Archive for September 2009

By Tom Tancredo

Recently I spoke at a college in New York State. After my speech, a student handed me one of his text books entitled Understanding Human Differences: Multicultural Education in a Diverse America.

Given the title, I didn’t expect sympathetic treatment. However, I was still shocked to see myself quoted as saying, “illegal immigrants were ‘coming to kill you and kill me and our families.’” While illegal aliens disproportionately commit violent crimes, I would never make such a blanket assertion.

I contacted the publisher who gave the source as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hysterical smear piece against the immigration control movement creatively titled “The Nativists.“ The SPLC purported that I said this at a 2004 speech in Illinois.

What I actually said was that our open borders policies allow terrorists to sneak into our country. And yes, terrorists want to “kill you and kill me and our families.” But the SPLC’s intentional misrepresentation is now repeated across the internet and even in college textbooks. (To their credit, the publisher will eliminate the quote in future editions.)

The SPLC describes itself merely as a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups. They made a name for themselves by suing the Ku Klux Klan, and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. With the Klan virtually non-existent, they raise money by tarring opponents of illegal immigration as the second coming of the Klan.

The anti-amnesty organization The Federation for American Immigration Reform recently released “A Guide to Understanding the Tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the Immigration Debate” that exposes this strategy.

According to FAIR:

“While disavowing any position on immigration policy, the SPLC has for nearly a decade targeted organizations and individuals who support immigration enforcement…The SPLC concluded that just about everyone actively opposed to amnesty and mass immigration was a “nativist” a “white supremacist,” or had ties to such groups and individuals.”[PDF]

The SPLC calls FAIR a “hate group.” They don’t try to debunk any of FAIR’s studies or point to racist statements made by its staff. Instead they smear FAIR by accusing them of being linked to supposed racists. This guilt by association is so tenuous that they attack FAIR for receiving contributions from someone whose deceased father was allegedly a “white supremacist.”

If the attacks on opponents of illegal immigration are not absurd enough, their website reprinted an article that attacked The Lord of the Rings movies as “Eurocentric” and likened them to “promotional ads for those tired old race and gender paradigms.”

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Dozens of delegates attended a conference held at Birmingham’s NEC to discuss the rising problem of underachieving young white boys in UK’s schools.

The Raising the Achievement of White Working Class Pupils lectures and seminars focused on tackling the educational and racial divide present in classrooms.

Among the issues discussed was the possibility of young white males in Birmingham being at risk of being recruited by far-right organisations.

Karamat Iqbal, school effectiveness adviser for Birmingham City Council, was one of the guest speakers at the conference held at Birmingham’s NEC.

Mr Iqbal, who has written to two reports on the subject, said both white boys and white girls from less well-off back grounds are potentially at risk to the “negative attitudes” of extremists.

In one of his studies, Underachievement of White Disadvantaged Pupils in Birmingham, Mr Iqbal showed there was a correlation in a child from a white British working class background not attaining high grades at GCSE level and the voting patterns of the neighbourhood. Using figures from the 2004 local election, areas like Longbridge and Sheldon which had a higher percentage of votes for far-right parties, were the same communities suffering from low GCSE passes among white children.
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Threats by the Communist Party front organisations to interfere with the 22nd October broadcast of the BBC’s Question Time show featuring the British National Party have been dismissed as “empty nonsense” by the BNP leader.

Reacting to the news that far leftist cranks hope to demonstrate and physically interfere with the broadcast, Mr Nick Griffin MEP said this “sort of nonsense was heard every time the BNP and the BBC were mentioned in the same breath.

“These cranks are closely allied to a Communist Party front organisation and each time the BNP has had a television election broadcast, these tired old whining extremists are wheeled out,” Mr Griffin said.

“They have threatened disruption, switching off the power, destroying the tapes; you name it. All of it has been empty nonsense and no one takes them seriously for a second.”

Mr Griffin also said he was not concerned about threats made by far left trade unions. “These fools blame the BBC when all it is doing is adhering to its legally enforceable charter.

“Instead of attacking the BBC for doing its job, the leftists should be wondering why their political party is importing workers from all over the world to take their own members’ jobs,” Mr Griffin said.

