in recent years. That there has not been a revolutionary uprising yet may owe partly to the successful maintenance of economic illusions, partly to Western economies still being able to live off past glories, partly to the unimaginable scale of public debt, and partly to the inability of the public to understand the personal consequence of these colossal numbers (to them, they are just numbers). Still, even if public debt itself has ceased to be contentious, its speed of growth, if seen as excessive, can still temporarily occasion problems for politicians. For the moment, this puts a limit (which is ever shifting) to the amount of money that can be printed—which means any shortfalls need to be made up with through taxes. Deficit reduction will continue to be used as an excuse to impose more and higher taxes. Because taxes are unpopular, however, the emphasis will be on concealing the actual increase of this burden by using indirect methods. In 1997 Tony Blair was elected in Britain after assuring the middle class that his party would not see their income burglarized by a fiscally hostile and irresponsible government; yet the tax burden grew heavier all the same via a plethora of indirect, invisible ‘stealth taxes’, which were regularly increased even while the income tax was kept steady or even moderately reduced.

If you think the tax burden is heavy now, in time it may be regarded as benign compared to what may eventually come. In 1932 the top rate of income tax in the United States was raised to 63% and steadily increased until reading 94% of all incomes above $200,000 in 1945. Worse, the top rate stayed around 90% until 1964. In the United Kingdom, personal income tax reached 98% of earnings above £20,000 (equivalent to £155,247, or $225,000 in 2010): 83% for normal income, and an additional 15% for income from dividends and investments. We are still a long way from that, but given a severe enough series of crises and panics, maybe a war, politicians could well find themselves willing, if not compelled by circumstances and / or the hard Left, to revisit this kind of fiscal obliteration. 

More Inflation

Even if attenuated by increases in taxation, deficit spending (money printing), will remain an instrument of choice: on the one hand, taxes can only be raised up to a point before leading to revolt; on the other hand, deficit spending in the public sector is farther removed from people’s daily lives, because the consequences are only felt years later, can be further deferred with additional money printing, and are not generally attributed to money printing. All the same, when the supply of money grows faster than the supply of goods and services, the value of money decreases, and prices adjust upwards. Vast quantities of money have been printed since the onset of the present financial crisis in 2007; and the U.S. Federal Reserve, acting on its own, has printed much more than previously known or imagined—$3,300,000,000,000, equivalent to Germany’s GDP—in its efforts to bail out foreign banks in the United States. Much of that money remains parked in the bowels of the banking system. If and when it is finally released, we can expect sharp upward adjustments in the price of consumer goods and services. We may not necessarily revisit Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe, and if we approximate anything alike it might still take years to get there, but we will see ‘the cost of living’, relative to incomes, rise in 2011.

More Immigration

Any efforts to curb immigration in the West have proven merely cosmetic efforts to quell unrest among citizens nervous about the transformation of their country, something they never wanted, never needed, and never asked for. In the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s Labour government orchestrated a top-level conspiracy to make the country more multicultural, secretly ramping up immigration. The present coalition government has promised to curb immigration, but their temporary cap on non-EU immigration was overturned after being challenged by a pro-immigration group and their concessions to businesses partially neutralise the promised curbs, if not effectively provide a loophole for more immigration.

More Liberalism

Since the liberalism remains the dominant ideological paradigm in the West, since liberalism is predicated on a belief in progress, and since a traditional mindset is an obstacle to progress, we can expect liberal intellectuals and campaigners to continue pushing the envelop in 2011. Once the battle to allow gays serve in the military is won, campaigners will move on to the battle: allowing the disabled join the gays. On and on it will go, not only in the military, but on all fronts, until all lines have been erased, except those that defend anything White, European, and traditional. 

More Legislation

Holding the chanko stew of the multicultural society together requires more laws to maintain minimum standards and ensure its continued functioning, because what was once obvious to everyone, and what would previously occur to no one, is no longer obvious, does not occur to many, and is in fact part of one or more competing group’s culture and religious beliefs. A parallel process driving the need for more laws, also driven by immigration, are the increasingly crowded conditions in the cities and the close proximity of incompatible, hostile, and mutually exclusive tribes competing ever more fiercely for dwindling resources. This often takes the form of illicit economic activity or ethnic gangs that specialize in new forms of crime that exploit the welfare and insurance systems of Western societies. Examples are the insalubrious Ecuadoran immigrant gastronomic flea markets in Madrid’s public parks and the Asian staged crash insurance fraudsters that have proliferated in England over the past few years. Needless to say that the increased chaos and criminality are not limited to immigrants; but their presence acts as a catalyst for the progressive social dissolution that results in the need for increased legal regulation. More laws will be introduced in 2011 to cope with the increased chaos of the multicultural society, to suppress dissenting voices, and optimise tax revenues and collection.

