John Derbyshire Asks: Island Race No More?

By John Derbyshire

03/02/2014

When I read news from the country of my birth, the emotions I experience (with rare exceptions) are disgust, horror, and despair.

This last week, for example, saw the sentencing of the Woolwich killers. These two young men, English-born to Christian Nigerian parents, converts to Islam, ran down an off-duty British soldier in May last year. Then, in a busy London street at half-past two on a mid-week afternoon, they stabbed and hacked the soldier to death, trying unsuccessfully to decapitate him, while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great.) [Woolwich attack: terrorist proclaimed 'an eye for an eye' after attack, By Gordon Rayner and Steven Swinford, Daily Telegraph, May 22, 2013]

The killers did not take their sentencing well:

Michael Adebolajo, 29, and Michael Adebowale, 22, had to be manhandled out of court by security guards after being told by Mr. Justice Sweeney that their crime was a “betrayal of Islam.”

Adebolajo screamed at the judge as he was manhandled down the dock stairs in the historic Court No 2 but, in scenes lasting several minutes, his co-defendant was held to the floor and cuffed before being carried downstairs head first.

Relatives of Drummer Rigby, who were sitting just three feet away from the dock, stood up and cowered away from the violence.

[Lee Rigby murderers sentenced to life in prison, By David Barrett and Clare Carter, Daily Telegraph, February 26, 2014.]

I would rather have read: “… after being told by Mr. Justice Sweeney that their crime was ‘obviously inspired by Islam’,” and that “Relatives of Drummer Rigby, who were sitting just three feet away from the dock, leapt forward to assist the court officers, taking the opportunity to gouge out the accuseds’ eyeballs and knock out their teeth…”

Alas, either thing would have been utterly at odds with the whipped, pacified, emasculated, cringing posture of 21st-century Britain. “They cowered away from the violence…” Of course they did.

Had Mr. Justice Sweeney said what I wish he had said, he would have been stripped of his office and made the subject of a parliamentary enquiry.

Had Drummer Rigby’s relatives done what I wish they had done, they would themselves have been swiftly arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and jailed, to tremble in their cells at the mercy of the Muslim gangs who control Britain’s houses of correction, and who are welcoming the Woolwich killers as heroes even while I am writing this.

The Woolwich horror, and many others, flows directly from the decision by postwar British governments to open their country to floods of blacks and Muslims: the least assimilable of races, and the most intolerant of religions. When black resentment of the host society combines with Muslim fantasies of world domination, Woolwich is what happens.

It could all have been foreseen. We know that, because it was foreseen. Historians of the future will marvel at such an astounding act of national suicide — the more so because post-WW2 Britain was a quirkily conservative place, its culture as singular as Japan’s.

We now know from genetic investigations that Britain’s uniqueness was rooted in biology. The British were indeed what Winston Churchill called them: an island race.

As VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow wrote the other day:

DNA archeology has actually completely rewritten British historiography. It is not true that the English are descendants of Saxon invaders, except linguistically. The base population in England simply changed its language. It’s not even true that there is any ethnic difference between the Irish and the English. But 14,000 years of history is about to be overwritten by just a few decades of government policy. [Electing A New People in America and Britain, by Peter Brimelow; February 15, 2014]
Peter has been exploring his own ancestry, he tells me, using the 23andMe service. He (to be exact, his identical twin brother) reports in at 32.4 percent British and Irish, 2.2 percent Scandinavian, 59 percent nonspecific northern European, and 6.4 percent nonspecific European. And he is 3.2 percent pre-Homo sapiens, thanks to Paleolithic hanky-panky between our species and their cousins, the Neanderthals. Most Europeans are around 2.7 percent Neanderthal, according to 23andMe.

Curious about my own antecedents, a few weeks ago I signed up with National Geographic’s Geno 2.0 project. (Which has a different focus from 23andMe’s. When you sign up to Geno 2.0 you are volunteering to contribute your genome to a project that, in their words, “is an ambitious attempt to help answer fundamental questions about where we originated and how we came to populate the Earth.” The information you get is about your deep ancestry. To quote the Geno 2.0 booklet again: “Your Story. Our Story. The Human Story.” 23andMe on the other hand gives you more information about your near ancestry, including actual names of fifth cousins and such, where they have given permission to be named.) They sent me a kit containing a Q-tip, with instructions to swab some saliva from inside my cheek onto the Q-tip and send it back.

I followed the instructions. The Geno people read off my DNA and posted the results on a web page they’d assigned to me.

My deep ancestry turned out to be 43 percent ancient North-European hunter-gatherer, 37 percent Middle Eastern neolithic (i.e. early farmer), and 18 percent Southwest Asian neolithic.