“If these so-called trade union leaders spent more time working for the interests of British workers, they would not be in the isolated minority position in which they find themselves.”
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Note: In biology, “adaptive” means (very precisely) promoting the survival and reproduction of an organism’s genes. “Natural selection” is the logical and empirical process whereby forces of nature affect the survival and reproduction of some genes over others. The terms, “natural selection” and “selection pressures” (particular causes of selection) help one think clearly.

Many of us remember getting the message about Social Darwinism during the Franz Boas-dominated second half of the 20th Century. According to Boasians, the behavior of humans is remarkably exempt from biological forces and is instead governed mainly by social constructs. Thus humans can achieve utopian peacefulness and universal altruism by developing the appropriate cultural mores. In contrast, Social Darwinism was the idea that nature was “red in tooth and claw,” so that we might as well go along with it, along with all the other animals, and be as ruthless as we like: kill, kill, kill!! Ruthlessness would be a natural, thoroughly acceptable lifestyle since it is part of what we inherit rather than learn, and it would be unnatural to keep trying to override such built-in tendencies. If we inherited them, they must be adaptive and therefore good.

But the social learning advocates explained to us that just because, say, a tornado, was natural didn’t mean we had to like it. That would be the flawed logic of confounding the empirical with the moral — confusing “what is” with “what should be.” It was also pointed out that much of Darwinian evolution occurs not through bloody battles but via such non-violent processes as mutations for, say, better digestion of milk in adulthood and better immune systems. No “red in tooth and claw” there. “Survival of the fittest” was declared a tautology, meaning only that those organisms that ended up having the most surviving and reproducing offspring were, in modern biology’s jargon, the “fittest” — but only because “fittest” no longer meant that the “fittest” somehow deserved to survive, or might be expected to survive, but only that they in fact did survive.

The book under review, Might Is Right…, (MIR), would certainly be considered by many to be the reductio ad absurdum of 19th-century Social Darwinism. “Ragnar Redbeard” (RR) was evidently greatly enamored of Darwin’s theory of natural selection including sexual selection (in which choice of mate by both males and females influences which genes are propagated) despite the fact that he, like Darwin, could not have known about genes or modern molecular biology. Nevertheless he manifested an intuitive understanding of one important modern term, “inclusive fitness”: “A man’s family is … part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his own life” (p. 49).

“Ragnar Redbeard” was a pen name, but whoever he was, he was an extremely well-informed, erudite person, albeit with a rather florid literary style which might be off-putting for some readers. I came to find both style and content quite amusing. In fact, it occurred to me more than once that I was reading a satire, one suitably embellished by esoteric Biblical references and Victorian phraseology: a worthy companion to Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.

On the other hand, suppose MIR was not a satire. Then why would anyone in the 21st century look twice at such a book? One reason would be the emergence today of a rethinking of conventional wisdoms: in economics (OK, communism is out, but aren’t there big problems with unregulated market economies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and fractional reserve banking?), in politics (what happened to the Republican Party and “true conservatives”?), human nature (we don’t all have the same IQ?), or race relations (diversity is not a utopia?). Much of this rethinking is taking place on the internet, of course.

Some have even concluded late in their lives that they’ve been the butt of a big ideological con game. They eventually realize that humans, either individually or in groups, cannot possibly be at all “equal” except in the restricted sense of each person theoretically having one vote (“one idiot, one vote”). And is “democracy” really all that sacred? Instead of living under a dictatorship of one man, we have a dictatorship of a majority manipulated by Hollywood, the mainstream media, and obscure elites. But many of us have given up on utopias and now simply want to obtain or defend a half-decent way of life which we are awake enough now to see is severely threatened if not already lost — given the ubiquity of muggings, rapes, and car-jackings in US cities, the Wall Street shakedowns, the dumbing down of schools. So, having had so many of our assumptions about what is “right” or “good” turned up-side-down, maybe we should re-examine “Social Darwinism” too.

So consider several issues raised in MIR.

Much of MIR focuses, albeit a bit repetitively, on what RR perceives as an unending history of horrible treatment meted out by humans on their enemies and the logical and empirical imperative of relying on “might” in the normal course of human affairs. He probably commits one empirical excess in an especially misanthropic diatribe in Chapter IV: While stating that the story of Jews stealing and murdering Christian infants in order to use their blood for Passover rituals is a myth, he accepts as fact an exceedingly high estimate of the frequency of human cannibalism — perhaps understandably given the dearth of reliable anthropological evidence 100 years ago.