More Surveillance

As more chaos demands more laws, more laws demand more surveillance, for the same reasons given above. So the newest technology will be used in the West more efficiently to monitor its citizens and ensure they remain compliant, fiscally and psychologically.

More Bureaucracies

More laws and more surveillance entail, necessarily, more bureaucracies for their successful implementation and administration. And with already so many bureaucracies, all expanding and running into one another with their competing and often contradictory remits and interests, even more bureaucracies may be needed to regulate the bureaucracies. But perhaps we have reached that level, and we will need bureaucracies to regulate the bureaucracies regulating the bureaucracies, plus bureaucracies to obscure what is going on and keep the citizens ignorant and disinformed. With the infinity of possibilities opened by deficit spending, there is virtually no limit to the layers of bureaucracy that can be built and nestled into one another to track all aspects of life, which takes us to…

Even More Deficits, and Even More and Higher Taxes

Yes, to pay for the continued growth of bureaucracies.

Even More Inflation

Need I explain?

Even More Immigration

This will be necessary to expand the tax base and staff all the ever-growing bureaucracies.

In Sum…

More of the same for 2011. We have our work cut out for us.

New Horizons

As of this January I will be joining Richard Spencer as editor of Alternative Right. I am pleased to take part in this enterprise and look forward to working with the many talented writers and individuals involved in the website.

As Richard has already mentioned, and as those who are familiar with my articles already know, I favour not just commenting on the evils of the contemporary situation in the West, but also attempting to push beyond this situation, and encouraging the construction of something new, founded on elitist, traditional, yet also ‘futuristic’ values.

To this effect, in my new editorial role I will emphasise not only staying topical with the content, but also identifying, examining, feeding, and catalysing productive areas of White-centric counter-culture in the West and throughout the European diaspora. This will involve delving into a wide range of alternative ideas and methods of cultural praxis. By riding, building, and focusing these counter-currents, we can make it to ‘the other side’—the side beyond the modern cultural paradigm. I am therefore as interested in articles that look at counter-cultural production as I am on articles that dismantle, deride, and deconstruct the cultural anti-production of the Left.

Also, I will emphasise breaking out of the comfort zones of our particular milieu: there is a sizable element of dropping out and preaching to the choir within the so-called ‘radical’ Right, and if we are to be successful in our endeavours, we have to reach beyond the choir and make inroads into the general public; otherwise, how are we going to get anyone to rethink the world, let alone involve them in its transformation? There are many who are fed up with the bankrupt liberal system of egalitarian modernity, but who either do not know that there is an alternative, or have been frightened off by proponents of the status quo or by the failure of those nominally on our camp to engage them in an apt and constructive manner.

We need to develop a new language, a new way of defining and expressing ourselves that emphasises what we are for rather than what we are against. We are elitists, not anti-egalitarians; we are traditionalists, not anti-modern; we define ourselves on our terms, not against the terminology of our opponents. The frustrations of living under a hostile dispensation have, understandably, but inexcusably, fomented a mentality of pessimism and negativity. This mentality suits the system very well, as it leads to despairing paralysis. Alternative Right has been better than most in this respect, having maintained a brighter, more vibrant tone; an active rather than a reactive stance—this is something that I would like further to strengthen and develop.

Another positive with Alternative Right has been the conscious embrace of stylised aesthetics as a weapon of mass communication. Alternative Right was the first website of its kind self-consciously to sport a stylish and professional design—others have followed since. This is disproportionately important, because humans tend to make swift pre-rational judgments about their potential affiliations: it is often whether a website looks good, both to the potential reader and those present who may happen to glance at the reader’s computer screen, that decides whether that potential reader will return. If a certain website does not look modern and professional, he will assume the content is amateurish, inferior, and less than legitimate—often before he reads the first headline. If he does not feel comfortable with others knowing that he reads a certain website, he will avoid it or treat it as a guilty secret rather than a source worthy of his recommendation. Thus, Alternative Right’s graphic and technological aspects, being, so to speak, another form of text, another method of communicating ideas, will necessarily remain a key area of constant improvement and development. Alternative Right’s effectiveness depends as much on its looking at least as good its counterparts on the mainstream as it does on the quality of its content.