Like Peter, I also show a 3.7 percent soupçon of Neanderthal and Denisovan. Denisovans are a second pre-homo sap species, discovered only in 2008, and Geno2.0 notes the results are experimental. 23andMe doesn’t estimate Denisovan proportions.

I know, it doesn’t add up to 100 percent — they have a note on that too.

This is all boringly routine for a guy of British ancestry. My nearest match in the reference populations was in fact British. I am a Brit from Central Casting.

I am a Brit from Central Casting.

My second-closest reference population was Romanian. (I knew I had some affinity with that place.)

The Romanians, along with the Slavs, have a dash of Northeast Asian ancestry that I don’t have, not in my somatic chromosomes anyway. I’m guessing that my Romanian connection is via the T1 haplogroup in my mitochondrial DNA. T1 is very much a Romanian thing.

I’m not totally without Northeast Asian connections, either. Tucked away on my Y chromosome (that is, my paternal lineage) is a wee I-M253 haplogroup, linking me to Leo Tolstoy and a hot Finnish babe.

Not a picture of Tolstoy.

Here’s another Dissident Right reprobate who’s been peering into his genome: satirical vlogger Ramzpaul:

On my Dad’s side I got my haplogroup… pure Aryan. This is like, perfect. I could be, like, a National Socialist… It was from Norway, it was from Germany, it was from Scotland, Swiss… There was a little bit of Irish in there, but… Anyway, I was all psyched.
In fact, Ramzpaul’s paternal haplogroup — R1b1b2a1a1 — is the same as Peter Brimelow’s.

Turns out Ramz has a touch of the tarbrush, though:

Then I looked up my mother’s side. I looked at the haplogroup, and it’s K1C1. Hey guys, I’m really worried, ’cause that’s the haplogroup for… you know: them. Jews. I think I’m Jewish… [“The Kosher Neanderthal Nationalist,” by Ramzpaul, February 8, 2014.]
Jewish genetics is way more complicated than that, as I’m sure Ramzpaul knows. One scholarly paper tells us that: “After decades of intensive study a definitive answer [to the question of Ashkenazi ancestry] remains elusive.” Lots of K-haplogroup bearers are unrelated to Jews. Ötzi the Iceman, floruit 3,300 B.C. — which is to say, a millennium and a half before Abraham and Isaac — was a K1. (As, again, is Peter Brimelow).

This stuff can be very addictive. I once asked a friend, a professional genomicist, whether it might one day be possible to produce a family tree of the entire human race, with all the human beings that ever lived shown in all their connections.

“Shown” is of course meant metaphorically: the billions of nodes would be too many to fit on any diagram. Nor would we know the names of the persons at most of the nodes, only that they existed, and were connected thus and thus to other nodes.

My friend said no, too much noise in the system. A pity.

Speaking of Ramzpaul, he is, like me, a Hungarophile. In a later vlog he reports to us from Budapest.

The thing I love about Hungary, it’s still Hungarian, it’s still kind of a nationalist system here.

There’s really two competing models we have in the world today: the international model, which is really Trotskyism, and then you have the nationalism…

I like diversity: that’s one of the reasons I like nationalism. When I come to Hungary, I don’t want to see a bunch of Africans. And it’s not that I have anything against Africans, but I can go to Africa for that.

Here they’re Hungarians. They speak Hungarian and they’re all the same ethnically, pretty much; so that’s why I like it…

That’s an advantage of Budapest versus, let’s say, London. I have nothing against London, but London is no longer English, right? It’s, er, there’s Africans, Muslims… In fact in London there was a beheading. That’s not the London I want to see. [Five Reasons to Visit Hungary, by Ramzpaul, February 17, 2014.]

I assume the beheading that Ramzpaul is referring to is the one I started with, the one in Woolwich last year, though the whole wretched country is such a horror show now, one can’t be sure. Perhaps the jihadis have made it a monthly feature of life in the sceptered isle — who knows?

The Hungarians were locked behind the Iron Curtain for most of the later 20th century. The British kept their freedom, but used it to import millions of immigrants from utterly different ancestral stocks, with unknown consequences for the future character of their nation.

Taking the long view of history, and with heroic disregard for my own personal interests (I was born in England in 1945), it would have been better for the British if, after WW2, Stalin’s armies had seized their islands.

There would have been some unpleasantness, no doubt: purges, show trials, repressions, uprisings. Still, the Brits would have been spared horrors like the Woolwich killing, the 2011 race riots, the 2005 bombings, and all the rancorous fussing, fretting, and posturing over “racism” that we in the U.S.A. know so well.

Sorry, did I say “racism”? I meant of course “white privilege.”

Race, as we all know, is a social construct. Except that it’s not.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.

< Previous

Next >


This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.