Now, the anti-Social Darwinists complain that evolution and natural selection are not always so horribly bloody. Quite right. However, that does not mean that violence is never adaptive. Consider Genghis Khan whose Y chromosome has been found by geneticists to be so widespread across Asia due to the fact that the leaders of the Mongol armies controlled the women in the areas they conquered.
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United in a common goal, we, the readers of Ancestry, are working to learn about our ancestors’ lives. Though each of us may be alone in this task within our own families, we share a common interest with millions of people. Through this interest, we gain an understanding of not only our family but also our own ethnic identity. Our ethnicity, which is a part of our personal history, helps mold our own individuality. It is a powerful influence in determining our identity, and we are together in the quest to learn who we are.

America in the past has been called a “melting pot,” implying that we believed the distinctions among people of different ethnic backgrounds were unimportant. At one time this viewpoint may have been true; today, however, American interests are more in line with preserving ethnic identities rather than blending and losing all traits of other cultural pasts.

A sense of belonging and historical continuity are basic psychological needs. We need only browse the cookbook aisle in a bookstore to see the growing emphasis not only on cultural qualities but on regions as well. A quick look along the shelf will reveal Italian, French, Chinese, and Japanese cookbooks, as well as those devoted to Southern, Western, New England, or California cooking. Today, both our foreign cultural backgrounds and our regional residences help to identify us as Americans.

It seems that as the twentieth century arrived, bringing many new immigrants representing many ethnic groups to our shore s, our need to differentiate our identities grew. This need may be more strongly represented in urban and suburban areas, where the ethnic flavor is more diverse, than in more rural communities that have remained relatively stable.
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(September 27, 2009) - More Black students are participating in advanced placement classes and taking the courses’ final tests, but the gap in test results for White students and Black students is widening, data from The College Board shows.

According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, in 1985 only 2,768 Black students took advanced placement exams. By 1990, 6,800 exams were taken by Black students. It was up significantly again by 1997, with Black students taking 34,514 exams and by 2008, Black students took 133,074 advanced placement exams.

But when they take the exams, Black students score a whole letter grade lower than White students, the journal reported. Data showed that Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to receive a qualifying grade and only 2.8 percent of Blacks received an “A” grade, compared to 14.1 percent of White test-takers.
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Amsterdam – Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen suggests women who refuse jobs rather than give up wearing the Islamic burka should not receive unemployment benefit in an interview with daily newspaper Trouw.

In the interview, Cohen said women who fail to find a job because they don a burka should not expect to receive unemployment benefits for those genuinely trying to find employment.

“Personally, I think it’s terrible to see a woman in a burka. But whether or not I like something isn’t a reason to forbid it,” Cohen tells the paper.

The Amsterdam mayor opposes a general ban on the burka as he believes it is an expression of religious belief. However, he believes the burka does not believe in situations where contact with other people is necessary, such as at school or in the workplace. There, women should choose a less restrictive head covering.

I agree that if you can’t get work because you insist on wearing the burka, you shouldn’t apply for [unemployment] benefit.”
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TYLER, TX (KLTV) - Over the course of this tragedy, parents and students have brought to light an apparent racial divide on the John Tyler High School campus. Superintendent Dr. Randy Reid acknowledged yesterday that some of the fights happening at East Texas schools are related to gang activity. And, students say that the racially charged violence has them fearing for their safety.

“Right now, these fights are pretty much all racial,” said Laura Arredondo, a junior. “Like, you know, it’s all about race.”

Arredondo says less than 24 hours before Mr. Henry was stabbed, Hispanic and African American students brawled.

“It was pretty bad,” said Arredondo. “There was…everybody was in the back where the buses be at, and then this side was all Mexicans, the other side was all blacks, and it was just everybody getting at it.”

Superintendent Randy Reid says…

“I’d be the first person to tell you, that we do have a gang problem in Tyler, Texas,” said Reid.

“Is race driving these fights?” I asked Gerardo Arredondo.

“Yes, sir, it is,” he replied.
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