This all sounds very serious, and we are indeed engaged in a serious project. But, having said this, it is important that we do not lose our sense of humour. Humour is both a tonic and a weapon. On the one hand, humour helps to release tension and to engender feelings of well-being and goodwill; it breaks down barriers to communication, and makes our company more enjoyable—no one wants to be around a person who is always depressed, miserable, and complaining. It also makes the person deploying the humour seem stronger, because he appears relaxed, confident, and above the fray. On the other hand, humour, if intelligent and well directed, can destroy an opponent’s prestige and credibility more thoroughly, swiftly, and efficiently than the most rigorous data or logical argument. The data and the arguments are essential, of course, and must be present; but on their own they are a difficult sell, as humans believe what they want to believe, what makes them feel good about themselves and the world they live in. Solid data with a dash of clever humour is an irresistible combination. And it is worth noting that nothing angers and exasperates the Left more than its not being taken seriously.

2011 promises to be a busy and exciting year.

Homo Equalis

On 13 December 2010 the BBC News online magazine ran a feature about Toby Ord, the 31-year-old man who has pledged to give away £1,000,000 to fight against global poverty over his lifetime. What distinguishes Ord from the likes of Bill Gates and fellow billionaires is that the former exists on an annual income of £25,000 ($40,000), which means that he gives away to charity everything he earns over £18,000, or £833 a month out of an income of £1,583 after tax. This is on top of his entire savings of £15,000, which he has already given away.

In order to achieve this, he lives in a sparse one-bedroom flat, which he rents from his employer; eats out only once a fortnight; and has a cup of coffee only once a week. He also has no children, which enables his wife, a medical doctor, to give away part of her income as well.

What motivated this man to make such an unusual commitment?

Ord tells us that as a university student he was idealistic, and that he would be rebuffed by his fellow students, eager to shut him up, for what appears to have been his incessant pontificating about poverty in Africa. While doing a Master’s degree, in which he studied ethics and philosophy, Ord decided to give away most of his money to help save lives abroad.

He says,

When it began, I would be down in the supermarket agonising about whether to buy a more expensive cereal or not but I realise that’s a road to a nervous breakdown and that it was much more sensible to work out at the start what you can live on [give away the rest in a lump sum] and then after a year readjust - can I live on less, am I pushing it too hard - instead of perpetually agonising about it.

It seems the agony stemmed from comparing his situation to that of people in the rest of the world:

When I was earning £14,000 as a student, I found I was in the richest 4% in the world, even adjusting for how much further money goes in developing countries.

Frankly, I have great difficulty understanding this mentality, and it is impossible for me to sympathise with it in any way.

It is not that I think he is ruining his life by doing without luxuries: luxuries mean a great deal to a materialist, whose identity is often linked to his possessions; idealists can derive a superior sense of well-being by sacrificing for a super-personal cause. It is not that I think he is using the wrong method, as some commenters have pointed out, and limiting his lifetime impact by donating as he goes along: I would rather his impact be as limited as possible. And it is not that I think he will eventually come to regret giving away so much of his money, since no one will help him in his old age, when he finds himself in abject poverty: it is his decision and he will have to accept any personal consequences, no matter how grim. No. What bothers me is that his idealism, because misplaced, is not only foolish, but also dangerous, and the consequences are likely to be felt by all of us.

Ord has calculated that his lifetime efforts will save thousands of lives in ‘developing’ countries—places where fertility is very high. He has organised a campaign called Giving What We Can, and recruited 64 others like him. According to Ord, each person in the United Kingdom can potentially transform thousands of lives in the poorest regions of the Earth. My worry is that without a drastic reduction in fertility, whatever aid money is not siphoned off by corrupt governments and cleptocracies, will further fuel the unsustainable population boom we have seen during the past half century. The demographic explosion has only spread and aggravated the poverty, which in turn has only exacerbated migratory pressures, and created more, poorer, hungrier immigrants in the Third World, who continue to dream of claiming for themselves an ever larger slice of the European pie. Ord will spend his life exacerbating this already intractable problem, and recruiting charitable souls to do the same, only so that he can alleviate his hypertrophic feelings of guilt and live at ease with himself.

Another problem is what is not being done as a result of this ill-conceived drainage of funds. I am not merely talking about the National Health Service in Britain, or about the crumbling public infrastructure, or about the elderly pensioners forced to choose between eating and freezing or starving and heating themselves every winter. I am also talking about research to find cures for liver disease, cancer, and blindness; about the space programme; about the preservation of our artistic heritage; about discovering and developing cheap, environmentally friendly, and effective sources of energy. It is easy to see how progress on several of these fronts would be of immense and lasting benefit, which would be felt for many generations; but none seem to fall under Ord’s radar. Why? Probably because the tithing of surplus income to charity is not about bettering the lives of others but about bettering the life of Ord, and quieting the screeching demon inside his mind that tells him that the world’s ills are his fault and that every degree in his central heating’s thermostat is a child that dies of malnutrition in some wretched corner of the Earth.

As is to be expected, Ord has received very mixed reactions: some are highly praising, others acidly critical. Among the latter one cannot help but detect an instinctive revulsion, which is manifest despite efforts to conceal it with insincere praise and oblique criticisms, such as: 

I don't want to belittle what is clearly a very significant and generous gesture but this couple’s combined income AFTER charity giving is significantly more than my household income with three children to raise.

 Or:

Sad thing is when he is old and low on money because he has given his wealth away then he will find that nobody is willing to help him. For sure he will find that he has given away far too much. Giving what you can afford is one thing but he is giving away far more than he can afford for sure.

 Or:

Interestingly, If they were to take the same amount of money and invest it wisely, (shares, real-estate etc) I strongly suspect that once growth kicks in they could give away far more total money over their lifetime, whilst also building up a stock of assets that will provide for them into retirement. These assets could then be given to chosen charities as a bequest when no longer needed. I'm not criticising the sentiment or the action - just the method.

Is this the incomprehension of bourgeois materialism speaking? Certainly in many cases. Is this miserable envy in the face of what is taken as extraordinary virtue? Certainly in some cases. Is this secret resentment in the face of implicit guilt-mongering? I would not be surprised at all. There is, certainly, something oddly irritating and repellent about an over-educated, middle class White man with two Macs and an iPhone pontificating publicly about poverty in Africa and who agonizes—to the point of fearing a nervous breakdown—over whether buying himself a more expensive kind of cereal is really ethical. I suspect some find him rather pathetic, even if they dare not say it for fear of social sanction. But I also encountered a similar feeling of irritation and repellence around the time Bob Geldof ran his absurd Live8 campaign some five years ago. To me both Ord and Geldof represent a peculiar species of Western man—one that is pathological, the result of a subclinical neurological condition, of some form of psychological hypertrophia, that afflicts them with chronic and overpowering feelings of guilt and a totalitarian universalist outlook that tolerates no inequality and no dissidence. Some have called him homo equalis.

There is nothing wrong with the view that money over and above what is needed for adequate living can be better spent elsewhere. Many who appreciate this website have thought so and acted in consequence when they sent in their donations. What is unfortunate is that it is the most noxious and misguided kind of idealist that, along with fashion-conscious celebrities, routinely performs the most spectacular acts of generosity, and is able to recruit others to imitate their example. If only those millions, indeed those billions, were put to work on useful, positive, and constructive causes, rather than, directly or indirectly, on making poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, an even greater threat to European civilization than it already is.

The supreme irony is that, for the reasons I have stated elsewhere, what will help in many parts of the ‘developing’ world is money being drained out, rather than pumped in.

The kindest outcome would be for Ord to find ways to make even greater savings and give away an even greater proportion of his income, lest he achieves any kind of dangerous wealth; to choose giving money away to distant strangers over reproducing himself, lest he pass on the gene; and to help others like him to decimate their own wealth, so that they may lose access to resources and become less influential. This would still cause damage, but it would be limited. History suggests, however, that this charitable enterprise could well end in tragedy. We have already seen examples of naïve, idealistic Westerners who have gone to fight poverty and injustice in the Third World, only to get themselves killed—sometimes by the same people they sought to help. As both differential birthrates and the ongoing population transfer from the Third World into the West causes the latter to converge with the former, we can expect the West increasingly to resemble the parts of the world that are now the objects of Western charity. I doubt a Toby Ord would be safe in such a chaotic and brutal environment, or that he would be able defend himself and any chargees from its predations: he is and looks very much the product of a rather cosseted, peaceful, stable, prosperous—and dare I say monastic?—environment; he is, in fact, only possible because of the privileged environment that gives him such moral travails.

In Toby Ord we are witnesses to over two centuries of liberalism. Let’s end it.